Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900 [1 ed.] 0268029768, 9780268029760

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title page
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
1. Hand Piety; or, Operating a Book in Early New England
2. Poor Performance
3. Addressing Maps in British America
4. Print, Manuscript, and Staged Performance
5. From Performance to Print in the Native Northeast
6. Beyond the Printed Word
7. Sarah Wentworth Morton and Changing Models of Authorship
8. The Path of a Play Script
9. “The Speaking Eye and the Listening Ear”
10. Print Poetry as Oral “Event”in Nineteenth-Century American Periodicals
11. Silenced Women and Silent Language in Early Abolitionist Serials
12. Straddling the Color Line
13. Secret in Altered Lines
14. The State Between Orality and Textuality
15. Authentic Revisions
16. Reading the Image
17. The Emerging Media of Early America
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Edited by Sandra M. Gustafson and Caroline F. Sloat “This collection contains important contributions to our understanding of a wide range of media in America before 1900. The volumes published in A History of the Book in America have already begun to give an impressive sense of the major contribution of the history of the book to our understanding of American culture, but Cultural Narratives goes beyond the brief of those volumes both in emphasizing other media than the book and in stressing the interrelations between those media. This volume is important not only to scholars working in American Studies but also to anyone interested in the impact of ‘textual media’ in the making of culture and history.” —Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania “This volume brings together some of the most exciting work in print culture and ‘old new media’ studies (relating to early America) that is being done today. The collection will have an avid scholarly audience as the interdisciplinary fields of book history and of media, literacy, and performance studies, and their subfields, continue to thrive.” —Patricia Crain, New York University

Cultural Narratives

Cultural Narratives

Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900

Gustafson and Sloat

Cultural Narratives

Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900

“Cultural Narratives encompasses an extraordinary range of topics, including crosscultural exchanges of music, poetry, oral narrative, and theatrical traditions. It delves into codes of civility, poetic performance, and visual and verbal literacy, considering issues of race, class, and gender, and how they intersected with the ‘texts’ so many Americans used in shaping their own identities.” —Heather S. Nathans, University of Maryland Contributors: Caroline F. Sloat, Matthew P. Brown, David S. Shields, Martin Brückner, Jeffrey H. Richards, Phillip H. Round, Hilary E. Wyss, Angela Vietto, Katherine Wilson, Joan Newlon Radner, Ingrid Satelmajer, Joycelyn Moody, Philip F. Gura, Coleman Hutchison, Oz Frankel, Susan S. Williams, Laura Burd Schiavo, and Sandra M. Gustafson. Sandra M. Gustafson is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Caroline F. Sloat is director of scholarly publications at the American Antiquarian Society. Cover art L-R: [1] An opening from The Indian Primer, ed. Experience Mayhew (Boston, 1720). [2] The Council of the Rulers, and the Elders against the Tribe of ye Great Americanites. Westminster Magazine 2 (1775): opp. p. 640. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ61-79. [3] Illustration from James Redpath’s edition of William Wells Brown’s Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864), reprinted from Redpath’s The Roving Editor (1859). Courtesy of Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. [4] The Rebel Songster (Richmond, VA: Ayres and Wade, 1863). Image courtesy of Boston Athenaeum.

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Edited by

Sandra M. Gustafson and Caroline F. Sloat

Cover design by James F. Brisson

Gustafson Cover 06.indd 1

2/11/10 9:41:31 AM

Cultural Narratives

Cultural Narratives Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900

edited by

Sandra M. Gustafson and

Caroline F. Sloat

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2010 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cultural narratives : textuality and performance in American culture before 1900 / edited by Sandra M. Gustafson and Caroline F. Sloat. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02976-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-02976-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mass media—United States—History. I. Gustafson, Sandra M. II. Sloat, Caroline. P92.U5C845 2010 302.23'0973—dc22 2010004290

This book is printed on recycled paper.

CoNteNtS

Introduction Caroline F. Sloat

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Hand Piety; or, Operating a Book in Early New England Matthew P. Brown

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Poor Performance: Incompetence in Conversation, Manuscript, and Print in British America David S. Shields

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Addressing Maps in British America: Print, Performance, and the Cartographic Reformation Martin Brückner

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Print, Manuscript, and Staged Performance: Dramatic Authorship and Text Circulation in the New Republic Jeffrey H. Richards

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From Performance to Print in the Native Northeast Phillip H. Round

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Beyond the Printed Word: Native Women’s Literacy Practices in Colonial New England Hilary E. Wyss

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Sarah Wentworth Morton and Changing Models of Authorship Angela Vietto

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The Path of a Play Script: Louisa Medina’s Nick of the Woods Katherine Wilson

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“The Speaking Eye and the Listening Ear”: Orality, Literacy, and Manuscript Traditions in Northern New England Villages Joan Newlon Radner

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Print Poetry as Oral “Event” in Nineteenth-Century American Periodicals 200 Ingrid Satelmajer

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Silenced Women and Silent Language in Early Abolitionist Serials Joycelyn Moody

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Straddling the Color Line: The Print Revolution and the Transmission, Performance, and Reception of American Vernacular Music 240 Philip F. Gura

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Secret in Altered Lines: The Civil War Song in Manuscript, Print, and Performance Publics Coleman Hutchison

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The State between Orality and Textuality: Nineteenth-Century Government Reports and “Orature” Oz Frankel

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Authentic Revisions: James Redpath and the Promotion of Social Reform in America, 1850–90 297 Susan S. Williams

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Reading the Image: Visual Culture as Print Culture and the Performance of a Bourgeois Self 319 Laura Burd Schiavo

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The Emerging Media of Early America Sandra M. Gustafson

Contributors Index

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367 369

Introduction C a r o l i n e F. S l o a t

Personal narrative—the memoir form—appears to be growing in popularity as a contemporary publishing phenomenon. James Atlas observed in 1996 that “if the moment of inception is hard to locate, the triumph of memoir is now established fact. Consider the evidence: nearly two dozen memoirs are being published this spring, with more to come, supplementing the 200 titles—by one book review editor’s estimate—published last year.” In the intervening decade, Atlas himself transitioned from critic and journalist to memoirist and publisher of biographical works. As compelling as the memoir is to writers and readers today, it is a form that has a long history but that, thanks to the scholarly study known as the history of the book, is also finding a future for itself. The flexibility of the memoir enables its writer to describe and reflect upon a particular series of events. When published, it takes advantage of a culture of publication that is comparable to the model of the dispersed, regional—often rural—printing office that might set in type and print a first-person account for its author to distribute and sell as part of a narrative performance (Fabian). The memoir is the genre of choice for authors representing cultures ranging from high and low and topics ranging from dark to light. Contemporary memoirs describe public lives and those of ordinary men and women, as the New York Times best-seller list for a recent week indicates. Of the top sixteen hardcover books (including “booklike objects”) listed, twelve are memoirs, among them those of Alan Greenspan, Clarence Thomas, and Valerie Plame 1

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Wilson; those of popular musical performers and other celebrities (read: sex, drugs, and rock and roll); and a story of the impact of an adopted elderly dog on a family. Additionally, ten of the top sixteen paperback nonfiction titles are memoirs. That the writers of many of these memoirs have appeared on other media “book talk” programs also speaks to the robustness of this speaking genre, especially as part of the circuit of publication, in our culture. When a memoir is selected as the basis for an interview, the moderator of the program can probe the author and the text for additional narrative and cultural reflection. The collection of papers that follows indicates ways in which personal accounts have enough cultural currency to be a historical category as well. They attract literary scholars and historians who wish to recover and interpret aspects of past life and culture in fresh and exciting ways that might not, without close examination, be apparent. Recent scholarship that integrates personal narrative and memoir to create new histories of communication includes the work of Sandra M. Gustafson, Mary Kelley, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, among others. Gustafson takes notice of spoken performance as a category that cuts across race, gender, and class in Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (2000). By using and extending the scholarly methodology known as the history of the book and broadening its meaning, even as she identifies the changing meaning of oratory, Gustafson shows that forms of communication that at another time might have been passed over as powerful expressions are indeed episodes in which power can be identified. In Eloquence Is Power, she draws on a variety of memoirs to extend the definition of public speaking by ascribing to all oral and colloquial performance a value and power comparable to the traditional power of the printed page—the Bible, the law—and the function of literacy as these have been traditionally understood. The premise of Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic is that in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America public speech was a civic action that was not reserved only for male youth. Women’s education also included instruction in reading and speaking, which were used to the extent possible as entrees into the public arenas of civic life and the market economy. In The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, Ulrich imagines a society in which the masculine world of politics and the

IntroductIon  3

church is the backdrop to women’s handwork, interpreting activity with the shuttle and the loom and with the needle and woven fibers as creative expression that can be read as history. In each of these studies, the use of personal narrative helps break down the wall between the private and public spheres by extending the semiotics of reading and literacy into new arenas. Recent studies such as these suggest that the trajectory of scholarship on literacy may at one time have been too dependent on the concept of progress represented by the printing press. They challenge the role of this powerful and fixed technology as a replacement for the more ephemeral forms of speech and manuscript and introduce the idea that material objects can also be read. To test notions such as these, Gustafson built on her interest in the changing meaning of eloquence by envisioning a conference that would be part of a series sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society’s Program in the History of the Book in American Culture. She developed a call for papers for a conference titled “Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America before 1900.” Of the conference she wrote: “The verbal arts in this period manifest a strikingly rich pattern of development and change. From the wide variety of indigenous traditions, through the initial productions of settler communities, to the elaborations of colonial, postcolonial, and national expressive forms, the shifting dynamics of performed, manuscript-based, and printed verbal art capture critical elements of rapidly changing societies. These three varieties of linguistic media competed with, complemented, and shaped one another in unpredictable ways that have only begun to be described.” The papers reproduced here in revised form were originally presented at the conference, which was held in Worcester, Massachusetts, during 10–12 June 2005. These essays imagine a modern history of the manuscript and the spoken word without privileging the printing press, while still affording it a transformative role in the evolution of texts. The authors address performances of religion and government, race and gender, poetry, theater, and song. Their studies are based on texts—intended for reading silently or aloud—maps, recovered speech, and pictorial sources, including an early technology for viewing images at home. In the absence of printed words that can be attributed to an actual speaker, scholars consider other documentary evidence. In a particularly rich instance, Joycelyn Moody describes her search for evidence

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of the speech of enslaved women that uncovers instead the practice of creating text that purports to speak for others. These papers transport the reader to such locales as the parlor and the stage, the schoolroom and the battlefield. The evidence is visual—wall maps and house furnishings; it is aural—performances on the banjo, performances of civil war songs, performances of poetry for special occasions; and it is intended for reading—poems circulated as manuscripts, unpublished plays, letters published in newspapers, poems published in magazines, belletristic novels, notes from reading copied into a commonplace book. The reader is asked to take account of the sounds and semiotics evolving from a complex series of interchanges between string and finger; between performers, some of whom are black and others white; between printed songsters and oral traditions; between poets with identities masked by decorous eponyms. Also offered for consideration are the technologies and semiotics of the wall map and of the stereopticon, a novel apparatus through which the viewer can see (read?) images. The authors ask readers to engage with bibliographical tools in new ways—to consider evidence of publication in microform or electronic media, manuscripts that have political “heft” without appearing in print, and bibliographical sequences of oral, manuscript, and print publication. And in a concluding essay—the American Antiquarian Society’s annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book, a series intended to set forth new trends or developments in the history of the book—Sandra Gustafson offers a view of media as being constantly refreshed and changing. As each of the essays in this volume shows, media, even when they appear to be fixed, are reflections of dynamic, cumulative, expansive, and eloquent experience.

— Among these papers offering a fresh and fruitful reinterpretation of the power of speech and expression are several that make substantial reference to oratory and oral practices. They portray conversations, theatrical speeches, reading aloud from specially prepared manuscripts, public lectures, instruction, singing, and poetry reading as recorded and as presented for performance in print and manuscript. These studies stretch the evolving, already capacious, definition of oratory, which can refer to either an act or a place. In medieval times, oratory was connected with

IntroductIon  5

personal prayer—referring to the divine act of hearing earthly prayer or to a place set apart for that purpose. By the nineteenth century, oratory was once again associated with the public speaking of ancient Greece and Rome, but this time in a uniquely American way. These classical democratic or republican civilizations were hailed as exemplary models of political communication with a form of address readily adaptable to public speaking and reportage in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The place of speech in oratorical public culture is vividly shown to be an American tradition by Gustafson in Eloquence Is Power. Oz Frankel builds on the concepts that bind orality with government in his description of the official reports of the branches of the government as communications between the officer making the report and the report’s recipient. Frankel bases his discussion on “orature,” which he defines as “a communicative category that straddles the divide between literature and orality” by incorporating speech and manuscript into printed reports. In his account, printed government reports are embedded in a sequence of actions that might begin and conclude as a spoken performance. Frankel describes the legislative practice as a performance continuum extending from the preparation of the report from notes into an approved text with commissioned illustrations to its delivery as both a print publication and, frequently, an oral event. Frankel envisions these performances as triggering a further series of actions as part of the report’s dissemination, one of which is reading the report without having been a participant at its presentation or public reading. Though Frankel notes the rules of official reportage could be deployed in ways that diminished the effectiveness of government communications, his identification of the potential dynamism of this form enables it to be considered with the other religious, theatrical, and literary narratives making up this volume. Public speaking for the civic good was, as Kelley discusses, integrated into the school curriculum in the new republic, specifically in such texts as The Columbian Orator. This anthology, which included political essays, poems, and dialogues for reading, reading aloud, and memorization, valorized by its title the centrality of public speech in the new democracy. The Orator was one of a genre of widely used schoolbooks from which reading and public speaking were taught in the first

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quarter of the nineteenth century to both white and black students. Joan Newlon Radner’s essay in this collection reveals the discovery of a charming practice in the long history of public speaking: its integration into a form of small-town, wintertime recreation that took place comfortably after hours in the district school. The links between oral reading and speech as a style of pedagogy were beginning to weaken by the end of the nineteenth century, so that the form of self-improvement represented by this cache of materials that Radner discovered is an even greater surprise: a body of manuscript newspapers created as part of a rural lyceum movement. The price of admission to these events was a written contribution and group participation, providing opportunities to comment on a local issue or relationship. The “performance of the paper” was an event at which young people met to listen to a reading of topical manuscripts presented in the format of a local newspaper. These surviving manuscripts present an unexpected outcome demonstrating a way in which school textbooks concerned with matters of citizenship had created a space for a recreational and social opportunity to flourish and for public speaking to transfer from the schoolroom into daily life. Another form of dialogue, but through literature, is identified by Angela Vietto in her location of Sarah Wentworth Morton’s body of work within a series of literary dialogues, private correspondence, and her social standing in Boston political circles. Vietto highlights the poetic praise that Morton lavished on the work of Mercy Otis Warren and Judith Sargent Murray and the collaborative style of writing that emerged in the hitherto frequently dismissed New England world of letters. Information that Morton gleaned from correspondence about Native Americans with military leaders of the early republic grounded her early poetry and prose in the republic of letters. The tables were turned on Morton when a tragic domestic situation resulting in the suicide of her husband’s mistress became the basis for two other literary works, including William Hill Brown’s Power of Sympathy, but took a further, somewhat ironic and dialogic, twist when Morton authored Ouâbi; or The Virtues of Nature (1790). This tale blending her own experience as part of a love triangle with the distinctive Americanness of a Native American theme was published by Isaiah Thomas, the founder of the American Antiquarian Society. It is intriguing to imagine that his celebrated interest in Native Americans as representatives of America’s

IntroductIon  7

antiquities might have been informed in part by publications such as this one. Essays by Matthew P. Brown and Phillip H. Round describe the declaration and interpretation of the word of God as performances by both speakers and hearers that enhance the relevance and meaning of scripture. In his essay “Hand Piety; or, Operating a Book in Early New England,” Brown, describing the practice of commonplacing, suggests that scripture in its codex form nurtures discontinuous literacy. A reader, either clerical or lay, who keeps a commonplace book copies quotations for later reference. In this view, reading is a mechanical operation that is combined with sensory experience. Brown offers the image of the hand that operates the book complementing the piety of the heart. Once the hand skill was demystified, a reader might create a personal text by copying texts for private devotional use into a commonplace book that might also, as appropriate, become notes for later incorporation into a sermon or other public speech. In Brown’s account, the book, with its tooled binding and contents that might be referred to at random and in a fragmentary way, was a sensory object from which other meaningful patterns in addition to those of the printed words of text might be woven. The Puritans and their descendants through both white and Native missionaries also sought to map a Christian faith onto the Native psyche. Brown’s nuanced explanation of how a meaningful devotional culture was created suggests the flexibility of a written cultural tradition and its somewhat surprising adaptability to a culture that measured literacy in terms of its oral, pictographic, and material expression. Essays by Phillip H. Round and Hilary E. Wyss probe the Native perspective on whites’ efforts to educate them and use of literacy to measure their acculturation. Native response to the Bible presented the missionary Samuel Kirkland with a dilemma: a Native spirituality already existed, the Indians said, because the “Great Spirit gave us a book,” but not a printed document such as the white missionaries wished to promote. Round shows that this tension between spiritual literacy inscribed in hands and hearts, fluency in one or more Native languages, and literacy in written English was a central theme of missionary labor, particularly as Native missionaries challenged white missionaries working in their communities. The Native missionaries Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson each navigated the divide between the two cultures. Able to acquire literacy and,

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as Native missionaries, to create audiences for copies of printed books including Bibles, worship books, primers, and spelling books, and for paper on which to copy and distribute texts, they created for themselves a mediating role in the early republic even as their lands were being dispossessed and their communities were being fragmented. Wyss’s essay complements Round’s by seeking out evidence of women’s literacy in Native communities. She identifies girls among the students at Indian schools, an indication that coeducation was an accepted practice. Its benefits, whatever the girls’ need for writing might be in later life, included the possibility of instruction in domestic arts, but it is in Native domestic arts that Wyss—following Ulrich—crafts an expanded definition of Native women’s literacy. Bodily markings, wampum, and woven and decorated baskets and mats bespoke a continuing Native culture paralleling whites’. The depiction of the two influential households of Mary and Samson Occom and Molly and Joseph Brant reveal the semiotics of Native expression. By keeping an Indian-style home, Mary, a literate Montauk who persisted in following Native customs in speech, dress, and foodways, challenged her husband to retain his Native identity by putting him in a position where he had to continuously make transitions between his adopted English manners and practices and the Indian manners of domestic life with his chosen partner. Molly Brant, Indian wife of the powerful William Johnson, created a public performance of Iroquois culture that reflected the Iroquois-English alliance without diminishing her matriarchal power. Imagining the dynamic of the blends in these households allows a more informed consideration of Native women’s domesticity as part of the critique of Indian-white relations, despite the absence of written or printed texts authored by these women. Joycelyn Moody takes a different, more theoretical, approach to this “silence” on the part of women. When she set out to recuperate the speech of enslaved women, her efforts to find references to women’s spoken words were thwarted by the discovery of the formulaic nature of such writings. Using the first person, she describes her research plan of “examining literacy and narrativity among nineteenth-century African Americans” with the expectation of finding stories dictated to abolitionists. At the American Antiquarian Society, she searched “for transcribed bondwomen’s voices” in the kinds of sources that other authors

IntroductIon  9

represented in Cultural Narratives have found so compelling: “abolitionist broadsides, church periodicals, private diaries, Christian magazines for youth, song and hymn lyrics, and black-owned newspapers.” The silences she encountered resulted from both the well-meaning abolitionists and black women themselves, leading her to note the cogency of Katherine Clay Bassard’s claim that nineteenth-century black women (authors included) distrusted not only literacy as a mastery over language but language itself. In her reading of some enslaved women’s dictated narratives, Moody comes to the “troubling” conclusion that these women may have purposefully not pursued literacy despite a desire to exploit the currency it gave them among reading Americans. Accounts of slavery based on field interviews, some taken down in shorthand, by the abolitionist and reformer James Redpath were used in the production of reform discourse when presented in newspapers and published in book form. The sources used by James Redpath as certain indicators of truth and described by Susan S. Williams in her essay are interviews with ex-slaves written as letters to the newspaper editor. But these interviews fall short in Moody’s view, as they give voice to few women. “That is,” Moody concludes, “by at best mediating and at worst silencing black women’s voices in antislavery periodicals, abolitionists used black women to buttress the status quo of all women’s sociopolitical subjugation, which depended on the maintenance of separate gender spheres.” Listening for evidence of communication between blacks and whites, Philip F. Gura finds that the banjo provided a medium for crosscultural communication that took place, not through words, but through hearing and copying the performances of fingers on frets and strings. These performances are behind the tutor books that regularized fingering notation so that the folk practice of banjo playing could be adopted for performance by the musical mainstream and, he shows, mainstream music adapted to the banjo. These American sounds, once set down and printed, could also be integrated by European classical composers into other written musical forms evocative of American experience.

— As might be anticipated, the traditional elements of the history of the book—orality, manuscript, and print, including the tools of bibliography—play an important role in the scholarship reflected in the

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papers in this volume. But the ambivalence toward each of these categories of analysis, as expressed by Moody and Wyss, for example, cannot be overlooked, suggesting that other categories have become equally relevant as the history of the book has taken a more cultural turn. These are performance and semiotics, two categories that are foundational for many of the papers that follow. For example, David S. Shields describes the value accorded to face-to-face communication in the seventeenthcentury American colonies as part of the negotiation of what constituted good performance. In the first half of the eighteenth century cultural authority in the colonies was still fluid, and before the lines hardened the circulation of belletristic verse in manuscript or print was considered a mark of regard in seeking political or social favor. Martin Brückner picks up the baton with his discussion of the performative semiotics of two contemporary oversized wall maps whose presentation possibilities were recognized by the merchant who acquired copies for sale in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin. When hung as emblems of empire in the Philadelphia State House or Assembly Hall, they would function “as custom-made artifacts informed by personal interest and British America’s emergent media landscape.” Underscoring Brückner’s point about the semiotic rather than way-finding properties of maps are two satirical prints dating from 1775 that are both reproduced in this volume. Two authors have chosen the theater as the venue for their analysis of the relationship of print to performance. Katherine Wilson traces the performance and publication history of Nick of the Woods, a melodrama adapted from a popular novel of 1837 for stage production. As such, it existed in a handwritten manuscript, then a series of actors’ sides—cues leading into an actor’s speeches—and stage managers’ promptbooks, all of which, though in print, yield performances illustrating what Wilson describes as “variables of the era.” The theater is an ideal venue for understanding the fluidity, rather than the fixity, of the acted script in performance and the challenge documented by Wilson of crafting a readable text for publication and possible performance long after Nick of the Woods left active repertory and the customs of its performance had faded away. These efforts described by Wilson exemplify the enthusiasm of playwrights and others for “theatricalizing culture,” described by Jeffrey H. Richards as emblematic of the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

I n t r o d u c t I o n   11

Interest in the theater could take forms other than a published script. An author could be fascinated by the dramatic form and write plays that were cultural commentary rather than intended for performance, as did Mercy Otis Warren or Judith Sargent Murray. Plays published as dramatic pieces for performance by students were written in the style mirroring the emerging professional theater in Boston by the Reverend Charles Stearns, who made subtle shifts in gender and language to support his claim that these texts were moral tales for performance by youth. By achieving publication for these texts, Stearns identified the school stage as a theatrical space. For St. George Tucker, despite the intensity of his efforts to have his texts performed or published, playwriting was amusement for an amateur well informed about the theater, yet unsuccessful in achieving production. Richards suggests that unperformed plays are an indicator of fascination with theatrical performance that may have been more prevalent in the early republic than the history of the stage would indicate. Another medium that has received attention as a venue for its spoken performance is poetry, the subject of a recent study by Joan Shelley Rubin. The relationship between the literary periodicals of the late nineteenth century and the poetry that they published and whose recitations they promoted is the performative nexus central to Ingrid Satelmajer’s essay. This essay also connects to other studies in this volume for which texts intended for public performance in a variety of formats are the object of analysis. These include Frankel’s performative interpretation of government reports and essays by Moody and Radner in which periodicals are sources for spoken events. Coleman Hutchison’s account of the circulation of the Civil War song “Dixie” takes a slightly different angle, especially when he documents the attempts in 1904 to fix the lyrics of that anthem for all time. To the circuit of voice, manuscript, and print associated with songs Hutchison offers the category of the variant version, one that might never have been printed but had a life in performance and possibly manuscript. The payoff here, of course, is that Hutchison’s analysis of the culture of revisionism encapsulated in the variant verses echoes the trajectory of the evolving memory of the Civil War described from other sources by historian David W. Blight (Beyond; Introduction; Race).

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— Each of the authors in the following collection has chosen a moment of eloquence or a cultural artifact to interrogate, using the tools of the history of the book. The studies included in the following collection take as their starting point some quite traditional sources in history-ofthe-book scholarship. Among them are publications, such as the Bible, novels, newspapers, periodicals, play scripts, songsters, music tutors, and maps, as well as manuscript letters. A more unusual source might be the technology of the stereopticon viewer and its images. But they read their chosen sources from a particular perspective to show their role in the emerging cultural narrative of the United States before 1900. As in our imaginations we cross the American terrain from east to west and north to south, we are introduced to individuals and groups inhabiting those spaces and we hear their stories, many for the first time. Some of these stories were found in new places, for example by searching electronic media and nonprint forms of textuality. The essays in this collection describe the vibrancy of the emerging media of early America. This is the subject of Sandra Gustafson’s concluding essay, a reminder that openness to novel technologies of manuscript and performance is essential. “Regardless of whether they are ‘old’ or ‘new,’ media are never static. They change internally, and they change in relation to one another. . . . Even more striking than the creation of new modalities of manuscript in the age of print is the exuberant emergence of performance media in the early United States.”

workS Cited

Atlas, James. “Confessing for Voyeurs: The Age of The Literary Memoir Is Now.” New York Times Magazine, 12 May 1996. . Bassard, Katherine Clay. “Gender and Genre: Black Women’s Autobiography and the Ideology of Literacy.” African American Review 26.1 (1992): 119–29. Blight, David W. Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. ———. Introduction. The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces, Together with Rules, Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence. By Caleb Bingham. 1797. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

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———. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Fabian, Ann. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in NineteenthCentury America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Gustafson, Sandra M. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. ———. “ ‘Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America’ Conference: Call for Papers.” 23 Oct. 2003. H-Net. . Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. New York Times Best Seller List. 25 Nov. 2007. . Rubin, Joan Shelley. Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Knopf, 2001.

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Hand Piety; or, operating a Book in early new england M a t t h e w P. B r o w n

Started during his Harvard training, the personal miscellany of third-generation minister Thomas Weld opens with a set of anecdotes that reflect his values of pithiness, piety, and deft rhetoric. One points us in particular to a minister’s memory theater and sermonic performance: “A man preached a Sermon in commendation of the Saints. He began thus, ‘I will begin with St Crysistome, his excellence is such that I will place him in the first seat of the church.’ And he was very tedious to his auditors. He was long in his discourse. At length he come to St Bernard, then, saith he, ‘Oh blessed St Bernard and where shall I place him?’ Upstarts a man and saith, ‘Sr place [him] in my seat if you please,’ and so went away and left room for him” (7). When we think of performative literacy in the religious culture of early New England, the drama of learned preaching to which the mocking tale alludes comes to mind. The minister’s show refers of course to the art of memory, the Renaissance mode of retention organized through associative techniques and architectural space. The preacher further performs his learning through citation of Chrysostom and Bernard, references that connote as well a scholar’s mode of extensive reading. Indeed, the joke prefaces Weld’s commonplace book, the written format where, as in the art of memory, spatial topoi organize knowledge for the learned. Yet this bias toward a theater of learnedness might obscure 14

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the ways performative literacy structured the reading practices of both lay colonists and elite ministers. Humble readers, whether directed by the conduct protocols of devotional manuals or enjoined to expressive song by psalmbooks, were expected to perform. Learned readers found in books the prompts for oral culture, in an idiom closer to folk vernacular than scholastic display. Consider the recorded joke, which does more than dramatize the interaction of preacher and auditor: it also supplies Thomas Weld with a script, a script that requires pace, timing, and delivery, that requires—in a dead metaphor initially quickened by musical performers—touch. What does performative literacy mean, then, in early New England? If we begin to see in Weld’s anecdote a complex set of reading habits in the early modern world, we also begin to try out new meanings for the term’s key words. In this light, performance applies not solely to public actors in social rituals but equally to audience members instructed in comportment and behavior. Though irreverent, the listener’s exit from the service exemplifies such conduct. Early New England’s worship services, family devotions, and Bible readings created a series of environments that scripted and induced behavior through texts. Indeed, the listener’s action is but a comic expression of a tension at the heart of the Protestant tradition: the Reformation bequeathed to the zealous colonists a view of literacy that was at once emancipatory and oppositional (the individual authorized to read the vernacular Bible, over and against “popish tyranny”) and regulatory and dominative (the divinitytrained minister authorizing proper reading and maintaining hierarchical control) (Hall, “Readers” 119). The humorous dissent and defiance of regulation described by the joke are on a continuum with the dutiful application of “uses” promulgated at the end of spoken and printed sermons: reading in early New England was transformative rather than enlightening or diverting. The Weld anecdote also suggests that literacy might be construed more broadly. In a narrow sense, literacy in the early modern period meant familiarity with Latin, but we might define it more broadly as an ability that translates written symbols into silent words, moves continuously through a text, and promotes a deep and private immersion in language. From Augustine’s observations, the still lips of Ambrose symbolize, in a kind of antitheater, this turn in the Western tradition.

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Such a conventional definition occludes, however, a number of literacy’s operations, not least the kind of historically specific meanings of reading and writing evidenced in, for example, the Protestant vernacular disciplines mentioned above. More generally, a conventional view of literacy demotes the aural, the visual, and the tactile; it neglects the specific formats of written language; and it fundamentally misrecognizes the physical activity of book reading. The boring orator’s cross-referencing of Bernard and Chrysostom intimates these operations. While displaying his memory skills and learned reading, it also invokes the tactile handling of multiple volumes, or multiple parts of a single volume. More overtly, the indexically arranged commonplace book that houses the joke is a format designed for random access: if the ear is necessary to deliver the joke, the eye and the hand must find it first. The codex format thus nurtures this mode of discontinuous literacy, and it is an activity as common to ordinary readers navigating a single almanac or singly bound Judeo-Christian Bible as it is to “extensive” readers with access to a library. In this view, literacy might carry its conventional sense while also conveying performative implications. Readers operate books, and literacy’s meanings emerge in part from the sensory experience of texts. Such a portrait of performative literacy draws on histories of premodern and early modern reading and on recent treatments of the codex format. In theorizing literacy in the Middle Ages, Brian Stock offers the notion of the “textual community,” where writing and reading are organized around shared cultural records that script behavior (23). The focus on behavior here represents a significant advance on the institutional stasis inherent in Stanley Fish’s notion of “interpretive community.” For seventeenth-century New England, David D. Hall wrests attention away from signature counts and reading rates and instead studies literacy’s social spaces, such as the meetinghouse, the marketplace, and the closet (Worlds 32–36 and passim). Jay Fliegelman (Declaring 1–2) and Sandra Gustafson (Eloquence xvi–xvii) have oriented study of textual practices in early America to the elocutionary revolution and to public spaces of oratory, with Gustafson in particular conceptualizing a “performance semiotic of speech and text” grounding the read word in its spoken or unspoken cadences. Roger Chartier presents a methodological schema that connects these spaces and their communicative media. Referring to “traditional cultures” of orality and gesture and to “cultures of writing,”

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he describes “the situation that existed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century when media and multiple practices still overlapped” in terms that connote a theater of literacy: Some of these overlaps associate the spoken word and writing: either a spoken word fixes itself in writing or, conversely, a text returns in oral form through the mediation of reading out loud. Other overlaps connect writings and gestures. . . . Manuals on how to prepare for death, books on religious exercises, guides to good manners, and handbooks are among many examples of genres that attempt to internalize necessary or appropriate gestures. Furthermore, writing is installed at the very heart of the most central forms of traditional culture; festivals or entries, for instance, are surrounded by written notices of all kinds and commented on in programs that explain their meaning, and ecclesiastical rituals often require written objects to be placed at the center of the ceremony. (170)

If these social conditions remind us of the multimedia nature of reading in the early modern period, the work of James O’Donnell, Paul Duguid, Peter Stallybrass, and Leah Price has foregrounded the performative nature of the book format itself. Much as Roger Chartier emphasizes “written notices” and “written objects,” these scholars avoid reifying “print” or “the book” and instead specify qualities of the codex format. They see books not as linear narratives but as spatial volumes of discrete items that can be randomly accessed. Whether in Price’s description of the fragmented, anthologized novel in the eighteenth century or in O’Donnell’s alternative history of the book, which makes the Alexandrian library—rather than the Mainz print-house—a point of origin and digital databases the codex’s logical extension, this scholarship comprehends the book format as a search engine (Price 4; O’Donnell 50–63). Duguid even revives I. A. Richards’s phrase that “the book is a machine to think with” (qtd. in Duguid 78). Readers operate books through navigational aids and cross-referencing techniques that generate knowledge and inform behavior. With attention to behavioral mores and the spatial disposition of books, the following pages examine cases of devotional literacy in seventeenth-century New England. Drawing on reading matter and

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book artifacts owned by both humble and learned colonists, I argue that performative literacy helps illustrate the affective life of devout subjects in the colonies. The argument begins by returning to Thomas Weld’s personal miscellany. Weld’s personal writing is both a learned commonplace book and a resource for pastoral performance. I then shift attention to an exemplary devotional steady seller, The Godly Man’s Ark, by Edmund Calamy. From a reader-based and book-trades perspective, devotional steady sellers are the literary culture of early New England. They are very much the kind of performative text Chartier discusses: prescriptive manuals that connect gesture and the written word. Yet Calamy’s cheap pious tract also models for the devout the kind of discontinuous literacy associated with learned, “extensive” readers. The scriptural text for Calamy’s sermon series is from Psalm 119, and I turn next to the ur-steady-selling genre of the psalmbook with reference to variants for Psalm 119 in the Bay Psalm Book and New England Psalm Book. Here too the psalm literature entails performative dimensions both obvious—through songmaking—and subtle—through the abecedarian system of Psalm 119. The essay concludes with study of bookbinding in early New England; the boards and covers on devotional manuals point to ways the codex was operated by the pious. Portraits of devotional subjectivity and reading practice in early New England have stressed processes of “sacred internalization,” in which the Word is lived and its physical medium is effaced (Warner 19). While this mode of “heart piety” has been crucial to comprehending devotional life, it might be complemented by “hand piety,” a materialist and affective perspective wherein the book format also served to cultivate devotion. If this cultural narrative might help us rethink the pious life in early New England, is there a larger lesson for the narratives of culture we tell, one that might emerge from a focus on performative literacy? To this end, the essay asks of performance studies the same question posed by Adrian Johns for book specialists: like book history, histories of performance are certainly interesting, but are they—in Johns’s challenging terms—consequential? My claim is that performative literacy might move us toward an understanding of performance related to everyday behavior (rather than public ceremony) and toward an understanding of literacy related to affective knowledge (rather than cognitive abstraction).1

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— Commonplace books such as Weld’s are the most familiar genre of early modern personal writing that served as a navigable storage system, with the alphabet used to organize favorite passages of reading or list references to titles and page numbers of such passages. Associated with the rise of Renaissance humanism, commonplacing revived Greek and Roman educational theories and found early modern models in Erasmus’s De Copia (London, 1569) and Locke’s New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (1706). Literary treatments of the genre privilege its modes of genteel self-fashioning and its presentation of belles lettres, emphases that are distant from devotional concerns; but the genre’s educational function reminds us that commonplacing was consistent with the learned culture of Protestant ministers. William Perkins offered instructions in The Arte of Prophecying, framing his guide to “the framing of Common-place bookes” with verse 18 from Psalm 119. “Have in readiness common-place heads of every point of divinitie,” writes Perkins, distinguishing the expressive purposes of the genre for ministers. Perkins directed the formatting of the manuscript book: each page should be titled with a head and divided into columns; a verso should be left blank so that “fresh paper may be put to”; and an “alphabeticall table” of authors and titles should be appended to the commonplace book in order to cross-reference entries and their sources (28–30). The Perkins passage defamiliarizes the codex format, suggesting how users manipulated the space and heft of a book to store, recall, and meditate upon textual fragments. Thomas Weld (1653–1702) was the second son of Thomas Weld of Roxbury and the grandson of the Reverend Thomas Weld, the antinomian controversialist, psalmbook translator, and aide to John Eliot. He graduated from Harvard in 1671, held a position as a schoolmaster in Roxbury in 1674, and began to preach in Dunstable in 1679. He was ordained there in 1681, but it was a community that suffered during King William’s War, with two-thirds of the English colonists moving away and with few resources to support the ministry. By the late 1690s there were only 125 inhabitants, and Weld himself died in 1702. His commonplace book’s origins date from a happier time, begun in 1669 when he was at Harvard. Insofar as its first fifteen pages begin with a set of anecdotes with poems, epigrams, and journal entries appended to it, the document is a miscellany. Its bulk, however, is a commonplace book,

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askew from Perkins’s directions, for it features an alphabetical sequence with corresponding entries and then a second alphabetical sequence, the first cross-referenced with page numbers to this latter unit. Miscellaneous elements such as the prefatory anecdotes illuminate the text as a resource for pastoral performance. Indexed under the title “Stories upon hearsay somewhat notable,” the jokes are referenced as oral culture, as “hearsay.” “A waiter upon the fellows being [in a] very Sharp fit,” goes one such story, “insomuch that he could not tarry till they had done with the pie, cuts it open and eats out all the meat, and instead thereof puts in grass and puts on the lid with this Superscription on it, ‘all flesh is grass’” (Weld 4). We know this is designed for oral performance in part because of its content: the sharing of food dramatized through the lighthearted agon of a vengeful servant and his mild tricksterism—and the depiction of the sort of social event where the story would be told, with deviations and reversals that supply it with its putative humor. But the anecdote also features the rhythms of spoken performance, building to its curt, oral emphasis—“all flesh is grass”—which is both proverb and punch line. As in the story with which I opened the essay, the joke does not work on the page. But here too we have indirect evidence of spoken performance. Recall the tedious minister and the written record of the joke: Weld has the minister mention only two church fathers, Chrysostom and Bernard, before having the irreverent auditor deliver the punch line. For the joke to succeed—if a puritan joke can succeed—Weld would need to observe the folkloric structure of three: the delay, anticipation, and closure necessary for any verbal gag set up with a serial sequence of actors or actions. At the least, he would need to extend the series of fathers, if only to recreate, when telling the joke, the tedious style of the minister. Is this a botched gag? Not necessarily: it is a script or prompt, and we can—perhaps must—imagine Weld improving it through oral execution. Indeed, the written record only partially communicates this verbal act, and its full discursive reality may exist only as virtual speech. If the miscellany is a resource for jokes, it is also a commonplace book, a knowledge-generating machine designed to help author compositions. But as the jokes complicate our view of learnedness, so Weld’s entries under the alphabetical headings likewise point to oral performance and popular piety. To be sure, the miscellany houses Latin epigrams and

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verse, passages and page numbers from tomes by Edward Leigh and Edward Reynolds, and secularized information, such as a history of England under the “E” heading or a text cited for headaches under “H.” Yet Weld’s commonplaces are, importantly, proverbs, the ordinary language ministers use in their face-to-face pastoral care. Under the “D” heading, he records that “dancing is a motion of ye flesh”; under “E,” “Our Endowments should be proportionable to our / imployments” (21, 23, 25). Weld even conjures a discontinuous literacy that is creatively admonitory: under “S,” “Sin is the decalogue read backwards in mens lives and conversations” (49). Furthermore, Weld was as interested in the subjective state of devotion as he was in the learnedness of, say, theological debates. In a list of citations adjacent to entries under “Affections,” Weld makes general reference to Reynolds’s Treatise of the Passions (London, 1640) and specific reference to passages on the affections from Leigh’s massive A Systeme or Body of Divinity, thirty-two pages from a one-thousand-page tome (16). Other readings from learned writers discuss the performance of worship, such as Weld’s reminder, under “F,” to consult Thomas Hall: “Against formalitie see Hall on 2 Tim. 4.5” (26). Although Weld’s library inventory of 169 titles lists many learned works, it also documents titles such as Hall’s sermon, along with the steady sellers Alarm to the Unconverted, The Practice of Piety, The Second Spira, the Bay Psalm Book, John Flavel’s treatise on fear, and The Godly Man’s Ark (Robinson and Robinson 166–75). The commonplace book follows this mode of practical divinity; the letter “H,” for instance, features proverbs on heaven and hell, dictates on hating sin, and precepts for humbling the self (29). Precise mention of ritualized devotion surfaces as well—under “F”: “On fast dayes everyone should mend something” (25). Using the commonplace book as a script for jokes, pastoral care, and popular devotion, Weld most strikingly demystifies learnedness and the codex format in one last “story upon hearsay.” Books and the navigational systems subtending them—tables of contents, indices, concordances, library catalogs, search engines—are an especially powerful form of nonhuman memory (O’Donnell 54–55). Yet here we see the learned duplicitously reliant on the laity for knowledge, as a preacher counts on the seriality of Sabbath readings and the compliance of his audience to save him from having to reveal his own inattentiveness:

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I have heard of a certain minister, who after other duties being performed would have preached also, but had forgotten the place that he preached at the last lords day. therefore he rises up, and thus frames his talk viz. “I think I preach a dayes to the heathenishest people that are again in the world, I don’t think that ther’s one of you that can tell when the text was last Sabbath day.” Thereat up stood an old man, and asked him why he thought so? “Because you do little mind, much less practice what I say to you, and you that are so brisk to ask [:] where was it? Can you tell?” and so then he told him where it was and then he could preach thô before he had forgot it. (Weld 1)

The story alludes to a number of performative contexts: the pastor’s “other duties,” the preaching itself, and the applied conduct of congregants. And if we needed any more evidence for declension as a ministerial state of mind, here it is. While lighthearted, the story captures the degree to which auditor memory and emancipatory literacy were caught in a hierarchy of devotional practice. The outright exercise of power rather than book access seems to define the ministry’s learning. The old man, in volunteering knowledge based on attentive listening or notating, is an ideal reader within the Protestant myth of access to the vernacular Word. Yet his performance is solicited from a tirade against the congregation, and the interaction more generally serves to bolster the minister’s authority. Knowledge itself emerges not from a college, a library, or a commonplace book but from a venue of social performance.

— Nonconformist martyr Edmund Calamy (1600–1666) never visited New England, but his steady seller The Godly Man’s Ark settled there. Calamy was in the thick of midcentury London’s religious politics. Appointed at St. Mary Aldermanbury, he voiced a moderate Presbyterianism that alienated radicals and Laudians, a position that he published in one-off print exchanges. More famously, he is the “EC” in the joint pseudonym “Smectymnuus,” author of An Answer to a Book Entitled “An Humble Remonstrance,” the critique of episcopacy that prompted John Milton’s inflammatory apology. Opposing the regicide and favoring the restoration of Charles II, Calamy kept his appointment after 1660 but could not abide the 1662 Act of Uniformity and was ejected from

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his seat. Still attending the church in 1663, he took to the pulpit when the priest was absent, a defiance that landed him in Newgate. He died shortly after the 1666 fire. This is memorable drama, but historians of devotion would listen to a different rhythm, based on the less topical but equally enduring body of conduct literature Calamy produced. Opening the text of Psalm 119’s verse 92—“Unless thy Law had been my delights, I should then have perished in mine afflictions”—The Godly Man’s Ark went through seventeen editions by 1693, appearing on Robert Boulter’s shipping list and repeatedly on John Usher’s invoices. This steady seller is a composite: its first section is a funeral sermon for Elizabeth Moore, sister of the publisher John Hancock; it then features a series of sermons that emerged from the first, its sequence building to a thirteen-step program for conduct, a set of applications or “uses” in the fifth and final sermon that mirrors the genre movement of text-doctrine-use in the individual puritan sermon; and it concludes with “Elizabeth Moore’s Evidences,” an appendix of private writing “composed and collected by her in the time of her health, for her comfort in the time of sickness” (Calamy title page). The composite form and collective function fit the work’s rhetorical strategy: Calamy imagines scripture, Psalm 119, and readerly subjectivity as a storehouse, a site to collect God’s commands, delights, and promises in order to transform its audience. Calamy’s godly audience performed devotion through preparatory humiliation, a mode of humbling supplication emptying readers of worldly needs and desires and thus preparing the converted for glorification and enabling the unconverted to receive (but not merit) original grace. Such Renaissance soul-fashioning involved self-examination and condemnation of sin, an internalized affliction to remind pious subjects of the Fall. Calamy targeted a reader caught in the potential despair of preparatory humiliation—the “Afflicted” and “wounded Conscience” typifying devotional subjectivity—so that she or he might apply the promises appropriately and thus be consoled, comforted, and heartened. His preface explains that “to help a doubting Christian to perform this great work, there are thirteen plain ‘Rules’ and ‘Directions’ laid down in the following Treatise” (sig. A3–A3v). The treatise implicitly proposes two ideal readers, under external afflictions analogous to the situation of the actual audience’s purgative abjection. First, Calamy renders Elizabeth Moore

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exemplary with his brief “To present you with the Pattern of a Woman whom God did pick out to make an example of great affliction, and great patience, that when you come into great troubles, you may bee comforted with those comforts, with which shee was comforted” and “To acquaint you with the pains shee took, and with her diligence in time of health to make her salvation sure; That so you may bee provoked to lay up suitable, seasonable, and sufficient provision against an evil day, and not have your Evidences for Heaven to get in the hour of adversity” (sig. A2v). Second, he refers to David, who “found in the Law of God” while under Saul’s banishment “great benefit and comfort”; indeed, Calamy cites authorities to argue that David had a copy of the Torah with him, helping him to avoid the heathenish impurities of the Philistines (3, 5). The treatise also illustrates the readerly dispositions of pilgrimage and rumination that characterize the life of piety. The devout’s salvific progress is modeled in images of readerly movement—“remember Cranmer and Ridley, the former learnt the New Testament by heart in his journey to Rome, the latter in Pembroke-Hall Walks in Cambridge”—and it is imagined in a sacred temporality: “Let us make it appear that we are Saints in deed, and in truth, not onely Saints in Mans, but in Gods Calender, by following the example of holy David” (73, 72). Equally, though, the devout’s anchored meditation is modeled by Thomas à Kempis, who follows Cranmer and Ridley in Calamy’s series as a reader of the Gospels, but as one who “found rest no where, nisi in angulo, cum libello; but in a corner with this Book in his hand” (73). So too, Calamy advises readers of the means of textual consolation: “The great reason why the people of God walk uncomfortably in their afflictions, is, because they do not chew the Promises; they are rare Cordials, but as a man cannot taste the sweetness of a Cordial, unless hee chew it, no more can wee receive any spiritual refreshment from the Promises, unless wee meditate on them” (106). These modes and ideals of reading are to be emulated by the doubting Christian reader that is Calamy’s intended audience. Such readerly attitudes and performative ideals are to serve the broader program of emotional uplift and cognitive dissonance patterned by the affective life of piety. “Afflictions teach us to know God Experimentally and affectionatively,” writes Calamy, “not cerebraliter (as Calvin saith) but cordialiter, so to know him, as to love and fear him, and to flye unto him as our rock and hiding-place in the day of our distress”

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(10). Feeling enables knowing, and the devotional subject’s affective life is a source of delight and joy. Worldly pleasures are compared to the Word and found wanting—“whilst others take pleasure in Hunting, Hawking, Carding, Dicing, Eating, and Drinking, the Saints of God can say with Austin, Sacrae Scripturae tuae sunt sanct ae deliciam meae, Thy Holy Scriptures are my holy delights”—and the Word is valued intrinsically, for its sweetness and lovability (58). For the despairing Christian, “the Promises are the kisses of Iesus Christ, they discover his dear love, and when hee discovers to us our interest in them, then hee kisses us with the kisses of his mouth, and fills us with joy unspeakable and glorious” (133). Further, Calamy encourages meditation on the resurrected body, when “our vile bodies [will be] like unto the glorious Body of Christ” (141). These means of comfort are augmented by the classic paradox of devotion promulgated by ministers: “The more sensible thou art of thine own unworthiness to lay hold upon the Promises, the more thou art fitted and qualified to lay hold upon them” (173). This “unworthiness” culminates, however, in a portrait of the devout that is not fully a growth in grace. Calamy defies the complacency that might come with assurance, for “hee that saith hee hath grace enough, hath grace little enough. Hee that stints himselfe in his endeavours after grace, never had true grace. Wee must labour to bee perfect, as God is perfect” (189). The treatise maintains the protocols of both consolatory progress and cyclical abjection that structured devotional performance. Calamy is acutely aware of the spatial disposition of books as well, understanding that devotional performance entails discontinuous practices taken up by humble readers. The “ark” of the title is but one figure that Calamy deploys to redescribe the holy Word as a storage container and reference system. Scripture is fashioned as an “Alabaster box,” an “Apothecaries shop,” a “spiritual Armory,” and—in the etymological echo of a later textual format—a “Magazine” out of which readers may “fetch” cordials, cures, and weapons (191, 99, 98, 95, 144). The theme is established as Calamy opens the text of Psalm 119, verse 92: “It is penu doctrina publicum unicuique apta & convenienta distribuens, a publick store-house of heavenly doctrines, distributing fit and convenient instructions to all the people of God. . . . [It is] fitly called, A holy Alphabet for Sions Scholars. The A,B,C, of godliness. Sixtus Senensis calls it, An Alphabetical Poem. The Jews are said to teach it to their little Children the first thing they learn,

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and therein they take a very right course, both in regard of the heavenly matter, and plaine stile fitted for all capacities” (2). As David “fetched [comfort] out of the word,” so contemporary readers are to understand scripture as scattered fragments that become retrievable information: a “garden” where we should “pick out these flowers” of consolation and a “mine” in which we must “digge” (7, 107, 106). Calamy recommends fragmentary reading, arguing that “a man may read a Chapter, and hear a Sermon, and taste no sweetness in them at one time, and at another time taste much sweetness in them, as God is pleased to co-operate with the reading of the one, and hearing of the other” (206). And he presents discrete passages from the Bible for readers to contemplate (146–47). “The Scripture is bespangled with Promises,” writes Calamy, “as the Heavens are with stars” (148). The subjects of these spatial metaphors of disjunct singularity—flowers in gardens, stars in a dark sky—are to be collected, however, and Calamy enjoins readers to list their evidences, gathering the scattered sacred texts for comfort. The preface’s final direction instructs the reader to “make Catalogue” of the promises; the application at the end of the first sermon counsels that “we must prepare and provide a stock of Scripture-Promises, which be as so many reviving Cordials, to chear us, and as so many Spiritual Anchors, to uphold us from perishing the day of our tribulation.” The uses at the end of the second sermon implore the reader to catalog sacred text—“when you read the Bible, and meet with a suitable promise, with which God is pleased to affect your hearts, take the pains to write it down”—and Calamy provides a model for collections in the work of Edward Leigh. The appendix of Elizabeth Moore’s evidences is similarly to be emulated (sig. c4, 113–14, 233–54). These recontextualized fragments are to be sources of solace, and Calamy, in “Rule 13” of the final sermon, concludes the applications with the practice of a “Mrs. Diggons,” Moore’s neighbor, who kept such a journal and read it with Calamy when she was on her deathbed (211–12). Scripture navigation and the collection of evidences indicate humble modes of nonlinear textual activity comparable to the learned elite’s extensive reading and commonplace miscellany. Psalm 119 was itself considered a nonlinear reference work enjoining performance. Devotional steady sellers repeatedly invoke it as the ideal scene of reading because it catalogs pious behavior through David’s reverential treatment of the Word. Along with primers and catechisms,

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psalms served as literacy’s entry texts for New Englanders. Two of the psalm’s formal features deserve attention. First, each of the 176 lines presents a synonym for the Torah: namely, “law,” “statutes,” “precepts,” “ordinances,” “testimonies,” “judgments,” “commandments,” “word,” and “name.” Second, Psalm 119 has an abecedarian form: the original is an alphabetic acrostic, its twenty-two eight-line strophes following the sequence of the Hebrew alphabet, each of the eight lines within a stanza beginning with the letter to which the strophe is dedicated. These diction and alphabet procedures produced a nonlinear collect of moods, addresses, and dispositions. Indeed, contemporary commentators saw the text as a reference system. Calvin labeled it a “Dictionarie” (157). George Abbot wrote that “the Psalm is without title, and for the matter of it, drives no particular subject”; its prescriptions for conduct “are promiscuously scattered throughout the Psalm, promises, precepts, documents, prayers being variously intermingled, and to be taken notice of accordingly by the Reader as they happen in his way” (575–76). “Scattered” fragments, to be taken up as the reader “happens” upon them: Abbot assumes random-access reading. But what of versions of Psalm 119 itself, ones circulating in seventeenth-century England and New England? Interestingly, the colonially based translations witness variants that specify the book format’s navigability and broach its larger ideological purchase. First, the Bay Psalm Book and New England Psalm Book reproduced the abecedary in modified form (whereas the versions of the psalm in English Bibles and in the Sternhold-Hopkins, Ainsworth, and Tate-Brady psalmbooks do not). While this might reflect the “literalism” of the translators, it suits well the culture of indexical literacy observed so far. Verse 111 is also a compelling example. All the early modern English translations in scripture, psalters, or psalmbooks present verse 111’s Torah synonym as “testimonies,” “testaments,” or “law.” But the Bay Psalm Book reads, “Thy recods are mine heritage / for aye: for my hearts joy they bee”; while the New England Psalm Book corrects the error to read, “Thy Records I inherit do . . .” (Whole Booke, unpaginated; Psalms, Hymns 258, 270). The only aspect of the Bay Psalm Book that scholars love to malign more than its literalism is its crude printing, but might we, indeed, recode this flaw to acknowledge the variant’s implications? The New England versifiers consistently translate the Hebrew edot as “records,” the Torah

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synonym a noun appearing in place of “testimonies” up to sixteen times in the common meter version of the 1651 revision. As Eric Jager observes, the etymology of record is telling, for it derives from the Latin cor, the heart, understood in classical antiquity and patristic learning as the storehouse for thought, memory, and emotion, but connoting as well documentation, so that the book becomes a material extension of the heart (xv). Finally, the textual artifacts themselves provide windows into performance and literacy in early New England. The book structure of a devotional work became a prop in this early modern theater of reading, and bindings supply conjectural evidence for the induced behavior of book operation. Given the massive publication of seventeenth-century religious manuals in English, and given the contingencies that have preserved a select few copies of these titles, such study is speculative. Yet the navigable and composite qualities of these pious texts remind us of the root meanings of manual, and we lean here on the metaphor of the index, which connotes both the fingering of the physical object and the cross-referencing choreography of nonlinear reading. Elaborated in The Godly Man’s Ark and implicit in the psalmbooks, prescriptions from other devotional manuals spell out this practice, with recommendations to asterisk passages and dog-ear leaves (Downame 648–49; Rogers et al. 117). Practiced by ministers such as Thomas Weld, indexical reading— the reading around rather than reading through—was facilitated by the tactile dimensions of the codex format. The bindings tell a story as well. The assembly of a codex could take many forms, and there was certainly no essence to a book such that a volume was to contain a single title read front to back. Titles from the London trade were often prebound. As Stuart Bennett demonstrates, more than 80 percent of books in Britain during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were sold ready-bound, and colonial purchasers could expect similar trade bindings of a plain sort. But buyers could also customize the binding of sheets and include multiple titles in one volume. The assembly of a cover likewise involved variability. Tanned leather over boards of wood, scabbard, or pasteboard might constitute a cover; so too limp vellum might protect the work; or paper might simply wrap around a text block without boards. Leather covers might wrap around the boards for a full binding or stop short in a half or quarter binding; there are thus tactile

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differences based on the inner or outer location of the wrapping material.2 Metal tools impressed leather surfaces, and metal fittings occasionally adorned the cover. A leather cover might be decorated with work that was both visual (the metallic shine of gold tooling or the darkened relief of blind tooling) and tactile (the depressed surfaces produced by the tooling). Sight and touch might be engaged by clasps and furniture of brass that could frame and lock the text block. So too, stitching supplied textural differences in the feel of the book, resulting in exposed bands inside or outside a book, raised bands on the spine as both functional and expressive features of the leather, or unobtrusive bands hidden by the cover. This range is familiar to anyone working with old books, though the devotional steady sellers present a few distinctions worth noting. First, the brickishness of the more encyclopedic manuals meant that bindings around a title by Lewis Bayly, Arthur Dent, or Henry Scudder would usually feature just this title rather than multiple titles. Second, twelvemo (or smaller) manuals and psalters were eminently portable, so that their heft and touch were felt whether the reader was anchored at home, seated in church, or traveling on life’s pilgrimage. The colonial reprints of the steady sellers supply further means to specify these observations; the physical state of surviving copies presents format and binding traits indicative of the puritan devout’s hand piety. Early eighteenth-century editions published in Boston were thin relative to their English sources, as colonial printers economized on paper costs through small formats, tiny fonts, and absent margins. The 1718 edition of The Practise of Pietie is anywhere from two-thirds to one-half the length of English editions; the cramped 1727 version of Samuel Smith’s The Great Assize runs to 194 pages, compared to editions from London that averaged 320 pages and displayed spacious margins; a 1722 reprint of William Dyer’s Christs Famous Titles presents eye-aching typography. Abridgments were also an economical option: Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice was condensed in 1667, and meditations from Bayly were extracted for the pamphletlike 1728 edition. Colonial printers later in the century would likewise avail themselves of cutting and cramming to produce quite variant editions of English novels such as Robinson Crusoe (Winans 178–81). The high cost of paper in the colonial book trade affected binding practices as well and contributed to the tactile properties of local

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binding. For if colonial reprints were less brickish in volume, they were more so in firmness when bound with boards. Because pasteboard— the creation of boards through the laminating of waste sheets—was in short supply in the colonies as compared to, say, London, local binders used scabbard, a thin wooden board made from oak, maple, or birch. This stiff format prevails in extant copies of colonial devotional steady sellers.3 Finally, Hannah French found blind tooling at the board edges common in seventeenth-century colonial binding, a practice that—adding to French’s observation—the stiffness of scabbard permits.4 Touch as a measure of performative literacy, this reading around rather than reading through—the theater of a book might be best illustrated through discussion of an emblematic binding. The décor on Joseph Sewall’s copy of Richard Alleine’s Heaven Opened—a 1699 colonial reprint of a favored steady-selling divine, now held at the Boston Public Library—is a prompt for hand piety. The full binding in sheepskin features tooling that represents the sensory affect of devotional books. A full binding necessarily entails fingering of the leather on the insides of the board, a continuum of animal hide and human hand that both broaches and opposes the book’s holy interiority. (Consider the following as a contrast to such skin continuities: the vegetable fibers of a paper cover make exterior and interior coterminous and connote for the text block a sacral holism, distinct from the user.) There is blind tooling at the board edges, the liminal site of book operation. As with numerous other extant bindings, the effect of tooling at the turn-in makes the user sensitive to textural contrast at the moments of opening and orchestrating a book. But what speaks powerfully to the materialist elements of lived religion is the figure impressed in the sheepskin of Joseph Sewall’s book: a heart, found in each of the four corners of the front and back covers. Recall that tooling is both visual and tactile. Hand and heart are interdependent in Sewall’s copy, reminding us of the philological relation of the “record” to both the documentary and the immaterial. The heart records a book’s content, and the book stores the pious affect of a devout pilgrim’s heart. The hand piety of tactility and indexicality—respectively perhaps the most and least obvious qualities of book artifacts—is folded into the customs of devotional reading in the Reformed tradition. With reference to Thomas Weld’s commonplace book, Edmund Calamy’s prescriptive literature, the Bay Psalm Book’s abecedary, and the

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covers around devotional titles, the cultural narratives of performance and literacy might be told anew. In methodological terms, performance is seen to apply to the ordinary behavior of those scripted into a commonplace, psalter, or conduct book’s message. Further, literacy is seen to apply to the spatial disposition and phenomenological operation of the codex format. In historical terms, the specific meanings of performative literacy and the book format in early New England indicate that puritan readers were weavers of textual fragments, readers who roamed anxiously among passages that comforted and cajoled, that heartened and harangued, readers who lived their religion—in the delights it promised and the afflictions it induced—through the materiality of the Word. Indeed, for pious New Englanders we might suggest that, in its imaginative, sensory, and affective charge, the book was a machine with which to feel.

NoteS

Portions of this essay were adapted from material in my earlier book The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 1. Although Fliegelman’s and Gustafson’s studies of performance in early America are both interesting and consequential, they focus on public ceremony, on oratorical sites and learned declamation. This essay attends to ordinary settings of performance, such as pastoral care and devotional conduct, so that we might see the interaction, in Stock’s terms, of text and behavior at the everyday level. My other contention is that the conventional view of literacy as a silent operation is premised on cognitive abstraction, the notion that literacy’s impact is felt through the written word’s translation into the mind’s immaterial ideas and concepts. I hope to detail that knowledge is generated equally through the physical and emotional vectors of reading. 2. Two examples of full bindings in contemporary sheepskin by steadyselling author John Flavel are in the Houghton Library, Harvard University: A Saint Indeed (Boston, 1726), EC65.F6183.668sk, and Sacramental Meditations (Boston, 1729), C1337.47*. 3. Along with copies mentioned in the next note, scabbard can be found on the following cheap devotional works at the American Antiquarian Society: The Psalms Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, of the Old & New-Testament (Boston, 1711, and Boston, 1713), Binding Collections B; Edward Pearse, The Great Concern (Boston, 1711); and Henry Stubbes, Conscience (Boston, 1714). The

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Massachusetts Historical Society holds “Bay Psalm Books” of 1709, 1716, 1726, 1729, and 1730 (E187) with covers of scabbard. 4. Examples of devotional steady sellers with tooling at the board edges are Pearse, The Great Concern (Boston, 1711) and Stubbes, Conscience (Boston, 1714), “Dated Books,” American Antiquarian Society; the “Bay Psalm Book,” 23rd ed. (Boston, 1730), E187, Massachusetts Historical Society; Dyke, The Mystery of Self Deceiving, 8th ed. (London, 1624), bound abroad, Prince Collection, Boston Public Library; Flavel, Sacramental Meditations (London, 1700) 4th, enl. ed., BV824 .F53 1700, Boston Athenaeum.

workS Cited

Abbot, George. Brief Notes Upon the Whole Book of Psalms. London, 1651. Bennett, Stuart. Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles, 1660–1800. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004. Calamy, Edmund. The Godly Man’s Ark. London, 1658. Calvin, John. The Psalmes of David and Others. Pt. 2. London: Thomas East and Henry Middleton, 1571. Chartier, Roger. “Texts, Printings, Readings.” The New Cultural History. Ed. Lynn Hunt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 154–75. Downame, John. A Guide to Godlynesse. London, 1622. Duguid, Paul. “Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book.” The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 63–102. Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. French, Hannah. “Early American Bookbinding by Hand.” Bookbinding in America: Three Essays. Ed. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt. 1941. New York: Bowker, 1967. 3–47. Gustafson, Sandra. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Hall, David D. “Readers and Writers in Early New England.” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Vol. 1 of A History of the Book in America. 117–51. ———. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Jager, Eric. The Book of the Heart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. O’Donnell, James. Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

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Perkins, William. The Arte of Prophecying; or, a Treatise Concerning the Sacred and Onely True Manner and Methode of Preaching [. . .]. London: Felix Kyngston, 1607. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old and New Testament. Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green, 1651. Robinson, Charles F., and Robin Robinson. “Three Early Massachusetts Libraries.” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 28 (1930–33): 107–75. Rogers, Richard, et al. A Garden of Spirituall Flowers. London: R. B., 1638. Stallybrass, Peter. “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible.” Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 42–77. Stock, Brian. Listening to the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Weld, Thomas. Commonplace Book, 1669–95. Ms. SBd-69. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. The Whole Booke of Psalmes. Cambridge, MA: Stephen Day, 1640. Winans, Robert W. “Bibliography and the Cultural Historian: Notes on the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” Printing and Society in Early America. Ed. William L. Joyce et al. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983. 174–85.

Chapter two

Poor Performance Incompetence in Conversation, Manuscript, and Print in British America

D av i D S . S h i e l D S

While incompetence in communication, whether in speaking or writing, has a self-evident quality to any witness of a poor performance, the way discursive performances fall short of adequacy has differed over time. Verbal awkwardness, argumentative illogic, rhetorical excess, conversational vagrancy, and weak induction all have histories. In contrast, outright failure in communication—that is, being completely unintelligible to someone else—has remained a constant over history. Here I discuss communicative incompetence—poor discursive performance—in British America during the eighteenth century. Why British America? Because it is a question that reveals the fundamentally new understanding of the issue of performance that has been introduced into early American studies by the past decade of print culture scholarship. Until book history supplied a concrete sense of what constituted a steady seller, a well-received gift pamphlet, a popular broadside, there was little concrete historical sense that a fully functional media culture worked efficiently in the English colonies—little sense that there was communicative competence in a variety of communicative registers.1 Adequate performance had been confused in historiography with that peculiarly long-lived anxiety about cultural adequacy—the question of when Anglo-America would evince the genius of London. Book history 34

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has taken us beyond that confusion. Here we will describe certain manifestations of communicative incompetence peculiar to the conditions of performance in British America during the early eighteenth century. Incompetence is recognized by a majority of persons without recourse to scientific, legal, or disciplinary expertise.2 Knowledge about the characteristics of incompetence constitutes part of the doxa of commonplace judgment. A general characterization, then, takes the form of exploring current linguistic usage of the term—what Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations referred to as circulating about a particular language game. Incompetence belongs to that group of concepts defined by negating another term. Just as failure is the absence, partial or total, of success, so incompetence is the absence of adequacy in performance. Consequently, incompetence has a less concrete character than competence, being not only negative but polymorphous. Proverbial wisdom tells us that while there may be only one sure path to the mountaintop, there are many treacherous ways down. Furthermore, competence in communication is readily intelligible to most people because what constitutes adequacy of performance has a simple form shaped by common aims and enacted with recognizable skills. In communication, competence has a rather bald marker: the speaker, writer, or depicter conveyed a message to a desired recipient and that recipient understood the message. This presumes at the very least that both parties shared a linguistic or symbolic code, that the medium of communication served adequately as a vehicle conveying it from creator to receiver, and that the receiver heeded the call of the communication, devoting time to listening, reading, or inspecting it. Competence as a communicator is commonplace, less marked and compelling than success, and far from triumph or greatness. To the extent that we possess an ordinary knowledge of competence, we possess a guide to knowing incompetence (Cupach and Spitzberg 24–26). We might best exemplify triumphant success, competence, and incompetence in communication for a particular moment by citing cases that have broad currency and characterizing them in ways that are unobjectionable. For instance, if we considered what one branch of communicative ability, “literary success,” looked like in America in 2005, we might begin with some names. It looked like Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel García Márquez—or, if one viewed that success in financial

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terms, Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling, and John Grisham.3 Drawing features from these careers, we could say that success at the beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by the receipt of prizes, the appointment to academic sinecures, critical accolades, invitations to give well-paid readings and signings, strong sales in the print market, hefty advances on projected books, recognition by the media as a cultural pundit, the translation of works into foreign languages, the elaboration of one’s work in other genres (theater, cinema, visual arts, television), the envy of colleagues, the liberty to set one’s own terms of work, and the possibility of literary futurity. Competence as a literary figure was marked by an ability to get one’s work published and reviewed, having a literary agent, having one’s publisher invest a modicum of money in book promotion, having a place on the literary reading circuit, and having sufficient income to sustain oneself without recourse to another job, unless it was teaching creative writing. Incompetence was marked by a relative lack of one or another of these requisites and extended to outright failure, a total and abject absence of any sign of favor: no readers, no agent for one’s manuscripts, the need to pay a vanity press for publication, no attention from reviewers, inability to finish the manuscript—in the pungent summation of Willie Morris, “Not published, not read, not paid, not laid.” Literary culture’s agon of success and failure looms so large in contemporary imagination that it may be difficult to exorcise from our thinking about communicative success, competence, and incompetence in earlier eras. Expel it we must. When thinking about what constituted communicative success in the colonial period, or failure, we must first grasp how little the familiar registers and institutions mattered. Let us think about the 1730s, the decade when presses became available in most colonies. Prizes there were none, not even in Harvard College or the College of William and Mary (Jackson 249–55). Criticism was a fitful and volunteer enterprise, lacking an authoritative establishment.4 Readings were unpaid. Remuneration by the market was laughably modest (Amory 28–37). Indeed, an author frequently paid to have a poem or piece put in a gazette. Anyone with sufficient coin could be heard. The amorous mooing of many swains in praise of Delia, Celia, Myrtilla, and Priscilla disgraced the muses’ corner of colonial papers from 1732 onward. While failure and success, mastery, competence, and incompetence were meaningfully attached to the performance of letters in the first

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half of the eighteenth century in America, the question of adequacy was much less insistent than it is today, when software programs inform the author in midflight that a sentence has been botched. The cultural editorial apparatus in the United States was extraordinarily elaborate in 2005. In 1730 the social structure was only just coming into its full articulation. While the impious word might be rebuked and the rude address admonished on the grounds of piety, and while blasphemy, abuse, and dissent might be prosecuted in court, the reign of taste and the refinement of manners had not progressed so far in the American provinces that a standard of style beyond mere civility could be said to have existed prior to the 1730s (Spindell; Kamensky 183–90). The performance of any gesture at discursive style was so unusual that it could constitute a form of play when individuals did it in manuscripts that they exchanged with each other. Yet even in the zone of play, the phantom critic haunted the conversation, threatening judgment. And in an increasingly elaborate institutional world of private society where politeness, wit, and sense were jostling for preeminence, arbiters were setting up to render verdicts upon performance. A wonderful letter of 9 June 1734, by Abigail Franks of Manhattan to her son Naphtali in London, comments on the creation of polite society in New York City by Governor William Cosby and his wife as a means of recouping the public’s goodwill that he had forfeited by his political schemes: The governor has altered his Conduct Very much Since his Comeing & Tries by being Affable & Courteous to regain the Peoples Exteem he invites ’em frequently to dinner Our Neighbour vrincroft, Van Wyck, Ten eyck, duyken, and Severall more of these Sort of Gentry are frequently in their turns invited to dine at Court As you will observe the Journalls Are Very merry upon These feasts And I think Some times to have bin to[o] free with his Excellency & Family As to my Own Priviate Opinion I am inclined to the town Side Soe is Mr Moores Family and many more but however all appear neuter Fanny Riggs and my Self often are togather and then We Settle the Nation Our Family for apperance great Favourits and tho’ madm keeps her Visiting day once a Week She and the Governor have often desired me to Spend any other afternoon and Eavening there but I never have for I desire noe more honour then the rest of my fellow Cits tho’ your father has bin there of an Eavening They have Not

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many Woman Courtiers Mrs. Ashfield was One formerly but the Tables are turned Mrs dick at Albany Soet that Pauls wife is the Only Person that Sees em dayly for the Coach is allways at her house Either Carrying them to her house or fetching her to the fort. She has Allmost forgot to walk a foot[.] People have an Ill Natured Mirth at Paulls Poiliteness. The Governor has made a Very Pretty Bowlling greens with a handsome Walk of trees Raild and Painted Just before the fort in th Large Durty place it Reaches three doers beyond Mr. Nickles and Looks Very Well I must not forgit to doe Justice to Mrs Cosby on Acct of Saying that she liked noebody but Mrs Dick & Richards I Never heard She Said any Such thing and I bleive to much Sence to think Soe Especialy of Insipid Mrs Rds Soe much for Court Affairs but Mum. (25–26)

This passage deserves extensive quotation because it brings to view a problem peculiar to the colonial scene: the provisional and defective mirroring of that central mechanism of metropolitan culture, the court, in the colonial capitals. As the retinue of executive power, the nexus of conversation and display, the prime courtship and marriage bourse of the country, the very arena of heterosexuality, the theater of taste, grace, and civility, and the palace of patronage, the court figured all of the richness of life that breeding, ambition, enterprise, and art could fashion (Elias; Adamson; H. Smith). But the colonies lacked the wealth, the aristocracy, the urbanity, and the social stability to consolidate gubernatorial courts (Shields, Civil Tongues 295–300). Here a coach, a patch of greensward, an allée with a painted fence, and a dinner table make for courtly splendor. Women are few. The gentry families can be counted on both hands, the regulars on one. Granted, Mrs. Franks belonged to the town faction around Lewis Morris, who opposed Cosby’s politics (Kammen 203–15), but even she appreciates the effort at making a scene of gentility in the capital city. And later in the letter, Mrs. Franks appreciates a moment when Mrs. Cosby’s court performed gentility by encouraging poetry: Now I am Talking of Verses I must Tell you Some thing Merry you remmeber the Assembly member that made Verses on Inoculation Some one Acquainted Mrs. Cosby of his fine Genious and One day at dinner amidst abundance of Company in her Agreeable Courtly Method beg’d he would favour her with a Copyy he told her he had em not Abouth

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him but would repeat Some to her wich he did you may be Sure in a Very Elegant manner Mrs. Cosby Seem’d mighty delighted and at Every Period would turn to Lady fits Roy dear betty admire the beauty of it did you Ever hear any thing Soe fine they al humer the thing and ye poor Creature was in such a Extacy at the admiration of his fine Tallent that As Soon as he could he procured her Ladyship a Copy.

This scene was merry perhaps because of its novelty. New York had not—even in the days of Governor Robert Hunter—witnessed such ceremonies of metropolitan-style courtliness before (Shields, Oracles 125–41). True, the courtliness was that of a city madam’s drawing room rather than that of Queen Anne’s palace, yet all the gestures were right. Conversation alone could no longer suffice to create bel esprit. The oral performance of a text spiced the evening’s wit. The topic was public, the performer Robert Nichols, a member of the governing class.5 The hostess presided and pronounced the verdict of taste—how beautiful! Her role was verbal. The consequence was the author’s bestowal of the manuscript of the poem upon the hostess, cementing a personal connection with a patroness who combined political centrality with cultural potency. That Abigail Franks saw the performance as a pageant of vanity with the governor’s lady egging on a self-enchanted aspirant to poetic laurels does not signal Nichols’s failure in his performance at all. Rather, it suggests the extent to which any and all of the fashionable ceremonies of civility were exercises in vanity in the provincial capitals in the third decade of the eighteenth century. Yet these displays of vanity were necessary to the larger project of imperial life in British America—they were the payoff, the richness of existence promised to provincials and colonists in recompense for their industry and for their distance from the seat of power. These rites did not mirror or ape metropolitan life so much as extend it. Gentility’s agents in the field—William Byrd, Benjamin Colman, Henry Brooke, Richard Astell, Robert Hunter, Archibald Home, James Sterling, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, Alexander Sterling—learned their graces in the British Isles.6 Abigail Franks did not have the benefit of such tuition, but her children did. They learned to paint, dance, and cipher from the schoolmaster Alexander Alexander. They learned to write under the direction of the secretary of New Jersey, Archibald Home, the youngest son of baronet

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John Home (Shields, “Cosmopolitanism” 143–62). Abigail’s children, Moses and Richa Franks, became members of Archibald Home’s Trenton coterie. Moses became the first Anglo-Jewish poet in North America; Richa became Archibald Home’s forbidden love. Home read all the writings of members of his coterie, corrected them, and polished them, enforcing a standard of expressive competence. In the posthumous manuscript collection of his verse, an appendix was devoted to these works with corrections noted in the text. It is worthwhile seeing how Archibald Home became archpoet of New Jersey, the arbiter of the polite world of his time and place. As Abigail Franks’s letters indicate, New York in the early eighteenth century was a contested polity. It had party divisions of long standing. Cosby and his courtiers were opposed by the remnants of a strongly antiprerogative country party, led by Lewis Morris and James Alexander, who bankrolled Peter Zenger and an opposition press. Zenger’s New York Weekly Journal, founded in 1733, set into print a paper war against the court party centered in the pages of the New York Gazette. Yet the papers were only one dimension of a literary war of extraordinary extent that animated New York, producing balladry performed and sold by the jointstool singers, coffeehouse manuscripts, and pasquinades nailed to the town pump, as well as odes, satires, and slanders that appeared in print (Olson). This literary war for public opinion was a legacy of the extraordinary successful, indeed transformative, literary campaign waged by Governor Robert Hunter in the early 1710s. He had created a literary public sphere that attached to election politics. This public was expanding at the time of the anti-Cosby agitation, which was a fullblown Augustan paper war in a provincial capital. Home came to power in this war, curiously enough by floating a satire directed against Zenger, “The Memoirs of a Handspike.” It was so ingenious that the head of the Townside, Lewis Morris, sought Home out and offered to make him a protégé. One way ambitious public men could consolidate power was to cultivate talented men of letters and make them secretaries and agents.7 Morris did so with Home, eventually securing his appointment as colonial secretary of New Jersey. The lawyer who successfully defended Zenger, William Keith, when he became the leader of the antiproprietary forces in Pennsylvania similarly would make the young Benjamin Franklin his protégé.

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Home’s success was attested by his political opponents’ coming to cultivate and patronize him. When party positions were more fluid than they are now, literary talent trumped political ideology. Possessing loyal opinions was insufficient to constitute public success. Consider the case of another man writing for Cosby, Francis Harrison. His poetic career was an anatomy of public failure in a politically contentious world. In 1730, before Cosby had appeared on the scene, Harrison had shifted from the opposition to the court party to profit from the “oblong grant” from Connecticut to New York. He earned the particular hatred of Alexander, William Smith, and Lewis Morris. When Cosby came to power in 1732, Harrison became his volunteer laureate. But his rejoinder to the fusillade of raucous beast fables that Zenger directed at the governor and his regime was so lame and tepid an invocation of Cosby’s virtues that he became a literary laughingstock. Consider his poem appearing 7 January 1733/34 in the New York Gazette: COSBY the Mild, the happy, good and great, The strongest Guard of our little State; Let Malecontents in cracked Language write, And the D[um]b H[ound]s belch, tho’ they cannot bite: He unconcern’d will let the Wretches roar, And govern Just, as others did before. (Harrison, “Cosby”)

The irregular meter, boilerplate commendations, and mismanaged central metaphor—are the dogs truly dumb if they can belch and roar? Is voicelessness or toothlessness at issue?—raise the question of how truly potent and rich this provincial court can be if its champion can’t manage to invoke its charm. His publications began a downward spiral. A councilor, Harrison attempted to forge a manuscript threat to get a member of the opposition in trouble, leading to widespread opprobrium (W. Smith 21: 8–10). In 1735 he was dispatched or perhaps fled to England to testify in the hearings that Morris had brought against the governor in London. Cosby’s death left Harrison bereft of patronage and fortune. A partisan’s loyalty ensures a measure of forbearance. The paradox of literary incompetence in scenes of partisan contention is that one wins forbearance on the other side as well. Failures are allowed to rave on. A

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successful advocate must be stopped by being “turned” to the other side, quashed by legal means, or bought off. Home was turned. The Weekly Journal authors were quashed in the Zenger trial and various ballads were burnt on the gibbet in New York (Shields, Oracles 163–69). James Ralph, Franklin’s youthful friend, who became a partisan writer in London, enjoyed an early retirement on a pension for not writing. Enemies relished the sounds of incompetent advocacy. Indeed, James Alexander did his best to ensure that Harrison would be heard again, goading him in print: “A Large Spaneil, of about Five Foot Five Inches High, has lately stray’d from his Kennell with a Mourth full of fulsom Panegericks, and in his Ramble dropt them in the New York Gazette.” This mockery had its desired effect—Harrison began baying again, and this time the sound upset the citizens of New York. Why should the dareing Press be thus allow’d To Midwife Scandal in the Brainless Crowd, Whom to the worst Misconstrue every Hint, And will believe what e’er they read in print, Especially if levell’d at the Great, Or impudently meant to abuse the State? Whole Sheets of Weekly Filth are sent about To Cozen and Inflame the giddy Rout. (Harrison, “Since Scandal”)

This was not a flattering portrait of the citizenry whose opinion Harrison and the court party should have been cultivating. Indeed, we have here a declaration of the unworthiness of a citizenry to constitute a literate public served by the press because print is automatically accorded too much credulity. Harrison’s own misbegotten adventure in forgery suggests that autograph manuscripts glowed most brightly with the aura of credulity; it was manuscript that Harrison exploited most insidiously. His enemies too saw the peculiar radiance surrounding manuscript communications. After the New York Weekly Journal was repressed, Alexander and Morris floated manuscript satires—now vested with the mystique of conveying a truth that those in power dared not permit in print. Two of these were intercepted and burned at the public gibbet—a testament of their success.

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In the partisan world of the paper war one did not come before the public with one’s name blazoned on an attack. Yet political enemies knew for the most part who wrote what. The Spaniel need not be named. Cosby knew that Alexander, Smith, and Morris, not Zenger, all lurked behind the persona of “Non Ignotus,” who offered the most pungent of the comments in the Weekly Journal. But if the purpose was to shut the opposition up, arresting Zenger expended less political capital and avoided the legal effort of proving who had written which sentence. Besides, the literary fight was a political sideshow. Harrison’s contempt for the citizenry, however impolitic, spoke a hard truth: public opinion and election results did not constitute the whole of the political power game in New York. Governors were appointed in London and had to be overcome there. An Assembly might stop their salary, but some executives could resist financial squeezing better than others. A paper war could only taint public opinion, not effect a political removal. It would not be until the 1760s, in the Stamp Act Crisis and the Regulator Revolts, that print expressions would promote popular resistance that effected political and cultural change. Morris had to ship across the Atlantic to promulgate his charges against Cosby. He attempted this in 1735, going to London with his son Robert Hunter Morris to plead his case in Whitehall. He failed utterly and upon his return reflected, in a long poem, “The Dream and Riddle,” that he circulated in manuscript, on the ill effects to colonies of having the decisive power over affairs reside in a transoceanic authority. A literary meditation on political failure, it is one of the few documents from colonial America that pointed to the limits of the effectiveness of publications in achieving political change. Who read “The Dream”? Morris learned the political utility of belles lettres from Hunter, who had distributed his political closet drama, Androboros among the social coteries of New York and New Jersey. Morris did the same. Indeed, throughout his career, Morris loosed manuscript political verse through the club and teatable networks of New Jersey and New York, sending pieces as far afield as Boston.8 Robert Hunter Morris probably conveyed a copy to the circle in which he participated as a man of letters—the Trenton Circle, presided over by Archibald Home. This circle included, besides Moses and Richa Franks, Abigail Coxe, James Worrall, and David Martin. Perhaps a copy was sent to Abigail Franks. Would a copy have found its way into Mrs. Cosby’s court? If it had, it

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would have been read with alacrity. What is interesting is that there existed an array of these circles, each presided over by an arbiter—whether the hostess of the drawing room or the archpoet of the coterie. In this person rested a local authority confessed by the participants. Abigail Coxe, for instance, said of Home in an elegy: The artless labours of my Pen You knew, And all were pleasing if retouch’d by You; Early to thee each rude Essay I brought, You scann’d the Line, and pointed out the Fault: But harshly now I tune the jarring String Depriv’d of Thee, who taught me how to sing.

Moses Franks, too, confessed Home’s mastery in a tribute: . . . take this Verse (if Verse like this is heard) The last sad Tribute of a Muse Thou rear’d; And if thro’ Time my Artless Labours rise, My Muse shall hail Thee to Thy Native Skies. (Home, front matter)

In the Trenton coterie Home was the arbiter of quality, vested with the potency of judgment that a town madam had when hosting a drawing room. Final word resided with the arbiter. A male or female performer could be judged unseemly, foppish, crude, dull, pedantic, or rude. But who judged the town madam in charge or the master of a coterie? Politeness suggests that elite men and women of letters should not engage in contests as vituperative as those of a political paper war, with teatable raging against teatable. Yet such contests took place. Manuscript satires, criticisms, and familiar letters circulated. Isaac Norris twitted the poetic widow Elizabeth Magawley and her poetic plantation, where she cultivated a cult of suitor poets on the outskirts of Philadelphia in the 1730s. Home floated a manuscript satire, “The First Satyr of Horace Imitated,” directed at Robert Nichols (the poet who graced Mrs. Cosby’s salon): Say, why by chance established or by choise, None, in the Stations which they fill rejoice?

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But Mar their Bliss with this accurs’d allay, “The Neighbour sure is happier much then they” Brave Nichols who in man a hard Campaign When Churchill conquer’d France & Mordaunt Spain, Had shar’d the Toil of ev’ry Glorious Day And treasur’d up a Stock of wounds——& Pay— Salutes Delancy, yet with Envy burns When the deep Vessell brings the rich Returns.

