Introduction

We are immediately skeptical of relic collections like the one made by the early nineteenth-century Philadelphia historian John Fanning Watson (figs. 1 and 2). The box, constructed for Watson around 1823 by an unknown craftsman from the wood of Penn’s Treaty Elm, seems to be just another instance of invented tradition. Its contents—like Queen Elizabeth’s knitting bag—obviously have apocryphal provenances. Watson’s published works, the Annals of Philadelphia (1830) or the Annals and Occurrences of New York City and State in Olden Time (1846), do not hold up any better under scrutiny than his relics. Their anecdotes about the events and customs of the past are similar in fragmentary form and in dubious accuracy to the objects he collected. Susan Stabile sums up modern views of Watson’s work with the comment that his “error-ridden though widely read Annals perpetuated the heroic (and often inaccurate) myths of national memory.” Even his contemporaries, like Dr. James Mease—himself the author of an early account of the city’s history titled The Picture of Philadelphia (1811)—complained that Watson’s collections and writings merely promoted “venerable traditions … as if historical truth were not more valuable than any tradition, however ancient, and gratifying to our national vanity, pride, or good feelings.” Rather than giving us a history lesson, this box seems to owe us an apology for the invented past of virtuous aristocrats and friendly Indians that it inflicts on us.

Yet the box works against our efforts to take venerable traditions and history seriously. Compared with the multivolume works like David Hume’s History of England or Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution that provided Watson’s generation with researched and logical narratives of past human actions, this small box and its miniature contents make history seem like child’s play. Narrative histories of action make us exceedingly conscious of the sequence of events over time. But time plays hide and seek in these small fragments. On the one hand, as critic and poet Susan Stewart points out, when we attempt to describe miniature objects, we descend into an overabundance of detail and confront language’s limited ability to represent a material object. Unlike a narrative sequence of actions, therefore, these objects push us towards a silence that arrests time and encourages contemplation. On the other hand, the arrowheads, buttons, fabric scraps, and pieces of wood in Watson’s box are all remains of larger wholes. Like a memorial lock of hair or the remains of the Coliseum, they reveal that death and relentless physical erosion accompany the passage of time and ultimately reduce an entire world to a few fragments. Because these fragments cheat destruction, they possess a supernatural quality even as they bear witness to the inevitable process of decay. But unlike the Coliseum, Watson’s ruins are small enough to be manipulated, domesticated, and protected from decay in the box. Their overall effect, therefore, is not one of sublime awe at the forces of chaos but of nostalgic delight in a toy-sized past purified of death and putrefaction.

Since these miniature ruins arrest time through play and contemplation rather than narrative action, it is not surprising that Watson’s books and his box all fail to account for change over time critically or logically, either by depicting it as a narrative of birth, growth, and decline or as a Whig account of progress. Instead, Watson, his readers, and his fellow relic collectors used these discontinuous forms to challenge the dominance of narrative in the production of historical knowledge. The fragments cultivate physical delight, emotional attachment, and creative play to make people care about the past. This amateur production of history sits at the boundary between object and narrative. It also occupies a border between the art of cultivating the memory to store ideas in the “rooms” of the mind’s metaphorical “house” and the empirical, evidence-based social science of history. Writing annals and collecting relics also draws nineteenth-century history together with the contemporary “fancy” material style that used surprise, variety, color, and striking ornamentation to engage the emotions and the imagination with physical objects.

The Art and Science of Collecting

Watson’s relic box transforms the classical art of training the memory to function like a house with rooms for storing ideas into a physical box with compartments for holding evidence. During his brief stint as a Philadelphia bookseller before becoming cashier of the Bank of Germantown in 1814, Watson joined with the Baltimore publisher Edward J. Coale to publish a memory manual Mnemonika; or, Chronological Tablets (1812). According to the preface, “some are so fortunate by nature, that their minds may be compared to a miser’s chest, from which nothing is ever lost. Others must rely upon art for that which nature has denied.” Mnemonika is a list of “remarkable occurrences” rather than a program for training the mind, but it presumes that readers already understand their memories architecturally as houses or as chests with compartments. In his box, Watson turned this art of cultivating a mental miser’s chest into a physical artwork of wood, brass, and relic materials. But in keeping with his interest in the curiosity of ordinary local life, Watson did not order an ersatz medieval coffer for his collection. Instead, the form of a rectangular body perched on small feet evoked other common household objects like a Pennsylvania spice box—a receptacle for valuables—and sewing and jewelry boxes. Although the box turned “remarkable” relic wood into an artful shape, that form was still, like the histories Watson would collect in it, the ordinary work of everyday people.

Watson’s collecting and publishing also drew on the scientific methods of natural history. His relic box was not a purely personal affair but was oriented, through both his labels and his collecting practices, towards an outside audience. Watson documented the significance of nearly all of the objects in the box—including the wood of the box itself—by attaching paper labels. In addition to demonstrating the rational for each item’s inclusion, the labels also reveal a network of collectors. For example, the “handle of Wm Penn’s Bookcase” was first acquired by a Peter Worrel who gave it to Ge[orge] Dillwyn who gave it to H. Coleman who, finally, gave it to Watson. Relic collecting required more than making private, sentimental connections to objects. Devotees integrated themselves into a larger social web much like the networks that connected colonial and metropolitan naturalists. Watson also drew other members of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which he helped to found, into his efforts to document the past using local informants. Like the natural historians who obtained specimens from indigenous people and slaves, Watson and other Historical Society members systematically collected oral histories from elderly persons, including African Americans and Native Americans, for the Annals. In many ways, therefore, the relic box and Watson’s writings represent early forays into archaeology and social history, which both use empirical methods derived from the collecting practices of natural historians.

By blending art and science into a physical object, Watson’s relic box ultimately connects history to the “fancy” style of many other contemporary material objects that also sought to engage both the intellect and the senses. “Fancy goods,” as demonstrated by the inventory in this Philadelphia merchant’s advertisement, consisted of games, “surprising” sword canes or telescopes, and small, personal objects like scissors, shaving cases, lockets, hair brushes, soaps, and liquor flasks (fig. 3). Like the relics in Watson’s box, some of these objects are delicate and require careful handling, others are linked to women’s private lives, and still others are ornamental containers for valuable possessions like the relic box itself. Overall, according to decorative arts expert Sumpter Priddy, the fancy material style aimed to elicit a “wide range of emotional responses … delight, awe, surprise, and laughter. These were triggered not just by the stunning nature of the objects,” Priddy maintains, “but also by the dynamic combination of images and allusions that connected the viewer’s imagination to the larger world.” Watson sought to imbue history with the sensational and sensual qualities of this fancy style. “If we would make the incidents of olden time familiar and popular by seizing on the affections and stirring the feelings of modern generations,” Watson explained in his Historic Tales of Olden Time (1832), “we must first delight them with the comic and the strange of history and afterwards win them to graver researches.” Watson’s historiographical contribution was that serious historical narratives could wait.

Labeling the Past

With the exception of the “knitting bag and sheaf,” which has been recognized as a rare Renaissance sweet bag and knife sheath, the objects in Watson’s box are neither striking examples of American design nor valuable artifacts. But the labels change these objects of daily use to fodder for the imagination and to sources of fancy and delight: wood from Penn’s Treaty Elm, Colonel Alex Fanning’s snuff box, sand from the Sahara. With these associations, Watson made the ordinary, material world testify to the strangeness of its experiences in the same way that the vernacular, fancy style used eye-popping colors, Japanned patterns, perfumes, trompe l’oeil painting, or amusing slogans to transform objects of everyday use into opportunities for imaginative engagement.

Certainly curiosity cabinets also used labels to show that an otherwise ordinary object had come from far away. However, as historian Lois Dietz notes, Watson’s collection had stricter selection criteria than the typical curiosity cabinet. Virtually all of its objects were important for their relationship to the past and not for their rarity or for their foreign manufacture. As a result, the box creates a distance between past and present because it only preserves objects that have existed in the past. For example, Watson’s labels distinguished the buttons in the box from contemporary buttons because of their age, because of the people they have been attached to, and because of the events they have witnessed (fig. 4). If their existence in the past makes these buttons different from functionally equivalent, modern buttons, then the past must be a foreign place from the present. Conversely, if the past is different from the present, then the objects connected to it become more valuable and more worthy of imaginative engagement.

Watson’s perception of the past as a rarity that had to be labeled and preserved was not shared by all of his contemporaries. According to the diary of his friend and fellow historian Deborah Norris Logan, his wife, Phoebe Crowell Watson, managed to reject at least one elderly tea table that her husband tried to collect and install in their house as a relic. For her, it was junk, not history. Phoebe Watson judged the tea table by its usefulness and probably also by its style. The fact that the table had existed in the past mattered little if it was too rickety to use or if its scruffy appearance made it seem that the Watsons could not afford better furniture. Her reaction reminds us that whether or not women chose to participate in the work of producing history, they could still be performing the work of a curator or preservationist. John Watson’s antiquarian collecting of large and small relics probably added significantly to his wife’s labor. Neither the buttons nor the tea tables were magically protected from disintegration by the action of Watson’s mind.

