I had come to Yale to give a lecture, but since I had a few hours on my own I decided to check some references in the Beinecke Library, the university’s rare book and manuscript repository. I skimmed through the finding aid to the Jonathan Edwards Papers looking for the letters I wanted when I saw something unexpected listed for Folder 1655 Box 36. Confiding my astonishment to the woman at the desk, I called up the item. A few minutes later she took an acid-proof cardboard box from the library trolley, smiling as she placed it before me. I tenderly lifted the lid. There, cradled in tissue paper, was a handmade linen bed sheet folded to expose the blue cross-stitched letters T^EE. A handwritten note sewn to the sheet explained: “This was spun by the Mother of President Edwards who was born in 1703 – It is probably now 155 years old – Nov 1846.”

I had seen lots of sheets like this in New England museums but I never expected to find one in a research library. I was tempted to unfold it to its full length just to see the reaction of the sober scholars seated at the polished tables around me. Instead I concentrated on deciphering the note, which I later discovered had been written by an Edwards descendant named Hannah Whittlesey. I found her note confusing until I figured out that “President Edwards,” not his mother, was the person born in 1703. (Jonathan Edwards had once been the head of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, but the bed sheet didn’t belong to him but to his parents.) Like many antiquarians before and since, Whittlesey had used fixed landmarks to date an undatable artifact. Knowing that Esther Stoddard married Timothy Edwards in 1694, she concluded that the sheet was “probably” 155 years old in 1846. The date was a guess, but the initials left little doubt of ownership. The elevated E stood for Edwards, the T for Timothy and the E for Esther. The initials confirmed the attribution and gave it a place in the Edwards Papers when they came to Yale in 1900. Yet the sheet had nothing to do with the famous theologian. It had passed from Esther Edwards to her daughter Hannah Wetmore, from Wetmore to her daughter Lucy Whittlesey, and then from Whittlesey to her daughter Hannah, the writer of the note.

A year or so after my visit to Beinecke, I stumbled across another example of Hannah Whittlesey’s preservation work in the registration records of the Connecticut Historical Society. In 1840, she gave the Society a pair of silk shoes “worked by Miss Hannah Edwards daughter of Rev Timothy Edwards, of East Windsor, sister of President Edwards, and wife of Seth Wetmore, Esq of Middletown,” and a fragment of crewel embroidery “wrought by Miss Molly Edwards, daughter of Rev. Timothy Edwards.” Once again she identified the women who “worked” or “wrought” these items in relation to their presumably more distinguished male relatives. At the same time she memorialized their handiwork, claiming that the Edwards sisters had not only spun the thread in their embroidery but had dyed it “with the juice expressed from native plants.” Esther Edwards may or may not have spun the thread in her bed sheet, but her daughters could not have produced the thread in their fancy embroideries. To Hannah Whittlesey, however, there was no distinction between plain linen and high-style crewel. Everything surviving from the colonial period had to have been the product of a woman’s hands.

The embroideries in Hartford, like the bed sheet in Beinecke, exemplify the mythical power of New England’s age of homespun. Whittlesey was not alone in memorializing fabrics she thought had been spun by her ancestors. The image of the colonial dame toiling at her spinning wheel was widely cherished in the nineteenth century–much more so, in fact, than it had been during Esther Edwards’s lifetime. Between 1820 and the Civil War, New England novelists, poets, town historians, and creators of civic celebrations appropriated the spinning wheel as an icon of regional identity, laying the foundation for a complex and often conflicted approach to colonial women’s history.

Five years after Whittlesey labeled her great-grandmother’s bed sheet, the Hartford pastor and reformer Horace Bushnell told an audience at the Litchfield County, Connecticut centennial not to go into burying grounds looking for the monuments of famous men. “It is not the starred epitaphs of the Doctors of Divinity, the Generals, the Judges, the Honourables, the Governors, or even of the village notables called Esquires, that mark the springs of our successes and the sources of our distinctions. These are rather effects than causes; the spinning-wheels have done a great deal more than these.” For Bushnell, the spinning wheel symbolized all that was positive about the preindustrial New England economy–hard work, neighborliness, cooperation between husbands and wives, and patriotism.

By diminishing the public distinctions that Whittlesey cherished in her male ancestors, Bushnell made a place for ordinary people in history. But he also abandoned the individual identities–the succession of names, the embroidered initials, the silk shoes, and the crewel-embellished bed hangings that were part of her heritage. Neither he nor Whittlesey understood the ways in which household manufacturing, commerce, and gentility were entwined in the economy and culture of eighteenth-century New England. Looking back, all they could see was the spinning wheel.

They had illustrious company. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow introduced romance into the mythology of homespun in his 1858 poem “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” This was the story of how Plymouth Colony’s gruff military commander, Miles Standish, asked the handsome, young John Alden to act as a go-between in his courtship of the beautiful Priscilla Mullins and how she, in response, told John to speak for himself. In the climactic scene, Priscilla sits at her spinning wheel with “carded wool like a snow drift/ Piled at her knee.” Longfellow’s legend was so popular that an illustrated guide to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 assumed that a spinning wheel displayed in the “New England Log Cabin” was the “very one which Priscilla, the Puritan maiden, whirled so deftly that poor John Alden could find no way out of the web she wove about him.” By 1885, thrifty collectors could buy plaster casts of John Roger’s sculpture of the famous couple with the immortal words inscribed on the base, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John.” A Boston furniture manufacturer borrowed lines from the poem in an advertisement for parlor chairs made out of the discarded parts of old flax wheels. By the time of the Columbian Tercentenary, Longfellow’s story was so firmly planted in American history that John Alden and Priscilla Mullins appeared in a New York City parade alongside Columbus and Isabella.

The spinning wheel was as deeply entrenched in the American imagination as the Liberty Bell. Spinning entranced academic painters like Thomas Eakins as well as popular writers like Louisa May Alcott, who in Silver Pitchers, published in 1888, imagined a modern-day John beguiled by a costumed spinner at the Philadelphia centennial. Antique wheels salvaged from grandmothers’ attics appeared in undergraduate sitting rooms at Yale, in the mansion of a Montana mining magnate, and in hundreds of civic parades. Jane Addams organized spinning demonstrations at Hull House in Chicago and the Daughters of the American Revolution planted a stylized flax wheel on their insignia.

European institutions boast dazzling textiles left by nobles and the rich, but they offer very little to document ordinary clothing or homemade bedding and linen. New Englanders, in contrast, saved fabrics so humbly homemade that under magnification bits of unprocessed flax still cling to the thread.

The spinning wheel was an attractive emblem because it was so malleable. For patriots it symbolized women’s contributions to the American Revolution, while for sentimentalists it conjured up a timeless domesticity. Craft revivalists saw in it the harmony of labor and art, feminists women’s untapped productive power, and antimodernists the virtues of a bygone age. For Elizabeth Barney Buel, the wheel captured all of these ideals, and more. In The Tale of the Spinning-Wheel, published in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1903, she attributed the success of the colonial experiment to female industry. “The plough and the axe are not more symbolic of the winning of this country from the wilderness, nor the musket of the winning of its freedom, than is the spinning-wheel in woman’s hands the symbol of both,” she wrote. Colonial wives “spun into thread and yarn the flax and wool that was raised on the farm, and then knitted every pair of stockings and mittens, wove every inch of linen and woolen cloth, and cut and made every stitch of clothing worn by a family which generally numbered ten or a dozen Johns and Hezekiahs and Josiahs and Hepzibahs and Mehitable Anns. No wonder a man could go to the war for his country’s independence, when he left Independence herself at home in the person of his wife.” Although she did not claim to be a feminist, her prose radiated a conviction that women mattered in the past, and that they had not been given their due.

For Buel, the spinning wheel united women across space and time. She laid out her evidence point by point, dropping learned allusions to archaeology, art history, folklore, mythology, opera, and the Bible. “No written page of history, no musty parchment or sculptured stone, is so old that we cannot find upon it some traces of the spindle and distaff with their tale of joys and sorrows spun into the thread by the fingers of patient women whose hearts beat as our own to-day, in tune with the common throb of humanity.” New York artist and Litchfield summer resident Emily Noyes Vanderpoel added authority to the argument with delicate drawings of mummy cloth, Stone Age fishing nets, and medieval distaffs as well as colonial flax wheels. Her frontispiece for the book captures Buel’s notion of a “woman’s sphere” centered in the home. A youthful spinner, dressed in the gauzy costume of the early republic stands in a vine-covered doorway, looking outward but securely planted within. Her enormous wheel, with its hub centered just beneath her slender waist, measures the reach of her arms and the power of her sexuality. She is both productive and potentially reproductive, fitted to her setting yet visible beyond it. “And the home still centres in the woman; the country still centres in the home, and no mere change of womanly occupation can alter God’s fundamental law of human society,” Buel wrote.

Suffragists among Buel’s contemporaries developed a more dynamic sense of women’s place in history without abandoning the wheel. In 1889, the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association mounted a historical pageant in Boston that surveyed women’s history from the landing of the Pilgrims to the present. Organized as a series of “living, moving, speaking tableaux,” it opened with Priscilla Mullins at her wheel, and then moved on to the banishment of Anne Hutchinson in 1638, the hanging of witches, and Hannah Duston’s scalping of Indians in 1692. After a “Home Scene in the Life of Abigail and John Adams” and a demonstration of the minuet, a woman dressed as the Goddess of Liberty watched suffragist orator Mary Livermore read the Declaration of Independence. The nineteenth-century tableaux featured “Garrison printing the Liberator,” followed by a portrayal of a “Women’s Anti-Slavery Meeting Broken Up by [the] Mayor of Boston.” A depiction of the relief work of the Women’s Sanitary Commission during the Civil War preceded Frederick Douglass’s reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Finally, in the last scene, contemporary female writers and reformers portrayed themselves in “Woman’s Sphere, 1889.”

Where Buel used the spinning wheel to circumscribe a female sphere, the suffragist leaders of the 1889 Historical Pageant integrated it into an explicitly feminist history. In such a context, Priscilla Mullin’s choice of John Alden over Miles Standish represented the ascendancy of youth over age, love over power, New World freedom of choice over Old World convenience. “Was there a spice of feminine coquetry in her famous speech to John Alden?” one writer asked. “Or was it that she understood the dignity and worth of womanhood, and was the first in this new land to take her stand upon it?” For more than a decade, The Woman’s Journal had been criticizing male-centered ceremonials. The men who gathered to celebrate “Forefather’s Day” in April of 1879, wrote a New York correspondent, had forgotten the brave wives of Plymouth colony in a festival limited to male descendants of the Pilgrims. “Only as a sideshow was a handful of well-dressed ladies permitted to look on, while men ate and drank and lauded their male ancestors’ virtues. Thus did ‘the sons of New England honor Forefathers’ Day,’ in the very name of the feast insulting the daughters of New England and the memory of their foremothers.” No festival that included Priscilla and her wheel would be guilty of such an affront.

