American Indians and the history of the American state

Modern American political culture has no greater shibboleth than Big Government, that un-American serpent who slithered into our garden around the time of FDR, wrapping American society in its coils. “Isn’t our choice really not one of left or right, but of up or down?” Ronald Reagan once asked. “Down through the welfare state to statism, to more and more government largesse accompanied always by more government authority, less individual liberty and, ultimately, totalitarianism.” Nothing was more certain to conservatives like Reagan than that their vision of a government that did little but plan and fight wars was the original American model, “the dream conceived by our Founding Fathers.” 

Though probably only a minority of professional American historians ever voted for Ronald Reagan or any politician like him, they have generally told a similar story about government’s role in the early American past. Despite the fact that this government was what the founders chiefly worked to create, the institution itself gets almost no play in typical historical narratives once the founding documents are signed. Typical historians’ attitudes are well summarized by Princeton historian John Murrin’s quip that the early U.S. government was “a midget institution in a giant land,” an insignificant force “with almost no internal functions” and no ability to effect major changes or drive historical trends. “Its role scarcely went beyond…the use of port duties and the revenue from land sales to meet its own expenses.” Murrin was building on a long tradition of scholarly riffing at the expense of the American state. Political scientist James Sterling Young’s Bancroft Prize-winning study of Jeffersonian Washington, The Washington Community, 1800-1828 (1966) cast a long shadow. “The early government was…a small institution, small almost beyond modern imagination,” Young wrote, and size mattered, he thought. “Small size indicated slightness of function.”

This “myth of statelessness,” as University of Chicago historian William Novak calls it, was a comforting and ideologically convenient interpretation for Cold War-era historians eager to turn American history into a story of expanding individual freedom that could be contrasted with Soviet authoritarianism. It proved equally convenient for so-called New Political Historians whose number-crunching approach treated voting statistics as social data and consistently concluded that antebellum politics was best understood in terms of competing religious values and ethnic identities rather than the policy debates and economic issues that previous scholars had emphasized. A weak or nearly nonexistent early American state also made an indispensable contrasting benchmark for political scientists eager to show a transformation in American governance at some later period. According to pioneering “new institutionalist” scholar Stephen Skowronek, the operations of “the early American state were all innocuous enough to make it seem as if there was no state in America at all.”

So everyone agrees. Yet for a political historian who has grown up, so to speak, after the great post-1960s expansion of mainstream history beyond its former social and racial boundaries, a question naturally occurs: how could any scholar claim to have seriously interpreted the history of the American state, without foregrounding the experience of those peoples who were first, most frequently, and most punishingly targeted by government policy in the United States? Those peoples would be the American Indians, who were subjected to U.S. government policy before the United States even had an executive branch or the power to levy taxes.

Rising State, Vanishing Americans

The early American state, the “Great Father at Washington,” did not look much like a harmless little person to the continent’s indigenous population. Without suggesting any lack of pride in their own nations or discounting the many occasions when Uncle Sam’s representatives appeared to be weak and incompetent, Indian leaders found the United States an awesome, inexorable force. This impression especially got across when Indians were directly confronted with the government’s full scope and the nation’s true size and extent. One of the most effective tactics against indigenous resistance was taking delegations from tribes it was dealing with back east to tour U.S. cities and visit the president in Washington, D.C. European travelers and subsequent historians generally derided the early capital as a “city of magnificent distances,” but native visitors were usually impressed even if there were still cows grazing at the base of Capitol Hill. “So large and beautiful was the President’s House,” said a Winnebago chief visiting John Quincy Adams in 1828, “I thought I was in heaven, and the old man there [Adams], was the Great Spirit.” Diehard Sauk resistance leader Black Hawk was taken to Washington after his capture in 1832 and went home speaking respectfully of the U.S. “war chiefs” and open to political and cultural cooperation with whites. U.S. officials were well aware of the impact these tours had on the Indians. It was noted that, before Little Crow, leader of the 1862 Dakota Sioux rebellion in Minnesota, no Indian who had been to Washington ever engaged in violence against whites again. The tactic remained generally effective even long after 1862. Writing of a recalcitrant tribe in 1888, the commissioner of Indian affairs advised that “a visit east will…open their eyes to the power of the Government [and] ‘knock the fight out of them.’”

While the early American state may seem innocuous and ineffectual by European or twentieth-century American standards, it rarely seemed puny to Native Americans who had to face myriad, overlapping projections of government power into their territories, cultures, and lives. That midget came on horseback, booted, spurred, and heavily armed, with wagon trains of bureaucrats, government-contracted missionaries, and speculators in the “public lands”—fungible commodities government policy had created out of the Indians’ quasi-communal homelands—trailing behind it. This midget somehow managed to accomplish the political subjugation and economic expropriation of the interior North American Indians and their lands, spanning the entire continent, in less than a century.

It is important that we be clear on the magnitude of the U.S. government’s gruesome achievements in this area. It has long been popular among Americans of European descent to think of the decline of the Indians as the result of some inevitable “natural process.” Romanticized beginning in the late 1700s as “vanishing Americans” whose noble but primitive civilization was picturesquely doomed by progress, militarily defeated American Indians were subjected to a kind of cultural cannibalism in which their image, history, and very names were appropriated by artists, writers, and real estate developers to ennoble and Americanize their own productions. The general idea can be seen in such still-popular images as James Fraser’s much-copied statue, The End of the Trail, and Frederic Remington’s The Scout, which mournfully overlooks downtown Kansas City from a hilltop park and serves as the city’s unofficial logo and one-time hockey mascot. In the Midwest, they slapped once panic-inducing names like Black Hawk, Sauk, Tecumseh, Shawnee, and Osceola onto towns, counties, streets, and schools seemingly within hours of these war leaders and their peoples’ defeats.

In recent times, it has become more common to blame the Indians’ alleged demise on European diseases and market forces, but from a certain angle that only amounts to a further naturalization of the conquest, which manages to subtly strengthen the European-American’s sense of having a genetically superior civilization, while simultaneously allowing him to deplore the Native American holocaust and absolve present Americans of any sense of blame for it. Biological agents played a huge role in the conquest to be sure, but within North America much of the native holocaust—a demographer’s term, not mine—was still ahead when the United States came on the scene. Demographic historian Russell Thornton estimates that the indigenous population of the present forty-eight contiguous states was approximately two million in 1492. By 1800, the first year for which Thornton finds reliable census figures, the numbers were much diminished, but there were still some six hundred thousand American Indians living across a vast territory that they still largely controlled.In certain eastern regions where first contact and virgin-soil epidemics were many generations past, notably the southeastern lands of the Creek and Cherokee nations, the Indian population was actually growing. That was a major reason Andrew Jackson and other southern leaders wanted to remove them. The rapid conquest and liquidation of this population—by force, forced relocation, and legal-economic evisceration—was the primary work of the nineteenth-century United States government, and any truly complete or coherent account of the history of the American state must take it into account. This conquest was the product of an interlocking system of government policies rather than something that happened “naturally.”

By calling attention to the awful “effectiveness” of U.S. Indian policy, I do not mean to deny the agency or resourcefulness of the peoples who were expropriated or the survival of their descendants today. Instead I use such strong language because doing otherwise risks making the struggle for the continent seem like a fairer fight, and thus more glorious to the victors, than it was. It would be terribly ironic if historians’ laudable desire to make indigenous peoples the protagonists of their own history led us to inadvertently take it easy on Uncle Sam and his policies.

Its Name Was Legion

A brief narrative of the U.S. conquest of native lands in the early republic shows just how prominent a role government played. Stalemated in the West at the end of the revolution, Alexander Hamilton’s better-financed United States government flexed its new “sinews of power” (see Max Edling’s article in this issue) against the still-unbowed Indians of the Old Northwest soon after 1789. After the disastrous defeats of Generals Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair in 1790 and 1791, the budding fiscal-military state plowed its new revenues into a brand-new, much better-equipped and better-trained army, General Anthony Wayne’s United States Legion. The legion invaded the Indian confederacy’s heartland in present northwest Ohio and routed a native force at Fallen Timbers in 1794.

One of the legion’s major accomplishments in the campaign had more to do with public works than fighting. Like previous armies attacking Indians farther east in earlier wars, Wayne’s men built a road through the woods and swamps that was large and smooth enough to allow large numbers of soldiers and heavy military wagons to move north from the Ohio River and penetrate deep into Indian country. 

While barely mentioned in standard accounts minimizing the early American state, military road-building was in fact one of the more crucial and extensive activities undertaken by the federal government. Once they had served their original military purposes, military roads greatly facilitated the expansion of civilian commerce and the white population into the areas where they were built. The devastation wrought by those developments was much more permanent than any battlefield setback. From 1794 on, it was standard to insert language into Indian treaties granting the United States rights-of-way to build roads through Indian land, increasing the natives’ vulnerability in multiple ways. “The road or canal can scarcely be designated, which is highly useful for military operations,” wrote secretary of war John C. Calhoun, “that is not equally required for the industry or political prosperity of the community.” While historians have paid much more attention to the slow progress of civilian government road building in the form of the National Road, it was the War Department that really had charge of national transportation development, drawing up plans for a national road network (see fig. 2 below), that led to more planning through the Survey Act of 1824 and furious lobbying for new routes and improvements to old ones.

The Battle of Fallen Timbers began a string of significant military and diplomatic moves that, over the following two decades, would gradually crush the natives’ ability to offer large-scale resistance to the United States or its settlers, while incorporating gigantic swaths of Indian territory into the United States. Despite the small size of the antebellum standing army, the government showed a remarkable ability to meet episodes of Indian resistance or noncompliance with overwhelming force. Two examples were the battles won by future presidents William Henry Harrison, at Tippecanoe in 1811, and Andrew Jackson, at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, where almost nine hundred Creeks died in the single bloodiest day of U.S.-Indian warfare ever. (Jackson’s and Harrison’s armies also built roads, later improved by the War Department.) While the United States dismally failed to “liberate” Canada or defend the East Coast during the War of 1812, the aforementioned western victories (plus Jackson’s encore against the British in New Orleans) were remarkably effective in securing the continent’s midsection from further European incursions and in destroying the remaining military capabilities of the Eastern Woodlands tribes. The United States would face many frustrations at the hands of the Indians later in the nineteenth century, but the War of 1812 was the last time that Native Americans presented a serious military threat to U.S. sovereignty.

Cultural domination and actual occupation of Indian lands by U.S. citizens was another matter, but these too came very rapidly in the wake of military defeat. The speed and scale of this displacement are truly shocking to contemplate. As of the 1795 Treaty of Greeneville, the “frontier” line between acknowledged Indian land and the areas open to white settlement still only reached partway across present-day Ohio. Large chunks of territory, even in the eastern states behind that line, belonged to the natives in law and in culture. By the 1840s, the “line” would be far beyond the Mississippi and the small Indian population behind the line largely ignored. By the early twentieth century, the United States had expropriated all the economically productive land from coast to coast, reduced the native population to barely more than one hundred thousand people, and successfully claimed total hegemony even over Indians who lived in their own homelands.

This massive cultural and demographic displacement was engineered by instrumentalities of the federal government just as much as the military conquests. Though Indians were technically sovereign in their own lands until those lands were ceded by treaty, various policies and constitutional arrangements rendered Indian lands latent U.S. territory in practice and created tremendous incentives for U.S. citizens to encroach on Indian lands. As the historian and budding radio personality Peter Onuf has argued, the system of territorial government set up in the 1780s promoted a “dynamic, expansive conception of the union” that ensured the rapid incorporation of available territory into the United States. The territorial system automatically imbued frontier areas with the legal infrastructure necessary to legitimize U.S. private-property holding, law enforcement, and military action. The system of survey and sales administered by the General Land Office and its local branches facilitated the swift commodification of frontier land and the attendant destruction of native communities.

Though U.S. laws and treaties typically forbade whites from settling on unceded or reserved Indian land, the government’s incentives for expansion simply overwhelmed those relatively feeble protections. Both the first U.S. president and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, wanted to foster a more peaceful and stable relationship between Indians and whites and fulfill the treaty commitments they had made to the natives. Yet both Washington and Knox were life-long speculators in frontier lands, and their efforts to do the Indians justice were made in full awareness and tacit support of the fact that the United States would continue to expand at the Indians’ expense. This was the purpose of the land system they had created. In 1796, Washington approved the surveying of a boundary line between U.S. and Cherokee land with some distinctly fatalistic remarks about the permanence or meaningfulness of such a line. “The Indians urge this, the law requires it, and it ought to be done; but I believe scarcely anything short of a Chinese wall, or a line of troops, will restrain land jobbers, or the encroachment of the settlers upon the Indian territory.” 

Both Federalist and Democratic-Republican presidents occasionally used troops to remove illegal settlers from Indian lands, but these moves are more accurately seen as blows for a more orderly and efficient expansion process (so officially favored speculators and the government could make more money) than as real efforts to protect the Indians or curtail expansion. Such acts of due diligence also served to buttress the U.S. claim to the international community and critics at home that the aggressive expansion of white settlement and the expropriation of the Indians were lawful and legitimate activities.

The governmental machinery set up to facilitate expansion caught the Indians up far more often than it did the white squatters on Indian land. Any native efforts to resist such encroachments, even by livestock, immediately enveloped them in the white political and legal machinery that was set up around their lands, frequently leading to violence that might or might not progress to the stage of full-scale war but almost always led to new pressures for land cessions or outright removal. Enforcement of the laws protecting Indians depended upon local courts dominated by Indian-hating white settlers who were little disposed to see any of their own punished to provide justice to the natives. Territorial militia like those Andrew Jackson led against the Red Sticks were the shock troops of this Indian removal process, and the frontier garrisons and federal officials charged with protecting the Indians on their lands often oversaw their liquidation instead. 

The infamous Indian Removal Act, the first major legislation of Jackson’s presidency, only formalized and reduced the level of violence associated with a procedure that had existed since the time of Washington and Jefferson. At the same time, it was an ambitious government program that eventually required the negotiation of more than ninety separate treaties and the transportation and resettlement in the West of something on the order of one hundred thousand people, albeit often not successfully in terms of getting them there alive or establishing permanent new communities.

The Welfare State on the Range

In fairness, it might be argued that military conquest, rudimentary land management, and the extension of the legal system do not really count as “the state” in the modern sense of a centralized, bureaucratic welfare state. Yet this later kind of state, generally supposed to have emerged in America only in the early twentieth century, first emerged in Indian country more than a century earlier.

The Indians faced not only U.S. soldiers and forts but also a continental network of Indian agents and subagents, trading posts or “factories,” government-sponsored missionaries, and schools. U.S. Indian policies not only sought to control and displace Indians but also to radically reshape their cultures and lifestyles. The thrust of this “civilization policy” was precisely to transform the Indians into potential citizens of a modern liberal state: private-property-owning individuals who would disregard their tribal identities and communal economic practices. Once the natives had changed their way of life, it was hoped, they could live peacefully and perhaps invisibly among the European American population. In addition to the diplomatic and military efforts against them, Native Americans were the “beneficiaries” of what is arguably the first social program in U.S. history and the “clients” (to use a modern term from the world of social provision) of the government’s first regulatory agency and social welfare bureaucracy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The scope of this social reengineering project was more or less total. Federal policymakers wanted to transform Indian agriculture, politics, religion, dress, living arrangements, gender roles, and, especially, their modes of subsistence and property holding. Begun slowly under Washington and Knox but greatly expanded by President Thomas Jefferson and his successors after 1800, the civilization program required the creation of numerous new public institutions and a new bureaucracy to manage them. A series of trade and intercourse laws created a chain of government stores (or “factories”) to supply the Indians and provide a market for the produce of their hunting. Following the practice of the British Indian Department, regional superintendents were appointed to manage U.S.-Indian relations in their area. Beneath the superintendents, a network of Indian agents was created to work with individual tribes. Through the agents or missionary groups contracted for this purpose, economic and educational assistance was provided that ideally included European farming supplies and implements, craftsmen to service this equipment and teach their skills to the natives, model farms to demonstrate more commercial and intensive European farming methods, and schools to teach English and European household economy. Run by the secretary of war in its first few decades, the complexity of the civilization program eventually led to the creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824.

This was part of a highly ironic pattern: each new policy that looked forward to the disappearance of the “Indian problem,” whether by assimilation, removal, or whatever other means, ended up requiring more elaborate programs and more extensive bureaucracies to deal with the policy’s results. Those darn vanishing Americans just wouldn’t actually vanish. For instance, the removal of eastern Indians to the west was supposed to allow the agency system to be gradually phased out and military expenditures retrenched. Instead, troubles with the Plains tribes and unexpectedly rapid white expansion into the Plains and the Pacific Coast led to expensive wars and the reservation system, which involved the government not just sending Indian nations west but minutely controlling all of their movements and greatly expanding certain aspects of a civilization program policymakers had once hoped to let wither away. As early as 1842, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was running its own school system, with two thousand students enrolled in some fifty-two schools and more on the way.

Professionalism and reliance on expertise are two hallmarks of the modern governance systems generally thought to have emerged only in the later nineteenth century. While the early American state did not have access to university-trained professional administrators and social scientists, as they did not yet exist, the early Indian civilization program was notable for the experience and intellectual engagement of the men who designed and implemented it. President Washington had gained much direct experience with Native Americans during his time as a young frontier military officer, and Thomas Jefferson’s scientific interests are well known. Jefferson had included extensive anthropological material on the eastern Indians in his Notes on Virginia and instructed Lewis and Clark to bring back much more data on the Plains and Northwestern peoples. It was Jefferson who set out the civilization program’s full intellectual rationale and mode of operation, including the self-serving expectation that Indians in the process of civilizing would fall into debt and thus be motivated to sell more land.

While Indian agents and BIA officials later earned a terrible reputation for corruption and incompetence, the most prominent officials of the early U.S. Indian service were dedicated civil servants who eagerly sought to gain expertise on Native American culture and seem to have been sincerely and idealistically committed to the misguided cause of changing that culture. The first southern superintendent and long-time Creek agent Benjamin Hawkins gave up a political career in North Carolina to spend the rest of his life in the Creek country far beyond the boundaries of white settlement. Hawkins conceived himself as a kind of secular missionary, devoted to the cause of “bettering the [Indians’] condition.” We might usefully think of him as the civilization program’s caseworker in the Creek Country. 

Thus American Indians had to confront the U.S. government’s full “stateness” long before many other Americans did. As political scientist James C. Scott so vividly showed in his book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), statist social engineering projects in the twentieth century were frequently and often disastrously applied by elites who had little sympathy with or understanding of the social groups and conditions their plans affected. This is not to say that the state always fails or is inherently evil or is uniquely the tool of left or right. It is to suggest that governments tend to work in terms of abstractions far more readily imposed upon people whom the dominant culture regards as inferior and whose wishes officials are not bound to respect. Contrary to popular belief, Americans need not look to the history of “totalitarian” governments abroad to understand this truth. Their own government’s relations with indigenous peoples tell the same story eloquently enough.

Adapted from a paper presented at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic annual meeting, Worcester, Massachusetts, July 2007, and at the Policy History Conference, Charlottesville, Virginia, June 2006.

