John Ledyard was ill and haggard. His normally erect frame was bent, making him look years older than his thirty-eight. His hands and arms were mottled with a series of closely placed reddish brown dots (tatau, or “tattoo,” as Captain Cook transcribed the Tahitian word) that resembled a tailor’s pattern for cutting fabric and that he had acquired while sailing with Cook. He carried a heavy overcoat, boots, and socks made from reindeer hide; a fur cap; and a pair of fox-skin gloves lined with rabbit fur. He was penniless, expecting, as he had for most of his days, that friends and acquaintances would provide the essentials of life. Aside from his clothing, his only valuable possession was a travel diary he had kept during his previous two years’ journey.

That journey had taken him overland from London to the Russian city of Yakutsk and then back to London, more than ten thousand miles in total. It was a journey Ledyard undertook alone, intending to survive through sheer determination and the good will of strangers. It was also an incomplete journey. Ledyard had planned to travel across Europe, Russia, Siberia, and the Russian Far East to the Pacific Ocean, and from there to reach the North American continent. He had hoped to become the first man to traverse the continent, traveling from west to east alone and on foot and depending on his limited knowledge of American-Indian languages and customs for his survival. He would collect scientific readings not with instruments and notebooks but with a crudely fashioned sextant and a pointed, stained stick, using the latter to tattoo on his body the coordinates of various landmarks.

Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, the trip was cut short. Russian authorities expelled Ledyard from their dominions before he reached the Pacific Ocean.

His return to London in December of 1789 was nonetheless a happy occasion. For he was greeted with news that a prominent British antislavery activist had formed the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. And the Association was pleased to employ Ledyard to journey to the headwaters of the Niger River, for which he would be paid a modest stipend and, if successful, would achieve the kind of celebrity he craved. He would also, he assured his patrons, return to the America in which he was born and attempt once again to traverse its great expanse. “He promises me,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, then American minister to France, “if he escapes through this journey, he will go to Kentucky and endeavour to penetrate Westwardly from thence to the South sea.”

He was, we all know, unable to keep his promise.

A misdiagnosed stomach ailment took him before he ever made it to inner Africa. The honor of making that journey would go to the great Scottish explorer Mungo Park. And the honor of crossing the American continent would not go to a lone traveler, banking on little more than native wit, but to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the two American military officers later commissioned by the federal government to explore America’s unknown West.

I.

In death, John Ledyard numbered, for a time, among America’s most celebrated sons. Through the early 1790’s, glosses of his life, his letters, and his unpublished writings appeared in American newspapers and gentlemen’s magazines. And the New York editor and poet Philip Freneau solicited subscriptions for an edited collection of Ledyard’s writings, a project he never completed.

In 1828 Jared Sparks, the Unitarian pastor and eventual president of Harvard College, published the first life of Ledyard. The biography represents the culminating moment in America’s celebration of this tragic figure. It gave readers a John Ledyard admirable not so much for what he accomplished but rather for the way he lived. Sparks’s Ledyard approached his various and often impossible projects with fortitude and an abiding refusal to be cowed by failure. As summarized in the book’s final paragraph, “The acts of [Ledyard’s] life demand notice less on account of their results, than of the spirit with which they were performed, and the uncommon traits of character which prompted [him] to their execution. Such instances of decision, energy, perseverance, fortitude, and enterprise, have rarely been witnessed in the same individual; and, in the exercise of these high attributes of mind, his example cannot be too much admired or imitated.”

Sparks’s Ledyard is thus the supreme romantic hero. His adventures are not inhibited by worldly concerns or fear of physical suffering; like the ancient Stoics or the great saints of Christendom, he freely sacrificed himself for some greater cause. Writing amidst the explosion of market-driven individualism that enveloped Jacksonian America, Sparks no doubt saw in Ledyard a worthy role model for his increasingly materialistic, acquisitive countrymen. But of course there is much more to Ledyard, much that may not have interested Sparks.

Consider the following: beneath the stoic adventurer was a man in every way a product of that larger entity we have come to call the British Empire. Ledyard was born in the British colony of Connecticut. His family was thoroughly dependent on the British West Indies trade. His working life began aboard a merchant vessel plying the British Atlantic triangle trade. And his career as traveler and explorer was thoroughly intertwined with the British pursuit of empire. Captain Cook’s third Pacific expedition would never have happened had the Admiralty, the agency charged with protecting Britain’s oceanic trade, not sought easier routes to the rich Pacific basin. And Ledyard’s final two undertakings, the attempted crossing of North America and a journey to Africa, depended partly on the patronage of Britons whose imperial vision was refracted through the benevolent pursuit of scientific facts.

Ledyard was no innocent, unconscious pawn in all this. For in addition to being a product of empire, he was, or at least struggled to be, an agent in empire’s growth. As a lowly British marine, an author, a businessman, a traveler, and explorer, Ledyard looked to the Pacific. It was that vast, rich region that would raise this New Englander from obscurity and poverty.

In addition to a story of self-sacrifice, Ledyard’s biography is thus the story of thousands of Britons who came to see in empire not simply an abstract structure of the sort the American Revolutionaries attacked, but also a source of opportunity: opportunity for personal betterment, for self-realization, for wealth and honor, for all of those things that young Anglo-American men so desperately sought during the latter part of the eighteenth century.

For Ledyard, that is, empire was another arena in which young men could fight to achieve distinction and notoriety, an arena like other new frontiers of individual attainment, including the art market, the popular theater, and Grub Street. The latter proves especially important since Ledyard’s imperial life was equally a life of writing. Everything he did, whether sailing with Cook, crossing Siberia, or promoting the Northwest-Coast fur trade, depended on his ability to translate experience into prose. The written word, as much as patronage or trade, provided the sinews of John Ledyard’s imperial world.

II.

John Ledyard was born in Groton, Connecticut, in 1751, the son of a sea captain and the grandson of one of the colony’s most prominent politicians and magistrates. His early childhood was uneventful, punctuated by the comings and goings of his seafaring father. In 1762 when smallpox took Captain Ledyard, young John’s mother Abigail sent him, her eldest son, to live with his grandfather in Hartford.

A decade later, family connections allowed John to attend Dartmouth College, recently founded in the woods of central New Hampshire. But financial problems and personal clashes with Eleazar Wheelock, the college’s founder, led John to withdraw a year and a half after arriving at Dartmouth. Inspired by his intensely pious mother, John attempted to apprentice for the Congregational ministry, but finding no willing sponsor and desperate for work, he signed on as a common seaman aboard a New London merchant ship. In early 1776, John found his way to England on a fruitless search for wealthy relatives. As an able-bodied man with neither money nor an official letter of introduction, he became a target of Britain’s ceaseless battle against idleness. In Ledyard’s case, that battle meant a choice between life in the army or in the convict colony at Guinea.

Ledyard chose the former but after his unit was ordered to leave for Boston to help put down a colonial rebellion, he petitioned for a transfer, claiming that he could not raise arms against his American brethren. The petition was successful and Ledyard was allowed to enlist as a corporal in the marines, those sea-soldiers whose primary occupation was not putting down rebellions in far off colonies but simply preventing them on his majesty’s ships. When the former North-Sea coal-hauling vessel H. M. S. Resolution, commanded by Captain James Cook, arrived in Plymouth at the end of June 1776, Ledyard joined its complement of nineteen marines.

Ledyard came to see that this voyage of discovery offered him more than simply freedom “from coming to America as her enemy.” The payoff for sailing with Cook would come not from any income paid by the Admiralty or from prize money (which was unlikely on a peaceful exploratory expedition), but from what the voyages did for its participants’ reputations. Under normal circumstances, that would come from military valor and sangfroid. But on a voyage of discovery, the young officers, midshipmen, and ambitious enlisted men had to find other ways to achieve distinction.

And many of them found this in an unlikely place: writing. Every crewmember who could do so kept a journal or notes for some future account of the voyage; others produced drawings and crude charts. That Ledyard saw in such writings a potential source of distinction is perhaps best indicated by the testimony of James Burney, brother of the novelist Fanny and first lieutenant aboard the Discovery, the Resolution’s consort ship.  In a later account of Pacific exploration, Burney recalled that the American “had a passion for lofty sentiment and description” and that after Cook’s death, Ledyard attempted to persuade the voyage’s new commander, Captain Charles Clerke, to allow him to become official “historiographer” of the expedition. To this end, Ledyard presented Clerke with a specimen of his own ethnographic writing, presumably lifted from his personal journal. Ledyard, however, was unaware “how many candidates he would have had to contend with, if the office to which he aspired had been vacant; perhaps not with fewer than with every one in the two ships who kept journals.”

There is no way to know exactly what that number was. Nearly thirty journals and logs remain from the voyage but it is almost certain that many more such documents have been lost. There might have been those who, like Richard Rollett, a sailmaker on Cook’s second Pacific expedition, kept a journal “Interlin’d in his bible.” But if so, they seem to have suffered the same fate as the writings of James Bligh, master aboard the Resolution. Bligh would have been responsible for hourly entries in the ship’s log and, as was common practice, would almost certainly have kept a running journal, narrating the ship’s daily progress. But none of these are known to exist. Similarly, Ledyard’s own journal, which Burney implies he kept and which was supposedly the basis for his only published book, is lost.

III.

If for the moment, Ledyard’s writing did little to distinguish him, he hoped his conduct would. And perhaps the best indication that that conduct was in fact dutiful and worthy comes from Cook’s own written account of the expedition. Ledyard’s name appears there only once, when he volunteered to travel to a Russian camp on the Aleutian Island of Unalaska. In the brief passage describing the incident, Cook referred to Ledyard as “an intelligent man.” That Ledyard appears nowhere else in Cook’s journals is a testament to his good service since Cook almost never mentioned enlisted men by name unless they died or committed a crime.

Perhaps the young wanderer from Connecticut recognized that through quiet service an obscure enlisted man could—much as Cook, a former shop clerk, had done—rise up the naval hierarchy and achieve for himself the kind of recognition he craved.

After more than four years at sea, Ledyard was given reason to believe that his good conduct had served such a purpose. On September 23, 1780, as the Resolution prepared to return to the naval yards at Deptford, John Gore, the Virginian-born commander who had succeeded the deceased Captain James Clerke, promoted Ledyard to sergeant, the highest noncommissioned office in the marines. It was an act that perhaps emboldened Ledyard to petition the first lord of the Admiralty for an officer’s commission. As he wrote in that petition, “[W]hen I reflect that I can appeal to the testimonies of such as have done honour to our Navy, to the World, and to your Lordship’s Patronage . . . I flatter myself justified in looking upon your Lordship for a reward for my past and an encouragement for my future services.”

Though supported by the esteemed Gore, Ledyard’s petition failed to move the head of the Admiralty. Instead of an officer’s commission, this dutiful marine veteran found himself posted aboard a frigate cruising the waters off Long Island. Not surprisingly, the temptation of going home would overcome whatever loyalty the rebuffed Ledyard may have had to the navy. And in 1782, he deserted, probably with the help of his mother who lived in Southold, near the island’s northeastern tip. From here, he made his way to Hartford where, in 1783, he published a book entitled A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and in Quest of a North-West Passage. For the most part, the book is a dry travelogue; it shows little of the “sentimental thought and florid prose” that Burney found in Ledyard’s private discourse.