Someone was paid to build the relic box; Phoebe Watson refused to dust another tea table.

A Picture of Changing Time

The wood that makes up this box represents an unbroken history leading from the first European contact to the creation of the United States. Yet, the overly small and excessively ornamental feet on which this block of wood poses literally and figuratively undercut the stability of this “grave” history. Their paw shape and flowery brackets contrast sharply with the rigid lines and geometrical inlays that compose the box. This union of the inanimate box and the potentially animated feet is grotesque and whimsical rather than sublime. According to the label Watson pasted inside the box, it is primarily constructed of elm wood from Penn’s Treaty Tree, which fell over during a storm in 1810. The walnut border comes from “a cluster of forest trees” that stood before Independence Hall. Watson associates both the walnut and the elm with the Founding Fathers and with the trees that covered the area prior to European arrival. The small “star[s] of mahogany” on the lid and front of the box come from “the house in St. Domingo where Columbus dwelt.” These inlaid woods replicate a triumphal narrative of progress catalyzed by the actions of great white men from Columbus (mahogany) through Penn (elm) to the United States (walnut). Externally, the box tells a story that resembles the “discoveries of countries” and “foundations of empires” listed in Mnemonika. Yet nearly everything else about the box challenges this traditional concept of history.

The relic wood itself generates a tension between the hard work of great men and the desire for leisure in a pastoral “cluster of forest trees.” Typically, the pastoral ideal offers escape from urbanization, mechanization, and linear time, but Watson did not simply use history to flee Jacksonian America. While some of his contemporaries longed to escape back into the slower life of an idealized past, Watson enjoyed experiencing the different tempos of modernity and history, and he was especially delighted by sudden shifts in time. He could suddenly arrest time by holding a miniature relic or speed it up by riding on one of the new forms of steam-powered transportation. For example, his account of a train ride in 1835 abounds with excitement rather than anti-technological nostalgia. “When we had attached ourselves to the Locomotive Engine,” Watson recounted, “Oh! With what rapidity we went! It was an amusement to try to count the panels of the fences as we passed them. We went faster—(15 m an hour) than I could count them beyond 20 to 30 times! Wonderful invention!” Even after the event, Watson’s exclamation points and interjections convey a very unantiquarian enthusiasm for speed. A similar delight in manipulating the pace of time appears in the contrast between the lively little feet and the measured procession of history in the wood of the box. The objects in the box also document sudden change: dresses less than fifty years old are already in rags; coffins buried in the last century are dug up to make way for new water pipes; steamboats are dashed to pieces by waterfalls; cities are burned to the ground. These miniature relics, like the fence posts Watson tries to count from the train, allow the eye and the hand to stop time for a moment in contemplation, but their ruined state also makes the viewer aware that time is passing rapidly.

Different tempos juxtaposed against one another also form the subject of the watercolor inside the box (fig. 5). Watson’s adaptation of William Birch’s frontispiece to The City of Philadelphia … as It Appeared in the Year 1800 (fig. 6) presents a pastoral world of leisure against the backdrop of bustling, modern-day Philadelphia. Where Birch emphasizes continuous progress between the construction in the foreground and the commerce in the background, Watson creates a stark difference between pastoral stillness and urban activity. In the left foreground of Birch’s image, two men industriously chop and saw wood for the boat being constructed directly behind them. In the middle ground, another group of builders heat construction materials over a smoky wood fire. The proximity of axes, sawyers, wooden ships, and fire to the elm highlights its vulnerability to destruction in the name of progress. Already this tree is one of the only remaining trees from the forests that once covered this area. At any minute one of the men could look up from his work and see the tree in terms of board feet of lumber. Birch does not necessarily condemn this impulse. His frontispiece reminds Philadelphians of their founding story in which Penn signed a fair and friendly treaty with the Native peoples for the land on which he built their city. If this land can be converted from indigenous to European and from woods to city without struggle or loss, then there is no reason that the tree cannot be converted from a relic of the forest into a trading ship with equal ease and felicity.

Watson disagreed. In his watercolor, he removed the threatening sawyers, boats, and fire. In place of these, he depicted a solitary fisherman, slightly larger than the scale would dictate, sitting on a dock. This figure, like Rip Van Winkle or the Angler from Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, avoids productive labor by engaging in the sport of fishing. In this game, he escapes from crowded cities into the static rural world protected by the box where play replaces construction and destruction. The relic box, this image suggests, is Watson’s “fishing hole.” Here he reels his “keepers,” or keepsakes, up from the depths and applies imagination to them in order to visit places and times that are strange and surprising in comparison to the present. “From such materials,” he explained in the Annals of Philadelphia, “we may hope to make provisions for future works of poetry, painting, and romance. It is the raw material to be elaborated into fancy tales and fancy characters.” By enjoying the delightful surprise of moving back and forth in time, of holding onto a moment and letting it go, Watson believed Americans could shape their identity in “fancy tales and fancy characters” rather than being compelled by unseen forces of change to mindlessly produce and destroy.

Preserved Feeling

While Rip Van Winkle’s playful life in the Catskills offers him an escape from domesticity, Watson’s retreat from the masculine labor of founding countries into playful contemplation of the past relies on the miniaturized domestic space of the box for protection from change and decay. This connection between history as child’s play and the home as a space that encloses emotional relationships and separates women from wage labor helps to explain why Watson’s box most resembles contemporary sewing and jewelry boxes, protective cases that are strongly associated with sentiment and domesticity (fig. 7). The jewelry box in this image has paw-shaped feet very similar to those of Watson’s box. Its gilt, stencil decorations of cornucopias, eagles’ heads, and foliage go much further in exemplifying the exuberant colors and patterns typical of the fancy style. Like Watson’s box, the jewelry box is labeled. On the back panel, a painted inscription reads, “M. A. Torris. / Oh years have flown since first we met, / And sorrows have been mine. / I’ve felt when to thy bosom pressed, / That greater bliss was mine. / New York January 1st 1829.” These conventional verses indicate that this box is almost certainly a New Year’s gift marking either a friendship or a romantic relationship. Watson’s relic box takes this idea of making an ornamental box symbolize a private, emotional relationship with a contemporary and turns it into a medium for cementing and protecting a relationship with dead forefathers and dead ways of daily life. The similarity between Watson’s box and this contemporary jewelry box appropriates sentimental domesticity for the work of preservation. The relics of the past can be protected and preserved—”to thy bosom pressed”—to create emotional ties that transcend time and space just as the jewelry box symbolically encloses and preserves the feeling between giver and receiver. But relics, relic boxes, and jewelry boxes are also objects that can be bought and sold. The feelings that they represent are, to some extent, the result of having these new kinds of fancy goods to exchange in order to consume preserved feelings.

Homespun Rural Self-Sufficiency

Inside his box, Watson seems ambivalent about consumer goods. His collection includes several scraps of American silk made by Susanna Wright and Mrs. Haines and her daughters (fig. 8). These fabrics seem to idealize women engaging in pastoral and domestic labors like spinning and weaving. In one sense, therefore, they exemplify the nostalgia for an “age of homespun” that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich describes as an idealized past where women clothed their families without complicated machinery and without leaving the domestic sphere to shop or work. But Watson’s brief history of silk culture in his Annals tells a more complicated story of communal self-sufficiency. In addition to the work of the Wright and Haines families, he describes how the American Philosophical Society and the Pennsylvania Assembly supported the construction of a “public filature at Philadelphia for winding cocoons” in 1770. After a hiatus caused by lack of government support, Watson claims that the same idea of communal self-sufficiency in silk reemerged in the 1830s. “A Holland family on the Frankford road is making it [silk culture] their exclusive business on a large scale; and in Connecticut whole communities are pursuing it, and supplying the public with sewing silk.” Watson’s silk scraps, therefore, also signify a desire for government-supported and scientifically managed rural labor. This kind of work can be carried out in the pastoral space of the farm or of the village so that these communities can become self-sufficient rather than sending men and women to labor for wages and to consume manufactured goods in the city. The “age of homespun” in Watson’s box, therefore, is as much about sustaining an idealized, pastoral lifestyle through cottage industries and scientific farming as it is about celebrating women who model thrift and hard work within the home.