By embracing Priscilla Alden the mythical colonial spinner, women had found a place, if a circumscribed one, in history. Even Charles Andrews, who had little to say about women in the text of his magisterial history of colonial America, acknowledged their presence by selecting as the frontispiece for his final volume a photograph of a reconstructed “New England Kitchen” from the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts.

All of which helps to explain why a bed sheet was among the Edwards family papers when they came to Yale University in 1900. The surprising thing is that it remained with them. For in the middle of the twentieth-century, the reputation of so-called “pots and pans” history fell as the fortunes of once-forgotten clerics like Jonathan Edwards rose. For those interested in “the New England mind,” it was the letters and sermons of the male Edwardses, not the productions of their wives and sisters, that mattered. Nor did the “new social history” of the 1960s and 1970s show any interest in homespun. Historical demographers and students of sexuality were intensely interested in what went on between bed sheets, but it is safe to say that none of them traveled to Beinecke to study one.

When historians did turn their attention to household production, it was primarily to debunk the colonial revival notion that early American families spun and wove most of their own bedding and clothing. In Good Wives, published in 1982, I explained that between 1670 and 1730 fewer than half of households in northern New England owned spinning wheels and that the few weavers in the region were male. I argued for a new icon for women’s history. “Spinning wheels are such intriguing and picturesque objects, so resonant with antiquity, that they tend to obscure rather than clarify the nature of female economic life, making home production the essential element in early American huswifery and the era of industrialization the period of crucial change.” By then, I knew that Priscilla Mullin’s spinning wheel was a figment of Longfellow’s imagination, that early Plymouth colonists were too busy building farms and cutting timber to engage in household manufacturing, and that even if they had wanted to produce cloth there was little flax or wool to work with. But it wasn’t just a concern for historical accuracy that caused me to question the symbolism of the wheel. I wanted to break apart the nineteenth-century notion of an unchanging and universal “woman’s sphere.”

Nobody was more surprised than I when ten years later I began a serious study of New England’s age of homespun. My research for A Midwife’s Tale (published in 1990) told me that women in late eighteenth-century Maine were not only spinning but weaving, and that cloth making was at the center of a system of barter and exchange that I called a “female economy.” I wanted to know if the world of Martha Ballard was unique, or if similar things were happening elsewhere, and I wanted to know when and why women began to weave. So I began a massive study of household inventories that survive in large numbers for the entire colonial period. For my purposes, the key variable turned out to be the ratio of spinning wheels to looms. In commercial cloth making areas of England and the continent and in Pennsylvania, where continuous immigration perpetuated artisan weaving, there were eight to ten households with spinning wheels for every one with a loom. That makes sense, since spinning is more labor intensive than weaving, and it typically took several families to keep one weaver in work. In New England, however, the ratio of looms to wheels began to drop dramatically in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, until in some places there was one household with a loom for every two households with a wheel. The reason was simple. Weaving had become a part-time household task for women and girls. This dispersed system of manufacturing persisted into the nineteenth century, providing a base for an early putting-out system and eventually a labor force for New England’s famous mills.

This discovery turned everything upside down. Spinning wheels turned out to be markers, not of stasis, but of change. The key problem was not when hand production ended but how and why it began. Instead of the familiar evolution from subsistence to market production, I needed to understand how a highly commercial cloth making system in seventeenth-century England became the household production system Horace Bushnell and his contemporaries memorialized as “the age of homespun.” Suddenly, the collecting habits of the nineteenth century became important. If weaving was widely dispersed, then few weavers had much experience or training. What did their cloth look like? Did traditional fabrics change as women took over production? Those questions took me into museums and historical societies looking for surviving fabrics. I was amazed at what I found.

Motivated by a desire to include ordinary people–including women–in history, nineteenth-century antiquarians created what is arguably the world’s largest collection of ordinary household furnishings and fabrics from the preindustrial era. European institutions boast dazzling textiles left by nobles and the rich, but they offer very little to document ordinary clothing or homemade bedding and linen. New Englanders, in contrast, saved fabrics so humbly homemade that under magnification bits of unprocessed flax still cling to the thread. They saved ragged towels, warped bed blankets, cocoons left over from failed experiments in silk culture, and unfinished stockings still looped onto rusted needles. A curator at the Maine Historical Society in Portland recently opened an old trunk and found the bottom two-thirds of a woman’s linen shift with a penciled notation “old Linen for sore rags.” New Englanders saved weaving drafts written on the back of old letters, handmade dye books, and yarn reels carved in some farmer’s dooryard. They saved silk shoes, quilted petticoats, and crewel-work bed hangings, but they also saved stained and faded aprons and the ragged corners of old coverlets.

The artifacts nineteenth-century Americans saved open up many themes in early American social history. The bed sheet in Beinecke suggests two of them–the link between household production and gentility, and the centrality of textiles to the inheritance patterns of women. The initials on the bed sheet signify both themes. In the colonial era, embroidery was an elite accomplishment. The alphabets that embellished schoolgirl samplers signified both a girl’s literacy and her future role as keeper of household textiles, which before industrialization were far more valuable than furniture. Very few women had either the blue silk thread or the skill needed to produce cross-stitched initials like those on Esther Edwards’s sheet.

Objects marked with a woman’s maiden name or initials perpetuated female legacies in a society that gave married women little claim to property.

That a sheet marked in Edwards’s lifetime (if not at her wedding in 1694) survived to become a monument to the age of homespun tells us that the family was wealthy and continued to be so. In most households, sheets were used until they wore into rags and then were recycled into other uses. Those that survived their first owners were passed on to daughters, and if they lasted long enough and the daughters’ themselves had a surplus, might become genealogical relics. Like silver, these “relic sheets” were sometimes marked by more than one generation. Although this sheet bears the joined initials of a couple, probate inventories and other marked objects from the region (including the chests and cupboards that contained textiles) suggest that it was far more common to use the woman’s initials alone. Objects marked with a woman’s maiden name or initials perpetuated female legacies in a society that gave married women little claim to property. By the early nineteenth century a few women became quite bold in marking the bedding they produced. A particularly self-conscious inscription fills the center of a hand-woven coverlet made from factory spun cotton: “The Property of Abigail Bailey, Fletcher, Vermont.” To study household textiles, therefore, is to explore a little known arena for female expression.

The silk shoes and the crewel panel at the Connecticut Historical Society enlarge the meaning of the bed sheet in the Beinecke. Hannah Whittlesey was wrong in her claim that the Edwards girls spun and dyed the thread in their fancy embroidery, but in a larger sense she was correct in attributing both common linen and ornamental fabrics to the “age of homespun.” New England’s female-centered production system developed in tandem with the aspiration to refinement. When Boston diarist Samuel Sewall visited Northampton, Massachusetts in 1716, he spent several hours with Solomon Stoddard at his parsonage, noting that old “Madam Stoddard, who is lame of the Sciatica . . . yet spins at the Linen-wheel.” Esther Stoddard was Esther Edwards’s mother. Like her descendants, Esther Stoddard was a woman of impeccable piety and genteel accomplishments. Her husband’s probate inventory, taken in 1731, listed both a spinning wheel and “Needle Wrought Cushions.” That combination was common among elite families from the late seventeenth-century through the Revolution. Large households not only had the raw materials and the labor necessary for household production, they had the need. They typically produced common linens, servants’ clothing, aprons, and blankets from their own flax and wool, but relied on imported cloth or artisan-produced fabrics for more refined uses. Esther Edwards–or her servants–might well have spun that linen sheet.

Household production spread beyond elite households in the early eighteenth century. By the eve of the Revolution, eighty to ninety percent of rural households owned spinning wheels, and almost half owned looms. As young men turned their energies to market production–herding, tanning, barrel making, cordwainery, lumbering, cabinetry, and other crafts based on the mixed agriculture, fishing, and timber–women increasingly devoted themselves to spinning and weaving fabrics for household use. As cloth production lost its craft status, it gained in mythic power.

The Revolutionary crisis and the struggle for economic independence during renewed conflict with England before the War of 1812 accentuated the political significance of household production, but neither conflict created the system that sustained it. For ordinary people, the production of cloth was never dissociated from a desire for refinement. Surviving fabrics, taken together with written documents, show the integration of homemade and store-bought fabrics in New England households from the late seventeenth century to the 1830s. The Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont has an everyday shift, pieced and patched out of homemade linen by a skilled weaver who craved store-bought clothes and once confided in a letter to her son, “my father never bought me but one frock–and yours never but one–I have to worry thro’ thick and thin to get all my clothes, crockery chairs clock, and so on.” The fragmentary diaries and account books of Sarah Weeks Sheldon show that she clothed herself and children through a combination of household manufacturing and local exchange, trading handspun stockings for calico and butter for cloth. She was driven as much by a desire for middle-class refinements as by pure need. Unlike Molly and Hannah Edwards, the rural embroiderers of the early republic did spin and dye their own embroidery thread. Their productions were simple but their vision was clear. They wanted to be both producers and ladies.

The Revolutionary crisis and the struggle for economic independence during renewed conflict with England before the War of 1812 accentuated the political significance of household production, but neither conflict created the system that sustained it. For ordinary people, the production of cloth was never dissociated from a desire for refinement. Unlike Molly and Hannah Edwards, the rural embroiderers of the early republic did spin and dye their own embroidery thread. Their productions were simple but their vision was clear. They wanted to be both producers and ladies. Letters and diaries show the yearning for respectability that glossed even the homeliest of labor. The Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont has an everyday shift, pieced and patched out of homemade linen by a skilled weaver who craved store-bought clothes and once confided in a letter to her son, “my father never bought me but one frock–and yours never but one–I have to worry thro’ thick and thin to get all my clothes, crockery chairs clock, and so on.” Sarah Sheldon’s diaries and accounts show that she clothed herself and children through a combination of household manufacturing and local exchange, trading handspun stockings and homemade cloth for calico and silk. Her spinning wheel was driven as much by a desire for middle-class refinements as by pure need.

Further Reading:

Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992); Horace Bushnell, The Age of Homespun, in Work and Play (London, 1864); Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986 (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1988); Kenneth P. Minkema, “Hannah and Her Sisters: Sisterhood, Courtship, and Marriage in the Edwards Family in the Early Eighteenth Century,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 146 (January 1992): 35-56; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., 55 (1998): 37-38; The history of the Women’s Suffrage Pageant can be traced in The Woman’s Journal XIX (1888): 180; XX (1889): 100, 240, 276, 284, 292, 301, 316, 332, 416. More information on the Edwards Collection is available from from Yale University Library.  Further information about The Age of Homespun can be found on the publisher’s Website.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.1 (October, 2001).

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich teaches history at Harvard University where she directs the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Her latest book, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 2001.

I will begin with a letter. It was sent on May 18, 1789, from Benjamin Franklin’s goddaughter, Amelia Evans Barry, to her childhood friend, Sarah Franklin Bache (fig. 1). With her itinerant merchant husband, Barry had spent her adult life traveling the world and found herself, in the tense European spring of 1789, between Holland and Italy. Bache had spent the intervening years in Philadelphia, where her father had returned.

