Engaging Urban Panoramas

America’s adventure with cities began in earnest during the four decades following 1820. There had of course been urban centers during the colonial and early national eras. But between 1820 and the onset of the Civil War, the proportion of the nation’s residents inhabiting communities of twenty-five hundred or more (the crude but conventional index of “urban”) jumped from about one in thirteen to one in five. Concentrated primarily in the North, the shift entailed natural reproduction of current city residents joined by the arrival of white rural folk searching for better (or at least different) opportunities. Especially in the North, however, it also entailed the presence of free blacks, of slave escapees from the South, and heavy infusions of newcomers from other countries. And with these heterogeneous demographic ingredients came other developments. Antebellum cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were arenas of remarkable (albeit remarkably uneven) economic growth, of frequent social and cultural reconfigurations, of appreciable tension and conflict—and above all of incessant changefulness. Such cities might be worrisome. Often they were puzzling. But they had to be engaged by contemporary Americans. And crucial to how they were engaged was a large and highly diverse assemblage of pictorial representations we may style city views of the antebellum North.

Two framing factors should be born in mind in discussing these images. First, they existed within an overall outpouring of pictures. After all, the 1840s and 1850s were the birth time in America of photography and the implantation of literally millions of photographic graphics within the milieu. But equally, it was a time of major growth in non-photographic images. Precise statistics are not possible. But it’s evident that more picture makers (both native-born and immigrants) were working fulltime (both as free-lancers and as more or less steady employees of image-producing enterprises) to turn out graphics, which, together with imports from overseas, ensured rising numbers of pictures made without cameras. There were paintings, drawings, and prints—including under this last heading images extending from lithographs and woodcuts to various engravings. The full inventory of antebellum pictures encompassed a spectrum of sophistication, prices, and accessibility. And prints in particular existed as both free-standing artifacts and as illustrations garnishing increasingly large and variegated arrays of publications: venues that included thick assortments of books, pamphlets, and periodicals, from cheap to elegant.

Indeed, taking antebellum picture making as a whole, it’s evident that the upsurge of pictures surrounding antebellum northern city views even included representations of other places. Though substantially less abundant than their northern-focused counterparts (and consequently not under immediate review here), there were some images of contemporary southern communities. Then too, and more notably, there were pictures of the hinterland. Notwithstanding the tilts toward urbanization, most Americans, including most northern Americans, continued to live in the countryside. And the rural retained enormous material and cultural importance. Landscape pictures emerged in these years as a dominant registration of how this nation hosted unrivaled God-sanctioned expressions of nature (of nature become Nature), while genre images of rustic mores provided soothing visions of harmony and stability.

Fig. 1. A View of Charles Town: The Capital of South Carolina in North America, from Scenographia Americana (London, 1768). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

A second framework for the views of the antebellum urban North was the backstory of earlier images treating American towns and cities. As there had been urban settings before 1820, so there had been city views. During colonial years, maps (some sporting figurative cartouches) had now and again provided representational “plans” of larger communities. And during both colonial and early national periods, there were townscapes (typically sighted across waterfronts) and streetscapes (figs. 1 and 2), as well as pictures of particular buildings and incidents (from “mobs” to parades) sufficiently associated with urban communities to comprise engagements with city panoramas.

Fig. 2. Cornelius Tiebout, A Perspective View of the City Hall in New York (New York, 1791-93). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Moreover, by the early 1800s communities like Philadelphia and New York were drawing upon the rich European tradition of “street cry” imagery to produce graphic records of their own street vendors that amounted to a further significant version of city views (fig. 3).

Fig. 3. "Pepper Pot," from Cries of Philadelphia: Ornamented with Elegant Wood Cuts (Philadelphia, 1810). An example of American "street cry" prints, this woodcut provides an early national illustration of African Americans—shown here as both seller and buyers—whose presence would contribute importantly to antebellum northern urban populations. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Fig. 3. “Pepper Pot,” from Cries of Philadelphia: Ornamented with Elegant Wood Cuts (Philadelphia, 1810). An example of American “street cry” prints, this woodcut provides an early national illustration of African Americans—shown here as both seller and buyers—whose presence would contribute importantly to antebellum northern urban populations. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

What were the goals behind these pre-1820 city views? Typically, these pictures sought to lay out information: to deploy facts about urban North America. Before the Revolution, however, city views were not uncommonly produced by Old World artists and aimed at Europeans skeptical that America even had cities of any note. Supplying information was thus at times combined with, and perhaps outweighed by, the goal of overcoming such doubts. And the images were consequently constructed less as rigorously accurate transcriptions of (say) Boston, New York, or Philadelphia than as loosely configured designations of some city. Accuracy grew more important in the years between 1783 and 1820. But city views crafted in this era often express other blendings, this time joining information giving with efforts to render their subjects interesting and amusing (via the street-cry imagery, for example) as well as—crucially—to deliver urban good news. The almost routine patriotism manifested by early national artists (not excepting the substantial roster entering the new nation from overseas) and used by them to gain acceptance in the early Republic, together with the ongoing belief that graphic arts should be inspirational and leavening (rather than critical and condemning)—all this fostered early national city views of a decidedly upbeat character. Specifically, such attitudes encouraged images that avoid depicting urban poverty and instead emphasize keys to urban prosperity—not just by showing prominent buildings and waterfront sightings of busy ships (as provincial images had now and again disclosed) but increasingly by stressing wealthy homes and, preeminently, bustling streets. Hence Francis Guy’s well-known painting of New York’s Tontine Coffee House (1797) gives as much attention to the hectically converging thoroughfares fronting the structure as to the coffee house itself (fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Francis Guy, Tontine Coffee House, ca. 1797, oil on linen, 43 x 65 inches, accession number 1907.32. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.

Such, then, was the context for antebellum views of northern cities. And at one level these post-1820 pictures can be taken as simply fitting within this framework. Certainly they continued the formats already in play, for they were often configured as townscapes, streetscapes, and street cries, as pictures of incidents and of individual buildings. At the same time, these images demonstrably reflected the contemporary surge of graphics, for they made use of all the techniques of picture making available in the antebellum era, from painting to drawing, from photography and lithography to all manner of engraving. And produced through these techniques, antebellum city views likewise paralleled the broad range of formal refinement (and cost) characterizing pictures generally in these decades. Again, moreover, prints especially exemplified the spread. For antebellum city views rendered as prints ran the gamut from highly skilled images to less technically impressive lithographs and fairly crude woodcuts, from stand-alone images to pictures tucked into volumes and journals, both pricey and cheap (and including the newly popular digests known as city guides).

Fig. 5. "New-York Street Figures," from Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion 8:20 (Saturday, May 19, 1855). The article accompanying this illustration identifies its subjects as a chimney and street sweeper, two Chinese immigrants, an omnibus driver, two female dealers in rags and glass (cast as the centerpiece figures), and several street hawkers. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Fig. 5. “New-York Street Figures,” from Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion 8:20 (Saturday, May 19, 1855). The article accompanying this illustration identifies its subjects as a chimney and street sweeper, two Chinese immigrants, an omnibus driver, two female dealers in rags and glass (cast as the centerpiece figures), and several street hawkers. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

In several notable respects, however, antebellum city views actually went in new directions. Thus, alongside familiar configurations, we now find more fully developed genre treatments, such as images that go beyond street cries to depictions of so called street figures (fig. 5). So too, we find townscapes constructed as panoramic or hyper-elevated bird’s-eye views (fig. 6). And treatments of single buildings (and sometimes their surrounding streets) are now often cast as trade cards. Occasionally recycled into newspaper notices but for the most part published as single sheets meant to be posted publicly (sometimes in splendid color) or distributed free to the public, trade cards were advertisements that were commissioned by stores and manufactories and that generally centered around detailed pictorial representations of the sponsoring businesses.

Fig. 6. J. T. Williams, View of Harrisburg, Penn. (Baltimore, 1855). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

When these establishments were located in urban settings, and the representations focused on the buildings housing the businesses, the cards became, willy-nilly, important installments of antebellum city views.

Ultimately, however, the most trenchant shift in antebellum city views—and the one I’ll focus on for the remainder of this discussion—had to do with their purpose: with their cultural “work.” To be sure, earlier intentions, and mixings of intentions, did not disappear. There was a drive for information giving and for accuracy (as demonstrated in the painstaking draftsmanship of bird’s-eye views), for amusement (as evident in both the ongoing city cries and the new street figures), and for positive messages (as shown in renderings of crowded, in fact increasingly crowded, thoroughfares). Yet shifts in the goals of these images are no less manifest. There are instances, for example, when the push for precision clearly overcomes the priority of inspiration. For the first time city views start to examine poor neighborhoods, and as a result we begin to get judgments of cities that are cautionary—even alarmist—as well as upbeat (fig. 7). But pictorial registrations of urban destitution were hardly the only realignment of purpose in city views. In deeper, more systemic ways, the most trenchant alteration in the goal of these pictures seems to have been a heightened drive to explain.

Fig. 7. "The Five Points in 1859," from the Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1860.The print flavors its handling of a well-known New York slum with deadpan but still condemnatory noticings of poverty linked to disorder. Ramshackle buildings coincide with what white viewers of the time would probably have taken as disturbingly unchecked racial mixings (the black presence including a foregrounded man in strikingly—and likely offputtingly—upscale apparel). Likewise marking the chaos, a policeman poised for action is set, uselessly, near a woman falling down and not far from a beckoning prostitute (her raised skirt and dragged foot the give-away signals). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. — Fig. 7. “The Five Points in 1859,” from the Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1860.The print flavors its handling of a well-known New York slum with deadpan but still condemnatory noticings of poverty linked to disorder. Ramshackle buildings coincide with what white viewers of the time would probably have taken as disturbingly unchecked racial mixings (the black presence including a foregrounded man in strikingly—and likely offputtingly—upscale apparel). Likewise marking the chaos, a policeman poised for action is set, uselessly, near a woman falling down and not far from a beckoning prostitute (her raised skirt and dragged foot the give-away signals). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Exactly because antebellum northern cities could be worrisome and puzzling, exactly because they were so incontestably changeful, and perhaps also because, as a result, urban vistas departed so dramatically from the iconic, reassuring visions of rural America—for such reasons, there was a generalized desire, indeed a broadly felt necessity, to develop firmer understandings of the urban milieu. And in that light, it’s not hard—on the contrary it makes considerable sense—to read antebellum city views as being especially about explicating the panoramas they displayed: as essaying not just to provide informative facts but to show how these facts constituted patterns and processes of urban life; as striving not just to deliver amusing vignettes or pass judgments (whether positive or negative) but to demonstrate how cities existed and how they worked. This is not to argue that pictures of rural America did not also embrace forays into explaining what was happening outside cities. Nor is it to deny that explanatory tropes used by city views do not show up elsewhere in the era’s graphic literature. But it is to suggest that antebellum city views can be reasonably seen as aiming, more centrally than ever, to comprehend urban terrains.

