Early Republic/Antebellum US – Common-place http://common-place.org The journal of early American life Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:03:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.2 Arthur Mervyn, Bankrupt http://common-place.org/book/vol-18-no-1-gaudet/ Tue, 30 Jan 2018 10:41:54 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=8158 An eighteenth-century novel explores how American society handles the collateral damage of capitalism—and who deserves a second chance.

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A separately published, engraved portrait of Charles Brockden Brown by John B. Forrest from a miniature by William Dunlap (1806). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

In 2010, I found myself living in a small Maine town, helping my spouse establish a bankruptcy law practice. This was not long after the beginning of the financial crisis, so bankruptcy law seemed a promising gig. It was also a few years after the passage of a bankruptcy reform bill in 2005, with new regulations that made it much harder to establish oneself as a so-called honest debtor eligible for a discharge of debts. That also made more work for lawyers. So, in breaks from writing my dissertation about eighteenth-century literature, I pasted paystub data into spreadsheets, tallied up living expenses and debt, and learned to think about bankruptcy as a shorthand for relief, rather than a code for failure.

On occasion I sat in courtrooms and watched the presiding trustee march through the rolls of petitioners, raising questions about the value of an RV or the ownership structure of a family cabin. At the end of each hearing the trustee would rattle off a half-hearted benediction, sending the petitioners out into the world for another try at making a living. The bankruptcy code is designed to provide debtors with a fresh start, he would say; I hope it works out that way for you. The phrase fresh start stuck out to me. It seemed so colloquial, so non-legalistic. It is, in fact, contained in the official glossary of bankruptcy terms provided by the state. It says:

Fresh Start—the characterization of a debtor’s status after bankruptcy, i.e. free of most debts. (Giving debtors a fresh start is one purpose of the Bankruptcy Code.)

Beyond the oddness of the framing, I was struck by the concept of the fresh start. The idea of bankruptcy as redemption, as the rock-bottom that precedes a new rise, looked to me quite different from the stories of bankruptcy that appeared in eighteenth-century literature. There, bankruptcy often signals vice and corruption. A fictional bankrupt is often also a seducer, a gambler, and any number of other terrible things. When a person is broke, his story is over. If he wants a fresh start he is going to have to move away, to some hazy other-country with richer soils for self-reinvention. Often, that country is America. But what about those who were already here?

You don’t come across a lot of bankruptcy hearings in eighteenth-century novels. This is pretty easy to explain: they didn’t happen much. But they did happen, and I’m going to go into some depth about one early American novel that touches on the subject, in the process opening a window into the turbulent waters of debt, failure, and new beginnings. This novel is Arthur Mervyn, published in 1799 by Charles Brockden Brown. It’s a long, rambling novel that follows a young naif, Arthur, as he travels through turn-of-the-century America. The novel is most often remembered (when it is remembered) for its gothic descriptions of Philadelphia in the grip of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Critics also like to discuss its unreliable narrative; it’s impossible to follow the turns of the plot, and the veracity of the first-person account is constantly challenged by other characters. However, I take the side of a small but longstanding critical cadre that believes Arthur Mervyn is best read as a tale of financial transactions. Specifically, I read it as a novel about debt.

Title page of Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the year 1793 by Charles Brockden Brown (New York, 1799). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The growth of a mercantile Atlantic economy through the eighteenth century caused a sea change in concepts of credit and risk, one so momentous that we continue to sort through its effects today. Borrowing and lending became depersonalized; debt shifted from a moral hazard to a cost of doing business, and a business in itself. Both the radically unstable narrative of the eponymous hero and the raging career of Welbeck, the villain, can be understood as critiques of the unmoored economy of speculation, in which fortunes were won and lost in what seemed then, before nanotrading, like the blink of an eye.

Charles Brockden Brown came from a commercial family, and makes clear throughout Arthur Mervyn that he has a professional’s knowledge of financial transactions and the consequences they can carry. (His father was once imprisoned for debt.) The novel teems with reversals of fortune: sudden plunges from middle-class respectability caused by bad banknotes or fraudulent insurance arrangements, as well as by disease, seduction, ill-will, or bad luck. Precarity is the background hum behind the novel’s picaresque plot. Time and time again, Arthur Mervyn finds himself without a penny or a crumb to his name, starting fresh. Yet, while his progress shines a light on the instability of personal finances in early America, Arthur himself remains optimistic, seemingly untouched by failure.

Arthur goes bankrupt almost as soon as he leaves his rural home for Philadelphia. He starts with a little money, but is so naïve that he spends it all on two sorry meals. As he walks along, ruminating on his plight, he finds that he has already entered the city. And he realizes something else. “Suddenly I recollected that I had not paid the customary toll at the bridge; neither had I money wherewith to pay it.” He is stuck: “I had nothing to pay, and by returning I should only double my debt. Let it stand, said I, where it does. All that honour enjoins is to pay when I am able.”

Arthur’s progress, therefore, begins with insolvency. He considers himself in debt, promising himself he will pay when he can. He decides immediately that the answer to his problem is more debt, and sets out to find a farmer he knows who might lend him enough for a meal. In the process he leaves behind his bundle of clothes, and even his shoes, as if to underscore his total lack of worldly capital. For Arthur, however, indigence is opportunity. While he claims to be in search of honest work, he never does settle down to any task. Instead, he lets himself be swept along by the currents of the commercial city, until they carry him out of it.  Before long he finds himself again at the bridge, and again penniless. Far from recalling his old debt, Arthur cheerfully doubles it. “With light steps and palpitating heart I turned my face towards the country. My necessitous condition I believed would justify me in passing without payment the Schuylkill bridge.”  Bankrupt, Arthur is free to follow his destiny.

Let’s pause for a moment on the debt of the bridge. At the beginning of the novel, the rusticated Arthur believes that “honour enjoins” him to pay the toll later. A quarter of the way into the book, having begun an education in the commercial economy, he has acquired a new approach to debt: having nothing justifies nonpayment. In other words, bankruptcy undoes obligations, and provides opportunity.

Arthur’s constant optimism in the face of loss makes him exceptional, but he is far from singular in his bankrupt status; ruin seems an occupational hazard of being a character in this book. I’d like to focus on two of these insolvents. The first is Welbeck, the sensational, irredeemable villain, who drives much of the novel’s plot through his career as a swindler, seducer, and forger, as well as through his patronage of Mervyn. The other is Carlton, whom nobody remembers.

In a novel so overstuffed with plot and characters, the mild-mannered Carlton fails to draw much attention. Carlton is a bankrupt, but he is not a gambler or a drinker, nor does he attempt to seduce heiresses under false pretenses of prosperity. He’s an honest man who happens to have both a poor head for business and an importunate creditor.

Carlton enters the narrative when Arthur’s friend receives a mysterious note requesting him to come without delay “to the debtors’ apartments in Prune Street,” the infamous debtors’ prison. The gothic atmosphere of the prison reminds readers of the scenes of yellow fever that began the book. Prune Street is “filled with pale faces and withered forms,” the air a “noxious element” that makes it hard to breathe. Yet Arthur’s friend, named Stevens, is unsympathetic: “The marks of negligence and poverty were visible in all; but few betrayed, in their features or gestures, any symptoms of concern on account of their condition. Ferocious gaiety, or stupid indifference, seemed to sit on every brow.”

This is a fitting place for a villain, in other words. Thus when Stevens finds that the prison contains a dying Welbeck, a narrative loop seems closed: debtors’ prison is not the gallows, but is a suitable end to a rake’s progress. This morality tale, however, is disrupted by the figure of Carlton. Stevens finds him “Seated on a bench, silent and aloof from the crowd, his eyes fixed on the floor, and his face half concealed by his hand.” Unlike the thoughtless mob, Carlton is “governed by an exquisite sensibility to disgrace” and anguished by the thought of what will happen to his dependent sisters. But, Stevens tells us, “fortitude was not among my friend’s qualities,” and he seems likely to share Welbeck’s fate of dying in debtors’ prison.  

What great mistake or tragic misunderstanding brought this seemingly innocent person to this place, we wonder? As is typical in this novel, the story is slow to unwind. We learn that he “lives by binding fast the bargains others made”—I take this to mean that he is a commercial lawyer. Brown himself, it bears noting, was intended for the law by his family. We might assume that he knows whereof he speaks when he writes that Carlton’s “impatient temper and delicate frame unfitted him for the trade.” Unlike Brown, who chose to write instead, Carlton had gone ahead with the profession, and “pursued it with no less reluctance than diligence, devoting to the task three nights in the week, and the whole of each day,” even to the risk of his health. Hardworking and responsible, Carlton is nevertheless “embarrassed with debts which he was unable to discharge.” We learn later that there is just one debt, contracted by Carlton’s father, who had himself been imprisoned for it. To free his father from prison and save his health, Carlton had co-signed the debt, and had steadily worked to pay it off. Finally, however, he had fallen short, with $400 left to pay.  

Stevens gets Carlton a private room in the debtors’ prison, which, with great narrative convenience, is already occupied by Welbeck. Side by side, they are the two faces of bankruptcy: the swindler and the unfortunate. If Welbeck, who seduces and lies and forges because he refuses to do honest work, represents the reckless speculator, poor forgotten Carlton is his milquetoast foil, the insolvent. If Welbeck shows the spectacular potential and dangers of mercantilism, Carlton raises questions about how society handles the collateral damage of capitalism. Does it leave him to perish in the prison, or does it give him another try?

This is the question that the earliest forms of bankruptcy law tried to answer. Debts should be paid, it was generally agreed, but a growing movement suggested that when payment was impossible, it was cruel and counterproductive to punish the debtor. “Is the state of the creditor such as to make the loss of four hundred dollars of more importance to him than the loss of liberty to your brother?” Arthur asks Carlton’s sister, incredulously. He continues more pragmatically: “Your brother cannot pay the debt while in prison; whereas, if at liberty, he might slowly and finally discharge it. If his [that is, the creditor’s] humanity would not yield, his avarice might be brought to acquiesce.” This particular creditor, however, is motivated by a sense of vengeance, and would rather see Carlton expire in prison than recover his money. In a world of ruthless lenders, it won’t do to rely on individuals for a sense of proportion in dealing with debt. We will have to look to the law to maintain humanity—and to keep individuals properly productive within the capitalist system.

It is indeed through law that Carlton’s situation is resolved. After he has marinated in the Prune Street prison for another quarter of the novel (though only a few days, according to its murky accounting of time), Stevens returns to his friend, whom “with much difficulty, he persuaded to take advantage of the laws in favor of insolvent debtors.” In other words, he petitions for a discharge of debts under a bankruptcy law. This proved successful: “by rendering up every species of property, except his clothes and the implements of his trade, he obtained a full discharge. In conjunction with his sister, he once more assumed the pen, and, being no longer burdened with debts he was unable to discharge, he resumed, together with his pen, his cheerfulness. Their mutual industry was sufficient for their decent and moderate subsistence.” The inhumane creditor is overridden by law, and a useful citizen returned to productive activity.

While Brown was writing Arthur Mervyn, what he calls the “laws in favor of insolvent debtors” existed in a shifting patchwork of state ordinances. Very few citizens would have had access to the kind of discharge Carlton received. The first federal bankruptcy act was passed in 1800, just after the publication of Arthur Mervyn. Given the extensive political debate around the 1800 law, the question of bankruptcy would have been in the air when Brown was writing the book. Legislators discussed the same problems suggested by the novel: How could the law protect insolvents like Carlton, while leaving the villainous and the irresponsible to their fates? Who, in other words, deserves a slate wiped clean, a second chance?

Examples from the manuscript collection of John Sprague (collection dates 1713-1815); the papers include legal documents such as land deeds, bills, receipts, and promissory notes transferred to Sprague, in lieu of outstanding debts. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The question has proved difficult, to this day. The 1800 law lasted only three years, and no federal legislation had any staying power until the end of the nineteenth century. Even after another century of refinements, the Manichean quality of bankruptcy appeared again in the title of the 2005 revision to the law: the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Creditors (specifically, credit card companies) had come to feel that bankruptcy relief was obtained too easily, and with too little shame. Most commentators agree that “consumer protection” is much less a focus of the law than creditor protection, but the title does reflect the continuing sense that a commercial society needs some way to offer relief from overwhelming debt. Elizabeth Warren, who strenuously opposed the act, argued that, “If Congress is determined to sort the good debtors from the bad, then it is both morally and economically imperative that they distinguish those who have worked hard and played by the rules from those who have shirked their responsibilities.”

The 2016 election (like the publication of Arthur Mervyn) proved one of the rare moments when debates around bankruptcy emerged from legislative and legal chambers into popular culture, with self-styled “king of debt” Donald Trump bragging about his companies’ multiple bankruptcies as demonstrations of business savvy while a Hillary Clinton ad titled “Who Got Hurt?” presented, over murky scenes of Atlantic City, “How Donald Trump made millions while bankrupting his businesses, laying off his workers, and stiffing his contractors.” In the terms of this article, Trump is a Welbeck—a swindler whose careless investments wreak havoc on individual lives and the national economy, protected from Welbeck’s fate by his “brilliant” use of bankruptcy law.

But Arthur Mervyn is neither a Carlton nor a Welbeck, neither a good debtor nor a bad one. As often as he is penniless, he is lucky; as often as he is lucky, he is foolish; as often as he loses credibility, he talks his way back to credit. At the novel’s end he finally achieves financial stability by marrying well—indeed, by abandoning his first love to be the second husband of a wealthy European. As Arthur prepares to depart for the Old World, he leaves us with the sense that under American capitalism, speculation and diligence alike are mugs’ games. 

Perhaps we are more than ever in need of the idea of Arthur Mervyn, who is such a shameless bankrupt, who can turn inability to pay into a backward form of currency, a constant stream of fresh starts. Arthur is a free radical in the system of credit and debt, punishment and forgiveness.

Reading Arthur Mervyn as a book about debt and relief, we are reminded that it might be possible to be penniless and free, to take insolvency as opportunity.    


Further Reading

The text of the novel referenced here is Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Kent, Ohio, 1980), first published by H. Maxwell, Philadelphia, 1799. For a thorough and excellent discussion of debates around bankruptcy law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). Mann’s wife, Senator Elizabeth Warren, is equally lucid and erudite on the legal and social aspects of bankruptcy. Her books on the topic include As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America (Frederick, Md., 1999) and The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (New Haven, 2001), both coauthored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbrook, and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke (New York, 2003), with Amelia Tyagi.


A Handy Handbook for Financial Historians http://common-place.org/book/vol-17-no-4-5-campbell/ Thu, 16 Nov 2017 12:13:22 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=8136 Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regressions that would normally send students accustomed to a predominantly narrative-driven discipline running for the hills.

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Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 208 pp., $19.95.

Few in the history profession, at least in the academy, can confidently assert that brighter days lie just around the corner. Economic historians in particular have had much to lament. In a recent essay, Sven Beckert observes that economic historians now reside almost exclusively in economics departments. Others have documented the decline of economic history relative to other sub-fields in the last forty years as shown in a survey of U.S. history faculty listings in the AHA’s Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians. Amid this wholly justifiable sense of malaise and decline, there are a few signs of promise. The history of capitalism sub-field, which burst onto the scene in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession, has brought renewed vigor to the study of all things economic.

The latest publication from historian Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People’s Money, affirms the import of financial history through a survey of money and banking from colonial beginnings to the Civil War era. Murphy writes, “money and banking played a critical role in the lives of everyday Americans in the nineteenth century, shaping the society in which they lived and worked,” adding that understanding the financial history of this period “broadens and deepens our knowledge of the Early American Republic” (7). For Murphy, capturing Americans’ long-standing and complicated love-hate relationship with banks requires us to look back to the formative years of the early nineteenth century and Civil War period, years that presaged our modern financial system.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to basic economic concepts like barter, inflation, taxation, and public debt, showing how debates over these issues informed many of the most important episodes in the colonial and revolutionary eras. In chapter 2, Murphy uncovers some of the unresolved issues involving charters of incorporation that stemmed from the Constitution’s ambiguous language. It is in chapter 3, entitled “How Panics Worked: The Era of the Bank War,” that the author finds her groove, buttressing and enriching her analysis with salient primary sources. Consistent with recent scholarship emphasizing the global dimensions of the history of early modern capitalism, Murphy explains that the movements of specie and credit overseas, combined with peculiar domestic factors, produced disruptive financial panics in 1819 and 1837. The tipping points occurred when confidence and predictability, those elusive and intangible characteristics that greased the wheels of finance both then and today, suddenly evaporated. Murphy shows us in chapter 4 that early Americans fiercely debated the wisdom of fractional reserve banking, activist monetary policy, and the mixing of for-profit, commercial lending alongside the storage of public revenue in one financial institution. This was a notable feature of the nation’s early central banks, the First and Second Banks of the United States. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the struggles faced by both Union and Confederate governments in raising revenue during the Civil War, including the printing of greenbacks and establishment of a nationwide system of federally chartered banks.