In early 1783, Ledyard successfully petitioned the Connecticut State Assembly for a copyright (the first ever issued for a book in the United States), apparently fearful that his book’s contents would be pirated. The danger was not so much lost book sales; this was still an age of rampant and unregulated plagiarism. Rather, it was the possibility that someone else would lay claim to knowledge that no other American had and that Ledyard had very good reason to believe would be much valued in the new United States.

The Revolutionary War had left American merchants searching for ways to free themselves from the trade routes of the British dominated Atlantic. And Ledyard had a solution to their problem. Recalling the untapped wealth of Nootka Sound off Vancouver Island he wrote,

[T]he light in which this country will appear most to advantage respects the variety of its animals, and the richness of their furr. They have foxes, sables, hares, marmosets, ermines, weazles, bears, wolves, deer, moose, dogs, otters, beavers, and a species of weazel called the glutton; the skin of this animal was sold at Kamchatka, a Russian factory on the Asiatic coast for sixty rubles, which is near 12 guineas, and had it been sold in China it would have been worth 30 guineas . . . Neither did we purchase a quarter part of the beaver and other furr skins we might have done, and most certainly should have done had we known of meeting the opportunity of disposing of them to such an astonishing profit.

The commercial possibilities of the Pacific were thus nearly unlimited. Those exotic goods, particularly Chinese tea and porcelain, that occasionally made it to North America, usually via Britain, and that were almost unaffordable could now be obtained for the price of a few sea otter skins. And the fur trade, which by the late eighteenth century had nearly vanished from eastern North America, could become once again a viable American business.

The Revolutionary financier Robert Morris found Ledyard’s case persuasive and paid him a modest retainer to secure a ship, crew, and other investors. But after one partner pulled out, Morris too abandoned Ledyard, leaving the former mariner with little hope of finding American support for his costly scheme. Part of the problem was that after Cook’s expedition, the Northwest Coast had become the focus of an increasingly tense dispute between the British and the Spanish. For an unarmed American merchant ship to venture into those waters was thus risky. Perhaps Morris and his colleagues recognized this and, still seeking alternative markets for American goods, decided to find a different route to Asia. They did this shortly after parting ways with Ledyard when on February 22, 1784, the 360-ton Empress of China sailed from New York for Canton. Instead of relying on Northwest Coast furs, this venture relied primarily on ginseng gathered from the New England countryside.

Shortly before the Empress sailed, Ledyard traveled to France in search of other investors, and formed a brief partnership with John Paul Jones, America’s first great naval commander. But nothing came of this and Ledyard found himself in Paris in 1787 with no money and few prospects. Thomas Jefferson suggested that he undertake a very different kind of enterprise, an enterprise that would take him to the Pacific not as a fur trader but as a lone traveler, trekking east across the North American continent.

IV.

If there is more to John Ledyard than Jared Sparks would have us believe, it lies not in Ledyard’s accomplishments, but, as Sparks suggested, in his way of living. To Sparks, the latter suggested stoicism and selflessness. But a fresh look at John Ledyard suggests something more. Far from simply a man of extraordinary determination and strength of character, John Ledyard was a man of his times. Where he went, who he knew, how he traveled, his peculiar talents all reflected processes that drew in people from throughout the British Empire. Even something so mundane as the writing of a travel journal can be understood in this light. Whether sailing with Captain Cook or traveling through the Russian Far East, Ledyard wrote with the expectation that his words would be consumed by men like Robert Morris or Thomas Jefferson, men who could find valuable talent in this strange traveler. It would be through their favor that Ledyard’s fragile purchase in this world would be extended. They would feed and cloth him. And they would affirm his good reputation, assuring him the kind of lasting notoriety that all aspiring men of the age sought. Empire would do for John Ledyard what it had done for so many aspiring young Britons, from Benjamin Franklin to Captain Cook, the fortunate son of an ordinary day laborer. It would make him a man worth knowing. And this was John Ledyard’s supreme desire. Writing to his mother shortly before his death, he observed, “Born in obscure little Groton, formed by nature and education . . . behold me the greatest traveller in history, exccentric, irregular, rapid, unaccountable, curious, and without vanity, majestic as a comet. I afford a new character to the world, and a new subject to biography.”

Further Reading:

Since Jared Sparks’s The Life of John Ledyard, The American Traveller (Cambridge, Mass., 1828), two complete biographies of Ledyard have appeared: Kenneth Munford’s John Ledyard: an American Marco Polo (Portland, Ore., 1939) and Helen Augur’s Passage to Glory: John Ledyard’s America (New York, 1946). Also see Larzer Ziff’s useful sketch in his Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780-1910 (New Haven, 2000), 17-57. The most comprehensive treatment of Ledyard’s Siberia journey is Stephen D. Watrous’s detailed introduction to his superb edition of Ledyard’s Russia journal and related writings, John Ledyard’s Journey Through Russia and Siberia, 1787-1788 (Madison, Wisc., 1966), 3-87. Also see my “Visions of Another Empire: John Ledyard, an American Traveler Across the Russian Empire, 1787-1788,” in The Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Fall 2004): 347-80. On Ledyard’s years with Captain Cook, see the introduction by Sinclair H. Hitchings to John Ledyard’s Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, James Kenneth Munford, ed. (Corvallis, Ore., 1963), xxi-xlix.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

Edward G. Gray teaches early American history at Florida State University and is writing a biography of John Ledyard.

Or, why I never made it to Chichen Itza

When I began writing pieces for Pastimes, my kids, Lily, Max, and Sam, were eight years old. They were excited about the world and just starting to think historically. This made for great traveling. As a family, we spent free time exploring everything from whaling museums in New England to American Indian cliff dwellings in New Mexico. In short, we had fun.

Last year, as the kids approached twelve and a half, it rapidly became clear that our fun was dwindling. While the kids were fully aware that there is a difference between “then” and “now,” they were increasingly engaged in navel gazing or shrouded in brain fog. Well, that’s not entirely fair. They were beginning to be far more curious about the world present and past when they were with anyone but their siblings, my husband Mark, or me.

For years, friends with teenagers had greeted my happy narratives of exploration with knowing half-smiles. “Enjoy it while you can,” they’d tell me. “Just you wait.” It was inconceivable to me that Lily, Max, and Sam would transit the heavens, turning into adolescent zombies who proclaimed boredom when faced with anything having to do with family, history, and adventure. And yet, with astronomical regularity, as they approached Magic Thirteen, Lily, Max, and Sam began to retreat into themselves.

This became dramatically apparent to me when the five of us went to Cancun last spring. I’m less surprised that it happened than I am at its force and speed. Adolescents are supposed to get snotty with their moms and dads, right? Their diminished desire to spend time with parents is the crucial first step they take as they separate and create their own social and familial galaxies. I guess I just hadn’t expected it to happen so soon or to be so nasty. I especially hadn’t anticipated what this shift would mean for our high-spirited, history-themed family outings.

In the middle of last year’s fierce New England winter, I trawled the Internet and found a special for a beach resort on the “Mexican Riviera” with two swimming pools, snorkeling, bicycles, exhibits of endangered wildlife, and free excursions to nearby Maya ruins. Like a landlocked cruise, the resort included all meals and evening entertainment, including karaoke night. We could relax in the sun, the kids could claim a bit of independence on those bicycles, and we could see interesting animals and have our history lessons. I was all but packed.

From the moment we arrived, I could tell I was going to have a hard time making peace with resort culture. To give you an idea of the place, imagine walking into the breakfast buffet, a cavernous space filled with floral arrangements and tables groaning under the weight of most every conceivable breakfast food, including my favorite—plaintains sautéed in a honey syrup and sprinkled with coconut—and Sam’s favorite, Zucaritos (Frosted Flakes here in Boston, little sugary things in Mexico). Because our Cancun resort included unlimited alcohol, there were even cocktails at breakfast. Not up for an actual slice of melon in the morning? No problem. Try some Midori on ice.

Though I was embarrassed by the excess, I appeased my conscience by reminding myself that we’d be getting out of the compound and away from the booze to hike in the ruins. I was most excited about seeing Chichen Itza, but I picked Tulum first because it was closest. Christopher Columbus encountered Mayas in a canoe. Unbeknownst to him, they’d been living on the Yucatan peninsula for a millennium. We, meanwhile, encountered them on a tour bus. Our guides—several short, squat, trilingual men who looked like animated Maya carvings in white polyester guyaberas and dark dress slacks—regaled us with stories of the history of their people.

As Lily complained of car sickness and Max and Sam dramatically yawned (my children?), the guides told us that the Maya had erected Tulum atop a cliff overlooking the Caribbean as a combination fort and lighthouse. Gesturing with smooth, brown hands, one guide said in English that his ancestors probably built Tulum in the tenth century at a time of declining power so that they could protect themselves from invaders, constructing a wall around three sides of the sixteen-acre site. On its fourth side, he said, Tulum faces out onto sparkling turquoise water. Farmers and commoners, he told us, likely lived outside the fort. Craftspeople and religious elites lived within the walls, performing rituals and directing ocean-going trade. The Maya living at Tulum posted flags at strategic points, signaling to traders the best way to navigate a reef off the rocky shore. Our guide encouraged us to look for a neat, rectangular opening high up on a wall in the main temple, known as the Castillo. Superb astronomers, he told us, the Maya positioned the window so that sunshine would strike particular images carved on a post, announcing the equinoxes and solstices.

We filed out of the bus into oppressive heat and choking dust. Told that we needed to walk to the site, we took off, children shuffling and grumbling, angling for soda. Our guide met us close to the fort and made quick work of the history of the distant past, explaining in great detail Maya calendars and their reliance on constellations in the sky. He slowed down as he narrated twentieth-century Maya politics, describing how his people had been living at Tulum in the late 1950s when the Mexican government decided to excavate and renovate the thousand-year-old structures. Lily, Max, and Sam perked up when our guide said that, at that time, the kids didn’t go to school or wear shoes. Now, he told us, they live off-site and own McDonald’s franchises, which aren’t lucrative because tourists like us stay at resorts and don’t want to eat Quarter Pounders. Sam allowed that he wouldn’t mind a QP right then and there. I reminded him that at least he could look forward to tomorrow morning’s Zucaritos.

We ended our tour at the Castillo, studying the rectangular opening. Mark asked another family to take a picture of all five of us. Max and Sam refused to stop pulling faces. Then came paternal directions concerning hats, sunscreen, and water consumption. Noncompliance elicited more forceful commands. As surely as a ray of sunlight lands on a Maya stele to announce the passing of a season, Max beamed an insult at Mark’s heart. It landed on target, separating time past from time future, announcing Max’s shift from childhood to adolescence. Just audibly, but with laser-like precision, Max snarled, “Dad’s an asshole.”