Is it failure or an indication of some substance when one draws the notice of the critic and inspires a satire? There was no laureate or potentate of the realm of letters in the American colonies whose critical authority had the dominion of Dryden, or Pope, or Samuel Johnson. Certain persons—Mather Byles in Massachusetts, Dr. Alexander Hamilton in Maryland, James Kirkpatrick in South Carolina—aspired to such authority, but none achieved it. Rather, “the critic” became a kind of free-floating signifier that anyone could adopt or disparage. When being satirical or critical, one did what one could to make one’s statements seem to possess authority. Home used the prestige of a classical model, so learning sounded as much as judgment and wit in his verse. The absence of a master arbiter in the various literary scenes of course made the question of who performed well, or not, a slippery matter. To be sure, there were easy calls: the hacks who supplied fodder for the street balladeers—poets such as John Dommett (Taylor) in Pennsylvania or Tom Law in New England.9 And, even in the early eighteenth century, schoolboys could chide elegists who continued to churn out lugubrious memorials in the old New England style. London-style grief made John Danforth’s elegies seem rough homespun indeed. But what of someone who was smitten with the muse and had Pope, Milton, and Thomson, along with Bysche’s Riming Dictionary, on the desk? For those who aspired to be a man of parts—who was there to tell them if some of the parts didn’t fit just right? In a colonial world of critics without portfolio and academies that did not teach belles lettres, the standards by which poor performance in polite conversation, in oral declamation, in literary expression, and in public rhetoric could be ascertained were negotiated in a world of

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face-to-face communication. During the decade when printing presses became fixtures in most of the colonial capitals, we have seen a variety of venues where proficiency and inadequacy were identified and witnessed judgments were being passed. We have noted that getting into print was no assurance of expressive competence and that in the partisan world of early newspapers persons sought to provoke more, not less, incompetent writing from the rival camp. We have also noted that in the various polite coteries that existed in some numbers in British American towns there was a tendency for one figure to emerge as arbiter of discourse, determining to a certain degree the reception of manuscripts and declamations. This person served variously as arbiter, mentor, critic, and bestower of rewards, whether of praise or position. While the aesthetics of politeness in British America viewed communicative competence as valuable in itself, there were, for both men and women, concrete consequences for ability: for men, appointment as a protégé to a political figure—the path that Home, Franklin, Aquila Rose, and others followed—and for women, attracting the notice of men of sense, the benefit that Abigail Coxe, Elizabeth Magawley, and Richa Franks enjoyed. The incompetent enjoyed no admiration and earned derision and neglect.

NoteS

1. In this regard, David D. Hall’s introduction to The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, vol. 1 of Amory and Hall’s History of the Book in America (published in 2000), marked a milestone of summary elucidation. 2. Because of pedagogy’s preoccupation with instilling professional skill, quality, and excellence in students and certifying it by tests, reviews, and observations, there is a sense in which all positive forms of accomplishment now fall under some sort of disciplinary regimen. Incompetence and failure, however, violate these regimentations in stupefyingly various ways that elude summary beyond the FMM (frequently made mistakes) that serve as negative exemplars in instruction. 3. In 2005 Forbes listed J. K. Rowling’s sales at $41,000,000, Dan Brown’s at $88,000,000. 4. The first attempt to institute an enduring critical authority in print in British America was connected with the Proteus Echo essay series, composed by Mather Byles, Matthew Adams, and John Adams in the New England Weekly Rehearsal in 1732. The series ran weekly for a year.

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5. Robert Nichols (Nicolls), a descendant of New York’s first English governor, a member of Cosby’s court party, was an attorney who would in 1836 become coroner and later postmaster of New York City. 6. Consider William Smith’s contemporary assessment of the cultural influence of Governor Burnet upon New York society: “The Governour was a man of sense and polite breeding, a well read scholar, sprightly, and of a social disposition. Being devoted to his books, he abstained from all those excesses, into which his pleasurable relish would otherwise have plunged him. He studied the arts of recommending himself to people, had nothing of the moroseness of a scholar, was gay and condescending, affected no pomp, but visited every family of reputation, and often diverted himself in free converse with the ladies, by whom he was very much admired” (1: 165). 7. Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift were the most famous of Home’s contemporaries who secured office by dint of literary skill. Their friend Colonel Robert Hunter, who became governor of New York, also rose to power by means of communication talent. 8. The following poems were circulated through New York and New Jersey: “The Mock Monarchy of the Kingdom of Apes,” “On the Essex Riots,” “A Song made upon the Election of New magistrates for this City,” “To his Excellency the Governour of New Jersie, upon the Assembly’s Disiring him to fix his own Seat,” “Dialogue Concerning Trade,” “In the Garb of old Gaul with the Fire of old Rome,” and “On the Death of a Late Valorous and Noble Knight.” His critical meditation “On the word ‘the’ in the New England Poem” was meant for a Boston audience. 9. Law, the author of the ballad on the Pickwacket fight, was particularly noted for counting in his ballads (Dingo).

workS Cited

Adamson, John. “The Tudor and Stuart Courts, 1509–1714.” The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500–1750. London: Phoenix Illustrated, 2000. 95–114. Alexander, James. Notice. New York Weekly Journal 24 Dec. 1733. Amory, Hugh. “Reinventing the Colonial Book.” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Vol. 1 of A History of the Book in America. 26–55. [Coxe, Abigail]. “To the Memory of Archibald Home, Esq. late Secretary of the Jerseys, etc.” Pennsylvania Gazette 16 Aug. 1744: 3. Cupach, William R., and Brian H. Spitzberg. The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication. Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. Dingo. “To John Winthrop Esq; on his Poetical Address to King George spoken Extempore Aug. 1, 1723.” New England Courant 26 Aug. 1723: 2.

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Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Rev. ed. Dublin: University College of Dublin Press, 2006. Franks, Abigail. Letter to Napthali Franks. 9 June 1734. The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Colonial Jewish Correspondence: Letters of the Franks Family, 1733–1748. Boston: American Jewish Historical Society, 1968. Hall, David D. Introduction. The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Vol. 1 of A History of the Book in America. [Harrison, Francis]. “Cosby the Mild.” New York Gazette 7 Jan. 1733–34: 3. ———. “Since Scandal and Ill Nature take their Rounds.” New York Gazette 15 Apr. 1734: 4. Home, Archibald. “Poems on Several Occasions, by Archibald Home, late Secretary, and One of His Majesties Council for the Province of New Jersey: North America.” Laing mss. 3: 452. University of Edinburgh Library. Jackson, Leon. The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Kamensky, Jane. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Morris, Lewis. “The Dream and Riddle. A Poem.” Unpublished ms. Misc. Verse and Prose. Robert Morris Papers. Special Collections, Rutgers University Library. Olson, Alison. “The Zenger Case Revisited: Satire, Sedition, and Political Debate in 18th-Century America.” Early American Literature 35.3 (2000): 223–45. Shields, David S. Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ———. “Cosmopolitanism and the Anglo-Jewish Elite in British America.” A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America. Ed. Frank Shuffelton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 143–62. ———. Oracles of Empire: Poetry Politics and Commerce in British America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Smith, Hannah. “The Court in England, 1714–1760: A Declining Political Institution?” History 90 (2005): 23–41. Smith, William. The History of the Province of New-York from the First Discovery to the Year 1732. Ed. Michael Kammen. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Spindell, D. J. “The Law of Words: Verbal Abuse in North Carolina to 1730.” American Journal of Legal History 39.1 (1995): 25–42. [Taylor, Jacob]. “An Elegy, on John Dommett, Who dy’d at White-Marsh, on the 22nd of July, 1739.” American Weekly Mercury 3 Aug. 1739: 3.

Chapter three

addressing maps in British america Print, Performance, and the Cartographic Reformation

Martin BrüCkner

I begin with two examples of early American cartographic sponsorship. In 1747, British America’s best-known printer and bookseller, Benjamin Franklin, enthusiastically placed a repeat order for Henry Popple’s Map of the British Empire in America (1733; fig. 3.1).1 At the same time, Franklin’s account books show him supporting with equal excitement the surveyor and map engraver Lewis Evans, whose General Map of the Middle British Colonies (1755; fig. 3.2) Franklin would go on to praise in his personal correspondence and the Pennsylvania Gazette.2 Franklin could not have put his money or influence behind two maps that differed more in their mode of representation or reputation. When ordering the Popple map Franklin selected a cartographic work that was a generation behind in its display of geographical knowledge about North America. Initially approved by the Board of Trade, the map was quickly repudiated by the board’s commissioners because it misrepresented British territorial claims (Cumming 233). Other critics denounced the Popple map for its overzealous use of pictorial placeholders—(showing, for example, imaginary settlements in Illinois or mountains in the Great Plains)—that on the whole served to cover up 49

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Figure 3.1. this is the title map, a reduced image prefacing the twenty sheets in this atlas that, when fully assembled, make up one large map of north america. Henry Popple, map of the British empire in america: with the french and spanish settlements adjacent thereto (london: Harding, 1733). courtesy american antiquarian society.

geographical ignorance. Indeed, because the map was visually enhanced by a variety of picture insets it readily evokes Jonathan Swift’s satirical line on early eighteenth-century mapmaking conventions: “So Geographers in Afric maps, / with Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps; / And o’er uninhabitable Downs / Place Elephants for want of Towns” (12). The Evans map, by contrast, not only omitted such decorative “elephants” but was hailed for its geographic accuracy (Gipson 75–83; Wroth 155–62). Unlike Popple, Evans emphasized the discourse of cartographic writing, especially grid lines and coordinates, over pictorial

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representations. Decorative elements, such as borders or cartouches, were replaced by narrative texts; instead of allegorical images, words performed the work of representation; and where Popple’s margins offered scenic views, the Evans map showed numerical tables comparing travel distances. Almost predictably, upon its publication the critical response to the Evans map was decidedly Johnsonian rather than Swiftian in nature. In 1756 the Evans map received an unexpected nod of recognition from Samuel Johnson in the Literary Magazine. Applying the definition from A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), according to which a “map [is] a geographical picture on which lands and seas are delineated according to the latitude and longitude,” Johnson’s review praised Evans for using a “table of latitude,” “his meridian at the State-house in Philadelphia,” and the “computation of degrees from London” (295). In map criticism the formal differences between embellished picture map and gridded word map reflect the discursive changes implemented by the “cartographic reformation.”3 Map historians such as Leo Bagrow describe this reformation in the terms of Enlightenment ideology: between 1670 and 1770 “maps ceased to be works of art, the products of individual minds, and craftsmanship was finally superseded by specialized science and the machine” (22). Theoretical geographer David Harvey follows suit, arguing that eighteenth-century maps were gradually “stripped of all elements of fantasy and religious belief, as well as any sign of the experiences involved in their production,” and instead became “abstract and strictly functional systems for the factual ordering of phenomena in space” (249).4 However, when this assessment is applied to Franklin’s comments on map sponsorship we are pressed hard to find agonistic and differential language lamenting changes in cartography that trace formal or cultural shifts from art to science, craftsmanship to mechanical reproduction, or fiction to fact. Instead, Franklin’s writings reveal a much more synchronic and materialistic attitude toward cartographic culture. Let us consider Franklin’s map order of 1747, in which he writes to his agent in London: “I must desire you to send me per first Opportunity the Maps [I] formerly wrote for, viz. Popple’s large One of North America pasted on Rollers; Ditto bound in a Book: 8 or 10 other Maps of equal Size if to be had; they are for the Long Gallery and the Assembly Room in the Statehouse. If none so large are to be got, let Prospects of Cities,

Figure 3.2. lewis evans, a general map of the middle British colonies (Philadelphia: franklin and Hall, 1755). courtesy american antiquarian society.

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Buildings, &c. be pasted round them, to make them as large” (Labaree 3: 321). Neither map content nor cartographic accuracy but material size seems to matter the most. The Popple map was one of the print giants of the eighteenth century: it measured 239 × 229 cm when fully assembled. It was also one of the more expensive printed artifacts reaching North America. Without shipping and handling fees, a copy of the Popple map cost when fixed “on rollers 2£:12s:6d,” “Bound 1£:16s:6d,” and “in Sheets 1£:11s:6d” (Popple). Pointedly, Franklin, the self-declared man of frugality, requested repeatedly that copies of the map were to be “pasted on Rollers” (Labaree 3: 214 and 4: 323). In comparison, the Evans map was much smaller in size (49 × 64 cm) and cheaper in price. A colored Evans map cost “on superfine Writing Paper, Two Pieces of Eight, and of the plain ones, on Printing Paper, One Piece of Eight each.” As with the Popple map, Franklin seemed to favor the expensive copy: his ads proclaim that if purchased as “colour Maps” the Evans map would be accompanied by a free copy of Evans’s pamphlet Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays (1755).5 Franklin’s response to these two very different maps offers an alternative perspective for reassessing, if not correcting, the narrative about the cartographic reformation. Underlying our current critical assessment is a broader epistemological revaluation of spatial representation: by the same token that Michel Foucault is able to contend that in the wake of Enlightenment reforms “space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile” (70), many studies across the disciplines have now observed how toward the end of the cartographic reformation maps had become static signs. Calling on centralized state power and a blind faith in the sciences as the cause of change, they show that after the cartographic reformation maps lacked “human” and/or “humane” qualities because they reduced phenomenologically full life-worlds into geometrical empty (and emptiable) spaces. This essay argues for a different epistemological grounding that views the Popple and Evans maps, not as antagonistic examples of a historical process, but as complementary indices of a cartographic user culture that approached maps as interactive texts embedded in material culture and its attending communicative rituals. Franklin’s map order has already given the cue: his overt emphasis on the maps’ packaging—as wall maps “on rollers” or as a marketing gimmick for

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literary pamphlets—invokes an evaluation system in which maps are viewed less as passive victims of a culture industry than as custommade artifacts informed by personal interest and British America’s emergent media landscape. In short, his order suggests that the inside of cartographic representation can be productively reassessed from the outside. Indeed, in what follows, this essay steps outside conventional map criticism to approach maps in a way that is similar to W. J. T. Mitchell’s proposal for “addressing media.” I will examine maps “not as if they were logical systems or structures but as if they were environments where images live, or personas and avatars that address us and can be addressed in turn” (Mitchell 203). On the one hand, this approach allows us to discuss cartographic representation in relation to its mediation, that is, as a specialized form of printed matter. On the other hand, taking an environmental approach to exploring the meaning of maps opens up for analysis the habits and rituals surrounding the response to and consumption of maps. Like Swift’s and Johnson’s response to eighteenth-century maps, the Popple and Evans maps elicit a set of questions that consider the materiality of map form and use function: How do we address maps in relation to pictures? How do maps address print culture? What are we to make of performances surrounding maps in public and private spaces? Ultimately, the essay shows how eighteenth-century maps had become repositories showcasing changes in eighteenth-century print ideology. Occupying the worlds of both print and visual communication, maps did more than foster a highly versatile notion of print literacy: like the Bible, the primer, or the newspaper, the map became the kind of overdetermined print artifact that could quickly turn into a media event in which the performance surrounding it was as significant as the artifact’s actual content.

piCture S, priNtS, aNd the popple Map

I first address the Popple map as an instance of print media. When Franklin asserts his map to be the material standard for customizing other maps, his insistence on enhancing the size through the addition of “prospects” is concurrent with the eighteenth-century definition of the

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word map. The majority of eighteenth-century textbooks associate maps with the word picture or its semantic alternatives, delineation, drawing, or projection (Andrews 2; Alpers 122–26; Harley 109–47).6 When applied to the Popple map the term picture is especially apt, since the map imitates the content of large paintings and other wall hangings coming out of both eighteenth-century art studios and print shops.7 Indeed, the map shares many attributes of popular picture theory: its compositional order strives for balance, invoking the rules of perspectival drawing such as the golden mean and the use of a vanishing point (variously taking the map margin or the equator for a horizon). No part of the canvassed space remains empty; land and water, known and unknown territories are all sketched out. Pictorial elements—that is, realistic drawings of landscapes and people—render the western expanse of North America in the picturesque tradition (showing, for example, intricate tree clusters and hillsides). In the map’s upper margins we see elaborate picture insets containing panoramic views of Niagara Falls, Mexico City, Quebec, and New York. At the map’s lower center a scene of a naval battle follows the contemporary taste for historical genre paintings. On the lower left, the title cartouche’s baroque imagery presents the interpretative key for making sense of the map’s imperial message. But it is the material size that locates the Popple map squarely inside the interpretive framework established by the visual arts for picture prints (Ivins). As a product of copper engraving and cold press or roller printing techniques, the map is first and foremost a printed image intended for the vertical display afforded by tall architectural spaces. Historically, decorative maps were designed for display in both public and domestic interiors of the privileged classes. The Popple map’s size recalls the “map galleries” that were maintained by Renaissance courts and the Vatican (Barber 110–16; Schulz). Circa 1750, however, it represented the high end of a popular print genre that was increasingly finding its way into the homes of the middle classes. Genre painters from Jan Vermeer to William Hogarth frequently added the image of large maps to the portrayal of their patrons. Shown next to tapestries, mirrors, window treatments, domestic use objects, and paintings, display maps of all sizes ascribed to sitters, viewers, and patrons the role of the newly minted imperial geographer, consuming and consumed by a territorial desire and a burgeoning global commodity culture.8

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By the mid-eighteenth century British Americans were equally partial to oversized map displays. The Virginia Gazette captured the domestic appeal of maps in ads such as this one: “a very large Map (being Five Feet long, and Four Feet broad on Two Sheets of Elephant Paper), it’s not only Useful, but Ornamental, for Gentleman’s Halls, Parlours, or Staircases” (9–16 Sept. 1737). Whether “framed,” “glazed,” or “on rollers,” maps competed directly with other conspicuously sized printed matter, such as broadsides and picture prints.9 These print genres outsold wall maps handily, but they hardly threatened the maps’ optical sway over eighteenth-century American interiors. Even when facing the ultimate big print medium, the “elephant size” wallpaper, maps managed to eclipse the latest newcomer of domestic print furniture (Lynn 17–30, 156–58). As a 1787 fictional sketch in the Columbian Magazine suggests, maps asserted their control over the walls in American homes in ways that no other print genre could: writing about her bookish husband, a woman complains that “the pretty flowered paper in the hall is all cover’d over with nothing but maps” (qtd. in Pritchard 217).10 Outside the home, maps were an equally prominent staple of public decor. For example, the Popple map was put on display in Philadelphia’s Assembly Hall, where it thus hung in close proximity to portraits of the Penn family, sculptures and allegorical prints, all kinds of firearms borrowed from the armory next door, and gift objects such as Native American ceremonial blankets.11 Other public arrangements are reported for the Popple map in the North, where it was hanging in Boston’s Old State House (Nutzhorn 360n), and in the South, where the map was displayed in the governor’s mansion in Williamsburg, Virginia (Hood 62, 65). Smaller wall maps, such as the Evans map, were commonly found inside courthouses, taverns, counting rooms, and coffeehouses, not to mention bookstores and print shops, where maps were put on display along with newspapers, advertisements, satirical cartoons, and local folkloristic objects.12 In both private and public settings, the Popple map’s primary function was to become a silent spectacle celebrating British imperial power. Variously called a schema, a matrix, or an analogue, the map inherently invokes the rhetorical conceit of being a silent signifier (Popper 77; Gombrich 90; Harley 83–107): from the linguist’s perspective maps are ultimately ideographic signs and thus are unpronounceable (one cannot

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enunciate cartographic signs or symbols in imitation of a sound or an utterance). Applying this rationale to the Popple map, the most suggestive ideographic image is the map’s title cartouche (see fig. 3.1, lower left)—the “pictura loquens of maps” (Harley 136)—in which the pictorial rendition of Native American characters contains the act of speaking but renders Native or American speakers mute. The cartouche’s allegorical message amplifies the political agenda of the map title: intended to show the “British Empire in America,” the map illustrates how we ought to envision the submission of all Americans to British commercial interests (Brückner 63–74). But if the cartouche figures as a semiotic key to the map’s political meaning, its pictorialism provides a comment on how both map and meaning ought to be positioned in relation to print communication. In its dual capacity as a giant wall hanging and a picture print, the Popple map was intended to become the object of a respectful and admiring gaze. Respect, admiration, and the implicit denial of the viewer’s agency have been identified by modern map critics as one of the dominant modalities shaping the reception of cartographic representation (Harley 51–81). In the history of bourgeois visual arts, display objects such as the Popple map played an important role in rituals intent on defining and regulating social relations through spatial representation. Presiding over a variety of architectural spaces in North America, the Popple map’s material format visually structured public and private lives. While the map’s content created the illusion of stabilizing a large geopolitical arena that was constantly in flux, its excessive materiality helped to stabilize a new social hierarchy that was becoming increasingly porous and competitive. Put on display in, say, Franklin’s home or shop, the Popple map would work as a conspicuous consumer object, signifying not only the owner’s economic status but also his place in a social network defined by educational achievement and cultural refinement.13 By the same token that a large map reflected the attitudes of the imperial subject it also was a self-reflexive object, one that actively structured its viewership. As maps provided a canvas on which to project all kinds of personal ambitions, they became the focus of the map audiences’ collective gaze. In their capacity as focal point all wall hangings were intended to attract the eyes of the sophisticated connoisseur and the plainly curious. If large maps were intended to garner respectful

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inspection, the act of displaying imperial maps elicited a different dramatic gesture of reverence. Such maps responded to a “politics of size” (Zagarri) in which the map’s material size and the size of the represented territory were mutually constitutive of the map owners’ authority; thus maps were displayed with the intent to impress local politicians and foreign diplomats because the map-viewing ritual conferred an additional sense of dignity and gravitas to private ceremonies and public performances. Indeed, the basic pattern of display and review defined social rituals until the onset of the American Revolution, when the Popple map still managed to impress John Adams, the Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress. Reporting to his wife the most notable sights of Philadelphia on 13 August 1776, Adams described the Popple map with awe: “It is the largest I ever saw, and the most distinct, not very accurate. It is Eight foot square” (Adams 90).

p r i N t i N G l e t t e r S , r e a d i N G w o r d S , a N d t h e e va N S M a p

While the Popple map primarily encourages materialistic and spectatorial use patterns, through its implied proximity to prints and the practice of silent viewing the Evans map creates a different effect by emphasizing print literacy and the habits of reading. What is striking about A General Map of the Middle British Colonies is that it presents itself not as a picture but as a text. The map achieves this textual pitch, on the one hand, by discontinuing the use of scenic views or decorative cartouches, using only one heraldic image (the dedication in the upper left corner) and the image of a compass rose (in the lower right). On the other hand, the map privileges alphabetic signs in the form of a letter-coded grid (map margin) and several verbal narratives that imitate two competing modes of textual transmission: manuscript (in cursive fonts) and typography (shown in bold and variable typographical fonts). Overall, Evans uses a trompe l’oeil effect, imitating smaller papers (inset map and dedicatory note) to create the impression that his map is a paper construct that is being written upon, consulted, and edited—in short, that it is a scrivener’s or printer’s document imitating a busy work desk rather than a fancy wall display. Emphasizing paper, writing, and typographic marks, the Evans map adjusts both the rhetoric of the map and the modalities of map

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reception. The map no longer pursues a communication model in which it is primarily considered a product of the visual arts and thus subject to the silent gaze. Instead, it applies notions of modern literacy and reading competence. For the map to make sense, its consumer must be able to “read” alphabetic signs. In practice this means the map reader must behave like a student who learns how to cipher—by moving eyes and tracing fingers from left to right, up and down, he or she imitates the most elementary reading exercise offered by colonial primers. Indeed, it is not so much alphabetic print literacy as the pedagogic protocol surrounding it that becomes the key to accessing the Evans map. In “An Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies,” part of the separately published pamphlet Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays, Evans teaches readers (not viewers) how to use the alphabetical letter code in the map margins. He writes: “The Letters in the Margin point out a ready Way of Finding a Place in the Map. In the East margin is a Row of Capitals; at Top, another of small Letters, in each Degree of Latitude and Longitude” (2). Relying on typographic symbols in the printed text of the pamphlet, Evans seeks not only to relate alphabetic letters to numerical coordinates but to realign the map’s pictorial status with modern conventions of letterpress printing.14 The literate map reader would proceed as follows: “Carry your Eye from the Capital Westward till you come into the Square, under the small Letter, and there you will find the Place referred to.” Thus we discover that “the settlements made by the English may be considered as extended to No. 4 ||* on Connecticut River, and thence to Saratoga † on Hudson’s River, and to Case’s § on the Mohock’s River; thence back, by the Lakes ¶, at the Head of the Susquehanna, to the Head of the Delaware, and thence down the last mentioned River to the Mouth of Legheiwacksein || . . . ☞” (Evans, Geographical 2). Throughout this passage the pamphlet’s margin transposes typographical symbols such as “||” or “†” into alphabetic letter combinations such as “Cb” and “Cc.” Nonalphabetic signs become alphabetized, transforming the act of map reading into a finger-guided, indexical literacy lesson. While the “eye” governs both the reception of the printed alphabet and the process of map reading, the Evans map goes one step further by proposing the integration of “sound” into the map’s repertoire of communication strategies. Continuing his instructions on map reading, Evans

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writes: “In the Letter-press Printing I am obliged, for want of Proper Characters, to substitute gh in the Indian Words to express a certain sound that the Italians, French and English are destitute of; and that other modern Nations, who have it, are not agreed to express by any settled Character. The Hollanders use g, the Irish gh, the Welch and Germans ch. In the Engraving I have revived the antient Greek Character which was used to express the same Sound” (2). Through instructions such as these Evans asserts the graphic shape of the printer’s alphabet—here the dead letter of a dead language—as the standard for approximating the “sound” of unfamiliar languages. In so doing he proposes an elocutionary model of cartographic representation. By seeking to approximate linguistic differences that separated both Euro-Americans from Native Americans and Europeans from one another, the map manual inadvertently bridges the gap between the written and the spoken word. The map changes its form of address: not only does it instruct its readers in viewing it like a text, but its use of the manicule—a mnemonic device employed by both readers and speakers—reminds us of the oral aspect of primary literacy lessons in which the map reader ciphers letters out loud (Sherman). As alphabetic writing and speech—the dead letter and the living word—are now conjoined, cartographic writing both invokes speech and oralizes the map image; the map becomes a speakable print form.15 That the Evans map became part of British American oral culture is a much-overlooked aspect of its reception history. When in 1754 the Pennsylvania Assembly voted to give Evans the sum of £50 for working on A General Map, the debate for spending this much money was informed by a decade of territorial warfare, beginning with the Louisburg campaign of 1745 and ending as another major British-French conflict was being foreshadowed by the publication of John Mitchell’s large Map of the British Dominions in North America (1755).16 While the Popple and the Evans maps were the talk of the town in Philadelphia, public speakers referenced maps literally and figuratively: indeed, orators turned regularly to the figure of the map as both material and forensic evidence during the process of dispositio (organization of one’s material) and elocutio (high, middle, or low style of presentation).17 Maps were called upon by writers and speakers as a popular commonplace or topos for illustrating—and clinching—arguments about issues ranging from land schemes to speculative theories about the “love of country” (Brückner 90–97).

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The Popple and the Evans maps (and a host of other cartographic alternatives) must now be viewed as spectacular stage props participating in the theaters (and theatrics) of colonial public life. Indeed, Franklin’s demand for oversized maps fits well into an established English theater tradition (beginning with William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton) in which actors playing Machiavellian statesmen were wont to handle cartographic artifacts on stage. In the theater called the “Globe,” large maps were deployed for signifying nations and estates, as well as for driving plots and stories of territoriality (Morgan; Brückner and Poole). At the same time that maps were exchanging hands between characters, they became internalized as textual forms that shaped popular metaphors expressing the nexus of performance, politics, and psychology. We have only to think of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Lear (1603), in which the king’s very first spoken words (“Give me the map there. Know that we have divided / In three our kingdom”) transpose the map from a stage object into the basis of speech acts (dialogue) and bodily action (violence). In Middleton’s Game at Chess (1624), the Black Bishop readily compares his ambitions to a “globe” and his thoughts to a maplike “plot.” A century later, in 1730, Henry Fielding has the character Politick exclaim in the play The Coffeehouse Politician: “Map me no Maps, Sir, my Head is a Map, a Map of the whole World” (436). As properties of the stage, cartographic representations thus took on the dramaturgical role of “material fact” and therefore became agents motivating actions independent of map contents or cartographic signifiers. Instead, maps now absorbed dramatic meaning, became defamiliarized and fetishized, and as a form of public possession became possessed: certain stage props were haunted media, affecting not only the play’s characters but audiences with each and every performance of the play (Sofer 20–27). One property of staged maps—and this I argue applies to the Popple and Evans maps—is the way they circumvent the maps’ implied silences by creating opportunities for dialogic gestures. Eighteenthcentury visual culture and in particular satirical prints illustrate how maps entered into dramatic dialogue. As early as 1755 the image of a large map is at the center of the satirical print Britain’s Rights maintained; or French Ambition dismantled (fig. 3.3).

Figure 3.3. satirical print, Britain’s rights maintained; or french ambition dismantled (london, 1755). library of congress Prints and Photographs division. lc-usZ62-1502.

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Overall, this print depicts a dramatic dialogue between allegorical figures performing before a public (here presented as a cheering crowd celebrating an imperial column bearing the royal crest and letters “GEO:II”). The cast of characters consists of two Roman gods (Neptune and Mars), the two combating nation states of England and France (Britannia and the Genius of France), and two caricatures showing the French aristocrat and the British commoner/sailor, Jack Tar. Controlling this dialogue is the map of North America. Placed at the center, it assumes the stage work of a conversation piece, directing the narrative flow of the cartoon as well as the traffic of the viewer’s gaze and reader’s comprehension. Illustrations of “map talk” tend in the majority to reflect the principled performance of polite conversation (Cresswell 258; Dolmetsch 28, 45). However, examples such as this one show that conversing by maps also entails the danger of social action, as suggested by Neptune’s imaginary stabbing of the American map while the figures cry, fret, and debate over it. Indeed, a later print, The Council of the Rulers, and the Elders against the Tribe of ye Great Americanites (1775; fig. 3.4), goes as far as to suggest that violent behavior is the direct result of the staging of maps. The print shows a wall map, entitled “North America,” exploding into flames while overlooking a political gathering in which the audience is losing its studied civil behavior: men markedly belonging to the social elite are shown to shout and argue, using emotional and aggressive gestures. The correlative symbolism of map and social action cannot have been lost on Franklin or other British American sponsors of publicly staged maps. All we have to do is remember that the Popple and Evans maps were hung in Philadelphia’s State House and thus inserted into several theatrically overdetermined spaces. The Assembly Hall provided the formal setting and stage for civic affairs, including parliamentarystyle meetings and courtroom dramas. The Long Gallery was a space in which local officials and patrons of the arts enacted the rites of sociability: it witnessed sociable meetings in the European tradition as well as more rustic Native American powwows; it was the stage for lectures on the arts and sciences, musical and theatrical performances, and last but not least, formal and informal banquets. Considering these settings, the maps sponsored by Franklin not only were intended for public display but also were strategically selected subjects for generating public debate. Franklin’s initial map order was paid for by the taxpaying public;

Figure 3.4. the council of the rulers, and the elders against the tribe of ye great americanites. westminster magazine 2 (1775): opp. p. 640. library of congress Prints and Photographs division. lc-usZ61-79.

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subsequently, imperial wall maps such as the Popple map and Evans’s local mapping projects became a matter of common interest, attracting the elite and the nonelite to closely inspect the community’s cartographic investment in a setting notorious for noise rather than silence.

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While we do not have reports on how the staging of maps in Philadelphia caused actual riots during the 1750s, the prodigious entanglement of silent “dead” maps with “live” performances shows that maps—and in particular display maps—bear out the attributes of being “living” objects. If we go beyond the textual aspect and look to their integration into the various performance environments, then maps are a print genre (and here I am invoking the first large maps by Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator) that adheres to the early modern doctrine of material associationism (or “intertextuality,” to use a more recent philological term). In that sense, maps are material artifacts that, in the words of Robert Blair St. George, become significant through referential strategies, such as “metaphoric compression, symbolic condensation, and symbolic diffusion” (5). As with sacred or iconic objects from the period, the material environment of the map becomes meaningful because maps are “entangled with the world beyond its edges” (5). Indeed, once understood as a rhetorical and material commonplace, the maps discussed above operated like a Brechtian fourth wall. Largesized cartographic artifacts such as the Popple map redefined the colonists’ relationship to the cartographic representation of territory and the social space they inhabited; the map now had as much in common with the refined goals of silent map reading as with the boisterous noise of theatrical spectacles. With map prints becoming stage props in public and private spaces, the audience transposed cartography’s most recurrent motif—the visual display of territories—into performative texts that were more than symbolic objects recording upper- and middleclass consumer habits. They were “living” objects that not only embodied the colonies’ official investment in territorial representation but also revealed just how specific forms of print affected communicative behaviors and everyday actions (Brückner 20–25, 90–94).

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In the end, Franklin’s map order of 1747 reveals a set of performative principles that goes far beyond the established consensus about map meaning or the cartographic reformation. The critical expectation that maps are one-way signs regulating the imperial traffic in power relations becomes complicated by the two-way patterns surrounding the local performance of maps. Indeed, Franklin’s commitment to the Popple and Evans maps points to a much broader, anthropological definition of performance. If for anthropologists performance is what Richard Schechner calls the “restoration of behavior,” each of the staged maps shown above could be considered an instance of “restored behavior.” On the surface, this means that display maps become the storage container for official territorial behaviors, including modern patterns of invasion and surveillance. Like other performance projects, however, maps emerging during the cartographic reformation can then be examined as a record of “twicebehaved behavior,” as a material repetition and index for documenting attitudes of territoriality shaped by the rules of seeing and reading, speaking and writing (35–116). Modern cartographic criticism has demonstrated at great length how maps serve rote-oriented public goals. Maps repeat knowledge of natural phenomena, historical events, and political ideologies; they repeat directly preexisting maps and indirectly official records. At the same time, however, if we apply the anthropologist’s reminder that “no action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way twice; they must be reinvented or recreated at each appearance” (Roach 46), the cartographic reformation takes a distinctly performative turn. Instead of making the grammar and technology inherent to map discourse the focus of cartographic investigations, Franklin’s example teaches us that the nexus of map production and reception (including the maps’ periodic and often anachronistic method of reinventing or recreating information) is an important pivot point around which we may wish to organize not only our histories of cartography but those of print, literacy, and orality.

NoteS

1. This was 28 Nov. 1747, the second time that Franklin ordered the Popple map. His first order is recorded on 22 May 1746 (see Labaree 3: 77). Franklin ordered the Popple map at least once more on 20 June 1752 (Labaree 4: 323).

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2. Franklin’s relationship with Evans was long and complicated: Franklin was at once his employer and his creditor (Evans borrowed money from Franklin between 1736 and 1753). See Lemay 398 and Labaree 3: 48. On Franklin’s promotion of Evans, see Labaree 5: 448; Pennsylvania Gazette 10 and 24 July, 14 Aug., and 27 Nov. 1755. 3. Brannon; Rees; Edney’s “Cartography” offers an excellent survey of eighteenth-century map history and criticism. 4. Here we must acknowledge recent criticism looking at maps as historically specific artifacts that are subject to market forces and social construction. For example, see Harley 51–81; Edney, “Reconsidering” 165–98; and most recently Pedley. 5. See Pennsylvania Gazette 27 Nov. 1755. 6. Readers beware: to discuss maps as pictures is anathema to map theorists and cartographic historians. It took most of the 1980s and 1990s to convince fellow cartographers and other disciplines that maps are not merely pictures but complex writing systems. This analytical/ interpretive effort, however, has also led to a perhaps hasty retreat from considering the pictorial definition of maps at face value and viewing maps as artifacts belonging to a larger visual culture of print/s (as defined by Chartier 7–8). 7. Mapmakers were versatile artists working as engravers and painters. See Wallis; Alpers 119–68; for an American context, see Bosse, “‘To Promote Useful Knowledge,’” and Danforth. 8. On the commodification of maps and their appeal for the European middle classes, see Alpers 119–68; Pedley 6, 159. On maps and consumer habits, see Mukerji; Barber; and Pritchard. 9. A search of the Pennsylvania Gazette for the period between 1730 and 1760 reveals that advertisements by shopkeepers and booksellers consistently list entries for “maps” next to “pictures,” “prints,” or “cuts.” For a representative example, see Pennsylvania Gazette issues for 18 Jan. 1743; 19 Jan. 1744; 1 Nov. 1744; 17 and 19 Oct. 1745; 24 Apr. 1746; etc. 10. The article quoted is “Frettana,” Columbian Magazine 1 (1787): 594. 11. I would like to thank Robert L. Giannini for showing me Independence Hall and for sharing his unpublished report “Furnishing Review: Second Floor, Independence Hall,” Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia. 12. For records documenting the presence of maps in colonial public spaces, see Pritchard; Pritchard and Taliaferro 43–56; Rice 24, app.; Bosse, “Boston Map Trade” and “Maps in the Marketplace”; and Brückner, chaps. 1 and 2. 13. On commodity and consumer culture in the transatlantic region, see McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb; Breen; and Carson, Hoffman, and Albert. 14. For different readings of Evans and typography, see Hallock; Boelhower. 15. Evans’s gesture toward speech resembles what Sandra Gustafson has called “the performance semiotic of speech and text,” in which the speech and

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text are considered “as symbolic and performative forms of language rather than as discrete and hierarchical entities” (xvi). 16. See Wroth 153, 157–58. Franklin’s papers tell this story as one of competition between the empire’s new cartographic masterpiece, John Mitchell’s 1755 Map of the British Dominions, and the Evans map, which exemplified the colonial desire for self-representation. With the Evans map about to go public, Franklin writes: “Evans, who is for that purpose furnished with all the Materials our Country affords, and the Assembly have to encourage him given £ 50 towards the Expence. When that is done Dr. Mitchel’s Map may perhaps be something improv’d from it” (Labaree 5: 448). 17. Eighteenth-century rhetoricians come very close to describing the classical system of oratory in cartographic terms, calling attention to the habits of organizing and committing presentation material in the form of “topics” or “loci.” Blair is critical of this system because once it became popular it suggested that “a person might mechanically become an orator, without any genius at all” (118). Blair, like many of his fellow rhetoricians, here seeks to come to terms with Cicero’s conception of committing ideas to memory by creating maplike sketches on wax tablets (De Oratore 2: 353–60).

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———. “Maps in the Marketplace: Cartographic Vendors and Their Customers in Eighteenth-Century America.” Cartographica 42.1 (2007): 1–51. ———. “‘To Promote Useful Knowledge’: An Accurate Map of the Four New England States by John Norman and John Coles.” Imago Mundi 52 (2000): 138–54. Brannon, Gary. “The Artistry and Science of Map-Making.” Geographical Magazine 61.9 (1989): 37–40. Breen, T. H. “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776.” Journal of British Studies 25.4 (1986): 467–99. Brückner, Martin. The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Brückner, Martin, and Kristen Poole. “The Plot Thickens: Surveying Manuals, Drama, and the Materiality of Narrative Form in Early Modern England.” English Literary History 69.3 (2002): 617–48. Carson, Cary, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert. Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. Chartier, Roger, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Oratore. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Cresswell, Donald. The American Revolution in Drawings and Prints: A Checklist of 1765–1790 Graphics in the Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1975. Cumming, William P. The Southeast in Early Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Danforth, Susan L. “The First Official Maps of Maine and Massachusetts.” Imago Mundi 35 (1983): 37–57. Dolmetsch, Joan D. Rebellion and Reconciliation: Satirical Prints on the Revolution at Williamsburg. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1976. Edney, Matthew H. “Cartography without ‘Progress’: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking.” Cartographica 30.2–3 (1993): 54–68. ———. “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making.” Geography and Enlightenment. Ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 165–98. Evans, Lewis. A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America. Philadelphia: Franklin and Hall, 1755. ———. Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays. Philadelphia: Franklin, 1755.

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Fielding, Henry. Plays. Ed. Thomas Lockwood. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Gipson, Lawrence Henry. Lewis Evans. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1939. Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. Gustafson, Sandra M. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Hallock, Thomas. “Between Accommodation and Usurpation: Lewis Evans, Geography, and the Iroquois-British Frontier, 1743–1784.” American Studies 44.3 (2003): 121–46. Harley, J. B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Hood, Graham. The Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg: A Cultural Study. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1991. Ivins, William M. Prints and Visual Communication. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Johnson, Samuel. “Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays, . . . by Lewis Evans.” Literary Magazine, or, Universal Review 15 Sept.–15 Oct. 1756: 293–99. Labaree, Leonard W., ed. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–. Lemay, J. A. Leo. The Life of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Lynn, Catherine. Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to World War I. New York: Barra Foundation Cooper-Hewitt, 1980. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Middleton, Thomas. A Game at Chess. Ed. J. W. Harper. London: New Mermaids, 1966. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Morgan, Victor. “The Literary Image of Globes and Maps in Early Modern England.” English Map-Making, 1500–1650. Ed. Sarah Tyacke. London: British Library, 1983. 46–56. Mukerji, Chandra. From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

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Nutzhorn, Harold F. The Old State House in Boston, Mass. Boston: State Library, 1938. Pedley, Mary Sponberg. The Commerce of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Popper, Karl. Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. La Salle: Open Court, 1976. Popple, Henry. A Map of the British Empire in America. London, 1733. Pritchard, Margaret Beck. “Maps as Objects of Material Culture.” Magazine Antiques Jan. 2001: 212–20. Pritchard, Margaret Beck, and Henry G. Taliaferro. Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America. New York: Abrams, 2002. Rees, Ronald. “Historical Links between Cartography and Art.” Geographical Review 70 (1980): 60–78. Rice, Kym S. Early American Taverns: For the Entertainment of Friends and Strangers. Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1983. Roach, Joseph. “Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic World.” Performativity and Performance. Ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. London: Routledge, 1995. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Schulz, Juergen. “Maps as Metaphors: Mural Map Cycles of the Italian Renaissance.” Art and Cartography. Ed. David Woodward. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 97–122. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Sherman, William H. “Toward a History of the Manicule.” Owners, Annotators, and the Signs of Reading. Ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote. Newcastle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005. 19–48. Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. St. George, Robert Blair. Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Swift, Jonathan. On Poetry, a Rapsody. Dublin, 1733. Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg). 9–16 Sept. 1737. Wallis, Helen M. “Geographie Is Better Than Divinitie: Maps, Globes, and Geography in the Days of Samuel Pepys.” The Compleat Plattmaker. Ed. Norman J. W. Thrower. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. 1–43. Wroth, Lawrence C. An American Bookshelf, 1755. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934. Zagarri, Rosemarie. The Politics of Size: Representation in the United States, 1776–1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Chapter Four

Print, manuscript, and staged Performance Dramatic Authorship and Text Circulation in the New Republic

JeFFrey h. riCharDS

After a decade of confusion and hesitancy following the Revolution, theater in America gained sufficient momentum to be accepted as a professional entertainment in most cities of size in the United States. By 1800, American spectators from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Savannah, Georgia, could expect to see some manner of staged drama enacted in taverns or in older or newly built theaters in small and large towns throughout the Atlantic states. In the book trade, the firmer establishment of the stage meant an increase in the number of dramatic titles published by American printers, as well as continuing importation of British imprints for plays. Oddly named collections, such as Enoch Story’s American Theatre, served as means to circulate the latest British plays, while other publishers capitalized on the performance of a particular play to market a new American imprint. American playwrights likewise used the medium of the (often rare) performance itself to sell printed copies of their dramas.1 At the same time, individuals not associated with specific professional theaters also took to the pen, some successful in printing their works as plays, others resigned or preferring to have their plays circulate in manuscript. In short, the decade of the 1790s marked the greatest moment in the eighteenth century for 73

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the acting, writing, printing, and overall circulation of play scripts that British North America had yet seen. Given the relatively visible role of professional performance in promulgating knowledge of plays in the new republic, the role of print as a medium of circulation for Americanauthored plays remained relatively small in the early nineteenth century. By examining the choices made by—or for—three U.S. playwrights, we may be able to discern both the influence of print on dramatic authorship and the appeal of manuscript even in an age dominated by the power of print. Prior to the Revolution, print drama texts had a relatively modest circulation, although it is difficult to tell simply through advertisements placed by bookshops or American imprints how extensive that circulation might have been. The works of some British authors seem fairly widespread by the time of the Revolution. Samuel Sewall read Dryden in the 1680s from an imported copy. Shakespeare was well known among the Revolutionary generation, to be sure, but there was only one American printing of his complete works before 1800, and that was in 1795–96 (Plays and Poems).2 Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, a popular play in America from late 1770 through the 1790s, appeared in at least one American edition (1772) before Congress closed the theaters in 1774 and in others after they reopened (1792, 1794, 1808, 1818). Among American authors, only about thirty-five titles in book form (or as parts of books) that appear before 1784 bear any resemblance to plays, and most of those are political or instructional dialogues, not drama intended for the stage. This number includes such political plays as Robert Hunter’s Androboros and an anonymous New England writer’s midcentury closet drama but does not take into account short plays that appeared only in newspapers.3 For the most part, dramatic publication in the American colonies by resident writers was a political, not a theatrical, gesture, even as the actual circulation of British-imprint plays designed for the stage was much more extensive than the figures for American publication suggest. After the war, American printers released a much longer list of locally authored material. Between 1784 and 1815, at least 165 dramatic titles of likely American authorship appear at the hands of American printers and publishers. These include such acted plays as Royall Tyler’s The Contrast and James Nelson Barker’s Tears and Smiles, and a number

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of other pieces, some topical, many imitative, most of which go largely unread today and probably went so then as well. This number does not include the vigorous reprint business entered into by such printers as Longworth in New York and Carey in Philadelphia, who republished British titles in easily accessible editions for American readers. Works like John O’Keeffe’s The Poor Soldier or Andrew Cherry’s The Travellers, both popular in the theaters, could be purchased from American printers in the first three postwar decades. While there had long been a reprint business in the American colonies of works from Britain and Europe, the pirating of plays increased substantially after 1790, tied largely to the restoration and expansion of legal theater. As Meredith McGill argues for the 1830s and 1840s, reprinting involved more than simply dodging the paying of royalties to foreign authors; it went to the heart of a certain conception of the dissemination of knowledge and the power of printers to select from a vast array of printed materials for their own constructions. She claims that in its rejection of the exclusiveness of authorship as a kind of elite position, “the system of reprinting represents the Jacksonian form of national culture” (108). But in a preJacksonian age, the expanded market for reprinted dramatic works, along with enlarged possibilities for American playwrights to see their works in print, seems more tied to the particular development of theater culture, including its long retention of British modes of playhouse management, repertoire, and acting corps into the nineteenth century. And it is likely that most play texts that circulated in the early United States were imported. In either case, the increased importation and reprinting of theatrical scripts meant a widening influence of theater even among citizens reluctant to attend the stage themselves. Professional theater was certainly the catalyst for this relative enthusiasm for texts of plays. With companies changing the bill often nightly during the period, even a two-week run in a small city (four nights a week, two plays a night, with a repeat show of at least one main play) could offer as many as fifteen different plays, both main dramas and afterpieces, to entertainment-hungry audiences. For residential companies who remained in one city for an entire season, like the Old American in New York, a fall-through-spring repertoire could bring one hundred or more different works before audiences. The circulation of printed scripts—or hand copies of same—made audiences very

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knowing of what they would see and critical when actors missed lines or prompters and managers deleted passages that they expected or demanded.4 Such circulation inevitably would inspire local writers to seek print as well as performance for their works—or so it would seem. Play script circulation, however, also had the potential to create cultural crises in a country where religious and moral objections to the stage would not significantly diminish until late in the nineteenth century. An example of dramatic cultural anxiety occurs in Hannah Foster’s 1797 novel The Coquette, in which the rake Peter Sanford is portrayed as dazzling a group of women by reading aloud to them from a play. Foster suggests that such play reading is a sign of Sanford’s corruption and theater’s allure for vulnerable young women; in that scene, even the unfortunate title character shies away from the play, preferring a discussion about republicanism. In an exchange of letters, as Eliza Wharton seeks to emerge from her depression, one of her correspondents urges her to avoid both the theater and the circus and to content herself with the museum as the ideal of rational amusement. While this is a piece of fiction, it illustrates the potential dangers that mere possession of a play text might engender within segments of society (Stern 113–30; Richards, “Politics”). If ownership of a play text in its printed form carried cultural cachet, it also threatened to destabilize social relations built upon virtue acquired through reading. Drama read aloud took on the seductions of oral performance delivered without regard to content; further, it might call attention to the speaker as an object of spectation, further enhancing the seductive allure of the book. Among the full variety of potentially dangerous print objects, drama books may have seemed especially dangerous because their dangers were so appealing. Even so, the postwar pressures to reinstate theater or launch it in cities heretofore closed to the stage were forceful enough to create demands for both performances and texts. Many theaters themselves sold scripts of plays that were likely to be popular that season. Booksellers also sold plays, both expensive collected editions, such as the works of Arthur Murphy at Bradford and Inskeep, and cheaply printed individual plays, as at William Spotswood’s shop (Poulson’s 20 Apr. 1808; Federal Gazette). Those who did not attend theaters or have recourse to bookshops, or who felt that investment in printed scripts was a morally dubious bargain, would have access to another print text, the newspaper.

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With the rapidly expanding number of newspapers in the postwar period, which often circulated well outside the immediate urban area of cities, many readers without the ability or the inclination to attend the literal stage could at least peruse the advertisements of local companies, ads that sometimes did much more than simply identify the play and a few main roles. Managers, for instance, could induce desire for their product by adding a line, such as “Lately applauded in London,” to a play title or by engaging audiences with promises of spectacle, especially in the later 1790s and early 1800s. Occasionally, ads took on a level of specificity that turned their texts into near-scripts. Take, for instance, this portion of an advertisement for Sheridan’s Forty Thieves, billed as a “Grand Operatic Romance,” in a Philadelphia paper, to be performed at the Chestnut Street stage on Monday, 2 January 1809: Scene First, The Fairy Grotto. This brilliant Scene exhibits large masses of coral, interspersed with massive shells and grass, in the distance is seen the Silver Lake, bounded by immense rocks. Chorus.—“Fairy of the Glassy Lake.” The Fairy appears, attended by Nymphs, Sylphs, Naids, &c drawn by TWO WHITE SWANS; her Chariot is composed of a Large Sea Shell; coral and sea weeds. . . . The Fairy calls her attendants and expresses her determination to protect the virtuous Ali Baba, (a poor wood cutter) and his family, from the power and machinations of the Enchanter Orchobrand. She waves her wand, a part of the scene opens and discovers the figures of Ali Baba and his son Ganem, with their old house, going to their daily occupation as wood cutters. (Poulson’s 31 Dec. 1808)

This level of detail continues through several scenes, including, in later descriptions, snippets of dialogue. Although this is an extreme version, the fact remains that many readers, even those removed from urban centers, had means via print to imagine stages as something more than mere boards upon which stood mere mortals mouthing mere words. Print, rather than becoming the retreat of the reader from the limitations of performance, as for William Hazlitt and the neo-Shakespeareans of the nineteenth century, served as a stimulus to observe or at least imagine performance, here rendered as spectacle (Peters 296). Thus it was not necessarily the play performed or the text of the play but the text of the

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ad that had potency to inspire theatrical thoughts in a rapidly theatricalizing culture. With at first a scant existence, then a sudden proliferation of theaters and print drama titles available to American readers and spectators, it is worth inquiring what effect these conditions had on the circulation of dramatic scripts by American writers. In the current historiography, we lack the sort of study that Julie Stone Peters so ably performs for England, France, and Germany in Theatre of the Book. Rather than speak of the text itself as a performance, however, I here prefer to confine myself to texts as circulating objects, existing somewhere amid a culture that in part valued professional production and consumed a variety of print media but was not yet fully committed to print authorship or professional performance insofar as drama was concerned. To do this, I will look at three playwrights, only one with even modest fame, as registers of an extratheatrical sensibility, writers whose plays circulated in a variety of forms but who were not really authors for a professional stage. The point of this exercise is to examine how the theater and availability of print drama might influence persons with virtually no contact with a professional stage, encourage them to write dramas and send or show them to others, and inspire them to express concern for their texts in relationship to print culture. Implied in this exercise are the issues that emerge from the following: the writer’s self-conscious concern with authorship; the social conventions associated with media of textual exchange; the varieties of audience for dramatic texts; and a dramatic text’s relationship to performance culture in general and theatrical culture in particular. Insofar as patriotic American writers identified themselves as republicans first and writers for the stage only secondarily, they had to negotiate among all these concerns, especially that of deciding between manuscript and print as the most appropriate textual means of responding to theater’s presence in an evolving republic. I begin with Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814), known in her time and ours as the author of three political plays penned before the war, none intended for the literal stage, and two verse dramas, The Ladies of Castile and The Sack of Rome, written after the war and meant, perhaps after the fact, to be represented in the theater.5 A fifth-generation Mayflower descendant and married to another, the Plymouth resident seems

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an unlikely choice for British America’s first female playwright, but at least in terms of published work she so stands. There is no evidence that she ever attended a play, certainly not a professionally produced one, and given the hostility in Massachusetts to theater in the years she was writing her plays, there would have been little chance to see one. Even the college students of the time had to be surreptitious in presenting their occasional productions of Cato, as Royall Tyler attests in his Bay Boy, and there is nothing in the record to suggest that her Harvard son, James Warren Jr. (who entered in 1772), had anything to do with such productions.6 Yet in 1772 Warren wrote the first of her political dramas, a blank-verse attack on royal governor Thomas Hutchinson entitled The Adulateur, with fragments of it appearing first in Massachusetts Spy and a five-act revision in pamphlet form appearing the following year, with emendations added without her knowledge by an unknown hand (Warren et al., Adulateur). Thus within a year a few discontinuous scenes in a Whiggish periodical became a separately printed publication, fleshed out beyond Warren’s own intentions into a form familiar to readers of drama. Like her Calvinist forbears, Warren seems to have distinguished dramatic writing from acted performance; her letters suggest she read Shakespeare and Molière, at least, as well as Addison’s Cato, and possibly other more recent British playwrights, although her correspondence makes few direct references to dramatic authors of the eighteenth century. Still, contained within newspapers of the period are other plays by unknown hands, plays almost always meant to critique politics of the period; she might have gotten the idea from them rather than from Shakespeare directly and thus sought to participate in a public sphere of print drama, meant to entertain rationally, in the closet, rather than spectacularly, on the stage. After the publication of her most famous political play, The Group, in 1775 and an exchange of letters with John Adams, another reader of Shakespeare, over whether it was appropriate for a female author to indulge in satire—Adams told her it was—Warren stepped away from dramatic writing, confining her creative work to poems and letters. But in the meantime, she had opportunities to meet French military officers and become exposed, in soirees with General and Mrs. Washington, to a kind of polite society culture that Plymouth would not have exhibited. At the end of the war, Warren moved into Hutchinson’s old house in Milton and coincidentally turned to writing verse drama that used

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historical subjects. There was as yet no professional theater in Boston, and though its institution was a topic widely discussed, Warren appears not to have participated actively in the debate. While still encoding political messages—the plays were intended for the benefit of her sons and the rising generation—she spent more effort on character and narrative than she had in the three anti-Hutchinson plays. Warren wrote both The Ladies of Castile and The Sack of Rome in a declamatory style reminiscent of early eighteenth-century drama, which was rapidly losing favor on the boards; but in their manuscript form she sent the two plays to John Adams to circulate in London for possible representation upon the professional stages there. Although that effort failed, on the grounds that, as Adams told her, “nothing American sells here,” Warren had not given up hope. She published both texts in 1790 in her book of poems, which included a letter to the public that justified a new attitude toward the morality of the stage and expressed the hope that, as the print texts gained approval for their moral, rational, and republican contributions to political discussion in the public sphere, their future appearance on some stage might “[open] a field of contemplation to the reflecting and philosophic mind.” For Warren, unlike Foster, possession of a printed play text could, in fact, serve as the very stimulus to virtue, especially in “an age of taste and refinement” when “lessons of morality, and consequences of deviation, may perhaps, be as successfully enforced from the stage, as by modes of instruction, less censured by the severe” (Richards, Mercy 108; Warren, Poems 11). The first step was print, a medium that allowed rational contemplation and therefore made possible a virtuous stage, its works having been vetted by a known process of reading and philosophic response. In the United States, Warren circulated her verse dramas through the medium of Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, copies of which she sent to well-placed political figures, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. All properly thanked her, but none took any step to make very much of her dramas or do anything further than what Adams had already done in London to put them on stage. Yet while Warren’s work between two covers seems to have had little immediate impact on either the theater or the dramareading public, one who did take notice of Warren’s printed volume, Judith Sargent Murray, may have been inspired by her older contemporary’s text to write the three plays she is known to have written for the

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theater (two of which appeared in print). Unlike Warren, Murray had a literal stage nearby in Boston in 1793, but one of her first influences was the written work by the author of The Ladies of Castile. In that sense, then, the print text of unstaged verse dramas may have had an indirect role in the creation of native-authored stage plays.7 During the 1790s, with her eyesight declining and age catching up to her, Warren spent the bulk of her creative and intellectual energies on refining her History. But at some point during this late phase of her life she returned to her prewar political dramas. Unhappy perhaps with the way they had appeared in print, she had her son and amanuensis, James Warren Jr., put the three plays in manuscript form, neatly written out as polished, if not finished, texts. In the case of The Adulateur, “extracts” of which had first appeared in Massachusetts Spy, Warren had to counter the pamphlet version of her play that converted it from anti-Hutchinson propaganda to a five-act tragedy on the Boston Massacre. In her postwar manuscript, Warren had her son write out only one extended speech by Hutchinson, whom she called Rapatio, and one by Brutus, her name for her brother, James Otis Jr., but she also included introductory and concluding notes that put the play in context. For one thing, she declares that her prospective postwar readers are her sons, whose “curiosity . . . with regard to any political tracts that they may find in the cabinet of their mother” will be satisfied by her further explanations of the political allegory she intended. For another, she explains further the nature of publication—“only as occasions arose, and the exigencies of the times required the vizard should be stripped from the face of intrigue”—and thus justifies the need to put these works in context for “the different views of posterity [for whom] they may be little useful or entertaining.”8 Thus print had an exigent political function, to expose loyalist vice, but not an artistic one. She accepted the decline of the text in print for the purpose of expelling Hutchinson. Thus while she undertook to print her verse dramas for the sake of a rising generation, she restored her political plays to manuscript for a more limited audience—her immediate posterity. For Warren, the totality of her original text or the details of separating her contribution from the 1773 “Plagiary” are less important than the essence of the play, extracted as two speeches by the morally opposed main characters, contrasting her enemy the governor with her hero the brother of the “authoress.”

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With the manuscript of The Defeat, a play that she seems to have intended simply as further acts and scenes from The Adulateur, she takes more care to establish authorial control. This play originally appeared in print in two numbers of the Boston Gazette in mid-1773, with the second extract containing references to the release of the Whately letters, just then made public. In this case, the manuscript is clearly superior as a literary production to the published extracts, both in arrangement and in the alterations in manuscript to lines in the original publication, with an occasional exception. As with The Adulateur, she includes notes explaining the circumstances and justifying the seemingly harsh portrayal of Hutchinson and his cronies. In both cases, she found it useful not to reprint for a broad public but to turn to manuscript for a limited one—that is, to use the private circulation of posterity rather than resort again to print, which had not always been kind to her—as the best way to ensure the survival and accuracy of her plays (Richards, Mercy 88). As Margaret Ezell has pointed out for the Restoration and early eighteenth century, small communities of English writers and individuals, both men and women, preferred to circulate their texts in manuscript rather than risk the inaccuracies or misreadings of the uncontrolled public of print. The same practice persisted in the early and mid-eighteenth century in the colonies, as David Shields has observed (Ezell 40; Shields 438–41, 458). Given the relatively ephemeral nature of play scripts in the late eighteenth century, both print and hand copied, turning to manuscript on heavy-duty paper as a means of preservation of original intention is the result, not simply of publishers’ discrimination against women or authors’ lack of resources to subvent a print job, but of a preference for an alternative means of circulation than either the painted stage or the printed page. Although Warren through much of her life sought to appear in print with an eagerness not always shared by other writing women of the early republic, she seems to have recognized another power in manuscript circulation, limited though it might be, that she could not always obtain with print. By preserving her works as manuscript texts, she could remain above an increasingly rancorous partisan fray and thus imbue her works with a kind of republican stamp, produced without any attempt to garner the plaudits of sycophants or the mob (as reflected in her letters to James Warren Jr. in the 1790s).9 In that sense she might have agreed with the seventeenth-century English playwright Margaret

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Cavendish, who thought of publication as “exposure”: “It is most certain, That those that perform Publick Actions, expose themselves to Publick Censures; and so do Writers, live they ever so privately and retir’d, as soon as they commit their Works to the Press” (qtd. in Peters 239). While Warren in her earlier writing career sought such exposure with her plays, she also felt its stings and returned to the security and artistic integrity (read authorial control) of limited-circulation manuscript. Warren’s younger contemporary and another native of Massachusetts, the Reverend Charles Stearns (1753–1826) had much more success in having his plays performed. Probably the most prolific playwright in the United States during the 1790s, at least if judged by the number of plays in print, Stearns wrote his texts to be enacted by the students of the Lincoln Liberal School at fall, winter, and spring exhibitions and published them in 1798 in a 540-page work entitled Dramatic Dialogues for the Use of Schools.10 The title, however, is disingenuous, or really, carefully calculated; the thirty performance pieces contained within are not dialogues in the older eighteenth-century sense but plays, often built on well-known models or using characters or situations that attendees at the Federal Street Theatre in Boston would recognize. Stearns represents another of those intermediary positions between a secular affirmation of theater and a religious skepticism about its value. A Harvard-educated minister and one charged with the education of secondary-level students, both female and male, Stearns seeks to palliate those with objections to performance by ensuring that each of his plays has an expressly stated moral theme. In this sense, Stearns shares with Warren a belief in the educational value of the stage while not expressing openly an affirmation of the particular professional stage then emerging in Boston. Although Stearns meant to inculcate lessons, stated on the title page of each play, these little dramas are not of the heavily moralized type—Miss Virtuous Virgin defies Mr. Vile Seducer—but proximate or distant variants of plays then available on stage or in print or both and with sufficient complication to be several steps removed from merely admonitory moral tales. In another work, Principles of Religion and Morality (2nd ed., 1799), Stearns more properly uses the traditional dialogue form to catechize youth on basic religious tenets, expressed in the short form of a conversation between a scholar and a preceptor. In his preface to that publication, Stearns explains that he has entered the print world reluctantly. “In the

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process of time,” he remarks, “numerous copies were taken of them in writing; and the manuscripts, written out for the use of the School, were almost defaced and destroyed.” After writing out or having his students copy between two and three hundred manuscript versions, he decided that turning to print would be “much the cheapest method,” both providing his school with a ready supply and allowing for the chance that “a few copies might fall elsewhere” (Stearns, Principles iii). Of his book of plays, he says nothing about the impulse to convert manuscript to print, although one can again imagine the convenience of having printed, rather than handwritten, copies of plays. Because he calls himself “The Author” on more than one occasion, however, Stearns may have felt that authorship properly rendered in the 1790s required a turn to print. In this he follows a long tradition among Massachusetts clergy in delivering his texts to the printer but is original in being the first minister to commit plays, rather than plain dialogues, to type. Indeed, Stearns seems to have had a brief love affair with print at the time he chose to publish Dramatic Dialogues. Beyond an ad in 1797 announcing the summer term at the Liberal School, where he hid behind the term “PRECEPTOR,” Stearns saw, or ensured that he saw, his name appear in New England and Middle Atlantic newspapers for the next two years (Massachusetts Mercury 9 May 1797). He apparently circulated a notice, one that appeared in several U.S. papers, announcing his intention to publish a poem called “A Lady’s Philosophy of Love,” which, he claimed, had first been written in 1774 but had languished “in the closet of the author.” The notice also included the encomium, “From the established reputation of the author, as a genius and a scholar, the public expectation is greatly raised, and we doubt not will be amply gratified” (Gazette of the United States). In due time the poem itself appeared, also reprinted in several northern papers, with his identity as “preceptor” of the Lincoln Liberal School prominently included in the headnote in the Sun. Meanwhile, notices appeared in other papers announcing that, for copyright purposes (per the law of 1790), Stearns had properly deposited one copy of Dramatic Dialogues with the District Court in Massachusetts (Massachusetts Mercury 19 Jan. 1798). This was followed several months later by a similar notice for his deposit of his other book of the period, Principles of Religion and Morality—a rather neat conjunction (Massachusetts Mercury 2 Nov. 1798). And although they appeared more

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than a year after his first deposit of a copy, ads for the sale of Dramatic Dialogues at the Boston bookshop of W. P. and L. Blake and the one of Isaac Beers and Co. in New Haven appeared in 1799 (Columbian Centinel 30 Jan. 1799; Connecticut Journal). In other words, it was not enough for Stearns to print his plays merely to fill a need at his school; he also constructed a notion of authorship that required the circulation of his name both as preceptor and as “author.” For Stearns, copyright signified this claim in the form of a public proclamation of identity. At the end of his long preface to Dramatic Dialogues, Stearns acknowledges resemblances between his and other plays, and his list of stated sources shows a broad knowledge of the European tradition. One of his short dramas is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, another from Diderot’s Père de Famille, two others from plays by Plautus, and one from The Orphan of China, for which he credits both Arthur Murphy and Voltaire. Because “the author” has written for younger actors and audiences, however, he claims, “they are so far new that he believes that there is not a correspondent page between his book and any other book now in print” (Stearns, Dramatic 30). That is true in a literal sense, but his choice of base texts and method of adaptation bear observation. Stearns intended these plays for “exhibitions,” using student actors, and taking in total up to four and a half hours—meaning that several (four to six) of his ten- to fifteen-print-page plays would be enacted in a single program. Compared to the original versions, fewer characters, different names, altered circumstances—especially when sex or religious profanation were involved—are used, and sometimes the genre is shifted from tragedy to comedy, all in an attempt to meet the needs of an audience of parents and school proprietors as well as preadolescent student actors. Take, for example, his versions of two well-known plays by the midcentury British playwright Edward Moore, The Foundling and The Gamester. The Foundling premiered in London, with David Garrick in the role of Young Belmont, in 1748 and though relatively popular there in the eighteenth century was not enacted in North America until after the Revolution. The play appears in the widely circulating British anthology Bell’s Theatre and thus would have attained a certain canonical status by 1790. In March 1794, Moore’s comedy appeared at the Federal Street stage in Boston and was published there simultaneously by West

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and West; the play was repeated on stage in May (Columbian Centinel 1 and 8 March and 7 May 1794). Thus Stearns had opportunities both to see the play and to purchase it at local bookshops or the theater, although it is also possible, if unlikely, that he might have simply heard of the plot in conversation with theatrically minded acquaintances. In transforming The Foundling Stearns sticks to comedy but shifts the title character from female to male and the age from young adult to adolescent. In the process, he puts more responsibility on the shoulders of the natural father of the foundling, with the last scene revealing Fieldfare, a rake, signing an agreement to marry the long-abandoned woman whom he has ruined rather than forfeit an enormous sum of money for the care and upbringing of both mother and child. By the play’s title, Stearns could appeal to those who were familiar with Moore—he even named the foundling boy Sam Moore—but he himself provided a distinct moral about male responsibility, and he changed the plot by theatrically redeeming the offstage mother and thereby saving her from moral condemnation. Like many another professional playwright of his era, Stearns borrowed from a print original but modified it to meet specific, local conditions of performance and reception, then issued his text in print for replication in performance on other school stages.11 In the case of The Gamester, Stearns had additional resources available to him. The topic of gaming was one that occasionally appeared in newspapers, as in the fictional but highly dramatic rendering of a morally stricken card player in Massachusetts Spy in 1795, a partisan Worcester paper that would have been readily available to a Republican in nearby Lincoln. Moore’s The Gamester, more widely known than The Foundling, was popular on the American colonial stage and remained as an occasional piece in repertory throughout the century and well into the next, although in Boston it did not appear on a professional stage until 10 June 1795 (Johnson and Burling; Massachusetts Spy; Columbian Centinel 6 June 1795). In print form, there were three Philadelphia editions in 1790–91 and no doubt a number of British editions that were readily available, making access to the text relatively easy. As a domestic tragedy, The Gamester had far-reaching effects on nineteenth-century melodrama, informing such mid-1800s American theater classics as William Henry Smith’s The Drunkard; but it is entirely possible that its villain, Stukely, also shaped earlier portrayals of American agents of corruption, including Warren’s

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Rapatio. Moore’s drama ends with Beverley, the eponymous card player, in prison, where he drinks poison and dies in complete wretchedness in the presence of his long-suffering wife and other friends and family. For Stearns, a kinder, gentler Calvinist than his predecessor writer for children Michael Wigglesworth, this was far too graphic and horrible an ending for young minds to contemplate; he allowed his gamester, Van Keppel, to be redeemed by both the love and the clever maneuverings of his wife. Curiously, Stearns sets his play in Amsterdam but then uses the location to speak by contrast of Massachusetts, having the gamester remark that women in New England carry much more domestic authority with their husbands than they do in Holland. By committing his text to print rather than simply keeping his exhibition scripts in handwritten copies, as he had originally with the catechetical dialogues, Stearns sought to claim the school stage as a theatrical space and the world of print as the proper sphere of the minister-preceptor-author in which to exhibit the performance of his duties. A consumer of print drama, Stearns chose to move from manuscript to print himself, countering the potential corruption of the play script that Foster warned about with the edifying virtues of a surprisingly entertaining drama. In essence, he met public authorship and performance head on, not to oppose them, but to embrace them in the name of liberal education. In Virginia, we find a third writer facing issues regarding the circulation of drama, Stearns’s nearly exact contemporary and a strictly amateur playwright, the jurist St. George Tucker (1752–1827), whose plays never appeared either in print or on stage—and by that I mean professionally—during his lifetime. Tucker was born in Bermuda, attended the College of William and Mary, spent his early manhood back in Bermuda, then returned to Virginia in time to participate in the Revolutionary War, including the Battle of Yorktown. At the end of the conflict, Tucker penned a light little piece, Fairy Hill, the first of his plays to survive in manuscript, and one intended only for the amusement of himself and his correspondents. As he settled into a career as a lawyer and justice, with a home in Williamsburg, he would occasionally write poems or plays, largely in response to political events. Tucker also built up a substantial personal library of perhaps eight hundred volumes, but of the four hundred or so that survive from that collection there are very few plays (Coghlan). One wonders, then, about his possession, through

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either borrowing or purchase, of printed drama. That the collection at William and Mary contains so few plays might reflect his heirs’ belief that play titles were ephemeral or inconsequential and thus to be discarded or might simply indicate that the plays themselves, often published without hard binding, had deteriorated more rapidly than the histories and law texts that dominated his known library. It could also be that Tucker chose to own few plays and instead used his direct knowledge of the stage in Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, or Norfolk as his cue. In any event, Tucker felt confident enough about his ability to write a play and possessed sufficient knowledge of dramatic traditions to author several of his own over the next three decades.12 In 1789, for instance, after the election of Washington and Adams, Tucker wrote portions of a satiric play called Up and Ride; or the Borough of Brooklyn. A Farce. Using a local election in Brooklyn to represent the national election, Tucker, a Jeffersonian Republican, takes aim particularly at Adams, here denominated Jonathan Goosequill. The text exists in three versions: an outline in the form of a letter to one of his brothers, probably Thomas Tudor Tucker, then a fledgling congressman from South Carolina; a clean copied version of the prelude and Act 1; and a marked copy of the prelude and further dialogue that occurs subsequent to the first act in the clean version.13 As far as I know, there is no full-text version of the play. The prelude indicates that Tucker knew some postShakespearean British drama, for he uses the same character that appears in the Duke of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, Bayes, the author who is about to demonstrate his play for Sock, the theater manager. The play is overtly partisan; he intends, he tells his brother in a letter, “to ridicule the frivolity of the proceedings of the Senate & to expose in its proper Colours the Character of their President [that is, John Adams], whom I consider as the high priest of Monarchy” (3 June 1789, Tucker-Coleman Papers). Further, Tucker imagined that the play would be performed: “I am resolved if possible to bring it on the Stage, & try the force of ridicule upon minds callous to other modes of reasoning.” A note connected to one of the other versions claims, “As acted by the American Company of Comedians.” Thus it seems at one point that Tucker intended to send the play to New York and through his brother Thomas’s agency give it to Lewis Hallam Jr., the manager of the former American Company (by 1789 called the Old American Company). That performance never took

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place and never could have. Assuming that Tucker’s brother even showed the script to Hallam, the latter rarely performed American-authored plays, and when he did they were often sufficiently distanced from partisan politics not to evoke a reaction from one side or another—a standard managerial tactic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At some point, Tucker must have realized that this enactment of his text would not occur; he wrote on another version of the text the phrase, “As acted on the Theatre of the United States,” perhaps moving from the microcosmic theater of the John Street stage to the macrocosmic theatrum mundi where so many colonial and Revolutionary-era writers set their scenes. Up and Ride, however, was not the last of Tucker’s attempts to have his works appear on stage. In 1797 he wrote perhaps the best of his manuscript plays, The Wheel of Fortune. This five-act comedy exists in a full script and takes place in Philadelphia, both a theater center and the capital of the nation. The themes here are pro- and anti-British sentiment in the new republic, the persistence of Toryism, the pursuit of money without regard to the national welfare, and the survival of republican selflessness in a time of greed. It is an interesting commentary on the United States of the time, but I want to look at its circulation as a text. Having completed the play in early 1797, Tucker sent it to John Page, a friend, fellow Republican, and Virginian, then completing his last term in Philadelphia as a congressman. On 9 February, Page wrote to Tucker to say he received the play, and on the 26th he wrote again to say that he, per Tucker’s instructions, had taken the play to Thomas Wignell, the actor who had premiered Tyler’s Jonathan ten years before but was now the manager of his own company at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Wignell, however, begged off on performing it that late in the regular season. Some further efforts to mount the play as a benefit production in March or April failed as well, and eventually by the late summer Page returned the manuscript to Tucker (Page). Like Hallam, Wignell shied away from overtly political plays and could not have performed such a distinctly Republican play while a Federalist administration was presiding across the street from his theater. Even if Wignell had wanted to play it, the political tide was turning against the Republicans in 1797, meaning that the generalized criticisms of commercial culture in Tucker’s manuscript would have been far more provocative

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than Wignell wanted to risk at that time. Despite that rejection, Tucker kept the returned manuscript, perhaps for reasons similar to those of Warren: as the document of a classical republican to leave to posterity. As another war with Great Britain loomed in the new century, Tucker tried again to have a play staged. This one is The Times; or, The Patriot Rous’d, a play he called affectionately “the Rag Baby.” This play satirizes the beliefs of some Americans that Britain is a friend and that it is acceptable for them to enrich themselves by illegal trade with British ships. Written first in December of 1811, Tucker’s play was adjusted to keep pace with the news and the outbreak of hostilities. Seeking the aid of yet another intermediary, in this case William Wirt (the future biographer of Patrick Henry), Tucker sent the manuscript to Wirt on 16 February 1812 and in August told Wirt that he had written to John William Green about exhibiting the play in Baltimore. Green had been the manager of the Virginia Company, a traveling troupe originally based in Norfolk, which played significant portions of every season in Richmond.14 It was in that city in December 1811 that a terrible fire swept through the theater, killing dozens of people, including Green’s daughter, and destroying the properties and the future of the Virginia Company. With the loss of his company, his theater, and his daughter, Green was simply trying to carry on, with no inclination to encourage the political drama of a local playwright. He never wrote back to Tucker. Tucker next thought to have it exhibited in Philadelphia in 1813, and when that did not pan out he tried once more when Green was in Washington to have Wirt intercede on his behalf. Like his other plays, it was never enacted. Tucker wrote one other play at the conclusion of the war, a kind of sequel to The Times (The Patriot Cool’d), but seems not to have made much effort to have it staged. Nevertheless, Tucker maintained something of a career as an amateur playwright over a period of nearly thirty-five years, writing three full-length plays and several shorter pierces, farces, and treatments, and never once had the pleasure or anguish of seeing one of his works performed on a professional stage. On the one hand, he had some understanding of what constituted popular drama at the end of the eighteenth century, since through watching performances or reading printed scripts he had acquired a sufficient knowledge of stage types and plot devices to write at least a couple of plays that are not very much worse than what was being performed. His letters indicate that he wanted at least some

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of his works to be performed. But he never says anything about publication. Just as in the manuscript communities that existed in England at the end of the seventeenth century—seemingly in defiance of the rapid growth of print—Tucker wanted to keep his plays in circulation, in each case finding a friendly intermediary who would then have the play read or looked at by a theater manager. Unlike such writers as the mechanicclass John Murdock of Philadelphia, who published his three dramas almost in defiance of the theater managers, Tucker did not seek to expose his compositions to the ever-expanding print culture.15 Instead, while perhaps imagining an audience of like-minded spectators who would laugh at his political satires, he also recognized that exposure through print might diminish the value of his texts—what Adrian Johns calls “credit” (31–32). He left them for posterity among his papers—his posterity, not that of the wider world. And so they remain—a few worked into master’s theses at William and Mary but otherwise unprinted, monuments to a moment in American culture when the power of the unpublished, unacted dramatic manuscript seemed even greater to its author than its popular circulation on stage or in print. Johns describes the struggle over control of print waged by scientists and stationers of seventeenth-century England in terms that may also apply to late eighteenth-century dramatic writers like Warren and Tucker. Part of the problem with print had to do with class perceptions. When gentlemen in England became authors, they had to face the power of stationers to control a print product. This meant, in essence, a loss of class status in stooping to the hierarchies of the printing house rather than hiring a printer as a kind of servant. “Gentlemen thus repudiated authorship,” Johns remarks, “not out of simple snobbery, nor from affected repugnance at ‘the stigma of print,’ but because the character of the Stationer impinged on fundamental elements of the genteel identity” (176). For both Tucker and Warren, print proved a mixed blessing. Tucker published a poem on liberty as a separate book and wrote other tracts that appeared in print. He certainly had the wherewithal to issue Wheel of Fortune or any of his later dramatic works in print as well, but his papers show no effort on his part to seek the solace of print for the pain of rejection by the stage, as John Murdock did. Thus, while he may have entertained a notion of republican simplicity in the retention of his works as manuscripts, he may also have feared negotiating with

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printers about lines in his play as something that he, as an American elite, was not willing to do. Of course, for many Americans plays themselves were signs of corruption, and this public image may also have influenced Tucker’s decision to keep his plays for private circulation when they could not appear as performances in the theater. Nevertheless, in the late eighteenth-century United States, some of the same issues that affected seventeenth-century England may have worked on Warren and Tucker to retain the purity, privacy, and class positioning of manuscript. For Warren, Stearns, and Tucker, small and capital-R republicans all, the print world of newspaper and dramatic text made possible access to a theatrical world that the three directly sampled only rarely or never. Each imagined the self as author, all circulated their texts in manuscript, all sought some other means than manuscript to promulgate their texts, and though all three were well known within certain circles in their day, they stayed in relative obscurity as dramatic authors because their works never appeared on a professional stage. Nevertheless, their example suggests to us a more widely engaged society of dramatic writers and readers than physical existence of theaters or listings of print publications by American and foreign writers can account for. Theater in America may have been proscribed, constrained, and maligned by its opponents for another half century, but its influence on scribbling individuals in the early republic, whether through text circulation or literal enactment, may be much deeper than we have heretofore acknowledged. But for writers of the early republic, the dual goals of professionally acted script and printed play were not often realized; therefore, as we consider further the circulation of dramatic texts and their influence, it is important that we acknowledge another kind of desired fame: that handwritten plays by republican ancestors would live in the hearts of virtuous, republican youth more fully than on the wooden boards of brick-facade playhouses.

NoteS

I wish to thank Sandra Gustafson, Caroline Sloat, and John Hench for their support of this project from the outset and the two anonymous readers for their comments.

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1. See, for example, the publication of Hamlet and Twelfth Night by David West to coincide with the Federal Street Theatre’s productions in 1794 or, for American writers, the printing of James Nelson Barker’s The Indian Princess in Philadelphia in time for its 1808 premiere. 2. Sewall, Diary 1: 136. On Shakespeare in America before 1900, see, among many sources, Shattuck and Sturgess; as for the 1795–96 edition prepared by Joseph Hopkinson, consult Sturgess 60–66. 3. Publication figures for this paragraph and next are from Bergquist; for “Boston’s First Play,” see Moody. 4. For an illustration of audience-manager conflict, see Richards, Drama 69–71. 5. Biographical information in this section on Warren is from Zagarri and from Richards, Mercy. 6. On college productions during the Revolutionary era, see Shaffer. 7. On Warren’s influence, see Murray, Gleaner 96, esp. 3: 260–64. 8. Warren, Adulateur [ms., ca. 1790s] 6. 9. See, for example, her letter to her son, 11 Nov. 1792 (Letters). 10. Levy is the only recent critic to take the Dialogues seriously. 11. On circulation of Stearns’s plays outside Lincoln, see Levy 11. 12. For a general overview of Tucker’s plays, see Braymer. 13. See also Hamilton 88. 14. Portions of Green’s career in Virginia can be traced in Pilkinton; Sherman; and Shockley. 15. On Murdock’s struggles with Philadelphia theater managers, see Nathans 92–101.

workS Cited

The American Theatre: Being a Collection of Plays, Taken from Bell’s Theatre, and Performed by the Old American Company, Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Enoch Story, 1792. Barker, James Nelson. The Indian Princess. Philadelphia: Palmer, 1808. ———. Tears and Smiles. Philadelphia: Palmer, 1808. Bergquist, G. William. Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830: Microfiche Collection Checklist. New Canaan, CT: Readex, 1991. Boston Gazette. Braymer, Meta Robinson. “Trying to Walk: An Introduction to the Plays of St. George Tucker.” No Fairer Land: Studies in Southern Literature before 1900. Ed. J. Lasley Dameron and James W. Mathews. Troy, NY: Whitson, 1986. 87–100.

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Cherry, Andrew. The Travellers; or Music’s Fascination. Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1807. Coghlan, Jill M. “The Library of St. George Tucker.” MA thesis. College of William and Mary, 1973. Columbian Centinel [Boston]. Connecticut Journal [New Haven] 11 Apr. 1799. Cumberland, Richard. The West Indian. Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1772. Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Federal Gazette [Philadelphia] 2 Feb. 1793. Foster, Hannah Webster. The Coquette. 1797. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Gazette of the United States [Philadelphia] 20 Oct. 1797. Hamilton, Phillip. The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family: The Tuckers of Virginia, 1752–1830. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Hunter, Robert. Androboros. New York: Bradford, 1714. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. University of Chicago Press, 1998. Johnson, Odai, and William J. Burling. The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary Calendar. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Levy, Jonathan. “The Dramatic Dialogues of Charles Stearns: An Appreciation.” Spotlight on the Child: Studies in the History of American Children’s Theatre. Ed. Roger L. Bedard and C. John Tolch. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. 87–100. Massachusetts Mercury [Boston]. Massachusetts Spy [Worcester] 29 Apr. 1795. McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Moody, Robert E., ed. “Boston’s First Play.” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 92 (1980): 117–39. Moore, Edward. The Foundling. Boston: West and West, 1794. ———. The Foundling. Bell’s Theatre. London: J. Bell, 1789. Vol. 1. ———. The Foundling: A Comedy and The Gamester: A Tragedy. Ed. Anthony Amberg. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. ———. The Gamester. Philadelphia: E. Story, 1790. ———. The Gamester. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: E. Story, 1790. ———. The Gamester. Philadelphia: H. Taylor, 1791. Murray, Judith Sargent. The Gleaner. 3 vols. Boston: Andrews, 1798. Nathans, Heather S. Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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O’Keeffe, John. The Poor Soldier. Philadelphia: Seddon and Spotswood, 1787. Page, John. Letters. Page Family Papers. Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pilkinton, Lucy Blandford. “Theatre in Norfolk, Virginia, 1788–1812.” Diss. University of Michigan, 1993. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser [Philadelphia]. Richards, Jeffrey H. Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. Mercy Otis Warren. New York: Twayne, 1995. ———. “The Politics of Seduction: Theater, Sexuality, and National Virtue in the Novels of Hannah Foster.” Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History. Ed. Della Pollock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 238–57. Sewall, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729. Ed. M. Halsey Thomas. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Shaffer, Jason. “‘Great Cato’s Descendants’: A Genealogy of Colonial Performance.” Theatre Survey 44 (2003): 5–28. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Boston: David West, 1794. ———. The Plays and Poems. 8 vols. Philadelphia: Bioren and Madan, 1795–96. ———. Twelfth Night. Boston: David West, 1794. Shattuck, Charles H. Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976. Sherman, Suzanne K. Comedies Useful: A History of the American Theatre in the South, 1775–1812. Williamsburg, VA: Celest Press, 1998. Shields, David S. “Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture.” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Vol. 1 of A History of the Book in America. Ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 434–76. Shockley, Martin Staples. The Richmond Stage, 1784–1812. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977. Stearns, Charles. Dramatic Dialogues for the Use of Schools. Leominster, MA: J. Prentiss, 1798. ———. Principles of Religion and Morality. 2nd ed. Amherst, MA: S. Preston, 1799. Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Sturgess, Kim C. Shakespeare and the American Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sun [Dover, NH] 18 Apr. 1798. Tucker, St. George. Fairy Hill. Ca. 1781. Ms. Tucker-Coleman Papers. Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA.

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———. The Patriot Cool’d. 1815. Ms. Tucker-Coleman Papers. Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. ———. The Times; or The Patriot Rous’d. A Dramatic Medley. 1811. Ms. TuckerColeman Papers. Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. ———. Up and Ride; or, The Borough of Brooklyn. A Farce. 1789. Ms. TuckerColeman Papers. Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. ———. The Wheel of Fortune. 1797. Ms. Tucker-Coleman Papers. Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. Tucker-Coleman Papers. Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. Tyler, Royall. The Bay Boy. The Prose of Royall Tyler. Ed. Marius B. Péladeau. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1972. ———. The Contrast. Philadelphia: Pritchard and Hall, 1790. Warren, Mercy Otis. The Adulateur. Massachusetts Spy 2.56 (1772): 15; 2.61 (1772): 32. ———. The Adulateur. Ms. Ca. 1790s. M. O. Warren, Drama and Poems, Houghton Library, Harvard University. ———. The Defeat. Boston Gazette, 24 May and 21 July 1773. ———. The Defeat. Ms. Ca. 1790s. M. O. Warren, Drama and Poems, Houghton Library, Harvard University. ———. The Group. Boston: Edes and Gill, 1775. ———. The Ladies of Castile. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous. ———. Letters. Mercy Warren Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. ———. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous. Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790. ———. The Sack of Rome. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous. Warren, Mercy Otis, et al. The Adulateur. Boston: n.p., 1773. Wirt, William. Letters. William Wirt Papers. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. Zagarri, Rosemarie. A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995.