Further Reading:

The “midget institution” quotation comes from John M. Murrin, “The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816),” in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J., 1980): 386-453. The “myth of statelessness” is taken down by William J. Novak in The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996) and “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 752-772, but was the premise of Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge, 1982).

On the “vanishing American” trope and other ideas that have guided political history away from taking much account of the American Indian experience, see Robert J. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian From Columbus to the Present (New York, 1979); Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn., 1982); and Gordon M. Sayre, The Indian Chief As Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, From Moctezuma to Tecumseh (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005).

The standard historical reference on the U.S. government policies and institutions charged with managing the indigenous population is Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln, Neb., 1986). Other especially illuminating works, among many, are Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (Norman, Okla., 1992); Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775-1787 (Philadelphia, 1983); Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism From Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (New York, 2004); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (New York, 1999); and Wiley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795 (Norman, Okla., 1985). On the particular topic of military road building, see Harold L. Nelson, “Military Roads for War and Peace—1791-1836,” Military Affairs 19 (1955): 1-14; Francis Paul Prucha, Broadax and Bayonet: The Role of the United States Army in the Development of the Northwest, 1815-1860 (Lincoln, Neb., 1995); and W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846-1869 (Lincoln, Neb., 1979). On native leaders being brought to Washington for a reality check, see Herman J. Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins: A History of Indian Delegations in Washington, D.C. (Bluffton, S.C., 1995). The Indian population statistics above come from Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, Okla., 1987). Finally, Patrick Griffin makes a consonant but very different argument in American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York, 2008). Personally, I am not sure I can go all the way from “midget” to “leviathan.”

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

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This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

Thomas Paine, the new atheism movement, and the European skeptic tradition

Something uncommon has been going on in the United States over the past four or five years: atheism has found its way into public discourse, and it has done so with a fair amount of success. This in itself is paradoxical enough, for self-identified atheists constitute but a small minority, concentrated mostly in the West, particularly, the Pacific Northwest. Figures vary, but according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2008, they account for a mere 1.6 percent of the adult population (with agnostics representing another 2.4 percent). While the United States is well known all over the world for its high level of religiosity, it also has a reputation for a widespread mistrust of people “without faith.” Polls and a few surveys bear out the stigma attached to atheism in the United States. Atheists—or “secularists” as they are sometimes misleadingly called—are the most distrusted minority, considered by many to be “deviant” or “a threat to the American way of life.”

This has not prevented a resurgence of militant positive atheism, as reflected in a series of books written by acclaimed authors and recently published in what is for some “the most Christian nation in the world.” These books, which explicitly deny the existence of God or gods and lambast institutionalized religion, have attracted a good deal of attention across the political and religious spectra, to the extent that four or five of them have made it on to the New York Times bestseller list or have won or been nominated for awards. Among them are Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004); The God Delusion (2006), by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (2006); and God is not Great: Religion Poisons Everything (2006), by British-born columnist Christopher Hitchens. To these three most prominent titles we can add several others, including the English translations of two French hits, Atheist Manifesto: The Case against Christianity, Judaism and Islam (2007), by popular philosopher Michel Onfray, first published in 2005 under the title Traité d’athéologie, and The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007), by philosopher André Comte-Sponville. While we still need to learn more about the readership of this literature—its motives, socioeconomic status, and geographic distribution—the books’ amazon.com sales ranks seem to show that they are all selling extremely well. Most important, pundits have been speaking of a “new atheism movement.” This somewhat deceptive but cogent label has sowed the seeds for another one: “the new new atheism.” The latter was coined by Peter Steinfels only a few months ago in “Beliefs,” his biweekly column in the New York Times, to make sense of the publication of books such as Living without God (2008), by Ronald Aronson, or The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality.

The notoriety of Harris’s, Hitchens’s, and Dawkins’s anti-faith books has spurred animated debate on radio and TV programs, the Internet, and in dailies and magazines. Commentators, authors, and representatives of different religious traditions who have either praised those books—at times with a touch of condescension—or disparaged them outright, blaming them for their ignorance of the topic they address, as well as for the “irreligious intolerance” or “secular fundamentalism” they allegedly propagate. For Stephen Prothero, professor at Boston University and the author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (2008), Hitchens “assumes a childish definition of religion” and is “fundamentally unacquainted with his subject.” For Harvard professor Harvey Cox, Richard Dawkins is “the kind of Jerry Falwell of the atheists.” Vocal atheism has also produced works on religious belief and the related issue of religious tolerance and equality. A few, explicitly published in response to the provocations of the three polemicists, refute atheism. That is the case of John F. Haught’s God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens(2008) or Thomas Crean’s God is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins (2007). In I don’t Believe in Atheism (2008), yet another provocateur, Chris Hedges—foreign correspondent and author of a book on the Christian Right entitled American Fascists—argues that the new atheism movement is as dangerous as religious fundamentalism. The “new atheists” have their defenders, too, including, among many others, Ian McEwan, the acclaimed English novelist; Salman Rushdie, who, in October 2007, signed with Sam Harris a Los Angeles Times opinion piece on Somali-born former Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now under protection after she was threatened with death for criticizing Islam (their editorial was translated into French and appeared in the French daily Le Monde a month later); Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg, who published “Without God” in The New York Review of Books last September; and Bill Maher, comedian and political commentator, who hosts Real Time with Bill Maher, an HBO talk show.

I would like to offer some observations on the recent appeal of militant atheism in the United States, while linking it to the concurrent renewed interest in Thomas Paine in evidence over the last five or six years (no less than ten new books devoted to Paine have appeared since 2005). Indeed the “new atheism” derives from a long-established free-thinking tradition in which Thomas Paine has a key place. Paine was no atheist, but a plain-spoken anti-Christian deist, whose religious outlook is best summarized by his profession of faith as it appears in the first chapter of The Age of Reason, published in two parts, in 1794 and 1795, while Paine was in Paris (and partly in prison where he stayed from December 28, 1793, to November 4, 1794).

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Hence, while Paine believed that the universe and mankind had been created by an impersonal, remote, and uninvolved God, he also insisted that “the most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that [had] afflicted the human [had] had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion,” by which he meant Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism (as Islam was called in the eighteenth century). Traces of Paine’s reasoning and prose appear in the contemporary books listed above—especially in that of Hitchens. At the same time, the nature of the current debate over the upsurge of interest in militant atheism shares many similarities with the heated controversies that erupted in Britain and in the United States following the publication of The Age of Reason.

Skepticism and the Enlightenment Tradition

The most vocal of the contemporary anti-faith books draw upon two of the European Enlightenment’s radical strands—the attack on priestcraft and kingcraft on one hand, and on (mainly French) philosophical materialism on the other—both of which worked to undermine traditional sources of religious authority. This wide-ranging body of thought crossed the Atlantic over the course of the eighteenth century; especially in seaboard cities like New York and Philadelphia, readers could find the works of English freethinkers such as Matthew Tindal and John Toland and of French philosophes Voltaire, Helvétius, Volney, Condorcet, Rousseau, and Baron d’Holbach. Following the Revolution, ideas dispersed through print took institutional form in disestablishment, which eliminated state-sponsored churches, and in various experiments in church-state separation. By the 1790s, the ranks of deists, agnostics, atheists, materialists, and other skeptics active in the United States included Ethan Allen; Benjamin Franklin; Thomas Jefferson; poet and diplomat Joel Barlow; physician Thomas Young; Elihu Palmer, the founder of the Deistical Society in New York in 1794 and editor of two short-lived deist papers, The Temple of Reason and Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, which reproduced serially a number of French writings; and, of course, Thomas Paine himself. The beliefs and careers of such men attest to the young republic’s capacity to absorb and adapt radical European thought. Indeed, the interest generated today by a form of atheism that has its roots in Europe—after all, Dawkins and Hitchens are both of British origins—shares the same pattern of absorption and adaptation.

But that borrowing, that process of absorbing and adapting, has been obscured by media commentators who insist that the “new atheism” is quite new indeed. Pundits generally locate the origins of the “new” atheism in the early twentieth century and tend to connect it to H. L. Mencken’s satirical send-up of religious “folly.” Even observers who have questioned the newness of militant atheism, in the historical sense of the term, have scarcely acknowledged the Enlightenment and its aftermath, particularly its radical dimension, in their discussion of the resurgence of vocal skepticism. This oversight may reflect a general lack of interest in the Enlightenment. It may also reflect a suspicion of French influence among some American authors; certainly, the widely held assumption that the Enlightenment was dominated by an anticlerical France has not helped.

The Paine Connection

The failure to articulate the new atheism’s filiation with the framers’ stance on freedom of conscience, the skepticism of the 1790s, or that of the 1830s New England Free Enquirers—who, in line with Paine, advocated mental emancipation—is all the more remarkable given that Dawkins, Hitchens, and to a lesser extent Harris make constant reference to the early years of the republic. Thus, Dawkins quotes no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson to buttress his arguments that the Bible is a work of fiction and to discredit the scriptural evidence of God’s existence. Although Jefferson is known more for his deistic leanings than for his ferocious anti-Christian views, he was certainly capable of disparaging Christian doctrine: in a letter to John Adams in 1823, for example, the father of the Declaration of Independence predicted the day “when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

Such references to Jefferson may be predictable. But what is particularly striking are the commonalities in form, content, intention, and impact between modern-day atheist books and Paine’s last best-seller, The Age of Reason. An explicitly deistic tract with Paine’s trademark style, The Age of Reason borrowed heavily from the European skeptic tradition. To demonstrate that the Bible was not the word of God, and with an eye toward undermining the Christian religion, Paine drew from Thomas Hobbes’s philological analysis of scriptures in Leviathan (1651) and the historical-critical method elaborated by Baruch Spinoza in Tractacus Theologico-Politicus (1670). He also took inspiration from the writings of English freethinkers such as Thomas Woolston, whom Voltaire copied at length, and Peter Annet, the editor of The Free Inquirer, a journal published in London in 1761, which encouraged readers to think by themselves and portrayed Christianity as “a mere cheat.” The French philosophes also figure prominently among Paine’s sources of inspiration. Voltaire is the most obvious possibility, but Helvétius and Volney are also likely candidates. And Paine was almost certainly familiar with Baron d’Holbach, who promoted atheism by printing tracts and whose own work, which was partly translated into English, appeared in the early republic under the pen names of Boulanger and Mirabaud. Paine may also have read the anonymous Traité des trois imposteurs (Treatise of the Three Impostors), a clandestine manuscript that circulated extensively in France from 1719 onward and was eventually printed under the title La Vie et l’esprit de Spinoza (Life and Spirit of Spinoza). This text also appeared in England, where the press enjoyed more freedom, before making its way across the Atlantic, where an edition, in French, appeared in Philadelphia in 1796.

Because his point was to encourage his readers to rely upon reason rather than to provide a gloss on the Enlightenment, Paine did not credit the authors who inspired him. And while it is hard to know whether or not Paine had direct access to all these works, there is no doubt that he depended on and contributed to the circulation of ideas in the eighteenth century and beyond, inspiring other freethinkers, deists, materialists, atheists, and humanists down to the present day. Then as now, Paine served as a conduit, bringing radical ideas to the broadest possible audiences. His controversial The Age of Reason, the first part of which was published in seventeen editions between 1794 and 1796 in the United States, provoked the publication of over one hundred replies in the young American Republic and in Britain from the mid-1790s to the late nineteenth century. A few were enthusiastic and supportive, but most were scathing, disparaging, and at times condescending.

Since Paine’s times, the scope of the dispute over skepticism has only expanded. New religious demographics and increasing diversity in the United States as in Western Europe have brought Islam and other faith traditions into the debate. The scrutiny of the errors of religion now includes references to international terrorism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, new religious movements, the cult controversy, child abuse, the threat to women’s reproductive and sexual rights, and creationism, among other issues. But through all this, Enlightenment reasoning and rhetoric have endured—the centrality of science to debates over religion, the critical fight against the alliance of politics and religion, the rationalist exegesis of sacred texts, to say nothing of the fundamental, epistemological Hobbesian question, “How can we know anything about God?” So too has persisted the theological response to heterodoxy, with its inevitable scorn, charges of shallowness, and its propensity to twist the polemicists’ meaning.

The influence of eighteenth-century European free thought may be most evident in Hitchens’s God is not Great, which is regarded by some critics as the most strident of the three contemporary books. Obviously modeled after Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Hitchens’s book even plagiarizes it. This is fair game, since Paine himself plagiarized Spinoza, Voltaire, and d’Holbach, and most probably Thomas Woolston and Peter Annet, just as others had earlier and would later on. Like Paine and in the same spirited, incisive, and often humorous style, Hitchens directly addresses his reader, calling upon “the thinking person” to use her mind. As Paine did in chapters 7 and 8 of The Age of Reason, part 1, and again in the two chapters of part 2, Hitchens examines the various books of the Bible in two central chapters: “Revelation: The Nightmare of the ‘Old’ Testament” and “The Evil of the New Testament.” Even Hitchens’s wording echoes Paine’s. Where Paine declared that “I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder,” Hitchens writes that “one could go through the Old Testament book by book,” addressing one logical problem after another. Like Paine, Hitchens makes use of the model of the three impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet. Like Paine, Hitchens takes inspiration from Spinoza to demonstrate that the sacred books are not authentic, that they are not what they are supposed to be, namely, the word of God, and hence to suggest that revealed religion is man-made and based on an imposture. Like Paine, who called the Bible a “manufactured book,” Hitchens provisionally concludes that “religion and the churches are manufactured, and this salient fact is too obvious to ignore,” while adding the Koran to his concerns, “in the same spirit of inquiry.” As the title of chapter 9 plainly states: “The Koran is borrowed from both Jewish and Christian myths.” Hence, reiterating, updating, and thus completing Paine’s work, Hitchens exposes the inconsistencies, absurdities, violence, hatred, and immorality of the scriptures. “If one comprehends the fallacies of any ‘revealed’ religion, one comprehends them all,” he argues in the chapter on Islam. He does not credit Paine, but he occasionally mentions or quotes him. After commenting on the “lasciviousness” and “genocidal incitements” of the Old Testament, for example, he acknowledges that “so thought Thomas Paine, who wrote not to disprove religion but rather to vindicate deism against what he considered to be foul accretions in the holy book.”

The success of God is not Great suggests that The Age of Reason remains not only relevant but compelling. Revised and adapted for our times by Hitchens (a former Marxist and an admirer and biographer of Paine), it still generates passion and polarizes readers. One fascinating indicator of the resurgent interest in The Age of Reason can be found in the customer reviews posted on amazon.com. The 2007 paperback edition “stands the test of time,” according to one reviewer, and “is the most remarkable book ever written,” according to another. After more than two centuries, the same old disputes over the authenticity of the Bible, the legitimacy of religious authorities, the morality of scripture, the power of reason, and the source of faith have once again come to the fore, in ways that were hardly imaginable some fifteen years ago. Religion per se is less important in today’s debates than two issues that would have been familiar to Thomas Paine: traditional religion as we know it (“faith-based” religion, as Sam Harris terms it, or religions with “supernatural gods” as Dawkins does) and freedom of conscience and speech. After all, the fact is there is a good deal of spirituality and Buddhist meditation in Sam Harris’s book, so much so that atheist readers have taken issue with him for not being a real atheist. By appropriating something of Paine’s strategy and style—although probably not his democratic appeal—Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris have reinvented the genre of the antireligious pamphlet. Like others who call for a “new Enlightenment,” they are carriers of an intellectual tradition whose most direct influence may be confined to an educated elite but which has gradually contributed to the dissemination and popularization of skepticism in a transatlantic republic of letters.

Promoting Freedom of Speech and Conscience

Anti-religion hard-liners today are faced with an inevitable dilemma that recalls Thomas Paine’s difficulty in reconciling his forceful defense of religious freedom with his insistence on the superiority of deism and his assault on Christianity, which was unquestionably phrased in ways disrespectful of other people’s beliefs. As atheists who insistently deny the existence of any God—be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins perforce display various degrees of intolerance, ranging from irony and ridicule to rude simplification and anticlericalism. This is especially the case when they advocate disrespect for all organized religion, lump together the Muslim faith and forms of Islamism, and argue against religious moderation, which Dawkins and Harris claim “fosters fanaticism.” Sam Harris, who calls for nothing less than “the end of faith,” might appear to be the most intolerant of all, for he adamantly refuses to accept any religious tradition on the grounds that “intolerance is intrinsic to every creed.” At the same time, Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and their colleagues at the Council for Secular Humanism champion greater acceptance of the irreligious across the globe. They claim to speak in the name of all atheists—militant, organized, or closeted—who are themselves the victims of intolerance. And they do something else: their books have fostered reflection on the propriety of discussing religious ideas freely and critically, as the historian David A. Hollinger has argued. Connecting Hitchens and the like to Paine—and by extension to the freethinkers of the early republic, from the 1780s to the 1830s—helps us grasp the true nature of the so-called new atheist movement. In particular the comparison brings to the surface concerns about the role of religion in public life and freedom of expression in the United States today.

Ultimately, the philosophical basis for Paine’s otherwise paradoxical critique of revealed religion and insistence on the superiority of deism rested on the free conscience of a freethinking individual. Paine expected a universal religion to emerge: “in the meantime,” he wrote, “let everyman follow, as he has a right to do, the religion and worship he prefers.” The same paradox appears in Hitchens’s God is not Great. Although Hitchens professes that God poisons everything, he nonetheless claims that “what believers will do, now that their faith is optional and private and irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion.” The Age of Reasonwas designed to stimulate public debate, to encourage individuals to think and to speak their minds without fearing the consequences. After all, as Paine points out in Rights of Man, “it is only those who have not thought that appear to agree.” In the early years of the twenty-first century, when religious diversity is on the rise and religious extremism constitutes one of the greatest problems facing the world, these bestselling atheist authors make no call for religious freedom—quite the contrary. Neither do they advocate total freedom of expression. In that sense, they differ markedly from Paine, who lived in more optimistic times. But like Paine, they make the case for a free conscience and encourage public discourse on crucial matters. Perhaps most important, they draw attention to “the demon of relativeness” (Harris’s phrase) within the context of religious pluralism. They ask: Can we really say whatever we want? Can all spheres be placed on the same footing? Can we teach our children creationism and other facts based on faith rather than science on the basis that all discourses should be granted the same freedom of expression? Like Paine and his followers, they are intent on restoring “the public use of reason,” as Immanuel Kant put it in 1783, in our own age of unreason. They are similarly committed to the kind of “free inquiry” that utopian social critics of the 1830s—including Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, George Henry Evans, among others—viewed as the cornerstone of progress. In Dawkins’s words, they are “consciousness raisers”—a phrase that could be applied to Paine—who uphold the right to discuss religion freely in the United States and in the rest of the world, as their involvement in the Danish cartoons controversy or their commitment to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s cause exemplifies. Indeed, their insistence on the right to discuss religion and their opposition to the notion that “it is taboo to criticize a person’s religious beliefs,” as Harris puts it, may be what ties these thinkers to each other and, eventually, to Paine.