An Appetite for History

The early nineteenth-century invention of the past in “fancy stories and fancy characters” extended well beyond Watson’s relic box or his Annals. For example, Samuel Goodrich, writing as Peter Parley, and Francis Lister Hawks, writing as Lambert Lilly, churned out thousands of anecdote-based history books for children in the 1820s and 1830s. Their fancy histories tolerated poorly documented stories about the adventures of Peter Parley and other characters in order to bring readers imaginatively into tactile contact with the past. This method responded to changing concepts of memory itself from an art to a biological organ. In his preface to The History of New England, Illustrated by Tales, Sketches, Anecdotes, and Adventures (1831), Lilly explains children’s minds as though they were stomachs. “The first impulse of a child,” he says somewhat contemptuously, “is to feed his imagination, and satiate his curiosity.” Although he knows that children’s appetites are unsound, Lilly writes his history according to the laws of human development. “Children are impelled by their feelings and tastes, and we cannot change their nature. The only way to guide them safely through the first giddy paths of their existence, is to consult their nature, and conform to their dispositions.” The History of New England assumes children are developmentally incapable of understanding better-researched narratives and provides them with colorful, apocryphal stories instead. Lilly’s idea that physical appetites govern the mind indicates that fancy, anecdotal history increasingly functions as a concession to memory that has become a physical organ.

Watson’s shift from memory as a metaphorical miser’s chest to memory as an appetite appears most clearly when he has his head examined by phrenologist A. D. Ditmars in 1835. The word “memory” does not appear in Watson’s transcript of the phrenologist’s report. Instead, Ditmars uses Watson’s head shape to determine that his capacity for remembering has changed from a strong ability to remember faces and places to an ability to remember historic facts and dates. Watson’s memory changes over time, just as a child’s memory gradually matures. But the memory still remains fixed by the growth and decay of the physical structure of the head. Ditmars does not suggest that any amount of art or cultivation will allow Watson to regain his memory of faces and names.

Watson’s interest in the past, according to this reading, comes primarily through his “organ of Self Respect.” This organ is “very high indeed … Should like to command & to rule—would have been military, but that my organ of destructiveness was not large—don’t like to see pain & misery inflicted.” He concludes, “Self Respect & veneration & comparison being very high & full, are the cause of my love of Relics, and my Acquisitiveness makes me gather & keep that which is rare & curious.” It seems fairly obvious why Watson links the organs of veneration, comparative reasoning, and acquisitiveness to his collecting activities. Interest in the past requires an emotional respect for its significance and delight in the difference between past and present. The miserly organ of acquisitiveness naturalizes the desire to snatch and hold onto things that Watson and Coale had once perceived as only a metaphor in Mnemonika. “Self Respect,” in contrast, does not appear like an obvious quality for a relic collector. As Watson explains it, however, it demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of fancy history’s effort to blend art and empiricism to produce a past that people will want to protect.

According to Ditmars’s phrenological reading, Watson naturally desires to “command and rule” and is just as naturally unable to destroy anything. Thanks to his insufficient “organ of destructiveness,” Watson is incapable of throwing out the Indian hemp or the woman’s shoe buckle or the “piece of coffin!” because they feed this appetite for delight even though they do not add up to a single, coherent narrative of the past. However, Watson does not acknowledge, as Mease does, that a sense of entitlement to history travels along with the humane desire to preserve it. The complicated politics of rendering, say, indigenous objects or other people’s coffins as history are entirely absent from Watson’s “fancy tales.” Instead, all his evidence demonstrates the size of his self-respect. The fact that this organ is large shows, in turn, that he is entitled to collect this evidence. Watson’s relics reveal the strength of his appetites and his physical capacity to command and rule. But because the objects that he acquires are evidence of his physical nature, they cannot critique his physical desires. By positing a natural drive to feed the imagination on relics and anecdotes, Watson and other creators of “fancy tales and fancy characters” fail to remember that history is an art as well as a science and that, like all human-fabricated things, destruction is its genesis and its destiny.

Further Reading:

Out of the numerous studies of collecting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my evaluation of Watson’s relic box especially benefitted from David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006); Susan Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004); Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C., 1993); and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001).

For vernacular material culture in the early nineteenth century, I used Sumpter Priddy, American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790-1840 (Milwaukee, 2004) as well as the collections in the Winterthur Museum. I am very grateful to the Winterthur Museum and Library for a fellowship, which allowed me extensive access to their collections, and to staff members Linda Eaton, Sara Jatcko, Helena Richardson, and Jeanne Solensky for pointing out Watson to me and for sharing their insights on boxes and ruins.

The most detailed study of John Fanning Watson is Deborah Dependahl Waters, “Philadelphia’s Boswell: John Fanning Watson,” PMHB 98 (January 1974): 3-52. The only analysis of the relic box that I am aware of is by Lois Amorette Dietz, “John Fanning Watson: Looking Ahead With a Backwards Glance” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 2004). Watson’s unpublished manuscripts, journals, and letters are rich archives for understanding how nineteenth-century Americans produced history. They are divided between the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts at the Winterthur Library and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to both the Winterthur Library and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for permission to publish the quotations from Watson’s manuscripts.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.1 (October, 2009).

Yvette Piggush is an assistant professor of English at Florida International University. She is working on a book manuscript titled We Have No Ruins: The Culture of Historical Consciousness in the Early United States, 1790-1840.

It may not be a terribly exciting manuscript aesthetically, but a list of books in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, identified 12 months ago at the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), sheds new light on an important episode in the intellectual history of the early American republic: George Wythe’s 1806 bequest of his sizable library to President Jefferson. A prominent jurist and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Wythe was Jefferson’s law tutor in Williamsburg during the 1760s, and his “most affectionate friend through life.”

Why is this list of books noteworthy? Jefferson’s library, which he sold to Congress in 1815 following the destruction of the Congressional library by the British in the War of 1812, is arguably one of America’s national treasures. This collection, which Jefferson described in 1814 as having been 50 years in the making, and on which he “spared no pains, opportunity or expence to make it what it is,” formed the foundation of the Library of Congress as we know it today. The newly discovered list enables us to identify the Wythe books within Jefferson’s library. It greatly expands our understanding of Wythe’s book collection, its contents and the ideas they represented, as well as its disposition following his untimely death. For Jefferson scholars, it sheds new light on America’s third president as a book collector. Jefferson documented his collection decisions in this manuscript—which books to retain, which ones to give away, and to whom. For scholars interested in book history, this previously unknown primary source provides a fascinating case study on provenance, as we trace books as objects moving from one collection to another, both geographically and over time.

Our story begins when Endrina Tay, a librarian working at Monticello, asked to examine Jefferson’s “1783 Catalog,” a manuscript book catalog that Jefferson maintained from the late 1770s through 1812, now preserved in MHS’s Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts. Although Tay has worked on the Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries Project at Monticello since 2004, she had used only digital images of the 1783 Catalog, and had never seen the President’s original manuscript list. (The Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries project is building a comprehensive and publicly accessible database of the books Jefferson owned, read or recommended throughout his lifetime. It is now part of the Libraries of Early America project on LibraryThing.com.)

When MHS’s assistant reference librarian, Jeremy Dibbell, brought out the clamshell box containing this manuscript, we were both surprised to find a second, untitled list in Jefferson’s distinctive hand. This list consisted of three folded sheets, forming twelve pages (eight written, four blank). The first five pages contained short lists of books grouped under the names of some of Jefferson’s family members and other individuals. The final three pages listed additional books, bracketed with subject headings similar to those used by Jefferson in organizing his library, such as Common Law, Mathematics, and Architecture. Neither of us recognized this list, and there was nothing in the collection’s online finding guide or other files identifying it.

Coincidentally, Tay had recently answered a reference question about Jefferson’s ownership of Wythe’s books, and the knowledge that Jefferson had given some away was fresh in her mind. Could the unidentified list be an inventory of the books Jefferson had received from Wythe?

This question set us on a lengthy but exhilarating investigation, which led from published bibliographies, through Jefferson’s correspondence at MHS and the Library of Congress, and into library and auction catalogs and several estate inventories. Our first foray was to examine the mystery list for known Wythe titles: books still in existence, containing Wythe’s bookplate, signature, or notes. Most of these titles are at the Library of Congress, scattered among the remains of the collection Jefferson sold to Congress in 1815. E. Millicent Sowerby’s five-volume bibliography of Jefferson’s collection, published between 1952 to1959, includes thirty-one books identified as likely to have originated from Wythe’s library. Remarkably, twenty-four of these appear in the final three pages of the untitled booklist. The placement of these entries towards the end of Jefferson’s 1783 Catalog suggested that he added them at some point after the majority of entries were made, a detail consistent with their relatively late acquisition in 1806.

The chances that such a high rate of overlap could be coincidental seemed tiny, and Dibbell emailed Tay: “I think we may just have it!” Still, much sleuthing remained. We were now convinced that the final three pages of the untitled list represented books retained by Jefferson. This suggested that the preceding five pages listed books that he gave away.