My dear Madam,

You, who have been separated during a series of years from your excellent father, will know by experience that where affection is sincere, it is augmented rather than diminished by absence. Our infantile amusements and pursuits I have never forgotten; our little contests for superiority characterising us and America, desirous of independence, often occur to my memory, but like our country at that time we were not fit for it; and one or other conceding immediate reconciliation took place. It has not been in the power of 27 years absence to efface these scenes from my memory.

In Europe I have often thought of you; on the African shore you have been tenderly remembered by me; and in Asia tho’ we were separated by the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Egean Seas I have not forgotten you. Permit me then to hope that these sentiments have been reciprocal; and that in the lapse of time the idea of your Amelia has not been totally obliterated, tho’ we may meet no more. I have often wished to return to Philadelphia, but superadded to the repugnance I should have to cross again the Atlantic Doctor Hawkesworth has contrived to repress this desire, by so finely portraying the situation of a man who returned late in life to his country; and the changes that have taken place in America would make every scene as new to me as countries that I have never seen. Doctor Johnson’s Imlac occurs to my mind. After having related to Rasselas the events of his life to the period of his return to his country with a mind improved by knowledge & travel, he says “I now expected the caresses of my kinsmen and the congratulations of my friends, but I was soon convinced that my thoughts were vain. Of my companions the greater part were in the grave and of the rest some could with difficulty remember me and some considered me as one corrupted by foreign manners.” This would certainly be my case should I return to Philadelphia. It must then be in a better world that we are to meet.

Tho’ I well know that the resentment of individuals against persons invested with supreme authority is as ridiculous as impotent, yet I was very angry with your congress for not permitting my dear Doct[or] Some year ago to resign his employments as he had in contemplation a visit to Italy; and perhaps our benign climate might have induced him to remain here which would perhaps have drawn you hither. What a scheme of felicity has been interrupted. Do me the favour to present my best compliments to Mr Bache and to all who are dear to you and ever believe me, dear Madam, your affectionate friend and servant, A. Barry.

Barry expresses many of the assumed conventions of women’s correspondence of this period: the assurance of affectionate sincerity, the strength of sentimental proximity over geographic distance. This is surely an émigré displaying her warm regard for the friend of her youth. But is this all that she is saying? Her connections between personal identity and the idea of America are quite hard to make sense of. Bache and Barry’s conflicts and resolutions, their growth toward independent adulthood, mirror their nation’s transition from dependence to sovereignty (“our little contests for superiority characterising us and America”). This is a powerful analogy for female friendship, but it is hardly a happy one. If maturity is independence then it is estrangement too. But perhaps another relationship—that of godfather to goddaughter—is equally important in this letter.

Barry maintained an admiring correspondence with Franklin while her association with Bache had lapsed. In an earlier letter she recalled for him “the scenes of childhood [when] your two little girls strove who should obtain [the] distinction of your notice.” The struggle that defines Bache and Barry’s friendship is as much about their relationship to competing versions of father-Franklin as competing images of nationhood. Franklin, in fact, is everywhere in Barry’s letter. His movement between continents (and the two women) seems to mark the distance between two identities: international enlightenment and domestic patriotism. Franklin thought of Barry as representing the former. “Her father . . . was a geographer,” he wrote of Lewis Evans, “and his daughter has now some connection I think with the whole Globe; being born herself in America, and having her first child in Asia, her second in Europe, and now her third in Africa.” (fig. 2) Evans’s geography is written out in his daughter’s itinerant maternity, reproducing the global enlightenment in a family of continents. Barry is clearly aware of how transatlantic exile might be read as exemplary. Her list of oceans (across which only the memory of Bache moves) has a numinous quality, and she compounds her own exoticism by making herself the subject of a voyage or oriental tale, trading the loss of her father/country for an expansive cosmopolitanism.

In its intermingling of the national, the paternal, the feminine, and the global, this letter is perhaps not quite the warm epistle of friendship it purports to be. While Barry claims the identity of an enlightened peripatetic, Bache implicitly represents an inert nostalgia: the patient homeland reaping the fruits of independence in the return of the absent patriarch. And perhaps, too, there is something of an anti-federalist swipe in the “supreme” authority that impedes Franklin’s projected Italian journey. This letter is hardly a paean to enduring sentimental ties or transatlantic attachment. Rather, it bears testimony to the imagined strength of an old rivalry between a Philadelphian who might read nationalist triumph in the return of her father (a figure for the nation and the age) and an embattled American wanderer, who wanted to regard herself as a citizen of the world.

Barry’s intriguing letter highlights some concerns of my current research. My project looks at the politics of women’s epistolary and manuscript culture in and around revolutionary and early republican Philadelphia. I came to this research from some work I had done on the Massachusetts writer Mercy Otis Warren, and I had quite predetermined ideas about what women’s letters were for and what they might do. When I started work with the Philadelphia sources, what I thought I was going to find most interesting about them was the sense of community, solidarity, and cultural connection one so often sees in circulated texts—I thought I was going to be most interested in women’s letters, journals, and commonplace books as agents of attachment. And while the ways in which manuscripts defined the bonds between women is incredibly important, I was much more struck by how their apparent connectedness (the connectedness of the form) belied a deeper sense of disconnection many Philadelphia women felt in relation to their political and literary cultures, their religions, their region, and their nation. Barry’s letter suggests the complexity of her feelings of detachment from her native Philadelphia. There is a hesitancy behind her confident mobility, a certain emptiness somewhere beyond the stylized bravado. For her, the idea of country seems profoundly bound up with the sense of loss. And this loss is suggestive of the ways in which the familiar letter reproduces absence.

As I worked on Mercy Warren, I often thought about how the letter made a writer present to her audience and how circulated texts afforded vicarious mobility to women who never moved beyond their local communities. It was just a shift of emphasis, perhaps, but with the Philadelphia sources I became powerfully aware of manuscripts as signatures of distance, as frail memorials of the space that divided the hand that wrote from the eye that read. This became particularly acute when working on Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1737-1801) at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Fergusson is often written about as the first American salonière, transplanting European culture to colonial Philadelphia. But this figure of successful literary cohesion was not who I encountered in her writing. In fact, I found a divided identity—one assumed and one expressed—in the difference between the appearance of her gift-books and their contents.

Fergusson’s beautiful gift-books, such as her Poemata Juvenilia, are persuasive objects (figs. 3, 4). Expensively bound and stamped, their author’s projected identity is proclaimed on the inside boards with the coat of arms, which marked the Graemes’s inherited attachment to a British (if by then imaginary) sense of class. But the hubris of the objects themselves—their sense of their own cultural importance and place—belie the disconnection and insecurity that dominated all that Fergusson wrote. As a transatlantic traveler she described herself as Odysseus out of Ithaca and later accounts of her position in revolutionary and early republican Pennsylvania refine this theme of detachment. Despite (or perhaps rather because of) her intense sense of entitlement, Fergusson’s ambiguous marital status, her indefinite political affiliations, her uncertain economic position, and her provisionally owned property were marked with an ambivalence that her writing revisits (fig. 5).

This ambivalence is not just a question of what Fergusson’s words say or mean but of the production and reproduction of her books themselves. Fergusson pressed them on a network of friends and readers, also revising them over long decades: reworking lines, adding notes and marginalia, later disguising her more virulent attacks on Pennsylvania’s revolutionary government, and returning to hone the vocabulary of her estrangement with frenetic, melancholy repetition (figs. 6, 7). Then the books were circulated again, or reproduced, with other readers in mind. Circulation here speaks less the language of literary community than that of lonely remonstrance.

Fergusson’s itinerant gift-books formed an analogy with her own rootlessness. Whether she was in London, the Scottish Highlands, or Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the landscape and her writing mirrored her dislocation, her sense that this was not her country. Fergusson had a profound awareness of what national attachment might mean to a woman like her but somehow could never connect herself to it (one of her writing’s most conspicuous fantasies involves the figure of an exiled queen). Her awareness of her estrangement (from husband, family, class, land, and country) was specific but by no means unique. From radical Edinburgh émigrés to loyalist exiles, from democratic republicans to disenchanted federalists, the women of Philadelphia all articulated their particular sense of distance from the new United States. This distance does not mean that nation was less important to these women as archetype or value. Rather, in a world where personal bereavement and familial separation found potent geopolitical analogy in international conflict, nationhood represented for them a lost ideal, the scene of melancholy remembrance rather than patriotic attachment. In very different ways, then, for the women of Philadelphia the sense of place was also the sense of loss.

When I began research on Philadelphia’s incredibly diverse revolutionary and early republican women writers, I had hoped to explore the different facets of manuscript culture as community (in a particularly gendered sense). But as I found the circulated text to be as much about absence as propinquity, so I discovered that letters did not so much bespeak collective identity as thematize detachment. This detachment is there in Mary Hewson’s admission to her absent relations that in Philadelphia she felt as distant from the concerns of Washington’s administration as she had in Britain from those of the British government. It is there in Rebecca Gratz’s protests against the false promises of American bourgeois society: “the world has deceived me and I will in my truth deceive it.” This detachment is there in Elizabeth Wister’s poems, picturing the effects of national pride in the abandoned “hamlet . . . ravaged by conquest and war.” And it is there too in Deborah Norris Logan’s melancholy reflections on Philadelphia’s modernity and familial marginality as she watched the smoke of the city rise from a safe distance across the Delaware (fig. 8).

In her letter to Sarah Bache, Amelia Barry had other readers in mind. She was also responding to her godfather’s suggestion that she “return, as I have done, to your native Country.” And her letter speaks past its addressee to an archive and a history of women’s manuscript writing where nationhood is the stuff of memory and distance, of disaffection and desire. It tells us of how eighteenth-century letters, and eighteenth-century identities, might be about where you were not.

Further Reading:

Significant manuscript collections of the women mentioned in this essay are held at the American Philosophical Society Library (APS), Dickinson College Library, Haverford College Library, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP), and the University of Pennsylvania Archives. Among the excellent existing work on Philadelphia women and revolutionary/early republican political and literary cultures see particularly: Catherine Blecki and Karin Wulf, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (University Park, Pa., 1997); Anne Ousterhout, The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (University Park, Pa., 2004); Susan Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004) and her introduction to Ousterhout’s biography; Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000); and Judith Van Buskirk, “‘They Didn’t Join the Band’: Disaffected Women in Revolutionary Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania History 62:3 (1995): 306-329. Exciting new work on eighteenth-century epistolary and manuscript writing includes: Clare Brant, Eighteenth Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke, England, and New York, 2006) and Eve Tavor-Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (Cambridge and New York, 2006).

