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).

Anxieties of influence in the postbellum slave narrative

Once upon a time, there was a southern-born woman living in Harlem who would chastise her granddaughters with these words: “Remember, girls, you’re not anyone: you’re Virginia Teamohs!” I constituted half of the team of those wide-eyed miscreants and chafed under the awesome and vague burden of a Reconstruction-era politician ancestor. Little did I imagine, as a girl in 1960s New York City, that George Teamoh, my great-great-grandfather, suffered from his own anxiety of influence—and that I would one day write about Teamoh’s “problem” with his dominating literary ancestor, Frederick Douglass.

Most readers familiar with Douglass have likely read the 1845 Narrative of the Life of a Fugitive Slave. His later autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), are less on the stack of well-read slave narratives. It’s safe to say, however, that fewer have read Teamoh’s God Made Man, Man Made the Slave than any of Douglass’s books: it was not even published until the early 1990s and only then by a small southern university press. Teamoh, however, has an important role in the history of black autobiography, particularly the postbellum slave narrative.

In the pages of his autobiography, Teamoh demonstrates a sharp memory and a sense of humor that Douglass would have appreciated. Where Teamoh and Douglass notably intersect is in their joint incursions into the chilly waters of post Civil War black autobiography. As the critics William Andrews and Frances Foster have noted, the attitude of the audience for the post-1865 slave narrative was signally different from that for those published before the onset of the Civil War. Later narrators, Andrews and Foster have agreed, argue for reconciliation and cooperation; although they do not shrink from detailing the abuse that was slavery, such autobiographers were often inspired by the first fruits of Reconstruction to urge cooperation between whites and blacks, if not to acknowledge the tangled bonds remaining between the formerly bound and the freeborn.

By the 1870s and 1880s, Douglass and Teamoh had become international travelers and political activists, achieving varying measures of fame. Yet the causes of their people, and thus their own books and good works, became—as the nineteenth century neared its close—overshadowed by what the historian Rayford Logan termed “the nadir,” commonly called Jim Crow.

But while I was still a graduate student, the historian Peter Kolchin urged me to look into my ancestor’s experience and explore in greater detail the genesis of his narrative. Perhaps, I came to believe, it was time for Teamoh to join Douglass in the pantheon of great narrators of the slave experience.

Assembled in two sections—the first in 1874, the appendices in 1883, around the same time as Douglass’s Life and Times—the eighteen blue-fronted copybooks in which Teamoh wrote his life story reside in the Library of Congress’s Carter Woodson papers.

Teamoh did not publish—perhaps was not able to publish—his autobiography during his lifetime and in fact noted in a preface that he wrote at “the request of many friends.” Whether during his lifetime any of those friends laid eyes on the text, to give feedback, offer corrections, or just satisfy personal curiosity, I cannot say.

Such readers might have found that Teamoh was not the stylist of his better known peer. God Made Man, Man Made the Slave has neither the tight economy of Douglass’s 1845 narrative nor the rhetorical surety of the Marylander’s 1855 autobiography; neither does it share the heft of Douglass’s Life and Times. Teamoh, though, saw himself quite clearly as an author, one taking his place in a tradition of African American writers. And the biggest star in that tradition at the time of his manuscript’s composition was Frederick Douglass.

There are several occasions on which Teamoh’s readers can see the long shadow of Douglass. The first comes in that preface mentioned earlier. Teamoh introduces his manuscript in the following manner:

It but rarely falls to the lot of one … a slave of fifty years … to narrate, in any intelligent form[,] the history of his life … it seems almost incredible, when we learn of those who have done so … Frederick Douglass, whose towering intellect, out stripping all who have preceded him in this country, has been … the most successfull [sic] of self-made men … the editorial genius of all Europe has pronounced in his favor.

Teamoh invokes other forebears, notably William Wells Brown, whose books exhibit “exalted thought great originality, comprehensiveness and scholarship.” Yet he returns, pointedly, to Douglass, noting that “I have seen … ‘My bondage and my freedom.’” Curiously Teamoh then asserts that “the crudity of [Douglass’s] writings however is plain evidence of his never having been schooled, or at least not so by routine.” What do we make of an assessment that at once acknowledges Douglass’s “towering intellect” and yet dismisses My Bondage and My Freedom—viewed today by some critics as the apogee of Douglass’s autobiographies—as an awkward, unschooled effort?

