Los Angeles before the movies

In 1887, the writer Charles Dudley Warner, who had (with Mark Twain) named the late nineteenth century the Gilded Age, visited a booming Southern California and assessed its frenzied appeal. “If the present expectations of transferring half-frozen Eastern and Northern people there by the railway companies and land-owners are half realized,” Warner said, “Southern California, in its whole extent, will soon present the appearance of a mass-meeting, each individual fighting for a lot and for his perpendicular section of climate.” Warner’s projection (his sarcasm aside) was only the latest symptom of a regional identity that had been taking shape since the end of the Civil War—an identity whose characteristic images and themes would be magnified and multiplied through the twentieth century. That we do not readily recognize the nineteenth-century part of this story owes, in a word, to the movies—or, to the wholesale naturalization of the Gilded Age imagery of Los Angeles in the era of the classical Hollywood cinema and beyond—the era of, as it were, mass culture. So strong have the signs and signals of this era been, encompassing not only the movies but also literature, art, and architecture, that we have neglected an entire, earlier way of seeing Los Angeles—and “Southern California.”

But the nineteenth-century invention of Southern California deserves our attention. It resulted in the creation of a mythology and iconography that continues to surround Los Angeles, even as the early origins and full implications of this “L.A. style” continue to escape our notice. In the aftermath of the Civil War, “Southern California” meant something very different than it does today. To the extent that the name signified anything at all, it functioned negatively—a covering term for all that was not San Francisco, a city catapulted into the mental geography of the nation by the Gold Rush. This was a broad and indeed amorphous notion: Southern California as the territory stretching from Stockton in the north to San Diego in the south. When the author Charles Nordhoff wrote of it in his popular 1872 book, California, he meant Stockton (the city due east of San Francisco) and all points south. “Southern California,” he stated, “which includes the San Joaquin Valley and its extensions, . . . as well as the sea-coast counties parallel with these, is the real garden of the State.” Yet by 1890 things had changed, and Southern California as we know it today had emerged—a region centered on Los Angeles and perceived in all of those ways that have seemed, until now, to be the pure product of the twentieth century: of the movies and television, of artists like Ed Ruscha and critics like Reyner Banham. An entire prehistory to such developments lies back in the nineteenth century. Recovering a modest portion of this prehistory’s images and themes—and situating them in their own historical moment—is the purpose of this essay.

That prehistory begins in the turbulent—the industrializing, urbanizing, and diversifying—years after the Civil War, when Los Angeles’s promoters projected the idea that one’s senses rather than one’s mind would be stimulated in their small corner of the tropics, that prospects of things like palm trees would rid the body of the external as well as internal (the spatial as well as subjective) constraints of the Eastern metropolis, relieving the body of too much crowding and divesting the mind of too much thought. It was an idealized picture, leaving out all manner of contradiction and bespeaking the class as well as racial position of its authors, and it took shape against the backdrop of a major trend in the political economy of post-Civil War Los Angeles: the Anglo-American expropriation of Californio land (Californios being the Spanish-speaking people born in California prior to its U.S. annexation) and the subsequent subdivision of that land for commercial purposes. By the 1880s real estate had emerged as a distinct, dominant, and segregating economic sector, a development that coincided with the spread of increasingly visual technologies of communication, especially photography. The result was the onset of a speculative as well as spectatorial habit, a joining of “speculation” and “spectatorship” (both words derive from the Latin for “to see”), as the trade in land and the trade in images now began a peculiarly intimate association in the history of Los Angeles.

Consider first H. T. Payne, a photographer who displayed nearly one thousand views of Southern California in 1876 at the nation’s Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In Payne’s views, collected in series like his “Semi-Tropical California,” equatorial plantings at the homes of leading citizens became agents in their own right—carriers of civilization in this latest imperial move westward. Palms and cacti draw the eye, mirroring the built forms of hearth and home and supplying the pictures with their very titles, as with Payne’s “CACTUS, Feb. 10th. 1876” (fig. 1). Here the subtitle names an early subdivider, N. C. Carter, who was developing the L.A. suburb of San Gabriel at the time. Viewed in isolation, the picture seems like an oddity, a strange testament to a lost era bound between tradition and modernity, the familiar and the exotic. But it was more than that: a first statement in a Southern California discourse that invited viewers to imagine their own tropical homesteads and to substitute their own names for N. C. Carter’s, as though transmitting their signatures upon the document (a contractual commitment was, after all, the characteristic goal of subdividers). In the flash of Payne’s camera, then, private property received a new and different look but one that already augured its own repetitive mass market—an early example of Southern California’s emerging tropical identity. Other examples included people themselves, as with Payne’s “Ladies in the Orange Grove” (fig. 2). A stately home presides over this improbable tableau, confirming the arrival of L.A.’s sun-splashed white newcomers in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

Such images gave no hint of the ugly colonial reality of nineteenth-century California, even if elsewhere Payne acknowledged L.A.’s shabby frontier appearance (see, for example, fig. 3). Ultimately Payne came no closer to the truth than to offer picturesque renditions of the region’s Catholic missions, established by Spanish friars in the late eighteenth century. His stereograph, “Mission San Gabriel,” was one such illustration, setting the monument within a frame of appealing decay (fig. 4). The depicted property was the origin of where, one hundred years later, N. C. Carter’s home would stand (as in fig. l), and where Carter himself would subdivide land as part of the entire area’s then quickening real estate nexus. Significantly, in the image of the San Gabriel Mission, Payne included the date of founding: “est’d, Sept. 8th. 1771,” which reminded the late nineteenth-century viewer that American history had a Pacific, not just Atlantic, component. In this telling, New Spain was to be seen as an ancestral ground prepared by the missionaries while America had carried out a revolution against Britain in the name of freedom. The missionaries, in turn, were to be seen as the progenitors of California landscape design—they had, after all, been the first to bring the palm tree, that most emblematic of tropical plants, into the region. All of this meant that such abuses as the forcible employment of Native Americans on the missions earned no mention, and ignoring the state’s long history of conquest and violence, the varied images of Payne’s “Semi-Tropical California” file thus leapt from the Spanish American past to the Anglo American future with hardly a word for what had come in between—that other geopolitical formation, Mexico, against which recent and bloody battles had been fought. This, finally, made the Spaniards’ acts of transplantation seem like divine favor, garnering the sympathy of promoters such as Benjamin C. Truman, who, in 1874, wrote, “The Anglo-Saxon pioneer found here a pueblo, the site of which had been selected with that almost intuitive recognition of the fitness of locality which seemed to be characteristic of the founders of the early Spanish settlements in the Occident.” For Truman (who had, among other things, reported on the Civil War for the New York Times), the Spanish American missions were “objects of profound interest.”

Projecting the world of the missions as the Romantic precursor to post-Civil War California, H. T. Payne and other promoters were assembling the elements of a new tropical identity for Los Angeles, and in this they were not alone. Indeed, by 1876, a group of promoters had begun to coalesce and to do exactly the same. They cited, if they did not outright copy, each other’s work. They produced imagery not only of palm trees and other decorative plants but also of commoditized things, like citrus fruit. Invariably, too, they found themselves checking their own promotional momentum, as when Benjamin Truman wrote, “No enchanter’s wand summoned up these orange groves, these fruitful vines, these waving fields of grain. Hard work and plenty of it wrought the miracle of transforming grove and thicket into these productive acres.” “Hard work” on the one hand and a “miracle” on the other, Los Angeles mirrored itself—magical and ordinary, artificial and real, blessed and damned—a dialectic of promotion that suited this prototypical culture industry, invoking truth and falsity at once and ultimately extending such values to language itself, which seemed by turns capable and incapable of representing the place.

In 1877, a promoter from Kansas, James De Long, who had been inspired by Charles Nordhoff’s California(1872), published his own short account, Southern California. He told of having toured several citrus groves and vineyards in Los Angeles County, reminiscing that “for several days the beauty of those lovely places haunted me, and I had almost come to the conclusion that what I had seen was merely imagination, and that such sights could not be found in 34 degrees north latitude in the United States, and so to satisfy myself I paid another visit and was fully convinced of the reality.” Reassured, De Long nevertheless insisted that “neither pen, pencil nor painter can describe those lovely places. They must be seen to be appreciated.”

Ironically it was De Long himself who also warned of the dangers of promotional excess, flatly stating, “Thousands of families have been ruined by the inducements held out in the glowing descriptions in hired newspapers, prize essays and stereoscopic views, in the interest of land speculators.” Ruin or not, the conventionalized identity of tropical Los Angeles had emerged in the short span of time since De Long’s source of inspiration, Charles Nordhoff, had published his own book in 1872. And when, in 1878, the travel writer Benjamin F. Taylor wrote of visiting Los Angeles, he expressed nothing but disappointment over the failure of the actual landscape to meet his expectations. “My idea of an orange grove,” he sighed, “was of an orchard where the trees laden with golden fruit sprang up from a smooth, green turf ‘of broken emeralds,’ that invited you to sit down on the dapple of a shadow every few minutes and be happy; of trees with a tropic brightness of foliage that would dispose me to listen to such fowls as the bulbul and sing gay little canzonets in two parts.” Instead he found and gave notice: “When you feel like reposing in a well-weeded onion bed you can take lodgings in an orange grove.”

By the 1880s, the outline of the region’s promotional image was set. The publisher of an 1883 guidebook chose to include tropically themed pictures of the sort that others had first put into circulation in the prior decade. His “Century Plant.—Residence of Mr. O. H. Bliss, Los Angeles,” cast the region’s flora as actors in the drama of development—in the subdivision, purchase, and display of private property (fig. 5). “There is a strange mingling,” the guidebook explained, “of mountains and plains, hills and valleys, gardens and deserts; and their unusual and unexpected combinations are ever ready to interest the intelligent observer and to confuse the careless sight-seer. Climate and seasons are unlike anything known in the Eastern States. The weather may be said to ‘let one alone’ physically, but it is always exciting [one’s] wonder and study.” Other guidebooks expressed similar sentiments.

William R. Bentley’s Hand-book of the Pacific Coast (1884), which featured the illustration, “Palm Trees, Los Angeles County” (fig. 6), recommended that a visitor to Los Angeles find “one of the numerous bluffs surrounding the city” in order to take in the view, and in doing so Bentley was merely repeating visual instructions from the previous decade—Benjamin Truman in 1874 saying that “the denizen of Los Angeles, or the stranger within her gates, need only ascend the first eminence north of its business streets, to look out upon a scene which rivals in picturesque variety any vision which ever inspired the poet’s pen, or fascinated the beholder’s eye,” or another promoter, A. T. Hawley, writing in 1876 that “from almost every point of view a splendid panorama of mountain scenery greets the vision, while from the higher lands the view embraces the valley reaching to the ocean,” or James De Long reflecting on “the most beautiful horizon that can be imagined” in 1877.

All of these projections shared literally in the long view—the panoramic form as applied to what was, in truth, a relatively open and modestly settled location. Los Angeles was developing but not in the manner of the walking city (its suburbs emerged before its downtown). This meant, in turn, that vision could be uninterrupted, and promoters made sure that their readers (and viewers) knew this, different as it was from the frenzied visual experience of the “great cities” of the East. When the sociologist Georg Simmel addressed the latter in his seminal essay of 1905, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” he considered it a kind of sensory overload whose discontinuous cycle of rapid-fire “impressions” had trained up the “intellect,” which was necessary in order to safeguard the integrity of one’s inner self. By contrast, the image of tropical Los Angeles sidestepped all such incursions and requisite defenses. “All over this beautiful landscape,” Bentley’s  Hand-book resumed, “are dark patches of orange, lemon and lime groves; palms, pepper, eucalyptus, . . . and a multitude of other plants, trees, and shrubs, that have, as if by magic, sprung into existence to adorn a scene beautiful beyond comparison.”

Here again was the dialectic of promotion: tropical Los Angeles had materialized “as if by magic,” but there was, in fact, evidence that reveled in displaying the artifice, as with one promotional photographer’s testament to the human labor and organization involved in transplanting such big plants as Bentley had catalogued (fig. 7). Such an image did not have to be marketed, but that it was marketed indicated a public appetite for it—a popular wish to assemble as well as disassemble such constructed landscapes. Meanwhile, Los Angeles was in the process of becoming an increasingly viewable place—the Atchison, Topeka, and Sante Fe Railroad Company determined, in 1884, to extend its rail lines to the city, leading to a rate war with the Southern Pacific and the onset of a land boom that put Los Angeles on the nineteenth-century map. As a result, more and more publishers of travel literature began to stock Los Angeles subjects.

The Ohio-based company, Ward Brothers, which produced an entire catalogue of the period’s typical “souvenir” albums, began a series on L.A. Its 1886 edition featured palm trees in various settings, juxtaposed with the missions where the plants had originally been introduced (fig. 8) or depicted within the grounds where they had more recently been transplanted (fig. 9). Visitors too were arriving in greater numbers, among them a popular writer named Emma H. Adams, whose To and Fro In Southern California appeared in 1887. Adams proposed that “the apparent rapid flight of time” was a “singular feature of life” in the region. “How to account for this influence is difficult,” she admitted. “There seems to exist in the country a something which cheats the senses. Whether it be in the air, the sunshine, in the ocean breeze, or in all these combined, I can not [sic] say. Certainly the climate is not the home-made, common-sense article of the ante-Rocky Mountain States. It is a product of consummate art.” Here again tropical Los Angeles seemed both real and artificial. The weather cast “an unreality around life,” said Adams. “All alike walk and work in a dream.” This was, in short, a senseless landscape. By evening time, Adams insisted, “I find myself unspeakably tired, but have had no appreciation of the passage of the day. Had I been at home, on the southern shore of much maligned Lake Erie, I should have ‘sensed’ the going by of nine honest, substantial hours, though I had been just as busy.” In the accretion of moments like these, the double-sidedness (not to say double-talk) of L.A.’s promotion held out the empty truth, and still people wanted it. “Now,” Adams herself concluded, “I am not finding fault with this state of things. I rather like it. I think all the people do. It is in keeping with every thing [sic] else on this coast. Every thing [sic] is new and peculiar and wonderful.”