The letter from Amelia Evans Barry (b. 1744) to Sarah Franklin Bache (1743-1808) is in the Sarah Franklin Bache Papers, APS. Other quotations are from the Franklin Papers (Amelia Barry to Benjamin Franklin, February 9, 1789; Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, July 22, 1774; Benjamin Franklin to Amelia Barry, October 14, 1787); the Gratz Family Papers, APS (Rebecca Gratz [1781-1869] Poem, “Lebanon Springs, 1806”) and the Eastwick Collection, APS (Elizabeth Wister [1764-1812] to Charles Wister, n.d. [1803]). Barry’s comparison of herself to Johnson’s and Hawkesworth’s protagonists refers to Imlac in Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) and the explorers of John Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyage . . . for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere(1773). Other references are to Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, “Some lines upon my first being at Graeme Park after my return from England, August 16, 1766,” in Poemata Juvenilia, LCP; and the Fergusson/Benjamin Rush Correspondence, LCP; Mary Hewson (1734-1795) to Barbara Hewson, April 22, 1789, Hewson Family Papers, APS; Deborah Norris Logan (1761-1839) “An Afternoon Visit” (no date) HSP (Phi 379 no. 60).

The author would like to thank the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the Leverhulme Trust for fellowships that have enabled her to pursue research on this project.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Kate Davies is the author of Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (2005). She lectures in English and American literature at Newcastle University.

What we all believe about Abraham Lincoln is this:

The extraordinary thing about the life of Abraham Lincoln is how intensely typical it was. The son of a poor farmer, his honesty, diligence, and insatiable appetite for books and homespun witticism ensured he rose quickly from the log cabin of his youth to the relatively polished

It’s not that what we all believe about Lincoln is wrong. But what is actually extraordinary about the life of Abraham Lincoln is how intensely typical it has become. Lincoln has become the personification of the nation’s self-reinvention, its ceaseless quest for moral worth, not because he always already embodied in an angular six-four frame American ideals of diligence, democracy, and self-government, but because we all hoped so badly that he would that we have clothed those ideals in his image. We have taken Lincoln’s virtues and made them America’s. If George Washington is the father of the American civic religion, Lincoln is its savior, whose embodiment of virtues brought to his nation salvation.

This is the Abraham Lincoln of America’s monuments: the man whose rude and crude beginnings have been carefully enshrined, their roughness preserved—as it must be—but also somehow sanitized and sacramentalized, like the fingerbones of Catholic saints, into a vehicle of democratic self-determination. Because Lincoln made himself a president, we can grasp our dreams; because he saved the nation for us, we have that possibility.

The Smithsonian’s exhibit, Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life, stands in a small chamber just off of the National Museum of American History’s most popular exhibit, The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden. That exhibit takes up nearly a dozen overcrowded and brightly lit rooms in the center of the museum’s third floor, joyfully jumbling together Warren Harding’s pale blue silk pajamas with George Washington’s dress uniform, a filmed tribute to movie presidents (Kevin Kline as the cheerful klutz “Dave;” Charlton Heston curling his lip as Andrew Jackson; the paternal gravitas of Jed Bartlet) with recordings of key inaugural addresses (Kennedy, Reagan, Roosevelt; the usual suspects), and a dollhouse belonging to Grover Cleveland’s daughters with the bloody pages of the speech that survived an attempt on Theodore Roosevelt’s life. The walls of The American Presidency are a brisk pale orange, the display cases overstuffed, the lighting bright and cheerful. Children jostle for the chance to stand behind an inaugural podium and visitors fiddle with a computerized display that allows them to vote for their favorite presidents. The tone here is magnificently American: celebratory, confident, a bit playful, and not just a little triumphal. It’s the life which death made possible.

That death awaits next door. A sharp corner separates the two exhibits, and when a visitor steps across the small atrium into the memorial to Lincoln, her first impression is of darkness. The walls of Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life are draped in black, the lighting is targeted, the mood somber. This is a chapel as much as it is a museum, and we are to pay respects as much as we are to learn. And visitors respond; they speak quietly, and move slowly, and linger. The cheerful chaos of The American Presidency is absent here; while that exhibit lays largely open, allowing visitors to move as they will through its rooms, the Lincoln exhibit is a single, sometimes tight corridor snaking inexorably through Lincoln’s life. The narrative pace is well known and essential, and almost liturgical; we accept the irresistible slow progress from the stumpy fields of Kentucky to the White House to Ford’s Theatre. There are no buttons to push, no podiums to play with, only artifacts to ponder and words on the walls to read.

The items here exhibited, particularly in the early sections of the exhibit, tend toward the iconographic—single pieces, instantly recognizable and pieced into the great arc of Lincoln symbology, displayed and lit in solitary cases, separated by appropriately solemn swaths of the black back wall. Upon entering, visitors are greeted with the battered top hat Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre, followed in quick succession with a wedge Lincoln used to split rails, a rail which Lincoln split (presumably with the wedge next door), and the “mud circuit” desk the young lawyer sat at while serving the frontier courts of Illinois. We are told that Everett Dirksen, a Republican senator from the state in the 1960s, owned the desk and worked on civil rights legislation while seated at it; thus does the Lincoln legacy persist. The exhibit does here hold a few surprises. We’re shown, for instance, an 1848 sketch and model for an invention designed to lift boats out of shallow water for which Lincoln sought patent protection; this is helpfully contextualized in the industrious Jacksonian era, and in the faith in commerce and support for canal building that Lincoln’s Whig politics embraced.

Lincoln’s rise to the presidency—indeed, his life before the Civil War generally—is quickly but skillfully sketched over in a few exhibit cases. We’re shown a presidential suit, a shawl that he used to keep warm while working in his cold office, an inkwell; surprisingly intimate items that draw us into his life. Campaign memorabilia emphasizes the divided Republican party—an emerging theme in the Lincoln narrative, driven by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. It also emphasizes the popular support for the lawyer from Illinois: even as the exhibit’s captions emphasize that Lincoln’s frontier image was carefully constructed, the artifacts present him, almost constantly, as a man of the people.

This is driven home when the visitor reaches the first item documenting the war: sheet music, produced in Philadelphia in 1862, for a tune called “We Are Coming, Father Abraham: Three Hundred Thousand More”—a rousing cry that almost immediately, only inches away, crashes into stark, large photographs of the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg, and a ceremonial rifle that one imagines Lincoln received from the New Haven Arms Company with mixed emotions.

Essential to Lincoln’s image, and perhaps unique to him among eternally optimistic American heroes, is a sense of tragedy. His triumphs are seasoned with martyrdom, his achievements with melancholy. With one exception, the exhibit handles the assassination with elliptical delicacy, showing us only heartbreaking snatches: a coffee cup which a White House servant retrieved from the president’s windowsill after Lincoln left for Ford’s theatre; the blood-dotted cuff of Laura Keene, lead actress at Ford’s that night; the surgical instruments used on Lincoln’s body. Many visitors round the corner from these fascinating trinkets and gasp upon seeing what comes next, strategically placed over mannequin heads: the hoods placed upon the nine conspirators as they stepped to the platform with nooses around their necks. It’s a rather shocking moment in an intentionally muted exhibit.

We trust that Lincoln had to suffer so the nation could survive; we’ve been told that over and over already. What is novel about Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life is its determined effort to place emancipation at the center of this achievement. Indeed, the exhibit’s tribute to emancipation sits at the literal center of the exhibit, a small atrium that bridges the two halves of the story of Lincoln’s life both spatially and metaphorically. Only here are there benches; only here is there any hint of the technology that The American Presidency relies on: a video, in which notables from scholar Ira Berlin to former president Bill Clinton discuss the social, political, and economic transformations that emancipation wrought. We are shown recruitment posters from the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments, emphasizing that African Americans helped take control of the emancipation process, fighting for their own freedom, an inkstand Lincoln may have used to write the Emancipation Proclamation, and its complete text in an 1864 print. Though the exhibit emphasizes Lincoln’s martyrdom, they are linked, hand in hand, with his accomplishments.

Visitors depart the exhibit past a row of photographs of Lincoln, from the earliest 1840s daguerreotypes to the last cracked and gaunt image captured only weeks before his death. The president’s aging is striking, and telling; we’re to leave with a sense of respect, a sense of debt, and a renewed conviction of the truth of what we believe about Abraham Lincoln.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.2 (January, 2012).

When Thomas Harris’s ghost appeared to his childhood friend William Briggs across a field one March morning in 1792, he set in motion a chain of events that produced a lawsuit. It is easy to understand why Harris’s spirit was unable to settle down for eternity. Harris had left four illegitimate children as a result of a long-time connection with a woman named Ann Goldsborough. Eager to provide for their future, Harris instructed his brother James to sell his land and to use the proceeds to support the children. James sold the land, but pocketed the earnings, and Harris’s enraged ghost set to work to solve the problem. Six visits persuaded Briggs that this apparition was indeed the specter of his old friend, and Briggs in turn used the information the ghost provided to pressure the living to follow the wishes of the deceased. Like any good friend seeking to redress a grievance in a world saturated with legal knowledge and with relatively easy access to courts, he filed suit in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, in 1796-1797.

Some readers might chafe at the amount of speculation in this book, but Crane’s stories are so inviting and her expertise so assured that it would be a disappointment if she did not try to tie some of the knots together for us.

Thomas Harris’s ghost is just one of the many fascinating characters readers encounter in Elaine Forman Crane’s newest book, Witches, Wife Beaters, & Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America. This enthralling, deeply researched work demonstrates vividly that early Americans lived in a world saturated by the law. Crane is interested specifically in the “common folk” of her title; tavern keepers, merchants, a handful of witches, murdered and battered wives, an enslaved black man. To uncover how the law suffused their world, Crane employs the methodology of microhistory, an approach used with great success by historians seeking to discern the lives and mentalities of those often not able to speak for themselves. Crane has undertaken research in challenging sources. Even more impressively, she has taken snippets of information and woven them into engaging, moving, and occasionally riveting stories. Crane demonstrates through her painstakingly recreated life histories just how much “legal culture and the routine of daily life were knotted together in early America” (4).

Crane illustrates this thesis in six chapters that focus on different crimes in four distinct legal jurisdictions: the Dutch colony of New Netherland, the English colonies of Bermuda and Rhode Island, and the state of Maryland. Her first chapter examines slander cases in New Netherland, while her second chapter takes us to Bermuda, established as an English colony in the wake of the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609. Bermuda experienced a witch hunt in the 1650s, and Crane analyzes the accusations launched against 12 people, five of whom were executed. Chapter three analyzes eight cases of family violence in eighteenth-century Rhode Island, in which four men were prosecuted for homicide in the deaths of their wives. Crane draws on trial depositions with great facility to illustrate the formal and informal legal solutions that friends and neighbors deployed to protect women from violent husbands. Chapter four explores a case of rape brought before the Rhode Island court. The incident allegedly happened on December 23, 1742, when a woman named Comfort Dennis Taylor traveled between Portsmouth and Bristol on a ferry navigated by a slave named Cuff. This chapter is an absorbing read. With Crane’s eloquent prose, her detective work, her judicious handling of problematic and contradictory evidence, and her willingness to speculate frankly about the case, this chapter would make ideal reading for an undergraduate methods class. Chapter five turns to the problem of debt, with a focus on the family of Samuel Banister, whose longstanding legal battles over debt payment in Rhode Island took a dramatic turn when he shot—and killed—a man accompanying the sheriff when he came to evict Banister in 1745. The final chapter takes up the story of Thomas Harris’s ghost and the complex family connections Harris’s case reveals.