Other People’s Money takes its name from the title of a book written by Progressive Era reformer, future Supreme Court justice, and intellectual godfather of the Federal Reserve, Louis Brandeis (165). Early twentieth-century reformers like Brandeis faulted the “money trust” for leveraging public money and depositors’ savings into high-risk bets, too often making off with riches while the majority suffered. The Panic of 1907 was a case in point. For Murphy, there was a common thrust between those who lambasted the immense concentrations of wealth and power epitomized by robber baron J.P. Morgan and the impetus behind Andrew Jackson’s Bank War. In both instances, average Americans knew that the game was rigged. The wealthy were picking winners and losers in violation of the principles of free market capitalism (167).

Murphy is concerned less with the degree to which financial institutions contributed to, and were shaped by, the early stages of the industrial revolution—a historiographical debate explored by previous scholars—and more with how early Americans experimented with new financial mechanisms and institutions through a process of trial and error. Often it was a calamitous financial panic, such as the famous one of 1837 that bankrupted the South’s plantation banks, or some other convulsive, watershed moment, such as the Civil War, that impelled financiers to rethink their assumptions and opt for a more efficient system. In other instances, important developments emerged gradually. Such was the case with investment banking—brokering and underwriting stocks and bonds, often to overseas investors—which capitalized much of the nation’s transportation infrastructure, or the interbank cooperation and clearinghouse systems that made the Panic of 1857 less damaging than it would have been otherwise.

One of Murphy’s contentions is that historians have described the political dimensions of major conflicts like the Bank War without providing sufficient economic context. Political cartoons of the era, she notes, tended to focus on the political battle between Jackson and Nicholas Biddle while only a few raised broader concerns about the economic implications of Jackson’s policies (96-97). One can agree with this claim in the main while at the same time holding that Murphy might be overstating the case. Even when biographies and histories of the antebellum era have maintained a predominantly political focus, they have, by necessity, delved into the economic conflicts that helped define the presidencies of Jackson and others. Specialists will find some overlapping content with Howard Bodenhorn’s excellent 2003 study, State Banking in Early America, particularly in the earlier chapters, and may at times yearn for the inclusion of a few more secondary sources in the endnotes and “suggested further reading” section. On the other hand, Murphy’s book, the latest release in the How Things Worked series published by Johns Hopkins University Press, is not a monograph. The abbreviated notes and suggestions for further reading reflect an editorial decision in consideration of the book’s targeted audience, and specialists, being specialists, already know where to look for more information. Other People’s Money, thus, works in a variety of educational settings. First-year graduate students who show an inkling for financial history (gasp!) will find a useful primer here. Professors teaching specialized classes in business history, the history of capitalism, and economics for non-economists (this class should be more widely taught) can assign it. Because the sheer number of different financial institutions and credit instruments of this era is daunting even for experts, they can keep this on their bookshelves or digital devices as a quick reference. Non-academics interested in early American history will also find this book accessible.

The strengths of this work are numerous. In addition to narrating some intriguing vignettes on Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Herman Melville, this book contains a fascinating array of cartoons and images of credit instruments, many of which are drawn from the author’s extensive personal collection. Murphy’s writing is also straightforward; her analysis, insightful. Financial history presents many challenges. To grasp its intricacies, one needs to know, for example, how a bill of exchange worked; what reserve ratios are; how panicky borrowers, reacting to information asymmetries, can imperil an entire economy. It requires immense skill to take complex, abstract, and highly technical accounting principles and explain them to the reader in digestible ways. Murphy is more than up to the challenge. She summarizes a great deal of content and manages to pack a lot of information into a few words with lucidity and clarity. Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regressions that would normally send students accustomed to a predominantly narrative-driven discipline running for the hills. Importantly, Murphy demonstrates an agile, dexterous familiarity with financial terminology so that she can explain definitions succinctly without sacrificing complexity. At the same time, she shows how these definitions fit together—a clear improvement over some of the more convoluted works of financial history that came out of the mid-twentieth century. This is economic history as it should be written. 

Post-2008, understanding the relationship between banks and recessions became paramount. There continues to be no shortage of craven politicians and pundits who fear-monger about debt and inflation while deliberately minimizing social welfare. Each year their apocalyptic predictions fail to materialize, but sadly, their platforms remain. When expertise that scholars have worked decades to develop is cavalierly dismissed as “elite” while abject ignorance is touted as a defining feature of what it means to be a “real” American, a back-to-the-basics, jargon-free approach to financial literacy is more essential than ever. In the world of antebellum-era finance, to find out how things worked, as the series title indicates, here is an ideal place to start.


Reading Time http://common-place.org/book/reading-time/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 12:22:23 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=7502 Focusing attention on the various “temporal markers” in each text, Weinstein reveals the ways the novels in her archive unsettle straightforward chronology and leave time in disarray.

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Ever since I first received my copy of Cindy Weinstein’s inventive, invigorating new book, I have puzzled over its title. The book’s appealing cover reproduces Samuel P. Avery’s engraving of a “universal time plate,” a circular block into which are embedded a few dozen clocks registering the “times of all nations.” The title of the book appears in the center of this image: “Time, Tense, and American Literature” in a bold, red sans serif font against a white background; and beneath that, in slightly smaller but italicized black type “When is Now?” What puzzles me is this: Which is title and which is subtitle? Size and sequence—typically we read from top to bottom—would seem to nominate the former as the book’s title (and this is indeed confirmed by both its copyright and its less ambiguous title page). Yet academic titling conventions, not to mention the italics, might suggest otherwise: those conventions typically call for crisp, evocative titles—like, say, “When is Now?”—followed by more flatly descriptive, enumerative subtitles. Curiously, Weinstein’s book seems to place the subtitle before the title, and the title comes after the subtitle. Why?

Cindy Weinstein, Time, Tense, and American Literature: When is Now? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 194 pp., $89.99.

There is something apt about this little perplexity, I think: the book’s title cleverly performs a version of the “temporal shenanigans” (6) that constitute its main interest in a handful of American novels from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Using Edgar Allan Poe’s “temporally unhinged” Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a kind of fulcrum, Weinstein analyzes fictions by Charles Brockden Brown, Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Dreiser, and Edward P. Jones that foreground questions of time and “whose hold on sequence,” as she puts it, “is wobbly” (4). Focusing attention on the various “temporal markers” in each text—verb tenses and adverbs, words that indicate time or tempo, the appearance of clocks and time-pieces, references to dates—Weinstein reveals the ways the novels in her archive unsettle straightforward chronology and leave time in disarray, confounding what comes before and what comes after, and the verbal formations that help us tell the difference.

Weinstein’s playful term for this intricate, often disorienting “temporal grammar” is “tempo(e)rality.” Tempo(e)rality represents “a breakdown in temporal logic” (5); it is “what happens when “the narrative goes into a temporal rabbit hole” (4). Drawing on the insights of narratology, especially the narrative theory of Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette, Weinstein develops a method of reading that attends rigorously to “verbal minutiae” and exerts unusual pressure on temporal terms and phrases like “while,” “first,” “at length,” “now and then,” or “would.” The result is a series of dazzling readings that identify, with a remarkable level of precision, what it is that makes the experience of reading a novel like Edgar Huntly or An American Tragedy so very strange and frequently disorienting. Weinstein reveals, for instance, the “condition of delay” (31) that characterizes the narrative movement (or lack thereof) in Edgar Huntly, a novel in which “the perpetual postponement of action becomes the action” (31). In her reading of An American Tragedy, she concentrates on Dreiser’s odd stylistic penchant for avoiding past tense verbs in favor of present participles and gerunds in an attempt to capture the presentness of the present moment, despite the fact that the novel is a past tense narrative. And her concluding chapter on The Known World proceeds by way of a detailed, sustained analysis of the “tricky word” would, which helps Jones to “harness the power of prolepsis” (110).

On this, the micro-level, the book is a tour de force of close reading and a reminder, if one needs reminding, of the pleasures and rewards of intense, prolonged scrutiny of the verbal complexities of literary texts. An exquisite reader, Weinstein models a method of analysis that has a great deal to teach about “how to read time” (8). Yet Time, Tense, and American Literature is not solely concerned with the strictly aesthetic dimensions of literary fiction. Weinstein also seeks to account for her chosen texts’ temporal intricacies by situating them “in the time of their production” (8). Which is to say that the book also tells a “macro-story that reads temporal patterns in dialectical relation to particular historical contexts” (5). So however much the narratives she treats might themselves seem to be “temporally at sea,” they are always nevertheless “anchored by a historical moment” (12). For example, Edgar Huntly’s preoccupation with hesitation and paralyzing deliberation mirrors the temporal conditions of debates over ratification of the Constitution: the Federalists’ insistence that “the time is now” versus the anti-Federalists seemingly endless deferrals. Or in Pym, the text’s unsettling of a temporal zero degree—a “now” point against which to measure before and after—is at odds with its commitment to the stabilizing force of conventional racial hierarchies. The novel’s “aesthetic power has the alarming effect of obstructing [its] ideological perspective” (42). And in her chapter on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar, Weinstein argues that “the temporal disorderliness reflects the experience of rupture and trauma that was the Civil War” (74).

As startling as Weinstein’s analyses typically are, however, her commitment to historicism turns out to be, for me at least, the book’s more surprising claim. Weinstein aligns Time, Tense, and American Literature with the recent “temporal turn” in American literary studies, exemplified in recent books by Wai Chee Dimock, Lloyd Pratt, and Dana Luciano, for example. Yet Weinstein resists the temporal turn when its investments in alternative temporalities lead scholars to question practices of periodization (one thinks here of Cody Marrs’s recent Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War) or to disrupt what I would describe as conventional historicist practices. Following Valerie Traub, Weinstein maintains that temporal studies “need not and should not be divorced from historical inquiry” (14). With this I agree and, to be sure, the connections Weinstein makes between texts and contexts—the temporal dimension of the ratification debates, for instance, or the links between Dreiser’s stylistic idiosyncrasies and William James’s work on time consciousness— are fascinating. Yet Weinstein’s particular form of historicist practice also leaves unexamined some questions about what constitutes historical inquiry and what it means to historicize.

Those questions arise from Weinstein’s tacit distinction between the time of (textual) narrative and the time of (perhaps extra-textual) history, the former, as Weinstein’s readings so vividly demonstrate, wayward and variable, and the latter seemingly stable and secure. Yet Weinstein’s final chapter itself collapses this dichotomy and ultimately unsettles, rather than adheres to, the Jamesonian imperative to “always historicize!” (14). That is, the historical context Weinstein chooses for her reading of The Known World is U.S. slavery. The chapter’s historical archive includes, for example, antebellum slave narratives as well as periodical articles, court decisions, and treatises that debate the legal status of slaves. Weinstein’s handling of these materials and their relation to Jones’s novel is characteristically perceptive and absorbing. Yet her treatment might also be seen as methodologically tenuous. After all, antebellum slavery is the context of the novel’s setting, not of its time of production. (In the same way, 1787, the year of the ratification debates, is the year the action of Edgar Huntly takes place; the novel was published in 1799). According to the logic of historicist contextualization, then, Weinstein’s reading is itself unhistoricist. Which, I want to say, I point out less as a criticism than as a condition of inevitability—since contexts, too, are temporal narrative devices.

These misgivings about Weinstein’s implicit theory of history aside, Time, Tense, and American Literature is a tremendously engaging book, a major contribution both to the temporal turn and, in its method of reading time, to the renewed interest in aesthetics and new formalisms. It also delivers on its promise to establish a new and surprising American novelistic tradition—one that places Poe, of all American novelists!—at its center.

Jeffrey Insko is associate professor of English at Oakland University in Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. He is completing a manuscript titled The Ever-Present Now: Time, History, and Antebellum American Writing.



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A Tale of Two Uncles: The Old Age of Uncle Tom and Uncle Remus http://common-place.org/book/a-tale-of-two-uncles-the-old-age-of-uncle-tom-and-uncle-remus/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 12:22:23 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=7648 Why does Uncle Tom grow old?

The post A Tale of Two Uncles: The Old Age of Uncle Tom and Uncle Remus appeared first on Common-place.

Though Uncle Tom appears relatively young in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, the perception of his age changed. The narrator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) invites the reader to observe “the hero of our story,” Uncle Tom, “a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black” and his wife, Aunt Chloe, who shares his sheen with her “round, black, shining face,” which is “so glossy as to suggest the idea that she might have been washed over with white of eggs.” There are three children in their cabin: two young boys, Mose and Pete, running around at their feet, and a baby girl. If one puts aside the not insignificant matter of their enslavement, then the two look every bit the picture of domestic bliss—young, healthy parents, who don’t have a wrinkle between them.

1. Illustrated dust jacket for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published by Grosset & Dunlap (New York, ca. 1930). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Yet by the turn of the century Uncle Tom had become much older in illustrations for the novel and in American popular culture more broadly: his hair changed from black to grey and balding, his face wrinkled, and his body stooped. The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2006) shows the far-reaching effects of this change when it hesitates to identify the three children in the cabin as belonging to Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe since their relationship allegedly resembles that of Abraham and Sarah. In the biblical story, the prophecy that the couple will have a child makes Sarah laugh—she was ninety and Abraham was 100 years old when their child, Isaac, was born.

The perception of Uncle Tom’s age clearly defies Stowe’s original description and exchanges the strong, powerful middle-aged young father with an old man whom he barely resembles. Given the cultural importance of Stowe’s novel and its afterlife, this particular transformation bears further consideration. Why does Uncle Tom grow old? Why does Uncle Remus, who becomes popular at the turn of the century, look so similar to him? What does it mean that he does?

The stage performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, known as Tom plays, offer one explanation. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a literary phenomenon and when it took to the stage it became even more popular. Famously, Thomas F. Gossett has suggested that for every one person who read Stowe’s novel, there were fifty who attended one of the countless performances of the Tom plays, staged by as many as 500 companies and running from 1852 to 1930. Changes to characters, scenes, and plot inevitably occurred, including the use of live dogs to embellish the scene where Eliza flees across a frozen river.

The actors portraying Stowe’s characters often became more visually iconic than the characters in the book. Just as film adaptations change how we imagine characters of novels we’ve read so that Harry Potter becomes Daniel Radcliffe and Katniss Everdeen becomes Jennifer Lawrence, the stage personas of the Tom plays eclipsed their textual source. Robin Bernstein has shown, for example, how child actress Cordelia Howard’s brown hair became an iconic depiction of Little Eva, despite the fact that Stowe describes Eva as having golden blonde hair. Uncle Tom’s old age was yet another change made as the plays upstaged the novel. The plays were simply more accessible, more visceral, and more social than the written word, and without copyright restrictions to speak of they had the freedom to alter the content and characters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in profoundly influential ways.

The Tom plays were an outgrowth of blackface minstrelsy and they borrowed its stereotypes. A nineteenth-century entertainment staple, minstrel shows featured white actors who blackened their faces to engage in racial caricature. The aged slave was one such stereotype and while Stephen Foster’s “Old Uncle Ned” may have been the most famous example, other variations included “Old Dan Tucker” and “Old Black Joe.” Uncle Tom’s age rose upward, pulled by the collective influence of these pre-existing characters, until he melded into just another older slave, no different than any other. Charles Townsend, for example, recorded the directions for blacking up “for elderly negroes, like ‘Uncle Tom,’” which included drawing wrinkles “across the forehead and around the eyes, with India ink” and accentuating the lower eyelids and lips, “which will give them the sunken look of old age.” The physical manifestation of old age lent itself to minstrelsy’s tendency to emphasize racial weakness and dependency, which resulted in the association of old age and loyalty. The Tom plays exaggerated Uncle Tom’s age due to the influence of the minstrel stage, using it to make him seem impotent, weak, and complacent. The effect was the stigmatization of the name “Uncle Tom” into the epithet that it has become.