James Dinsmore, an Irish joiner who worked at Monticello from 1798 through 1809, received seven books, among them the 1762 edition of The Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. James Ogilvie, tutor to Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, received two volumes of Etienne Bézout’s Cours de mathematics, à l’usage du corps royal de I’artillerie, plus a nine-volume edition of Cicero, which he recalled in his 1816 memoir (Philosophical Essays) as “a complete and elegant edition in quarto.”

Other recipients of a few Wythe books included Jefferson’s granddaughters, Ann Cary Randolph and Ellen Wayles Randolph; his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph; and his son-in-law, John Wayles Eppes (previously married to Jefferson’s daughter, Maria, who died in 1804). Ann and Ellen (aged fifteen and almost ten respectively) were given works by Plutarch, Dryden, and Shakespeare, along with Alexander Pope’s translations of the works of Homer. Martha received a nine-volume set of Pope’s works, and to Eppes went a collection of classical texts, including the Foulis editions of Herodotus, Xenophon, Caesar, Homer, and Cicero.

Jefferson’s favorite grandson and namesake, fourteen-year-old Thomas Jefferson Randolph, received a significant number of books, comprising two full pages of the list: seventy-two titles in 111 volumes. These books, including classical texts in the original languages and in translation, histories, and works on mathematics and grammar, would have been seen by Jefferson as an integral part of his grandson’s education, in which he took a great interest. One of the Wythe books given to young Randolph, the first volume of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters (Philadelphia, 1784), was sold at a 1921 auction, described as bearing the “autograph of T. J. Randolph on title.”

Another full page of the list was devoted to books given to Thomas Mann Randolph, husband of Jefferson’s daughter Martha. Jefferson wrote Randolph on October 10, 1806, that he had boxes of books for him; these may have included those designated for the entire Randolph family. Thomas Mann Randolph’s 1832 estate inventory includes all but six of the titles noted on the list. There is some overlap between this probate inventory and the books given to young Thomas Jefferson Randolph, suggesting that a few of the books Jefferson designated for his grandchildren may have found their way into their father’s library.

The first group of books on the list proved most challenging to trace. The top edge of the first page is missing, eliminating any name or other information. Fortunately, we were able to trace some titles in this section. Mostly standard law reports and texts, they went to Dabney Carr, Jr., Jefferson’s nephew and an up-and-coming lawyer, appointed commonwealth’s attorney for Albemarle County in 1801. A September 11, 1806, letter bears out our finding: “Th. Jefferson with his affectionate salutations to Mr. Carr, sends for his acceptance some books, a part of Mr. Wythe’s law library, which may be useful to him in his law-labors. in this disposition of them he believes he fulfills the philanthropic views of the testator more exactly than by retaining them himself.” We located three books from Carr’s collection that matched titles in the first section of the mystery list. Matthew Hale’s Historia placitorum coronel (1736), at the University of Virginia, contains an inscription, “Given by Thos Jefferson to D Carr 1806.” Sir Geoffrey Gilbert’s Reports of Cases in Equity (1742), also at the University of Virginia, contains a similar note. And in the 1875 auction of the library of Richmond judge Thomas Wynne, we found a copy of Lord Raymond’s British law reports (1743), which had passed from Wythe to Jefferson to Carr and later to Wynne.

With clues gleaned from Jefferson’s correspondence, we were able to put together a timeline of events leading up to the creation of this book inventory. In January 1806, Wythe added a codicil to his 1803 will: “I give my books and small philosophical apparatus to Thomas Jefferson, president of the united states of America; a legacie considered abstractlie perhaps not deserving a place in his musaeum, but, estimated by my good will to him, the most valuable to him of any thing which i have power to bestow.”

On June 12, 1806, Jefferson received a letter from William DuVal, Wythe’s executor, informing him of Wythe’s tragic death on June 8. Wythe’s ne’er do well grandnephew, George Wythe Sweeney, had allegedly forged checks to pay gambling debts and then resorted to poisoning both Wythe and Wythe’s fifteen-year-old former slave, Michael Brown, who was to have inherited a portion of Wythe’s estate. Brown did not survive, but Wythe lived long enough to disinherit Sweeney (who was later acquitted of the murders).

On July 12, DuVal informed Jefferson that “A catalogue of the Books, the Small Phylosophical Apparatus, with the two Cups and Gold headed Cane, also Mr. Wythe’s portrait” had been delivered to the care of George Jefferson, the president’s cousin and designated agent in Richmond. DuVal added: “The Terrestrial Globe is missing. It is apprehended G.W.S. [George Wythe Sweeney] sold it. He sent last year several Books belonging to Mr. Wythe to vendue.” Sweeney had a history of financing his debts by stealing his granduncle’s property, including selling three trunks of Wythe’s law books. Sometime between August 17 and 30, Wythe’s library, packed in five boxes, arrived by wagon at Monticello together with Wythe’s portrait. The book catalogue mentioned by DuVal arrived with Wythe’s books but has never been found.

Jefferson spent the month of September 1806 at Monticello, minding the affairs of state remotely; and also at Poplar Forest, building the foundation of his retirement retreat and overseeing his tobacco farm. He also took time to inventory Wythe’s books. A consummate list maker, he compared the titles he received against his own library catalog and created an inventory of the titles he decided to retain and the duplicate titles he would offer to relatives and other individuals. The result of this effort is the list housed in the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts at the Massachusetts Historical Society, now recognized for the first time in over a hundred years.

The previous attempt to recreate Wythe’s library, undertaken by Barbara C. Dean at Colonial Williamsburg in 1975, identified just 170 titles (some based on conjecture). The new list more than doubles that count, revealing that Wythe’s bequest to Jefferson amounted to some 338 titles in 649 volumes. Of those, Jefferson gave away 183 titles in 400 volumes, and retained 155 titles in 249 volumes.

Jefferson had a practice of marking his books by placing his initials, “T” before the first I-quire signature and “I” after the T-quire signature. Signatures are printer’s marks, often alphabets or numbers printed at the bottom of page gatherings or quires, to ensure that bookbinders assembled the page gatherings in the correct order. We noticed that Jefferson did not generally place his initials in the Wythe-Jefferson books extant at the Library of Congress. Was this omission out of respect for his mentor? Or was it simply because he lacked the time for this task during those few weeks at Monticello in September 1806? These are among the questions that continue to intrigue us.

Digital images of the booklist are available through the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Jefferson Electronic Archive, and a transcription of the list, with links to the digital images is also online. The full annotated catalog of George Wythe’s library is available on LibraryThing.com as part of the ongoing Libraries of Early America project. We hope that scholars will take advantage of these resources in their studies of the lives and works of Jefferson, Wythe, and others, and that this list will also be useful in future scholarship relating to book history and print culture in the early republic.

Further Reading

Jefferson’s 1783 Catalog and his correspondence with Dabney Carr Jr., Thomas Mann Randolph, and George Jefferson are all in the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society. His correspondence with William DuVal is in the Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, and available online. Thomas Mann Randolph’s probate inventory is found in Albemarle County Will Book XI: 346-349. James Ogilvie’s memoir is Philosophical Essays (Philadelphia, 1816). The auction record for Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters is lot 16, Selections from the Purchases and Stock of the Late George D. Smith [Part Three] (New York: Anderson Galleries, 1921). The auction record for Lord Raymond’s reports is lot 1816 ½, Catalogue of the rare, curious and valuable library collected by the late Hon. Thos. H. Wynne, of Richmond, VA. … To be sold at auction, in the city of Richmond, Va., commencing on the 14th of July, 1875 (Richmond: J. Thompson Brown, 1875).

For more on the intriguing murder of George Wythe, and the subsequent murder trial of George Wythe Sweeney, see Bruce Chadwick, I Am Murdered: George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and the Killing That Shocked a New Nation (Hoboken, N.J., 2009); Julian P. Boyd, “The Murder of George Wythe,”William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 12 (1955): 514-42; and Edwin W. Hemphill, “Examinations of George Wythe Swinney for Forgery and Murder: A Documentary Essay,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 12 (1955): 543-74.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Endrina Tay is Associate Foundation Librarian for Technical Services at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, owned and operated by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She heads the Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries Project based at Monticello.

Jeremy Dibbell is an Assistant Reference Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and coordinator of the Libraries of Early America Project at LibraryThing.com. He is the author of ““A Library of the Most Celebrated & Approved Authors’: The First Purchase Collection of Union College” (Libraries & the Cultural Record 43:4). Dibbell edits the MHS blog, The Beehive, and also blogs about books, libraries and archives at PhiloBiblos.

The articles in this issue of Common-place examine many different dimensions of music in early America. To the historian of religious culture, however, there is also an important element of continuity that links these disparate studies together. It is the process of ritualization that operates through this music across time and space in both religious and non-religious contexts.