A few months before, Mark and I had driven to Providence—alone—to hear Bill Harley in concert. Harley is a masterful storyteller whose audience is usually made up of children. He was giving a rare “adult” concert, not with X-rated subject matter but with stories parents would enjoy. We’d laughed spasmodically as Harley went through “Neanderthal Boy,” a tale about raising teenage sons. Harley recounted the experience of having watched the Olympics with Noah, his oldest, when Noah was a young child. “Dad,” Noah had asked adoringly, “you’re a really fast runner. Why aren’t you in the Olympics?” When Noah turned twelve, his tone changed. “Dad?” he asked, “am I going to go bald like you?” Harley was astonished when Noah, at sixteen, raged that Harley had “a small, pathetic life.” Who was this sneering teen who mostly just grunted like a Neanderthal? Where had the adoring boy gone?

I looked at Max with similar shock and wistfulness. Such an awful thing to say, calling Mark an asshole. As I gazed out at the ocean, I knew that Lily was wishing she had her best friend Sylvie with her so that the two could go swimming; that Sam would be happiest in a hammock, reading Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, rather than actually hiking; and that Max wanted to be anywhere Mark and I weren’t. I was just so sad to see my children turning into a pack of hobbits, adventure-averse in the extreme.

When we returned to the resort, Max announced that he would not be going on the next day’s tour of Chichen Itza. Max couldn’t stay alone, Mark said, so he’d hang back as well. If Dad and Max weren’t going, Sam said, he certainly wouldn’t submit himself to another long, boring bus ride and hot, dusty, pointless hike. Lily, wanting desperately to please me but agreeing with Sam, struggled to make up her mind. “Come or stay, whatever you want,” I snapped, pushing back in the voice of an adolescent from whose company I thought I’d long ago parted. I hadn’t come all the way to the Yucatan to listen to a bunch of angry teenagers. For me, it was Chichen Itza or bust.

That night, I lay awake in bed. To go or not to go? I flopped around under the covers. I learn by seeing and doing, so touring Chichen Itza was my best shot at knowing something about people who had lived impossibly long ago. But the kids were right. The bus ride was long and boring. The air was dusty and hot. And besides, there was so little time left at the beach on this vacation—so little time when these kids would happily tolerate my company.

I wish I could tell you that I turned on my heel the next morning and took off for Chichen Itza, but I didn’t. I stayed behind at the resort with Mark and the kids. We did nothing monumental at all. We snorkeled. We swam. We read. We watched cable TV. And, of course, we ate.

Later, back in snowy Boston, I winced as I looked at the photograph of the five of us at the Castillo. A worse photograph it could not have been. Not a one of us looked happy. Motivated mostly by vanity, I hit the delete button on the camera. The image instantly disappeared. And then I quickly wished I hadn’t erased that photograph. It captured the split second before Max insulted Mark, before his adolescent equinox, perhaps the last true moment of his childhood. As I write this, almost a year later—a year, I’ll add, punctuated with more ugly comments than I care to recount—the trip to Cancun itself seems like an archaeological site, littered with traces of what once was.

Further Reading:

To learn more about Bill Harley, go to www.billharley.com. The following are helpful in exploring what may be for you uncharted territories: For adolescence, see Anthony E. Wolf, Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall? A Parent’s Guide to the New Teenager (New York, [1991] 2002). For the Maya, see C. Bruce Hunter, A Guide to Ancient Maya Ruins (Norman, Okla., 1986); Richard D. Perry, Exploring Yucatan: A Traveler’s Anthology (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2002); Robert J. Sharer, The Ancient Maya, 5th ed. (Stanford, [1946] 1994).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

Catherine A. Corman is a nonresident fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University and a member of the Writers’ Room of Boston. Corman has recently published Positively ADD: Real Success Stories to Inspire Your Dreams (New York, 2006), a series of profiles of successful adults with attention deficit disorder. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband and their thirteen-year-old triplets.

Beckoned by landscapes beyond the archive

As a lover of archives and a historian of the nineteenth century, I cherish my time inside the vault, thriving on chilled air and pitiable handwriting. I was therefore surprised to find that following every lead in a collection of family correspondence took me out to the open road, tracking down an intersection in a New England town, a house in a Gulf South city, even a particular expanse of sand on a Caribbean island.

My recently published book, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (2006), began with a trip to the Special Collections Library at Duke University. There I found a collection of five hundred or so letters written by the members of a white, working-class family from New England. Among the letters, those of one family member particularly captured my attention. Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly married a fellow New Englander, but unlike Connolly’s brothers who fought for the Union, her husband fought and died for the Confederacy. Then, after the war, Eunice married a man of color, a well-to-do British West Indian sea captain, who brought her to his home in the Cayman Islands where she lived for the rest of her life.

To write Eunice’s story—which is also a story about the mercurial nature and abiding power of racial classification—I followed her: from New Hampshire, where she married her first husband and worked in the cotton mills; down to Mobile, Alabama, where she moved in 1860, hoping for a better life in a booming southern city; back to New England, where she returned in the middle of the war, after her Yankee husband had enlisted in the Confederate Army; and across the Caribbean Sea to Grand Cayman Island.

In an effort to plot the transience of Eunice’s New England family—they were separated by marriage and remarriage, repeated searches for wage labor, and the Civil War—I compiled a master list of places where each relative had lived, then matched street names and the occasional house number with city directories, census records, and vintage village maps. I hadn’t at first intended to take my research beyond the literal vault, but when I began to visit local archives, I found it irresistible to scout out the places described in the letters. Each time I set out, I imagined that finding a road or a building would bring me closer to past lives than a mere letter ever could. At the very least, I hoped, my excursions would enhance my book’s descriptive narrative.

In Manchester, New Hampshire, where Eunice’s story began, the places of her life turned out to be the most elusive. I walked a long way on a gray day, up and down Mast Road in Piscataquog Village and across the bridge in West Manchester where, according to a city directory, Eunice, her husband William Stone, and their young son had lived in the early 1850s. Without a house number or an intersection, though, there was nothing to point me toward Eunice’s daily whereabouts. (For Eunice’s mother, I had a rare actual address in downtown Manchester, but this too proved elusive, since all traces of 18 Hanover Street had been swallowed by the Queen-Anne style buildings erected in the late nineteenth century.)

In Mobile, Alabama, where Eunice lived when the war broke out, I made my way down Government Street, up Broad, and along Old Shell. “When I left, Ellen was living on the corner of Shell Road & Hallett Street,” Eunice later wrote, referring to the sister who had preceded her to Mobile (and who became an ardent Confederate). The Stones had boarded with Ellen’s family, and for the first time I found a house (fig. 1). A local guidebook revealed that the bright blue building on the northwest corner of Shell and Hallett had been a sashmaker’s cottage in the nineteenth century, and indeed Eunice’s husband and brother-in-law were both carpenters who fashioned sashes for windows and door frames.

“Excuse me, sir, do you live here?” I asked a man entering the house. Through the distinct aroma of morning drink, he told me that the house, an old one indeed, was now broken up into apartments. Eunice crossed these very corners, I told myself, but the hanging traffic signal, telephone poles, and stop sign seemed to make her ghost shy. Later that day, a file at the Mobile Historic Development Commission revealed that a fire had broken out several years earlier, and before that a car had driven into the house, prompting reconstruction. Maybe so much change had driven away the spirits of the past.

During the war, Eunice returned to the North, to Claremont, New Hampshire, where she struggled to support herself and her two children as a washerwoman. On a visit there, I used a nineteenth-century map and a Chamber of Commerce tourist pamphlet to plot the crossroads at which her rented tenement stood. “Take the coach and tell them when you get to the village that you want to go to Mrs. Stones on Washington street next house to Leonard Fishers,” Eunice had directed her mother, traveling from Massachusetts in 1864. The old map clearly marked Fisher’s house near the intersection of Washington and Winter Streets, but when I drove by (then turned around and drove by again), I saw that whatever surroundings Eunice knew had been obliterated by a low-rise apartment complex and a rickety commercial strip (“Birney’s Mini-Mart,” “Our Famous Fried Chicken,” “Claremont Speedway”). For good measure, I followed Eunice’s descriptions to where her in-laws had lived farther down Washington Street; here the approximate location yielded quickly to left-turn lanes, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, and Wal-Mart. No welcome for nineteenth-century ghosts there either (fig. 2).

Suffering from the shock of widowhood after the Civil War, Eunice convalesced in her mother’s subsequent home on Mammoth Road in Dracut, Massachusetts, just across the bridge from Lowell. This dwelling was also the likely venue of Eunice’s 1869 wedding to the black sea captain, Smiley Connolly. At the Center for Lowell History, I examined city directories and census records, counting back from where Mammoth Road meets the New Hampshire border—that’s where the census taker for Middlesex County began his rounds. Then a local genealogist with a pick-up truck drove me to the house.

About a half-mile beyond the intersection of Mammoth and Lakeview (Dunkin’ Donuts graced a corner; we had already passed a McDonald’s) stood a building worthy of transporting a historian back in time: a white-painted colonial with eight neatly black-shuttered windows and a picket fence on either side. As we walked around the old graveyard and down the hill, I felt a vague sense of proximity to Eunice, but these were the early days of my research, and it didn’t occur to me to knock on the door of her former home.

Another part of my Massachusetts research, though, allowed a closer communion with the landscape of the past. An archivist at the Center for Lowell History assisted me as I traced Eunice’s ambitious brother, Henry Richardson, from one city directory to the next (Henry never again spoke to Eunice after she married across the color line). In the 1890s, Henry had served as agent of the Appleton Mills, the highest local executive, and I found him listed as living on Highland Street in Lowell. “I know the people who live in that house,” the archivist told me; they were good friends, in fact, and she promptly arranged a visit.

The Italianate-style, yellow clapboard, dating from the 1860s, bore a historic plaque naming it as the home of the Appleton Mills agent. The interior had been remodeled over time, but the owners served coffee and scones in the dining room where the floor, fireplace, bay window, light fixtures, door, and wood trim were all original. Eunice had never entered these rooms (she died in the Caribbean in 1877), but Henry had appointed himself keeper of the family correspondence, and no doubt the bundles of letters now housed at Duke once rested somewhere inside. Here, as in Dracut, I sensed the spark of time travel, but even the most vaporous spirits seemed unable to slip between the apertures of the past and this particular May evening.

In tiny Morristown, Vermont, where Eunice went to live in 1866 after her mother could no longer support her, I came the closest to meeting my protagonist. The president of the Morristown Historical Society (a ninth-generation Vermonter) helped me locate the house where Eunice had boarded with Melissa and Moses Rankin, her deceased husband’s sister and brother-in-law (fig. 3)—again we used a nineteenth-century map that included the names of each dwelling’s occupants. That July day, I stood across the road and looked; the next day, when I returned on my own, I knocked on the door.