2. Illustrated trade card by D. Appleton and Company for The Folk-lore of the Old Plantation…Uncle Remus (New York, ca. 1881). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The other explanation for Uncle Tom’s increasing age has to do with his proximity to Little Eva. The daughter of Augustine St. Clare, Eva is saved by Tom when she falls off a steamship carrying a cargo of slaves to New Orleans to be sold. She persuades her father to purchase him as compensation for his heroism. Once they return to the plantation together, Uncle Tom and Eva become fast friends as she reads the Bible to him. When Eva falls ill later in the story, they become quite close: Uncle Tom carries Eva into and out of her room when she is too weak; he takes walks with her, sings hymns to her, and sits with her. When she nears death, he sleeps outside of her room on the verandah. Eva seems innocent in these scenes and Uncle Tom seems trustworthy and loyal. As Robin Bernstein discusses in Racial Innocence, Eva’s purity, her childhood innocence, allows her to transcend racial prohibitions. The physical intimacy shared between Uncle Tom and Eva becomes permissible, or at least explicable, when cast under the glow of her pure, angelic aura.

However, to some who feared the intermingling of races, Eva seemed vulnerable and the proximity between her and Uncle Tom proved disconcerting. Eva’s purity might sanction her relationship to Uncle Tom, but it could just as easily be spoiled by it. Age, while not resolving the racial tension stemming from the proximity between a white girl and a black man, certainly provided a more tolerable picture for those who held such anxieties. The older Uncle Tom became, the more the tension was alleviated between the two. The influence of the minstrel stage on Uncle Tom’s age provided a complementary solution to the problem of physical intimacy by adding a layer of separation. Insofar as Uncle Tom becomes old, he becomes, to borrow James Baldwin’s phrase, “divested of his sex,” and more like a grandparent for Eva. And, once Uncle Tom is estranged from his own family because he is too old for the children in the cabin to be believably his, the decision to be loyal to Eva above all else becomes easy. As Uncle Tom ages, his proximity becomes more tolerable and less threatening.

Just as Uncle Tom became old on the stage, another aging ex-slave entered American popular culture: Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. The two would prove indissoluble—it is almost as if Uncle Tom aged into Uncle Remus. Harris developed his signature formula in the Atlanta Constitution in which Uncle Remus tells stories set in the antebellum past to an audience—a nameless Little Boy—in the postbellum present. The stories are animal folktales that feature Brer Rabbit narrowly escaping the grasp of Brer Fox with his trickster antics. On the basis of these entertaining folktales in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Harris rose from regional to national fame and became one of the most significant literary figures in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. When Harris asks the reader of his first book to imagine Uncle Remus as one who looks as though he lived in the period he describes, that is, an old man who was an adult well before the Civil War, for many the image that came to mind was Uncle Tom. On their respective laps sat different children, but the image of an elderly black man with a white child stayed the same. The two blurred to the point that in Young Folks’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1901), it is Uncle Tom, not Uncle Remus, telling Eva Brer Rabbit stories.

3. Colored lithograph, “Eva’s foreboding’s: “I’m going there,” she said, to the spirits bright, Tom; “I’m going before long…” published by N. Stannard & Dixon, lithographed by Louisa Corbaux (London, 1852). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

At the 1905 Georgia State Fair in Atlanta, President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt drew out Joel Chandler Harris, who was notoriously reclusive. With Harris seated as a guest of honor at the presidential banquet, Roosevelt remarked, “Presidents may come and presidents may go; but Uncle Remus ‘stays put,’” before going on to praise him for the way he was able to exalt the South in his fiction without “even a flavor of bitterness toward any other part of the Union.” Roosevelt’s praise seems to be the exact opposite of the message Stowe apocryphally received from Lincoln: “so you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” According to Roosevelt, Uncle Remus helped heal the tensions of the war started by Uncle Tom. This transformation from instigator to alleviator is indicative of how old age effaced the anti-slavery politics of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Furthermore, I would submit that at least part of the reason why Uncle Remus seemed like he was always there is because Uncle Tom became old first.

What Roosevelt valued about Uncle Remus and, by extension, Uncle Tom, is troubling in retrospect. The saccharine stories without “even a flavor of bitterness” helped reconcile white Northerners and white Southerners at the expense of African Americans, whose suffering was denied by the manufactured consent imposed upon them. Imagining loyal, aged slaves who were nostalgic for the plantation economy helped the North find an exculpation for its long-time complicity in slavery, its failure to enact emancipation sooner, and its quitting of Reconstruction; it helped the South imagine a romanticized past that could justify disenfranchisement through Jim Crow legislation while preserving the illusion of Southern valor. Old age and loyalty became inextricable, and so too did Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom, their transformation made so complete it erased the traces of any transformation in the first place by making it seem as if they were never not there.

There are, however, two differences between Uncle Tom and Uncle Remus that I wish to bring to your attention in closing. Together they are indicative of a widespread shift in the cultural meaning of old age in the United States after the Civil War that often slips past unnoticed in the story of shared resemblance I’ve described above. The first difference is a mortal one: Uncle Tom dies while Uncle Remus stays old.

Uncle Remus was already old when he appeared in the first of Harris’s books in 1880, and in “A Story of the War,” he says he was old even before the war, let alone how he had aged since then. Yet in a volume published twenty-five years later, Told by Uncle Remus (1905), he is described as hale and hearty in spite of his age. The second difference between Tom and Remus is a didactic one, having to do with their relationships to the children with whom they are paired. Though children sit on their respective laps, Uncle Tom is taught while Uncle Remus teaches. Their respective lessons have to do with the past: Uncle Tom is taught about Christianity while Eva reads the Bible to him, and Uncle Remus teaches the Little Boy about the antebellum past through folk tales.

The two differences combine to make the meanings of their old age distinct. For Uncle Tom, old age is a penultimate state, meaningful only in its relation to death. The recognition of death’s value shows how receptive Uncle Tom has been as a vehicle for Eva’s religious instruction. By inviting death, Uncle Tom fulfills the role for which Eva has prepared him and accesses the religious meaning of martyrdom, his death conferring meaning upon his life. For Uncle Remus, however, old age becomes meaningful in and of itself. Unlike Uncle Tom, his value is contingent upon old age, not death. His lesson depends upon the continuation of his memory, so to die would be to lose value. Instead, Uncle Remus must stay put and in so doing he becomes doubly old: old enough to be a credible witness to the time of slavery and old enough to keep repeating his memory. Instead of a single generational transaction where Eva teaches Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus assumes a regenerative function, teaching generation after generation. When he reappears after a long absence, he returns in order to tell stories to another little boy, who is actually the child of the boy to whom he first told stories.

In this way, President Roosevelt incidentally puts his finger on the pulse of the matter. The “staying put” of old age assumes greater value at the turn into the twentieth century as the coming and going of death loses value. With the dissolution of the “good death” in the Civil War that Drew Gilpin Faust describes, what comes to take its place is old age. The threshold of death mediated power, culture, and identity in antebellum America. In the void left from its collapse, the cultural significance previously reserved for death began to creep into one’s late life.

The resemblance of Uncle Tom and Uncle Remus is important because it tracks the attenuated political meaning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Uncle Tom ages in appearance. Equally important, however, is an appreciation of their difference, which is suggestive of the widespread shift in the meaning of old age as a life stage. While it is common to think of the United States at this time as being reordered, reincorporated, reborn—in short, rejuvenated—by the process of economic modernization that accelerates after Reconstruction, perhaps old age plays a more fundamental role in that perception than previously thought.

Further Reading

Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York, 2011).

Kathleen Diffley, “Representing the Civil War and Reconstruction: From Uncle Tom to Uncle Remus.” In Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson, eds. A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 (Malden, Mass., 2005).

Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas, 1985).

Barbara Hochman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911 (Amherst, Mass., 2011).

Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (Columbia, Mo., 2007).

Nathaniel A. Windon is a doctoral candidate at Penn State University. His dissertation, “Gilded Old Age,” is on the social construction of old age in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.







“Permitted to Proceed Unmolested”: Childhood and Race in the Burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum http://common-place.org/book/permitted-to-proceed-unmolested-childhood-and-race-in-the-burning-of-the-colored-orphan-asylum/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 12:22:23 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=7666 Does the creation of New York's Colored Orphan Asylum suggest that race was irrelevant to nineteenth-century understandings of childhood?

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On July 13, 1863, a riot in New York City that had begun as opposition to the draft for the Union’s Civil War army morphed into a violent mob that targeted African Americans. That afternoon a large crowd attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum, looting it and then burning the building to the ground. This attack has been a focal point of discussions about the New York draft riots since the first newspaper accounts of the riots began appearing, but one element in the contemporary accounts stands out to me as a historian of childhood, an element that has generally escaped notice in the frequent recitations of this story: not only did all 233 African American children who lived in the institution escape unharmed, but according to some accounts they were allowed to “proceed unmolested” to safety through an otherwise riotous and bloodthirsty mob. A description of the children processing safely through the violent crowd appears in every version of the story recorded by the managers of the institution itself, with some of the most evocative language penned in an 1868 annual report, in which they wrote,

the long line of trembling, terrified little children filed quietly down stairs and through the halls into the very body of the mob, who literally filled the enclosure, and whose savage yells and inhuman threats thrilled like a death note on every heart . . . The human mass swayed back as though impelled by an unseen power—not a hand was raised to molest them, and without sustaining the slightest injury, children and care-takers reached the station house.

Surely the managers intended the “unseen power” here to refer to God, but there are other possible explanations for the behavior of the mob that managers recounted. One of these, I want to suggest, was New Yorkers’ own beliefs about childhood and the protections it afforded.

1. “The Riots at New York – The Rioters Burning and Sacking the Colored Orphan Asylum,” full page wood engraving in Harper’s Weekly (New York, August 1, 1863), p. 493. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Age studies scholarship encourages us to interrogate understandings of age and stages of life as social constructs. As with other social constructs, scholars argue that things that seemed natural, inherent, and biological to members of that society were in fact—at least partially—constructed by the society of which they were a part. Beliefs about the traits, needs, and rights of people based on their age have therefore varied by time and place and so historians are well-placed to interrogate them. Scholars have worked to uncover how Americans in different time periods conceived of children and childhood, and a growing body of literature captures antebellum Americans’ emergent belief that children were naturally and rightly innocent, malleable, and dependent. These were the assumptions that drove the creation and operation of orphan asylums during this period, replacing indenture for young children with institutionalized care and education as labor increasingly came to be seen as outside the appropriate purview of childhood.

The Colored Orphan Asylum was one of many such orphan asylums in mid-nineteenth-century New York City, one which served African American children who had lost at least one parent. This begs the question: does the creation of this institution along lines similar to those of other orphan asylums suggest that race was irrelevant to nineteenth-century understandings of childhood? It is important to note that the question here is not whether nineteenth-century white New Yorkers saw African American and white children as equals. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that most did not. The question rather is whether white New Yorkers’ beliefs about the traits, needs, and rights inherent to children of a specific age extended to both black and white children in the designated age range. In other words, how universally did nineteenth-century Americans apply their professed ideas and assumptions about childhood? Examining the history of the Colored Orphan Asylum, and in particular looking at the episode of the destruction of this institution during the draft riots, suggests that in many respects white New Yorkers did apply their understanding of age-related traits to children regardless of race but that this did not always lead to the protection and treatment generally understood in the period as the proper purview of children. In nineteenth-century New York, African American children were regularly discussed as possessing the malleability, dependence, and helplessness attributed to children of all races, but despite this, these children were often placed in vulnerable situations. While there was significant variation in the ways white New Yorkers treated African American children—with the white women who founded the Colored Orphan Asylum and the white mob that destroyed it exemplifying the spectrum—as a whole white New Yorkers conceived of African American children as children, but their assumptions about the traits and needs inherent to age existed alongside their beliefs about race. Neither the children’s race nor their age trumped the other, but rather existed simultaneously in the minds of white New Yorkers.

2. “Hanging a Negro in Clarkson Street,” detail, wood engraving in Harper’s Weekly (New York, August 1, 1863), p. 484. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

That the children escaped the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum unharmed is agreed upon by every contemporary account of the event, even as the authors of these accounts disagreed about everything from the number of children (ranging from 200 to 1,000), whether or not the adults in the asylum had warning, and the method of the children’s escape. In addition to the assertion quoted above that the children walked through the crowd unharmed, some contemporary versions of the story claim the adults of the asylum snuck the children out a back door or that the children were saved from a violent demise by the actions of a heroic Irishman. And while the definitive means of their escape cannot be proven, it is no less fanciful to believe that a mob parted to allow the children to walk through untouched than to believe that 233 children—the number confirmed by institutional records—snuck out of the building without being noticed or that one individual was able to singlehandedly restrain a violent mob. Furthermore, upon closer examination, affording the children such an escape would actually be in keeping with other actions of white New Yorkers toward the children living at the Colored Orphan Asylum in the nineteenth century. In protecting the children’s bodies on July 13, 1863, even while terrorizing them and destroying their home, the mob repeated a pattern in which nineteenth-century white New Yorkers recognized, articulated, and to some extent supported African American children’s status as children but denied them the full protections and rights such status extended to white children.

New York City draft riots

The New York draft riots consumed New York City July 13-17, 1863, when a mob erupted over fears and frustrations about the initiation of a draft for a bloody war that was increasingly touted as a conflict to end slavery, their own precarious economic status, and their place relative to African Americans within the city. In the course of this riot over $1.5 million of property (at least $30 million in today’s dollars) was destroyed and more than 100 people—mostly African American men—were killed. Thousands more were injured, and the terror inflicted on the black community led to an exodus out of the city.

Scholars and contemporary accounts of the riots agree that after initially focusing on governmental, military, or elite targets, the mob then turned its sights on the Colored Orphan Asylum, a charitable institution that housed and educated orphaned African American children and was supported by a combination of donations and city funds. The building was looted and then burned, with complete physical destruction but—as established earlier—no loss of human life. This took place in the midst of a riot in which African Americans were targeted for violence. On a day in which the New York Times noted that the crowd spent a lot of the day “amusing themselves” by “chasing and beating every person of color who chanced to make his appearance” and when “It seemed to be an understood thing throughout the City that the negroes should be attacked wherever found, whether then [sic] offered any provocation or not,” it is noteworthy that none of the African American children from the Colored Orphan Asylum were harmed. That in the chaos and violence of the riots all 233 children, some of whom became separated from the group and were navigating the city on their own, were protected by adults and spared by the mob suggests that despite the attack on their home, the children did enjoy something of protected status.

Contemporaries certainly believed these children were entitled to such protected status. In the midst of days of violence and destruction, the attack on an orphan asylum—a monument to the traits of dependence and helplessness associated with childhood—provoked outrage in contemporaries, suggesting a widespread application of the rights of childhood to the African American children of the Colored Orphan Asylum. Newspaper accounts of the riots published throughout the country frequently emphasized the burning of the asylum as one of the worst offenses of the riots. Harper’s Weekly’s visual depiction of the burning of the asylum was the largest of their eleven images of the riots contained in the August 1, 1863, issue, filling an entire page of the three-page spread, leaving the other ten images to share the remaining two pages. This emphasis was paralleled in the text, which exclaimed, “The burning of an orphan asylum is infamous beyond parallel in the annals of mobs.” Given the notorious violence of many mob actions, and contemporary accounts’ gruesome depictions of the violence perpetrated on African American men by this very mob, Harper’s Weekly’s insistence that the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum was particularly heinous seems to rest on the assumption that children—and orphaned children in particular—were a separate and protected class. Many contemporaries, then, seemed to agree that all children—regardless of race—deserved special protection and that even among the many horrible actions of a mob, burning an orphan asylum was a particular low.

3. “Ruins of the Provost Marshal’s Office,” detail, wood engraving in Harper’s Weekly (New York, August 1, 1863), p. 484. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The juxtaposition between the perceived proper treatment of the children and their abuse at the hands of the mob was captured by a New York Times account four days after the attack on the asylum, which credited the escape of twenty of the children separated from the rest to interference by some in the crowd. It exclaimed, “It hardly seems credible, yet it is nevertheless true, that there were dozens of men, or rather fiends, among the crowd who gathered around the poor children and cried out, ‘murder the d — d monkeys,’ ‘Wring the necks of the d — d Lincolnites,’ &c. Had it not been for the courageous conduct of the parties mentioned, there is little doubt that many, and perhaps all of those helpless children, would have been murdered in cold blood.” The author of this piece expressed a belief in the universal applicability of the traits and protections of childhood and assumed his readers would agree that anyone who did not extend such characterizations and protections to all children was a “fiend” rather than a man.