Chapter Five

from Performance to Print in the native northeast PhilliP h. rounD

In 1773, Mohegan missionary Joseph Johnson (1751–77) wrote in a letter meant for public circulation, “Be it known to all in general, that I am Properly an Illiterate man” (179). Johnson was apologizing in advance for his writing style to anyone who might someday happen upon his manuscripts. He was a man who read the Bible and religious tracts regularly, turning often to Richard Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest after long days of teaching and working in the fields. He was fluent in two languages and working on a third, Oneida. In years following this letter, he would write many public petitions to government officials. Yet in speaking to an imagined Anglo-American public, Johnson felt the need to depict himself as totally unskilled in the written word. The following essay offers one explanation for Johnson’s puzzling statement. By mapping the practices of print, literacy, and performance emerging in the Native Northeast during the last decades of the eighteenth century, I argue that Native peoples, especially Christian converts under the sway of British and American colonialism, adopted several aspects of an emerging performance semiotic that Sandra Gustafson has described as arising during the latter half of the eighteenth century.1 This semiotic—in which “speech and text” are viewed as “symbolic and performative forms of language rather than discrete and hierarchical entities” (xvi)—provided them with a much-needed weapon 97

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in their battles against relocation, allotment, and cultural erasure. The literacy practices they adopted in turn fostered bicultural (and sometimes bilingual) print, manuscript, and public oratorical performances whose “claims to authenticity and relations of power were given form and meaning through the reliance on or freedom from text in oral performance” (Gustafson xvi–xvii). Although Indian people were generally depicted as “unlettered” and uncivilized by Euro-Americans well into the nineteenth century, as early as the 1770s Native converts such as Joseph Johnson and Samson Occom were able to engage intercultural communication practices that at once affirmed their Christian identities, asserted their rights as indigenous peoples, and addressed concerns about the dispossession of traditional lands and the fragmentation of local communities.

t h e “ p r o b l e M ” o F N at i v e l i t e r a C y

Any attempt to describe an emerging eighteenth-century Native American performance semiotic must first grapple with the so-called problem of Indian literacy. Native literacy has become particularly problematic in the historiography of early America because, as literary scholar Laura Donaldson reminds us, “English alphabetic writing has become so thoroughly naturalized that its function as a colonial technology has remained obscure.” But even as “writing worked alongside . . . more overt weapons of conquest” (47), Native North Americans, Donaldson argues, “were [not] always only victims of Western literacy” (2). The historical records, both oral and written, simply do not support that view. A reexamination of Native literacy is therefore first needed to map Native American performance semiotics in the Northeast. The critical role of literacy in colonial Native subject formation has been in part obscured by oversimplified representations of Native peoples’ fascination with print’s supposed “magical qualities.” The original inhabitants of the eastern woodlands were so impressed by European books and literacy, James Axtell explains, that communicating at a distance, with print and manuscript books, was viewed as “an aweinspiring spiritual feat” (304). But anthropologist Peter Wogan has cautioned against such reductive views of the Native experience of print.

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Wogan warns against the assumption that print had a universal appeal for Native people, urging us to instead deploy “ethnographic approaches to literacy” that take into account the kind of sociocultural factors that “mediate and determine the uses of literacy of any given culture” (408). Following Wogan, then, we must first acknowledge that two main sets of cultural practices mediated Native use of and reaction to European print. First, the oral traditions of each tribal community—even though they varied in distinctive and marked ways—shared many of the paralinguistic and performance features of Euro-American discursive practices in the period. These would come to mediate the circulation, use, and production of print in Native communities. Second, many forms of graphic communications held sway across North America before contact. From the eastern woodlands, where wampum circulated in beaded belts endued with Manitou and rhetorical power, to the Great Plains, where tepee covers and buffalo robes detailed personal, family, and communal identities in pictographs and graphic designs, Native people were already employing a wide array of sign systems prior to the arrival of Europeans.2 In addition to reexamining these Native discursive contexts for an emerging performance semiotic, we can gain insight into Native literacy practices by adopting the broader perspective of the “ideology of the book” described by Walter Mignolo in The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1990). As Mignolo points out, “The spread of Western literacy . . . did not only take the form of reading and writing. It was also a massive operation in which the materiality and the ideology of Amerindian semiotic interactions were intermingled with or replaced by the materiality and ideology of Western reading and writing cultures” (76). For the Europeans who came to the Americas, “true writing [was] alphabetic writing and was indistinguishable from the book” (77). In fact, there exists a subdiscourse within the discourse of colonization and contact in which the book figures prominently as “an agent of change” for both Europeans and Native peoples. Timothy Alden’s account of an eighteenth-century Christian mission among the Seneca exemplifies this discourse. He reports that a Six Nations chief once said, “I have often told my people that we must be wrong, that you must be right, because you have the words of the Great Spirit written in a book.” The leader then drew “the finger of his right hand across his left,

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repeatedly, to give an idea of the disposition of the lines on the page of the Bible” (74), performing the semiotic difference that Alden believed obtained between European and Indian sign systems. Although tribal perspectives on the coming of the book to Indian country were varied, Native peoples could just as easily turn the discourse of book conquest on its head. Samuel Kirkland reported that Onoongwandekha counseled the Seneca against accepting Kirkland’s mission because the Bible, a “White people’s book[,] . . . was never made for Indians.” The “Great Spirit gave us a book,” Onoongwandekha continued, but “he wrote it in our hands, and in our minds” (24). In other tribal contexts, as for example among the Muskogee, Claudio Saunt reports that some tribal members who were in favor of appeasing the Americans during the first decade of the nineteenth century adopted writing and “branded their stock with the same marks they drew on written documents.” In Muskogee, Saunt notes, “‘branded’ and ‘written’ are . . . the same word” (201). The striking contrast between these views of books and writing in Indian country confirms Wogan’s approach to literacy in the Native Northeast. To tease out the complex interactions between alphabetic literacy, Native graphic sign systems, and the ideology of the book, I will employ the techniques of book studies (l’histoire du livre). D. F. McKenzie, one of the founders of modern Anglo-American book studies, was the first to recognize the applicability of l’histoire du livre to “the contact between the representatives of a literate European culture and those of a wholly oral indigenous one.” In Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, McKenzie observes that the history of the book provides a theoretical framework for moving from simple questions of textual authority “to those of dissemination and readership as matters of economic and political motive” (1). Such questions are paramount in the case of cultures such as those in Native America because of the central role played by “oral, manuscript, and printed texts in determining the rights of indigenous peoples . . . subjected . . . to the commercial and cultural impositions of the powerful technologies of print” (5). While many scholars continue to fall back on literary critic Arnold Krupat’s now overused phrase “bicultural composite composition” to refer to texts produced by American Indians with the help of Euro-American editors, printers, and publishers, by reexamining such works from the point of view of

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current book studies theory we may note that all texts are produced in a composite way and that all texts, Euro-American and Native American alike, are the products of complex networks of publishers, printers, editors, audiences, and authors. By adopting a book studies approach to Native literacy we may better recognize “the continuing reciprocities of speech and print in the evolution of [Indian] texts” (McKenzie 130), even as we acknowledge that this “reciprocity” was neither evenhanded nor equal for Native Americans.

l i t e r a C y e d u C at i o N i N t h e N at i v e N o r t h e a S t

The Mohegan missionary Samson Occom (1723–92) emerged as the first published Indian author in British North America out of a cultural war over Native literacy. His own literacy education was especially significant in determining how he would go about negotiating both his participation in New England’s “Protestant vernacular” and his personal and political identity as a Mohegan leader.3 His defense against those Boston clergy who opposed his 1765 trip to England (a manuscript known as his “Personal Narrative”) focused on his education, and it was the nature of his education that remained at the center of the controversies and triumphs that marked several important stages of his life. In the narrative, Occom describes his educational trajectory as both self-motivated and underwritten by Euro-American colonialism. He also pointedly notes that not all missionary educational systems were effective and that not all Native people wanted outside help. Occom is especially critical of the state of Indian education during his youth, a time in which the program of the seventeenth-century Puritan missionary John Eliot had fallen into disfavor and the political will of New Englanders for educating Indians was at an all-time low.4 In the 1730s at Mohegan, Occom recalled, “there was a sort of a school kept . . . but I believe there never was one that ever learned to read anything” (52). Occom was saved from such neglect, he claims, when the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock took Occom into his own home for literacy education and Christian conversion for three years between 1753 and 1755. Unlike the schooling of John Eliot’s mission in the seventeenth century, Wheelock’s brand of Indian education was founded on a fairly strict

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ethnocentrism. Perhaps the clearest enunciation of the assumptions and goals behind this new system can be found in his disciple John Sergeant’s Letter from the Reverend Mr. Sergeant of Stockbridge to Dr. Colman of Boston. Sergeant, missionary to the Housatonic converts in western Massachusetts, proposed “a method . . . as shall in the most effectual manner change their whole habit of thinking and acting” into that of “a civil industrious and polished people.” His plan differed from older models like Eliot’s in that he insisted on introducing “the English language among them instead of their own imperfect and barbarous dialect” (3). Sergeant’s program was progressive in the sense that he proposed to include “Girls as well as Boys,” believing that “the cultivation of both the sexes has a natural tendency to improve each other” (5). Yet his language is telling. Sergeant’s Native learners are merged into the metaphoric language of an idealized agricultural economy: “The need there is of cultivating a Soil so barren, a soil so overrun with hateful weeds, and pricking Thorns” (7). Indeed, Sergeant’s pastoralization of Native converts became one of the most important image patterns in the many set pieces of Indian education that eighteenth-century New Englanders produced in their effort to solicit contributions from fellow colonists and metropolitans.5 Engravings and woodcuts produced to complement such glowing descriptions of Native education also idealize the encounter between missionary and students, often placing a book at the focal point of the illustration. This pictorial trope, made famous in the Dartmouth College seal, was perfected in the 1840s when the Buffalo Creek Mission School for Seneca students published a Native-language newspaper whose masthead vignette formalized the role of literacy education in transforming the Indian hunter into the gentleman property owner (fig. 5.1). Indian converts repeated similar scenes in their own narratives, but with different emphasis. Joseph Johnson reported that when “the day came the Indians for to see what Proficiency their children made in the 10 weeks past . . . the hearts of the Parents were not little effected to see their children stand in order, like a row of willow” (164). Johnson focuses on the parents’ hearts rather than the missionary’s “affections,” suggesting that, for the Native communities the educators served, there were motivations different from property ownership and rational enlightenment. Indeed, the historical record suggests that many Native parents viewed relinquishing their children to European schools as an important

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Figure 5.1. masthead vignette from the mental elevator (1841), the native-language newspaper of the Buffalo creek mission school.

diplomatic gesture, comprehensible within well-established practices of alliance building. During the seventeenth century, Native sons and daughters were “given” to Euro-American missionaries and teachers in much the same way that Pocahontas was “married” to John Rolfe. The practice continued well into the eighteenth century. In 1761, Joseph Brant and two other young Mohawk men were sent to Wheelock’s school in a deal struck between Wheelock, Sir William Johnson, and Mohawk leaders. Brant’s schooling was cut short by the French and Indian War, but Johnson’s later expulsion of Samuel Kirkland, a missionary of Scotland’s Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, and his refusal to send more Indian children to the school underscore that he and the tribal council viewed education as a diplomatic strategy and a reciprocal ceremonial endeavor. Moreover, from the very beginning, many Native communities approached Euro-American literacy education in New England as a means of achieving status in the emerging bicultural colonial society. E. Jennifer Monaghan observes that on Martha’s Vineyard “social cachet was attached to literacy education” (505) and that there was a recognizable pattern in the familial transmission of literacy. Hiacoombes, the first convert on the Vineyard, appears to have used his new religion and literacy to achieve higher status in the community than he had enjoyed prior to missionization. For other Native people—on the economic margins of this new colonial world—literacy became a form of “repayment” for the indenture of their children. Ezra Stiles noted in his diary that in 1782 his son “brought home an Indian Boy from Killingworth bound to me till aet. 21.” The boy’s mother, Ruth Waukeet, identified in the indenture as an

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Indian widow, asked in return for her son’s service that “thes sai Stiles agree to learn the said Aaron to read and to give him a Bible” (3: 25). Tribal communities, however, often entertained very different views about the relationship between alphabetic literacy and the profession of Christianity than their Euro-American schoolmasters. Some demanded that Christian catechism and literacy education be decoupled. Samuel Kirkland’s report on the wishes of the Iroquois in this regard is typical: “[Literacy] they would wish to be taught in the English language, to read and write the same. The other kind of schooling they would have to be in their own language and in their respective villages” (157). Samson Occom recalls that in his youth the Mohegan community remained ambivalent about education and that the missionaries’ efforts were sporadic and threatening. He also recalls that many of his neighbors showed up at services only for the blankets. During his stay on Long Island, Occom found that although the Montauk could “read, write, and cipher well,” they were “not so zealous in religion,” indicating that the two sets of practices could be (and were often) kept separate in Native communities. Within this complex set of wishes for and demands about literacy education in Native communities, Occom’s own account of his pedagogical practices demonstrates a sensitivity to cultural difference and local needs: “As soon as the Children got together, and took their proper seats, I prayed with them, then began to hear them, I generally began . . . with those that were yet in their Alphabets, so around, . . . and I obliged them to study their Books, and to help one another. . . . As soon as they could spell, they were obliged to spell when ever they wanted to go out” (19). Occom noticed that some of the children could “say over their letters” but that “their eyes can’t distinguish the Letter” (56). Occom sought “to Cure em” by transforming the primer’s two-dimensional alphabet into a more tactile experience, much as Erasmus had done two centuries before. “Making an Alphabet on Small bits of paper,” Occom glued them on small chips of cedar, after this manner, A B &c. I put these on letters in order on a Bench, then point to one letter and bid a Child to take notice of it, and then I order the Child to fetch me the letter from the Bench if it brings the Letter, it is well, if not it must go again and again till it brings the right Lr [.] When they can bring any Letters, this way, then I Just Jumble them together, and bid them to Set them in

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Alphabetical order, and it is a Pleasure to them; and they soon Learn their letters this way. (56)

While Occom employed cedar chips to make the printed alphabet more materially comprehensible to his students, he also utilized printed spellers, primers, and readers in ways that were consistent with EuroAmerican educational practices of the day. In such uses, print mediated the children’s experience of the English language in a number of ways. First, it underscored the fundamental difference between English and their Native languages by representing the English alphabet and typography as the universal linguistic representational medium. Second, as Roger Chartier has observed, “Reading is always a practice embodied in acts, spaces, and habits.” Occom’s practice “brings the body into play, it is inscribed in a space and a relationship with oneself or with others” (3, 8). To read the printed materials produced for Native students in New England since the time of John Eliot, Occom’s students had to recite the printed alphabet, pronounce the printed syllables on later pages in their primers, and finally intone the words of the Westminster Assembly’s catechism. A page from the Indian Primer (edited by Experience Mayhew in 1720) opens to our view the material practices experienced in Occom’s eighteenth-century missionary classroom (fig. 5.2). Anticipating what Patricia Crain has labeled “the alphabetization of America,” the primer also dramatizes how print guided Native readers toward the more subtle forms of literacy entailed in typography. As a book that owed its existence to European education manuals such as The New England Primer, the Indian Primer exhibited to its pupils an array of alphabets in roman, italic, and black-letter type on its opening pages. The facing-page “translation” not only showed the Native reader how to form letters in the Massachusett syllabary to match their English semantic equivalents but also how to shape the typographic tone of the utterance to master European typographic conventions. In this way, the Indian Primer served as a disciplinary educational technology, “introducing the alphabet into a nonalphabetized culture and to a nonprint audience” (Crain 42).6 Thus, even as Occom’s classroom conformed to its Euro-American counterparts in many ways—employing performative pedagogies to help in alphabet learning, using printed primers and spellers—there were telling differences.

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Figure 5.2. an opening from the Indian Primer, ed. experience mayhew (Boston, 1720).

SCeNe S oF re adiNG

We get some sense of the variety and extent of Native students’ experience with print from diaries such as Joseph Johnson’s and Samson Occom’s and from the reports of the missionary societies. Like most literate eighteenth-century Euro-Americans, Indian converts read only after the day’s physical labors were done, and then they read “intensively,” a mode of reading characterized by its “devotional and ritualistic function” (Kaestle 53). For example, when he had the time, Joseph Johnson pored over Richard Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest (1652). He read and reread the book over a period of several weeks, returning many times to a section that recommends “the necessity of diligently seeking of the Saint’s rest.” Around the same time, Johnson remarks in a letter that he “went out alone to Seek favour from God and Carried a Bible and found a Convenient place for retirment” (120). By taking the book into the woods, Johnson turned the act of reading into a devotional ritual. Not all of Johnson’s reading habits, however, fell into this category. Some of his reading was spur-of-the-moment, seizing the few opportunities for leisure available to an overworked missionary teacher. In one diary entry, Johnson relates that when he retires to his room after a long day’s labor, it is “so light [he] can read by the moon light through

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a window” (109). During bad weather, Johnson spends the “Chief of the time reading” (153). Through the window of Johnson’s journal we also find that not all of his reading was strictly spiritual. On Christmas Day 1772, Johnson whiled away the hours with Isaac Frasier’s Brief Life (1768), the sensational tale of a highwayman. To get to this point—intensive reading of religious texts and opportunistic reading of secular ones—Joseph Johnson, like many Native converts, had moved through a series of stages from an oral vernacular literacy into print literacy. In a 1760 letter of reference, Samson Occom described one such aspiring Native reader’s travails: “He never had but little Instruction in reading and he can read English books well, in his way, he can’t pronounce many English words proper” (130). In this convert’s case, reading is an internalized activity, whereas the recitation of the text deemed necessary both to rudimentary reading education and to Christian congregational membership is still lacking. One observer of an eighteenth-century Anglo-American mission school complained about this “Indian” way of reading. “Children learn, after a sort, to read,” Jonathan Edwards noted, before judging that “they were really only learning to make such sounds on the sight of such marks,” not knowing what they read (Kelsay 84). Reading was also a leisure-time activity that ran counter to most Native lifestyles. Although Euro-American scholars such as Ezra Stiles routinely read for thirteen hours in a day, and his children had “read through the Bible in course” at least six times by the time they reached maturity (3: 134), most Indian converts had little time for reading and had been able to read only for a few years. Occom’s “Personal Narrative” focuses on how overworked and underpaid he is, noting that he is “obligd to Contrive every way to Support [his] family,” and can often be found “whoeing . . . Corn Some times before Sun Rise and after . . . School is Dismist” (57). Joseph Johnson’s letters and journal entries are punctuated with scenes of manual labor that displace reading and writing. More than once Johnson sits down to read or write only “between school,” or after making ladles and caning chairs. Yet Indian readers such as Occom and Johnson were a particularly motivated group. Occom recalls that his first reading experience did not take place in school but occurred when he found himself “a Primmer and Used to go to . . . English Neighbours freequently for Assistance in Reading” (53).

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Occom’s description of the Indian convert’s reading formation (“in his way”) becomes therefore a particularly telling example of what Roger Chartier calls the “specific mechanisms” of reading that distinguished Christian Indian readers from their Anglo-American counterparts. It echoes Edwards’s comments about the Stockbridge school, indicating that it was probably part of the pattern of many Native readers’ development.7 This halting reading style, the ability to verbally articulate the text only with great difficulty, was usually accompanied by a high level of spoken literacy in the Native vernaculars. Occom’s follow-up comment about the aspiring reader he is describing points out that “he is a good speaker of Indian.” Though he goes on to shape this fellow’s future into a hopeful “civilizing” narrative—“a good speaker of Indian like a wild tree in the Wilderness; but we hope, he is cut down now”— present-day scholarship confirms that literacy in at least two languages was the norm for such readers (130). Occom in 1760 would “read” belts of wampum concerning the Shawnee uprising in Virginia. He would be presented with these and other tokens of Native expression and idiom throughout his career. At one point on his fund-raising trip to England, Occom requested that a wampum belt be sent from the Oneidas because it “would be of great use to us as he remembers the Speech” (Richardson 74). He also preferred to catechize his students in his native language. In spite of their often ad hoc approach to English-language printed texts and their busy, overworked schedules, Native converts had a striking array of books available to them. The testaments Occom mentions reading and distributing were those “printed in Oxford by Thomas Baskett” (95). He also often suggested other books to prospective donors that he felt would work well with Native literacy skills and spiritual needs. He therefore lobbied his English patrons for copies of Benjamin Keach’s Tropologia (1683), a text that he considered “the best Book for the Instruction of the Indians of Humane Composure I ever saw” (101). He also recommended Alexander Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament (London, 1738) and was given Matthew Poole’s Annotations Upon the Holy Bible (1683) by one of Wheelock’s correspondents. In his own library, Occom had works such as Thomas Horton’s Forty-Six Sermons (London, 1674) and a 1685 edition of Eliot’s Indian Bible. Joseph Johnson later bought some of these books from Occom, and we already have seen that he was an avid reader

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of Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest and Frasier’s Brief Life. Many of these titles remained staples of Native converts’ libraries into the nineteenth century. Eleazar Williams reports in his autobiography that when Jacob Jemison died of brain fever off the coast of Algiers in 1830, his trunk of belongings included Jeremy Taylor’s Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying (1670), Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted (1652), and a pocket testament. When Jemison’s books were later given to Williams, he noted that “some of them had been used much.” For his parishioners and prospective converts, Occom drew on a rapidly growing body of evangelical tracts created specifically for American Indian and African American readers and circulated by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Wealthy benefactors supplied Occom with “Several Sorts of Hymn and Psalm books” to distribute to Indian towns, and Occom reported back to them that “they continue to Come to me from all Quarters for Books, even to the Distance of 60 miles” (42). He specifically requested “Little Hymn Books Design’d for the Negroes, Printed by John Oliver,” and commented that “Mr. Mason’s songs and Penitential Hymns are very Pleasing to the Indians” (95). The society also sent two hundred copies of Sin and Danger of Slighting Christ and the Gospel and another two hundred imprints of various tracts (Thacher 3). Occom’s and Joseph Johnson’s letters suggest that there was a greater demand for good-quality print among Native converts than the society could meet. More than once, Johnson and Occom pleaded for small print favors—“half a Dozen of Smal Quarto Bibles, With good Paint and Papers and Binding” (Occom 83)—that might carry a fledgling Christian community through its first tentative stages of formation. When Occom and his parishioners finally made the move to Oneida country in 1785, he sent the society yet another letter that signals the importance of books to these newly established Native Christian communities: “Our most Humble Petition and Request is, this once, to help us a little, in our settling, in this wilderness, we extreamly want a grist mill and saw mill and we are very destitute of all manner of Husbandry tools and we should be glad and thankfull for a little Liberary” (150). Within this circuit of printed materials in Indian country, books functioned as valuable and valued material objects as well, often cementing relationships as symbols of affection and esteem as well as

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providing a useful form of capital. In his trip to England, Occom received books as gifts on more than one occasion; he carefully noted those like the ones a Mr. Dilley offered him “for my own use.” When he visited missionaries or others interested in the mission cause, Occom often accepted both donations and books, as, for example, when he “went to seen the Rev. Graves, and he gave me 9 books and one dollar.” On his later travels, in Schenectady, New York, he received a “Mohawk book” from a priest, and a woman showed him a book he had given her when she was a little girl (263). The many handwritten inscriptions in Occom’s books also tell the tale of a reader whose economic marginality made books a valuable source of capital when times were tough. In 1776, Occom sold a book to Joseph Johnson, one that he had received previously as a gift. Lemuel Haynes bought Horton’s Sermons, and Thomas Shaw is recorded as having purchased Occom’s copy of the Eliot Bible in 1790. We know, too, that Occom bound books to supplement his meager missionary wages (Love 47). To read “in his way,” then, a Native convert in the eighteenth century engaged in bicultural and bilingual reading practices that highlighted reading as a devotional act and often were performed in a communal setting. Even when a group of Native people could not read well, they were surrounded by printed texts donated by individuals and missionary societies.

SCeNe S oF writiNG

Writing—both a complement to reading and a specialized skill in its own right—was considered the crowning achievement of Indian education. Eleazar Wheelock routinely included samples of Native student writing in his fund-raising missives to British benefactors. Evidence drawn from the mission schools at Stockbridge, Oneida, and Mohegan, as well as from the diaries and letters of both Anglo and Indian missionaries, suggests that eighteenth-century Indian students’ experience with writing continued the pattern seen in the vernacular literacy programs of the previous century. That pattern, as E. Jennifer Monaghan discovered in a careful reading of Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts (1727), was that while most Native converts were taught to read, writing

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instruction was limited primarily to men and was learned for the most part in a school setting.8 Writing was an institutional practice tied not to parental instruction but rather to the colonial power structure; as a result, this aspect of Native literacy was especially status laden. By the turn of the eighteenth century, writing instruction was becoming regularized in Anglo-American urban areas, and the period of American history just prior to the Revolution was characterized by the establishment of “writing schools” in most New England towns. Ironically, for American Indian children, “schooling opportunities diminished rather than increased after the turn of the century” (Monaghan 512), probably as a result of the racial hostilities and ethnocentric realignment of Indian education that resulted from King Philip’s War. But in spite of this marked downturn in educational opportunities to learn to write, written documents and printed publications came to occupy increasingly important positions in the societies of most Native communities in the Northeast. By the time Samson Occom began to study with Eleazar Wheelock in 1755, writing for Christian Indians in New England “held a meaning that was both more personal and more generalized [than reading]. It was used for making notes for sermons, for keeping records, and for preserving the last words of loved family members. But it was also used in broader political and legal contexts” (Monaghan 517). Like reading, the writing experiences of eighteenth-century Native converts in the Northeast were tied to missionization, education, and diplomacy. For most Indian writers, the practice of writing was initially authorized by a performance of scribal worth before an assembly of EuroAmerican elites. Thus Indian writing, like Indian reading, was constantly under surveillance. Before Joseph Johnson could teach at Farmington, Connecticut, he “read and wrote before several,” including Governor Timothy Pitkin. Once men like Johnson were successful in performing for the authorities, they were routinely shipped off to the frontier to preach to Native communities. In these communities, writing became a difficult “frontier” task, performed far from the libraries and studies in which Anglo-American clerics did their own writing. Many of the young men who served in Wheelock’s missions in Oneida country, for example, had been rushed into missionary service on the frontier, where they had to continue their writing education on their own. They were a highly motivated group but were handicapped by the “wilderness” settings in which

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they had to write. A typical entry from Joseph Johnson highlights this challenging context for Indian writing: “It is too dark for me to write much more, but I believe I can read my own writing” (156). Like Anglo-Americans, Native Americans relied on the written word to replace or supplement printed texts that were not available or were too expensive. Wheelock wrote George Whitfield in 1756 that Occom had “scarce any book but what he borrowed” (Love 46). We find Joseph Johnson typically spending part of his day “in writing out Hymns” (108), mostly because his community was “so poor that [they] cant purchase Bibles and books” (254). Although a Euro-American scholar might copy manuscript books from the collections of other pastors, such copying was for Native converts an essential part of literacy and devotional practice. During the winter of 1772 in Farmington, Joseph Johnson stitched together eight gamuts, or singing books, for his impoverished congregation. Even the paper needed to copy these printed works was in short supply, and Johnson and Occom’s letters and diaries are filled with requests for quires of paper and lamentations about the expense. Writing as copying had another important function in Native communities—it served as a way of modeling the rhetorical structures of power and the “polished manners” of civility. Early in Occom’s journal, we find him copying down an especially rhetorically stylish letter of transit he had received in 1761 from Jeffery Amherst, the military commander of British forces in North America. Apparently Occom found Amherst’s formal language inspiring and perhaps useful for his own future writing. Joseph Johnson borrowed a “copy plate” from Occom and dutifully practiced his writing by imitating the words and phrases he found there. When a Euro-American commentator wished to praise a literate Native writer, he or she often noted that the individual wrote in a “good” hand. Timothy Alden went out of his way to praise Dennis Cusick of the Tuscarora Nation because he “had left numerous pieces of writing, of different hands, showing skill in penmanship seldom surpassed by anyone” (Alden 119). Of the several written genres that literate Native writers produced in the eighteenth century, handwritten autobiographies and journals represent a particularly vexed conjunction of institutional duty and selfrevelation. For Indian missionaries, journal writing was required by the various missionary societies as evidence of how funds were being

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spent and what progress was being made. The written work required a complex marshalling of manual dexterity, rhetorical flourish, and selfexamination. It was often an anxiety-ridden task. When Mohawk cleric Eleazar Williams looked over his manuscript autobiography, written not long after he left Moor’s Charity School, he observed that it “was written at a time after I just begin to write . . . [and] was written with no alterations.” While he believed that “many places ought to be corrected,” he decided that since it was only for his personal use, he would “let them be just as it is.” This kind of self-consciousness about written performance followed Indian writers into the public sphere. As Joseph Johnson addressed the Connecticut government, he felt obliged to remark, “I hope you will look indulgent upon us, and upon this Writing, as I am but an indifferent Scribe” (256). Such scribal writing demanded much of men such as Johnson, but it was at the same time one of the most fruitful cultural performances by which literate Native people could achieve a voice in colonial British affairs. The letters exchanged between Eleazar Wheelock and his Indian students epitomize the shifting power dynamics at work in eighteenthcentury indigenous epistolarity. During the 1750s, Wheelock printed many of his students’ letters under the auspices of different metropolitan missionary groups—the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, among others—to raise money for his mission. Through a skillful manipulation of Native voices, Wheelock produced a body of Indian epistles that seemed to repeat the motto of the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal, which depicted a Native American calling to Europe, “Come over and help us.” However, as Laura J. Murray explains, Wheelock’s Indian correspondents “still maintained circles in which they could speak and act outside of his knowledge or control” (20). Murray shows how the letters of one convert, David Fowler, actually shuttle between “complex emotion or negotiation and formulaic obedience” (21). Letters like these were important to Native peoples because their very survival was bound up in written legal contests over their land and sovereignty. In his own correspondence, Occom underscored the important role literacy played in this struggle. Writing to the Reverend Samuel Buell in 1773, Occom observed, “I am afraid the Poor Indians will never Stand a good chance with the English, in their Land controversies

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because they are very poor . . . and the Indians have no Learning, no Wit nor Cunning the English have” (104). Land tenure disputes, like the long-standing Mason Controversy in which he was himself involved, had become a war of written words as much as anything else. During the second half of the eighteenth century, literacy practices such as those detailed above were replicated in Native villages up and down the eastern seaboard. From the Six Nations country of presentday New York to the Muskogee Nations of Alabama, books, print, and paper had become facts of Indian life. When John Parrish journeyed from Philadelphia to the great Indian councils of 1793 and 1794 in Indian country, he found that in the process of negotiation “the Indians produced a bundle of papers as reasons and ratifications” (235). Joseph Johnson’s own father kept a “pocket book” containing written copies of important treaties, land sales, and the like (232). In addition to manuscript notebooks and loose papers, Native communities increasingly looked to the printed word. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the kinds of books that Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson list as being common texts for Native converts could be found in dispersed villages throughout the near frontier. Perhaps more importantly, the Protestant tracts and basic primers that had appeared in the eighteenth century were increasingly being supplemented by geographies, arithmetics, and natural histories as educational practices and local publishing concerns adapted to an emerging reading public. To missionaries and other Anglo-Americans engaged in the circulation of books and literacy in Indian country, these increases were factual and codifiable “results”—proof that the long-sought-after reclamation of the Indians to church history was under way. But Native converts such as Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson were “thankfull for the little library” they had been given for the voice it gave them in their battles for sovereignty and identity on into the nineteenth century (Occom 150). NoteS

1. This essay focuses on what I see as an indigenous literacy complex centered on the Wheelock and Sergeant schools, New England’s praying towns (Farmington, Connecticut, and Natick, Massachusetts, for example), and the missionary schools found in Six Nations communities. Joseph Brant, Samson

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Occom, Joseph Johnson, and David Fowler are the most famous alumni of these institutions, and the influence of this educational complex would be felt all the way to Wisconsin in the nineteenth century, when the New Stockbridge Indians moved there from New York. 2. On the many “literacies” present in early New England, see Wyss and Bross. 3. This is David Hall’s term for the “distinctive mode of literacy” that held sway in New England in the seventeenth century (18). 4. Samuel Penhallow comments in his introduction to History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians, “God has made them a terrible Scourge for the punishment of . . . that very Sin of ours in neglecting the welfare of their souls” (n.p.). 5. See Timothy Dwight’s comments in Travels (76) and the observations of Theophilus Chamberlain and Titus Smith, visiting missionaries for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospels, in Whitaker’s Brief Narrative. Laura Stevens has provided a fine analysis of how these tropes of husbandry entered missionary literature (34–61). 6. Even though Occom’s students were learning in English, this illustration exemplifies the range of printed materials that were circulating in Indian communities at the time of Occom’s own education. 7. In seemingly contradictory entries, the missionary diary of Joseph Fish, who recorded his ministrations to the Narragansett between 1765 and 1776, describes how Native people of southern New England used print even if they could not always read it (5, 29, 40, 52). 8. Monaghan discusses parental roles and concludes “that Indian girls taught to read, whether at home or school, were not also taught to write” (507).

workS Cited

Alden, Timothy. An Account of Sundry Missions Performed among the Senecas and Munsees in a Series of Letters and an Appendix. New York: Seymour, 1827. Axtell, James. “The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 44 (1987): 300–309. Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Crain, Patricia. The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Donaldson, Laura. “Writing the Talking Stick: Alphabetic Literacy as Colonial Technology and Postcolonial Appropriation.” American Indian Quarterly 22 (Winter–Spring 1998): 46–63.

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Dwight, Timothy. Travels in New England and New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Fish, Joseph. Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765–1776. Ed. William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982. Gustafson, Sandra. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Hall, David. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989. Johnson, Joseph. To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776. Ed. Laura J. Murray. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Kaestle, Carl F. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Kelsay, Isabel Thompson. Joseph Brant: Man of Two Worlds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984. Kirkland, Samuel. The Journals of Samuel Kirkland: Eighteenth-Century Missionary to the Iroquois, Government Agent, Father of Hamilton College. Ed. Walter Pilkington. Clinton, NY: Hamilton College, 1980. Krupat, Arnold. “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self.” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 171–94. Love, W. Deloss. Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England. 1899. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Mayhew, Experience, ed. Indian Primer. Boston, 1720. McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Monaghan, E. Jennifer. “‘She Loved to Read Good Books’: Literacy and the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1643–1725.” History of Education Quarterly 30.4 (1990): 492–521. Murray, Laura J. “‘Pray Sir, consider a little’: Rituals of Subordination and Strategies of Resistance in the Letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock.” Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Helen Jaskoski. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 15–41. Occom, Samson. The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America. Ed. Joanna Brooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Parrish, John. “Book Relative to Indian Affairs: Journals to Treaties, 1791–1794.” Manuscript, Newberry Library, Chicago.

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Penhallow, Samuel. The History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians. Boston, 1726. Richardson, Leon Burr. An Indian Preacher in England. Hanover: Dartmouth College Publications, 1933. Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sergeant, John. A Letter from the Reverend Mr. Sergeant of Stockbridge to Dr. Colman of Boston. Boston, 1743. Stevens, Laura. The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Stiles, Ezra. The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles. 3 vols. Ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter. New York: Scribner’s, 1901. Thacher, Peter. Brief Account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America. Boston: Hall, 1798. Whitaker, Nathaniel. A Brief Narrative of the Indian Charity-School in Lebanon in Connecticut, New England. London: J. and W. Oliver, 1767. Williams, Eleazar. “Autobiography.” Ms. Box 2. Williams Papers. Newberry Library, Chicago. Wogan, Peter. “Perceptions of European Literacy in Early Contact Situations.” Ethnohistory 41.3 (1994): 407–29. Wyss, Hilary E., and Kristina Bross, eds. Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.

Chapter Six

Beyond the Printed word Native Women’s Literacy Practices in Colonial New England

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It has long been assumed in the study of literacy and print culture that Native women in the colonial world did not participate in literary or even literate circles. Certainly nobody has yet uncovered a Native woman poetess along the lines of a Phillis Wheatley or a Lucy Terry. We have not yet uncovered any seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Native women diarists or essayists along the lines of Native men such as Samson Occom or Joseph Johnson. It would seem easy to conclude, then, as several scholars have, that Native women simply did not have the means to write. Yet the relationship of Native women to English education and print culture in the eighteenth century and before is far more complicated. Native women did in fact participate in literacy instruction—as students in local schools, in boarding schools, and even occasionally as schoolteachers. Nevertheless, there is no significant record of northeastern Native women engaging in the exchange of texts associated with transatlantic missionary fund-raising, the vast print record of indigenous and colonial diplomatic exchange, or even the extensive legal record of petition writing and written court testimony contained in the archive of early American legal and political life.1 This absence, I would argue, is only part of the larger story of Native women’s textual production—a story complicated by a gendered colonial hierarchy that 118

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devalued women’s intellectual abilities; colonial ambivalence about Native women’s role in education; and a modern set of assumptions about textuality and literacy practices that leaves no space to explore colonial Native women’s self-expression. Writing by Native girls and women is admittedly rare, since they were generally accorded fewer educational opportunities than not only their Anglo-American female counterparts but also their Native American male peers. The cultural expectations that drove the missionary work of Anglo-Americans through much of the colonial period, as E. Jennifer Monaghan, David Hall, James Axtell, and Gloria Main all point out, reflected the highly gendered assumptions about literacy and its practices in the Anglo-American world. While reading and reading instruction were considered the domain of women, writing was gendered male. All children were expected to acquire reading instruction in the home; in fact, a 1642 law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony mandated that if children were not receiving such instruction at home they could be taken from their parents and apprenticed to someone who would provide it. Once basic literacy (that is, the ability to read the Bible) was acquired, girls tended to go on to sewing while boys went on to master the additional literacy skills of writing and arithmetic. The percentage of those who possessed the full set of skills we today consider literacy—reading and writing— stayed relatively modest even for Anglo-American girls until later in the eighteenth century (Main 143), and it was generally significantly lower in Native communities, especially among Native women.2 We see this gendered division of literacy practices played out on Martha’s Vineyard: of the forty-two biographies of Native women and girls published in Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts in 1727, twentysix mention an ability to read, but only one specifically mentions writing. When children attended school, the boys learned both reading and writing, while the girls mention only reading. The only texts produced by the Wampanoag inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard included in Mayhew’s book (six of the fifty-two records of pious women and children cite writing) are produced by fathers, confirming the gendered (and even patriarchal) nature of writing in the early eighteenth century. What this writing seems to further suggest is that it was not particularly a vehicle for expressing personal piety; rather, it served as a record of familial or communal spirituality.

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Personal piety in Indian Converts is most clearly revealed in women through their reading skills, never their written expression. Mayhew typically says approvingly of any one of his women subjects that she “loved to read in good Books” (145), “she seemed . . . to delight in her Book” (151), “she made much use of her Bible and other good Books” (163), or “she often read the Word of God, and such other Books of Piety as were so long ago published in the Indian Tongue” (197), meaning that these women regularly read books such as the scriptures, their catechism, and other unidentified texts, all, presumably, “translated into the Indian Tongue” (140, 197). Occasionally Mayhew refers to specific texts such as “Mr Perkins’s Six Principles of Religion” (169) and The Practice of Piety (199, 207), both of which were translated into Massachusett. The only woman in Mayhew’s text who clearly has the ability to write is named Rachel Wompanummoo. She is described by Mayhew as follows: “Having been much among the English, and so got the Knowledge of their Language; she, after she was a Woman grown, learned to read English, and also to write a legible Hand, (having only learned to read Indian before) which having done, she used to read English Books when she had any Opportunity for it” (212). Interestingly, although Mayhew mentions her writing ability, it is largely absorbed in his fascination with her ability to read in English. In other words, having mentioned her writing with little comment, he moves on to explore her reading skills at greater length, leaving unanswered the question of whether her ability to write was in both English and Massachusett or only in one of the two languages. For Mayhew, the only skill that truly marks piety in women is reading. Since piety is his primary concern in his series of biographies, we are left to wonder if the ability of other women to write may have been viewed by Mayhew as unrelated to their religious state and therefore went unrecorded. For Mayhew, writing seems to be a skill associated with the more practical (and masculine?) matters of this life and thus has no place in his record of pious women’s lives. The implication of Mayhew’s text is borne out elsewhere as well; while scholars Kathleen Bragdon and Ives Goddard collected and translated more than 150 documents written in the Massachusett language between 1679 and 1752 by Algonquians from throughout New England, only one of those documents apparently shows evidence of writing by a

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Native woman. The documents collected by Bragdon and Goddard are overwhelmingly legal or official testimonials; some are even wills for Native women, yet none clearly display women’s written literacy. Even the single document that does exhibit a woman’s writing ability tantalizingly is signed with a mark, suggesting that literate women did not always reveal the extent of their writing abilities.3 Evidence from Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere in the early eighteenth century reveals a striking gender divide in literacy practices, as noted by scholars such as Roger Chartier and others in a more international context; as the century wore on, however, that divide narrowed significantly. This was certainly a reflection of the general trend toward increasing educational opportunities for girls and a growing consensus that girls as well as boys should learn to write. In fact, as Monaghan points out, by 1771 Massachusetts changed its Poor Laws to include both reading and writing as the minimal educational requirements for all girls in the colony (“Literacy” 63), and Mary Kelley notes the rise of institutions of higher learning specifically for girls (usually privileged white girls) starting in the post-Revolutionary period and expanding significantly in the early nineteenth century. Increasing educational opportunities for Native girls certainly participated in these larger trends, but they probably also reflected the reality of life in so many Native communities in New England: there were far more women and girls than boys and men living in Native towns, and any attempt to fill classrooms had to accommodate this fact.4 Thus in 1757 Joseph Fish informs the commissioner of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel on the process of hiring a schoolteacher for the Stonington Pequots. He writes, “They generally inclined to have a school mistress, and an Indian; Urging that their children were chiefly Girls. I knew not whether this wd be agreable to Commissioners, however, allow’d them to make trial. Several were propos’d.” Indeed, Samson Occom reports having female students at Montauk, as do Samuel Kirkland and others in their schools in Native communities.5 And when Eli Forbes of Brookfield, Massachusetts, petitioned the General Court of Boston for permission to draw on missionary funds to bring four Mohawk children into his home in 1767, his original plan was to include two boys and two girls to be instructed in “the English Language reading and writing; also in the knowledge and practice of Christianity” (13 June 1767).

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When Joseph Johnson wrote his diary for 1772, the year in which he served as schoolmaster for the Tunxis tribe in Farmington, Connecticut, he did not at any point suggest that he viewed the male and female students differently at his small community school (152–64). In fact, several of his entries casually refer to Native women’s literacy: he writes frequently of women’s ability to read, creates singing books for several women in the community, and upon receiving two psalters “for the use of the school” (158) he gives one to young Sarah Robins, presumably a student in his school. At one point Johnson writes, “At night I received Couple of Letters from Groton, one from Mr Jacob Fowler Schoolmaster there, & the other from the two Daughters of Mr Samson Paukanop Deacon there” (159). When discussing his school, Joseph Johnson reports only on the number of “children” or “scholars” in attendance on any given day; however, an entry for 17 December 1772 suggests that Sarah Robins (the recipient of the psalter) was hardly the only female student. Johnson reports regretfully that although his “scholars” behaved well during school hours, when he initiated his final prayer for their dismissal three of the students acted up, refusing to stay silent and respectful (159). He found himself forced to make an example of them, and although he assures his readers that “what was inflicted on these 3 at this time was very lite” (160) he is rendered heartsick at having to inflict what seems to have been corporal punishment. What is remarkable about this incident is that only at the very end of a full page of discussion of the incident does it emerge that one of the three was in fact a girl. At least for Joseph Johnson in the early years of the 1770s, the coeducation of Native boys and girls in basic literacy practices is to be taken for granted. Yet despite the increasing availability of literacy education throughout the eighteenth century, Native women seem to have been reluctant to exhibit their writing ability once they had acquired it. Clearly, more Native women were able to write as the century progressed; there is evidence of writing circles among family members within Native communities that included both men and women, and several letters written by Native women are scattered throughout the archives.6 Yet women’s writing ability remains extremely difficult to characterize. So even as Samson Occom tells of receiving letters from his wife, and even as we have evidence of her brief written exchanges with Eleazar Wheelock,

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she uses an amanuensis to write a letter of thanks to some English benefactresses. (It is also the case that Eleazar Wheelock, clearly a highly educated man himself, also resorted to using an amanuensis periodically, so it is unclear what we should extrapolate from Mary Occom’s decision to use one.)7 And Mary Occom’s sister-in-law Hannah Garrett (Pequot/Narragansett), a student at Wheelock’s school for a number of years and a woman whose marriage to a Montauk schoolteacher and minister meant that she spent long stretches away from her family and friends, left not a single written word of her own. In fact, even toward the end of the eighteenth century, writing, the symbolic system most intimately attached to English power structures, was not self-evidently of benefit to Native women. Whatever educational prospects they had, the reality for Native women was that they had very few opportunities to participate in English colonial structures to their fullest abilities. Although women were increasingly included in writing instruction through the eighteenth century, colonial presumptions about writing’s suitability for “masculine” pursuits such as business, ministry, and politics still meant that women were barred from its most obvious economic benefits as a consequence of their gender.8 Even though scholar Mary Kelley points out the rise of alternative career paths for educated women such as editing, writing, and school teaching, such careers typically assumed access to economic or cultural capital that was far beyond the reach of most Native women (4–5). That social reality was probably reflected in the treatment some Native women received at the hands of individual missionaries and institutions. So, to return to our earlier examples, even as Joseph Fish suggested that the Pequot community at Stonington wanted a “schoolmistress,” he was uncertain how the commissioners of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) would react, concluding, finally, that none of the candidates was suitable. Was this because Fish understood something about the feelings of the commissioners concerning women teachers, or was this perhaps because Fish himself had trouble with the idea of elevating a Native woman to the status of schoolmistress? And in another case, while Eli Forbes petitioned the Massachusetts House of Representatives for the support of four Mohawk children, he was approved to bring home only two boys and one girl—perhaps a sign of the ambivalence of the court in the matter of female education.

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The most telling example of how female education was viewed is that of Eleazar Wheelock and his charity school. While initially Wheelock enthusiastically endorsed the education of Indian girls and regularly bought paper and other supplies for their schooling, he was quite clear about his priorities for them, explaining that he had “hired Women in this neighbourhood to instruct [the Native girls] in all the Arts of good Housewifery, they attending the School one Day in a Week to be instructed in Writings &c. till they shall be fit for an Apprenticeship, to be taught to make Men’s and Women’s Apparel” (Plain and Faithful 34). The primary skill for girls was sewing, while the acquisition of literacy skills—including writing—was tucked into the corners of their time.9 The evidence seems to suggest that these young women were apt students of the skills Wheelock emphasized for them, as Wheelock’s accounts for 1768 include the following note: “Making and mending Cloaths, &c. &c. for the Male School, has been done by the Female School, which will near counter balance the Expence for Support of it” (Continuation 44, 46). The girls, in other words, were responsible for supporting the cost of their own education, unlike the boys, who were to be the recipients of the charity the good Doctor Wheelock was so actively soliciting. Thus while literacy training was available for Native women and was in fact highlighted in Wheelock’s original plan for his charity school, it was incidental, finally, to the training of Wheelock’s female students in the domestic arts. And the expectations for these students seem to have been basic literacy, not the more defined curriculum in languages, religion, mathematics, geography, and other higher learning of the boys. Wheelock’s female students did on occasion write to him; there are letters from Sarah Simon (Narragansett), Mary Secutor (Narragansett), and Miriam Storrs (Delaware), among others, in Wheelock’s records.10 Yet despite Wheelock’s constant casting about for materials to send to English benefactors to display the nature of his work (he at various points sent to England writing samples from his students as well as arrows, wampum, and other artifacts of indigenous culture), he never reprinted any letters from his female students, suggesting that at least in his mind their experience was peripheral to that of the men he could train as schoolmasters and missionaries. And while missionaries and the institutions through which they operated constrained Native women’s literacy, they were hardly the only

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constraint. So to return to the ever-hopeful Forbes who originally wanted to bring two Mohawk boys and two Mohawk girls to his home, when he did find children among the Oneida whose parents agreed to allow their children to risk the journey, he encountered a number of problems. He carefully clothed all three children (his accounts to the court include three sets of shoes, hose, and shirts as well as three silk handkerchiefs and three spelling books; those items specifically for the girl eventually identified as Lanna included plaid linen and thread for her gown, three yards of checked cloth for her apron, and three yards of homespun for her petticoat as well as cloth for her “underpetticoat” [16 Jan. 1768]) and apparently fulfilled his obligation to instruct them. However, when he returned almost a full year later with the two boys to have them examined by the “Chief men of the Oneida Tribe,” Forbes reported with some frustration that these Oneida men “after several meetings and much consultation very sagely Concluded that it was not best for Indians to know too much and being well cloathed thought fit to Detain them [the two boys] and have sent me two others naked & wild.” This exchange occurred around March 1770; by September the “young onydaan woman” had returned home at the “urgent desire of the Chieften and of ye Onyda Tribe, and her particular Friends.” Clearly frustrated by his interactions with the Oneida, Forbes wrote that while he had hoped to return with another female student, and had in fact prepared a room for her, the Oneida had informed him that “they were well satisfied with the Education of their child Lanna—and think it best not to send her back.” He mentioned hopefully that they would send someone in her place—perhaps a boy— but was without a clear time line. The final petition in 1774 reported that Lanna, having returned “to her native country . . . is since become the Mistres of Family and behaves well.” There is no evidence that the tribe sent any other girls to live with Forbes. Clearly the intentions of the benefactor and the desires of the tribe did not always line up; while Forbes seemed to have believed that he could have a major impact on the moral and spiritual lives of Native Americans at least partly through the education of girls, the Oneida themselves seemed far more interested in the material benefits of the exchange and much less interested in sending their young children such a great distance. Whatever the intentions of any particular set of people, clearly Native communities could be quite resistant to the efforts

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of missionaries to educate their children. Throughout the documentary record we see repeated reference to Native communities removing their children from schools, and this was most certainly the case with the young women involved in these educational ventures. John Sergeant, missionary to the Stockbridge Indians of western Massachusetts, reported with frustration in the mid-eighteenth century that because of a “childish fondness for home” the young girls he placed with English families often simply disappeared (Hopkins 82); similarly, although there are few instances of Native women’s writing, the female students at Wheelock’s school wrote achingly of their longing to return to their homes and their own cultures. Clearly the separation from their communities was deeply painful to both boys and girls; because girls were seen as less vital to the missionary effort, they were probably more vulnerable to the demands that brought so many of these students home. Whatever factors were involved in Native women’s limited access to literacy training—pressure from their home communities, ambivalence on the part of the missionaries who took them on, or simply a sense of the limited role an education provided them—there is enough evidence to suggest that some young Native women did learn to read and write. However, there is no evidence that Native women in New England used writing skills to engage in the public world of colonial political, legal, or religious discourse. Writing, it seems, simply did not hold the promise of economic gain or even a clear enough means of self-expression to warrant more than a rudimentary mastery of its practices. Rather than embracing colonial literacy practices, it seems, Native women maintained technologies of self-expression that had been available to them for generations outside the literacy practices involved in print culture. Book history scholars such as Germaine Warkentin and Elizabeth Boone have argued that our definitions of text, print, and literacy are inadequate in dealing with Native American graphic expression. I would add that this is certainly true of Native women’s expression. Definitions of literacy (both modern and colonial) have masked Native women’s role in the intersecting worlds of orality, writing, and print. As we have seen, despite the factors working against them, some Native women acted as schoolteachers and maintained networks of family correspondence through their letter writing—clear markers of literacy by even the narrowest definition. However, to focus simply on the small fragment of

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Native women’s written expression is to overlook the way women shaped their literacy practices. Participating in long-standing indigenous traditions that included weaving and household management, women marked their allegiances to kin and community as well as their complex interactions with Anglo-American culture in multiple ways. Through sign systems built into basketry, clothing design, and other domestic modes, women actively marked their dissent, their assent, and most importantly their sense of place in the world as they defined it. In the process, they affirmed the place of alternative forms of self-expression in their lives—even as those forms of expression went largely unrecognized by a social order increasingly defined by alphabetic literacy. Long before the arrival of print culture to the Algonquian communities of the eastern seaboard, Native women had an array of options for marking themselves as active participants in a wide variety of communicative practices, only a very few of which were defined as literacy practices. Practices such as weaving, the creation of wampum belts, and even the marking of the body through tattooing and body painting all communicated through sign systems with their own internal “grammar” and “vocabulary,” forming alternative textualities rich in meaning. And while outsiders may not have access to the particular rules regulating any given communication system, recognizing the broadest application of notions of “grammar” and “text” opens scholars to the complexity of all kinds of interpretive systems that shape and give meaning to culture. Once Western literacy practices had taken hold in Native communities, Native women continued to mark their bodies and their spaces within alternative literacy systems. Several documents in the Massachusetts Archives Collections from the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries are marked by Native women and men using pictographs, which, as scholar Heidi Bohaker has recently shown, had a variety of functions, only some of which neatly correlated with Western traditions of signatures.11 Similarly, we see Native women such as the powerful Wampanoag woman Weetamoo, who is such a presence in Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, adorning her body and painting her face in preparation for her work with wampum. Rowlandson dismisses this act as vanity, famously calling her rival “a severe and proud Dame” (96). According to Rowlandson, Weetamoo spends her time “powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with Neck-laces, with Jewels in her

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ears, and Bracelets upon her hands: When she had dressed herself, her work was to make Girdles of Wampom and Beads” (97). This description of Weetamoo’s adornment is followed by an extended description of her clothes in the dance that marks the formal ransom of the group’s captive, Rowlandson herself. Weetamoo, Rowlandson reports, “had a Kersey Coat, and covered with Girdles of Wampom from the loins upward: her armes from her elbows to her hands were covered with Bracelets; there were handfuls of Neck-laces about her neck, and severall sorts of Jewels in her ears. She had fine red Stockins, and white Shoos, her hair powdered and face painted Red, that was always before Black” (103). Clearly, Rowlandson is intent on making an analogy to the corruption of “the Gentry of the land” or the elite whose practices so disturbed the Puritans of New England in their English compatriots across the ocean. Despite Rowlandson’s attempts to frame Weetamoo’s dress as frivolous, Weetamoo’s decisions about what to wear and how to display her body emphasized her high status, her conscious embracing of a military role not typically taken on by one of her gender, and most significantly her commitment to her people. (After all, this sign system was legible to them, not to the English with whom she was meeting, as Rowlandson’s misreading seems to suggest.) Through Rowlandson’s description we get a sense of the place of bodily marking as an expression of indigenous political power. Scholar Kathleen Bragdon has pointed out the significance of the colors red and black in marking wartime valor through face and body paint; she also notes the practice of warriors decking themselves out in wampum and other displays of wealth (173). As a woman and a wartime leader, Weetamoo was very consciously marking herself within a sign system that would have been perfectly legible to her followers. While many of the specific meanings attached to gestures, expressions, and other forms of bodily markings are lost to us now, we should not underestimate their value in providing a set of practices performing many of the functions we now attach to written texts, among them making claims about politics, nationality, and self-identity.12 Similarly, weaving served, as recent scholars have pointed out, as a means to communicate through distinctive patterning on matters of political and cultural importance. Through much of the eighteenth and even into the nineteenth century Native men and women were familiar sights as they peddled their baskets and other wares to the English. Yet

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these baskets served as more than a source of income through much of this period; the patterning and even weaving styles of this traditionally female skill marked out family connections and tribal allegiances. While much of the symbolic vocabulary of color, shape, and texture is lost to us now, this does not mitigate the value of basketry and other forms of weaving as texts to be produced, read, and exchanged—particularly those forms of weaving that remained within the community rather than being produced for sale to colonists. Thus while Sarah Hannit of Martha’s Vineyard “could not read very well,” “the matts, or platted Straw, Flags and Rushes” with which her wigwam was lined “were neatly embroidered with the inner Barks of Walnut Trees artificially softened and dyed of several colors” (Mayhew 167). To Mayhew this weaving marked her as a talented domestic figure and not much more. But as Ann McMullen, Gladys Tantaquidgeon and Melissa Fawcett, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Age of Homespun), Linda Coombs, and others have pointed out, such weaving revealed far more about the women who created them. The designs woven into baskets and mats and painted onto woodsplint baskets had a variety of meanings, and such designs could comment about the shape and meaning of community or the significance of any particular political act through an extended vocabulary of signs.13 Indeed, as Ulrich has commented about sources for women’s history more generally, to attend to only the written record is to miss the larger story of the ways women recorded their lives (“Of Pens” 207). Thus even as we see Mary Occom choosing to let another write letters for her, we also see her clearly marking out her life as a Native woman, much to the bemusement of an observer who writes, “He [Occom] wished to live in English style; but his Wife who was of the Montauk tribe retained a fondness for her Indian customs. She declined, evening & morning setting at table. Her dress was mostly indian, & when he spake to her in English, she answered in her native language, although she could speak good English” (McClure 192). Even as her husband, Samson Occom, was fiercely committed to English manners and practices—most notably literacy practices (he built for himself and his family a fine two-storied house lined with books from his 1765 trip to England)—Mary Occom quietly marked her own life as quite distinct from that of her husband. Similarly, Molly Brant, sister of Joseph Brant and wife of William Johnson, is generally recognized today as having been an extremely

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successful diplomat, on the basis far less of her writing abilities than of the way she deployed alternative forms of expression such as speech, dress, and material surroundings. Arguably the most powerful northeastern Native woman on the eighteenth-century Anglo-Indian frontier, Brant is an unusual figure in many ways—she bridged two cultures more or less on her own terms and used the power accorded to her in matriarchal Mohawk culture to forge a relationship with the most powerful patriarchal figure on the colonial frontier of upstate New York, Indian superintendent William Johnson. As recent scholars Alan Taylor and Kirk Davis Swinehart have pointed out, Brant merged her role as consort to Johnson with her responsibilities as a clan mother to her people. Though she was indisputably powerfully positioned in Iroquois-English relations, there is some debate over the extent of her literacy skills. Only a handful of letters can be arguably attributed to her, and these are from later in her life, after the death of William Johnson. Finally, she is known, not for the few letters she may or may not have written much later in life, but rather for her management of their home, the 1762 Johnson Hall (in present-day Johnstown, New York), in the decades leading up to the American Revolution as a bicultural environment that simultaneously celebrated Mohawk and English society. While Mary Occom’s expression of identity positioned her squarely in the domestic sphere and as a preserver of traditional culture against the depredations of those who would disrupt indigenous lifeways, Molly Brant was at the forefront of change, embracing whatever strategies allowed her the political and social authority to act decisively. Thus Johnson Hall became an amalgamation, a strategic balance between alternating languages, cultures, and ideologies; Brant’s adept manipulation of the sign systems of both English and Iroquois cultures made her a force to be reckoned with. These two very different women’s choices about clothing, food, and the general management of their homes were marked far less by the importance of both of their husbands than by their insistence on marking themselves as having their own relationship to both their indigenous culture and the expectations of Anglo-Americans. It is tempting to see Mary Occom’s marks of Native identity as a reaction against AngloAmerican culture and her strategy for returning to an indigenous structure of identity. However, Molly Brant’s performance of Indianness and Englishness reminds us that a far more complex set of impulses is at play

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than can be neatly defined as resistant or accommodationist. The choices of these women are political, after all, and the fact of their expression within the domestic sphere does not diminish their import. As our brief look at the worlds of Weetamoo, Molly Brant, and Mary Occom reminds us, Native women’s lives were far more varied than we have tended to see, perhaps not least because the technologies of the literacy through which they expressed themselves are simply not legible to us. No colonial Native woman has the body of written work associated with Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and others. Except for a handful of texts, colonial Native women did not, as a rule, write, and as noted above there is no evidence that any Native women attempted to publish poetry like Phillis Wheatley’s or even Lucy Terry’s.14 Perhaps these extraordinary African American women invested their prodigious intellectual and emotional energies in the production of written texts at least in part because they had few alternative traditions available to them. Living as slaves in white households in New England from early childhood onward, their familial ties had been irreparably severed, as Wheatley reminds us repeatedly in her poetry. Even among Native women who had the training and the material conditions to set pen to paper, the evidence seems to suggest that more often than not they remained silent. Admittedly this was not much of a choice for most—by the end of the eighteenth century a great many of the Algonquian women of New England were brutally poor; they led a bare subsistence existence with few opportunities, never mind the leisure to actually write. Even so, perhaps the “silence” of Native women is not silence but rather an engagement with a set of practices and experiences that are not fully contained in the world of Western literacy. Perhaps Native women, unlike Phillis Wheatley and Lucy Terry, were able to maintain ties through family and community to their past as well as their present and future. Perhaps even when they worked as indentured servants in Anglo-American homes Native women still found themselves in a landscape and a social environment that was imbued with long-standing meanings outside those imposed by Anglo-Americans— meanings that resonated with these women’s sense of themselves as active participants in an ever-changing, pulsating, indigenous community. Finally, these women lived within a nexus of social and cultural practices only partially bounded by the world of print literacy; it is then

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perhaps not surprising that Native women participated in its public use so sparingly, even as they marked themselves and their families as participants in long-standing literacy systems beyond the printed word.

NoteS

1. Native women certainly participated as defendants, witnesses, etc., in legal cases and on occasion signed (or marked) legal documents such as land deeds, petitions, and court testimony delivered orally. However, there is little or no evidence of documents authored by Native women rather than simply authorized by them. The distinction may be a small one, but in terms of tracking literacy practices it is not insignificant. 2. Bragdon and Goddard point out that Native vernacular literacy (that is, literacy in the Massachusett language) hovered around 30 percent at its peak in the early eighteenth century (14); such literacy was at least initially contingent on contact with Anglo-American missionary culture, since the language existed in its written form only through the literacy work of John Eliot and his Native “assistants,” such as Job Nesuton and others, who did the principal work of translation and textual production with the intention of creating an Algonquian Bible. While this literacy rate would have been significantly lower among Native women in this period, no figures currently exist about its exact rate. 3. The document in question, no. 47 in Bragdon and Goddard’s collection, is primarily written in one hand (probably, according to them, that of Peter Talman). However, someone else, apparently Abiah Togkoosen, corrected the text and added a sentence, making this, in the view of the editors, “the only specimen of writing in the corpus that is likely to be a woman’s” (164). 4. This fact is repeatedly reflected in census records throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so that by the early nineteenth century William Apess can write bitterly of the reservations of New England, “Let a gentleman and lady of integrity and respectability visit these places, and they would be surprised: as they wandered from one hut to the other they would view, with the females who are left alone, children half-starved and some almost as naked as they came into the world. . . . One reason why they are left so is because their most sensible and active men are absent at sea” (155). 5. Joseph Fish, letter to Andrew Oliver, 5 Nov. 1757; Occom and his Montauk school, Samuel Kirkland among the Oneida, and others in Wheelock’s school accounts (Continuation; Plain and Faithful). 6. Women’s writing primarily in the form of letters; examples include several at the Connecticut Historical Society (one by Sarah Wyacks to Samson Occom from 1763, and one by Olive Adams in 1777, one of Occom’s grown

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daughters, both in the Occom Collection); Wheelock’s female students’ letters are still available in the Dartmouth College’s Eleazar Wheelock Collection; and there are several extant letters of Samson Occom’s wife, Mary (one at the Newberry Library and a handful in the Wheelock Collection at Dartmouth). References to letters written that no longer exist suggest a larger pool than we currently have available. So far there has been no systematic search for documents written by women, but as scholars turn their attention to this matter assuredly more will be found. 7. See, for example, documents in the Wheelock Collection at Dartmouth from Mary Occom: a receipt signed with an X dated 12 June 1766; a letter to Eleazar Wheelock dated 8 Nov. 1766; a letter to Eleazar Wheelock dated 15 July 1767. See also a letter from Samson Occom to Mary Occom asking her to get someone to write letters for her, dated 21 Jan. 1767. 8. As E. Jennifer Monaghan points out, the presumption in colonial New England was that writing was better suited to boys and therefore was construed as a masculine trait (“‘She Loved to Read’” 507; “Literacy” 66–67). 9. Recent scholars have pointed out the relationship between literacy and sewing through young women’s samplers from the eighteenth century, which included phrases from the Bible, sayings, and dates or other personal information for the stitcher. It is important to keep in mind, however, that such samplers were often produced in finishing schools and were markers of privilege. The young girls of Wheelock’s school were involved in a more pedestrian and utilitarian form of sewing than the fine embroidery such intricate samplers modeled. It is unlikely that they ever produced samplers or stitched letters into cloth. For more on such samplers, class issues, and literacy practices, see Bowden; Monaghan, Learning; and Miller. 10. See Wyss, “Mary Occom,” which discusses Sarah Simon and Mary (Fowler) Occom in some depth. See also Wyss, “Writing,” in which I reprint and discuss a letter from Sarah Simon to Eleazar Wheelock. For more on Wheelock’s school and co-education, see Szasz, chap. 9 (218–31), and Love, chap. 4 (pp. 56–81). 11. Bohaker, “Nindoodemag,” “Reading.” 12. For more on Weetamoo and her relationship to Rowlandson, see Potter; Arnold. 13. See McMullen, as well as Ulrich (Age of Homespun), among others. 14. Mary Kelley notes the rise of African American women’s literary societies, church-based benevolent societies, and various mutual aid societies in the nineteenth century, although she does not find any in the eighteenth century. At the same time, Kelley usefully reminds us of “the importance of class and race in defining an individual’s engagement in organized benevolence, social reform, and associations devoted to reading and writing” (9); those African American women who did participate in such associations typically were members of a social elite.

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workS Cited

Apess, William. “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man.” On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Ed. Barry O’Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. 155–61. Arnold, Laura. “‘Now . . . Didn’t Our People Laugh?’ Female Misbehavior and Algonquian Culture in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity and Restoration.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21.4 (1997): 1–15. Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Bohaker, Heidi. “Nindoodemag: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600–1701.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 63.1 (2006): 23–52. ———. “Reading Expressions of Identity on a 1725 Peace and Friendship Treaty.” Wyss and Bross 201–12. Boone, Elizabeth Hill. “Introduction: Writing and Recorded Knowledge.” Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Bowden, Antonia. “Stitching Individuality through Conformity: Reading Samplers from the Sarah Stivours Embroidery School.” MA thesis. Auburn University, 2007. Bragdon, Kathleen J. Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1996. Bragdon, Kathleen, and Ives Goddard. Native Writings in Massachusett. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988. Chartier, Roger. “The Practical Impact of Writing.” A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Coombs, Linda. “Ancient Technology: Building a Wampanoag Home of the Seventeenth Century.” Plimoth Plantation. June 2, 2007. . Fish, Joseph. Letters. Miscellaneous Bound Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Forbes, Eli. Correspondence with the General Court of Boston. 1767–68. Massachusetts Archives Collection, Boston. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Hopkins, Samuel. Historical Memoirs Relating to the Housatonic Indians. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1753. Issued as extra no. 17 of Magazine of History with Notes and Queries (New York, 1911).

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Johnson, Joseph. To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776. Ed. Laura J. Murray. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Love, William DeLoss. Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Main, Gloria. Peoples of a Spacious Land: Families and Cultures in Colonial New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Mayhew, Experience. Indian Converts. London, 1727. McClure, David. Diary of David McClure, Doctor of Philosophy, 1748–1820. Ed. Franklin B. Dexter. New York: Knickerbocker, 1899. McMullen, Ann. “‘Looking’ for People in Woodsplint Basketry Decoration.” McMullen and Handsman 102–23. McMullen, Ann, and Russell Handsman, eds. A Key into the Language of Woodsplint Baskets. Washington, CT: American Indian Archaeological Institute, 1987. Miller, Marla. The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. Monaghan, E. Jennifer. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. ———. “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England.” Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 53–80. ———. “‘She Loved to Read in Good Books’: Literacy and the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1643–1725.” History of Education Quarterly 30.4 (1990): 493–521. Occom, Samson. The Collected Writing of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America. Ed. Joanna Brooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Potter, Tiffany. “Writing Indigenous Femininity: Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of Captivity.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36.2 (2003): 153–67. Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 1682. Ed. Neal Salisbury. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Swinehart, Kirk Davis. “Object Lessons: Indians, Objects, and Revolution.” Common-place 2.3 (2002). 9 Nov. 2007. . Szasz, Margaret Connell. Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Tantaquidgeon, Gladys, and Melissa Fawcett. “Symbolic Motifs on Painted Baskets of the Mohegan-Pequot.” McMullen and Handsman 94–101.

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Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 2007. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Knopf, 2001. ———. “Of Pens and Needles: Sources in Early American Women’s History.” Journal of American History 77 (1990): 200–207. Warkentin, Germaine. “In Search of ‘the Word of the Other’: Aboriginal Sign Systems and the History of the Book in Canada.” Book History 2.1 (1999): 1–27. Wheelock, Eleazar. A Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity School, in Lebanon, in Connecticut. Hartford, 1771. ———. A Plain and Faithful Narrative. Boston, 1763. Wyss, Hilary E. “Mary Occom and Sarah Simon: Gender and Native Literacy in Colonial New England.” New England Quarterly 3rd ser. 79.3 (2006): 387–412. ———. “Writing Back to Wheelock: One Woman’s Response to Colonial Christianity.” Wyss and Bross 96–104. Wyss, Hilary E., and Kristina Bross, eds. Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.

Chapter SeveN

sarah wentworth morton and changing models of authorship angel a vietto

Bostonian Sarah Wentworth Morton was recognized as among the most accomplished American women of letters of the postRevolutionary generation and was dubbed “the Sappho of America” by the Massachusetts Magazine in 1791 (“To Poetical Friends”). A speaker at the 1805 Phi Beta Kappa meeting included her in a short list of prominent American writers, claiming that although his fellow citizens were not rewarding their best writers financially, Morton’s “rich Epic strain” would garner praise from subsequent generations (T. Harris 197). In truth, of course, Morton and other popular writers, especially poets, of the early Republican era were largely forgotten by following generations as a Romantic ideal replaced the neoclassical literary tradition. As early as 1840, an essay on women’s writings apologized for Morton, explaining her as the result of a period “unfavourable to genius and good taste” and claiming that Morton “in the present day would have written in a different style” (“Female” 15). The general consensus until the last few decades that regarded early Republican belles lettres as a gap in intellectual life between the Puritans and Romanticism sufficiently explains the relative critical neglect of Morton.1 Recent work in early American studies has begun to recuperate those elements of early Republican literary culture that were previously undervalued—neoclassical poetry, manuscript culture, the literature of sociability.2 Morton certainly deserves 137

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a significant place in the changing canon of early American literature, reason enough to reexamine her major works. Beyond that, however, Morton offers a fascinating case study in the history of authorship: her earliest works are clearly products of a communal, coterie literary culture, while her last book bears the marks of the Romantic, individualistic notion of authorship that has come to dominate narratives of authorship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. In Morton’s career, many of the contradictions and coalescences between these two modes of authorship come into sharp relief. Foucault’s observation that “the coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes a privileged moment of individualization” in Western culture (141) suggests that, in addition to having a famous death in the twentieth century, “the author” must have had a birth at some point in history. While new historicism, cultural studies, and poststructuralism have all helped to reveal the inevitably social nature of texts, the fact and force of the “author function” remains, and literary and book historians have attempted to write the life history of the author considered as individual. Given Foucault’s analysis of the author function as an expression of the ideology of individualism, the analogy between the idea of the author and a real individual’s life history seems reasonable; however, the emerging history of authorship suggests that the more appropriate analogy is the process of species evolution. The idea of the author as individual emerges gradually out of a more social and collaborative idea of authorship, and the privileged individual author coexists at many points in time with the competing, socially oriented ideal. Early scholarship on authorship in the United States tended to focus on authorship as a financially viable profession and thus to focus on the material and economic conditions that enabled such a profession, beginning perhaps in the 1790s but not really developing significantly until the first few decades of the nineteenth century.3 Newer conceptions of the evolution of authorship in Western literature have reemphasized the importance of earlier, less commercial notions of authorship and the less than straightforward transition from older to newer models of authorship. Margaret Ezell has traced the extent to which manuscript circulation coexisted with the rapidly growing world of print in the eighteenth century, arguing that it was not merely a “nostalgic clinging to an outdated technology representing a fading aristocratic possession of

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the world of letters” but rather a deliberate choice (12). Strikingly, Ezell traces the simultaneous participation in print and manuscript cultures in the early career of Alexander Pope (61–84). Similarly, according to Martha Woodmansee’s account, the proprietary author-as-original-creator is an idea that emerges gradually, achieving dominance only in the early nineteenth century. Woodmansee argues persuasively that a corporate or collaborative notion of authorship—authorship as a sociable activity in which a writer is always to some extent compiling, editing, or commenting upon the writing of others—remained viable in the eighteenth century, even exemplified in the work of so “professional” an author as Samuel Johnson (17–24). If even writers such as Johnson and Pope, long among the canonical authors studied as towering individual figures, participated in multiple modes of authorship, it seems clear that no account of eighteenth-century authorship ought to assume an easily traced shift from one mode to another. To the extent that the author came into being in the early modern era, he or she seems always to have been an ideal fraught with contradiction, existing alongside or even embedded in social networks that revealed authorship as communal in some degree. One task facing an author, then, particularly at a moment when a new model of authorship was emerging, would be the construction of the self-as-author, a version of the self designed to align more or less with existing ideas of authorship. One reason Morton is so fascinating in this context is that her construction of herself as author seems to have been highly self-conscious. Morton’s early published writings bear reminder after reminder of her participation in literary, political, and social communities. In the Massachusetts Magazine, Morton contributed a variety of poetry, including a number of poems that participated in the polite exchanges between poets using eponyms, a practice that enacted coterie culture within the public world of the magazine. In 1790, for example, Morton published poems in praise of Mercy Otis Warren (“Ode”) and “the author of the poems under the signature of Della Crusca” (“Lines”): she also engaged in an extended exchange with Boston writer Judith Sargent Murray, which began when the two found themselves using the same eponym (Constantia). Morton ceded the field, renaming herself first “Philenia Constantia,” then settling on Philenia (it is worth noting, however, Morton’s concern to make the transition visible by retaining

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Constantia for a time). In participating in the public exchanges between poets in the Massachusetts Magazine, using decorous eponyms, Morton established herself as part of a genteel tradition of literary work that was highly social. More striking in terms of figurations of authorship as social, even collaborative, are Morton’s book-length publications of the 1790s. The first of these was Ouâbi; or The Virtues of Nature (1790), a verse narrative of a love triangle between Ouâbi, an Illinois warrior chief, his young wife, Azâkia, and a Frenchman named Celario who loves Azâkia but becomes a loyal follower of her husband. In the end, the dying Ouâbi divorces Azâkia in order to allow her to marry Celario without guilt, in a move of self-renunciation like that of so many later noble savages in American literature.4 A slim volume (fifty-two pages) of sentimental verse, never reprinted (though parts were excerpted and reprinted as freestanding poems), Ouâbi has received little critical attention.5 Nonetheless, the poem offers a fascinating study in the elaborately social and collaborative context of early American belles lettres, a work triply marked as the product of its author’s membership in literary, political, and social communities. Ouâbi constantly reminds the reader of its author’s participation in the world of letters. The title page bears an epigraph from Spenser (“Fierce Wars and faithful Loves shall moralize my Song”), marking the author’s awareness of literary heritage, particularly verse epic (also marked in the subtitle, An Indian Tale in Four Cantos). While Ouâbi clearly does not claim anything like the scope or complexity of The Faerie Queene (it calls itself a tale, not an epic), these echoes of the English poetic tradition do claim a place for the text as part of a tradition of polite literature— and for the poet as a woman of letters. The volume bears a dedication to former Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin as well as Bowdoin’s response to the dedication, which, predictably, praises the poem but also suggests that in preparing the manuscript for the press Morton should “add to it from her budget of poetry” and should publish under her real name (iv). This response demonstrates to the reader that the author’s work was already known to Bowdoin and that she had already produced a substantial body of poetry. Morton’s failure to take Bowdoin’s advice and print her name on the title page, publishing instead as Philenia, gestures toward conventions both of modesty and of coterie culture, in

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which pen names hid identity only from outsiders. Bostonians in the know could easily have identified Philenia as Morton, and indeed when selections from the book were printed in contemporary Philadelphia and New York periodicals they sometimes identified Morton by name. Morton did take Bowdoin’s advice to add to the volume from her “budget of poetry” but added only a single poem. That poem is notable, however, in that it too demonstrates its author’s membership in the world of letters: it is a poem in praise of another poet, “Lines Addressed to the Inimitable Author of the Poems under the Signature of Della Crusca.”6 The text is thus framed, from first page to last, with references to its author’s participation in the world of letters. Such references permeate the rest of the book as well. In the introduction, Morton acknowledges that the plot of the story came from another text: “Many of the outlines of the Fable are taken from a prose story in Mr. Carey’s entertaining and instructing Museum; but as the opening scene of that narrative was rather deficient in decency, and the conclusion, in my opinion, very little interesting, I have entirely changed it in those respects, and have introduced a variety of customs, the description of battles, and many other circumstances, which appeared essential to poetry, and necessary to the plot; still I acknowledge myself indebted to that production for many of the events, and for the names of the characters” (vi). This acknowledgment clearly reflects a complex understanding of authorship. Morton admits her indebtedness to her source for the events of the plot and the names of the characters, but she also claims superiority for her own text on the counts of decency, interest, and artistry. On the one hand, authorship here seems collaborative; items printed in magazines appear to be public property, available for adaptation and change at will. On the other hand, the passage reveals an imperative to justify the originality of the present text (and its superiority over the prose version of the story).7 The introduction also acknowledges other sources: most of Morton’s information about Native Americans has been obtained through correspondence with “General Lincoln”—Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary War veteran from Massachusetts who was then part of a commission negotiating a treaty with the Creek people regarding lands on the southern borders. Morton also quotes at length from a number of ethnographic writings about Native Americans to justify certain aspects

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of the plot.8 The text itself features numerous footnotes documenting various aspects of Native American culture or American history referenced in the poem; in addition to Lincoln, whom Morton has identified as the source of most of her information, she cites William Penn’s Letters repeatedly along with Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These notes not only build authority for Morton’s depiction of Native Americans but also demonstrate her own wide reading. Combined with the various references to literary communities that frame the text, the footnotes complete a picture of Ouâbi as an elaborate pastiche. From the unnamed writer in Carey’s magazine, who contributed the plot, to Spenser, whose verse epic offers a model, to the ethnographic writings cited in the footnotes, Ouâbi seems to a modern eye almost authored by other texts. For Morton, however (and for her contemporaries who praised her extravagantly on the basis of early works including this one), all of these debts to other texts did not diminish Philenia’s importance as author. Reading sources, combining them, adding to and modifying what she found, arranging, and versifying the whole justified Morton’s claims as author, even as the text revealed that authorship on these terms was an explicitly collaborative endeavor. As the wife of a well-known Patriot partisan who was to become a leading member of the opposition Democratic-Republican party in Massachusetts, Morton certainly seems to have viewed herself as part of the founding generation, both in terms of her relationships with men of high political stature and in terms of her mission as a writer describing and envisioning a specifically American social scene. Ouâbi highlights its connections to American politics and society. As noted earlier, Morton dedicated the book to the former governor of Massachusetts, revealing that he was a personal friend (iii–iv), and cited information received via personal correspondence with a federal official involved in treaty negotiations with Native peoples (v). Her choice of Jefferson and Penn as sources for ethnographic information demonstrates her awareness of the writings of political figures beyond her personal sphere of acquaintance and beyond her region, constructing an American identity that embraces New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South. The poem also highlights its focus on American subject matter. Like Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper after her, Morton finds in Native Americans a convenient, unarguably American subject.