Thus, while overhead perspectives were hardly unprecedented in the history of graphic representations, the key function (and appeal) of panoramic and bird’s-eye city views in this period likely turned on their ability to make the total shape of urban settings readily comprehensible. And the individual structures often featured along the borders of bird’s-eye views (as in figure 6) would only have supplemented this legibility by joining particulars to the whole: by giving viewers the added leverage of understanding cities as both totalities and discrete elements. Similarly, we should not ignore the explanatory force of accuracy in these images. Now it is true that antebellum city views were not entirely devoid of intentional distortions; occasionally they privileged compositional balance or anticipated new construction that departed from the reality of a given moment. And it’s true as well that the accuracy they did exhibit in many ways simply continued the advancing commitment to truthful city views commenced in early national times. Still, the overall devotion to precision apparent in post-1820 pictures of cities—certainly in photographs but in non-photographic graphics also—held special meaning. Given the continuing rhythms of change sweeping through northern cities, the representational reliability of most antebellum urban images may well have provided those regarding these graphics with a pleasing cognitive anchor: the knowledge that amidst all the transitions, this building or that street looked just so. Such knowledge, in turn, could well have carried the implicit proposition that accurately depicting a building or street at a given pictorial moment would help explain the often disconcerting texture of the urban milieu.

Fig. 8. "Keystone Marble Works, S. F. Jacoby & Co.," advertisement, published in Colton's Atlas of America (New York, 1856). Lithograph printed by Herline & Co. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. — Fig. 8. “Keystone Marble Works, S. F. Jacoby & Co.,” advertisement, published in Colton’s Atlas of America (New York, 1856). Lithograph printed by Herline & Co. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

More concretely, views of northern cities in these years offer explanatory guides to components of the urban economy. Trade cards were marvelously instructive along these lines. The interior and cutaway views they sometimes offer of manufacturing establishments, for example, go some way to displaying step-by-step narratives of production (fig. 8). And even trade cards that fix on the outside of businesses would almost certainly have carried instructive implications. For one thing, they likely provided clues to help urbanites locate various establishments. At a time when (reflecting the fluidity of urban centers) stores and workshops frequently changed locations within a city, pictures that (reflecting the accuracy of most antebellum city views) displayed recognizable portraits of business exteriors could only have facilitated locating a given store or workshop. Added to this, trade cards presenting outside views of stores now and then end up both illustrating what was for sale and providing primers in how to buy. The former project is often accomplished through careful inclusions of shop signs. The latter explanatory purpose is achieved by illustrating individuals moving through sequenced steps of purchase. Potential customers are sometimes shown engaged in the newly surfacing practice of window shopping or in the longer-standing tradition of examining goods piled on sidewalks, the pictured figures in effect initiating the process of buying by familiarizing themselves with the merchandise available. But then, using the vehicle of windows and open doorways, exterior views of stores also reveal the next phase, the stage involving individuals moving inside retail spaces to interact with clerks and actually acquire an item (fig. 9).

Fig. 9. W. H. Rease. [Joseph Feinour's Stove and Hardware Stores]. (Philadelphia, ca. 1845). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. — Fig. 9. W. H. Rease. [Joseph Feinour’s Stove and Hardware Stores]. (Philadelphia, ca. 1845). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Following similarly concrete routes, the images we’re exploring make further explanatory use of the city dwellers they delimit. Thus, they mobilize the emblems of clothing and observable activities to document the cohabitation within cities of affluent folk and working people. And in doing this much they quietly suggest that urban environments are to be understood—indeed, can only be understood—in terms of both better sorts and laboring folk. But it is the case, too, that lesser-ranked figures are more present in post-1820 urban views than in earlier pictures of American cities, so that antebellum urban imagery softly advances the contention-registered throughout antebellum culture—that the visual presence of working people was becoming more established in America and more vital to understanding many facets of the Republic’s existence. Added to this, the presence of pictured figures of recognizably different standing in urban venues often serves to explain at least some of the complex choreography among socioeconomic strata in cities of the antebellum North. For, taken as a whole, the pictures reveal higher and lower ranks at once interacting and yet often remaining apart—salient features of what class meant in these places.

Another way figures in urban views were harnessed to an explanatory purpose was in their formulation as types. The urban genre imagery of the period, and most notably the graphics of street figures, took heavy advantage of tendencies in antebellum representations to situate individuals within groupings that go beyond class to encompass racial, ethnic, and even regional niches. Or (as evident in figure 5, above) even subniches: the poor, pathetic, waif-like street sweeper, for example, or the slightly menacing (because slightly weasily-appearing) youthful hawker of kindling. In any event, the result was that urban views deposit figures into easily comprehensible categories that, in company with class designations, enabled viewers of the views to more easily chart—and thus understand—the often confusing medleys of individuals encountered in places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

The final explanatory dimension of antebellum city views we need to ponder relates to their observational strategies. And what is particularly important to consider here are the watching figures positioned inside the images. These individuals signal modes by which Americans actually regarded city settings, modes the views themselves seem on some level to take on as their points of view.

Fig. 10. Augustus Köllner, Broad-way (New York and Paris, 1850). The stylish pedestrians along the edges of this print can be detected surveying shop windows as well as strolling and pausing watchfully along one of New York's major avenues. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Fig. 10. Augustus Köllner, Broad-way (New York and Paris, 1850). The stylish pedestrians along the edges of this print can be detected surveying shop windows as well as strolling and pausing watchfully along one of New York’s major avenues. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Who were these watchers? Occasionally they were working people. But more frequently, and rather more defining of the perspectives city views themselves unfurled, they were figures of standing or authority (or both). So there are the instances of window shopping, with the window shoppers usually flagged as more or less genteel. And if we look closely at streetscapes, we can perhaps also find signs of the watchful promenades the upper ranks had begun undertaking in these years, coupled with the related custom of urban bystanding through which pedestrians (again usually upper-ranked) pause to observe street scenes or curbside events (fig. 10). And by the same token we can spot references to (or at least hints of) individuals engaged in oversight. Particularly apparent in depictions of ongoing labor (in the workrooms illustrated by figure 8, for example), suggestions of supervision grow generally more frequent in antebellum city views. And this was because such references in fact point to—were in fact part of—a broad reorientation in the nation’s post-1820 visual culture. Linked to shifts reaching from aesthetics to mounting controversies over slavery (and its systems of oversight) and connected to growth of reformative supervision on one side and to crescendos of bourgeois modesty (and more abstractly to the trajectories of rationality Michel Foucault has ascribed to Western modernity) on the other, the alteration in America’s visual culture in play here took different shapes. But as we come upon it in antebellum city views—as we can perhaps detect its imprint extending tangentially even beyond workplace supervisors to other regard-wielding figures in these images—the core nature of the change is clear enough. Simply put, in contrast to provincial or early national times, the act of regarding was becoming more expressive of elevated standing and power than the experience of being regarded.

As I have suggested, antebellum city views can be interpreted as adopting for themselves the stances of their observing protagonists, so that their efforts to explain in some measure unfold through the eyes of their own watchers. It is of course quite true that post-1820 city views were built on received conventions of pictorial viewpoints. And it is true as well that they appropriated angles of regard (like their panoramic and bird’s-eye standpoints) unrelated to their roster of interior observers. Still, it seems possible to inscribe into many of these images an outlook cast as middling or upper ranked, as carrying the distanced flavor of window shopping, bystanding, and promenading, and as touched by the authority exemplified by supervision. Indeed, it seems possible to go yet further and infer from these images tendencies to equate such an outlook with an assumed viewership. For while their divergent forms and prices make it all but certain a wide mix of people saw these images, it is not a large reach to understand views of antebellum northern cities as projecting an audience resembling the bulk of the viewers they picture.

There was, though, a complication to this fusion of pictured watchers, pictorial perspectives, and external viewerships. It was the complication of the flâneur. Long gestating in Europe, the flâneur surfaced in the antebellum Republic as another antebellum social type. Construed as typically male, usually—though admittedly not always—of upper rank, flâneurs were reckoned to traverse urban—not rural—territories. And while thought to occasionally respond to what they saw with interpretive (even intricately imaginative) narratives, flâneurs were more often registered as figures who only looked on, who surpassed other city observers by doing nothing but observing and who, moreover, observed not merely with distance but with thoroughly self-satisfied disengagement. Appropriated by journalists and by authors as different as Poe and Whitman, the flâneur posture was also present in city views, the persona characteristically presented as a stylish gent slouched watchfully against a lamppost (fig. 11).

Fig. 11. "J. & M. Baird, Marble Works, Spring Garden Street, above Ridge Road," Robert Telfer, engraver, 1852. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Though not the central subject of this image, a flâneur in his characteristic pose can be detected in the foreground of this midcentury trade card. — Fig. 11. “J. & M. Baird, Marble Works, Spring Garden Street, above Ridge Road,” Robert Telfer, engraver, 1852. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Though not the central subject of this image, a flâneur in his characteristic pose can be detected in the foreground of this midcentury trade card.