The New York Times piece—and the version of the children’s escape it recounted—juxtaposed two groups of white New Yorkers—those who upheld the children’s status as children and those who denied it. In other accounts of the children’s escape, however, the two ideas were described as co-existing even within the mob itself. The accounts of the event penned by those running the institution each relate in quick succession the vicious violation of the rights of childhood represented by the destruction of the asylum and the simultaneous protected status of the children represented by their escape. In multiple accounts from the year immediately following the riot, the managers depicted the mob as unrestrained, threatening, and insensitive to the children’s protected status, but simultaneously noted that the children were “permitted” to escape “unmolested.” Managers initially offered no theories for this disjuncture, but in later accounts managers attributed the children’s escape to God’s intervention and, in one case, the mob’s own recognition of the rights due to the children as children. In a dramatic recounting of the event three decades after it occurred, in the institution’s 1896 annual report, managers described a mob “thirsting for their [the children’s] very lives,” who ransacked the house and “heap[ed] horrible abuse upon the helpless inmates.” Then, however, as the children processed out the door and into the mob, “the sight of a helplessness so absolute stirred in the hearts of the rioters a feeling akin to pity, cursing was turned to blessing. And then a hush fell over the crowd, the seething mass fell back upon itself, and a passage was opened for the children.” In this later account the children’s escape and the mob’s mercy were explicitly attributed to the orphans’ status as helpless and defenseless children, a fact recognized even by the least likely group of white New Yorkers.

4. “The Asylum for Colored Orphans, on Fifth Avenue, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets,” wood engraving in Seventh annual report of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (New York, 1843). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Analyzing this event from the perspective of age studies suggests that African American children occupied something of a liminal status in white New Yorkers’ perceptions of them as children. The asylum residents’ status as orphaned children protected their bodies but not their home during the riots. The burning of the institution provoked national outrage and led to an influx of donations, but the asylum was not able to rebuild on its previous site and there was no consideration—at least that I have seen—of admitting these children who had lost their home into those institutions serving white children. It is also clear that while the children were safe and many adults worked to ensure this, they were not spared from taunts, threats, and physical intimidation during the riots, even after escaping to the station house. That these African American children naturally possessed the dependence and helplessness assumed to belong to children was not challenged during this episode, but while this prevented their physical harm, it did not insulate them from the racism and violence of the riots.

Institutions for children

The children’s escape through the mob is evocative, but it was clearly an atypical event and the mob cannot be taken as representative of white New Yorkers as a whole. When the status of the Colored Orphan Asylum and its residents are considered more broadly from the angle of perceptions of childhood, however, it becomes clear that the characterization of these children as existing in a liminal space regarding understandings of childhood was not limited to this one, clearly unusual, event, but rather part of a larger pattern regarding white New Yorkers’ conceptions of the rights, traits, and proper treatment of the children who came into the care of the Colored Orphan Asylum. As was seen during the riots itself, white New Yorkers were not a homogenous group but, taken as a whole, policies regarding African American children in nineteenth-century New York City suggest a widespread belief that these children possessed the traits of childhood and yet were not entitled to the full range of protections afforded to white children based on their age.

5. “Colored Orphan Asylum,” black and white lithograph (Snyder & Black, ca.1850). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The perception that African American children both possessed the traits believed to be inherent to children and yet were not entitled to the same protected childhood as white children is apparent in the very founding of the Colored Orphan Asylum itself. The institution was founded in 1836 by a group of Quaker women who were disturbed by the fact that African American children who ended up in the city’s care were housed, not with other children in the institutions for children on Long Island Farms (or later Randall’s Island), but rather “retained with the adults in the crowded buildings at Bellevue” and “in care of a half-deranged man.” These women believed the city was not treating African American children in accordance with the rights and needs of childhood, rights and needs these founding women believed the children inherently possessed due to their age. Given that Long Island Farms housed white children who were poor and primarily the children of immigrants, it is clear that race rather than class or family background was the distinguishing factor between those children who were admitted and those who were excluded from the city’s institutions.

6. Account of the children’s escape by the Colored Orphan Asylum Board of Managers, July 25, 1863. Minutes of Board Meetings, Vol 3, July 25, 1863, records of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, 1836-1972, New-York Historical Society.

Throughout their annual reports, pleas for funds, and public presentation of their charges, managers consistently emphasized the residents’ status as children and highlighted the malleability, dependence, and helplessness commonly discussed in nineteenth-century culture as inherent traits of childhood. Managers of the Colored Orphan Asylum explained in their first annual report, which served as both justification for the institution’s founding and plea for financial support, “When it is remembered that three asylums for white children are liberally supported in this city and that there still remained a class excluded from a share in their benefits, with souls to be saved, minds to be improved, and characters to be trained to virtue and usefulness, can any for a moment doubt the necessity for establishing such an institution.”  The managers’ emphasis on the potential for training that all children were presumed to possess suggests that they assumed African American children possessed the same malleability or plasticity that was emphasized as an inherent trait of childhood more broadly in the period. The assumed malleability of childhood made it essential that children be placed in environments designed to educate them and shape their character. Managers similarly emphasized the children’s dependence at every turn, consistently evoking the children’s status as orphans and complete reliance on the aid of the institution and its benefactors. In these ways they highlighted the traits associated in nineteenth-century New York with childhood, seeking aid for their institution on the grounds that African American children’s status as children entitled them to the years of provision, education, and nurturing the institution aimed to provide, elements recognized in the period as inherent rights of childhood.

City leaders did not refute the Colored Orphan Asylum managers’ claims and in fact helped fund the institution and publicly endorsed the work the Colored Orphan Asylum did, but they were unwilling to take action themselves, exemplifying the uneven treatment of African American children in nineteenth-century New York City. The Commissioner of the Almshouse, for example, wrote in his 1849 annual report that the institution “cannot fall short of eliciting the unqualified approval of every friend to human sympathy.” While the city was unwilling to integrate the children’s branch of the almshouse to include African American children or to create a separate child-care facility for these children itself, it was supportive of the work the managers of the Colored Orphan Asylum did to serve the children in their own institution. In other words, while city leaders accepted African American children’s status as children, they were unwilling to do the work required to ensure that these children were the recipients of the care they articulated as appropriate for other children. Similarly, at a Board of Aldermen meeting held two weeks after the asylum was destroyed, Alderman Ottiwell moved for the city to allot $50,000 toward the reconstruction of the Colored Orphan Asylum by specifically evoking the dependence and innocence associated in nineteenth-century America with childhood. He argued that the burning of the asylum made the children dependent on the city, “a trust which, from the helplessness and utter destitution of these unfortunates thus suddenly deprived of shelter, food and raiment, should be at once accepted.” Their “total dependence” and the “undeserved, yet bitter and unrelenting persecution” they had experienced, he continued, entitled them to “the sympathies and commiseration” of the city as well as “of all right minded and enlightened men.” The city did eventually compensate the association $70,000—part of $1.5 million it paid in damage claims from the riot—although it prevented the institution from rebuilding on its prime location on Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, pushing it to relocate farther up the island. City officials did not dispute—and at times articulated—the age-related needs and claims of African American children, but did not prioritize these claims, privileging the needs of white children and other financial concerns.

7. Depiction of the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum, Illustrated London News, August 15, 1863. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, the New York Public Library. “The riots in New York: destruction of the Coloured Orphan Asylum.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 19, 2017.

African American children’s liminal or provisional classification as children is also apparent in the city’s bifurcated approach to the question of whether to classify African American children as children within their own increasingly age-stratified institutional systems. While African American children were not permitted in the children’s branch of the Almshouse (Long Island Farms and Randall’s Island) through at least the 1870s, they were admitted during these years to the city’s institutions for children who had committed crimes or were believed to have delinquent tendencies (the House of Refuge and the Juvenile Asylum). In housing African American children in these institutions for delinquent children, city leaders revealed their assumption that children of all races were inherently malleable and so needed to be housed apart from adult criminals to foster rehabilitation. However, in only including African American children with white children in those city-run institutions that housed delinquent children rather than those admitted without such a designation, they categorized African American children as not entitled to the full protections of childhood offered to white children. City leaders did not explain their reasons for different policies regarding racial integration at the city institutions serving children, but one characteristic frequently attributed to children in this period that may have been a factor is the presumption of innocence. Children in delinquency institutions were presumed to be lacking this supposedly natural sense of childhood innocence (akin to what we might call naiveté). In addition to those children admitted as a consequence for committing a crime, many children found themselves in these institutions due to a label of being “incorrigible” or a presumed corruption due to time on the streets or in other environments thought corrosive to childhood innocence. Leaders did not articulate a connection between this loss of innocence and race, but as that was a major factor differentiating white children in the two institutions, this may be one characteristic of childhood that city officials did not assume occurred evenly across racial lines.

City policy and the actions of the mob that looted and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum do not align neatly or offer a consistent pattern, but they do reveal that white New Yorkers recognized African American children as possessing many of the traits and rights of white children due to their age, but that this fact did not serve to ensure the children’s protection or public support. Looking at this well-known event through the lens of age studies adds a layer of nuance to our discussion. Age studies asks us to consider the way a society’s understandings and assumptions about age and stages of life affected life for people within that society. An examination of the treatment of children who lived at the Colored Orphan Asylum in nineteenth-century New York City reminds us that the interplay between age and race (or other facets of identity) is complex. Not only have conceptions of age and the traits believed inherent to various stages of life varied by time and place, but even within a given time and place they have often not been evenly applied to all people of a designated age. This presents challenges for an academic working to uncover and articulate boundaries or definitions for age-related stages of life, but while they were not always consistent, historical actors’ understandings of age and its related traits and needs had real, tangible effects on the treatment and lived experience of children. In the case of the children living at the Colored Orphan Asylum on July 13, 1863, these ideas about age just may have saved their lives.

Further reading:

Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans Manuscript Collection at the New-York Historical Society. Many of these records have been digitized and are freely accessible online.

T[homas] H[enry] Barnes, “My Experience as an Inmate of the Colored Orphan Asylum.” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago, 2003).

William Seraile, Angels of Mercy: White Women and the History of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum (New York, 2011).

Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York, 2005)

Sarah Mulhall Adelman is an assistant professor of history at Framingham State University. She has published on the political culture of American Catholic women religious and is currently working on a project about nineteenth-century orphan asylums and conceptions of childhood.



What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Age in Early America? http://common-place.org/book/what-do-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-age-in-early-america/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 12:22:22 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=7639 Was age in early America an objective measure of years, an individual's self-understanding, or a status imposed by a public official?

The post What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Age in Early America? appeared first on Common-place.

Historians of early America often talk about age, especially when measuring an individual’s maturity or defining a demographic group. But what does chronological age refer to in an environment where many people did not know their birth dates? When early Americans recorded age, was this an objective measure of years since birth, an individual’s self-understanding, or a status imposed by a public official? The answer to these questions can tell us much about how people employ abstract social categories—not just chronological age, but also race, gender, and nationality—to determine who has access to particular rights and opportunities as well as who does not.

At the time of the American Revolution, many Americans did not know their birthdays. They left school, started work, and got married at widely varying ages. Death struck young and old alike. The pious measured their days not by secular time but by progress toward eternal salvation. Chronological age, in short, had little significance in people’s daily lives. The law, however, demanded precise knowledge of age. From the beginning of European settlement, people had to meet age qualifications to testify in court, be held liable for a crime, sign a contract, will property, marry, and, if white and male, pay a poll tax, serve in the military, vote, and run for political office. Laws and regulations spoke in terms of precise ages—sixteen years to pay a poll tax, twenty-one years to vote, forty-five years to end militia service, for example. But what did those numbers mean in a culture where many people did not know their birthdays? What exactly were public officials measuring when they demanded proof of age?

1. Inscription page, “to Lucy Bacon from her father Leonard Bacon,” in Sunday Hymns, published by S. Colman (Boston, 1846). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Evidence from court cases, diaries, letters, and family records suggest that many people in early America did know their exact date of birth. These individuals often owned a family register they could use to prove age, thus turning age itself into a kind of property owned by some but unavailable to others. Those without a recorded birthday could sometimes offer an approximation based on family stories that associated their birth with a memorable event. Still others had no knowledge at all of when they were born. In these latter two cases, officials charged with administering age qualifications had to determine chronological age based on shared knowledge of historical events or physical signs of maturity. For these people, documents stating age record a negotiation between citizens and the state: individuals offered personal testimony and public officials imposed a precise age. These official assessments appear as chronological age in written records, but in fact have little to do with age in the modern sense of stating an exact birth date. Nor do they reflect people’s use of age as a measure of self-understanding. For some, age was a form of property secured by ownership of a family record. For others, it was a negotiation with the state. In either case, age functioned as a boundary to citizenship with which citizens had to contend.

Most people in early America recognized chronological age as an arbitrary boundary to citizenship rights. As John Adams mused in May 1776, “What Reason Should there be, for excluding a Man of Twenty years, Eleven Months and twenty-seven days old, from a Vote when you admit one, who is twenty one?” The reason was obvious to most people—age qualifications were necessary because young children lacked the capacity to exercise rights and perform duties. Believing that age restrictions were necessary, the nation’s founders retained age qualifications inherited from English common law and embedded new ones in American law. What they did not do was create a reliable system for registering births and documenting age. In the colonial period, some legislatures required ministers or town clerks to register births, recognizing that these records were essential for probate cases, but compliance and enforcement remained spotty at best. Massachusetts led the way over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in creating the first modern bureaucracy for recording vital statistics. By steadily raising fines on town clerks who failed to report births and deaths, and increasing fees paid to those who did, Massachusetts developed the most reliable birth registry in the new nation. Even there, however, infants born in rural areas and large cities often escaped the notice of any public official.

The most common technology for recording birth dates in early America was a private one: notations in the family Bible. This tradition, imported from England, was quite widespread because courts accepted birth records in family Bibles as evidence for probate. Historians Shane Landrum and Susan Pearson have found that some families with even small amounts of property kept such records, but many transient and impoverished people did not. As a result, having a family record was a mark of class privilege. The ability to document and prove age, like many other markers of identity such as whiteness or citizenship, was a sort of property, accrued by some, denied to others. Those able to purchase and maintain a private, family register could easily meet age qualifications in law. The poor, the transient, and the illiterate could not.

2. Engraving by Peter Maverick from artwork by Henry Williams, family register for the family of Mr. Daniel Lamb, of South Hadley, Mass., to the year 1799 (Newark, N.J., ca. 1809). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Indeed, by the early nineteenth century, publishers marketed increasingly ornate and costly Bibles and family records. As historians Georgia Brady Barnhill, Peter Benes, and François Weil have documented, many families aspiring to respectable, middle-class standing displayed illustrated genealogies in their homes. Girls attending female academies learned to paint or stitch handmade family records that could be displayed as markers of family unity and refinement. Engravers marketed family records illustrated with Republican and Christian symbols. Engraver Pater Maverick, for example, presented the allegorical figures of Charity with an infant and cornucopia, Hope holding an anchor and pointing to heaven, and a bird feeding its young beneath the sun’s rays. Most of these surviving records show evidence of having been framed for display. By the 1830s, lithographers such as Nathaniel Currier and James Baillie pictured idealized bourgeois families celebrating births, consummating marriages, and mourning deaths. These ostentatious prints, paintings, and embroideries increasingly linked family record keeping with financial success.

In a further display of prosperity, some families began celebrating children’s birthdays. In 1803, a Boston printer marketed the first American edition of British author Elizabeth Somerville’s small volume, A Birth Day Present, or, a New Year’s Gift . . . For the Use of Young Persons, from Ten to Fifteen Years of Age. At a time when children’s birthday celebrations were still a novelty, this book offered a sort of how-to guide for organizing an event that would balance “a little entertainment of cakes and fruit” with moral lessons on self improvement. By the 1830s, giving books to children on their birthdays was a common practice recorded in loving inscriptions such as “To my dear daughter Lucy Bacon, a birthday present for her sixth birthday.” Receiving birthday presents underlined age itself as a form of property to be treasured. For privileged children such as Lucy, counting birthdays became central to their self-understanding as American citizens. The historian Jon Grinspan found that many white, middle-class youth in antebellum America used their diaries and letters to track their yearly progress toward age twenty-one when they would become adults and, if white and male, cast their first vote.