A New Atheism? Religious Transformations and Cross-Cultural Concerns

The publication of atheist books, together with the countless public appearances—conferences, talk shows, interviews—of their authors can be attributed in part to partisan politics. Yet there is something else involved in the publishing phenomenon that has brought the issue of atheism into the public arena. The current revival of articulated atheism also indicates profound religious transformations, which are obscured by the focus on the political dimension of the so-called new atheism movement. Undoubtedly, the recent rash of atheist manifestos and the popular interest it has generated result largely from the anxiety created by emerging forms of faith-based fundamentalisms in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the anti-Islamic overtones of the media-hyped “war on terror.” They are also the consequence of the backlash against the cultural influence of the Christian Right in the United States, to say nothing of the disturbing convergence of religion and politics under George W. Bush’s administration, which jeopardized the separation of Church and State. Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and the like are political activists committed to three major battles that share a great deal with Paine’s concerns. They fight against terrorism based on religious faith, against the assault on science, and against attacks on individual rights. The current interest in atheism also reveals a significant change in the public perception of atheists, who are no longer perceived as lunatics, as Madalyn Murray O’Hair was in the 1960s when she zealously denied the existence of God. This is not to question the profoundly religious nature of American culture. But, as cultural anthropologist Frank L. Pasquale—a research associate at the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture—has shown, there is a zone here where much is going on, a zone where lines are not so clear, where institutionalized religion as we know it has no place, but where the belief that there is no God can go hand-in-hand with rituals and sermons, Buddhist group meditation, or the framing of an ethic or philosophy in religious terms. The Religious Identification Survey 2008 reveals that while Americans are historically reluctant to self-identify as atheists, 12 percent of Americans hold agnostic or atheistic beliefs when asked specific questions about the existence of God. So far there has been little empirical research on the topic and, as Ariela Keysar argues, scholars and commentators have tended to “lump together atheists, agnostics, and the ‘no religion’ population into an undifferentiated mass.” It is only recently that attention has been paid to unreligion, and hence irreligion, as such. The scholarship is the result of the awareness that the group of people who profess no explicit religious identity, known as the “none” or “unaffiliated” category, is growing in the United States—it has now reached 16 percent.

Finally, the revival of militant atheism and the renewed interest in radical Enlightenment literature, with its cross-cultural currents, parallel recent developments in Europe. British, American, and French atheist writers engage ideas relevant to other societies and reach out to an international audience. Similar controversies about the role of religion in society are in play on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, the pressure of the Catholic Church poses a serious threat to abortion rights advocates. Creationism is now making alarming headway in public education in the United Kingdom and, on October 4, 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution that promoted the teaching of evolution in schools. In France—where 30 percent of the population identify themselves as being “non religious,” a small majority self-identify as Catholics (with only 26 percent who are certain that God exists, according to an opinion poll in 2006), and where Islam has become the second most common religion—questions about the place of religion in society have become increasingly urgent. French president Nicolas Sarkozy has sought to introduce religion into the public sphere by infusing various speeches with “God talk” in ways that many French people find disturbing, especially because the president’s call for “positive” secularism and inclusion tends to exclude nonreligious people. In La République, les religions, l’espérance (The Republic, Religions, and Hope), published three years before his election to the presidency in 2007, Sarkozy, then minister of the interior, admitted that he found the certainty there was no God arrogant. Sarkozy’s standpoint on laïcité, a concept which was defined and institutionalized in 1905 by the Law on the Separation of the Churches and the State, is famously summed up in the controversial speech he made in the Palais de Latran in Rome on December 20, 2007, in which he asserted that “the school teacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor.” This statement drew sharp criticism for contradicting the basic principle of laïcité, whose close links with education derive from the Enlightenment’s appeal to reason and, more specifically, Condorcet’s idea that schools were the vehicle for emancipation, universal progress, liberty, and equality.

It may be no coincidence that The God Delusion and God is not Great have recently appeared in French, along with new editions of d’Holbach’s antireligious writings and of the Traité des trois imposteurs, to name but a few. French conflicts over laïcité resonate with the revived interest in the Enlightenment paradigm as well as the resurgence of militant, even ideological atheism in the United States. At a time when stereotypes about national character tend to drive a wedge between the United States and France, our common concerns regarding secularization and religious revivalism are thus emphasized. More broadly, the ongoing European discussions on the presence of religion in public life resonate with those in the United States, which is witnessing, according to another recent Pew survey, an increasingly negative assessment of those who would mix politics and religion and less support for religious institutions that speak out on social issues.

Further Reading:

On the Enlightenment, see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (New York, 2002); Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (second revised ed., Lafayette, La., 2006); David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly 28:2, Special Issue: An American Enlightenment (Summer, 1976); Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976); Paul Merril Spurlin, The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers (Athens, Ga., 1984); Catherine Secrétan, Tristan Dagron, Laurent Bove, eds., Qu’est-ce que les lumières “radicals”? Libertinage, athéisme et spinozisme dans le tournant philosophique de l’âge classique (Paris, 2007). See also Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford, 2008) for its thorough treatment of the historiographical debate on the varieties of Enlightenment. On the Traité des trois imposteurs, Silvia Berti, Françoise Charles-Daubert, Richard Henry Popkin, eds., Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe: Studies on the Traité des trois imposteurs(Dordrecht, Boston, London, 1996).

On unbelief in the United States, see Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society,” American Sociological Review 71 (April 2006): 211-234. Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, eds., Secularism and Secularity (Hartford, Conn., 2006); Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of Secularism (New York, 2004); Christopher Grasso, “Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (Fall 2002): 456-508; “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 95:1 (June 2008): 43-68; James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Religious Unbelief in America (1985). On freedom of expression, see David A. Hollinger, “Religious ideas: Should They Be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?” Representations 101 (Winter 2008): 144-154. On Americans and the place of religion in politics, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “More Americans Question Religions’ Role in Politics” (August 21, 2008). On French Catholics, “Portrait des catholiques, sondage exclusive,” CSA/Le Monde des religions (9 javier 2006) Quote from Stephen Prothero appears in the Washington Post (May 6, 2007). Quote from Harvey Cox was taken from “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” PBS (January 5, 2007).

In addition to those mentioned in the text, new atheist books include Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, ed., The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever(New York, 2007); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York, 2006); John Allen Paulos, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up(New York, 2008); Victor J. Stenger, God, the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (New York, 2007); Bob Avakian, Away with Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World(Chicago, 2008). On Hitchens, see Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, eds., Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left (New York, 2008).

Literature on the French Radical Enlightenment includes Paul Henry Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, System of Nature (London, 1797); Christianity Unveiled: Being an examination of the principles and effects of the Christian religion(published in 1795 in New York, under the name of Boulanger); as well as Constantin-François Volney, Ruins; or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empire (New York, 1796); Common sense, or, Natural ideas opposed to supernatural (New York, 1795; in fact Bon sens du curé Meslier by d’Holbach). The first English translation of Le Traité des trois imposteurswas published in 1844. Two years later, it was reprinted in New York by Gilbert Vale, a follower and biographer of Paine, who published a deistic paper from 1836 to 1846, called The Beacon. For a more recent translation, see Abraham Anderson, The Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of Enlightenment: a New Translation of the Traité Des Trois Imposteurs (1777 Edition) With Three Essays in Commentary (Lanham, Md., 1997). Quotes from Paine come from Moncure Daniel Conway, ed., The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 volumes (New York, 1967).

The author would like to thank Peter C. Mancall, Richard Wrightman Fox, Kirsten Fischer, Jeffrey L. Pasley, Edward G. Gray, Donna Kesselman, Élise Marienstras, Andrew Diamond, and Christopher Robinson for their fine comments and encouragement.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Nathalie Caron is the coeditor of the Revue française d’études américaines and professor of American studies at the Université de Paris 12-Val de Marne, France. She is the author of Thomas Paine contre l’imposture des prêtres (1999) and more recently of “Résurgence et pertinence de Thomas Paine,” Sources 20-21 (automne 2008): 57-82. In 2003, she guest-edited a special issue of the RFEA on the American Enlightenment with Naomi Wulf. She has also published essays on religion and its treatment in the media. This piece is a revised version of a paper given at a conference on tolerance and intolerance at the University of Southern California in April 2008.

In his 2004 book, Turnaround, Mitt Romney insists that despite emigrating to Mexico in 1884, “my great-grandfather [Miles Park Romney] never lost his love of country.” Romney, like other Mormons, sees his forebears as patriots despite persecution. The New York Times columnist David Brooks takes Romney’s ancestor veneration a notch further, arguing that Miles Romney’s experience of persecution—like that of all Mormons, as well as Jews—gave Mitt Romney “tenacious drive.”

Half-truth, meet your other half. To understand Mitt’s great-grandfather’s experiences and how they shaped Mitt, we need to look at Miles Romney’s milieu, something David Brooks hasn’t done. Was Miles Romney a patriot? Perhaps. To make that judgment without context, however, is to miss a more interesting story. That story concerns not just Miles Romney, but a whole bevy of Mormon politicos. Four families—the Romneys, the Udalls, the Flakes, and the Pearces, all prominent in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)—have produced dynamos for both major parties. Their divergence, and perhaps their dynamism, can be tracked to the strange and bloody cauldron of frontier Arizona.

Let’s run down the list of politicians from those four families. George Romney was governor of Michigan and once ran for president. His son, Mitt, was governor of Massachusetts and is now running for president.

Levi Udall was the liberal chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court. One of Levi’s sons, Morris, became a U.S. congressman and ran for president. Another son, Stewart, served as Secretary of Interior. Morris’s son Mark, in turn, is a U.S. senator from Colorado. Stewart’s son Tom is a U.S. senator from New Mexico.

Jeff Flake, a U.S. congressman, is the frontrunner for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona. His uncle, Jake, who died in 2008, was speaker of the Arizona House and a powerful state senator.

For good measure, we can add Russell Pearce, former president of the Arizona Senate (until his recent recall) and author of Senate Bill 1070, the anti-immigrant measure that sparked national outrage by making Hispanics targets for racial profiling. Though Pearce is not from a powerful family, he is the great-grandson of James Pearce, founder of the Mormon town of Taylor, Arizona. Pearce’s brother, Lester, also served in the state legislature and is now a justice of the peace. (Full disclosure: in 2009, he rightly fined me for a speeding ticket.)

The Romneys, Udalls, Flakes, and Pearces gathered in Apache County, Arizona, in the 1870s, when Brigham Young sought to open a corridor to Mexico. Miles Romney (progenitor of George and Mitt) and David Udall (progenitor of Levi, Morris, Stewart, Tom, and Mark) settled in St. Johns. Udall became a bishop and Romney his “first counselor.” William Flake (progenitor of Jeff and Jake) settled nearby at a socialist colony called Sunset, but soon found it full of “queer unsociable people.” When 38 converted families from the Deep South arrived in Sunset, Flake—himself a Southerner—decided to move his family and the newcomers a few dozen miles away to a place called Snowflake. The name commemorated both Flake and the fugitive LDS apostle who helped him choose a townsite, polygamist Erastus Snow. James Pearce settled downstream from Flake at a place called Taylor, named for the then LDS president and “chief revelator” (according to Mormon doctrine, God reveals truths and prophecies to LDS presidents as to prophets of old).

Though the socialist framework of the early colonies soon broke down, the colonists foresaw prosperity. They had arable land, good grass, good sheep, and sturdy Utah cows. Their small dams washed out repeatedly, but the church helped them rebuild. They also had a rail line after the Atlantic & Pacific pushed through Arizona. By 1884, Mormon settlers even had a newspaper, the Orion Era. Miles Romney served as editor. His son, Gaskell—Mitt’s grandfather—helped set type.

A Theater of Conflict

If the path forward for Romney and his fellow colonists was not radiant, it was at least visible. Trouble, however, was ever afoot. New Mexican sheepherders—who had settled Apache County in the 1860s—contested the range, sometimes violently. Often, they ran Mormon stock off free range. In one case, New Mexicans in St. Johns attacked a group of armed Mormons who had come to see a bullfight. After several men were hit, an LDS elder stepped into the middle of the battle, waving his hands and yelling “for God’s sake, quit firing!” A bullet to the head killed him instantly. A bullet hit Miles Romney’s house in the same fray.

In another altercation, a New Mexican gave a severe beating to one of Romney’s sons, whom he blamed for an earlier attack on his own son. In a separate incident, a man struck Miles Romney so hard on the head that he fell insensible and nearly died. In still another case, a Mormon man cut “underslopes”—cattle marks—into the ears of a New Mexican accused of horse theft. At about the same time, New Mexicans and Mormons squared off for a turf war to claim town lots. Because settlers claimed lots via possession and paltry improvement rather than purchase, conflicts abounded. Only with great exertions did calmer minds prevent war.

The way Arizona Mormons remember their history, they were victims. They endured persecution and prevailed. From another perspective, they were aggressors. According to Jesse Smith, president of the collection of LDS congregations known as the Eastern Arizona Stake of Zion, “the blood of Cain” ran in New Mexican veins. Mormons believed that God had “marked” Cain by giving him dark skin after he killed his brother Abel. Like other white Americans, they likewise believed that God had cursed Ham’s progeny—starting with Canaan—with dark skin and perpetual servitude after Ham sinned against his father, Noah. Being dark-skinned people, Smith reasoned, New Mexicans must have descended not solely from Europeans and “Lamanites” (the Book of Mormon’s term for American Indians) but also from the accursed peoples of Africa.

“If we do not settle these places,” continued Smith, “someone else will … The Mexicans will come in here and get fat without the blessings of God.” Apostle Wilford Woodruff seconded Smith’s instruction, telling settlers to avoid interactions with “Jews, Mexicans, and Gentiles” by claiming “all the desireable places as fast as the brethren come … I do not intend to let daylight, dark night or grass grow under my feet to stop me trying to do my duty . . . bringing the House of Israel into the Kingdom of God.” Miles Romney echoed these sentiments in letters to the Deseret News of Salt Lake. There he displayed his own prejudice, writing that “but few years will elapse before a large and prosperous city will take the place of the ugly, ungainly God-forsaken Mexican town [St. Johns] that now almost gives a man who has any taste for the observance of any rule of architecture the ‘horrors.'” When New Mexicans and Jews proved bent on contesting Mormon claims, Romney journeyed to Salt Lake City to request more colonists. He succeeded. The church sent 200 more families to Apache County, giving Mormons a numerical majority and helping them take control of county government in 1886.

Mormons, then, had their own Manifest Destiny. In earlier decades, they had imagined their vast domain—”Deseret,” which stretched north to Idaho, west to the Pacific, and south to Arizona—as a separate nation altogether. By the early 1880s, their ambitions had diminished. By then, they imagined only a religious domain, a kingdom of righteousness. No longer did they imagine a counter-nation, a nation of God amid godlessness, but they still sought social and economic separation.

In Apache County, Mormons continued toward that goal, instructing the faithful to avoid mixing with “gentiles” (non-Mormons) or allowing their daughters to work for them. In 1884, however, they met a new threat: the Aztec Land and Cattle Company, a giant operation created by powerful investors from New York and New England, including two former Massachusetts governors. The Aztec commanded a million acres, imported 32,000 cows, and hired Texas cowboys to run them. Like New Mexicans, the cowboys drove Mormon sheepherders off the range. They jumped Mormon claims. They stole Mormon stock. They pistol whipped Mormon men and threatened to kill them.

From the cowboys’ perspective, this was a justifiable defense of the Aztec’s range. Having bought railroad land, Aztec had the right to make additional claims within a 10-mile-wide strip of federal “lieu” land where Mormons were settled. (Because settlers had already claimed a few tracts within the 40-mile-wide strip that Congress promised to the railroad in 1872, Congress held back an additional strip, the lieu land, from which the railroad could select parcels as compensation for those taken.) When Mormons arrived, they had assumed that the railroad would not be extended through Arizona and the land rights would fall to them. They continued to believe the land was theirs after the railroad did go through, reasoning that the Aztec—though it had bought the railroad’s land—could make no claim to specific tracts in the lieu lands until Congress authorized a survey. Realizing that Mormons had taken parcels with good water and grass, however, the Aztec sought to evict them. Settlers, contended the Aztec, had no right to take up homesteads until the Aztec had made its selections.

Mormons and Aztec managers—together with New Mexicans and Texas cowboys—were participants in a broader dynamic. Throughout the West, corporations struggled against smallholders for control of resources and land. Smallholders also struggled against other smallholders. Sometimes, indeed, smallholders teamed up with corporations to dispossess other smallholders, much as Texas cowboys teamed up with the Aztec to dispossess Mormons. From another perspective, however, the battle between the Aztec and Mormons was a battle between powerful corporations. Until the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the church as a corporation, the church functioned much like a holding company. Mormons worked on behalf of other Mormons. They worked, moreover, on behalf of a church that sought resources and land for its own ends.

Elsewhere in the rural West evolved a similar dynamic. In Kansas and New Mexico, local factions assassinated the political leaders of competing factions. Often the battle was simply over where to locate a county seat. In Texas, factions composed of extended kin prosecuted outright war—euphemistically called feuds—against enemies. Battles sometimes pitted former Unionists against former Confederates, though the underlying contest often involved access to range and to water. The most famous of the range wars occurred in Johnson County, Wyoming, in 1892, when a cabal of powerful ranchers hired several dozen Texans to attack smallholders accused of rustling. After assassinating one of the smallholders’ leaders, the assassins found themselves under the guns of a posse. Only the Army’s intervention saved them from slaughter.

The West’s peculiar pattern of conflict shaped Mormons every bit as much as it shaped others. That is not to say that those caught up in it fully understood it. To Mormons, cowboys were not mere players in a vast Western drama; they were criminals. Such judgment was not altogether wrong.

Whereas Mormons were zealous in faith, cowboys were merely zealous; they transformed company policy into persecution. Two cowboys in particular plagued the Mormon settlers of Snowflake, Taylor, and nearby towns: John Payne and Andy Cooper. After Payne, at the behest of the Aztec, threatened to kill James Pearce and demanded that he and his fellow Mormons abandon their homes, Pearce went to Jesse Smith and asked permission to murder his nemesis. Smith told him to stay his hand. Payne and other “outlaws,” predicted Smith, would soon be out of the way.

Adding to Mormon troubles was a political faction—comprised of Jewish merchants, ranchers, and New Mexican sheepherders (“jackals, vultures, and vampires” cursed one Mormon settler)—that worked tirelessly against the polygamous newcomers. The Saints, it seemed, sought to take over the county; politics was a way to block them. The faction’s mouthpiece was the St. Johns Herald. In addition to assailing Mormons for being “un-American”—particularly after they flew the American flag at half-mast on July 4, 1885, to protest U.S. anti-bigamy laws—the Herald called on readers to lynch Mormon leaders. It singled out David Udall and Miles Romney in particular, calling the latter “a mass of putrid pus and rotten goose pimples; a skunk, with the face of a baboon, the character of a louse, the breath of a buzzard and the record of a perjurer and common drunkard.”

Mountain Meadows and Its Legacy

Not all anti-Mormon feeling came unbidden. What brought matters in Apache County to a boil were new revelations about the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, when Mormons had slaughtered the Fancher-Baker party, a group of some 120 men, women and children en route from Arkansas to California.