Crane’s chapters illustrate several important themes. First and foremost is the legal knowledge that these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North Americans and Bermudians possessed. For example, Samuel Banister knew just how to cope with repeated claims on his estate: he promised to repay and he delayed. This was the legal strategy his indebted father had also pursued. For the most part, Banister’s stalling worked—until he lost his wits and shot someone. Likewise, Taylor knew how a woman who had been raped should act, and she comported herself accordingly: she screamed for help in order to demonstrate that she had resisted her attacker; she quickly reported the attack; and she had bruises to show from her ordeal. John Middleton, one of the confessed witches in Bermuda, was similarly skilled in knowing how to make his confession persuasive. A Scot, Middleton was likely even more familiar with witchcraft than his English-born neighbors, but all of the island’s inhabitants demonstrated remarkable knowledge about witches, manifested in the many juries summoned to investigate the accused witches’ bodies for telltale marks, or revealed in depositions in which neighbors attested to the evil deeds surely attributable to the witch in their midst.

A second important theme is the role that growing literacy rates played in altering legal practice. While Banister’s primary difficulty was his inability to pay his debts, the growing literacy of New England over the course of the eighteenth century made him more vulnerable to legal action. An earlier culture in which people trusted handshakes and memory had yielded to debts recorded in daybooks and a variety of paper records. Courts called for this book evidence when they adjudicated cases, and this paper trail proved damning to the likes of Banister. Literacy also played a key role in the saga of Harris’s ghost. Thanks to their reading of the ghost stories that were so popular in the 1790s, Marylanders knew how ghosts were likely to comport themselves. By 1816, one could even read an article outlining the rules for ghosts’ behavior.

A third important theme is the variations between colonial legal systems. Massachusetts, for example, passed a law in 1650 that ordered that neither wives nor husbands could strike each other—an unusual gender-neutral law on domestic violence. While Rhode Island had no such law, it did have another legal deviation: in Rhode Island (but not elsewhere in New England) courts could rely on circumstantial evidence if there were no eyewitnesses. A second example concerns Rhode Island’s laws about rape. Colonies did not have laws about attempted rape, so Taylor’s accusation of Cuff fell into a grey area. But in the midst of her legal struggles to get redress in any forum, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed a law in August 1743 that pertained to attempted rape by a black man and that could have been prompted only, Crane argues, by Taylor’s ordeal (137). The law made attempted rape by a black man punishable by branding, whipping, and transportation. This law, and others like it in colonial America, racialized laws about attempted rape by assuming that any advance by a black man toward a white woman would be unwanted, and thus the man was automatically guilty of rape (129). The Rhode Island law provides strong evidence for Crane’s argument “that law was implemented from the bottom up” (8). In light of these (and many other) important legal variations, it might have been helpful for Crane to devote more time in her book to a discussion of her selection of these particular jurisdictions.

There are many admirable attributes of Crane’s study. She draws together jurisdictions not normally considered in tandem, with her choice of New Netherland, Bermuda, Rhode Island, and Maryland. This analysis required her to straddle different legal regimes, including both civil law and common law. Her research is deep and extensive. She combed a variety of local sources, from tax codes to maps to town records to church registers, to identify people and to piece together their lives. She even drove through a snowstorm to find out if one could really hear someone scream across Narragansett Bay in late December.

Crane draws on this impressive documentary base to speculate, something that is essential given the snippets of information she unearthed. She ponders what really happened when Taylor accused Cuff of rape. She tries to understand why Bermuda was beset with a witch hunt in the 1650s, and tests possible links to events elsewhere—a sodomy case in New Haven in 1653, or the rise of the Quaker movement in the mid-1650s. She wonders what William Briggs had in mind when he ventriloquized the words of Harris’s ghost in his deposition. She tries to get to the bottom of Harris’s relationship with Ann Goldsborough, combing local records to identify this elusive woman, in order to find a way to characterize their relationship and to understand how this illicit relationship could endure through the births of four children. Some readers might chafe at the amount of speculation in this book, but Crane’s stories are so inviting and her expertise so assured that it would be a disappointment if she did not try to tie some of the knots together for us. As she writes frankly, “speculation invites rebuttal” (202), and her honest appraisal of the problematic evidence allows readers to come to their own conclusions.

In the book’s epilogue, Crane yokes the legal cultures she has described so vividly to the post-revolutionary United States. How, she asks, did these case studies foreshadow the later era? She posits that legal history can “offer a general interpretation of the American experience” (215). This conclusion seems apt in the respect that Anglo-Americans in the new United States, like their colonial ancestors, were deeply immersed in legal culture and familiar with many different aspects of the law. But it is difficult to discern how to connect these four jurisdictions with later U.S. legal cultures. Crane asserts, for example, that the stories in her book “confirm a connection between law and intrinsic American values” (10). What does this claim of American values mean in the context of the multiple jurisdictions Crane examines? Bermuda seems especially oddly placed, since it is American only in the sense of being in the western hemisphere, but not in the meaning that I think Crane invokes in her epilogue of pertaining to the United States. The legal code of New Netherland, based on Dutch civil law, was transformed under later English rule, and the Dutch colony’s connection to the legal behavior or values of the later United States is similarly unclear. And which Americans? Cuff, for example, sits oddly here. Crane writes that Cuff’s values were “at odds with early American society” (15). It is difficult to tell, however, if it was his unique values or simply his plight that shaped his response—flight from further legal proceedings—to his legal predicament. Crane’s admirable book is likely to inspire many other studies that will help answer some of these important questions. In the meantime, she has blazed a trail with her exemplary study, demonstrating that it is possible to bring the dead to life even without the aid of a ghost. Instead, Crane offers us an engaging and detailed analysis of how ordinary people understood and deployed the law in the most adverse circumstances, drawing us in with stories that are sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes funny, sometimes confounding, but always intriguing and absorbing.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4.5 (September, 2012).

Alison Games is the Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History at Georgetown University. Her most recent book is Witchcraft in Early North America (2010).

Gray H. Whaley’s impressive and ambitious study of the U.S. presence in the Lower Columbia River region and the impact of that colonialism on the Indians living there firmly places the Pacific Northwest into the broader story of U.S. empire. With great skill the author considers the role of merchants, missionaries, settlers, and diverse Indian communities over a period of sixty years of profound change, showing how “westward expansion” was part of a larger imperial project.

Whaley also contributes to Pacific Northwest history by introducing two “metaphors of place” (x). The first, “Oregon,” was a space of imperial competition and the destination of American agrarian settlers in the 1840s and 1850s. “Illahee,” by contrast, was the Indian conception of the same region. The latter was less a territory than a network of communities, kin relations, spiritual, and cultural relationships. Whaley argues that the relationship between these two conceptions of place were dynamic and dialectical. Oregon shaped Indian life and Illahee helped define the character of the American and British presence, at least until disease and genocide left little room for negotiation. The transformation of Illahee from the dominant conception of the Lower Columbia to the a peripheral fragment of Oregon’s colonial society was not the inevitable result of “westward expansion” but was brought on by disease, missionary activities, ideology, settlement, violence, and genocidal warfare.

Between 1792 and 1859, the dialectical relationship between Illahee and Oregon worked out on the ground. The first Americans came to the Lower Columbia in the aftermath of the voyages of the Columbia, which sought to bring American commerce into China through the lucrative sea otter fur trade. Whaley focuses his energies on the relationship between Indians and Fort Clatsop, of the Corps of Discovery, and Fort Astoria, of the fur trading Northwest Company. By the time Americans arrived to Illahee, the Chinook and others had been participants in the global China trade for over a decade. Before the Louisiana Purchase opened up a region of American expansion on the continent, the Lower Columbia was already a region of imperial competition and the home of a nascent colonial society. Life in Fort Clatsop and Fort Astoria for both Indians and American traders was one of negotiation with competing visions, which produced a new society. Fur traders were frustrated by the complexity of Illahee’s “many little sovereignties” and threats of violence—both of which cemented the Indians’ reputation as “Rogues,” and which would justify so much violence in the coming decades (63). Indians also looked on landless and drifting sailors, existing outside of the kin relations that defined Illahee, with suspicion. Yet through prostitution, intermarriage, working together, and trade, the fragments of a colonial society were formed that did not privilege the American vision of Oregon. By the 1830s, increased encroachment on the land and a devastating malaria epidemic turned the balance decidedly toward Oregon, but did not eliminate Illahee’s influence on the emerging colonial society.

Whaley proves the endurance of Illahee with two fascinating chapters on the missionary endeavors of the 1830s and 1840s. Optimism about creating an “evangelical empire” (99-102) and a religious colonization of the region turned sour due to the racism of religious and nonreligious settlers, resistance by Indians to Christianity, and the demographic disaster that made a spiritual return on the missionaries’ investment doubtful. The difficulties these missionaries faced were symptoms of the growing incompatibility of Illahee and Oregon in a colonial society. Ultimately the colonization of Illahee, virulent racism, and genocidal warfare, culminating in the Red River War of 1855 and 1856, made extermination of the Indians the means to fulfill the ideology of Oregon. Whaley ends the book with a consideration of the survival of Illahee, despite the end of Indian communities, the seizure of their land and property, and massive population decline. Even as the relationship between U.S. empire and Oregon shifted to a new phase with statehood, Indians continued to use the concept of Illahee as a survival strategy. As more local community identities fell away, younger generations knew only Illahee, with Chinook as a common language (initially used by teachers as a transition to English-language instruction).

Readers from many fields of history will be able to mine Whaley’s rich text for insights. Aspects of social, environmental, demographic, religious, diplomatic, and maritime history all shaped Oregon’s colonial history and Whaley wisely includes all of these aspects into his account. Instead of diluting the text, this complexity adds to his argument and reveals his wealth of knowledge. For example, Whaley has produced one of the strongest accounts of the trading fort known as Astoria since James P. Rhoda’s Astoria and Empire. By using the published headquarter’s log of the Northwest Company’s Pacific coast experiment, Whaley writes a fine social history of this short-lived fort. Looking beyond the diplomatic and maritime aspects of Astoria, the author shows that Astoria was a space of rich social interaction between Indian and white American workers, an interaction that often led to intermarriage between Astorians and Indian women. In the same way, Whaley’s account of the demographic collapse brought on by the 1830s malaria epidemic and its impact on missionaries and empire building reminds us that the fate of empire is always contingent on social and environmental forces and cannot be reduced to diplomacy or economics.