Beyond age twenty-one, however, most people did not celebrate their birthdays, as historian Howard Chudacoff has found. The main exception was family gatherings when an elder relative reached the biblical milestone of three score and ten. A person living to 100 might receive a special sermon in church and notice in the local paper. Most middle-aged adults, however, did not celebrate their birthdays until late in the nineteenth century when manufacturers of commercial greeting cards began to promote the practice. Many did, however, quietly remark upon the date in diaries or letters. These people, generally from educated, propertied families, displayed a high degree of age consciousness. This did not mean, however, that they could reliably produce written proof of age.

3. Hand-colored lithograph, family register for the Bugbee family of Worcester, Mass., with “Family names – Born when and where – Married when where and by whom – Died when and where,” published by N. Currier (New York, ca. 1850). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Children’s birthday parties and ornate Bibles were effective displays of bourgeois respectability, but they were not reliable means of documenting age. Fires, floods, and carelessness could easily destroy family records along with other forms of property. Young adults who moved West might leave their birth records with parents many states away. As a result, even literate and propertied Americans often found themselves in middle or old age without any proof of their birthdays. To guard against such loss, some families purchased Bibles for each of their children, filling the family record pages and leaving space for the next generation. The American Tract Society, founded in 1825, released relatively inexpensive Bibles with printed family record pages. These mass-produced registers enabled more family members to retain copies, but private registers always remained vulnerable to loss. While it is impossible to quantify what percentage of American families maintained a Bible record or other private registry of births, enough of these documents survive that we can safely assume that many—though by no means all—propertied Americans from stable families possessed some written record of their age by the 1830s.

Detailed birth records also existed for those who were themselves property. Slave owners diligently wrote down the births and deaths of enslaved people because age was an important factor in establishing the monetary value of chattel property. Some slave owners employed Bibles for this purpose, as when Floyd County, Virginia, resident Gabe Wells recorded “Births of my Black Folks” in one section of a family record and his white relatives in another. Mary Ragland Stamps Rice, plantation mistress of The Oaks in Charlotte County, Virginia, used a recipe book to record the ages of enslaved people. She wrote precise birth years for most, but also noted when age was an approximation: “Old Sam about 68 . . . John aged 14 when purchased.” The last entry hints at the uncertainty of age in a market where slave traders had incentives to lie about chronological age in order to inflate prices. As historians Marie Jenkins Schwartz and Wilma King have documented, slaves received the highest valuations in their late teens and twenties. If John was a large child, a slave trader may have passed him off as older than he was. The ages recorded in plantation account books thus reflect the self-interest of those who sold and owned slaves, not the self-understanding of enslaved people themselves.

Indeed, slave owners generally kept the capacity to record age—both written records and literacy skills—from enslaved people. When representatives of the Works Progress Administration interviewed former slaves in the 1930s, many reported that they did not know their date of birth. Fugitive slave Frederick Douglass first raised this issue in his 1845 Narrative, asserting that slave owners desired slaves should “know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs.” Douglass explained that preventing this self-knowledge was part of a larger effort to dehumanize enslaved people. As a free man, Douglass chose February 14 as his birthday because his mother had called him her “valentine.” In 1888, when he was old and famous, admirers organized a gala celebration for his seventy-first birthday. He reminded them that, properly speaking, he “never had a birthday . . . Birthdays belong to free institutions.” With deep insight, Douglass pointed out that chronological age in nineteenth-century America functioned primarily as a measure of citizenship status, a qualification possessed by some but denied to others. By inventing a birthday, Douglass solidified his identity as a free man but learned nothing of his own birth.

4. Sample page from a church register featuring the families of Merrill, Leach, Messure and Oaks. From the Jonathan Fisher Papers, 1791-1826, mss. boxes F (box 1 folder 2), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester Massachusetts.

In contrast to Douglass, some fugitive slaves knew their date of birth. Harriet Jacobs, for example, had access to literacy and a close-knit family, both of which facilitated knowledge of her age. She organized her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl around particular birthdays. After the Civil War, freed people dedicated themselves to reuniting family members and, as part of that effort, began to keep their own records of births and deaths. Printers capitalized on this new market by releasing family records with illustrations of black families. Like Douglass, the families who purchased these records laid claim to birth dates as a mark of freedom.

In sum, births were most likely to be written down if they occurred in families with property or in those owned as property. What of the large population of poor and working-class people in between? Historian James Schmidt has demonstrated that well into the early twentieth century, many poor, working-class, and rural Americans of all races and ethnicities did not know or could not prove how old they were. How then did people meet the numerous age qualifications they faced in law? Records of military service, marriages, and elections offer evidence that for people without birth records, chronological age was not so much a knowable fact as it was a matter of negotiation with authority. People testified to their ages, but public officials also assessed their appearance to determine if the testimony seemed credible. Those with no written proof of age remained particularly vulnerable to having an age assigned to them by someone else.

For those who did not own a record of their age, negotiating age with the state became an established tradition during the colonial period. Tax assessors, militia captains, court officials, and ministers marrying young couples, among other public officials, all had to determine a person’s age in order to carry out their responsibilities. In cases where a person did not know or could not prove age, public officials balanced personal testimony with their own judgment. In her carefully researched study of boy soldiers during the American Revolution, Caroline Cox documented that recruiters directed to enlist boys over sixteen often accepted “stout” lads of fourteen or fifteen. Size and capacity mattered more than proof of age. With regards to child marriage, Nicholas Syrett found that young people often traveled to counties where nobody knew them and successfully convinced a minister they were of age. Once a marriage was consummated, courts rarely invalidated the bond even if a parent or guardian produced proof that a child was underage. As part of his study of elections in early America, political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel demonstrated that young men provided sworn testimony as to their age but could be challenged by election officials and bystanders. In contested cases with no written proof of age, judges sought witnesses who could name well-known events that occurred around the time of a person’s birth. Officials also looked to physical evidence of maturity, most often the growth or lack of a beard. Based on scattered evidence, Bensel estimated that overall roughly ten percent of voters did not know their own age, though in some areas such as rural Kentucky far more lacked this knowledge.

5. Mary Ragland Stamps Rice, receipt book, 1848, accession No. 15794, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

What these histories reveal is that state and federal governments created age qualifications for citizenship long before all citizens knew or could prove their ages. As a result, public officials developed elaborate mechanisms for investigating and, if necessary, inventing ages. Individuals offered their own testimony, but the ultimate power to determine age remained with officials administering the rights and obligations of citizenship. As with gender, race, and other categories of citizenship, age was subject to visible scrutiny by the state. Personal claims could be either validated or delegitimated by those in power.

The administration of Revolutionary War pensions offers a particularly vivid illustration of how public officials scrambled to determine age before any standardized identity documents existed. In 1832, Congress granted pensions to all surviving veterans without regard to need or disability. The Pension Bureau in Washington directed local courts to process applications, printing a standard form with questions to be answered under oath by the applicant and two character witnesses. As part of a general effort to combat fraud, the pension bureau showed a remarkable interest in both determining applicants’ ages and whether or not they had written proof of age. Directing court officials that “the age of the claimant must invariably be mentioned,” the Bureau demanded that court officials ask “Where and in what year were you born?” and “Have you any record of your age? and, if so, where is it?” This curiosity about written records is remarkable, for it appears as an effort to test whether or not age claims could be documented and if so, how. The results showed that many people could state an age but had no written documentation to prove it.

Payment of a pension was based on service, not age, but these records nonetheless reveal in remarkable detail how people tracked their own ages in early America. Historian Caroline Cox productively used these records to document the youth of boy soldiers, but pension records open a much broader window on understandings of age. A statistical sampling of these records could reveal the extent of age consciousness for a large sample of older men in the 1830s. What interests me here is not quantification, but the ways in which individuals testified to their age and how they knew it. Interestingly, many admitted that they only knew what family members had told them. For example, Abraham Aarons, applying in Adair County, Kentucky, told the court that he was “born in Lancaster County state of Pennsylvania on the 17th of March 1759 agreeable to the information of his parents which he believes to be true and correct[,] he never having heard speak of any other.” Other individuals came from towns in New England that had kept some record of births and pointed to this official document as proof of age. For example, Nathan Abbot told the Middlesex County Court he “supposes that his birth is recorded in the Town Records” of Andover.

People who knew the month and year of their birth often claimed to have gained that knowledge from the record in a family Bible, though in many cases the Bible itself had been lost. Thus, Paul Findley, testifying in Abbeville, South Carolina, reported that he was born in January 1762 and “has no doubt relative to it from the fact of his having seen the record of his age in his father’s family Bible at the age of sixteen or seventeen years, which Bible is now lost or otherwise destroyed.” His older brother, John Finley, also a veteran, provided a more detailed account of how the Bible had been lost. He told the same court that “he has not the original record of his age, that it was burned by the Tories during the Revolutionary War.” Also testifying in Abbeville, David Pressly reported that “he was born in the city of Glasgow in Scotland on the 13th of January one thousand seven hundred sixty four and brought from there to America when he was an infant in the nurse’s arms.” Pressly clarified that “the record of his age was in a Bible belonging to his cousin David Pressly who is dead.” He did not know what had become of the Bible.

Anticipating that many veterans would have no written proof of age, the Pension Bureau designed a specific process through which those with public authority could certify the applicant’s claim as credible. Directions specified that the applicant supply “two respectable persons—one of whom should be the nearest clergyman, if one lives in the immediate vicinity of such applicant, who can testify, from their acquaintance with him, that they believe he is of the age he represents, and that he is reputed and believed in the neighborhood to have been a Revolutionary soldier.” The pre-printed form provided for this purpose read, “we believe him to be [blank] years of age.” The witnesses thus had to specify a chronological age. They could not simply say he was old, though some qualified their answer by saying they believed the applicant to be “about” his stated age. The clerk of the court also had to certify the applicant’s age. Three people thus had the authority to accept or reject a veteran’s personal testimony as to his age.

Relying on witnesses and court officials ensured that an applicant appeared to be roughly the age he claimed, but could not wipe out all fraud. What it did accomplish was to create a process for categorizing citizens by age before the development of birth registration. This system enabled people to testify as to their own self-understanding of age, but also empowered “respectable persons,” particularly clergy and court officials, to accept or reject that testimony and, if needed, assign a credible age to someone who did not provide one. In processing claims, the Pension Bureau generally accepted whatever age had been entered by the district court. These documents thus reveal in detail how age was a negotiation, a balancing of personal testimony with public authority.

Today, we assume that most Americans have a birth certificate stating their true age. We recognize that people might lie about their age or even obtain a fake identification card, but we suppose that beneath these falsehoods there exists a reliable record. It is worth remembering, however, that age-based qualifications for citizenship preceded and in no way depended upon documentation of age. This should give us pause when we think about the “truth” of other identity categories such as sex, nationality, or race. Just as people lacked written proof of age in early America, they also lacked proof of race or sex. Many people assumed these categories were obvious, easy to read on people’s bodies, and essential to daily life in ways that age was not. But we know some people chose to “pass” as something they were not, while others did not fit neatly into one race or sex category. These people might find a race or sex assigned to them in much the same way that officials assigned age. Age appeared to people in early America as the most arbitrary qualification for citizenship, but that very recognition reveals the arbitrariness behind other categories as well.


I would like to thank Anna Mae Duane and Nicholas Syrett for their insightful comments on this essay. I am also grateful to Jaclyn Penny at the American Antiquarian Society and the staff of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia for help locating exemplary copies of early family records.

Further Reading:

Peter Benes, “Decorated New England Family Registers, 1770-1850,” In The Art of the Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England, eds. D. Brenton Simons and Peter Benes (Boston, 2002): 15-59.

Georgia Brady Barnhill, “’Keep Sacred the Memory of Your Ancestors’: Family Registers and Memorial Prints,” in The Art of the Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England, eds. D. Brenton Simons and Peter Benes (Boston, 2002): 60-74.

Richard Franklin Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York, 2004).

Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1989).

Caroline Cox, Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).

Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).

Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106:8 (June 1993): 1710-91.

Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed (1995; Bloomington, Ind., 2011)

Shane Landrum, “From Family Bibles to Birth Certificates: Young People, Proof of Age, and American Political Cultures,” in Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present, edited by Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett (New York, 2015), 124-47.

Susan J. Pearson, “‘Age Ought to Be a Fact’: The Campaign Against Child Labor and the Rise of the Birth Certificate,” Journal of American History (March 2015): 1144-65.

James D. Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (New York, 2010).

Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

Nicholas L. Syrett, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).

François Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2013).

Corinne Field is an assistant professor in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America and co-editor with Nicholas Syrett of Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present.



Early National Bro Culture in Daniel Parker’s War Department http://common-place.org/book/early-national-bro-culture-in-daniel-parkers-war-department/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 12:22:22 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=7744 Participation in a privileged culture of masculinity was an important part of achieving and maintaining political power.

The post Early National Bro Culture in Daniel Parker’s War Department appeared first on Common-place.


I’m not trained as a gender historian. I take for granted the fact that gender has always been a cultural construct and that it has influenced the behaviors of people in the past; I tend not to think too much about it otherwise. But when I started looking for information on early nineteenth-century army supplies in the papers of a United States War Department official at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I found, interwoven in the correspondence about politics and conflict, references to binge drinking with male friends and hooking up with young women. Why was this the case, in a collection that included letters from senior army officers and four secretaries of war?

1. War Department, Southwest Executive Building, 1816-1819. Courtesy of Office of the Historian, history.state.gov, accessed January 11, 2017.

Daniel Parker (1782-1846), the son of an Army lieutenant and a descendant of one of the largest original landholders in Shirley, Massachusetts, became a clerk in the office of the War Department in 1810 (fig. 1). He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1801 and practiced law in the Boston area before moving to Washington. He was twenty-eight at the time, well into adulthood by historical standards. And certainly, Parker’s office in the War Department became a hub of very adult decision-making among generals, army contractors, and secretaries of war and state—decisions that determined national security. Parker was responsible for managing correspondence related to military legislation, and to army provisions, movements, and promotions. But in addition to the letters from high-ranking federal officials, Parker received a fair amount of correspondence from young, unmarried men whose inside jokes, social activities, and sexual exploits made me think of today’s bros—or at least something similar to the culture of “fratty masculinity” that is common among (usually) young, privileged, white men. They wove their homosociality and chauvinistic bragging so seamlessly into their discussions of financial matters, state and federal politics, and military service that it might have been easy to miss, were it not for the lack of polite euphemisms that I had assumed camouflaged most nineteenth-century misdeeds.

Participation in this privileged culture of masculinity was an important part of achieving and maintaining political power. As soon as Parker moved to Washington, his youngest brother and many of their friends began asking for favors. This in and of itself was not unusual. Patronage has existed in various guises throughout history, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it served, to quote historian Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, as the “social glue” of society. The communication among Parker’s cohort, however, suggests that insults, bragging, and lewd comments about women were what made this glue stick.

Daniel Parker’s younger brother Leonard was twenty-one when Daniel started his tenure in the War Department. Recently graduated from Dartmouth, Leonard took over Daniel’s law office in Charlestown. The first time we hear from Leonard is in June 1811, on a day that, according to Leonard, was so hot and humid, he couldn’t be bothered to write too much. He was cool enough, however, to accuse Daniel of not doing enough to drum up clients for him. The law office suffered, he said, because Daniel had left abruptly without advertising on his behalf. Also, Leonard needed money, and because Daniel was doing well, he should give his younger brother some. He complained to Daniel about his dire circumstances, even as he went out fishing and drinking and looking for girls. In one letter, we meet Leonard’s roommate, D.W. (Daniel Waldo) Lincoln, who had been “drunk nearly all week” while two of his siblings were in town. Lincoln was from a prominent Massachusetts family. His father, Levi, was a well-known judge with close ties to Thomas Jefferson, and his brother Levi Jr. would later serve as governor of the state. D.W., like Leonard, expected his family and friends to help him overcome professional difficulties. He worked in the same office as Leonard, and assumed his father’s status gave him license to continue his roguish ways. D.W.’s bad habits were, according to Leonard, another reason the law office wasn’t doing well. About D.W.’s drinking Leonard wrote: “Sunday while we were gone to meeting I think he began—drank on our passage home. This afternoon came over with intoxication. Tomorrow I expect he will be quite drunk.” Leonard claimed to his brother that, “seeing Lincoln trifling about the office frightened [clients] and carried them off.”