When the U.S. government finally gathered enough evidence to bring charges, it uncovered a story of fanaticism, hysteria, and premeditation. When President James Buchanan had sent troops to impose federal rule over Utah some eighteen years earlier, Brigham Young had prepared for war. The Fancher-Baker party was making its way through Utah at precisely the wrong moment. Rumors spread that members of the party had called Mormon women whores; that they had poisoned a well; that they had participated in the murder of LDS apostle Parley Pratt, or perhaps even Joseph Smith himself.

Upon receiving instructions from Brigham Young to close emigrant routes, the militia in Cedar City planned an assault. Dressed as Indians—and with Paiute allies in tow—some fifty to sixty Mormons laid siege to the emigrants as they passed through a grassy pass called Mountain Meadows. For several days, the emigrants held out, causing Mormons to resort to a ploy. If the emigrants surrendered, promised Mormons, they would be granted safe passage to Cedar City. The emigrants agreed. Instead of safe passage, the attackers separated men from women, marched them into the open, and murdered them. If any escaped, reasoned leaders, avengers would kill Mormons. The attackers spared only children under eight, who were deemed too young to have sinned.

Though whisperings of the massacre sparked outrage, Mormons stymied any investigation. Brigham Young, indeed, made it clear that he wanted Mormon jurors—should there be a trial—to exonerate the accused. As governor of Utah Territory, it was his duty to investigate the crime. He did the reverse: he helped cover it up.

The wheels of justice, however, made slow revolutions. In 1875, when the government initiated prosecutions, some of those spared from the massacre—they were now in their 20s—testified to what they had witnessed (still other survivors mysteriously disappeared). The trial, writes historian Will Bagley, created “a public fascination unequaled until the Lindbergh kidnapping case and exceeded only by the O.J. Simpson trial of the 1990s.” In Arizona—where Mormons were beginning to colonize—the trials stirred anger.

Though Miles Romney had no familial ties to the killers, other colonists did. James Pearce, then 18, had been among them. According to some records, he was struck ill on the day of the massacre and stayed in camp. Other records tell a different story. When young Pearce had tried to save one of the victims, his own father, Harrison Pearce, shot James in the face. He carried the scar the rest of his life. In Mormon councils prior to—and after—the massacre, Harrison Pearce had been among the most zealous for mass murder.

Another of the killers, Samuel Dennis White, was father to William Flake’s first bride, Lucy Hannah White. Flake himself probably passed through the carnage immediately after the massacre, when he and other Mormons heeded Brigham Young’s call to return from outposts in California. It is also possible that Flake, a hale and hardy frontiersman of 18, had come earlier to prepare the way for his fellow Californians, allowing him to participate in the slaughter. All we know is that in 1857, when he met his wife, he was a “soldier” posted in Cedar City. The only man convicted, however—the scapegoat, who was said to have given the orders—was John Doyle Lee, whose granddaughter married David Udall’s son, Levi. In 1877, Lee faced a firing squad. No further prosecutions ensued.

What did ensue were attacks on polygamy, particularly in Arizona. Within a few years of the trials, the federal government made Mormons swear oaths to the laws of the U.S.—including those banning polygamy—and barred them from voting or holding office if they refused. The government also prosecuted polygamists directly. It charged Miles Romney with both illegal cohabitation (he had five wives and thirty children in his long life) and with filing false documents to gain a homestead. David Udall, who had but two wives, was arrested for having falsely born witness to Romney’s claim. William Flake—who also had two wives—was likewise caught up in the purge. In 1884, a U.S. marshal escorted him to trial for polygamy.

Convictions soon followed. Udall was sent to a federal prison in Detroit. Unable to pay bail, meanwhile, Romney and Flake had sought loans. Flake had borrowed $2000 to pay for both Romney and himself. When Romney fled to Mexico, he left Flake to pay the debt. In Chihuahua, Romney helped establish refuges for polygamists.

Past Meets Present

“In no other section of the country,” averred Miles Romney’s biographer in 1948, “was the anti-Mormon hatred more pronounced than in Apache County, Arizona, and certainly no Latter-Day Saints since the days of Missouri and Nauvoo have been the objects of greater indignities and persecution for righteousness sake.” From the Mormon point of view, they suffered, survived, and remained patriots. The Herald’s charge that Mormons were “un-American,” however, was not far off the mark.

On the one hand, Mormon colonists jubilantly celebrated each Fourth of July. Independence, they reckoned, was part of God’s plan. Without kings and state churches to block the way, true Christianity—Mormon Christianity—could be restored. On the other hand, Mormons thundered against Americans. Apostle Woodruff—who as LDS president would guide his people toward moderation and reform—told his Arizona flock in the 1880s that “Zion will rise and Babylon will fall … The Lord will sweep the wicked from the face of the earth. There is not a crime that could be named but what this nation is guilty of.” Another Arizona leader urged the flock to redouble its missionary efforts among Indians, who would become allies in the coming war against persecutors. Brigham Young himself had said Indians would be “the battle-ax of the Lord.” Erastus Snow—apostle, polygamist, and fugitive hiding in Arizona—told Mormons that “peace has departed forever from this land.” Civil War veterans, he preached, had “abandoned themselves to the lowest acts and walks of life.” Americans conceived during the Civil War, he added, “have this disposition born in them and they delight in blood.”

To Arizona colonists, both Woodruff and Snow—fugitive polygamists who moved from town to town to stay away from the marshals—were the holiest of men. Their words carried weight. If Mormons “never lost their love of country,” then, they came very close. Though Mormons saw themselves as sacred defenders of the Constitution—and especially the First Amendment, insofar as they believed that it sanctioned polygamy—they simultaneously prophesied that the U.S. would disintegrate in civil war.

Throughout the twentieth century, many right-wing Mormons remained convinced that the Constitution was under siege. Joseph Smith himself once prophesied that the Constitution would one day hang by a thread, only to be saved by Mormons. The Mormon leader who carried that torch into the modern era was W. Cleon Skousen, the Salt Lake police chief and prolific author who viewed President Eisenhower as a communist and who believed Social Security—and the whole welfare state apparatus—to be unconstitutional. Communists, claimed Skousen, were attacking the nation from within and without. A one-world-order was in the making, claimed Skousen, and it was the duty of Mormons to stop it.

Skousen’s teachings soon worked their way into LDS congregations, causing rank-and-file Mormons to believe they were endorsed by the church. The church did little to disabuse them of the notion. Two church presidents—David O. McKay and Ezra Taft Benson—befriended Skousen and admired his teachings. Benson, indeed, suggested that no liberal could be a good Mormon. Not until 1979, after McKay died, did church officials notify bishops that they should cease to schedule meetings of Skousen’s John Birch-like organization, the Freeman Society, in LDS churches.

Skousen’s righteous anger—one might call it “Skousenoia”—continues to animate Mormon pundits like Glenn Beck as well as politicians like Russell Pearce. Though not as outspoken about Skousen as his brother, Lester, Pearce admits that Skousen influenced him. Skousen himself, interestingly, was the great-grandson of another polygamous Mormon who colonized northeastern Arizona, James Niels Skousen, who, after serving a short term for unlawful cohabitation, avoided subsequent prosecution by sending one of his wives and her children to Mexico.

Despite their parallel family histories, Skousen’s righteous anger does not animate Mitt Romney, else he would garner more Tea Party votes. Nor does it animate the Udalls (or at least the line descended from David Udall’s first wife, who became the family’s liberals). The trajectory of the Romneys and Udalls—no less than that of Skousen—can be traced partly to their forebears.

The Udall Way

In 1885, President Grover Cleveland, eager to win Mormon votes, gave David Udall a pardon. Once back in Apache County, Udall—who had urged his flock to “carefully avoid acts of violence”—took steps to resolve tensions with his Jewish and New Mexican neighbors, including adjudicating fair claims to the waters of the Little Colorado River. Moreover, he vehemently opposed lynching, sympathized with Mexicans who felt displaced, and made friends with one of the New Mexican leaders, Don Lorenzo Hubbell. Udall also seems to have endorsed the political party created in St. Johns in 1886 to bring rapprochement between Mormons and their enemies.

It’s difficult to say for certain that Udall’s pacific gestures shaped the politics of his descendants, but they may well have done so. His son, Levi, and his grandsons, Morris and Stewart, remained loyal to the Democratic Party into the Civil Rights era and beyond. It was Levi Udall who wrote the majority opinion for the Arizona Supreme Court when, in 1948, it belatedly guaranteed American Indians the right to vote even if they lived on reservations. Morris and Stewart, while attending the University of Arizona a year earlier, invited a black student to dine with them, thus integrating the university cafeteria and defusing racial tensions. Morris, indeed, petitioned the Army to integrate its forces even before Harry Truman ordered it to do so. Tom and Mark have followed their fathers’ examples.

There are, of course, other explanations for Udall liberalism. Most Mormons were Democrats in the 1880s; perhaps the Udalls merely remained constant while others veered right. Perhaps, too, the Udalls took seriously their mission to convert New Mexicans. Several St. Johns Mormons had learned Spanish, in part so they could proselytize. Joseph Smith had prophesied that Mormons would someday convert the Western hemisphere. To fulfill that prophecy required Mormons in eastern Apache County to come to terms with racial antagonism. Mormons in the western part of the county, by contrast, separated themselves from New Mexicans almost entirely (William Flake, indeed, had required New Mexican farm hands to vacate Snowflake when Mormons took possession; he replaced them with impoverished converts). Neither prophecy nor pragmatism pushed them toward rapprochement.

Whatever its source, the Udall trajectory is best exhibited in Stewart Udall’s final book, The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West (2002). In that book, Udall, who died in 2010, derided the idea of the “Wild West,” a West “won” by gunfighters, prospectors, and Army troops. In place of that mythic West, Udall spoke of a West created by God-fearing folk with roots in the soil. Violence, claimed Udall, did not win the West; it retarded development. Even the Indian wars, claimed Udall, were really just massacres. To call them “wars” is to give them legitimacy. They were not just brutal but unnecessary. What enabled Americans—as well as Mexicans and Indians—to build up the West was hard work and a strong sense of community. In particular, Udall praised the hard work and sense of community of his progenitor, David Udall, and those who settled in Apache County.

Stewart Udall’s own history shows those same virtues. He is arguably among the most important secretaries of Interior of the twentieth century, in large part because he sought to preserve federal lands for a national community, not just exploit them for private interests. History taught Stewart and his brother, Morris—who championed environmentalist causes and worked tirelessly to protect Arizona’s scenic treasures—to love not only moderation but also to love the land that their ancestors settled. “Like the eagle that selects the highest tree in which to build her nest,” Apostle Snow had told Arizona settlers, “so have the Saints come to the highest mountains in which to make their homes.” To the Udalls, those mountains became sacred.

Stewart Udall’s ideas about how the West was built (“won” is too sanguine) and how to protect it, however, have not filtered into the Arizona legislature, where conservative Mormons and their allies want states to control federal lands and open them to commercial uses. Conservatives, moreover—with Russell Pearce at the helm—have voted repeatedly against gun control. In recent years, Arizona has minimized licensing and registration requirements, allowed individuals to carry guns into bars, and—at the direction of Pearce, who was then Senate president—endorsed the right of legislators to carry arms in the capitol building.

Members of the Flake family have sung for the same choir. Jake Flake—who boasted of his ranching background—championed conservative causes in the legislature for decades. Jeff Flake, similarly, as a U.S. congressman defends gun rights, voted for the Iraq War, and brags that he got his politics from his grandfather, James Madison Flake, who “was a genuine cowboy.” Though he made a name for himself as a maverick in Congress by touting the normalization of relations with Cuba, he agrees with Russell Pearce on immigration. Having once supported a guest worker policy, he now supports sealing the border and mass deportations. To understand that sensibility, we might review how and why the path of William Flake departed from that of David Udall—and for that matter, Miles Romney—in the 1880s.

A Battle among Mormons

Unlike Romney, William Flake did not flee to Mexico in 1884. Summer Howard—who had served as a prosecutor in the Mountain Meadows case—convicted Flake and sentenced him to a short term in the Yuma Territorial Prison. In his journal, Flake prophesied that Howard would soon be “under the sod.” Six months later, Flake returned to his wives in Snowflake—he remained married to both—where a band played “Dixie” to greet him. He also returned to freighting throughout central Arizona, desperate to pay the money he owed creditors for land purchases, for his bail, and for the bail of Miles Romney. Rather than seeking rapprochement with old enemies, he resorted to force.

With Flake’s approval, a group of Mormons and their political allies met at Winslow in 1886 to form the “People’s Party,” a name meant to evoke not the party of socialistic Populists (who formed their own People’s Party in 1891) but rather to evoke the all-Mormon party that had dominated Utah politics. The name also evoked the “People’s Party” that had created the San Francisco vigilance committees of the 1850s. Apache County’s People’s Party put forth a bounty hunter employed by Flake—a man named Commodore Perry Owens—for sheriff. Owens’s supporters promised he would drive out malicious cowboys, arrest New Mexican “criminals,” and bring corrupt county officials (Jews and New Mexicans) to justice.

Although Mormons who, like Flake and Pearce, resided in the western part of the county, endorsed Owens, those in the eastern half (where the Udalls resided) took a different tack. The “Winslow Convention,” lamented John Milner, new editor of the Orion Era, had been “captured by Anti-Mexicans.” To combat intolerance, Milner joined forces with New Mexicans and cowboy “criminals” (including Ebin Stanley, brother-in-law to Ike Clanton, whose brother Billy was gunned down at the OK Corral in Tombstone in 1881) to create the Equal Rights Party.

Milner’s party drew up a platform that denounced race prejudice, soft-pedaled the crime issue, and nominated Don Lorenzo Hubbell—son of a New Mexican mother, proprietor of the famous Hubbell Trading Post, and in earlier years a bitter enemy to Mormons—for sheriff. Hubbell, in turn, told New Mexicans that People’s Party supporters—if victorious—planned to set up vigilante committees to lynch them. He was not far wrong. A mysterious group of “cattlemen”—likely members of the Apache County Stock Growers Association, an organization that included William and James Flake and several other Mormons and non-Mormons—had purchased the St. Johns Herald and used it to promote vigilantism. Rather than lynch Mormons, the Herald’snew editor inveighed that “good” men must lynch thieves.

The split between the factions was deep and bitter. The Herald—in full-throated support of the People’s Party—railed against “Sister Juan y Baca Milner” and his “mongrel” coalition (the Bacas were a powerful New Mexican family who supported Equal Rights). “If Sister Milner should lay eggs and the Equalites act as incubator,” wrote Barry Matthews, the Herald’s pro-Mormon editor, “will some student of natural history tell us what name to give the birds. Judging from the smell of the nest we should say they would be buzzards or winged skunks.” Thanks to overwhelming Mormon support in the western part of the county, Commodore Owens prevailed by 91 votes out of 909 cast.

With the help of spies, deputies, and vigilantes, both Mormon and gentile, Owens made good on the promises of those who backed him. James Pearce’s cowboy persecutor, John Payne, was the first to die. Among those who fired on him in the so-called “Pleasant Valley War” was James Tewksbury, who had served as a spy for William Flake and his fellow Snowflake Mormons. Stake President Jesse Smith’s earlier prediction that Payne would soon be out of the way proved correct. A few weeks later, in one of the most famous gunfights in Arizona history, Commodore Perry Owens killed—or murdered, depending on how one reads the event—the other arch nemesis of Snowflake Mormons, Andy Cooper, along with his 15-year old brother and another cowboy. One of Owens’s deputies subsequently killed Ike Clanton, who had escaped Wyatt Earp’s wrath in Tombstone in 1881. In 1888, another of Owens’s deputies handed over three more cowboys—probably all innocent—to a lynch mob.

Supporters of the People’s Party viewed the killings as providential. “God heard our prayers,” wrote Lucy Flake, one of William Flake’s wives. “Our enemies ‘fell into the pits they had digged for us’ as the Lord promised they would.” She estimated that Commodore Owens had killed eight to ten outlaws. Another Mormon put the figure at thirty-eight, adding that Owens had frightened many more out of the county. “The Lord said if the Saints do right He will fight our battles,” wrote a Mormon settler on New Years Day 1888. “It is said,” he added, “that New York, Boston & other places would be destroyed in the near future.” In 1918, when Owens died, Mormons baptized him posthumously, recalling that he had been “providentially sent.”

Apache County, meanwhile, quieted down. At the behest of a new church president, Mormons abandoned polygamy in 1890. Fifteen years later, the Forest Service began to regulate the range. Rustling dissipated. Lynching disappeared. And the Flakes and Pearces? Like the majority of Arizona’s Mormons, many of them drifted to the right, becoming hardline Republicans.

One cannot simply reduce their conservatism to their 1880s experience. In a sense, they simply followed the trajectory of most Mormons. In the early twentieth century, the church repudiated socialism, worked closely with Mormon business leaders, and urged lay Mormons to be patriots. The course toward conservatism was part of the church’s quest to become mainstream. The gales of the 1880s, however, surely pushed Arizona Mormons—at least some Arizona Mormons—farther and faster to the right. In some respects, those gales continue to blow.

Out of the fires of frontier Arizona came Mormons liberal and Mormons conservative. Obviously the Arizona experience did not wholly determine their politics, but it made an impression. It became a testing ground, a latter-day Massachusetts Bay, a religious colony that gave issue to powerful (even militant) ideologies and voices, be they anti-communist or environmentalist, anti-immigrant or pro-civil rights.

The Path of Arizona

It is ironic to hear Jeff Flake brag of his cowboy ancestry, given that his forebears’ greatest persecutors in the 1880s were Texas cowboys. Until the latter arrived, recalled one settler, neither Mormons nor non-Mormons carried guns. Few Mormons, moreover, felt drawn to the cattle trade. They strove to be a farming people, even in Arizona’s dry climate. When an Apache County cowboy from Massachusetts witnessed Mormons gathering stock in 1886, he wrote his sister that Mormons “knew about as much as some of you folks about what a round up is.” The Flakes, however, were something of an exception among colonists, given that their progenitor—William Flake—preferred herding and loved to race horses. In ensuing decades, however, other Mormons took up ranching simply because it paid. When drought drove the Aztec out of the cattle business, indeed, Mormons leased land from their erstwhile nemesis and ran their own small herds. Mormon towns even advertised rodeos, explaining that rodeo “has always been an important form of entertainment” in the region.

It wasn’t just Mormons who fancied themselves cowboys. With the railroad and then the automobile, thousands upon thousands of tourists and sun-seekers arrived in Arizona. They saw in Arizona a romanticized Wild West presented by writers like Zane Grey, the bestselling novelist in the world in the 1910s and 1920s. Grey, who owned a hunting retreat in east-central Arizona, made the state’s bloody past into fodder for a long string of novels. Though Mormons deplored Grey and he—at least initially—deplored them (his first bestseller portrayed Mormon men as evil polygamists), they bought into the romance that he helped create. Good men, in Grey’s telling, defeated bad ones with fists, guns, or both. Civility didn’t work. That was precisely the lesson that Mormons like William Flake had learned in the 1880s, when they had countenanced violence to “clean up” the county.