Here’s how I render the scene in The Sea Captain’s Wife : “When there was no answer at the front, I walked around to the side (Saturday, a car in the driveway, laundry on the clothesline—someone should have been inside). A woman emerged. ‘I’m writing a book about a person who lived in this house in 1866,’ I told her. The woman had never heard the name Rankin, but I sat at her kitchen table while she retrieved the papers from her late husband’s search through property records, and in his notes we found the name. The interior of the house had been greatly altered in the intervening 137 years, the woman explained—the center hallway, stairwell, and chimney moved; small rooms opened up—but she pointed out original beams and walls that had known Eunice’s presence. She rummaged through a drawer to find her own snapshots of the house in wintertime (how it looked when Eunice lived there, we imagined) and generously gave them to me. The unbroken quilt of snow in the photographs lent a timeless quality to the surroundings, making it easier to envision Eunice’s presence at the front door.”

But it was actually much harder than I made it sound. For one thing, I was more nervous about intruding than those breezy sentences convey. For another, it proved more difficult to imagine Eunice’s presence than I would have liked. “I have a fire every night and morning,” she wrote from Morristown, describing how she would “lay down with a hot free stone and the curtains put down.” But the chimney had been moved and the rooms reconfigured; I knew Eunice had been there, but I couldn’t bring that sentence quite as alive as I’d hoped.

On Grand Cayman, in the village of East End, I also found a relatively unaltered landscape; once a settlement of former slaves, East End has been slower than the rest of the island to transform into a destination for tourists and wealthy expats. In her letters back to New England in the 1870s, Eunice described the house that Captain Connolly was building for her, noting how the many bedrooms would open up, one next door to the other. When I asked a Connolly descendant where Eunice and Smiley had lived, he exclaimed, “I can show you!” The house, which had been inherited by one of Smiley’s sons from his first marriage, was destroyed in a twentieth-century hurricane, but this seventy-eight-year-old man recalled the mahogany foundations and took me to the land, where a newer house now stood.

Another descendant also recalled the house, including the wooden gallery that ran all around the top part of the second story—but she remembered the dwelling as standing on a plot of land about a mile farther west (and inherited by a different son, her grandfather). She, in turn, took me to that piece of land, where a bar called the Pirate’s Cove now stood. There had been a loft upstairs, she recalled, and a porch facing the sea.

The caretaker climbed a ladder and shook two coconuts from a palm tree; then one of his workers cut them open so we could drink the milk. Assuming that Eunice had lived on this expanse of beach, I tentatively envisioned her—of course she sipped milk from coconuts in summer too—until our host informed us that the palm trees were only recently planted. They hadn’t been there at all in Eunice’s day (fig. 4).

Maybe the writer Geoff Dyer, posing as a struggling biographer of D. H. Lawrence, put it best: “You try saying a mantra to yourself,” Dyer writes. “‘D. H. Lawrence lived here.’ You say, ‘I am standing in the place he stood, seeing the things he saw . . . ,’ but nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same.” Or listen to literature professor Saidiya Hartman, walking through a castle in Ghana that once imprisoned enslaved Africans: “I closed my eyes and strained to hear the groans and cries that once echoed in the dungeon, but the space was mute.”

I could have gone back to knock on the door in Mobile or Dracut or to see the Vermont house in wintertime. But during my travels, I learned that a place in the present is less likely to conjure the past than it is to confirm our distance from the past. A place by itself, of course, isn’t a time machine, since the passage of time can so thoroughly alter a landscape. But even buildings little marked by time’s passage can remain unyielding, surrounded as they are by evidence of change—the fast-food chain across the street, the interstate highway that got you there.

As a historian of the Civil War era, I’ve walked through the meadows and woods of preserved battlefields only to feel the tug of the time machine interrupted by the rows of monuments; though intended as testaments to the past, those imposing markers serve also to erase a landscape’s past. (I remember Professor John Murrin of Princeton University remarking that he liked to ask tour guides how the troops in the American Revolution shot at each other with all those monuments in the way.)

In The Sea Captain’s Wife, I open each chapter with a brief act of historical imagination, describing Eunice’s surroundings when she lived in northern New England, the Gulf South, and the British Caribbean. “To find a view that she took in,” I write in the chapter that takes place in Cayman, “look past East End’s convenience store, gas station, and lighthouse (built only in the twentieth century), toward any unobstructed vista of the crystalline jade and turquoise waters, next to a band of fine white sand or the rugged ironshore, that jagged, blackened rock that rings the Cayman coastline.” But in the process of writing such descriptions, I came to see that this kind of exercise works better for the reader than for the historian. Even in Vermont, where I explored the house in which Eunice had sipped whiskey by a fireplace in 1866—even there, I found the best I could hope for was a subtle combination of the evocative and the elusive.

Other historians may be more adept at time travel than I. For me, those well-preserved letters—faded ink on creased paper—ultimately brought me closer to Eunice than the places where she had lived and walked ever could. In the end, the streets and the street corners, the houses and the sand, offered only the least I had hoped for: a way to write a more richly descriptive historical narrative, one that permits readers—in an armchair, on the subway, in a waiting room—what the literal landscape did not permit me: a journey back in time. The historian’s imagination will always be interrupted by gaps in the sources and by the ever-eroding landscape. Our readers, on the other hand, unburdened by literal encounters with places and change, possess the luxury of imagination unmoored.

Further Reading:

For writers grappling with an unyielding landscape, see Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Struggling with D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1997) and Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, 2007).

Various historians have invoked the land as a historical document. In Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge, 1993), Winthrop D. Jordan imagines the sounds of Mississippi in 1861, including thudding axes, hooting owls, and wind in a chimney. In The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994), John Demos describes the way his protagonist walked on snow, through (as revealed in a footnote) his own experience of “wintertime travel in the New England woodlands.” For The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998), Patricia Cline Cohen strolled the streets of lower Manhattan where her protagonist lived and died. For “The Provincial Archive as a Place of Memory,” History Workshop Journal 58 (Autumn 2004): 149-66, Rebecca J. Scott walked into the Cuban countryside in search of clues to the rebels she was tracing. In A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (New York, 2003), Suzanne Lebsock lay down on the ground in a farmyard so a companion could tell if a dead body was visible from a certain spot. In The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows (New York, 2006), Gabor Borritt, who has lived on a Gettysburg farm for twenty-five years, lends the authenticity of place to his study of Abraham Lincoln. In Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (New York, 2006), Scott Reynolds Nelson offers a meditation on present-day pine trees in order to trace the history of a particular part of Virginia. For The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York, 2006), Daniel Mendelsohn crawled into an underground hole in the Ukraine to call up the experience of relatives who died in the Holocaust.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Martha Hodes is a professor of history at New York University. The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century is an alternate selection for Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Guild, and Quality Paperback Book Club; it was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize and was named one of the best books of 2006 by Library Journal . You can find out more at The Sea Captain’s Wife. Hodes is also the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South and the editor of Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.

Calling on the daughters of Dr. Byles

In 1776, the Reverend Mather Byles was a nuisance to the rebels, and his Loyalist politics got him fired by his congregation at the Hollis Street Church. In 1777, his puns and wisecracks about the rebel cause got him arrested and convicted of being a dangerous person. The Committee of Safety, charged by the citizens of Boston with maintaining civil order during the Revolutionary crisis, sentenced him to house arrest and posted an armed guard at his home. But by 1820, that war had long been over, and Mather Byles had long been dead. Only his two daughters, Mary and Catherine, unmarried seamstresses, one seventy, the other sixty-seven, remained in the old family house, living private lives with little money and no political influence. One might suppose that by then, nearly a half-century after Lexington and Concord, bitter memories in Boston of the Loyalism of the Byles family would have faded, passions cooled. Still, the Revolution was a civil war. Do the embers of civil wars ever entirely cool? Observe this anonymous letter, received by the sisters in 1820 and carefully preserved in their files.

Dear old maids,

You who are paupers yet profess the contemptable [sic] kingly opinions of your tyrannical father—you would be more proud to kiss the hand or great toe of the fornicator George the fourth than perform the command of Deity Increase and multiply and replenish the earth—you who think more of family descent than goodness—poor weak simple dried up old virgins who does not despise you and your contemptable [sic] opinions. The writer gives you notice that unless you alter your proud course of conduct within one month your old rotten house shall totter and your first warning will be broken glass.

My sister has a box of extraordinary things such as are not to be seen every day.

Shortly thereafter, Mary and Catherine awoke to find their property vandalized and their trees hacked. But such assaults only stiffened the backs of the stubborn sisters and made them increasingly defensive—many people said increasingly proud—about their family history and their father’s reputation. After all, they did have contemptible opinions. Through the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, Mary and Catherine obstinately, fiercely stuck to their convictions, insisting until their deaths—Mary’s in 1835, Catherine’s in 1837—that they remained loyal and unrepentant subjects of the British Crown who had been robbed of their rights as Englishwomen and marooned on a hostile peninsula on the shores of Boston Bay.

Despite this ugly anonymous letter, a small circle of friends occasionally came to tea and now and then helped them financially with a gift or by bringing them some sewing. Lydia Maria Francis, the young novelist fresh from the publication of Hobomok, insinuated herself with these friends, gaining an invitation to call upon the sisters. She had planned to write a novel about the Revolution, and she turned to the sisters for family stories about the siege of Boston and about their father’s famous wit. Francis’s meetings with the sisters persuaded them that in this young American novelist they had finally found a sympathetic soul who would honor them and their parents for courageous adherence to principle and who would, at last, grant their father the courtesy he deserved. But when the novel appeared in 1825, Catherine and Mary found Mather Byles mocked and his enemies celebrated.

The novel, entitled The Rebels, was also a surprise to the young novelist; although she might have anticipated the Byles sisters’ reaction, she could not have imagined that some of Boston’s prominent families would turn positively frigid towards her. They thought that Francis had behaved unscrupulously by gaining the sisters’ trust and then abusing it. Making matters worse, several families found their own ancestors targets of heavy-handed satire in The Rebels. Politics aside, Miss Francis had unwittingly outraged old Boston’s sense of propriety, and Boston had its ways of punishing social offenders. Humbled, she wrote the sisters an apology. It is a strange rhetorical mélange of contrition and self-justification. Shortly thereafter, the young teacher Elizabeth Palmer Peabody noted in her journal that the Byles sisters had replied to Francis with “a very dry note, refusing to see her.” But they did assure her that “they hoped to meet her in another world”—and they made sure to keep Miss Francis’s letter.

In 1833, the well-known Philadelphia writer Eliza Leslie came to Boston, hoping to meet the now legendary daughters of Dr. Byles. A visit was arranged, but evidently nobody had briefed her about what to expect at the house on Byles’s Corner, near the Boston Neck and a short walk from the Hollis Street meetinghouse, where Mather Byles had been dismissed long ago. Burned before by a visiting writer, the sisters had not forgotten. Miss Francis had confirmed their belief that in a republic, the word of a lady or a gentleman cannot be trusted. Still, the friend who had asked them to receive Miss Leslie was a dear person, a Bostonian who had always generously assisted them. One could hardly deny her this favor. But be wary.

Eliza Leslie was shocked to see the old house on Byles’s Corner. Frame, plain, and black as iron, it looked forbidding among the other dwellings of modern Boston. Cracks and chinks gave the board fence surrounding it a dilapidated air; the gate dangled by a leather string. The front steps were decayed and collapsing. Yet, on that mild summer morning the lot was green, with wild flowers amid the grass. Two giant horse-chestnut trees threw deep, pleasant shadows on the roof and walls. As Leslie and her companion walked up the narrow path to the doorway, they thought they saw a female figure hastily flitting away from the front window.