Despite taking on a topic as large as U.S. empire, Whaley always remains firmly on the ground. Most of the major players in the fur trade, westward expansion, elected leaders, or government officials remain in the background. Whaley is rightfully focusing on what he calls “folk imperialism”: the efforts of individual workers, traders, and settlers in laying claim to the Lower Columbia and the ideologies that drove these Americans. The high politics of competing claims between Great Britain, the United States, and Russia have only a minor role in the much more essential conflict between Oregon and Illahee. Folk imperialism also contained its own ideology, driven by the antebellum market economy, evangelical Christianity, and the emerging unification of American republicanism with an exclusionary whiteness. These popular ideas determined the more aggressive and genocidal aspects of settler colonialism in the region. For Whaley, Indian resistance is also best looked at from the ground. Considering the realities of Indian politics within Illahee, this focus is unavoidable. Despite white settler fantasies, Indians in this region never formed a unified resistance. Instead their resistance took the form or theft and murder. These acts in turn fed white fantasies of a race war in the Oregon territory. Whaley shows white settlers needed little encouragement as most of the justifications for empire were self-fulfilling. An important contribution of this book is to remind readers that the ideology of empire and the workings of empire in a colonial society are intimately connected.

This is a rich book but reminds me of a crucial question facing nineteenth-century historians. What is the place of America in the world during a century dominated by empire building from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast, sectional conflict, and industrialization? With the decline of the sea otter fur trade and the resolution of imperial competition, it seems that the history of the Pacific Northwest turns inward and feeds into the history of American “westward expansion.” Whaley carefully detaches himself from the ideological baggage driving those conceptions of Western history through his use of empire.

Nevertheless, the merchants and sailors, such as those populating Astoria, are replaced with miners and farmers, carrying with them the ideology of the republic’s continental expansion. Is it true that after the 1830s, the Pacific Northwest stopped looking toward the Pacific? We know from Jean Barman and Bruce McIntyre Watson’s Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest that the “kanaka” presence in the region remained strong throughout the century. What impact did these people have on Illahee? Was the global story that shaped so much of the Columbia’s River early history replaced with an exclusively American colonial society? Whaley does not directly address these questions but his frame of reference makes it possible to ask these questions by clarifying the place of Oregon’s settlement in the centuries-long story of U.S. empire.

In the middle of her book, Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics, Alexandra Socarides describes a disorienting moment during her archival research when the familiar terms and narratives of scholarship on Emily Dickinson failed to accurately represent the materials before her. In the Amherst College Archives, Socarides describes wanting to look at “Set 2,” a group of poems on sheets that Dickinson did not sew together but were loosely assembled by her posthumous editor Mabel Loomis Todd and later represented in a fascicle-like “set” by Dickinson scholar R.W. Franklin. But, when the folder arrives from the vault, what she finds does not resemble what she expected. “Because scholars call them ‘sets’ and because Franklin reproduces them in groups that resemble the fascicles, someone visiting the archive at which they are housed is prepared to encounter loose sheets that are somehow related to each other, even if this mode of relation is unclear,” Socarides writes. In the archive, however, she reports “the disorienting experience of calling up these ‘sets’ and then not knowing what [she] was looking at.” “If you want to look at ‘Set 2,'” Socarides continues, “you have to request Folder ’87’… a folder that contains the seven loose sheets that Franklin later distributed among sets 2, 5, 6a, 6b, and 7” (108). Some sets, like set 2, consist of poems on four sides of a single folded sheet of stationery, while others consist of multiple folded sheets. The archival researcher, Socarides explains, has to reconstruct these sets by consulting reference works and shuffling the manuscripts into the prescribed order. Socarides shows us that important terminological and methodological questions arise when we encounter the material evidence of Dickinson’s manuscripts. How is a single folded sheet a “set” in the same way that a group of ten folded sheets is a set? By whose logic have these sets, and our mediated encounters with them, been organized, Dickinson’s or her editors’?

Dickinson Unbound proceeds from the tensions that arise between prevailing remediations and interpretations of Dickinson’s work and the material archive of Dickinson’s writing itself. Addressing these tensions head on, Socarides works toward their resolution via a materially grounded account of Dickinson’s process and poetics. Socarides asks us to unbind the grasp that various editorial and interpretive positions have held on our understanding of Dickinson, and she guides us in this by unbinding the fascicle sheets long enough to consider anew the poet’s material processes of composition and construction.

In three of her five chapters, Socarides presents Dickinson’s career chronologically, charting a trajectory from orderly material forms to disorderly ones. Chapter one deals with bound fascicles; chapter four takes up loose, unsewn fascicle sheets; and chapter five addresses scraps and fragments. While it is common to characterize the fascicle-making stage of Dickinson’s career as the most productive, perhaps because she was creating recognizable book-like forms, Socarides argues that Dickinson’s move toward increasingly fragmentary forms represents the maturation of her thinking about closure and ending, the subject of so many of her poems. Socarides’ map of Dickinson’s career in chapters one, four, and five, traced through her specific and changing material practices, shows that Dickinson engaged with differently shaped material containers for her work as part of ongoing attention to and experimentation with relationships, endings, and closure.

After Socarides builds the critical apparatus for reading Dickinson’s sheets and scraps in the introduction and chapter one, she puts aside the above-mentioned career trajectory to offer studies of Dickinson’s material practices in relation to the nineteenth-century genres of the letter and the poetic elegy in chapters two and three. In truth, the relation of genre to material form is present throughout this study, but it is the primary focus of these middle chapters. Chapter two, “Epistolary Practices and the Problem of Genre,” takes up the interrelations of Dickinson’s poems and letters, a longstanding topic of interest in Dickinson scholarship and one that is refreshed by Socarides’ material focus. While Dickinson’s editors and critics “make it seem as if … letters and poems were discrete and stable categories for her to write in,” Socarides returns to the archival evidence to show that Dickinson was not invested in our generic categories but was, instead, actively exploring “the instability that existed at the heart of both modes of writing” (53).

Chapter two also highlights Socarides’ ability to place Dickinson’s material poetic processes in relation to the conventions of American women’s writing in the nineteenth century. Socarides places the poetry in Dickinson’s letters against the backdrop of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals for women and their concerns about containment and proper gender performance. She discusses how Dickinson’s parallel arrangement of sheets in self-made fascicles allowed her to work outside the gendered scripts for writing and scrapbooking in commercially available blank books. Through these explorations of genre and convention, Socarides offers a Dickinson conscious of the material contexts in which nineteenth-century American women wrote, and who actively chose practices that extended, subverted, or performed those expectations differently. Given the poet’s fidelity to the relations of words and poems on a single sheet, it becomes clear why the published book was not a proper end point for Dickinson’s stacked sheets, for it seems likely that she knew how the printed book put interleaved pages in a different relation to one another than she desired for her poems. In Socarides’ hands, Dickinson’s famous stance toward print is less a condition of lack, and more a conscious choice to “understand exactly what print would enable and obscure” (46).

One of Socarides’ lasting contributions to Dickinson scholarship will surely be her demonstration that the poet paid close attention to, and made meaningful decisions based on, the discrete unit of the sheet. While previous scholars have advanced readings of Dickinson’s fascicles as meaningful wholes, basing interpretations on the proximity of poems assembled in book-like form, Socarides asks us to undo the fascicles’ stitches in order to study how exactly Dickinson made them. “Dickinson had a particular method for copying that kept poems distinct from one another and preserved the unit of the folded sheet” even when those sheets were sewn together in fascicles (24). In the first chapter, Socarides gives a detailed reconstruction of Dickinson’s process, revealing that the fascicle poems were copied onto separate folded sheets and later sewn together. The sheets were not folded, interleaved, and then written upon as if they were a bound book, but folded and stacked one on top of another in a form of parallel relation. In readings of the relations that emerge between poems that share the same sheet, Socarides calls us to recognize how “respecting the breaks that exist between sheets gives them back the identity they once had as Dickinson copied poems onto them and allows us to focus on the relationship between poems that the sheet, as a unit of composition, sets in motion” (44). Dickinson did not regard the book as a meaningful unit of analysis for her work, but too often, her editors and critics have.

These insights set the stage for chapters three and four, in which Socarides’ incredibly close attention to Dickinson’s arrangement of sheets leads to new insights into the poet’s later formal and generic experimentation. Socarides demonstrates how the sheet is important for reading and interpreting Dickinson’s poetry in several close readings. In chapter three, “Sewing the Fascicles: Elegy, Consolation, and the Poetics of Interruption,” for example, Socarides reads sequences of poems about death that, when “read with an awareness of individual sheets,” shows how Dickinson engaged with and challenged the generic conventions of elegy. “By writing poems about death and by sewing them to each other, Dickinson investigates the inability of poetry to represent the nature of loss as it exists at the very limits of comprehension” (80). While elegies conventionally explore consolation and closure, Socarides finds that Dickinson’s practice of copying and sewing sheets created space to explore the topic of death through the interruption of spatial and temporal sequences, multiple or shifting perspectives, and the foreclosure of consolation and finality. Dickinson’s focus on interruption, fragmentation, and open-endedness is pushed to the extreme when she writes on scraps and fragments of paper, the focus of her late production and Socarides’ fifth chapter, “Methods of Unmaking: Dickinson’s Late Drafts, Scraps, and Fragments.” Dickinson stopped recopying drafted poems and arranging them on whole sheets, and instead left poems in their drafted state on scraps of envelopes or advertisements. Pins (and the pinholes through which Socarides traces them) are sometimes all that hold scraps together during this period when Dickinson most firmly “rejected the book as a source of containment, comprehensibility, and authority” while she “navigat[ed] new relationships to issues of order, wholeness, finality, and relation in her poetry” (166).

Dickinson Unbound is in many ways a complementary volume to Virginia Jackson’s influential Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005). Jackson argues that, beginning with Thomas Wentworth Higginson and continuing through the twentieth century, Dickinson’s poetry has been subjected to a process of “lyricization” that isolates the poet and the poems from their material contexts and translates them into a lyric form closer to editors’ intentions than Dickinson’s (8). Socarides acknowledges that Jackson’s call for renewed attention to Dickinson’s material contexts and mediations “made available the particular questions that drive” the book (5). It is also worth mentioning that Socarides is equally generous toward scholars with whom she ultimately disagrees, noting, for example, that while she parts ways with Sharon Cameron on whether fascicles should be read thematically, her own work on sheets is made possible by Cameron’s influential move toward studying fascicles in the first place. Together, Dickinson’s Misery andDickinson Unbound have historicized the editorial and critical apparatuses brought to bear on Dickinson’s work, and shown how expectations about poetics and genre must be tested against Dickinson’s actual manuscript production. While Jackson’s book has already become a standard-bearing work on the lyric, Socarides’ book will be similarly influential in scholarship and teaching on the processual dimensions of material textuality in general, and of Dickinson’s poetics in particular.