But the flâneur raised problems. Inasmuch as he truly only watched, he was by definition unproductive. And in a republic dedicated to notions of virtue resolutely tied to productivity, he was thus anomalous—or worse. He was an “aristocratic” parasite, a potentially malevolent “lounger” or “loafer.” Other difficulties attended his role in city views. To start with, his determinedly total disengagement conflicted with the interest these images demonstrated in deploying judgments—by this time both negative and positive—about the cities they portrayed. Every bit as significant, however, the flâneur’s decided aloofness confined him mainly to surface impressions and, consequently, to an explanatory perspective on of urban life that was actually becoming suspect. For the fact is that in multiple and complicated ways—in ways we can only allude to in this essay—fair portions of antebellum Americans were finding outer (i.e., surface) manifestations of reality increasingly unreliable. Concern was deepening, for example, that physical self-presentations might be faked, that expensive-looking clothes might be only cheap ready-made knock-offs, that banknotes might be counterfeit, and that the most readily ascertainable aspects of cities might not tell the full story. And against that background, the flâneur’s surface-clinging viewpoint could well seem problematic.

Hence arose corrective responses. In the culture as a whole, there were efforts to assess external forms critically. From phrenology (which developed into an extraordinarily popular “scientific” tactic for connecting people’s outer physiologies with their inner temperaments), to calls for intense scrutiny of clothes (to distinguish tailor-made from off-the-rack and thus to determine an outfit’s underlying meaning), and on further to counterfeit detectors (for identifying false money)—making use of such techniques and technologies, good numbers of Americans set about to take account of what was without but then probe what lay within. Nor were cities excluded from this approach. Journalistic exposés and “Mysteries-of-the-City” stories sought to lay bare the underlying “truths” of major metropolises. And of direct relevance to our considerations, city views hosted their own penetrations of surface impressions. Which is to say, their quest to explain ultimately led these images to provide counterbalancings to the flâneur’s form of onlooking tout court, to offset the flâneur’s emphatically self-contented regard of mere surfaces. And so, while they might contain flâneurs, pictures of antebellum northern cities also, and more frequently, include images (some of them coordinated with journalistic pieces) expressly calculated to reveal the underlying (and often unsettling) portions of antebellum urban situations (fig. 12). Indeed, in light of this investigatory impulse, even images we remarked upon earlier take on new connotations. The confluence of trade cards that illuminate both exteriors and interiors of urban enterprises, for example, now acquires the feel of an aggregate perspective, rooted in joining the without to the within. And similarly, the coexistence of pictures glossing Broadway and New York’s notorious Five Points slum now takes on the sense of a composite viewpoint organized around treating both what the city wanted to display—its surface glitter, as it were—and the truth of its seamy underside.

Fig. 12. "Backgrounds of Civilization—Mrs. Sandy Sullivan's Genteel Lodging House in Baxter Street," from New York Illustrated News, February 18, 1860. This woodcut illustrated an investigative article on New York's notorious Five Points slum. Negative number 44728. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society. — Fig. 12. “Backgrounds of Civilization—Mrs. Sandy Sullivan’s Genteel Lodging House in Baxter Street,” from New York Illustrated News, February 18, 1860. This woodcut illustrated an investigative article on New York’s notorious Five Points slum. Negative number 44728. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.

To be sure, this tilt toward the darker underside did not appeal universally. Concerned to shield white society from criticisms, the South was relatively unreceptive to diggings beneath surfaces, with the result that views of southern cities, even those mixing exteriors and interiors, lacked the powerful investigatory drive present in the North. And likewise, endeavoring to learn what surface appearances might cover did not always make sense to working people. Antebellum lesser folk were by and large alert to the utility of masks, pretense, and outright dissimulation in dealing with difficult (and often patently unfair) economic pressures. And they were thus by and large open to making (and manipulating) their way along the byways of outer appearances. All of this ensured the regional flavoring of northern city views. And it also ensured that even when they rejected the flâneur, the outlook of these pictures was characteristically not from the bottom up but remained (in accordance with most of the more acceptable observers they depicted) aligned with middling or upper strata.

This brief survey scarcely exhausts all the ways northern cities were viewed in this period or all the ways viewing transpired within these communities. But it is perhaps sufficient to mark the pivotal part city views played in delimiting—and more generally engaging—key urban panoramas rising up in America between 1820 and 1861.

Early National Bro Culture in Daniel Parker’s War Department

I’m not trained as a gender historian. I take for granted the fact that gender has always been a cultural construct and that it has influenced the behaviors of people in the past; I tend not to think too much about it otherwise. But when I started looking for information on early nineteenth-century army supplies in the papers of a United States War Department official at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I found, interwoven in the correspondence about politics and conflict, references to binge drinking with male friends and hooking up with young women. Why was this the case, in a collection that included letters from senior army officers and four secretaries of war?

1. War Department, Southwest Executive Building, 1816-1819. Courtesy of Office of the Historian, history.state.gov, accessed January 11, 2017.

Daniel Parker (1782-1846), the son of an Army lieutenant and a descendant of one of the largest original landholders in Shirley, Massachusetts, became a clerk in the office of the War Department in 1810 (fig. 1). He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1801 and practiced law in the Boston area before moving to Washington. He was twenty-eight at the time, well into adulthood by historical standards. And certainly, Parker’s office in the War Department became a hub of very adult decision-making among generals, army contractors, and secretaries of war and state—decisions that determined national security. Parker was responsible for managing correspondence related to military legislation, and to army provisions, movements, and promotions. But in addition to the letters from high-ranking federal officials, Parker received a fair amount of correspondence from young, unmarried men whose inside jokes, social activities, and sexual exploits made me think of today’s bros—or at least something similar to the culture of “fratty masculinity” that is common among (usually) young, privileged, white men. They wove their homosociality and chauvinistic bragging so seamlessly into their discussions of financial matters, state and federal politics, and military service that it might have been easy to miss, were it not for the lack of polite euphemisms that I had assumed camouflaged most nineteenth-century misdeeds.

Participation in this privileged culture of masculinity was an important part of achieving and maintaining political power. As soon as Parker moved to Washington, his youngest brother and many of their friends began asking for favors. This in and of itself was not unusual. Patronage has existed in various guises throughout history, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it served, to quote historian Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, as the “social glue” of society. The communication among Parker’s cohort, however, suggests that insults, bragging, and lewd comments about women were what made this glue stick.

Daniel Parker’s younger brother Leonard was twenty-one when Daniel started his tenure in the War Department. Recently graduated from Dartmouth, Leonard took over Daniel’s law office in Charlestown. The first time we hear from Leonard is in June 1811, on a day that, according to Leonard, was so hot and humid, he couldn’t be bothered to write too much. He was cool enough, however, to accuse Daniel of not doing enough to drum up clients for him. The law office suffered, he said, because Daniel had left abruptly without advertising on his behalf. Also, Leonard needed money, and because Daniel was doing well, he should give his younger brother some. He complained to Daniel about his dire circumstances, even as he went out fishing and drinking and looking for girls. In one letter, we meet Leonard’s roommate, D.W. (Daniel Waldo) Lincoln, who had been “drunk nearly all week” while two of his siblings were in town. Lincoln was from a prominent Massachusetts family. His father, Levi, was a well-known judge with close ties to Thomas Jefferson, and his brother Levi Jr. would later serve as governor of the state. D.W., like Leonard, expected his family and friends to help him overcome professional difficulties. He worked in the same office as Leonard, and assumed his father’s status gave him license to continue his roguish ways. D.W.’s bad habits were, according to Leonard, another reason the law office wasn’t doing well. About D.W.’s drinking Leonard wrote: “Sunday while we were gone to meeting I think he began—drank on our passage home. This afternoon came over with intoxication. Tomorrow I expect he will be quite drunk.” Leonard claimed to his brother that, “seeing Lincoln trifling about the office frightened [clients] and carried them off.”

2. Leonard M. Parker to Daniel Parker, December 18, 1815, Daniel Parker papers (Collection 466), Historical Society of Pennsylvania. After complaining about the privileged treatment given to “a particular friend of Mr. Crawford Sec of War,” Leonard drew a frowny face in this letter to his brother, Daniel. Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

As Leonard and D.W. made clear in their letters, both men felt entitled to their jobs and to assistance from family and friends. D.W. wrote to Daniel for help with a client, and insisted that he “attend to this immediately!” Leonard, meanwhile, pestered Daniel into helping him get reappointed as army judge advocate (a position for which Leonard thought he had enough “leisure” time). Leonard actually drew a frowny face because there was another candidate who had more influence with the Secretary of War than he (fig. 2).

This sense of entitlement extended to their relations with young women. D.W. was “making love to Miss Freeman,” but that didn’t stop him from “playing off his gallantry to” other women after a few drinks. This “gallantry” usually came out after Leonard decided he had no interest in pursuing the woman. One Sunday in July 1811, for example, a group of their friends was sailing home from a weekend in Hingham, and Leonard boasted that the daughter of a wealthy merchant was staring at him, but conceded that his alleged admirer may have been mistaking him for Daniel; at that point he left her to be preyed upon by a very drunk D.W. He wrote, “she again had her eyes fixed on me. I had like to have been vain enough to think her in love with me but on the whole I think it must have been you she had in view. I left it to Lincoln to play off his gallantry to and about her which he did up in great style under the excitement of 2 or 3 glasses.” Leonard was starting to think about marriage, and he wrote to Daniel that if any happiness was to be found in life, it was in a wife, and he “trust[ed] in God I shall find an inexhaustible stock of this life’s blessings.” He eventually contented himself with just one wife, when he married D.W.’s sister, Martha; his earlier determination to “find her in loose robes,” fulfilled.

“Rape culture” describes a society in which nonconsensual sexual acts are so common, so normalized, that people are desensitized to them. Although coined by feminists in the late twentieth century, the term is useful for understanding Daniel Parker’s early nineteenth-century social milieu and how the men in it understood their place in society. His letters contain frequent references to forced sexual acts, cheating, and the objectification of women. These references ranged from benign-seeming scenes of domesticity to more overt harassment. One Army contractor wrote to Parker that, “it may be at this time to let you into the secret—well then you know Mrs. B was so gratified on learning of the passage of a certain bill—that on about that time she concluded to become a mother.” He was basically saying, “my wife was so happy with the money I’ll get from Congress’s recent appropriations bill that she was eager for me to get her pregnant.”