2. Leonard M. Parker to Daniel Parker, December 18, 1815, Daniel Parker papers (Collection 466), Historical Society of Pennsylvania. After complaining about the privileged treatment given to “a particular friend of Mr. Crawford Sec of War,” Leonard drew a frowny face in this letter to his brother, Daniel. Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

As Leonard and D.W. made clear in their letters, both men felt entitled to their jobs and to assistance from family and friends. D.W. wrote to Daniel for help with a client, and insisted that he “attend to this immediately!” Leonard, meanwhile, pestered Daniel into helping him get reappointed as army judge advocate (a position for which Leonard thought he had enough “leisure” time). Leonard actually drew a frowny face because there was another candidate who had more influence with the Secretary of War than he (fig. 2).

This sense of entitlement extended to their relations with young women. D.W. was “making love to Miss Freeman,” but that didn’t stop him from “playing off his gallantry to” other women after a few drinks. This “gallantry” usually came out after Leonard decided he had no interest in pursuing the woman. One Sunday in July 1811, for example, a group of their friends was sailing home from a weekend in Hingham, and Leonard boasted that the daughter of a wealthy merchant was staring at him, but conceded that his alleged admirer may have been mistaking him for Daniel; at that point he left her to be preyed upon by a very drunk D.W. He wrote, “she again had her eyes fixed on me. I had like to have been vain enough to think her in love with me but on the whole I think it must have been you she had in view. I left it to Lincoln to play off his gallantry to and about her which he did up in great style under the excitement of 2 or 3 glasses.” Leonard was starting to think about marriage, and he wrote to Daniel that if any happiness was to be found in life, it was in a wife, and he “trust[ed] in God I shall find an inexhaustible stock of this life’s blessings.” He eventually contented himself with just one wife, when he married D.W.’s sister, Martha; his earlier determination to “find her in loose robes,” fulfilled.

“Rape culture” describes a society in which nonconsensual sexual acts are so common, so normalized, that people are desensitized to them. Although coined by feminists in the late twentieth century, the term is useful for understanding Daniel Parker’s early nineteenth-century social milieu and how the men in it understood their place in society. His letters contain frequent references to forced sexual acts, cheating, and the objectification of women. These references ranged from benign-seeming scenes of domesticity to more overt harassment. One Army contractor wrote to Parker that, “it may be at this time to let you into the secret—well then you know Mrs. B was so gratified on learning of the passage of a certain bill—that on about that time she concluded to become a mother.” He was basically saying, “my wife was so happy with the money I’ll get from Congress’s recent appropriations bill that she was eager for me to get her pregnant.”

3, 4. John R. Bell to Daniel Parker, February 6, 1812, Daniel Parker papers (Collection 466), Historical Society of Pennsylvania. John Bell boasted about attacking the general’s daughter “à la militaire.” Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

A young army captain named John R. Bell, who bragged that women in Washington referred to him as “the handsome Mr. Bell,” was more aggressive. During the winter of 1812, the War Department sent Bell to Pennsylvania to recruit men for the army. He was enchanted by all the “dutch [i.e., German] girls” he saw, but disappointed that recruiting duties kept him from “becoming acquainted” with more of them. One night, he stayed at the home of a general whose fifteen-year-old daughter Bell found quite attractive. Bell bragged to Parker that, “like a solider I attacked her, à la militaire.” He “made approaches regularly to the breast work,” and “impressed a sweet goodnight upon her ruby lips” (figs. 3, 4) It’s unclear whether the general’s young daughter wanted the kiss or the groping. Either way, Bell felt entitled to whatever liberties he could take with her. In a departure from his usual boasts, Bell confided to Parker in one letter that he was “bashful among genteel virtuous and handsome ladies” (women who were his age), and unable to “squeeze a hand or steal a kiss without being almost asked to do so.” But even then Bell saw his biggest obstacle as “almost” having to ask for a kiss.

This culture of chauvinistic entitlement pervaded the War Department and its orbit. Elbert Anderson Jr., an Army contractor from New York, wrote to Parker about his “very handsome circle of female friends…gay as the lark yet chaste as Diana,” whom he wished Parker could “have his choice from”—as if the women were his to give. Anderson subcontracted beef and pork rations during the War of 1812 to a man named Sam Wilson, who some theorize became the namesake for “Uncle Sam.” Whether this is indeed true, I do not know. But judging from Anderson’s letters to Parker, his role as a husband and father did not stop him from working it with the ladies. Or from bragging about it. Anderson boasted to Parker about a fancy carriage he had built in New York and told him that “all the young girls and some young married ladies” wanted to ride in it.

This sort of subject-blending matters for historians because it reveals how the personal, however ignoble, was inextricably bound with these men’s understanding of their professional lives. For example, after telling Parker about the number of soldiers who had died near Buffalo, New York, Anderson wrote, “I am going to have the charge of a pretty woman in my baron’s wagon for five days—at least. Don’t you envy me.” In another letter, he gossiped about their friend’s new wife, speculating about whom she had slept with and whether she was pregnant, and then closed by saying he would be sending his bill for supplies to the War Department and asking Parker if he needed another loan. Parker himself similarly mixed the personal with the professional. In 1819, for example, he secured his friend Lieutenant Colonel E. Cutter a more lucrative post, which enabled Cutter, according to another friend, to “get, with some cash, a very amiable woman.”

5. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Army advancement, however, often proved more challenging than exerting control over women. Bell, for example, was a young second lieutenant in a regiment of light artillery when he asked Parker to recommend him for the post of adjutant or quartermaster general. The best Parker could do in June 1812 was to get him appointed as paymaster to the regiment of light artillery. Bell sent Parker a letter thanking him for the appointment, but said that he planned to decline, owing to the position’s paltry compensation and his desire to devote himself to the company of light artillery in which he served. Bell was promoted to first lieutenant that August, and the following summer his request was granted when the War Department appointed him major and assistant inspector-general on July 29, 1813. After the war, though, he complained to Parker, who had since been made inspector- and adjutant-general of the Army, about the location of his post. For the remainder of the 1810s, Bell served as a captain of light artillery and an instructor at West Point. He grew restless, and wrote to Parker for an appointment in the west. Bell secured a position as interim governor of Florida in the summer of 1821, after the United States acquired the territory from Spain. The following year, however, he was passed over for the position of chief Indian agent in Florida.

By then, Bell was in his thirties and accustomed to getting what he wanted, which was evidenced in a letter he received from Secretary of War John Calhoun (fig. 5). On a separate research trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., I found Bell in a volume of confidential and unofficial letters sent by secretaries of war in the 1810s and 1820s (fig. 6). This letter and others in the volume suggest that for privileged War Department bros, there seemed to be an understanding that rejection be mitigated by compliments and explanation. Calhoun explained President Monroe’s decision by assuring Bell that the decision had nothing to do with qualifications: Bell, he said, was probably superior, but the other man had a large family. That man needed government patronage more than Bell, who already had a lucrative command position. Calhoun closed by reiterating how pleased the department was with Bell. This sensitivity to ego usually only extended to bros within the department. As a contractor, Anderson therefore wasn’t privy to the same fawning. He got angry when he wasn’t paid quickly enough, nor given a satisfactory explanation. Peace with Britain after the War of 1812 had barely been declared when he wrote to Parker that the amount he was owed was “enough to make one’s heart sick” and then said he would “unleash the dogs of war” on Secretary of War James Monroe if the government didn’t pay his balance soon. He snidely joked that once he was paid, he would establish his “Franklin magazine” for the poor. He wasn’t poor, and he didn’t care all that much about people who were. For this reason, I couldn’t help but feel a bit satisfied when I read that in June 1816, Parker learned that Congress hadn’t appropriated sufficient funds for army contractors.

6. Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Confidential and Unofficial Letters Sent. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

I don’t want to conclude with as unsavory a character as Anderson. To be fair, men more sensitive than he also appear in Parker’s letters, men who wrote about their infant sons’ teething and the guilt they felt subjecting their families to military life. But in general, Anderson, Bell, and Leonard Parker were more typical of the men with whom Parker corresponded; the chauvinist camaraderie they shared was, in fact, a big part of patronage. As Parker got older, the juvenile discussions of women abated, but there was a certain consistency among the letters he received at age thirty and age sixty in terms of insults: his colleagues took jabs at “foreigners” and questioned the sexuality of politicians they didn’t like. One man whom Parker stopped hearing from and about shortly after taking up residence in Washington was D.W. Lincoln, who, in an incident not unlike the sad news we sometimes hear about fraternities, drank himself to death. Leonard’s observation that “[D.W.] Lincoln drinks like hell … and always will I fear,” came true in the worst way. “He [D.W.] fell asleep and literally died without a struggle.”

Parker eventually married and had children, and after serving as adjutant and inspector general, returned to his position as chief clerk, which he held until his death in 1846. Over the course of his career in the War Department, Parker received many letters thanking him for various military posts and commissions. These letters suggest what would be lost if we only looked at official military correspondence. Patronage appointments were about more than partisan politics. They were also about bonding through masculine entitlement and the degradation of others, and if we skipped these personal papers, we might miss the fact that there were a bunch of dudes running the War Department.

Further Reading

This essay was based on the Daniel Parker Papers (Collection 466), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Confidential and Unofficial Letters Sent, RG107 Entry 11, Vol. 309, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Domonic A. Bearfield, “What Is Patronage? A Critical Reexamination,” Public Administration Review 69:1 (Jan.-Feb., 2009): 64-76; Brian W. Beltman, “Territorial Commands of the Army: The System Refined but Not Perfected, 1815-1821,” Journal of the Early Republic 11:2 (Summer, 1991): 185-218; Konstantin Dierks, In My Power—Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia, 2011); Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, Conn., 2002); Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters (New Haven, Conn., 1995); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, 2005); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, “’Auctioneer of Offices’: Patronage, Value, and Trust in the Early Republic Marketplace,” Journal of the Early Republic 33:3 (2013): 463-488; Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana, Ill., 1989); Lurton Dunham Ingersoll, A History of the War Department of the United States: With Biographical Sketches of the Secretaries (Washington, D.C., 1879); Albrecht Koschnik, “Young Federalists, Masculinity, and Partisanship during the War of 1812,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, David Waldstreicher, eds. Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004): 159-179; Sarah M. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2008); Steven Watts, Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore, 1987).

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele is assistant professor of history at Miami University, Ohio. She received her PhD from Brown University in 2015 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company in Philadelphia in 2016.


Print Culture and Popular History in the Era of the U.S.-Mexican War http://common-place.org/book/print-culture-and-popular-history-in-the-era-of-the-u-s-mexican-war/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 14:39:12 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=7387 The racial agenda preserved in nineteenth-century print culture resonates with contemporary U.S.-Mexico relations.

The post Print Culture and Popular History in the Era of the U.S.-Mexican War appeared first on Common-place.

1. “A New Rule in Algebra,” lithograph published by E. Jones & G.W. Newman (New York, 1846). Courtesy of the Political Cartoon Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. A New York lithographic firm humorously depicts three Mexican prisoners of war staring in comic disbelief at their amputated limbs. During the Mexican War, the “annexation” and “dismemberment” of Mexican territory by the U.S. was symbolized by images of bodily punishment of Mexican soldiers.

As a Latino scholar who recently completed a year-long postdoctoral fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, I can’t approach researching the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico without being reminded of how the print archive preserves evidence of nineteenth-century racism that resonates with contemporary U.S.-Mexico relations. Consider this statement from Corydon Donnavan’s 1847 book Adventures in Mexico: “The fact need not be concealed, that from their meanest soldier to their best general, [the Mexicans] are a nation of liars and plunderers. There are a few honorable exceptions, it is true, but more modest epithets will not serve truly to portray their general character.” Mid-nineteenth-century American popular culture frequently made such claims, ascribing lawlessness and immorality to the Mexican people. The present essay offers some archival discoveries that show how American publishers played an active role in shaping portrayals of the Mexican War in U.S. print culture, in particular, by censoring the writings of U.S. soldiers before they appeared in the print public sphere. As we will see, some authors and publishers edited manuscripts before publication to remove evidence of illicit activity by the American military. In other cases, print itself was marshaled as evidence of U.S. superiority and Latin American underdevelopment.

While the origins of wide-scale U.S. racism against its southern neighbor can be dated to the Texas Revolution (1835-36), the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48) was better able to mobilize popular print culture due to the newly industrialized book trade and emerging technologies that produced visual culture on a larger scale. The conflict provided the American army with a foreign war that doubled as exotic travel for volunteer soldiers, many of whom strongly identified with their Anglo-Saxon roots. Soldiers spread their assessments of Mexican culture in media formats that ranged from newspapers and printed books to lithographs, daguerreotypes, and moving panoramas.

2. Front wrapper, Legends of Mexico by George Lippard, tenth edition, printed by T.B. Peterson (Philadelphia, 1848). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. The original printed wrappers of Lippard’s novel contain valuable information regarding the widespread distribution of Mexican War fiction and lithographic prints. The bottom portion of the front wrapper documents a publishing network that connected Philadelphia’s T.B. Peterson to booksellers across the nation. On the rear wrapper (not pictured), Peterson advertises that his bookstore sells “all the Lithographic prints issued, colored and uncolored, plates of the late Mexican Battles, and all the caricatures published.”

A remarkable amount of writing produced by the American soldiery documents their experiences. More entrepreneurial souls like Corydon Donnavan (described in more detail below) wrote books, gave public lectures, and charged admissions to panorama exhibitions. In print and manuscript, soldiers made countless racist observations that were inflected by perceptions of Mexican political institutions, society, cuisine, and gender identities. For instance, Robert Armstrong, aid to General Winfield Scott, wrote his sister that the Mexican people are “totally incapable of self government,” blaming Catholicism for ruining their political system. Furthermore, many U.S. soldiers were avidly on the prowl for sex. Complaining of having few responsibilities to occupy his time, since fighting was infrequent, C.B. Ogburn wrote about the “Saltillo girls” who inspired him to engage in as many “tall sprees” as he could manage. Other soldiers were fascinated by vestiges of pre-Columbian history. The Lieutenant John Wolcott Phelps paid Mexican children to gather stone fragments from the pyramid at Cholula: “The latter always occurring in such a shape as to leave no doubt but that they are the broken and worn out knives which were used in the sacrifices.” Military officers such as Phelps recorded their observations in diaries as well as letters, which were often excerpted for publication in American newspapers; Mexican souvenirs sometimes were mailed home with this correspondence as well.

3. Camp Stories: or Incidents in the Life of a Soldier, by George C. Furber (Cincinnati, 1849). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Cheap works such as Furber’s Camp Stories sought to capture the print market for Mexican War soldier narratives begun by Camp Life of a Volunteer. Furber’s publisher sold a number of Mexican War books using the subscription method.

The U.S. invasion was culturally defined by this “scribbling soldiery,” a term used by the New York periodical Yankee Doodle in 1846 to describe the phenomenon of the soldier-turned-amateur author. My research has been illuminated by considering the original editions of soldiers’ narratives from collections held by the American Antiquarian Society and other institutions. In particular, I’ve been drawn to a hitherto unstudied pattern of erasure and omission of detail in published accounts, where the publishers and editors of these soldier-authors seem to deliberately omit the violence of the war. Modern scholars such as Robert Johannsen, Shelley Streeby, and Paul Foos have previously studied these Mexican War narratives, from cheap fiction by George Lippard and Ned Buntline to personal histories such as 1847’s Camp Life of a Volunteer. Novels such as Legends of Mexico (1847) and ’Bel of Prairie Eden (1848) helped justify the war to popular audiences by casting a narrative of Anglo-Saxon superiority over Mexico’s mixed-race population and weak level of state-formation. As ’Bel of Prairie Eden’s John Grywin put it: “Fifty white men of Texas are equivalent to one thousand Mexicans, any day.” Less noticed is the fact that Lippard’s texts themselves located authenticity in manuscript narratives of the Mexican War. ’Bel of Prairie Eden, for instance, drew from a fictional manuscript written by a “Soldier of Monterey.” Authors of fiction used the conceit of the “real” manuscript (even if they were making it up), just as popular accounts came from soldier diaries and letters. But manuscripts from the war didn’t appear in print without careful editing. By implication, it is the mediations between manuscript and print—the transmission from one medium to the other—that revealed the ideological constraints that made some perspectives on the war invisible to the public.