Readers lacking a deep investment in the history of Dickinson scholarship might initially look past what is, essentially, a single-author study. To this reviewer, however, Dickinson Unbound offers a great deal to those more generally concerned with the direction of book history and print culture studies. Socarides shows how the dominant and idealized form of the printed book incorrectly shaped critical expectations about a writer who worked primarily in manuscript sheets, scraps, and correspondence. That Socarides’ methodology stems from “book history” while her objects of study are clearly not books demonstrates the necessity of the field’s recent turn toward more capacious terms like “material texts” and “material textuality.” When Socarides asks, “what happens when we treat the paper itself as a meaningful context for reading and interpretation,” she helps broaden our methodology beyond the printed book toward the full diversity of signifying material in the archive (39). In this fascinating work, “material textuality” points not only to a diverse range of texts, but acknowledges that paper in its materiality has signifying capacities itself.

Socarides’ Dickinson Unbound is an important book that advances how we understand the poet’s work in relation to its material archive. In addition to her meticulous research and clear arguments about Dickinson, Socarides models how rigorous attention to material contexts and processes can enable other scholars and critics.

Jonathan Senchyne is an assistant professor of Library and Information Studies and the associate director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is writing his first book, under the working title, “Our Paper Allegories: A Sense for the Material Text in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature.”

History and the Found Poem

Debt

We may never know the mystery of sleep.
We don’t want to become machines.

But we let our vagabond thoughts run riot,
not like hurricane but like breakfast table,
spread with honey and cereal. And then: falling
over the dog, kicking the ribs out
of the heirloom chair. Somewhere
between the end of the table and half-past

nine, the stock-market crashes. We watch and can’t
believe we are watching. And then: hot flannels
to the face, brocade of poppy-heads. Forget,

forget—bag of ground pepper dipped in whiskey
and placed in the ear.

We never want to hear what people are saying. We never
know exactly what is needed. Blister Compound, Opium Powder,

Lint. Baths or Fomentations; Forcepts or Pins.

If you swallow a bee, if your throat is stung inside—
you are not necessarily closer to the mystery, your own dying.

Tonight I will place a key over your bee-sting
and force the poison out. You are very lucky. I don’t
even know you, but still you owe me nothing.

Excuse

I had rejected every soft-handed suitor, but then
one night: you with your mitts and sandpaper.

In the morning my mother found the salmon you left on the beach.
Then the seal, the basket of scallops. Like this each night for weeks.

She was anxious to meet you. We had become rich.
She rose early to greet you but saw only a bear lurching

out of the waves. We were discovered. You carried two whales
in your paws and dropped them. You turned into a rock.

A supernatural being of the sea, that’s what I tell people now
when they ask me about my black veil, my net and stockings.

You can still see the spot where he dropped the whales, I say,
you can still see the rock. It’s become a national landmark.

Flower of the Standard Talking Machine

I’ve got the time, I’ve got the place, but it’s hard to find the Girl.
Any little Girl that’s a nice little Girl is the right little Girl for me.

Ain’t you coming out tonight? If He comes in, I’m going Out.
A Bushel of Kisses. Wedding Bells. Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I’m afraid to come Home in the Dark. I heard the voice of Jesus say.
All that I ask of You is Love. Then we’ll all go Home.

By the light of the Silvery Moon. Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.
Come where My Love lies Dreaming. In the Gloaming.

Where is my Wandering Boy Tonight? Abide with me.
Has anybody here seen Kelly? Don’t let me Go. Bye-bye, Dearie.

Barnyard Serenade. When you Marry a Girl for Looks. America.

Triangle Sideshow
                    —with John Dillon

Barker:

Love in all Shapes! Visit my gallery
of Portraits. Wolf in Sheep’s clothing or
the Biter (finally) Gets Bitten. Love’s
labor lost. Love’s many machinations.

Love’s lenten lucubrations. Love’s tentative
Lubrications. False alarm—or No One
there. Love in a labyrinth; the adventures
of My Day. A reminiscence of by-gone-times past

ten o’clock on a Cloudy Night. Travelers, notice
the Nag’s Head on the heath. Step up and meet
the Ventriloquist, a man in the Wrong Box.

Dummy:

                    I believe in America,
the voice thrown from the stage.

I will never betray you.
Eventually he told me

how an egg is filled. How feathers
are hollow, the particular service
of the eyelid. What gives

blood its motion, our fine, beautiful
eyes, our limbs arranged in a great order

like fingers of a hand kissed
in greeting. Dangling, eyes
roll to ceiling. See how

we are always evolving?

Has the soul any passion?
Are the soul and body connected?

The men from the Sideshow saying,
don’t ever talk to anyone
outside family.

The men in shark-skin
patting their brows, folding their teeth
in kerchiefs and staggering
into the next room.

Ventriloquist:

When you hold your breath for a longer
or shorter time—a body of midnight

outside of the city, a single tone
of quickness on slowness that can’t
be measured. Like taking one’s self

away, like being away from a place.

I would hang a cow-bell around
his neck like a trophy. My voice
sliding up or down in pitch on a word.

I am your gentlest one.

The Evolution of Rape Law

Knowing that at any moment she could turn
into a witch, they sit the girl in the corner by the fire.

They place a wooden cross in her mouth, cakes of salt, soap.
They place a coin over each doorway.

She says nothing. When they divide up her father’s things
to pay for the scandal—his lathe, his axe, his pewter

bowls—she holds her mouth half-closed like a lock
that waits, a jagged outline, lizard or turtle, silhouette opening.

Either she’ll lose her name or a neighbor will hang.
It is known that she has been with a man, in a brake or bush,

out in the land. They say she can change into a partridge or
deer, and that the night she appeared in a field

a man followed her. It’s true when she moves, she makes
a shifting sound, and sand fills her shoes, filtering

onto the floor beneath her skirt where she sits still
as an hourglass. To try her case, they shave a bull’s tail,

grease it, and thread it through her door-clate. She places
both feet on the threshold. If she holds the bull by the tail,

she can save her honor. If not, she will keep the grease
that clings to her hands. Her face shiny now, like

warm meat. Years later she will still roll grease
from her arms. Truth will become the wolf that lurks

in snowfields of her eyes as she sits by windows and beyond
the invention of glass. Her thoughts crashed into again like birds.

Before independence from Britain, North American merchants belonged to an imperial trade network that spanned the globe, from nearby Jamaica to distant Japan. But the commodity most associated with the American Revolution undoubtedly remains tea, the quintessential Asian, luxury trade good. At the time of Boston’s “tea party” in 1773, North Americans imported almost a quarter of a million pounds of tea annually, nearly two-thirds of it through Boston harbor (12). Almost all of this tea came from the distant port of Canton, in southeast China, part of a growing and increasingly profitable British investment in Asia and the East Indies.

For a few years, tea’s politicization made it the symbol of unjust taxation and monopolies, and while the former is what most history textbooks emphasize, James Fichter deftly argues that the latter had far greater consequences for the future of United States’ business practices. After 1783, U.S. merchants developed their own routes in the East Indies with remarkable rapidity and alacrity, spurred by North American demand for Asian goods including tea, which once again took pride of place as a marker of gentility. But these new investor-capitalists, a small and elite group of traders, remained wary of monopolistic practices and embraced a more open system in Asia, ultimately forcing even Britain to abandon its mercantilist ways. This is a significant intervention which not only demonstrates how important international investment was to early American commercial development, but also how it created the prototype for modern corporations. East Asian trading demanded larger groups of investors than either Atlantic or even European shipping to pay associated costs and diversify risk. Such practices resulted, Fichter argues, in a new system of “cooperative venture” through standardization of shareholders (regularized contracts), specie (silver), and supervision (supercargoes) (128-129).

Conducted on free trade principles, America’s commerce in Asia became so extensive and so profitable during these French Wars that it undermined the monopoly of the British East India Company and forced the company to open its own free trade to the region.

Colonial American and early republic studies since the 1980s have emphasized the need to contextualize U.S. history within larger regional frameworks. The most obvious example has been the rise of Atlantic history and its emphasis on crossing national and imperial boundaries. Indeed, it is the circulation of goods, people and ideas across and around this ocean that defined the field. Early studies traced migration, trade patterns or specific commodities, but more recent work has focused on less tangible but critically related ideas, such as notions of taste and refinement, and adaptation and creolization. Anglo-Atlantic scholarship outpaced work on other empires until the last decade, but historians and literary scholars have begun to turn the tide, and the resulting work not only challenges ideas about what can be consumed (notions of fashion as well as clothing), but has also broadened both the Atlantic regions and peoples considered as consumers, including Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as women, native and enslaved peoples.

So Great a Profitt does not so much challenge the validity of Atlantic scholarship as argue for the importance of other less-studied regions to the early American economy. It does so by weaving together stories of conquest, imperial expansion, smuggling, and financial entrepreneurship with an impressive array of customs and shipping data and the lives of individual men who tried their hand at commercial enterprises half a world away. While many of the nations vying for dominance in the east between 1790 and 1830 would be familiar to Atlanticists—including Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States—the backdrop and path to success was quite distinct. France, Britain and Holland had their colonies and territories to be sure, but it was the United States, Fichter argues, and its policies of neutral trade rather than annexation and colonization, which ultimately reshaped the region.

Americans had operated in the Pacific and Indian Oceans since the early eighteenth century, first as smugglers and pirates, and then as more legitimate agents of the British East India Company. Within a year of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, U.S. vessels sailed to the region under their own flag, but the new nation’s rise to challenge Britain in eastern trade was far from a foregone conclusion. In the first years after independence, few ships were large enough to make the journey, and fewer sponsors were willing to back them. Some that did undertake the voyage, such as the visually beautiful but commercially disastrous Massachusetts launched in 1790, were spectacular maritime and business failures (43-45). Nor was free trade the obvious model for U.S. interactions; despite Americas’ association of monopolies with tyranny in the 1760s and 1770s, business models based on just such government-sanctioned companies appeared as early as 1785 (39). While Congress rejected plans for an American East India Company, they did so as much because federal versus state authority over trade regulation remained unresolved as because of anti-monopoly rhetoric.

The real breakthrough came with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which Fichter combines as the “French Wars” stretching from 1793 to 1814. When European nations turned their vessels to combat rather than commerce, America’s neutral status meant it enjoyed enormous opportunities in both Asian and European markets. This part of the study is less novel as Fichter acknowledges that past historians have already credited early nineteenth-century, inter-European warfare for the expansion of America’s maritime reach. But what is new is his use of this argument as the basis by which American actions transformed Anglo-American business more broadly. Conducted on free trade principles, American’s commerce in Asia became so extensive and so profitable during these French Wars that it undermined the monopoly of the British East India Company and forced the company to open its own free trade to the region. The former colonies and their British Empire thus came to share what Fichter terms “Anglo-American capitalism” (2).

There is no small irony, however, that despite the popularity of anti-monopoly rhetoric in North America, which Fichter suggests even pre-dated independence, the expense of trade to Asia increasingly concentrated capital into the hands of a few, those who became America’s first millionaires. Laws may not have restricted entry into this market, but means certainly did. In theory the region’s free trade policies promoted meritocracy; in practice they enabled the rich to become richer and to transfer their wealth into other investment opportunities. Stephen Girard chose banks, Israel Thorndike helped build the Lowell Mills, and John Jacob Astor invested in western lands and attempted to dominate the domestic fur trade industry. When that failed, he returned to the China trade, perhaps somewhat chastened, but then nonetheless “profited handsomely” (275).