Such talk of climate and landscape drew the skepticism of Charles Dudley Warner, who had, again, visited Los Angeles in 1887 amidst the commotion of its railroad-to-real-estate boom. Invoking the Social Darwinian ideas of the time, Warner wrote, “One of the great uses of New England in the world is that of an object lesson, for the devotees of the development hypothesis, of the survival of the fittest.” But “Southern California,” he forthrightly declared, “offers to illustrate the converse.” For Warner, the mammoth migration of Americans animating the Los Angeles land boom constituted “both in quality and volume, the most striking phenomenon of modern times.” Yet, unlike the movement of people tied to the Gold Rush of 1849, the “present emigration is not for adventure at all, and primarily not for gold; it is a pursuit of climate.” It was, in other words, the consequence of a “human desire for dwelling in a place genial and tolerant of human physical weakness.” Warner was pointing to the much advertised healthfulness of the region—but this was the rub. Did not the promotion of a tropical Los Angeles ultimately underwrite the grandest paradox of them all—that a domesticated tropics should entail, in the very act of domestication, a migration of disease and mortality as terrible as anything that promoters and their audience took to characterize the tropics themselves? In this regard, the promotion had been fraught all along. Didn’t Warner now demonstrate the falseness of the commodity once more? As he dryly insisted, “the buyer, amid the myriad signs of ‘Real Estate for Sale,’ ought not to be confronted by so many legends of ‘Undertakers and Embalmers.’ It chills ardor.” In other words, deaths still occurred, despite the city’s happy promotion, and if the publicists of Los Angeles had wanted, they could have further boasted possession of the American West’s first crematorium.

Warner was fascinated by the place all the same. A few years later, in 1891, he published an entire book on Southern California. “It must be confessed,” he wrote at that time, “that there is a sort of monotony in the scenery as there is in the climate,” and he proceeded to judge that “the present occupiers have taken no hints from the natives. In village and country they have done all they can, in spite of the maguey and the cactus and the palm and the umbrella-tree and the live-oak and the riotous flowers and the thousand novel forms of vegetation, to give everything a prosaic look.” Warner did not like this look, but the promotional words and pictures of the previous two decades had projected it consistently, just as a picture presumably taken by the photographer Carleton E. Watkins, titled “Street View in Los Angeles” and published in William Seward Webb’s California and Alaska of 1890 (fig. 10), did nothing so much as evoke H. T. Payne’s earlier tropical take, “CACTUS, Feb. 10th. 1876.” Imitation or, as one guidebook put it in 1886, “emulation” had become the name of the game.

It was the ongoing predicament of tropical Los Angeles—and of a promotion already beginning in 1883, 1886, and 1890 to be exhausted by its own success. The movies, when they arrived, would simply give all of this second life, and in turn we would eventually receive the postmodern estrangements of an artist like Ed Ruscha, whose book of 1971, A Few Palm Trees, took the palm-planted landscape of Hollywood and made it seem unfamiliar once more. See, for example, figure 11, where (as in all of the book’s images) the city receives a literal whitewash, leaving only the trace of isolated palm trees behind and, opposite them, captions that disclose their true locations (in figure 11, the address is “5529 W. Sunset Blvd.”). What is this if not a late twentieth-century take on—and part of—a process begun a century earlier?

Can we, then, truly understand such comments as A Few Palm Trees, such period styles as the classical Hollywood cinema, or such symbolic formations as the twentieth-century “culture industry” itself without stopping to recall the likes of H. T. Payne, Benjamin Truman, and Emma H. Adams, or to review the words and images that they and others disseminated, or to remember their now forgotten views of late nineteenth-century Los Angeles? The answer, if we care to look, lies in the years before Hollywood—in the nineteenth not twentieth century—and in the still not moving pictures of a moment waiting to be seen anew.

Further Reading:

An early survey of the region’s social and cultural history is available in Carey McWilliams’s Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York, 1946). McWilliams’s narrative style shares much with that of Kevin Starr, whose Americans and the California Dream (New York, 1973) provides a particularly good introduction to the intellectual history of the state as a whole. David Wyatt masterfully traces what he calls The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (Cambridge and New York, 1986). A different, more workaday aspect of the garden motif is treated in John E. Baur’s The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870-1900 (San Marino, Calif., 1959). Groundbreaking books in the scholarship of the region’s social history are Leonard Pitt’s The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley, Calif., 1966) and Richard Griswold del Castillo’s The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History (Berkeley, Calif., and London, 1979). Anders Stephanson discusses the entire era’s key expansionary dynamics in the middle chapters of his Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York, 1995). For the imperial nexus marking Los Angeles itself, see William Deverell’s state of the art Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley, Calif., 2004). The photography of the American West is authoritatively examined in Martha Sandweiss’s Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, 2002). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” which appeared as part of their Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Amsterdam, 1947), was written (not coincidentally) from their home in exile: Los Angeles.

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

James Kessenides is assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. This essay grows out of his current project, a cultural history called Before Hollywood: A Prehistory of Los Angeles.

Following a time-honored American literary tradition (see, for instance, the Leatherstocking Tales) and suited to our own age of random access, this well-designed, masterfully researched, and highly readable third volume of A History of the Book in America appears after the first volume but before the second, which is not yet published. No matter; with the OED‘s likely abandonment of printed and bound volumes, the luxurious ambition and material heft of these volumes (and their relative affordability, at $34.95 for the paperback of volume 1) is welcomed in any order. The new volume’s “industrial book” evokes a discourse of Franklinian “industry,” hinting towards an “industrious book,” making its virtuous and commercial way through nineteenth-century culture. The “industrial book” moreover compellingly suggests an artifact that condenses within itself the labors of many men, women, and children (the latter were often employed in binding and hand coloring); their technologies and their machines (or, à la Thoreau, perhaps the other way around); and their economic, communications, and transportation networks.

Some books of these midcentury decades fall easily under the rubric—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, famously churned out by steam presses running round the clock, or Moby Dick, whose “Cetology” chapter wryly links the industrial whale to the codex. And yet, of course, by “book” the series means not only books but that harder-to-name object of study, sometimes a printed artifact, sometimes any inscription or anything in print’s general neighborhood (handwriting, say, but also Dickens’s Little Nell in Parian ware), as well as the practices or attitudes associated in some way with print (reading, for example, and diary keeping but also union organizing, copyright case law, school curricula, literary taste, etc.). As to the parameters of 1840 to 1880, the editors don’t elaborate. But by eluding traditional periodization, the identification of this four-decade period of fervid geographic, demographic, and cultural expansion (vaguely, antebellum through Reconstruction, encompassing the “American Renaissance”) with “the industrial book” liberates this volume from the thrall of curricular- and discipline-bound chronologies.

The introduction describes the 1876 meeting of the American Book Trade Association (ABTA) in Philadelphia and its centennial fanfare. While a trade show may seem a pallid starting point, it helpfully positions literature, literacy, and literary culture in the demystified context of trade and finance, of masculine clubbiness and display, and, as importantly, of failure: the ABTA folded two years later. During the period this volume covers, book production and distribution began, if very unevenly, to assume its modern form: printing shifted from a craft to an industry, printers became publishers, authorship became a profession, literary property became regulated, and reading became, increasingly, a value as much as a practice.

As its loose frame indicates, this volume is a collection of essays providing specialists’ syntheses of broad areas of inquiry, rather than an overarching narrative. Organized thematically, around such matters as manufacturing and labor, trade and government, serial publication, ideologies and practices of reading, and cultures of print, and moving, generally, from economic and institutional history to cultural history, each of the eleven chapters (many divided into mini-essays by various authors and all supplemented by rich bibliographic essays) is charged with covering the whole period. The most elegant essays—among them, Meredith McGill’s on copyright, Bruce Laurie’s on labor, David Henkin’s on urban print, Louise Stevenson’s on books in the home, Susan Williams’s on authorship—offer a panoramic history in and around the period and zoom in on representative events. Henkin, for example, contrasts the Philadelphia the friendless young Benjamin Franklin famously encountered with Horace Greeley’s New York a century later, which welcomed that ambitious youth with a riot of raucous and abundant signage. Like these wordy urban streets, the capacious “book” takes in a wide range of cultural forms and locations, from the African American Amos Webber’s diary, kept from 1854 to 1903, to the professionalization of learned culture through journals, research universities, and scholarly societies, to the circulation of religious tracts in staggering numbers during the same period.

In his essay, “The Census, the Post Office, and Governmental Printing,” Scott Casper writes, “What seems a largely administrative history—of statistical categories, postal regulation, and a printing bureaucracy—is also a political, social, and ideological one” (179). Indeed, sections about new technologies and new business practices (on manufacturing and on international trade, for example, both by Michael Winship) not only provide the statistics that make this a durable reference book—drawing out and interpreting data of this massively documentary epoch from census and congressional reports—but also suggest directions for social, cultural, and literary history. For example, the robust international trade in print in the midcentury—which shows, among many other things, a spike in exports to Brazil, Colombia, and Spain in 1865-6 (152)—cries out for interpretation and research, especially given the hemispheric and transatlantic turn in American studies.

Amid these riches, readers may still wish for more in the field or approach that most interests them or that they most lack in their own reading and research. In this volume, for example, there is not even an index entry for “children,” “children’s literature,” or “juvenile literature.” Nonetheless, I’ve annotated my copy with some two dozen such index entries, which is by way of saying that this is a topic that is inescapable in the period and, in my view, worthy of a sustained examination rather than glancing references. At the 1876 American Book Trade Association meeting, here offered as a framing heuristic, eighteen of the ninety-five publishers’ displays featured schoolbooks and/or juvenile books (20-23); whole schoolrooms (in one case with a real kindergarten teacher and students demonstrating the Froebel system to spectators) were replicated throughout the exposition (30-31). While a portion of one chapter is devoted, importantly, to the trade in schoolbooks, nothing is made of their content, and yet children of the nineteenth century who read “the industrial book” in the 1840s and ’50s became its adult consumers and producers in the 1870s and ’80s.

But it’s in the nature of such a magnificent beast as A History of the Book in America to stimulate and even to invite alternate genealogies. In what amounts almost to a prospectus, John Hench, formerly vice president of the American Antiquarian Society, suggested as much, writing in 1994 that the “multivolume work we have undertaken to produce will be a giant step toward a new understanding of American culture through a systematic, collaborative examination of the mediating role of print, but it will certainly not be the last word on the subject. Did we believe that it would be definitive, we would have substituted the article ‘The’ for ‘A’ in the title.” Such scholarly generosity is a marker of this magisterial series, whose volumes one anticipates eagerly and will return to again and again.

Further Reading.

John Hench’s article, “Toward a History of the Book in America,” appears in Publishing Research Quarterly 10:3 (Fall 1994).

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

Patricia Crain is associate professor of English at New York University and the author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000); she is working on a book about children’s literacy in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States.

In November 1755, as the Seven Years’ War brought hostilities to western Pennsylvania, several hundred German settlers walked some sixty miles to Philadelphia alongside a wagon heaped with the scalped and dismembered bodies of their neighbors. Once in the city, they escorted the display to the governor’s house and, according to one observer, threw the body parts at the door of the State House, “cursing the Quakers[‘] Principles” (78). Peter Silver’s powerful book details how, beginning in the 1750s, colonists’ displays and descriptions of mangled bodies helped to create the increasingly meaningful rhetorical categories of “Indians” and “white people.”

European Americans’ construction of racial categories is well-worked ground, but Silver’s extensive research, trenchant analysis, and elegant prose make the tale clearer and newly chilling. The unprecedented mingling of diverse Europeans in the middle colonies did not at first lead to mutual understanding. Different religious and ethnic groups saw themselves as the “chosen people” in the midst of a disturbing Babel. What began to bind them together was not a belief in European superiority but the opposite—a shared feeling of victimization at the hands of Indians and other enemies. Silver’s ability to convey the terror of living in a war zone makes the transition comprehensible. As he explains, Indians fighting against the colonial settlements intended their attacks to be terrifying. They succeeded. The most common response to wartime violence was moving away, exactly the desired outcome of Indian attackers from the Seven Years’ War through the early 1790s. As European settlers stressed their common suffering, they omitted cause and context. A rhetoric that Silver calls the “anti-Indian sublime” appeared in English and German newspapers, near-illiterate petitions, academic essays, and sensationalistic plays and poems. Standard images included babies torn from their mothers’ wombs and “clotted gore” smeared on walls and floors, all evidence of Indians’ devastation on a “bleeding country” (87-94).

One of Silver’s great achievements is never letting the inflated rhetoric blind him to more complicated realities, not only the larger wartime context but also the limits of the rhetoric itself. A growing sense of common victimization did not miraculously do away with existing linguistic and cultural barriers. And, as the 1755 display of bodies in Philadelphia reveals, not all Europeans were included in “the white people.” The anti-Indian sublime was as much about lambasting particular non-Indians as dividing whites from Indians. As Silver explains, writers usually defined Indians as “co-bogeymen” (xxii) with the French, with Quakers whose efforts to restore peace seemed to betray the western settlements, and with the British during the Revolution. For failing to serve “white people’s” interest, Quakers got some of the worst of the name-calling. The Episcopalian Reverend William Smith in 1755 called Quakers “the bloodiest People in our Land” (198). While Philadelphia’s press had once called western settlers worse than savages, by the time of the Revolution, most accounts cast them as much-suffering heroes. Erasing the colonies’ own British heritage, the Philadelphia paper Freeman’s Journal charged in 1781 that “the Britons are the same brutes and savages they were when Julius Cesar invaded them above 1800 years ago” (251). Continuing British savagery was evidenced by the desire for empire and the willingness to ally with Indians.

Yet some Indians were exempted from the category of “Indians.” Fear of enemy attacks made most settlers concerned that neighboring Mohegans or Delawares were treated well and thus not angered into violence. When wandering bands of men trying to protect their homes from enemy Indians occasionally failed to distinguish among Indian groups, other Pennsylvanians usually condemned them. Still, the rhetoric of Indian-hating decreased opportunities for peace by making colonial and Indian authorities reluctant to come together to conduct treaties.