Countless writers and movie-makers followed Grey’s lead. Arizona meanwhile attracted millions of newcomers. Most came after World War II, when the U.S. sought to become the world’s policeman. Though acting out pop culture fantasies proved problematic—cowboying offered few jobs—Arizonans chose leaders who were tough guys. Barry Goldwater was one. Then it was John McCain who, some say, “never met a war he didn’t like.” And Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County sheriff, with his dedication to making prisons as miserable as possible. And the Flakes. And the Pearce brothers, Lester and Russell (Arpaio’s sweltering tent prisons, brags Russell Pearce, were his idea). Arizonans—with Mormon support—brought Commodore Perry Owens into the twenty-first century.

In 2011, Russell Pearce endorsed a bill to make the Colt revolver Arizona’s official state gun. “Anytime you see a Western movie,” explained state Sen. Ron Gould, “the revolver in John Wayne’s hand is a Colt single action…. This is a historic firearm and it fits well with the story of Arizona.” Gould and his supporters ignore—or don’t know—that Arizona’s story also involves a reaction against guns. Indeed there was a reaction against Commodore Perry Owens.

In 1888, Owens had lost his bid for re-election. “Our Territory has had enough of desperadoes as ‘peace’ officers, who parade about with abbreviated cannon strapped to their hips,” announced yet another new editor of the St. Johns Herald. “The trouble with the desperado-class of officers is that they shoot whom they please, and are acquitted on the plea that their victim ‘had it in for ’em,’ and the shooting was in self-defense.” The legislature, meanwhile—along with many towns—passed gun control laws and forbade officers to carry weapons while drinking.

Arizona did more than that. Between 1907 and 1915, it banned prizefighting, gambling, and capital punishment; reformed prisons to promote rehabilitation rather than vengeance; and extended the vote to women. Though Arizona Progressives displayed a racist streak—they imposed a literacy test to screen out non-white voters—they rejected the state’s Wild West image.

Few Arizonans remember their Progressive past, when politicians and voters strove to make the state “civilized.” What they choose to remember—what popular culture has told them to remember—is the Wild West. Mormons, too—especially those who came of age when Westerns dominated fiction and television—sailed with pop culture winds. Whereas once Arizona’s Mormons were bitter enemies to Texas cowboys, with their gunfights, their gambling, and their whiskey, modern Mormon legislators—along with evangelicals like Gould—often oppose gun control. They espouse not only the Skousen doctrine of a Constitution under siege, but also the myth of the swaggering cowboy—the myth that gun-toting tough guys “won” the West—the myth that Stewart Udall sought to banish.

The Romney Way

If the Mormon experience in 1880s Arizona led Udalls leftward and led Flakes and Pearces rightward, the impact on the Romneys is more difficult to decipher. That may be in part because their ancestor, Miles Park Romney, fled to Mexico—then a refuge for polygamists—shortly before Apache County Mormons divided, with some choosing conciliation and others choosing vengeance. According to Mitt, his great-grandparents led “a life of toil and sacrifice, of complete devotion to a cause. They were persecuted for their religious beliefs but they went forward undaunted.” Even in Mexico, Miles Romney “had an abiding loyalty to America and a deep interest in [U.S.] politics.” None of that stopped Miles Romney from being “orator of the day” in Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, on March 21, 1886, when the local jefe raised the Mexican flag “and the entire [Mormon] congregation rent the air with three cheers for the Mexican colors.” Romney himself delivered a patriotic oration on Benito Juarez, the former president of Mexico.

Miles Romney’s grandson, George—who was born in Mexico—immigrated to the U.S. with his father, Gaskell, and the rest of his family when Mexican revolutionaries drove out Mormons in the 1910s. George Romney’s experiences put him on a path different from that of the Flakes and Skousens on the one hand and the Udalls on the other. As governor of Michigan (where he had been CEO of American Motors), he was a moderate Republican who assailed the LDS church for excluding blacks from the priesthood. He also instituted a state income tax. In 1964, he ran against Barry Goldwater in the Republican presidential primary, then refused to endorse Goldwater (another politician shaped by Arizona’s frontier fires) after he won the nomination. With his support for civil rights, George resembled the Udalls, yet, like all good Republicans, he opposed “big government.”

Mormon history explains George and Mitt Romney as much as it explains Udalls, Flakes, Skousens, and Pearces. That explanation owes less to the Arizona experience in itself than to the constant flight and mixed loyalties. Nineteenth-century Mormons loved the Constitution yet sought to separate themselves from Americans. From New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois to Utah to Arizona and California, to Mexico, even to Canada, nineteenth-century Mormons experienced one hegira after another. Add to that the perennial hegira of Mormon missionaries—young men (and sometimes women) who serve two-year stints throughout the world—and one begins to see a pattern.

Perpetual hegira did not necessarily give Mormons “tenacious drive,” as David Brooks suggests, but—in the long run—it gave them the ability to change skins, to fit in, to be liked and to be likable, even (despite Skousenoia) to be moderate. Perpetual hegira tested their loyalties. They were loyal to Deseret, to the U.S., to Canada, to Mexico, to plural wives and plural families, and above all to their church. Having so many loyalties meant disloyalty, too. One cannot be all things to all institutions. With so many loyalties, one must learn to be—to use an appropriate pun—catholic.

Perpetual hegira finally led Mormons into the mainstream. In the late nineteenth century, the church abandoned polygamy and blood atonement (the idea that some sinners so offended God that only violent death could redeem them). Leaders sought stability rather than flight. In the early twentieth century, church leaders went further: they told lay Mormons that loyalty to country was part of being a good Mormon. Though they had sidestepped the Civil War, church leaders encouraged Mormon youths to volunteer for service in World War I. In the 1930s, pollsters found that the majority of Americans viewed Mormonism positively. The church had left behind the fiery preachings of nineteenth-century prophets like Brigham Young and Erastus Snow, who made Skousen look like a mere epigone. In 1979, indeed, the church even separated itself from Skousen himself, assuring Mormons that his doctrines were not theirs. Perhaps one of the last battles in the war between the Skousenoia of old and the new moderation occurred when Mormon voters in Arizona recalled Russell Pearce from the state Senate in November 2011, and replaced him with a moderate Republican.

Had Gaskell Romney stayed in Arizona, Mitt Romney might well have been the moderate who ran against Pearce. If the Flakes tell us something about Mormon conservatism and the Udalls tell us something about Mormon liberalism, Mitt Romney tells us something about the greater Mormon shift from isolationism to acceptance (and the craving for acceptance). It is Mitt Romney who, in many ways, epitomizes modern Mormons: likable, mainstream (except when pushed right by Tea Partiers), ambitious, and moderately conservative.

With all that said, however, Mitt and his fellow Romneys still have a blot on their past. According to Osmer Flake, Miles Romney never did pay back the $1000 in bail that he owed William Flake. Mitt Romney may epitomize modern Mormonism, but he and his still owe some money.

Further Reading

Much of the evidence for this article came from the research I conducted while writing Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West (New Haven, Conn., 2010). For a fuller treatment of 1880s conflict in Apache and Yavapai counties, Arizona—as well as the legacy of that conflict in history and in literature—readers should consult my book. Also worth reading is Rita Ackerman, OK Corral Postscript: The Death of Ike Clanton (Honolulu, 2006).

Readers interested in early Mormon experiences in east-central Arizona will find two small gems: Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing along the Little Colorado River, 1870-1900 (Tucson, 1973); and George S. Tanner and J. Morris Richards,Colonization on the Little Colorado: The Joseph City Region (Flagstaff, Ariz., 1977).

Because the LDS church directed its pioneers to keep journals and records, the primary sources on Mormon settlement are rich. Several university libraries in Utah and Arizona hold extensive collections of Mormon journals and records from 1880s Arizona. Among the most helpful to me were Joseph Fish, “History of Eastern Arizona Stake of Zion; Early Settlement of Apache County, [and] Stake Clerk’s Records & Journal, 1878-1912,” held by Arizona State Library and Public Records. Also helpful were three journals held by Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library: Lucy Hannah White Flake, “Autobiography and Diary of Lucy Hannah White Flake”; Allen Frost, “Diary of Allen Frost”; and Jesse Nathaniel Smith, “Journal,” in the Jesse N. Smith Papers.

Valuable and fascinating published memoirs and biographies by or about Arizona’s Mormon pioneers include Roberta Flake Clayton, ed., To the Last Frontier: The Autobiography of Lucy Hannah White Flake (reprinted 1976); Osmer Flake, William Jordan Flake: Pioneer, Colonizer; Eugene Flake, James Madison Flake, November 8, 1859 – February 4, 1946: Pioneer, Leader, Missionary (Bountiful, Utah, 1970), 93; and Joseph West Smith, Journal of Joseph West Smith: The Life Story of an Arizona Pioneer, 1859-1944.

Both Miles Romney and David Udall also left journals. Though neither is available in manuscript, substantial excerpts from David Udall’s journal have been published. See David King Udall, Arizona Pioneer Mormon: David King Udall: His Story and His Family, 1851-1938 (Tucson, 1959). Like his newspaper, the Orion Era, Miles Romney’s journal has disappeared. Even his descendant and biographer, Thomas Cottam Romney, complained that he could not gain access to the journals to write a biography. He did, however, draw on his progenitor’s prolific letters to the Deseret News. See Life Story of Miles P. Romney (Independence, Mo., 1948). For a better understanding of Miles Park Romney and plural marriage, one might consult Jennifer Moulton Hansen, ed., Letters of Catharine Cottam Romney, Plural Wife (Champaign, Ill., 1992).

The most thorough treatment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman, Okla., 2002). Also valuable are Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Norman, 1962), and Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York, 2008).

Good studies of the twentieth-century Mormon trajectory toward moderation, reform, and acceptance are Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1890-1930 (Urbana and Chicago, 1986; reprint, 1996); and Michael D. Quinn, “The Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War: An End to Selective Pacifism,” Pacific Historical Review 43:3 (Fall 1974), 342-366.

On the Aztec Land & Cattle Company, we have two fine books: Robert Carlock, The Hashknife: The Early Days of the Aztec Land and Cattle Company, Limited (Tucson, 1994); and Jim Bob Tinsley, The Hash Knife Brand (Gainesville, Fla., 1993).

To understand how big corporations and investors sought to dominate not just east-central Arizona, but much of the West, one must read William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence, Kan.,1994). I recommend reading Robbins’s book in conjunction with books that take a more considered view of Western violence, including Richard Maxwell Brown, Strains of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York, 1975); Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American Society (New York City, 1992); and William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916 (Urbana, Ill., 2004).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.3 (April, 2012).

Native American literacy in colonial New England

Samson Occom—Mohegan, Presbyterian minister, and Native political leader (1723-1791)—was a famous man, so famous that even in his absence strangers were introduced into his house so that they could marvel at his accomplishments and his urbanity, as we learn from the journal of an obscure eighteenth-century Quaker named Abner Brownell (now in the AAS diary collection). Describing his travels in the year 1779 throughout New England and upstate New York, Brownell recorded his near encounter with Occom. As it happened, Occom was not home at the time of Brownell’s visit, but Brownell left us a most intriguing view of reading and writing in this Mohegan community. His Mohegan guides conducted Brownell through Occom’s house to his book collection.

he appear’d (as they told me) to be a man of great Litteral Learning; I saw his Study, being a Stow Room in his Chamber, where his Library of books was in which was as we Judg’d about a Common Cart-body full, being books of all Sorts Some of all the Languages that is often Learnt in this Nation, of which they told me he understood and many upon Divinity being of all Sorts, and of all Societys Setting out that are in this Nation and also having as Large Volumes of Comments and Expositions and Annotations of the bible as I Ever saw or heard of in these parts.

Awed by Occom’s erudition, Brownell could only measure the importance of the books by their quantity (“a common cart-body full”) and by the fact that Occom’s texts were in languages other than English. He emphasized that Occom was a towering figure of scholarly sophistication “in this Nation,” comparable to any other learned gentleman “in these parts.” It is worth noting too that even though Brownell passed through the Mohegan area repeatedly in his later travels he never returned to find Occom himself at home. It seems that seeing Occom’s library was more than enough for Brownell to “read” and understand Samson Occom.

A speaker of multiple languages, a gifted writer, a voracious reader, and a widely respected community leader, Samson Occom taught himself to read and write during his teenage years. In 1743, he sought out the help of the local white minister Eleazar Wheelock to further expand his education. Wheelock’s work with this extraordinary young man (who by his twenties had mastered Greek, Latin, Hebrew, as well as English, in addition to his native Mohegan language) convinced the minister to open Moor’s Indian Charity School for Native and white charity students in 1754. In 1765, Occom left his post as a minister and schoolteacher among the Montaukett tribe of Long Island to embark on a two-year journey to England to help finance Wheelock’s school, which he saw as a promising opportunity for Native people. By the time of his return, however, he and his mentor Wheelock had a bitter falling out over the use of the funds Occom had worked so hard to collect and over Wheelock’s desire to shift the direction of his school from educating Native students to serving as a college for white students. Severing his ties with Wheelock, Occom dedicated himself to the founding of Brotherton, a new kind of a pan-tribal Christian community in upstate New York.

Eleazar Wheelock too was gloomy about the outcome of his educational venture. In 1771, he assessed that of the forty or so Native students who “were sufficiently masters of English grammar, arithmetic, and a number of them considerably advanced in the knowledge of Greek and Latin, and one of them carried through college,” “I don’t hear of more than half who have preserved their characters unstain’d, either by a course of intemperance or uncleanness, or both; and some who on account of their parts, and learning, bid the fairest for usefulness, are sunk down into as low, savage, and brutish a manner of living as they were in before any endeavours were used with them to raise them up.” Wheelock felt that most of his students (besides the exceptional Samson Occom) had failed him. And he viewed the failure of his school as the general failure of Native literacy in New England.

But Wheelock’s claim simply wasn’t true. After all, in addition to Occom, his school produced Indian writers like David Fowler (Montaukett) and Joseph Johnson (Mohegan) and an extraordinary collection of letters and accounts by various Native students, girls as well as boys. Even so, official missionary pronouncements like Wheelock’s on the general inadequacy of Native peoples to become properly “civilized” have fostered the assumption that Native Americans remained outside of the vibrant eighteenth-century world of reading, writing, and print culture. But if we turn to newly uncovered sources (and view old sources with fresh eyes) we can glimpse a more nuanced picture of literacy in the daily lives of Native people.

In fact, we don’t even have to leave the Occom household to begin to expand our understanding of how Native people related to books and writing. Mary Occom, wife of the famous minister, was surely at home when Brownell visited and was ushered into Occom’s study, which, remember, was “a Stow Room” off their “chamber.” What were her thoughts as this group of men tramped through her bedroom to marvel at her (absent) husband’s erudition? Did any of her visitors wonder whether she could read and write? (Brownell does not even mention her in his account.) Mary Occom did not own “a common cart-body full” of books, and she most certainly did not have her own room for reading and writing. But on her husband’s two-year trip to England years earlier she had exchanged letters with him. Her household accounts for the period of his extended absence include money spent on an inkpot, powder, and paper, surely the most tangible clue to her own literacy. Raising small children during her husband’s long absence in the same house that later came to stand in for her husband’s extraordinary readerly and writerly achievement, how lonely and overwhelmed Mary Occom must have felt mixing her own ink and penning her own letters at the kitchen table in the very few moments of quiet she could find for herself. It is not surprising that Samson Occom described letters from his wife during this time as “chiefly mournful.” None of these letters survive.

Letters that do survive show that Native families relied upon correspondence to maintain their connections to each other as they became increasingly dispersed for work or through marriage. These letters are extraordinary only for their very ordinariness. In 1763, Sarah Wyoggs fills in her brother (Samson Occom) on family news: “Brother Jonathan has had a long fit of sickness this summer … your mother is well at present, & Lucy & her family, only the youngest Child is frequently sickly, Thomas went up to Windsor last winter, came down last march & after tarr[y]ing a few days … he returned to his wife. As for myself I am as well as I am ordinarly … ” “Pray mother to bring my cotton yarn, and [a] bit [of] Red broadcloath to back my old Cloak,” asks Olive, Mary Occom’s grown daughter who writes to her parents shortly after marrying and moving to a different town in 1777. (Both letters are from the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.)

Other surviving forms of Native writing include diaries, sermons, and biographical accounts. There are also wills and other more or less informal documents like land deeds and records of other kinds of economic exchanges between individuals. Native writers copied out music books called gamuts as well as other kinds of print texts to make them more widely available. They also kept various kinds of “accounts,” an all-encompassing category ranging from grocery lists and records of household finances to travel descriptions and narratives. Some wrote government petitions. Many dictated their thoughts and concerns to others who wrote those words for them. One of Wheelock’s students, a young Delaware man named Hezekiah Calvin, even forged a pass for a slave, an act that landed Calvin in jail and caused Wheelock (himself a slave owner) much embarrassment. After all, this was hardly the way he had envisioned his students using their literacy skills.

Truth be told, even though Wheelock was eager to accept the credit for the achievements of extraordinary students like Samson Occom, his school was by no means the only way Native New Englanders became literate. Throughout New England, indenture contracts required that Indian servants be taught to read, and increasingly through the eighteenth century those contracts even specified that they be taught to write. While the vast majority of such contractual obligations were not fulfilled, enough were that there were increasing numbers of Native readers and even writers in early America. In fact, Wheelock’s school was intended to capitalize on an already expanding interest among Native people in reading and writing. New England tribes had been funding their own schoolmasters on and off for decades by the time Wheelock founded Moor’s Indian Charity School.

Missionary Experience Mayhew’s account of conversions on Martha’s Vineyard, Indian Converts, Or, Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a Considerable Number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard in New England (1727), shows that many Native people easily and comfortably used their literacy skills daily and, in fact, had been doing so for two generations. According to Mayhew, the Bible was the primary text for Native readers. In this way, Native Americans were no different from most colonists of the period, religious or not, who learned to read in the pages of the Bible and viewed it as the central text of literate experience.

Even a handful of surviving criminal confessions by Native Americans contain some markers of Indian reading and writing practices. Katherine Garrett, a Pequot woman convicted of infanticide in 1738, spent six months in jail in New London, Connecticut, awaiting her execution. At her execution, she said that she was “grateful” for this additional time she spent “reading the holy Scriptures and other good Books that were put in her hands.” In fact, her course of reading was viewed as evidence that Garrett had repented and converted to Christianity, and she was consequently permitted to receive visitors and even visit friends and fellow Christians throughout New London during her incarceration. Garrett’s own account of her life, which she may have written herself, appears as an appendix to the published edition of an execution sermon delivered by Eliphalet Adams, who was with Garrett on the scaffold.

In addition to “godly books,” we know from diaries and other sources that Natives were eager consumers of the kinds of print ephemera that circulated throughout New England. Newspapers, broadsheets, and almanacs were cheap, widely distributed, and easily available; newspapers and broadsheets were usually passed from individual to individual, while almanacs were individually owned, marked up, and consulted for everything from the weather to circuit court dates. Works like Samson Occom’s sermon were read out loud in community gatherings, as were letters of general interest and news reports.