Fichter’s argument is a compelling one, but he acknowledges some limitations. In “America’s Re-Export Boom,” one of the seminal chapters of the book, he carefully details how trade in East Indian goods such as pepper, tea and Indian cloth linked American merchants to producers and consumers around the world. But he also notes that while “the re-export boom was quite significant,” East Indian goods made up “but a small portion of these re-exports; sales of Caribbean sugar and coffee in Europe and of European manufactures in the Americas made up the bulk” (83). This does not undercut Fichter’s central argument that American neutrality in East Indian trade precipitated a radical shift in British commercial policy in the early nineteenth century, but it is does indicate that the financial significance of this trade most directly affected a small sector of American investors—men like Thorndike, Girard, and Astor. This same cohort, Fichter persuasively demonstrates in his later chapter on “America’s First Millionaires,” invested their eastern-based profits in factories, canals, railroads and banks with far larger implications for U.S. infrastructural and economic development. But the Caribbean—especially sugar, but increasingly coffee—remained the bulwark of U.S. re-export efforts and likewise connected the new nation to global commerce. America’s West Indian merchants may have been, in Fichter’s words, “little more than shopkeepers with ambition,” but there were many more of them, and their combined profits represented a significant portion of overall U.S. trade income (113). Moreover, Fichter’s own examples provide provocative evidence of how these trades intertwined. In 1801 Israel Thorndike (who would likely be rankled if called an ambitious shopkeeper) provided his captain with a detailed list of seven potential West Indian ports of call in which to sell his Indian cloth cargo (98-99). While those sending ships to the east often came from a different socio-economic tax bracket than Atlantic traders, their business interests may have overlapped in important ways.

This is an ambitious and wide-ranging book that explores not only the specifics of business transactions, but also the social and cultural ramifications of America’s entry in what had previously been systems defined by empires. Better still, it is composed in a lively, engaging manner easily accessible to scholars in the field and those whose interests may not focus on finance. Fichter is a seamless writer, a real pleasure to read, and the streets of Dutch Cape Town, like the home of merchant Elias Derby of Salem, Massachusetts, come alive on his pages (35-17 and 132-134). His work is also a major corrective to the traditional narrative of early American history still taught at the undergraduate level, which largely focuses on what will become the United States. In these classrooms, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton stand in for the series of pamphlets and Congressional sessions that debated whether the new nation’s future lay overseas or overland, the textbook chapter that most students half-heartedly slog through before getting to the far more enticing fare of Lewis and Clark and westward expansion. Thereafter America’s international affairs are usually limited to immigration or war. The War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Spanish-American War were each about defining and defending United States’ territorial rights. Most of our classroom attention is paid, however, to the developing schism between the states and resultant Civil War, or in outlining a series of “revolutions”—the market revolution, transportation revolution, and communications revolution—that made possible a nation from sea to shining sea. What is important to American history, in other words, occurred at home and not abroad.

Atlantic historians have struggled against this trajectory for three decades, arguing that just as many Americans looked east (and south) across the ocean as looked west across the continent. Fichter’s work adds a key new dimension to this debate, albeit to a more distant horizon line. He encourages historians of early America, business history, and globalization to look west, but much farther west than we have in the past, to see how the Asia trade increased both the number of connections and volume and value of U.S. foreign trade in the decades after 1783, as well as how it undergirded investment in those very transportation and communications relations that made possible domestic expansion.

September 28, 2008

September 23, 2008

September 22, 2008

September 19, 2008

September 17, 2008

September 10, 2008

September 9, 2008

September 7, 2008

September 5, 2008

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (September, 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.

On January 28, 1856, Philadelphians celebrated the centennial of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth with a blowout event. There was a concert, the program stuffed with pieces by the beloved German composer, and a speech on “The Life and Genius of Mozart” delivered by local newspaper editor Thomas Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald hyped the event in Fitzgerald’s City Item, donnishly labeling Mozart’s music “food for Apollo” suited to “the taste of an enlightened audience” (70). Together the concert, address, and publicity indicate a broad shift in U.S. cultural history, as Americans began consciously to distinguish between music they believed to be elite, uplifting, and sophisticated on the one hand, and the popular and folk music of the masses on the other. Yet the distinction between “cultivated” and “vernacular” traditions, to use the terms coined by musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock in 1969, was not absolute: as historian Dorothy T. Potter states in the introduction to Food for Apollo, “[p]re-Civil War musicians and audiences would find this [distinction] puzzling, since they saw nothing amiss in a popular march or sentimental ballad being on the same program with works by Handel, Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven” (12). Nothing was amiss because all of this music was, in fact, “popular.” A song like “Home, Sweet Home” was as welcome an encore as an opera aria.

Today classical music carries a lot of baggage. Despite the fact that some classical music has become truly popular—think of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” the “Hallelujah” chorus, or “Für Elise”—entrenched cultural hierarchies mean that higher prestige is attached to classical music than other genres. Even as scholars pinpoint how elitism developed in the nineteenth century, they often struggle to ameliorate the division between high and low that is that century’s musical legacy. In Food for Apollo, Potter picks a path around the questions of why classical music has been set apart. Instead, she documents how cultivated music thrived in Philadelphia, an important cultural center in early America. She traces the careers of influential publishers and critics, entrepreneurs, European immigrant composers and composers born in the United States, and touring musicians, charting a course through more than one hundred years of American musical life. From the days when sacred music dominated to the rise of genteel domestic music making in the mid-nineteenth century, Potter shows how porous the boundary between “high” and “low” actually was.

The first three chapters survey music in Philadelphia from 1700 to 1861. Chapter 1, “Philadelphia’s Musical Beginnings, 1700-1786,” provides an overview of the remarkably diverse musical life of the colonial period, when Protestant psalmody thrived against a backdrop of Quaker silence, complemented by the prodigious musical accomplishments of Moravian communities to the west. A confluence of commercial and social trends in the middle of the century supported the growth of secular music in Philadelphia, including the establishment of music stores, concert series, and performance venues, a growing demand for dance and music instructors, and a more lenient religious culture that permitted performances by theatrical touring companies before and especially after the Revolutionary War. In the second and third chapters Potter exhaustively documents musical activity on stage and in print from 1786 to 1861, using the death of publisher Benjamin Carr in 1831 as a dividing point between two eras—first an era in which cultivated music found its footing in the early republic, and then one in which musical life grew more complex, even as Philadelphia’s cultural status slipped behind New York and New Orleans. In these chapters Potter highlights the increasing importance of touring European performers, such as charismatic French bandmaster Louis A. Jullien and singers Maria Malibran and Jenny Lind, while also crediting the accomplishments of home-grown musicians such as composer William Henry Fry. Also noteworthy is Potter’s attention to African Americans’ musical contributions, which she examines through the career of composer and bandleader Francis Johnson. Cultivated music permeated the domestic realm as well as the world of public entertainment throughout this period. The role of the taste-making publishers and instrument makers who brought music into middle-class homes is taken up in chapter 4, “Music for the Masses: Publishers and Piano Makers, 1786-1861.”

Food for Apollo raises an important question: how should we understand the major role European classical music has played in American cultural history? This is a question that has long vexed musicologists, who typically frame it as a debate about what constitutes “American” music. While this is not a question Potter sets out to solve, what is clear in her book is that European émigrés, lured by the commercial possibilities in the United States, played a pivotal role in the both the dissemination and popularization of cultivated music. Yet given the high profile of many European musicians who worked in the United States, it is curious that the figure Potter returns to throughout the book is Mozart, a German musical luminary who never traveled to America, and whose fame in the Anglo-American world was surpassed in his lifetime by George Frederic Handel, Joseph Haydn, and composers whose names are less familiar today. Potter lists two reasons for singling out Mozart: his music proved to be especially adaptable, continuing to satisfy the tastes of Philadelphians even as the music entertainment environment became increasingly competitive; and because of “his unique standing as a cultural icon, in the print literature of the time” (13). Her argument makes a certain amount of sense: that Mozart’s music was literally adaptable can be seen in the many recycled versions of his melodies that appeared regularly in (often pirated) sheet music and in concert. The claim that Mozart occupied a special status as a cultural icon is more difficult to prove, especially since works by the composer, who died in December 1791, were not the most frequently performed or published in antebellum America—a fact Potter forthrightly admits.

Potter turns her full attention to the book’s lodestar in the final chapter, “Historians, Critics, and Romantics: Mozart in Literature, 1803-1861.” Here she tackles the (largely posthumous) transformation of Mozart’s reputation, painstakingly reviewing the English-language biographical and pseudo-biographical studies that began to appear during Mozart’s life. She outlines the emergence of a Mozart mythology that depicted him as a tragic genius, but she also illuminates a lesser-known side of his reputation as a man indebted to the support of his family—appealing character traits for readers steeped in the romantic and sentimental tropes of the antebellum period. In this chapter the book’s themes synchronize, as Mozart’s rising reputation is hitched to the overarching influence of European musical taste in America and the popularity of commercialized cultivated music. Indeed, according to Potter, Mozart’s fate was synonymous with that of cultivated music: in the figure of Mozart, “musical idealism and mass entertainment” were united (159). She shows that the border between cultivated and vernacular music was slippery indeed, while reaffirming Mozart’s central place in the canon of Western classical music. Despite the strength of her argument in this chapter, Potter’s habit of turning to Mozart for examples in previous chapters can be a bit misleading, giving the impression that the composer’s pieces were more ubiquitous than others’ works. Moreover, the chronologically organized book covers a period before Mozart’s iconic reputation was solidified (including the half century before he was even born in 1756), leaving one to wonder if the composer would garner such lavish attention from a writer less enamored of his music.

Potter ventures into the territory of musicologists in Food for Apollo. In the introduction she wonders why music is so often neglected by historians, given the fact that “music is surely the most inclusive of the arts” (11)—a statement whose precise meaning is elusive, but surely speaks to the author’s own passion for the topic. Yet while Potter’s subject matter may be traditionally in the domain of music scholars, her approach is strictly historical: she brings her discipline’s research habits and interpretive instincts to bear on a considerable quantity of data (exemplified in the ample appendix listing of libraries with Mozart titles and Philadelphia publishers who issued the composer’s works in the antebellum period), and steers clear of the musicological methods of musical analysis and hermeneutics. In documenting the activities of key performing groups and individuals, critics, institutions, composers, and publishers, Potter makes good use of the bibliographic scholarship that represents most of musicological inquiry into this period. Works by Richard Wolfe, Oscar Sonneck, and Donald Krummel appear to have been especially useful for her research. Food for Apollo elucidates meaningful cultural trends as ever-increasing commercialization made music more widely available to Philadelphians, and European influences mixed with the efforts of local talent. Potter’s work will be useful to those interested in the details about performers, publishers, composers, critics, entrepreneurs, and inventors in this period.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2.5 (March, 2013).