We might approach this question by first recognizing that Teamoh and Douglass shared a generation—they were born a year apart (and would die within a decade of one another); similarly, both were born into bondage, and both experienced the work regime of slavery, as field hand and shipyard worker. The two men shared another important trait as well: both fled their enslavement and both made their way to freedom as sailors, although they did so fifteen years apart (Douglass self-liberated in 1838; Teamoh in 1853). Each spent a brief amount of time in New York City as new runaways, and each went on to live and work for a time in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Both men would return to the South after the Civil War—a hallmark of the postbellum slave narrative, as William Andrews has pointed out—although only Teamoh returned to his native state to live.

Perhaps these commonalities are not surprising given the small numbers of former bondspeople able to commit their experience to autobiography, but Teamoh and Douglass had much else in common as well. Teamoh moved in the circles of men and women who counted Douglass among their friends and fellow abolitionists: Teamoh and Douglass each knew the noted antislavery figure William C. Nell; Teamoh was a member of Nell’s “Lyceum” or Adelphic Union Library Association. Nell’s presence in Teamoh’s life and narrative points to the additional possibility that Teamoh and Douglass actually knew each other.

Consider the brief passage in which Teamoh speaks admiringly of the black activist and historian Nell. “His whole life … has been one eternal round of devotion to the slave,” Teamoh wrote. But what immediately follows this tribute is the telling observation,

Douglass, on a certain occasion while speaking of the many who from time to time had in his employ as Clerks, writers, &c. after calling them over severally by name, said he, “then there is Nell, the only one I have ever known who was willing to work without any pay.”

On what occasion Douglass made this remark Teamoh does not say. Yet at the time to which Teamoh refers—the mid-1850s—he and Nell were both residents of Boston, and Douglass, a frequent visitor. It’s not such a stretch to assume that Teamoh either heard this remark in a private conversation with Douglass or heard it in an address, perhaps delivered before a Lyceum meeting.

Whether or not the two men actually had conversational exchanges, there is no disputing the commonality of their experience. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the two men’s reflections on that famous fugitive’s asylum, not to mention the land of wealth, New Bedford, Massachusetts. Here was not just a common destination for these two self-liberated former slaves but also a touchstone for the ideals of freedom and citizenship both sought.

For Douglass, his new home “took him by surprise, in the solid wealth and grandeur there exhibited.” Fifteen years later, the city still impressed: the newly arrived Teamoh called it “that wealthy city.” The seaport indeed boasted the ability to make men’s fortunes—and support a multiracial, multicultural community.

Perhaps the most signal event for black southerners in “the Fugitive’s Gibraltar,” a phrase perhaps coined by Teamoh himself, was the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. When Douglass arrived, with his free wife Anna Murray Douglass, much of the burden of his capture would have laid with his putative owners; by the time Teamoh set foot in the unabashedly abolitionist whaling town, southern slave owners could successfully command northern governments to do the dirty work of remanding Americans back into perpetual slavery—and worse.

Between Douglass’s and Teamoh’s arrivals, New Bedford’s fugitive slave population nonetheless increased. This could in part explain one fundamental difference in the two autobiographers’ experiences. In 1855, Douglass recalled, “I put on the habiliments of a common laborer, and went on the wharf in search of work … Happily for me, I was not long in searching. I found employment, the third day … stowing a sloop with a load of [whale] oil.” Nevertheless, Douglass did not experience some sort of multiracial utopia in New Bedford. After deciding to pursue his previous career as a skilled caulker, Douglass found that “every white man would leave the ship” the minute he came aboard to caulk. Still, Douglass was able to take some solace in the fact that he found work with relative ease, possessed all of his pay, and “supported … self and family for three years.” In the midst of it all, he also found time to join a church and become involved in the antislavery movement.