3, 4. John R. Bell to Daniel Parker, February 6, 1812, Daniel Parker papers (Collection 466), Historical Society of Pennsylvania. John Bell boasted about attacking the general’s daughter “*à la militaire*.” Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

A young army captain named John R. Bell, who bragged that women in Washington referred to him as “the handsome Mr. Bell,” was more aggressive. During the winter of 1812, the War Department sent Bell to Pennsylvania to recruit men for the army. He was enchanted by all the “dutch [i.e., German] girls” he saw, but disappointed that recruiting duties kept him from “becoming acquainted” with more of them. One night, he stayed at the home of a general whose fifteen-year-old daughter Bell found quite attractive. Bell bragged to Parker that, “like a solider I attacked her, à la militaire.” He “made approaches regularly to the breast work,” and “impressed a sweet goodnight upon her ruby lips” (figs. 3, 4) It’s unclear whether the general’s young daughter wanted the kiss or the groping. Either way, Bell felt entitled to whatever liberties he could take with her. In a departure from his usual boasts, Bell confided to Parker in one letter that he was “bashful among genteel virtuous and handsome ladies” (women who were his age), and unable to “squeeze a hand or steal a kiss without being almost asked to do so.” But even then Bell saw his biggest obstacle as “almost” having to ask for a kiss.

This culture of chauvinistic entitlement pervaded the War Department and its orbit. Elbert Anderson Jr., an Army contractor from New York, wrote to Parker about his “very handsome circle of female friends…gay as the lark yet chaste as Diana,” whom he wished Parker could “have his choice from”—as if the women were his to give. Anderson subcontracted beef and pork rations during the War of 1812 to a man named Sam Wilson, who some theorize became the namesake for “Uncle Sam.” Whether this is indeed true, I do not know. But judging from Anderson’s letters to Parker, his role as a husband and father did not stop him from working it with the ladies. Or from bragging about it. Anderson boasted to Parker about a fancy carriage he had built in New York and told him that “all the young girls and some young married ladies” wanted to ride in it.

This sort of subject-blending matters for historians because it reveals how the personal, however ignoble, was inextricably bound with these men’s understanding of their professional lives. For example, after telling Parker about the number of soldiers who had died near Buffalo, New York, Anderson wrote, “I am going to have the charge of a pretty woman in my baron’s wagon for five days—at least. Don’t you envy me.” In another letter, he gossiped about their friend’s new wife, speculating about whom she had slept with and whether she was pregnant, and then closed by saying he would be sending his bill for supplies to the War Department and asking Parker if he needed another loan. Parker himself similarly mixed the personal with the professional. In 1819, for example, he secured his friend Lieutenant Colonel E. Cutter a more lucrative post, which enabled Cutter, according to another friend, to “get, with some cash, a very amiable woman.”

5. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Army advancement, however, often proved more challenging than exerting control over women. Bell, for example, was a young second lieutenant in a regiment of light artillery when he asked Parker to recommend him for the post of adjutant or quartermaster general. The best Parker could do in June 1812 was to get him appointed as paymaster to the regiment of light artillery. Bell sent Parker a letter thanking him for the appointment, but said that he planned to decline, owing to the position’s paltry compensation and his desire to devote himself to the company of light artillery in which he served. Bell was promoted to first lieutenant that August, and the following summer his request was granted when the War Department appointed him major and assistant inspector-general on July 29, 1813. After the war, though, he complained to Parker, who had since been made inspector- and adjutant-general of the Army, about the location of his post. For the remainder of the 1810s, Bell served as a captain of light artillery and an instructor at West Point. He grew restless, and wrote to Parker for an appointment in the west. Bell secured a position as interim governor of Florida in the summer of 1821, after the United States acquired the territory from Spain. The following year, however, he was passed over for the position of chief Indian agent in Florida.

By then, Bell was in his thirties and accustomed to getting what he wanted, which was evidenced in a letter he received from Secretary of War John Calhoun (fig. 5). On a separate research trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., I found Bell in a volume of confidential and unofficial letters sent by secretaries of war in the 1810s and 1820s (fig. 6). This letter and others in the volume suggest that for privileged War Department bros, there seemed to be an understanding that rejection be mitigated by compliments and explanation. Calhoun explained President Monroe’s decision by assuring Bell that the decision had nothing to do with qualifications: Bell, he said, was probably superior, but the other man had a large family. That man needed government patronage more than Bell, who already had a lucrative command position. Calhoun closed by reiterating how pleased the department was with Bell. This sensitivity to ego usually only extended to bros within the department. As a contractor, Anderson therefore wasn’t privy to the same fawning. He got angry when he wasn’t paid quickly enough, nor given a satisfactory explanation. Peace with Britain after the War of 1812 had barely been declared when he wrote to Parker that the amount he was owed was “enough to make one’s heart sick” and then said he would “unleash the dogs of war” on Secretary of War James Monroe if the government didn’t pay his balance soon. He snidely joked that once he was paid, he would establish his “Franklin magazine” for the poor. He wasn’t poor, and he didn’t care all that much about people who were. For this reason, I couldn’t help but feel a bit satisfied when I read that in June 1816, Parker learned that Congress hadn’t appropriated sufficient funds for army contractors.

6. Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Confidential and Unofficial Letters Sent. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

I don’t want to conclude with as unsavory a character as Anderson. To be fair, men more sensitive than he also appear in Parker’s letters, men who wrote about their infant sons’ teething and the guilt they felt subjecting their families to military life. But in general, Anderson, Bell, and Leonard Parker were more typical of the men with whom Parker corresponded; the chauvinist camaraderie they shared was, in fact, a big part of patronage. As Parker got older, the juvenile discussions of women abated, but there was a certain consistency among the letters he received at age thirty and age sixty in terms of insults: his colleagues took jabs at “foreigners” and questioned the sexuality of politicians they didn’t like. One man whom Parker stopped hearing from and about shortly after taking up residence in Washington was D.W. Lincoln, who, in an incident not unlike the sad news we sometimes hear about fraternities, drank himself to death. Leonard’s observation that “[D.W.] Lincoln drinks like hell … and always will I fear,” came true in the worst way. “He [D.W.] fell asleep and literally died without a struggle.”

Parker eventually married and had children, and after serving as adjutant and inspector general, returned to his position as chief clerk, which he held until his death in 1846. Over the course of his career in the War Department, Parker received many letters thanking him for various military posts and commissions. These letters suggest what would be lost if we only looked at official military correspondence. Patronage appointments were about more than partisan politics. They were also about bonding through masculine entitlement and the degradation of others, and if we skipped these personal papers, we might miss the fact that there were a bunch of dudes running the War Department.

Historical Maps Online

Over the past twenty years, with the help of dealers, bookstores, auction houses, and other collectors, I have collected more than 150,000 maps of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North and South America. Scores of scholars, researchers, and others interested in history and the humanities have viewed the physical collection housed in San Francisco, California. The collection also features world maps, and includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Driven by an intense desire to make the collection available to the public in an intimate setting, in March 2000, I launched www.davidrumsey.com, a Website that allows free viewing of my maps via high-resolution images on the Internet. The Web site now has over eight thousand historical maps available for close examination. The sophisticated, yet simplified software allows visitors to view maps side-by-side, zoom in for inspection of the smallest details, as well as save and print. A comprehensive catalog provides information about each map’s cartographic relevance and provenance, author, the publisher and date of publication, and other historical and geographic facts. Users can launch a simplified browser-based viewer or download and install a feature rich Java client. The Website also has a browser-based geographic information system (GIS) viewer. The interactive Web GIS allows geographers, cartographers, and researchers to integrate historical maps with modern satellite imagery, aerial photos, and other geospatial imagery.

Fig. 1. Home page of the David Rumsey Map Collection

When I began collecting maps in the early 1980’s, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American mapping was not a popular subject with most map collectors. Thus, I was able to assemble an expansive array of maps very quickly. As it happened, the cartographic publishing business in the United States was forming during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. American mapmaking businesses often were interconnected, such as those of Colton and Johnson, Melish and Tanner, and Finley and Mitchell. These relationships are important when trying to recreate a comprehensive cartographic history of the time.