Their knock was answered immediately by Miss Mary Byles, a broad-framed, smiling old lady dressed in a black worsted petticoat and a white short-gown with a muslin kerchief tucked at her neck. Her full-bordered white linen cap nearly covered her smooth white hair. She ushered her guests into the parlor, where they encountered bare floors and a few pieces of very old furniture. Miss Leslie’s companion inquired about the health of Catherine Byles, and Mary ruefully said that her sister was quite unwell, having passed a bad night with rheumatism. As Miss Leslie and her companion sat a bit nervously in the parlor, they expressed regrets at missing the chance to meet the younger sister, but while they murmured in disappointment the door suddenly opened and Miss Catherine swept into the room, greeting her visitors warmly and dismissing her rheumatism with a smile. She also wore a black bombazine petticoat, a short gown, and a close-lined, bordered cap, but her appearance differed markedly from Mary’s. Catherine, wrinkled and thin, had sharp, angular features.

The sisters immediately directed their visitors’ attention to a magnificent portrait of their father done years earlier by John Singleton Copley, pointing to Dr. Byles’s signet ring with its splendid red cornelian—an exact likeness of the ring itself. They turned next to a self-portrait of their nephew, the now famous portraitist Mather Brown. Though the sisters lamented that they had not seen the poor boy for nearly forty years, they knew of his huge success in England. Why, Catherine had given him his first drawing lessons while he lived with them in the years before their father had lost his pastorate and salary. When the rebels convicted and sentenced Father, he had no money to keep young Brown, so the boy went off at age fifteen to follow the army camps, making his way as a painter of miniatures. Later, their father’s influence, and that of his boyhood chum Benjamin Franklin, got Brown to England, where he would study with the great history painter Benjamin West. He became so admired that he even painted the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York! But he never forgot his Aunts Polly and Kitty. Look closely at the self-portrait. In his hand he holds an open page containing the very words of a letter Kitty had sent him!

“What would have happened,” Catherine asked, “if we had been able to persuade Father to give up America and move to England at the end of the war?”

“Why, in that case,” Mary answered, “we should all have been introduced at court; and the king and queen would have spoken to us and, I dare say, would have thanked us for our loyalty.”

After showing her the paintings, Mary Byles invited Miss Leslie to sit in a great, black, oaken armchair, which had been sent from England more than a century earlier as a present to their maternal grandfather, Governor Tailer. It was elaborately ornamented, with a carved crown on the top of the back. Its velvet cushion, Mary explained, was always kept upside down to preserve it—but for her guest’s comfort, she turned it right-side-up so that Miss Leslie might sit upon velvet.

“Do you find it an easy seat?” inquired Mary.

“Oh, yes, indeed, quite easy,” replied Miss Leslie.

“I am surprised at that,” rejoined Mary. “I wonder how a republican can sit easy under the crown.”

Startled, Miss Leslie did not quite know how to reply to this unexpectedly political pleasantry—but then she saw Mary and Catherine exchange a smile.

Catherine next brought Miss Leslie to the very table where Dr. Franklin took tea on his last visit to Boston. While the guests admired the curious table, Mary dragged from a closet a huge, intricately carved, iron-and-timber bellows, which she judged to be two hundred years old and which she invited her visitors to work—but it was so heavy that only a very strong man could have done so.

Then Mary turned to Catherine and asked, “Have you no curiosities to show the ladies?”

“Nothing, I fear, that the ladies would care to look at.”

“To the contrary,” said Mary, “my sister has a box of extraordinary things such as are not to be seen every day.”

Thereupon, Miss Leslie’s companion begged the sisters to permit their Philadelphia visitor a glimpse of Miss Catherine’s collection of curiosities. After a little coaxing, Catherine produced a square bandbox. She took from it the envelope of a letter to their father addressed by Alexander Pope himself. There were four commissions, each bearing the signature of a different British sovereign at the top of the document—demonstrating, Catherine explained, that royalty comes before everything else. One bore Queen Anne’s signature; another, George I’s; another, George II’s; and George III’s graced the last. The next treasure was a piece of moss gathered from the roof of Bradgate Hall, the birthplace of Lady Jane Gray, whose brief nine-day reign preceded Queen Mary’s. The last was an artificial mulberry that looked surprisingly real.

“And now,” said Catherine, “I will show you the greatest curiosity of all.” She removed an inner pasteboard box that fit within the larger one, set it on the floor, and took from a round hole in the lid an artificial snake. With some mysterious twist, she set it in motion, and it ran about in the neighborhood of Miss Leslie’s feet. After all had remarked on its ingenuity, Catherine told the snake that it was time to go home. As she returned it to its box, it seemed to wiggle away.

“What!” said Catherine, giving the snake two or three smart taps, “Won’t you go in? Are you a rebel too?” Immediately, the serpent straightened and scurried back into its box.

“Now,” said Mary to Catherine, “won’t you show us your extraordinary trick, which always astonishes the ladies?”

“Oh,” replied Catherine, “if I were to do so, someone might learn of it and have me taken up and hanged for a witch.”

Everyone promised to keep the secret. Thereupon, Catherine tore a scrap of white paper into four small pieces and set them in a row on the table. Then Mary left the room, shutting the door tightly behind her. Catherine invited Miss Leslie to touch her finger to any piece of the paper. She touched the second. Catherine then called for Mary, saying as she entered, “Be quick.” Without hesitation, Mary advanced to the table and pointed to the second piece of paper. Miss Leslie, startled, asked to repeat the task. Again Mary identified the correct piece. And again. And again. Finally baffled by this non-witchcraft, the guests implored the two elderly sisters to reveal their secret. Delighted, they explained that the four pieces of paper denoted the first four letters of the alphabet. When the guest touched the second (B), Catherine greeted her sister with the phrase, “Be quick.” For the fourth, she said, “Do you think you can tell?” For the first, “Are you sure you can guess?” For the third, “Come and try once more.” The foolproof method never failed them.

Having been treated to the portraits, the easy chair, the table, the bellows, the museum of documents, the artificial snake, and the mystery of the papers, it seemed time for Miss Leslie and her companion to take their leave. Yet Mary and Catherine had a request for their visitors. Pincushions, needle-books, and emery bags covered a square table near one of the windows. This was their “charity table” where they sold items “for the benefit of the poor.” Miss Leslie thought that the Byles sisters were themselves their own poor, but kindly she decided to buy the ugliest needle-book she’d ever seen.

As Catherine exchanged parting pleasantries with her visitors, Miss Leslie glimpsed Mary slipping out into the short hallway leading to the house door and then back in again. Then Mary joined them and escorted them to the front door. Now, preparing for their final departure, the two visitors approached the front door. But it was locked! And it seemed impossible to unlock it! Mary turned the key this way and that, but the door would not open.

“Oh, dear,” said Mary. “The ladies will have to send home for their nightcaps, as they are likely to be kept here all night!” As the visitors exchanged alarmed glances at that prospect, Mary smiled slyly and gave the key a turn. The lock yielded; the door opened; Mary curtsied and smiled them out.

Making her way down the narrow path to the drooping gate, Miss Leslie remarked that she had just undergone one of the strangest experiences of her life. “Ah,” her companion replied, “I am afraid I have kept a small secret from you. I have had this experience before—precisely this experience. Every visitor has this experience the first time, without deviation. Miss Mary always receives guests at the front door; Miss Catherine always pretends to be indisposed but then makes her entrance. Visitors always see the Copley portrait and the cornelian ring, the self-portrait of Mather Brown is always exhibited and the letter noted, the new guest is always placed in the great chair to experience what it is like for a republican to sit under the crown, the sisters always take turns in producing one curiosity after another, culminating in Catherine’s box of documents, the trick snake, and the joke about the rebel snake; the astounding trick of the pieces of paper always occurs next, and whenever the visitors hint at departing, Miss Mary always slips out, locks the front door, and slips back in to conduct her little hoax and tell her joke about the ladies’ nightcaps! Only after you have survived this piece of theater will you have any chance for a conversation with them about Loyalism during and after the American revolution.”

“So you knew all along what they were doing? Even the trick with the paper?” Miss Leslie asked. 

“Yes, of course. There is no other way. And now you know. You did very well. I am sure they will see you again if you ask to call.”

Miss Eliza Leslie did call again. Subsequently, she reported, the sisters “were infinitely more rational than when ‘putting themselves through their facings’ to show off to strangers.” In “the course of these quiet conversations,” Leslie recalled, “they told me many little circumstances connected with the royalist side of our revolutionary contest, that I could scarcely have obtained from any other source.” Mary and Catherine, she wrote, “gloried—they triumphed, in the firm adherence of their father and his family to the royalty of England—and scorned the idea of even now being classed among the citoyennesof a republic; a republic which, as they said, they had never acknowledged and never would; regarding themselves still as faithful subjects to the majesty of Britain, whoever that majesty might be.” In an upper room, they displayed portraits of themselves at ages seventeen and eighteen, painted by the famed English portraitist Henry Pelham. She saw the family silver, their father’s scientific instruments, and his extensive collection of rare books. They had rejected all invitations to sell anything, even to Harvard College.

Then there were the personal anecdotes. They recalled that as young women they walked on the Boston Common with General Howe and Lord Percy, and the regimental band serenaded them under the horse-chestnut trees. They knew George IV when he was in Boston as Duke of Clarence and an officer in his father’s navy. They had even written him a letter of congratulation when he became King, assuring him that they, the surviving members of the family of Dr. Byles, remained truly and fervently devoted to the rightful sovereign. They remembered fearing starvation during the siege, but they recalled that after they had given a hungry British soldier a piece of pork, he returned a few evenings later to slip Mary a packet of “the detested tea” as a token of his gratitude. They spoke of their pain in seeing the Hollis Street meetinghouse converted to a barracks and in seeing the Old North Church torn down for firewood. They recalled that during the last days of the siege they darkened their house and kept their shutters drawn because the American artillery used the house as an aiming point. They recalled their bitterness and anxiety during their father’s imprisonment in his own home, their lonely separation from their relatives in Halifax, and their isolation from the rest of the town. Living in the strictest abstemiousness, they subsisted on two hundred dollars per year and on the charity of friends. By frugality, they managed to save most of their two hundred dollars; they donated a portion of that, along with the proceeds from their charity table, to the poor. They seldom went out, except—bonneted and heavily veiled and always in the same Sunday clothes—to services at Trinity Church, and they continued to dress in the fashion—indeed, in some of the same clothes—of 1776. For years they had conducted a running dispute with the city of Boston, which wanted to open a street through their property. They resisted the pressure from city officials to sell their land as they had resisted offers to buy their treasure chest or box of curiosities.