Teamoh knew work would be hard to find when he arrived during the winter of 1853-1854. With the “cold weather … now fast putting in,” he found himself forced to ask for help, “notwithstanding [the townspeoples’] repeated manifestations of kindness.” Teamoh also notes—again, I think of the ever-increasing numbers of fugitives in the 1850s—”Once there you were ‘free indeed,’ and then thrown on your own resources after a few weeks of indulgence.” Teamoh similarly found prejudice among white skilled laborers in the shipyard, although unlike Douglass, Teamoh was in his thirties when he arrived, a man who had worked on the USS Constitution while a slave. Now literate, he wrote a letter of protest to the local paper—and was satisfied to see black caulkers hired. Yet employment remained difficult, particularly during the winter off-season, and Teamoh eventually left, first for Providence and then Boston, the last northern city in which he would live.

In Boston, a half-brother would help situate him within the black world of the city’s west end, and his friendships with movers and shakers like William C. Nell would help him find work.

One could say that Douglass left New Bedford to rise within the ranks of antislavery activists, propelled by his talent for oratory, good looks, youth, and perhaps good fortune; Teamoh would leave in search of work and connections, lonely for the family sold away from him down south.

In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass closes with the words, “never forgetting my humble origin, nor refusing, while Heaven lends me the ability, to use my own voice, my pen, or my vote, to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race.” For his part, Teamoh hopes that his story may be “the last book that will ever be written by the untought [sic] Negro of this country” and plaintively avers that “with bleeding feet I pressed my weary way over the flinty rocks of life which have been so amply bridged for others of my race” (emphasis mine). Douglass and other black men who took to the stage during Reconstruction did not, like Teamoh, have their homes foreclosed and their political ambitions thwarted by their own Republican party. Nonetheless, Teamoh struggled to end on an optimistic note, closing with the comment that he “can only trust that this good work [of racial uplift] will be pushed forward with a zeal commensurate with the cause” (106).

In March of 1867, almost two years after the Civil War ended, the newspaper of the AME Church, the Christian Recorder, carried an item submitted by George Teamoh. The announcement requested any information regarding two of his three children; they had been sold away from their mother in 1853 and might, he noted, be in Texas. A few years ago and over a century and a half after Teamoh’s oldest children were taken from their parents, I received an email from the Reverend Dana Teamor. “I am your cousin,” she wrote; “I found out about God Made Man, Man Made the Slave and wanted to tell you that I am one of George Teamoh’s siblings’ descendants—and that there are a number of us.” I have learned, too, that the Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Old Dominion University in Virginia hosts a George Teamoh Colloquium series. While I may never locate Teamoh’s grave, I am finding his influence has yet to disappear. Despite his somewhat pessimistic assessment, Teamoh and his legacy remain with us.

The author would like to thank Samuel Otter and Robert Levine; an earlier version of this essay aired at the Melville-Douglass Sesquicentennial at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Further Reading:

See two important essays, one by William L. Andrews, “Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley,” Black American Literature Forum 23:1 (Spring 1989): 5-16, and the other by Frances Smith Foster, “Autobiography after Emancipation: The Example of Elizabeth Keckley,” James Robert Payne, ed., Multicultural Autobiography. American Lives (Knoxville, Tenn., 1992): 32-63.

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

Rafia Zafar is professor of English, African American, and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Among her publications are We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870 (1997) and, with F. N. Boney and R. L. Hume, God Made Man, Man Made the Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh (1992). Her essays have appeared in Early American Literature, Gastronomica, and other journals.

Few general readers now pick up the American book that prompted Sydney Smith to ask “Who reads an American book?” In truth, few general readers ever did. Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals—an eight-hundred-page, six-pound volume, printed in the dimensions of a modern metropolitan phone directory, with 175 numeric tables describing population, commerce, and debt—aimed at nothing less than a full representation of the United States in book form, but the massive book was not for the masses. Without governmental intervention it may have had no readers at all. Seybert’s colleagues in Congress believed the book would be “necessary and acceptable to every functionary of the Government of the United States” but that it could never be “popular,” and in April 1818 they passed an act to subscribe for five hundred copies. The public had bought a work of American literature.