And this is where the distinction between oral and literate culture becomes less clear. Native people gathered together to meet visitors, pray together, celebrate, grieve, and maintain their connections as communities in countless ways. In these moments, texts—printed sermons, prayer books, hymnals, letters, and petitions—were read out loud, to be discussed or understood communally. Even though only some Native people were readers or writers, all could hear reports read out in community gatherings and have their words written out for them by an accommodating friend or neighbor, making the distinction between literate and nonliterate seem largely beside the point. From criminal confessions to missionary celebrations, from personal diaries and letters to court documents, such seemingly unrelated materials make us see with new eyes what had already been available through our print archive: one way or another, regardless of whether any particular individual could read or write, Native communities in New England were alive with texts. 

Further Reading:

Joanna Brooks, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America (New York, 2006); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, 2008); Kris Bross and Hilary Wyss, Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst, Mass., 2008); Laura Arnold Liebman, Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts: A Cultural Edition (Amherst, Mass., 2008); William DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (reissued, Syracuse, N.Y., 2000); James Dow McCallum, Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians (Hanover, N.H., 1932); Laura J. Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751-1776 (Amherst, Mass., 1998); Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst, Mass., 2000).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Hilary E. Wyss is the Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature at Auburn University. She is the author of Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (2000), and, with Kristina Bross, Early Native Literacies in New England: a Documentary and Critical Anthology (2008). Her current book project, titled “English Letters: Native American Literacies, 1750-1850” is a study of Native American educational practices in the colonial and early national period.

In April of 2007, Angelo Mozilo, founder, chairman, and CEO of the not-yet-infamous mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, opened his firm’s annual report with a letter addressing shareholders. Mozilo acknowledged that Countrywide had “faced many obstacles,” including credit concerns that were becoming “acute, most notably in the nonprime space.” But he reassured readers that Countrywide had limited their exposure, and that they had tightened their lending guidelines to stabilize loan performance. The accounting statements that followed confirmed this story. Smiling out at readers alongside his president and COO David Sambol, Mozilo assured them that Countrywide’s best days were still ahead.

A year earlier, Mozilo had e-mailed Sambol to describe his concerns about their growing subprime business in vastly different terms. He viewed Countrywide’s 100% loan-to-value mortgages as “the most dangerous product in existence,” explaining that there could be “nothing more toxic” to the company’s financial stability. Over the course of the year, he repeatedly called the mortgages “toxic” and “poisonous.” Countrywide was “flying blind” with no way to assess the real risk on their balance sheet. This story, of course, never made it into Countrywide’s quarterly or annual reports. Their boilerplate prose and optimistic accounting gave only a vague and distant sense of the danger facing Countrywide—danger sufficient to prompt Mozilo and Sambol to exercise options and sell millions of dollars of stock before its value plummeted.

To give an account of something is to tell a story about it, and to hold someone accountable is to make him responsible for that story. At Countrywide, executives used accounting to spin a story that distorted the truth and deceived shareholders. They told the public a vastly different story than they told each other. But account books tell stories even when their keepers are not trying to deceive. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, individual men and women used accounting as a guide to navigate the increasingly complex world around them. Bookkeepers braided together words and numbers, sometimes following the recommendations in the latest textbooks, but also developing their own idiosyncratic notations for making sense of the world. They scrawled rough and ready calculations alongside precise and orderly balance statements, revealing their anxieties, preferences, and priorities along the way. Following them illuminates the daily drama of accounting as a narrative, contested search for understanding and control.

Irving’s Sketch Book, literary overproduction, and the politics of the “purely literary”

Most literary historians agree that the 1819 publication of Washington Irving’s collection of fiction and descriptive essays, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., marks the beginning of professional authorship in the United States. For the first time, the imaginative work of an American writer appealed to a broad, relatively affluent reading audience and sustained for its author a long-term publishing career. But if the appearance of the Sketch Book marked the economic development of American literary culture, it was also haunted by widespread economic unrest. Written in the wake of the 1818 bankruptcy of P. and E. Irving, his brothers’ import company, the first issues of the Sketch Book were sent hastily to a waiting printer in order to stave off Washington Irving’s personal financial ruin. Irving had intended Moses Thomas to publish the American edition; but after Thomas nearly became insolvent in early 1819, Irving asked his friend, Henry Brevoort, to take over. A year later, the publisher of the English edition, John Miller, went bankrupt before the first volume was completed, leaving John Murray, London’s “prince of book sellers,” to finish the job. Of course, the wider context for so many failures was the widespread economic distress that troubled the Anglo-American world. In Britain, a severe recession followed the War of 1812 and the victory against Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. In America, a series of bank failures led to the nation’s first financial crisis, the Panic of 1819.

The fact of Irving’s celebrated success and the tradition of classic American literature that it inaugurated make it easy to underestimate the impact of such economic turmoil on the social conditions of authorship. If domestic literary demand had become significant enough to encourage professional authors, however, it also required their dependence on both a highly competitive marketplace for books and readers whom they sometimes perceived as voracious, capricious, and vulgar. Writers like Irving saw themselves as disinterested gentlemen who wrote works of enduring cultural value, but their writing was often consumed by the same people who enjoyed cheaply produced books by less polite authors. Although the economic rewards of publishing enabled their writing, they took pains to deny their interest in financial remuneration. Yet their intimate relation to the risky, capital-driven business of publishing made them very much speculators on the tastes of a mass reading public, and even the most romantic of their writings often betray anxiety about this predicament. In some cases, this anxiety is expressed as a kind of panic about the status of authorship, literature, and books.

Compared with our own current economic recession, the cycle of boom and bust that led to the Panic of 1819 appears all too familiar. The economic expansion of the post-War period saw unprecedented growth in all aspects of American economic life: sharp increases in manufacturing and trade, the chartering of hundreds of new banks, near manic levels of investment, the entrance of many thousands of consumers into the middle class, and the expectation of an indefinite future of prosperity. This extraordinary growth, however, was facilitated by extremely easy credit and the over-production of currency, which by 1819 led to the collapse of America’s banking system and widespread economic depression characterized by glutted markets, falling prices and wages, large-scale capital losses, bankruptcy, unemployment, and an unprecedented number of citizens receiving poor relief (10 percent in New York City in 1820).

For many contemporary observers, the panic, whose effects lasted well into 1822, was a crisis of social stability, whereby the gothic specter of paper money and crushing debt signaled the demise of a land-based economy and a rank-based society and the arrival of a culture of indulgence and imposture (fig. 1). The Cincinnati Inquisitor Advertiser, for example, blamed the catastrophe on a “thirst for acquisition of riches without labor,” while the National Advocate complained of “loose and vulgar” young men who “plunge into the extravagance of the times,” such that “before they can earn a shilling by honest industry, they expend hundreds.” In the same vein, Niles’ Weekly Register expressed the hope that “honest men” would replace “speculating madman and visionary schemers,” and the Order of Tammany demanded a “fundamental change in morals and habits” and an end to “this factitious and preternatural accession of money.” Whatever their focus, most commentators emphasized the problem of an unstable currency. As William Tudor wrote in 1820, the “notion prevails, that a bank is to create wealth like a mine, and that the indefinite multiplication of engraven pieces of paper … is an actual increase of that property, though in reality it diminishes its value.”

If increasingly worthless paper money represented both a compromised social order and the compromised status of printed texts, it gave a certain aspect of perilous excess to the country’s rapidly expanding publishing industry and mass culture of reading. Since the 1790s, inexpensive sensationalist fiction had been available for purchase or through lending libraries in most American cities, and by 1800, urban printers were sending their wares (typically Bibles, devotional works, and cheap American editions of popular British authors) to rural markets across the ever-extending frontier. From 1810 to 1820, the total output of American presses grew by 50 percent; and by 1815, post-war affluence saw the emergence of well-stocked bookshops throughout the Atlantic seaboard and into the Ohio Valley. According to Mason Locke Weems, the influential southern book peddler, America in 1819 was “a Country of such boundless extent and rapidly growing population … where the passion of Reading is rising with a flood beyond all former notice of Man” (fig. 2).

Bookselling not only rose with the nation’s growing economy, its structure and business practices mirrored that of the unstable and illusory financial markets. The increasing availability of credit after the creation of the Bank of the United States in 1791 provided much of the capital necessary to print and sell books in what soon became a competitive and risky business. Although booksellers discovered various forms of cooperation to manage such risk in the short term, some of these had the long-term effect of merely disguising it. For example, they exchanged books with one another in order to diversify their offering and achieve better distribution. But because exchanges gave the false impression of actual sales, this practice quickly led to over-production and, despite rising sales, the inevitable devaluation of too many unsold books. Moreover, in order to raise capital and extend their credit over the long, unpredictable term of a book’s market life, they often endorsed or guaranteed each other’s promissory notes, in this way creating elaborate networks of mutual dependence. As a result, when one firm became insolvent, it often took several others down with it. But to make things even worse, many booksellers estimated their net worth based on unsold (and devalued) inventory rather than on a more realistic accounting of their assets. This meant that, at any given time, it was difficult for a bookseller to know either his own true financial position or that of the firms whose notes he’d endorsed. Thus, by 1819, with many thousands of worthless books circulating as inflated currency, the bankruptcy of a bookseller was a frequent occurrence.

Mathew Carey, the leading Philadelphia bookseller, lamented such problems in his 1813 Address to the Booksellers of America, and he blamed them chiefly on “delusive and pernicious speculations in extravagantly large editions.” Whereas London publishers typically printed small editions of 500 to 750, thereby keeping both demand and prices high, American publishers, in order to cover their higher production and distribution costs, often printed editions of 1,000 to 1,500. When such editions failed to find their audience, they were often sacrificed at book auctions or sold at “extravagant discounts.” But large editions also tied up booksellers’ capital, forcing them to borrow excessively and making them even more vulnerable to the “extreme fluctuations” of the market. As a result of such inefficiencies, a significant portion of booksellers’ assets lay “dormant,” much of it “not at present worth the price of the paper.” Indeed, Carey estimated that “two-thirds of the bankruptcies that have taken place among the booksellers, as well in Europe as in this country, have arisen from the immoderate extent of their editions.”

Yet overly large editions merely exacerbated what many American writers during the years surrounding the panic saw as the problem of too many authors. For some, such excess reflected a lack of originality. Edward Tyrell Channing’s 1816 essay, “On Models in Literature,” cautioned that if the enormous number of “borrowers and imitators are only encouraged, the swarm will go on thickening.” Others complained that intense competition made literary fame impossible. According to Richard Henry Dana’s 1821 Idle Man, “[B]ooks are multiplying so fast upon us, that they seem, at first sight, to be doing little else than crowding each other out of place.” Still others saw overproduction as symptomatic of a pandering, superficial literary culture. In his 1819 satirical poem, American Bards, Gorham Worth lamented the “contemptible catch-penny quackery” of the “glorious copartnership of Critics, Bards & Booksellers,” singling out for criticism the dubious practices of producing unnecessary second editions and “puffing” or promoting low-quality writing. In fact, Worth saw an explicit connection between such “inflations of folly” and those of America’s over-extended financial markets. “Let the old world compare with the new, if it can – / ‘Tis in vain! for America now leads the van, / And in bards, as in bankers, excels!”

The period’s most explicit fears of literary overproduction, however, were articulated in Irving’s Sketch Book. In one sketch, “The Art of Book Making,” Geoffrey Crayon’s musings on the “extreme fecundity of the press, and how it comes to pass that so many heads, on which nature seemed to have inflicted the curse of barrenness, should teem with voluminous productions” lead him to conjure a phantasmagoric scene of dispossession and revenge. Having wandered into the reading room of the British Museum library, he discovers “many pale, studious personages, poring intently over dusty volumes, rummaging among mouldy manuscripts, and taking copious notes of their contents.” These, he gradually discovers, “were principally authors and in the very act of manufacturing books” (fig. 3). But after musing on the ethics of literary borrowing, he falls asleep and dreams that these authors are “a ragged, thread bare throng” of untutored bumpkins, borrowing the “garments” of classic writers in a ridiculous display of “vulgar elegance” (fig. 4). The victims of this literary rapine, a cadre of long-dead authors arrayed in dour portraits on the library walls, then come to life and rise up in a fierce counterrevolution “to claim their rifled property” and chase the plunderers out of the library. Although, like Channing, Irving frames the sketch as a statement about literary originality, as a “getter up of miscellaneous works” himself and well accustomed to borrowing from classic authors, he appears to stage the imagined revolt of the portraits as an unconscious panic about literary overproduction and authorial dispossession.

In another sketch, “The Mutability of Literature,” Crayon has an imaginary “colloquy” with a dusty antique volume in Westminster Abbey about the morbid effects of time and social change on books, language, and literary reputation. At first, Crayon calls such mutability “the wise Precaution of Providence” to prevent “the creative powers of genius” from “overstock[ing] the world” and leaving the mind “completely bewildered in … endless mazes of literature.” But when he considers that in the modern age all former “restraints on this excessive multiplication” have vanished, he succumbs to a panic about overproduction and competition. The “inventions of paper and press,” he warns, “have made everyone a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print, and diffuse itself over the whole intellectual world. The consequences are alarming. The stream of literature has swoln into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea … Unless some unforeseen mortality should break out among the progeny of the muse, now that she has become so prolific,” Crayon worries, “I tremble for posterity.”

We can better understand the anxiety about authorship expressed in these sketches if we consider that, as Irving wrote them, he trembled more for himself than for posterity. In 1816, while living with his brother-in-law in England, he wrote to Brevoort that he was too “harassed & hagridden by the cares & anxieties of business” to produce anything literary; and in 1818, after the family firm had failed, he warned that “a much longer continuance of such a situation would indeed be my ruin.” When that year Thomas proposed his “getting up an original work,” however, Irving confessed he was “very squeamish on that point.” Desperate for money and capable of earning it only through his writing, he was nonetheless uncomfortable with the ungentlemanly idea of writing for money. “Whatever my literary reputation may be worth, it is very dear to me, and I cannot bring myself to risk it by making up books for mere profit.”

To write for “mere profit” was, for Irving, an unpleasant necessity. Born into New York’s commercial class, he had long mixed with his social betters and used his literary talents to claim a genteel place among them (fig. 5). But while he enjoyed the limited provincial success of his earlier works, Salmagundi and The History of New York, he was somewhat reluctant to participate in the increasingly unstable market for books and loathe to identify himself as anything but an amateur. Clinging to his gentlemanly status, he persistently declared that in publishing the Sketch Book he sought only a “scanty but sufficient means of support.” To “please the public and gain the good will of my countrymen,” he wrote, “is all I care about—I only want money enough to enable me to keep on my own way, and follow my own taste and inclination.” But in less guarded moments he made clear how important the financial success of this high-stakes venture was. “My fate hangs on it—for I am now at the end of my fortune.”

Irving’s apprehensions about money and status pervade the Sketch Book‘s themes of loss and nostalgia too. These are nowhere more apparent than in the sketch about “Roscoe,” a destitute banker and forgotten writer whose library is sold at auction to a crowd of “wreckers” and “speculators.” In a more abstract way, we also see them in the book’s melancholy stories of untimely death (“The Widow and Her Son,” “The Broken Heart,” and “The Pride of the Village”), of virtuous forbearance (“The Wife” and “The Royal Poet”), and of earlier, more stable times (“Rip Van Winkle,” “Rural Life in England,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). As Irving attempts with each sketch to escape from what he called “the common-place realities of the present,” he betrays an uneasy yearning for traditional forms of culture in a rapidly changing world.

Perhaps the most ironic by-product of Irving’s authorial panic was his invocation of the idea of a pure form of literature, untainted by money, commerce, and changing tastes, one that would allow the public to distinguish the Sketch Book from what Dana snidely referred to as “the trashy works which are daily turned out.” In “The Mutability of Literature,” for example, after his fear subsides, Crayon admits that certain authors, such as Shakespeare, survive the chaos of overproduction. “Because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature,” they “transmit the pure light of poetical intelligence from age to age.” The “true poet” will survive the “increase of literature,” he insists, because he “writes from the heart and the heart will always understand him” (fig. 6). Likewise, in “Roscoe,” despite the author’s sad fate and the volatility of the market, the value of great books remains. “When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.” In fact, reviewers of the Sketch Book said the same of it. Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review dubbed it the first “purely literary” American book worthy of praise, and in the North American Review Dana declared Irving the “first to begin and persevere in works which may be called ‘purely literary.'”

Such praise was doubly gratifying to Irving. It helped not only to distinguish him from more mercenary and less talented writers but also to generate record sales. But, in fact, the idea of the “purely literary,” which first gained widespread currency in the early nineteenth century, was only possible in the context of mass literary culture. For it was precisely the excesses of the bookselling industry that made cheap books readily available and that eventually produced Irving’s enthusiastic middle-class readership. Moreover, in spite of his protests, he was remarkably adept at the game he claimed to be so reluctant to play. He demanded and received a higher price for the first edition of the Sketch Book than even his mentor Walter Scott could command from London booksellers, and he insisted that the book be made of the finest paper, ink, and boards, thereby establishing a new industry standard of luxury. Indeed, it was Irving’s financial success, along with that of Scott, Byron, Cooper, and other best-selling writers, that finally made professional authorship respectable.

Like the blurred distinction between real wealth and paper profits, American authors of “purely literary” texts found it increasingly difficult after 1819 to distinguish their literary art from mere print commodities. Forever after, elite literary culture would be inextricably tied to popular culture, despite many protests to the contrary. But when genteel literary authorship first confronted the realities of capitalist commerce, such confusion was both novel and, for some, shocking. In other words, when writers like Irving first considered that the independence of aesthetics from economics might be merely a convenient fiction, panic ensued.

Further Reading:

On the early nineteenth-century transformation of American book publishing and reading culture, see James N. Green, “The Rise of Book Publishing in the United States, 1790-1840,” in Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., A History of the Book in America: Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C, forthcoming); Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishing in the New Republic (Philadelphia, 1996); and Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York, 1993). A useful selection of relevant primary texts can be found in Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves, eds., Perspectives on American Book History (Amherst, Mass., 2002). Although historical scholarship on the Panic of 1819 remains relatively thin, a technical overview is provided in Murray N. Rothbard, The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (New York, 1962). For recent biographies of Irving, see Andrew Burstein, The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 2006) and Brian Jay Jones,  Washington Irving: An American Original (New York, 2008).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Edward Cahill teaches American literature and culture at Fordham University in New York. He is completing a book on aesthetic theory and politics in the early republic.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

When Charles Cora accompanied his mistress, Arabella Ryan, to the theater on November 15, 1855, neither had any idea that their choice of an evening’s entertainment would shape the future of San Francisco. During the play, the gentleman seated in front of the couple rose and demanded that Cora and Ryan leave the theater. Ryan, commonly known as “Belle,” was a prostitute, and the gentleman–U.S. Marshal William Richardson–felt her presence was an offense to his wife. Cora refused to leave. Two days later, when Richardson and Cora met and exchanged words over the incident, Cora pulled out a pistol and shot Richardson to death.

But what came to be called the “Cora Case” didn’t end there. It became a favorite subject in the city’s newest newspaper, the Daily Evening Bulletin.  The Bulletin had been established in October 1855 by James King of William (who adopted this patronymic to distinguish himself from other James Kings). Hoping to build a successful newspaper in a city that already boasted several other major papers, King made reform his watchword. He electrified the public through his personal attacks on politicians, priests, and prostitutes, his dramatic headlines, and his pull-no-punches editorials. King had a knack for finding San Francisco’s hot button issues and weaving them together to depict the city as being in grave danger from vice and political corruption.