Eventually, they lost that dispute. To make room for the street, Boston exercised its rights of eminent domain, taking half the Byles’s yard and half the house. The sisters refused to vacate during the demolition. “They mourned over the departure of every beam and plank as if each was an old friend,” wrote Eliza Leslie, “and deep indeed was the affliction of the aged sisters when they saw, falling beneath the remorseless axe, their noble horse-chestnut trees, whose scattered branches, as they lay on the grass, the old ladies declared, seemed to them like the dismembered limbs of children.” Within a year, Mary was dead. Catherine insisted that her sister had died of a broken heart. She had always hoped to die, as she had lived, in her father’s house just as he had left it. “Poor sister Mary,” said Catherine. “She soon fretted herself to death.” And Catherine knew the source of this final indignation. “Ah,” she said, “this is one of the consequences of living in a republic. Had we been still under a king, he would have known nothing about our little property, and we could have enjoyed it in our own way as long as we lived. There is one comfort, that not a creature in the states will be any the better for what we shall leave behind us—Sister and I have taken care of that. We have bequeathed every article to our relations in Nova Scotia, since our nephew, poor boy, was so unfortunate as to die before us. In all our trials it has been a great satisfaction to us to reflect that when everything was changing around, grace has been given to us to remain faithful to our church and king.”

And they had taken care of it. At Catherine’s death everything—including the Copley and Pelham portraits and the voluminous file of correspondence they had quietly conducted for sixty years—was crated and shipped to Halifax, where it was divided among members of the family and subsequently scattered all over Canada—a situation calculated to make a researcher fret himself to death.

Further Reading:

The anonymous 1820 letter and the 1826 letter from Lydia Maria (Francis) Child are printed from microfilm copies at the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management (Almon Family Fonds, Series G, Subseries 2, No. 89 and Series A, No. 29; originals held by Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa). Mary Tyler Peabody discusses the Child/Byles incident in a March 22, 1826, letter to Rawlins Pickman (Horace Mann II papers, Massachusetts Historical Society). Mary and Catherine Byles’s reply to Child is mentioned in the journal of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody for September 22, 1826, as extracted by Mary Van Wyck Church in her manuscript biography of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (Massachusetts Historical Society). Footnotes in Carolyn Karcher’s The First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, N.C., 1994) and Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters (New York, 2005) helped steer me to these unpublished sources. Child’s fiction has recently been rediscovered and freshly appreciated. Carolyn Karcher has edited a paperback edition of Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986); she has also published A Lydia Maria Child Reader (Durham, N.C., 1997). Eliza Leslie, although she wrote voluminously in many forms, is best known for her nine cookbooks. One of them, Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches (Philadelphia, 1837), was the best-selling cookbook of the nineteenth century. My account of her visit reconstructs events she reports in her article “The Daughters of Dr. Byles: A Sketch of Reality,” from Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 20 (1842): 61-65; 114-18. Arthur Wentworth Eaton’s The Famous Mather Byles (Boston, 1914) and the biographical sketch of Byles by Clifford K. Shipton, reprinted in New England Life in the 18th Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), remain the chief sources of information about him. For Mather Brown, see Dorrinda Evans, Mather Brown: Early American Artist in England (Middletown, Conn., 1982). The standard histories of the American Loyalists are Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York, 1969); Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 (Boston, 1972); and Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America (New York, 1973).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Edward M. Griffin is professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Having written a biography of a prominent patriot clergyman—Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705-1787—he has now taken up the opposing side with a biography-in-progress of Chauncy’s Loyalist rival Mather Byles, 1707-1788. He is also editing the unpublished letters of Byles’s Loyalist daughters, Mary and Catherine.

Secret lives of the nineteenth-century ballot

Voting is meant to be the culminating moment in American civic life. It’s the answer to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s citizenship exam question, “What is the most important right granted to United States citizens?” And yet, like those out-of-time days spent on jury duty, going to the polls can feel less like a moment of decisive action than like the dream-life of citizenship, a surreal and unique event, whose meaning seems to inhere in its very isolation from everyday life.

The act of voting self-evidently centers on the ballot, but that item is so various in current practice as to be barely contained by one rubric. In Manhattan, where I have voted for decades, the “ballot” has long since disappeared behind the toggles and gears of the stalwart if vaguely Chaplinesque mechanical lever machine (yearly threatened with extinction, it was still in place, in my district anyway, in February 2008). You enter the polling booth through a curtain; now in effect inside the machine, you pull the lever to the left to close the curtain. Record your votes by turning handles (think pinball machine) next to the names and party symbols of your choice; pull the lever to the right to lock in your vote; and with that the curtain springs open and you spring out, your performance on the democratic stage enacted in secret. In Minnesota, I’ve voted by an optical scanning system, where the act is more in the nature of a literacy event, characterized entirely by the voter’s relationship to reading and writing practices. Here you are presented with a grease marker with which to fill in a gap in an arrow pointing to the name you want to vote for.

These and all other methods of voting used in America have in common a sacramental devotion to the secret ballot. But the secret ballot was an innovation of the late nineteenth century. Except for article 1, section 4, which assigns congressional election procedures to the states, the U.S. Constitution stayed silent on suffrage until the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, with the logistical details of voting always left to the states. The U.S. Supreme Court noted in Pope v. Williams (1904) that “the privilege to vote in a state is within the jurisdiction of the state itself, to be exercised as the state may direct, and upon such terms as to it may seem proper, provided, of course, no discrimination is made between individuals, in violation of the Federal Constitution.” Over time, then, the ballot has taken a variety of forms, consonant with the changing demands of local political cultures.

The technology of the ballot in the United States may be very loosely charted through four phases, from the Revolution through the nineteenth century: from viva voce, to handwritten and printed ballots, to printed party tickets, to the Australian or Massachusetts ballot, first adopted in the United States in 1888. This last is the result of a reform that introduced the genre that remains: the municipally published, nonpartisan secret ballot (though the technologies that mediate this ballot continue to be locally determined and to vary widely). By 1800, most states were, according to their constitutions, voting by “written papers.” Broadly speaking, this periodization of the ballot marks the transfer of authority and legitimacy from one medium to the next: from voice to hand to print to machine.

Before the secret ballot became the national standard, election ballots were a vivid genre of print ephemera. The examples here, drawn from the American Antiquarian Society’s cache of uncatalogued ballots, might suggest some ways of thinking about what “that most potent of all sheets of paper” (as the early twentieth-century editor and writer Philip Loring Allen called the ballot) has meant in the past. The ballot shares some characteristics with other print and manuscript genres. Like a contract, it is executable. It becomes the act that it represents, but it is inert until and unless it is activated. Like money, it has taken a wide variety of forms since ancient times. In the United States the ballot shares paper currency’s shifting institutional location, from private, entrepreneurial, and local to public and government-sponsored. Like street literature—handbills, newspapers, leaflets—the ballot promotes and advertises, and its delivery system links stranger to stranger in public spaces. Like a poster for an urban spectacle—a night at the theatre or at Barnum’s museum—its text consists of a dramatis personae headlined by seductive and hard-to-keep promises.

More than most print genres, the ballot is a hinge between the political and the personal, national vistas and hometown scenes, the sweep of public events and the nuanced rhythms of private life. If we usually think of ballots in the aggregate or in the abstract, those that survive in archives emerge as fragments of these multiple narratives.

In 1829 in Massachusetts, the Jacksonian politician and newspaper editor David Henshaw (who appears on ballots in figure 1) presented a printed rather than hand-written ballot at the poll and was turned away for not having a “written” ballot as stipulated by the state constitution. In the resulting legal test, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that in this case “written” encompassed “printed.” Though printed ballots were used in other states, this judicial intervention marks a signal moment in the long transformation from rhetorical and manuscript culture, in which physical gestures and practices of the hand testify to legitimacy, to a culture in which products of mechanical reproduction can be authorized and even sometimes preferred to originals. Henshaw’s motives were pragmatically political. He had objected to party workers who would write out multiple ballots and try to press them on voters at the polls. He apparently hoped that the printed ballot would carry more legitimacy and would neutralize the power and convenience of the prewritten ballots, increasing voters’ access to a variety of tickets and hence to independent choice.

This was not by any means the universal outcome of this medial shift. The notorious printed ballot of the mid- to late century was produced by parties, in often partisan print shops, and handed out by party workers at the polling place. Voters were cajoled and corralled in bustling and raucous scenes (figs. 2 and 3), which took place in a wide range of venues. Sometimes a schoolhouse or a town hall would be reserved for voting, but anywhere—a barn or a bar—would do; one was handed a party ballot and in turn handed it over at the voting window.

In 1829 in Massachusetts, the Jacksonian politician and newspaper editor David Henshaw (who appears on ballots in figure 1) presented a printed rather than hand-written ballot at the poll and was turned away for not having a “written” ballot as stipulated by the state constitution. In the resulting legal test, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that in this case “written” encompassed “printed.” Though printed ballots were used in other states, this judicial intervention marks a signal moment in the long transformation from rhetorical and manuscript culture, in which physical gestures and practices of the hand testify to legitimacy, to a culture in which products of mechanical reproduction can be authorized and even sometimes preferred to originals. Henshaw’s motives were pragmatically political. He had objected to party workers who would write out multiple ballots and try to press them on voters at the polls. He apparently hoped that the printed ballot would carry more legitimacy and would neutralize the power and convenience of the prewritten ballots, increasing voters’ access to a variety of tickets and hence to independent choice. 

This was not by any means the universal outcome of this medial shift. The notorious printed ballot of the mid- to late century was produced by parties, in often partisan print shops, and handed out by party workers at the polling place. Voters were cajoled and corralled in bustling and raucous scenes (figs. 2 and 3), which took place in a wide range of venues. Sometimes a schoolhouse or a town hall would be reserved for voting, but anywhere—a barn or a bar—would do; one was handed a party ballot and in turn handed it over at the voting window.

Voting was performed in public view; no matter how many times you folded the typical nineteenth-century ballot, there would be no mistaking what your vote was. 

But secrecy was not always seen as a requisite or even desirable component of voting and wouldn’t become one by law until 1888; for some elections in some places, viva voce voting remained the norm for much of the century. Sociologist Michael Schudson vividly imagines the characteristic state of mind of the mid-nineteenth-century voter.

You are not offended in the least by this openness; indeed you want your party loyalty to be recognized. Your connection to the party derives not from a strong sense that it offers better public policies but that your party is your party…Very likely you have been drawn to your party by the complexion of the ethnocultural groups it favors; your act of voting is an act of solidarity with a partisan alliance. This is a politics of affiliation, not a politics of assent.

Whether every voter fit this model or not, the ballot nonetheless ostentatiously emblematized affiliation.

In the nineteenth century, the ballot was often indistinguishable in both form and function from campaign paraphernalia, turning voters into advertisers and promoters. These gaudily potent sheets of paper performed in much the same way as other print genres of the time, a “carnival on the page,” as the historian Isabelle Lehuu puts it. They converse with the riot of colorful print ephemera coming off the presses and circulating through urban and rural spaces: newspaper and magazine advertising, handbills, circus posters, playbills, railroad tickets and timetables, school rewards of merit, currency, and all manner of ephemeral job-printing. The ballot promotes and displays the printer’s art, using the visual jargon of publicity and advertising, the same techniques of engraving and headlining as any handbill, poster, or print ad. Ballots participate in the same public spectacle as other campaign activities, such as the rallies in which questions of public moment are subsumed in a general air of theatricality and festivity, speechifying and glad-handing.