Hoping to find a market for Seybert’s book beyond the politicians and institutions of higher learning to which Congress distributed Statistical Annals, Philadelphia printers Thomas Dobson and Sons ran off at least a thousand more copies at their own risk. Brave booksellers in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia advertised the book in late 1818, and favorable reviews in U.S. newspapers appeared the next year; nonetheless, supply radically surpassed demand. Would the government step in again? In 1821 the printers begged the Senate to purchase eight hundred additional unsold copies “at a reduced price.” They met with defeat but may have sold some of these toxic assets to the author himself. Thirteen years later, Seybert’s sister Elizabeth Rapp petitioned the House to purchase three hundred copies that remained in the family at the time of her brother’s death in France in 1825, but she had no more luck unloading Seybert’s American book than the printers had.

A child of the Enlightenment, Seybert presented his few readers with “facts and data,” not “mere opinions” or theoretical “speculations,” information that would form the basis of future policy debates (as it did) but was not itself subject to debate. His book serves as a prime example of what historian Patricia Cline Cohen has called the “quantitative mentality” of the early United States; it also represents one stage in the evolution of what literary scholar Mary Poovey has described as “the modern fact,” those pieces of numeric evidence whose status before or beyond interpretation made them useful building blocks in economics and the social sciences. The demographic and commercial “facts” presented by Seybert that captured the most attention from his U.S. contemporaries—his ratios of free to unfree persons charting the growth of slavery from 1790 to 1810 and his tables showing the imbalance of trade with other nations—were the same ones that led Sydney Smith to focus the concluding remarks of his January 1820 review on the failure of the United States to export important cultural products and on the questionable claim of white Americans to be “the greatest, the most refined, the most enlightened, and the most moral people on earth.” After all, Smith asked, “Who reads an American book?” And how moral could the white population really be in a country that could count—thanks to Seybert’s American book—”every sixth man a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?”

The nine historians featured here treat literature as evidence, but they do not see the books they recommend as repositories of neutral “facts.” Carolyn Eastman considers the readers of a frequently reprinted “true account” of Caribbean pirates. Vincent Brown discovers a new perspective on contemporary immigration debates in a policy pamphlet about Jamaican slavery. Caroline Winterer sees an intellectual path not taken in a scientific essay on the origins of racial difference. Joyce Chaplin returns to a natural history of the American South and to a pre-Darwinian moment in the relation of science with religion. Sarah Knott finds, in the pages of a forgotten novel, a generational change in the history of the emotions. John Wood Sweet sees challenges to early national politics and to our own understanding of the meanings of freedom in a rare eyewitness account of the Atlantic slave trade produced in Connecticut by a native of Africa. François Furstenbergdescribes a famous biography as a national glue between readers in distant regions. James Sidbury recovers a bound manuscript pamphlet written by a resident of Sierra Leone, a man who had returned to the region of his birth after slavery in South Carolina and service with the British during the American Revolution. And Matthew Mason recommends a first-person account of one man’s life under slavery in the antebellum United States, a crucial document for historians who hope to write the history of the domestic slave trade.

The works selected are wide-ranging examples of the rich literature of early America, but because what counts as literature has changed so fundamentally since the time of Seybert and Smith, some of the selections may strike readers as decidedly nonliterary. Presses in Colonial British America and the early United States issued nearly one hundred thousand non-periodical imprints before 1820. In this vast sea of books, pamphlets, and broadsides, the small islands of writing most modern general readers call literature are statistical outliers. Novels, poems, and plays, for instance, represent only about 3.5 percent of the total items printed between 1640 and 1819; and since American presses issued works by European authors, the percentage of texts most modern readers would describe as “American” is significantly smaller. Asked to write short “blurbs” about American books they teach and study, the historians here go beyond the questions of who wrote or who read American books, of whether certain books meet our contemporary and narrow definition of literature, to suggest what effects these books had in the past and why such books should be read—and reread—today.

Alexandre Exquemelin, Bucaniers of America: Or, a True Account of the Most Remarkable Assaults Committed of Late Years Upon the Coasts of the West-Indies, by the Bucaniers of Jamaica and Tortuga, Both English and French (1678). Reprint, London: William Crooke, 1684.