Paul Foos observes in his 2002 study A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair that many published personal narratives from the Mexican War are curiously silent regarding the conflict’s violence. American soldiers largely refrained from considering the moral implications of a military invasion against a poorly organized enemy. That said, my bibliographic analysis of the transmission of manuscript into print clarifies the ideological function of the war’s literature. In at least three instances, archival evidence proves that American publishers carefully edited soldier narratives to omit information that might contradict the war’s nationalist justification. For example, Camp Life of a Volunteer—a widely read history described by the historian Robert Johannsen as a “straight forward journal”—is anything but truthful. The University of Texas, Arlington, possesses the manuscript diaries of the soldier Benjamin Franklin Scribner that formed the source material for Camp Life of a Volunteer. On a recent visit to Arlington, I conducted a line-by-line textual comparison of the manuscript with the printed edition and found numerous divergences. Camp Life’s publisher (Philadelphia’s Grigg, Elliott, & Co.) omitted passages unfavorable to the military. Scribner’s reflections on his moral failings—moments of doubt and confusion regarding the war’s justification—were omitted from the published edition. American readers were never able to read that Scribner felt he was “acting a part in which my own character is not represented,” or that he had “dipped into all the temptations that have come in my way.” This latter statement offers a rare suggestion of the illicit activities of the U.S. military perpetrated upon the Mexican people. At the same time, because of the censorship, American readers never learned that Scribner occasionally wrote about how he abhorred the war, that he felt “alone and desolate in my social relations,” and concluded that in Mexico “the future has nothing in store for me.” Without these crucial statements, the voice of Camp Life of a Volunteer had a more tenuous relation to the manuscript sources than readers were led to believe. Grigg, Elliot, & Co. thus distributed a war narrative that sanitized Scribner’s account in such a way as to minimize political controversy and conceal evidence that U.S. soldiers were not always behaving their best.

When transformed into books, manuscript sources were carefully edited to suit the interests of publishers hungry to satisfy the print market. Consider a second example. In 1849, South Carolina’s H. Judge Moore published a personal history entitled Scott’s Campaign in Mexico, which sought to give greater credit for Southern distinction in the American victories led by Winfield Scott. Although Moore presented himself as writing with a “free and impartial hand, and an unbiased head,” comparison with his manuscript diary (held by Yale’s Beinecke Library) reveals a similar pattern of selective memory. For instance, missing from the printed version is Moore’s desire to “see a Mexican Donna” and “claim the promise made to Abraham that my seed should possess the land.” Moore’s published book therefore focused on the details of battle at the expense of the more complicated sexual factors that shaped his experience of the war. Such examples reveal the rhetorical frames that foregrounded particular experiences over others deemed less favorable or marketable. The project of nineteenth-century American autobiography, which historian Ann Fabian has summarized as the writing of a “plain, unvarnished tale,” proves in the Mexican War histories to be anything but plain or truthful.

4. Front wrapper (left) and marbled cloth binding (right) of Life of Franklin Pierce, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields (Boston, 1852). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. In addition to the standard publisher’s cloth binding (not pictured) and the paper binding pictured above, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields issued an unusual marbled cloth binding. The paper wrapper edition and the marbled cloth version of the Pierce biography are among the rarest items of Hawthorne’s published works.

Consider a third case of doctored narrative: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notorious campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce. Just in time for the 1852 election, Hawthorne aided Pierce’s bid for the presidency by writing a “political biography” whose intimate knowledge of the man derived from a friendship that began when both were students at Bowdoin College. Despite Hawthorne’s claim of impartiality, the author clearly manipulated the facts to represent Pierce as a hero of the Mexican War. In a decisive act of editorial manipulation, Hawthorne reproduced Pierce’s war diary as Chapter IV of the Life of Franklin Pierce. The author framed Pierce’s account by presenting it as authentic documentation: “They are mere hasty jottings-down in camp … but will doubtless bring the reader closer to the man than any narrative which we could substitute.” Hawthorne wished to bring the reader closer, but not too close. In fact, several crucial entries from Pierce’s Mexican diary were deliberately omitted from the biography published by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields.

It is worthwhile to understand Hawthorne’s act of message crafting as a later instance of the framing techniques and editorial strategies used in Camp Life of a Volunteer and Scott’s Campaign in Mexico. One passage Hawthorne chose not to include from Pierce’s camp writings is quite interesting; here Pierce writes for a need for ruthless military prosecution: “War, that actually carries, widespread woe & despoliation to the conquered and tacitly at least, allows pillage & plunder with accompaniments not even to be named during a campaign like this even in a private journal.” Obviously, this statement just wouldn’t do in a contested political campaign. And in a more subtle way, passages of this kind from Pierce’s diary dramatically undermine the ideological coherence of the U.S. invasion by suggesting that the American military allowed and implicitly promoted “pillage & plunder with accompaniments not even to be named.” Like the diaries of H. Judge Moore and B.F. Scribner, Franklin Pierce’s manuscript hints at aspects of the U.S. military invasion that might be described as war crimes. That said, these are only hints—literary expressions of sexuality, plunder, violence, and martial manhood—that cannot be precisely documented. Because Hawthorne’s Life of Franklin Pierce silenced these ambiguities of Pierce’s wartime experiences by leaving them out of the publication altogether, the campaign biography exemplifies the larger effort by American publishers to obscure the war’s history.

5. Broadside, “Soon to close!: Donnavan's grand serial of panorama of Mexico! delineating the scenery, towns, cities, and battle fields ... over three thousand miles in extent. Open every evening, and Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, at Boylston Hall, corner of Washington and Boylston Streets, the largest and most comfortable hall in the city.” (Boston, 1848). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
5. Broadside, “Soon to close!: Donnavan’s grand serial of panorama of Mexico! delineating the scenery, towns, cities, and battle fields … over three thousand miles in extent. Open every evening, and Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, at Boylston Hall, corner of Washington and Boylston Streets, the largest and most comfortable hall in the city.” (Boston, 1848). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

One printer turned public lecturer, Corydon Donnavan, asserted the dominance of American society over Mexico’s underdeveloped institutions by directly contrasting the printing trades—a purported marker of progress—of both nations. At the war’s outset, Donnavan worked as a clerk in the steamboat business, but he later monetized his experiences in Mexico when he became a public showman and exhibitor of moving panoramas in Cincinnati, Boston, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Here we see how sensational reading about the war operated within a broader media environment, as Donnavan used his panorama shows as promotional opportunities to sell Adventures in Mexico. A broadside for performances in Boston summarizes Donnavan’s multi-medial combination of panorama, oratory, and bookselling: “For several months a prisoner during the recent war in that country, will deliver an Explanatory Discourse, relating many incidents of the war, Mexican Life, Manners &c., as the Painting passes before the audience. His ‘Adventures in Mexico,’ a work of 132 pages, including an appendix descriptive of the Panorama, may be had at the Hall.” Among other events, the book made much of his capture in 1846 by a group of Mexican bandits, who sold Donnavan and several other men into slavery.

As recounted in Adventures in Mexico, the captors spared the Americans’ life when Donnavan explained that his fellow prisoners were job printers and not U.S. soldiers. In response, the bandit Poco Llama decided to sell the men as labor in a Mexican printing office. The captives were then taken from Camargo on a long march through Coahuila stretching from Monclova to Parras. From there Donnavan and company were taken farther south to Sombrerete, to Fresnillo, and finally to modern-day Zacatecas (then known as Valladolid). While some parts of the story are undoubtedly fictionalized, even the imaginary aspects of Donnavan’s tale contain their own explanatory power, insofar as Adventures in Mexico offers another index of the various ways U.S. print culture conjured its Mexican enemy as the opposite of democratic modernity. In particular, Donnavan focused on a printing press as the symbol of Mexico’s postcolonial underdevelopment. Here is his description of a decrepit hand press used to print newspapers in Valladolid:

In printing, as well as other arts, mechanics, and agriculture, the Mexican people are at least two centuries behind the age. Their type and presses, like their muskets, are generally the worn out and cast-off material from England. The old Ramage presses were so venerable they could scarcely stand alone, and at each successive revolution of the rounce their shrieks would grate upon the ear, as if exercise was as painful to them as to the Spanish printers who were torturing their old joints.

There’s a bit of irony here: Ramage presses were actually relatively recent, first sold by Adam Ramage from Philadelphia in 1800. But the larger point made by Donnavan contrasts the print modernity of the United States (the nation’s steam presses, stereotyping plants, paper factories, etc.) with the backwardness of a Mexican newspaper still locked in the hand press era. Print technology, in other words, was the vehicle for Donnavan’s racist bias. He was especially insulted that the Mexican printers set type while sitting down: “The cases, instead of being mounted on stands, are spread out on the floor, as the Spaniard, being too lazy to take a perpendicular position, prefers to sit down to set up type; and on a filthy mat, thrown out upon the floor, he sprawls himself at his occupation, where he will sometimes succeed in setting three thousand em’s per day.” Punning on the homonym sit/set, Donnavan draws a seamless connection between backwards print technology and backwards printing practice. Surely a nation that lazily sits down to set type, rather than standing at an orderly type case, doesn’t have the political will to exercise sovereignty. If, as U.S. politicians suggested, Mexico didn’t have a functioning republic, then it stands to reason that part of that dismissal is rooted in values similar to Donnavan’s claim that Mexican printing, “as well as other arts, mechanics, and agriculture,” are obsolete by several centuries.

6. Title page, Adventures in Mexico, by Corydon Donnavan (Cincinnati, 1847). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. The title page has a glaring typographical error, mistakenly listing the year of publication as 1487. Donnavan’s narrative provides a rare glimpse of the working conditions inside a printing office in central Mexico at midcentury.

But Donnavan’s disgust at bad printing turns out to be misplaced. First, we should note that Ramage presses were produced in the United States, and therefore Donnavan ends up chastising Mexican print culture for striving to resemble its northern neighbor. But the Ramage press was not the only irony. Despite his accusation that Mexican printing is riddled with mistakes, the first edition of Adventures of Mexico erroneously lists its year of publication as 1487. The supposedly superior printing abilities of the American press produced the first edition of Adventures of Mexico with a glaring printer’s error right on the title page. In the process of arguing that the printing press itself distinguished between Mexico and the United States, American printers inadvertently left a corpus of badly printed books that contradict the central premise of that argument.

U.S. print culture in the era of the Mexican War demonstrates how the American republic’s first foreign war brought together nationalism and the print market in ways that anticipated the role of modern mass media in shaping public responses to warfare. Both the content of American book publishing (soldier narratives, military histories) and the media formats themselves (the technologies of text production and visual culture) worked in the service of propagandizing a war that, as Amy Greenberg reminds us, did in fact have a vocal minority of critics in the public sphere. That these works of public “history” were, more often than not, either highly selective in their presentation of facts or downright fictitious shouldn’t lead us to overlook the political implications of Mexican War literature. Quite the contrary. As demonstrated here, the Mexican War is an important flashpoint in tracing a longer history of the tactics of a mass press that transformed its source material into fodder for popular reading. The war inspired racist stereotypes about a nation (Mexico) and an ethnic category (Latinos) that remain crucial elements of American hemispheric and transnational cultural politics.

Further Reading

The classic treatment of the U.S.-Mexican War in popular culture is Robert Johannsen’s To the Halls of the Montezeumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York, 1985). Shelley Streeby’s American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley, 2002) offers the best analysis of Mexican War fiction. For a recent history emphasizing popular opposition to the war within the United States, see Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York, 2012).

Robert Armstrong’s Feb. 13, 1848, letter to his sister is from the Mexican War Collection, University of Texas, Arlington, Special Collections. C.B. Ogburn’s December 1847 letter from Saltillo is held by the New-York Historical Society. John Wolcott Phelps’s diaries from the Mexican War are at the New York Public Library, Manuscript and Archives Division. In A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill, 2002), Paul Foos recovers the experience of American soldiers and notes their reticence in writing about military violence. Peter Guardino explores a fascinating comparative study of Mexican and U.S. soldiers in “Gender, Soldiering, and Citizenship in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848,” American Historical Review 119.1 (2014): 23-46.

On the varieties of nineteenth-century American autobiography, see Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, 2000). The full text of the published editions of Camp Life of a Volunteer (1847) and H. Judge Moore’s Scott’s Campaign in Mexico (1849) are available via the Internet Archive. The manuscript diaries of Benjamin Franklin Scribner and H. Judge Moore are available at the University of Texas, Arlington, and Yale University’s Beinecke Library, respectively. Scott E. Casper discusses Hawthorne’s biography of Franklin Pierce in Constructing American Lives: Biography & Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1999). Franklin Pierce’s Mexican War diary (1847) is held at the Huntington Library and is microfilmed as part of the Franklin Pierce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

For a helpful summary of nineteenth-century printing presses I consulted Elizabeth M. Harris, Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth-Century America (2004).

John Garcia is currently lecturer in humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies and a visiting instructor in the English Department of Clark University. He was the 2015-16 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Literature at the American Antiquarian Society, and has held Mellon fellowships at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. His research on book distribution and the print culture of the U.S.-Mexican War is part of a larger project on bookselling in early America.




]]> Recovering Rice http://common-place.org/book/recovering-rice/ Mon, 31 Oct 2016 13:34:17 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=7305 David Shields's book about Southern foodways contains the seeds of many future conversations.

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David Shields, Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 416 pp., $30.

Southern Provisions is a remarkable piece of scholarship from a remarkable scholar. David Shields’s name is well known to readers of Common-Place for his foundational work on early American belles-lettres, not to mention his pivotal role in founding the Society of Early Americanists. This monograph on southern foodways offers a synthesis of these twin passions for archival research and social organization.

Southern Provisions stretches the literal definition of a monograph in the variety of its ambitions. In its larger conceptions, Southern Provisions has more in common with Nature’s Metropolis (1992), William Cronon’s extensive study of the links between Chicago and its rural hinterlands, than it does with foodways scholarship that is focused on a given dish, crop, or region. The book offers three distinct sections, framed around cooking, selling, and planting, each of which could stand alone. The first section, “Cooking in The South,” details several pinnacles of antebellum southern gastronomy—nineteenth-century fine dining in New Orleans restaurants; the Maryland Club Feast; catering in Charleston; and a more detailed account of a single meal, at the Jockey Club Banquet of February 1, 1860. This section closes with a coda detailing humbler fare, titled “Possum in Wetumpka.” The middle section, “Selling,” details the evolution of the Charleston City Market from 1810 to 1860, the pivotal role an African American ex-Confederate gunrunner played in developing Charleston’s seafood industry, the New York market for southern provisions, and truck farming.

The final section, “Planting in the Lowcountry,” treats specific commodities: Carolina Gold rice, sugar, sorghum, cooking oils, peanuts and peanut oil, and citrus. One of the very salient appeals of this section is that in several cases, the reader can buy, cook, and eat the commodities Shields describes recovering. This history of commodities, considered together, offers an inspiring alternative to the more narrowly focused commodity histories—Mark Kurlansky’s Cod (1997), or Larry Zuckerman’s Potato (1999)that have populated nonfiction bestseller lists over the last several years.

Across these three sections, Shields works with simultaneous concern for the past and future. There is as much detail as almost anyone could want about the history of southern crops and dishes—the chart detailing sources for South Carolina garden seeds stretches for eight pages (41-49), and represents untold hours of archival work. Shields is most eloquent, however, on efforts to promote the return of several of these vanished crops, most notably Carolina Gold rice. In concert with Glenn Roberts, the proprietor of Anson Mills, and scientists Anna McClung and Gurdev Khush, among others, Shields worked to reintroduce the nearly extinct variety of rice that was the foundation of the Carolina rice kitchen celebrated in Karen Hess’s 1992 book of the same name. This work of recuperation is outside the ambit of most early American scholars, and, not surprisingly, these passages find Shields at his most persuasive. Describing the beginning of this quest, Shields explains, “I wanted to taste that lost variety, whose reputation remained so potent that it sold millions of dollars of anonymous white rice in the nation’s groceries” (231).