Writing during World War II, the political scientist O. Douglas Weeks describes the ballot, in his introduction to Spencer Albright’s The American Ballot, as the “material object which democracy has sought to substitute for the battle-axe or the hangman’s noose and as an emblem and as a weapon in the settlement of civil disagreements.” If in the abstract the ballot strives to offer an alternative to violence, during the Civil War party ballots continue the political campaign as well as the war campaign. Some deploy battlefield imagery, in commemoration and exhortation to allies, with a warning to others. 

Party ballots often display female emblems—Liberty, America, Columbia—as partisan iconography, evoking patriotic ideals as well as the presumed moral gravitas of the domestic and sentimental figure of the woman.

Perhaps most pervasively and suggestively, ballots mimic currency, in a family resemblance that goes deeper than the economic and monetary platforms of campaigns. Their saturated engraved designs imply counterfeit-proofing, making them look like deeds or stock certificates, positioning the ballot as a stake in the national joint-stock company. Like currency, the ballot is meant to function silently; only its purchase power and its meaning in aggregate are supposed to “count.” The individual ballot’s materiality, like that of currency, is meant to be subsumed by its symbolic value, expressed in its design. Just as counterfeiting undermines legal tender, ballot tampering threatens the legitimacy of the vote.

A ballot marked by actual handwriting, rather than its facsimile, can also remind us that the ballot is more, finally, than its political iconography, more than its value as a unit in an election count—more, that is, than a mere individual chirp indistinguishably merged into the vox populi. As we know from our own experience of voting, the ballot, whatever its material form (switching a toggle and engaging a gear; inscribing, poking, or punching paper, etc.), can be invested with emotions and ideas, hopes and dreads, fantasies and phantoms sometimes only obliquely related to politics or to civic life. Two ballots in the American Antiquarian Society collection retain the traces of such unquantifiable affect. John H. Evans, a young farmer in Freetown, Massachusetts, cast a ballot for John Quincy Adams II in the gubernatorial election of 1871 and kept one as a souvenir, using it to testify—”right smart stout”—to his vote. Just twenty-five in 1871, Evans would have been making one of his first trips to the polls. For Evans, ballot in box isn’t quite enough. His handwriting insists on the full-body presence of a particular voter as he also records the context for his vote, associating it with his day’s work on his neighbor Henry Winslow’s mill and with the company of his neighbor and coworker, Henry Pierce, who went with him to vote. By inscribing his ticket, Evans pulls the ballot out of circulation, out of its role in the aggregate, and into a unique relation to the voter. More than a scrapbook souvenir of the event, Evans’s ballot is a fair copy of the event, a snapshot.

Ten years earlier, Augustus Russell Pope, born, like Evans, in 1846, used a ballot to send a melancholy letter to his uncle. Too young to vote in 1861, he dispenses with the election in the first sentence; the son of a prominent abolitionist minister who had died in 1858, Pope does note that the staunch Republican governor John Andrews has likely won. Then the young writer turns to his health woes and thoughts of joining the navy. But this youth writes as if to be “at sea” in 1861 is the same as it was in 1851. “Aug. R. Pope,” as he signs himself, is headachy and has a bad humor in his blood. He apologizes for “errors…and bad writing,” the result he says of haste and of his mother’s wish that he overcome his left-handedness.

Augustus Pope longed to be otherwise and elsewhere—to be strong and, like so many young men before him, to go to sea. As it happens, he enlisted in the Massachusetts infantry and died of dysentery in Andersonville Prison in August of 1864 at the age of eighteen. Young “Aug. R. Pope” never did get to vote. These personalized ballots register individual voices through the medium that’s designed to speak strictly in the composite vox populi. Their inscriptions exchange the ballot’s political value for an affective value in a private network making another kind of claim for the potency of the ballot.

Liz Hutter assisted with the research for this article.

Further Reading:

Most histories of voting are quite naturally devoted to politics and suffrage, per se, while the materiality of the nineteenth-century ballot cries out for further research. Useful in this regard is work on nineteenth-century print culture more generally, especially David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York, 1998) and Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000). For other examples of nineteenth-century ballots see Melanie Goodrich, 19th Century Ballots from California. Other Websites that helpfully place these ballots in context are: Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project and Douglas Jones’s Voting and Elections.

An excellent mini-history of the ballot, with a focus on the development of the secret ballot, is Jill Lepore’s “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” in The New Yorker (October 13, 2008): 90-96. For the history of voting technologies, see Roy G. Saltman, The History and Politics of Voting Technology: In Quest of Integrity and Public Confidence (New York, 2006). For an excellent description of the logistics of voting in the nineteenth century, see Richard Franklin Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004). For a history of the ballot, see Spencer Albright, The American Ballot (Washington, D.C., 1942). A recent and very fine history of the franchise is Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000). See also the essays collected in Donald W. Rogers, ed., Voting and the Spirit of American Democracy: Essays on the History of Voting Rights in America (Urbana, Ill., 1992). Also useful is an earlier work on early national and antebellum suffrage: Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton, N.J., 1960). For rich descriptions of nineteenth-century campaigning and voting, see Glenn Altshuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 2000) and Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civil Life (New York, 1998). A good general survey of presidential campaigns, with terrific illustrations, is Evan Cornog and Richard Whelan, Hats in the Ring: An Illustrated History of American Presidential Campaigns (New York, 2000).

The description of the ballot as “that most potent of all sheets of paper” is from Philip Loring Allen’s “Ballot Laws and Their Workings,” Political Science Quarterly 21 (March 1906). For the context of the David Henshaw printed ballot case, see Gerald J. Baldasty, “The Boston Press and Politics in Jacksonian America,” Journalism History 7 (Autumn-Winter 1980) and Arthur B. Darling, Political Change in Massachusetts, 1824-1848: A Study of Liberal Movements in Politics (New Haven, 1925). Henshaw v. Samuel H. Foster et al. is reported in Octavius Pickering, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (Boston, 1883). For Massachusetts politics before Reconstruction, the context of many of the ballots here, see Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984). For woman suffrage and the Boston School Committee, see History of Woman Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Gage, and Ida Harper, published by Susan B. Anthony in 1886. For the battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama see Juliet Wilson-Bareau, with David Degener, Manet and the American Civil War: The Battle of the U.S.S. Kearsarge and C.S.S. Alabama (New York and New Haven, 2003).

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

Patricia Crain is associate professor of English at New York University and the author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000).

The transition from financial continuity and stability to market pricing for financial services

For most of the past two centuries, routine financial transactions in the business world were based on the widely recognized principles of “relationship banking.” This meant, essentially, that business customers and their favored bankers generally maintained long-term linkages through a variety of financial services. Like marriage partners, customers and banks were tied together by lasting commitment. Loyalty was very important. Once a banking relationship had been formed by mutual agreement, other business enterprises were expected to keep their distance. Divorces occurred, but only rarely. These enduring relationships were often multigenerational, lasting not merely for decades but for an entire century and beyond. Moreover, in some sectors of the economy, especially in smaller communities, these commercial linkages between banks and their long-standing borrowers are still alive and well today.

Under these prevailing conditions, the efforts of competitive banking institutions to “steal away” accounts from one of their peers was seriously frowned upon within the broader commercial community. Any attempted “theft” of accounts was especially pernicious if a rival bank offered prospective borrowers similar services at lower prices. Price competition in the banking world was unwelcome and in some quarters, even regarded as unethical. As a consequence, instances of infidelity within the world of high finance—the banking sector that catered to large and important corporate customers—were uncommon. Indeed, those bankers seeking to entice accounts away from competitors faced the potential loss of their cherished reputation for prudence and good character.

Beginning about a quarter century ago, however, these guiding principles were steadily undermined and, in time, largely abandoned. Competitive pricing for financial services became commonplace. Aggressive banks solicited business from one and all. Cold phone calls and other means of pointed communication to attract new business accounts became the norm. The justification for these marketing initiatives was that corporate customers would have the opportunity to avail themselves of superior financial services at reduced costs. Given these cost savings, large corporate customers were tempted to dissolve their long-term banking relationships. In the end, the majority finally surrendered to the advances of emboldened suitors, and relationship banking steadily disappeared. The change was especially pronounced among the largest banks and business firms, where the need to demonstrate quarterly earnings superseded long-standing banking loyalties.

To sum up before moving forward, the economic principles associated with the realization of more cost-efficient financial markets had triumphed over the previous guidelines of stability and precedent. In this altered environment, the twin goals of efficiency and stability proved, in many instances, to be mutually exclusive. Whether the steady decline of the former system of relationship banking was the prime cause of the increased volatility in financial markets during the first decade of the twenty-first century is debatable. Nonetheless, the new institutional arrangements, which championed price competition over all other considerations, were almost certainly contributing factors.

Historical Background

Relationship banking coincided with the birth of the nation’s commercial banking sector in the 1790s. The early banks were typically established by individuals with common ties—whether political, social, or commercial in nature. Banks made loans to a relatively small clientele of business customers. It was not uncommon in some areas for bank officers to arrange business loans almost exclusively for the family and friends of investors who owned stock in the bank itself. Business firms that were denied access to one bank’s lending facilities had every incentive to raise sufficient capital to start a new bank. By modern standards these banks had a small managerial staff. The bank president and his major borrowers usually knew each other very well. New business enterprises had the chance to seek out the most favorable banking connection, but once established over a period of months or years, the linkage between a given commercial bank and its borrowing customers was essentially permanent. So long as borrowers were satisfied with the financial services offered by their primary banking connection, rival banks did not try to interfere. The interest rates charged on most bank loans were nearly identical in a given geographical area; thus, price competition was not a factor. Throughout the nineteenth century, most of the borrowers at commercial banks were wholesale merchants, farmers, and a wide range of small retail firms.

The same relationship ties existed within the realm of investment banking. Investment bankers differed from commercial bankers in that the former did not act as a direct lender but rather as an intermediary in identifying potential private investors in a company’s stocks and bonds. Investment bankers earned fees for performing this marketing service. The fee was normally anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of the value of the securities successfully marketed to investors. This financial sector was smaller than the commercial banking sector because it only dealt with larger enterprises that required substantial capital. Investment banking firms were invariably partnerships, and the partners and the executives of their corporate clients conducted prolonged and careful negotiations prior to the issuance of new securities. Corporations raised capital only at periodic intervals, often two to ten years apart. When an enterprise contemplated the issuance of another round of securities, its executives usually returned to the same investment banking firms that had served the company in the past. Outsiders recognized that the business enterprise and its investment bankers had a special relationship. The main participants in these transactions did not necessarily socialize together, but they were considered valued business friends.

The investment banking sector of the economy arose at a later date than the commercial banking sector. A few partnerships emerged in the 1840s and 1850s to serve the capital needs of the railroads, but it was not until after the Civil War that the shape of the investment banking field truly solidified. For a quarter century or so, Boston and New York competed for leadership, but by the 1870s, the Wall Street crowd had become the dominant force. Investment banking was an oligopolistic sector, meaning that a handful of firms, ranging in number from five to ten or thereabouts, handled the bulk of the business. From the 1870s through the outbreak of the First World War, the U.S. railroads generated the largest volume of corporate securities and in turn were the largest clients of the investment banking industry. A clear pattern of business alliances soon emerged: a given railroad line continued to rely upon the very same investment banking partnership decade after decade to underwrite new issues of its stocks and bonds.