Even though Bucaniers of America wasn’t published in America until the nineteenth century, it circulated around the Atlantic like its subjects, its author, and the images that portrayed the book’s action. Alexandre Exquemelin had been a buccaneer himself before he temporarily retired and turned author in Amsterdam in 1678, so he wrote with authority about vivid characters like Bartholomew the Portuguese, Rock the Brazilian, and the exceptionally brutal Francois Lolonois—men who disrupted both Caribbean trade and orderly state and empire building. Translated into German, Spanish, French, and English editions in increasingly larger print runs, the book appeared in early American libraries within twenty years of its original publication.

Exquemelin’s book figured America as a site of action and adventure—and the printers who kept new editions on the market made sure to underscore this aspect of the book’s appeal. In what was at least the fifteenth edition (1704), a London printer explained in a preface, “Indeed, the wondrous actions, and daring adventures therein related, are such as could not but transport the most stupid minds into an Admiration of them,” he stated frankly. Pirates surely failed to exhibit “Justness and Regularity” of Christian men, he acknowledged, or even the “tolerable morals” of ordinary men. Yet they inspired the “greatest Astonishment imaginable.” The printer touted the book as fodder for the imagination, a means of transporting oneself to a world of wonders. To enhance the imaginative work of such texts, printers added numerous evocative cuts displaying dynamic scenes of torture, sea battles, and swordplay. These were far from the static illustrations of harbor scenes or portraits of other contemporary books: Bucaniers of America told tales of action in both text and image.

By the 1720s Bucaniers of America was one of several titles available on pirates; enterprising printers even took to compiling omnibus editions that combined Exquemelin’s account with those of Charles Johnson, Woodes Rogers, and other writers. Each new volume contained illustrations and tales that built on Exquemelin’s original themes and codified the textual and visual repertoire of pirate themes. As a result, stories about pirates appeared in dozens of editions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, guaranteeing that pirates would be known for the “wondrous actions” and “daring adventures” that took place in the Americas—adventures to be enjoyed vicariously by readers everywhere.

Carolyn Eastman

Carolyn Eastman is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and author of A Nation of Speechifiers: Print, Oratory, and the Making of a Gendered American Public, 1780-1830 (forthcoming).

Anonymous, An Essay Concerning Slavery and the Danger Jamaica is expos’d to from the Too great Number of Slaves, and the too little Care that is taken to manage Them, and a Proposal to prevent the further Importation of Negroes into that Island. London: Charles Corbett, at Addison’s-Head, over-against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-Street, 1746.

Teachers of history face a contradictory challenge: we seek to encourage our students to recognize how different the past was from the present, while, at the same time, prodding them to see how issues in the past resonate with current concerns. If we are successful, the very strangeness of the past throws similarities of predicament or process into sharper relief. One of my favorite early American texts, published in 1746, does this beautifully. It warns of the dangers of unchecked immigration to America and urges a labor policy that would favor assimilated residents over new migrants; this much is familiar. But the treatise is discussing a slave society burgeoning with the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade.

An Essay Concerning Slavery is a pamphlet, written in response to a rebellious conspiracy in St. John’s Parish, Jamaica, discovered in 1744 and allegedly organized by a dozen slave drivers, themselves enslaved, on different plantations. The anonymous author worries about the racial composition of the colony, as we would expect: “By the Poll-Tax in 1740,” he notes, “it appeared that the Negroes were ten times more in Number than the white Persons.” More surprisingly, he offers the natural rights argument against slavery, even while recognizing emancipation as impractical for an empire grown rich off the labor of the enslaved. Yet both his abolitionist sentiments and his racial fears are subordinate to a more general concern about the number of alienated, oppressed workers with no stake in maintaining the existing order. His proposal to save the colony from being “over-run, and ruined by its own Slaves” features a racially flexible social reform: ensuring a due proportion of free people “of one Colour or another, white, black or yellow, since white Men enough cannot immediately be got,” preventing slaves from entering trades or being employed in domestic service, and limiting them to “the Field or such kind of Drudgery as cannot be carried on but by them.” Drivers, especially, should be free men.