As fighting continued after the British lost the Revolution, the rhetoric became more purely anti-Indian. Some writers advocated extermination, either literally killing all Indians or expelling them to the west. However, Silver resists the simplistic determinism so common to analysis of the rise of race. He points out that it was nineteenth-century reformers opposed to anti-Indian sentiments who became some of the strongest proponents of Indian removal (an irony that continued through the federal allotment and termination policies). As Silver makes clear, simply labeling conflict of the past as racism “is lazy, and one of the most interesting things about the whole tangled history of American intergroup relations turns out to be not how much they have stayed fundamentally the same, but how drastically they have changed” (xxii).

A warning: this book takes a long time to read. It is filled with sentences as beautiful as that one, sentences that this reader had to savor, rereading them for their poetry and their significance. Silver takes us deep into the terror of violent interactions. To give only one example of Silver’s astute combination of comedy and tragedy, he judges Hugh Brackenridge’s Death of General Montgomery “not a good play” and reveals that “Brackenridge’s own preface observed that it would have been improved if he had spent more than a few weeks writing it.” Yet Silver gives enough of the play’s garish imagery, including Montgomery’s blood seeping into the snow outside Quebec’s walls, to prove that it was “little short of a masterpiece” as political writing (234). Throughout, the book shows how fear led to hatred but never excuses the results.

This care is most evident in the discussion of the infamous systematic killing of pacifist Moravian Indians at the Gnadenhütten mission in 1782. At first, Silver writes with the demoralized air of someone who has spent too much time meditating on a horrific event: “however much one tries to understand the events of those days and to take them apart step by step, something cold and alien—an irreducible emptiness—is likely always to remain at the core of what happened.” Yet he picks himself up in the next sentence, recommitted, as throughout the book, to a seldom-flinching “effort at historical sympathy” and goes on to describe both the ghastly details of the slaughter and the frustrations and fear that led to it (267). By this point in the book, Silver’s historical sympathy has been so effective that we can almost believe the war-weary settlers who later claimed that the hymns coming from the mouths of unarmed men, women, and children sounded like war songs.

Silver’s superb analysis and stunning prose create unsettling implications for other times of war. Lambasting Quakers’ efforts at peace and toleration as “collusion with killers” (108) and accusing thoughtful people of being “tasteless” (85) for discussing context when white bodies had been damaged—these attacks on reason are hardly confined to eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. In Silver’s skilled hands, they are both historically specific and frighteningly timeless.

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

Kathleen DuVal is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. She is currently writing a history of the American Revolution on the Gulf Coast.

Contagious disease requires three things to spread: First, an infectious agent must be present. Second, there must be a population of susceptible individuals. And third, there must be connections between them. It is in his exploration of this last requirement—connections—that Paul Kelton makes a major contribution to our understanding of the biological encounter that decimated the indigenous populations of the American Southeast from 1492 to 1715.

The gist of Kelton’s argument is that the spread of imported pathogens through the Southeast was not “inevitable.” Instead, he says, it was “contingent on the type of colonial system that Europeans chose to impose upon the region and its indigenous inhabitants” (xxii). The most devastating “epidemics thus followed rather than preceded the spread of European influence” (99).

As the title suggests, Epidemics & Enslavement puts the emergence of a commerce in native slaves at center stage. The growth of the English-Indian slave trade after 1659 laid the groundwork for a series of deadly epidemics at the end of the seventeenth century. It did so by uprooting people, by altering lifeways, and by changing patterns of contact far and wide. Around 1659, for example, the Westo Indians fled from Virginia to the Savannah River under pressure from English expansion and the Powhatan Confederacy. But the Westos retained their trade ties to Virginia and used English firearms to enslave Hitichis and Muskogees they transported north to the Old Dominion. These attacks, Kelton says, led to the coalescence of the upper Creeks from a variety of Muskogee communities and allowed the Cherokees to expand into the vacated territory (113, 121).

Power and people shifted constantly. Like Allan Gallay before him, Kelton demonstrates that the effects of the English-Indian slave trade extended deep into the continent. In 1679 Carolina slave traders enlisted Shawnee allies to enslave and expel the Westos. Soon the Yamasees joined the Shawnees on the Savannah River and ensconced themselves as suppliers of Cherokee captives to the Carolinians. The Upper Creeks—former Muskogees—sought to avoid enslavement themselves by raiding westward and offering Choctaw captives to English traders.

The result for native peoples, Kelton says, was a “highly vulnerable state of warfare, slaving, resettlement, and malnourishment when smallpox spread through the region in the last four years of the seventeenth century” (143). This epidemic is the centerpiece of Kelton’s story. The pestilence started in Virginia in 1696 and followed trade routes south and west all the way to the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi Valley. The connections and conditions created by the slave trade facilitated its spread and made it more deadly. Compact, fortified villages, for example, rendered transmission of the virus more likely. But in the face of constant war, this was a living pattern that made sense (145).

War and smallpox were bad enough. But southeastern natives also suffered from a wave of follow-up infections—what Kelton terms “aftershocks”—from 1698 to 1711. Some, like certain dysenteries, may have been present before Columbian contact. But others, like influenza, yellow fever, and measles, were newcomers from the far side of the Atlantic.

The havoc went from bad to worse. Population collapse meant that warriors had to travel farther in their search for human quarry. By 1708, one Englishman reported that South Carolina’s slaving tribes had “to goe down as farr on the point of Florida as the firm land [would] permit” to find captives (186). The Yamasees in particular could not get their hands on enough slaves to satisfy either the Carolinians’ demands or their own desire for trade goods. When they saw the Carolinians cultivating the powerful Choctaw nation, they came to fear enslavement themselves. Thus, in 1715, they attempted a preemptive strike in what became known as the Yamasee War. The Yamasees’ defeat and enslavement by the English capped two decades of spiraling decline.

Kelton’s account of the syncretic interplay between contagion and colonization is utterly convincing. But he is so attached to this interplay that he sometimes excludes whole realms of possibility from his analysis. In addressing areas of knowledge where the evidence is thin, it seems wiser to leave such possibilities open than to dismiss them prematurely.

This is particularly true in Kelton’s effort to demonstrate that the smallpox outbreak of 1696 was the first widespread epidemic to afflict the Southeast. He claims, for example, that earlier imported plagues could not have reached the Southeast from Mexico because there is “no credible evidence of direct links” between the regions and “no goods of Mesoamerican origin have been found at southeastern archaeological sites” (50). Direct links, however, are not necessary. What matters is the chain of contagion. Nor do we need to find Nahua gold in Alabama Indian mounds to understand that person-to-person connections extended to Mexico and to other places as well.

Kelton is likewise too eager to dismiss the possibility that genetic differences might have made Native Americans more vulnerable to Old World pathogens. Genetic resistance, he says, “only develops after tens of thousands of years” (44). “The genes of indigenous peoples of the Americas, therefore, did not make them any more or less vulnerable to epidemic diseases than were Europeans” (46). Thus all variations in immune response had to be situational, a consequence of the slave trade and the mayhem of colonization.

Unfortunately, evolutionary biology does not support Kelton’s claim. One example will suffice. In 1950, Australian pest control experts deliberately introduced a pox virus called myxoma into the country’s burgeoning rabbit population. The effort was a phenomenal success. Myxomatosis killed ninety-nine percent of the rabbits infected, and their numbers plummeted. But then, very quickly, the population stabilized. Two things had happened: The myxoma virus evolved to become less virulent. (An infection that kills too effectively may die out itself.) But the rabbits also evolved. By 1957 many Australian rabbits could survive even the most virulent strains of myxoma.

Obviously humans do not breed like rabbits. But this does not mean genetic selection takes “tens of thousands of years.” As the Australian experience suggests, the timeframe depends upon many variables, including the lethality of the microbe and the speed with which it kills. Native Americans today may well have more resistance to some imported plagues than their ancestors did five hundred years ago.

Epidemics & Enslavement grapples with some of the biggest questions confronting early American historians. Opinions differ, and arguments hinge on the most fragile threads of evidence. None of us has it all figured out. But Kelton’s appraisal of the southeastern smallpox epidemic of 1696 has filled in one piece of the puzzle, showing how the upheavals of colonization augmented the killing power of disease in the Southeast.

Further Reading:

For additional reading reflecting a variety of views on the topics addressed here, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972); Frank Fenner and Bernardino Fantini, Biological Control of Vertebrate Pests: The History of Myxomatosis; An Experiment in Evolution (New York, 1999); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002); David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976); and Ann F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1987).

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

Elizabeth Fenn is an associate professor of history at Duke University and the author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (2001).

In The King’s Three Faces, a brilliant, bounding study of Anglo-American political culture, Brendan McConville smashes a false idol of American history: the “neoliberal perception” of the colonial period “as a long prologue to the revolutionary crisis” (3). McConville rejects the notion that Britain’s North American colonies were populated—as it might appear in the hindsight of a later, more democratic society—by “protorepublicans, readers of Country pamphlets, rising assemblies, plain-folk Protestants, budding contract theorists, protocapitalists, protoproletariat, protoliberals, (and) modernizers” (4). To the contrary, he argues, those colonies were inhabited by ardent, purple-eyed king worshippers, perhaps the most devoted royalists in all of the British Empire.

In the first part of this three-part monograph, McConville examines the royal political culture that developed in British North America after the Glorious Revolution. McConville discovers this political culture—committed to limited, Protestant monarchy—in an astoundingly vast array of phenomena and events. Folk rituals such as the Pope Day parades by which colonial crowds commemorated the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot; public holidays such as the anniversaries of accession on which the monarch’s greatness was proclaimed; and consumer goods such as the mass-produced prints of the king and queen, which American colonists hung alongside portraits of their own kin: these are but very few of the ceremonies and artifacts that integrated colonial America into the British empire.

In tracing the rise of this political culture, McConville offers an interesting spin on anglicization: the thesis that eighteenth-century North American society grew to resemble more closely that of the British Isles. As McConville explains, the richly royalized political culture that flourished in the American provinces never took root in the metropole, where a large administrative bureaucracy doled out ample patronage, where the liturgy of the state church gave meaning to people’s spiritual existence, and where an organized system of land tenure tended to preserve the social order. These assimilative forces all bound home islanders to their nation but allowed them to remain phlegmatic toward the Hanoverians’ monarchical rites (8). Thus in McConville’s ironic formulation, Americans were becoming more British than was in fact British.

In the second part of his study, McConville reveals just how firmly royalism had taken hold of the American imagination. To accomplish this, he explores the myriad rhetorical purposes for which British colonists invoked the king’s name. On both sides of the Zenger Crisis, for example, disputants waved the banner of Georgian liberty. Much more intriguingly, enslaved African Americans in several instances justified rebellion by proclaiming the righteous English king’s supposed intention to abolish slavery. As these moments demonstrate, colonial Americans envisioned their monarch as a benevolent defender of their rights. At the same time, however, they also imagined the king in neoabsolutist terms. McConville explains that by midcentury, as if to repair the dynastic breach of an earlier generation, Americans had restored to the Hanoverians the glory, if not the prerogative, of divine right. Resulting in part from a popular revival of Stuart remembrance, this process culminated in use of “solar imagery and other absolutist metaphors” to describe the Georges (203).

Why was it, then, that such reverential colonists came to desecrate the king? To a considerable extent because George III fell short of their vaunted expectations. Despite Americans’ pleas for royal intervention, King George never protected his loving subjects from a corrupt Parliament or a scheming ministry (neither of which figured heroically in British Americans’ imagined constitutional order). So profound was Americans’ resulting disillusionment that, as McConville details in Part III, the Revolutionary crisis touched off a frenzy of anti-royal iconoclasm.

Regrettably, McConville does not question the limitations of political culture as a mobilizing force; rather, he presumes its efficacy to integrate the nation and reconcile its members to their sovereign. His evidence makes it easy for readers to do the same. But just how potent was this political culture? What other social and political ends did it serve? Was it conducive to more consensus than conflict? Did every colonist who disdained royal festival, like the Puritan Samuel Sewall, ultimately come to accept it (55)?

These questions are not simply academic but would rather seem to press upon McConville’s central thesis. For even if we join McConville in his assumption that American colonists fêted the Crown out of heartfelt regard for their king, the question persists, why? Did British colonials tote about his majesty’s miniature portrait because they thought that a hereditary sovereign monarch was an essential component of benevolent government? Or did colonial Americans, situated at the far reaches of the Atlantic, adulate the Crown because to do so confirmed their identities as trueborn Englishmen? For McConville the answer is clearly both, but he does not weigh these considerably different impulses against one another. In fairness, he likely cannot: such intentionality does not readily yield to rigid quantification. Still, somewhere in this dichotomy, false though it may be, rests the balance of royalism and republicanism. Under the former interpretation, the Declaration of Independence and the republican constitutions written in its wake would seemingly represent a monumental abrogation of past principles. But under the latter, the War for Independence would be more remarkable for patriots’ violent repudiation of national allegiance than for the republican institutions they subsequently adopted.

Readers who wish to burn their own golden calves must lace up their boots, for McConville ranges far and wide. His analysis of rough music and skimmington as rituals for the enforcement of early American gender norms ranks among the very best treatments of the subject. And yet not until a belated and maddeningly brief discussion of patriarchy and family roles does McConville relate those folk customs to the rise and fall of royal America. (Would that the Elizabethtown Regulars who flogged a notorious wife beater on his “Posteriors” had instead branded the royal arms on that same spot [183].) Similarly, McConville’s chapter on imperial reform offers a fruitful exploration of the many imaginative proposals floated by imperial consolidators for the reorganization of Britain’s eighteenth-century dominions. Aligning this book with a late renaissance in imperial history, this chapter points the reader toward a breathtaking vista of Albion and Indian what-might-have-beens. It further discloses certain colonists’ willingness to resolve their political grievances within a constitutional framework, a testament to their thorough integration into the British Empire. And yet this chapter stands apart from the rest of the book in its detachment from the ceremonial and material culture by which British North Americans avouched devotion to the Crown.