Like the germplasm banks that provide some of the resources for this work of agricultural recovery, Southern Provisions contains the seeds of many books. There are crops, institutions, and cooks too numerous to name, all of which emerge as deserving of more extensive scholarship. (This is certainly the first book that made me want to read up on sorghum, for instance.) At the same time, the variety of tasks this book takes on makes it challenging, at times, to engage as a sustained narrative. Chronology works somewhat differently in each of the three sections, and determining exactly how each section relates to the other takes some effort. Geographic range and definition appear equally elastic. Shields’s focus is mainly on South Carolina, except when his stories take him elsewhere. In like measure, his definition of “southern” (like any definition of “southern,” really) will raise objections from partisans of the regions it excludes or neglects. Perhaps because of this capaciousness rather than despite it, Southern Provisions, much more than most academic books, is one that rewards dipping into, both for its historical insights and its compelling prose. It’s rare to review a book for a journal and find oneself reading selections aloud to companions, but a sentence like “Conservation was a rich man’s movement directed against the ambitions of laissez-faire profiteers from the wild” (99) is hard not to share.

Southern Provisions thus shows the many opportunities, and perhaps a few of the pitfalls, that food studies has to offer scholars and enthusiasts of early America. Food has the potential to forge links between the past and the present that resonate in the imaginations of the broader public with a general interest in early American culture. Shields traces many of these links in compelling fashion. The crop restoration projects Shields has promoted offer a kind of reemergence of the past that is impossible to imagine for other facets of early American culture. One cannot walk down King Street in Charleston as it was in 1870, but one can enjoy the same rice that those Charlestonians did.

At the same time, because food, and especially good food, lends itself to celebration, there is always a danger that food-oriented projects focused on recovering a southern past will inevitably offer a somewhat sanitized and cheerful version of that past. This is a cultural history of food, more than it is a social history of food, but in its focus on promoters and impresarios then and now, the immense labor that attends any agricultural work can be difficult to see in this account. It may in part be a function of the concurrent appearance of a number of high-profile monographs about slavery (notably Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told [2014]), but considering this is a book about the South both before and after slavery, it’s surprising that there is not more of an effort to tease out the difference between the legal status of being a slave and the cultural status of being Black. In particular, a passing mention of free Black women in Charleston who owned slaves warrants a bit more explanation (114-115). To be sure, there are sketches of some remarkable Black lives, notably Charles C. Williams, the Black Confederate gunrunner who then used his intimate knowledge of Carolina’s coastal waters to revamp Charleston’s seafood industry during Reconstruction, and then used that experience to become a leading ichthyological expert. That said, the foodways Shields documents, both before and after slavery, relied upon social relations of inequality and exploitation that seem missing from his account. Then or now, on a plantation or at a farm-to-table restaurant where the server breathlessly details the provenance of your pork chop, part of the art of fine dining consists in occluding the messy, dirty social relations that populate the road from the field to the plate.

In all, Southern Provisions is a wide-ranging and ambitious book, a remarkable achievement that tells the stories of remarkable achievements in which its author played a major role. While it is possible to imagine other books that might have been written from this same archive, we hope this is the beginning of a conversation with an array of voices chiming in. Academics, including early American academics, like to talk about the intervention a scholarly work makes. Usually, these interventions exist in an abstract and intellectual realm. While Shields will no doubt change how future writers think about southern foodways, he also details more concrete interventions. Thanks to the work that Shields has done himself, and the work of others he has promoted, the fruits of several of the historical recoveries he describes are available via Anson Mills and other vendors. The full impact of Shields’s work comes in savoring interventions you can cook and eat.

Jonathan Beecher Field is an associate professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London (2009). He sometimes writes about food at The Gurgling Cod.


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Hamilton, Burr, Livingston, Clinton, Van Buren: Building Banks, Canals, and a Political System in New York State http://common-place.org/book/hamilton-burr-livingston-clinton-van-buren-building-banks-canals-and-a-political-system-in-new-york-state/ Thu, 15 Sep 2016 13:07:20 +0000 http://common-place.org/?post_type=article&p=7229 Common-place talks with Brian Murphy about the business and politics of early New York State.

The post Hamilton, Burr, Livingston, Clinton, Van Buren: Building Banks, Canals, and a Political System in New York State appeared first on Common-place.

Common-place talks with Brian Murphy, author of Building the Empire State, about the business and politics of early New York State, how historians address questions of political economy, and the resonances of early republic politics in the twenty-first century.

Why did so many early Republic politicians seek incorporation for institutions such as banks and companies dedicated to infrastructure and internal improvements? What powers and protections did they afford?

credit: Victor G Jeffreys II
credit: Victor G Jeffreys II

The easy answer is that a corporation—that is, an organization or business that’s been granted the privilege of a state-issued corporate charter—enjoys a particular set of legal protections and economic advantages. They are why businesses still incorporate today.

As a fictional corporate “person,” a corporation has the right to sue and be sued in court as its own entity. That means the board of directors or larger population of shareholders don’t have to file lawsuits individually; instead, they can just do it under the aegis of their corporate organization. Similarly, you can go after a corporate entity in court rather than each shareholder-owner separately.

A corporate structure also lends longevity to a firm. Whereas a partnership has to be dissolved or bought out when someone dies or quits, a corporate charter ensures that managers or directors can be replaced without fundamentally changing the structure or mission of the company. Names change and often rotate, and the company itself endures for as long as a charter will allow, which is called perpetual life.

For these and other reasons, the corporation was an ideal vehicle for “capital formation”—a term we use to describe the pooling of investment capital. People can buy shares, vote in elections for seats on the corporation’s board of directors, and buy more shares if they like how things are going. If they don’t, they can sell their shares. That all makes it easier to raise money for a project, and it’s why state legislatures that were short on cash were willing to grant charters to early American improvement promoters who were looking to make money by building infrastructure projects or founding banks and other companies. The state could mobilize private capital toward public ends, and set the terms of that company’s mission and scope by writing the language of its corporate charter.

Why have historians struggled with understanding how Americans in the early republic distinguished between public and private forms of finance and business investment?

Our language around public and private often obscures more than it illuminates. Ultimately, it’s not at all clear to me that there was a bright line between public and private spheres of action in the early republic. It’s a muddled gray zone of colliding intentions and interests.

I think many historians are basically uncomfortable with that idea. Much of the historiography of the early republic assumes there were identifiable divisions between public and private finance and action, and that, if there weren’t, people must have been very upset about it. We don’t like the contradiction of being self-dealing and publicly minded at the same time. We want to see some angst. A reviewer recently suggested that what I was really writing about in my book is deal-making in the early republic, as if state formation was something more refined and above the logrolling I describe. But this is what legislating and governance looked like in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century United States.

In my research I kept seeing colonial kinship networks, political patronage, dependence on credit, insider dealing, and political party affiliations all intersecting to make the financing of projects and banks a complicated affair that was partly new and also partly a throwback to pre-Revolutionary ways of doing business. With that in mind, one of the interventions I’m trying to make in the literature is to show that many legislators and early American internal improvement promoters were comfortable with these arrangements. So instead of searching for clean hands or applying a one-dimensional analysis, I think a better approach is to dive into the details and try to understand the context. The evidence speaks for itself: political economy involved politics.

Historians often explain the national development of political parties (to the extent that they existed formally) through discussions of editor networks or galvanizing issues such as the French Revolution. How does Building the Empire State alter that narrative?

I don’t think you can understand the development of institutional political parties in this era unless you realize that they were supported by, and existed within, a network of early American corporations, particularly banks.

Because state governments had the right to grant charters—municipalities and counties couldn’t—incorporation was an inherently political process. After all, legislators controlled access to something that people wanted and they would never grant every request. So the first question is: how do you wrangle a charter?

It turns out that the process of assembling a coalition and petitioning lawmakers on behalf of a project was a kind of political mobilization. The process followed the same cycle elegantly embedded in the First Amendment’s speech clause: speech, press, assembly, and petitioning. So to win a bank charter, you have to organize a coalition, print up materials to attract investors, hold a public meeting, and submit a petition for a charter. But to win that charter—to get a majority of votes—you ultimately have to recruit supporters in state legislatures. And that’s where the political entrepreneurs come in: well-connected people who act as intermediaries between elected officials and would-be investors. They might not know anything about banking, but they’re helpful and necessary. They know which legislators will want to be rewarded with board seats or stock shares, or access to bank credit.

This means that there’s already a concentration of political capital and expertise in early American corporations. But banking is even more special: because lending is inherently discretionary, you have to be a member of the board or know one, or know someone who knows someone, to access a limited supply of credit. That means that these bankers have sway in their communities. They’re gatekeepers who control access to a pile of money, and it’s a short leap before they start using that influence toward partisan ends by rewarding allies and supporters and punishing dissenters.

The thing to realize here is that party formation is gradual. It’s not a sudden shock like the French Revolution. The Bank of New-York wasn’t founded as a Federalist bank. After all, there aren’t Federalists in 1784. But what happened is that the bank’s leadership and lending gradually became more—and almost exclusively—concentrated in Federalist hands by the late 1790s. When Aaron Burr and other Republicans founded the Manhattan Company as an alternative, they knew that they’d be able to recruit political supporters among people who had been denied credit by the Bank of New-York. And they knew that credit offered them a tool to exert discipline among an unstable political coalition of Federalist opponents. Credit (or debt—there’s no sense in getting worked up over which term you use since they’re flip sides of the same coin) was thus a way to maintain and discipline political coalitions and mobilize support among legislators and voters alike.

Therefore, before there were formal political parties that had their own institutional structures or a state apparatus that could dispense vast amounts of patronage, partisanship dwelled in corporations. Banking and internal improvements were something that partisans could do together that gave them a shared material interest in their alliances with one another. It wasn’t just that they shared ideological commitments or read from the same newspapers; they were also in business together, a cooperative effort that extended beyond the narrow window of the calendar year devoted to electioneering.

To what extent is the story of banking and canal-building applicable to the history of the United States outside of New York? 

I wrote this book about New York because I wanted to be able to provide some deep context for what was happening around the country in this era. Pick up the legislative journal of any state in any year in the early republic and see what lawmakers are working on: petitions from coalitions of investors seeking exclusive monopoly privileges, special rights, or corporate charters for a road, bridge, manufacturing enterprise, or some other public-private initiative. The specific projects may be different from what was happening in New York, but you’ll find similar legislative processes and the interposition of political entrepreneurs who acted as intermediaries between capital and the state.

In some cases states very explicitly emulated New York. Pennsylvania’s canal experiments were attempts to replicate the success of the Erie Canal, despite obvious geographical differences. But New York’s 1790s canals were inspired in part by Virginia’s 1785 Potomac Company. People interested in internal improvements and banking were keeping tabs on what their peers in other states and nations were doing, and they saw themselves as progressive, transformative voices in their own locales.

I also argue that once the Erie Canal opens and commercial trade to the west flows through New York City, New York’s canal experience becomes a de facto national story. That’s a transformative moment for the city, state, and the country as a whole. Suddenly, Philadelphia and Boston and a bunch of other cities are, from an economic standpoint, less relatively important. The financialization that happened in New York provided the basis for building the canal, and the canal in turn amplified the scale and scope of those financial institutions and markets.

Among its contributions, Building the Empire State seems to offer an alternate route into recent debates about the history of capitalism. That is, your narrative of finance and internal improvement seems to shift the conversation away from the role of slavery, on which many of the most prominent recent books in the field have focused. In what ways do you see Building the Empire State as an extension of or challenge to that work?

I certainly didn’t set out to challenge that recent work, and many of those books came out while I was revising or rewriting a project that had started way back in 2002. Along the way I was influenced by Stephen Mihm’s book on counterfeiting and Julia Ott’s book on investing and shareholding. Jessica Lepler and I have been circling each other since a SHEAR conference in Montreal and reading one another’s work for a decade now.

A story I’m trying to tell is how markets are structured by the state and how entrepreneurs used the rules of the game to enrich themselves and shut out competitors. I think the state is the agent of change in the early American economy. But I have to say that I don’t really think of myself as someone writing about capitalism per se because I don’t know how useful that term is for me as a way to frame an investigation into how the profit motive expressed itself in early American politics, and how people either resisted or accommodated it. For me, it was crucial at the outset to ground my work in institutional settings, and “political economy” was a far more useful conceptual way to enter the literature.

When I read some of the economic historians who had done work on banks, it often seemed like they were missing the fundamental, obvious fact that corporate chartering was an inherently political act. Likewise, I think some of the recent work on capitalism and slavery is under-institutionalized or relies on terminology and jargon to do heavy lifting that could have more effectively been accomplished by investigating and explaining concrete financial relationships and the rhythms and mechanisms of commerce. When we describe capitalism as a culture, what does that mean exactly? In some venues it can mean anything and everything, and you can write about capitalism without ever writing about money or banks or credit. If you end up comparing apples to oranges and can’t show the frequency or impact of particular activities, people who know the economics won’t be able to figure out what to make of your work.

I think a challenge we have as historians right now is to ask how the early American economy was structured and functioned and why there’s this explosion of banks, corporations, stocks and bonds, mortgages, insurance policies—all of these instruments—contributing to a rapid financialization in the antebellum period. It’s a big deal, and I hope my book is a helpful piece of the puzzle.

You’ve written previously at Common-place about how your historical training has aided you in your recent work reporting on corruption in New Jersey politics. Can you discuss the reverse process, that is, how your work as a journalist has helped you understand the construction of the Erie Canal?

In many ways my work as a journalist is why I became a historian. I covered personal investing and then a presidential campaign in 2000, and then had this interesting job covering state politics in New Jersey in 2002. I had no idea at the time that that job would later be so important in the overall trajectory of my career, but even then it was provocative and interesting.

I reported on Cory Booker’s first race for mayor of Newark in 2002, when he lost to the incumbent mayor, who was also a state senator, the chairman of a water utility, and a coach on the payroll of a local community college. Plural office holding! In the twenty-first century!

I covered a newly elected governor and state legislators and intensely local politics in a state big enough to have some regional variety but small enough that you could pretty much get a handle on everything important that was happening in a few months. And in that time something became clear: many of the most powerful people in politics weren’t names I had heard before. They operated behind the scenes and in mixed economy institutions that straddled the public and private spheres. For the most part, the general public has no idea who they are. I had already read Robert Caro’s book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker, so I already had a reference point to process what I was seeing. Nevertheless, it was a revelation.

When I started thinking about the Manhattan Company, I became interested in why Aaron Burr and Robert Livingston would use a water utility as an institutional foundation for opening a bank. How did that work legislatively? How did they build the coalition? What role did it play in New York? Who was in the room where these decisions happened, whose interests were at stake, and whose were prioritized?

People had written about the Manhattan Company before, but there was something missing from those accounts. It seemed to me that they didn’t quite get the politics and the nuance. So I started digging. I didn’t decide to impose an analysis and then go hunting for evidence to back a worldview. I wanted to know how it happened.

Something similar happened when I started that Erie Canal chapter. The legislative history of that project is a two-volume set published to commemorate its opening. There are petitions, meetings, reports, hearings, surveys, land transfers. It’s huge. But I kept thinking of something that modern-day reporters and legislative staffers say all the time: until everything is agreed to, nothing is agreed to. And so I was interested in seeing what particular unresolved details had derailed previous canal plans, and what the last-minute hurdles were before the New York legislature gave final approval to canal legislation in 1817. It turned out that the issues and principles at stake in that moment turned on a question about the propriety of financing large internal improvement projects via corporations governed by private interests. When lawmakers decided to fund the canal’s construction with state-issued bonds, they were laying out on a new course for how we build public works in the United States.

It was fun to write a chapter with that big a payoff and have this fantastic set of people—DeWitt Clinton, Martin Van Buren, Gouverneur Morris—driving the narrative. The big institutional story matters, but I think my journalism background always drags me toward writing it up in a way that feels immediate and personal. I want students and people outside of our profession to be able to pick the book up and share my excitement about this stuff.

Brian Phillips Murphy is an associate professor of history and the director of the Honors College at Rutgers University-Newark. He is also a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo. Building the Empire State won the 2016 James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