Responding to the labor migration that had made Jamaica the most profitable colony in British America, the author of the Essay urges a reconsideration of the society’s terms of inclusion and hierarchy. Students see in this text how an antislavery sentiment they undoubtedly share emerges from an anti-black racism they commonly condemn; they see how a concern to perpetuate a brutal system may lead to the advocacy of a more plural social elite; they see an eerily familiar anti-immigration argument emerging from the peculiar circumstances of a place in the past. Hopefully, they also see how history unfolds in discernible but unpredictable patterns.

Vincent Brown

Vincent Brown is Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History at Harvard University and author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008).

Samuel Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. Philadelphia: Robert Aitken, 1787.

Among the most memorable phrases in an age that gave us so many is Samuel Stanhope Smith’s “universal freckle.” He didn’t coin it, but he used it to great effect in his landmark Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). What made people around the globe look so different? For Smith it was environment, not a separate creation. The differences between whites and blacks were not in kind but degree; dark skin was just a lot of freckles that had spread together, like cookies in the oven. Freckles would come and freckles would go, but the theological truth of a single human family was eternal.

Smith was a minister and a philosopher in an age when it was fine to be both, happily knitting science to Christian revelation. His Essay was recognized for what it was: among the most important examinations of race produced in Enlightenment America. It was cheered across the Atlantic by Scottish philosophers such as Dugald Stewart and by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. It was soon reprinted in Edinburgh (1788) and London (1789), a sign of its appeal in transatlantic debates about race and science.

Today we all remember the more pessimistic racial ideas Thomas Jefferson expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia (also published in the 1780s). Jefferson thought that the physical and mental differences he observed between blacks and whites might be unchanging, views that looked ahead to the kind of hereditary racism that became increasingly popular before the Civil War. But it was Smith who best captured the more optimistic outlook of his own age, when it seemed that the human family might all share parts of a universal freckle.

Caroline Winterer

Caroline Winterer is associate professor of history at Stanford University and author of The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2002) and The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (2007).

William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. Embellished with Copper-Plates. Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791.

William Bartram was America’s most influential naturalist. He was also its most unflappable. According to him, every near-death experience out in early America’s wild green yonder was yet another uplifting example of cosmic beneficence. Only consider how Bartram, discovering that a wolf had sneaked away provisions stored near his sleeping self, commended the creature’s mercy for stealing his food rather than ripping his throat out.

This year, when it’s all Darwin all the time, Bartram’s view of nature is especially interesting as the before picture: red in tooth and claw yet, somehow, providentially good. Bartram extols nature as divine Creation and savors the American frontier as a sensory riot in which he thwacks alligators, dines on raccoon pilaf, and snuffs the sweet-scented plant he uproots while tumbling down a hill. His readers ate it up and ripped it off—notably Coleridge in “Kubla Khan” (1816), where American wilderness becomes: Xanadu!

Even Darwin cited Bartram but glimpsed unprovidential trends within nature’s relentless hunger. Did Darwin deprive science of religion? It may be truer that he deprived it of literature. Darwin theorized brilliantly about death; Bartram wrote brilliantly, even on death: “the bee quite exhausted by his struggles, and the repeated wounds of the butcher, became motionless, and quickly expired in the arms of the devouring spider, who, ascending the rope with his game, retired to feast on it under cover of the leaves; and perhaps before night, became himself the delicious evening repast of a bird or lizard.” Available in paperback.

Joyce Chaplin

Joyce Chaplin is James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University; she is the author of An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (1993), Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (2001), and The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006).

Samuel Relf, Infidelity; or The Victims of Sentiment. A novel, in a series of letters. Philadelphia: W.W. Woodward, 1797.