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Morton claims to offer a great deal of highly accurate information about Native Americans (though by modern standards her ethnography is sorely lacking). The title, of course, labels the work “An Indian Tale,” and the title page is accompanied by a plate depicting the three main characters of the work, with Ouâbi in elaborately exotic headdress. In the introduction, Morton suggests that the poem may be deficient as poetry but will still be useful because it “[collects] . . . many particulars which are not generally known” (v). She also claims special consideration based on the nationalistic content of her work: “I am induced to hope, that the attempting a subject wholly American will in some respect entitle me to the partial eye of the patriot” (viii). Morton and her work are fully embedded in the imagined community of the new nation. The poem is thus marked as a product of its author’s membership in both the republic of letters and the new American republic. These gestures toward the creation of a specifically American literature, and these claims on behalf of the text and its author as participants in the literary and national communities that would produce that literature, would have been comprehensible to Morton’s readers not just in Boston but throughout the colonies and even abroad (Ouâbi received at least one favorable review in England). Many readers beyond Boston, however, would have been unable to recognize a third level at which this text was marked by its social context: Morton’s veiled replies to a play and a novel that had appeared in Boston the year before, capitalizing on a tragic scandal in the Morton household.9 By using her text to reply to personal attacks on herself and her family, Morton both spoke to a smaller, local community and engaged in a literary war over ideas about nature and the shape of the American character, at least as reflected in particularly “American” literature. The scandal was the result of an affair between Sarah Morton’s husband, Perez Morton, and her younger sister, Frances (“Fanny”) Apthorp, who gave birth to a child, as a result of the liaison, in late 1787. The child having been placed with a foster family in the suburbs of Boston, Apthorp returned to the Morton household, where she remained until, the affair coming to light, her father insisted on a public confrontation between Apthorp and Perez Morton, a meeting to which Apthorp objected and which never occurred. In August 1788, Fanny Apthorp committed suicide. An investigation later that fall officially cleared Perez Morton of

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wrongdoing in relation to the death. In January 1789, Charles Apthorp, Sarah and Frances’s brother, challenged his brother-in-law to a duel, and they met but apparently did not fight.10 All of this drama became fodder for two Boston literary productions later that year: a play called Occurrences of the Times and the much better-known novel by William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy.11 Occurrences of the Times is a clearly satirical depiction of the aborted duel, in which the Mortons appear as Mr. and Mrs. Sidney. Perez Morton is depicted as a coward, libertine, and bully; Sarah Morton is portrayed as a passive witness of his crimes and herself a likely adulteress. One purpose of the play seems to have been to advertise the forthcoming novel The Power of Sympathy; the alleged attempts by Perez Morton to suppress “a Novel that will brand him a villain centuries to come” (11) form a large part of the action of the play.12 Other advertising for The Power of Sympathy similarly stressed the Morton–Apthorp affair as its subject matter, while touting the book as the “first American novel.”13 When the book came out, a graphic frontispiece depicted Apthorp’s suicide, though the story of “Ophelia” (the name of the Apthorp character in both novel and play) actually constitutes only a brief subplot in The Power of Sympathy. That brief subplot supports the novel’s claim to be “founded in truth” by making only the slightest nod toward protecting identities: Morton becomes Martin. The tragic events in the Morton–Apthorp families had become, then, not only local scandal but local literature—indeed, the ostensible subject of the “first American novel.” A response to the literary appropriation of her family tragedy seems to be implied by the mere fact of the publication less than a year later of Ouâbi—written by Morton on a subject stressed as “wholly American” and published by Isaiah Thomas, the same publisher who had printed The Power of Sympathy despite the Mortons’ alleged attempts to suppress it. Moreover, surely no reader familiar with the scandal could have failed to notice that Morton, whose family had been rocked by the tragic outcomes of a love triangle, had written her verse tale about a tragic love triangle. Granted, the trio in the poem reverses the gender roles of the real events, with two men loving the same woman, and those two men are not brothers (though it is worth noting that Ouâbi calls Celario the “chosen brother of my breast” [27]). Still, the notion of a love triangle in which all of the participants are tied

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by loyalty and affection surely would have called to mind the Morton– Apthorp affair for anyone who knew of it. Even the title hinted that this was a reply to Brown: Ouâbi; or The Virtues of Nature notably echoes the full title of The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature. While it is somewhat difficult to say what exactly constitutes the “triumph of nature” in The Power of Sympathy, Morton’s message about “natural” behavior (presumably represented by the Native characters) seems clear—and clearly implies a response to the literary criticisms of herself and her husband. The poem glorifies Ouâbi’s self-denial in freely giving up the woman he loves to the other man, whom she loves. Ouâbi’s action echoes in one regard Sarah Morton’s presumed willingness to forgive Perez Morton but also calls to mind Fanny Apthorp’s suicide, which resolved the tensions of the love triangle, whether for good or ill. At the same time that Ouâbi’s self-renunciation just before his death echoes Fanny Apthorp’s literal self-sacrifice, it is also used to suggest an alternative solution. Unlike Fanny, Ouâbi does not literally die to make room for his successor (though symbolically the result is the same); rather, Ouâbi divorces Azâkia so that she can marry Celario with a free conscience (a step made necessary, even though Ouâbi is dying from wounds inflicted by enemies, by asserting that Illinois custom might have required Azâkia to commit suicide after her husband’s death). The question of divorce arises earlier in the story, when Celario is wooing Azâkia during Ouâbi’s absence. Azâkia says that she could not return Celario’s affections unless she were divorced, and Morton inserts a footnote explaining that “the marriage contract of the North American Indians is not necessarily during life, but while the parties continue agreeable to each other” and then goes on to describe a divorce ceremony, ending the note with an observation that might be interpreted as a strong hint at the desirability of divorce: “The greatest obstruction to the conversion of the Canadian Indians to Christianity, was their reluctance at forming marriages for life” (24). Divorce, at least to the Native Americans who presumably represent nature in this text, seems natural—or perhaps it is just that marriage for life seems unnatural. In any case, if Ouâbi celebrates the “Virtues of Nature,” the willingness to dissolve a marriage that no longer pleases both partners seems to be one of those virtues. Morton’s reply to Brown’s criticisms of herself and her husband with regard to the tragic ending of their real-life love triangle,

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worked out through the medium of this imaginary one, seems to be that the arbitrariness of marriage customs is to blame, rather than any of the individuals involved. To the extent that Ouâbi can be understood as participating in a debate with William Hill Brown over the nature of “nature” and society, the character of the American people, and the culpability of Morton herself or her husband in her sister’s suicide, it enacts another feature of coterie literary culture, in that the text operates differently for insiders and outsiders. William Hill Brown, his friends and family, his publisher Isaiah Thomas, who also published Ouâbi, and many other Bostonians would almost certainly have recognized the veiled and decorous response Morton made to Brown’s satirical depiction, but Morton had not publicly mentioned Brown or any of her family members by name. Insiders would understand the nature of the debate because they knew the earlier texts and the context; outsiders would have missed the personal context in a work seemingly so remote from Morton’s Boston. The performance of authorship as social and collaborative in Ouâbi also typifies Morton’s Beacon Hill (1797) and The Virtues of Society (1799). Both took up unarguably American subjects, dramatizing events from the Revolution. The introduction to Beacon Hill suggests that the poem itself was written in response to a request from someone else, presumably her husband, “one, whose injunctions it is my pleasure to regard” and who himself had been “at an early period of life, actively engaged in those important scenes” (vii). So, like Ouâbi, Beacon Hill was someone else’s idea; moreover, in fleshing out the poem suggested by a venerable veteran, Morton made use of “the best historians of our country,” whose material encouraged her to “enlarge, until [she] was terrified at [her] own temerity” (viii); again, the poem was supplemented with footnotes providing authority for factual events or more information in some cases. In the preface to The Virtues of Society, a dramatization of the story of Lady Harriet Ackland, an Englishwoman who followed her husband to the scene of battle during the Revolution, Morton noted that “the subject . . . is principally selected from a little book, containing letters of General Burgoyne” (iii). Burgoyne, then, provides both subject and historical authority. Both poems bore dedications to subjects who marked Morton’s association with the new polity: Beacon Hill to the “Citizen-Soldiers” who fought in the Revolution, and The Virtues of Society to First Lady Abigail

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Adams. During the 1790s, then, Morton sought to present herself as a writer who compiled and arranged, versified and improved upon content made available by other writers; she stressed her connections to political and literary communities; and she sought through documentation of historical fact to establish both her authority and her learning. Morton’s last published book, My Mind and Its Thoughts (1823), offers a strikingly different vision of the author: an isolated individual generating original ideas out of private inspiration. The title page alone marks the difference dramatically. The title itself, of course, gestures toward an interiority very different from that of Morton’s earlier selfdepictions. For the first time, Morton’s full name appears on the title page. And her epigraph this time comes from Byron’s Childe Harold: “I stood among them, but not of them— / In a shroud of thoughts, which were not their thoughts.” Instead of a dedication to a prominent individual or patriotic group, the introduction begins with a direct address to the reader: “And what are your thoughts like? or what are they worth? exclaims the gentle reader, perhaps the ungentle critic, possibly the unsparing satirist!” Far from invoking anyone else to lend credibility to her work, Morton specifically disclaims even receiving encouragement to publish: “without the usual miserable subterfuge of pressing friends and officious advisers,” Morton claims to have “at last, pulled down all responsibility upon [her] own luckless head.” Unlike her earlier works, then, My Mind and Its Thoughts presents a picture of the author as self-reliant individual. However, the book presents Morton’s “mind” in the format of a commonplace book, collecting material on a wide variety of subjects and organizing it so that readers could access specific items easily. Unlike the typical commonplace book, however, Morton’s does not include excerpts from anyone else’s writing.14 The book contains 121 numbered “thoughts,” 6 “paradoxes,” 30 numbered essays, 6 other short but unnumbered essays, and dozens of poems. The table of contents groups these texts in these categories, but in the text itself thoughts, paradoxes, essays, and poems are interspersed. The table of contents even organizes the “thoughts” not in order of appearance but in alphabetical order by topic, while in the text the thoughts have numbers but no titles. The effect of this organization is striking in its suggestion of multiple ways of reading. A reader could read from beginning to end, perhaps noticing that some thoughts are

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followed by others that extend a line of reasoning, or by a poem that illustrates or comments upon the prose, while in other cases the movement from thought to thought seems random. Or the reader could peruse all the texts in a given genre, since the titles are grouped that way in the table of contents. Or if a reader were merely curious what Morton thought about a particular topic, he or she could look up that term in the alphabetical list of thoughts, learning that Morton had more than one thought on many topics, such as friendship and experience, and that sometimes those thoughts qualified or contradicted one another. Although the selections are obviously arranged, the book gives the impression that the author has sought to reproduce her thinking in something like its genuine associativeness and recursiveness while offering in the table of contents an index to her mind. In this distinct departure from her earlier self-presentation as author, Morton might well have been attempting to shape her work into a form more suited to the literary culture of the 1820s in an attempt to gain (or regain) the place in American literature promised to “the American Sappho” by the high praise of her early career. Perhaps she really viewed the conventions of coterie culture as “miserable subterfuge” and sought finally to liberate herself by casting aside the literary habits to which she had adhered as a younger writer. In either case, she had clearly picked up the Romantic inclination toward the fragmentary and the subjective and reconstructed her self-as-author in line with a Romantic ideal. Gilbert Stuart painted Sarah Morton three times, and two of these portraits serve as particularly apt emblems for the two versions of authorship Morton enacted in her career. In the earlier of the two portraits, Morton sits at a writing table with books and paper at hand; an oversized bust of Washington sits to her right. In the later, unfinished portrait, Morton holds a large white veil that she seems to be raising from her face, in a gesture reminiscent of the “unveiling” of her thinking in My Mind and Its Thoughts.15 Of course, in a painting that captures her midaction, we cannot be certain whether she is indeed raising the veil or lowering it, any more than we can know whether Morton truly believed she was casting aside a veil to reveal some essential core of self when she replaced a social model of authorship with an individualistic one. But the career of Sarah Wentworth Morton reminds us that dramatic shifts in understandings of authorship could occur within the career of

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a single individual and that authorship, like other kinds of identity, is constituted in its performance.

NoteS

Portions of an earlier version of this essay appear in chap. 5 of Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America (Ashgate 2006). 1. Lawrence Buell deftly summarizes and refutes the tradition of denigrating Federalist-era literature, a tradition he argues began with Emerson (see especially 84–102). While recuperation of eighteenth-century U.S. belles lettres proceeds, Morton remains a marginalized figure. Aside from Pendleton and Ellis’s 1931 biography and William Bottorff’s introduction to a facsimile of Morton’s last book, the most extended discussion of Morton is Ellison’s analysis of the connection between race, sensibility, and mourning in Morton’s Ouâbi (see both “Race” and Cato’s Tears 136–42). 2. Most notably, Shields; Mulford, Only for the Eye; Blecki and Wulf; S. Harris; Stabile; Ousterhout. 3. See Charvat for one of the most important examples. This approach has dominated most considerations of authorship in the nineteenth century. For an excellent overview of scholarship on antebellum authorship, see Newbury 1–18. 4. Ouâbi is thus one of the earliest in a line of noble savages, made most famous by Cooper, who conveniently die off to make room for Europeans. For more on the cultural work of the self-sacrificing noble savage in American literature, see Dippie 21–25, 209–14. 5. Although no print publication of Ouâbi has been issued as of this writing, the book is available online through the Brown Women Writers Project. 6. Previously published in the Massachusetts Magazine in 1790. 7. “Azâkia: A Canadian Story” began with an attempted rape from which the French hero rescued Azâkia (before beginning his own attempts to woo her); presumably it was the attempted rape that Morton considered “indecent.” The ending differs from Morton’s in that Ouâbi is allowed to live in the prose version, merely divorcing Azâkia so that she can wed Celario and himself marrying Zisma instead; the two couples both live happily ever after: “Each husband, well assured that there were no competitors, forgot that there had been any predecessors” (198). In addition to the outline of the plot, Morton used material from this story in her footnotes. 8. Throughout this work, Morton seems unaware of or unconcerned about the problems inherent in mixing ethnographic information about various

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Native peoples. The source story is set among the Hurons in Canada; Morton supplements information from that poem with information about the Creeks, from the southern part of the East Coast, along with information about other groups of Native peoples from a variety of sources; yet she sets her story among the Illinois, about whom she seems to have no specific information. 9. Ellison notes that Ouâbi constitutes an “indirect reply” to the scandal (“Race” 463); in the following discussion I attempt to delineate with more specificity precisely what that reply was. 10. This account of events relies on Pendleton and Ellis’s piecing together of the evidence in their biography of Morton; see 32–38. They relied on a number of sources, the most important of which was a manuscript by Frances Morton written shortly before her death. 11. Because its subplot concerns Morton’s family and because she was well known as a writer, this novel was in the nineteenth century mistakenly attributed to Morton, and in fact an edition of the novel was printed under Morton’s name in 1894. Attribution to Brown has been conclusively established; see Brayley; Byers; and Ellis. 12. The subtitle of The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature is alluded to in the play; African American servants who are represented in thick dialect repeatedly refer to the novel as “The Trumpets of Nature” (9–10). 13. Davidson (89–91) summarizes the marketing of The Power of Sympathy. The best complete analyses of the novels are Davidson 83–109 and Mulford, “Introduction.” 14. In thus seeming to organize her own thoughts according to the habits we normally see applied to the work of multiple authors in a commonplace book or anthology, My Mind and Its Thoughts reproduces some of the behaviors Leah Price has examined in the Collection of Sentiments that Samuel Richardson prepared by abstracting the “Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections” from his own novels. For a fascinating consideration of the multiple mutations of the practices of commonplacing and anthologizing as they shaped both literary production and reception, see Price’s The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 15. The first of these paintings is reproduced in Pendleton and Ellis; the unfinished painting is in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, and may be viewed in its online collection (Stuart).

workS Cited

“Azâkia: A Canadian Story.” American Museum, or, Universal Magazine Sept. 1789: 193–98.

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Blecki, Catherine L., and Karin A. Wulf. Introduction. Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Bottorff, William K. Introduction. My Mind and Its Thoughts. By Sarah Wentworth Morton. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975. Brayley, Arthur W. “The Real Author of ‘The Power of Sympathy.’” Bostonian 1 (1894): 224–33. [Brown, William Hill]. The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature. 2 vols. Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789. Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture from Revolution through Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Byers, John R., Jr. “Further Verification of the Authorship of The Power of Sympathy.” American Literature 43 (1971): 421–26. Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. Ellis, Milton. “The Author of the First American Novel.” American Literature 4 (1933): 359–68. Ellison, Julie. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ———. “Race and Sensibility in the Early Republic: Ann Eliza Bleecker and Sarah Wentworth Morton.” American Literature 65 (1993): 445–74. Ezell, Margaret. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. “Female Authorship.” Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters 3.1 (1840): 10–15. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism. Ed. and trans. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 141–60. Harris, Sharon M. American Women Writers to 1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Harris, T. M. “On American Patronage.” Literary Miscellany 2.2 (1806): 196–98. Morton, Sarah Wentworth [as S. M.]. Beacon Hill: A Local Poem, Historic and Descriptive. Book I. Boston: Manning and Loring, 1797. ——— [as Philenia]. “Lines, Addressed to the inimitable author of the poems under the Signature of Della Crusca.” Massachusetts Magazine; or, Monthly Museum Dec. 1790: 761. ———. My Mind and Its Thoughts. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1823. ——— [as Philenia Constantia]. “Ode. Inscribed to Mrs. M. Warren.” Massachusetts Magazine; or, Monthly Museum July 1790: 437.

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——— [as Philenia, a Lady of Boston]. Ouâbi; or The Virtues of Nature. An Indian Tale in Four Cantos. Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790. ——— [as “The Author of The Virtues of Nature”]. The Virtues of Society: A Tale, Founded on Fact. Boston: Manning and Loring, 1799. Mulford, Carla. Introduction. William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797). Penguin Classics Series. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1996. ———, ed. Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Newbury, Michael. Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Occurrences of the Times: Or, The Transactions of Four Days. [Viz.—From Friday the 16th, to Monday the 19th January, 1789.] A Farce. In Two Acts. Boston, 1789. Ousterhout, Anne M. The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003. Pendleton, Emily, and Milton Ellis. Philenia: The Life and Works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759–1846. University of Maine Studies. Maine Bulletin 34.4 (1931). Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Shields, David. Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Stabile, Susan. Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Stuart, Gilbert. Mrs. Perez Morton. Ca. 1802. Worcester Art Museum. 31 Aug. 2007. . “To Poetical Friends.” Massachusetts Magazine 3.12 (1791): 721. Vietto, Angela. Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Chap. 5. Woodmansee, Martha. “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity.” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 15–28.

Chapter eiGht

the Path of a Play script Louisa Medina’s Nick of the Woods

k at h e r i n e w i l S o n

In the late 1830s, the Bowery Theater in New York City commissioned its in-house playwright, Louisa H. Medina, to convert a recent popular novel into the melodrama Nick of the Woods. It became instantly successful across all strata of audience as a new spectacular play and continued to appear fairly regularly in theaters around the United States as well as England and Canada. It saw its way to print by the leading English-language play publishers. After a quarter century of repeated stagings, Medina’s drama had come to seem quaint, an older play that suited elite houses, still enacted by the very actor who had starred in its premiere. Nick of the Woods then faded from the theater world, omitted from modern collections of American drama, ignored by the early film industry, and forgotten by theater artists, though as a document it persevered in archives and, in its second century, passed through new textual incarnations. Medina’s play entwines several plots that unfold in a European “emigrant” settlement in “Kentuck’,” where whites are besieged by scalphunting Indians. In one strand of the story, “Nick of the Woods” is an alter ego of a Quaker named Nathan, whose family has been massacred by the Indians—as “Nick,” Nathan can avenge that violence with violence. In the second strand of action, a pair of aristocratic cousins who are also beloveds were recently cheated from their rightful inheritance by Braxley, an evil white man who now abducts the lady cousin, igniting 153

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the romantic quest of the play. The second female lead, Telie, having been raised in the woodland by a white-turned-Indian (a “renegade”), plies her deft wilderness skills to help the couple. Telie reveals her love for the male cousin, Roland (who turns out to be a relative), takes a bullet meant for him, and dies contentedly after her romantic sacrifice. Given repeated assistance from a horse thief with a heart of gold, the mourning Quaker and wronged aristocrats are at last avenged—the play closes with Indians killed, the white villain in custody, Nick and Telie dying poetically, and the couple reunited with their entitlements restored. By early twenty-first-century aesthetic and political standards, the play is dreadful. But whatever current readers opine, it was extremely popular during the middle stretch of the nineteenth century and hence left a longer trail of archival traces—that is, documents—than did many other contemporary plays. Leaving aside the play’s content (which has been examined by others),1 this essay focuses on that trail of documents. It imagines the travels of Louisa Medina’s most successful play across its stage life between 1838 and the 1880s, trailing off as the play enters its afterlife in archives and later republications through recent technologies. The play began in another written object, Robert Montgomery Bird’s popular novel, published in 1837, Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay; a Tale of Kentucky. As was characteristic of the era, Bird’s novel saw publication on both sides of the Atlantic by separate companies and underwent successive reprints parallel to, but distinct from, Medina’s play. The publication of Bird’s novel sparked not one but several dramatized versions, again on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic. In London, John T. Haines, Esquire, wrote a script that saw publication, and the Lord Chamberlain files of drama submitted for precensorship contain three related titles, two anonymous, and a third rendered as a horse spectacle.2 In New Orleans, George Washington Harby (sometimes cited as Harley) dramatized a version that never came to print, though it was mentioned in local newspapers and recorded in one or two chronicles (Rees 30). Three other unnamed dramatists wrote playscripts submitted for censorship in England in the 1840s and 1850s. In New York Louisa Medina wrote the play that became the most popular and also most published of all the theatrical versions of Nick of the Woods. Medina had already dramatized a parade of other popular novels, but most of these plays have been lost. Her Ernest Maltravers and Last Days of Pompeii, both from novels by the

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British writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, were published and preserved but never achieved the same long-running popularity as did Nick.3 Each of these versions packaged a somewhat different Nick of the Woods. They varied in their configurations of characters: for example, England’s Haines rendered a “Sambo” Negro character not present in Medina’s drama (Bird’s novel does include “a few Negroes” [41]). Each restructured the details of the plot (such as Telie’s pedigree). Their variations of content are manifest in the permutations of the works’ titles. The New York premiere called the play The Jibbenainosay, referring to Bird’s putative Indian name for the Nick figure. All other versions repeated the same anchoring phrase Nick of the Woods, while they varied their respective tag phrase—that “or” subtitle then typical in drama and fiction. Bird’s 1837 title stretched to three parts: Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay, a Tale of Kentucky. (Most titles ended with a definition of genre, such as “tale” or “drama.”) The horse-show version scrambled the sequence of parts, stressing the animal role: The Jibbenainosay; or, the White Horse of Nick of the Woods, a Romantic Equestrian Spectacle in Three Acts. The English dramatist Haines’s title gives away the plot’s climax (revenge) while expressing the suspense of melodrama (exclamation point): Nick of the Woods; or, The Altar of Revenge! The southerner Harby’s script, meanwhile, was recorded under the title Nick of the Woods; or, The Salt River Roarer, which yokes two epithets for the hero while alluding to his vivid waterfall ride, but the surviving manuscript is titled Nick of the Woods, or, Kentucky in ’82, replicating the original title’s nostalgia for the Revolutionary-era frontier.4 After its debut as Jibbenainosay, Medina’s play was for a while announced as Nick of the Woods; or, The Renegade’s Daughter, casting limelight on the white forest girl, Telie Doe, and foregrounding her filial relationship to the white-Indian (though her real patrimony is a plot twist). Medina’s title does reflect her changes to Bird’s novel, which elevated both Telie’s role and her skills from inept girl to deft wilderness guide. While it seems tempting to ascribe Telie’s promotion to Medina’s gender consciousness, any account of the author’s choice needs to factor in certain variables of the era, such as the fashions of Bowery Theater, which welcomed active roles for females. Another consideration is the pressures bearing on in-house theater writers: Medina had to tailor parts to a particular cast and answer to a boss, who also happened to be an intimate partner of some kind.

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Writers nearer to Medina’s era recognized her skill not in handling social themes but in crafting spectacular melodrama out of a novel. Such dramatizing involves transferring text from fiction (usually) to melodrama, translating not only content but also format. Dramatic format accorded to conventions that had developed since the sixteenth century in two entwined yet separable systems, theater manuscripts and printed scripts.5 In her dramatizing, Medina, like other playwrights, had to have acquired fluency in the codes of scripts intended for rehearsal, distinct from published play format and quite different from other genres of writing. Medina, like other dramatists, had to think in a script’s nonverbal language, to reconceive texts into visual scenes and sounds that would function dramatically. In Medina’s manuscript, Bird’s descriptive narrations became dialogue or parenthetical stage directions; frequently they were cut. Where the novel introduces the Cinderella-like figure of Telie weaving at a loom, taunted by her haughty peers to “inexpressible confusion,” Medina’s play abandons both loom and the extra female characters, dispenses with Telie’s “coarse garments,” and renders her “tremulous terror” through music (when there is none in the novel) or leaves such emotion outside the text, for the actress’s bodily expression (Bird 52–53). Bird’s narrations of speaking—“he cried,” “said Roland,” “exclaimed Nathan,” “he muttered”—become character labels, their intensity expressed by exclamation points, or again, left to performers’ own choices of physical expression. (Emotive directions such as sadly had not yet permeated scriptwriting.) Drama layout and style sheet by 1830 had become fairly standardized in the English-speaking theater world. Medina styled her text in relatively large letters, running about six or eight words to each full written line (not line of dialogue), judging from her manuscript of an earlier play, Last Days of Pompeii. She laid tall, tilted slashes to demarcate stage directions, which in the later print edition would shrink to ordinary parentheses. Her calligraphy, at the top of each section, is flourished with spacious curls, and even within the scenes she exaggerates—by late twentieth-century (D’Nealian) handwriting standards—the taller verticals y and j. The exigencies of theater determined the pace of writing—inhouse playwrights worked like Grub Street hacks—though handwriting itself was of course shaped by other institutions (which were themselves evolving) and sundry idiosyncracies.

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Passed to the manager or prompter, the handwritten play became the textual source for the production, until—if—the play was later printed. The manuscript entered a new phase in the theater rehearsal. A master copy was held during the brief preparation phase by a central authority, either the “manager” (the forerunner of the modern “director”) or the prompter. Medina’s script passed to Thomas Hamblin, her alleged or common-law husband, who ran the Bowery Theater. It or a copy soon reached the prompter. Someone had to write out copies, a laborious task, one conducted with a range of skill and attention—as manifest in surviving copies, some of which are barely legible, while other painstakingly decorated booklets are signed with arabesque flourish by the copyist. Promptbook pen-marks reveal that even a published play script was far from sacrosanct (a topic revisited below), though we lack a detailed description of how it was actually handled in the rehearsal process. The script in rehearsal bears similarity to other behind-the-scenes cultural documents, such as sewing patterns or an architect’s blueprints. Both the rehearsal script and those schematic diagrams function as a transitional master plan, one to be realized materially in threedimensional space, with the physical result accruing more value, financially and aesthetically, than the document that guided its realization. This heuristic analogy helps to point out that the script becomes a different kind of document in the rehearsal and staging and in each of its phases. Still, the analogy cannot be carried very far: labeled diagrams for buildings or clothes are not used to memorize, to guide an event, or to format new published texts. One of the key functions of a play script is mnemonic. Melodrama actors rehearsed from the script under the surveillance of the prompter and memorized from it during off-hours at home, under a grueling schedule dictated by quick rotations of multiple plays (before long runs, which were just beginning).6 In the era of the star system, the burden landed unevenly, since prominent actors were entitled to play the same few roles repeatedly, often hopping from one local company to another, while humbler company actors, under the system of short runs and multiple shows per night, were forced to memorize rapidly, in quantity, and therefore often imperfectly.7 Following a convention dating back at least to Renaissance England, actors rehearsed not from the entire text, but from excerpts—a copy of only the text that pertained to one role, usually written

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out by an actor or prompter.8 This copying produced a separate, shorter document, called a “side,” containing the minimum: lines of dialogue, actions (such as physical action, called “business,” and the end-of-act configuration, called the “tableau” or “picture”), and a partial “cue”—the last speech or action before one’s next line. The term part meant sometimes this document, sometimes the dramatic role (as it still does today), and sometimes both.9 The actress playing Telie (Mrs. Shaw in the first run) thus rehearsed without the entire play text of Nick of the Woods. Only the prompter tracked Telie’s lines together with Nick-Nathan’s speeches and all the other parts. As texts, the sides are not meaningful in themselves, given the truncations and omissions. For example, when Telie reports the recent revelation of her true identity and confesses her love to Roland, the actress’s part would have read like this, starting from a cue: ——————new-discovered wealth To me that wealth is worthless, unless ’tis shared with thee. Dear Roland, I love thee! ——————a grateful fancy. Alas! Then droop to my hope to blight the heart which promised so much bliss.10 (3: 4)

The character names are dropped, and cue sentences are replaced by dashes except for the last three words before Telie’s next line. These “side” or “part” copies, judging from archive samples for other plays, are written on half-sheets, sometimes in what seems a notebook sliced into horizontal booklets. Some sides have covers; some do not. Written at the top are the name of the role or sometimes the performer (“Telie” or “Mrs. Shaw”) and the title of the play, usually followed by the proprietary command, “to be returned to Prompter.” They almost never name the author. Whatever the vagaries of individual handwriting, the formatting of sides reads as fairly consistent: minimized cues, boxed stage directions, stage-position acronyms (C for center), and an occasional reminder to do “business.” As a genre of document, what are these sides? They are not the play, nor do they consist of a coherent section of the play. The sides read absurdly in themselves, as the excerpt above shows. Lacking beginner’s instructions, they are not like manuals but more akin to students’ “cheat

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sheets”—purely functional, utterly telic, short-term mnemonic devices. As laden with use value as they were, sides also were valued as a kind of property. They bore exchange value because possession of the written part—the copied dialogue—was sometimes melded with possession of the acting part, the dramatic role.11 If Mrs. Shaw hoarded the part for Telie, then no other actress in the company could play it. The value of the document was related, then, to the conventions of acting, one of which was the association of an actor with one role, as Joseph Proctor linked his name to Nick. The reminder jotted on actors’ parts to “return to Prompter” suggests that the manuscripts used for productions were accorded a value, obviously not literary, but related to power, reproduction, and economics. Guarding the sides was vigilance against “piracy”—the producers’ desire to keep copies out of the hands of rival producers or wily publishers, especially before the U.S. dramatic copyright statute in 1856. As the actors worked from script extracts, and the manager or prompter harbored the master manuscript, the conductor had to hold a full copy of the script to mark with notations specific to music—the melo in melodrama. These two separate notational systems, musical and dramatic, intersect here. The interrelation of music and drama was directed by convention and ad hoc strategies, not by specific instructions written into the script. Medina and other writers here and there noted the basic command “music” but rarely specified a mode of melody; in some scripts playwrights omitted the direction because it was generically automatic— manager, actors, conductors, and musicians knew that the grand entry required a grand musical announcement (Mayer 49–63). Medina’s script mentions music in about fifty places, but these directions say nothing about melody or quality, except one “Music agitato” to toll Telie’s death (2: 4) in one edition (Dicks). Usually the musical staff culled from existing melodies to cobble together a complete score (or just a list of tunes), following the shifts in mood in the play script. As a few instruments accompanied rehearsals, “adjustments would have been made to both ‘texts’ as the musical, gestural and spoken elements were fitted together” (Hibberd and Nielsen 32). Nick of the Woods did spark original compositions by composers Anton Shide and George Bristow, which were published and archived separately from the play text, but these musical pieces were probably not intended for live theater accompaniment; Shide’s pieces were student lessons, while Bristow’s was a full orchestral score.12

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Only a few antebellum scripts were integrated with a musical score, either materially or conceptually: that is, specific music was usually neither tied to, nor unique to, a certain play. Medina opens her Nick of the Woods with a song: . . . music. CHORUS. Wanderers from our native hearth, Exiles from our homes of birth, Weary, faint, and wasted we With joy our place of refuge see (Dicks 1.1)

The song’s words and melody, though, were coupled only in live performance. Printed melodrama scripts did not include musical scores, and only later, perhaps with solidified copyright and the consolidation of musical publishing, did printed scripts indicate where consumers could purchase the corresponding sheet music. By the time frontier melodrama resurfaced as musical theater in Oklahoma!, text and music would be closely entwined. When the play advanced from “page to stage” at showtime, the page was still present, except now it stayed fully behind the scenes. Hamblin produced Medina’s Nick of the Woods first in late 1838 in a nearby theater while the Bowery was recovering from fire; then early the next year, the renovated Bowery “began with a thriller by Louisa H. Medina,” as the chronicler Odell reconstructed the event (316). The whole script accompanied the show in the hands of the prompter, an Anderson or a Williams according to records, who policed actors’ recitations from a post at a backstage table (Wischhusen). Performers crammed lines in the wings (whence the slang “to wing it”). The trade conventions allowed latitude for predictable gestures, or “business,” movements associated with particular actors or roles (then called “lines”).13 The vigilant prompter issued fines for actors’ missteps—missing cues, or losing composure and laughing, among other infractions. The conductor or lead musician, meanwhile, followed along with a hybrid music-text script or list. After memorizing, while transient actors returned their partial script “sides” to the prompter, and while others held on to their “parts,”

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stars got hold of the whole script, whether to carry the play to other theaters or to use for their own “benefit” nights (when they collected a portion of the net ticket earnings). Proctor, who enjoyed minor stardom as the lead of Nick of the Woods, helped bring the play to subsequent productions, the script in tow. In the Bowery debut, Proctor was a young man stepping into the starring role, or more precisely roles (his part rotated through four or five personas). Proctor carried the play to England and back. With parts well memorized, Proctor reproduced the play regularly across the United States, in performances reported from East Coast cities (Boston, Philadelphia, and Providence); the southern theater center, New Orleans; and newer cities as far West as Portland. Even as younger actors rivaled Proctor in the same role, by the 1880s, when it had faded from the metropolis, Nick had migrated to the hinterlands, leaving traces in Montana (Nealley), New Brunswick (“Nineteenth”), and Utah, among other places.14 In the life of the script, these revivals meant that the hosting theaters used a master copy of Nick of the Woods, probably one of the published editions, from which sides were copied for the resident actors, and a prompter adapted the promptbook according to a common repertoire of notations but tailored for individual preference or a theater “house style.” The early live productions informed the published versions of the script. Drama publishers sought popular plays, competing with rival publishers in the race to win the authorized copy (or dispatching stealth stenographers to live shows, or, after 1856, buying the right to copy together with the physical copy). The English version of Nick of the Woods by Haines—The Altar of Revenge!—was published by the London firm T. H. Lacy possibly soon after its London production, but American copies of Medina’s script are dated from the 1850s (or so library cataloguers have deduced). Publishers modeled the print scripts on promptbooks from recent productions, or at least boasted that they did so, an authentication that enhanced their publication’s reliability. But they did not design the book to resemble production copies (as early printers copied the look of manuscripts). The image of these published scripts pertained as much to publishing, the world of printed documents, as it did to theater. Medina’s play saw publication by another London house, Dicks, briefly by Spencer in Boston, and most enduringly by Samuel French in New York (and later

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in London as well). Book covers and title pages especially, part of the mediating material now known as “paratext” (Genette), promoted the overarching company (Spencer’s Boston Theater) or one category of plays within the whole stock (French’s Standard Drama, The Acting Edition), while of course featuring that particular work (Nick of the Woods). As was standard across genres, all firms positioned their company names at the top of their editions of Nick. Samuel French, who acquired some of Spencer’s plates in the 1860s, then divided its stock into several strands— mainly French’s Standard Plays and French’s Minor Plays, the latter encompassing lighter fare, “afterpieces” and comedies.15 With the brand at the top of the page, the imprint was always found at the foot. In between, the title appears as one blunt phrase, Nick of the Woods, followed not by a tag line but by the genre label—a drama—and its length—in three acts. In printed plays, the tag line (“or, The Renegade’s Daughter”) was usually dropped. As on the covers of novels, the title stands largest on the page, overshadowing Medina’s byline. R. M. Bird is invisible on these title pages (but later librarians reinsert him in catalog entries). As images, the covers of Spencer’s and French’s editions of Nick of the Woods look sparse and plain, spreading a few short lines of text spaciously down the vertical page. Resembling the covers of contemporaneous fiction, French’s and Spencer’s play covers hardly connote melodrama or theatricality (as do the loud exclamations of posters). With practices varying, however, Dicks did include illustrations on the covers; for its edition of Nick it used a line drawing of a bejeweled gypsylike woman kneeling over a sleeping princely figure before a cottage, as suitable to Walter Scott romances as to “Nick of the Woods”—that is, the image reflects publishing trends as much as the theatrical details of one play (Dicks). The printer of the original stereotype plates (who perhaps doubled as publisher) made modifications to render the manuscript into a published script; manuscript and printed play scripts were not isomorphic, however much each influenced the design of the other. One variable was size and leading of the type. Though Medina’s handwritten script sprawled expansively across larger, quarto-sized sheets, printed scripts compressed the text to conserve space, since rag-based paper was still proportionally costly for publishers in the era before cheap wood pulp had been developed. Scripts were printed on thin, somewhat fragile paper. Published editions came in a portable scale; Dicks’s Nick would

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fit tiny pockets, small as a thin stack of index cards. Another variable is paratext: that is, what else gets added besides the play text proper. Earlier editions such as Haines’s Nick of the Woods added nothing, leaving blank space on the back and inside covers. Soon though, London and United States publishers began filling the extra space with their own promotional notices. Increasingly these took the form of catalog listings, columns of tiny titles, without authors’ names, sequenced by arbitrary inventory numbers (also printed on the script’s title page). Dicks assigned the number 547 to Nick of the Woods; Samuel French used Roman numerals, CCLXIX. Spencer’s catalog ended on blank column space, yet continued the chain of numbers down the empty slots for future titles to fill. Other publishers’ catalogs divided the overall stock into small subsets, or “volumes,” not to be confused with their series (for example, Ethiopian Drama). Each volume assembled a handful of titles apparently randomly, or in grab-bag fashion, rather than for a common feature. In Spencer’s inventory, Nick of the Woods could be purchased alone (number 62) or bundled with Anne Blake, My Fellow Clerk, Bengal Tiger, The Steward, Captain Kyd, The Marble Heart, and Laughing Hyena as volume 8. From a political economy perspective, such catalog groupings homogenized diversity by reducing works to interchangeable units (in other words, the practice made the play text into a blatant commodity). From the business point of view, the publisher’s volume may have helped peddle the slow-moving titles; for the consumer the fixed combination may have seemed desirable, at least for reducing the cost per script (though admittedly little is known about these reader-consumers). Prices, of course, were another sign that distinguished the printed script from the rehearsal manuscript, marking its entry to a formal market. Besides the play catalog, extra space was now filled by advertisements for other products, how-to guides, kits, or biographies, especially in scripts geared for amateurs. A Samuel French edition of Medina’s Nick of the Woods, for example, added notices to its cover, advertising a makeup guide in the header and a makeup kit at the foot (“in strong fancy card-board box $4 or elegant tin cases $5”). The verso presents a full-page ad for “scenery,” wallpaper-like sheets from which to rig a backdrop of cottage interior, drawing room, garden, or—the only one useful for Nick of the Woods—a wood (Dicks). The back cover offers a medley of “articles needed by amateurs,” including “Tableaux Lights, Magnesium

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Tableaux Lights, Prepared Burnt Cork, Grease, Paints, Lighting for Private Theatricals, Guide to Selecting Plays, Hints on Costume,” and the scenery mentioned above. The proliferation of published plays, overwhelming to nonprofessionals, gave rise to published guides “to selecting plays.” Amateur theater provided a key market for play publishers, who tailored script packages for these theater enthusiasts—in one sense amateur theater was engendered by industrial publishing, rather than vice versa. In addition to tempting amateurs to purchase other goods from the same company, these scripts offered them guidance that a professional’s rehearsal text did not need, such as inventories of costumes and a key to acronyms for stage positions. While Nick may not have been a popular choice for homemade productions (the waterfall and flaming canoe are rather daunting special effects), the play was reprinted and catalogued for the amateur market. Some editions include a feature not found in modern scripts: a cast list not only for the premiere (as is conventional today) but for several productions that took place in multiple cities, in the form of a table. Whatever the intentions at the time, the chart seems to have served several functions: it replaced the usual dramatis personae listing (albeit without descriptions); it recorded which actor played the roles in the play’s respective productions (as Proctor appears under several cities); it testified to the play’s ongoing popularity (by covering different years); and, by implication, it mapped the theater centers of the country (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and New Orleans). That is, it served other functions besides understanding the play text or staging a production. Beyond the paratext, the process of publishing also transformed the format of the play text proper. Script formats were already conventionalized at a general level (act divisions, stage directions delineated, and so on), but they continued to evolve, perhaps in a back-and-forth influence between prompter notes and printer practices. The minute element of the characters’ position markers at the ends of scenes, the tableau diagram, underwent change in the nineteenth century: the angle of the names pivoted, and an explanation key was dropped. The marker of the conclusion was sometimes the readerly “The End,” sometimes the theatrical “Curtain,” and occasionally the cosmopolitan “Fin.” For many elements of the printed play, practices were varied in 1850 and would

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continue to vary even under the near-monopoly of Samuel French, the tycoon of play publishing from the 1850s on. Specializing in theater products (with a few detours to magazines), Samuel French bought out the stocks of stereotype plates from former rival companies, accumulating Nick of the Woods and other Medina plays. French acquired a London house, Lacy’s, which had earlier acquired another company, and so on—French’s was the fourth and final gulp in the proverbial big-fish, small-fish food chain of the era (Stephens 125). Stereotype enabled French to reprint Nick without the labor of recomposing type (except to replace the company name), which meant that reprints were reproduced in the style of the former publisher. Reinforced by the evolving intellectual property laws, French annexed printing rights for theater’s new successes, such as Dion Boucicault’s Poor of New York and Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, catalogued alongside Nick and other older titles.16 By the time his company straddled the Atlantic, Samuel French had secured not only printing but production rights for his titles, rights litigated by his son, T. H. French, from the New York base, after the 1870s. French’s intellectual property strategies, however, were too late to benefit Louisa Medina, nor did they alter the front matter of Nick of the Woods—as the 1856 dramatic copyright act altered the covers of new plays—until the next century (Odell 7: 226). Once the script was published, later productions used the print edition as the master copy from which to generate separate “sides” or the promptbook. The promptbooks fashioned from published scripts are peculiar kinds of text, not only because they are the version of the antebellum play script called “book.” The prompter made his or her book by undoing the printer’s job—interspersing the printed pages with clean sheets of paper, usually unlined, sometimes cropped to the same size, but in one case larger than the script. These pages allowed more space in which to mark cues for actor movements, or sound effects, or prop placement—which would clutter the dense text of the published script. The new script alternated printed page with blank page, the inner edges affixed by pasting or perhaps stitching. When their “books” were used by the same person, prompters could mark their notations somewhat idiosyncratically, but most books followed a shared repertoire of codes. One prompter of Medina’s Nick of the Woods used systematic notation. This prompt script, interposing blank

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leaves in a Samuel French edition, contains some symbols inscribed on the blank sheets, others jotted within the printed script. For example, the prompter drew a manicule (a pointing-finger icon), often followed by strokes zigzagging down to other codes lower on the page. The finger signaled the prompter to prepare for the action indicated below. For example, a pointed finger followed by the phrase “ready to fire” leads—via a large z-shaped line—to commands for sound effects. The total images read approximately like this



☞ Ready to fire

Z

☞

 music  Gun  music

The icon leads to this stack of commands, where gunfire is sandwiched by music. Each tiny circle corresponds to an identical symbol jotted on the printed script just next to the relevant stage direction. Thus the circle-slash icon and the word gun correspond to the same circle-slash icon drawn by Medina’s stage direction, “Gun fired.” The prompter frequently marked the command “ music,” emphasized with superscore and underscore. Some symbols, such as a separate zigzag framed by a pink triangle, are harder to decipher. Oddly, the spectacular scene of Nick’s ride down cataracts in a burning canoe elicited no special notation in this promptbook, whether because it was too obvious to need noting or because the tech crew worked from separate notes. Promptbooks reconfigured the published script. At one level, they reinforced the printed text’s “fixity” (to borrow without endorsing Elizabeth Eisenstein’s term), insofar as they helped to realize the instructions, to “fix” the text for the show. Yet they also exposed the flexibility of text, as prompters slashed out lines of dialogue or entire scenes. (National and international copyright, and years of playwrights’ complaints, could not protect the script from producers’ surgeries.) And considered materially as a document, a kind of book, the promptbook modified the script into almost a new ontological status. It added blank pages for another

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person’s interpretation; not merely its margins but its very text became scratched with someone else’s iconography in addition to the author’s. The promptbooks, like published books, were closely tied to commerce, although rather than being the commodity, as was literature that readers marked with their marginalia, these were just part of the production of a further commodity, the theater show. These notations were partly conventional: those dotted circles and frames around cut sections recurred across unrelated scripts. They were also partly idiosyncratic and often sloppy—legible to only a few contemporaries or a dedicated researcher. Prompters, like every other hand along the script production circuit, contributed to the shape of the play text and ultimately its reception. After losing its popularity even in the provinces, Nick of the Woods left the stage and the theater world. It persevered as a document, though, recorded in late-century book lists for individuals or libraries.17 In the early twentieth century, the actor George Becks bequeathed his extensive collection of “my prompt books, the traditions of the stage and labour of my life,” including both American editions of Medina’s play, to the Tilden Library before the New York Public Library had instituted its specialized theater division (Catalogue of the Becks Collection 1). A later president of the Samuel French publishing house passed the Medina plays, within a massive donation, to his alma mater, Amherst College (D’Arienzo 6). More than a dozen copies of Nick of the Woods, including several promptbooks, eventually landed in modern U.S. library collections, and one copy migrated to a Japanese institution—if print and electronic catalogs are accurate. The documents once devalued and hidden in the background of a popular spectacle were now its only visible traces, preserved as antique books and accessible for academic interests that unfolded decades later. Medina’s play was not embraced by definitive American drama anthologies in the era of modern theater. Around the play’s hundred-year mark, though, the playwright Tom Taggart edited a new version based on Medina’s script, published by Samuel French under the extended title Nick of the Woods; or Telie, the Renegade’s Daughter, while modifying the genre label “a drama in three acts” to “an old melodrama in three acts.” Taggart’s edition includes a preface that recounts his own amateur production of Nick and a historical note reconstructing the origins of Medina’s script. Another section reproduces nineteenth-century

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amateur instructions, along with Taggart’s own advice for an affectionately nostalgic presentation of the play that extends to the ambiance of the whole theater, not merely the stage, to evoke the antebellum era. Where the older scripts had printed lists of productions in cities across America, he includes the playbill from his Cleveland production— “segars prohibited,” it jokes (17–20). Here the extra material makes this Nick not just another reproduction of its script but a repackaging into a new kind of play—a modern recreation of old American theater more than a representation of old American life (a gesture current scholarship calls “intertheatrical”). But the script is marked as a twentiethcentury artifact by advertisements for contemporary play titles and a copyright blurb more elaborate than any in Samuel French’s lifetime, expanding across both the page (spreading to the verso with an elaborate legal advisory that quotes section 4966 of the copyright law) and the world (applicable not only in the United States but also in the British “Empire” and Canada). A generation after Taggart’s quirky reproduction, Nick of the Woods, like many older dramas, resurfaced in new forms based more in the realm of academics and bibliography than of practical theater. In the 1970s Nick appeared within an anthology of nineteenth-century “Victorian” melodrama, as theater and literary studies were questioning the canon and establishing new criteria of value in texts (Smith).18 The same decade saw Nick reconfigured for the new technology of microform: Readex published the three companys’ editions as micro-opaque cards inside its ambitious collection of English and American drama of the nineteenth century.19 The microform presentation preserved the look of each separate page (since these were photographed) but changed the way a reader interacts with the script, through the mediation of a hulking machine. A generation later, in turn, Nick of the Woods was converted into digital file as part of a database marketed mainly to institutional buyers, launching a drastically different way of reading the old play. The ProQuest edition preserves some aspects of format (for example, italicizing stage directions), while it transforms others: it adds line numeration, the full character name alongside the shorter version, and the phrase “front matter” at the top—something print versions had but never labeled. Meanwhile, a small-scale publishing venture, Feedback Theatrebooks, issued in 2001 yet another paper copy of Nick of the Woods, manufactured informally

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using office supplies and purchased (in my case) through a middleman book dealer over the Internet. The informal publisher, it turns out, is a scholar of nineteenth-century theater, Walter Meserve (and family). Meserve’s writings, which are excerpted in the booklet’s preface, have promoted hitherto neglected U.S. drama—my own research here has made use of them. The cover reproduces a woodcut of the canoe scene, an advertising image that never was part of the play script during its stage life. Retyped into friendly-sized font and leading, this low-budget edition is the first version of Nick that seems packaged for reading rather than for theater production (it lacks extra instructions) or academic research (it lacks citations, even of the source play text). This 2001 edition of Nick, unlike its 1850s predecessors, is copyrighted. Not only the means of copying but the uses and cultural values of the playbook have leaped far from those of the nineteenth century. Tracking these paper products expands the historical vision of theater by reconstructing a more thorough picture of backstage processes and by extending the sphere of theater to encompass its intersections with the sector of publishing and printing. This path of a script, tracked for material transformations, can reveal other aspects of social and political operations besides the much-discussed textual qualities of drama. It builds from the well-known model of Robert Darnton’s circuit, a schema that encompasses all agents in the life of a book, from writer through distributor to reader—but it crosscuts Darnton’s circuit with a loop of theater production in which the text passes through another sequence of agents, each making a transformation to the material object. With the promptbook, the print circuit loops back to theater. This close tracking of a play’s path is also inspired by Chartier’s meticulous examination of play texts across different material form and contexts, including the backstage promptbook, albeit from earlier eras.20 This ostensibly simple theatrical artifact, then, the melodrama Nick of the Woods, was actually a multiphased phenomenon, composed of a variety of documents passing hand to hand: published novel, handwritten play script, copies of “parts,” musical script, promptbook, published script, and new promptbooks. For different functions and by new technology, Nick of the Woods was reincarnated in the realms of academics and archives, in microform, an anthology, and digital technology. Each phase in the life of the play text reveals distinct qualities of the material, circulation, and

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use of theater documents, and the life of one script highlights the intersections of various modes of reproduction in theater and publishing.

NoteS

1. For analyses of Medina’s play text content, see Bank; Dudden 107–35; and Mullen. 2. Nick of the Woods or Kentucky in 1782 (1840); Pritchart [erroneous attribution], Nick of the Woods (1844); and Jibbenainosay, or, The White Horse of Nick of the Woods, A Romantic Equestrian Spectacle in Three Acts (1858), MSS (Lord Chamberlain’s theater censorship files), all in the Readex (now Newsbank Readex) microform collection Nineteenth Century English and American Drama. 3. For a list of Medina’s sizable oeuvre, see López Rodríguez. 4. Smither lists the Salt River title. 5. Peters surveys this coevolution across early modern Europe (15–122); see also Martin 318–22, 376–82. 6. For the context of antebellum melodrama, see Rahill. 7. Joseph Proctor, the star associated with Nick of the Woods, sometimes migrated across companies but often ran his own companies. 8. For a description of the role of prompting, see Wischhusen, and for descriptions of some promptbooks, see Chartier, although they discuss other places and eras. 9. For an explanation of actors’ parts, see Burge, who discusses them as part of his reconstruction of professional acting. 10. This reconstruction is modeled on actors’ sides for other plays, in particular those for two titles associated with Medina: Wacousta, attributed to J. S. Jones (Billy Rose), and LaFitte, the Pirate (Boniface, box 6). 11. See Burge. 12. Shide, “Selections”; Bristow, Overture. 13. See Burge. 14. Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) 25 Jan. 1877: 3, America’s Historical Newspapers. Other newspapers document Nick appearances in West Virginia, San Francisco, Nevada, South Dakota, Brooklyn (NY), Indiana, and northern New England. 15. My reconstruction is indebted to Stoddard’s meticulous reconstruction. 16. Samuel French, Ltd., has not elicited a critical history, but see McGowen 170–71; Stern 132–34; and the company itself, Samuel French, Ltd. 17. Nick is listed in a few old library catalogs digitized by Google Books: Catalogue of the Library of the College of the City of New York, 1877; Catalogue

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of the Young Men’s Library of Atlanta, 1884; Catalogue of the Barton Collection, 1888. 18. Smith, following the authority record (the library unification of name variations), identifies Medina as Louisa Hamblin, using her alleged husband’s surname, although nineteenth-century documents invariably used “Medina” and the marriage was probably not legal. 19. In the Newsbank Readex microform set Nineteenth Century English and American Drama, the Dicks edition is in the English part, while French’s and Spencer’s are in the American part. 20. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings and Publishing Drama.

workS Cited

America’s Historical Newspapers. New Canaan, CT: Newsbank Readex. Database. Bank, Rosemarie K. “Theatre and Narrative in the Work of the NineteenthCentury American Playwright Louisa Medina.” Theatre History Studies 3 (1983): 55–67. Billy Rose Theater Collection. Library of the Performing Arts, New York Public Library. Bird, Robert Montgomery. Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay; a Tale of Kentucky. 1838. Ed. Curtis Dahl. New Haven: College and University Press, 1976. Boniface and Jones Family Papers. Box 6, Manuscripts and Archives Division. Humanities and Social Science Library, New York Public Library. Bristow, George Frederick. Overture, Jibbenainosay: For Grand Orchestra. 1886. Ms. Library of the Performing Arts, New York Public Library. Burge, James C. Lines of Business: Casting Practice and Policy in the American Theatre, 1752–1899. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Catalogue of the Barton Collection. 1888. Part II. Boston Public Library. 3 Dec. 2007. . Catalogue of the Becks Collection of Promptbooks (George Becks). 1906. Library of the Performing Arts, New York Public Library. 3 Dec. 2007. . Catalogue of the Library of the College of the City of New York. New York: College of the City of New York, 1877. 3 Dec. 2007. .

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Catalogue of the Young Men’s Library of Atlanta. Atlanta: Harrison, 1884. 3 Dec. 2007. . Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. ———. Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe. Panizzi Lectures. London: British Library, 1998. D’Arienzo, Daria. Newsletter of the Friends of the Amherst College Library 29 (2002–3): 5–6. Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. 1982. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. 107–35. Dudden, Faye E. “Spectacles: Thomas Hamblin and His Women.” Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 56–74. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Guild, Curtis. A Chat about Celebrities; or, The Story of a Book. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1897. Google Books. 27 Nov. 2007. . Haines, J. T., Esquire. Nick of the Woods; or, The Altar of Revenge! A MeloDrama. London: T. H. Lacy, 183?. Harby, George Washington. Nick of the Woods; or, Kentucky in ’82. 1838. Ms. University of Virginia Small Special Collection. Hibberd, Sarah, and Nanette Nielsen. “Music in Melodrama: ‘The Burden of the Ineffable Expression’?” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 29:34 (2002): 30–39. López Rodríguez, Miriam. “Louisa Medina, Uncrowned Queen of Melodrama.” Women’s Contribution to 19th Century American Theatre. Ed. Miriam López Rodríguez and María Dolores Narbona Carrión. Valencia, Spain: Biblioteca Javier Coy d’Estudis Nord-Americans, University de València, 2004. 29–42. Martin, Henri-Jean. The History and Power of Writing. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Mayer, David. “The Music of Melodrama.” Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976. Ed. David Brady, Louis James, and Bernard Sharrat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 49–63. McGowen, Kathleen. “Samuel French.” Ed. Peter Dzwonkoski. American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638–1899. 2 vols. Detroit: Gale, 1986. 1: 170–71. Meserve, Walter J. Heralds of Promise: The Drama of the American People during the Age of Jackson, 1829–1849. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Medina, Louisa H. Ernest Maltravers. New York: Samuel French. 185?. ———. Last Days of Pompeii. Ms. 1858 (?). Billy Rose.

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———. Nick of the Woods. Boston: William V. Spencer, 18–. Billy Rose. ———. Nick of the Woods. Boston: William V. Spencer, 1856. Literature OnLine. ProQuest Information and Learning. ———. Nick of the Woods. London: Dicks, n.d. Nineteenth Century English and American Drama. New Canaan, CT: Newsbank Readex Microprint. ———. Nick of the Woods. New York: Samuel French and Son. 187?. ———. [Hamblin, Louisa]. Nick of the Woods. Victorian Melodramas: Seven English, French and American Melodramas. Ed. James L. Smith. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976. 65–96. ———. Nick of the Woods. Brooklin, ME: Feedback Theatrebooks and Prospero Press, 2001. ———. Nick of the Woods. Prompt script. New York: Samuel French, 186?. Billy Rose. Mullen, Mark. “Sympathetic Vibrations: The Politics of Antebellum Melodrama.” Diss. University of California at Irvine, 1999. Nealley, Edward B. “A Year in Montana.” Atlantic Monthly Aug. 1866: 236–50. Cornell University, Making of America Collection, New York Public Library. Nineteenth Century English and American Drama. New Canaan, CT: Newsbank Readex Microprint. “Nineteenth Century Playbills.” Atlantic Canada Theatre Site. 27 Nov. 2007. . Odell, George C. Annals of the New York Stage. Vols. 12, 13, 14. 1928. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book: 1480–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rahill, Frank. The World of Melodrama. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967. Rees, James. Dramatic Authors of America. Philadelphia: Zieber, 1845. Samuel French, Ltd. Truly Yours: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Play Publishing and Service to the Theatre. New York: Samuel French, 1980. Shide, Anton. “Selections from Nick of the Woods.” Philadelphia: Lee and Walker, 1859. Smith, James L., ed. Victorian Melodramas: Seven English, French and American Melodramas. 65–96. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976. Smither, Nelle. A History of the English Theatre in New Orleans. 1944. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. Stephens, John Russell. The Profession of the Playwright: British Theatre, 1800– 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Stern, Madeleine. Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

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Stoddard, Roger E. “A Guide to Spencer’s Boston Theatre, 1855–1862.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 79 (1969): 9–74. Taggart, Tom. Nick of the Woods. New York: Samuel French, 1940. Wischhusen, Stephen, ed. The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1975.

Chapter NiNe

“the speaking eye and the listening ear” Orality, Literacy, and Manuscript Traditions in Northern New England Villages

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In November 1837, the young adults of the small hill town of Dublin, New Hampshire, gathered together to create the constitution for a new association. They began the preamble with a sweeping declaration: “The improvement of the mind should be regarded as the grand aim and purpose of life. To the attainment of this object every other pursuit should be made to subserve.” The Dubliners were in no doubt about the best means of improving their minds. Their preamble continues: “Although much may be effected in this cause by individual exertion, still far more may be accomplished by associated action.” What the young Dubliners were doing was utterly common in the small villages of nineteenth-century northern New England: they were creating a wintertime association dedicated to the goal of mutual improvement through public speaking. These rural societies were most commonly called “lyceums,” but they should not be confused with the far more urban and largely antebellum Lyceum Movement that featured subscription lecture series by traveling notables. (As Joseph Kett has commented, in the nineteenth century the word lyceum could signify “a literary club of almost any description” [45].) Between the 1830s and the 1880s, after the culture of oratory and self-improvement spread beyond 175

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the urban, educated elite, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of associations such as the one in Dublin were invented and reinvented in the small hamlets of northern New England. Typically, rural lyceums flourished in remote hill towns and small neighborhoods. Thaddeus Perry Mason, one of the founders of the Dublin Young People’s Society for Mutual Improvement, described his home in words that could have been applied to any of the hundreds of villages that sponsored lyceums in the nineteenth century: Such is the location of Dublin that it enjoys few of the literary advantages of our opulent cities, nor have there been numbered among its inhabitants many who have devoted their time exclusively to literary or professional pursuits. Its population has been almost entirely composed of plain practical New England farmers and mechanics who have experienced the truth of the declaration “by the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread,” and they have regulated their conduct accordingly. But they have still had some seasons of respite from toil. Our long and seemingly dreary winter evenings have afforded many a leisure hour. . . . This has been favorable to their intellectual improvement. (“Report”)

The seeming disadvantages of the little village—distance from sophisticated urban opportunities, dearth of intelligentsia, hard-laboring population, long and dark winters—could actually constitute conditions favorable to mental development. “Associated action”—the villagers’ chosen path to intellectual improvement—entailed speaking aloud, face to face. The membership of the rural lyceums shared the general contemporary belief that public speaking could develop the mind as physical exercise developed the body. In the words of Dr. William Ellery Channing, “Speech is not merely the dress, as it is often called, but the very body of thought. It is to the intellect what the muscles are to the principle of physical life. The mind acts and strengthens itself through words. . . . The attempt to give clear, precise utterance to thought, is one of the most effectual processes of mental discipline” (234). The activities of the rural lyceums involved a distinctive intertwining of extemporaneous speech, writing, and reading.1 With this imbrication of verbal technologies—what Sandra Gustafson calls a “performance

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semiotic of speech and text” (xvi)—the lyceums enacted a complex expression of the villagers’ cultural values: their belief in education as a lifelong and collaborative project; their determination to maintain the intimate village community; and their vision of the village as an active, forwardlooking, and quintessentially democratic model for the evolving nation. The “improving” activities of these weekly or biweekly winter lyceums were deliberately miscellaneous. The central event was a debate, or “discussion,” conducted by assigned speakers and audience volunteers. Surrounding the debates the lyceums deployed other verbal events: declamations, recitations, dialogues, essays, lectures, mock trials, public critiques of the presentations, and oral performances of homegrown, handwritten literary newspapers. This variety was designed to incorporate different segments of the village population, and it strategically interwove speaking, writing, reading, and listening. Democratically, rural lyceums aimed to involve as many active participants from the community as possible. On designated winter evenings men and women, old and young, gathered around the woodstove in the local schoolhouse—the very scene an image and inspiration for lifelong collective education. The youngest members, advanced common-school and high school pupils, were assigned to present memorized performances that replicated schoolroom exercises—martial or patriotic declamations for the boys, sentimental or descriptive recitations for the girls.2 Young, mostly unmarried men debated avidly, sometimes wrote and read aloud essays, and—in democratic rotation—administered the lyceum. Older men in the community—ministers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, but also farmers and tradespeople—attended and took part in the debates. Occasionally, respected and educated citizens or visitors presented lectures. Adult women also attended; those who participated in the exercises were mostly young and single or recently married (and thus, presumably, without the demands of children to keep them at home). Although women debated only in rare circumstances, they had a major lyceum role: producing and reading aloud the “paper,” a handwritten collection of locally composed poetry, prose, and minor genres. Men also sometimes edited lyceum papers. All members of the lyceum were encouraged to write and submit pieces. Activities in the lyceum ranged from spontaneous speech to reading aloud. At one extreme were the extemporaneous debate arguments,

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challenging discussants to muster information and transform it on the spot into persuasive performance. In each of the other literary exercises of the lyceum, speech mediated the written word in a distinctive way. Commercially printed materials—books, journals, newspapers—had no physical presence in the proceedings but were often invoked by the highly literate members: as the texts brought to life by recitations and declamations, as the sources of the debaters’ research, or as the biblical, poetic, or journalistic models behind the homegrown pieces written for the lyceum paper. Other events of the lyceum evening called in one way or another on the writing skills of the members. Some assigned discussants wrote out their arguments and memorized them in advance, and when women took part in the debate they often did so by writing their speeches and either reading them aloud or having a man read them on their behalf. One Landaff, New Hampshire, woman explained her choice to write her argument rather than speak in the debate: “Were I accustomed to speak extemporaneously I would lay aside my pen, and when Friday night came, would rise up before you and attempt to say something in favor of Woman and her Influence; but should I do this a big heart would come up in my throat and throb so hard that my voice would tremble like a poplar leaf. So I must say what I have to say with my pen” (Emblem). Lecturers wrote out and read their speeches; young men sometimes read their own essays or declaimed their own written compositions. The most extensive exercises in writing and reading aloud—and the feature on which this present essay will focus—were the lyceum papers. Because they were the only activity in which all members were expected to participate, they were also the only single event that could truly be said to represent their collective voices—a fact that helps to account for the prominence of the papers in the lyceum programs. Showing their esteem for the papers, the members willingly allocated considerable time to the readings. Thaddeus Mason noted in his diary the duration of the papers at lyceums he attended—from thirty minutes to more than an hour—and commented approvingly when the evening’s paper was “quite lengthy.” On 11 January 1843 he observed that the paper “took an hour longer than I had expected” but that the audience had listened to the reading with “a good degree of attention.” On a few occasions in Dublin the reading of papers even crowded out the evening’s planned debate (Diaries, 25 Mar. 1840; 30 Mar. 1842).

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Papers were everywhere created by the same process. The officers of a lyceum would appoint one or more editors (male or female, but the great majority were female) to produce the paper for the next meeting. The editor would solicit friends and neighbors to compose and submit literary pieces and would then select from among the submissions, arrange the pieces in a suitable order, usually compose an opening editorial and—if submissions were too scanty—additional pieces, and then make a fair copy of the whole and read the manuscript aloud at the appointed lyceum meeting. Copying eased the public role of the editor, who otherwise would have to struggle in front of the lyceum audience to perform text from odd scraps of paper in script of varying legibility. Because the copy concealed the individuality of contributors’ handwriting, it also helped to preserve the anonymity of the authors. Although the lyceum members referred to their literary compendia as “papers” or “newspapers” and used journalistic terms in connection with them—editor, editorial, terms of subscription, columns—their “circulation” was purely oral. After the meeting the editor might keep the paper or discard it; there was no designated lyceum archive. Not intended to survive, the issues were created for ephemeral oral performance in the lyceum. Maria Gordon, a Fryeburg, Maine, editor, reported in her diary in 1870 that a neighbor had come to dinner on the day after the lyceum— which he had missed, and thus had missed hearing her paper—so, she remarked, “I read my paper to him.” She did not hand him the fair copy for his silent perusal. Even in a private visit, in the parlor, it was in the nature of the paper to be listened to. Such situations remind us that particularly in rural areas print and oral cultures remained entwined for much of the nineteenth century; reading was still regarded primarily as an oral activity. “Learning to read,” as an author wrote in the Common-School Journal in 1839, “is, in fact, something like learning to sing” (“Reading” 158). Common school education was founded on memorizing, reciting, and reading aloud— a continuity from the eighteenth century’s literacy-learning practices.3 William Gilmore has pointed out that oral transmission of information remained the dominant mode of education in the upper Connecticut River Valley well into the 1820s and that in the antebellum years the reading of newspapers aloud in post offices, general stores, and taverns was still common.4

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For both reader and listener, the art of reading aloud was understood to be an important intellectual exercise. In an 1856 essay, George William Curtis compared reading to oratory, portraying them as “two movements” working “side by side . . . and tending alike to the elevation of the masses” (qtd. in Warren 18). A much-reprinted article from the North American Review contended that reading aloud could itself promote mental development: “It requires a constant exercise of mind. It demands continual and close reflection and thought, and the finest discrimination of thought” (qtd. in Russell 17). Listeners critiqued the skill of readers. A young woman’s first turn as “editress” was charged with initiatory challenge. When Mary Frances Hodsdon of North Waterford, Maine, first read her lyceum’s paper on 19 February 1866, she wrote in her diary, “I didn’t break down but failed to satisfy myself in reading.” Three weeks earlier, on 29 January, she had commented: “Mrs. J. B. Rand presented the paper, it was not very well read but there were some good articles in it” (Diary). Occasional reports describe the quality of women’s reading. One author writing in the manuscript paper of the village lyceum in tiny Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, commented with arch appreciation on the previous week’s reading of the paper: “The ladies of the tribe who are always forward in all good works, not deeming it proper to dispute in public with their lordly masters, did write both wise and witty sayings which one of their number did read to the people in a tone and style, so captivating, that the whole crowd did listen, and wonder, that one so beautiful, and unassuming, could read in such a natural, and forcible manner, word[s] so well befit[t]ing these subjects and the place” (Literary Banner 14 Jan. 1858). Local columnists reported on their village lyceums in the regional press, rating not only the debaters but also the caliber of the paper and its readers. A correspondent writing in a Claremont, New Hampshire, newspaper commented in his account of the season’s opening meeting of his community’s village lyceum that “the Quechee Star—a brilliant luminary of the literary Heavens—also made its appearance, and its well rounded columns sparkled with an abundance of goodly things both of the sentimental and humorous, and was very beautifully read by its accomplished editresses, Misses Bragg and Simmons” (Aurora).

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The popularity of lyceums underscores the fact that in nineteenthcentury America both reading and writing were recognized as social acts, suitable for women as well as men. In The Young Woman’s Guide to Excellence William A. Alcott named conversation, reading, and composition as the young woman’s three methods of “Intellectual Improvement.” Of composition he commented, “This is nothing, either more or less—at least it should not be—than talking on paper. As reading is merely talking over the thoughts of others—conversing in another’s words—so composition is merely conversing with others through the medium of a piece of paper” (319–20). To write for a village lyceum paper was to enter into a social conversation even if the writing itself was accomplished in private. As they wielded their pens to compose pieces to submit to the editor, authors would have been intensely conscious of their prospective audience. They knew the identity of their first reader—the editor—and of the entire audience—the lyceum attendees. From their past experience in the lyceum meetings they could imagine how their work would be received, and from their membership in the close community of the village they could imagine individual reactions and responses: who would laugh, who would blush, who would nod approvingly, who would dismiss. Indeed, writing for the paper was like conversation. Lyceum members treated the papers as—in an extended time frame—conversational and responded from week to week to each other’s contributions. Explaining that it was “sent in in reply to an article in the last number of the ‘Scrap Book,’” the lyceum paper of Webster, New Hampshire, a contributor in 1882 submitted a poem about his mustache. Editors encouraged these exchanges as the best way to deal with literary provocation: Verses for the Sunbeam Come one and all both old and young Come for the good, if not for fun For we have here a lyceum good Which all may enjoy if they only would. We have a question with a long debate, And a declamation hard to be beat.

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Then a recess, which the young like so well So they can play and scream and yell. After recess a nice paper is read But ah me, I here [sic] it said That some are mad at the contents there in Pray tell me what can it have been. For we do not intend to plague any one But we do want a little fun, So if you get hit a little in that Just write for the next paper tit for tat. (Bean’s Corner Sunbeam)

Writing for the paper presented not only opportunities for rejoinder but also—much more important for many members—intellectual challenges and opportunities. Lyceum editors constantly encouraged reluctant writers, stressing the value of writing as a means of mental development. “Thought engenders thought,” urged an editor in 1884: Place one idea upon paper, another will follow it, and still another, until you have written a page. You cannot fathom your mind. There is a well of thought there which has no bottom. The more you draw from it the more clear and plentiful it will be. If you neglect to think yourself, and use other people’s thoughts, giving them utterance only, you will never know of what you are capable. At first your ideas may come in lumps—homely and shapeless; but no matter—time and perseverance will arrange and refine them. Learn to think; and you will learn to write; the more you think the better you will express your ideas. It is the habitual thought that frames itself into our life. (Meteor)

In homegrown language and imagery this lyceum author unwittingly echoed the injunctions of nineteenth-century rhetoricians—witness antebellum writer Harvey Newcomb’s prescription for writing (“thinking on paper”): “One such composition will conquer all the difficulties in the way of writing; and every time you repeat such an effort, you will

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find your mind expanding, and your thoughts multiplying, so that, very soon, writing will become an easy and delightful exercise” (163). Village authors were not experienced writers or people of leisure, but they subscribed heartily to the ideology of self-improvement on which the lyceums were based, and—tentatively, nervously—they offered their literary skills for community attention. H. P. Pray, a farmer in Fryeburg, Maine, submitted a piece to an editress with a wry, self-conscious note: “If you can’t read it, send it back and I will hang it up in the corn field this summer to scare crows.” As Mr. Pray was aware, lyceum authors risked rejection. But even if their submissions were accepted, they might suffer some degree of embarrassment. Authors might hear frank critiques of their work from their neighbors and— if the lyceum had one— from the week’s appointed critic. Furthermore, although pieces in the papers were anonymous, in a small village authors might be unmasked and held responsible for their compositions. Mental improvement and the opportunity for riposte were not the only factors motivating neighbors to write for the papers. Romance also offered incentives. Young women wrote pieces to please editors to whom they were attracted, and young men, likewise, to please editresses. In 1841 Thaddeus Mason of Dublin submitted a poem to the Ladies’ Miscellany with an elegant and gracious cover note: “Miss Piper, If you deem the following lines worthy of a place in your paper they are at your disposal.” This could well have been a strategic move: within two years Thaddeus and Fidelia were married. Romantic incentives aside, many authors wrote for the sake of social participation. In 1882 Detta Goodhue of Webster, New Hampshire, submitted a piece for the Scrap Book with a note to her friend Mattie, the editor: “I am no hand to write but the girls find fault because I don’t contribute for the paper.” Lyceum constitutions, bylaws, and the stated “terms of subscription” of some papers stipulated written contributions as a condition of lyceum membership. Required explicitly or not, contributions were necessary to sustain the major literary organ of the lyceum, and authors were conscious of their role in maintaining a tradition that all enjoyed. Contributions to the papers came in many genres. Though papers differed widely in tone and emphasis, most had similar contents. In a working sample of fifty complete issues of lyceum papers dating from

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1840 to 1889, the average issue contains about thirteen discrete pieces of varied length; the largest has thirty-seven. Every paper includes at least one serious essay: a philosophical or spiritual meditation, an exhortation about good behavior, an appreciation of nature, an evaluation of a local or national issue, or, occasionally, a deadpan parody. Likewise, every paper includes poems—some on topics similar to the essays, but also poetic accounts of the week’s events, self-reflexive verses about writing for or editing the paper, humorous poems, and many different kinds of short rhymes teasing local people. Narratives occur occasionally, usually presenting moral exempla (sad stories of slave capture, or of a boy lost to drink) or recounting a humorous and usually local event. Several papers include retrospective letters to the lyceum, ostensibly written many years in the future, imagining what has “happened” to the village and its inhabitants. Given the preponderance of young, unmarried lyceum members, it is no surprise that courting and love are among the most popular topics of compositions, informing dozens of different genres from forged diaries and versified wills to roguish rhymes and parodies of classified ads. Short local news items, letters to the editor, diverse bits of wordplay, maxims, generic jokes, parodies, and local chronicles written in biblical language make up the rest of the contents. Although genres and topics recurred from paper to paper, the specific arrangement of each issue was very fluid. Individual editors treated the physical space on each page as they wished. Some simply copied out the pieces one after the other, regardless of whether they began at the bottom of the page or at the top, occasionally drawing horizontal lines between pieces to indicate beginnings and endings. Others left blank space after the end of a major piece. Still others employed short jokes and maxims to fill up the page, so that the next extended article or poem began at the top of the next page with no space left unused. As for the overall organization of the paper, again there was no consistency. The most common formal feature was an editorial, usually at the beginning. Papers that did not open with statements from the editor most often began with serious essays or poems, though from time to time an advertisement, an item of local news, or some teasing piece came first. Similarly, essays or poems usually closed the issues, but occasionally papers ended with notes from the editor, fictitious retrospective letters, jokes, stories, or pieces chronicling activities of the lyceum.

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Unlike commercial newspapers, lyceum papers had no departments, advertising sections, or specialized pages. Apart from a cover page or a small banner at the top of the first sheet, they had no predictable layout. Instead, miscellany ruled. Tone, topic, and genre varied from one piece to the next. Rapturous poetry comparing the dying year to the frailty of human life might be surrounded by punning conundrums poking fun at local courting couples. This seeming jumble was itself a lyceum paper convention. Given that editors changed with every issue and that they were free to select and organize the pieces in their papers as they wished, it is striking how similar the papers were, from issue to issue, village to village, and even state to state, in their very hodgepodge. The consistency suggests that editors were responding, consciously or not, to a powerful community aesthetic. This conventional mélange was not random, however. What each editor created was a crazy quilt of available literary materials, a deliberate arrangement of the different voices and skills of the village, structured strategically to serve an audience diverse in age, gender, marital status, and civic stature. Older common-school pupils of both sexes were welcomed in the lyceum, as were young adults—most of them unmarried and thus situationally interested in the topic of courting—and older adults who had responsibility not only for their families but also for farms and businesses and for the government and welfare of the village. In juxtaposing news items, philosophical reflections, teasing rhymes, sentimental poetry, conundrums, and more—the general and the local, the epideictic and the argumentative, the reflective and the comic—the editor was ensuring that every few minutes the interests of a different segment of the audience would be engaged. In a poetic editorial, a New Hampshire editress personified her paper as a generous innkeeper of the intellect: From your sumptuous bill of fare Any one can suit his taste. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Everything the reader wishes Is upon your table placed Where there are a score of dishes Every one can suit his taste.

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Whether he is seeking after Essays or domestic news Or a tale exciting laughter To relieve him of the “Blues.” Folks of liberal education Who possess a jolly mind Wish for general information Which they here are sure to find. (Casket)

The spotlight of the lyceum paper revolved regularly, illuminating and engaging different people. The papers’ aesthetic demanded variety, discontinuity, a deliberate disorder that paradoxically promoted social order (or at least quiet attention), a miscellany that betokened a larger social unity. It betokened village unity—but not isolation from the world at large. Lyceum papers made it plain that villagers were aware of national issues, had their own opinions about them, and regarded themselves as informed and responsible citizens of the republic. Essays and poetry from these remote northern hill towns lamented African American slavery and the dispossession of the Cherokees, celebrated railroads, and deplored intemperance and patent medicine fraud. Such material marked the villagers as attentive readers of the weekly press, sharing actively in the growing cosmopolitan sophistication, broad knowledge, and business awareness of the nation’s newspaper readers. As William Gilmore pointed out, rural northeastern America “was the first society in the Western world where the vast majority of residents—all but the poorest families, and a few of those, and females as well as males—strove to accommodate the integration of local and distant worlds” (“Literacy” 41–42). Village authors wrote as persons connected to national and regional concerns, confident that they were worthy commentators in larger forums. Reporting on the conduct of a debate on the common-school system at a lyceum in a small neighborhood in Fryeburg, Maine, one writer opined (with sincerity, despite spelling and grammar), “I think if we could of had a stienographer present it would been worth while to have laid some of those arguments before the legislature for they are now to work on this matter” (Toll Bridge Journal).

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Habitual reading of the commercial press—particularly the eclectic and more literary weekly newspapers that circulated to many rural households—brought lyceum authors not only information but also stylistic models. The handwritten lyceum papers proclaimed their journalistic inspiration in their range of subjects and genres and even in their mottoes, which echoed those of the printed weeklies: “Devoted to Education, Poetry, and The Fine Arts” (Floral Wreath); “Devoted to Science, Morals, and General Intelligence” (Literary Banner). Many of the genres represented in the lyceum papers derived from the popular press. With the exception of editorials, however, the lyceum pieces whose form most clearly marked them as journalistic were presented with obvious irony or parody. Business and personal notices, advertisements and solicitations for ads, lost and found announcements, weather reports, police records, recipes, announcements of auctions, marriage and obituary notices, shipping news—these characteristic newspaper genres were commonly manipulated as jokes in the lyceum papers. Many of the items played with local courting aspirations and disasters; the lyceums, after all, were organized and sustained by young, and mostly unmarried, people. Lost A verry small pastboard box containing a pinch of ashes. This being all that remains of a true heart, devoured by the flame of love, kindled by that false-hearted lass, Hatty Gilman. Any person finding the same will please return it to its owner, Will Abbott. (Monitor 9 Jan. 1878) Marriages The upright notorious Frank Morse and the surpassingly beautiful Florence Field were united in the holy bonds of Door Lock. The poor fellow had to walk home in the rain saying it was the first time she ever turned the key on him; she would never have a chance to do it again. (Gem of the Valley)

Not all of the “journalistic” teasing in the papers concerned courting. Notices made arch allusions to other local events, including farmers’ blunders. In 1870, after some leading citizens of Fryeburg, Maine, had

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purchased diseased hogs that subsequently died, the Toll Bridge Journal carried several artfully satiric pieces, three of them journalistic travesties: a brief “news” item, headlined “No Certainty in Hogs”; a notice of a forthcoming “scientific lecture upon the subject of hogology”; and a deadpan recipe for soap making, detailing the false economy of buying a sick pig solely for its lard. The journalistic joking in the lyceum papers often drew playful ironic contrasts between the manuscript papers and their mercantile models. One author from East Cabot, Vermont, delivered a fine travesty of a commercial sales pitch: “We have often urged upon our patrons the necesity [sic] of advertising in the Monitor, and a few have patronized our advertising columns, and always with good results. We publish but one instance. In our issue of last week Miss Lizzie Abbott, who is sorely afflicted with corns, advertised for a remedy. The next morning bright and early a pedd[l]er called with a plaster warented to pull them out by the roots every time. You can all see the value of advertising in our paper” (Monitor 27 Feb. 1878). The fact that, like most lyceum papers, the Monitor never carried advertising underscores the ironic intent of such a “notice.” Like many of the journalistic jokes, this one carried a message of rueful selfdeprecation: just as the lyceum paper was not a major marketing tool, so the rural hamlet lacked the commercial opportunities of the city. On the other hand, the stylistic parody of commercial journalism that pervaded these very noncommercial papers can be seen as subversive. In their tongue-in-cheek allusions to their “subscribers” or to the “terms” of subscription, the lyceum editors, masters of irony, called attention to the fact that their papers were not commodities and could not be bought. In an announcement typical among rural lyceum papers, the cover of the Literary Banner proclaimed its “subscription” price: “Terms: liberal communications to be paid invariably in advance.” That is, this paper was “purchased” (supported) by the pieces its contributors wrote. Lyceum commerce was not in money but in communication and group participation. Take another example: the frequent pieces entitled “Marine News” or “Shipping News.” Invariably these pertained to lyceums in inland villages with no access to the coast and no shipping business whatsoever, so there was an immediate wink: the audience knew that a joke was

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coming. What followed was always a sly tease about the fortunes and activities of courting couples: Ship News (Port of Veazie) The Steamer Hattie sailed from port commanded by Capt. Morris Buckly, Capt. Frost having resigned. (Veazie Light)

Tacitly acknowledging that these villages, far from the coast, were remote as well from the mainstream economy, such pieces dislocated the commercial in favor of the personal. In the village, they seem to say, the important traffic is not in cargoes but in personal relationships. This message was reinforced by the physical production of the lyceum papers. They were invariably handwritten. It is true that rural hamlets had little access to commercial printing presses, but this fact does not seem to account fully for their exclusively chirographic papers. Affordable presses for hobbyists were available after the Civil War, but these seem never to have been used by village lyceums. Instead, pieces were copied carefully onto whatever paper came to hand—copybook pages, miscellaneous stationery—in a process more akin to private letter writing than to commercial publication. Consciously or not, lyceum members made a significant choice to avoid mechanical printing. “It was print,” writes Tamara Thornton, “that endowed handwriting with its own, new set of symbolic possibilities; script emerged as a medium of the self in contradistinction to print, defined as characteristically impersonal and disassociated from the writer. Handwriting thus became a level of meaning in itself, quite apart from the sense of the text, and the sense that it transmitted took as its subject the self” (xiii). Through manuscript production of their “papers,” the lyceum authors and editors simultaneously invoked popular journalism and symbolically rejected much of its cultural message, asserting the virtues of the village community against the mercantile, urban, and impersonal larger nation. The papers did not oversimplify this dichotomy: they epitomized both the modernization of knowledge and the ambivalence it could bring. They presented a complex dialogue about the changing world and its relationship to the shrinking New England villages. One lyceum

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author lamented the farmer’s lot, while another saluted it. One praised the success of emigrants from the village, while another created a scenario to show the probable failure of out-migration. The papers kept in dynamic equilibrium the varied hopes and opinions of young and old, men and women, adventurers and stay-at-homes. In the process, they modeled the way in which the intimate village community accommodated differences, and they protected that community from the kinds of conflict that might create irreparable rifts. Even the good-natured teasing in the papers could have helped to maintain village harmony, as local blunders—courting disasters, farming misjudgments, personal indiscretions—moved from the realm of private and potentially pernicious gossip into the public forum of the lyceum, there to become welcome occasions for verbal art. Open expression created safety, therefore—but so did certain strategic areas of silence. Religious and political matters—primary divisive issues—were explicitly excluded from lyceum papers. As the Reverend Levi Leonard of Dublin, New Hampshire, put it in the opening editorial of the Dublin Lyceum’s 1841–42 season, Communications on all subjects of general interest, free from personalities, will be gladly received, and due attention shall be paid to them. Sectarianism in religion and party politics, will be seen at once to be improper subjects for its columns. A paper thus conducted may not be so immediately interesting, as one in which personal conflicts & the contest of parties are prominent. But there are subjects enough deeply interesting to well regulated minds, & highly useful for discussion, which are free from all objection; and many of the exciting topics of the day, if treated in a spirit of kindness and candor, might be profitably introduced. (Rural Repository)5

Silence was also maintained about authorship. Authors expected editors to keep their identities confidential. A penciled note on the back of some teasing “Alphabetical Poetry” submitted to the editress of the Bean’s Corner Sunbeam made this explicit: “Miss Mary E. Webster, Pleas[e do] not tell who wrote this.” Anonymity gave village writers a safe place to express tendentious opinions, adopt experimental personae, or attempt sundry writing styles. It even permitted a kind of literary cross-dressing:

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women could write argumentative or robustly humorous pieces; men could rhapsodize about natural beauty. That this masquerade actually took place is demonstrated by the unusually full evidence from Dublin, New Hampshire, where the Young People’s Society for Mutual Improvement simultaneously sustained a women’s paper, the Ladies’ Miscellany, and a men’s paper, the Wednesday Evening Post. Members of both sexes contributed to each other’s papers—but when they did so they shaped their submissions to fit the papers’ separate gendered conventions. Regardless of the sex of their authors, pieces in the Ladies’ Miscellany tend toward the romantic and sentimental, mirroring the interests urged on young women in the etiquette books of the era: health, music, landscape, religion, appreciation of the beautiful. The Post, meanwhile, retails a pointed and teasing sort of humor, alternating with argumentative rhetoric; its pieces favor such youthful interests as dancing schools and courting. Lyceums in other villages typically produced only one paper, which combined these gendered styles and thus offered to their diverse contributors the same possibility of literary masquerade. We do not know the identity of the authors of specific pieces. But the great majority of lyceum papers were edited by women, and if—as was true in Dublin and seems to have been true elsewhere—women wrote more prolifically for the papers than men, we might assume that the great majority of the authors were also women. Women were clearly taking advantage of the anonymity of authorship to write as they pleased, to step beyond the limits of the ladylike and to adopt masks more generally appropriate to young men (argumentative, humorously critical of others) or to older men (discursive on national affairs, opinionated in their appraisal of local issues, wryly commenting on foibles). Avid consumers of the nineteenth-century American popular press and thus aware of a wide world of information and discussion, rural women were using the lyceum papers to extend their writing skills beyond Victorian conventions. That this intellectual stretch was important to them we can infer from the fact that women were usually the workers who kept the papers going.6 Even if we take a (rightly) skeptical view of the possibility of complete anonymity in a small neighborhood, we can see that the convention of anonymous authorship itself was protective. Anonymity may have been fictitious, but it was an important fiction. It did not disguise

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the fact that the papers were offering villagers extraordinary freedom of literary expression, but it made it possible to ignore that fact in public. Tacitly, the lyceum members colluded both in women’s wishes to move beyond the domestic, sentimental and devotional borders of their conventional intellectual sphere and in men’s wishes to write within those boundaries. The nineteenth-century lyceum papers present a microcosm of the dynamic situation of rural northern New England. The wide range of topics in the papers mirrors the growing range of villagers’ interests— far from parochial. That women and men, young and old, were writing about these interests demonstrates awareness that old roles were breaking down—but the tacit maintenance of earlier conventions permitted this change to take place without systemic disturbance. The lyceum papers dramatize Anne Ruggles Gere’s observation that “becoming literate means joining a community” (6). Just as a boy’s first assigned role in a debate constituted a rite of passage, a signal that he was deemed ready to take part in adult deliberations, so a writer’s first accepted submission to the lyceum paper changed her or his relationship to the community. Even anonymous “publication” gave the writer access to public influence. If the submission was an essay on moral values or proper behavior, the author implicitly joined those who claimed wisdom or conserved social propriety. Submissions relating to village issues such as farming, roads, or emigration established the writer’s self-image as a concerned and responsible citizen. Descriptive poetry and prose placed contributors in the ranks of literary artists. Even teasing verses and clever wordplay about courting couples were instruments of local power, inspiring blushes and chuckles at the time and (if sufficiently memorable) recitation and laughter later on. Lyceum audiences were far from passive in their response to the performance of the paper, as this South Levant, Maine, author showed vividly: as we’ve listened to some sharp bit Of pointed scorn or youthful wit We’ve laughed to see the faces change, And shrink behind our visions range.

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But when they joked us in our turn With silent rage our face would burn.