Historians tend to think of ritual as a fixed pattern of symbolic behavior, such as the Roman Catholic mass or the five required daily prayers in Islam, that gains its meaning through a set text and invariant performance. A more dynamic and adaptive concept of ritual has emerged in recent years, however, especially through the work of anthropologist Victor Turner and historian of religion Catherine Bell. Their basic idea is that in contrast to ritual’s stabilizing functions, the process of ritualization can also catalyze and symbolize conflict and changing cultural circumstances.

Music, with or without words, has an extraordinary capacity as an agent of ritualization to make symbolic sense of a changing world. All the essays in this issue treat music that registers quintessentially American processes of cultural change—encounter, innovation, contestation, reconfiguration, transfusion. Accordingly, it seems valuable to read them also with an eye to how ritualization contributed to their creation of cultural meaning.

McDougall and DeLucia begin with accounts of English trumpets and drums counterpoised to Kikotan and Algonquian dance and song in primal encounters of peace and violence in the seventeenth century. In these cases, musics that had formerly provided ritual stability suddenly became rivals for symbolic supremacy in their New World encounter, invoking their respective peoples, warriors, and gods first in tentative coexistence and then in fatal conflict.

Gray and Goodman explore how individual Old World songs were textually reconfigured, musically re-presented, and culturally repositioned in the primal political combat between Federalists and Democratic Republicans during the 1790s. In these cases, an iconic English ballad and French Revolutionary anthems of great ritual power in their original national contexts were transformed and redeployed as agencies of public ritualization in a revolutionary society still experimenting with a new mode of political order.

Newcomer, Goodman, and Pappas take this collection into music and ritualization in the world of American Protestant sectarianism and civil religion. Their studies concentrate on music that helped to ritualize Methodism, Shakerism, and Southern nationalism when they were new movements. In these cases, manuscript and printed music served to create new systems of symbolic meaning which, when transmitted through and performed by sectarian constituencies, established the cultural stability critical to their survival.

Finally, Masten’s account of the transfusion of African and Irish music and dance suggests powerful processes of ritualization at work both in the creation of the new hybrid genre of “Negro jigs” and in its elaborately codified performance practice.

These brief reflections suggest just the most apparent dimensions of ritualization through music disclosed by these studies. Further reflection on them will reveal important additional aspects of how music serves to ritualize the American experiment’s unceasing processes of change.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Blessedly, there was comparatively little cant at this conference, arguments about which side was morally bankrupt, or patriotic celebrations of the Founding Fathers and texts such as those we see on the best-seller lists. There were, however, a couple dogs that did not bark, and every such gathering presents a moment to note the current location of the historiographic pendulum. There was not a single paper that addressed causation, and only one presenter (Ned Landsman) looked back decades before the Revolution to its history. At other historiographic moments, of course, Prime Minister William Pitt’s decision to fight the Seven Years War in North America and across the globe, and his decision to keep Canada in the peace settlement of 1763, thereby reversing the British Empire’s decision at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession fifteen years earlier, would have taken center stage. Not this time, though; causation and deeper history were not discussed.

There was some discussion of the waging of the war, which might have benefitted from contextualizing the bloodshed historically, but is an essential part of the story nonetheless. Per capita deaths were higher in the American Revolution than those suffered in any subsequent American war, the quasi-exception being among the Confederates who fought against the United States in the Civil War. This means a higher percentage of the living suffered the loss of a loved one, neighbor, or acquaintance in the Revolution than in any American war since. It was an ugly war; there were executions, and soldiers were tortured, homes were pillaged, and limbs were lost. Many never recovered. At no point did half of the American population support the war effort of what became the winning side.

Of course people fought for what they perceived to be their own interests; of course they fought with an eye to defend what they had and in the hope of achieving and acquiring more or being restricted less. Of course violence begat violence and the longer the war continued the more brutal it became. No side—at least for or against; I happen to have a soft spot for some of the morally driven neutrals—was more principled and no side was less so as a group. Americans fought righteously, and with their eyes on the main chance. They fought for themselves, for their comrades in arms, for their families, for their communities, and with God on their side. Of course they did. Don’t we always?

American politics at the time was plagued by corruption, provincialism, and dreams of conquest, and it was led by some brilliant and principled men, although not men who necessarily shared each other’s principles or many of ours, whatever yours are. Obviously, the past was not the present, for good and for ill. The Revolutionaries were people, and they were not the same people that we are two-and-a-half centuries later. So, let it go. It is history—important then and important to help us understand now, but the Revolutionaries were neither saints nor devils, worthy of worship nor deserving of our disdain and dismissal. We should try to understand them as humans just like us. Were men of wealth less moral than the impoverished were (or would have been if social roles were reversed)? Wrong question; move on. How did the world look to people of different races, ethnicities, regions, genders, classes, and religious beliefs? Good question. It is worth asking about perspectives and what informed and affected them. With whom do you more closely identify? Whom do you admire, revile; whom do you fail to comprehend? Fine, if those questions appeal to you, but be sure to answer modestly and with an appropriate seasoning of self-doubt. Try your best either to avoid anachronism or to wallow self-consciously in it; there is no middle ground, and you will fail in any event, whichever path you take.

Do you assume that people back then were inspired by rational, conscious choices that were fully informed and dispassionate? Really? I have heard it said that all historical actors are victims, in the sense that they have incomplete knowledge and less than full capacity to act independently of others. Thomas Hutchinson was not a victim in the same ways that Thomas Jefferson’s slaves were, so “victim” is a poor choice of words, but I take the point. It is important to try to understand Hutchinson, Jefferson, and the slaves from their own points of view.

People get swept up by events, by circumstances, by tides against which you cannot swim. You can try to ride it out, you can try to swim out the side of the current, or you can drown. You may drown in any event, but can you choose rationally? It is hard to say what you would do until you feel yourself in the death grip of a natural force against which you are powerless.

Perhaps someday historians will realize that the great masses of eighteenth-century humanity were not college professors, and did not think, reason, and act on the basis of what they read in books. Actually, we delude ourselves that college professors are rational and inspired by ideas, but we should not assume that George Washington or his rank-and-file were similarly deluded about themselves. As the late Rhys Isaac observed,

Historical understanding has too long been enthralled by the assumptions, preferences, and definitions of intellectuals—a high priesthood of which historians themselves form a part. In highly literate milieus the assumption is unquestioned that significant communication is conveyed by words, especially by written words, and above all by printed words. Yet one may ask: How many people in our own society—among the elite even—arrive at articulate verbal statements of the meaning of their own lives? For all persons such statements are most often implied in patterns of behavior.

The corollary assumptions against which Isaac advised are that ideas are formed in a linear fashion. Historical figure X reads political theorist Y and therefore writes text Z, which (somehow) leads whole armies to form and invade an “enemy.” There is often in the literature on the Revolution no recognition of pre-cognitive influences, countervailing forces, external stimuli, irrational and/or personality-based preconditions, or the dominance of inconsistency over consistency in human behavior. It’s as if few historians of the Revolution have ever parented teenagers or had a spouse point out his inconsistencies. There is often no delving beneath words in the literature on the Revolution; the words are relied on by historians as prima facie evidence of their meanings. “Common sense” and literal readings are the resort, the method, the underlying and generally unexamined assumptions of such analyses. The intervening role of those dimensions of the historian’s reading also goes unrecognized in such an “objective” approach to ideas. More truly, the “objectivity” is a mask that deceives the historian himself, who seldom penetrates his own self-interested reading, never mind the self-interests of the historical figure, unless to dismiss it. No, I’m not headed for “The Mask of the Red Death;” that would be silly.

Further Reading:

To read Rhys Isaac’s full work, see The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Thomas P. Slaughter is Arthur R. Miller Professor of History at the University of Rochester and author of Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution (Hill & Wang, 2014).

Comments on the American Revolution Reborn

I’d like to open briefly with some remarks about themes, and then highlight something important that has been missing from the rest of our discussions.

Before all else, it is absolutely critical to do what so many involved in this conference are trying and proposing to do—that is, situate the American Revolution in its transnational and Atlantic contexts. This is crucial to rethinking the nationalist origin myth. It is equally critical to offer a new, archive-based history of the revolution “from below” and to concentrate on a mass of experience that would include Native Americans, African Americans, workers, and women. A fully realized new narrative will depend on facing and accomplishing these tasks.

The new work in turn will face two dilemmas. First, if Michael McDonnell and others are right in saying that roughly sixty percent of the population in the American colonies were “disaffected” in the run-up to the revolution, and even after it broke out, and if the remaining forty percent were more or less evenly divided between Loyalists to Britain and American patriots, this set of facts makes the victory of the patriot movement more improbable and, in the end, even more spectacular. This in turn will prompt a new round of no doubt celebratory studies about how the patriots did it, likely confirming the dictum offered by C.L.R. James that most history is made by small, highly organized groups of people. How did such a group come to create and use the nation-state as a modality of power? Multiple histories from below will collide, conflict, and occasionally overlap. How a smaller-than-imagined patriot movement managed to mobilize the labor to fight and win the war may emerge as the pivotal issue.