Samuel Relf’s Infidelity; or The Victims of Sentiment has been forgotten by posterity, forgotten even by those feminist critics who recuperated the sentimental novel, a victim at once of sentiment’s embarrassing quality outside its immediate moment and of our political concerns. Why read the tears penned by a twenty-one-year-old gent of dubious talent? Why linger over a tale of rebellious young love and married women, an indulgent nod to Goethe’s Sorrows and Sympathetic Attachments of Werther, complete even with a Cavern of Meditation where—unironic, this—the stones make sympathetic echoes and the stream flows fuller in the company of human anguish? Infidelity was, arguably, the first free-standing Philadelphian novel, graciously dedicated to the fifteen-year-old daughter of Anne Bingham, the city’s Federalist salonniere. The novel’s interest—cued not least by that dedication—resides in the generational relations it exposes and the story it reflects about the shifting historical fate of sensibility, the era’s striking commitment to the self’s sensitivity. Relf’s insight is the cultural disjuncture between an older generation of sentimentalists—Bingham’s generation, who invested the American Revolution with sentimental hopes to create a new and more sensitive society—and a rising youth. Heirs to the revolution and its social utopianism, this younger generation turned sentiment inward and onward. Raised in the mainstream of revolutionary sentiment, that is, young ladies and gents were compelled to reinvent sensibility, pressing it to greater solipsism and excess. They focused less on remaking society and more on refining their exquisite selves. Counterposing older and younger friendship circles, Relf’s novel captures the generational divide that frayed the Revolution’s sentimental hopes and framed sensibility’s initial post-revolutionary fate.

Sarah Knott

Sarah Knott is associate professor of history at Indiana University, coeditor of Women, Gender and Enlightenment (2005), and author of Sensibility and the American Revolution (2008).

Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, But resident above sixty years in the United States of America. Related by Himself. New London, Conn.: C. Holt, at the Bee-Office, 1798.

More than twelve million people survived the middle passage from Africa to the Americas, but only about a dozen left behind eyewitness accounts. One of them was Venture Smith.

His brief Narrative (1798) offers a sweeping, bottom-up view of the colonial dynamics that brought together—and kept apart—disparate peoples and places in an increasingly global world. Although Smith was illiterate, his narrative voice was distinctive and personal. He challenged several major developments in late-eighteenth-century discourse: the sentimental style that dominated Anglophone antislavery writing, the recurrent claim that people freed from slavery in the North were incapable of virtuous citizenship, and the pervasive emphasis on the “free market” as the basis of American pursuits of happiness.

Smith’s memories of his West African childhood are dramatic and detailed. His account of slavery along the shores of Long Island Sound emphasizes ongoing negotiations over violence, labor value, and the limits of civil society. And the story of how he secured his freedom—through an agonizing series of bargains and betrayals—stands as a powerful rebuke to those inclined to view the ideologies of liberty and sentiment as detached from African American agency.

Smith is often hailed as an American hero, a self-made man who triumphed against the constraints and prejudices of his time. Fortunately, his story is much more interesting than that. In it, slavery and freedom are not easy opposites. Alongside pride in his own achievement is an awareness of brutality, injustice, and sadism. And his commitment to commercial values is colored by doubt about the ultimate worth of money, the wounds it can heal, and the happiness it can secure.

John Wood Sweet

John Wood Sweet is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (2003), and coeditor of Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (2005).

Mason Locke Weems, The life of George Washington with curious anecdotes, equally honourable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen. 9th, greatly improved/embelished with seven engravings. Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1809.

I knew of Mason Locke Weems long before I ever read anything he’d written. Hack historian, bookseller, clergyman, and most of all epistolary genius, Weems is now best known for his account of George Washington and the cherry tree—a story that he almost certainly invented and then popularized in his 1809 Life of George Washington. Written and then revised between 1800 and 1808, the biography was a runaway bestseller: by 1825, it was in its fortieth edition. The book was a product of Weems’s many years traveling the country from New York to Georgia selling books and pamphlets and gathering knowledge about his readers’ interests. No surprise the book became so popular.

What is more surprising is to discover that the “curious anecdotes” that appealed to readers in the early nineteenth century still captivate readers today, at least if my students’ reaction is any gauge. The book is beyond corny, and yet somehow it charms every group to which I’ve assigned it. Despite themselves, they are drawn into the stories of Washington’s childhood and Weems’s thrilling account of the American Revolution. Even my Franco-Canadian students are somehow moved.