All of these observations amount to little more than praise by faint damnation, for The King’s Three Faces is a compelling book. If McConville argues for the power and pervasiveness of royal political culture with the fervor of a recent convert, that is because he is. “Like most scholars of my generation, I accepted the whiggish schools’ central imperatives,” McConville confesses. “Belief that some form of modernization drove change in colonial America still dominated the historiography of the period, and I endorsed its logic” (6). McConville’s new faith may not entirely displace the old republican and liberal orthodoxies, but it will certainly force a rethinking of their creeds.

Further Reading:

On the anglicization thesis, see John M. Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1966); T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 467-99; and Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), especially chapter 8. Readers will find a take on anglicization similar to McConville’s—that the American colonies were becoming more “English” even as England was becoming something rather different—in James A. Henretta’s “Magistrates, Common Law Lawyers, Legislators: The Three Legal Systems of British America,” in Christopher Tomlins and Michael Grossberg, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America: Early America, 1580-1815 (New York, 2008): 555-92. In its concern for political culture, McConville’s study contributes to the so-called “newest political history,” which includes works by Joanne Freeman, Simon Newman, Jeff Pasley, Len Travers, and David Waldstreicher, to name only a few of its practitioners.

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

Benjamin H. Irvin is an assistant professor of history at the University of Arizona. He is now completing a book about the Continental Congress and the political culture by which it endeavored to promote American independence.

If you have even a passing interest in seeing what the history of the book looks like when it achieves intellectual maturity, then The Pilgrim and the Bee is certainly worth your time. If (like many of us) you wonder about how to forge productive links between close reading and the enterprise of social history, Brown’s carefully crafted examples will illustrate how to make a book clasp and an end-rhyme resonate with equal force. This important study has implications for a wide range of readers. So first the pilgrim, and then on to the bee.

The pilgrim of Brown’s title is the reader we think we know from history and the reader we think we are. Undertaking reading as one would undertake a pilgrimage, this reader advances line-by-line, word-by-word across any stretch of text. This reader cannot (and does not) abide distraction or delay; divergences from the straight and narrow path amount to intellectual and moral cul-de-sacs, sloughs of despond serving no ultimate purpose and disconnected from the true task at hand. He’s the reader whom studies of “the word” in early New England typically connect to the onset of “redeemed subjectivity.” His progress as a reader leads to the progress of his self. It is as though the nineteenth-century realist novel reader—the reader of a genre organized around the linear unfolding of time—were transported back to the seventeenth century. This reading subject accrues his sense of place and of self through sustained attention to the (assumed) protocols of reading in Western culture: left to right, top to bottom, beginning to end.

Yet Brown’s close and sensitive attention to the materiality of early New England’s steady sellers—commonplace books, sermon notes, elegies, and other devices of devotional literacy—discloses a constant companion to this first reading subject, one whose practice of reading has been largely ignored: the “alvearial” reader or bee. As Brown describes it, the “reading program” he unearths “is defined through two central tropes: on one hand, the pilgrimage, wherein readers treat texts as continuous narratives and follow a redemptive journey, a progressive telos or ‘growth in grace’; and, on the other, the alvearial, wherein readers, like bees, extract and deposit information discontinuously, treating texts as spatial objects, as flowers or hives which keep readers active but anchored” (xii). The devotional culture of early New England did not predict or facilitate a straight line from sin to salvation. Likewise, early New Englanders were incited to achieve a form of sacred subjectivity that moved fitfully forward and back, side to side, and occasionally hovered…like a bee. In Brown’s account, the accent falls on book culture as opposed to the theological (although he does not neglect the relevant theology). He reminds us that the culture of the codex associated with the steady sellers of this period—Christian conduct manuals—was distinctly unnovelistic and nonlinear. Not only did these conduct manuals mimic the various sermonic forms already familiar to us from this period, which were themselves decidedly nonlinear, the indexical features of the codex encouraged episodic and selective engagement of the text contained therein. The pilgrim and the bee, it turns out, are one and the same. An ingenious figure who oversees the enterprise of Brown’s “reader-based” reassessment of early New England’s literature, Brown’s reader is both more and different than we could have imagined (4). As Brown writes, “the bee metaphor has a particular power for devout settlers. It integrates the other common tropes for reading in early New England: the bee suggests the directional motion of the pilgrim, while it evokes the hovering stasis of the ruminator” (10).

If the pilgrim-bee conjunction is one of the prevailing threads knitting this rich study together, it has other notable features as well. First, Brown reminds us just how deeply it matters what kind of text—what genres, what printed formats—we designate as a period’s primary literary archive. He also helps us to rethink what constituted the “literature” of early New England and to identify how this revised sense of the early American “archive” should change our view of this period. He explains, “Book trades and probate research has recovered, along with catechisms, primers, and schoolbooks, a set of devotional works…—manuals of piety, guides to conversion, psalmbooks, and sermons—that, with scripture and almanacs, were the popular literature of early New England.” These devotional works, Brown argues, “reorient our sense of literary culture in the period away from colonial-born ministers, private diarists, or unpublished poets” (7).

In addition to stressing this relative popularity and influence of the steady sellers, The Pilgrim and the Bee also emphasizes that whatever materials dominated daily life, their mode of usage also deserves attention. Early New England writing, like literary culture more generally, is, according to Brown, best understood in terms of the dynamic “communications circuit” that the history of the book encourages us to recognize. Reader-based literary history yields a more nuanced sense of not only this but of any period’s literature; and the history of the book, when practiced as what Brown calls “interpretative bibliography” (15), has the potential to refigure in important ways the practice of humanities scholarship and teaching. Here, Brown’s attention to that communications circuit reveals the broad extent to which early New England’s steady sellers were part of a performative “theater of literacy” (5) in which print culture—a term that Brown rightly questions for its abstracting tendencies (14)—functioned variously as a totemic object, as a resource for oral reading, as a funereal gift, and as part of the transaction of ritual fasting. Given these varied functions, it should not surprise us that the famous “heart piety” of early New England “worked alongside what might be called ‘hand piety,’ the tactile feel of and indexical movement within and across godly books, and ‘eye piety,’ the visual contemplation of material images” (71). Finally, Brown ends his book with a highly suggestive chapter on the relationship of book culture to Amerindian literacy and its relationship to England. He demonstrates the central disciplinary function that the “written record as artifactual wonder” played in the “civilizing” and “salvational” Protestant missions, as well as the ways in which the requirements of those missions underwrote the emergence of a New England book culture (181). 

Near the start of his book, Brown writes the following:

[H]ere is my wager: if I can convince you that the physical properties of texts—their visual appearance, tactile feel, and oral performance—were central to a society conventionally understood as iconophobic and ascetic, where communication is in the “plain style” and where expressive aesthetics are feared, then the case for book history’s significance will be all the stronger when we turn to individuals and societies where such conditions do not prevail (13).

For this reader, at least, that wager has been won.

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

Lloyd Pratt is assistant professor of English and core faculty in African American and African studies at Michigan State University.

For at least four decades, political, economic, and business historians have asserted that the rise of the corporate organizational form in the late nineteenth century represented the emergence of a new and formative institution of power and authority in modern America. While recognizing the considerable scholarship on early American corporations, these historians’ prevailing assumption has been that the corporation remained a relatively marginal institution in American political economy until the late nineteenth century, after which it began to take on a more central role in organizing politics and the market. In Founding Corporate Power, Andrew Schocket argues that the institutionalization of the corporation in the economy and in politics actually took place much earlier—and in fact was an integral part of the “Revolutionary settlement” that emerged in the early republic.

Focusing on Philadelphia, Schocket documents how the city’s elite, deposed from political office in the years after the Revolution, turned to the formation of corporations to gain control over resources and decisions in the economic sphere, where their “money, technological and legal expertise, and financial savvy” still garnered them considerable influence (205). Men like William Bingham, Thomas Willing, and Robert Morris managed to gain corporate charters to engage in large-scale collective projects such as banking, canal building, and municipal works. Whereas other scholars have seen the emergence of early corporations as a way for policymakers to assemble capital, organizational skill, and other resources to pursue large-scale public projects and economic development, Schocket makes the case that an implicit political agenda was also at work among Philadelphia’s “corporate men,” who used the corporate form as an institution for reasserting their influence over policy and for restoring power to the city’s elite. Using countless examples of the efforts of corporate promoters to subvert regulatory oversight, to sway policy, and to influence the flow of commerce, Schocket builds the case for how the economic elite of Philadelphia reasserted power and authority by using the corporate form to counter the leveling effect of the Revolution.

At the heart of the book lie three well-researched case studies of the rise of corporations in banking, canal building, and municipal projects. In each case, Schocket accounts for not only the public economic benefits created by early corporations but also private consolidation of power and influence in the hands of insiders. The Schuylkill Navigation Company’s efforts at canal building and civil engineering, for instance, opened up the urban market for farmers and coal miners in Philadelphia’s hinterland and enhanced access to inland markets for goods produced by the city’s artisans and entrepreneurs. Yet, at the same time, the state’s charter to the Navigation Company shifted power to the company’s private board, which controlled commerce by setting toll rates and terms of use on a public waterway. The board exploited this authority to influence electoral politics and public policy.

Schocket insists that in none of the cases he examines was the corporate form the only legitimate institutional option for mobilizing resources for large-scale ventures. In particular, he points to state-funded projects and private voluntary efforts. These could undertake large-scale projects without concentrating public power in the hands of economic elites. For specific examples, he points to the land banks of the colonial era and state-funded canal projects, most notably the Erie Canal, but neither is examined in much detail.

One of the more interesting choices made by the author was to focus this study on Philadelphia, a city often characterized in the economic historiography as a place dominated by small artisans and entrepreneurs rather than by corporations. Schocket argues, generally convincingly, that the city’s vibrant artisanal and entrepreneurial culture rested on an underlying infrastructure, which provided utilities, transportation to markets, and credit, that was created and controlled by early corporations. While these were certainly not equivalent to the large vertically integrated corporations of national scope that emerged a century later, the author makes a good case that they had a formative influence on the shape and terms of trade in the regional economy.

Schokett’s interpretation of early corporations as vehicles for the restoration of elite power and authority, on the other hand, is more vulnerable. While he makes a compelling case that elite Philadelphians attempted to use the corporate form to assert authority in the market and in economic policy, it is unclear that the corporation, as it evolved in the United States, was the best institution for that purpose. As the author himself points out, the number of charters granted by Pennsylvania and other states increased rapidly in the early republic and expanded even more quickly with the passing of general incorporation laws in the second third of the nineteenth century—undermining the usefulness of corporations as a means of protecting exclusive privileges for the few. While the British corporations of the eighteenth century, which served as models for early American corporations, may have helped preserve the power of elites, changes to the corporate form in the American context (and especially the liberalization of incorporation laws) made it more difficult for the institution to be used for such purposes. Schocket interprets the proliferation of corporations as evidence that Philadelphia’s “corporate men” were able to “co-opt” opponents of the institution, but the growing number of incorporations in the period is perhaps better understood as evidence that democratic critics of early corporations were able to “co-opt” the corporate form and turn it into something other than a vehicle of special privilege. In fact, expanding access to incorporation allowed the form to be used by challengers who sought to upset the status quo of an industry as much as by those who sought to use it to consolidate their power and influence. In the end, this ability of newcomers to use the corporate form to challengeincumbents in the market is at least as important a legacy of early American corporations as the socioeconomic stratification the author describes.

Nevertheless, Schocket should be given much credit for shifting our attention from the late to the early nineteenth century and for his bold interpretation of the relationship between the evolving politics of the post-Revolutionary era and the emergence of the corporation. By examining the political backdrop to the emergence and institutionalization of the corporation in the early republic, he has helped reintegrate the issue of power into our understanding of the rise of corporations and their place in American political and economic development.

Further Reading:

An extensive literature has developed over the last four decades on how the rise of the large-scale corporate organizational form reshaped the structure of the economy and politics in modern America. Some of the landmark works on this topic include Robert Weibe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967); Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44:3 (1970): 279-90; Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (New York, 1988); Richard R. John, “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler’s The Visible Hand After Twenty Years,” Business History Review 71 (1997): 151-201.

Historians, of course, have long recognized the importance of the corporate form in early America but largely viewed it from the perspective of an instrument used by policymakers to promote economic development. Studies in the tradition of the “commonwealth” school as well as the legal histories in the tradition of J. Willard Hurst tended to interpret early American corporations in this way. Examples of work in this tradition include Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (New York, 1947); James Willard Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Corporation in the Law of the United States, 1780-1970 (Charlottesville, Va., 1970); Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought, 1776-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1948); Harry Scheiber, “Private Rights and Public Power: American Law, Capitalism, and the Republican Polity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yale Law Journal 107:3 (1997): 823-861. Schocket tries to position his work differently: “Rather than considering the state’s actions toward corporations, it asks how corporate men influenced the state through the activities of corporate insiders and allies, such as lobbying, applying financial leverage, and mobilizing voters dependent upon corporate officers’ good graces” (13).

While many northern industrial cities and regions have been used as settings for examining the rise of corporations in the economy and politics, Philadelphia has often been used as a counterpoint to illustrate the persistence and competitiveness of small-scale proprietary capitalism. See, for instance, Phillip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885 (Cambridge, 1983); Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia, 1983); Donna Rilling, Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism: Builders in Philadelphia, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia, 2001); Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1995).

For an interesting discussion of the expanding use of corporations in the United States (particularly in banking) as it differed from Europe, see Richard Sylla, “Early American Banking: The Significance of the Corporate Form,” Business and Economic History 14 (1985): 105-23. On how corporate law evolved to allow newcomers to challenge incumbent corporations as vehicles of privilege see Stanley I. Kutler, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (Philadelphia, 1971).

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

R. Daniel Wadhwani is an assistant professor at the University of the Pacific. His book, Creating Citizen Savers: Origins of the Market for Personal Finance in the United States, will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press.

History explains; film shows. But how does film show slavery, and to what end? And why is slavery such a vexing problem in film, in museums, in national parks, or any medium of public historical representation? To ask these questions is almost to pose a commonplace: why is evil, oppression, trauma, and great conflict in the past difficult to confront in a modern democratic society?