The audience included subjects as well as authors; people listened, in part, because they might hear allusions to themselves. The same South Levant poet imagined a courting couple going home after the lyceum: And when ’twas finished and all was o’er We’ve lingered bashfully around the door And when that one of all the rest Had kindly granted our request Then up the horseback chill and bleak, We quickly turned our willing feet. Or past the shop beyond the mill, And wished the way was longer still. We smiled to think we should not fear, If all the world should know and hear. And when at last with sweet goodnight We’re left alone in the silent night. In some mysterious way we find We’ve left our courage all behind We know they’ll rhyme or prose about it And well we’ll wish we hadn’t done it. And so through all our life it goes, Our joys are mingled with our woes. (Independent)

Lyceum members gossiped about the couples who had been teased about their liaisons, and they speculated about authorship. (“Fred Young wrote the piece in the paper about Bemis and Eva Heath,” Emily Luther McKenney of Bethel, Maine, confided to her diary in 1875.) In contrast to audiences in the more urban lecture lyceums, village audiences were actively involved in everything that took place in the lyceum, from volunteering their opinions on the debate topics to writing

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to and about their neighbors and their world in the paper. The collective listeners in the lyceum heard their lives transformed to literature and gained stimulus for future writing. Listening, the current authors heard their own contributions in the context of the other pieces and gained some critical distance on their compositions. Free to observe other listeners, authors learned from audience response to their work. In the democratic model of the village, improvement came not from professional teaching, expert criticism, or celebrity presentations but from—as the Dublin, New Hampshire, constitution put it—“associated action.” The New England rural lyceums, which in their debates, declamations, recitations, dialogues, and papers presented every variety of public speaking from spontaneous argument to rehearsed reading, constituted one of the last wholehearted expressions of the Golden Age of American oratory.7 Oratorical occasions have a particular ritual magic: they foster a sense of community, an awareness of shared expectations, values, history, and place (Scott 795). Within the village lyceums the papers intensified this sense. They presented the literary productions of many village authors, all mediated through the single voice of the reading editor, whose “community voice” gave back to the lyceum as a whole an aural image of itself, multiple yet united. As a spoken performance, the lyceum paper was an event in time rather than (as with silent reading) space. No skimming was possible, no fast-forward: every word received its due time. Fledgling authors and practiced essayists, lawyers and farm girls, all received equal attention in the performance of the paper. As the editors mustered their elocutionary skills to express the tone and feelings of each writer in turn—to perform the diverse villagers’ written conversation—they were creating and echoing back to their community its ideal democratic self: a model for the nation, writ small. The village and its paper were indeed small, but villagers held out large hopes for the effects of their earnest literary endeavors. Writing for the paper could even be the first step toward reversing the intellectual, moral, and artistic decline caused by modern commerce and industry: It is said that as the world grows richer and advanced, it at the same time lowers its standard of dignity, elegance, art and literature. The Ciceros and Caesars are few today, the Raphaels and Mussilos, Shakesperes and

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Miltons. Where are the great men of Athens? . . . Today few will give up their life for the glory that will live after them. We want our rewards as we go along, and are angry if we do not get them. The love of literature, the cultivation of the taste for the beautiful, art and science, are not common among us. How shall we begin to win back lost ground, how awaken the languishing interest, and stir the smouldering ruins to living flame, bring out the power lying dormant within us? It cannot be done in a year or in many years even, but slowly and step by step. . . . There is no place of any size on earth but where there may be a literary circle, and how much better it would [be] to spend one’s leisure hours in study than in idle gossip that drags downward all who become victims to its grasp. It is the little things that tell. Then begin with the little things. You say, I can’t write a piece for the paper, because I have no talent in that line. It is just what you ought to try to develop. A great writer said demand virtue and you will have it, demand taste for literature and you will obtain it. (Toll Bridge Graphic, Fryeburg, Maine, ca. 1880)

Freighted with so much hope and ambition, the village lyceums and their papers represent a liminal moment in the history of rural northern New England. They occupied a transitional period in rural modes of knowledge and communication. Writing and speaking, silent reading and public oratory, personal handwritten expression and massprinted information coexisted in shifting relationship. New England’s rural hamlets were also negotiating a new social and economic balance as residents weighed kinship and commerce, farming and industry, country and city, the local and the cosmopolitan. An 1841 letter to the Dublin Lyceum’s Rural Repository made a powerful statement of faith in the way of life and the collective mission of Improvement embodied by the village lyceums. Down to its final “Amen,” it makes a fitting last word here: We are social beings. We need the speaking eye and the listening ear to enable us to go on with success. We meet on a cold & bleak spot. But if there is warmth & resolution in our hearts, our meetings here will not be thin, nor in vain. We shall be able to say, with conviction, at the close

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of the season, “The time spent here had not been wasted.” Let us then do what we can, not only for Lyceums, but for schools, for friends and families, & for the public welfare. Amen. (Rural Repository)

NoteS

The major documents on which this essay focuses, handwritten literary newspapers of the nineteenth-century rural lyceums of northern New England, are scattered across the region in private collections and archives of local and state historical societies and other scholarly institutions. My research is indebted to dozens of generous archivists, librarians, and community historians who have helped me track down the elusive vestiges of this ephemeral tradition and also to a research leave from American University, a research grant from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for 2001–2 from the American Antiquarian Society. 1. As many recent scholars have pointed out, oral and written modalities are not mutually exclusive, and their uses and complementary interrelationships differ in different cultures. See Finnegan; Goody; and McKenzie, 237–38. 2. Barbara Finkelstein calls the acquisition of literacy in rural schools a “process of communal exposure” and points out that “learning to read and write constituted a process which embedded the written word in the oral-aural world of face-to-face communities” (116 ff.). 3. David D. Hall calls this earlier stage of New England history “traditional literacy,” when children “came to literacy by the road of recitation and reading aloud” (23–24). 4. Gilmore (Reading 378) points to genre paintings as evidence of community newspaper reading, citing Richard Caton Woodville’s War News from Mexico (1848) and William Sidney Mount’s California News (1850). 5. At this period, Dublin in fact sustained two lyceums, which met on alternate Wednesday evenings so that their members could attend and participate in each other’s events. The Dublin Lyceum was established in 1836 by older citizens of the town and produced its own paper, the Rural Repository; in the following year the young people got together and created the Young People’s Society for Mutual Improvement. 6. The Semi-Colon Club, founded by Harriet Beecher Stowe and other New England expatriates in Cincinnati in the 1830s, presents an analogous situation in which both women and men wrote anonymous compositions that were read aloud, and women, who organized the meetings and kept the club going,

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took advantage of the anonymity to write intellectual and humorous pieces beyond “womanly” expectations. See Tonkovich, “Writing in Circles.” 7. See Baskerville; Clark and Halloran; Johnson; and Warren.

workS Cited

Alcott, William A. The Young Woman’s Guide to Excellence. 13th ed. Boston: Peirce, 1847. Aurora of the Valley [Claremont, NH] 26 Oct. 1872. Baskerville, Barnet. The People’s Voice: The Orator in American Society. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1979. Bean’s Corner Sunbeam [Jay, ME] ca. 1877. Private collection. Casket [Landaff, NH] Mar. 1855. Bronson Papers. New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord. Channing, Dr. William E. “Extracts from an Address Delivered before ‘The Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia,’ May 11, 1841, ‘On the Tendency of the Age to Universality.’” Common School Journal 3.15 (1841): 234–37. Clark, Gregory, and S. Michael Halloran, eds. Oratorical Culture in America: Essays on the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. Curtis, George William. “Lectures and Lecturing.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine Dec. 1856: 122–25. Emblem (Landaff, NH) 1.3, 20 Jan. 1860. Bronson Papers. New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord. Finkelstein, Barbara. “Reading, Writing, and the Acquisition of Identity in the United States: 1790–1860.” Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective. Ed. Barbara Finkelstein. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979. 114–39. Finnegan, Ruth. Literacy and Orality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Floral Wreath [Lisbon, ME] 1858. Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England/Westbrook, ME. Gem of the Valley [West Plymouth, NH] 30 Nov. 1878. New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord. Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Gilmore, William J. “Literacy, the Rise of an Age of Reading, and the Cultural Grammar of Print Communications in America, 1735–1850.” Communication 11 (1988): 23–46. ———. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

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Goody, Jack. The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Gordon, Maria Eliza. Diary (Toll Bridge, Fryeburg, ME). 27 Feb. 1870. Private collection. Gustafson, Sandra M. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Hall, David D. “Introduction: The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850.” Printing and Society in Early America. Ed. William L. Joyce et al. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983. 1–47. Hodsdon, Mary Frances. Diaries (North Waterford, ME). Box 279, fols. 4 and 7. Special Collections, Fogler Library, University of Maine, Orono. Independent [South Levant, ME] 23 Mar. 1881. Private collection. Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Kett, Joseph F. The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Ladies’ Miscellany [Dublin, NH]. Box 2. Thaddeus Perry Mason Papers. Historic Deerfield Library, Deerfield, MA. Literary Banner [Mont Vernon, NH] 14 Jan. 1858. Ms. no. 1997–058. New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord. Mason, Thaddeus Perry. Diaries (1840, 1842). Private Journals, 1838–1851. Box 1. Historic Deerfield Library, Deerfield, MA. ———. “Report on the History of the Young People’s Society for Mutual Improvement.” Box 3. Thaddeus Perry Mason Papers. Historic Deerfield Library, Deerfield MA. McKenney, Emily Luther. Diary. 1875. Bethel Historical Society, Bethel, ME. McKenzie, D. F. “Speech-Manuscript-Print.” Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 237–58. Meteor [Kenduskeag, ME] 15 Nov. 1884. Private collection. Monitor [East Cabot, VT] Vermont Historical Society, Fairfax. Newcomb, Harvey. Young Lady’s Guide to the Harmonious Developement [sic] of Christian Character. 5th ed. Boston: Dow, 1843. “Reading [by ‘a School-Committee Man’].” Common School Journal 1.10 (1839): 158–59. Rural Repository [Dublin, NH] 10 Nov. 1841. Dublin Historical Society. Russell, Anna U. The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader; Containing a Selection of Reading Lessons; with Introductory Rules and Exercises in Elocution, Adapted to Female Readers, by William Russell. Boston: Munroe, 1845.

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Scott, Donald M. “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in MidNineteenth-Century America.” Journal of American History 66.4 (1980): 791–809. Scrap Book [Webster, NH] ca. 1882. Private collection. Thornton, Tamara Plakins. Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Toll Bridge Graphic [Fryeburg, ME] ca. 1880. Fryeburg Historical Society. Toll Bridge Journal [Fryeburg, ME] 12 Mar. 1870. Private collection; photocopy in Fryeburg Historical Society. Tonkovich, Nicole. “Writing in Circles: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Semi-Colon Club, and the Construction of Women’s Authorship.” Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Ed. Catherine Hobbs. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. 145–75. Veazie Light [Veazie, ME] 22 Jan. 1877. Private collection. Warren, James Perrin. Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Chapter teN

Print Poetry as oral “event” in nineteenth-century american Periodicals i n g r i D S at e l M a J e r

In his 1996 article “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature,” Joseph Harrington argued that the study of American literature had come to mean the study of American fiction. Since then, a body of scholarship, including books by Kirsten Silva Gruesz (Ambassadors of Culture), Paula Bennett (Poets in the Public Sphere), Mary Loeffelholz (From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry), and Angela Sorby (Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry), has challenged the neglect of nineteenth-century American poetry by enacting the kind of “cultural” work that largely had been absent from poetry studies. My own recovery efforts bring the methodologies of textual studies to bear on the question of the neglected genre and ask how nineteenthcentury poetry’s physical state might have hindered or enhanced appreciation for these poets. I believe that any recovery of nineteenth-century American poetry depends highly on recognizing its vital life in periodicals, and I focus on the implications of recovering the era’s poetry with an eye on the vagaries and benefits that attended periodicals as sites of publication, distribution, and reception. As sites that not only published poets but also hyped them as cultural celebrities, periodicals are central to our understanding of the cultural esteem in which poetry was held. Even 200

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with poetry’s reputed ill health in the last part of the century—its vitality and centrality questioned as fiction rose in prominence—a commitment to the genre meant that periodical editors served as cultural salespeople and carved out a new place for it, turning it into a “consumable.” Editors, I believe, not only brought poetry into their advertisement-filled, commercialized worlds of mass culture but used the tactics of that world to convince readers to consume poetry. I have argued that with lavish illustrations came the same kind of “iconic links” between image and text that Richard Ohmann has found in postbellum advertising, that poetry became an advertised product akin to the canned food featured in many periodicals’ pages.1 In addition to visual packaging, however, the aural and oral notes that graced late nineteenth-century periodical poetry tell both of poetry’s long-standing cultural centrality and of editorial efforts to keep poetry alive in that period. I highlight, first, how periodicals tracked the oral performance of poetry and drew heavily on the genre’s still-vital ceremonial and occasional role to capture poetry as an “event.” Second, I argue that periodical editors, fully aware of their medium as available for print and oral dissemination, concerned themselves with creating events and programs and thus offered poems to readers for recitation. I find in the print attempts to track and promote poetry as oral event a hope, an insistence, that poetry still mattered. These periodical texts offer, moreover, a rich forum for considering the methodology of tracking and recovering a lost genre and lost audiences. So often, recording recitation or making poetry available for performance was a self-conscious act, and periodicals made public both the anxieties and benefits with which such acts were replete. What we recover of poetry in nineteenth-century periodicals tells us much about how we do pursue and how we might pursue a broad range of recovery projects.

— Joseph Harrington charts twentieth-century scholarship’s neglect of American poetry, from F. O. Matthiessen’s almost poetry-free American Renaissance in 1941 to critical studies of the 1990s that “present themselves as studies of American literature or culture per se” while making little or no mention of poetry (Poetry 164). Those recovering nineteenthcentury poetry have tried to discern what value its contemporary readers

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drew from it, what demands they brought to it, and, as in Alan Golding’s notable From Outlaw to Classic, what happened to the fortunes of various American poets as those demands changed.2 Projects on nineteenthcentury women’s poetry use questions such as these to challenge the neglect of, among others, Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Piatt, the Cary sisters, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In fact, though, American literary scholarship has also long forgotten William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes; the entire culture of nineteenth-century American poetry has suffered neglect. Of course, to speak of the whole of nineteenth-century American poetry is to address different states of the genre. We know that in the early part of the century authors such as Longfellow and Sigourney wrote best-sellers and that others—such as Bryant—were less popular but still culturally prominent and critically esteemed.3 Critics note a shift in the genre’s fortunes, however, in the final part of the nineteenth century. No big names appeared to fill the void that developed as the earlier poets died out; their successors, contemporary critics complained, were doubly imitative; and as the novel and short story ascended in popularity—the narrative claims—readers turned their attention elsewhere. In the early part of the century, poetry, with its high reputation and cultural propriety, lost ground to the novel, a more sexy, rebellious, and subversive genre; then, in the later part of the century, it was told to submit to fiction’s eventual and huge popularity. With fiction’s ascendancy, late nineteenth-century American reading habits seem represented well by a piece in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas, where a “devouring” young reader gobbles the magazine’s stories and then tosses it aside (Pratt 557). By contrast, reports on American poetry frequently registered concerns over the genre’s health; even newspapers such as the Independent, a weekly that was a noted supporter of poetry, reported in 1898 on survey results in Current Literature regarding the statement that interest in poetry was declining in America (qtd. in [Untitled] 92). And less than a year later, M. S. McKinney lamented the state of contemporary poetry in a piece for the Saturday Evening Post—“In the Twilight of Poetry”—that made all too memorable an impression on twentieth-century critics who wanted to dismiss the period’s product. This “twilight” did not, as some twentieth-century

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critics have stated, signal a decline in quantity.4 Regular complaints surfaced over the floods of submissions, and some editors published essays and stories openly discouraging poetizers. In the manner of a government report on manufacturing statistics, William H. Hills tallied “The Annual Poetry Product” in 1893, noting the monthly Ladies Home Journal’s receipt of five thousand poems per year (when it contained five or six poems at most per issue) and the annual use by a Boston daily of one thousand poems gleaned from the ten thousand submitted (221–22). Indeed, though scholars have rarely acknowledged it, poetry’s health was a debated issue that emphasized the many participants in it as a cultural institution—writers, critics, and readers. Writers, or the lack of poets of the first order, drew blame in such commentary, but so did critics for receiving the genre with a “tone of contempt” and thus “discourag[ing] . . . poets and publishers of poetry” (“Plea” 316). Moreover, readers, in the harshest estimates, were deemed downright inadequate, ignorant of “masterpieces,” which, such arguments went, demanded sustained attention even when the current product was lacking. Most notably, because its title has so widely been construed in terms of criticism of the era’s product, the Post editorial “In the Twilight of Poetry” in fact catalogs the sins of the reading public. Certainly, “the elder generation of American poets” has passed, but “even [‘the old standard poets’] lie in neglect, ” McKinney complains (426). Declaring that “the taste for poetry is becoming a lost accomplishment” (426), the editorial thus places plenty of blame on readers too.5 In articulating reception as well as production problems—a perceived gap between “poetry” and audience—the debate over poetry’s health made vacant a position in sales. “If an author kept a shop and stood behind his own counter,” one piece jested, “wrapped up his poems in brown paper and took cash for them, he might make a considerable addition to his income” (“Suggestion” 538). In fact, I would argue that periodical editors stepped forward, not only bringing poetry into their ad-filled, commercialized worlds of mass culture, but also using those sales tactics to convince readers to consume poetry. One editor, noting the comforting familiarity of the many advertisements in horse-cars for “soap, ink, baking-powder, and patent medicine,” half-seriously “wondered whether, in the interest of public education, some of our Browning or Shakspeare [sic] societies, or art associations,

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might not hire a few panels in the horse-cars in which a verse from Browning or Shakspeare [sic] might be exposed until they had become sufficiently familiar, or in which a good engraving or heliotype might be exhibited for the public eye, while in still another panel a phonograph . . . might play a Beethoven symphony” ([Barrows] 732).6 Periodicals were those horse-cars. They were venues filled with similar “soap, ink, bakingpowder, and patent medicine” panels, venues highly effective in reaching people. But more than that, they often had individuals highly involved in similarly pushing poetry to an audience. Periodical editors stepped forward as cultural salespeople; their customers bought a product those editors very carefully had “wrapped . . . in brown paper.”

— In the centerpiece feature for its sixtieth-anniversary issue, the Independent, a Congregationalist weekly, trumpeted its long-standing poetry patronage by celebrating seven well-known poets: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Bayard Taylor, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Henry Stoddard, William Cullen Bryant, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Earlier issues also had feted several of the members as a group. The 15 December 1881 issue opened with poems by Whittier, Holmes, Stedman, and Stoddard, boasting, “We are proud of our first page, as every American must be of the singers who contribute their lyric measures to this our Christmas number” (“As” 19). And the fiftiethanniversary issue (1898) omitted only Taylor and Stedman, including in its generous helping of poems selections by the other five (FiftiethAnniversary 1636, 1641–42, 1651, 1659). However, it is the elegantly illustrated 1908 grouping that asserts itself as a collector’s item: editorial notes proudly claim the “possession” of six of the reproduced manuscripts (readers were not the only collectors), and the magazine shares a standard photograph of each poet and an accumulated wealth of archival material.7 This poetry spread is a highly visual production—manuscripts and corrected proofs are both text and illustration, and accompanying portraits dwarf author notes. But the issue also is about poetry as an activity and publishing as a process. In manuscript facsimiles and notes, the periodical highlights the act of revision, the discovery after an author’s death of an unpublished poem, the first-ever transatlantic transmission of a poem by telegraph. And in at least one case, it also is about poetry as

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“event.” In a note unusual for its digression from the reproduced poem (an excerpt from “The Rock-Tomb of Bradore”), the description of the abolitionist Whittier reads, “Mr. Whittier wrote many poems for The Independent before and during the Civil War. There was much early prejudice against him and he was called the ‘Infidel poet.’ Tho a Quaker and an advocate of peace, the Civil War brought him fuller recognition, which was made complete by his ‘Snow Bound.’ The last poem of his publisht in The Independent was read at the Centennial Celebration in this city of George Washington’s inauguration, April 30, 1889, and was entitled ‘The Vow of Washington’” (Sixtieth-Anniversary 1386). As a note that highlights moments in Whittier’s larger career, the Independent sets him outside the magazine’s pages in a way that it does for no other poet in the spread. Claiming virtue by association—or by publication—the Independent affirms its own literary judgment by allying itself with this narrative about the poet’s rising fortunes. The weekly, as Louis Filler has argued, had increasingly downplayed its religious roots and highlighted instead its antislavery stance (293–94).8 In citing its steadfast publication of Whittier the “Infidel” during the Civil War, in setting itself apart from the “early prejudice against” the poet, the Independent solidifies that self-portrait. And ending this sketch by noting the performance of Whittier’s Independent-published “Vow of Washington” celebrates the course of both the magazine and the poet. The poet, the former “Infidel,” becomes public patriot; the periodical, constant supporter of the poet, receives the poem in the end as its reward. The literary-political position that both held at the beginning, the magazine thus underscores, was vindicated in the end. The inclusion of this digressive note hardly seems surprising. Nineteenth-century American poetry held a constant and prominent role at public events; the day’s periodicals thus seem bound to reflect that.9 In the Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes, popular Atlantic contributor and one of the century’s chief occasional poets, evoked his public life and recitations repeatedly with the publication not only of poems such as “A Poem Served to Order” but of accompanying notes that repeatedly began “Read to,” “Read at,” and “At the Dinner,” thus documenting his performances at meetings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Harvard Alumni Association, Harvard commencement functions, and other society dinners and honorary events.

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Moreover, beyond Holmes’s culturally elite arena, poetry’s public life was repeatedly recorded in mass-market periodicals such as the Youth’s Companion and in religious weeklies such as the Unitarian Christian Register. Stories such as “A Poet’s Emergency” in the Companion invoke the public poem to teach a moral lesson. In the story, a village poet unable to fill an order for a dedicatory poem considers reciting another’s as his own; he ultimately presents, instead, the story of his temptation and thus situates his character as his work-in-progress (Clark 568–69). And the Christian Register especially makes evident poetry’s deeply entrenched public role through the periodical’s necessary interest in church ceremonies and programs. Various members of the clergy frequently authored the magazine’s poems, and poems evoked church programs with acknowledgments such as “Suggested by a sermon of Rev. Reed Stuart” (Montgomery 496) or “After a sermon . . . at Scituate” (Parsons 599).10 There were “hymns” that had been written for anniversaries and ordinations, but even the numerous other “hymns” not designated for specific occasions recalled the recitation, song, and performance of countless services. These moments tell something of poetry’s active public life—they tell us of Holmes’s performance schedule, of rural community life, of Unitarian church ceremony. But to stop there simply casts the periodical as a reporter, an uncomplicated archive that is passively available for other cultural projects. To consider in addition the cultural activities of the periodicals themselves highlights that there were decisions to be made about what to record and that transmission was hardly straightforward. As the Independent’s sixtieth-anniversary issue presentation of Whittier illustrates, these texts were not captured simply because they were there. Instead, editorial motivations compete with one another in the Whittier layout and are satisfied only when the magazine tries to have it both ways—offering the manuscript facsimile of one poem for the audience’s visual satisfaction and offering the report of the other poem’s performance in order to help rewrite its own editorial program. The “record,” as much as the “event,” clearly carries its own set of performance conditions.

— Key to configuring periodicals as something more than an archive— or, as Lyn Pykett terms it, “a mirror” (102)—is the recognition of the

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ways the media sought to move beyond a print-bound role and actively create events. While the Christian Register recorded echoes of bygone sermons and once-performed “verses” (a term we might use broadly here), its pages probably contributed to church programs too. The high number of Easter poems in one issue (3 Apr. 1890) suggests the magazine’s useful function as performance text, as do the Christmas poems connected to ceremony in the 18 December 1890 issue: “A Christmas Ode,” “Christmas Hymn,” and “Christmas Invocation.” As sources that conceived of themselves as available for print and oral dissemination— clipping and reciting—periodicals concerned themselves with creating events and programs and thus offered poems to readers for recitation. In some cases, those poems came in the context of highly scripted programs. Periodical media giant the Youth’s Companion, for example, offered readers an elaborate national public school Columbus Day program in 1892. Formal plans for the celebration, an event decreed by presidential proclamation, had developed with close ties to the magazine. A representative from the Companion chaired a committee that “prepare[d] an Official Programme of exercises for the Day, uniform for every school”; the pages of the Companion would then distribute the instructions. The Companion not only printed the program; it also offered, “as its special gift, the Original Poems and the Address which are to be rendered on the occasion” (“National” 446). The program offers detailed instructions on how to prepare for the celebration—organize, assign, rehearse, cooperate are watchwords throughout. And the program carefully scripts a day meant to look and sound a particular way. The “beat of drum or other music” is to accompany students on their way to the flag; “Veterans will lead the assemblage in ‘Three Cheers for “Old Glory,’” and the pledge (a Companion staff product as well) is to take place when “all repeat [it] together, slowly” (“National” 446). “At the words, ‘to my Flag,’” the instructions continue, “the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, towards the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side. Then, still standing, as the instruments strike a chord, all will sing America—‘My Country, ’tis of Thee’” (“National” 446). Edna Dean Proctor’s ode for the occasion, “Columbia’s Banner,” reinforces the sounds that are to surround the flag ceremony. “Uplift the New World’s Banner to greet the exultant sun!” one stanza begins,

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“. . . Till the wide air rings with shout and hymn to welcome it shining high” (“National” 446). The Companion hoped students would perform Proctor’s poem, the original “Song of Columbus Day,” and the other pieces of the scripted program in simultaneous ceremonies throughout the entire country. No other publication was so fit to implement such a plan. As a media giant, as a periodical that famously awarded readers prizes in return for recruiting additional subscribers, the Companion attempted to fuse commercial and literary worlds. Ever employing the always-new scheme to increase its subscription list, the magazine, impressively successful in attracting subscribers (it purportedly reached five hundred thousand in the 1890s), made clear its ability to distribute whatever it chose and its ability to pull off an event such as a national Columbus Day ceremony.11 The Companion could command with confidence: “Let every pupil and friend of the Schools who reads The Companion, at once present personally the following programme to the Teachers, Superintendents, School Boards, and Newspapers in the towns and cities in which they reside. Not one School in America should be left out in this Celebration” (“National” 446). The extent of the magazine’s subscription list and the manner in which it recruited additional subscribers by training readers to be “workers” ([Announcement] [1]) made certain the success of the program’s distribution. The Companion’s Columbus Day ceremony offers more than simply a belief in the power of mass distribution, however. Poetry and other pieces of periodicals were used beyond print culture because magazines set themselves up for use. Ellen Gruber Garvey’s research on nineteenthcentury scrapbooks has shown ways in which readers appropriated periodicals and other mass media (esp. 55–72, 66 figs. 2–3). And in acts of clipping and reciting, periodicals could locate an affirmation of the quality and/or popularity of their literary products. The “dinner table” recitation by Independent editor William Hayes Ward of Sidney Lanier’s “Ballad of the Trees and Master” took place, his sister writes, because the just-submitted poem had left the editor “haunted all day by the love and grief at the heart of the ballad” (Ward 2363); the periodical’s editorial promotion of the poet—and, separately, of this poem—clearly sought a similar emotional attachment (and, arguably, response) from the reader.

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In addition, when the Saturday Evening Post introduced to its readers “The Best Poems of the World,” a new series, it offered a rationale for selection that affirmed the act of disassembling print texts. The poems, the introduction explains, “belong to what may be called the ‘Pocket-Book School of Poetry’—those poems that one cuts from a newspaper and carries in the pocket-book till they are worn through at the creases” (“Best” 8). Although the Post clearly sought to set itself apart from “newspaper” poetry by surrounding individual poems with related anecdotes and illustrations by the Leyendecker brothers and others, some of the early entries in particular would have made excellent “pocket-book” poems— readers might have removed the page without otherwise damaging the periodical’s contents. Active consumption and use did not necessarily rest on the physically disassembled periodical, however. Relating the story of a visit to a onetime school roommate, author Dora Donn, in her 1894 article “Companion Day,” describes her surprise at the rural family’s comfortable and tasteful residence and at her friend’s fresh appearance; that friend, despite having six children, defeats the author’s expectations of finding her “with beauty faded and the weary looks so common to isolated farmers’ wives” (279). Pleasantly surprised by how Mr. Brown, a man of “no regular education,” and the rest of the family talk with intelligence about a wide range of topics, Donn discovers the following day the secret to this family’s success: they use the Companion as an educational tool and as the point around which their weeks revolve. As Mrs. Brown explains, when the family receives the Companion every Thursday, they study each issue until the next Wednesday. On Wednesday, they follow a schedule of discussing different categories of articles, present from magazine-related writing assignments, read portions of the magazine out loud, and recite poems. No “scrapbooks” of the magazine for this family, either. Mrs. Brown shows Donn ten bound volumes of the magazine in which, she says, “There is not a torn or soiled paper there” (qtd. in Donn 279). In its print form, the magazine is preserved, made into a homebound archive. But this account makes central a particular recitation model as well. And by setting out for its readers this model—where a family centers its week on the magazine—it makes recitation and performance key conditions for that magazine’s print-bound preservation.

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— Of course, another significant challenge to the “archive” model of periodicals lies with the ruptures that frustrated any periodical’s attempt to serve as a record. The Atlantic might note, quite simply, of Whittier’s “Haverhill” that it was “read at the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the city, July 2, 1890” (Whittier 270). But a supporting note in the Christian Register suggests the extent to which such transmissions always carried questions of legitimacy and signaled possible error: “Mr. Whittier’s fine poem on ‘Haverhill’ appears in its complete and perfect form only in the Atlantic Monthly for August” (“Literary” 495, emphasis added). How many incomplete, imperfect forms of the poem had circulated? I have relied elsewhere, as I do here, on the textual theorist Joseph Grigely for the theoretical underpinnings of my own recovery work. Grigely argues that supposedly “damaged” goods inevitably result from human interaction with texts and that “reconfiguration” and “reterritorialization” are “germane to art and perhaps are reasons it is able to substantiate itself as art” (1–2). What was invested in the attempt to capture—and correct—Whittier’s “Haverhill” (and other poems) in print? Was the recitation itself in fact “complete and perfect”? It is worthwhile considering these transcriptions as moments that help trace the process of “reconfiguration” and “reterritorialization,” as moments that track the vagaries and the benefits (often intertwined) of oral and print intersections. At times, the whole enterprise—transmission, recitation, and printing—could seem to be filled with errors. In contrast to the Atlantic Monthly’s presentation of Whittier’s poem in “complete and perfect form,” examples abound of print’s propagation of error. An 1898 Saturday Evening Post note on the graveyard favorite “There Is No Death” by J. L. McCreery explains the poem’s frequent attribution to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and describes how McCreery, “so full of hope and cheerfulness[,] . . . heard a portion of [his poem] recited in the House of Representatives by Mr. Coffroth, Member from Pennsylvania, in his oration on the death of Mr. Rush Clark, Member of Congress from Iowa. It was delivered as Bulwer’s poem, and was so credited when it appeared in the Congressional Record” (“Disputed” 13). The error in the recited poem’s author attribution, the Post explains, happened because someone with a name similar to Sir Bulwer’s copied McCreery’s original publication with his own name—one paper printed it with that name, and an

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exchange editor changed it to Sir Bulwer’s, the name under which it then was circulated widely. Print here not only records the recitation error but creates it from the start. As for the benefits of such transmissions, take, for example, the commentary about oral-to-print transcriptions in the Christian Register. The little-studied Unitarian weekly offers a rich site for consideration of oral and print culture intersections, I would argue, because it was a basic, utilitarian publication enmeshed in a clearly structured social organization. Earlier in the century, one source likened “a well conducted religious periodical” to “a thousand preachers, flying in almost as many directions, by means of horses, mail stages, steam boats, rail road cars, ships, etc., etc., offering life and salvation to the sons of men in almost every clime” (Religious Telescope, qtd. in Humphrey 105). By the close of the century, when preachers apparently faced increasingly precarious audiences, a general optimism still imbued consideration of the relationship between the “pulpit” and the “press”: “The modern pulpit is not complete without a printing-office attached,” a 12 November 1891 Register editorial declared, “and the modern newspaper is not complete without connection to the pulpit” (“Brevities” 743).12 Keenly attuned to the administration of the print culture it participated in, the weekly weighed in on matters of courtesy and professionalism related specifically to religious periodical practices—summarizing, in one case, a debate over the unauthorized reprinting of one speaker’s “Lenten lectures” and ultimately weighing in itself: “There is an especial reason why no report of an address by Dr. Brooks should be published against his protest. It is that Dr. Brooks talks with such rapidity that it is impossible to take him verbatim” (“Editorial” 257). But the periodical most commonly stated the benefits of that pulpitpress connection. The review by W. H. L. of a prominent minister’s printed sermons highlights the extensive reach such publications afforded, noting of their distribution that “they have been read to little companies in Germany, Russia, and the farthest East”; the author argues in addition for the cognitive advantage printed sermons offered: “Spoken sermons touch the heart. Printed sermons, giving time for reflection, mould the thought” (W. H. L. 446). Still another advantage—one not usually associated with ephemeral periodicals—was immortality: “It is one advantage of the Register pulpit that voices from the past may speak

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from it as well as those from the present,” reads a 20 March 1890 item commenting on the paper’s inclusion of a sermon by a since-deceased speaker (“Brevities” 178). Periodicals were quick to note the advantages of print—its textual stability (the complete and perfect form of Whittier’s “Haverhill”) and its more extensive distribution, cognitive advantages, and supernatural ability to summon the voices of the dead. (The ability to call up “voices from the past” would have seemed a particular benefit to late nineteenth-century poetry culture, since editors routinely filled the gap left by a perceived lack of new talent by reprinting the Fireside Poets and other earlier favorites, even after the poets’ deaths.) Still, the relationship and the benefits clearly were reciprocal. “Editors do most of their exchanging with their scissors,” one Register item reported on 6 March 1890, “but last week an editorial exchange of a different kind took place, Rev. M. J. Savage filling the editorial chair of the Register to the extent of writing the excellent editorial ‘Our Missionary Work,’ . . . while the editor of this paper filled Mr. Savage’s pulpit in Boston, and his sermon was printed in ‘Unity Pulpit’” (“Brevities” 146). One benefit of the print culture in which the Register and other periodicals were invested, then, clearly was its lack of fixedness, the opportunities it provided for movement between itself and other venues. That being said, the Christian Register note on Whittier’s “Haverhill” tells of more than the poem’s performance or print publication. I find in this note a sentiment that 1890s critics and editors feared was becoming increasingly rare—the idea that Whittier’s performance should create the desire to hold the poem in a tangible form. That desire is for more than the poem as performed. It is a desire to believe that a publicly recited poem matters—that poetry still matters. Was the editor speaking out long after the audience had left the house? Joan Shelley Rubin, writing about poetry recitation, notes that “sites ranging from radio broadcasts to Girl Scout campfires . . . sustained ongoing traditions of engagement with poetic texts” from 1917 to 1950, despite the purported “decline” critics noted in late nineteenth-century America (273–74). She finds, in her focus on schoolroom recitation, that students read an eclectic mix of poetry, and she calls for consideration of “the culture of a given era in terms of readers’ encounters with a mixture of conventional forms and stylistic innovations, domestic products

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and foreign imports, ‘serious’ writing and ‘lighter’ works” (275). And as part of the larger challenge that her book presents to the supposed lack of a postbellum poetry audience, Sorby argues a compelling specific case with Longfellow: “While Longfellow may have become less popular, he remained just as ‘known,’ and even became increasingly well known, because by 1900 his work was taught in almost every school in America” (3). Certainly, surprising evidence surfaces in periodicals—even as the medium also seemed a ready venue for so many of the genre’s critics—of a vibrant poetry-reading community in late nineteenth-century America. The Christian Register, for instance, not only regularly noted the publication of poems in other magazines in the early 1890s but functioned as a forum for readers’ questions and dialogue, leading to requests such as this by one K. L. W.: “Can any reader of the Register furnish or put me in the way of finding two beautiful poems which were popular fifteen years ago, ‘The Creed of the Bells’ and ‘The Child on the Judgment Seat’?” (761). And people responded. Several weeks later, on 3 December 1891, we read, “‘K. L. W.’ returns thanks to several of our readers for sending her copies and information in regard to the poems concerning which she asked” (“Brevities” 791). Too, in the Book Buyer’s “Literary Querist” department, a surprising volume of questions surfaces about poetry. Readers tenaciously seized pieces of poems—remembered vaguely for “beauty,” a title, a line, or stanza—and groped in periodicals for the missing pieces. In recent scholarship that considers the history of reading, as Jonathan Rose points out in his own “history of audiences,” newfound confidence undergirds the elusive task of charting “the minds of ordinary readers in history, to discover what they read and how they read it” (1). As records of reader response, periodicals have not assumed an especially favored status in recent demands for empirical research in documenting the history of reading.13 Researchers privilege instead public records (from, for example, libraries and schools) and, excepting memoirs, nonprint documents (such as letters and diaries).14 Clearly, unpublished archives offer invaluable information about reading practices and, more significantly, about the historical reader in a way that periodicals probably cannot. But what nineteenth-century periodicals can offer is an evocative and similarly untapped site for examining “reading” not only as represented but as instructed and responded to. In periodicals, as with diaries and unpublished letters, writing cues up reading—we

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capture reading in the response it evokes. But unlike these nonprint counterparts, periodicals make more readily apparent multiple layers of reading—readers writing in, other readers writing back—a hall of mirrors where the two acts prompt each other and are recorded time and again. Notes such as that on Whittier’s “Haverhill” draw us into a world positioned somewhere between record (e.g., library logs) and representation (e.g., fictional scenes of reading).15 It is not clear to what degree periodical editors’ efforts prompted readers’ responses or to what degree readers responded in spite of what some would consider editors’ overblown efforts. But as foreign as editorially produced texts are to traditional critical conversations about poetry—the genre that especially prompts a privileging of original genius and the solitary author—they clearly were an important part of the larger poetry culture, as witnessed in the reprints, editorial commentary, and “peeks” into the lives of authors that periodicals offered to nineteenth-century American readers. And before we can state so readily that no one was reading poetry, that everybody thirsted after fiction, we will need to consider something beyond book sales numbers and peevish editorial complaints—the viability of the fragmentary reading experience periodicals offered and the validity of the readers’ response to that experience. Readers clipped, memorized, quoted back, and recited the poems that they found. And periodical editors, who were insistent that the American public not stop up its ears and voices, realized that the performance of poetry was an essential part of the fragmentary reading experience they offered and helped create.

NoteS

I appreciate comments from two anonymous reviewers. And I thank Robert Levine, Martha Nell Smith, Neil Fraistat, Bill Sherman, and Matt Hill for their constructive input on the earlier material that informs this essay. I delivered portions of this essay earlier at the 2003 convention of the Modern Language Association and the 2004 convention of the American Literature Association. All errors remain my own. 1. See Ohmann 146. I consider the visual marketing of nineteenthcentury poetry in Satelmajer, “Dickinson” (esp. 115–17).

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2. Thus one critic, in his examination of Longfellow’s onetime “appeal,” homes in on “his advocacy of a cross-gendered sensibility—and, crucially, of a ‘sentimental’ masculinity—that answered to the experiential trials and affective needs of his audience” (Haralson 329). 3. As Harrington asserts, apparently about antebellum America, “poetry sold well”: “It is hard to believe that ‘Benito Cereno’ was more widely read and quoted than Longfellow’s Evangeline—or than Mardi or Typee, for that matter” (Poetry 165). 4. Characterizations of the product’s quality have morphed at times into statements on quantity, leading, for example, to characterizations of “magazine pages” as containing “a smattering of poetry” (Tebbel and Zuckerman 65) and claims that the “quantity” of “magazine verse was said to be in decline” (Weber 134). 5. Matthew Giordano, who similarly foregrounds periodical context in his recovery work on Sarah Piatt, also questions prevailing narratives about the “postbellum periodical marketplace,” challenging standard characterizations of the product and its audience (40). 6. On the question of editorial authorship in this and other religious periodicals, see Satelmajer, “When” (esp. 83–84), which focuses in particular on the editorial sales work by the brother-sister team of William and Susan Hayes Ward at the Independent. 7. Additional poems outside that section highlight other past “greats” from the periodical’s pages (such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sidney Lanier). 8. I cite specific information and arguments but do not provide overviews of scholarship for individual periodicals. With the exception of the Christian Register, however, see Mott, History, for individual profiles of the periodicals. 9. For a wide range of interesting public performances of poetry by “non”-poets, see numerous examples in Sorby (xv–xvi, xxxiii–xxxiv, 12, 110). For an important treatment of the occasional poem, see Loeffelholz, “Religion,” and the chapter “Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields” (From School, 162–91). 10. According to the Register, the Parsons poem was reprinted from the Boston Transcript (date not given). 11. For circulation numbers in the context of a larger profile, see Mott 2: 266, 268. 12. With ministers “on the markets” (Douglas 8) after the final act of disestablishment in 1833, periodicals also became a necessary stopgap measure. Preachers, the Register implied, were facing increasingly precarious audiences. One 31 July 1890 item chastised an evangelical minister for “caus[ing] . . . a breeze” when he criticized “the excessive fanning on a hot Sunday evening in his congregation”; that “some of the audience left the church for a cooler

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situation and one less exposed to draughts,” the item implies, was understandable (“Brevities” 486). And in one joke, stated to be reprinted from the Chicago Herald, a “rather dry” minister explains that he keeps his audience because he preaches at the penitentiary (“Holding” 612). 13. Nord observes that varying “streams of readership/audience research” “share the conviction that what is needed is not more philosophy, not more theory about audience activity or passivity, but rather more empirical research, research that links different levels of analysis, research that links actual readers not only to texts but to social contexts in which the readers lived and the texts were read” (267, 268). Radway offers a useful overview of different scholarly paths by which “reading” has been examined (literacy studies, book history, reader response, and the “ethnography of reading” [293]). 14. Barbara Sicherman writes that “by supplementing publication and distribution records with sources such as diaries, letters, commonplace books, and autobiographies, it is nevertheless possible to discern the importance of print culture in helping to shape the identity of an emerging middle class and its individual members, at least some of them” (141). And see Rose’s comment that “common readers disclosed their experiences in memoirs and diaries, school records, social surveys, oral interviews, library registers, letters to newspaper editors (published or, more revealingly, unpublished, fan mail, and even in the proceedings of the Inquisition” (1; emphasis added). Rose’s list offers an abstraction of recent scholarship that correspondingly draws on each of the resources. The privileging of unpublished over published letters to the editor reflects Nord’s work on unpublished letters to Chicago Tribune and Chicago Herald editor James Keeley. “Better than letters submitted for publication,” Nord writes of their merit, “manuscript letters suggest a diversity of purpose and style” (251). 15. As H. J. Jackson notes in a “genre study” of marginalia, that sense of access certainly is debated: “Critics disagree . . . about the reliability of readers’ notes, and consequently about the ways in which they might legitimately be used to reconstruct either a reading environment or the mental experience of a particular reader” (6).

workS Cited

[Announcement]. Youth’s Companion 29 Oct. 1891: [1]. “As to Our Own Poets.” Independent 15 Dec. 1881: 19. [Barrows, Samuel J.]. “Musings.” Christian Register 13 Nov. 1890: 732. Bennett, Paula. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

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“The Best Poems in the World.” Saturday Evening Post 28 May 1898: 8. “Brevities.” Christian Register 6 Mar. 1890: 146. “Brevities.” Christian Register 20 Mar. 1890: 178. “Brevities.” Christian Register 31 July 1890: 486. “Brevities.” Christian Register 12 Nov. 1891: 743. “Brevities.” Christian Register 3 Dec. 1891: 791. Clark, Imogen. “A Poet’s Emergency.” Youth’s Companion 7 Nov. 1895: 568–69. “A Disputed Authorship.” Saturday Evening Post 4 June 1898: 13. Donn, Dora. “Companion Day.” Youth’s Companion 14 June 1894: 279. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. 1977. New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1988. “Editorial.” Christian Register 23 Apr. 1891: 257. Fiftieth-Anniversary Issue. Independent 8 Dec. 1898. Filler, Louis. “Liberalism, Anti-Slavery, and the Founders of the Independent.” New England Quarterly 27 (Sept. 1954): 291–306. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Giordano, Matthew. “‘A Lesson from’ the Magazines: Sarah Piatt and the Postbellum Periodical Poet.” American Periodicals 16.1 (2006): 23–51. Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Grigely, Joseph. Textualterity: Art, Theory and Textual Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Haralson, Eric L. “Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental Masculinity.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.6 (1996): 327–55. Harrington, Joseph. Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. ———. “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature.” American Literary History 8 (1996): 496–515. Hills, William H. “The Annual Poetry Product.” Writer (1893): 221–22. “Holding His Audiences.” Christian Register 18 Sept. 1890: 612. Humphrey, Carol Sue. “Religious Newspapers and Antebellum Reform.” The Media and Religion in American History. Ed. William David Sloan. Northport, AL: Vision, 2000. 104–18. Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. K. L. W. “Information Wanted.” Christian Register 19 Nov. 1891: 761. “Literary Notes.” Christian Register 31 July 1890: 495. Loeffelholz, Mary. From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

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———. “The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston’s Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863.” American Literary History 13.2 (2001): 212–41. McKinney, M. S. “In the Twilight of Poetry.” Saturday Evening Post 31 Dec. 1898: 426. Montgomery, William Howard. “Our Flag.” Christian Register 30 July 1891: 496. Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–68. “National School Celebration of Columbus Day: The Official Programme.” Youth’s Companion 8 Sept. 1892: 446–47. Nord, David Paul. “Reading the Newspaper: Strategies and Politics of Reader Response, Chicago, 1912–17.” Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 246–73. Ohmann, Richard. Politics of Letters. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Parsons, T. W. “Lamp to My Feet.” Christian Register 18 Sept. 1890: 599. “A Plea for the Poets.” Century (1896): 316–17. Pratt, Sarah S. “A Diet of Candy.” St. Nicholas May 1891: 557–59. Pykett, Lyn. “Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context.” Victorian Periodicals Review 22 (Fall 1989): 100–108. Radway, Janice. “Beyond Mary Bailey and Old Maid Librarians: Reimagining Readers and Rethinking Reading.” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 35.4 (1994): 275–96. Religious Telescope [Circleville, OH] 27 Nov. 1839. Rose, Jonathan. “A Preface to a History of Audiences.” The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 1–11. Rubin, Joan Shelley. “‘They Flash upon That Inward Eye’: Poetry Recitation and American Readers.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 106.2 (1996): 273–300. Satelmajer, Ingrid. “Dickinson as Child’s Fare: The Author Served Up in St. Nicholas.” Book History 5 (2002): 105–42. ———. “When a Consumer Becomes an Editor: Susan Hayes Ward and the Poetry of The Independent.” Textual Cultures 2.1 (2007): 78–100. Sicherman, Barbara. “Reading and Middle-Class Identity in Victorian America: Cultural Consumption, Conspicuous and Otherwise.” Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950. Ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. Sixtieth-Anniversary Issue. Independent 10 Dec. 1908. Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. “A Suggestion for Authors.” Christian Register 20 Aug. 1891: 538. Rpt. from Book Buyer [n.d.].

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Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America: 1741–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. [Untitled]. Independent 20 Jan. 1898: 92. Ward, Susan Hayes. “A Decade of American Poetry, 1879–89.” Independent 31 Aug. 1899: 2362–64. Weber, Ronald. Hired Pens: Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997. W. H. L. “Rev. J. W. Chadwick’s Sermons.” Christian Register 9 July 1891: 446. Whittier, John Greenleaf. “Haverhill.” Atlantic Monthly Aug. 1890: 270–73.

Chapter eleveN

silenced women and silent language in early abolitionist serials J o y C e ly n M o o D y

I spent my first day as a Peterson Fellow in April 2003 working in the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Reading Room in Worcester, Massachusetts. On my second day of fellowship, I wrote in my research diary: I left here last night feeling traumatized. The conversations I had with other scholars did not make me feel any happier, although these new colleagues were sympathetic. Perhaps I am just not used to the formulae of children’s literature like the Slave’s Friend. But the representation of enslaved women was so formulaic as to suggest that there were no actual women “behind” the texts, that the lyrics, the dialogues reflecting their power differentials, and the short sketches about enslaved women were based on anecdotes and news stories culled from newspapers or other abolitionist resources but not necessarily from actual women. I noticed this lack . . . even when the slaves to be pitied—the enslaved people objectified in the sketches—were given actual names.

By the end of my research month, I had learned a great deal, but none of my excavations had broken the silence enshrouding black women in

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abolitionist papers. For all of the work I did at the AAS in 2003, ultimately my mission failed. Specifically, my ongoing book project, tentatively entitled Silent Language: Enslaved Women and the Production of Literature without Literacy, examines the dialectic of the narrating ex-slave or enslaved woman subject and her amanuensis—whether abolitionist or not—in both book-length autobiographies such as Olive Gilbert’s Narrative of Sojourner Truth and news items such as the American Anti-Slavery Reporter article that includes “Dr. Torrey’s” mediated account of the abduction of a free “young black widow woman, with an infant at the breast” (qtd. in “From” 102). My restricted definition of abolitionist is meant to evoke such white men as John G. Whittier and William L. Garrison, especially influential during the 1830s and 1840s United States as public advocates against chattel slavery. For as Jacqueline Bacon notes in The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition, “Until recently, most historical accounts of the abolition movement have focused on organizations such as the [American Anti-Slavery Society] and . . . the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, societies whose leadership was primarily white and male” (3). I wanted to determine when early print media published individual women’s dictated narratives and to detect patterns of narrative interlocution and mediation in the published records. So, with privileged access to the AAS collections, I searched for transcribed bondwomen’s voices in abolitionist broadsides, church periodicals, private diaries, Christian magazines for youth, song and hymn lyrics, and black-owned newspapers. Nevertheless, in April 2003 I found markedly few representations of “actual” enslaved women in such serials as the Slave’s Friend and the Anti-Slavery Bugle. In researching the subversion of power and the power of subversion in slave narratives dictated by “anonymous” women, I found that inasmuch as abolitionists indeed sought to end slavery, they did not necessarily deem communication with actual fugitive, free(d), or enslaved women vital to their condemnations of the peculiar institution. As for black women’s interests in (white) abolitionists, texts such as the “life stories” of Harriet Tubman indicate that early ex-slave women alternately embraced and rejected Western letters as literary practice.1 They recognized the value that print accounts of their experiences could

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make to the abolitionist project, but those who told their life stories seem to have perceived or at least feared the abuse of their orature: they could be misused to preserve (rather than to overthrow) race, gender, and caste hierarchies. Like their literate counterparts—that is, such nineteenth-century African American women authors as Zilpha Elaw, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet E. Wilson—“they express everything from mild tension to outright suspicion of the power of the Written Word to provide freedom, economic security, and a restructuring of social formations of power” (Bassard 120). While it is a commonplace to proclaim that “achieving literacy is at the very heart of most African-American spiritual [and slave] narratives” (Pierce 52), I agree with Katherine Clay Bassard’s rejection of this premise and find more cogent her claim that nineteenth-century black women (authors included) distrusted, not only literacy as a mastery over language, but language itself. As Bassard argues, they “connected language with difference (gender and race) and the unequal distribution of resources (class) that characterize the fallen world” (127). Indeed, I read a troubling undercurrent in some enslaved women’s dictated narratives that suggests that they purposefully did not pursue literacy despite a willingness to exploit the currency it gave them among reading Americans. Their autobiographies are riddled with gaps and ellipses: the women’s language, then, is “silent.” Considering how few narratives I found, the abolitionist enterprise itself seems ironically to have silenced enslaved and ex-slave women. This effect is especially odd, given that most slave narratives “are framed by prefaces, testimonials, and postscripts [written] by [whites]” (Valerie Smith xxvii). Speaking subjects and their amanuenses seem to vie for power in any given assertion of a dictated narrative. The scarcity of documents I found also suggests that well-known abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe incorporated black women’s accounts of bondage, subterfuge, or suffering into their own records without consistently identifying them or, conversely, identifying them but portraying them in stereotypical ways. Stowe’s unintentional parody of Sojourner Truth as the “Libyan Sibyl” is one example. Other texts underestimate the full extent of black women’s contributions to the abolitionist cause.2 Urging a revision of the historical record to reflect the abolitionist insurgency of “women, black and white, enslaved and free,” Veta Tucker has characterized historically neglected antislavery activists as “secret

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weapons on abolitionist battlegrounds” (2). Archival studies by both Tucker and Bacon have revealed that “white male abolitionists often influenced the activism and the rhetoric of their female and African American colleagues” such that the significant contributions of the latter to the U.S. abolitionist movement have frequently been subsumed into the record as the efforts of white men “who presumed to speak for [them] rather than allowing them to define and articulate their concerns” (Bacon 3).3 In this way, too, nineteenth-century freed women’s discourse, like their enslaved sisters’, is reduced nearly to silence. In the case of slave women who literally told their life stories, it bears recalling that formerly, when a speaking subject could not literally inscribe her story and had to rely on the assistance of another person to transcribe it, academics disregarded the mediated text. After all, such antebellum rhetorical collaborations presented the “most complex [problems in terms of] establishing authenticity of voice and representation of experience” (Humez, “Reading” 29). As a rule, either scholars of literature and rhetoric and other readers ignored the generic distinctions separating dictated slave narratives from self-authored texts, or they doubted the authenticity of dictated narratives. Suspicion about narrative credibility is indisputably a legitimate stance toward “black” texts produced by whites during the slave era, but we pay a high price for dismissing dictated accounts as inauthentic and fraudulent.4 Without developing strategies to read effectively narratives dictated by enslaved women, we concede, for example, that Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, alone constitutes the entire canon of antebellum slave women’s autobiography. Because there do exist antebellum texts generated, though not self-inscribed, by once-enslaved women, my project involves interrogating genuine rhetorical authority and examining literacy and narrativity among nineteenth-century African Americans. At Worcester, I searched widely for transcribed bondwomen’s voices in antebellum American publications—and discovered the bitter irony noted by Mark Reinhardt: “To seek the words of antebellum American slaves is to confront a paradox, for those words are everywhere and nowhere in the archives of the era” (81). While northern abolitionists would presumably have encountered decidedly few women enslaved in the South, my expectation of finding narratives dictated to abolitionists by fugitive enslaved women was based on mediated autobiographies such as

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the anonymously authored Memoir of Old Elizabeth (1863) and The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866). Since my 2003 fellowship month, Reinhardt and several other scholars have theorized significantly the high stakes of analyses of rhetorical relationships in antebellum slave narratives. I address their scholarship below. First, I offer an illustration of a “representative” slave woman’s narrative published in the Slave’s Friend, remnant numbers of which are archived at AAS. This serial was a didactic monthly for young white children founded by the famous abolitionist Lewis Tappan and first circulated by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1836 (Geist 27–28). The primary messages in its sixteen pages were “the wickedness of slaveholders, the nobility of the black race, and the hypocrisy of a nation that called itself Christian but permitted one human being to own another” (Edson 408). In The Grammar of Good Intentions, Susan Ryan observes that the abolitionist movement’s “widely distributed emblems, which featured a kneeling African American slave and the words ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ or ‘a woman and a sister’” occasionally appeared in the Slave’s Friend. “Because the emblem’s message was formulated as a question rather than a direct statement, its creators placed . . . the power to alter the slaves’ status—on the . . . viewer’s affirmative response, implying that African American ‘elevation’ was contingent on white benevolence” (63). In other words, white children who read the Slave’s Friend were directly addressed and their supreme role in the fate of (ex)slaves and other blacks was clearly illustrated. Consistently, the children’s magazine privileged moral values and religious catechism over detailed stories of slavery (Geist 28). In fact, its contents posited its (white) readers’ necessary “relationship with a needy black population, mediated through an established [abolitionist] organization, [and] constitutive . . . in the character formation of white boys” and girls (Ryan 75). On the third day of my fellowship month, I encountered in the Slave’s Friend the story of “Sarah,” a very pious, “cheerful, amiable, and sensible looking woman,” “born in Kentucky to Christian parents.” Titled “Read This,” the unsigned sketch of the fictive heroine comprises twenty-three sentences replete with conventional figures of sentimental rhetoric, including deceased parents, orphaned offspring, a slave auction, child abduction, the separation of an enslaved family, Christian redemption and piety, and such weeping “as if the poor woman’s heart would break. I

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could not help weeping myself. If Jesus were on earth, I think he would have wept, too” (7–9).5 Although the word slave does not appear in fully the first half of the story, the anonymous narrator announces Sarah’s otherness with an afterthought in the third sentence: “I almost forgot to say, she is . . . colored” (7). The intimation that Sarah is or was enslaved forms in the eighth sentence, when the narrator exclaims, “When she was nine years old, [Sarah] was taken away from her parents, and has never seen them since!” (7) By integrating the abolitionist lesson in the narrator’s expression of shame in the penultimate sentence—“I almost blushed, to think I was white, for it is the white people who are so cruel to the black and colored people” (9)—the amanuensis underlines the serial’s predominant focus on whites and their moral duty. Although “Sarah” speaks in direct discourse in this sketch, she is plainly more construct than actual fugitive. “There is no there there,” perhaps because Sarah, though “now thirty-four” years old, apparently still lacks both literacy and a reliable interlocutor. This story of “Sarah” arguably illustrates why so few women’s voices resound in early abolitionist autobiography. To date, Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published twenty-six years later (in 1861), remains the only self-authored slave woman’s autobiography. (Because it is a novel rather than an autobiography, I exclude from this discussion the recently recovered The Bondwoman’s Narrative, written circa 1853 but never published by its putative author, “Hannah Crafts.”) After the Civil War, of course, there were additional self-authored slave narratives by women, though grievously few. Mary Helen Washington has estimated that “black women wrote approximately 12 percent of the total number of extant slave narratives” (qtd. in Valerie Smith xxxvii)—and she may not have meant that black women literally wrote those texts. The most famous post-Emancipation narratives penned by formerly enslaved women are probably Elizabeth Keckley’s 1868 White House memoir titled Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House and Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d U.S. Colored Troops, published in 1902. Across the centuries leading up to the Civil War, numerous enslaved women who were forcibly deprived of literacy, such as Ellen Craft, told slavery expressly for nonserial publication.6 In contrast, the early nineteenth-century periodical press was available to relatively so few black women because the number of freed and

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fugitive women positioned to talk to (white) abolitionists fell far below the number of (black) men who had a writer’s ear. That is, more men than women escaped slavery as fugitive slaves. Emotional ties to their children and beloved others kept women tethered to a single place— when they could choose their fate. Ruminating on the constraints that rendered it virtually impossible for ex-slaves “to tell a free story,” William L. Andrews writes: “Slave narrators were not always free creative agents who could make what they wished of the facts of their lives. As public men and professional fugitives these men were the creatures of abolitionism” (106, emphasis added). In other words, an ex-slave’s autobiographical collaboration with abolitionists presupposed male gender. Interviews with slaves written as letters by James Redpath make up another category in which male perspectives predominate. In several midcentury trips to Virginia and the Carolinas, and westward to Louisiana, Missouri, and Kansas, the British-born abolitionist collected interviews with slaves, then sent them as letters from “John Ball, Jr.,” to Boston and later to New York for pseudonymous publication between August 1854 and April 1855, respectively in Garrison’s Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard (McKivigan xv–xvi).7 While Redpath’s 350-page bound volume, titled The Roving Editor: Or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (1859) and composed largely of his previously published letters, surpassed other collections of slave testimonies in its documentation of slave women’s experiences (McKivigan xi), it nonetheless records significantly more men’s than women’s voices. Moreover, Redpath’s bias for the (mostly male) “mulatto” suggests a further neglect of women phenotypically marked as African. Black women, mixed-race “mulattas” included, were stereotyped as inherently incapable of embodying True Womanhood. As such, they could hardly meet the mandated socialization of middle-class white women to be demure and submissive. Thus Jacobs called in Incidents for a different “standard” by which slave women ought to be judged. As many critics have discussed, it is the enslaved woman’s virtue under siege that Jacobs’s autobiography so urgently unveils. Those formerly enslaved women, such as Jacobs, who narrated their survival of sexual violence risked a psychic return to sites of trauma.8 Sometimes that painful retelling exposed both the lasciviousness of their interlocutors and the failure of literary “standards” to represent the intricacies of bondage.9

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Furthermore, slave women’s representation of rape risked alienating “genteel” white readers. That Jacobs stalwartly faced the risks of her rhetorical vulnerability highlights her recognition of what Bassard calls “the limits of the literacy-equals-economic-security formula,” for Incidents ends, not with “any hope for economic change through its sale,” but with the political aspiration of creating sympathetic awareness of “‘the condition of two millions of women at the South’” (Bassard 121). Jacobs’s hopes were unrealistic by some measures. “Antebellum America had never been receptive to black autobiography as an expressive mode unless it could be packaged and recommended by whites as something else” (100), asserts Andrews in To Tell a Free Story. The “something else” that whites wanted of black women was less insight into their experiences of bondage than their conformity to (white) women’s second-class status. That is, by at best mediating and at worst silencing black women’s voices in antislavery periodicals, abolitionists used black women to buttress the status quo of all women’s sociopolitical subjugation, which depended on the maintenance of separate gender spheres. A “John Ball, Jr.,” letter that ran in the 1 September 1854 issue of the Liberator (subsequently published in The Roving Editor under the title “The Old Slave Mother”) indicates that Redpath was not above such strategies of bifurcation (McKivigan 51–53). For example, Redpath offers no more details to establish the authenticity of the unnamed “old mother” at the center of his interview than does the narrator who urges white children to “Read This” ostensibly true story of “Sarah,” discussed above. And whereas the author of the Slave’s Friend uses the youth-oriented figure to argue for both white affectability and “colored” women’s capacity for virtue and submissiveness, Redpath reveals his adroit manipulation of the “maternal affections” of the “venerable” mother of eleven children to insinuate his own rhetorical skill and fidelity (“I knew she would answer any questions now”) as well as to proclaim black women’s sorrowful maternal devotion, despite their bound condition (McKivigan 51). Notably, Redpath holds enslaved fathers to a very different standard of paternal affection: he concludes his interview with a “mulatto” father of thirteen children by confessing “that I was rather astonished at finding so resolute a family man in bondage; for I thought that the energy he had thus exhibited in the ‘heavy father line’ of endeavor, might also have effected his escape, or at least his self purchase” (qtd. in McKivigan 43).

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Judging (white) abolitionist serials as not deliberately but rather unintentionally omitting slave women’s voices, we can usefully consider Amy Thomas’s examination of American Tract Society reports filed by a colporteur named Micah Croswell. Croswell’s reports were composed of verbatim religious conversations he initiated in South Carolina in 1855. Thomas’s cogent analysis of these conversations provides important insight into the rhetorical situations of amanuenses and their speaking subjects. She demonstrates, for example, that while Croswell tries to follow Tract Society rules that he “mute” his own voice and opinions, he ends up revealing his personal beliefs by the choices he makes in the contents of his reports, in their organizing structures, in their patterns of inclusions and exclusions, and in various other formal aspects (108). Thomas’s emphasis on the expectations of reporters articulated in the Tract Society’s Instructions suggests a parallel in the abolitionist movement’s tacit directives to abolitionists regarding their transcription of slaves’ narratives. Provocative activists such as Garrison and the Grimké sisters do not illustrate the case so much as do amanuenses who chose to remain inconspicuous, such as the anonymous author of the Memoir of Old Elizabeth. Abolitionists such as the latter might engage in “selfcensorship” to write texts that their peers would approve (and thus read), and in doing so they would replicate an abolitionist formula, even an implicit one (109).10 Most significantly, Thomas notes that Croswell’s most comprehensive reports were about middle-class white men—whom he clearly considered his peers. Her inferences about the “missing designations” of other conversations that Croswell initiated suggest that antislavery amanuenses truncated (or worse, misconstrued) details when they conversed with those from whom they felt alienated in some way or from whom they “naturally” estranged themselves (113, 131). Natural estrangement ironically characterizes the ex-slave marriage of John Jea, the freed “African Preacher” whose Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings was first published circa 1810, and Elizabeth Jea, his first wife, a Native American woman. Andrews has identified Jea’s Life as an important eyewitness testimony, a “detailed documentation” of the “monstrous regime” of slavery. Jea’s “recitation of ugly facts from his past” included malnutrition and starvation and “correction” by whipping (Andrews 48). Ultimately, however, as Andrews argues, Jea’s Life is more conversion narrative than antislavery treatise, for it establishes

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Jea’s authority to “preach against hypocritical Christians” (48). Indeed, Jea so firmly believed that sin “originated not with God .  .  . but in a human choice to disobey the maker” (Saillant 478) that he expressed virtually no sympathy or empathy for anyone, free or bound, who did not convert. Ironically, John Jea’s Christian piety leaves him without the capacity to tell his wife’s tragic story with charity rather than censure.11 John Jea is one of a handful of slaves who claimed to have been “spontaneously ‘blessed’ with miraculous literacy”; “proof” of that literacy led to his manumission (Pierce 39). However, John Jea, who claimed “he never receive[d] one reading lesson” (Pierce 54), was not able to steer his better half to her own empowerment through literacy. Elizabeth’s tragic story shockingly illustrates the gender differences between men’s and women’s narratives enumerated above. While John Jea freely served as an itinerant Christian minister, Elizabeth remained bound de facto to the woman who had once legally owned her. As Graham Hodges notes, “Newly freed domestics often had the stressful choice between remaining in near-bondage in their former mistresses’ residences or setting up independent households with little money” (24). During her husband’s travels, Jea’s Life asserts, her mistress worked to erode Elizabeth’s faith in both God and John. Apparently “maddened by the pressure,” Elizabeth lost her piety and began abusing their infant daughter to try to keep her husband at home. John Jea reports that he and his wife’s now-chastened “mistress” told Elizabeth “that she was become a hardened sinner . . . but she was so hardened in her heart, that she could not bear to hear the name of the Lord mentioned” (122). In that temperament, Elizabeth killed her child and her own pregnant mother, who had interceded in the infant’s behalf. Soon after, Elizabeth threatened to murder John as well. “The ensuing trial and execution were unreported in the press or court records of the period” (Hodges 120–23).12 “Before her punishment took place,” John Jea recalls, he “frequently visited her, . . . and begged her to pray unto God to have mercy upon her soul . . . but her heart was so hardened by sin, that it was all in vain” (Hodges 123). Thus John Jea narrates the “core story” of his wife’s murders. “Core story” is Humez’s phrase for “an exceptionally evocative and revealing story of high value to the storyteller,” or in this case “of high value” to John Jea if not also to Elizabeth Jea (“Reading” 39). Humez further defines a “core story” as one that “reveals a genuine struggle of wills, and

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a resulting spirited dialogue” between a narrating subject and her interlocutor (39). Contemplating the Jeas’ “spirited” dialogue, I wonder what, if anything, might have been different in Elizabeth’s life if regional legislations and social mores regarding blacks, Native Americans, bondage, and education had been different in the new nation. Reinhardt rightly cautions contemporary scholars who “[yearn] to speak with the dead” (as I do) against “practicing the worst form of ventriloquism” (116). He regards “ventriloquism as a metaphor for the practice of speaking for slaves in general” (84n9) and argues that even as contemporary scholars address such prickly questions as “Who spoke for Margaret Garner?” and “What constitutes a responsible telling” of slaves’ stories? (117), we should outline the contours of what we can learn from or about Garner’s or any slave’s “elusive” words. Heeding his admonition means guarding against any temptation to “speak confidently about the nature of [a slave’s] inner life” (Reinhardt 116). Whereas Bacon insists that “the voices of . . . marginalized rhetors must not be silenced by an analytical framework that threatens to replace, reduce, alter, or control the primary texts themselves” (7), Reinhardt condemns any scholarly framework that threatens to supplant silence with inventions “that underscore the methodological, ethical, and political perils of trying to tell—and retell—[slaves’] stories” (101). Addressing ex-slave women’s abolitionist insurgency, Tucker expresses concern that where the historical record cannot provide accurate information about early African American women, their lives “fade into folklore” (17), for folklore “rush[es] to fill in gaps” (15). Instead, she argues, we should look for ironic illusions in the U.S. historical record. The small-bodied “General” Harriet Tubman, who donned drag to conduct tours on the Underground Railroad, is only one example of many optical illusions and endless errors that subverted the system of slavery. In short, as Bacon implores, because so many voices have been “silenced within traditional accounts of the antislavery movement,” we need to question “traditional approaches to rhetoric” as well as “traditional histories of the abolition movement” (4). So advised, I use my research to correct the “speech impediment” that slavery instigated, to develop a prognosis for recovering speech, lost or impaired.13 I recognize that the explicit decision not to gain literacy does not constitute impairment. And I accept that “the search for the

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true voice of an individual” is “a search with an underlying ethos of romantic individualism” (Baym 1453). Still, it is true that “nineteenthcentury ex-slave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwomen, and runaways experienced and enjoyed liberty” (Saillant 475). In the case of Elizabeth Jea, I want (which is to say I lack) an ex-slave narrative that will allow me to understand that particular ex-slave’s experiences as a freed but disturbed woman. John Jea’s account of Elizabeth’s acts is the only one we have; in the historical record “the rest is silence.” Lindon Barrett writes that “to enter into literacy is to gain important skills for extending oneself beyond the limited condition and geography of the body” (444). My research will not make Elizabeth Jea literate; no research can now extend Elizabeth Jea beyond the troubled borders of her corporeal geography. However, research can illuminate what the lack of literacy cost her. One price she paid was the incapacity to write a narrative that counters John Jea’s version of her murderous last days; his version leaves intact an impression of her as devious and deviant. Assuming she were willing to write her story, would that narrative subvert her husband’s stereotypical narrative of her as a “squaw”? Although Elizabeth Jea was manumitted, we are nonetheless bereft of a paper trail that documents not only her transition from bondwoman one day to freedwoman the next but also any account of her experience in freedom. Tucker cites emancipation and education among “historically traceable opportunities” (3). Had Jea been formally educated as well as manumitted, we would almost certainly be able to locate some trace of her, and perhaps then some aspect of her attitude toward her “owner”-cum-employer (Humez, “Reading” 34). What attitudes of Elizabeth Jea’s shall we infer from the fact that her only “amanuensis” seems to have been her loving but censorious husband? Or rather, that husband’s amanuensis, once removed?14 Where Reinhardt cautions scholars against ventriloquizing enslaved women, Jacqueline Jones Royster argues in Traces of a Stream for the validity of “imagined history” to fill in the purposeful omissions of the historical record. Royster insists that deploying imagination in black feminist studies is imperative work (82–83, 92–93). Before I willingly imagine the missing parts of Jea’s story, however, I propose an exhaustive turn to the archive to answer a growing list of questions. What do the extant words of former slaves—self-reported or under others’

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bylines—reveal about the degree and the kind of power they wanted their rhetorical situations to yield to them? Can we access Elizabeth Jea’s experience by applying the “muted group theory” that Bacon consulted to penetrate traditionally overlooked linguistic strategies adopted by abolitionists? Bacon attributes “muted group theory” to “linguistic anthropologists . . . and communication theorist[s]. . . . [It posits] that the control of language by dominant members of a society leaves other individuals in a ‘muted’ position.” Muted voice is not the same as silence, however: muted groups often respond to subjugation by “encoding their particular concerns” into variable words and deeds that subvert dominant models (Bacon 8). Do Elizabeth Jea’s infanticide and matricide count as subversions of dominant ideologies? Should they? Could transcripts of Elizabeth Jea’s trial tell us anything that might be more meaningful, “truer” than her husband’s spiritual autobiography? Recognizing the limits of what a narrative from Elizabeth Jea could not disclose, should we speculate about what her own words would add to our comprehension of her life? Who would have benefited, who would benefit now, from access to Elizabeth Jea’s self-representation? How applicable to her case is a Spivakesque observation that subalterns know that they sometimes benefit more from silence than from speech (Reinhardt 111), especially silence about sex? Should we read sexual violence in the silence surrounding Elizabeth Jea’s story? Reinhardt notes that in the trial record of Margaret Garner, “sexual fascination courses through the press reports, but it is disguised or sublimated” (99)—as it is in most enslaved women’s narratives. Scholars have noted that the History of Mary Prince, published in England in 1831, for example, names only psychological sadism, but the vividly recounted atrocities suggest more particularly psychosexual sadism. Silence about sexual assault pervades the Narrative of Sojourner Truth and many others as well. Almost indisputably, some of these silences enshroud homosexuality. Could it be that the married couple who employed Elizabeth Jea urged the former slave to leave her husband not only because he was a religious zealot and an itinerant (read: often absent) husband but also because one or the other of them regarded John Jea as a sexual rival? Because sentimentalized enslaved motherhood was already a convenient Christian construct in 1816, it informed John Jea’s narrative and the contexts in which it was read. The two murders Elizabeth committed

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challenge claims for the sacred redemptiveness of maternal love. It could not prevent her from killing her own mother, who was pregnant with Elizabeth’s sibling; it could not protect that mother’s granddaughter (Elizabeth’s own baby girl) from first abuse, then death by a murderous mother. Were these murders Elizabeth Jea’s macabre interpretation of slavery’s mandate that “the child shall follow the condition of the mother”? Did Elizabeth Jea suffer postpartum depression long months after she gave birth? Did poverty drive her insane? Was she driven mad by arduous labor as domestic and mother in a state of de facto freedom? Did her husband’s insistence that they were fully rather than nominally free push her over the brink?15 As Yolanda Pierce asks, did Elizabeth Jea regard marriage as one more form of bondage, “ensuring that she would never be master of her own body[?]” (61). Should we speculate that Jea was schizophrenic? Can one argue that she was not mad at all? One testimony published in a July 1834 special issue of the American Anti-Slavery Reporter provides a sobering conclusion to these speculations about the rhetorical situations of enslaved women as speaking subjects in abolition-era serials. An excerpt from “Mr. Henry B. Stanton, in a . . . letter to the editor of the New-York Emancipator [sic], dated April 23, 1834,” allegedly records the direct discourse of an anguished slave woman whom Stanton encountered in a slave coffle one morning “before leaving Halifax”: Before coming up with the gang, we saw at a distance a colored female, whose appearance and actions attracted my notice. I said to the stage-driver . . . , “What is the matter of that woman, is she crazy?” “No, massa,” said he, “I know her. . . . Her master sold her two children this morning to the soul-drivers, and she has been following along after them, and I suppose they have driven her back. Don’t you think it would make you act like you was crazy, if they should take your children away, and you never see ’em any more?” By this time we had come up with the woman. She seemed quite young. As soon as she recognized the driver, she cried out, “They’ve gone! They’ve gone! The soul-drivers have got them. . . . I told [Master] I could’nt [sic] live without my children. I tried to make him sell me too; but he beat me [back] . . . and I never shall see my children again. Oh! What shall I do!” The poor creature shrieked and tossed her arms about with maniac wildness—and beat her bosom, and

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literally cast dust into the air, as she moved towards the village. At the last glimpse I had of her, she was nearly a quarter of a mile from us, still throwing handfulls [sic] of sand around her, with the same phrenzied air. (qtd. in “From” 100)16

More so than the story of “Sarah,” created for juvenile readers of the Slave’s Friend, Stanton’s report disturbingly documents slavery as gendered psychoses and maternal trauma. Both narrators encode the voices of slaves in a self-conscious blend of standard American English and black vernacular English, and both texts deploy sentimentalized notions of enslaved womanhood as abolitionist manifesto. The texts diverge at Stanton’s vitriolic doubled use of “soul-drivers.” The narrator of Sarah’s story almost blushes at his whiteness, but if white children are to see themselves as the saviors of black folk, then whiteness must prevail virtuously in the Slave’s Friend. Similarly, Christian duty trumps abolitionism in John Jea’s spiritual autobiography: the former slave wife emerges as a woman driven mad as much by the erosion of her religious devotion as by her social captivity. Although Stanton’s use of “soul-drivers” grates with rhetorical immodesty, the very contrivance of his text effectively argues against slavery. At the same time it powerfully shows both the limitations of mediated slave narratives and their indispensability to the historical record. If there is a way to read the record of Elizabeth Jea’s life, even if she proves to have been both insane and sinful, I hope to uncover it. I want to answer Humez’s call to scholars to “reconceptualize the mediated text as a truly collaborative project undertaken by two fully engaged personalities situated in different social locations and attempt to identify the distinct voices and agendas of the two parties” (47). Although Elizabeth probably did not collaborate with John to tell her “hard-hearted” last days, I still have hope that, without resorting to ventriloquism, one might decipher her distinct voice, and that there is more in its register than lunacy and pathos.

NoteS

1. I borrow the phrase “life stories” from Humez’s biography of Tubman. See also Humez, Harriet Tubman 139.

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2. See Tucker, whose research has documented the extraordinary abolitionist exploits and postbellum achievements of Mary Ellen Smith Pleasant, among others. 3. Fulton discusses ways that black women since the slavery era have circumvented efforts to silence them. 4. Addressing authorial risks in The Bondwoman’s Narrative: A Novel, Fabian chronicles the debacle surrounding John Greenleaf Whittier and James Williams (44–48) that began on 4 January 1838, when “the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society authorized” Whittier “to write a narrative of the life and escape of [Williams from bondage in Virginia and Alabama] & that the same be published under the direction of the Publishing Committee, with a portrait and other embellishments” (qtd. in Fabian 44, emphasis added). Scholarly suspicion of mediated narratives seems rooted in wariness of (the myth of) a natural predisposition to prevarication in Africans on the continent and throughout the African diaspora. 5. See Hochman for a discussion of the construction of the fictive slave narrator, especially as developed by Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and its relationship to abolitionism and white readers in the nineteenth-century United States. 6. See Craft and Craft. 7. I am indebted to Susan Williams for introducing me to Redpath as an interviewer-interlocutor; see Williams’s essay in this volume. Prior to that, I had known Redpath as the putative “editor” of Keckley’s Behind the Scenes. See Foster li–lii. 8. See Spillers and Hartman for more on enslaved women’s experiences of trauma. 9. For this discussion of the literary representation of slave women’s experiences, I draw from Valerie Smith’s research. 10. Abolitionists were like their proslavery counterparts in their pursuit of a consistent ideology. What Faust asserts about southerners can be justly applied to abolitionists: “While one advocate might specialize in religious arguments and another in the details of political economy, most acknowledged, accepted, and sometimes repeated the conclusions of their fellow apologists. The high level of conformity within proslavery thought was not accidental” (326). 11. See Pierce’s analysis comparing Jea’s Life with Bayley, Narrative. In rhetorical choices very different from Jea’s, Bayley’s narrative in part records his mother’s and daughters’ lives. 12. My research at AAS uncovered several news reports of criminal court cases involving black women after 1830, that is, after emancipation in the northern states and, later, after the passing of the fugitive slave acts. Tropes of criminality are unsurprising in the literature of slavery given that many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave narratives were modeled on

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criminal and sacred confessions and that some were testimonials of crimes allegedly committed by the enslaved subjects. See Reinhardt on Margaret Garner’s infanticide. See also McLaurin, for a reconstruction of an 1855 homicide case involving a Missouri slave woman. Court cases especially proliferated after the passing of the midcentury fugitive slave acts. At AAS, in a variety of abolitionist periodicals including the North Star, the African Observer, and the Anti-Slavery Reporter, I found details of at least six different court cases involving enslaved, fugitive, or free(d) women, most of them anonymous or first-name-only defendants. The July 1834 edition of the American Anti-Slavery Reporter, a special issue entitled “The Domestic Slave Trade,” cites an 1817 collection of several court cases, Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States. Written by “Dr. Jesse Torrey, of Philadelphia, one of the earliest, and therefore most meritorious laborers in the anti-slavery field,” it contains a statement “published in the Baltimore Telegraph [sic] a few months ago, that a female slave who had been sold in Maryland, with her child, on her way from Bladensburg to Washington, heroically cut the throats of both her child and herself, with mortal effect. This narrative has been since confirmed by a relative of the person who sold them” (qtd. in “From” 99). 13. Fresonke concludes her caustic review of Bacon’s study by contending that “slavery was not a speech impediment.” 14. Kazanjian reads Jea’s last page as suggesting that “he also likely had an amanuensis—‘My dear reader, I would now inform you, that I have stated this in the best manner I am able, for I cannot write, therefore it is not so correct as if I have been able to have written it myself. . . .’ Hodges argues that the amanuensis was probably not the printer, James Williams, but does not suggest who it might have been” (177n22). 15. Saillant tells a similar story when he “conjecture[s] that Jea’s wife knew that she lived in the grey zone between slavery and freedom, and was driven insane by that state, while Jea simply failed to recognize that [the grey zone] existed” (474). 16. My thanks to Lisa Wilson for her reminder that Stanton ironically plays a key role as slave master and thief in A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture (Venture Smith). Oliver Johnson also uses the term soul-driver in his letter to Rowland Thomas, dated 27 Jan. 1837; see Diggle.

workS Cited

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

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Bacon, Jacqueline. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Barrett, Lindon. “African American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority.” American Literary History 7.3 (1995): 415–44. Bassard, Katherine Clay. “Gender and Genre: Black Women’s Autobiography and the Ideology of Literacy.” African American Review 26.1 (1992): 119–29. Bayley, Solomon. A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents, in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave, in the State of Delaware, North America; Written by Himself and Published for His Benefit at London in 1825. Documenting the American South Project. Chapel Hill: University Library, University of North Carolina. Electronic ed. 2001. . Baym, Nina. Rev. of The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition, by Jacqueline Bacon. American Historical Review 108.5 (2003): 1453–54. Craft, William, and Ellen Craft. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. 1860. Ed. Barbara McCaskill. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Diggle, Kate, comp. Letters of the Underground Railroad from the Collection of Rokeby Museum. Ferrisburg, VT: Rokeby Museum, 2000. Edson, John R. “Slave’s Friend.” Children’s Periodicals of the United States. Ed. R. Gordon Kelly. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. 408–11. Fabian, Ann. “Hannah Crafts, Novelist; or, How a Silent Observer Became a ‘Dabster at Invention.’” In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on “The Bondwoman’s Narrative.” Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins. New York: BasicCivitas, 2004. 43–52. Faust, Drew Gilpin. “Proslavery Thought.” Slavery in America: A Reader and Guide. Ed. Kenneth Morgan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. 320–37. Foster, Frances Smith. Introduction. Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. By Elizabeth Keckley. Ed. Frances Smith Foster. 1868. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. ix–lxxii. Fresonke, Kris. Rev. of The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition, by Jacqueline Bacon. Journal of American History 90.4 (2004): 1446. “From the Liberator. Report on the Slave Trade.” American Anti-Slavery Reporter 1.7 (1834): 99, 101–4. Fulton, DoVeanna S. Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery. Albany: State of New York University Press, 2006. Geist, Christopher D. “The Slave’s Friend: An Abolitionist Magazine for Children.” American Periodicals 9 (1999): 27–35.

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Hartman, Saidya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hochman, Barbara. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era: An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading.” Book History 7 (2004): 143–69. Hodges, Graham Russell, ed. Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993. Humez, Jean M. Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2004. ———. “Reading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth as a Collaborative Text.” Frontiers 16 (1996): 29–52. Jea, John. Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher. 1816. In Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White. Ed. Graham Russell Hodges. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993. 89–165. Kazanjian, David. “Mercantile Exchanges, Mercantilist Enclosures: Racial Capitalism in the Black Mariner Narratives of Venture Smith and John Jea.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.1 (2003): 147–78. McKivigan, John R. Introduction. The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. By James Redpath. Ed. John R. McKivigan. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. i–xvii. McLaurin, Melvin. Introduction. Celia, A Slave: A True Story of Violence and Retribution in Antebellum Missouri. Ed. Melvin McLaurin. Athens: Georgia University Press, 1991. ix–xi. Memoir of Old Elizabeth, A Coloured Woman. 1863. Documenting the American South Project.  Chapel Hill: University Library, University of North Carolina. Electronic ed. 1999. . Pierce, Yolanda. Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005. “Read This.” Slave’s Friend 7 (1836): 7–9. Redpath, James. The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. Ed. John R. McKivigan. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Reinhardt, Mark. “Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Slavery, Silence, and the Politics of Ventriloquism.” Critical Inquiry 20 (2002): 81–119. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Ryan, Susan M. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Saillant, John. “Traveling in Old and New Worlds with John Jea, the African Preacher, 1773–1816.” Journal of American Studies 33 (1999): 473–90.

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Smith, Valerie. Introduction. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. By Harriet Jacobs. Ed. Valerie Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xxvii–xl. Smith, Venture. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa: But Resident of Sixty Years in the United States of America (ca. 1789). Documenting the American South Project. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library. Electronic ed. 1999. . Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics (Summer 1987): 65–81. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, Her Parentage, Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery, Incidents during the War, Her Escape from Slavery: A True Story. 1866. L. S. Thompson. Documenting the American South Project. Chapel Hill: University Library, University of North Carolina. Electronic ed. 1999. . Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “The Libyan Sibyl.” Atlantic Monthly Apr. 1863: 473–81. Thomas, Amy M. “Reading the Silences: Documenting the History of American Tract Society Readers in the American South.” Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950. Ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. Knoxville: Tennessee University Press, 2002. Tucker, Veta. “Black Women Insurgents: Secret Weapons on Abolitionist Battlegrounds.” Paper presented at Miami University of Ohio, Oct. 2004.

Ch a p ter t w elv e

straddling the color line The Print Revolution and the Transmission, Performance, and Reception of American Vernacular Music

P h i l i P F. g u r a

“Think of what we miss if we do not listen to the heard past,” Mark Smith writes in his Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (2001). “New storylines—causal and explanatory, begin to emerge once we start to listen to hearing” (262). These words and others by those who recently have contributed to the emergent field of the history of the senses immediately suggest ways to investigate hitherto veiled topics in the history of American music.1 In particular, we might begin to recover what Richard Cullen Rath has termed early American “soundscapes,” those “paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniques—in short, the ways—that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes and beliefs about sound” (2). Why does this matter? Because, as Smith has noted, so much of what we claim to “know” of history is mediated by our “ocularcentrism,” a predisposition toward the sense of sight so strong that we understand the past in only “one-fifth of its texture and scope.” Fortunately, however, “soundscapes,” as recorded in print culture, belong to a world only “set aside rather than lost” and so (in some cases literally, in others metaphorically) can still be heard (M. Smith 6).