Fig. 2. Group window of the online collection, including thumbnails, data, and searching features Because I wanted to record these relationships and other information about the maps as I collected them, I used a catalog database. The database not only preserved important information about the collection, but also allowed me to shape the growth of the collection with truly contextual collecting–seeing the relationships between the collected maps by subject, graphic type, time period, author or publisher, or geographic location. The use of a catalog database allowed me to see the collection in a data space and this allowed the shaping of the collection into a coherent whole. It also laid the groundwork for building the online collection, although I did not realize that until much later, when the Internet came into existence. Beyond atlases, the collection consists of individual maps, globes, puzzles, books with important maps (such as Lewis and Clark’s published accounts), charts, and cartography in ephemera and unusual forms. Maps by their nature connote many forms of expression: William Henry Holmes’s 1882 topographic drawing of the Grand Canyon is as much art as it is a map, and Samual McCleary and William Pierce’s 1850 wood puzzle titled, Geographical Analysis of the State of New York, is the earliest known map and children’s puzzle in the United States. It was a tool for teaching geography. Maps were also used in historical accounts: a large number of exploration books, government documents, and reports are part of the collection. They detail the official exploration and surveys used to map the United States as it expanded westward. Fig. 3. The Image Workspace window, where maps can be enlarged and compared One of the special gems in the map library is John Melish’s Map of the United States published in 1816. This was the first large map to show the United States from coast to coast, and is considered a precursor of the later popular notion of Manifest Destiny. Melish was also a cartographic poet who, on the map, described the Texas panhandle as "Immense Plains of light salt sand mixed with fragments of Snail shells, moved with the wind, discovering Peaks of Volcanic Rock." To make the collection available to a larger audience, I first considered publishing a print catalog, using the collection database as the source. However, this option would not allow people to truly study the original maps. With my growing interest in software and the Internet, around 1997 I decided to create a software program that would display my collection via the Internet, through collaboration with Luna Imaging. Placing the collection online and adding Internet GIS capability was no small feat. The site required years of time-consuming and careful scanning, experiments with several display and Web technologies, and GIS integration. During this time, I began the arduous process of converting historical materials to high-quality digital images, and converting my existing database catalog to an online catalog of my map library. My database catalog contains a detailed compendium of cartographic materials and notes to connect the items. This record was quite useful in developing the online cataloguing system during the scanning process. Complete atlases were scanned, as were covers for pocket maps, puzzles, and their cases. Folding globes were shown compressed and then opened, and maps were shown enclosed within books. Each subset or group within the collection has a unique number to tie all of its components together. Individual items in the group have derivations of the unique number, and by numbering each record sequentially, the items appear together and in the correct order. Thus, if one searches for an entire atlas, all of the pages will come up together and in the proper order. In addition, when browsing, the cover for a map will appear next to the map itself. I was also able to create digital composite images of maps that were intended to be joined by the cartographer and engraver but were separated in the bound books. An example is Henry Popples’s 1733 Atlas of the British Empire in America. On March 15, 2000, the map library site was launched on the Internet with more than twenty-three hundred maps. The number of visitors to the site in the first few months was astonishing: we averaged over ten thousand visitors a day. Feedback from users was immediate and revealed that a number of K-12 teaching resource groups, Civil War buffs, university map libraries and history departments, home schoolers, and the general public were keenly interested in this type of online library. Since the launch date over two million people have visited the site and used its resources. By 2001, I was working with Telemorphic, Inc., a GIS software developer, to modify their Web browser for general image analysis and visualization. We specifically tailored the software to allow people to see four different maps at the same time. The Quad View feature enables people to view a historical map next to other historical maps as well as contemporary satellite imagery or modern raster and vector data of the same area. Fig. 4. David Rumsey preparing a map for scanning We decided to use the most readily available source of current map data: the United States Geological Survey (USGS). In addition, we faced another technical limitation in not being able to integrate current data with the thousands of maps on the site all at once. As a result, we decided to develop the Web GIS on a city-by-city basis, then move on to regional, state, and county levels. We focused on the San Francisco Bay Area first, obtaining digital orthophotos, topographic map sheets, digital elevation models (DEMs), and satellite imagery from the USGS Bay Area Regional Database. We quickly learned that just having the data wasn’t sufficient. We needed to rectify the digital images of the historical maps to an accurate geographic basemap so that they had common reference frames. This process of "warping" historical maps to modern geographic reference data was challenging. Many historical maps were created before the availability of modern mapping and surveying technologies, and some of the items were tourist maps that were visually surveyed or based on an artist’s rendering. Fig. 5. The GIS Quad Viewer showing the same part of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Clockwise from lower left: a 1915 map, a modern USGS map, an 1869 map, and a modern aerial photo. By December 2001, we had completed integration of eleven different maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, from the mid-1800’s through early 1900’s. Soon thereafter, we added Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. The site has a basic and professional GIS interface intended to allow people of various skill levels to move easily through a series of visualization processes and create, save, and print their own custom maps. Users can also download new image products with complete georeferencing information (world files) for integration into their preferred desktop GIS package. Adding the GIS feature to the online collection is giving mapping professionals a unique opportunity to learn from the past. Stephen Skartvedt, a GIS specialist for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, sees many advantages of the new GIS site for his organization. Because Golden Gate Park is now, to a large extent, an island surrounded by development, Skartvedt says the historical maps provide visual confirmation of the value of protected land and show the pace of development in a typical urban setting. Being able to share historical maps across the Web in an interactive environment has proven more rewarding then initially imagined. Response from cartographers, geographers, and GIS professionals has been very enthusiastic. The latest new dimension to the online GIS experience is three-dimensional viewing and fly-through sequences. Visitors can now fly-through parts of California in the late 1800’s such as Yosemite Valley and Los Angeles in 1883, and Lake Tahoe in 1876. Expansion of the current GIS data sets will continue, adding more cities and more historical detail, such as fire and insurance maps and hand-drawn land parcel/ownership maps, along with more current satellite and aerial imagery, topographic map data, and detailed street information. We also plan to increase the level of interoperability between the site’s Luna Imaging browser and the GIS service, so that users can click on a spatial feature in the GIS view and immediately launch the image browser to see a corresponding map or drawing with more detail. Fig. 6. Images showing the creation of a 3D Map of Yosemite Valley. Clockwise from lower left: a modern digital elevation model (DEM) of the valley, the 1882 Wheeler survey of the valley, a 3D image resulting from combining the DEM and the historic map, and a detail of the 3D historic map. Soon people will browse multiple map collections at once, comparing maps from widely dispersed institutions in a common Internet space. Currently, I am working with several major public map collections interested in achieving this broad goal. One of these joint ventures is with the University of California at Berkeley. A collaboration with the University of California’s East Asian Library has made their collection of rare and fragile historic maps of Japan, some of which date back as far as four centuries, available. More than two hundred maps, including examples of rarely seen woodblock print maps of the ancient city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo, are now available online. Thirteen of the Tokyo maps, dating from 1680 to 1910, were also added to the GIS browser. Additional historic maps of Osaka, Japan, and Kyoto, Japan, have been added to the site as well. I am also working to establish many different ways that the online map collection can be found and accessed by users. We have contributed most of our records to the Open Archive Initiative. Several OAI based search engines are developing, an example being the University of Michigan’s OAIster, where our maps can be found along with millions of other documents and images. Our records and images can also be found on popular search engines like Google. We create automatically an individual Web page for each of our records, and the Google data "spiders" catalog and index these records. Google currently has over sixty-five hundred record pages from my site. We contribute our data to the ESRI Geography Network, a shared GIS database, and to the ECAI Meta Data Clearinghouse, a GIS database for historians. With the help of the University of California, we are putting all our records with links to the map images into the OCLC catalog, where they can be downloaded and added to library OPACs–UC Berkeley has added over forty-five hundred of our records to their online catalog. We will continue to add new ways for people to find and intersect with our information via the Web. Historical maps reveal amazing tales about towns, boundaries, politics, geographic features and early landscape values, and how they changed or vanished with modern development. The very existence of high-resolution map imagery on the Web will bring these beautiful and important materials to the attention of the general public and scholars in ways that have not been possible before. Thanks to the Web and GIS, historians, artists, geographers, cartographers, and others can reconsider their understanding of history. this issue home Discuss this article in the Republic of Letters — Fig. 2. Group window of the online collection, including thumbnails, data, and searching features

Because I wanted to record these relationships and other information about the maps as I collected them, I used a catalog database. The database not only preserved important information about the collection, but also allowed me to shape the growth of the collection with truly contextual collecting–seeing the relationships between the collected maps by subject, graphic type, time period, author or publisher, or geographic location. The use of a catalog database allowed me to see the collection in a data space and this allowed the shaping of the collection into a coherent whole. It also laid the groundwork for building the online collection, although I did not realize that until much later, when the Internet came into existence. Beyond atlases, the collection consists of individual maps, globes, puzzles, books with important maps (such as Lewis and Clark’s published accounts), charts, and cartography in ephemera and unusual forms. Maps by their nature connote many forms of expression: William Henry Holmes’s 1882 topographic drawing of the Grand Canyon is as much art as it is a map, and Samual McCleary and William Pierce’s 1850 wood puzzle titled, Geographical Analysis of the State of New York, is the earliest known map and children’s puzzle in the United States. It was a tool for teaching geography. Maps were also used in historical accounts: a large number of exploration books, government documents, and reports are part of the collection. They detail the official exploration and surveys used to map the United States as it expanded westward.

Fig. 3. The Image Workspace window, where maps can be enlarged and compared

One of the special gems in the map library is John Melish’s Map of the United States published in 1816. This was the first large map to show the United States from coast to coast, and is considered a precursor of the later popular notion of Manifest Destiny. Melish was also a cartographic poet who, on the map, described the Texas panhandle as “Immense Plains of light salt sand mixed with fragments of Snail shells, moved with the wind, discovering Peaks of Volcanic Rock.” To make the collection available to a larger audience, I first considered publishing a print catalog, using the collection database as the source. However, this option would not allow people to truly study the original maps. With my growing interest in software and the Internet, around 1997 I decided to create a software program that would display my collection via the Internet, through collaboration with Luna Imaging. Placing the collection online and adding Internet GIS capability was no small feat. The site required years of time-consuming and careful scanning, experiments with several display and Web technologies, and GIS integration. During this time, I began the arduous process of converting historical materials to high-quality digital images, and converting my existing database catalog to an online catalog of my map library. My database catalog contains a detailed compendium of cartographic materials and notes to connect the items. This record was quite useful in developing the online cataloguing system during the scanning process. Complete atlases were scanned, as were covers for pocket maps, puzzles, and their cases. Folding globes were shown compressed and then opened, and maps were shown enclosed within books. Each subset or group within the collection has a unique number to tie all of its components together. Individual items in the group have derivations of the unique number, and by numbering each record sequentially, the items appear together and in the correct order. Thus, if one searches for an entire atlas, all of the pages will come up together and in the proper order. In addition, when browsing, the cover for a map will appear next to the map itself. I was also able to create digital composite images of maps that were intended to be joined by the cartographer and engraver but were separated in the bound books. An example is Henry Popples’s 1733 Atlas of the British Empire in America. On March 15, 2000, the map library site was launched on the Internet with more than twenty-three hundred maps. The number of visitors to the site in the first few months was astonishing: we averaged over ten thousand visitors a day. Feedback from users was immediate and revealed that a number of K-12 teaching resource groups, Civil War buffs, university map libraries and history departments, home schoolers, and the general public were keenly interested in this type of online library. Since the launch date over two million people have visited the site and used its resources. By 2001, I was working with Telemorphic, Inc., a GIS software developer, to modify their Web browser for general image analysis and visualization. We specifically tailored the software to allow people to see four different maps at the same time. The Quad View feature enables people to view a historical map next to other historical maps as well as contemporary satellite imagery or modern raster and vector data of the same area.