Not that he had to make it up. King’s San Francisco was full of vice and corruption. When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in January 1848, about one thousand Mexican and American settlers lived in the Mexican settlement on the bay. By 1855, nearly fifty thousand immigrants from China, Chile, Mexico, Ireland, Australia, France, and especially the United States had arrived in the city. Men outnumbered the first female arrivals by as many as ten to one. Meanwhile, tents outnumbered buildings. Gambling and prostitution were among the most lucrative businesses; hundreds of men could be found every evening in the gambling saloons, eating cheap meals, drinking hard liquor, playing cards, and paying an ounce of gold just to sit next to a woman. The boom-and-bust economy sent a few poor men to the pinnacle of success while merchants dreaded overstocked markets and plummeting fortunes. Widespread theft and arson, largely unchecked by the courts, provoked the formation of extralegal organizations to stamp out crime. One of these, the Vigilance Committee of 1851, involved seven hundred European and American merchants who hanged four men and exiled many others, mostly Australians, from the city on pain of death.

By 1855, the year Charles Cora shot and killed William Richardson, California gold production was in decline, and San Francisco had begun to take on the characteristics and aspirations of a more settled community. Some gold rush immigrants left, but others decided to settle permanently in San Francisco. They built brick houses and business establishments. Those men who could afford to, particularly middle-class Americans, sent for their wives and sweethearts until men outnumbered women only by three to two. The wives of merchants and artisans became the largest group of women in the city, outnumbering the prostitutes. Though San Francisco had changed a great deal since 1849, its most settled residents argued that vice, crime, an unstable economy, and an especially corrupt political system still threatened the security of business and family life. Prostitutes still sat, scantily clad, in windows of the city’s main thoroughfares; spectacular murders splashed across the front pages of the newspapers; well-established financial institutions crashed; and fraudulently elected city officials used their offices for personal gain.

It was in this context that James King of William, himself a family man, took up the cause of reform. Making the Cora case a symbol of San Francisco’s myriad problems, King argued that San Francisco’s most successful prostitutes, like Charles Cora’s mistress, Belle, worked hand-in-glove with gamblers, like Cora, and corrupt politicians to dominate and corrupt city politics. When Cora’s January trial resulted in a hung jury, King trumpeted: “‘Hung be the heavens with black!’ The money of the gambler and the prostitutes has succeeded, and Cora has another respite!” Throughout the winter and spring of 1856, King continued to combine attacks on prostitution with news stories alleging that Belle had bribed jurors to protect Cora. King attacked many other urban problems as well, but the Cora case effectively captured so many issues at once that King returned to it again and again.

To bolster his circulation and garner support for his reforms, King encouraged women to write to the Bulletin. The women who read the Bulletin, and probably those who wrote letters as well, were San Francisco’s newest immigrants: educated middle-class American wives from the Northeast. Recently arrived in the city, many such women were already organizing churches, sewing societies, and benevolent associations. Such activities were generally accepted in the eastern United States as appropriate public outlets for women; writing to the newspapers on political subjects was not. Yet middle-class women in San Francisco–who did not even form a women’s rights organization until 1868–seized this opportunity to participate in the public conversation over the future of the city in which they lived. As the reform movement built, in the spring of 1855, women’s participation in public political debate in San Francisco grew as well. But would this prove to be an anomaly? Would the changing and changeable culture of San Francisco allow women to participate in public politics, or would that opportunity be as short-lived as James King of William himself?

On May 14, 1856, as Cora awaited a retrial, King published a muckraking article on county supervisor and local newspaperman William Casey. As King walked home that evening, an incensed Casey shot him, and King died on May 20, a martyr to the reform cause in San Francisco. Outraged citizens organized a Vigilance Committee, which ultimately enrolled over six thousand men, particularly merchants, clerks, and skilled workers–groups whose members were likely to be permanently settled in San Francisco. These men included most of San Francisco’s white ethnic groups, with the notable exception of Irish Catholics who were virtually excluded. The vigilantes’ first act was to raid the jail, where they captured both William Casey and Charles Cora–King’s murderer and the man who best symbolized all that King had fought against in his reform rhetoric. As King’s funeral procession wound through the city on May 22, Casey and Cora were “tried” before the executive committee and hanged. Minutes before the hanging, Belle married Charles Cora in his cell inside vigilante headquarters. Afterwards, her fate, as well as that of James King of William’s broad-based reform crusade, hung in the balance.

During the next three months, the committee hanged two more men and exiled over two dozen others (mostly Irish-Catholic Democrats) for alleged political crimes. In addition, the vigilantes conducted illegal searches, suspended the law of habeas corpus, confiscated federal arms, subverted state and local militias, sought to oust elected city officials, and even imprisoned a justice of the state supreme court. In response, the governor of California declared the city of San Francisco to be in a state of insurrection and attempted to crush the committee by force. Certain prominent citizens of San Francisco, including many Irish-Catholic politicians, organized a Law and Order Party, insisting on the rule of law above all else. In their own defense, the vigilantes cited the right of revolution. A sovereign people, they argued, whose government is not only corrupt but has resisted reform, has the right to rise up and replace that government. They claimed that they had the nearly universal support of the people–the “respectable people of all classes.” To protect themselves from prosecution, the vigilantes supported the formation of the People’s Party in August 1856 (a major qualification for candidacy was public support of the Vigilance Committee), which dominated city politics for the next decade.

Both the supporters and detractors of the Vigilance Committee claimed to have not only God and the right, but also “the ladies” on their side. As Colonel Bailie Peyton put it, “The ladies are always right, and their endorsement of any cause would insure success; and it is enough to me to know that the ladies are with the Committee.” Similarly, the vigilantes’ opponents, particularly the Law and Order Party (led by John Nugent, editor of the Herald), claimed that “true women” supported their cause.

To strengthen these claims, nearly all the city’s major newspapers, even some that had never done so before, invited women to write letters on political subjects and printed them in the summer of 1856. Although women wrote on a variety of topics throughout the summer and showed their partisanship in other ways as well, the peak of women’s participation through the press coincided with the moment, in late May and early June, when the vigilantes themselves seemed uncertain about their moral authority and the direction of their movement. Needing to garner all the support they could, men on both sides of the struggle encouraged women to show their support. But some women seized the opportunity to advance an agenda of their own.

In all, about thirty letters from women appeared in May and June supporting the vigilantes. (Although it is possible that the letters may have been penned by men, the style and subject matter of the letters, read over time, suggests otherwise.) Many such letters in the pro-vigilante press simply endorsed the vigilante movement. But others, aware that the vigilantes were somewhat at a loss for an agenda, challenged the vigilantes to include sexual politics in their reform agenda. The first such letter to appear after the hangings was published on May 26, and addressed,

TO THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE: Allow me to express to your respected body our high appreciation of your valuable services so wisely and judiciously executed. You have exhibited a spirit of forbearance and kindness that even the accused and condemned cannot but approve. May Heaven continue to guide you. But, gentlemen, one thing more must be done: Belle Cora must be requested to leave this city. The women of San Francisco have no bitterness toward her, nor do they ask it on her account, but for the good of those who remain, and as an example to others. Every virtuous woman asks that her influence and example be removed from us. The truly virtuous of our sex will not feel that the Vigilance Committee have done their whole duty till they comply with the request of MANY WOMEN OF SAN FRANCISCO

In follow-up letters, some pro-vigilante women broadened this argument to a general attack on prostitution, insisting as King had that political corruption and prostitution were interrelated. “Philothea,” for example, accused Belle Cora of killing King through her efforts to spare Cora “the just penalty of his awful crime.” Not just Belle, but prostitutes in general, inhabited a dangerous “sphere of influence, which has caused innocent blood to flow in our streets.” “Femina” took the argument even further. Making only veiled reference to Belle, Femina drew out the connections between prostitution and political corruption: “These evil and shameless women squander by thousands their ill-gotten gains to fee corrupt lawyers, to screen the criminal, whose hands are reeking with blood, from the award of justice, to uphold the gambling politicians, who in return fill their hands with plunder derived from, or stolen from, our public offices of trust . . . You can compel these women to leave our city; will you not do it?” By emphasizing that prostitution, crime, and political corruption were intertwined, Femina sought to make it difficult for the Vigilance Committee to ignore the issue of sexual politics.

Meanwhile, women writing in the anti-vigilante press also joined in the discussion of Belle Cora’s future. On June 4, “Gertrude” responded directly to “Many Women of San Francisco.” Less concerned with the standing of Belle Cora than with the legitimacy of the vigilantes’ supporters, however, Gertrude accused the pro-vigilante women of being unchristian, uncharitable, and unwomanly. Headlined “A True Woman’s Plea for the Frail Portion of Her Sex,” this letter first established Gertrude’s own credentials as a “true woman.” Modestly remarking that “although I am not a newspaper correspondent and have no desire to appear in print,” Gertrude added that, “I have no sympathy with Belle Cora or her calling (which is loathsome in the extreme).” Still, Gertrude felt that as a woman, she ought to take a more high-minded attitude. “I am a wife and a mother, and I have a woman’s heart and a woman’s feeling–a feeling that would prompt me to extend the hand of charity to Belle Cora or any of her class, as quick as to the most virtuous in the land, and feel then that I had done only my duty.” Secure in her own position, Gertrude argued that women ought not to persecute their own sex and wondered aloud whether Many Women of San Francisco feared that prostitution was contagious. Having thus subtly called these women’s virtue into question, Gertrude concluded, “I feel that every high minded, true hearted woman in San Francisco will agree with me, and for the remainder I value not their opinion.” Here Gertrude staked out the moral high ground. The true women of San Francisco would be on her side; no one else was worth listening to. Could such arguments topple the moral authority claimed by those women who supported the vigilantes?

Perhaps Thomas King (James King’s brother and his replacement as editor of the Bulletin) thought about the importance of women’s reputation, both as individuals and as Vigilance Committee supporters, when he prepared the June 2 issue of the Bulletin. Certainly that issue marked a turning point in the debate over Belle Cora as well as in the involvement of women in the vigilante movement. On page 3, King inserted a brief notice:

BELLE CORA.–We have received about a score of communications regarding this woman. We think that no good purpose can be served at this time by publishing another word about her.

Clearly, with twenty letters on the table, this subject remained important to King’s readers, especially women. But King no longer felt it deserved attention. After June 2, the number of women’s letters in the Bulletin on any subject, not just prostitution, dropped precipitously (from five per week to fewer than one per week and then to fewer than one per month). Apparently, Thomas King had not only had enough of the debate over Belle Cora, but also of women’s letters on political subjects.

In fact, the vigilantes were already turning their attention sharply away from Belle Cora and prostitution in favor of ballot-box stuffing and political corruption. As Femina’s letter appeared, the vigilantes discovered a false-bottomed ballot box, which became the preeminent symbol of their cause, fortifying the vigilantes’ claim that political corruption was rampant in San Francisco. A focus on the ballot box, however, shifted the reform agenda to traditional politics, a sphere inhabited only by male voters and officeholders, and away from sexual politics where women had been both encouraged participants in and the objects of reform.

Although the number of letters declined markedly in the Bulletin (once the most likely place for women’s letters to appear), a few women continued to publish political letters in other city newspapers. Of these, only two mentioned prostitution, and they sounded a new, more tentative, note as if questioning women’s right to be heard on this subject. “Laura Lynch,” for example, argued that while women ought to act against prostitutes, they were constrained by their “natural feeling of delicacy, which recoils from such public notice.” Still, she was not prepared to be entirely silent. “I want my say, that’s all,” she wrote.

Laura Lynch may have had her say, but in the end, the Vigilance Committee did not adopt the view of reform put forth by women like Femina and Many Women of San Francisco. Perhaps the Vigilance Committee, needing broad masculine support, did not want to alienate men by attacking prostitution. But sexual politics also played a different role in the vigilantes’ search for legitimacy than it had for James King of William. Whereas King needed sexual politics to build a broad-based reform consensus (and to attract subscribers), the vigilantes staked their futures on claims to legitimacy grounded in republican political ideals. The right of revolution existed for citizens whose government was corrupt, not for people concerned about morality, the cost of post office boxes, or other seemingly tangential reforms. Thus for its own survival, the Vigilance Committee had to demonstrate that the “ladies” were on its side, but to keep the focus of the reform movement squarely on political corruption.

The Vigilance Committee of 1856 is usually remembered for its role in reshaping San Francisco politics, attacking political corruption, and bringing the People’s Party to power. However, it is worth recalling that the Vigilance Committee reshaped gender politics in San Francisco as well. For a short time, as middle-class American women arrived in the city, ready to become active in their new community, women had a prominent place in public political discourse in San Francisco. Their opinions were sought out, listened to, and debated by other women and men. When the Vigilance Committee came to power, women continued for a brief time to have a say in public political debate. But the vigilantes set the agenda, not only for the summer of 1856 but for years afterward, and that agenda was about politics in deeply masculine terms. Vigilantes, who excluded women from committee headquarters and increasingly ignored or refused to print women’s letters in the newspapers, created a political climate in San Francisco that was anything but conducive to women’s political activism. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that no woman suffrage organization existed in San Francisco until after the Civil War and the demise of the People’s Party.

Further Reading:

The letters referred to in this essay may be found in the following locations: Bailie Peyton in the Alta California, June 15, 1856; “Many Women of San Francisco,” in Daily Evening Bulletin, May 26, 1856; “Philothea,” in Daily Evening Bulletin, May 29, 1856; “Femina,” in Daily True Californian, May 29, 1856; “Gertrude,” in San Francisco Herald, June 4, 1856; Thomas King’s notice, in Daily Evening Bulletin, June 2, 1856; “Laura Lynch,” in Daily Evening Bulletin, June 13, 1856. Too many historians have written about the San Francisco Vigilance Committee to list them all here. For a thorough treatment of the Vigilance Committee and an excellent bibliographic essay, see Robert M. Senkewicz, S.J., Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco (Stanford, 1985). For more on the political culture of San Francisco and the vigilantes, see Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Berkeley, 1994). Other recent treatments that address the role of women include Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, 1990); Roger W. Lotchin, San Francisco 1846-1856: From Hamlet to City (Urbana, 1974,1997); and Michelle Jolly, “Inventing the City: Gender and the Politics of Everyday Life in Gold-Rush San Francisco, 1848-1869” (Ph.D. diss., U.C. San Diego, 1998).

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

Michelle Jolly is an assistant professor of early American history at Sonoma State University. She is working on a project entitled, “The Price of Vigilance: Gender, Reform Politics, and the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856.”

There was a time when I thought that African-American literature did not exist before Frederick Douglass. Then, in an introductory African-American literature course as a domestic exchange student at Spelman College, I read several poems from Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). I confess I had no idea who she was before I read her name, poetry, or looked on the frontispiece of the collection. Over the course of our classroom discussion, I learned that she was an enslaved (later freed) young woman and the first black person to publish a book of poetry in America.

Even after learning this brief history, I paid very little attention to the poems themselves because I was far more concerned with the frontispiece. On the front cover of my Penguin edition, there appeared the body of Wheatley. Because she was, in fact, a black woman, her body confirmed her place as the “inaugural poet” of African-American literature. I stared at the engraved image of a thoughtful young African woman with pen in hand, bounded by the words, “Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston.” I read the words again only to return to her body. Because I could see her—the complexion of her etched skin, her pensive gaze, her fingers bent slightly around her quill pen, her body poised and seated at a desk—she was not simply the words that meandered around her engraved image. She was real.

More than the words of the prefatory testimonials, the biographic information, or even the presence of her poetry, the frontispiece made Wheatley real to me. Despite her master John Wheatley’s account of young Phillis’ life and the preface’s obligatory mention of her intention in writing—”[t]he following Poems were written originally for the Amusement of the Author, as they were products of her leisure Moments. She had no intention ever to have them published…”—I imagined her as she was pictured there: a servant fixed in time, sequestered and forced to write even though her master’s prefatory comments suggest that she, while enslaved, had moments of leisure.

Out of this picture, I constructed a story. It began in Africa with her declaration, “‘[t]was mercy brought me from my Pagan land/Taught my benighted soul to understand/That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too.” It continued through the infamous Middle Passage that brought her to America (though an explicit reference to this fact is absent from Wheatley’s writing) and into Boston where a precocious young woman fought against her oppression by writing verses—like, “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train”—with a subtle irony that masked her resistance. My story ended with a celebration of a new literary tradition, African-American literature. This story was a memorial to a past that I presumed was dependent upon the emergence of texts that represented the suffering and resistance of a racial body (just like one that appears in the frontispiece of Wheatley’s poems).

This is a satisfactory story if we are to assume that race is Wheatley’s ultimate concern; that literary traditions emerge from a single point of origin (a collective racial identity, in this case); that such traditions are linear and therefore move seamlessly from one author to the next (for example, Phillis Wheatley gives rise to Frederick Douglass and then to Langston Hughes and on to Toni Morrison). Its simple narrative mobilizes a history, which understands race as a collective way of behaving that is loosely tied to a collective history of suffering. It is a story where the idea of race emerges out of a belief that privileges great suffering (for example, the physical privations of slavery) and ties it to “real” accounts of the “African-American experience” or “authentic” ways of behaving and acting black. Wheatley’s suffering inaugurates this literary tradition, this collective way of behaving, which is later marked by stories of suffering or resistance and heroic accounts of overcoming (see of course Frederick Douglass).

The assumptions that foreground this story are right in part. It is certainly the case that Wheatley is important to the history of African-American literature. Just as it seems plausible that Wheatley resisted her adverse circumstances, it also seems true that Wheatley experienced suffering, as evidenced by her testimonial:

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?…
Such, such was my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway.

In this poem “To the Earl of Dartmouth,” Wheatley offers her readers a reconstructed memory—one of the few that appears in her poetry—that recalls her loss and her father’s suffering. Wheatley turns this memory into a “teachable moment,” by professing the origins of her desire for freedom; she recalls the “cruel fate” that snatched her from Africa and a past she no longer remembers. Wheatley, by way of her suffering, seeks to garner the attention of her audience to create a sympathetic connection with them.

But this story is too simple and ignores an obvious fact. Though marked by the racialized words (“African,” “Black,” or “Negro”) of the title page, eighteenth-century African-American authors rarely discuss what it means to be part of a cohesive racialized community. Moreover, when what could be classified as racial subjectivity—namely, an identification with those racial markers—appears in this literature, it is not tied solely to a collective bodily suffering.

Let’s consider for example the case of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African prince, former slave and friend of the Huntingdon Methodist Connection, the religious network of the Countess of Huntingdon Selina Hastings that included famed itinerant minister George Whitefield, Phillis Wheatley and several other notable anglophone black writers, such as the multifaceted Olaudah Equiano, and minister John Marrant. In his A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, Written by Himself (1774), Gronniosaw, after observing his master read, mimes the action he sees. But what he sees is not the practice of reading but rather the book talking directly to his master. He explains,

I open’d [the book] …in great hope that it would say something to me; but was very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found it would not speak, this thought immediately presented itself to me, that every body and every thing despised me because I was Black.

Gronniosaw sees his blackness for the first time because he is unable to hear the religious text (a prayer book) that he hopes would speak to him.