Second, if a new narrative of the American Revolution “from below” should arise, we know from past experience that it will be completely unacceptable to the ruling class of the country. We should recall the National History Standards debate in the early and mid-1990s, when a team of historians, led by Gary Nash, proposed to integrate the new social history of the previous generation into the body of knowledge every student in the United States should possess, only to have its proposed revision voted down 99-1 in the U.S. Senate because it was “insufficiently patriotic.” This matter also deserves serious discussion here and hereafter.

The “something missing” in the conference is big, elusive, and difficult to express. I’d call it the profound historic power of the revolutionary idea—the notion that human beings can organize themselves collectively, in a movement, to change the very course of history. This is a modern idea, and a powerful one. It is so central to modern consciousness that, perhaps, we take it for granted. We should not. Within the revolutionary idea lies another, a concept much used, and abused, by historians these days. I refer to “agency.” Who are the historical agents? The American Revolution helped to form the idea of conscious, willed, systemic, historic change—and thereby the very notion of agency itself.

Aaron Fogleman, Marcus Rediker, and Peter Thompson discuss violence and the whitewashing of violence in Revolutionary America.

In preparing these remarks, I asked myself, how can I best sum up the power of the revolutionary idea? I tried to find examples of writers who understood and expressed it. The best example I could come up with was a contemporary of the American Revolution, the great English poet and artist William Blake. I refer to his visionary poem, America, A Prophecy, and to several engravings he made around the same time.

In case you are wondering, yes, I really am going to hold all of us historians to the standard of William Blake. May God help us. Here we go.

Blake saw the American Revolution as … revolutionary. His poem opens with a symbol of revolution, Red Orc, pinioned to the ground, his arms and legs bound by “tenfold chains.” He breaks free of his manacles. The “age of revolution” begins.

Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations,
Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds & raging Fires!
Albion is sick. America faints! enrag’d the Zenith grew.
As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven
Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea;
Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire
With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers
Surrounded; heat but not light went thro’ the murky atmosphere
The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision

Blake wrote the poem in 1793, a profoundly revolutionary moment, in England, Ireland, France, and St. Domingue.

The King of England sends his war angels against Red Orc, who, by the way, is no gentleman. He is rather a “Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities” and a “Lover of wild rebellion, and transgresser of Gods Law.” Orc is violent, murderous, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and apocalyptic, an apt symbol for a truly revolutionary age.

The King then unleashes demons to spread pestilence among the rebellious Americans. But “the red flames of Orc” defeat him as the Americans declare their rebellion: “no more I follow, no more obedience pay.” The patriots unite in solidarity, what Blake calls “the fierce rushing of th’inhabitants together.” Sailors take direct action against property, tomahawking casks of tea and dumping it into Boston Harbor; Tom Paine “casts his pen upon the earth” and writes Common Sense.

Red Orc reaches across the Atlantic, for soon “France reciev’d the Demons light.” “Stiff shudderings shook the heav’nly thrones! France Spain & Italy … And so the Princes fade from earth, scarce seen by souls of men.” A more hopeful future, republican and revolutionary, emerged from the purifying fire. Of America, Blake concludes, “But tho’ obscur’d, this is the form of the Angelic land.” This is Blake’s history, his prophecy.

Blake paid close attention to freedom struggles around the Atlantic, especially when engraving eighteen images for John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname (1796). He based his Red Orc on an African man named Neptune, who was executed in the storied year 1776 in Suriname for killing a white overseer. Like Neptune, Orc was pinioned to the ground. Blake called him “the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa.” Blake thus used a tortured African rebel to express his own hopes of freedom in the age of revolution.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that Blake is typical of anyone in his generation; I am not saying he studied or even knew a great deal about the American Revolution. He probably did not understand the conservative goals that some of the “revolutionaries” fought for. What I am saying is that he intuited something big and important, as a great poet ought to do! This circulation of “the demon’s light”—the revolutionary idea and its new possibility—is a key to the American Revolution, as Blake well understood.

There have been many critiques and deconstructions of “revolution” as a concept in recent years. Some of this is valuable, but some of it is pure cynicism, an expression of the degradation of politics, in the United States and around the world, in this era of Reagan and Thatcher. There is something important to be saved in the notion of revolution, as Blake teaches us. This brings us back to the concept of agency, which, we usually forget, has its own history. The American Revolution helped to establish the very possibility of collective, world-changing agency. Tom Paine understood this. He wrote in Common Sense: “Kings are not taken away by miracles, neither are changes in governments brought about by any other means than such as are common and human; and such as we are now using.”

Following Blake and Paine, I would hope that the new histories of the American Revolution would include more “Human fire fierce glowing.” The universalistic claims of the revolutionaries are historically important, even though many who uttered them in 1776 were in full retreat by the time Blake wrote his praise-song to revolution in 1793. Counter-revolutionary fears should not blind us to the potent idea they had helped to unleash a few years earlier.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of numerous prize-winning books, including (with Peter Linebaugh) The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2013), from which this essay draws, and most recently, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2012).

On the road to the halftone revolution

When William James Linton left England in 1866, bound for a new life in New York City, he was what we would now call middle aged, with more than three decades of a career as a wood engraver already behind him. Linton’s reasons for leaving England were complicated, but somewhere in the mix must have been his disappointment with the state of wood engraving as it had come to be practiced in London. Developed as a distinctive technique late in the eighteenth century, wood engraving had always been used almost exclusively for commercial purposes, to illustrate books and periodicals. But for Linton wood engraving was also an art, in the sense that it was a means for expressing the most essential truths about nature and beauty. When Linton learned the craft in the 1820s it was easier to dwell on its artistic possibilities, since the demand for illustrations was relatively low. That changed, though, in the 1840s, when periodicals like the Illustrated London News created an almost insatiable demand for wood-engraved illustrations. As engravers crowded in to meet that demand, they formed large engraving firms and devised clever new ways of dividing up labor in order to speed production. Linton deplored this industrialization of the craft, and he later wrote that by the time he left England, “there was no art of wood-engraving.”

The United States turned out to be a hospitable place for Linton to start anew. Shortly after arriving in New York he accepted a position teaching wood engraving at the Cooper Union; he was hired to work in the art department of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (which employed the same labor-divided methods Linton left in England—he didn’t last long there); and he was soon busy as a freelance engraver, with work coming in for both book and periodical illustrations. By 1870 he was established enough to leave New York for the quieter setting of Hamden, Connecticut, where he moved into a small house he called “Appledore” and continued his prospering career as a freelancer.

This was an especially exciting time for Linton and anyone else hoping to see wood engraving rise (or return) to the level of art in the sense that Linton had in mind. In the years since the end of the Civil War, publishers in the United States had founded a handful of illustrated periodicals—including the Aldine and Appleton’s Journal—that gave far greater attention to the aesthetic possibilities of wood engraving than did the wildly popular Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s Weekly. Few of these periodicals would survive for more than a decade, but they proved to be a boon for freelance engravers, who tended to be more artistically inclined—or at any rate more free to pursue their artistic inclinations—than those working for engraving firms or in house for magazines. They also set a new standard for the “white line” style of engraving that Linton and others agreed was where the distinctive art of wood engraving was to be found. Linton engraved for virtually every one of these periodicals, and by the early 1870s he had become something of an icon among American wood engravers.

It was with great concern, then, that Linton—probably late in 1878—noticed a “new phenomenon” in wood engraving that was pushing the form in a different and to his mind grievously wrong direction. In recent issues of Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, one of the newer (though by now well-established) illustrated monthlies, Linton saw that some of the illustrations—all wood engravings—sought to mimic the tones and textures of the drawings or paintings on which they were based, departing radically from the white-line style he believed was essential to good engraving. Linton knew that many of these engravings were made from images that had been photographically transferred rather than drawn onto the woodblock, a relatively new practice that seemed to him to be a further denigration of the craft.

By early 1879 he had seen enough to write an article on the subject, which the Atlantic Monthly published in June under the title “Art in Engraving on Wood.” Long, tendentious, and occasionally nasty (at one point Linton recalls his “disgust” upon viewing the work of the one engraver he criticizes by name, Timothy Cole), Linton’s article was in fact a diatribe, and it settled on one main complaint about what was already being called the “new school” of wood engraving. To be an art, Linton argued, wood engraving needed to be more than merely reproductive, something that Cole and others seemed not to understand. Rather than “translate” a picture from another medium to the distinctive lines of wood engraving, these engravers sought only to duplicate the original picture—a painting or a crayon drawing or even a photograph taken “from nature”—down to the last detail, so that the print from the engraving looked as much like the original as possible. For Linton this was a return to mere “facsimile” engraving, where the chief concern was a literal fidelity to the original picture. An engraving, he implored, ought to be something altogether new, “not a photographic image of the picture, but an engraving.”