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My interest in this topic relates to the ways in which burgeoning print culture between 1840 and 1880 recorded in detail an immensely significant development in the history of American culture, the creolization of African and European music. I wish to investigate this topic through a focus on the banjo, which derives from instruments originally played by enslaved West Africans and which they brought across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.2 For the next two hundred years the banjo existed as an artifact of folk culture in the plantation economy of North and South America and the Caribbean, and by the mideighteenth century Europeans were noting it in the mainland North American colonies. Through the early nineteenth century, however, we know very little of what such Africans and African Americans were playing on or singing to the banjo, for, again, the instrument and its repertoire flourished primarily in folk culture. By the 1820s, however, some musically inclined whites who had either lived in or traveled to the South began to learn to play the banjo by direct transmission, that is, by ear from blacks on southern plantations (Gura and Bollman 11–24). The veteran player Ben Cotton, for example, who as a youth had worked on the Mississippi River, recalled that he had visited with slaves “in front of their cabins” in order to hear them “start the banjo twanging” (New York Mirror, 3 July 1897). Similarly, the well-known stage player Tom Briggs acquired his tunes “at the south from negroes” (Briggs, pref.). Joel Sweeney, perhaps the best known of the early banjoists, learned to play from slaves on a neighbor’s plantation in Appomattox County, Virginia. He would “hang around the negroes at all times learning some of their rude songs and playing an accompaniment on a gourd banjo” (Inge 3). The Civil War greatly facilitated and extended such cultural exchange as thousands of northern soldiers learned of the music firsthand from enslaved or freed African Americans. The great stage banjoist Albert Baur, for example, recalled that while in the Union army he was “always watching for darkey banjo players on the different plantations in the vicinity of the camps” where he was stationed. When his corps was assigned around Murfreesboro, Tennessee, “as usual” Baur inquired “of every negro [he] could see as to the whereabouts of any banjo players among the plantation negroes.” One day a “contraband” told him that

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there was to be a dance at a house in town “where the music would be principally banjo players.” Though restricted by orders to camp, Baur and two fellow soldiers found this event. Entering a shut-up cabin, they found seventy to eighty people dancing to two banjo players. “Here was a scene,” Baur reminisced, “that I had often wished to witness, a regular plantation frolic” (7–8). As early as the 1840s the banjo made its way north as some white musicians who had learned to play appeared in traveling circus and variety acts. When they did this, they sometimes blackened their faces to appear like their tutors. Most memorably, in 1843 four such musicians in blackface—playing banjo, violin, tambourine, and bones and calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels—took to the stage in New York and began the phenomenally popular minstrel craze. Such performances, ever more elaborate, drew their audiences primarily from immigrant and working-class males and provided “a kind of underground theater in which black-face convention rendered permissible topics that were difficult to handle on the Victorian stage or in print” (Saxton 166). Within a few years the infatuation with such caricatured representation of African Americans—explicable, according to Eric Lott, in terms of the audience’s simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from the black’s liminal social and psychological status—spread throughout the United States and Europe. The instruments associated with the performance—particularly the banjo—became iconic of minstrelsy in general. Originally crafted in the folk tradition by individuals who probably never made more than a few instruments in their lifetimes, the banjo now was a commodity, as northern instrument makers produced it in quantities for use on the stage. A folk instrument of African origin and almost exclusively associated with African Americans now was largely out of their hands. But, still, what did the minstrel show, and, in particular, the African banjo, sound like? Here we reach the intersection with print culture, for the commodification of the instrument and the professionalization of its players contributed to the survival of important aspects of African American performance style that otherwise might have been lost. Remember that at first the stage minstrels who played the banjo had learned such music from southern sources, often directly from African Americans. But as minstrelsy proliferated, other musicians, primarily in northern cities far from the music’s source, sought access to

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its repertoire. Beginning in the late 1850s, several enterprising performers on the banjo transcribed into standard, European musical notation tunes that hitherto they had learned by ear and wrote instructions for how to play them on that instrument. These manuscript compilations found publishers, primarily large New York and Boston music wholesalers such as Oliver Ditson, Firth & Son, and T. S. Gordon, who printed these tunes in tutor books specifically for the banjo and thus made available a style of playing music that up to that time had resided exclusively as an aural tradition in the African American vernacular. Folk culture, in other words, was becoming popular culture. To punctuate this observation, consider two other early American music publications that ostensibly record similarly indigenous music. By the late 1830s entrepreneurs had recognized the commercial value of the unique blend of two widely divergent musical traditions as the banjo’s distinctive percussive sound melded with the European tradition of Scots-Irish fiddling. Thus as early as 1839 George Willig, a Baltimore music publisher, brought out a grouping of four folios of sheet music by George Knauff called Virginia Reels, which constituted the first publication of some tunes that, through creolization, now included African American components. But Knauff, not a banjo player, scored these for that quintessentially Western instrument, the piano, on which, in the folk tradition, the tunes never had been played. Similarly, in the late 1840s, shortly after the minstrel craze began, the prolific music publisher Elias Howe published his Complete Preceptor for the Banjo (1848) under the pseudonym “Gumbo Chaff, First Banjo Player to the King of the Congo” (6–15, 23).3 Here he offered tunes in European notation but with no instructions for the distinctive right-hand technique or “stroke” style essential to contemporary banjo playing. In other words, his banjo tutor does indeed record indigenous tunes as they then were performed by the Christy Minstrels and other groups, but in notation more appropriate for violin or flute, instruments long embedded in the Western musical tradition, than for the African five-string banjo that had come to define the minstrel sound. Then, beginning in 1855, white banjo players who had learned in the South and who knew standard European musical notation began to publish instruction books with detailed directions for the right-hand technique that so distinguished the banjo’s sound. Thus Briggs’ Banjo

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Instructor (1855), Phil Rice’s Correct Method for the Banjo (1858), and Buckley’s New Banjo Book (1860) offer the first extant record of how one should play tunes that had their origins on African instruments and then were modified by African Americans in the South as they encountered the Western musical tradition, and thus of how such tunes sounded on original instrumentation. From this point on, anyone who could read standard musical notation could master an esoteric music hitherto transferred solely through the folk tradition. In these decades banjo music, now available in standard musical notation, in turn began to fertilize the classical European repertoire, as classically trained musicians began to pay attention to what they regarded as quintessentially American sounds and rhythms. Even before the publication of Briggs’ Banjo Instructor, for example, the renowned pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk had absorbed the new music and produced, among other works, Le Banjo, Opus 15.4 So, too, with others raised in the classical European tradition. By 1858, for example, the banjoist Phil Rice claimed that in producing his tutor he had had the assistance of none other than the renowned pianist Sigismund Thalberg; and in 1860 James Buckley claimed him among his own pupils. When Thalberg was in the United States, Buckley wrote, he had given the instrument and Buckley’s method “a considerable portion of his time and practice” (3). Musicological analysis of these published tutor books is important and revealing. The music historian Joseph Ayars, for example, notes that Phil Rice’s Correct Method for the Banjo first records in standard European music notation the rhythmic patterns—in particular, what we call syncopation—that make antebellum music distinctive. As Ayars writes, Rice’s method “possibly identifies with greatest detail the convergence of African and European musical culture into the synthesis that formed the tap root of American pop music.” Ayars goes even further. In the transcriptions in which he noted rhythmic patterns “uncharacteristic of the Europeans’ preferred sense of rhythm,” Rice may very well have recorded for the first time what in half a century would become American ragtime and jazz (Ayars 12–14). But the story does not end here, for the next development in banjo playing offers a further example of creolization equally dependent on the expansion of print culture. In 1857 Howe noted that “until recently” the

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use of the banjo had been “almost entirely confined to the negroes of the South and their imitators,” that is, the minstrels. As such it often had been “made in a very rough and clumsy manner, totally devoid of scientific principles such as guide the makers of Guitars and Violins.” But within the past few years, he continued, “improvement” in its manufacture had been “truly wonderful.” Moreover, Howe believed that the banjo had not yet reached its full potential and was poised for new and different cultural work. It was, he wrote, “destined to perform” a very important role “as an accompaniment to vocal music” and would assume as well “a prominent position in the performance of instrumental music,” by which he meant music in the very different European tradition (Howe, Howe’s 3). Howe’s prediction was more accurate than he could have dreamed. On stage, banjo players began not only to play their own compositions but also to include art songs and other compositions from the European tradition, which they had either transcribed or written for the banjo. Indeed, this wish to perform more and different kinds of compositions on the instrument so permeated the contemporary musical scene that Buckley, Thalberg’s tutor, included in his instruction book a large proportion of European material never intended to be played on the banjo. Now the banjo’s sound was becoming Europeanized. Such music tended to be much more melodic and complex than that hitherto associated with the plantation tunes and could not be played either on the kinds of instruments that dominated the minstrel stage or in the down-picking style that defined the African sound. Thus, by the early 1860s, both the form and function of the banjo were transformed. A benchmark for this development was Frank B. Converse’s Banjo Instructor of 1865, which detailed an up-picking or guitar-style method along with the traditional down-picking style. (As an acknowledgment of the banjo’s origins, for the next two decades most such tutor books taught both styles, terming the earlier, down-picking style more “characteristic.”) Most significantly, Converse, like his colleague Buckley, whose tutor of 1860 had first introduced banjo players to European melodies, explained that he wanted to “elevat[e] the instrument” and thus had applied to the banjo “the theoretical musical principles . . . acquired from his piano studies” (3). The rise of this banjo culture also influenced the physical development of the instrument, not my focus but worth mentioning. For one

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thing, as the banjo was used to play different styles of music, makers began to experiment with different designs, including putting backs on the instrument, to make it more suitable to the new music and the venues in which it might be played. Second, the instruments now more often than not were fretted, for the player who performed the more complex new music needed to strike notes above the first position, to which much minstrel-style playing commonly was restricted. Finally, in the 1870s and 1880s, with the increased number of players at all levels and the concomitant development of mechanized production, there arose large factories in which great numbers of banjos were cheaply and poorly made so that they were available to virtually all classes (Gura and Bollman 75–135). This brings us to another example of the intersection of banjo culture with the bourgeoning world of print. This democratization of the instrument was carried on as well in a new kind of “simplified” tutor popularized in the 1870s by George Dobson, one of five brothers, all of whom were involved in one way or another with the banjo as performers, instructors, and makers (Gura and Bollman 107–35). Dobson had developed his new manner of instruction around 1861 to assist one of his pupils, a “lady” who did not have enough time to master reading the standard musical notation. He essentially developed what we call tablature, indicating which string to hit at what fret position, and his method went through several editions over the next twenty years. It seems genuinely to have popularized the instrument, allowing those whose “duties” precluded more formal music lessons to learn to play sophisticated music with some dispatch. Further, Dobson made clear whom he wanted to teach to play. “While most brilliant when played as a solo,” he wrote, the banjo was “an excellent accompaniment for the Voice” and as such could be used for “HOME AMUSEMENTS.” “A little investment in music,” Dobson counseled, “yields far more satisfactory returns than any other, and he or she who can perform upon any instrument need never be at a loss for company: a congenial friend is ever at hand” (Dobson, inside front cover). As this passage indicates, by the 1870s the banjo was making significant inroads in emergent middle-class culture. As one contemporary put it, “In 1844 there were not half a dozen banjos in New York City,” and they were to be met with only “in grog-shops or bagnios.” But he estimated that by 1866 there were more than “10,000 instruments in use in that city

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alone, the rich melody of its five strings” reaching “from the marble fronts of Fifth Avenue down to the slums of Baxter Street” (“Ziska”). Another contemporary concurred. A “banjo mania” had broken out “with a virulence that exceed[ed] anything known before,” he observed. It had become “the musical instrument of the people,” found “in homes of wealth” as well as “in dwellings of poverty” (“Banjo Craze” 2). He might have added that in its latest incarnation the banjo had become even further removed from its African American roots, primarily through the efforts of the very makers who sought to extend its popularity even further. By the 1880s, this divorce was complete, codified in print culture by Samuel Swaim Stewart, a remarkable Philadelphia banjo manufacturer and entrepreneur of music responsible more than any other for what I call whitewashing the instrument. More than any previous instructor, he wished to “elevate” the banjo from associations with blackface minstrelsy to the genteel world of Victorian parlors and concert halls. Toward this end, he built a large manufactory where he personally oversaw the production of thousands of quality instruments, which satisfied his customers’ desires for goods that signaled their newly acquired wealth and leisure. He also developed an extensive publishing empire through which he tirelessly proselytized for the banjo in general and his instruments in particular, assuring his readers (and would-be customers) that to own and play the banjo marked them as tasteful, sophisticated consumers (Gura and Bollman 137–91). Unlike other late nineteenth-century banjo makers, Stewart was not a technological innovator but a master salesman whose forte was advertising. As the New York Clipper put it in 1889 in a complimentary notice of his frequent use of their pages for advertising, Stewart “is evidently a believer in printer’s ink and is never afraid to use plenty of it” (“New York Clipper” 4). Thus, in addition to his instruments, he has left a remarkable paper trail of writings on the banjo: promotional broadsides and brochures, formal catalogs of his goods, instruction books, treatises on banjo construction, dissertations on the instrument’s history, and, perhaps most significant, S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal (1882–1902), a bimonthly publication dedicated to both those instruments but in fact given over almost wholly to his attempts to “elevate” the former. We can best see the nature of this crusade in the vitriol Stewart expended on Dobson’s “Simplified Method,” for virtually from the

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beginning of his career Stewart insisted that one should learn the banjo through standard musical notation. Thus in a promotional brochure issued in 1880 he announced what he would continue to say for years in his Banjo and Guitar Journal, that those who wished to play the instrument must learn to read music by note. Aligning himself with the belief in progress that drove late nineteenth-century America, he asked aspiring banjo players if they were “advancing with the times” or had “fallen into the ditch of the ‘Simplified Method’?” “The Banjoist who cannot read music today,” he noted, “is like the man who is unable to read a sign-post or a newspaper” (“Plain Facts” 1). Indeed, Dobson’s method was so easy and simple, Stewart complained, that a person could learn to pick out, “with perhaps one finger and thumb,” such “soul-inspiring tunes as ‘Shofly, don’t bodder me.’” Dobson’s students, Stewart claimed, rarely got any further because they had “taken the express train for Banjo Botchtown.” The “Simplified Method,” he wrote, is “the cow-catcher which catches sleepy gawks too lazy to get out of its tracks” (S. S. Stewart’s Banjo 2.3 [1883]: 4, and 2.9 [1884]: 2). By 1880 Stewart linked the skill of note reading to what he considered the proper repertoire for the instrument. Here Stewart’s cultivation of middle-class aspirations is readily apparent, for he condemned what he considered the vulgar uses of the banjo. Stewart observed that the most likely devotee of the “Simplified Method” was uncouth: “a chap with a cigar stump in the corner of his mouth, hat one side of his head, blue shirt, spring-bottom pants, and a Banjo under his arm.” When this person talked, his boorishness was even more evident: “He talks loud, using many slang words, and does not know one note of music from another, but he is able to ‘sling’ a glass of beer with anybody.” The lesson was clear. Prospective players should not “go around among variety halls or drinking saloons to hear some negro or mountebank attempt to play the instrument” but should go “into [the] parlor or drawing room, among gentlemen and ladies,” where they might find refined music (“Plain Facts”). Beginning in the early 1880s Stewart also published works about the banjo aimed at a more general audience in an attempt to educate them about the banjo’s potential as a musical instrument. Of these the most significant were his “lecture,” The Banjo Philosophically (1886), published in pamphlet form, and his clothbound book, The Banjo! A Dissertation (1888), the first attempt to provide a full-scale history of the instrument.

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But his history is problematic, for among other things, in his Banjo Philosophically he claimed that the banjo “was not of negroe origin,” as others thought, but rather took its name from the Spanish “bandore” (1, 9). By then, however, there was no doubt of the banjo’s African origins, a fact acknowledged by other of Stewart’s contemporaries, including the Dobsons. Thus Stewart’s effort to provide the banjo with a lineage through Europe rather than Africa is a distortion explicable as part of his effort to legitimize it as a concert instrument in the European tradition. Two years later in his longer treatise, when he was more willing to allow the possibility of the banjo’s African heritage, his basic prejudice was still intact. If it were the case that the instrument first developed among the Africans, he wrote, we should recall that “truth has often come into the world through lowly channels” (Banjo! A Dissertation 6). In addition, he fueled the rumor that Joel Sweeney had added two extra strings, including the shorter octave string, to three-stringed gourd instruments and had thus produced the five-string banjo as we know it (1). But it is clear from extant material culture evidence that the eighteenth-century African American banjo had the shorter string already. Finally, in Stewart’s account, the banjo as it was known on the minstrel stage marked an intermediate but still primitive stage of development, preliminary to the banjo’s emergence in its most sophisticated form, from his workshop. Stewart worked at whitewashing the banjo in other ways, too. By the 1880s, for example, some musicians were well enough known even outside banjo circles to bring credit to Stewart’s instruments, for from this point on he invariably sought out stage performers for endorsements of his wares. These might consist, in some instances, of brief letters that he printed in his periodical. Just as often, however, they were elaborate, full-page advertisements centrally placed in his catalogs or in the New York Clipper, the widely circulated journal of the stage, turf, and other American sports. One of Stewart’s most valuable endorsers was Horace Weston, who became a powerful weapon in the manufacturers’ assault on the banjo’s purportedly low and undistinguished past. For Weston was African American, and Stewart thought that his remarkable expertise on the instrument offered the public undeniable proof that even in the hands of those who had played plantation melodies on it (Weston once had been a member of a minstrel troupe) the banjo was destined for greater

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things than the minstrel stage (Gura and Bollman 152–60). As Stewart sought to move the banjo from its status as a primitive folk instrument associated with plantation life into the world of high culture, Weston became invaluable. By the mid-1880s Stewart’s adulation of Weston led to full-page illustrated ads, in one case with Weston’s wife “as they [had] appeared with Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company” on the stage. This use of Weston reached its pinnacle in 1884 with Stewart’s publication of a dime novel, The Black Hercules; or, The Adventures of a Banjo Player, loosely based on Weston’s life and offered for sale and as a premium for those who bought Stewart’s instruments (Stewart, Black Hercules). Finally, mention of Weston raises the topic of black banjo players themselves, for indeed some African Americans continued to play the instrument. There is not much documentation of such players, but we can make two general observations. First, incongruous as it sounds but as Weston’s career illustrates, in the post–Civil War era African American banjoists played on the minstrel stage. Indeed, by the 1860s black minstrel troupes, usually under the supervision of white entrepreneurs, began to tour the North, their shows advertised as more “authentic” than those of their white counterparts. By the 1870s, troupes such as Callender’s Georgia Minstrels and Haverly’s Colored Minstrels established national and transatlantic reputations.5 The irony, of course, is that these entertainers had to work within the audience’s well-established expectations for such entertainment and so reinforced stereotypical associations of plantation life popularized by whites in blackface. There was not much room, or pay, for the development of any African American aesthetic. Here an exception supports the rule. Recently, Howard and Judith Sacks have told the story of the remarkable Snowden family of Knox County, Ohio, whose patriarch had been raised in slavery in Maryland and who as early as the 1850s toured their region, with Len Snowden on banjo. With their distinctly African American instrumentation—violin, “triangular,” dulcimer, and castanets as well as banjo—they represented a unique mixture of black and white music, a sound so compelling that aspiring white musicians in the area sought them out for lessons (Sacks and Sacks). The Sacks contend that it was from the Snowden family that Dan Emmett, of Mt. Vernon, Ohio, learned the song “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land,” which he later published and claimed as his own.

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Further, despite the popularity of “colored” minstrel troupes, proponents of banjo culture tended to ignore African American musicians or conflated them with minstrelsy in general. Most African Americans themselves were not eager to identify themselves with the banjo. Here again, the Snowdens (who were basically a local act) were the exception. In the 1870s, for example, when groups such as the Fiske Jubilee Singers and their counterparts at the Hampton Institute and other black schools toured nationally to raise funds for their institutions, their shows centered on what they identified as blacks’ contribution to music, the spiritual. They played no banjos. Second, we must recall that in the later nineteenth century, as the story of the Snowden family indicates, the instrument persisted in rural areas, particularly in the South, among African Americans as well as whites. Paired most often with fiddle players, banjoists there developed a repertoire derived in part from antebellum plantation melodies, in part from the Scots-Irish tradition of fiddle music. These amateur musicians formed the core of the emergent string-band tradition made famous in such venues as medicine shows and, eventually, the Grand Ole Opry. Isolated from many of the currents of advertising and commerce that defined urban banjo culture as promulgated by the Dobsons, Stewart, and others, these players, black and white, understood and used the banjo differently. For them it remained a folk instrument, as it had been up to the 1840s when its commodification began, rather than a marker of middle-class status, as it had become for so many. Thus the nineteenth-century banjo and its music, as recorded in and transmitted through print culture, was deeply complicit in conversations about race, class, and ethnicity. Here I have focused primarily on its intersections with race but could spend more time discussing its importance as an artifact in what was becoming a consumer-driven culture, the world of Veblen’s “leisure class.” The instrument also brings focus to important issues in ethnicity, for analyses of the minstrel stage indicate an inordinate proportion of Irish musicians, which suggests that the music trades were particularly open to recent immigrants.6 Minstrelsy’s audience, too, was composed largely of immigrants and working-class people. And as we have seen, in the post–Civil War period, promulgators of banjo culture such as Stewart tried to separate the instrument from its association not only with blacks but with the lower classes. When

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Stewart attacked George Dobson’s simplified method, for example, he claimed that Dobson as a teacher most wanted “to secure a good fee for a quarter’s lessons” in advance and then to “let the pupils come in, when he was out,” or, what was worse, “come in and sit down to a beer drinking bout[,] picking on the Banjo at the same time” (S. S. Stewart’s Banjo 2.9 [1884]: 4). Clearly, Stewart felt that his rival was more at home in a workingman’s beer hall than in a music studio. If an immigrant wanted to become Americanized, Stewart believed, he could do no better than learn to play the banjo, as long as the person bought one of his instruments and took lessons from him in how to play real banjo music, not the kind heard on the popular stage. Finally, consider a few quotations, the irony of whose juxtaposition will be immediately apparent. In the late nineteenth century Stewart had called the banjo “the only Native American instrument,” and the American Guild of Banjoists, Mandolinists, and Guitarists declared that “the modern banjo is known throughout the world as the product of America, and is its National Musical Instrument” (Crescendo 1). But a half century earlier, on 22 February 1850, from Danville, Virginia, one Charles Doe wrote to a relative at Boston that he had just been to a church service where African Americans were present. “There were three or four hundred blacks there observing the custom of the whites,” he wrote. “Not one of them knows a note. Their national instrument is the Banjo; some of them play the violin. The whites play the banjo a great deal, at least as much as northerners do the flute.”7 These conflicting claims powerfully demonstrate how the banjo is indeed “America’s instrument” and how attention to its “soundscape,” as well as its presence in print culture, allows us to assess more faithfully the full and painful complexity of that designation.

NoteS

1. See, for example, Hoffer; Picker. 2. On the African antecedents of the banjo, see Charry; Jagfors. 3. Also see Kaufmann. 4. See Gottschalk. On Gottschalk’s interest in the banjo, see Starr, who notes that in the 1850s Gottschalk wrote a newspaper review of an appearance

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of Buckley’s Serenaders, a minstrel troupe, and that one contemporary critic claimed that The Banjo was the composer’s tribute to Thomas Vaughan, banjoist for Christy and Woods’s Minstrels. Also see P. Smith. 5. On these troupes, see Toll. 6. See, for example, the biographies in E. Rice. 7. The Virginia Historical Society now holds this letter. Earlier Bob Raynor had offered it for sale in one of his Americana auctions (Burlington, NC); I transcribed it from his catalog.

workS Cited

Ayars, Joseph. “The Banjo in 1858: The Early Jazz of Phil Rice.” Tuckahoe Review 1.2 (1997): 4, 12–14. “The Banjo Craze.” Gatcomb’s Banjo and Guitar Gazette 1.3 (1888): 2. Baur, A[lbert]. “Reminiscences of a Banjo Player.” S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal 9.6 (1893): 7–8. [Briggs, Tom]. Briggs’ Banjo Instructor. Boston: Ditson, 1855. Buckley, James. Buckley’s New Banjo Book. Boston: Ditson, 1860. Charry, Eric. Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Converse, Frank. Frank B. Converse’s Banjo Instructor without a Master. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1865. The Crescendo 1.1 (July 1908): 1. Dobson, George C. Geo. C. Dobson’s Simplified Method and Thorough School for the Banjo: Two Books in One. Boston: Perry, 1874. Gottschalk, L. M. The Banjo: An American Sketch. New York: Hall, 1855. Gura, Philip F., and James F. Bollman. America’s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Hoffer, Peter Charles. Sensory Worlds in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. [Howe, Elias]. The Complete Preceptor for the Banjo . . . by Gumbo Chaff, A. M. A. First Banjo Player to the King of the Congo. Boston: Howe, [1848]. ———. Howe’s New American Banjo School. Boston: Russell and Tolman, 1857. Inge, George. Letter to J. E. Henning. 16 July 1890. Elite Banjoist 1.1 (1890): 3. Jagfors, Ulf. “The African Akonting and the Origin of the Banjo.” Old-Time Herald 9.2 (2004): 26–33. Kaufmann, Eli. “Early American Banjo Methods, Part I.” Five-Stringer 174 (Winter 1993–Spring 1994): 6–15, 23.

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Knauff, George P. Virginia Reels Selected and Arranged for the Piano Forte. Baltimore: Willig, 1839. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. “New York Clipper.” S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal 6.3 (1889): 4. New York Mirror. 3 July 1897. Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. “Plain Facts! Matter of Vital Importance to All Banjoists.” [Philadelphia: S. S. Stewart, ca. 1880]. Rath, Richard Cullen. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Rice, Edwin LeRoy. Monarchs of Minstrelsy: From “Daddy” Rice to Date. New York: Kenney, 1911. Rice, Phil. Phil Rice’s Correct Method for the Banjo with or without a Master. Boston: Ditson, 1858. Sacks, Howard L. M., and Judith Rose Sacks. Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993. Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class and Politics in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso, 1990. Smith, Mark M. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2001. Smith, Paul Ely. “Gottschalk’s ‘The Banjo, op. 15,’ and the Banjo in the Nineteenth Century.” Current Musicology 50 (1992): 47–61. Starr, Frederick S. Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Stewart, S. S. The Banjo! A Dissertation. Philadelphia: S. S. Stewart, 1888. ———. The Banjo Philosophically. Philadelphia: S. S. Stewart, 1886. ———. The Black Hercules; or, The Adventures of a Banjo Player. Philadelphia: [S. S. Stewart], 1884. S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal 2.3 (1883); 2.9 (1884). Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. “Ziska.” “Our New York Letter.” Boston Daily Evening Voice 20 Oct. 1866.

Chapter thirteeN

secret in altered lines The Civil War Song in Manuscript, Print, and Performance Publics

ColeMan hutChiSon

Song done? Not yet. He knows that. Like a dollar bill it changes hands. Others will hear it and add a verse, goose the rhythm, slow it down to fit their mood, temperament, to fit the resonance set up in them by the arrangement of plates on the kitchen table that morning. . . . This is his own John Henry, who he figures is a man like himself, just trying to get along. And if the man who taught him the song has his own John Henry, let him. The next man will have his. Someone else will change his verses and today’s John Henry will be gone, or secret in altered lines like memory. Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days

Alan Trachtenberg has famously argued that the American Civil War served as “a proto-industrial experience, introducing a new scale in organizational systems and overturning older individualistic and local patterns” (Reading 110; see also Incorporation). The Civil War, the argument goes, taught America how to line up. This narrative of national incorporation in the postwar period is compelling; however, it begs the question, how did this “experience” play out during the war? Let us not move too quickly past the emergence of those “organizational 255

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systems,” past the expression of the “individualistic and local patterns” obtained in the numerous, proliferating publics that the acts and discourses of war enabled. Because the Civil War brought Americans together in unprecedented numbers and gave rise to unprecedented forms of discourse, it also gave rise to unprecedented numbers and forms of publics. Yet despite a recent turn in Civil War historiography toward local histories of the war, we seem unable to think theoretically about the coexistence of, and competition among, such publics. Moreover, we seem unable to recognize local, individual difference in the face of the violently binary logic so often associated with the period: abolition versus proslavery, North versus South, “us versus them.” In the following pages, I want to suggest that this inability is particularly evident in the ways we tell the history of the Civil War song and is exacerbated by our seemingly hypnotic fascination with printed versions of songs. The American Civil War song proves a woefully understudied point of intersection between book history and discussions of orality, performance, and print. To date, historians have relied almost solely on printed sources (such as songsters, sheet music, and broadsides) to reconstruct a history of the Civil War song. Such a privileging of print obscures the fact that, unlike the circulation of more traditional “literary” productions such as novels and memoirs, Civil War song circulation was by no means limited to a print public sphere. Since these songs were sung by dynamic groups of singers in various settings—parlor sing-alongs, slave work sites, military encampments, church gatherings, abolitionist meetings, political rallies, and numerous other public gatherings—we have scant record of the countless versions of these songs that never found their way into print. In non- and extraprint settings such as these, Civil War songs achieved a wide and free-flowing circulation and were multiply revised. Their tunes modulated and harmonized, their lyrics forgotten, misremembered, and improvised, these unrecorded, errant songs bespeak a culture of revisionism that has eluded traditional histories of the Civil War song and book. This essay argues that such a culture of revisionism was predicated on the complementary, not competitive, relationships among “speechmanuscript-print” versions of Civil War songs. This useful neologism,

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“speech-manuscript-print,” emerges from a D. F. McKenzie essay ostensibly about seventeenth-century print and manuscript cultures. However, the purview of McKenzie’s essay is by no means limited to the seventeenth century. Before broaching his argument about the coexistence of these seventeenth-century cultures, McKenzie offers the following, quite theoretical observations: “After all, we did not stop speaking when we learned to write, nor writing when we learned to print, nor reading, writing, or printing when we entered ‘the electronic age.’ For those who market texts in those forms, some of them may seem mutually exclusive (do we read the book, hear it on tape, or see the film?), but for the speaker, auditor, reader or viewer, the texts tend to work in complementary, not competitive, ways. None surrenders its place entirely; all undergo some adjustment as new forms arrive and new complicities of interest and function emerge” (238).1 In the case of the American Civil War song, one discovers particular “complicities of interest and function” that emerged as singing publics imagined political communities through a concatenation of oral, manuscript, and printed forms of songs. Yet for all such complicity among these forms, there remained a fierce sense of competition within the field of cultural production of the Civil War song. This competition obtained at the level of singing publics. Ironically, complementary relationships among manuscript, print, and performance gave rise to increased cultural autonomy for—and thus increased competition among—the publics in which those songs were sung.2 Thus, in limning complementary relationships among “speechmanuscript-print,” this essay will at the same time acknowledge the coexistence of, and competition among, different singing publics.3 In so doing, I argue that the ability to revise Civil War songs to fit a series of local, regional, and national agendas had a profound effect on the ways communities imagined themselves, and one another, through song. As such, the history of the Civil War song is a history of forms of revisionism that exceed and defy the purported authority and permanence of print. In this context, revision emerges as an important alternative to and yet a constitutive part of nineteenth-century print culture, as well as a particularly subtle index of the persistence of the “individualistic and local patterns” that, Trachtenberg avers, the war overturned.

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“a d v e N t u r e S a N d t r a N S F o r M at i o N S ”

Confederate “journalist” Henry Hotze spent the first months of the Civil War embedded with the Third Regiment of Alabama Volunteers. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Hotze had immigrated to Mobile, Alabama, in 1855. After gaining stateside fame as the editor and translator of Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races (1856), an influential eugenicist text that no doubt gained him favor with Mobile’s elites, Hotze became associate editor of the Mobile Register. During the war, Hotze served the Confederate States of America as commercial agent to Britain. In this capacity, he acted as chief journalist and editor for the London-based Index (1862–65), a weekly periodical dedicated to winning British “hearts and minds” to the Confederate cause. The Index’s coverage of military, political, and cultural events enjoyed both a transcontinental and transatlantic readership, being distributed in Britain, France, Ireland, and the United States. Recounting his experiences with the Third Alabama in a 26 June 1862 issue of the Index, Hotze describes his regiment rewriting “Dixie,” the de facto Confederate national anthem, “commemorative of the recent accession of Virginia and Tennessee to the Confederacy, and especially complimentary to the former”(140). Hotze goes on to note that the Third Alabama sang this revised “Dixie” on every appropriate occasion, with marked effect upon the hearts of the Virginian beauties. Such was the popularity of the song at Norfolk, where it originated, that some considerate persons bethought themselves of having it printed on little slips of paper, as “The Song of Dixie, sung by the 3rd Regiment of Alabama Volunteers, on their passage through Virginia.” These slips have been plentifully distributed on the road, and, I doubt not, will be preserved as historical relics, when the pretty girls who welcomed us shall have become grandmothers, and relate to the wondering little ones about the times when the first troops of Confederate volunteers came from the far South to fight the Yankees on Virginian soil. (140)

Hotze’s anecdote documents the timely, occasional nature of this revision, as well as the circulation of “The Song of Dixie, sung by the

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3rd Regiment of Alabama Volunteers,” in oral performance, manuscript, and printed forms. This “Dixie” was revised by a specific group of singers; in turn, its performance and circulation in all three forms constituted a series of publics.4 Though Hotze takes pains to note the importance to posterity of the printed version of this song, he does not indicate competition among those forms. Print functions in the service of cultural memory here, preserving this “Dixie” as a “historical relic.” Yet it is the oral performance version—not, importantly, the printed version—that has a “marked effect upon the hearts of the Virginian beauties.” As such, we might take seriously Hotze’s rhetoric of the “relic,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “something kept as a remembrance or souvenir of a person, thing, or place; a memento,” but also as “a surviving trace of some practice, fact, idea, quality, etc.; the remains or remaining fragments (of a thing); the remnant, residue (of a nation or people).” Here, print offers not an authoritative or definitive version of “The Song of Dixie, sung by the 3rd Regiment of Alabama Volunteers” but instead the “residue” and “surviving trace” of the practice or performance of that song. That the Third Regiment would choose “Dixie” as the musical setting (or “air”) for its revised lyrics comes as little surprise. “Dixie” was one of the most promiscuous and revised texts of the American Civil War. Often credited to a white northerner, Daniel D. Emmett, who may well have lifted the melody from an African American musical tradition, “Dixie” was first performed in a blackface minstrel show in New York City in 1859 and achieved a startling popularity in the weeks leading up to the war. During the war, southerners and northerners alike extensively and repeatedly revised the lyrics to the song. Indeed, historians of the Civil War song suggest that no fewer than thirty-nine distinct versions of “Dixie” appeared in print between 1860 and 1866 alone. Since such revisions were transnational in nature—the song was revised on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, with versions such as “Dixie for the Union” and “Dixie Unionized” employing ardently nationalistic lyrics—the status of “Dixie” as literary or national property proves deeply vexed. Despite the heavily contested lines of allegiance it traversed, “Dixie” was the express property of neither the South nor the North, neither the Confederacy nor the Union. Instead, and as I argue elsewhere, “Dixie” seems a much more ethereal or dynamic cultural

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document, one embedded not in static forms of the nation-state but in the free-flowing circulation of a transnational public domain.5 Not surprisingly, then, thirty-nine proves a profoundly conservative estimate for the number of versions of “Dixie” that circulated during the war years. In comprehending such a number, one must not overlook the ephemeral nature of the nineteenth-century sheet music, broadsides, and songsters through which such “Dixies” circulated. For instance, there is no known extant copy of the “Dixie” Hotze was so confident would be “preserved” as a historical relic. Yet despite the lack of a surviving trace of the Third Alabama’s “Dixie,” we have strong anecdotal evidence that such a version did in fact exist.6 More to the point, any reliance on printed material to reconstruct the revisionary history of “Dixie” belies the fact that, as Hotze’s anecdote affirms, Civil War songs circulated in non- and extraprint forms as well. Moreover, in the context of the proliferating publics that distinguish the American Civil War, the free-flowing circulation and revision that this essay describes had the potential to produce any number of alternative “Dixies.”7 In turn, “Dixie” was but one among many Civil War songs subject to such circulation and revision, as Brander Matthews’s 1887 essay “The Songs of the War” suggests: “The taking of the air of a jovial college song to use as the setting of a fiery war-lyric may seem strange and curious, but only to those who are not familiar with the adventures and transformations a tune is often made to undergo” (622).8 By Matthews’s account, revision, in the guise of imposition of or alteration to “fiery war-lyric,” is to be expected in times of war. In reconstructing those “adventures and transformations,” the always-partial archive that print offers us strongly supports Matthews’s contention. For instance, printed anthologies of war songs and poems from the period often include multiple versions of the “same” lyric, suggesting one of the ways that Civil War print culture attempted to represent the diversity of the versions to which a proliferation of publics gave rise (Browne). Similarly, print subtly suggests the mechanisms that made such revisionism possible. Since printed songsters and broadsides from this period rarely if ever offer musical accompaniment for their lyrics—instead these songsters and broadsides quietly indicate, for example, “Air—Happy Land of Canaan”—these texts assume the knowledge of a common repertoire of tunes, melodies, or airs. That is, these

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printed versions of songs assumed that their readers/singers would be so familiar with a certain set of melodies that they would not require additional musical notation to perform these songs.9 Given their wild popularity during the war years, songsters in particular offer us a surviving trace of the cultures of both musical performance and revisionism that produced so many versions of the “same” song. The history of the songster in America predates the Civil War by a generation or more. Songsters saw wide use during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in political campaigns and clubs and as souvenirs of musical performances (Miles). A songster is merely “a printed collection of secular song lyrics,” but one particularly well suited to musical performance in military settings: “Usually compact in size, relatively inexpensive, and not requiring musical literacy of its consumers, the songster could be an ideal accessory for song-loving soldiers who wanted access to the words of songs in a portable form” (Schultz 133).10 Like poetry anthologies from this period, songsters such as The Rebel Songster (fig. 13.1) often included alternative versions of the “same” song, occasionally on the same page or page opening. As such, these “portable” collections allow access to a musical culture in which lyrics were repeatedly revised to fit a series of familiar, commonplace tunes. Ironically, then, it is printed songsters and broadsides from this period that speak to—or, better, speak for—the often-elusive manuscript and oral performance forms of these songs. Again, print was not the only medium through which nineteenth-century songs circulated; it was merely the least ephemeral. Rather than accede to the purported authority of printed songs, we might think of these versions as standing in for other, more ephemeral versions. Moreover, we might usefully consider what the technology of print reveals about the practice of everyday song. For instance, broadsides and songsters underscore the rapport between well-known tunes and eminently revisable lyrics.11 The culture of lyrical revisionism that a common repertoire of tunes enabled found not only northerners and southerners singing different words to the “same” song but different groups of northerners and different groups of southerners singing different words to the “same” song. As a result of the complementary relationships among print, manuscript, and oral performance, each individual group of singers—whether a regiment of Confederate soldiers sitting around a campfire, a group of abolitionists

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Figure 13.1. the rebel songster (richmond, va: ayres and wade, 1863). Image courtesy of Boston athenaeum.

in a planning meeting, or a Lincoln reelection club—might well have had its very own version of “Bonnie Blue Flag” or “The Star Spangled Banner.” In some cases, the lyrics to these individualistic or local versions would have been the lyrics printed in songsters, on broadsides, or as sheet music; in other cases, the lyrics would have been circulated in manuscript—perhaps someone might have copied in longhand the lyrics to a song that celebrated a recent Union victory; in still other cases, such lyrics would have been impromptu, even improvised on the spot. As the above attests, such adventurous lyrical revisionism is not difficult when a group shares a common repertoire of tunes, airs, or melodies.

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“a k i N d r e d w o r l d o F u N w r i t t e N S o N G S ”

Thomas Wentworth Higginson wondered at how “easily a new ‘sing’ took root” among his regiment of black soldiers, the First South Carolina Volunteers: “They often strayed into wholly new versions, which sometimes became popular, and entirely banished the others” (“Negro Spirituals” 692–93). The Civil War had given Higginson, a distinguished Unitarian minister, essayist, and latter-day editor of Emily Dickinson, an opportunity not only to test his radical abolitionist mettle but also to come into intimate, intense cultural contact with the freed slaves that made up his regiment.12 Such contact resulted in a series of Atlantic Monthly essays and, later, the celebrated collection Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870). Higginson’s June 1867 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Negro Spirituals,” collects thirty-seven “specimens” of the spirituals sung by his regiment. Not surprisingly, the essay speaks resoundingly to the complementary relationships among oral performance, manuscript, and printed forms of Civil War song.13 Higginson’s transcriptions of the spirituals he heard in his two years with the First Volunteers have been discussed at great length in relation to the history of both African American music and slave culture; here, I want to reconsider those transcriptions within the broader context of Civil War–era musical performance and print culture. The “straying” and concomitant fluidity of versions that Higginson describes above are, I submit, of a piece with the broader culture of lyrical revisionism this essay describes. Above all else, Higginson’s influential “Negro Spirituals” essay speaks to his earnest but ambivalent relationship to the “slave songs” he heard, transcribed, and published.14 Here, Higginson describes his complicated role as amanuensis-cum-ethnographer: “Writing down in the darkness, as I best could,—perhaps with my hand in the safe covert of my pocket,—the words of the song, I have afterwards carried it to my tent, like some captured bird or insect, and then, after examination, put it by. Or, summoning one of the men at some period of leisure,— Corporal Robert Sutton, for instance, whose iron memory held all the details of a song as if it were a ford or a forest,—I have completed the new specimen by supplying the absent parts” (685). Higginson’s concern for secrecy and his reliance on another’s “iron memory” betray the provisional, always partial correspondence between what is heard and

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what is transcribed.15 In addition to the crucial cross-cultural differences implicit in such transcription, one wonders about the accuracy and authenticity of songs transcribed “in the darkness,” “in the safe covert of my pocket,” songs reconstructed some time after their performance. For Higginson—long a “faithful student of the Scottish ballads, [who] had always envied Sir Walter [Scott] the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones”—it was “a strange enjoyment” to be “suddenly brought into the midst of a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy, more uniformly plaintive, almost always more quaint, and often as essentially poetic” (685). Higginson’s apposition of Scottish and African oral traditions is a provocative one; however, it is this phrase, “kindred world of unwritten songs,” that sings. In John M. Picker’s reading of this passage, “Higginson means ‘unwritten’ in its strictest sense. He implies that a song is ‘unwritten’ if it is not physically represented on paper. . . . For Higginson, writing a work down appears to be the most crucial part of the process of musical composition” (12). Higginson’s extensive collection of slave songs, not to mention his decision to print and reprint that collection, strongly supports Picker’s claim. Yet such a paper- (and eventually print-) centric understanding of musical composition was not unique to Higginson, as Ronald Radano’s essay on the writing of slave spirituals suggests. Radano argues persuasively that the spate of slave song transcriptions that emerged from the Civil War—a spate for which Higginson was in large part responsible—all “ultimately amounted to little more than discursive fictions that offered a partial sampling of African American musical practices at a profound moment of cultural change” (508). All these “discursive fictions” suggest then a similarly literal definition of unwritten: “not committed to writing; left unrecorded” (OED). Picker is surely correct in claiming that Higginson “desired to solidify the fluid songs in printed texts” (18). However, such a desire and such fluidity were not exclusive to either slave spirituals or African American musical culture. Instead, this desire and fluidity were endemic to all forms of Civil War–era musical performance.16 Because so many Civil War songs were left “unwritten,” we can see in Higginson’s elaborate efforts to transcribe the songs of his regiment a “kindred” relationship between slave spirituals and Civil War songs in general.17 To this end, the

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slave spirituals on which Higginson lavishes such attention were a part of a broader repertoire of songs that the First Volunteers sang, as Higginson’s wartime journal suggests: “Meantime, the singing was brisk along the whole line, & reining up for them to pass, successive waves of song drifted by—first John Brown, of course, then ‘What make ole Satan for follow me so’, then ‘Marching Along’, then ‘Hold your light on Canaan Shore’ then ‘When this Cruel War is over.’ . . . All their own songs had verses improvised as usual, & mingled in the oddest way” (Complete 190). In this description, Higginson’s regiment is singing both “Negro spirituals” and secular music within the same performance public. Crucially, the performances of these songs are, by their nature, variable, and Higginson takes great pains to re-present such variability. For instance, in his collection of transcriptions, Higginson prints three “wholly distinct versions” of the spiritual “The Ship of Zion,” “all quite exuberant and tumultuous” (“Negro Spirituals” 691). The presence on the same printed page of three versions of a spiritual signals again the coexistence of, and competition among, different versions of the “same” Civil War song. However, print is not the only means by which one can mark such coexistence and competition. An extraordinary artifact held in the collections of the Boston Athenaeum offers an alternative. It is a well-worn, hand-bound book that collates three exceedingly rare 1863 southern songsters from the war: the Virginia Songster, the Southern Flag Song Book No. 3, and the Bonnie Blue Flag Songbook.18 The bringing together of these three printed songsters reflects materially a coexistence of, and competition among, Civil War songs because it conveniently places several distinct versions of the “same” song within the covers of a single book. Said book shows a great deal of readerly use; this was clearly a wellread (or well-sung) book. For instance, there are marginal comments throughout. The inside cover bears the following marginalia, which suggests the book’s provenance: “Bought this book at Augusta Georgia August [4th?] 1863 while on my way to Va, from Demopolis, Ala on furlough in company with J. K. Dougherty, James [Hif?], Llew Tillery, O. P. Bevans, Maj Robt. Williams and Col. McDowell all of the 3rd Mo Infantry [Berg ?] Cockrills Brigade, C.S.A.// Given by H. F. Semrall.” Another particularly endearing set of marginalia involves the addition of the name “Hattie” to the end of several romantic lyrics. For instance, the popular song “Ever of

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Figure 13.2. “additional words to Bonnie Blue flag as sung by the missourians during the war.” loose-leaf manuscript inserted into the Boston athenaeum’s copy of the virginia songster [P&w 6780]. Image courtesy of Boston athenaeum.

Thee” becomes “Ever of Thee, Hattie”; “I Love but Thee” becomes “I Love but Thee, Hattie.” In addition to these pencil markings, the book has two loose-leaf printed lyrics (“Bryant’s Songs/The Dream of Bonaparte” and “The Irishman’s Shanty”) pasted into its inside covers, suggesting that the owner of the book was in fact commonplacing lyrics. Finally and most provocatively, the book has tucked into its pages a manuscript of “Additional Words to Bonnie Blue Flag as Sung by the

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Missourians during the War” (fig. 13.2). That someone—presumably the book’s owner—would want to record for posterity a set of lyrics that had escaped the purview of this already capacious collection renders immediately intelligible the complementary nature of print, manuscript, and oral performance forms of Civil War song. These alternative lyrics, in turn, betray the always partial nature of print-as-archive, since, through a logic of representation, they gesture toward any number of alternative lyrics. Indirectly then, these handwritten lyrics speak resoundingly to the proliferation of publics that the war both enabled and required. After all, the authoritative definite article that this manuscript deploys—“as sung by the Missourians during the war”—begs the question, by which Missourians during the war? The state’s vexed decision to pledge allegiance to the Union despite the presence of strong Confederate sympathies led to a bewildering and bloody set of internal conflicts (Fellman). Such conflicts call into question the possibility of there being any single, unified set of “Missourians” during and immediately after the Civil War and hint at the existence of numerous other “additional lyrics.”

“SileNt throuGh the verSe S”

As the “Missourians” above suggest, rampant revisionism and a resulting proliferation of publics also raise the specter of competitive lyrical repertoires. The American Civil War brought together diverse groups of men and women and, through the extraordinary discourse networks on which all war is predicated, formed equally diverse publics. Such a proliferation raises the question: What happens when a given group knows multiple, competing sets of lyrics to the same tune, air, or melody? A 1904 publication entitled Joint Committee Appointed to Consider and Report on a Selection of New Words for “Dixie” offers a partial answer. The committee was formed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, United Confederate Veterans, and Sons of United Confederate Veterans to consider “an argument in favor of the adoption of [a single] version” of “Dixie.” The committee states clearly the rationale for such an adoption: “Since so many versions now exist and a different one is being used in every place, it is impossible for any assembly to sing ‘Dixie’ when the words to be used are unfamiliar. As has been already demonstrated in our gatherings, the

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chorus will be sung with a vim, but all are silent through the verses. Let us unite in the selection of one ‘Dixie’ and upon this be a solid South” (2–3). At the heart of this report are the difficulties posed by a multiplicity of “Dixies”: multiplicity per se. Multiple versions of the song are tantamount to competing versions, with “a different one . . . being used in every place.” Such diversity, the report suggests, actually inhibits the ability for the song to help imagine the postwar southern communities that the report represents: “but all are silent through the verses.” The committee continues, “Once our Confederate organizations have agreed upon rythmic words of patriotic fervor . . . it will be a question of a very short time when the song ‘Dixie’ will be used in our public schools, sung on all patriotic occasions, and known by heart, as the air is now known by every child. In such union of purpose nothing is impossible! Is not this our duty in making and preserving history?” (3). We see again in this remarkable, red-blooded passage an operative distinction between an air that is “known by heart” and a set of nonuniform, competing lyrics. The accompanying rhetoric of patriotism, “union of purpose,” and possibility—above all, rhetoric of a “solid South”—speaks elegantly to the regionalist and nationalist ends of song during this period.19 In turn, the committee’s invocation of a “solid South” both imagines and attempts to realize a postwar southern community no longer riven by internal conflicts. It is not surprising, then, that the “poetic world making” at stake in this example—the re-formation of a “solid South”—is a world making predicated on the selection of a single, uniform version of “Dixie” (Warner 114). That these veterans’ groups would feel compelled to form a committee to adjudicate which words should be sung over “Dixie” (not to mention sung in “Dixie”) evinces just how high the stakes were, and sometimes continue to be, for the lyrical content of this oft-revised song.20

“Swell the ChoruS”

As several cultural historians have suggested, music and musical performance were essential aspects of the imagining of both the United States and the Confederate States of America during this period.21 Indeed, music was integral to the practices of everyday life in nineteenth-century

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America in ways that may seem curious or obscure to our contemporary critical moment. Nonetheless, as Caroline Moseley contends, “More people, regardless of sex and social station, sang out loud in front of other people than is customary today, and more in wartime than in time of peace” (48). Yet how can twenty-first-century auditors hear those songs? Given that the Civil War predated the technologies that enabled sound recording, how might we “listen” to the Civil War and its many singing publics? The historian Mark M. Smith suggests that, in the absence of aural recordings of these songs and sounds, transcriptions such as Higginson’s and anecdotes such as Hotze’s remain “powerful and palpable because the printed words used to convey the various sounds and their meanings rendered aurality permanent and rescued them from the ephemerality of voice” (8). Although Smith remains skeptical about the “much privileged world of music,” reminding us that music and voice were but “some among many sounds” in nineteenth-century America, his call to aural action underscores—or, better, bellows—how much is lost when we “understand the past in one-fifth of its texture and scope” (6) and when we do not “listen to hearing”: “Missing and distorted are texture, meaning, and depth, not to mention storylines themselves. Indeed, new storylines— causal and explanatory—begin to emerge once we start to listen to hearing” (262). One of the story lines that emerges from such listening is the coexistence of, and competition among, different “war-lyrics” and the publics they helped to realize. In such a story line, the complementary relationships among manuscript, print, and performance have extraordinary “causal and explanatory” power, in no small part because these relationships prove a privileging of printed versions of Civil War songs to be historically myopic. While, pace Smith, print may well have “rescued” songs from the ephemerality of voice, it also has a tendency to silence the cacophony of competing and alternative voices. By positing both definitive versions of songs (such as a standardized “Dixie”) and uniform singing publics (such as “the Missourians during the war”), print can both amplify and drown out the sounds and songs of the American Civil War. The anecdotes and artifacts discussed here beg us to take seriously all those “Dixies” and “Bonnie Blue Flags” that were sung widely but never found their way into print. As I have been suggesting, non- and extraprint versions of these songs offer us the opportunity to trace much

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more carefully those “individualistic and local patterns” that, Trachtenberg argues, the Civil War helped to overturn. These errant versions also offer us an index of the relative cultural autonomy that the publics of the “Singing Sixties” enjoyed and suggest the mechanism by which that autonomy was secured: the promise of a near-perpetual process of revision. Thus, by “listening” to all versions of Civil War songs—even and especially those that eluded print—we gain a much more capacious sense of the cultures of both musical performance and revisionism that characterized the world the war made. But if we are to eschew a printcentric history of the Civil War song, we must reconceptualize both our methodology and our archive. We must seek out not only print and manuscript versions of Civil War songs but also accounts and descriptions of versions of those songs that have gone missing. Though we may never be able to “recapture” such “specimens,” their existence in anecdotes is something that demands our attention—and our listening. All of this brings to mind the familiar words of Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature” (Basler iv, 271).22 In view of the delicate musical pun and/or mixed metaphor here, one cannot help but wonder which “mystic chords of memory”? Remembering that the United States did not have an official national anthem until 1931, which “chorus of the Union”? (As the preceding suggests, there was no shortage of choruses during this period.) More to the point, even if that longed-for “swell” of the “chorus” had been “sung with a vim,” would all have been “silent through the verses”? The culture of revisionism that attended and produced the Civil War song gives such questions an urgency and depth well worth sounding.

NoteS

This essay has benefited from the feedback of audiences at the American Antiquarian Society, Boston Athenaeum, Society for Textual Scholarship, University

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of Delaware, University of Texas at Austin, and Northwestern University. I am particularly grateful to those audience members who sang along. 1. It is further of note that “speech-manuscript-print” explicitly extends the argument of McKenzie’s sublime 1986 study of relationships among oral culture, print, and literacy in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Thus McKenzie’s theorization of “complementary, not competitive” relationships among “speechmanuscript-print” seems just that, a theoretical model for understanding transhistorical relationships among coexistent forms of discourse. See introduction to McKenzie, esp. 7–9. 2. My discussion of competition among singing publics is of course indebted to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of competition in fields of cultural production. Bourdieu’s insistence on the at times violent dynamism of such fields, of the “permanent conflict” (34) that characterizes cultural production, has helped me to frame both my argument and my methodology. That said, while I would indeed contend that struggle is the “generative, unifying principle” (34) of the field of cultural production of Civil War–era song, my argument neither comprises nor considers the economic and cultural-capitalistic aspects of such struggle. As such, this discussion of both “competition” and “autonomy” follows Bourdieu only in the loosest sense. 3. I am aware that my use of the word publics to describe the social spaces created by song may prove a bit controversial, or, worse, a bit obscure. In what sense can a song constitute a public? Michael Warner’s searching and axiomatic “Publics and Counterpublics” suggests how. Though at no point does the essay discuss musical performance as a form of public discourse per se, Warner’s seven “rules” for a public strongly support my use. See Publics and Counterpublics 65–124. Rather than belabor here the conformity of Civil War–era song to Warner’s rules, I will instead gesture paratextually toward such conformity throughout the essay. 4. Warner’s first rule is a deceptively simple one: “A public is selforganized” (67). Though there is an argument to be made about the compulsive and coercive nature of military service during the American Civil War, the spontaneous and dynamic nature of camp song suggests self-organization. In addition, the transitory movement of soldiers during wartime ensured that the resulting social spaces remained dynamic, especially in terms of who was singing at any given moment. Such dynamism, in turn, addresses Warner’s second rule: that a public be a “relation among strangers” (74). See Higginson, “Negro Spirituals”; Wiley, Life of Billy Yank 157–69 and Life of Johnny Reb 151–56. 5. See my “Whistling.” 6. Efforts to collate and catalog Civil War–era sheet music, broadsides, and songsters are still very much in process, as Kirsten Schultz’s helpful study of

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Confederate songsters suggests. Until scholars complete a thorough, systematic census of these materials, estimates of sales, publication, and circulation numbers for Civil War songs will remain just that, mere estimates. 7. Warner’s fifth rule defines a public as “the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse” (90). For Warner a public is thus “an ongoing space of encounter for discourse. Not texts themselves create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time. Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and when a responding discourse can be postulated, can a text address a public” (90). The concatenation of versions of “Dixie,” and especially those versions that seem to respond directly to previous versions (such as “Dixie for the Union”), exemplifies the circuits of reflexive circulation and “responding discourse” that Warner describes. 8. Tellingly, Matthews’s essay reproduces images of manuscript versions of James R. Randall’s “My Maryland!” Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and John S. Gibbons’s “Three Hundred Thousand More.” While it seems clear that Matthews hopes to impart authorial aura by including these “autograph” versions, the poorly reproduced images also evoke complementary, not competitive, relationships among manuscript, print, and performance. 9. The most popular—which is to say most revised—of these songs included “Gay and Happy,” “The Happy Land of Canaan,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “John Brown’s Body/Hallelujah Chorus,” “Marseillaise Hymn,” several Scots-Irish folk tunes, a series of blackface minstrel songs, and, of course, “Dixie.” See Mahar; Wiley, Life of Billy Yank esp. 157–69 and Life of Johnny Reb 151–56. On the North and South sharing an “extensive prewar repertoire” of songs, see Moseley, esp. 45. 10. Schultz later ably articulates the social importance of songsters to the Civil War soldier: “a collection of lyrics that helped [the soldier] and his comrades to entertain themselves, to express their emotions in a culturally acceptable manner, to proclaim shared values, and to strengthen their ties to their comrades, family, community, or country” (164). On the relationship between songsters and sheet music, see Schultz, esp. 136–38. 11. See Schultz 148–49 for a discussion of the importance of familiar tunes to the popularity of specific songsters. 12. Higginson was an active abolitionist and one of the so-called Secret Six who helped fund John Brown’s doomed 1859 Harpers Ferry raid. 13. “Negro Spirituals” was reprinted as chap. 9 of Army Life. See Looby’s essays (“As” and “Flowers”) as well as his important edition of Higginson’s wartime journals and correspondence. 14. For instance, John Picker calls Higginson’s “Negro Spirituals” a “watershed in literature, music, and sociology, as the first substantial published collection of African American ‘slave spirituals’” (10). See also Cruz, esp. 145–50.

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15. On the “partiality” of transcriptions of slave spirituals, see Radano. 16. Picker goes on to argue that Higginson seeks “to fix [the songs] in a particular language and context, in essence to impose the settled qualities of print on transformative specimens of orality” (14). I am suggesting that all Civil War songs might be usefully discussed as “transformative specimens of orality.” 17. Noting that the phrase “Civil War songs” is something of an anachronism, one “which would have meant nothing to anyone in 1863,” Caroline Moseley defines “Civil War songs” as “the songs sung by Americans of the 1860s: parlor songs dating from the 1830s, 40s and 50s—some by American composers, most by Europeans; minstrel show songs of the 1840s and 50s; the traditional songs of the Afro-American slaves; the traditional songs of the Anglo-American immigrants; and numberless sets of words to any of those tunes” (45–46). Moseley’s inclusion of slave songs in her definition strongly supports the “kindred” relationship I am suggesting here. 18. The book is catalogued as P&W 6780. See Parrish and Willingham. 19. These regionalist and nationalist ends of song also evoke Warner’s final rule: that a public is a “poetic world making.” Warner opines, “All discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate and it must attempt to realize that world through address” (114). In the case of Civil War–era song, one witnesses repeated attempts to both characterize and realize such worlds. 20. For a lengthy discussion of efforts to adopt a uniform “Dixie,” see Simpson. 21. See, for instance, Moseley; Heaps and Heaps; Olson; Abel; and Faust. 22. As Basler notes, this paragraph was itself heavily revised. In one early draft the musical metaphor was much more explicit: “All the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet . . . again harmonize in their ancient music” (262).

workS Cited

Abel, E. Lawrence. Singing the New Nation: How Music Shaped the Confederacy, 1861–1865. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2000. Basler, Roy Prentice, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Bonnie Blue Flag Songbook. 3rd ed. Augusta: Blackmar and Bros., 1863. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

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Browne, Francis F., ed. Bugle-Echoes: A Collection of Poems of the Civil War, Northern and Southern. New York: White, Stokes and Allen, 1886. Cruz, Jon. Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Fellman, Michael Dinion. Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Heaps, Willard Allison, and Porter Warrington Heaps. The Singing Sixties. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870. ———. The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Ed. Christopher Looby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. “Negro Spirituals.” Atlantic Monthly June 1867: 685–94. [Hotze, Henry]. “Three Months in the Confederate Army: The Tune of Dixie.” Index 26 June 1862: 140. Hutchison, Coleman. “Whistling Dixie for the Union (Nation, Anthem, Revision).” American Literary History 19.3 (2007): 603–28. Looby, Christopher. “‘As Thoroughly Black as the Most Faithful Philanthropist Could Desire’: Erotics of Race in Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment.” Race and the Subject of Masculinities. Ed. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 71–115. ———. “Flowers of Manhood: Race, Sex and Floriculture from Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Robert Mapplethorpe.” Criticism 37.1 (1995): 109–56. Mahar, William. “March to the Music: Twenty Top Hits of the Sixties.” Civil War Times Illustrated 23.5 (1984): 13–14, 18, 41–45. Matthews, Brander. “The Songs of the War.” Century 34 (1887): 619–29. McKenzie, D. F. Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays. Ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael Felix Suarez. Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 2002. Miles, William. Songs, Odes, Glees, and Ballads: A Bibliography of American Presidential Campaign Songsters. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Moseley, Caroline. “Irrepressible Conflict: Differences between Northern and Southern Songs of the Civil War.” Journal of Popular Culture 25.2 (1991): 45–56. Olson, Kenneth E. Music and Muskets: Band and Bandsmen of the American Civil War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.

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Parrish, T. Michael, and Robert M. Willingham Jr. Confederate Imprints: A Bibliography of Southern Publications from Secession to Surrender. Austin: Jenkins, 1987. Picker, John M. “‘Red War Is My Song’: Whitman, Higginson, and Civil War Music.” Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood. Ed. Lawrence Kramer. New York: Garland, 2000. 1–23. Radano, Ronald. “Denoting Difference: The Writing of the Slave Spirituals.” Critical Inquiry 22.3 (1996): 506–43. The Rebel Songster. Richmond, VA: Ayres and Wade, 1863. “Relic.” Def. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Schultz, Kirsten M. “The Production and Consumption of Confederate Songsters.” Bugle Resounding: Music and Musicians of the Civil War Era. Ed. Mark A. Snell and Bruce C. Kelley. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 133–68. Simpson, John A. “Shall We Change the Words of Dixie?” Southern Folklore Quarterly 45 (1981): 19–40. Smith, Mark M. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Southern Flag Song Book No. 3. Vicksburg, MS: H. C. Clarke, 1863. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. ———. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. United Daughters of the Confederacy, United Confederate Veterans, and Sons of United Confederate Veterans. Joint Committee Appointed to Consider and Report on a Selection of New Words for “Dixie.” Opelika, AL, 1904. “Unwritten.” Def. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Virginia Songster. Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1863. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone, 2002. Whitehead, Colson. John Henry Days. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Wiley, Bell Irvin. The Life of Billy Yank, the Common Soldier of the Union. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943. ———. The Life of Johnny Reb, the Common Soldier of the Confederacy. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Chapter FourteeN

the state between orality and textuality Nineteenth-Century Government Reports and “Orature”

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This essay’s starting point is the much-celebrated Lewis and Clark expedition. In late September 1806, after three years of traveling in the West, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their Corps of Discovery arrived in St. Louis. They immediately began informing their superiors and the public at large about their extraordinary voyage. Lewis wrote a letter to President Thomas Jefferson in which he claimed to have found the most practical route across the continent and sketched his vision for a massive fur-trade empire in the Northwest. He subsequently composed another communication about their travels, this time for the newspapers. Accompanied by an entourage that included Chief Big White, he then journeyed to Washington, D.C. Finally, on New Year’s Day, Lewis met his mentor Jefferson in person. According to one description, the two men got down on their hands and knees to examine the expedition’s valuable map. Lewis stayed at the president’s house for three months of lengthy face-to-face discussions. This intensive debriefing did not conclude the course of reporting. The two explorers took advantage of many additional opportunities to recount their experience in public. During dinner parties and formal balls, around campfires and in taverns, they answered questions, made speeches, and shared endless 276

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anecdotes about the marvels of the wilderness—about grizzlies and otters, soaring mountains, and numerous brushes with danger (Large; Ambrose 406–21). Despite all of their efforts to impart knowledge, contemporary and even more so latter-day commentators have lamented Lewis and Clark’s apparent failure to produce a report—a grand document that would have described in detail the path of the expedition and explicated its scientific findings. Lewis had planned a three-volume account. He contacted a Philadelphia publisher and even hired naturalists and artists to assist him in rendering the project. For one reason or another—historians still debate the matter—he was never able to put a single word to paper. His suicide in 1809 only added to the mystery. Five years later, an abridged version of the expedition’s journals, edited by Nicholas Biddle, became available. Another ninety years would pass before the two explorers’ findings would be published in full (Cutright). In contrast to the uncertainty and inexperience that characterized this historic episode, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century the federal government turned into an enterprising publisher and many of its explorers emerged as accomplished authors. It supervised the printing, binding, and mass circulation of countless reports and documents, including expedition narratives, farming primers, and presidential messages, among other print ephemera that have become a staple of the modern state. This essay interrogates the literary-bureaucratic genre of the official policy report of which expedition accounts were a subset. As is evident in the Lewis and Clark case, reporting practices are diverse and feature a continuum of oral exchange, manuscript, and print. They include delivering public addresses, engaging in conversations, maintaining journals and diaries, writing letters, and publishing documents. I argue that despite the privileged status granted the printed text in this panoply of communication techniques, the official report has never lost its proximity to public speaking. The genre of the report has been rather neglected in the history of the book. The designation report applies to loosely connected types of conveyed information, news, legal accounts, statements about investigations, and even petty communications such as rumors. Nevertheless, within institutions such as the military or government, reporting typifies hierarchy. It frequently involves the transmission of information from a

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subordinate to a superior. By making reports, even those in positions of power indicate that equal or greater authority resides with the recipients. This is the case with elected officials reporting to the legislature—and ultimately to the people—or officers of voluntary organizations who are expected to inform their membership. The forms and contents of such presentations and dispatches are governed by protocols, as are their modes of delivery. The duty to report—as much as reporting for duty— implies presence, for relating or narrating information within a system of power invokes direct, unmediated presentation. Official reports are quintessential print products. Voluminous, tediously long, they often betray the excessive attachment of the modern bureaucratic state to the printing press. Yet written reports coexist with, and are generative of, a web of oral communications. Some forms of official writing bear direct resemblance to orality as theorized over the past few decades. Elephantine documents, whose production requires that forests and rivers of ink be sacrificed, reproduce features associated with orality, as they often grow aggregative, redundant, and meandering (Ong). Such attributes are rooted in these tomes’ archival dimension and their compilers’ proclivity for editorial bricolage, manifested in the habit of cobbling up official accounts out of endless, largely unrevised, letters, journals, and other such documents that are indiscriminately committed to print. Reporting routines and the printed reports may be best described as “orature,” a communicative category that straddles the divide between literature and orality. The term orature was coined in decolonized Africa, where it was first employed in the 1960s by the Ugandan linguist Pio Zimiru. Writing from a critical, postcolonial perspective, the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o conceives of orature as a comprehensive aesthetic system that refuses hierarchy among modes of communication (Ngugi 103–28). Despite the radically different context in which the concept originated, I contend that “orature” is pertinent to rethinking the state’s communicative practices as well as aspects of the modern public sphere in general. According to Joseph Roach, who employed the category to great effect in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, “[Orature] acknowledges that [particular] modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time and that their historic operations may be usefully examined under the rubric

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performance” (11–12). Indeed, the policy report—a key feature of modern public culture—is enveloped by a set of performances that accompany its production, submission, and circulation. The fanfare with which major investigative reports are submitted to the president or presented to the public is exceedingly familiar today, largely for the theatrics of photo opportunities and press conferences in which official authors deliver their tomes and summarize their findings and recommendations. (The recent presentation of the 9/11 Commission report furnishes a fine contemporary example.) The official report is forever moving, changing hands, cited on its way to some department or sent to Congress. Indeed, many nineteenthcentury reports were framed as letters. The epistolary format suggests an affinity between the report and the genre of the eighteenth-century political pamphlet that was also fashioned as a letter. At the same time, nineteenth-century government reports were packaged, disseminated, and even consumed as books and could be found in libraries or purchased in bookstores. In fact, the antebellum public sphere was cluttered with annual and special reports, promiscuously circulated by Congress, state and city governments, reform associations, individual reformers, and philanthropists. The report supplemented (and at a certain point replaced) the pamphlet as the archetypal political genre, signifying the bureaucratization of public life and the early stages of expert culture. Its publication constituted an event that instigated threads of printed and oral responses. Reports begot other reports in newspapers and elsewhere. In the nineteenth century, the press too elaborated its reporting techniques as well as the persona of the reporter. A good example of a much-anticipated official communication was the massive Annual Message of the president. Preparing this document, the White House stitched together numerous accounts from executive departments, which it wrapped in general remarks on directions and priorities of the federal administration. The document was sent by special carriages to major newspapers ahead of time so that they would be able to review and excerpt it on the day of its formal presentation to Congress. Tendering the Message, the president fulfilled his constitutional duty to inform the federal legislature. George Washington and John Adams delivered their Messages as speeches in Congress, but Jefferson abstained from addressing Congress in the flesh, instituting instead a

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new convention of sending printed documents to Capitol Hill under the pretext that the old custom was “an English habit, tending to familiarize the public with monarchical ideas” (Tulis 56). The most coveted government publication was the annual agricultural report of the Patent Office, which commenced publication in the late 1840s. It was an illustrated volume that featured a mélange of articles on the recent innovations in field cultivation and animal husbandry, improved seeds, and other minutiae of interest mainly to farmers. By the end of the century, this document was printed in four hundred thousand copies. In 1880, the Commissioner of Agriculture complained that while the print run of this primer was greater than that of any annual book ever published, it was not yet half large enough to meet the “reasonable and pressing demand” (Harrison 54). Congress engaged in other printing projects as well. Beginning in the late 1810s, it committed itself to fund serial publications that reproduced and preserved the documentary heritage of the nation. These large undertakings included projects such as the American State Papers, Annals of Congress, and American Archives. With the age of territorial expansion, expeditions and explorations nourished large publishing enterprises. In the early 1840s, legions of American readers were introduced to the West through John C. Frémont’s narratives on his travels to Oregon and California, which also became an indispensable tool for westbound emigrants. In the following decade, Congress invested enormous resources in ostentatious expedition reports, some of which were adorned with embossed leather binding and brimming with high-quality woodcuts and tinted lithographs (and even early chromolithographs), as well as illustrations produced by the somewhat more dated technique of steel engraving. The practice of enhancing illustrations by using handapplied color to ensure the fidelity of the image to the natural world was incredibly expensive. Illustrators also began employing daguerreotypes as a source material for their drawings. The most exuberant federal print product of the 1850s was arguably the twelve volumes issued to document a series of expeditions launched to determine the path of the much-anticipated transcontinental railroad (United States War Department). The production of these reports, with their true-to-life illustrations of western scenery and native people, cost twice as much as all of the actual expeditions combined.

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As manifested in the Lewis and Clark case, the report was linked to action, indivisible from the execution of an official assignment. Like other aspects of the commission, reportage followed recognizable patterns that were constantly rehearsed and refined. Thus, for example, iconic expeditions, such as Frémont’s journeys to the West, provided models for both reconnaissance and writing. The state apparatus also became accustomed to the mechanics of generating reports, either in fixed intervals, to satisfy the expectation that government would offer periodic accounts of its activities, or under special circumstances. In the case of expeditions, publishing was also necessitated by the protocols of science that since the seventeenth century had linked discovery with accepted procedures of publication (Johns). The report’s trajectory through the stages of production, from translating notes and other field objects to script to final circulation, could become itself an expedition, a complicated and somewhat risky mammoth undertaking that demanded great resources and manpower. It was also an endeavor that could go awry. At times it seemed easier (let alone cheaper) to send ships to remote oceans or a group of soldiers to uncharted deserts than to publish a report describing those ventures. The famous United States Exploring Expedition to the Pacific was a four-year venture. The subsequent publications consumed another thirty years but were never completed. Government risked bad reviews and even ridicule. In 1861, English botanist Joseph Hooker wrote to his American colleague Asa Gray regarding the Exploring Expedition project: “Who on earth is to keep in their heads . . . such a medley of books—double-paged, double-titled, and half finished as your Government vomits periodically into the great ocean of Scientific bibliography” (Novak 129). Whereas many reports addressed the activities of the nascent executive branch, for instance, Indian policy, the federal legislature largely controlled the publishing process, especially before the Civil War. Lawmakers and congressional staff decided matters of design, binding, print run, and even style. Publication was at times the subject of fractious floor debates. On occasion, Congress subsidized books that were judged particularly useful to its business, many of which were dedicated to historical or scientific topics. Congress usually owned the manuscript and purchased perhaps one thousand or two thousand copies. The publisher could sell additional volumes at the same price. Congress also

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disseminated reports on its own performances, committee interviews, public hearings, and special investigations. Printed documents were thus incorporated into the dynamics of congressional discourse that was—and still is—strongly oral. After all, so much of the operation and so many of the traditions of Congress evolved around the spoken word. Indeed, antebellum American culture featured the concurrent flourishing of print and oral communication. At the same historical moment in which the American “order of the book” reached maturity— exemplified in a robust publishing industry, vast readership, and an emerging cadre of authors—the public arena was particularly conducive to speech, as exemplified, for instance, in stupendously attended political debates, such as the seven Lincoln-Douglas public exchanges of 1858. Antebellum public discourse honed a remarkable oratorical quality, from Henry Clay’s and Daniel Webster’s Senate floor flair to the elegant yet accessible “Saxon eloquence” of Abraham Lincoln with its heavy reliance on rhythm and cadence (Cmiel 116–20). Lincoln, who referred to printing as the “better half” of writing, regarded both as “assistants of speech in the communication of thoughts between man and man” (262). While Congress assumed the mantle of an energetic publisher, it also reconfigured the relationship between print and speech within its own walls by sponsoring the efforts to record and publish congressional debates and resolutions. Early congressional deliberations were covered, irregularly, by newspaper accounts, by privately maintained journals, or through short-lived publications such as Thomas Lloyd’s Congressional Register. By the early nineteenth century, the National Intelligencer (1802) and later the Register of Debates (1824) and the Congressional Globe (1833) undertook the task. While the scope and quality of reporting gradually improved, there were many errors in converting debates to script, and coverage was at times partial and sketchy (Amer 2). In 1848, the Senate voted to hire reporters to register debates. Led by James Houston of the Washington Union, this team utilized a new method of phonetic shorthand that had been developed a decade earlier by Isaac Pitman in Britain. When Houston recorded verbatim a speech by Daniel Webster, the New York Tribune enthused, “He took it down word for word as it issued from the lips of Mr. Webster and has given it at this early hour to the world” (Ritchie 30). Meanwhile the Globe became a semiofficial organ and took charge of congressional reporting. It printed

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debates as first-person narratives rather than third-person summations. By the mid-1850s, Congress paid fees for the Globe’s reporters and controlled its editorial policies until it was finally replaced by the state-run Congressional Record (1873). Like other textual practices, record keeping constitutes a genre that shapes knowledge as well as affects social relations and modes of interaction (Schryer). Advanced stenography—coupled with the political decision to establish a comprehensive chronicle of debate—regimented the relationship between lawmakers and their utterances in chamber. Not everybody was content with the new arrangements, for politicians found it increasingly difficult to disown or alter their statements. Lawmakers demanded—and, for a while, received—the privilege of “correcting” their remarks prior to publication. The introduction of telegraph-based journalism had a similar effect, as the production of news no longer relied on the personal relationship between congressmen and Washington reporters. The flow of information proved more resistant to control. By documenting the particulars of oral traffic, including elements of its delivery, reports of congressional debates as well as of other hearings, speeches, and meetings ultimately capture and relate to performance. The layout of official minutes often resembles the page of play scripts, in the sense that scripts identify actors and their exact utterances and also give clues about their behavior on stage. In the history of theater too, during the Renaissance for instance, manuscript and print have sometimes followed performance (Worthen 13–14). We should also keep in mind the centrality of the idea of voice to modern representational politics. The notion of having a voice in the public arena preserved the political standing of oral expressions despite the ascendance of print. For John Stuart Mill (33), across the Atlantic, print-based recording of facts and opinions was a necessary but flawed substitute for the kind of open and inherently aural exchange that generated, in his conception, a true democratic regime of public interest and public opinion. Rendering and circulating documents and accounts— beyond their specific content—provided the state with a venue to voice itself, to represent itself, and to make itself present or to “report itself” in an age in which the communication between the state and its public had to be mediated through print. The state would only increase its range of communicative performances with the introduction of additional

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electronic media in the twentieth century. The confluence of official reports and political voice had other representational assignments as well, especially when in midcentury federal and state governments began paying attention to social policy, and official hearings recorded and circulated the words of Indian chiefs, African American freedmen, and foreign immigrants. Presentation of reports included, at times, the reading of the document. To give one example, in June 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, an official panel, the American Freedmen Inquiry Commission, which was investigating the condition of the newly freed slaves, concluded its interim report and sought the attention of decision makers in Washington. Robert Dale Owen, a senior member of the commission, regarded it “to be of vital importance” that they present their written report to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in person and read it aloud. They anticipated needing at least two hours to read the report and to allow the secretary time to reflect on the issues under consideration. In another episode, Owen, who provided many services to Lincoln’s administration, showed up at the White House with a hefty document he had prepared on the historical precedents of amnesty in cases of rebellion and treason. He found the president alone and insisted that he read the report to him. Lincoln, reluctant at first, was grateful at the end of the short presentation (Carpenter 98–101). These anecdotes remind us that in previous centuries, especially in the preprint era, reading to a ruler from a work dedicated to him signified or performed the making of the text public, that is, its publication. Two years later, in 1865, portions of a report by Carl Schurz on the circumstances of the former Confederate states would be read in the Senate chamber. President Andrew Johnson dispatched Schurz, who had been a major general in the Union army, on a tour of inspection to the South. However, when it became apparent that Schurz opposed Johnson’s increasingly lenient policy toward former Confederates, the president snubbed his emissary. Since they kept a lively correspondence during the voyage, he had gotten more than an inkling of Schurz’s opinions as they were forming. In addition, Schurz published letters in newspapers such as the Boston Advertiser. The habit of parallel reporting to the president and to the public—Lewis and Clark also corresponded with the press, though under less contentious circumstances—was not unusual.

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Upon Schurz’s return from his journey of inspection he reported personally to the White House. After some back and forth, President Andrew Johnson finally agreed to meet with him briefly. However, when Schurz, as he later recounted in his memoirs, informed Johnson that he wished to supplement his letters to him with “an elaborate report giving [his] experiences and conclusions in a connected shape,” the president told him, in so many words, not to bother (Schurz 202). Additional requests to issue his report privately went unanswered. Congress decided to intervene. Republican senators demanded that the document be transmitted to Capitol Hill. Once it arrived as part of a communication from the president they insisted it be read on the floor together with another report on the South by Ulysses Grant, which was clearly friendlier to the administration (Congressional Globe 19 Dec. 1865: 78–80). Such treatment was usually reserved for official messages from the president, although a previous controversial report on the mid-1850s depredations in Kansas was also read in the Senate. (The gesture is reminiscent of the act of publicly reading a document into an official record—in which reading aloud inserts one written text into another—a procedure that has a parallel in courtroom practices.) The Senate and the House then ordered thirty-five thousand copies of Schurz’s document, which advocated far-reaching measures to transform the South. Seizing the report, whose nominal addressee was the president, and commandeering its publication path dramatized the cause of radical Reconstruction and symbolized a shift of power from the White House to Congress, which would define federal politics in the second half of the 1860s. Even prior to Reconstruction, senators and representatives dominated the “circuit” of the official report. This was evident in the dissemination of official print matter. By midcentury, Congress was printing each of its published papers in 1,500 copies, but in every session about ten to twenty documents had a much larger print run, at times reaching the 100,000 mark. These substantial editions were allocated to libraries, colleges, and learned associations (such as historical societies) among other institutions, but most copies arrived elsewhere. Members of Congress used their mailing privileges to send vast numbers of official publications to political allies, constituents, and dependable newspapers. Decisions on printing or procuring particular documents were thus made with great attentiveness to the reading preferences of voters, an

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assessment that was conspicuously colored by party affiliation as well as regional considerations. For example, in an 1850 discussion on the House floor over the printing of an additional ten thousand copies of a Treasury report on statistics of commerce and navigation, representative John A. McLernand, an Illinois Democrat, objected to the large number of copies proposed. As a source of practical information the report best suited the interests of navigators, merchants, and boards of trade. “It was such a document as the mass of the people would neither have leisure nor taste to trace into its arithmetic details” (Congressional Globe 17 Jan. 1850: 172). Behind the printing proposal, he identified the sectarian machination of those purporting to be the champions of internal improvement and commerce. In the same vein, Jacob Thompson, a fellow Democrat from Mississippi, added that the document would be particularly valued in the districts along the seacoast where the shipping interest was strong but not in the interior, among farmers. Since none of his constituents had ever requested the document, he assumed that they were not concerned with the details of trade and would be entirely satisfied with “aggregates”: “Some to whom I might send it, when they find it only a book of figures, might take up the conception that I only sent it to them to puzzle their brains.” The Congressional Globe stenographer heard someone in the hall sneering, “Perhaps your constituents cannot read.” Thompson was offended. “My constituents need no defense for intelligence, and enterprise, and wealth” (Congressional Globe 17 Jan. 1850: 173). John Houston, a Delaware Whig, was surprised to hear that constituents took no interest in this account. From what other source would Mississippi farmers learn about the export of their greatest staple, cotton? He computed that the proposal would leave about three hundred copies for each of the thirty-four states and territories, five copies per county. His colleague from Mississippi would surely find five persons in each county of his district who would be interested. It was Thompson’s duty to encourage them to get interested in these figures and to make “a wise and patriotic use of them” (Congressional Globe 17 Jan. 1850: 174). This exchange revealed a range of sectional and political considerations: commerce versus farming, protectionism versus free trade. The debate juxtaposed two market-driven, supply-versus-demand views regarding the circulation of official knowledge: congressmen should abide by their

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constituents’ requests for particular information or, conversely, should elicit grassroots demand by stimulating interest. In countless congressional debates, senators and members of the House articulated divergent views concerning the dissemination of print and information. Some congressmen opined that it was incumbent upon government to inform the public directly through massive circulation of printed matter. A congressman from Ohio, David K. Cartter, maintained that government owed information to the people. In a debate over the publication of the Patent Office Agricultural Report he declared, “West of the mountains, the people got nothing from the Government but intelligence. Of the $30,000,000 which were annually taken from the people, to supply the Treasury, why should they not be permitted to receive back five mills on the dollar, in the way of information?” (Congressional Globe 7 Mar. 1850: 475). Others preferred that the marketplace assume the task of disseminating knowledge. Members of Congress who endorsed vast circulation often borrowed from the language of classical republicanism. Others emphasized the utility of knowledge to commerce, farming, and manufacturing besides other facets of economical and social life, including the settling on new lands. At times, the informational mission of the state was conceived in terms of instructing or educating the people. Such didactic sentiment resonated with rapid growth of the public school systems throughout the country. Justifications for publication also rested on patriotic arguments by which lavishly executed documents stood for the nation’s might, advancement, and generosity. Lawmakers frequently compared their print products with those offered by Britain, France, and other European nations. In its views of knowledge, antebellum America proved susceptible to the kind of utopianism that guided James Smithson’s bequest and the Smithsonian Institution’s subsequent commitment to increase the diffusion of knowledge across national boundaries. When in the 1840s the Frenchman Alexandre Vattemare promoted his pioneering ideas for a system of international exchange of government publications (as well as surplus books, works of art, and scientific specimens), he received support from Congress as well as from state governments (Nash). Vattemare was a famed ventriloquist and impersonator and later a key figure in the public libraries movement, in fact a founder of Boston Public Library. In 1848, as a result of Vattemare’s lobbying initiatives, Congress

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passed an act to regulate the international exchange of official papers, and for a while Vattemare was appointed as the agent for that purpose. Vattemare couched his system of reciprocal circulation as a means to bring harmony among governments and nations, “to cultivate the spirit of peace and reciprocal respect and good feeling” (Richards 428). The Smithsonian also engaged in the international circulation of scientific documents. The ongoing tension between republican ideals that lingered in the American literary world (McGill) and the emerging marketplace with its own mechanisms and ethos thus provided only one set of coordinates for a debate about publication (and knowledge) policy that was multivalent and complex. For one, those who supported keeping the printer busy in the name of informing the people had to concede that even the most generous circulation of documents could never be universal. Ultimately, congressmen had to select individuals within their circles of political allies or among their constituents to receive official literature. Arguments in favor of relying on the power of the press to disseminate information (or the profit drive of private printers who were already reprinting popular official documents) emphasized that only the market would allow indiscriminate access. Similarly, when George Townsend, the Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, wrote in favor of the marketplace approach to public knowledge, his views were tinged with a republican sensibility. In the recurrent official attempts to instruct the people, Townsend saw an overbearing, schoolmarmish didacticism. Government should leave the people alone to make their own maps and produce their own books. The state did have a role, however. It should create the market conditions for authorship rather than assume this function itself. How? By signing an international copyright law, which would not cost a cent but “will at once raise authorship to a profession here, and out of authorship will come maps, facts, excursions, discoveries, and books, all the more valuable that the people were rational enough to do them without law” (Townsend 240–41). This prescription notwithstanding, Congress was already deeply involved in the marketplace of print and publication. Prior to the establishment of the Government Printing Office in 1861, publication of official documents, especially the more elaborate expedition reports, relied on an army of private printers, publishers, embossers,

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and lithographers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The publishing house of Lippincott, Grambo & Company in Philadelphia, to give an example, earned a national reputation on the basis of its production of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Congress-sponsored survey on the Indian tribes of America. In June 1864, Congress authorized the superintendent of public printing to sell documents printed at the Government Printing Office to the public at cost. However, early efforts to offer federal documents for purchase yielded mostly disappointing results, and official publications were still allotted to members of Congress in large numbers (United States Senate 12–13). (The plan to peddle documents for general sale followed in the footsteps of the British example; from the mid-1830s onward parliamentary papers were sold to the public.) Regardless of rhetoric, congressmen were attached to their privilege to allocate printed documents, which informed their relations with their constituents. The privilege also made them, in effect, literary gatekeepers, publishers, and book-mongers. Surviving archival collections from the mid-nineteenth century reveal that senators and congressmen were in frequent correspondence with constituents and others over applications for public documents. There are additional indications that the public developed an interest in government reports—of course, in some documents more than others. They were read either in full or in part through extensive excerpts in the press. Expeditions and other natural history reports were prized for the aesthetic value of their illustrations. Some citizens collected public documents to enrich their private libraries. Yet it did not escape contemporaries that many gratuitously circulated official documents were resold by recipients (in Capitol Hill and elsewhere) to bookstores for profit. Critics complained about wastefulness and corruption. Viewed through the lens of the long history of the book, the policy report crafted by an official, a lawmaker, or a commissioned expert harks back to the early modern custom of offering books as gifts of knowledge from a writer (and sometimes from a printer or a bookseller) in exchange for patronage. Roger Chartier writes that a dedication of a book to a prince is not just a mark of unequal power. “It is also a figure by means of which the prince seems himself praised as the primordial inspiration and the first author of the book . . . as if the writer . . . were offering him a work that was in fact his own” (Chartier 42; Davis). It is

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therefore of some interest that following Meriwether Lewis’s tragic death it was suggested that Jefferson assume the task of editing and publishing the expedition’s journals. The idea seemed quite sensible not merely because of the known intellectual capabilities of the (by then retired) president but primarily because this expedition had indeed been “authored” by him. Jefferson had contemplated this venture for decades and was intimately involved in its planning, organization, and execution. The proposal made perfect sense, yet Jefferson declined. Despite the similarities with the dynamics of princely patronage, the antebellum mass circulation of gratis documents inverted the rationale of the earlier practice, since most of the recipients of gifted books were not powerful rulers but rather ordinary citizens. Political representatives were allocating official publications to their constituents in exchange for their support. The age of democratic patronage also affected authorship. If early modern patronage prompted rulers to grant protection, employment, or compensation to authors, in the antebellum period individuals could become authors by first allying themselves with government. A Senate committee complained that heads of government bureaus had turned into aspiring “book makers.” They kept clerks working all year around—or so the accusation went—in order to obtain material with which to inflate their annual accounts (United States Senate 6). Senator Hannibal Hamlin charged that every person who had the desire to publish a book attached himself to some expedition or survey. By doing so he could secure a book at the expense of one of the houses of Congress. Therefore, it was not that government commissioned individuals to perform tasks; rather, individuals harnessed government to help them achieve their personal ambitions and rise as authors (Congressional Globe 26 Aug. 1850: 1665). Whereas in the previous century’s “republic of letters” publication decorum prescribed anonymity, in the nineteenth century the identity of report writers became paramount. A new sense of authorship developed under official auspices, even though many of these documents were the result of collaborative efforts. State-sponsored authorship combined elements of a market understanding of the concept with notions that were derived from other ideological wellsprings. Some officials regarded the opportunity to publish a report as a means to compensate them for hard labor performed for the public good. This certainly guided Meriwether

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Lewis’s decision to reap the fruits of authorship in the literary marketplace of the early republic. Jefferson too viewed this publication to be part of Lewis’s official remuneration. In later decades, when expeditions became standardized and their rank and file were largely made up of army officers and personnel, authorship denoted the importance of the mission and the status of the reporter, a distinction that ostensibly did not carry immediate financial rewards. This sense of heroic authorship, if you will, established a tacit continuity between an officer’s field command and his leadership by the writing desk as well as throughout the arduous process of producing a report as a book, dealing with printers, binders, and illustrators or with his subordinates who also participated in the making of the report. In 1853, when John Russell Bartlett, the publisher and ethnologist who served as commissioner of the Mexican Boundary Survey, was dismissed by a hostile Democratic administration and denied the opportunity of writing a comprehensive account on his tenure, he complained bitterly. He claimed to be a victim of discrimination: “No public officer has ever before met with the treatment that I have” (Bartlett, Washington). All reports of American surveys and explorations, whether domestic or otherwise (including expeditions to the Amazon), were officially issued and distributed without charge. Bartlett led a public campaign and even received some support in Congress, but to no avail. He had to satisfy his craving for authorship with a private publisher that could compensate him monetarily but could not confer on him the honor of official reportage (Bartlett, Personal Narrative). Commodore Matthew Perry chose the Reverend Francis L. Hawks, rector of Calvary Church in New York City, to compose his report on his historic journey to Japan. Perry first invited Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he had met in Liverpool, to write the narrative of the expedition but then rejected Hawthorne’s proposal to entrust Herman Melville with the task (Kleitz). Perry regarded Hawks as merely a compiler. Nonetheless, despite all of his efforts to efface his authorship in the name of neutrality—and though only Hawks’s name graces the title page—the work has been inseparable from Perry (Morison 420). The public recognized him as the author of the report, for which he both received adulations and took personal responsibility. As he wrote (referring to himself in the third person) in the preface, “Every word of the work was read to

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the Commodore in manuscript, and received his correction before it was sent back to the press” (Perry iv). Still, official authorship yielded more tangible benefits than ethereal fame. Well into the middle decades of the century, there was constant wrangling over publication rights and an endemic confusion over private versus public property in official documents. For example, Captain Charles Wilkes raised eyebrows when he issued a personal copyright for future commercial editions of his narrative report on the course of the United States Exploring Expedition. Wilkes explained that the Narrative was not the original report he had sent to the Navy Department but a distinct document written specifically at the request of the congressional Library Committee. He further justified the unusual copyright for a government publication in terms of personal integrity: “My object in so doing was to protect my reputation, being unwilling that a garbled edition should be printed by others” (United States House 6). Commodore Perry ordered all journals, diaries, and correspondence kept by subordinates to be turned in for the benefit of the expedition’s final report. Nevertheless, he entered a feud with the expedition’s botanist (or “agriculturalist”) Dr. James Morrow, who retained his journal and the dry specimens and after arrival in New York proceeded to Boston to present this collection to Asa Gray so that the famed scientist would classify them. Morrow claimed he was under State Department jurisdiction rather than that of the navy and planned his own separate report that would include his journals, sketches, and the list of dried specimens. Perry pressured Gray to surrender the list to him and after a long skirmish won the day (Morison 421–23). Still, a renegade account was published by J. W. Spalding, the ship’s clerk on the Susquehanna, and other journals surfaced later (Barrows 345–46). The scuffles over publication rights among the various echelons of an expedition became characteristic of such ventures. The first race between expedition leaders and their underlings for the printing press was occasioned by Lewis and Clark’s homecoming, when to Lewis’s great annoyance—and alarm—Sergeant Patrick Gass, a member of the Corps of Discovery, was quick to publish his journals, prompting Lewis to assault them in the press as “unauthorized . . . spurious publications” (Kimmel 80).