Some answers can be found in the history of representation itself. In the wake of the Civil War, Americans began constructing images of slavery that were almost pure wish-fulfillment. By the 1880s and 1890s, a literary calculus was at work in sentimental fiction about the Old South. The freedpeople and their sons and daughters were the bothersome, dangerous antithesis of the noble catastrophe that the Confederacy’s war increasingly became in reminiscence and in Lost Cause tradition. Omnipresent, growing instead of vanishing, blacks had to have their place in the splendid disaster of the war, emancipation, and Reconstruction. So in the works of several widely popular dialect writers (the Plantation School), especially Thomas Nelson Page, blacks were rendered faithful to an old regime, as chief spokesmen for it, and often confused in–or witty critics of–the new. The old-time plantation Negro emerged as the voice through which a transforming revolution in race relations dissolved into fantasy and took a long holiday in the popular imagination.

In the Gilded Age of teeming cities, industrialization, and political skullduggery, Americans needed another world to live in; they yearned for a more pleasing past in which to find slavery. Page, and his many imitators, delivered such a world of idyllic race relations and agrarian virtue. An unheroic age could now escape to an alternative universe of gallant cavaliers and their trusted servants. Page’s best-selling world of prewar and wartime Virginia was inhabited by the thoroughly stock characters of Southern gentlemen (“Marse Chan”), gracious ladies (“Meh Lady” or the “Mistis”), and the stars of the show, the numerous Negro mammies and the loyal bondsmen (“Unc’ Billy,” “Unc’ Edinburgh,” or “ole Stracted”). In virtually every story, loyal slaves reminisce about the era of slavery, and bring harmony to postwar plantations by ushering Southern belles and good Yankee soldiers to reconciliation and matrimony. How better to forget a war about slavery than to have faithful slaves play the mediators of a white folks’ reunion?

By the time D. W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon began the collaboration in 1913 that would produce Birth of a Nation (1915), this genre of American fiction had become a nearly impenetrable fog of melodrama and racism through which most Americans could hardly see alternative visions of slavery and its aftermath. Griffith, who grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, came of age in the heyday of the Lost Cause. A lover of the Southern martial tradition and Victorian melodramas, and eager to portray a lost rural innocence in the new urban age, he was in New York by 1908, acting and making short films.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the war approached in 1909-11, Griffith made several Civil War melodramas. In these films, stock scenes and characters abound: rebel soldiers going off to war with black field hands cheering, genteel but sturdy Southern white women, Confederate and Union soldiers (sometimes brothers) shaking hands while wrapped in the folds of their flags, and ubiquitously, loyal slaves saving or dying for their masters. Indeed, during the semicentennial of the war, American theaters were saturated with Civil War films lasting fifteen to twenty-five minutes, with some ninety-eight produced in 1913 alone. The films’ subtitles repeatedly portrayed the slaves as “happy, contented, and well cared for . . . joyous as a bunch of school children,” as though the obsequious characters on screen did not adequately convey the message. Black characters in these films themselves carry the historical lesson that slavery was not the cause of the war, and its destruction was the lingering misfortune of the nation and the black race. Not only do black mammies and butlers die saving their white folks from marauding Yankees, but in some films, whole families and slave quarters defend plantations, and thereby the South, from its destruction.

In Birth of a Nation, Griffith gave his well-plied audiences the message not only that blacks did not want their freedom, but also that emancipation had been America’s greatest disaster. The lasting significance of Birth of a Nation is that it etched a story of Reconstruction, and of the noble restoration of white supremacy, into American consciousness. The film’s epic visualization of a necessary and noble birth of the Ku Klux Klan to thwart the schemes of deranged radicals and sex-crazed blacks makes this the most controversial film in American cinematic history. Indeed, visually and historically, especially given the persistence of neo-Confederate and genteel white supremacist traditions in America even at the turn of the twenty-first century, historians and filmmakers alike are still responding to the messages ingrained in our historical memory by Griffith’s epic.

Can we imagine any other film carrying such a politics for so long? A friend tells me that in her high school social studies class in 1970 in St. Louis, Missouri, a group from the Black Student Union broke into the classroom, tore the reel from the projector, and burned Birth of a Nation in front of teacher and students. Perhaps only some forms of pornography and some Cold War films may ever have caused such acts of resistance to the images on a screen. Such visceral responses to Birth of a Nation suggest that Americans have difficulty assessing the meaning of slavery outside of a moral language of good and evil and black and white. Slavery is widely seen as an economic institution, but determining its historical responsibility is an inherently moral act. And the origins of the slave trade itself, at least in the popular imagination (and despite decades of scholarship), have not been dislodged from images of benighted Africans stolen from their homelands by avaricious Europeans. The deep complicity of African societies in the slave trade has not found a comfortable place in historical memories on the American side of the Atlantic.

Moreover, any attempt to understand the legacies of slavery requires for some a confrontation with shame–heritage consciousness and ancestor worship, both growing trends in our world, tend to be quests for a positive and uplifting past. Few people would choose to have their ancestors be slaveholding capitalists who made their livings from the blood and liberty of human property; and few would choose to descend from chattel slaves who lost their homelands and liberty, and had to rise from illiteracy and cotton fields they could never own. Racial slavery has never fit well into a popular expectation in America that our history is about progress, that we are a people of good will who solve all of our problems. Broadly speaking, public expectations of the past are at stake in any attempt to represent racial slavery in film. But this doesn’t release anyone from historian Natalie Zemon Davis’s admonishment against “wish-fulfillment” in depicting the history of such a subject. Americans like to be pleased by their history, and that enormous backdrop of melodrama and wish-fulfillment about slavery still stands in the path of genuine understanding.

In her Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, Davis writes optimistically about the “differences between telling history in prose and telling history on film.” Those differences, especially in approach to canons of evidence and in portrayal of emotive drama, are striking and troublesome. But Davis wants to keep filmmakers’ feet to the fire when it comes to truth telling. “Historical films should let the past be the past,” she writes. “The play of imagination in picturing resistance to slavery can follow the rules of evidence when possible, and the spirit of the evidence when details are lacking.” In an appeal that can apply to documentary filmmakers as much as movie directors, Davis warns that “wishing away the harsh and strange spots in the past, softening or remodeling them like the familiar present,” can only make building a desired future harder. Take that Steven Spielberg and Ken Burns.

Davis’s admonition is that filmmakers should preserve the integrity of real stories, and not invent alternatives when they don’t like the evidence. “Wish-fulfillment,” she says, “should not steer the imagination in a historical film.” Davis’s argument is not a naive proposition, especially given her own experience as a very active creative force behind the dramatic feature film, The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), as well as with some recent efforts to confront slavery on screen. But on the subject of American slavery, filmmakers have always had an enormous sea of sentimentalism and melodrama to cross before even considering the subject. From several experiences working with documentary filmmakers and screenwriters, I have come to cautiously share Davis’s optimism about the possibilities for films about slavery. In the United States, PBS has become a frequent outlet for good films about African American history generally and slavery particularly. WETA in Washington, D.C., and especially the “American Experience” project sponsored by WGBH in Boston, have been homes to many young and talented filmmakers and writers in recent years. In 1993-94, I worked with Orlando Bagwell on his Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History, the first major attempt to represent Douglass’s life on film. In that film, Bagwell and his crew were rushed by an early air date, but they produced a film still in wide educational use; they created a Douglass of heroic proportions, but one who is complicated by the transformations in his life. From that one experience I learned that many filmmakers are themselves good historians; Orlando and his collaborators read everything on Douglass, and they delivered a Douglass rooted in historical time.

For his remarkable four-part, six-hour series, Africans in America, Bagwell and his producers invited me and three other historians to a two-day seminar for the rough-cut screenings (about a year before air dates). This was, again, a lesson in how documentary filmmakers do want to get the history right, at the same time they need to teach historians to think in filmic terms. With Barbara Fields, Gerald Gill, and Sylvia Frey, I sat through intensive, all-day discussions with the teams of producers and writers on each of the four segments of Africans. We had many disagreements and recommendations; all the discussions were taped and transcribed.

Our subject, of course, was how to represent the story of slavery from the slave trade to emancipation in six hours. Specific documents, quotations, and images were openly debated. But the impressive fact was that all of the filmmakers really wanted our criticisms. They were very attuned to what we deemed accurate and historically sound. At the end of the day we were all involved in an interpretive enterprise–debating how much of African complicity in the slave trade to stress, how and when a Christianization process set in among colonial slaves, just what interpretation of the American Revolution the lens of slavery and black freedom provided, how to capture the relationships between black and white abolitionists, which fugitive slave story was best representative of that crucial element of resistance in the 1850s, how to tell the story of slavery as both oppression and survival, and many more questions. We ventured into the filmmakers’ domain, begging for more interpretive commentary here, and less dramatic recreation there, less music in one place, and more talking heads in another. In every case, of course, we were trying to recommend good history that had to be converted into a film narrative. There are many aspects to quibble with, but Africansbecame American history with the story of slavery and race brought to the center of the national narrative.

Yet all of us who have worked with filmmakers, in reading scripts or as interviewees, have had other less encouraging experiences as well. In the early and mid-1990s I worked as an advisor for director Charles Burnett and producer Peter Almond on a dramatic film about Douglass. Burnett wrote many drafts of an impressive script and used me as a sounding board and reader. His was a psychological portrait of Douglass, created from rich documentation, a tale of a brilliant former slave who could never be fully secure in the world of intellect and radical abolition he had entered. Burnett juxtaposed Douglass’s home and family life in Rochester, New York with President Abraham Lincoln’s home at the White House in the Civil War years in interesting ways. He also probed Douglass’s relationships with other abolitionists, black and white.

Burnett would have given us a somewhat tormented young Douglass trying to shape and make history in ways he only half controlled; it was a story about Douglass, but also very much about slavery tearing apart the American nation-state. Lawrence Fishburne had been approached about playing Douglass. But that film has never been made because the company most interested, Turner Broadcasting, never liked the scripts. They wanted a more romantic story of Douglass–more about the war and the women in his life, in short, more melodrama. The scripts were submitted to a second writer who cut them virtually in half; the project languishes like many earlier efforts to present slavery on film. Film can be a blunt instrument for subtlety and nuance. In prose and poetry, a writer can capture the travail and spirit of a human soul. Films, especially documentaries, are married to realism, to the too often assumed power of visual artifacts. But no artifact interprets itself, no picture has meaning solely on its own. And the pictures from the past privilege those elements of history that were more frequently photographed or painted; material culture dominates in the visual record over human aspiration or suffering. So, when historians and filmmakers collaborate they are always reminded of the limitations of this mixed medium. When I first met the original script writer on the Douglass documentary, he told me that he begins every project by reading the children’s literature on the subject first. Initially I was worried about this, but came to understand his point when I realized that Douglass’s life would have to be boiled down to approximately a seventy-five-page script.

But such limitations do not release us from engaging filmmakers and helping them make good history. From my recent work on Civil War memory I came across a story that might provide an opening scene for some enterprising filmmaker eager to construct continuing answers to Birth of a Nation. It is a story worth telling not merely for its sentiment, but because it was all but lost in the historical record. After Charleston, South Carolina was evacuated in February 1865 near the end of the Civil War, most of the people remaining among the ruins of the city were thousands of blacks. During the final eight months of the war, Charleston had been bombarded by Union batteries and gunboats, and much of its magnificent architecture lay in ruin. Also during the final months of war the Confederates had converted the Planters’ Race Course (a horse track) into a prison in which some 257 Union soldiers had died and were thrown into a mass grave behind the grandstand.

In April, more than twenty black carpenters and laborers went to the gravesite, reinterred the bodies in proper graves, built a tall fence around the cemetery enclosure one hundred yards long, and built an archway over an entrance. On the archway they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.” And with great organization, on May 1, 1865, the black folk of Charleston, in cooperation with white missionaries, teachers, and Union troops, conducted an extraordinary parade of approximately ten thousand people. It began with three thousand black school children (now enrolled in freedmen’s schools) marching around the Planters’ Race Course with armloads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” Then followed the black women of Charleston, and then the men. They were in turn followed by members of Union regiments and various white abolitionists such as James Redpath. The crowd gathered in the graveyard; five black preachers read from Scripture, and a black children’s choir sang “America,” “We Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-spangled Banner,” and several spirituals. Then the solemn occasion broke up into an afternoon of speeches, picnics, and drilling troops on the infield of the old planters’ horseracing track.

This was the first Memorial Day. Black Charlestonians had given birth to an American tradition. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of roses and lilacs and marching feet on their former masters’ race course, they had created the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.

To this day hardly anyone in Charleston, or elsewhere, even remembers this story. Quite remarkably, it all but vanished from memory. But in spite of all the other towns in America that claim to be the site of the first Memorial Day (all claiming spring, 1866), African Americans and Charleston deserve pride of place. Why not imagine a new rebirth of the American nation with this scene?

Further Reading:

Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York, 1977).

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

David Blight teaches history and black studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, 1989), and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). He has been a consultant to several documentary films, including the PBS series Africans in America (1998).

Frances Trollope, the English-born Tory, found American religious habits loathsome (in truth, she found most everything about America loathsome). But Trollope was particularly revolted by the propensity Americans displayed for shoving their faiths down other people’s throats. You could implement a “religious tyranny,” she said, without state aid. Have a look at the Americans, bless their hearts. They were providing a convincing demonstration of how this might be done—through boisterous revivals, incessant proselytizing, and everyday social bullying. In short, through the blunt instrument of cultural coercion.

A better known observer from Europe, Alexis de Tocqueville, was more judicious in his assessment of American religious life. Like Trollope, he didn’t think religious faith had much effect on the nation’s “laws or the specifics of political opinion.” Nonetheless, he ventured that the broad and penetrating influence of Christianity sustained a common, religiously infused morality that regulated the nation’s unruly commercial and democratic impulses.