Linton’s interests were not as rarified in 1879 as they would be today. In fact, through virtually all of the nineteenth century, wood engraving was probably the most common means for bringing pictures before the public. Turn the pages of any illustrated book, pamphlet, or periodical published before 1885, and it is fairly certain that most of the illustrations are wood engravings. There were lots of other ways of printing pictures, of course, and as the century progressed the range of possibilities grew, as inventors and tinkerers developed a whole host of marvelous new graphic technologies, including the most marvelous of them all, photography. Wood engravings remained the overwhelming preference for illustration, though, mostly because they are printed in relief, like raised type, making it possible to print them alongside text. This was not yet true for photographs, which required their own tools and techniques to be printed from negatives.

But wood engravings were costly and time-consuming to make, and the advent of photography made them seem in some instances to place too many layers of mediation between the picture and the thing depicted. Those wanting to address these deficiencies were soon at work on a way to produce relief blocks using some kind of photographic process that would eliminate the costly and intermediary engraver. By the 1870s a method for “photo-engraving” line drawings had been developed, but it was not until the 1880s that a good method was devised for photoengraving tonal images like photographs. It was this “halftone” process that spelled the end of commercial wood engraving, for now any picture, including a photograph, could be printed in relief without the need for an engraver. Turn the pages of any illustrated book or periodical published after 1895, and it is fairly certain that most of the illustrations are halftones or line-blocks.

For Linton, the “photographic” style of the new school was pointing the direction and paving the way to this unfortunate end. But he wrote in the midst of developments he neither understood nor could fully predict, and while there was prescience in his article, there was also a good deal of irony. It is true that photography and wood engraving converged in the new school, not only visually (in the way the engravings looked) and conceptually (in the reproductive fidelity new-school engravers strove for), but also technically, in that photography was now being used as a tool in the production of wood engravings. The intersection of these two means for making pictures was not as dire to the artistic fortunes of wood engraving as Linton feared, however. Indeed, as photography and wood engraving traveled together in the field of illustration through the 1880s, wood engraving came to be valued as a fine art in ways that Linton could never have imagined a decade earlier. And when museums and connoisseurs began to collect wood-engraved prints, it was the reproductive work of the new school they sought, not the white-line engravings of the 1860s and 1870s. The story of photography and wood engraving in the nineteenth century, then, is not simply a story of one technology’s ascent and the other’s decline. Photographs did eventually replace wood engravings in illustration, but before that photography joined and transformed wood engraving so as to favor its claims as a fine art.

Crucial to the rise of wood engraving as a commercial art were the technique and style of engraving popularized in the late eighteenth century by the Englishman Thomas Bewick, one of the art form’s most celebrated practitioners. Bewick used a tool for engraving on metal called a graver to cut across the grain of a very hard wood (boxwood), and he produced his images using arrangements of white lines—the lines cut by the graver—instead of the black lines one typically sees in drawing and intaglio engraving. The technique was what distinguished wood engraving from wood “cutting,” and the style—called white-line engraving—stood in contrast to what was called facsimile (or sometimes black-line) engraving, where the engraver simply cut away the wood on either side of the lines drawn by the artist. An engraving titled Sage-Hen and Jackass-Rabbit, also engraved by Davis after a drawing by Beard and published in Scribner’s in 1877, shows both facsimile engraving—in the sky and in the hillside and plants on the left—and white-line engraving, through most of the rest of the hillside and in the rabbit in the foreground (fig. 1). Another illustration from the same article, also engraved by Davis after a drawing by Beard, shows a more fully developed white-line style, where virtually the entire image was produced by arranging white lines of different widths and lengths, as a detail makes clear (fig. 2).

From its inception, photography could contribute a great deal to the creation of wood engravings such as this. Photographs could, most simply, serve as sources for illustrations, so that the artist who drew the image onto the woodblock could work from something other than a drawing or memory or the imagination. This was especially appealing for illustrations that needed to be appreciated for their accuracy, such as a portrait or any other picture that promised to deliver more information with closer scrutiny. By the 1850s it was not unusual to see wood-engraved illustrations cited as being “from” or “after” a photograph—such as one titled Grouse on Nest from the same Scribner’s article as the Davis engravings—claiming something of the veracity of photography even if the illustrations themselves really looked nothing like photographs (fig. 3).

That same decade saw the development of a new and much more direct use of photography in wood engraving. In a technique sometimes called “photoxylography,” whatever picture was to be engraved could be photographically printed directly onto the woodblock, freeing up artists to work in whatever medium they wished and removing the need for an intervening draughtsman. It was this practice, which the art editor of Scribner’s was making regular use of by the mid-1870s, that helped give rise to the reproductive logic of the new school. Timothy Cole’s The Gillie-Boy, which appeared in Scribner’s directly across from Grouse on Nest, is generally considered the first wood engraving to apply this new logic (fig. 4). Cole later wrote that James Kelly, the artist who painted the original picture, had asked the art editor to “insist that his manipulation throughout, . . . be suggested, or carried out in fact, by the engraver.” Cole took these instructions to heart, and the result was “the first instance of the new manner.” The most dramatic departure from conventional engraving is through the sky and along the periphery of the image, where Cole attempted to reproduce the look of Kelly’s brush strokes. Partly what made this “new manner” more photographic than white-line engraving, then, was the technical reliance on photography to produce the engravings.

But for Cole and other new-school engravers, photography offered not only a technical means for preparing their woodblocks for engraving but an entirely new way of conceiving their work. This new understanding had them much more likely to use the word “reproduce” than “translate” or “interpret” (the words favored by Linton) to describe their work as wood engravers. As one member of the new school put it, the “business” of the wood engraver “is to reproduce a picture as well as the looking-glass does.” This shift to a reproductive mode signaled as well a shift in thinking about “fidelity” in art. For Linton, the fidelity of the engraver was to the essential meaning of the work to be engraved, and it was this essential meaning that the engraver needed to maintain when translating the work into white and black lines. For new-school engravers like Frederick Juengling, the fidelity of the wood engraver was simply to the picture itself, precisely as it looked. “What it seeks,” he wrote of the new school, “is a perfect reproduction of the original.” Admirers frequently insisted that a kind of self-effacement on the part of the engraver was crucial to attaining this reproductive fidelity. They argued that a wood engraving should be free from any personal style and as free as possible from the formal demands of the medium, so that (in the words of one engraver) “the spectator will see in the engraving, not the engraver, but the original artist.” Linton derided this ideal of transparency as a “new acquirement of self-abnegation,” but to his critics he was simply more devoted to presenting himself and his medium than the picture at hand.

If photography and wood engraving intersected technically and conceptually in the late 1870s, it was their visual intersection that was the most evident and startling. In an engraving of Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of Christ that appeared in Scribner’s early in 1879, Timothy Cole reproduced not only the central figure but the texture of the chalk, discolorations across the paper, and tears at the bottom and the right, none of which Linton would have considered important (fig. 5). Cole’s engraved portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, based on a crayon drawing by Wyatt Eaton and published in the following issue of Scribner’s, sought again to reproduce the rough texture of the original medium, as well as the shape (and now tint) of the paper (fig. 6). (In his Atlantic Monthly article, Linton singled out this engraving as especially bad, calling it “one undistinguishable mess of meaningless dots and lines.”)

What Linton and other critics recognized was that the conceptual and visual priorities of the new school carried the field of illustration closer to photomechanical reproduction. A. V. S. Anthony, a leading white-line engraver, noted early in 1880 that “reproductions of crayon, chalk, and brush effects lack the charm of firm, pure line” and “give nothing that the photograph would not give.” A writer for Art Interchange that same year was quite explicit about the congruence between the new school and “process” reproduction. “The popularity of the present style of wood engraving,” he wrote, “is in consonance with the strenuous efforts that are being made to bring the art of making fac-simile pictures to perfection.” Noting that “reproductive art, so considered, is purely mechanical,” the author averred that “modern engraving is the form that reproductive art assumes now.” Photomechanical processes, he said, were still “too crude” to be generally useful, so that the “imitative” imperative of the new school—”the effort being to obtain the same effects with the graver that the artist has given with his pencil”—was “a positive advance.” For Linton this was no advance at all, and it seemed amazing that wood engravers would push their medium closer to photoengraving. “For hand skillfulness alone, new processes will supersede that,” he warned in 1882, referring to photoengraving. The future of wood engraving would depend not on “mechanical excellence” but on “thoroughness in art.”