J. P. Morgan & Company and Kuhn, Loeb & Company were among the leading investment banking firms on Wall Street from the 1880s forward. The partners almost never lowered themselves to solicit new business from prospective customers. Instead, they waited quietly in their wood-paneled offices for railroad executives to approach them about the best means of raising capital. Once the partners had underwritten one issue of securities for a given railroad, the same firm tended to handle all of that customer’s subsequent transactions in the capital markets. Eventually, a goodly number of these transportation enterprises were grouped together and publicly known as “Morgan’s railroads.” Other investment banking firms had similar close associations with other groups of railway lines. Contrary to popular opinion, then and now, the partners in these investment banking firms did not invest heavily in the common stock of these railroads. One or two partners might sit on a railroad’s board of directors, but their major function was to serve as watchdogs for investors. J. P. Morgan and his peers did not become deeply involved in the management of any railroad line unless it was suddenly faced with serious financial problems.

When a railroad faced bankruptcy, or the threat of bankruptcy, federal and state judicial systems sought “trustees” who were granted the authority to reorganize the financial structure in a way that seemed most likely to produce an eventual return to solvency. The trustees frequently chosen by the courts were the investment bankers who had previously floated most of the railroad’s securities. Since the bankers had a long-term relationship with the railroad, they were a logical choice to implement a rescue package. The bankers were willing to serve in this capacity because they wanted to protect the financial interests of those investors who had purchased the railroad’s securities on the basis of the strong recommendations of the investment bankers themselves. If the bankers did not make their best effort to repair the financial damage, then future investors might refuse to purchase any new securities issued by the troubled railroad and, more critically, the securities of other railroads sponsored by the same investment bank as well. In short, the close relationship between a given borrower and its primary investment bank typically endured through both thick and thin.

The ties between corporations and their commercial banks were reasonably similar in nature. The key difference being that the number of commercial banks within the “relationship” group could run as high as ten to twenty primary lenders depending on the size and scope of the business. A large corporation might have close links with commercial banks from coast to coast. Nonetheless, the corporation usually maintained its largest deposit balances with a single bank in any locality. The key relationship for the very largest corporations was typically with a large commercial bank in New York. The main factor to remember is that, once established, relationships endured whether singular or multiple. If, for example, our fictitious XYX Corporation had done business for years with the same three commercial banks and a singular investment bank in New York City, then other competitors in the financial sector respected those existing alliances as essentially inviolate. Meanwhile, the majority of banks were content with the stability of these convenient semipermanent arrangements.

Triumph of Impersonal Market Forces

What eventually upset the apple cart was the movement for the deregulation of numerous sectors of the U.S. economy in the post-World War II era. In the late 1970s, both the airline and trucking industries were successfully deregulated. Competitive pricing became the norm for airline tickets and trucking rates. Financial services were likewise affected, although the changes occurred at a slower pace. Within the commercial banking sector, the previous governmental limitations on the interest rates that could be paid to personal and commercial depositors were steadily loosened. Paying interest on checking accounts as well as on savings accounts was permitted for the first time.

Within the capital markets, partnerships were permitted to reorganize as corporations, thus limiting the personal financial liability of the proprietors of investment banks. What had once been a vital hedge against risk was now lifted as investment bankers could build ever-greater risk into their companies’ portfolios while remaining personally insulated from that risk. The New York Stock Exchange also eliminated its fixed commissions for buying and selling stocks. Stockbrokers could now set their own fees for a wide range of transactions, thus inducing vigorous price competition among brokerage houses. As deregulation brought greater competition for banking and brokerage services, several of the premier investment banking firms found themselves competitvely unable to adhere to the long-standing traditions of “relationship banking.” Commercial marriages soon began to falter. The most aggressive investment banks no longer refrained from approaching the customers of their peers. They offered new customers superior services at lower fees. Breaking another long-standing taboo, they advertised boldly for increased business from destinations far and wide.

Another factor that may have played an important role in the emergence of a different climate in the nation’s financial centers was an unprecedented demographic and generational trend within the leadership positions. In the past, the top executive officers of both the banks and their business customers were seasoned veterans typically in their fiftiess and sixties. These executives had advanced at a slow, steady pace up the corporate ladder. Over several decades, the lending officers and their borrowing counterparts had experienced the opportunity to develop a viable commercial friendship. However, the new generation that came to power in the 1980s was devoted to more competitive pricing in financial markets. Armed in many cases with MBA degrees and demonstrating much acumen when it came to burnishing quarterly earnings reports, these younger hotshots frequently moved up into advanced executive positions in their 30s and 40s. The new bankers saw the old-fashioned guidelines as the hallmark of thousands of unimaginative old fogies whose days at the helm had rightfully passed.

Many political figures and their economic advisors praised the renewed vigor of the allegedly more efficient financial services sector. Fearful of the potential threats arising from financial institutions in Europe and Japan, they championed the increased intensity of competition exhibited by banks headquartered within the United States.

The culmination of the deregulation movement came with Congress’s 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that had prohibited commercial banks from acting as investment banks and vice versa. Now, every bank had the opportunity to offer a full range of financial services. Bankers could arrange short-term loans to corporations in a morning meeting and then put together an underwriting deal for stocks and bonds later that afternoon. The next day the very same bankers could offer clients sophisticated advice on potential mergers and acquisitions. Free of tight rules and intrusive regulations, U.S. banks could now offer complex bundles of services that would, they claimed, greatly help their clients’ balance sheets. This development further invigorated domestic and global competition in the banking sector. Social networks and cultural inclinations mattered far less when the main ingredient in crafting a deal was the bottom-line price for the services being rendered.

By the turn of the century, relationship banking in the major financial centers was mostly a relic of the past. Corporations in need of critical financial services had the option of shopping widely for the deals that seemed to serve them best at the most reasonable cost. The former universal principles of personal and institutional relationships had been downgraded to an incidental irrelevancy. Vitality had supplanted stability. The impersonal market ruled the financial realm.

In light of the worldwide financial crisis in the second half of 2008, it will be interesting to note whether current trends will continue—or perhaps on second thought the greater stability of the relationship model will undergo a sudden revival. Your guess today is as good as mine.

Further Reading:

The secondary literature on commercial banking is extensive, but the coverage of investment banking is more limited. Only rarely are these two financial sectors covered in a single volume. With respect to the shift away from relationship banking toward price-driven financial transactions, I strongly recommend Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York, 1990). See, in particular, part 3, which is appropriately titled, “The Casino Age.” This volume won a National Book Award in the nonfiction category.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Edwin Perkins, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern California, specializes in U.S. financial history from colonial times to the mid-twentieth century. His publications include American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700-1815 (1994) and Wall Street to Main Street: Charles Merrill and Middle Class Investors (1999).

Can you blame us for being a defensive lot, we lovers of early American literature, when all about us we see America’s political Founding Fathers (and sometimes Mothers) celebrated like rock stars, on t-shirts, in miniseries, and, most enviably, with best-selling biographical tomes? What about our literary Founding Fathers (and Mothers)? Anne Bradstreet? Edward Taylor? Charles Brockden Brown? Don’t they too deserve a little name recognition: at least a spot on CSPAN or a line-drawing portrait on a bookbag? We who cherish early American books and writers come by our defensiveness honestly. It is a long-standing American intellectual tradition, pioneered by fine American literary minds like William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, each of whom in his own way responded to that stinging question posed by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review in January 1820: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?”

Perhaps we might feel a little better if we put Smith’s barb in its fuller context. “In the four quarters of the globe,” he wrote, “who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets?” The occasion for these questions was a review of Statistical Annals Embracing Views of the Population, Commerce, Navigation, Fisheries, Public Lands, Post-Office Establishment, Revenues, Mint, Military and Naval Establishments, Expenditures, Public Debt and Sinking Fund, of the United States of America (1818) by the Philadelphia chemist and congressman Adam Seybert, an 803-page, leather-bound, copyrighted statistical celebration of the fact and expanse of American nationhood. Seybert’s Annals was itself but another iteration of a longstanding, defensively American genre begun with the seventeenth-century advertisements published by William Wood, John Smith, and other early English promoters of New World plantation schemes and redeployed for newly national purposes by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Jefferson wrote, in part, to defend his country against the antagonistic findings of French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon, that American climates were so unhealthful as to produce inferior specimens of the animal and human species. Perhaps Adam Seybert was feeling a bit like Thomas Jefferson when he solemnly proclaimed in his preface to the Annals, “No other nation has hitherto furnished an equal body of authentic information.”

Without giving any satisfaction to Sydney Smith—who was, after all, a passed-over Anglican cleric marooned in Edinburgh, and who did, after all, propose the self-consciously provincial motto “We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal” for his own Edinburgh Review—we might forgive him for poking a little fun at Seybert (whose Annals, to his credit, was published in French and Italian in 1820 and reprinted in 1969, 1970, and 1978). For by now it has certainly been established that lots of people have slept in American blankets, eaten from American plates, drunk from American glasses, watched American plays, and read American books. This special issue of Common-place gives us a chance to step back from the earnest defensiveness that has sometimes characterized early American literary history and delight publicly in the strange and wonderful books that are our American legacy.

The essays collected here together make the case that knowing more about the books, readers, and reading habits of early Americans is both pleasurable and intellectually enriching. As Hilary Wyss explores the world of books in early American Indian communities, she offers an intriguing look into the home library of one famous eighteenth-century indigenous author. Michael Drexler examines how a forgotten early American novel offers insight into the American response to the Haitian Revolution, with a surprising connection to Aaron Burr. Meanwhile, Lisa Gordis takes us on a field trip with her Barnard College literature students to Trinity Churchyard in downtown Manhattan, to shed a few tears over the grave of fallen eighteenth-century fictional heroine Charlotte Temple and to wonder at the pleasures early American books afford contemporary readers. In an essay that seems to speak directly to our own economic moment, Ed Cahill explores how the financial panic of 1819 was mirrored by a literary panic about the overproduction of American books, while Michael Winship investigates how American books like Charlotte Temple and Uncle Tom’s Cabin became “bestsellers.” Who publishes early American books today is the question Max Cavitch pursues as he reflects on the Library of America series and the digital future of early American literature; what the founding generation read is a question taken up by Alison LaCroix and a group of law students at the University of Chicago. Hilary Emmett takes a cross-cultural perspective on early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown, considering her Australian students’ reaction to his depiction of settler-Indian relations and to American culture at large. Together, these authors maintain that early American literary texts grant us access to aspects of the past that might otherwise remain invisible and that they have the power to touch the present in moving and unexpected ways.

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

Joanna Brooks teaches American literature at San Diego State University. She is the author of the award-winning American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (2003) and the editor of the Collected Writings of Samson Occom: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America (2006).