Students’ instinctive suspicions, bred over a lifetime of corporate advertising and patriotic shilling, seem to fade. Many stop reading the book as propaganda or even as homework and begin reading it as entertainment. Where most of my classroom discussions have me trying to knock down students’ skepticism, Weems provides a rare opportunity to teach a text from a position that produces naïveté. He allows us to ponder questions of readership—both historical and contemporary—to wonder why Weems and his countrymen were so fascinated with Washington’s childhood; and to investigate role of heroes in building a nation. Even his silences—where are Washington’s slaves?—speak eloquently about the work of forgetting in the nationalist imaginary.

Abraham Lincoln fondly recalled reading Weems’s biography of Washington as a child. As I listen to my students discuss the book enthusiastically, I occasionally let myself imagine that I am hearing a faint echo of what drew readers two hundred years ago to Weems’s delightful account.

François Furstenberg

François Furstenberg is assistant professor of history and holder of the McConnell Foundation Chair in American Studies at the Université de Montréal; he is the author of In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (2006).

John Kizell, “Apology for For the Conduct of John Kezell And His associates Occasioned By the Strictures And Denunciations by the Rev. Daniel Coker In His Journall Letters and Informations In the fourth Annual Report,” a manuscript pamphlet in the Ebenezer Burgess Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

During the summer of 1821, John Kizell decided to defend his reputation. A native of present-day Sierra Leone, he had been sold into South Carolina as a child but escaped bondage by joining the British during the Revolution. Following the war he settled briefly in Nova Scotia before returning to the region of his birth as an early settler in Britain’s Sierra Leone Colony. He offered his talents as a cultural broker to the first expedition sent out by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to found a black American settler society in Africa. The leaders of the group followed Kizell’s advice and settled at Sherbro Island, about one hundred miles south of Freetown, Sierra Leone. The island proved unhealthy, the white leaders of the expedition had difficulty negotiating with native headmen for land rights, and the expedition collapsed in the face of high mortality and uncertain security. Surviving settlers followed Daniel Coker, a black minister from Baltimore, back to the British colony at Sierra Leone. Coker made Kizell a scapegoat for the expedition’s failure.

Upon learning that he was taking the blame, Kizell wrote what must be one of the earliest English-language books written by an African American in Africa. He folded large sheets in half and sewed them together. In large and decorative cursive, he inscribed the title on the front, “Apology for For the Conduct of John Kezell And His associates …” Using creative spelling, unsystematic punctuation, and passionate argument, he expressed his anger and sense of betrayal. His text shines new light on the history of Liberia and the ACS, but it shines even brighter light on the cultural power of the book for people who struggled to acquire literacy. In his belief that a self-bound pamphlet would carry greater authority than a mere letter, Kizell provides a glimpse of the battles that many forgotten victims of slavery must have fought to influence debates over their fates. That his manuscript pamphlet sat in the Massachusetts Historical Society waiting to be discovered by a twenty-first century scholar reminds us how high were the barriers keeping them out of those debates.

James Sidbury

James Sidbury is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810 (1997) and Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (2007).

Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia as a slave, under various masters, and was one year in the nave with Commodore Barney during the late war. New York: John S. Taylor, 1837.

One of the very best entries in the large genre of the slave narrative was written by Charles Ball. Published twice in the nineteenth century, under two different titles, Ball’s testimony—including a gripping account of not one but two escapes from the Deep South—remains an invaluable first-person account of the domestic slave trade in the early nineteenth century.

This trade victimized Ball in its very early stages, when it was known more as the “Georgia trade” than as the trade to the Deep South, which ultimately wrenched around one million people from their homes in the older slave states. Recent (and burgeoning) scholarship on the slave trade—all of which draws on Ball’s descriptions of the early form and effects of this interstate human trafficking—has placed this coerced Great Migration at the center of the antebellum African American experience, replacing the plantation that stood at the center of earlier scholarship. After all, the trade affected not only the million or so people sold, but also their kinfolk left behind. Moreover, the threat of sale hung with menacing uncertainty over every slave—sold or not—in the United States. Ball’s narrative offers a compelling description of the human drama involved in all of this. It matches better-known slave narratives both in the adventure of his escapes and the power of his testament to slave resistance.

Matthew Mason

Matthew Mason is assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University, author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (2006), and coeditor of Edward Kimber’s The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson (2008).

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

Eric Slauter, associate professor of English and director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago, is the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2009).