Building on Tocqueville’s observation, the historian David Sehat contends that a formidable and coercive “moral establishment” triumphed in the early republic. Sehat’s smart and provocative book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, has gained an enthusiastic following among historians. The moral establishment thesis relies on two propositions: (1) the founders failed to restrict religious coercion by the states; (2) “religious partisans” exploited that opening to suppress liberal reform and irreligious dissent.

The first proposition is mostly uncontroversial. But the second is not and warrants investigation. Historians have known for some time that an unofficial Protestant, or at least Christian, establishment existed in nineteenth-century America. But what sort of establishment was it? And how coercive? These are questions that Sehat’s thesis raises in poignant new form.

Here’s what we generally agree upon: During the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the United States commenced a process of official disestablishment that eliminated most forms of direct government funding for churches and state-enforced religious doctrine. Unlike their European and colonial predecessors, early republican states imposed no creeds on believers nor penalties for missed church attendance. Early national constitutions also trimmed or eliminated religious tests for civil office.

Blasphemy laws were a manifestation of an unofficial establishment that accorded Protestant Christianity symbolic precedence and deferred to Protestant norms.

In addition, legislatures passed what amounted to general incorporation laws for churches and synagogues. This mattered a great deal, not least because it leveled the legal playing field between religious groups. For its part, the federal government wasn’t permitted to enact religious tests or support a national religious establishment, and was prohibited from legislating restrictions on religious exercise. That mattered less because the states, and not the federal government, possessed the power to actually infringe upon the rights of believers and nonbelievers.

What remained in most states were nondenominational Protestant or Christian establishments. The design varied from state to state but shared a common substratum of Protestant and Christian norms that justified Sabbatarian restrictions, limited office holding to those who could swear by the Old or New Testaments (sometimes both, which as you can imagine made things difficult for Jews), prescribed religious oaths for witnesses, and occasionally prosecuted revilers of Christianity.

That, more or less, is where the consensus ends. The thing that needs to be established is whether, in Sehat’s terms, “religious coercion” and determined efforts to “maintain religious power and control” were the defining characteristics of the early nineteenth century.

To Sehat, the essence of the early nineteenth-century moral establishment were the blasphemy laws that forbade defamatory speech or writing about Christianity. So these deserve special notice. The first thing to point out here is that blasphemy restrictions were longstanding features of Anglo-American law. There was nothing new about them. Nonetheless, some states such as Massachusetts did pass statutes prescribing punishments for any “denying, cursing, or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing, or reproaching Jesus Christ…”

Even in the absence of legislative statute, prohibitions against anti-Christian speech lurked menacingly in the common law, the source code of American jurisprudence, and were reaffirmed in a handful of state court cases. Had they been rigorously enforced, blasphemy laws would have made life precarious for unbelievers, skeptics, and radical dissidents.

But they weren’t. Despite the importance accorded early republican blasphemy cases by Sehat, very few were actually tried. In his Repressive Jurisprudence, Phillip Blumberg notes that he has “identified no fewer than 20 blasphemy cases in the first half of the 19^th century.” That’s the most any historian has verified, and it works out to less than one blasphemy case per state over a fifty-year period.

The impact of this regulatory restraint was significant. While re-publishing irreligious works such as Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason would likely get you prosecuted in early nineteenth-century England, American publishers repeatedly got away with it. If they suffered damage to their reputations in doing so, that was probably all the punishment they endured.

An exception proving the rule was the trial of the popular Boston freethinker Abner Kneeland. In the early republic, it usually took scoffing, scurrilous, or sexually related speech about Christianity to draw a blasphemy indictment. Radical social ideas could also do it, and that, as Paul Finkelman has recently argued, may have been behind Kneeland’s prosecution. At any rate, Kneeland was convicted in 1838 on the grounds that he published an article in his newspaper that denied the existence of God, Jesus Christ, and the immortality of the soul. The court sentenced him to jail for two months.

Stripped of context, Kneeland’s treatment seems like pretty convincing evidence for the moral establishment thesis. Before assigning the case to that ledger, we need to keep four things in mind. First, Kneeland entered prison a local celebrity and exited with even greater renown. Second, upon leaving, he proceeded to reprint the very same offending passages in pamphlet form. That “blasphemy” provoked no official action. Third, irreverent contemporaries such as Kneeland’s fellow Bostonian Theodore Parker (who declared that “[n]o institution in America is more corrupt than her churches. No thirty thousand men and women are so bigoted and narrow as the thirty thousand ministers”) preached to large audiences without legal sanction. Fourth, Kneeland’s was the last successful blasphemy prosecution in Massachusetts. It was an embarrassment to a community that prided itself on liberty of conscience.

This is not to say that blasphemy laws didn’t contain the potential for coercion, or reflect Protestant Christianity’s broader cultural influence. Christian jurists and legislators conceded as much when they explained, sometimes in tortured logic, that Christianity was not established in the way Anglicanism was in England or Catholicism in Spain. Nonetheless, they contended that it was still entwined with the common law and still mightily revered in the community. Daniel Webster and theologian Philip Schaff were among those who invoked a well-worn line from an 1824 Pennsylvania blasphemy decision wherein it was explained that the state had endorsed “not Christianity founded on any particular religious tenets; not Christianity with an established church, and tithes, and spiritual courts, but Christianity with liberty of conscience to all men.”

They protested too much. Blasphemy laws were a manifestation of an unofficial establishment that accorded Protestant Christianity symbolic precedence and deferred to Protestant norms. Yet Webster and Schaff had a point in suggesting that their state establishments were considerably more constrained than their colonial and European antecedents, and that they made relatively generous allowances for religious liberty. Those were not myths.

Indeed, an ever widening spectrum of religious eccentrics evaded blasphemy laws. That included one of Kneeland’s local advocates, the Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declared that genuine revelation (as opposed to its petrified scriptural varieties) was ongoing in nature and in our souls. Most of the time, Emerson’s heretical effusions inspired a satisfying bewilderment among his listeners.But even when Emerson’s audience was more discerning and his prose less opaque, authorities declined to indict him. At Harvard Divinity School’s 1838 commencement (delivered a month after Kneeland began his two-month sentence), Emerson told the pious assembly that their churches were hollow shells and that America’s clergy were unthinking conduits of tradition.

A deluge of criticism ensued. The public prints accused Emerson of “infidelity” and “blasphemy” (and probably with some truth of “vagueness” and “nonsense”). He was excoriated by the orthodox. But there was no longer an official church establishment to devour the irreverent metaphysician in its maw. Emerson was not jailed, flogged, or beaten in the streets. His opponents hurled neither sticks nor stones, nor blasphemy indictments. Just mean names.

It is still possible that blasphemy laws and the culture that supported them had a deterrent effect on those with freethinking tendencies. That’s what an aged and irascible John Adams suggested in an 1825 letter to Thomas Jefferson. While blasphemy regulations were rarely applied, Adams mused, they nonetheless cast a pall over unconventional thinking and stymied the progress of ideas. A contemporary opponent of religious revivals complained that “[m]en of the least talent and reflection are often the most successful in promoting them, and the most ordinary persons in these scenes may rise to the highest consequences.”

Perhaps the same could be said of early republican religion more generally: it inhibited irreverent and secular thought. Beginning in the 1790s, as the French Revolution approached its bloody peak, Americans began decrying irreligion and “infidelity,” and some didn’t stop until the twentieth century. Describing the impact of early republican religious culture, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans could not conceive—could not bring to cognition—what their Christian faith wouldn’t allow them. They were “obliged to profess an ostensible respect for Christian morality and equity…” As bold as they were in enterprise, Tocqueville thought these people were meek in matters of the intellect.

Skeptics and deists agreed that America was awash in anal retentive dogma. In 1822, Thomas Jefferson groused to Thomas Cooper that once-enlightened Richmond had succumbed to religious “fanaticism.” The object of his disdain was the same informal and female-centered social coercion that Trollope later bewailed. The women of Richmond, Jefferson wrote, “have their night meetings and praying parties, where, attended by their priests, and sometimes by a hen-pecked husband, they pour forth the effusions of their love to Jesus, in terms as amatory and carnal, as their modesty would permit them to use to a mere earthly lover.”

Historians, most notably Amanda Porterfield and Christopher Grasso, have illuminated the origins and development of this surging antipathy toward unbelief and impiety. But acknowledging that early republican culture tended to discredit or discourage irreligious thought and privilege evangelical sentiments is a far cry from saying that the period was marked more by religious coercion than religious freedom. Despite the vigor of the cultural machinery that evangelical Christians employed, despite their ceaseless production of cheap tracts and Bibles, the fact is that people in positions of higher authority were both disinclined and ill-equipped to prosecute systematic campaigns against dissenters.

In fact, one of the factors that made popular grievances so combustible during this period was that state prosecution and protection were so lackluster. Regular police forces were simply incapable of preventing or punishing mobs. At the same time, embattled churches such as the Mormons and Catholics either raised armies or threatened to do so. As a huge crowd of angry Bostonians prepared to destroy the ill-fated Charlestown convent in 1834, the Mother Superior, Mary Moffatt, badgered the motley assembly with the specter of a bishop-led “army of twenty thousand Catholic Irishmen who will burn your houses.” It’s not clear what alternatives were available to Sister Moffatt given that the town’s firemen stood aside to watch the proceedings and that the police—such as they were—never arrived.

All this is to say that when it came to religious matters, the states were weak and perpetually feckless, proving a slack instrument for the exercise of coercion against religious minorities, as well as a slender shield when mobs assembled to threaten those same groups.

The federal government exercised even less direct power on its citizenry than the states. Until the Civil War, it was still chiefly an employer of customs officers and postal workers. Nonetheless, in 1829, a furious debate erupted over the operations of the latter. The point of contention was whether the federal mails should operate on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. An 1810 congressional act mandated that post offices must open their doors for delivery at some point that day. Scores of petitions from across the country insisted that they should not.

In response to the Sabbatarian clamor, Senator Richard M. Johnson, chairman of the Senate Committee on Post Office and Post Roads, delivered an impassioned rejoinder. In his initial report to the Senate, Johnson indicated that religious diversity was now integral to the way Americans framed their church-state concerns. “What other nations call religious toleration we call religious rights,” Johnson told his colleagues. Adressing the House, Johnson added that “[t]he Constitution regards the conscience of the Jew as sacred as that of the Christian and gives no more authority to adopt a measure affecting the conscience of a solitary individual than that of a whole community.”

Opponents of Sunday mail delivery made an equally ardent plea for religious liberty and tolerance, along with their insistence that the federal government abide by the Fourth Commandment. What about the 26,000 men employed by the postal service who would experience the “partial” or “entire loss” of “the privileges of public worship on the Sabbath”? What about their consciences? What about the stage coach riders, or those who fed and sheltered them? When were they to rest their bodies and refresh their souls? Could this be dismissed as a matter of little consequence? And was it really the Jews whose consciences Senator Johnson was so concerned about? Could solicitude for this tiny population of non-Christians outweigh the interest of twelve million Christians? Saturday delivery would continue to violate their consciences anyway. So why the dyspepsia about outlawing Sunday delivery?

The diverse Protestant groups that joined in the campaign to eliminate Sunday mail delivery lost this battle, as they would lose a later battle to have God inserted into the U.S. Constitution. The federal government never succumbed to these evangelical importunities. And what became of Johnson, that impudent scourge of the moral establishment? Like Kneeland after him, Johnson emerged from the controversy as an icon of religious freedom and later served as Martin Van Buren’s vice president. At one point he was considered presidential material himself.

Nineteenth-century America maintained a secular federal government that no determined group of religious partisans could undo. Just as importantly, a nonsectarian and secularizing trend was evident at the state level. The legal historian Steven Green has charted a turn away from divinely sanctioned law both in Sabbath restrictions and public schooling during this period. Green notes that—again during the nineteenth century’s middle decades—Americans began justifying their Sabbath laws as health and welfare measures, rebranding them as rules that permitted laborers time to rest and saloon keepers a reason to keep their doors closed. Likewise, advocates of Bible reading in the schools were forced back upon secular justifications (scripture, it was argued, was an indispensable source of moral influence), as the good book became an increasingly scarce text in late nineteenth-century classrooms.

We’re still left with the potentially damning fact that court’s witnesses were required to demonstrate belief in a future state of rewards and punishments. Could this provide compelling evidence that the early republic was afflicted with high levels of religious coercion? It might seem so. In a 2009 Journal of the Early Republic article, Ronald Formisano and Stephen Pickering traced the persistent vestiges of these requirements in the common law. They found “that religious tests for ‘witness competency’ remained on state statute books and in judges’ decisions a much longer time” than scholars had previously thought. In fact, Formisano and Pickering showed that such tests persevered through much of the nineteenth century.

On the surface, Formisano and Pickering’s finding appears to offer persuasive evidence for the vitality of a coercive moral establishment in the early republic. Yet these scholars also note the general trend away from strict religious requirements for witnessing and toward their abolition during the middle decades of the nineteenth century—in line with what Green has found with regard to the schools and Sabbath enforcement—precisely when the moral establishment was supposedly approaching its indomitable heights.

The truly remarkable thing about the nation’s unofficial establishment is how much freedom it conferred. That distinguished it from colonial America and from much of contemporary Europe. Tocqueville noticed the difference. “In France,” he observed, “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty almost always pulled in opposite directions. In the United States I found them intimately intertwined.”

Consider a brief counterfactual: Picture Emerson or Kneeland parachuted into mid-Puritan New England; or Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, delivered into eighteenth-century New York. Setting aside the question of whether their controversial utterances would have even been conceivable, can we imagine public opinion having suffered them for an instant? Presuming they openly questioned the existence of God or proclaimed a new revelation, presuming that they gained the slightest influence among British American colonists, can we envision authorities who would have stopped short of banishment or capital punishment?

It is true that nineteenth-century Unitarians, Universalists, deists, and nonbelievers were regarded with open contempt by the evangelical majority. But here’s the thing: Universalists and other unorthodox believers preached and practiced openly now. Nor did “religious partisans” employ state authority to shut down free-thought societies or papers. Even the conjurors who invoked dead spirits prospered; in fact, they were wildly popular. When a lonely 1854 petition to ban séances arrived in Congress, it was simply tabled.