Though this failed dialogue might be read as a part of a racialized moment of becoming, he is not speaking of an embodied racial identity. What Gronniosaw actually does is admit to his sinfulness (albeit problematically tied to the word “black”) in a manner similar to St. John in Revelations 5 who writes of a book that is to be opened and read by those who are worthy. The worthy are called forth yet “no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon” (Rev. 5:4). Because Gronniosaw is a sinner like the unworthy of St. John’s story, he is unable to access the Word and to hear it as true believers can and do. Gronniosaw uses this encounter with the book, quite often referred to as the “talking book,” to criticize those who do not have a proper relationship with the Word of God. This “talking book” event appears with revision repeatedly in early African-American literature in the narratives of John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and John Jea. Much of the critical discussion of this scene focuses on the act of reading and by implication the desire to read even though in each version, a verbal conversation is expected between the book and “reader.” The result of this overemphasis on book reading and learning is a neglect of the religious intention of the author—to talk to and hear the Word of God.

As in the case of Gronniosaw, Wheatley does not write about race as a collective and embodied experience. As my fellow students observed in that introductory African-American literature course, Wheatley’s poetry mimes the poetic forms of dead white men like Alexander Pope and John Milton. Because her poetry lacks a historical sense of race that is fixed across time and geography, my peers argued that her mimicry of these men confirms that she was not “black” enough to be considered culturally important. When they searched for some reference to an acute desire for freedom from enslavement (the marker of authentic, enslaved black identity) as in the case of Frederick Douglass, they came up short. Wheatley does not narrate her plan to escape to freedom even though she does admit to a desire for freedom in both her poem, “To the Earl of Dartmouth” and in her letter to Samson Occom. Instead, she celebrates her enslavement because of the distance it creates between the “benighted” country of her birth and the redemptive nature of her American present (see “On Being Brought from Africa to America”).

Phillis Wheatley participates in and documents “something else,” as Ralph Ellison writes, “something subjective, willful and complexly and compellingly human.” When Ellison speaks of this “something else” in his essay, A Very Stern Discipline, he attempts to counter the literary emphases upon the “real,” the grit, the suffering of black life. Though he is unable to name this “something else,” Ellison admits there is a complexity that contrasts or exists alongside the simple sociological realities of twentieth-century black living, marked by the existence of suffering and that which he describes as “ruggedness,” “hardship,” and “poverty.” Ellison does not aim to say that the human (or in particular African-American) experience is without suffering. Rather, his choice of phrasing, “something else,” names an alternate possibility—in this case the possibility that Phillis Wheatley’s historical value is not tied to her raced body. Moreover, tradition-making is not her sole legacy. It begs the questions: How do we, at present, understand Phillis Wheatley if she is not to be remembered as a “first”? Who is Phillis Wheatley if her racial body—as it appears thoughtfully and writerly in the frontispiece—is not her single-minded concern?

What follows is my interrogation of these questions in Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral and letters. Though she is often touted as the first to jump-start the African-American literary tradition, Wheatley’s poetry actually confronts the limits of this idea because it lacks an interest in a racialized subjectivity. Her poems challenge the story that privileges her racial body and the scholarly expectation that race should operate as a governing principle in African-American literature. Her position as “first” is irrelevant when her writing is placed within the many communities that she wrote for, communities that included enslaved, Christian, Methodist, English, or free African populations. Wheatley inhabited multiple “writing communities,” to borrow a term coined by literary scholar Katherine Clay Bassard. Wheatley’s eighteenth-century writing communities created an imagined space, much like the cyberspace of today’s e-mails, text messages and Facebook, within which invention and conversation were possible. Such communities are structured by the bonds created through written exchange. Within the space of these written communities, networks are formed; ideas are discussed and traded; friends can talk amongst themselves. These networks are not based upon bodies or even experienced through bodies but instead by way of the words on the page or in a letter or a poem.

The result is what Bassard describes as a “rhetorical meeting place”—the site of these imaginary conversations—wherein Wheatley converses in writing with those who allow her to create and invent a self. There, she lays claim to the processes of renegotiation and revision out of which her intertextual communities emerge. Put differently, she is the author of this space. She not only writes poems and letters but also crafts an ideal self that is not bound to or by her body. At the site of this “rhetorical meeting place,” there is a body that does not matter. Therefore, it is not a necessary antecedent to the development of African-American literature. There is also textual revision and dialogue. Words, phrases, passages lifted out of other texts, particularly the Bible, enter into conversation and merge into her writing. The result is not mimicry but rather marks the boundaries of this writerly space and exchange.

No longer bound to a black body, an explicitly African body in this writing space, there is “something else” that matters more to Wheatley. It is her Christian faith. Wheatley uses her faith to counter the limits of her body: its flaws (“some view our sable race with scornful eye,/ Their colour is a diabolic die;”) its tendency towards sin and earthly pleasures (“Let us be mindful of our high calling, continually on our guard, lest our treacherous hearts/Should give our adversary an advantage over us”); and its sickliness (namely, asthma and consumption). The language of Christianity offers Wheatley a way to imagine a self that transcends the fleshly weakness of her body. This transcendence is not out of the body. Instead, it takes places inwardly. There, in the interior space of her heart, Wheatley experiences a transformation each time she opens this self to God. When she speaks of God and praises his name, Wheatley accepts the indwelling Spirit and admits to her desire to converse and fellowship with God. For Wheatley, desire is a religious imperative through which she is called to conversion, and subsequently, faith. The satisfying result of this desire is a pleasure—marked by her repeated use of the words “joy,” “enrapture,” “passion,” and “happy” that releases her completely from the confines of her body into a union with God.

In a July 19 1772 letter to her friend and fellow slave Obour Tanner, Wheatley speaks of the “poor state of health” that has claimed her body throughout much of the winter and spring. She asks Tanner to pray for her and offers the following prayer for herself,

While my outward man languishes under weakness and pa[in], may the inward be refresh’d and Strengthened more abundantly by him who declar’d from heaven that his strength was made perfect in weakness!

Wheatley calls upon Tanner to pray with and for her weak body. With Tanner, she enters into a rhetorical meeting place that begins a dialogue of fellowship with a friend that gives her body the strength to call upon God. By way of this prayer, Wheatley makes possible a mutual exchange between herself and God. When writing and speaking of God, Wheatley becomes present with God; there, she admits to her weakness and ties it to not only the pains of her illness but also to the “outward man” that is bound by the fallibility of the flesh.

Though Wheatley’s body languishes in pain and weakness, her prayer is not directed toward her flesh. Instead, Wheatley juxtaposes her weak and sickly body against an unnamed inward self, a self that can enter into dialogue with God, Tanner, and an imagined fellowship. Revising the language from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, Wheatley calls attention to the ways in which this unnamed inward self might be strengthened—namely by receiving the Spirit (that which is eternal) inwardly through her senses of touch, smell and sight. She invokes 2 Corinthians 4:16 where Paul writes, “but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” Wheatley’s declaration, “his strength was made perfect in weakness,” borrows the wording of 2 Corinthians 12:9 and anticipates Paul’s charge to “take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, I am strong.” Wheatley strategically selects these passages for revision because they offer her a framework within which to strengthen this inward self that is renewed by the weakness of the flesh. That is to say, her personhood, or as she describes it her “outward man,” no longer matters because there is this interiority, this inward self with whom she can feel strengthened by God.

When Wheatley speaks of this inward self, she describes a space that is created by what she calls the “saving change”—that is, religious conversion. The “saving change” names the change of heart that occurs at the site of this inward self. This interiority possesses the open heart required to welcome the Holy Spirit. It is what Wheatley speaks of when she writes to John Thornton on December 1, 1773:

Therefor disdain not to be called the Father of Humble Africans and Indians; though despis’d on earth on account of our color, we have this Consolation, if he enables us to deserve it. ‘That God dwells in a humble & contrite heart.’

Once again, Wheatley views her outward man (African and “despis’d on earth on account of [its] color”) as weak, the opposite of the “humble & contrite heart” wherein God dwells. Despite the weakness implied by her skin color, she remains confident in the quality of her inward self. Therefore, she aligns her inward self with those who deserve God’s consolation—namely, the heart that is properly opened to receive his Spirit.

Her open heart appears again when she writes to Tanner, “[h]appy were it for us if we could arrive to that evangelical Repentance, and the true holiness of heart which you mention.” What she celebrates in this exchange is the “saving change” which produces the true holiness of heart. She understands that it is a fleeting sentiment that must be cultivated properly. Her attention to this interior and her allusion to its proper cultivation recall the words of Whitefield, who in his sermon The Indwelling of the Spirit, Common Privilege to all Believers, begs the question—”[b]ut unless Men have Eyes which see not, and Ears which hear not, how can they read the latter Part of the Text, and not confess the Holy Spirit, in another Sense, which is the common Privilege of all Believers, even to the End of the World?”

When Whitefield poses this question, he enjoins his reader or audience to make way to receive the Word of God into his heart. Though eyes and ears are often attached to bodies, what he describes is not a body but rather an ability to sense, namely hear and see, properly. It is what Wheatley imagines in her poem “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” when she writes, “Arise, my soul, upon enraptured wings arise/To praise the monarch of the earth and skies.” So enthused, she leaves her body in order to take up with her soul. Because her soul knows no bounds, it rises “upon enraptured wings” and celebrates God by hearing and seeing the works of providence. The world, through which her soul soars, is rife with wondrous sights—”morning glows with rosy charms”—and sounds—of “the winds and surging tides.” If the believer possesses the proper feelings (seeing eyes and hearing ears), she can then claim that she is a Christian who, as Whitefield explains, “in the proper Sense of the Word, must be an Enthusiast—That is, must be inspired of God, or have God in him.” Whitefield offers a charge—the Christian “must be inspired of God, or have God in him”—and enjoins his listeners to welcome the Spirit inwardly; the result, of course, of this inward dwelling of the Spirit, is a “new birth.”

As a faithful follower, Wheatley experiences this “new birth.” In his sermon The Marks of the New Birth, Whitefield outlines the ways in which an individual can recognize this inward regeneration. There are five “scripture marks”—praying and supplicating, not committing sin, conquest over the world, loving one another, and loving one’s enemies—that not only identify the conversion experience but also acknowledge the inward presence of the Holy Spirit. This birthing process can only occur when an individual accepts God inwardly. Whereas Whitefield emphasizes the importance of these acts (to pray, to commit no sin, to love), Wheatley identifies the feelings that result from these acts. She goes one step further and admits to the conversation that must occur between her inward self and God in order to feel so deeply. Thus Wheatley, reborn in spirit, rids herself of the limitations of her outward body. She nurtures the interiority wherein she feels the pleasure inspired by the presence of the Spirit. This pleasure confirms that Wheatley is one of the “[f]ollowers [who] might be united to him [God] by his Holy Spirit, by as real, vital, and mystical an Union as there is between Jesus Christand the Father.”

In an October 30, 1773, letter to Tanner, Wheatley imagines this union: “Your Reflections on the sufferings of the Son of God, & the inestimable price of our immortal Souls, Plainly dem[on]strate the sensations of a Soul united to Jesus.” Though it is uncertain what Tanner has said in her letter, Wheatley’s response commends Tanner’s union to Christ. When she speaks of these sensations, she alludes to the sensory, the inward, means by which this union manifests itself. The soul united to Jesus is one that has experienced the “new birth” and has established the religious dialogue between the inward self and God. It understands “[w]hat a blessed Source of consolation that our greatest friend is an immortal God whose friendship is invariable!”

Wheatley examines the invariability of God’s friendship in a curious confrontation between the allegorical figures, the immortal Love (see 1 John 4:8) and Reason, in her poem, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence.” The confrontation begins with a question from Love to Reason: “Say, mighty pow’r, how long shall strife prevail/And with its murmurs load the whisp’ring gale?.” Love, imagined as God, berates Reason, the mortal voice, for her failure to recognize Love’s divinity and her creative power. Love demands that Reason remember her power to regenerate and share herself with every thing: “Refer the cause to Recollection’s shrine,/Who loud proclaims my origin divine,/The cause whence heav’n and earth began to be,/And is not man immortaliz’d by me?” These questions articulate a desire to reunite with Reason to transcend the strife between Love and Reason. By asking her to remember God, Love persuades Reason to reinstate this “invariable” friendship. Reason is not concerned with her body and its union with God; instead, Reason speaks of her feeling and the means by which this feeling enthuses her inwardly. What results from this reunion is that Reason is “enraptur’d.” She feels the “Resistless beauty which thy [Love’s] smile reveals.” Reason feels this beauty because she can speak again to God; this allegorical conversation—this dialogue of feeling and this communal exchange—pantomimes the means by which the Spirit dwells inwardly.

Reason is changed yet again with the return of Love not only by this conversation but also the embrace that finalizes their confrontation. Reason’s words are “ardent” when she speaks and she burns at the charms of Love when she finally “clasp’d the blooming goddess in her arms.” The burn that Wheatley imagines in this exchange is both pleasurable and inspired by a conversion that takes place. When Reason “clasp’d” Love, she accepts Love inwardly and feels her as this burning desire. Together, they share their thoughts on the works of Love’s providence, which are heard as “Nature’s constant voice” and seen as the sun rises and the “eve rejoices.” This imagined conversation mimes the process of inward regeneration that results from the “new birth.” Wheatley imagines the inward self as it is transformed and reborn in Love and Reason. She captures the ways in which both converse in order to share deeply the experiences of the other. What she documents is an emergent community that not only represents an important textual moment but also her relationship to Tanner and the larger writing communities of which she is a part. Wheatley proffers a religious literacy wherein a true believer—one who possesses an open heart where Love and Reason coexist—can receive the Spirit and, subsequently, speak of the pleasure of this union.

Thus, what Wheatley documents in this exchange and, more generally, in her letters, is the journey of the inward self, united to God by a sincere faith. She makes clear that cultivation of a proper inner life is critically important to the experience of a good Christian. Her fellowship with Tanner, Thornton, Whitefield and others memorializes the actualization of her desire to converse with God and to experience the pleasure of this exchange. Her real and poetic descriptions of this relationship offer her readers a sense of her interior life—a life that supersedes a concern for her race. So strengthened, Wheatley divorces her weak fleshly body from the experiences of this inward self who delights in and is transformed by way of sharing deeply with God. Wheatley not only shares deeply with God but also makes her inward self, her interiority, accessible to a community of readers with whom she marks the site of those feelings (joy and pleasure) that result from her satisfied desire to praise God within a fellowship of believers. Wheatley leaves a legacy in print of this inward change that transforms her self and the way that we, as readers, remember her.

I wrote the earliest version of this essay as a response to my undergraduate students’ disdain for early African-American literature. After reading selections from Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative, my students were surprised and disappointed by what they described as complacency. They repeatedly questioned Equiano’s desire to readily accept his enslavement, and criticized his (mis)representation of a slave’s experience. Without the obvious brutality and violence that they had observed in Douglass’ Narrative and the Roots mini-series, Equiano represented an eighteenth-century “sellout,” a prototype for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom whose lack of resistance stripped him of the African identity that marks the full title of his narrative. It was clear that what my students wanted and expected to read were autobiographical accounts of the “real black history;” here, “real” invokes the modern-day colloquialism, “keeping it real.” To “keep it real” signifies the cultural practices, the ways of behaving, the performance of blackness that have come to inform my students’ understanding of race. Though they acknowledged that race is socially constructed, what they wanted was writing that “keeps it real”—that is, racially authentic, really “black.” Put differently, my students wanted texts which reinforced the misinformed idea, criticized by Ellison long ago, that “unrelieved suffering is the only ‘real’ Negro experience.” As the comedian Dave Chappelle observes in his comic skits, titled “When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong,”—that poke fun at the lives of men and women who decide to “keep it real” and suffer tragic consequences—keeping it real can and does often go wrong.

As I recalled their emphases on the “real black history” and subsequent criticisms of Equiano, Wheatley, and their contemporaries, I realized that the present essay is not merely a response to my students. It is not simply a nostalgic account of my earliest encounters with early African-American literature. Rather it is story about reading itself. For this reason, it begins with a misreading, an expectation that Phillis Wheatley and her literary successors must and will conform to my expectations for her legacy. Whereas my current students assume that Equiano and Wheatley are “sell-outs,” I, while in college, imagined a version of Wheatley that lived up to what I understood to be her legacy. Just like my students, I believed that her legacy was the very idea of black identity.

What a reconsideration of Wheatley reveals, as this story continues, is the extent to which she offers us (as her readers) a way to read her writing and imagine her legacy. Reading, in this instance, is not tied to an ability to pronounce sounds and identify letters and words. Rather, Wheatley asks her readers to adopt the religious literacy that makes salvation possible. It is inward transformation, a change of heart that is the result of her relationship to God. This change connects Wheatley (and as a consequence, her readers) to expansive writing and religious communities that intersect in the textual spaces of itinerant ministers, John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, merchant and philanthropist John Thornton, the Countess of Huntingdon and many others. Out of this textual space, she creates and participates in a “rhetorical meeting place.” There, she writes a life, a legacy, which celebrates the “saving change,” the salvation that allows her to feel the pleasures of a freedom in God. What she experiences there is a pleasure that is the result of her satisfied desire to share deeply with God. Her writing documents this dialogue and the pleasurable experiences produced as the Spirit converses with her inward self. This interiority allows Wheatley to celebrate her self just as it also allows her to praise her God.

To imagine Wheatley as a receptacle for the pleasures of faith introduces new questions into scholarly and classroom discussions on this early period. Without knowing it, of course, Wheatley seems to write against the assumptions that begin this essay. In doing so, she crafts a way of being that makes possible the very notion of pleasure in the lives of eighteenth-century black women. If her faith offers her this type of experience, it admits to the fact that there is “something else” that willingly admits to the humanity of black life. When she writes,

“…yet I hope I should willingly Submit to Servitude to be free in Christ.—But since it is thus—Let me be a Servant of Christ and that is the most perfect freedom,”

Wheatley shares with us the way she would like to be remembered—as a servant of Christ. She admits to the good feeling that accompanies this freedom to worship.

Further reading

For Phillis Wheatley’s poems, see Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) edited by Vincent Carretta (New York, 2001). For writings by black authors that are both contemporaneous with Wheatley and members of the trans-Atlantic Huntingdon Methodist Connection, see Vincent Carretta’s Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century (Lexington, 1996). On Wheatley and the origins of a black women’s “writing community,” see Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations (Princeton, 1999). Henry Louis Gates Jr. first coins the term “the talking book” in his introduction to the anthology Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772-1815 (Washington, D.C., 1998) and Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literature (New York, 1988). For a well-articulated counter argument to Gates’s emphases on literacy and the “talking book,” see Frances Smith Foster’s article “Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17.4 (Winter 2005): 714-740. See also Smith Foster’s article “Genealogies of Our Concerns, Early (African) American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times,” American Literary History 22.2 (Summer 2010): 368-380. For a discussion of the importance of the interiority (rather than the body) in early American literature, see Jordan Alexander Stein’s article, “Mary Rowlandson’s Hunger and the Historiography of Sexuality” American Literature 81.3 (September 2009): 469-495.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.1 (October, 2010).