Fig. 4. David Rumsey preparing a map for scanning

We decided to use the most readily available source of current map data: the United States Geological Survey (USGS). In addition, we faced another technical limitation in not being able to integrate current data with the thousands of maps on the site all at once. As a result, we decided to develop the Web GIS on a city-by-city basis, then move on to regional, state, and county levels. We focused on the San Francisco Bay Area first, obtaining digital orthophotos, topographic map sheets, digital elevation models (DEMs), and satellite imagery from the USGS Bay Area Regional Database. We quickly learned that just having the data wasn’t sufficient. We needed to rectify the digital images of the historical maps to an accurate geographic basemap so that they had common reference frames. This process of “warping” historical maps to modern geographic reference data was challenging. Many historical maps were created before the availability of modern mapping and surveying technologies, and some of the items were tourist maps that were visually surveyed or based on an artist’s rendering.

Fig. 5. The GIS Quad Viewer showing the same part of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Clockwise from lower left: a 1915 map, a modern USGS map, an 1869 map, and a modern aerial photo. — Fig. 5. The GIS Quad Viewer showing the same part of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Clockwise from lower left: a 1915 map, a modern USGS map, an 1869 map, and a modern aerial photo.

By December 2001, we had completed integration of eleven different maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, from the mid-1800’s through early 1900’s. Soon thereafter, we added Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. The site has a basic and professional GIS interface intended to allow people of various skill levels to move easily through a series of visualization processes and create, save, and print their own custom maps. Users can also download new image products with complete georeferencing information (world files) for integration into their preferred desktop GIS package. Adding the GIS feature to the online collection is giving mapping professionals a unique opportunity to learn from the past. Stephen Skartvedt, a GIS specialist for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, sees many advantages of the new GIS site for his organization. Because Golden Gate Park is now, to a large extent, an island surrounded by development, Skartvedt says the historical maps provide visual confirmation of the value of protected land and show the pace of development in a typical urban setting. Being able to share historical maps across the Web in an interactive environment has proven more rewarding then initially imagined. Response from cartographers, geographers, and GIS professionals has been very enthusiastic. The latest new dimension to the online GIS experience is three-dimensional viewing and fly-through sequences. Visitors can now fly-through parts of California in the late 1800’s such as Yosemite Valley and Los Angeles in 1883, and Lake Tahoe in 1876. Expansion of the current GIS data sets will continue, adding more cities and more historical detail, such as fire and insurance maps and hand-drawn land parcel/ownership maps, along with more current satellite and aerial imagery, topographic map data, and detailed street information. We also plan to increase the level of interoperability between the site’s Luna Imaging browser and the GIS service, so that users can click on a spatial feature in the GIS view and immediately launch the image browser to see a corresponding map or drawing with more detail.

Fig. 6. Images showing the creation of a 3D Map of Yosemite Valley. Clockwise from lower left: a modern digital elevation model (DEM) of the valley, the 1882 Wheeler survey of the valley, a 3D image resulting from combining the DEM and the historic map, and a detail of the 3D historic map.

Soon people will browse multiple map collections at once, comparing maps from widely dispersed institutions in a common Internet space. Currently, I am working with several major public map collections interested in achieving this broad goal. One of these joint ventures is with the University of California at Berkeley. A collaboration with the University of California’s East Asian Library has made their collection of rare and fragile historic maps of Japan, some of which date back as far as four centuries, available. More than two hundred maps, including examples of rarely seen woodblock print maps of the ancient city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo, are now available online. Thirteen of the Tokyo maps, dating from 1680 to 1910, were also added to the GIS browser. Additional historic maps of Osaka, Japan, and Kyoto, Japan, have been added to the site as well. I am also working to establish many different ways that the online map collection can be found and accessed by users. We have contributed most of our records to the Open Archive Initiative. Several OAI based search engines are developing, an example being the University of Michigan’s OAIster, where our maps can be found along with millions of other documents and images. Our records and images can also be found on popular search engines like Google. We create automatically an individual Web page for each of our records, and the Google data “spiders” catalog and index these records. Google currently has over sixty-five hundred record pages from my site. We contribute our data to the ESRI Geography Network, a shared GIS database, and to the ECAI Meta Data Clearinghouse, a GIS database for historians. With the help of the University of California, we are putting all our records with links to the map images into the OCLC catalog, where they can be downloaded and added to library OPACs–UC Berkeley has added over forty-five hundred of our records to their online catalog. We will continue to add new ways for people to find and intersect with our information via the Web. Historical maps reveal amazing tales about towns, boundaries, politics, geographic features and early landscape values, and how they changed or vanished with modern development. The very existence of high-resolution map imagery on the Web will bring these beautiful and important materials to the attention of the general public and scholars in ways that have not been possible before. Thanks to the Web and GIS, historians, artists, geographers, cartographers, and others can reconsider their understanding of history.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

David Rumsey is the founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection and president of Cartography Associates. He is the author, with Meredith Williams, of “Historical Maps in GIS” and, with Edith M. Punt, of Cartographica Extraordinaire: The Historical Map Transformed (Redlands, Calif., 2003).

What He Did For Love: David Claypoole Johnston and the Boston Irish, 1825-1865

David Claypoole Johnston was an engraver, artist, and satirical commentator on American life, who can reasonably be called the best known and most popular American graphic artist of the first half of the nineteenth century (fig. 1). Born in Philadelphia, he apprenticed there, and moved to Boston in 1825, living and working in the city until his death in 1865. The cartoons, prints, and yearly satiric periodicals on which his contemporary reputation as “the famous caricature designer” rested were advertised, editorially noted, and sometimes extensively reviewed in the Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore and Charleston newspapers. Their circulation reached considerably farther—throughout the smaller cities of New England (Portland, Portsmouth, Providence, and Hartford)—and at times to Savannah, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. Love and marriage pulled this Protestant artisan and satirist, born into a family of performers, into the orbit of Boston’s tight-knit yet marginal Irish and Catholic community.

David Claypoole Johnston was no Irishman, but he married into the clan, and thereby hangs this tale. His own ethnicity was Scottish and English. Born in Philadelphia in 1798, he was the child of an Englishwoman, the young former actress Charlotte Rowson (the sister of the author Susanna Rowson), and William P. Johnston, an accountant, bookkeeper, and devotee of the stage, whose ancestors had come to New Jersey in the early eighteenth century from southern England and from Edinburgh in Scotland. Charlotte had been baptized in the Church of England, and by the mid-eighteenth century, members of the Johnston family were being married in the Anglican Church and buried in the Anglican cemetery. Indeed, Johnston’s great-grandfather, a Scotsman born in Edinburgh, had sought out the Anglican rather than the Presbyterian church when he arrived in his new homeland.

After their marriage, William and Charlotte became parishioners of old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Given Philadelphia’s high ethnic diversity by early American standards, David would have known a number of people of Irish descent, and more than a few Catholics; working as he did in the book trades, he surely would have known of, and perhaps met, the great publisher and printer Matthew Carey, the city’s most famous and successful Irish Catholic. Johnston’s master in the engraving trade, Francis Kearny, was himself the descendant of Irish Catholics who had come to New Jersey, but his family had shed its ancestral faith within a generation, also becoming Anglicans.

There is no reason to suspect Johnston of piety in his early life. He was a caricaturist from the time he could hold a pencil, and in his youth an accomplished mimic, an amateur musician with a predilection for comic songs, and as he recalled, “a nice man for a party.” His autobiography makes no mention of religious feeling or religious matters, and none of the work that he produced in Philadelphia between 1815 and 1825 had any religious content. Out of this religious genealogy, we can draw at least one conclusion: there is no evidence of any strain of Calvinist, Reformed, or Evangelical sentiment in Johnston’s background.

Human love, not a wrenching religious conversion or spiritual journey, determined Johnston’s trajectory. In this, he followed the path of his parents. Smitten by her appearances on the Philadelphia stage, William Johnston had pursued the eighteen-year-old Charlotte Rowson to Boston when her family had moved there to open the city’s first theater in 1797. He proposed, married her in Boston, and brought her back to his native city. Charlotte retired from the stage, but William maintained some involvement in theatrical business affairs in Philadelphia, eventually becoming treasurer of the Chestnut Street Theater. David, their oldest son, himself took a turn on the professional stage; as a young engraver looking for additional income, he spent three seasons as a part-time actor in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

In 1825, David Johnston moved to Boston, looking for a better reception from the city’s publishers than he had received in his turbulent early years in his home city. Shortly after his arrival, Johnston became a boarder at the Irishman Thomas Murphy’s well-known establishment on Federal Street—a seemingly small step that would prove momentous. The house was convenient to the Federal Street Theatre, where Johnston had “engaged with the Boston managers” for a year to finance his transition between the publishing worlds of Philadelphia and Boston. At that time, he met Murphy’s daughters, Mary Priscilla, then 17, and Sara Elizabeth, then 15. He seems to have been accepted quickly as a member of the household, to judge by a birthday acrostic he composed for Mary Priscilla in 1826. His theatrical background, which would have rendered him somewhat marginal in the eyes of most residents of respectable Boston households, and disqualified him from social contact with their young women, did not seem to have mattered.

Thomas Murphy had joined the campaign of the United Irishmen in County Wexford in the 1790s, and came to Massachusetts around 1798 after the crushing of the rebellion. Adapting well to his new country, despite the seemingly unpropitious religious climate of Massachusetts, he had become a prosperous innkeeper and then a boarding house proprietor in Concord, Woburn, and finally in Boston. He was a true pillar of both his community and his church: president of the Charitable Irish Society, founder and officer of the Vincent De Paul Society, the Roman Catholic Charitable Relief Society, and the Irish Orphans Annual Fair. His boarding house was a block or two from the Federal Street Theatre; far more important, it was next door to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, “the first house below the Catholic Church” as his advertisements always said. Priests were always traveling between the Bishop’s seat and their scattered flocks in the far-flung Boston diocese, which until 1843 covered all six New England states. Visiting priests were surely often part of Murphy’s extended household. Both proximity and devotion made Thomas Murphy an important layman.