In the early decades of the republic, free people enjoyed unprecedented autonomy when it came to their religious opinions and practices. And their theological disagreements widened as the range of possible belief billowed outward. The multiplying fissures and proliferating choices could be unsettling for believers and nonbelievers alike. Joseph Smith was among those who lamented the “war of words and tumult of opinions” that poured forth from American believers. They were “plagued,” Amanda Porterfield writes, “by doubt in many forms.”

The stimulatory effect of such doubts helps explain why these years represented one of the most fertile epochs of religious and cultural improvisation in world history. Terryl Givens once called it an age of “proliferating heterodoxies.” The country sparked with enterprising churches and entrepreneurial ministers. Parts burned hot, then suddenly cool; but the energy of the whole system seldom dissipated. It consolidated only to scatter in some newly perfervid way.

The free population in America conducted what the English philosopher John Stuart Mill called “experiments in living” on a vast scale. Freely exercising their faith allowed them to test the value of “different modes of life” through practical trial. Perhaps that is the best way to think about these early national Americans: less devoted to the lofty principles of inclusion and tolerance than they were inured to the reality of religious experimentation. “We are a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle. Every “reading man” carried “a draft of a New Community in his waistcoat pocket.” Either way, these experiments—the vast majority of which were religious in character—carried on with little if any official resistance.

The situation for religious minorities also belies the claim that the first decades of the nineteenth century were marked by religious coercion. The Constitution banned religious tests for holding office at the federal level and by the 1830s the remaining state religious tests had either been repealed or were commonly ignored. For all the nativist animus that they cultivated, Protestant religious partisans did a poor job of keeping Roman Catholics out of the country, and proved no more adroit at denying them political influence. They were similarly inept at excluding Jews, who were, as one historian of the period put it, “to be found in every part and in every faction.”

Moreover, for all the heat generated by the new religious diversity and its resulting antipathies, there were few fires, even amid the dry timber of Protestant-Catholic relations. Among the most conspicuous exceptions were the 1834 attack on the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and the 1844 assault on Philadelphia’s Catholic churches. Yet during this very period, as Margaret DePalma, John Dichtl, and Andrew H. M. Stern have demonstrated, an enormous amount of peaceful interaction was occurring between Protestants and Catholics. During the first half of the nineteenth century, those age-old adversaries helped one another construct many more churches than were burnt. Protestants and Catholics intermarried on a surprisingly steady basis, while Catholics joined Protestant-inspired reform societies and assisted Bible distribution efforts.

This was also a relatively good place to be Jewish. In 1811, the same year that New York’s highest court ruled against a man named John Ruggles for proclaiming that “Jesus Christ was a bastard, and his mother … a whore,” New York City named an American-born Jew, Mordecai Noah, its sheriff. A decade and a half later, a newly arrived Jewish immigrant, Aaron Philips, gushed to his German mother and father:

Here we are all the same, all the religions are honored and respected and have the same rights. An Israelite with talent who does well, can like many others achieve the highest honors. … America the promised land, the free and glad America has all my heart’s desire. … Dear parents, if only the Israelites knew how well you can live in this country, no one really would live in Germany any longer.

Even if Philips was overly sanguine about the prospects for American Jews, his cheerful report reflects a common contemporary sentiment. Immigration patterns bore it out. Between 1820 and 1877, notes Jonathan Sarna, the “American Jewish population increased at a rate that was almost fifteen times greater than that of the nation as a whole.”

Religious liberty also dissipated the impact of racial discrimination on freed people. Enslaved African Americans were of course subjected to brutal forms of coercion, a tyranny of body and soul that made church-state relationships mostly irrelevant to their experience. That was not the case for free blacks. The absence of an official establishment and legal provisions guaranteeing religious liberty made a real difference for them. Though generally indifferent to the fate of African American worshippers, the nation’s founders had created a structure in which African American churches could flourish. It’s unlikely that many intended this outcome. But that was the outcome nonetheless. And enough whites were comfortable with that fact to enable scores of African American churches and a handful of African American denominations to arise without fatal opposition.

The black church blossomed more dramatically after the Civil War. Freed people rarely acquired the land they had worked upon, and the political power they enjoyed was short-lived. What the formerly enslaved did gain was the right to independent worship. Within a year of the war’s end, Charleston, South Carolina, was already home to eleven African American churches. They came, Albert Raboteau tells us, in nearly every Protestant variety. There were black Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Baptists. Meanwhile, African American membership in white-led churches plummeted.

Taken together, the reality of rampant diversity and the sacred status of liberty of conscience placed substantive constraints on religious coercion in the early republic. On nearly all the fronts that would constitute religious coercion, Protestant partisans came up short. They failed to ban Sunday mail delivery, failed to expurgate skeptics, failed to keep Catholics and Jews out of the country, and failed to contain the spread of radical religious doctrines. Their successes in promoting temperance reform and Sabbatarian restrictions at the local level were generally achieved via democratic means and increasingly with secular justifications. If this is what success looked like for them, then their goals must have been very modest.

As far as religious tyrannies go, the early republic ranked among the least formidable and resolute in history. It permitted the most extraordinary demonstrations of dissent and the most spectacular outbreaks of heterodoxy. It is true, as Tocqueville emphasized, that the early republic sustained a relatively small number of avowed nonbelievers and very limited markets for their ideas, but federal and state governments had precious little to do with that.

If there was a “moral establishment” in the early republic, it was that sprawling and fragmented combination of Christian preachers and energized lay people who distributed books, lectured, cajoled, and sometimes made religiously inspired laws. Its influence was diffuse and its ends often conflicting. It possessed limited legal authority over individual consciences and lacked any warrant to interfere with religious practices. What power it possessed derived from its immensity and energy, and the approbation that it enjoyed from a broad swath of the American population.

Perhaps, as Frances Trollope suggested, the early republic’s religious tyranny was social and cultural. Evangelically inspired men and women did exert great moral pressure, and no doubt they annoyed the incredulous. Their earnest piety probably made untold numbers of them into intellectual bores and dour supper companions. But these people, some of whom helped jump-start the abolitionist movement, while persuading a drunken population to imbibe less extravagantly and patronize brothels less regularly, proved more inclined to tolerate religious differences than extinguish them.

Further Reading

For more on the impact of general incorporation laws, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property before the Civil War.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 162:2 (January 2014): 308-372; Gordon, “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America,” William and Mary Quarterly (April 2015); and Mark D. McGarvie, One Nation under Law: America’s Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State (DeKalb, Ill., 2004).

On blasphemy law in the early republic, see Paul Finkelman, “Blasphemy and Free Thought in Jacksonian America: The Case of Abner Kneeland,” in Profane: Sacrilegious Expression in an Multicultural Age, eds. Christopher S. Grenda, Chris Beneke, and David Nash (Berkeley, Calif., 2014); Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Blasphemy and the Law of Religious Liberty in Nineteenth-Century America,” in American Quarterly, 52:4 (December 2000): 682-719; Christopher Grasso, “The Boundaries of Toleration and Tolerance: Religious Infidelity in the Early American Republic,” in The First Prejudice, eds. Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia, 2011): 286-302; Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2010); James Kabala, Church-State Relations in the Early American Republic, 1787-1846 (London, 2013); and, David Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (New York, 2007).

On the destruction of the Charlestown convent, see Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Fire & Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 (New York, 2000). On the decline of Bible reading in public schools, see R. Laurence Moore, “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education,” Journal of American History 86:4 (March 2000): 1581-99. On the Sunday mails controversy, see James R. Rohrer, “Sunday Mails and the Church-State Theme in Jacksonian America,” Journal of the Early Republic, 7:1 (Spring 1987): 53-74; and, John G. West, The Politics of Revelation & Reason (Lawrence, Kansas, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3 (Spring, 2015).

Chris Beneke is associate professor of history at Bentley University. He is the author of Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (2006), and co-editor of The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Religious Intolerance in Early America (2011), Profane: Sacrilegious Expression in a Multicultural Age (2014), and The Lively Experiment: Religious Toleration in America from Roger Williams to the Present (2015). He is currently writing Free Exercise: Five Histories of the First Amendment’s Religious Clauses, which is under contract with Cornell University Press.

The role of serendipity in the archives is not to be underestimated, especially when searching for people whom the collectors and keepers of the material did not consider to be important in their own right. A couple of years ago, I had just finished a short-term fellowship in the study of visual culture at the American Antiquarian Society and was rounding out my research time in Massachusetts with a couple of days of poking around the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Although I had used their materials extensively for my first book, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, I had new research objectives for their catalog this time around. I was in the beginning stages of a new manuscript on cultural exchange through music and dance in processions in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Americas, and I wanted to familiarize myself with parts of that world and sources where the European language in use was not English.

Using the not-so-efficient vacuum approach to research in which one scans through a chunk of an archive’s holdings based on publication or creation date (graduate students reading this article, beware! This approach does not generally line up with efforts to shorten time to degree), I decided to call up a 1596 publication by José de Acosta, De natura novi orbis libri duo: Et de promulgatione Evangelii apud barbaros, sive, De procuranda Indorum salute, libri sex. The part of the volume that I thought I was interested in, De natura novi orbis, was first published at Salamanca in 1588 and is one well-known example among many that collected and distributed European perceptions of the peoples and places that to them were new. The Jesuit priest drew on classical thinkers, Christian theologians, and his own experiences in Peru and Mexico to narrate his view of the hierarchy of human civilizations and the inferior yet improvable status of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This account spread more widely in the vernacular as the first two books of Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) and in an English translation first published in 1604. Although I don’t (yet) read Latin, I thought it might be fun to see what I could puzzle out since I had read it in Spanish.

In addition to indulging this time-intensive post-tenure impulse, there was the added bonus that Puritan merchant, magistrate, and diarist Samuel Sewall had owned this particular volume, which also explains how it came to be part of the collections of the MHS. The online record for De natura novi orbis did not note any marginalia or signatures in Sewall’s hand, but his part in the volume’s provenance gave me a plausible scholarly rationale for needing to see the object rather than reading the text in digital format—I was performing due diligence in checking for any evidence of Sewall’s reception of Acosta’s ideas, not playing around in the catalog and paging items from the reading room simply because the power of touching books that are centuries old still amazes me. What follows is, in part, a cautionary tale about relying on catalog entries to indicate all the elements of an item’s story, metadata or no metadata.

As it turns out, neither Sewall’s nor Acosta’s authorial activities are the inspiration for this piece. Instead, a Punkapoag woman’s knowledge of Massachusett and English is the structuring warp for the patterns of Indigenous women’s work, land, language, identity, and community survivance in this particular piece of the archive. The immediately perceptible aspects of the text are of faded brown inked letters, traced with a scratchy quill that caught on the surface of the sixteenth-century paper made from cloth, a flyleaf of a book printed in Cologne in 1596 and later bound in leather, now aged into a soft and crumbling suede.  The inked letters are in Sewall’s hand, dated March 24, 1698/9, and they read, “Nunnacôquis signifies an Indian Earthen Pot as Hannah Hahatan’s Squaw tells me.”

My jaw actually dropped and my mouth formed a reading-room-appropriate silent “wow.” Not only marginalia, but marginalia mentioning one Native woman by name and another by household position. While it wasn’t exactly an unexpected place for Indians to be (to lift Philip Deloria [Dakota]’s phrasing) since Acosta’s text was about his impressions of Natives and Sewall was active in colonial missionary efforts, I had not anticipated this particular appearance. The librarian supervising the reading room didn’t know anything about the inscription, so I took some photos and then returned the book to him so he could make sure the catalog entry was updated to mention Sewall’s marginalia.

It had been long enough since I’d read Sewall’s diary that I couldn’t remember if he ever commented on vocabulary, although I was fairly certain that he had not written nearly as voluminously on language as had Massachusetts exile and missionary entrepreneur Roger Williams, author of the much-studied Key into the Language of America (1643). The word “nunnacôquis” and the object to which it referred also piqued my interest because I could not picture the context in which Sewall would have sought this information or Hahatan would have offered it. I wish I could say that I thought to look for an analysis of Sewall and his use of Acosta in the MHS Proceedings or at the very least in a specialized database, because it seems like those would be properly serious and scholarly modes of conducting research.

But I didn’t. I Googled it.

Not Sewall’s name, because that would return too many search results, but parts of the inscription. This research indicated that MHS members had once known of the inscription and discussed it at a meeting of the society, activity that was later published in its Proceedings. In 1893, Samuel A. Green connected “nunnacôquis” to a tract of land near present-day Ayer and Groton with the “Indian name” of Nonacoicus, a naming noted in the 1659 survey of the bounds of Simon Willard’s farm. Green considered one version a variation of the other, linking the words not only by their syllables but also by familial and ecclesiastical connections: Samuel Willard, Simon’s son, was the minister at the church where Sewall worshipped, so Sewall would have been familiar with the farm’s name. Green reported correspondence from a lawyer in Ayer who parsed the etymology as meaning “earthen pot,” a reference to a local plateau that sat opposite to where Nonacoicus Brook flows into the Nashua River. Five years later, he added another correspondent’s explanation that the word’s primary meaning was a different kind of “dry” pot, one made out of soapstone, and that the name, having lost its locative affix –es-et, recorded the existence of a soapstone quarry in the area rather than the shape of a landscape feature. This philologist living in Sag Harbor, Long Island, referred to a cognate “coquies” (meaning “earthen pot”) that appeared on a vocabulary told by Unkechaugs in Puspatuck, L.I., to Thomas Jefferson, the only vocabulary which he personally recorded rather than gathered.

These late nineteenth-century Anglo-American musings on the significance of this text were intended to display their authors’ knowledge on what were presented as esoteric matters. This framing, in turn, was essential to their overall purpose of building the United States as a “civilized” and white nation. The narration of Indian disappearance authenticated the plot line of America’s passage into modernity with colonial New England as its birthplace, a process that historian Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) has powerfully articulated as “firsting and lasting.” Hobbyist philologists often distorted or fabricated southern Algonquian words and naming practices in service to the overriding purpose of writing Indians out of industrialized progress and substituting white New Englanders as the “first.” This predilection makes it impossible to use their work as straightforward sources for understanding Native senses of place.