One path plotted out by the new school moved exactly in the direction that Linton feared. If the new imperative of the engraver was exact reproductive fidelity, then an engraving based on a photograph taken “from nature” would, ideally, look as much like the original photograph as possible. A photograph of Civil War General Joseph Hooker, for instance, taken during the war by Mathew Brady, was used for an 1886 illustration in the Century Magazine—formerly Scribner’s (compare figure 7 to Brady’s photograph of Hooker on the National Portrait Gallery Website). The wood engraving, based on the center portion of the photograph, was done by Peter Aitken (who was taught how to engrave by Cole) and quite clearly was a product of photography on the woodblock and of the strict reproductive fidelity of the new school. No detail is altered or missed in Aitken’s rendering, and the tonal range is far greater than anything that could have been achieved using traditional white lines and closer to the range that the halftone process would make possible. What is more, the “self-abnegation” of the engraver (whose name nonetheless appears at the bottom right), in seeking to transmit the image with as little evidence of his interpretive labor as possible, aspired to the principal aim of photoengraving, which was the removal of the “intervening” engraver altogether.

But there was another path suggested by the new school, one that led not to the purely photographic end of Aitken’s Hooker engraving but to ends more aesthetic even as they remained reproductive. It was this second path that Timothy Cole and other leading new-school engravers took: the engraving of works of art—especially paintings—for reproduction as wood-engraved prints. In 1883 editors at the Century decided to send Cole to Europe to begin engraving from “old master” paintings, a project that proved to be a great success and that kept Cole abroad and busy for more than two decades. His engraving of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child (from a larger altarpiece), which the Century published in 1890, is characteristic of that project, with its elevated subject and rich tones, and without the apparent imitation of texture, which critics had by now dismissed as gimmicky (fig. 8). Cole’s ability to produce engravings such as this one relied heavily on photography—diaries he kept while abroad show him constantly collecting photographs of art works and sending them to a photographer for transfer to woodblocks—and although the look here is very different from the Emerson portrait, Cole’s thinking about his work remained essentially the same. “Now the engraving is nothing, absolutely nothing,” he wrote to his editor in 1891. “It is the reproduction of the original alone that concerns me . . . The engraver must work in the spirit of the true artist, must aim to hinder his own individuality from acting. Must stand aside, make way for the artist. Must not speak his own words, nor do his own works, nor think his own thoughts, but must be the organ through which the mind of the artist speaks.”

Cole’s fantasy of reproductive transparency mimicked the ideal of photoengraving, but the product of that fantasy was far different than the halftone illustrations that were by now beginning to fill the pages of magazines. Indeed, by the time he wrote, wood engraving had come to be seen as a fine art in ways that were not true fifteen years earlier. Cole’s old masters series contributed to this development; so too did the activities of the Society of American Wood Engravers. Founded in 1882 and composed entirely of new-school engravers, including Cole, the society served as the institutional base for advancing American wood engraving as a fine art. When New York’s Grolier Club—devoted to the “promotion of the arts pertaining to the production of books”—held its first exhibition of wood engravings in 1886, the entire exhibition was comprised of work by members of the society.

In 1887 the society published a book of members’ engravings in which all but one (out of twenty-five) were based on paintings rather than drawings. Frank French’s contribution to the volume, engraved after a Frank D. Millet painting called Lacing the Sandal, has little of the photographic quality of the new-school work from a decade earlier and shows a much more careful composition of lines than in, say, Cole’s Head of Christ, but it is not a return to white-line engraving (fig. 9). And the reproductive logic of the new school is clear (and reiterated) in the accompanying text. “Everything of Mr. Millet is here except the actual pigment,” wrote William Laffan. “Fidelity is uppermost in the engraver’s mind . . . To reproduce as faithfully as possible the thing to which he has addressed himself is his only thought.” Connoisseurs took great interest in wood engravings such as this one, especially as signed proofs printed on “Japan” paper. (By the early 1890s the Century Magazine was sending proof sheets to Cole for him to sign and return to help defray the expense of his being abroad.) In June of 1890 a writer for the Century, in an article entitled “The Outlook for Wood-Engraving,” noted the growing interest in American wood engraving as a fine art and urged museums to “begin the systematic collection of a fuller historical exhibit of hand-proofs,” insisting that “posterity should not be left to gather up in meager or incomplete examples the record of so marked an achievement.”

Linton would have none of it. In the decade after his Atlantic Monthly article, he wrote four books on wood engraving, all of which carried on his denunciation of the new school. About the time Cole’s Madonna and Child was published, Linton spoke before an art society in London where he once again took up the charge against what he was still calling the “new style of engraving,” pointing specifically to the Century Magazine as a chief purveyor of “pseudo-engravings” that had no art to them and that were, in the end, mere “photographic imitations.” “Pure photographs,” he said, “would . . . well replace them.”

By then halftones were beginning to take up the task of providing literal fidelity in illustration, indeed replacing engravings like Aitken’s J. Hooker. That is part of the more familiar story of the rise of the halftone and the decline of commercial wood engraving. But there was another story of photography in engraving on wood, one that pushed Cole and others to turn to art reproductions and that saw wood engravings moving through books and magazines and into museums and private art collections. Linton could not make sense of this second story, and he might have felt vindicated had he lived long enough to see that the career of new-school engraving as a celebrated fine art was fleeting. When Cole returned to the United States in 1910 he was hailed as a true artist (he was soon elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters), but there was little support for his work. By the time he died in 1931 he was already being called “the last of the wood engravers.”

Further Reading:

Anyone interested in understanding the various techniques for making prints can do no better than to start with Bamber Gascoigne’s How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Inkjet, 2nd ed. (New York, 2004). The most formative study of photography and prints in the nineteenth century is Estelle Jussim’s Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1974). Jussim wrote after and in many ways in response to William M. Ivins Jr.’s Prints and Visual Communication (New York, 1969). On “art” engraving in the 1870s, see Sue Rainey, Creating Picturesque America: Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape (Nashville, 1994). For more popular wood engraving during the decades after the Civil War, see Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, 2002). William Linton has a full-length biography in F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan: William James Linton, 1812-97 (Manchester, UK, 1973). For a good discussion of Linton’s career during his campaign against the new school, see Nancy Carlson Schrock, “William James Linton and his Victorian History of American Wood Engraving,” in William J. Linton, American Wood Engraving: A Victorian History (Watkins Glen, N.Y., 1976). Studies that take up questions about photography and wood engraving include: Tom Gretton, “Signs for Labour-Value in Printed Pictures After the Photomechanical Revolution: Mainstream Changes and Extreme Cases around 1900,” Oxford Art Journal 28 (2005): [371]-390; Nancy Martha West, “Men in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Masculinity, Photography, and the Death of Engraving in the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Institute Journal 27 (1999): [7]-31; Gerry Beegan, “The Mechanization of the Image: Facsimile, Photography, and Fragmentation in Nineteenth-Century Wood Engraving,” Journal of Design History 8 (1995): 257-274; and David Woodward, “The Decline of Commercial Wood Engraving in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the Printing Historical Society 10 (1974-75): [57]-83. See also Neil Harris’s highly influential essay “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect,” in Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, 1990): 304-317. For a discussion of photography and wood engraving in the context of other graphic print media at the end of the nineteenth century, see Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West(New Haven, 2002): chapter 7.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.3 (April, 2007).

Stephen P. Rice is associate professor of American studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey and author of Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America (2004). He is working on a new project on commercial wood engraving in the nineteenth century.

When I first began researching early New England diaries, I was dismayed to discover how very few women’s diaries were available for study. This scarcity is due partly to the ravages of time and partly to historical circumstances. Because the Puritans believed it was important for everyone to be able to read scripture, most free white women in colonial New England could read. Writing, in contrast, was considered a specialized, job-related skill required by men to conduct business and unnecessary for women. Few of those women who could write had the time or ability to maintain any type of personal record; thus, the archives are commonly believed to contain no female-authored diaries dating before 1700. So when I eventually came across a volume of extracts from a Connecticut woman’s diary—in which some entries dated as early as the 1680s—I was immediately intrigued. I also began to wonder whether the original manuscript might still exist.

Titled Mehetabel Chandler Coit: Her Book, 1714, the volume of extracts had been published in 1895 by three sisters: Maria Perit Gilman, Emily Serena Gilman, and Louisa Gilman Lane, who I later learned were Mehetabel Chandler Coit’s great-great-granddaughters. According to these family editors, Coit—or Mehetabel, as I came to know her—was born in 1673 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, near Boston, and began her diary in 1688, around the time her family moved to Woodstock, in northeastern Connecticut. She eventually married New London, Connecticut, shipbuilder John Coit (1670-1744) and had six children, maintaining her diary, albeit irregularly, until she was in her mid-seventies.

According to the Gilman sisters, more than a century after Mehetabel’s death there remained in New London a “traditional remembrance” of her as “a person of unusual energy and power, physically and mentally.” And, indeed, the diary entries—and two letters included in the volume—evidenced a vibrant and complex personality. In keeping with conventions of the day, the entries were brief and unemotional, but they also touched upon an impressive range of subjects—from family affairs to local events to political developments. Mehetabel was clearly worth getting to know better, and I felt that I had to at least try to find her diary.