By the end of the theatrical season of 1825, Johnston was able “to cut the boards,” as he put it, to go back to “cutting copper.” His plan to use the theater as a bridge to full-time engraving had succeeded. He “became known to the book publishers,” and opened a shop at 81 Washington Street, where his “abilities were more than appreciated” and “liberally rewarded.” Despite his growing success, Johnston did not leave the boarding house. In fact, he would never leave the Murphy household. Smitten by a beautiful young woman, as his father had been, David patiently courted Sarah Elizabeth, and married her in 1829, just after her nineteenth birthday; he was thirty-one.

In the summer of 1999, a few months before leaving my hometown of Logan, Utah, to attend graduate school in Chicago, I took a temp job laying a faux-hardwood floor in a local toy store. On hands and knees, my little crew (me, plus two riotously profane sub-contractors from California) crept from the front entrance toward the stockroom, sticking pieces of perfectly grained plastic onto the glue-covered cement slab. Behind us, electricians from Idaho followed on rolling scaffolds, installing light fixtures and doing occult things with wires high in the ceiling—from whence would soon come the Annunciation of Big Bubba.

Big Bubba was the head electrician’s son, a large, bowling-pin shaped man of about twenty. Outfitted in trucker’s cap and Wranglers, he looked for all the world like he was about to hold someone upside-down over a junior high washroom toilet. As Big Bubba loomed above us, one of the California guys asked me a hard question: “So, what’s taking you to Chi-town?” Having long ago learned not to broadcast in public my intention to study eighteenth-century France, I ran through my catalog of lies (law school, commodities trading, professional baseball) before settling on a version of the truth. “I’m going to get a doctorate in European history,” I offered. Pausing and puzzling, the floor-layer wondered aloud, “Why would anybody want to learn about European history?” And then, with the authority of a messenger from the heavens, his face bathed in light of his own creation, Big Bubba leaned over the edge of his scaffold and proclaimed: “Cuz that way, if he goes to the bathroom next to ya, he can tell if yer a-peein’!”

As you can imagine, I’ve told the story of the Annunciation of Big Bubba a lot over the years. It gets laughs. But I’ve come to see what happened in that toy store as something that transcends bathroom humor. In fact, I’ve come to think of Big Bubba’s words as a kind of prophecy, one that became more meaningful the farther my career has taken me away from that half-finished floor in Logan.

To be sure, the foreign in general and France in particular have retained their hold over my psyche, Big Bubba’s disapproval notwithstanding. Like Mitt Romney minus the money, I spent two years in France as a Mormon missionary. Unlike Mitt, however, I’ve never had much reason to hide the acute, aching francophilia I picked up there. If my face allowed me to pull off the beret and pencil-moustache look, I’d probably do it. But as an American who wants to write about subjects that resonate with people back home, I confess that in addition to giving me reason to chuckle every time I go into a men’s room, Big Bubba also keeps me thinking about the allure of the familiar.

Once I got to Chicago, graduate study exposed me not just to the wonders of French history, but to the then new-ish vogue for Atlantic studies. Like everybody I went to school with, I read books and articles celebrating the demise of old models of scholarship rooted in the institutions of early modern empire or (tsk, tsk) the mere pre-history of the United States. There was now a more excellent way: the study of an integrated Atlantic world that embraced the internally diverse African, Native American, and European cultures thrust into contact in the years after 1492.

Cowed by the job prospects facing French historians and guided by sharp-eyed mentors, I edged away from France while positioning myself to catch the Atlantic wave. More than I should have, I smirked at the passé and exulted at the revolution this new thinking seemed to promise. While I parroted my share of fancy talk about historiography, theory, and methods, I’m pretty sure that I latched onto Atlantic history with Big Bubba’s words ringing in my ears. Here, perhaps, was a way of embracing the European without disavowing the yer-a-peein’. Pardon my French.

This personal compulsion to cling to two (or more) homelands, I think, tends to seep into scholarship, at least for some of us. We don’t just want to participate in the construction of Atlantic history as yet another sub-field. We’re not team players. Deep in our hearts, we know that the modern notion of an “Atlantic world,” built to bring some sense of order to an unruly early modern past, will in the end go the way of straight-up historical Marxism, annaliste-style “total history,” and the “new social history” of the 1960s and 1970s. It just happens. Ashes to ashes and all that.

Fig. 1. "A View of Fort Saint Louis at Acarron Bay," 1764, accession number 02057. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Click to enlarge in new window. — Fig. 1. “A View of Fort Saint Louis at Acarron Bay,” 1764, accession number 02057. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Click to enlarge in new window.

In truth, I run with the Atlanticist crowd for a selfish reason: because Atlantic history allows me to be in two places at once. And by “be,” I mean “be,” as in “exist or live,” or better yet, “belong.” In the course of my travels, I’ve retraced the steps of a refugee boy orphaned in the 1750s through the streets of modern Philadelphia, and I’ve looked out across Brittany’s Gulf of Morbihan toward Belle-Ile-en-Mer, imagining how the people I write about made sense of their own small niches in a world grown large. In addition, I’ve been lucky enough to ferret out and stumble upon the traces of obscure yet extraordinary men, women, and children in archives on both sides of the Atlantic. I get emotional about these little discoveries. But I’m not ashamed to admit that 250-year-old letters have nearly brought me to tears—which, being in an archive and all, I just blamed on the dust.

It wasn’t the dust. Rather, it was the breathtaking recognition of a ghostly, flickering point of connection between my own (admittedly trivial) struggles and the bona fide, life-threatening crises faced by my subjects in the eighteenth century. My colleague Craig Harline, a historian of Reformation-era Europe, describes these moments as well as anyone can: “[Y]ou sense something familiar, and your special History muscle goes into action to find it—flattening time in your head, dragging the past forward, pushing the present back, until the story from five or fifteen centuries before looks a lot like a story that happened to you just last week, and seems just as vital and personal too.”

Before taking my first research trips, I was an unlikely candidate for such an experience. No doubt spurred on by an overactive subconscious, I had fashioned a dissertation topic centered on what are now the Maritime Provinces of Canada—which, I now realize, are roughly the same distance from Utah and France. Despite knowing very little about them, I hit upon the idea of writing about Acadians. These, I gathered, were French colonists who, after living uncomfortably under British rule for forty years, were driven from their homes in the mid-eighteenth century, and whose descendants had become the Cajuns of Louisiana. It sounded like a pretty good story, but given my coddled modernity, I had no inkling that I would ever see myself in its protagonists.

As I made my way to the North American archives containing the earliest traces of the Acadians’ history, I did my best along the way to visit sites where that history actually took place. I struggled to get my bearings. The first French families to put down roots in Acadia, I discovered, did so in the mid-seventeenth century, establishing villages on the eastern shore of the Bay of Fundy while courting the good graces of the indigenous Mi’kmaq. But instead of hacking their homesteads from forests or prairies like the westward-probing English of Massachusetts or Virginia, Acadians walled out the sea. Using techniques honed along the rivers of western France, they built up a network of dikes and sluices to drain vast areas of fertile marshland. Long ago, my pioneer ancestors headed for the Utah hills; these folks clung to the coast.

In terms of productivity, it worked. By 1713, when the Treaty of Utrecht abruptly transformed the French colony of Acadia into the British province of Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy seemed poised to serve as a “granary” for the market-oriented towns of New England. Even as they mulled over the idea of expelling Nova Scotia’s “neutral French” and replacing them with “good Protestant subjects,” British officials strained to make sense of the otherworldly environment the Acadians had created. The uplands, they reasoned, were so much safer—no storm surges, no freak tides, no burrowing muskrats to pierce the sod walls and flood the fields. As I surveyed the site of the Acadian village of Grand Pré and the ruins of its elaborate system of dikes on a blustery Saturday in 2001, I felt much the same confusion. I marveled at Acadian tenacity, but worried that whatever it was that made them tick, I of all people wasn’t going to get it.

Learning about their expulsion from the Maritimes and the diaspora that saw them scattered across the Atlantic world made the Acadian experience seem even less comprehensible. Beginning in 1755, Anglo-American troops began a campaign to hunt down, arrest, and deport all 15,000 Acadians living on or near the Bay of Fundy. Among the first offensives in what would become the Seven Years’ War, the deportation was also among the most successful. Within three years, some 10,000 Acadians had been captured and shipped off to exile in the port cities of British North America, Great Britain, and France, while the rest mostly hid out in the wilds of New France. By the mid-1760s, Acadians had washed up in bizarre colonies in Saint-Domingue, Guiana, the Falkland Islands, and the French countryside. The toll in lives was staggering. By the hundreds, Acadians drowned in shipwrecks off the Azores, died of malaria in Guiana, and succumbed to starvation in Normandy. The physical and psychological trauma these people had endured exceeded anything I had known, and most of the darkest things I had imagined. Trying to relate to their experience, I realized, was a little like trying to relate to that of a slave, post-Middle Passage.

As I now recall it, I drove from Grand Pré back to my hotel in Moncton, New Brunswick, that Saturday in 2001 in an intellectual funk. I had never really wanted to analyze the past; I wanted to commune with it. That prospect now seemed dim. But as I neared Moncton, a town that has long served as a center of resurgent Acadian culture in the Maritimes, the sight of a bar got me thinking. Located on Champlain Street in the nearby town of Dieppe, it was called “Le Pub 1755.” A British-style pub with a French name that made reference to the year of the Anglo-American assault on Acadians? I pulled over to think about that for a few minutes.

Back in Moncton, I parked at the hotel and walked to the center of town in search of a cheap dinner. Teenagers from the hinterlands were arriving to drag Main Street—or rue Main, in this case. Jacked-up trucks, mesh-backed baseball caps, and Metallica T-shirts abounded. Skirting past the knots of kids forming on the sidewalk, I caught bits and pieces of familiar conversations about music, sports, the opposite sex, and where beer might be had. The scene could not have been more familiar or more small-town American—except that in Moncton, it took place in chiac, a local dialect that combines archaic French and Internet-era English. How historically aware Moncton’s teens were I couldn’t tell, but it struck me that night that those Acadian kids, like the pub owner on Champlain Street, were participants in the long process of figuring out how to belong to two places at once. And that, at least, I could understand. I might even be able to commune with it.