As I was cross-checking sources in an attempt to determine how accurate any of the associations that Samuel Green reported for nunnacôquis might be, I came upon another nest of nineteenth-century white New Englanders’ deployment of “the Indian” to narrate an American (read: United States) cultural origin story that distorted, obscured, or ignored Native presence and place. The tangle of connections involved that giant of seventeenth-century Puritan missionary culture, John Eliot, and under-credited Native translators like James Printer who had the expert knowledge that made it possible to translate the Christian Bible into Massachusett. It also included key figures of mainstream American literary culture such as the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and authors and Atlantic Monthly editors William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Mixed in with the deliberate racism and tropes of vanished Indians, these documents also displayed a heavy dose of nineteenth-century posturing veiled as scholarly commentary, a veritable gem of snark.

While cavorting in the voluminous records of white nineteenth-century United States literary culture was diverting (especially the letter in which an author complained to an editor that he supposed he could keep his article to the requested length just as he could cut off his dog’s body behind the ears, but that both articles and dogs were better with heads and tails), as a historian of the seventeenth century, I still wanted to know more about Sewall’s interactions with Acosta’s volume and why he chose to record the answer to his vocabulary question on this flyleaf rather than other paper. He was not in such desperate need of paper on which to write that he had to use every available blank space. And I was not convinced that the nineteenth-century philologists had it right, that Sewall had asked about the meaning of nunnacôquis because he was a member of Samuel Willard’s congregation, whose father had once owned a farm referred to as Nonacoicus; or that the farm’s name would have been in Sewall’s mind because his diary showed that he often visited with the Ushers, who had bought most of its acreage from Simon Willard.

Perhaps Sewall’s diary, published in a modern scholarly version, had a clue to his thought process: a mention of reading Acosta, or some mention of his ideas. No such luck. But his diary was not the only Sewall material available at a distance from archival holdings of his letters and papers. About a year before writing down the results of his vocabulary lesson, Sewall had finished and published Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica ad aspectum Novi Orbis configurata. Or, some few lines towards a description of the New Heaven (1697), a tract in which he argued that the Americas were the prophesied location of the flashpoint of the Apocalypse and the following “New Jerusalem.” Skimming through Phaenomena occasioned another sensation of synergy: Sewall made extensive use of Acosta in his tract. A full analysis of exactly how he did so is something for the future. For the present purposes, I was most interested in his earliest reference to Acosta, which comes in the first few pages as part of his initial case for America as the place for the new “Government of Christ” and serves as supporting evidence for occurrence of events described in Psalm 2:9 (King James version), “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potters vessel.” In the preceding verse (with which Sewall began the section), God tells kings and rulers who submit themselves to divine mandates, “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Here Sewall deployed scripture to equate non-Christian Indigenous people with pottery, explicit evidence that he was thinking about earthen vessels.

But there was even more to the connection with pottery than describing the empires of the Triple Alliance and the Inka in the time of initial Spanish invasion as shattered ceramic vessels, or as Sewall put it, “Christ’s Spanish-Iron Rod walking amongst the earthen pots; whereby great Kingdoms, and Empires were quickly broken to shivers, with many millions of their subjects” (3). Sewall drew on Acosta for examples of the place of pottery and related implements in “the Mexican Nation,” such as the ritual breaking of “all their Vessels, and stuff” at the end of each cycle of 52 years “which they call’d a Wheel” (3). More closely related to the marginalia on the flyleaf of De natura novi orbis, however, was his explanation that “the Pots wherein they boiled their fish, and flesh, &c. were made of earth; as also innumerable other vessels: most were enjoind to use no other” (3).

Earthen pots as metaphors for Indigenous peoples and an essay asserting America as the origin point of the millennium were getting closer to Sewall’s inspiration for writing the note than the late nineteenth-century white literary posturing and appropriations of Indian languages. But I wanted to return to the text. Not the source of the paper on which the words were written, or the intention of the man who wrote the words. “As Hannah Hahaton’s Squaw told me”: the written record of a verbal exchange between a Punkapoag woman and an English man, the woman’s name unrecorded by the man. In the proper light, this marginalia in Sewall’s hand signals not just the history of Sewall and his use of Acosta, but of the woman who served in Hannah Hahaton’s household. In the exchange with Sewall, she conveyed a minute fraction of her linguistic knowledge, knowledge that he then appropriated. The power that enabled this appropriation reminds us of the materiality of intellectual history, that the lineage of ideas does not exist independently of their embodiment. The full scope of this woman’s individual intellectual story has not been preserved in this piece of the archive any more than has her name, but her translation of a word for an earthenware pot hints at women’s skill in processing, storing, and preparing food and a worldview anchored by connections to other humans and to other-than-human beings that inhabit a particular place.

The uses and everyday activities that structure this short text are Punkapoag artifacts, even though its surroundings seem to suggest the dominance of European and Euroamerican influences. An English colonist inscribed the text on the pages of a book written by a Jesuit priest about Indigenous peoples, a text interpreted a century later by Euroamerican men with an interest in “vanishing” the Indian from their contemporary context to museum collections documenting the ancient past. By the time Sewall inquired about the meaning of “nunnacôquis” at the end of the seventeenth century, many of the pots used in Punkapoag and other “praying Indian” towns with concentrations of Native Christians were of European or Euroamerican manufacture. Archaeologist Stephen Silliman has argued for the classification of objects as Native American or European/Euroamerican according to their use and meaning in a given community, rather than their materials or supposed cultural origin. If ceramic tableware in a given setting was primarily used by Natives, then that tableware becomes a Native artifact, rather than being always and entirely European/Euroamerican.

To find out more about Punkapoag contexts and the lives of Native individuals, I turned to the named woman to see how tracing the threads of her experience might reveal broader patterns of Indigenous women’s lives. Hannah Hahaton’s name appears elsewhere in the colonial archive, on a deed also signed or marked by William Ahauton (other extant spellings of the last name include Nahaton, Nahawton, Nahuton, Ahawton, and Ahhaton) and three of their siblings. The 1680 document “conveys to Dedham all their interest in a tract of land as it lyeth towards the northerly side of the bounds of Dedham by the Great Falls in the Charles River and bounded upon the Charles River towards the East and upon said River up stream as the river lyeth and so continuing abutting upon said river until it came to the brook called Natick Saw Mill Brook,” closing the bounds with further details about topographical features and waterways. William and Hannah Hahaton’s leadership followed the violence and upheaval of the 1676-77 conflict often called King Philip’s War, including the English imprisonment of Mohegan, Massachusett, and Nipmuc allies on a barren island in Boston Harbor. After the end of declared hostilities, the siblings moved from Natick to Punkapoag, another Native Christian community, near Blue Hill.

Scholars studying this category of texts have made suggestions about classification parallel to Silliman’s suggestions about that process regarding ceramicware. Although land conveyances were texts that very much existed as part of an English colonial legal structure, some of them also recorded the adaptive political performance of leaders who maintained connections to land. This process is clearer in a series of deeds that began just a few years later, written in Massachusett and concerning land on Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard). In these documents, Wampanoag queen sachem Wunnatuckquannum witnessed the connection through her body as sachem between land and people, while fulfilling the increasingly intrusive requirements of colonial English law.  

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts today considers Punkapoag to be part of Blue Hill Reservation, a state park known for its variety of hiking trails, views of Boston, and Ponkapoag Pond. The eastern shore houses an Appalachian Mountain Club camp with cabins as well as a promontory labeled “Missionary’s Point,” an invocation of the site’s earlier colonial history. To the west of the pond and the extending wetlands lies a paved footpath that runs along the edge of Ponkapoag Golf Course. Trail maps label the path as “Redman Farm Path,” named not after a racial epithet but after the family name of one of the early English colonists who settled there.

In the creation of the text at hand, the member of Hannah Hahaton’s household who shared her facility with Massachusett and English preceded Sewall’s curiosity and his selection of the flyleaf of Acosta’s combined volume as the place to record the answer to his question while omitting the name of the source. The phrase contains her connection to ways of naming and knowing the land of first light that fought to survive colonial violence, and power structures that worked to dispossess Native communities and alienate and overlay their geographies. And its survival in alphabetic form is indicative of the literacy practices that are part of what made it possible for later generations of her extended kin to reclaim related knowledge and bring Wôpanâôt8âôk (Wampanoag language) back into the world of living languages under the guidance of Jessie “Little Doe” Baird (Mashpee Wampanoag) and the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. Rather than shattered ceramics and the end times, the short notation of the English translation for nunnacôquis thus suggests overlapping worlds, the labor of hands and back, the meaning given by mind and tongue, the memory work of colonists to erase Indigenous understandings of the land, and past and current work by Native communities, Indigenous scholars, and non-Native scholars to remap and reclaim Native spaces.

Further Reading

A good recent introduction to efforts to decolonize archaeology is Margaret Bruchac, Siobhan Hart, and H. Martin Wobst, eds., Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader on Decolonization (London, 2016); for specific articles used for this essay, see Stephen W. Silliman, “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England,” American Antiquity 74:2 (April 2009): 211–30; and Russell G. Handsman, “Survivance Strategies and the Materialities of Mashantucket Pequot Labor in the Later Eighteenth Century,” Historical Archaeology (November 27, 2017): 1–19. For decolonization of scholarship more generally, see Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, 2011).

On Wampanoag assertions of sovereignty over land even within a colonial legal framework, see Stephanie Fitzgerald, “‘I, Wunnatuckquannum, This Is My Hand’: Native Performance in Massachusett Language Indian Deeds,” in Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832, ed. Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke (Lincoln, 2012): 145–67. For scholarship on layered Native understandings of land and place and contested placemaking in Northeastern North America, see the foundational Kathleen Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 (Norman, Okla., 1996) and Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775 (Norman, Okla., 2009); and more recently Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, 2008). A small sampling of scholars who have built on this work include Margaret M. Bruchac and Siobhan M. Hart, “Materiality and Autonomy in the Pocumtuck Homeland,” Archaeologies 8:3 (December 1, 2012): 293–312, and Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven, 2018). Lisa Brooks’s latest monograph applies collaborative methodologies to investigating the spaces of what the English and subsequent scholarship came to call King Philip’s War in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven, 2018). Another entry into this active area of scholarship is Micah A. Pawling, “Wəlastəkwey (Maliseet) Homeland: Waterscapes and Continuity within the Lower St. John River Valley, 1784-1900,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region / Revue d’histoire de la region atlantique 46:2 (November 8, 2017): 5–34.

Much of the preceding research also engages with the fiction of the supposed incompatibility of modernity and Indigenous peoples, a topic central to Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, Kan., 2004) and Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010).

For two examples of the settler colonialist local histories most relevant to this essay that demonstrate the simultaneous reproduction, distortion, and appropriation of the Native past and present, see Samuel A. Green and Elizabeth Sewall Hill, Facts Relating to the History of Groton, Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1914); Daniel T. Huntoon,  History of the Town of Canton (Cambridge, Mass., 1893).

For an important modern reference volume on Native placenames in the United States, turn to William Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States (Norman, Okla., 2004). Older compilations include John C. Huden, Indian Place Names of New England (1962); Eugene Green, and Rosemary M. Green, “Place-Names and Dialects in Massachusetts: Some Complementary Patterns,” Names 19:4 (December 1, 1971): 240–51.

On the development of philology and the treatment of Native languages, see Gordon M. Sayre, “The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand,” Early American Literature 33:3 (1998): 225–49; Sean P. Harvey, Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); and Sarah Rivett, Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (New York, 2017). The latter two also consider Native languages as an important component in struggles for sovereignty and autonomy, drawing on Kathleen Bragdon and Ives Goddard, Native Writings in Massachusett, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1988).

On Indigenous literacies more broadly, see David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington, Ind., 1991); Drew Lopenzina, Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period (Albany. N.Y., 2012); Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature (Durham, N.C., 2012).

Examples of nineteenth-century philology and ethnology include John Wesley Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages with Phrases and Sentences to Be Collected (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880); and James H. Trumbull, Natick Dictionary (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903). Samuel A. Green’s discussion of “Nonacoicus” can be found in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2d. Series, vol. 8 (1894): 209-212. May Meeting, 1893.

For the authoritative version of Samuel Sewall’s diary, see M. Halsey Thomas, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1649-1729, 2 vols. (New York, 1973). On Sewall’s reading of José de Acosta, see Harry Bernstein, “Las primeras relaciones intelectuales entre New England y el mundo hispánico: 1700-1815,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 5, no. 1 (1939): 1–17, and Reiner Smolinski’s introduction to Sewall’s Phaenomena in Samuel Sewall, Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica ad aspectum Novi Orbis configurata. Or, some few lines towards a description of the New Heaven (1697), ed. Reiner Smolinski, Electronic Texts in American Studies 25. For more on Phaenomena, see Mukhtar Ali Isani, “The Growth of Sewall’s ‘Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica,’” Early American Literature 7:1 (1972): 64–75. On Acosta’s hierarchical vision of humanity, see Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, “Más allá del Incario: Imperialismo e historia en José de Acosta, SJ (1540-1600),” Colonial Latin American Review 14, no. 1 (June 2005): 55–81.

For a scholarly edition in English of José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, translated from the first early modern Spanish edition, see José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan, trans. Frances Lopez-Morillas, introduction by Walter Mignolo (Durham, N.C., 2002). Sewall owned a copy of De natura novi orbis, more widely known as the first two books of José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Sevilla, 1590). Sewall wrote his inscription on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s copy of José de Acosta, De natura novi orbis libri duo: Et de promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive, De procuranda Indorum salute, libri sex ([Cologne]: 1596). A digitized version of the same edition can be found here.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Heather Miyano Kopelson (PhD University of Iowa, 2008) is an associate professor in the history department at the University of Alabama. Her current research, “‘Idolatrous Processions’: Music, Dance, and Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World, 1500-1700,” builds on questions about performance and politics of the archive explored in her first book, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, 1660-1720 (2014).