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In conclusion, I find the concept of orature fruitful for exploring the publishing arm of the nineteenth-century federal state and beyond. There is more of value to this category than simply introducing a dimension of orality to a field that was supposedly dominated by print. Orature circumvents the questionable—and easily deconstructible—dichotomy between print and orality altogether by foregrounding performance instead. It thus places the production and circulation of texts in a larger economy of exchange between the state and its publics, an economy that has both tangible and symbolic dimensions. The appearance of printed texts on the stage of the state is always coupled with ritual. Elements of performance are also evident in the production, circulation, and consumption of nonofficial books as well as other print matter such as newspapers and journals. Nonetheless, performativity is a particularly strong feature of state communication, intrinsic to the manner in which the modern state performs itself (Gustafson chap. 6). At the same time, print and publication are not merely tools to empower government. The state that undergirds print culture is also encumbered by it. Thus, as we have seen, the rules of official reportage may have signified the power of the state but could also be subverted and employed in ways inimical to its purposes: for example, by individuals who sought authorship sponsored by the state or by political foes that could intercept and redeploy official communications, as in the case of Carl Schurz’s report on the South. Orature also points to alternatives to the conventional narrative about the history of communication that overemphasizes the transition from orality to textuality. Consider, for instance, that although in the early nineteenth century Jefferson chose not to deliver his presidential message in Congress, lest it seem too monarchlike, by the twentieth century the printed presidential Annual Message turned into the State of the Union address, replacing print with “oraturial” performance (Tulis 55–58, 133–34).

Note

I wish to thank Sandra Gustafson, Caroline Sloat, Alyson M. Cole, and the anonymous readers of the University of Notre Dame Press for their helpful

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remarks. For an extended discussion of government publishing in the nineteenth century, see Frankel, States of Inquiry.

workS Cited

Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Amer, Mildred L. “The Congressional Record: Content, History and Issues.” CRS Report to Congress 14 Jan. 1993. Barrows, Edward M. The Great Commodore: The Exploits of Matthew Calbraith Perry. 1935. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. Bartlett, John Russell. Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1854. ———. Washington Union, Bartlett Papers: Mexican Boundary Commission. Microfilm Edition, Scrapbook, reel 11, p. 277, clipping 2. John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI. Carpenter, F. B. Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The Story of a Picture. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866. Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Congressional Globe [Washington, DC] 17 Jan. 1850; 7 Mar. 1850; 26 Aug. 1850; 19 Dec. 1865. Cutright, Paul Russell. A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. Davis, Natalie Z. “Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 33 (1983): 69–88. Frankel, Oz. States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Frémont, Brevet Captain J. C. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843–44. Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1845. Gass, Patrick. A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery. Pittsburgh: Zadok Cramer, 1807. Gustafson, Sandra M. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

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Harrison, James L. 100 GPO Years, 1861–1961. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Kimmel, S. D. “Philanthropic Enterprise: The Imperial Contradiction of Republican Political Economy in Philadelphia during the Era of Lewis and Clark.” The Shortest and Most Convenient Route: Lewis and Clark in Context. Ed. Robert S. Cox. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004. 52–101. Kleitz, Dorsey. “Herman Melville, Matthew Perry, and the Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan.” Leviathan 8 (Oct. 2006): 25–32. Large, Arlen J. “Expedition Aftermath: The Jawbone Journals.” We Proceeded On 17.1 (1991): 12–23. Lincoln, Abraham. “Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions” [11 Feb. 1859]. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953. 3: 256–63. McGill, Meredith L. American Culture and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Mill, John Stuart. Writings on India. Vol. 30 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Ed. John M. Robson, Martin Moir, and Zawahir Moir. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Morison, Samuel Eliot. “Old Bruin”: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794–1858. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Nash, Suzanne. “Alexandre Vattemare: A 19th-Century Story.” Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes 3 (Sept. 2004): 1–17. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Owen, Robert Dale. Letter to Charles Sumner. 29 June 1863. The Papers of Charles Sumner: Microfilm Edition. Ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1988. Reel 28/647. Perry, Matthew Calbraith. Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan. 3 vols. Washington, DC: Nicholson, 1856. Richards, Elizabeth M. “Alexandre Vattemare and His System of International Exchange.” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 32.4 (1944): 413–48. Ritchie, Donald A. Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

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Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe. Inquiries Respecting the History, Present Condition, and Future Prospects, of the Indian Tribes of the United States. 6 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1851–57. Schryer, Catherine F. “Records as Genre.” Written Communication 10.2 (1993): 200–234. Schurz, Carl. The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz. Vol. 3. New York: McClure, 1908. Spalding, J. Willet. Japan and around the World. New York: Redfield, 1855. Townsend, George Alfred. Washington, Outside and Inside. Hartford, CT: Betts, 1873. Tulis, Jeffrey K. The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. United States. House. “Report from the Joint Library Committee.” House Report 160. 28th Cong., 2nd sess. Serial 468. ———. Senate. Cost of Public Printing and Distribution of Public Documents. Senate Report 247. 40th Cong., 3rd sess. Serial 1362. ———. War Department. Reports of the Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. 12 vols. in 13 pts. Washington, DC: Nicholson, 1855–61. Wilkes, Charles. Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, during the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. 5 vols. Philadelphia: Sherman, 1844. Worthen, W. H. “Disciplines of the Text: Sites of Performance.” The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. London: Routledge, 2004. 10–25.

Chapter FiFteeN

authentic revisions James Redpath and the Promotion of Social Reform in America, 1850–90

SuSan S. williaMS

The abolitionist and reformer James Redpath (1833–91) is today best known for his work with the Boston Lyceum Bureau (later Redpath Speakers’ Bureau), the first professional booking agency for lecturers in the United States. Redpath headed this agency from 1868 to 1875, during which time he amassed an impressive roster of speakers, including Susan B. Anthony, P. T. Barnum, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain. Yet Redpath’s work as a speaker’s agent is only one aspect of his multifaceted career: he was (to give only a partial list) a newspaper reporter for the abolitionist press; a friend, ally, and biographer of John Brown who spent several years in “bleeding Kansas”; the U.S. agent for Haitian emigration; a Civil War book publisher; a Union army reporter; a superintendent of the first integrated schools in Charleston, South Carolina; a clerk for congressional investigations of elections in the Reconstruction South; a proponent of Irish land reform; an editor of the venerable North American Review; and a friend of Jefferson Davis. Not all of his endeavors were successful: he called himself a “crusader of freedom,” but we might also call him, as historian Leonard F. Guttridge has, a “crusader of forlorn causes” (306). Yet the diversity of his work, and his efforts to make connections among various social and literary groups, have much to tell us about the production and revision of reform discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century. 297

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As a writer, editor, and publisher, Redpath strategically used a combination of manuscripts (transcripts made in shorthand and letters), print (newspapers, broadsides, magazines, and published books) and performance (private conversations and public speeches) to advance his various “crusades.” For example, his first book, The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (1859), is a collection of field interviews with slaves that he conducted during three trips to the South between 1854 and 1857. Redpath was able to record some of this material in shorthand, a skill he had first learned while working as a printer in Scotland (Horner 12). He reports in The Roving Editor that “my conversations with the slaves were written down as soon after they occurred as was convenient; occasionally, indeed, in stenographic notes, as the negroes spoke to me” (20). Redpath’s claims for the authenticity of these interviews, then, are directly tied to his ability, as a trained stenographer, to transcribe speech into manuscript notes; in one case, he states explicitly that he had recorded the remarks of a slave “in short hand [sic] as he uttered them” [61]).1 These manuscript notes, in turn, were printed in serial form (in pseudonymous columns in abolitionist newspapers) and then revised into a separate book. In that book, which he published under his own name, Redpath added a final section that combines his own observations with a range of sources, including snippets of southern preachers’ oratory, conversations with southern planters, and a personal letter to Charles Sumner from the abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe. Redpath’s overall goal in The Roving Editor was, as he put it, to enable “the bondman . . . in his own language (if I may employ the familiar phrase of political essayists and orators), to ‘define his position on the all-engrossing question of the day’” (2). This statement itself emblematizes Redpath’s narrative technique: providing frames for authentic oral accounts of slavery that are themselves framed by “familiar phrases” of print and oratory. Another of Redpath’s early works, a memorial for John Brown entitled Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (1860), employs a similar method. Here again, Redpath compiles speeches, essays, “brief testimonies,” letters, and poems about Brown, along with twenty-nine manuscript autographs. “This volume has cost me no little labor,” Redpath concedes in the introduction. “Apart from the correspondence which it has required, the immense number of journals that I have read in order to compile it,

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would hardly be credited” (8). This editorial labor, in turn, caused him to change his original plan of combining the memorials to Brown with reprints of the Declaration of Independence and biblical passages. Like the “familiar phrases of the day,” these documents “can easily be found in every library and every home” (9). Redpath’s narrative technique suggests the extent to which he viewed the relations between manuscript, print, and performance to be reciprocal rather than hierarchical, flexible rather than orderly and methodical. Yet the key point about his deployment of these various modes is that he put them together to achieve a specific political end: in the cases of the books above, to “speedily abolish slavery” (Roving 7) and to “fan the holy flame” kindled by John Brown into a “consuming fire” that “shall burn up . . . every vestige of [its] crime” (Echoes 5). He did not write with an “aim at a literary reputation” (Roving 20); instead, he functioned as a cultural editor whose particular goals could be achieved through a judicious mixture of manuscript, performance, and print.2 In what follows, I will focus on three specific moments in Redpath’s career: first, his work with the Haitian colonization movement and specifically with the Weekly Anglo-African newspaper, which he acquired in 1861; second, his work as a book publisher in 1863 and 1864 and his support of William Wells Brown and Louisa May Alcott in particular; and third, his collaboration with Jefferson Davis, whom he visited in the late 1880s in his capacity as managing editor of the North American Review. As I examine these particular moments, I will highlight the ways in which he used the relative strengths of manuscript, print, and performance to influence the public and to effect social change—even as his vision of that change shifted from revolution to reconciliation. Redpath acquired the Weekly Anglo-African newspaper in 1861, two years after it had been founded by Thomas Hamilton, one of New York City’s most important black publishers during the Civil War era. Redpath’s primary goal in acquiring the weekly newspaper was to promote Haitian colonization by free blacks in the United States and Canada. Viewing emigration to Haiti as an opportunity for black nationalism, Redpath expanded his endorsement of radical, violent antislavery activism—an endorsement most obvious in his support of John Brown and his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry—into support for African American emigration and what his friend Richard Hinton described as a “more

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extended insurrectionary or revolutionary movement, which embraced not only a projected uprising of colored American slaves, but the possible organization of . . . a racial nationality in the Gulf States, the midcontinental islands, and portions of South America” (qtd. in Von Frank 158). In 1854, Redpath had published a letter in the National Anti-Slavery Standard (later reprinted in The Roving Editor) in which he observed that North Carolina could “involuntarily” become a free state “if the Abolitionists would send down a trusty Band of ‘Liberators,’ provided with compasses, pistols, and a little money for the fugitives” (Roving 130). By 1860, he had turned his attention to the plight of those fugitives, advocating, in his Guide to Hayti, self-help over any moral imperative “to remain and fight the battle here [in the United States]” (173).3 In 1859 and 1860, Redpath visited Haiti three times to do field research, publishing some of his reports on Haiti in Hamilton’s Weekly Anglo-African as well as in the New York Tribune and other papers. He was so impressed with the opportunities for farming in Haiti that in the summer of 1860 he accepted an offer from Haitian president Fabre Geffrard (to whom he dedicated Echoes of Harper’s Ferry) to oversee a subsidized emigration movement in the United States. With a grant of $20,000 from the Haitian government, Redpath assumed the title of “General Agent of the Haytian Bureau of Emigration” and opened offices in Boston and New York. It was this bureau that published Redpath’s Guide to Hayti, which was distributed free to anyone interested in pursuing emigration.4 But Redpath viewed a weekly newspaper to be an even more effective way to promote his cause, since it could provide the most current information based on reports from a number of contributors. Given this belief in the efficacy of the press, Redpath was concerned when he saw the Weekly Anglo-African under Hamilton shifting from modest support for Haitian colonization to outspoken opposition to it. In March 1861, Redpath used $1,100 of his agency funds to acquire the paper, which he described as “on its last legs”; by May, he had moved its editorial offices from New York to Boston and renamed it the Pine and Palm.5 The racial politics involved in the shift from black to white ownership signaled in the renaming of the paper are complex. Some black abolitionists immediately questioned the paper’s ties to the Haitian government; Martin Delany, for example, argued that Geffrard had

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violated the principles of black nationality and self-reliance by appointing Redpath as general agent and funding his publications (Miller 241).6 George Stephens, a former reporter for the Weekly Anglo-African, complained to Hamilton that “the only paper the masses could call their own was prostituted to the advocacy of a scheme which had already proved more disastrous to the colored people than anything in their history except slavery itself.”7 Hamilton’s monthly magazine, the AngloAfrican, began to publish regular critiques of Haitian emigration. This critique—carried out in both manuscript and print—pitted Redpath’s romantic visions of black nationalism against the stark realities of Haitian colonization. The Pine and Palm was the primary vehicle of that romantic vision; Redpath filled its pages with reports of the abundance and fertility of Haiti’s land. Even the title of the paper hinted at this fertility; in a poem published in A Guide to Hayti, Redpath imagines the pine and palm as being “married” in Haiti, their branches “verdant” and “never blighted” (12). He also printed letters from prominent black abolitionists such as James Holly (himself one of Redpath’s recruiting agents), who had earlier stated in the Weekly Anglo-African that Redpath’s connection to the Haitian government “does not detract one iota from the idea of negro sovereignty, nationality and independence” (qtd. in Seraille 192).8 Yet Holly’s justification for this statement—that Redpath was “the white servant” and Geffrard “the black master”—suggests the degree to which the debate was always framed by hierarchical power relations. In the daily operations of the Pine and Palm, Redpath clearly saw himself as the master. A few months into its publication, on 22 June 1861, he argued that the paper needed to be “an impersonal organ” because withholding the “names of the editorial contributors” would allow him to attain “the purpose we all aim at . . . more surely and speedily” (Pine and Palm 22 June 1861: 2). In practice, however, this “impersonality” was at best a thinly veiled fiction. When Redpath was out of town, he relinquished all editorial duties to George Lawrence, an African American, but otherwise he himself was the most frequent contributor to the paper. He admitted to one correspondent that “its essays are written as if they were the production of colored men”;9 although he devoted the final page of each issue to “letters from emigrants, and essays by colored Americans,” the authenticity of these accounts remains in question. In many

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ways, then, Redpath’s work on the Pine and Palm itself constituted a kind of blackface performance, a reverse form of racial passing. If Redpath sometimes veiled his racial identity, he was consistently upfront about his desire to extend the influence of the Pine and Palm by broadening its circulation. “No paper ever published in the States has had so large a circulation among colored Americans as the ‘Pine and Palm,’” he boasted in a letter in March 1862.10 He used several tactics to increase circulation. First, he cut the cost of the paper in half, from Hamilton’s original rate of a dollar for a six-month subscription to a dollar for a full year. Second, he offered to send a free sample copy to anyone who requested it, including friends of subscribers, thereby appealing to informal patronage networks. Third, he arranged to insert printed advertisements in other black newspapers, such as Douglass’ Monthly, writing to Frederick Douglass directly in March of 1861 to inquire whether he could “devote a certain amount of space” to advertising.11 Two months earlier, Douglass himself had paved the way for such a request by writing an article for his Monthly in which he concluded that he could “raise no objection to the present movement towards Hayti” and reported meeting with Redpath in Boston in January 1861. Douglass found Redpath to be a “man of ability” who had “given many proofs of his deep abhorrence of slavery, and of his earnest sympathy with our oppressed people” (387).12 Redpath’s advertisements in Douglass’ Monthly specifically addressed “the Blacks, Men of Color, and Indians in the United States and British North American Provinces” who might want to acquire a “free homestead” in Haiti and included notices that “specimen copies” of the Pine and Palm would be sent free “to any colored American, anywhere” (Redpath, “Emigration” 463 and “Haytian Advertisements” 620). Redpath combined this print advertising with the more informal distribution networks of individual agents, who held public information meetings that included offering free samples of the newspaper. His manuscript letters record his efforts to secure agents to distribute the Pine and Palm and recruit Haitian emigrants in Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and other regional locations. He also enlisted agents in Canada. One of these, the author William Wells Brown, conducted a lecture tour in the summer and fall of 1861 that attracted large audiences in black communities from Toronto to Windsor. To convey the success of this tour to his readers, Redpath published in the 2 January supplement to the

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Pine and Palm a letter from Brown reporting on the “labors” of his public performances. In the letter, Brown describes full houses gathered in schoolhouses, churches, and town halls. He also notes the nobility and determination of his auditors and the industry of the colonists who have already agreed to emigrate. To emphasize these qualities even further, he reports refusing to enroll a fiddler whose “services would not be needed in Hayti” as well as an alcoholic whose “red nose showed that he was more accustomed to drink bad rum than to work for a living” (Ripley 459). Reports such as Brown’s translated a public performance—a public lecture and emigration meeting—into a manuscript letter that could then be printed in the newspaper. That printing, in turn, was designed both to encourage subscribers and to create audiences for other lectures. The strategic exuberance for Haitian colonization that Redpath displayed in the Pine and Palm could ultimately not sustain itself in the face of the reality of field reports in other newspapers. In 1862, some of Thomas Hamilton’s associates restarted the Weekly Anglo-African in New York and, in a direct counterpoint to the Pine and Palm, reported on the difficulties faced by Haitian emigrants. As one witness reported, “The majority of the emigrants [are] . . . not doing well, earning but little money, enjoying miserable health, generally dissatisfied with the country, its prospects, its climate, soil, and the ‘old fogy’ modes in which business of all kinds are carried on” (qtd. in McPherson 88). Another article complained about Redpath’s “work for the elevation of the negro . . . thousands of whom would like to elevate him to the nearest tree” (qtd. in Boyd 174). If Redpath had once passed, through print, as a black man, the hypocrisy of that passing was now critiqued through a reference to the public practice of lynching. At the same time, Frederick Douglass withdrew his support for the cause. With the Civil War entering its second year, he and others decided that the emphasis had to be on emancipation rather than colonization. After Redpath decided to cease publication of the Pine and Palm in September 1862, Douglass could write in his own paper two months later that “we can express no regret that Mr. Redpath has ceased to exert his talents in the cause of colonization” (Douglass, Editorial 741). Redpath himself memorialized the end of this revolutionary phase of his career in a final supplement to the Pine and Palm. This supplement first summarized his differences with Haitian leaders, which centered

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on the employment of American agents in Haiti and the surveying of lands in advance of emigration. It then concluded with his promise on 4 September 1862 to “retire for a while from public view to finish up and close—I think forever—that page of my career on which is written—‘To Hayti, the black England of the Future’” (extra leaf, 4). Ever aware of his audience, Redpath elegized a romantic vision of a black empire even as he attended to practical details: he also reassured readers that the entire term of their subscription would be honored, if not with the Pine and Palm (which he hoped to continue “as a purely literary journal”) then with “some other paper—The Liberator, The Anti-Slavery Standard, The American Baptist, The Boston Traveller, or The Commonwealth, as they may prefer” (4). He did not mention Douglass’ Monthly, however, signaling his break with Douglass over the issue of colonization. It would not have been a huge leap for Redpath to edit a “literary journal”; the Pine and Palm had featured works by, among others, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Parker Willis, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant. However, Redpath chose instead to use some of the literary contacts that he had made while editing the Pine and Palm to turn to full-time book publishing. As Redpath himself noted, this marked a key shift in his career, as he turned away from promoting a revolutionary vision of the “black England of the Future.” The reporter who had used his stenography to take field notes in the South and in Haiti now turned his hand toward marketing and business. As a practical matter, he began to dictate his letters to a stenographer rather than take shorthand himself—a style of “delivering [his] thoughts” to which, as he admitted in a letter to a friend, he was “not accustomed.”13 In The Roving Editor and the Pine and Palm, he had relied on transcripts of interviews to provide an “authentic” message to his readers. As a professional publisher, however, he realized that dictation—while necessary given the volume of correspondence—was itself prone to error; in the letter cited above, he even requested that his dictated correspondence be returned to him for revision in the event any of it was published. As a publisher, Redpath did not abandon politics altogether, particularly as the Civil War moved toward a focus on emancipation. One of his main publishing ventures was the book series Books for the Times, which consisted largely of antislavery works available in a variety of formats at prices ranging from $.50 to $2.25. Titles included

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Wendell Phillips’s Speeches, Lectures and Letters; a biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture; and William Wells Brown’s The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements.14 Another series, Books for the Camp Fires, was specifically designed for Union soldiers, providing them with high-quality leisure reading that was portable and inexpensive (each volume cost a dime). One of the works in this series, Balzac’s The Vendetta, had previously been serialized in the Pine and Palm. The series also included another work by William Wells Brown: Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States. As we have seen, Brown had lectured for Redpath on behalf of Haitian emigration; he had also written two serialized sketches for the Pine and Palm, “Celebrated Colored Americans” and “The Colored People of Canada.” In addition, an earlier version of Clotelle, titled Miralda, had been serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African between 15 December 1860 and 16 March 1861, the last installment coming just as Redpath acquired the paper (Mulvey). The headings for Miralda herald it as “Written for the AngloAfrican.” Yet in fact, the novel—like Clotelle—was a heavily revised version of Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, which Brown had published in London in 1853. These later editions revise what Robert Levine describes as Brown’s original “collage narrative technique” to embrace a more “traditional narrative storytelling” (Clotel 7). Redpath was particularly explicit about the effect he hoped this story would have on its audience. At the end of Clotelle, he went so far as to add a “note” in which he addressed the soldiers directly, telling them that “the author of the foregoing tale was formerly a Kentucky slave” and expressing his hope that the tale would not only “relieve the monotony of campfire life” but also “kindle their zeal in the cause of universal emancipation” (104). In separately revising the novel for the Weekly Anglo-African and then the Camp Fires series, Brown also changed the names of most of the characters; added more poetic epigraphs and quotations; and wrote several new concluding chapters that trace the fate of the main heroine, a tragic mulatta, and her husband after their reunion. Most significantly, he also muted his reference to Clotel as Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, calling her only a “descendant of Thomas Jefferson, the immortal author of the Declaration of Independence” in Miralda and “the daughter of an American Senator” in Clotelle (Clotel 6). As this publishing history suggests, Brown continually revised the original manuscript to appeal

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to distinct audiences. Brown’s original British audience was intrigued by the allusion to Jefferson. The second and third editions, in turn, focus more on emancipation, with both versions ending with the promise that the father of Miralda/Clotelle, a white plantation owner, has determined to free his slaves and settle them in one of the northern states.15 If Brown’s textual revisions reflect the different venues in which he published Clotel, one illustration in Redpath’s edition shows how visual images could also be revised by being used in different narrative contexts. This edition has five illustrations, four of which appeared in the original British edition of Clotel. Redpath added the fifth illustration by reprinting an image that had previously appeared in The Roving Editor (fig. 15.1). In that book, the image depicts a conversation between Isaac, a slave condemned to death for leading a slave insurrection, and a white minister. The minister has come to try to persuade Isaac to reveal the names of his co-conspirators, but instead he leaves convinced that he is the criminal and Isaac the man of God. This anecdote—originally told to Redpath by a Kansas newspaper editor named John C. Vaughan—is meant to memorialize the revolutionary ability of a Christian “heroic slave” to convince a white man to see the error of his ways. This ability is also emphasized by Redpath’s description of the story’s effect on multiple audiences; he reports that the editor Vaughan, when first hearing the story, found it “touching to the extreme” and that Vaughan’s retelling in turn made such an “indelible impression” on Redpath that he asked Vaughan to write it down. It is this manuscript that Redpath claims to print, verbatim, in The Roving Editor. Redpath reprinted this episode in the 22 June 1861 issue of the Pine and Palm, again using the same illustration. By reusing the image for a third time in Clotelle, Redpath simultaneously utilized his existing resources and created a visual intertext between his work and Brown’s. Yet the scene that the image illustrates in Clotelle carries a message that is almost the exact opposite of that in The Roving Editor. There are parallels: a white man (in this case a magistrate rather than a minister) visits a slave, Jerome, to see if he has any knowledge about an intended slave revolt. In this case, however, Jerome is in jail, not because he has openly confessed to leading such a revolt (as Isaac has), but because he has knocked down his master, who is also a minister, after refusing to be whipped at what the master “was pleased to call [Jerome’s] insolence.”

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Figure 15.1. Illustration from james redpath’s edition of william wells Brown’s clotelle: a tale of the southern states (1864), reprinted from redpath’s the roving editor (1859). courtesy of duke university rare Book, manuscript, and special collections library.

Jerome refuses to talk to the magistrate, but his justification is political rather than religious. When the magistrate tells him that he may be spared execution if he becomes an informant about the revolt, Jerome responds that his life as a slave is not worth living because he has “no right . . . to himself, his wife, or his children.” Jerome is then deemed “dangerous” by the magistrate and condemned to death, a fate that he

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avoids only because Clotelle helps him escape by visiting his cell and allowing him to change into her clothes (65). Redpath’s book publications, then, included not only reprints of works that had previously been published elsewhere—including the Pine and Palm—but also strategic revisions of those reprints, through either changes to the original manuscript or the use of the same illustration in different contexts. As a publisher, he continued to practice his skills as a cultural editor who could adapt existing visual and verbal texts for a particular audience and rhetorical purpose. This practice also helped him reduce his expenses (he claimed always to be in need of more capital) by reusing his own stereotype plates. A prime example is his reprinting of an excerpt from Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches—published in 1863 as part of his Books for the Times series—in On Picket Duty, a story collection that appeared a year later as part of the Camp Fires series. Hospital Sketches, in turn, was drawn from a series of letters that Alcott had written home while serving as a nurse in a Union hospital in Georgetown and had then revised into a “printable shape” and published in the Boston Commonwealth (Cheney 150). There they came to the attention of Redpath, who knew the Alcotts through their support of John Brown. When Alcott revised the letters again for book publication, she added a postscript that, in the voice of her narrator Tribulation Periwinkle, answers “en masse, and in printed form” inquiries that “have come to me from various friendly readers of the Sketches” (Cheney 86). This last move complicates the sometimes apparently seamless progression from manuscript (letter) to print (newspaper) and to reprint (book). The reciprocity of manuscript and print in Hospital Sketches reminds us, as D. F. McKenzie puts it, that we did not stop “writing when we learned to print” and that “for speaker, auditor, reader, or viewer, the texts tend to work in complementary, not competitive ways” (238). In this case, a serialized newspaper article that had its origins in letters written to family and then circulated to friends prompted letters from fans that were then answered in a printed open letter. The episodes recounted in the sketches, moreover, invest great emotional power in the letters that soldiers write home to their families. The emotional climax of the book occurs when John, a wounded Virginian blacksmith, dictates a letter to Tribulation that she then sends on to his family at home. In the letter, John instructs his brother on how to take over his duties.

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The family’s reply does not arrive until after John has died; Tribulation places the letter in John’s coffin. She does not describe any other patient at such length, and her mediation of his correspondence, both as transcriber and as deliverer, is clearly meant to increase its sentimental appeal. It is this scene that Redpath reprinted at the end of On Picket Duty, along with an illustration, also in Hospital Sketches, of Tribulation tending to John. This reprint emphasizes the sentimental power of the soldier’s letter while also extending its audience through print. As one of Redpath’s “Books for the Times,” Hospital Sketches was meant to have topical significance for its Civil War readers. To emphasize its political relevance, Redpath also used it as a means of raising money for war orphans. He contracted with Alcott to pay her 10 percent of the retail price for each copy sold (a common percentage at the time) minus a set amount earmarked for charity. Alcott had tried to convince him that her family, which was short of money, was itself an important charity. “Everything that is rightly mine I prefer to use for them,” she wrote (Alcott, Selected 87). But the book was printed with a publisher’s advertisement in which Redpath promised “to donate at least five cents for every copy sold to the support of orphans made fatherless or homeless by the war.” (The book itself sold for fifty cents.)16 The publishers of his biography of John Brown, Thayer and Eldridge, had used a similar tactic in that book, promising to donate a portion of the proceeds to Brown’s family. In the case of Hospital Sketches, however, Redpath used his benevolence to discourage reprinting of the work. “No reproduction of any part of the contents now first printed in these pages, will be permitted in any journal,” he wrote in an unnumbered advertisement at the beginning of the volume. “Should the sale of the little book be large, the orphans’ percentage will be doubled.” Although he himself was reprinting sketches from the Commonwealth, he defined reprinting by another publisher as being in conflict with his charity work.17 In this way, Alcott and Redpath, in their letters and in print, reveal the disadvantage of literary piracy, with Alcott asserting her authorial rights in order to support her family in the domestic sphere and Redpath asserting his publishing rights so that he could promote public benevolence. In the end, Redpath’s intentions were better than his business skills. In a letter of January 1864, he reported to Alcott that “the sale of H. S. [Hospital Sketches] is pretty much over.” Later that year, he wrote her that

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he did not have the capital he needed to publish Moods, another of her books, and his last publishing advertisement appeared in the American Publishers’ Circular in April 1864 (Alcott, Selected 105). “The sketches never made much money,” Alcott noted in her journal in 1877, “but showed me ‘my style,’ and taking the hint, I went where glory awaited me” (Cheney 152). Alcott’s comment suggests both the successes and failures of Redpath’s publishing venture. On the one hand, he used Hospital Sketches to support charity work and to help an aspiring author find both “her style” and her first lessons in publishing. Their letters discuss such topics as copyright, royalties, dual submission, and reprint rights. On the other hand, Redpath’s own publishing firm folded in fewer than two years, and he was not able to support Alcott in the way he had initially promised. Instead, he became more practical (and to her mind adversarial), asking her to cut the manuscript of Moods in half. She later memorialized this request in Little Women (1868), where she describes Jo’s difficulties publishing her first novel and quotes a letter from a publisher, Mr. Allen, who advises her to “leave out the explanations, make it brief and dramatic, and let the characters tell the story” (270). Yet Redpath, unlike Mr. Allen, had supported Alcott’s development as a young author; his later advice reflected his poor management skills as much as his artistic judgment. After the failure of his publishing firm, Redpath moved from publishing to managing his speakers’ bureau, supporting authors and other public figures by connecting them with local lyceum groups. In this way, he established a national speakers’ network that paralleled his earlier attempt to make the Pine and Palm a national newspaper. Yet whereas earlier he had endorsed the newspaper’s status as an “impersonal organ,” he now supported individual personal oratory as a mode of promoting national reconciliation and healing after the Civil War. One of his most heralded speakers was Frederick Douglass. Although he had diverged with Douglass over the question of Haitian emigration at the beginning of the war, by 1871 he was promoting a lecture tour in which Douglass would speak in favor of the United States’ annexation of the Dominican Republic, which had revolted from Haiti in 1844. In one broadside advertising this lecture, Redpath strategically quotes “a private note” he has received from Douglass, printing part of a manuscript to underline Douglass’s pro-annexation agenda as well as to demonstrate the pair’s positive working relationship (fig. 15.2).

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Figure 15.2. extra leaf from the lyceum magazine, sept. 1871, advertising a lecture series by frederick douglass. courtesy american antiquarian society.

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In 1875 Redpath’s work with his speakers’ bureau allowed him to make the acquaintance of another former political foe, ex-Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Redpath proposed, as an intermediary wrote to Davis, to organize a lecture series that would “bring prominent representative men of the North and South together in leading Northern and Southern cities.” Davis declined the invitation, but it paved the way for subsequent interactions between Davis and Redpath.18 In the summer of 1888, Redpath traveled to Mississippi to commission Davis to write several articles for the North American Review, of which he was now managing editor. Two of these articles, one on Robert E. Lee and the other on the doctrine of states’ rights, were published in the Review in early 1890. A third article, entitled “Andersonville and Other War Prisons,” was ultimately pulled because Lloyd Brice, the new executive editor of the Review, objected to Davis’s description of Union general Nelson A. Miles. Davis called Miles, who was the commandant of Fort Monroe, Virginia, during Davis’s own imprisonment there, a “heartless vulgarian” who had inflicted “needless privations” on him (163). Miles was himself a frequent contributor to the Review, and Bryce did not want to alienate him. When Davis refused to strike his description of Miles, Bryce permitted him to take the manuscript to Belford’s, another New York magazine, in a move that Redpath helped to negotiate. Davis’s publications in the Review indicate the way in which what Nina Silber terms “the romance of reunion” was carried out in periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that works by Davis and Bryce could appear in the pages of the same magazine shows how memories of the war were used to promote national reconciliation. As Redpath put it in an article on Davis in the Denver Commonwealth, “One essential factor in forming a more perfect Union is to understand and do justice to the principles that inspired the Southern people. It is time to drop, and drop forever, the old war-cant about Rebellion and Treason. Both sides fought for their convictions” (“Neither” 392).19 At the same time, the editorial disagreement between Davis and Bryce signals the precariousness of such attempts at national reconciliation. Ironically, it was Redpath—the former radical abolitionist and revolutionary—who worked behind the scenes to ensure that Davis’s views would make it into print. These private negotiations became public when Belford’s summarized them in an “Editorial Department” essay that accompanied

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the publication of “Andersonville and Other Prisons.” As part of this account, the editors reprinted two letters from Davis to Redpath complaining about his treatment by Bryce, including the “mutilated condition” of the print version of a letter that Davis had written in response to a negative article about him in the Review. Belford’s editors, by contrast, promised that they were publishing Davis’s manuscript “unmodified and unmutilated, just as it was written by Mr. Davis in the summer of 1888” (“Editorial” 273, 275). Writing to Davis about the matter that was not reprinted in Belford’s, Redpath underscored the promise that Belford would “publish the article without any mutilation” and stated that Redpath himself had declined to authorize the Review’s editorial change because he “recalled what you had told me . . . of [Bryce’s] conduct.”20 Redpath had indeed shared many conversations with Davis; he stayed at his home for two extended visits in 1888 and 1889. During this time, Davis began dictating his autobiography to Redpath (Cooper 645). Although he did not live to complete the dictation, his wife Varina Davis incorporated it into her memoirs of her husband, which Belford published in 1890. In the memoirs, Varina explains that at the end of his life Davis “yielded to the repeated requests, both of his personal friends and publishers, to write an autobiography,” dictating to “a friend, as an introductory chapter, this account of his ancestry and early childhood.” That friend is Redpath, who, returning to his stenographic training, took down the dictation as he and Varina “sat by his bed and listened.” In introducing this dictation, Varina emphasizes that “no verbal or other change has been made in the dictation, which Mr. Davis did not read over” (1: 3). Two slightly earlier printings of the autobiography had also emphasized that it had been “taken down in shorthand by a Northern guest [Redpath],” although they added that the “manuscript was revised by the old statesman before it was mailed to the Belford Company” (“Passing” 282; Jones 27). These earlier versions do indeed significantly revise the version printed in Varina’s memoirs; the sentence structure is longer and more complex, and many sections are omitted. By using the unrevised version in her own book, Varina created a fantasy of direct speech: of speech that had moved from shorthand manuscript to print without any mediation or, as Davis himself put it, “mutilation.” This protracted attention to issues of revision given by Belford, Redpath, and Varina and Jefferson Davis is, then, first and foremost an

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attempt to establish the authenticity of Davis’s dying words. Although Davis did not go on Redpath’s lecture circuit, the actual utterance of his speech was crucial to attempts to resuscitate his image at the end of his life, and his editors and publishers went to great lengths to downplay the mediating influence of print. Indeed, by positing manuscripts as words that could be “mutilated” rather than revised, they established the connection between those words and Davis’s actual physical body. In one way, this connection was for Redpath a return to his journalistic roots: The Roving Editor, after all, had gained its authority by insisting on its fidelity to interviews with actual slaves whose “utterances” Redpath had transcribed on the spot. And throughout his career Redpath placed great rhetorical value on reprinting letters—in his newspapers, in his advertisements and broadsides, and in the books he edited and published—that purported to be unedited testimonials. At the same time, however, it is clear that Redpath understood the importance of strategic revision. He revised and expanded his newspaper dispatches in the process of compiling The Roving Editor; he revised (and in some cases probably wrote) the letters from Haiti and from emigration agents in the Pine and Palm—which was itself a revised title for the original Weekly Anglo-African; he published books that were revisions of earlier works, some of which had been published in his own or other newspapers; he reprinted the same illustration in multiple works; he moved from working as a stenographer to employing one for his own dictations and then insisted that such dictations be submitted to him for revision if they were to be put in print; he encouraged lecturers to revise and recycle their material while on his lyceum circuit; and he encouraged Jefferson Davis to revise the autobiography that he had dictated. Along the way, Redpath also dramatically revised some of his own fundamental beliefs and priorities, as he moved, in broad terms, from an emphasis on revolution and insurrection to one on emancipation and finally to one on reunion and reconciliation. Redpath’s ideological shifts, that is, occurred alongside and were inextricably linked to his textual revisions. To understand the trajectory of Redpath’s career, then, is ultimately to understand not only the permeability of manuscript, performance, and print but also how those various modes worked together to produce an authentic reform agenda that was itself under constant revision.

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NoteS

1. Despite Redpath’s claims for authenticity, historians have debated just how reliable the interviews are. John McKivigan, for one, has authenticated some of the slave narratives while conceding that others “lack sufficient detail to verify their accuracy” (Redpath, Roving xii). 2. I borrow the term cultural editor from Robert Levine, who uses the term in his introduction to Clotel to describe William Wells Brown (Clotel 4). 3. On the continuities between Redpath’s support of Brown and his support of emigration (and between black activism and black emigration more generally), see Dixon 134–35, Von Frank 157–59, and McKivigan 61–83. McKivigan’s book, which appeared after this essay had been written, is now the definitive biography of Redpath. 4. This Guide was initially published by Thayer and Eldridge in Boston (the same firm that published Redpath’s Life of Captain John Brown and Echoes of Harper’s Ferry); after Thayer and Eldridge went out of business in 1861, the Haytian Bureau of Emigration issued a second edition (Stern 78). 5. James Redpath, letter to Isaac N. Carey, 8 Mar. 1862, Redpath Papers. This letter gives an extended account of Redpath’s acquisition of the paper and of the subsequent reestablishment of the Weekly Anglo-African, which he considered a breach of contract. 6. James Redpath, letter to E. Moultet, 26 Mar. 1861, Letterpress Book 184, Redpath Papers. 7. George E. Stephens, letter to “Mr. Editor” [Thomas Hamilton], 6 Feb. 1862 (Yacovone 177). Yacovone notes that Canadian abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd Cary denounced Redpath as “James Blackpath” the slave trader and his agents as “maggots in the Haytian carcass” (180). 8. For a discussion of the lecture tours that Holly undertook as one of Redpath’s agents, see Dean 36. 9. Redpath, letter to Moultet, 26 Mar. 1861, 184. 10. Redpath, letter to Carey, 8 Mar. 1862. 11. James Redpath, letter to Frederick Douglass, Mar. 1861, Letterpress Book 208, Redpath Papers. Earlier in the month, Redpath had differentiated his paper from Douglass’s in a letter to C. W. Jacobs: “Frederick Douglass’s Monthly, also, will contain occasional articles on Hayti. . . . But the AngloAfrican will publish ten times more than the other and will give you regularly the most minute facts and news” (165). 12. Douglass also accepted Redpath’s invitation to sail with James Holly from New Haven to Haiti at the end of April 1861. Douglass canceled the trip, however, after the firing at Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War (Miller 240). 13. Redpath, letter to Carey, 8 Mar. 1862.

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14. In a continuing chapter in the competition between Redpath and Thomas Hamilton, Hamilton published a rival edition of The Black Man in 1863, the same year that Redpath’s edition appeared. 15. For an extremely useful electronic collation of all four editions of Clotel, see Mulvey. 16. An advertisement on the inside back cover of On Picket Duty lists “Hospital Sketches, by Miss L. M. Alcott, 50c. No work recently published has received more and more uniformly flattering notices from the press and distinguished writers than this ‘wonderful little book.’” 17. For important recent discussions of the cultural value of reprinting and piracy, see McGill and Homestead. 18. For correspondence related to this proposed lecture tour, see N. P. Banks’s letter to Jefferson Davis, 20 Aug. 1875, and Jefferson Davis’s letter to James Redpath, 6 Sept. 1875, both in Rowland 452, 455. 19. For a comprehensive account of the cultural role of memory in the post–Civil War United States, see Blight. 20. James Redpath, letter to Jefferson Davis, 31 Oct. 1889 (Rowland 159).

workS Cited

Alcott, Louisa May. Hospital Sketches. Boston: James Redpath, 1863. ———. Little Women. 1868. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Penguin, 1989. ———. On Picket Duty and Other Tales. Boston: James Redpath, 1864. ———. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy. Boston: Little Brown, 1987. Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Boyd, Willis D. “James Redpath and American Negro Colonization in Haiti, 1860–1862.” Americas 12 (October 1955): 169–82. Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter. 1853. Ed. Robert S. Levine. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2000. ———. Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States. Boston: James Redpath, 1864. ———. Miralda, or The Beautiful Quadroon: A Romance of American Slavery Founded on Fact. 1860. . Cheney, Ednah D., ed. Louisa May Alcott’s Life, Letters, and Journals. Boston: Little, Brown, 1919. Cooper, William J. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Knopf, 2000. Davis, Jefferson. “Andersonville and Other War Prisons.” Belford’s Magazine Jan. 1890: 161–79; Feb. 1890: 337–54. ———. “Autobiography of Jefferson Davis.” Belford’s Magazine Jan. 1890: 255–66.

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Davis, Varina. Jefferson Davis: Ex-president of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife. 2 vols. New York: Belford, 1890. Dean, David M. Defender of the Race: James Theodore Holly, Black Nationalist Bishop. Boston: Lambeth, 1979. Dixon, Chris. African America and Haiti. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Douglass, Frederick. Editorial. Douglass’ Monthly Nov. 1862: 741. ———. “Emigration to Hayti.” Douglass’ Monthly Jan. 1861: 387. Douglass’ Monthly [Rochester, NY] 1858–63. “Editorial Department: Andersonville and Other War-Prisons.” Belford’s Magazine Jan. 1890: 273–75. Guttridge, Leonard F. Ghosts of the Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition. New York: Putnam, 2000. Homestead, Melissa. American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Horner, Charles F. The Life of James Redpath. New York: Barse and Hopkins, 1926. Jones, J. William, ed. The Davis Memorial Volume. Richmond, VA: Johnson, 1890. McGill, Meredith M. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. McKenzie, D. F. “Speech-Manuscript-Print.” Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays. Ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 237–58. McKivigan, John R. Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. McPherson, James M. The Negro’s Civil War. New York: Pantheon, 1965. Miller, Floyd J. The Search for a Black Nationality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Mulvey, Christopher, ed. “Clotel” by William Wells Brown: An Electronic Scholarly Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. “Passing Notes.” Belford’s Magazine Jan. 1890: 282–86. Pine and Palm [Boston] 1861–62. Redpath, James. Echoes of Harper’s Ferry. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860. ———. “Emigration to Hayti.” Douglass’ Monthly Mar. 1861: 463. ———, ed. A Guide to Hayti. Boston: Haytian Bureau of Emigration, 1861. ———. “Haytian Advertisements.” Douglass’ Monthly Mar. 1862: 620. ———. James Redpath Papers. 1861–86. Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Durham, NC. ———. Letter to Louisa May Alcott. 23 Jan. 1864. Papers of Louisa May Alcott, 1863–1888. Accession nos. 6255–6255-k. Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. ———. “Neither Traitor nor Rebel.” Commonwealth 2 (Jan.–Feb. 1890): 385–92.

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———. The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. 1859. Ed. John R. McKivigan. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Ripley, C. Peter, et al., eds. Canada: 1830–1865. Vol. 2 of The Black Abolitionist Papers. 5 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Rowland, Dunbar, ed. Letters, Papers and Speeches. Vol. 7 of Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist. 10 vols. Jackson, MS: Dept. of Archives and History, 1923. Seraille, William. “Afro-American Emigration to Haiti during the Civil War.” Americas 35 (October 1978): 185–200. Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Stern, Madeleine B. Imprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956. Von Frank, Albert. “John Brown, James Redpath, and the Idea of Revolution.” Civil War History 52 (June 2006): 142–60. Yacovone, Donald, ed. A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Ch a p ter 16

reading the Image Visual Culture as Print Culture and the Performance of a Bourgeois Self

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In 1861, the photographer John Moran produced a series of stereographic portraits of the family of his Philadelphia patron, the antiquarian Ferdinand Julius Dreer. In two of the views resulting from that commission, the members of the Dreer family are positioned in a home library that signifies at once both domesticity and literacy. Sitting amid framed prints and paintings, books, papers, and Dreer’s celebrated collection of autographs, the family members are involved in private undertakings, individuals constituted in part by their propinquity to literary effects. Although positioned as individuals, they are also cast as an integrated family unit, an idea expressed compositionally by their situation in a circle anchored by a large, wooden desk.1 In one view, Moran arranged his subjects and positioned his camera to reveal a revolving, tabletop stereoscope in the far right-hand corner of the room (fig. 16.1). The stereoscope assumes its place amid the trappings of this private library and refers out from within the image to the stereographic portrait in the hand of the viewer—a member of the family, or anyone with whom the Dreers shared these portraits. The reference creates a logic of inclusion by which the viewer of the stereograph, in holding and viewing the family portrait, is incorporated into the acts of literacy pictured in the image. The three-dimensionality of the picture, 319

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Figure 16.1. Interior of f. j. dreer library, february 1861. Photograph by john moran. the library company of Philadelphia.

when seen through a stereoscope, only further strengthens the sense of presence and membership in the circle of literacy.2 The stereograph, which appears in three dimensions when viewed through the stereoscope, was one of the most popular photographic formats of the nineteenth century. Moran’s portraits of this affluent home of a notable Philadelphia patron, philanthropist, and collector may be construed as a more rarified version of a particular genre amid the multitude of commercially available stereographs published in the 1860s and 1870s.3 In these views, the photographer simulated a parlor by including a host of props signaling refinement and tasteful purchasing— upholstered furniture, marble-topped tables, floors painted to resemble carpeting, and in some cases books and stereoscopes. In a view by J. A. French, who operated a studio in Keene, New Hampshire, in the 1860s and 1870s, the act of viewing stands alone as a sufficient symbol of domestic refinement. A man and a woman, each holding a stereoscope, sit at opposite ends of a textile-covered table. A circa 1870 view by W. C. Liscomb of Bristol, Rhode Island, exemplifies the mutually constitutive symbols of domesticity, literacy, and visual culture (fig. 16.2). In the Liscomb view, a couple plays chess and a woman holds a book. Volumes of books—one of them surely a Bible,

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Figure 16.2. untitled stereograph, ca. 1870. w. c. liscomb, Photographer. courtesy american antiquarian society.

as suggested by dangling bookmarks adorned with crosses—lie stacked on the table behind the subjects. A stereoscope is positioned beside the books. In these views, the activities of reading and viewing are granted a near-equivalence, and both are emblematic of refinement within a domestic space.4 In their infancy, histories of photography in the United States largely presented narratives of technology, charting the introduction of the new medium by Louis Daguerre in Paris in 1839 and subsequent advances in what was understood as a hybrid of science and art. With a critical engagement with photography as fine art came a turn to art historical methodologies, formal analysis, and questions related to artistic production and representation. Monographs recounted the careers, oeuvres, and influences of individual or schools of photographers, or less often treated the documentary nature of the medium by offering the photographic record of a particular time, place, or subject. Later readings of the medium indebted to cultural theory produced analyses that investigated the ontological status of the photograph or its process of signification, often without regard to historical conditions of production, dissemination, consumption, or reception.5 In the late twentieth century, research and writing about nineteenthcentury photography articulated the social, cultural, political, and

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ideological role of the medium. Scholars, following trends within the field of cultural history (and art history so influenced), posited the ways in which photography enabled a wider circle of participants—an emerging middle class—to take part in the procurement and display of images, particularly images of themselves, and thus contributed to the formation of the middle-class subject. As Shawn Michelle Smith maintains, for example, within the cultural framework of a middle class that valued sincerity and feared fraud, photography produced a “visual discourse” that differentiated authentic middle-class interiority from “the purported deviant, deceptive masquerade of imagined usurpers (55).”6 Histories of photography in this mold, as they chart an increased availability and affordability of photography and the “democratization” of the portrait, might be characterized (along with scholarship on the production and distribution of popular nineteenth-century prints) as the corollary in visual culture studies to the history of the book as it documents an ever-mounting tide of production and the attendant nineteenth-century democracy of print (Zboray). Despite Moran’s portraits of the Dreer family, and similar commissions by others, the vogue for stereo portraiture had largely faded by the 1860s. Although the stereo format remained very popular for other subjects, including landscape and city views, the carte-de-visite and later the cabinet card became the preferred formats for portraits. I argue here that the more noteworthy manner by which stereographs contributed to the construction of class lies outside the realm of representational practices and emerges instead in the viewing practices engendered by the stereoscope. I read the Dreer portrait, and the studio images by French and Liscomb, as clues to the significance of viewing as an activity and an experience, one made more meaningful for its being performed in the home. In this article I employ the stereograph as a case study to advocate for a practice that expands the consideration of visual culture from simply (even if never simple) forms of representation—with the attendant art historical consideration of authorship, iconography, and so on—to what Lisa Gitelman has called “a cultural history of experience” (4). I ask more about the practices and context of use that surrounded the stereoscope than about the images. This avenue of inquiry considers the particularities of both context and form to interrogate modes by which printed images might have been experienced, how that experience contributed to the

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viewer’s sense of self, and what the performance of viewing signified to others. The abundance of primary evidence about stereographs and their use in trade journals, periodicals, and prescriptive literature makes them fertile ground for exploring such questions. Because the particularities of the stereographic format lent an especially performative character to the act of viewing, these eccentricities help expose the discursive formations of their day—lessons regarding the construction and experience of class and subjectivity in everyday practices. What’s more, the parallels between reading and stereo viewing suggest a likeness between the experience of the printed word and the printed image despite any theoretical differences in their ontological status (Miller 276–77; Mitchell 89–91).

t h e S t e r e o S C o p e i N t h e pa r l o r

As scholars of commodity culture and domesticity have explored, by the mid-nineteenth century the construction of bourgeois subjectivity was defined in large part through the commodification of taste. In domestic spaces the middle class presented core cultural ideals of refinement and cultivation, allegedly timeless and beyond the vagaries of transient fashion or style, yet ironically expressed increasingly through the display of mass-produced commercial goods, including books and printed visual culture. These goods democratized the trappings of social distinction (Bushman; Merish; Blumin). The material qualities of refinement evident in the goods themselves were linked to individual characteristics of skill, manner, control, and polish. To create a successful parlor environment was to balance the principles of comfortable domesticity and democratized gentility. The model parlor was elegant, distinctive, and worldly, displaying a standard of civilized progress, yet also was comfortable and lacked ostentation. The home, and the parlor in particular, was the linchpin of middle-class consumer culture (Grier). From the early years of U.S. commercial production of stereoscopes in the 1850s, instrument makers offered elaborate, decorative stereoscopes, some of which served as much like parlor furniture as optical toys. Of rosewood, mahogany, and morocco leather, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, tabletop and smaller, handheld stereoscopes were displayed in positions of primary importance on the center table in the

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parlor, or in the library, as in the case of the Dreers’ tabletop, revolving stereoscope. A popular rosewood stereoscope produced by Alexander Beckers won a bronze medal at the 1860 Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association and was commended for its ornamentation said to benefit its parlor use (Massachusetts 67). Similarly, S. D. Goodale & Sons described their “Parlor Instrument,” a tabletop, revolving stereoscope that could show twenty-four views to two people at a time, as a “neat center-table ornament, being of high style of finish.” In describing the increase in price from the walnut ($25), to the mahogany ($30), to the rosewood model ($40), Goodale assured customers, “Every grade of instrument has some peculiar style of finish and mountings, making it well worth the additional price” (5–6). Some larger tabletop models also included drawers for storing view collections and even lamp trimmings for those models with their own light sources (Goodale 6). Although the stereoscope had been introduced into the scientific community in 1838 as a tool for the study of the physiology of vision, by the 1860s there was little doubt of its ability to signify taste by its mere presence in a household (Schiavo, “From” 122). In 1858 the American Journal of Photography proclaimed of stereoscopes, “Within a few years the stereoscope has become a rage; it finds its way into almost every social circle, and has become a familiar source of fashionable parlor amusement. . . . It were strange indeed if many parlors were without them” (“Editorial” 82). Two years later a catalog of stereoscopic instruments offered clarification: “In presenting this circular to the Public it is with a conviction that it is only necessary that the merits of the Stereoscope should be known to be appreciated, and that thousands who have never looked into one would, on witnessing their life-giving power, never be without one in their parlors. . . . Those who do not provide themselves with this beautiful Omniscope are really behind the times” (Goodale). In 1870 Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin definitively declared, “The Stereoscope is now a necessary acquisition to every fireside, and once introduced rarely loses its interest” (qtd. in Tipton 3). The stereoscope had come to be so solidly associated with the domestic setting that terms such as fireside and parlor became the instrument’s most common descriptors (Fireside 300; Himes 15; Tipton). Newspapers, advertising materials, and trade publications heightened the signifying power of the instrument by associating it with

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families. In 1869 the Santa Cruz Times wrote of a series of views published by the San Francisco firm of Thomas Houseworth, “There can be nothing more attractive or instructive in families. These views are just the things for the parlor center-table, and are within the reach of everyone.” Writing about the same series, another reviewer mimicked both language and sentiment: “Nothing could be more attractive in your drawing room, more pleasing to your wife, more instructive to your children, more interesting to your friends, than a Stereoscope and a selection of these wonderful views from nature” (Thomas vi–vii). The repetitive, formulaic nature of the language from publication to publication reified not only the appropriateness of the stereoscope in the home but its power as a sign of refinement. An article published in a photography journal reported a photographer’s shock at being asked what good stereographs would be to a customer with no stereoscope. To this the narrator retorted, “What a want of taste; no stereoscope!” With these prescriptions for the optical device in the home, editorial voices of the photographic trade and arbiters of middle-class sensibility declared the stereoscope a domestic item and a marker of taste (Simons 469). The similarities to book culture are illustrative here, given the connections between viewing and reading that this essay will ultimately claim. By the middle of the nineteenth century, because of the association of reading with self-culture, books had become a potent symbol of middle-class aspirations, functioning, in the words of one historian, “both as objects from the marketplace and as texts for readers, simultaneously expressing the central cultural role of literature and helping to maintain it” (Stevenson 319). The choice of reading material, like the choice of parlor accoutrements, was not left to chance. After 1870 a new genre of advice literature detailed what and how to read, making suggestions for people building their own libraries or helping their children select appropriate materials. Reading guides recommended books that pleased, instructed, and “refine[d] the taste and evoke[d] the nobler emotions” (Moore 10). They served a middle class seeking to distinguish itself in what was becoming an increasingly literate society.7 A similar notion was expressed by the description of “well-chosen views” in stereo catalogs (Hunt, “Stereoscope” 120; “Editorial” 130; “New Stereoscopic Pictures” 268). Stereograph collectors developed personal libraries, based, one might assume, on such recommendations as well as their

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own interests. One collector, Gyles Merrill of Vermont, went so far as to print a catalog of his stereo views.8 James Ayer of Boston appended a descriptive list of over sixty stereographs to the last page of his library catalog. Other collectors marked single views with their names (often in monogram) and a number, seemingly indicating the stereograph’s place within the owner’s collection, or stamped their cards to indicate ownership.9 While it is difficult to find records of actual users or private nineteenthcentury collections where the integrity of the collection has been maintained, a few records exist that shed some light on the question of the users themselves. Lucy Lawrence, a resident of Bangor and later Portland, Maine, purchased a stereoscope and stereoscopic views in the 1870s. Lawrence’s accounts, kept between 1873 and 1879, read as a document of middle-class participation. The account books document monies spent on church attendance (pew fees); household purchases (lamp chimneys and shades); periodical literature (subscriptions to Harper’s, Scribner’s, and the Boston Weekly); and the purchase of stereographs. Lawrence’s expense books detail her participation in the world of literacy associated with middle-class respectability and begin to suggest a relationship between reading and viewing practices. Books, like stereoscopes, were associated with parlors and the family. And as with the accoutrements of viewing described above, products related to literature flooded the marketplace. “Book décor”—bric-a-brac from Parian-ware busts and other figurines to transfer printing onto china featuring characters and authors—referenced literature and literacy and assumed prime locations in middle-class parlors (Stevenson 321–24). The links between visual and print culture are only underlined by their cross-fertilization in the development of cultural products. Images of authors (William Shakespeare, Washington Irving) and their birthplaces, and a preponderance of literary characters from works such as Pilgrim’s Progress and The Faerie Queene, appeared in photographic format, including stereographs. One of the most prevalent artistic subjects presented in stereographic format was the popular statuary of John Rogers. Rogers’s works capitalized on the popularity of well-known literary works by Longfellow and Irving and could be found in their original sculptural format on parlor tables and étagères.

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perForMiNG the SelF

In his elaboration of the political economy of symbolic power, Pierre Bourdieu describes the various ways in which those who possess cultural capital make it manifest. The objectified form of cultural capital is the goods themselves described above—“books, works of art, and scientific instruments that require specialized cultural abilities to use”10 (DiMaggio 76–77). Crucial for Bourdieu, as well, is the realization of the symbolic nature of these goods in the embodied state of the objects of cultural capital in the people who have learned to appropriately consume them (Swartz 76). Much in the same way as books and reading were increasingly associated with refinement in the decades after the Civil War (Sicherman 286–87), the stereoscope functioned as an object through which the embodiment of taste could be performed. Stereoscopes comfortably fit and helped reinforce a discourse of vision already in place by midcentury. In an 1850 commencement address to the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary entitled “The Cultivation of Taste,” William C. Fowler distinguished between persons with taste and those without, using the language of vision. He described three men standing atop Mount Holyoke, each of whom views the scene before him. One looks with a “brute unconscious gaze,” registering only a vague impression, and undergoes no emotional response. The second notes only the potential for profit in the waterpower of the river and the mountain lumber. But the third man alone among them experiences delight from every part of the landscape as he gazes at the graceful winding of the river and compares mountain to mountain, admiring the distinctive features of each (Fowler 3). A similar association of vision with taste was expressed in Godey’s Lady’s Book a few years later: “It is very true that there are many who can look upon the works of art, still no effect will be produced; yet a person of nice perception and correct taste could gaze for hours upon them, and see each time something to admire. It is so in Nature even. Many men might walk forth on a lovely morning when Spring first smiles, yet see no beauty whatever, but merely cast a careless eye upon all around” (“Beauty” 346; emphasis added). As these texts make clear, a salient discourse of vision associated visual acuity (“nice perception”) and “correct taste” at midcentury. The promotion of the stereoscope accentuated the avowed link between visual acuity,

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personal refinement, and taste.11 Promotional materials, popular periodicals, and publications of the trade characterized the stereoscope as a tutor in the art of seeing, an indication—indeed a performance—of embodied cultural capital. Central to the democratization of gentility in the decades leading up to the middle of the nineteenth century was the opportunity to perform refinement. With the stereoscope, as opposed to a chromolithograph or a flat photograph, the act of seeing was made uniquely performative: one had to pick up the stereoscope, insert a view, and place the hood to one’s eyes. The formal properties of stereo viewing—and here I mean, quite literally, the forms of the instrument—encouraged a withdrawal from the world and a consciousness of an autonomous, seeing self. British scientist David Brewster transformed the stereoscope from a bulky scientific instrument that used mirrors to replicate the phenomenon of binocular vision into a popular parlor amusement.12 In producing the commercial version of the stereoscope Brewster employed lenses to create a smaller, handheld instrument that allowed for intense, isolated viewing. (See fig. 16.3 for a version of the Brewster stereoscope shown in an 1860 advertisement for McAllister and Brother, Opticians, in Philadelphia.) Brewster claimed that the exclusion of all other objects from vision, for which he gave a scientific rationale about the exclusion of ambient light, was a “point of essential importance”: “The binocular pictures must be placed in a dark box, in order to produce their full effect; and it would be a great improvement on the lenticular stereoscope, if, on the left and right side of each eye-tube, a piece of brass were to be placed, so as to prevent any light from entering the left of the left eye, and the right of the right eye. The eyes, thus protected from the action of all external light, and seeing nothing but the picture, will see it with a distinctness and brilliancy which could not otherwise be obtained” (Brewster 160–61). It was a significant element of this viewing experience that it happened with few distractions and that it occurred for the individual alone within the cameral enclosure of the dark box, in an experience akin to that of the camera obscura. When Oliver Wendell Holmes developed his own version of the stereoscope a few years later, he followed through with Brewster’s notion of further shielding the eye. Holmes included a hood on his design (visible on the table in the Liscomb view) that further blocked extraneous light

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Figure 16.3. advertisement, mcallister and Brother, opticians, 1860. the library company of Philadelphia.

and eliminated distractions. Behind the hood of the stereoscope one could imagine oneself in a space all one’s own, creating a sense of interiority and even a solipsistic encounter with the image. Looking into such an instrument, one sees almost nothing but the view. In the second of three Atlantic Monthly articles devoted to musings on the stereoscope published in 1859, 1861, and 1863, Holmes described the resulting disembodied experience of stereo viewing as the “shutting out of surrounding

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objects, and the concentration of the whole attention” (Holmes, “Sun” 14–15). Hidden behind the hood of the stereoscope, the viewer retreated into a private space. The privacy of the viewing experience engendered by the stereoscope was also rooted in its presence within the “private sphere” of domestic space. Gillian Brown has argued that the eighteenth-century notion of possessive individualism (the privately determined personhood around which the concept of self was predicated) took on an appreciable element of the domestic in the nineteenth century as the home was reoriented as a signifying space. Brown maintains that values connected with domesticity—including privacy, interiority (seemingly determined to be retreat from the marketplace), and psychological well-being—came to be associated with individualism, the central element of selfhood. Together, these concepts acted in concert to support the market economy. Increasingly, the definitions and boundaries between a public, male-centered market and a private, feminine sphere of the domestic collapsed into a self-defining circular logic by which the domestic was “at once the separate sphere of women and the correlative to, as well as the basis of, men’s individuality” (Brown 4). Although employing language that reiterates all-too-familiar dichotomies, Brown in fact uses the discourse of private and public to destabilize the notion of separate spheres, arguing that the very definition of selfhood—so integral to the public sphere—takes root within the privacy of the home. As the scholarship on the relationship between reading and the bourgeois subject has established, the act of reading also contributed to a particular projection of selfhood. This concept provides a revealing parallel with the notion of the discerning, viewing subject suggested here. Barbara Stafford has argued that by the late eighteenth century reading had shifted from a more oral-based tradition engaged with the tactility of the book to a more private activity and internalized experience. Following this generalization, Stafford posits that “reading aloud[,] . . . with its conversational and theatrical style,” was “supplanted by the private, silent and solitary ingestion of abstracted information” (47). Clearly, Stafford’s generalization is just that. Scholars have uncovered many nineteenth-century examples in diaries and letters of the practice of reading aloud (Zboray and Zboray; Stevenson 325–26, 328–29) and have suggested, in fact, that not until the advent of electric light could

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reading become a more private experience (Stevenson 331). The variety of settings in which reading occurred resulted in experiences that both strengthened sociability and confirmed personal privacy. Reading, as Louise Stevenson has recently concluded, was “as frequently a social experience as a private one” (325). And although my own research has yet to uncover elaborated accounts about the shared viewing of stereographs, one can well imagine the handheld stereoscope passed back and forth in a social setting. Indeed, double tabletop stereoscopes allowed two viewers to look through the stereoscope simultaneously. Yet the concept of the performance of privacy is worth pursuing. Even if too gross a generalization, Stafford’s suggestion posits a recognizable style of reading in the nineteenth century that highlighted the values of interiority and privacy and that, in the case of both book reading and stereo viewing, was very much associated with the domestic. In her recent essay on nineteenth-century reading practices, Barbara Sicherman argues that by examining the practices of historically situated readers, historians can probe the social nature of an activity (reading) “that has often been represented as private” (294; emphasis added). This distinction, I would argue, is specious. Privacy, a culturally embedded construct, is always already social in that it is dependent, in part, on performance. The claim here is not that stereo viewing was a private phenomenon or that it happened in a space apart from sociability. Quite to the contrary, part of its meaning and value was embedded in its assertion and performance of the individual. Stereoscopic viewing helped constitute a public made up of individuals understood as private.

a Mode oF SeeiNG

Thus far I have described the viewing experience as one associated with refinement and constitutive of a sense of interiority. I now turn to the question of the mode of stereo viewing. As Rosalind Krauss has argued, the context and experience of viewing and the “discursive spaces” created around a given element of visual culture delimit meaning (313). The context in which stereographs were viewed and the normative viewing practices by which they were defined differentiated the stereoscope/ stereograph ensemble from other contemporaneous visual culture

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deemed “modern” or “cinematic” (Charney and Schwartz 1, 3; Charney 285–89). The private nature of this viewing experience—both in its home setting and in its emphasis on interiority—contrasted with what has been identified as the publicity of much late nineteenth-century entertainment, often understood to be rooted in the experience of the crowd (Charney and Schwartz 3–5). Efforts to mimic the pace and motion of a newly “modern” urban life often led to new representational styles and motifs that enabled the eye to take in an ever-expanding array of objects, goods, and teeming life. In the shorthand of Walter Benjamin, this roving eye and mobilized vision has been reduced to the evocation of the flanêur and flanêuse. Scholars who characterize modern visual culture by its sense of spectacle, motion, and commercial publicity have described photography as one of the “emblems of modern experience” (Gunning 19). According to Miles Orvell, rather than being an enabling technology, the camera, like the cinema that followed, was a technological realization of an already existing, transformed, eye (Orvell 202–21). I position the stereoscope as a challenge to such sweeping claims for a “revolution” in viewing. The stereoscope and its views encouraged an inclination toward stillness and contemplation rather than a simulation of the pulse of the city. Nineteenth-century reading practices thus suggest a more significant parallel with stereo viewing than do the examples of public and spectacular commercial culture. In the tradition of rational amusement, the stereoscope promised a “purer . . . pleasure to the mind” (“Wonders” 379). Stereographs isolated views for thorough consideration and intense viewing, stopping time amid the whirlwind of “modern” life. The revelation of details in the stereograph was one of its more admirable qualities, according to contemporary accounts. Commentators advised careful study and protracted, sustained, and repeated viewings. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of “creeping” (“Stereoscope” 739) within the three-dimensional views, providing a useful metaphor of motion by which to imagine the almost plodding ocular activity. Holmes alleged that it was only with such careful, intensive looking that “reproductions become realities indeed” (Stereoscope 77). The details and solidity of stereoscopic representation made both possible and necessary an intensive viewing experience even when the collection of available views was extensive.

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Rather than the dazzle of illusion, viewers were encouraged toward intensive, focused looking. The representational verisimilitude of the stereoscopic view, its dimensionality, and its detail were intended not to amaze but to instruct. An article on the stereoscope in the Art Journal (London) claimed a universal delight in mimetic representations, suggesting a human appreciation of verisimilitude in art and other forms of visual representation, enjoyed by the rich and the poor, child and adult, sophisticate or rube: “We are [all] led to receive pleasurable impressions from the contemplation of the production of the mimetic arts.” To be amazed, however, was not a sufficient experience of stereoscopic viewing. “How often have we heard the exclamation, ‘The figure seems to stand out of the picture!’ and this has been, by the uneducated admirer, regarded as the very perfection of artistic effort” (Hunt, “Stereoscope and Its Improvements” 305). The sophisticated viewer, by contrast, moved beyond a simple delight in the illusion. This distinction is made clear when the stereoscope is compared to the projection technologies of phantasmagoria and dissolving views, in fashion both before the commercial stereoscope and contemporary to it, both of which elicited notions of the incredible and whimsical in public displays of fantasy (Castle). Representations of magic lantern shows pictured audiences of up to a dozen or more mingling in small groups, distracted by one another and the spectacle of the display. In an illustration from The Magician’s Own Book (fig. 16.4), faces in the crowd are turned every which way. Mothers attempt to control children, and suspicious fraternizing detracts from any possibility of concentration. In contrast to the spectacle of the lantern show stands the image of a single viewer, the most common choice for depicting stereoscopes in catalogs of optical instruments and advertisements such as that for McAllister and Brother, Opticians, shown above (fig. 16.3). A solitary viewer stares intently into a stereoscope, much as a solitary reader might retreat between the covers of a book. In the interest of uncovering historically situated viewers, we can glean a sense of the totality of viewing and reading experiences from the example of eighteen-year-old Thomas Whitaker, who kept a diary of his daily activities in the 1870s. Whitaker reported that on 6 June 1875 he and some friends had gone “to see Blackes art entertainment of Stereoscopical [sic] views” and added, “We all enjoyed it very much.” This brief reference tells the historian little about what Whitaker and his friends

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Figure 16.4. Illustration, the magician’s own Book, by george arnold, 1857 (p. 158). courtesy american antiquarian society.

thought of the views they saw, probably projected in the manner of the stereopticon. However, as Whitaker also made notes regarding his reading practices, we do know that the previous year (14 August 1874) he read John Mason’s Treatise on Self-Knowledge Showing the Nature and Benefit of That Important Science and the Way to Attain It, in an 1828 edition after the 1744 original. The book advises studying the sciences to enhance understanding of the natural order and hence improve one’s morals and control the passions. Self-possession, set in opposition to whim and fancy, were meant to prompt humility, charity, and moderation. Judgment would “exhibit things to the mind in a proper light, and true colors, without those false glosses and appearances which fancy throws upon them” (Mason 90). That Whitaker’s range of leisure time included reading such a book suggests the inadvisability of an interpretive reliance on a rupture signaling the commencement of “modern” amusements. The challenge to such broad strokes of declared “revolutions” in media and their consumption is multipronged. In a review essay on the scholarship about readers and reading in the United States, David Hall

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suggests that future projects appreciate the ways in which, “in any given period of time, readers had available more than one representation or ideology of reading, texts, and writing.” What is more, Hall adds, differently positioned readers (or viewers) read, or looked, in different ways, and “readers in past times, as in the present, moved easily from one hermeneutical framework to another” (181). Whitaker’s activities begin to suggest the continued attention to older practices of self-culture and notions of rational amusement. The combined reading and viewing activities suggest challenges to the exploration of visual culture per se, apart from other cultural productions, practices, and discourses—specifically reading. Even with the emergence of new visual forms people did not stop using older media, nor did they abandon previous frameworks and styles for the reception of older media. Not only did people continue to read—and read even eighteenth-century texts—but also they might have approached a new medium like the stereoscope in “old” ways. In a reevaluation of his narrative of a late nineteenth-century shift from a Protestant culture of production and self-denial to a secular consumer culture based on a “therapeutic ethos stressing self-realization in this world,” Jackson Lears allows for burgeoning consumerism in the early period as well. He writes, “Preliminary evidence suggests that it may be a mistake to argue a shift from the plodding nineteenth century to the carnivalesque twentieth: the carnival may have been in town all the time” (“Beyond” 77). While enthusiastically embracing Lears’s inclination to reevaluate the alleged great divide that starts modernity in 1880, I would suggest an alternate, but by no means exclusive, conclusion. While millions of stereographs titles—largely decontextualized and widely circulating images—had been “in town” for quite a while, the context in which they were experienced and the viewing practices that gave them meaning were far from “carnivalesque.” Rather, much like books, they gained a degree of their meaning as instruments for the performance of a refined self, lost in the contemplation of beauty and truth. NoteS

An earlier version of this essay appeared as “‘Home Taste’: Stereoscopes in the Parlor and the Construction of a Middle-Class Viewing Subject,” in Schiavo, “Collection.”

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1. The Moran stereographs are in the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Stereographs—Moran. (1) 5750.F.1372d and (8) 1322.F.35d. A brief reference to these images appears in Panzer 148. On Dreer, see Martinez and Talbott 9, 26. 2. It cannot go unsaid that the two women in the stereograph reproduced here are engaged in needlework. Despite the distinctly “feminine” nature of the activity of the women in the Dreer family, both reading and stereo viewing were closely associated with women in the middle decades of the nineteenth century (Sicherman 280; Schiavo, “Collection” 287–90). 3. The number of views published in the United States is difficult to determine. An estimated five to six million titles were produced in this country between 1860 and 1890. This estimate is based on the assumption of an average of five hundred titles for the inferred twelve thousand photographers working in the stereo format during these decades (Darrah 6). 4. The French and Liscomb views are in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society. 5. For a review of the developments within the historiography of photography, see Schiavo, “Collection” 10–12. 6. Similarly, Andrea Volpe argues that cartes-de-visite contributed to the social formation of class through the representation of the collective, middleclass body. Shirley Wajda posits that the ability to present portraits of the family in the parlor contributed to the strengthening of the concept of domesticity as an integral element of middle-class identity (244–72). 7. On the rise of the novel in the United States in the early nineteenth century, see Davidson, chap. 3. For a summary of the state of the literature on literacy in the United States in the nineteenth century, see Sicherman. 8. Merrill’s collection, numbering more than two hundred views, was catalogued in a pamphlet originally published in January 1874, which was then edited with the addition of appendices one year later and republished two years later. The Catalogue of Stereoscopic Views Belonging to Gyles Merrill with Catalogue of 214 Views, with Index is in the Mss. Dept. of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. 9. One collector who marked her/his stereographs with the monogram ELC numbered the views in a system that reached as high as 465. These views are part of the stereograph collection at the American Antiquarian Society. A Langenheim Brothers view in the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia (“In Laurel Hill Cemetery, Phil”) is marked in the back with the name C. Pott. Affixed to two views in the National Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Archives, George Allen Collection (nos. 194, 195), are labels that read “Stereoscopic Collection of Mrs. Hanson S. Weaver.” They are numbered 1777 and 1778. 10. See also Bourdieu for the institutional construction of class difference.

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11. This concept of tasteful viewing was surely not unique to the midnineteenth century. Since the Enlightenment, arbitrary distinctions regarding visual discernment had been constructed as markers of education and taste. For an eighteenth-century account, see deBolla 70. What did characterize the stereoscope was its position in an age of increasing mass production and consumption. 12. For a discussion of this transformation and the attendant shift in meaning, see Schiavo, “From.”

workS Cited

Arnold, George. The Magician’s Own Book. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1857. Ayer, James Bourne. “Catalogue of Library, 518 Beacon St. Boston.” Ms. Ca. 1900. Octavo vols. “A.” Mss. Dept. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. “Beauty.” Godey’s Lady’s Book Apr. 1854: 346. Blumin, Stuart. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Brewster, David. The Stereoscope, Its History, Theory and Construction: With Its Application to the Fine and Useful Arts and to Education. London: Murray, 1856. Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Vintage, 1993. Castle, Terry. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 49. Charney, Leo. “In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity.” Charney and Schwartz 279–94. Charney, Leo, and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Darrah, William C. The World of Stereographs. Nashville, TN: Land Yacht, 1997. Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. deBolla, Peter. “The Visibility of Visuality.” Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. Ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. New York: Routledge, 1996. 65–81. DiMaggio, Paul. “Review Essay on Pierre Bourdieu.” American Journal of Sociology 84.6 (1979): 1460–94.

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“Editorial Miscellany.” American Journal of Photography (and the Allied Arts) 1.5 (1858): 82. “Editorial Miscellany.” American Journal of Photography (and the Allied Arts) 1.8 (1858): 130. Fireside Philosophy, or Familiar Talks about Common Things. New York: Townsend, 1861. Fowler, William C[hauncy]. The Cultivation of Taste: Professor Fowler’s Anniversary Address to the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Thirteenth Anniversary of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, South Hadley, Massachusetts, August 2, 1850. Amherst, MA: Adams, 1850. Pamphlet. Collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Goodale, S. D., and Sons. Catalogue of Stereoscopic Instruments. Cincinnati: Clark, 1860. Grier, Katherine C. Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. Gunning, Tom. “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema.” Charney and Schwartz 15–45. Hall, David D. Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Himes, Charles F. Leaf Prints or Glimpses at Photography. Philadelphia: Benerman and Wilson, 1868. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. The Stereoscope and Stereoscopic Photographs. New York: Underwood and Underwood, 1898. ———. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” Atlantic Monthly June 1859: 738–48. ———. “Sun Painting and Sun Sculpture; with a Stereoscopic Trip across the Atlantic.” Atlantic Monthly July 1861: 13–29. Hunt, Robert. “The Stereoscope.” Art Journal [London] Mar. 1856: 118–20. ———. “The Stereoscope and Its Improvements.” Art Journal [London] Oct. 1858: 305–6. Krauss, Rosalind. “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View.” Art Journal 42.2 (Winter 1982): 311–19. Lawrence, Lucy W. Household Account Books, 1873–79. Doc. 21. Manuscript Collection, Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Library, DE. Lears, T. J. Jackson. “Beyond Veblen: Rethinking Consumer Culture in America.” Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920. Ed. Simon Bronner. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. 73–97. Martinez, Katharine, and Page Talbott, eds. Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape: The Sartain Family Legacy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

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Mason, John. A Treatise on Self-Knowledge Showing the Nature and Benefit of That Important Science and the Way to Attain It. Windsor, VT: Ide, 1828. Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. Ninth Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association at Faneuil and Quincy Halls. Boston, 1860. Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Miller, David, ed. American Iconology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Mitchell, W. J. T. “The Pictorial Turn.” Artforum Mar. 1992: 89–94. Moore, Charles H. What to Read, and How to Read, Being Classified Lists of Choice Reading with Appropriate Hints and Remarks. New York: Appleton, 1871. “New Stereoscopic Pictures.” Philadelphia Photographer 3.33 (1866): 266–68. Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Panzer, Mary. “Romantic Origins of American Realism: Photography, Art and Letters in Philadelphia.” Diss. Boston University, 1990. Schiavo, Laura Burd. “‘A Collection of Endless Taste and Beauty’: Stereographs, Vision, Taste and the American Middle Class, 1850–1880.” Diss. George Washington University, 2003. ———. “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope.” New Media: 1740–1915. Ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 113–37. Sicherman, Barbara. “Ideologies and Practices of Reading.” The Industrial Book, 1840–1880. Ed. Scott E. Casper et al. Vol. 3 of A History of the Book in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 279–302. Simons, M. P. “A Plea for the Little Stereoscope and the Stereoscopic Portrait.” Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin 3.3 (1872): 469–70. Smith, Shawn Michelle. American Archives: Gender, Race and Class in Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Stafford, Barbara. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Stevenson, Louise. “Homes, Books and Reading.” The Industrial Book, 1840–1880. Vol. 3 of A History of the Book in America, ed. Scott E. Casper et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 319–31. Swartz, David. The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Thomas Houseworth and Co. Stereoscopic Views of the Mechanics’ Institute Fair. San Francisco, 1869.

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Tipton, W. H. Catalogue of Stereoscopic Views. Gettysburg, PA, 1876. Volpe, Andrea. “Carte de Visite Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation.” The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class. Ed. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnson. New York: Routledge, 2001. Wajda, Shirley. “Social Currency: A Domestic History of the Portrait Photograph in the United States, 1839–1889.” Diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1992. Whitaker, Thomas Arthur. Diary. 1874–75. Folio vols. “W.” Mss. Dept. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. “Wonders of the Stereoscope.” Eclectic Magazine July 1857: 372–84. Zboray, Ronald J. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray. “Reading and Everyday Life in Antebellum Boston: The Diary of Daniel F. and Mary D. Child.” Libraries and Culture 32 (1997): 285–323.