A year later, I felt that communion even more powerfully at the Archives départementales de la Vienne in Poitiers, a middling city in France’s middle. The archive itself was bright and well-organized, far less Gothic and more Napoleonic than I had hoped. Not so for “dépôt 22,” the collection of documents I had come to see. The archivist delivered them to my station not in a cardboard box or folder, but in an ancient, elaborately latched chest. With a nod to me, he opened it, revealing a pile of several hundred letters to and from a local nobleman, the marquis de Pérusse, all penned during the mid-1770s. The chest’s interior was a riot of paper, with brown, crusty vellum sheets sticking out from a cascade of robin’s egg-blue linen stationary. It all smelled vaguely of cathedral vault.

I plowed through the letters, growing more animated as I realized what they contained: a tale of intrigue and violence linking Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Louis XVI’s famous, wealthy controller-general of finances, and Jean-Jacques Leblanc, an ordinary, impoverished Acadian refugee from the western borderlands of Nova Scotia. They made an odd couple, and they came together in odd fashion. In the 1760s and 1770s, a cadre of French thinkers and statesmen became united in their disgust with the supposedly languishing state of French agriculture. Their solution was to colonize France itself. They hoped to found colonial companies like those that had once invested in North America or the Caribbean, but who would instead pour capital into the clearing and farming of uncultivated land within the kingdom. Among the first to step forward with a proposal was the marquis de Pérusse, the forward-thinking owner of a large, bramble-ridden estate near Poitiers.

The search for loyal, hardworking, and pliable agricultural laborers for this promising enterprise led royal officials to the Acadians, about 3,000 of whom had been scraping by in French seaports since the expulsions of the 1750s. In 1773 and 1774, nearly 1,500 Acadians made their way to Pérusse’s lands, where masons were (on the royal dime) busily constructing six new villages exclusively for the colonists. Among them was Jean-Jacques Leblanc.

Fig. 2. "Large and Particular Plan of Shegnekto Bay," engraving on paper by Thomas Jeffreys, 34 x 38 cm. (1755). Courtesy of the John Clarence Webster Canadiana Collection (W295), Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. — Fig. 2. “Large and Particular Plan of Shegnekto Bay,” engraving on paper by Thomas Jeffreys, 34 x 38 cm. (1755). Courtesy of the John Clarence Webster Canadiana Collection (W295), Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

He was unhappy to be there. For years he had told his Acadian friends that leaving France altogether was their best bet. The Spanish, he knew, were trawling for families to populate the frontiers of Louisiana, and had even made generous offers for groups willing to settle their own internal colony in the Sierra Morena of Andalusia. Even the hated British seemed to have softened on the Acadians: as early as 1763, rumors had flown across the English Channel of plans to settle France’s Acadians on the island of Jersey, while mysterious British agents had promised to carry them back to Nova Scotia, Irish priests in tow, to recreate their lost homeland. Louisiana appealed to Leblanc; several dozen Acadians had already landed there, and the Spanish were eager for more. But there was a catch. All of the European nations angling for new settlers offered the best terms to large, coherent groups. Mere individuals—or, as Catherine the Great of Russia called them, “fugitives and passportless people”—merited no special attention. So whatever France’s Acadians did, they had to do it as a community. And so Leblanc had reluctantly followed his compatriots to Poitiers while plotting a next move.

He soon got a hand from Versailles. Turgot, who became controller-general of finances under the young Louis XVI in mid 1774, opposed the Acadian colony as well. His reasons were straightforward: it cost too much, and it was deeply unfair. Although Turgot was sympathetic to promoters of internal colonization, Pérusse’s project had been funded by a previous administration less concerned with the kingdom’s mounting debt. Worse, in their efforts to lure the Acadians to Poitiers, Turgot’s predecessors had promised them what amounted to hereditary privileges—tax exemptions, a daily allowance from the royal coffers, cheap tobacco, and so on. Turgot despised privileges, styling them a fundamental barrier to economic vitality. As his correspondence made clear, he wanted the colony near Poitiers dismantled and its Acadians off the dole.

In the fall of 1774, the possibility of conspiring with Turgot hit Leblanc like a thunderbolt. After securing a passport and letters of introduction from some of Pérusse’s local enemies, he slipped away to Versailles and talked his way into a meeting with the controller-general. Leblanc then returned to Poitiers and got to work. With some burly friends, he formed a goon squad that roamed the colony’s farms. They recommended, in no uncertain terms, that Acadian colonists agree to leave their homes, abandon their privileges, and move together to the Atlantic port of Nantes. In response to foot-dragging, they issued threats, pelted homes with rocks, and hurled logs down wells, blocking off water supplies. One Sunday after mass, Leblanc’s henchman Simon Aucoin collared a few colonists as they left their parish church, growling that he would “knock them senseless” if they refused to follow Leblanc’s lead. For his part, Turgot delayed the Acadians’ allowance and threw up every administrative roadblock he could think of. Resistance by those who wished to remain on Pérusse’s estates began to crumble.

As I neared the bottom of the chest of letters, Jean-Jacques Leblanc finally prevailed. In 1776, all but a few of the colony’s 1,500 Acadians fled together, taking great wagon convoys to Nantes. Nearly a decade later in 1785, almost exactly the same number of Acadians sailed from Nantes to Louisiana—minus Jean-Jacques Leblanc, who died in 1781. If you know Cajuns, some of their ancestors probably lived through these strange events.

As I cobbled the letters into a narrative, the story spoke to me. Big processes were reflected in it: old regime France’s little-known attempt to colonize itself, the widening eighteenth-century market for free laborers, and the mysterious processes by which people forged collective identities and loyalties.

Fig. 3. "Portrait of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot," 1774. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France. — Fig. 3. “Portrait of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot,” 1774. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France.

Little things, though, stuck out even more. Jean-Jacques Leblanc, his friends, and their foes were all trying to negotiate the intricacies of belonging to two places at once. Some abandoned the old for the new. Gervais Gotrot endured Leblanc’s mistreatment in the Acadian colony near Poitiers, but instead of going to Louisiana he struck out on his own, settling in the English Channel port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he raised sons and grandsons who sailed warships for Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire. Many, of course, never recovered from the loss of their Maritime homes. Guillaume Gallet and his deranged adult son simply gave up, dying homeless in the French town of Saint-Malo in 1787. Others, however, groped for a way to claim the best of both worlds—the rustic liberty of the Americas and the security afforded by proximity to European power and sophistication.

Leblanc’s violent push toward Louisiana was a manifestation of this double-edged desire. So too was the face of Jean-Pierre de la Roche, one of the Acadian exiles I met while rummaging through the chest containing dépôt 22. De la Roche showed up only once. His passport, which enabled him to cross provincial borders as he traveled to Pérusse’s Acadian colony, was buried near the bottom of the heap. According to the clerk who described him, he was not attractive: “Acadian, twenty five years old, five feet two thumbs [pouces, a couple of inches each] in height; gray, sunken eyes, pointy nose, a scar below his lower lip.” The clerk then added a line that caught my eye: “He wears a wig.” Like thousands of French men, de la Roche had seized on the vogue for cheap wigs as an assertion of status and respectability—a display that would have irked his North American ancestors, but which for him, having arrived in France as a thirteen-year-old boy, seemed sensible. Even as I scanned his crumbling passport, generating a less-than-flattering mental image of young Jean-Pierre, the impulse to see this short, rodentine, bewigged refugee as kin became overwhelming. Were we not connected in our confusion?

After leaving Poitiers, documents elsewhere began to look less like flat paper and more like inter-dimensional portals. Peering in wasn’t easy. I recoiled at letters from the Connecticut State Archives recounting the story of two Acadian couples who traveled from Annapolis, Maryland, to Woodbury, Connecticut, in the winter of 1756-57. I’m not sure how it happened, but during the expulsion of 1755 the two sets of parents became separated from their seven children. Sent off to Annapolis, they scoured newspapers and queried travelers for over a year before discovering that their children had landed in Woodbury. After a midwinter journey by sea and land, they arrived frostbitten, clothed in vermin-infested rags. During a reunion reluctantly organized by some of Woodbury’s town leaders, the Acadian parents realized something awful. The youngest kids had essentially forgotten them. They were terrified by their parents’ ghoulish appearance, while the older children were hardly enthusiastic about giving up friends and apprenticeships in Woodbury in favor of family with little to offer besides skin and bones.

From Philadelphia to Ottawa to Boston to Aix-en-Provence, visits to diverse archives (during which, after the Connecticut discovery, I missed my own kids all the more) produced a strange duality. On the one hand, the geographical parameters of my project kept expanding at what seemed like an absurd rate—before long, I was writing about Guiana, Mauritius, and, somehow, Antarctica. On the other, my subjects’ unsteady, deeply personal pathways through transatlantic dislocation seemed to converge with my own.

True, reconstructing the Acadians’ efforts to live in multiple worlds didn’t help me resolve my own benign identity crisis. But I do like to think that my experience as a confused wanderer between France and Utah in easy times allowed me to unlock something of their globe-trotting lives in hard times. For as integrated as their eighteenth-century Atlantic world was becoming, and as linked and networked and hybridized as ours currently is, the act of crossing boundaries always leaves its mark.

For me anyway, going back to Europe and immersing myself in musty papers always makes the old French scars ache a little; trips to archives in the United States make me wonder if I really am, or can ever be, at home. Some readers will doubtless see these reflections as self-indulgent at best, meaningless at worst—as I write these lines, I can practically hear my tough-minded dissertation adviser making irritated animal noises. But sensibilities like mine have been with Atlantic history from the start. Early on, scholars made the Atlantic turn with NATO and the Soviet threat on their minds: others did so apolitically, as an extension of their expanding vision of early Native American, African, or European history; still others, as Bernard Bailyn notes, “were simply pursuing narrow, parochial interests that proved to have wider boundaries than they had expected.”

Bailyn’s statement may well be the best face I can put on my participation in Atlantic history. But as I prepare to fly from Salt Lake to Paris again this summer, planning to split time between the massive, bureaucratic Archives nationales and a few smaller libraries, I’m mostly thinking of a higher power. For the Annunciation of Big Bubba, I suspect, will be with me always. And not just in the men’s room.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).