Chapter SeveNteeN

the emerging media of early america S a n D r a M . g u S ta F S o n

hiStorie S oF eMerGeNCe

Emerging media is a phrase commonly used to describe the novel electronic media of today. The electronic archives that are rapidly becoming available will increasingly transform not only what scholars of early America read and teach but how those texts are read and taught. Electronic resources give us new tools for reading and teaching early texts; they also encourage us to ask new questions of the texts. The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web increasingly demand that we interrogate the forms and practices of textuality. They lead us to consider the nature of texts, comparing books or newspapers to Web sites. They encourage us to think more deeply about how texts produce meaning, for instance, by considering the changing practices of reading and writing brought on by Internet usage. And they lead us to ask what light these new forms of textuality shed on an earlier era’s textual forms and practices and to explore the new opportunities that they create for representing and interpreting the textual regimes of eras past. Emerging media can also usefully describe the media that were emergent in the colonies and early United States before 1900. These include, most prominently and familiarly, the rapidly spreading medium of print and its textual technologies that are the subject of history of the 341

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book scholarship. They include as well the precursors to modern representational and communicative media that swept the United States beginning in the 1820s, such as the daguerreotype and the photograph, developed in an early form in the 1820s and gaining widespread popularity with Daguerre’s invention of 1839; the electric telegraph, which appeared to great acclaim in 1844; the telephone, whose earliest version was developed in 1828, followed by Alexander Graham Bell’s in 1876; the phonograph, patented by Edison in 1877; the electric light, which transformed theaters, ball fields, and other performance spaces after its introduction in 1879; and advances in architectural and acoustical technologies that reached new levels of excellence and attracted international attention when Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater opened in Chicago in 1889.1 The “electrified” world that we know today is, in crucial ways, a product and extension of these nineteenth-century technologies, which had a long prehistory in both scientific research and theories of communication. Scientific demonstrations were one major medium for the dissemination and dissimulation of technical knowledge. They became popular fare in the eighteenth century, and for over a century they offered an important bridge between science and entertainment. Benjamin Franklin was an early master of the electrical performance and an expert at exploiting its intersections of technological, communicative, and political power. Franklin is famous for his skilled manipulation of a variety of media in the creation of his public image, including his electrical performances and the mythology that developed around them. In his Autobiography Franklin describes how he developed a series of experiments that could be performed to entertain and educate the public about the properties of electricity.2 Long before Franklin, Isaac Newton set the stage for the theoretical convergence of emerging electronic media and communication practices in his Principia, where he described “a certain most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles of bodies mutually attract one another,” and which also causes animal movement and perception. Newton characterizes this binding action as the product of an “electric and elastic Spirit” (2: 393). This somewhat mystical assertion about a spirit whose action offered a theoretical means to conjoin material and spiritual phenomena inspired scientific research that promised

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to deliver on this Casaubon-like grand theory of the unification of all life forms. The underlying promise of unity took on psychological and social dimensions in Newton’s theory and was extended in his followers, notably in the work of Anton Mesmer. Mesmer tapped into a widespread scientific and popular interest in electrical phenomena as they related to psychological states when he first tested his theories of mesmerism in the mid-1770s. Mesmer himself was attacked as a charlatan, his sexual ethics were impugned, and in 1784 a commission of the French Academy of Sciences that included Franklin among its members debunked Mesmer’s “fluid” (Darnton 62). Mesmerism later grew into a widely popular movement, spreading throughout Europe and achieving particular prominence in the United States after 1830. The vogue overlapped with the introduction of the electronic telegraph in 1844, when Samuel Morse telegraphed the message “What hath God wrought!” from Washington to Baltimore. This convergence was no accident, for mesmerists elaborated an electrical theory of mind that paralleled and commented upon emerging electrical technologies.3 The successful implementation of the electric telegraph sparked an outpouring of enthusiasm remarkably similar both in volume and in imagery to the rhetoric surrounding the introduction of the World Wide Web. Mind was said to have triumphed over matter. The electric telegraph promised the destruction of national boundaries and the achievement of “universal brotherhood.” Samuel Morse was credited with recreating a universal language—the telegraphic code—that would reproduce the universal bonds that God had destroyed at Babel. In the words of the Reverend Dr. Bellows, the telegraph would unite the “scattered members” of humanity into “one organic body, the great common humanity.”4 The nineteenth-century revolution in communications technologies was simultaneously a revolution in the way people thought about textual media, transforming representational and communicative practices in ways that directly affected the nineteenth-century print revolution taking place simultaneously. Often overlooked in both the field of communications studies, which typically begins its analysis with “the institutional birth of film and broadcasting and the development of large audiences in the twentieth century” (Marvin 3), and the field of history of the book, which most often relates print culture to manuscript

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and oral forms, these older new media provided contemporaries with a symbolic and functional point of reference for print technologies during this period. The rise of what is often called “print culture” took place during the first age of electrical research and was profoundly shaped by its emerging media. The emerging media of early America also included novel technologies of manuscript and performance. In this third sense, the phrase emerging media refers to the fact that, regardless of whether they are “old” or “new,” media are never static. They change internally, and they change in relation to one another. The circulation of literary manuscripts thrived at the moment in the eighteenth century that print culture underwent dramatic expansion. Manuscript permitted the formation of alternative publics and alternate articulations of “the public” well into the nineteenth century.5 The growth of the post office encouraged the writing of personal letters, while a vogue for album poetry led Ralph Waldo Emerson to write in 1840 that “a revolution in literature is now giving importance to the portfolio over the book.”6 Emily Dickinson’s fascicles represent a variant of the manuscript-based publication practice that Emerson described. As recent criticism has amply demonstrated, Dickinson’s refusal of print publication is best seen, not as a pathological fear of publicity, nor as a Luddite rejection of communications technologies, but rather as an essential component in a project to produce poetry that transforms the way language and textuality can be understood.7 Even more striking than the creation of new modalities of manuscript in the age of print is the exuberant emergence of performance media in the early United States. The history of American performance media is an especially useful field for complicating teleological narratives that trace textual technologies from orality to writing to print. Their emergence in the nineteenth century reflects a complex weave of social, cultural, and technological influences. The small size, geographic dispersal, and jurisdictional complexity of urban areas, coupled with widespread antitheatrical prejudice, inhibited the growth of a vibrant performance culture in the colonies and early republic. Preceding the emergence of a mature theater, and preparing the ground for it, touring performers offered dramatic readings. Such readings continued even after the theater began to develop as an institution, providing a dramatic supplement for those hungry for more theatrical fare and offering

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a performance alternative for those who continued to regard the theater with suspicion. By around 1820, the drama had emerged as a central component of urban cultural life in the United States. Such was the seriousness with which midcentury Americans regarded their theater culture that in 1849 the Astor Place Riot, sparked by transatlantic rivalries over “democratic” American or “aristocratic” British acting styles, resulted in the deaths of about twenty people. The growth of the theater reflected changing demographics and social attitudes. It also reflected changes in technology. Changes in theater design, the introduction of electrical lighting, and improvements in acoustics created new physical spaces that altered the social and aesthetic dynamics of the media of performance. The theatrical world of the nineteenth-century United States provides a rich and understudied site for the exploration of how technology and ideology interact. Other forms of performance evolved in ways that reflected both the impact of print media and the influence of the newly respectable institutions of the theater. The sermon, once the primary American performance genre, changed to reflect the emerging media context. Taking up strategies developed for the new mass print marketplace, which provided important tools of evangelization, sermons that highlighted storytelling increasingly came to supplant the text-doctrine-application structure of the Puritan sermon. Anticipated by George Whitefield’s dramatic enactments of scripture texts and by Jonathan Edwards’s compelling narratives of spiritual suffering and triumph, the popular evangelical literature and drama of the nineteenth century increasingly shaped religious life.8 In 1871 Mark Twain remarked that most Americans experienced the gospel through stage plays and religious novels “and NOT from the drowsy pulpit” (qtd. in Reynolds 1). Prompted by this loss of pulpit authority, trends in church architecture fueled the mingling of sacred and secular performance. Beginning in 1880, auditorium churches were built to resemble theaters, highlighting the convergences between the sermon and the play while asserting the primacy of the holy drama of the sermon over the worldly stage drama (Kilde). Political oratory underwent similar alterations to appeal to a newly performance-savvy audience. It first emerged as a mass public medium during the Revolutionary period. As statehouse galleries were opened to the public, the novel scene of statesmen debating before “the people”

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Fig. 17.1. george caleb Bingham, stump speaking (1853–54). courtesy of saint louis art museum. gift of Bank of america.

produced new ways of conceiving political representation.9 Over the following decades, rhetorical styles and modes of address, conventions of audience behavior and political campaigning, statehouse architecture, and institutional rules both helped to shape and were themselves produced by changes in the political and cultural landscape. Around 1840 the stump speech emerged as the paradigmatic rhetorical form of antebellum democracy. The phrase originally referred to the novel practice of electioneering in the open air, with a tree stump for a platform (fig. 17.1). A whole range of meanings attached to antebellum democracy—including the newly acceptable practice of openly courting voters and soliciting votes, the minimal elevation over the audience provided by a tree stump, the conduct of politics in close proximity to nature, and the frontier sense of land being cleared—took shape in the emergent form of the stump speech. Contemporaries understood, and sometimes deplored, the theatricality of the new genre. Perhaps the most conspicuously theatrical moment in the emergence of the stump speech took place during the presidential election of 1840. In that hotly contested race the Whigs successfully embraced the campaign techniques that had brought the

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Democrats such electoral success under Andrew Jackson. Whig leader Daniel Webster, who was the nation’s most famous political orator and man of letters, cast aside his dignified demeanor and polished literary style in order “to stump it,” as he put it.10 Webster refuted charges that his rhetorical shift was a bit of manipulative political theater by insisting on the deep truth of his newly democratized style: he was, he claimed, a true son of the frontier, raised by a plainspoken farmer in the mountains of New Hampshire. Like the sermon and the political oration, the treaty conference between Native American leaders and colonial governments was a central performance genre that was powerfully affected by the emergence of the theater. Throughout the colonial and early national periods these conferences, conducted with great dramatic flair, and printed in a playbill-like format by Benjamin Franklin, incorporated native diplomatic conventions such as the Iroquois condolence ritual and the use of wampum (fig. 17.2). These rituals were designed in part to stage the relative equality of power between the colonial governments and their Native negotiating partners. As whites established dominance over the continent, the performance technologies of American colonialism shifted away from the treaty conference and toward the Indian spectacle. This trend is visible in George Catlin’s touring displays of his paintings beginning in the 1830s and, during the same period, in the eastern tour that U.S. authorities forced upon Black Hawk, the defeated leader of the Fox and Sauk resistance. This movement away from the relative mutuality of the treaty conference and toward the imperial spectacle of defeated nations culminated in the Buffalo Bill shows of the late nineteenth century, where the staging of frontier warfare replaced the staging of peacemaking. A poignant testimony to the significance of media technologies as arbiters of cultural power appears in the narrative that Mahican leader Hendrik Aupaumut wrote of his 1794 mission to the western nations. Drawing on Mahican traditions, Aupaumut negotiated on behalf of George Washington’s administration only to find himself attacked by both parties to the negotiations, the confederation of western nations led by the Shawnees and the U.S. government. Aupaumut had imagined that he could create a position of cultural authority for the Mahicans in relation to the U.S. government analogous to the role they had held as diplomats and mediators among native communities prior to the

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Fig. 17.2. wampum belt. the record of a treaty with george washington in 1789, this belt represents the sacred agreement between the six nations and the original thirteen u.s. colonies. at the center is the longhouse of the six nations. there are two figures on each side of the longhouse: the mohawks are the keepers of the eastern door, and the senecas are the keepers of the western door of the confederacy. they have joined their hands in friendship, a covenant with the thirteen colonies. courtesy of the jake thomas learning centre, 2005, .

Revolutionary War. His mission failed, and instead of achieving cultural respect and integration within the United States, Aupaumut ultimately led his community west to the fringes of the nation rather than, as he had hoped, establishing its influence at the very centers of U.S. power. Aupaumut’s narrative suggests the social and cultural complexities contained within this broadest sense of “emerging media.” The traditions of Mahican diplomacy—wampum, oratory, the condolence ritual— proved to be highly unstable forms of mediation. Both sides came to view Aupaumut’s willingness to use these traditional media on behalf of the United States as a symptom of his inscrutability and untrustworthy

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nature. They failed to produce for him the image of sincerity and goodwill that he had hoped to create for himself as a representative of the Washington administration and instead were treated as instruments of deception.11

theoriziNG Media eMerGeNCe

The concept of “emerging media” offers an alternative to what we might call the stadial theory of media technology, which models successive cultural stages from the oral and performed to writing and manuscript and from thence to print.12 One common historiographical variant of the stadial theory distinguishes between evolving and residual media. As the association of “evolving media” with biological evolution suggests, the assumption about such media is that they offer a new form destined ultimately to replace earlier verbal technologies. Print typically functions as the evolving medium in this evolutionary narrative, while more recent versions put electronic media in the role once played by print. “Residual media” are remainders of a past communicative era, dinosaurs that survive into the age of mammals but are nevertheless doomed to extinction.13 The concept of “emerging media” differs significantly from this sense of linear development; it also should be distinguished from the narrower model of media in competition. Competition, a metaphor based on an understanding of media as essentially market-driven phenomena, is one mechanism of textual emergence, but it does not exhaust the possible modes of interaction between emerging media.14 Emergence differs as well from collage, an approach to textual media that views them in an aesthetic configuration with one another. “Collage says there is always more than one context, always more than one medium involved in any present event.” In focusing on media “collision” as a “central fact of life,” collage mutes or suppresses historical ways of thinking about media in favor of a homogeneous temporality marked by heterogeneous forms.15 The concept of “emerging media” retains temporality as a central element in thinking about media, and in this it owes much to scholars working in the field of the history of the book. A signal contribution of history of the book scholarship over the last twenty-five years has been

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to highlight the fact that the book is not a static object but rather changes its form and function over time. Printing formats, binding styles, distribution networks, and reading practices are defining, not accidental, elements of the book. In a related way, print is not a static medium but develops its range of meanings and functions within a particular social context. This contingent and historical, rather than essentializing, view of print and the book that is characteristic of history of the book scholarship owes much to a rising awareness that books and print are not the last word in textual form. It is no accident that the growth of the field coincides with the rise of the Internet. Antiessentialist understandings of print and the book stand in sharp contrast to a tradition of scholarship most famously represented by Marshall McLuhan, who treated the print medium as a technology whose visual orientation has determinate effects on human cognitive processes. In McLuhan’s deterministic understanding of media, the impact of print on cognition leads directly to certain social consequences, including individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism.16 Elizabeth Eisenstein developed McLuhan’s claims about the social effects of print (while skirting the issue of print’s cognitive effects) in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. In 1990 Michael Warner issued an important challenge to McLuhan and Eisenstein’s technological determinism, arguing in The Letters of the Republic that the configuration of social effects that McLuhan had identified as unvarying features of print culture were, instead, simply one of the possible forms that it might take. According to Warner, a print culture organized by classical republican ideals had preceded the liberal nationalist print culture that more nearly resembled McLuhan’s model. The medium is not the message, Warner implied; rather, medium and message mutually constitute one another.17 Other critics of technological determinism have challenged the parallel teleology that leads ineluctably from orality to writing and from manuscript to print. Ruth Finnegan, Brian Street, and others have provided an incisive critique of the tendency to hypostasize and hierarchically code “oral” and “literate” societies, as exemplified in the work of Walter Ong and Jack Goody.18 Recently, critics including Alvin Kernan, Sven Birkerts, and Mark Edmundson have developed a narrative of decline that builds on McLuhan’s work, even as it diverges from his exuberant vision of the

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electronic global village. McLuhan’s global village held forth the promise of an electronically induced universal harmony that some cultural commentators had envisioned more than a century earlier when the electric telegraph was introduced. In books with such titles as The Death of Literature, The Gutenberg Elegies, and Why Read?, Kernan, Birkerts, and Edmundson turn McLuhan on his head while sharing many of his basic assumptions. They pursue what we might describe as a “reading at risk” narrative, so called from the title of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) report on the decline of literary reading, which celebrates a lost era when the reading of novels, plays, and poems sustained a rich imaginative and social order. These texts trace the putative debasement of contemporary culture to new media such as television and now, increasingly, the Internet. What these critics add to the long-standing critique of modern mass media is an account of the supposed psychological and cultural consequences of electronic media consumption in contrast to an idealized model of literary reading. Explicitly building on McLuhan’s theories, these writers and scholars pose a strict dichotomy between the forms of subjectivity, cultural identity, and social engagement permitted by literary reading and those created by the consumption of electronic media. Birkerts offers the most pointed version of this jeremiad. Through the impact of electronic media, he writes, “we are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence.” Birkerts argues that as it becomes “easier and easier to accept the idea of electronic tribalism,” which he refers to as “hive life,” “subjective individualism is now not the goal but the impedance factor” (228).19 He values what he believes is endangered subjective individualism, which for him is nurtured above all through the solitary reading of novels, a position echoed by Edmundson. Birkerts cites Kernan when he dates this practice of reading to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the advent of the television threatened it. The older forms of electronic “new media”—the telegraph, the electric light (which dramatically facilitated private reading), and so on—have no place in these narratives, for these accounts require a textual past uncontaminated with the preoccupations and anxieties of the electronic media of today. Yet as consideration of a number of canonical texts of the American Renaissance period readily shows, literary writers construed their practices of authorship and expectations about readership in relation to

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that first wave of electrical media. Walt Whitman sang “the body electric” and celebrated the unifying powers of the telegraph. Henry David Thoreau built his cabin close to the railroad tracks and the telegraph lines. Thoreau found in new technologies a provocation to rethink the meanings of existing verbal forms. In the course of Walden he figures himself variously as a journalist, an express messenger, and a telegrapher attempting to communicate the messages of nature.20 Walden offers an extended meditation on the meaning of textual forms, including not only new technologies of the word such as the telegraph but also the varieties of sound and speech (the “voices” of nature, conversation, oration), writing (the journal, the words scratched on a bit of bark), and print (“little reading,” as he calls popular fiction, versus the classics). Just as today we rethink textual forms in light of the World Wide Web, so in the 1850s Thoreau rethought textual forms in light of the telegraph. Nathaniel Hawthorne similarly reflected on the emergence of new media and offered a strikingly familiar contrast between electrical forms and print in The Blithedale Romance (1852). Hawthorne’s misanthropic narrator Miles Coverdale identifies himself as a minor (and aggrieved) author. Attending a mesmeric performance in a village lyceum, another of the new performance media of Hawthorne’s day, Coverdale comments sullenly on the rich range of entertainments presented there and observes that “of late years [the lyceum] has come strangely into vogue, when the natural tendency of things would seem to be, to substitute lettered for oral methods of addressing the public.” Coverdale’s resentment about the performance genres available at the lyceum is further exacerbated by the mesmeric spectacle of Professor Westervelt and the Veiled Lady, which combines elements of the Oriental exotic, the spiritual, the erotic, and the scientific. The professor’s lecture echoes the optative contemporary celebrations of telegraphy, presenting the utopian prospects of the mesmeric electrical fluid that he promises will “link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity, with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one great, mutually conscious brotherhood” (802, 806). In Hawthorne’s other mesmeric novel, The House of the Seven Gables, the aging and unstable Clifford Pyncheon offers similar descriptions of the electrical union made possible through telegraphy. These are not visions that meet with the author’s approval. In both novels, Hawthorne characterizes the electrical union of souls (akin to Birkerts’s

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image of the electronic “hive”) as a violation of the subject’s integrity that overtly resembles sexual violation (as indeed was believed to be the case with mesmerism). What these Hawthorne novels suggest is that the contrast that characterizes many analyses of communicative media today between, on the one hand, print-based subjective integrity and, on the other, performative and electrical mass forms was already well established when the idealized figures of the author and the novel reader that appear in recent works on the death of literature first took shape.

hiStorioGr aphy aNd Media eMerGeNCe

To write history is to tell a story, and stories require narrative arcs. If instead of imagining a fixed sequence of media technologies we think of verbal media as always emerging, always in flux, and always in relation to one another, if we stress the fact that print does not supplant oral forms but coexists with new modes of performance, if we highlight the development of manuscript forms, if we foreground the constitutive relationship between print culture and electronic media, if, in short, we emphasize that media coevolve rather than develop sequentially, what more is there to say about them? How can a narrative structured around emergence give meaningful shape to these intersections? The literary projects of two prominent American cultural figures from the high age of print illustrate the contemporaneous configurations of emergent textual media. My first example is Daniel Webster, the statesman and orator who was arguably the most important cultural figure of his day (fig. 17.3). Ralph Waldo Emerson admired and emulated Webster through much of his career. It is Webster that Emerson has in mind when he observes that “the writer is but an orator manqué” and laments the writer’s lack of physical presence to his audience.21 In 1831 Emerson penned the following lines, which suggest the emblematic quality of Webster’s communicative power: “Let Webster’s lofty face / Ever on thousands shine, / A beacon set that Freedom’s race / Might gather omens from that radiant sign” (Complete Essays 816). Emerson refers here to the reputation that Webster acquired during the 1820s as an international advocate of freedom in such commemorative speeches as the Bunker Hill Monument address, which circulated through the

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Fig. 17.3. daniel webster, from a daguerreotype from life. lithograph, 39.8 × 24.5 cm. courtesy american antiquarian society.

Americas and Europe. The image of Webster’s face as a beacon and a radiant sign, reminiscent of Moses’s shining face as he descended from Sinai, suggests his relationship to the novel forms of mass and distance communication that were so important in the emergence of democratic thought. More common than Emerson’s image here of Webster’s shining face was an image in an Emerson poem from 1834 in which he describes

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Webster’s much-celebrated “great forehead” (Complete Essays 816), a ubiquitous metaphor for Webster’s powers of mind. For more than two decades, Webster embodied for many the relationship between spoken and written eloquence, the powers of the mind to transcend space and time, and the spread of political liberty. Like Edmund Burke, who was his immediate role model, and like Cicero, who was the ancient figure inspiring both Webster and Burke, Webster sought to form U.S. politics by shaping the communicative media and the rhetorical forms of political language. Famed equally for their eloquently delivered orations and for their elegant written prose, Cicero and Burke also embodied the role of defender of the republic. It was to this combination of textual and political achievements that Webster aspired in his “Seventh of March” speech in favor of the Compromise of 1850, endeavoring through his eloquence to maintain the Union even at the cost of the perpetuation of slavery. It was on this speech that Webster’s literary editor believed he wanted to rest his fame. Instead, the speech signaled the end of his political efficacy and alienated an influential portion of his constituency. This political failure contributed in turn to his eventual loss of literary reputation. This eventuality took some decades to unfold. Before the tide turned against Webster’s fame as a man of letters, however, his reputation for eloquence developed into a minor literary phenomenon. In 1851 Webster’s longtime friend Edward Everett published a textual monument to him, a six-volume collection of Webster’s speeches and other writings, which Webster helped to prepare. This may have been the first collection of an orator’s works planned and executed during his own lifetime, and thus it bears comparison to Ben Jonson preparing an edition of his own plays for publication. The literary culture of this so-called Golden Age of American Oratory makes this comparison less preposterous than it might at first seem. As the great republican verbal art, oratory was seen by many Americans to be particularly worthy of note. Whereas the British were acknowledged superiors in poetry, drama, and fiction, Americans were seen to excel at oral eloquence. Books recounting the biographies of famous American orators proliferated, as did anthologies of speeches. Recitations of famous addresses were common, both in school and on the stage. In the decades after his death, Webster continued to be accorded the treatment of a great man of American letters and given a role in literary

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history. In 1879, Edwin P. Whipple edited a one-volume edition of The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster that included Whipple’s fifty-page essay “Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style.” Focusing on Webster’s “plain, terse, clear, forcible” style that Whipple supposed reflected Webster’s closeness to nature, the essay compared Webster favorably to Burke (Whipple xiii, xiv, xxix, lvi). In writing this tribute to Webster, Whipple sought to contend with a very different evaluation of the orator’s literary contributions that Emerson had presented in his speech opposing the Fugitive Slave Law. Emerson celebrated the great man’s talents as the effect of a powerful mind: “Great is the privilege of eloquence,” Emerson observed. “What gratitude does every man feel to him who speaks well for the right—who translates truth into language entirely plain and clear!” Yet Webster lacked a measure of “moral sensibility” that was “proportionate” to his intellect. As a consequence, Emerson insisted, a “sterility of thought” characterizes his speeches, and “not an observation on life and manners, not an aphorism . . . can pass into literature from his writings” (Complete Essays 864–65). Rather than build the textual monument that Webster, Everett, and Whipple envisioned as Webster’s contribution to literary history, Emerson predicted that Webster’s once-eloquent words would fall into obscurity. It is Emerson’s, rather than Everett’s and Whipple’s, vision of Webster that persists today. Webster’s intertwined political and literary careers are useful for clarifying how verbal forms co-emerge, rather than emerging in a sequence from speech to writing to print. In his excellent study of the consolidation of national identity in the early republic, David Waldstreicher has demonstrated how the era’s many ceremonies, speeches, celebrations, and parades signified both as events or performances and as printed accounts that circulated in the newspapers. He persuasively demonstrates that performance and print were necessary and mutually dependent modalities for the consolidation of American nationalism. Webster’s orations signified both as performances—including their original delivery and that of numerous schoolroom and drawing room imitators—and in print as newspaper accounts, in printed separates, in speech anthologies, and in his collected works. Moreover, in Webster’s oeuvre spoken and printed forms of language emerged both in relation to one another and in relation to the political ideals of freedom and union that he aspired to embody in a monumental legacy. Webster represented a form

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of communicative power that translated from speech to writing, that resided in the power of mind to overcome material obstacles of time and space, and that promised universal brotherhood and freedom (while failing to adequately address slavery). Webster was, in short, a human embodiment of the utopian dreams that contemporaries also invested in the telegraph (remember Emerson’s early image of Webster’s face as a beacon and a radiant sign). Emerson’s post-1850 prediction, accurate as it turned out, that the printed record of Webster’s speeches would fail to make any permanent contribution to literature, signals the collapse of a vision that brought together universal communicative power with political ideals in the person of a statesman. Until his support for the Compromise of 1850 undermined his ethical authority, Webster embodied a distinctive cultural moment in which oratory was a signal form of verbal art, traversing oral and printed media and articulating high ideals for the relationship between language and statesmanship. This vision of the orator’s linked communicative and political power emerged with the Revolution and largely ended with the downfall of Daniel Webster. Emily Dickinson offers not only a remarkably different literary sensibility from Webster’s but also a different and equally self-conscious engagement with the emergent properties of verbal media. Dickinson snidely suggests the difference herself in “I’m Nobody,” where she contrasts the intimate public of nobodies (presumably readers of her poetry) to the public world of froglike somebodies such as Webster who “tell [their] name[s]—the livelong June— / To an admiring bog.” Because the vast majority of Dickinson’s poetry remained in manuscript throughout her life, and because she appears not to have circulated those manuscripts very widely, the intimate public of nobodies was very small, perhaps for some poems only herself and her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, perhaps for other poems herself alone, a public of one. Dickinson’s resistance to print publication is a well-known fact of her literary career, attested to in such poems as “This is my letter to the world” and “Publication is the auction of the mind of man.” The alternative mode of publication that she imagined for herself involved handwritten fascicles bound together in a pamphletlike form. Dickinson’s fascicles emerged as a subject of sustained critical interest in the early 1990s, prompted by the publication of R. W. Franklin’s two-volume print edition of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson in 1981. These volumes first made available to a wide

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audience the manuscript books that until that time had required a visit to Harvard’s Houghton Library, where the fascicles are closely guarded. Before this publication appeared, Dickinson’s poems had been edited in a wide variety of ways. The most standardizing approaches reduced or eliminated her distinctive punctuation and capitalization practices and her lists of alternative phrasings and at times even regularized her rhymes and meters. More recent editions seek to reproduce in print those aspects of Dickinson’s manuscript poems that an editor deems meaningful. In a deliberately provocative essay from 1993 on Dickinson’s manuscripts, Susan Howe pursues the logic of fidelity to the manuscript almost to its end, arguing that we must understand the fascicles as embodiments of Dickinson’s visual poetics, which require strict attention to her use of space, ink, and sound. Howe writes, “The space is the poem’s space. Letters are sounds we see. Sounds leap to the eye. Word lists, crosses, blanks, and ruptured stanzas are points of contact and displacement. Line breaks and visual contrapuntal stresses represent an athematic compositional intention. This space is the poet’s space. Its demand is her method” (139). Howe stresses the importance of the sounds of the poem as they relate to its visual components to produce meaning, suggesting its performance dimensions. She further imagines Dickinson’s fascicles as relatives of the artist’s book, a hybrid genre of text and visual or tactile art.22 For Howe, Dickinson’s preference for manuscript fascicles manifests her refusal to collaborate with the male-dominated institutions of publishing. Rather than reflect the stereotyped image of Dickinson “isolated from historical consciousness,” where the material form of the manuscript fascicles embodies Dickinson’s isolation and ahistoricism, in Howe’s view the fascicles register instead an intense historical consciousness about the ways that the material forms of gender relate to the material forms of printed textual production.23 The refusal of print publication is much more than a gesture of negation, however; it opens up alternative modes for the production of poetic meaning, modes that draw on the material properties of manuscript and the interrelation of poems in the fascicles. In her 1992 book Choosing Not Choosing, Sharon Cameron explores some of the consequences of reading Dickinson’s poems in the fascicles as if their order had meaning. She treats each set of poems in a fascicle as an intentional

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sequence and tracks themes and development (or lack of development) both within and between fascicles. What Cameron and Howe help us to see, in their different ways, is the emergent quality of manuscript in Dickinson’s work. Dickinson’s use of manuscript differs from earlier instances of manuscript circulation: first, in that the greater accessibility of print and the absence of overt censorship made the poet’s rejection of print a particular statement about her society; second, insofar as the context of modern feminist thought in which she wrote informed her choice of medium; and third, in the sense that her specific choices—of the layout of words and marks on the page, of the order of poems in the fascicles—are products of the poet herself and reflect her awareness of the material properties of her medium, an awareness that she shared with near-contemporaries, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, who in different ways interrogated the material practices of print (Davidson). Dickinson’s failure to control her work, which is the subject of Howe’s critique, is nowhere more visible than in the Web site prepared by Martha Nell Smith and available at the Dickinson Electronic Archive, titled “Mutilations: What Was Erased, Inked Over, and Cut Away.” Here the impact of manuscripts with chunks cut away or entire pages inked out is considerable, even in the admittedly inadequate photographic and digital reproductions. Smith discusses the range of reasons for the mutilations, some of them benign (a signature was cut from a letter to gratify an autograph seeker) and some sinister (text was inked out to suppress evidence of the close relationship between Dickinson and her sister-inlaw). In another Web publication that is not part of the archive, Marta Werner has included images of some of Dickinson’s very late works, which involve phrases written on slips of paper that are then arranged into forms with folds and pins, something like a collage, suggesting even more strongly Dickinson’s affinities with the artist’s book (fig. 17.4). The electronic turn in Dickinson studies was, in a sense, anticipated by Dickinson herself. As Jerusha Hull McCormack has recently argued, Dickinson was “remarkably responsive to the implications of technological innovation—even to its possibilities for poetry,” such as the “gnomic dispatches of the telegraph” that are a “natural correlative” of her style (McCormack 572–73). The ready availability of the images of Dickinson’s manuscripts via the Web suggests one important way that electronic archives will reshape

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Fig. 17.4. a reused envelope in two fragments on which emily dickinson made notes in pencil and used a straight pin to attach a fragment now removed. amherst college archives and special collections. reprinted by permission of the trustees of amherst college and by Harvard university Press from the manuscript Books of emily dickinson: a facsimile edition, ed. ralph w. franklin (cambridge, mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard university Press), a821/ a821a. copyright © 1981 by the President and fellows of Harvard college.

our understanding of verbal media. We can see directly, if not with the full detail we would like, the range of textual forms that Dickinson employed, her attentiveness to and playfulness with textual media. We can also see what happened to those texts, the mutilations or the unwitting neglect of significant material properties, such as the pins holding the late works together. This testimonial work is one important way that the emerging media of today can help us to better understand and preserve the emerging media of early America, making visible the range of textual forms from wampum belts to staged readings to popular pamphlets to dramatized novels. More generally, today’s emerging electronic media should provoke us to think creatively about how we can use new media to more fully represent and understand these and the many other emerging media of the past. In conclusion, let me suggest that my two examples of media emergence—Daniel Webster and Emily Dickinson—highlight

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historical formations of textuality as they are influenced by institutions and individuals as well as by the physical properties of both existing and new media. They provide us with instances of what David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins term “aesthetics of transition.” It is said that there is no better way to see time pass than to live with a young child. In much the same way, there is no better way to see “history” take shape than to contemplate the social and aesthetic effects of a new medium.

NoteS

A longer version of this essay was delivered as the 2005 James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture. 1. On the previous generation of new media, see Marvin; on the development of acoustics, see Thompson. 2. In The Letters of the Republic Michael Warner suggests that print is the primary material metaphor for Franklin’s characteristic practice of disseminating knowledge. As the circulation of electrical performances suggests, however, print did not have the priority that Warner ascribes to it. For a reading that similarly stresses the many forms that the basic pattern of circulation takes and relates it to capitalism, see Breitwieser. 3. On mesmerism in the United States, see Fuller; De la Peña 92–98. A group of mesmeric works was collected in the Library of Mesmerism and Psychology published by Fowlers and Wells (Walt Whitman’s publisher for the early editions of Leaves of Grass) around 1852. Of particular note in this collection is John Bovee Dods, The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology; in a Course of Twelve Lectures. Dods prints a letter dated 12 Feb. 1850, from a group of U.S. senators, including Henry Clay, Sam Houston, and Daniel Webster, inviting him to deliver his lecture series on electrical psychology for members of Congress. 4. Lepore 139–41; quoted passages, 140. 5. See Saunders; McKenzie; Love; Hall; Shields; Mulford; and Ezell. 6. On letters, see Hewitt. Emerson, “New Poetry” 137. 7. Martha Nell Smith offers a valuable overview of critical approaches to these issues in “Dickinson’s Manuscripts.” 8. For a discussion of Whitefield and Edwards, see chap. 1, “Gender in Performance,” in Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power 40–74. 9. On the rise of political oratory, see chaps. 3–7 of Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power. 10. Webster’s usage is quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘stump,’ .

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11. For a longer account of Aupaumut’s diplomatic career, see Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power 257–65. 12. My approach to these problems is similar to McKenzie’s analysis of speech, writing, and print in the Renaissance as “complementary” rather than “competitive” textual modes. Hayles’s concept of a “medial ecology” is relevant for this discussion as well. See Writing Machines and the definition in the book’s lexicon available at . 13. For residual versus “technologically advanced” media, see Marotti and Bristol 6. 14. On media competition, see “Yes, Obi-Wan” 13. 15. On collage as one approach to the study of multiple media, see Lander, Gustafson, and Fredman. 16. See McLuhan; see also Goody (Interface; Logic), who presents a very similar history but traces its origins to the written word rather than to print. 17. “The Cultural Mediation of the Print Medium,” in Warner 1–34. 18. Finnegan 254–60; “The ‘Autonomous’ Model: I Literacy and Rationality” and “The ‘Autonomous’ Model: II Goody,” in Street 19–64; Ong; and Goody (Interface; Logic). 19. Birkerts cites Kernan and is cited approvingly by Edmundson. Thus, while he is the least scholarly expositor of the position I am describing, he nevertheless usefully reflects some of its major claims and tendencies. 20. Thanks to James P. Shortall for calling these passages to my attention. 21. Emerson is quoted without citation in Matthiessen 22. 22. On artists’ books, see Drucker. 23. See Walter Benn Michaels’s sharp critique of Howe’s materialism in The Shape of the Signifier, 1–18.

workS Cited

Benn Michaels, Walter. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994. Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Cameron, Sharon. Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.

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Davidson, Michael. “The Material Page.” A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the Book and Writing. Ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay. New York: Granary Books, 2000. 71–79. De la Peña, Carolyn Thomas. The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern America. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Dods, John Bovee. The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology; in a Course of Twelve Lectures. New York: Fowler, 1865. Drucker, Johanna, The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary, 1995. Edmundson, Mark. Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: Modern Library, 1940. ———. “New Poetry.” In Uncollected Writings: Essays, Addresses, Poems, Reviews and Letters, 137–52. New York: Lamb, 1912. Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Franklin, Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: An Authoritative Text. Ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Fuller, Robert C. Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Goody, Jack. The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Gustafson, Sandra M. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. ———. “The Emerging Media of Early America.” James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture. Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 115 (2005): 205–50. Hall, David D. “The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century.” Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 97–150. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne: Collected Novels. Ed. Millicent Bell. New York: Library of America, 1983. Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Hewitt, Elizabeth. Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Howe, Susan. The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993. Kernan, Alvin. The Death of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Kilde, Jeanne Halgren. When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lander, Jesse M., Sandra M. Gustafson, and Stephen Fredman. “Manifesto.” Notre Dame Working Groups, Text-Media Studies. 2006. . Lepore, Jill. A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States. New York: Knopf, 2003. Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Marotti, Arthur F., and Michael D. Bristol. Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. McCormack, Jerusha Hull. “Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.” American Quarterly 55 (Dec. 2003): 569–601. McKenzie, D. F. “Speech-Manuscript-Print.” Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays. Ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 237–58. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Mulford, Carla, ed. “Introduction.” Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Newton, Sir Isaac. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Trans. Andrew Motte. 2 vols. London: Benjamin Motte, 1729. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. ———. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. 1967. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Porte, Joel, ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983. Reynolds, David S. Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Saunders, J. W. “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry.” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–64.

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Shields, David S. Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Smith, Martha Nell. “Dickinson’s Manuscripts.” The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Ed. Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. 113–37. Street, Brian V. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Thorburn, David, and Henry Jenkins. “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition.” Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 1–16. Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Whipple, Edwin P. “Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style.” The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster. Boston: Little, Brown, 1879. xi–lxiii. “Yes, Obi-Wan, There Are Still Books.” Editorial. New York Times 5 June 2005, sec. 4, p. 13.

CoNtributorS

Matthew p. brown is Associate Professor of English and Director of

the Center for the Book, University of Iowa.

Martin brückner is Associate Professor of English and Material Cul-

ture Studies at the University of Delaware.

oz Frankel is Associate Professor of History at the New School for So-

cial Research.

philip F. Gura is William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of

American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sandra M. Gustafson is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Coleman hutchison is Assistant Professor of English at the University

of Texas at Austin.

joycelyn Moody holds the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in

American Literature, University of Texas at San Antonio.

joan Newlon radner, Professor Emerita of Literature at American

University, is a folklorist and storyteller.

jeffrey h. richards is Eminent Professor of American Literature at Old Dominion University.

367

368

contrIButors

phillip h. round is Professor of English, University of Iowa. ingrid Satelmajer is Lecturer in English and University Honors at the

University of Maryland, College Park.

laura burd Schiavo is Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at The

George Washington University.

david S. Shields is McClintock Professor of Southern Letters in the Department of English, University of South Carolina. Caroline F. Sloat is Director of Scholarly Publications at the American Antiquarian Society. angela vietto is Associate Professor of English at Eastern Illinois

University.

Susan S. williams is Professor of English and Vice Provost for Aca-

demic Policy and Faculty Resources at Ohio State University.

katherine wilson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theater, Graduate Center, City University of New York. hilar y e. wyss is Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature at Auburn University.

iNdex

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. AAS. See American Antiquarian Society Abbott, George, 27 abolitionist literature. See also slave narratives appropriation of black women’s accounts of slavery, 222–23 ideological consistency in, 235n10 objectification of enslaved women in, 220 patronizing attitude of, 224 silencing of black women’s voices by, 222 unconscious biasing of information by, 228 Ackland, Harriet, 146 Adams, Abigail, 146–47 Adams, John, 46n4, 59, 79, 80, 279 Adams, Matthew, 46n4 Addison, Joseph, 47n7, 79 The Adulateur (Warren), 79, 81 aesthetics of transition, 361 African Americans. See also banjo; slave narratives black autobiography, white receptivity to, 227 emigration to Haiti, 299–304 as minstrel show performers, 250–51 The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Ulrich), 2–3 Aiken, George L., 165 Alcott, Louisa May, 308–10, 316n16

Alden, Timothy, 99, 112 Alexander, Alexander, 39 Alexander, James, 40, 41, 42, 43 Alleine, Richard, 30 amanuenses. See also abolitionist literature and authenticity, 313–14 ethnographer as, 263 Native Americans and, 122–23 and slave narratives, 221, 222, 225, 228, 231 (see also slave narratives) unconscious biasing of information by, 228 American Antiquarian Society (AAS), 220 American Anti-Slavery Reporter, 221, 233–34 American Anti-Slavery Society, 224, 235n4 American Archives, 280 American Company, 88 American Freedmen Inquiry Commission, 284 American Journal of Photography, 324 American Renaissance, emerging media’s impact on, 351–53 American State Papers, 280 American Tract Society, 228 Amherst, Jeffery, 112 “An Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies” (Evans), 60 369

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“Andersonville and Other War Prisons” (Davis), 312–13 Andrews, William L., 226, 227, 228–29 Androboros (Hunter), 43, 74 Anglo-African magazine, 301 Anglo-American culture, education of women in, 119, 121 Annals of Congress, 280 Annotations Upon the Holy Bible (Poole), 108 Annual Message of the President, 279–80, 293 An Answer to a Book Entitled “An Humble Remonstrance” (“Smectymnuus”), 22 Anti-Slavery Bugle, 221 Apess, William, 132n3 Apthorp, Charles, 144 Apthorp, Frances “Fanny,” 143–45 Army Life in a Black Regiment (Higginson), 263 The Arte of Prophecying (Perkins), 19 Art Journal (London periodical), 333 Astell, Richard, 39 Astor Place Riot (1849), 345 Atlantic Monthly, 205, 210, 263, 329 audiences, and performance, instruction in comportment and behavior, 15 Auditorium Theater (Chicago), 342 Aupaumut, Hendrik, 347–49 authorship collaborative notion of —history of, 139 —in Morton (Sarah W.), 138, 139–47 —survival of, in individual author era, 139 constructing of self as author, in Morton (Sarah W.), 139–43, 147–48 government reports and, 289–92 individualistic notion of —emergence of, 138–39

—in Morton (Sarah W.), 138, 147–48 scholarship on, 138–39 autobiographies, by Native American missionaries, 112–13 Autobiography (Franklin), 342 Axtell, James, 98–99, 119 Ayars, Joseph, 244 Ayer, James, 326 “Azâkia: A Canadian Story” (anon.), 149n7 Bacon, Jacqueline, 221, 223, 230, 232 Bagrow, Leo, 51 Ball, John, Jr., 226 “Ballad of the Trees and Master” (Lanier), 208 banjo African origins of, 241, 249 as America’s instrument, 252 black views on, 251 design of, 245–46, 249 Europeanization of, 245–46, 248–50 as folk instrument, persistence in rural areas, 251 influence on European music, 244 instruction books on, 243–44, 246, 247–48 lower-class roots, efforts to sever, 245, 247, 248–50, 252 in minstrel shows, 242 music for —adoption of European music, 245, 248 —printed collections of, 243 —transcription into European musical notation, 243–44 on plantations, 241 players, black, 249–51 popularization of, 246–49 professional manufacturing of, 242, 245, 246, 247 and race, class, and ethnic history, 251–52

I n d e x   371

style of play, 243–44, 245 white adoption of, 241 The Banjo: A Dissertation (Stewart), 248–49 The Banjo Philosophically (Stewart), 248–49 Barker, James Nelson, 74–75 Barrett, Lindon, 231 Bartlett, John Russell, 291 Baskett, Thomas, 108 Bassard, Katherine Clay, 222, 227 Baur, Albert, 241–42 Baxter, Richard, 97, 106, 108–9 Bay Boy (Tyler), 79 Bayly, Lewis, 29 Bay Psalm Book and performative literacy, 30–31 version of Psalm 119 in, 27–28 Beacon Hill (Morton), 146 Bean’s Corner Sunbeam, 182 Beckers, Alexander, 324 Becks, George, 167 Behind the Scenes (Keckley), 225 Belford publishers, 313 Belford’s magazine, 312–13 Bell, Alexander Graham, 342 Bell’s Theatre (anthology), 85 Benjamin, Walter, 332 Bennett, Paula, 200 Bennett, Stuart, 28 Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (McKenzie), 100 Biddle, Nicholas, 276 Big White, Chief, 276 bindings, of devotional books, as hand piety, 28–30 Bingham, George Caleb, 346 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 154, 155, 162 Birkerts, Sven, 350–51 blackface, 242 Black Hawk, 347 The Black Hercules; or, The Adventures of a Banjo Player (Stewart), 250

Blair, Hugh, 69n17 The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne), 352–53 body marking, by Native American women, 127–28 Bohaker, Heidi, 127 The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Crafts), 225, 235n4 “Bonnie Blue Flag,” 266, 266–67 Bonnie Blue Flag Songbook, 265 book(s) format of, and “hand piety,” 18 and Native Americans —availability of books, 108–9 —books as agents of change, 99–100 —books as objects of value, 109–10 —books in illustrations of native education, 102 —books specifically for natives, 109 —book studies approach to native literacy, 100–101 —native reaction to print, 98–99 as spatial volumes with multiple access points, 17, 19, 28 as symbol of middle-class aspirations, 325 Books for the Camp Fires (Redpath, ed.), 305 Books for the Times (Redpath, ed.), 304–8 book studies approach to native literacy, 100–101 Boone, Elizabeth, 126 Boston Lyceum Bureau, 293 Boucicault, Dion, 165 Bourdieu, Pierre, 271n2, 327 bourgeois subjectivity and commodification of taste, 323 reading and, 330 Bowdoin, James, 140–41 Bowery Theater (New York City), 153, 155, 157, 160, 161 Bragdon, Kathleen, 120–21, 128, 132nn2–3

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Brant, Joseph, 103, 129 Brant, Molly, 129–30, 130–31 Brewster, David, 328 Brice, Lloyd, 312–13 Brief Life (Frasier), 107, 109 Briggs, Tom, 241 Brigg’s Banjo Instructor (Briggs), 243–44 Bristow, George, 159 Britain’s Rights maintained; or French Ambition dismantled (print), 62–64, 63 Brooke, Henry, 39 Brown, Gillian, 330 Brown, John, 298–99 Brown, William Hill, 144–46 Brown, William Wells, 302–3, 305–8 Bryant, William Cullen, 202, 204 Buckingham, Duke of, 88 Buckley, James, 244, 245 Buckley’s New Banjo Book (Buckley), 244 Buell, Lawrence, 149n1 Buell, Samuel, 113 Buffalo Bill show, 347 Buffalo Creek Mission School, 102, 103 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 154–55, 210 bureaucratization of public life, government reports and, 279 Burnet, William, 47n6 Byles, Mather, 45, 46n4 Byrd, William, 39 cabinet cards, 322 Calamy, Edmund, 18, 22–23. See also The Godly Man’s Ark (Calamy) Callender’s Georgia Minstrels, 250 Call to the Unconverted (Baxter), 109 Calvin, John, 27 Cameron, Sharon, 358–59 carte-de-visite, 322 Carter, David K., 287 cartographic reformation, 51 maps as restored behavior and, 67 and maps as static signs, 54

Casket, 185–86 Catlin, George, 347 Cato (Addison), 79 Cavendish, Margaret, 82–83 Chamberlain, Theophilous, 115n5 Channing, William Ellery, 176 Chartier, Roger, 16–17, 105, 108, 121, 169, 289 Cherry, Andrew, 75 Choosing Not Choosing (Cameron), 358–59 Christian Register, 206, 207, 210, 211–12, 213 Christs Famous Titles (Dyer), 29 Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Roach), 278 civic life, centrality of public speaking to, 5 Civil War and banjo, spread of, 241–42 as proto-industrial experience, 255 publics in —creation through song, 259, 267 —failure to recognize diversity of, 256 —proliferation of, 256 reconciliation, memoirs and, 312 Civil War songs. See also “Dixie” catalog of, efforts to create, 271n6 circulation and revision of —and creation of communities, 257, 267–68 —and culture of revisionism, 256 —in non- and extraprint forms, 260 —and persistence of individualistic and local patterns, 257, 269–70 competition among different versions of, 265–67, 268, 269 defined, 273n17 printed versions of —as incomplete record, 260, 263–65 —overemphasis on, 256 —as overwhelming presence, 269 —as record of otherwise lost sound, 269

I n d e x   373

—as relic, 259 and publics —competition among, 257 —creation of, 259, 267 songsters as trace of cultures of performance and revisionism, 261–62 speech-manuscript-print in —cooperative interplay of, 256–57, 259, 263–65, 267 —explanatory power of, 269–70 —need for further study of, 256 —in negro spirituals, 263–65 —in songsters, 267 tunes, common repertoire of, 260–61, 272n9 Clark, William, 276 Clay, Henry, 282 Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (Brown), 305 Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (Brown), 305–8, 306 codex format, and indexical reading, 28 The Coffeehouse Politician (Fielding), 62 collage theory of media, 349 Collection of Sentiments (Richardson), 150n14 Colman, Benjamin, 39 colonization, books as agent of, 99–100 Colored Minstrels, 250 Columbian Magazine, 57 “Columbia’s Banner” (Proctor), 207–8 Columbus Day, Youth’s Companion program for, 207–8 commonplace books Morton’s My Mind and Its Thoughts as, 147–48 as spatial volumes with multiple access points, 19 Weld’s miscellany as, 19–20, 20–21 Common School Journal, 179 Commonwealth (Denver periodical), 312

communication competence in, in British America, 35–37, 46n4 —lack of master arbiter, 45 —local arbiters, 38–39 46, 44 —political nature of, 40–45 —recent scholarship on, 34 —standards of, as negotiated, 45–46 nineteenth-century revolution in communications technology, 343–44 non-literate, by Native American women, 126–31 community, creation of, through Civil War songs, 257, 267–68 “Companion Day” (Donn), 209 competence in communication, in British America, 35–37, 46n4 lack of master arbiter, 45 local arbiters, 38–39 46, 44 political nature of, 40–45 recent scholarship on, 34 standards of, as negotiated, 45–46 Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament (Cruden), 108 Complete Preceptor for the Banjo (Howe), 243 Congress and government reports publication process, 281–82 publishing and distribution of reports, 285–90 Schurz report and, 285 Congressional Globe, 282–83 Congressional Record, 283 Congressional records, 282–83 Congressional Register, 282 The Contrast (Tyler), 74–75 Coombs, Linda, 129 copyright and authorship as profession, 288 in early America, 84 and publication of plays, 165 The Coquette (Foster), 76 core story, 229–30

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“Cosby” (Harrison), 41 Cosby, Mrs. William, 38–39 Cosby, William, 37–39, 40, 41, 43 Cotton, Ben, 241 The Council of the Rulers, and the Elders against the Tribe of ye Great Americanites, 64, 65 Coxe, Abigail, 43, 44, 46 Craft, Ellen, 225 Crafts, Hannah, 225 crafts, women’s handiwork, reading of, as history, 3 Crain, Patricia, 105, 106 criminality, tropes of, in slave literature, 235n12 Croswell, Micah, 228 Cruden, Alexander, 108 cultural changes, changes in verbal arts as reflection of, 3 cultural history of experience, visual culture and, 322 culture of revisionism in Civil War, 256 and Civil War songs, 270 in negro spirituals, 263–65 songsters and, 261–62 Cumberland, Richard, 74 Curtis, George William, 180 Cusick, Dennis, 112 daguerreotype, as emerging media in early America, 342 Danforth, John, 45 The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Mignolo), 99 Darnton, Robert, 169 Dartmouth College seal, 102 David (king of Israel), 24, 26–27 Davis, Jefferson, 312–14 Davis, Varina, 313 The Death of Literature (Kernan), 351 De Copia (Erasmus), 19 The Defeat (Warren), 82 Delany, Martin, 300–301 democracy, importance of oral exchange to, 283

devotional books bindings of, 28–30, 31n3, 32n4 steady-sellers —as literary culture of early New England, 18 —as performative texts, 18 —Psalm 119 in, 26–27 —as spatial volumes with multiple access points, 28 Dickinson, Emily, 344, 357–61, 360 Dicks publishing house, 161, 162–63 Diderot, Denis, 85 divorce, Morton (Sarah W.) on, 145 “Dixie” (song) Civil War revisions of, 258–60 as dynamic cultural document, 259–60 history of song, 259 official version, creation of, 267–68 printed versions of, 258–59 Dobson, George, 246, 247–48, 252 Doe, Charles, 252 domesticity, and individualism, 330 Donn, Dora, 209 Douglass, Frederick, 302, 304, 310, 311, 315n12 Dramatic Dialogues for the Use of Schools (Stearns), 83, 84–85 “The Dream and Riddle” (Morris), 43–44 Dreer, Ferdinand Julius, 319 Dreer family, 319–20, 320, 322 The Drunkard (Smith), 86 Dryden, John, 74 Dublin Lyceum, 196n5 Dublin Young People’s Society for Mutual Improvement, 175, 176, 191, 196n5 Duguid, Paul, 17 Dyer, William, 29 Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (Redpath), 298–99 Edison, Thomas, 342 Edmundson, Mark, 350–51

I n d e x   375

education belief in, 177 of Native American women —literacy education, 102, 118, 121–22, 124 —obstacles to, 125–26 —views on, 123–24 —writing instruction, 110–11, 115n8 Edwards, Jonathan, 107, 108, 345 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 166, 350 Elaw, Zilpha, 222 electricity history of research on, 342–43 and nineteenth-century communications revolution, 343 electric light, as emerging media in early America, 342 electronic media, psychological and cultural consequences of, 351 Eliot, John, 101, 132n2 Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Gustafson), 2, 5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 344, 353–55, 356, 357 Emmett, Daniel D., 250, 259 Erasmus, Desiderius, 19 Ernest Maltravers (Medina), 154–55 Evans, Lewis, 60–61, 68n2. See also General Map of the Middle British Colonies Everett, Edward, 355 expedition reports, 280–81 authorship and, 289–92 publication rights of, 292 Ezell, Margaret, 82, 138–39 Fabian, Ann, 235n4 Fairy Hill (Tucker), 87 Faust, Drew Gilpin, 235n10 Fawcett, Melissa, 129 Feedback Theatrebooks, 168–69 Fielding, Henry, 62 Filler, Louis, 205 Finkelstein, Barbara, 196n2 Finnegan, Ruth, 350

“The First Satyr of Horace Imitated” (Home), 44–45 First South Carolina Volunteers, 263 Fish, Joseph, 115n7, 121 Fish, Stanley, 16 Fiske Jubilee Singers, 251 Fliegelman, Jay, 16, 31n1 Floral Wreath, 187 Forbes, Eli, 121, 125 Forty-Six Sermons (Horton), 108, 110 Forty Thieves (Sheridan), 77 Foster, Hannah, 76 Foucault, Michel, 54, 138 The Foundling (Moore), 85–86 Fowler, David, 113 Fowler, William C., 327 Frank B. Converse’s Banjo Instructor (Converse), 245 Franklin, Benjamin Evans (Lewis) and, 68n2 and maps, 49, 51–56, 67, 67n1, 69n16 media employed by, 361n2 mentor of, 40, 46 and Native American treaty negotiations, 347 and scientific demonstration, 342 Franklin, R. W., 357–58 Franks, Abigail, 37–39, 43 Franks, Moses, 40, 43, 44 Franks, Richa, 40, 43, 46 Frasier, Isaac, 107, 109 Frémont, John C., 280, 281 French, Hannah, 30 French, J. A., 320, 322 French, Samuel, 165. See also Samuel French publishing house French, T. H., 165 From Outlaw to Classic (Golding), 202 fugitive slaves, as predominantly male, 226 Game at Chess (Middleton), 62 The Gamester (Moore), 85, 86–87 Garner, Margaret, 232 Garrett, Hannah, 123 Garrick, David, 85

376

Inde x

Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 208 Gass, Patrick, 292 Geffrard, Fabre, 300–301 General Map of the Middle British Colonies (Evans), 52–53 cost of, 54 critical response to, 51 description of, 50–51 Franklin’s support of, 49 questions elicited by, 55 size of, 54 sound as communication strategy in, 60–61 as stage prop in colonial public life, 62–66 as text, 59–60 Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays (Evans), 54, 60 Georgia Minstrels, 250 Gere, Anne Ruggles, 192 Gilbert, Olive, 221 Gilmore, William, 179, 186 Giordano, Matthew, 215n5 Gitelman, Lisa, 322 Goddard, Ives, 120–21, 132nn2–3 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 327 The Godly Man’s Ark (Calamy), 22–26 as model of discontinuous literacy, 18 and performative literacy, 30–31 popularity of, 23 as spatial volume with multiple access points, 28 God’s Terrible Voice (Vincent), 29 Golden Age of American oratory, 194 Golding, Alan, 202 Goodhue, Detta, 183 Goody, Jack, 350 Gordon, Maria, 179 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 244 Government Printing Office, 288, 289 government reports and authorship, 289–92 and bureaucratization of public life, 279

Congressional records, 282–83 distribution of, 285–90 documents included as, 276 epistolary format for, 279 international exchange of, 287–88 lavish, as symbol of national greatness, 287 major publications, 279–80 as orature, 278–79, 293 and patronage, 289–90 as performance, 279, 293 as political voice of government, 283–84 as potentially disastrous undertaking, 281 as print products, 278 private market alternatives to, 288 publication process, Congressional control of, 281–82 and publication rights, 292 reading aloud of, 284–85 subverting of, 284–85, 293 web of oral communication surrounding, 278, 282 The Grammar of Good Intentions (Ryan), 224 Grant, Ulysses, 285 Gray, Asa, 281, 292 The Great Assize (Smith), 29 Green, John William, 90 Grigely, Joseph, 210 The Group (Warren), 79 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 200 A Guide to Hayti (Redpath), 300, 301 Gustafson, Sandra M., 2, 3, 5, 16, 31n1, 68n15, 97–98, 176–77 The Gutenberg Elegies (Birkerts), 351 Guttridge, Leonard F., 293 Haines, John T., 154, 155 Haiti, African American emigration to, 299–304 Hall, David D., 16, 119, 196n3, 334–35 Hall, Thomas, 21 Hallam, Lewis, Jr., 88–89 Hamblin, Thomas, 157, 160

I n d e x   377

Hamilton, Alexander, 39, 45, 80 Hamilton, Thomas, 299, 300, 303, 316n14 Hamlin, Hannibal, 289 hand piety defined, 18 devotional book bindings as, 28–30 handwriting, acquisition of meaning, 189 Hannit, Sarah, 129 Harby, George Washington, 154, 155 Harrington, James, 201, 215n3 Harrington, Joseph, 200 Harrison, Francis, 41 Harvey, David, 51 Haverly’s Colored Minstrels, 250 Hawks, Francis L., 291 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 291, 352–53 Haynes, Lemuel, 110 hearing, importance of listening to, 269 heart piety, 18 Heaven Opened (Alleine), 30 Hiacoombes, 103 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 263–65, 269 Hills, William H., 203 Hinton, Richard, 299–300 “Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America before 1900” conference, 3 History of Mary Prince (Prince), 232 Hodges, Graham, 229 Hogarth, William, 56 Holly, James, 301 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 204, 205–6, 328–30, 332 Home, Archibald, 39–41, 42, 43, 44–45, 46 Home, John, 39–40 Hooker, Joseph, 281 Horton, Thomas, 108, 110 Hospital Sketches (Alcott), 308–10, 316n16 Hotze, Henry, 258, 269

The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne), 352–53 Houseworth, Thomas, 325 Houston, James, 282 Houston, John, 286 Howe, Elias, 243, 244–45 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 298 Howe, Susan, 358–59 The Humblest May Stand Forth (Bacon), 221 Humez, Jean M., 223, 229–30, 234 humiliation, in Calamy’s The Godly Man’s Ark, 23 Hunter, Robert, 39, 40, 47n7, 74 Hutchinson, Thomas, 79, 81, 82 ideology of the book, Native Americans and, 99–100 image(s) of maps, in satirical prints of eighteenth century, 62–64, 63, 65 maps as, 55–58, 68n6 visual, reuse of in different contexts, 306–8, 307 imagined history, 231–34 “I’m Nobody” (Dickinson), 357 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Jacobs), 223, 225, 226–27 Independent (Congregationalist weekly), 202, 204, 205, 206, 208–9 Independent (lyceum paper), 193 Index (Confederate publication), 258 indexical reading, 17, 19 Bible and, 26–28 and hand piety, 30 tactile dimension of, 28–30 Indian Converts (Mayhew), 110, 119–20 Indian Primer (Mayhew, ed.), 105, 106 individualism domesticity and, 330 electronic media and, 351 individualistic notion of authorship emergence of, 138–39 in Morton (Sarah W.), 138, 147–48

378

Inde x

intellectual improvement. See also lyceum(s) as goal of lyceums, 175, 176, 181 through public speaking, belief in, 176 through writing, 182–83 interpretive community, 16 interviews with slaves, dominance of male perspective in, 226 “In the Twilight of Poetry” (McKinney), 202, 203 Iroquois, on education, 104 “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” (Emmett), 250. See also “Dixie” Jackson, Andrew, 347 Jackson, H. L., 216n15 Jacobs, Harriet A., 222, 223, 225, 226–27 Jager, Eric, 28 jazz, roots of, 244 Jea, Elizabeth, 228–29, 231–34 Jea, John, 228–29, 231–33, 235n14 Jefferson, Thomas and Annual Message of president, 279–80, 293 in Brown’s Clotelle, 305–6 and Lewis and Clark expedition, 276, 291 Morton (Sarah Wentworth) and, 142 Warren (Mercy Otis) and, 80 Jemison, Jacob, 109 Jenkins, Henry, 361 The Jibbenainosay; or, the White Horse of Nick of the Woods, a Romantic Equestrian Spectacle in Three Acts, 155 Johns, Adrian, 18, 91 Johnson, Andrew, 284–85 Johnson, Joseph books available to, 108–9, 110, 112 female students of, 122 and intercultural communication practices, 98 on native views about literacy education, 102

on political uses of writing, 114 on reading, opportunities for, 107 reading habits, 106–7 self-perception of, 97, 113 and writing, 111–12, 114 Johnson, Samuel, 51, 139 Johnson, Sir William, 103, 129–30 “Joint Committee Appointed to Consider and Report on a Selection of New Words for ‘Dixie,’” 267–68 journals, by Native American missionaries, 112–13 Kazanjian, David, 235n14 Keach, Benjamin, 108 Keckley, Elizabeth, 225 Keith, William, 40 Kelley, Mary, 2, 121, 133n14 Kernan, Alvin, 350–51 Kett, Joseph, 175 King Philip’s War, and native education, 111 Kirkland, Samuel, 100, 103, 104, 121 Kirkpatrick, James, 45 Knauff, George, 243 knowledge, social performance and, 22 Krauss, Rosalind, 331 Krupat, Arnold, 100 Ladies Home Journal, 203 Ladies’ Miscellany, 183, 191 The Ladies of Castile (Warren), 78, 79 “A Lady’s Philosophy of Love” (Stearns), 84–85 Lanier, Sidney, 208 Last Days of Pompeii (Medina), 154–55, 156 Law, Tom, 45 Lawrence, George, 301 Lawrence, Lucy, 326 Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Kelley), 2

I n d e x   379

Lears, Jackson, 335 Le Banjo, Opus 15 (Gottschalk), 244 Leigh, Edward, 21, 26 Leonard, Levi, 190 Letter from the Reverend Mr. Sergeant of Stockbridge to Dr. Colman of Boston (Sargeant), 102 Letters (Penn), 142 The Letters of the Republic (Warner), 350, 361n2 Levine, Robert, 305, 315n2 Lewis, Meriwether, 276, 289–90 Lewis and Clark expedition, 276–77, 281, 284, 292 Liberator, 226 Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings (Jea), 228–29, 231–34 Lincoln, Abraham, 270, 282, 284 Lincoln, Benjamin, 141 Lincoln-Douglas debates, 282 Lincoln Liberal school, 83, 84 Liscomb, W. C., 320–21, 321, 322 Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Smith), 240 literacy. See also native literacy; performative literacy as community, 192 costs of lack of, 231 formerly-enslaved women’s views on, 221–22 performative implications of, 15–16 traditional, 196n3 literacy scholarship, overemphasis of printed matter, 3 Literary Banner, 187, 188 literary culture of British New York, 40–46 literary culture of early New England, devotional steady-sellers as, 18 Little Women (Alcott), 310 Lloyd, Thomas, 282 Locke, John, 19 Loeffelholz, Mary, 200 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 202, 204, 213

Lott, Eric, 242 lyceum(s), early nineteenth-century rural activities of, 176–77 as enactment of cultural values, 177 engagement with world at large, 186 goals of, 175, 176, 181, 183, 194–95 as liminal moment, 195 press coverage of, 180 social functions of, 177, 181–82, 185–86, 190, 192–19 thriving of, 175 women’s roles of, 177, 178, 179, 180, 190–92, 196n6 Lyceum Magazine, 311 lyceum papers anonymity of authors in, 190–91 audience’s interest in, 178 centrality of, to Lyceum program, 178 as communal conversation, 181–82 and community aesthetic, 185 composition of, 179 critiques and criticisms of, 183–84 as ephemera, 179 exclusion of religion and politics from, 190 gendered versions of, 191 genres of contributions, 183–84, 187 humor in, 187–89 as oral object, 179–80 physical production of, 179, 188 reading well, critical importance of, 180 required submissions, 183 structure of, 184–86 style of, 191 stylistic models for, 187 subversive elements in, 188 Magawley, Elizabeth, 44, 46 The Magician’s Own Book (Arnold), 333, 334 magic lantern shows, 333, 334 Main, Gloria, 119

380

Inde x

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 359 manager, of theater, role in script management, 157, 159 manuscript(s) emergent quality of, 359 Redpath’s strategic use of, 298–99 The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 357–58 manuscript circulation, 138–39, 344 by American playwrights, 73–74, 78 Civil War songs —and creation of communities, 257, 267–68 —and culture of revisionism, 256 —in non- and extraprint forms, 260 —and persistence of individualistic and local patterns, 257, 269–70 Tucker (St. George) and, 88–91 Warren (Mercy Otis) and, 80, 82–83, 91 map(s). See also cartographic reformation commodification of, 56, 68n8 eighteenth-century definition of, 56 as interactive texts, 54–55 as oral culture, 60–61, 68n15 as performative living objects, 66–67 as pictures, 55–58, 68n6 political and ideological functions of, 57–59 and regulation of social relations, 58–59 in satirical prints of eighteenth century, 62–64, 63, 65 as self-reflexive object, 58 and social action, 64 as stage prop in colonial public life, 62–66 as text, 59–60, 68n15 map galleries, 56 Map of the British Dominions in North America (Mitchell), 61, 69n16

Map of the British Empire in America (Popple), 50 cost of, 54 description of, 49–50 Franklin’s support of, 49, 51–54 as picture, 55–58, 68n6 political and ideological functions of, 57–59 as print communication, 58–59 questions elicited by, 55 size of, 54, 56, 59 as stage prop in colonial public life, 62–66 title cartouche, 58 marriage, Morton (Sarah W.) on, 145–46 Martin, David, 43 Mason, John, 334 Mason, Thaddeus Perry, 176, 178, 183 Mason Controversy, 114 Massachusetts Bay Colony, education requirements in, 119, 121 Massachusetts Magazine, 137, 139–40 Massachusetts Spy, 79, 81, 86 material objects, as text, 3 Matthews, Brander, 260, 272n8 Matthiessen, F. O., 201 Mayhew, Experience, 105, 106, 110, 119–20, 129 McCormack, Jerusha Hull, 359 McCreery, J. L., 210–11 McGill, Meredith, 75 McKenzie, D. F., 100, 257, 271n1, 308 McKinney, M. S., 202, 203 McKivigan, John, 315n1 McLernand, John A., 286 McLuhan, Marshall, 350–51 McMullen, Ann, 129 media electronic, psychological and cultural consequences of, 351 evolving vs. residual, 349 theories of development, 349 media, emerging, in early America and historiography, 353–61

I n d e x   381

impact on American culture, 344–49 nineteenth-century revolution in communications technology, 343–44 print culture and, 343–44 theorizing of, 349–53 types of media, 341–42 Medina, Louisa H. See also Nick of the Woods (Medina) and adaptation process, 156 and Bowery Theater, 155, 157 career of, 154–55 Melville, Herman, 291 memoir(s) and North-South reconciliation, 312 recent scholarship on, 2–3 Memoir of Old Elizabeth (anon.), 224, 228 “The Memoirs of a Handspike” (Home), 40 Mental Elevator (newspaper), 103 Merrill, Gyles, 326, 336n8 Meserve, Walter, 169 Mesmer, Anton, 343 Mesmerism, 343 Meteor, 182 Mexican Boundary Survey, 291 middle class banjo, adoption of, 246–47 and books, as symbol of aspiration, 325 taste and refinement —and parlor environment, 323 —stereoscope as signifier of, 324–26 middle-class subject, photography in formation of, 322, 336n6 Middleton, Thomas, 62 Mignolo, Walter, 99 Miles, Nelson A., 312 Mill, John Stuart, 283 minstrel shows, 242 audience for, 251 black performers in, 250–51

and “Dixie,” origin of, 259 as record of African American performance style, 242 Miralda (Brown), 305 missionaries, Native American, writing by, 111–13 Mitchell, John, 61, 69n16 Mitchell, W. J. T., 55 modernization of knowledge, lyceums and, 189–90 Molière, 79 Monaghan, E. Jennifer, 103, 110–11, 119, 121, 133n8 Monitor, 188 Moods (Alcott), 310 Moore, Edward, 85 Moore, Elizabeth, 23–24, 26 Moran, John, 319–20, 320, 322 Morris, Lewis, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43 Morris, Robert Hunter, 43 Morris, Willie, 36 Morrow, James, 292 Morton, Perez, 143–45 Morton, Sarah Wentworth on American character, 143–46 collaborative notion of authorship in, 138, 139–47 constructing of self as author in, 139–43, 147–48 and husband’s extramarital affair, 143–46 individualistic notion of authorship in, 138, 147–48 Stuart portraits of, 148 success and reputation of, 137–38, 149n1 Moseley, Caroline, 269, 273n17 Murdock, John, 91 Murphy, Arthur, 85 Murray, Judith Sargent, 80–81, 139 Murray, Laura J., 113 music. See also banjo historical importance of, 240 in play scripts, 159–60 Muskogee, 100

382

Inde x

muted group theory, 232 “Mutilations: What Was Erased, Inked Over, and Cut Away” (Smith), 359 My Mind and Its Thoughts (Morton), 147–48, 150n14 Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Gilbert, ed.), 221, 232 narrative performance, memoirs as part of, 1, 2 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 226, 300 National Intelligencer, 282 Native Americans. See also women, Native American alliance-building tradition, and literacy education, 102–3 Morton (Sarah W.) on, 141–42, 142–43, 149n8 oral tradition, and reaction to print, 99 treaty conferences, new media impact on, 347–49 native literacy. See also writing, Native Americans and books, availability of, 108–9 books as agents of change, 99–100 book studies approach to, 100–101 and Christian education, native interest in decoupling, 104 definition of, need to expand, 126 education programs, 101–5 —adaptations to growth in literacy, 114 —education of girls, 102, 118, 121–22, 124 —hostilities and, 111 —imagery and metaphors of, 102 —imperfect results of, 107, 108 —motivation of native students, 107 —native views on, 102–4 —reading, teaching of, 104–5 —writing instruction, 110–11, 112 native reaction to print medium, 98–99

native views on, 125–26 reading —experiences with, 106–10 —teaching of, 104–5 and social status, 103, 111 spread of, 114 vernacular literacy rates, 132n2 “Negro Spirituals” (Higginson), 263 negro spirituals, cooperative interplay of speech-manuscript-print in, 263–65 Nesuton, Job, 132n2 Newcomb, Harvey, 182–83 New England Psalm Book, version of Psalm 119 in, 27–28 New Method of Making CommonPlace-Books (Locke), 19 newspapers, play advertisements in, 76–78 Newton, Isaac, 342–43 New York Clipper, 247, 249 New York Gazette, 40, 41, 42 New York state governor’s “court” in, 37–39 literary culture of, 40–45 New York Times bestseller list, memoirs on, 1–2 New York Weekly Journal, 40, 42, 43 Nichols, Robert, 39, 44 Nick of the Woods (Medina) as academic text, 168–69 changes from source material, 155 composition of, 153, 154 as library document, 167 manuscript —layout and style, 156 —music and, 159–60 —path of, 169–70 other dramatic versions of story, 154–55 plot of, 153–54 productions of, 153, 160–61 publication of, 161–65, 168–69 —and altering of text, 164–65 —in drama anthologies, 167–68 —overview of, 153

I n d e x   383

—paratext, 162, 163–64 rehearsal scripts, 157, 160–61 titles, alternative, of, 155 Nick of the Woods; or, Kentucky in ’82 (Harby), 155 Nick of the Woods; or, Telie, the Renegade’s Daughter (Medina), 167–68 Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay; a Tale of Kentucky (Bird), 154, 155 Nick of the Woods; or, The Salt River Roarer (Harby), 154, 155 Nick of the Woods; or, The Altar of Revenge! (Haines), 154, 155, 161, 163 Nord, David P., 216n13 Norris, Isaac, 44 North American Review, 180, 312 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 142 Occom, Mary, 122–23, 129, 130 Occom, Samson and books —availability of, 108, 109, 110, 112 —selling of, 110 education of, 101–2, 104, 111 female students of, 121 and intercultural communication practices, 98 on native literacy, 107, 108 pedagogical practices of, 104–5 on political uses of writing, 113–14 on reading, opportunities for, 107 wife of, 122, 129, 130 and writing, 112 Occurrences of the Times (play), 144 O’Donnell, James, 17 Ohmann, Richard, 201 O’Keeffe, John, 75 Old American Company, 75, 88 Oliver, John, 109 Ong, Walter, 350 Onoonghwaudela, 100 On Picket Duty and Other Tales (Redpath, ed.), 308, 309, 316n16

oral culture, American and democracy, 283 flourishing of in antebellum America, 282 government reports and, 278, 282 intersection with written culture (see also orature; speech-manuscript-print) —in eighteenth-century America, 38–39, 44–45 —in nineteenth-century America, 179–80 —in religious periodicals, 211–12 lyceum papers and, 179–80 maps as part of, 60–61, 68n15 oratory American —antebellum flourishing of, 282 —as characteristic republican virtue, 355 —Golden Age of, 194, 355 —Webster (Daniel) and, 353–57, 354 belief in intellectual improvement through, 176 centrality to civic life, 5 definition of, 4–5 power of, vs. printed page, 2 in school curriculum, 5–6 in women’s education, 2–3 orature, 278–79, 293 Orvell, Miles, 332 Otis, James, Jr., 81 Ouâbi; or The Virtues of Nature (Morton), 140–46, 149n7–150n9 Owen, Robert Dale, 284 Page, John, 89 paratext, in Medina’s Nick of the Woods, 162, 163–64 parlor, middle class taste and, 323 Parrish, John, 114 part (theater term), 158, 159, 160–61 Patent Office, annual agricultural report, 280, 287 The Patriot Cool’d (Tucker), 90 Penhallow, Samuel, 115n4

384

Inde x

penmanship, importance of, 112 Penn, William, 142 Pennsylvania Gazette, 68n9 performance Congressional record as captured orality, 283 government reports as, 279, 293 maps as performative living objects, 66–67 orature and, 278–79, 293 of privacy, stereoscope as object for, 328–31 Redpath’s strategic use of, 298–99 scientific demonstration as, 342 of taste, stereoscope as object for, 327–28, 335 viewing as, 323 performance media, as emerging media, in early America, 344–45 performative literacy defined, 15, 30–31 preaching as, 14 reading practices as, 15 scholarship on, 16–17 performative texts devotional books as, 18 periodicals as, 209 periodicals centrality to poetry culture, 200, 214 as opinion leaders, 214 and poetry —creating events for poetry, 201, 206–8 —marketing of poetry, 201, 203–4 —tracking of poetry as event, 201, 204–6, 213 poetry in —errors, propagation of, 210–11 —illustrations accompanying, 201, 204 —as items of use, 208–9 as reader response record, 213–14 religious, and intersection of oral and print culture, 211–12, 215n12 Perkins, William, 19

Perry, Matthew, 291–92 personal narratives. See memoir(s) Peters, Julie Stone, 78 Philadelphia’s State House, maps displayed in, 51, 57, 59, 64–66 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 35 Phil Rice’s Correct Method for the Banjo (Rice), 244 phonograph, as emerging media in early America, 342 photography as emblem of modern experience, 332 as emerging media in early America, 342 and formation of middle-class subject, 322, 336n6 scholarship on, history of, 321–22 Picker, John M., 264, 273n16 pictographs, Native American use of, 127 Pierce, Yolanda, 233 Pine and Palm, 300–304, 306 Pitkin, Timothy, 111 Pitman, Isaac, 282 Plautus, 85 play scripts American-authored, print circulation, history of, 74–75 British titles —American reprinting of, 75 —importation of, 73, 74 as catalyst of cultural crisis, 76 guides to, publishing of, 164 layout and style, 156 live theater as driver of demand for, 75–76 master copies, 157, 161, 165 music and, 159–60 newspaper advertisement descriptions of, 76–78 path of, 169–70 vs. printed scripts, 156 promptbooks, 161, 165–67, 169

I n d e x   385

publication by American printers, post-Revolution increase in, 73–75 rehearsal scripts, 157–59 —copying out of, 157 —vs. published scripts, 156, 162 —side (part) copies, 158–59, 160–61, 165 sale and circulation of by American playwrights, 73, 78 sources for, 76 playwrights, American and publication, concerns about, 91–92 sale and circulation of dramas, 73–74, 78 Pocket-Book School of Poetry, 209 Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (Warren), 80 poetry, nineteenth-century in periodicals —errors, propagation of, 210–11 —illustrations accompanying poetry, 201, 204 —as items of use, 208–9 periodicals and —creating events for poetry, 201, 206–8 —marketing of poetry, 201, 203–4 —tracking of poetry as event, 201, 204–6, 213 popularity of, 202–3, 212–13, 214 recovery efforts, 200 —methodology, 201 —scholarship on, 201–2 —textual variants and, 210 poetry culture, centrality of periodicals to, 200, 214 political debates, and oral culture, 39, 43, 282 political oratory, new media influence on, 345–47, 346 Poole, Matthew, 108 Poor of New York (Boucicault), 165 The Poor Solder (O’Keeffe), 75

Pope, Alexander, 139 Popple, Henry. See Map of the British Empire in America (Popple) power, of oratory, vs. printed page, 2 The Power of Sympathy (Brown), 144–45, 150nn11–13 The Practise of Piety, 29, 120 Pray, H. P., 183 press, and dissemination of government reports, 288 Price, Leah, 17, 150n14 Principia (Newton), 342–43 Principles of Religion and Morality (Stearns), 83–84 print emergence of, and manuscript circulation, 138–39, 344 as emerging media in early America, 341–42 errors, propagation of, 210–11 fixity of, 166 and native literacy education, 104–5 Redpath’s strategic use of, 298–99 social context of meaning of, 350 and theory of media evolution, 349 print culture flourishing of in antebellum America, 282 intersection with oral culture (see also orature; speechmanuscript-print) —in nineteenth-century America, 179–80 —in religious periodicals, 211–12 maps and, 55 nineteenth-century communications revolution and, 343–44 social effects of, 350 printed play scripts, vs. theater scripts, 156 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Eisenstein), 350 print media, control of, and upper class reluctance to publish, 91–92

386

Inde x

privacy reading and, 330–31 stereoscopes and, 328–31 Proctor, Edna Dean, 207–8 Proctor, Joseph, 161, 164, 170n7 promptbooks, 161, 165–67, 169 prompter promptbooks, 161, 165–67, 169 role in actor management, 160 role in script management, 157, 158, 159, 160 script revision by, 164 protégé system, in early New York literary culture, 40 Protestant tradition, literacy in, 15 Proteus Echo essay series, 46n4 Psalm 119, 18, 23, 25–28 Psalm books and performative literacy, 30–31 as spatial volumes with multiple access points, 28 versions of Psalm 119 in, 27–28 publication rights, government reports and, 292 publics in Civil War —creation of, through song, 259, 267 —failure to recognize diversity of, 256 —proliferation of, 256 Warner’s rules for, 271nn3–4, 272n7, 273n17 Pykett, Lyn, 206 Radano, Ronald, 264 ragtime, roots of, 244 Ralph, James, 42 Rath, Richard Cullen, 240 reader response, periodicals as record of, 213–14 reading. See also literacy and bourgeois subjectivity, 330 indexical, 17, 19 —Bible and, 26–28 —and hand piety, 30

—tactile dimension of, 28–30 and personal privacy, 330–31 stereoscopic viewing and, 332–35 reading aloud of document into official record, 285 of government reports, 284–85 of lyceum papers, 180 “reading at risk” narrative, 351 reading practices late nineteenth-century, 202 of Native American women, 120 as oral activity, in nineteenth century, 179 as performative literacy, 15 as social act, 181 and viewing practices, relation between, 326 “Read This,” 224–25 Redpath, James career, overview of, 293 charitable operations, 309 and Davis (Jefferson), 312–14 and Haitian emigration plan, 300–304 ideological shifts in, 314 male bias in works of, 226, 227 as North American Review editor, 312–13 as publisher and editor, 304–10 The Roving Editor, 226, 227, 298, 306, 314, 315n1 Speaker’s Bureau of, 293, 310–12, 311 and strategic revision, 314 strategic use of manuscript, print, and performance, 298–99 Register of Debates, 282 The Rehearsal (Buckingham), 88 rehearsal scripts, 157–59 copying out of, 157 vs. published scripts, 156, 162 side (part) copies, 158–59, 160–61, 165 Reinhardt, Mark, 223–24, 230, 231, 232 religion, new media influence on, 345

I n d e x   387

Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d U.S. Colored Troops (Taylor), 225 reports. See government reports representation, and voice, 283 Republican era literature, critical response to, 137, 149n1 restored behavior, maps as, 67 reunion, romance of, 312 revisionism, culture of in Civil War, 256 and Civil War songs, 270 in negro spirituals, 263–65 songsters and, 261–62 revisions, strategic, 306–8, 307 Reynolds, Edward, 21 Rice, Phil, 244 Richards, I. A., 17 Richardson, Samuel, 150n14 Roach, Joseph, 278–79 Robins, Sarah, 122 Rogers, John, 326 romance of reunion, 312 Rose, Aquila, 46 Rose, Jonathan, 213, 216n14 The Roving Editor: Or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (Redpath), 226, 227, 298, 306, 314, 315n1 Rowlandson, Mary, 127–28 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 231 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 212 Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying (Taylor), 109 Rural Repository, 190, 195, 196n5 rural schools, literacy in, 196n2 Ryan, Susan, 224 S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal, 247–48 The Sack of Rome (Warren), 78–79 Sacks, Howard and Judith, 250 sacred internalization, 18 Saillant, John, 235n14 St. George, Robert Blair, 66 St. Nicholas (periodical), 202

Saint’s Everlasting Rest (Baxter), 97, 106, 108–9 Samuel French publishing house, 161–62, 163–64, 165, 166, 167 Santa Cruz Times, 325 Sargeant, John, 102 satirical prints, eighteenth-century, maps in, 62–64, 63, 65 Saturday Evening Post, 202, 209, 210 Saunt, Claudio, 100 Schechner, Richard, 67 school curriculum, public speaking in, 5–6 Schultz, Kirsten, 271n6, 272n10 Schurz, Carl, 284–85, 293 scientific demonstration, as performance, 342 scrapbooks, periodicals as material for, 208 scripture proper use of, Calamy on, 24–25 as spatial volumes with multiple access points, 25–26 Scudder, Henry, 29 Secutor, Mary, 124 self, constructing as author, in Morton (Sarah W.), 139–43 self-improvement ideology, rural lyceums and, 183 Semi-Colon Club, 196n6 Seneca, Christian mission to, 99–100 Sergeant, John, 126 sermon, new media influence on, 345 Sewall, Joseph, 30 Sewall, Samuel, 74 sewing, and literacy, 133n9. See also weaving sexual abuse, as undercurrent in slave narratives, 232 Shakespeare, William, 62, 74, 79, 85 Shaw, Thomas, 110 Sheridan, Richard B., 77 Shide, Anton, 159 Shields, David, 82 Sicherman, Barbara, 216n14, 331 Sigourney, Lydia, 202

388

Inde x

Silber, Nina, 312 Silent Language: Enslaved Women and the Production of Literature without Literacy (Moody), 221 Simon, Sarah, 124 Sin and Danger of Slighting Christ and the Gospel, 109 “Since Scandal” (Harrison), 42 Six Principles of Religion (Perkins), 120 slave(s), published interviews with, dominance of male perspective in, 226 slave narratives in antislavery publications, limited number of, 221 criminality tropes in, 235n12 as mediated text, and authenticity, 223, 235n4 percent written by women, 225 sexual abuse as undercurrent in, 232 slave narratives by women limited number of, 221, 223–24 reasons for limited number of, 225–27 The Slave’s Friend, 221, 224–25, 233 “Smectymnuus”, 22 Smith, Mark M., 240, 269 Smith, Martha Nell, 359 Smith, Samuel, 29 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 322 Smith, Titus, 115n5 Smith, William, 41, 43, 47n6 Smith, William Henry, 86 Smithson, James, 287 Snowden family (Knox County, Ohio), 250–51 social class, and upper class reluctance to publish, 91–92 social performance, and knowledge, 22 social regulation, maps and, 58–59 social status among Native Americans, literacy and, 103, 111 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 109, 113, 115n5, 121

Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 113 “The Songs of the War” (Matthews), 260 songsters, 262 and competition among different versions of songs, 265–67 defined, 261 as trace of cultures of performance and revisionism, 261–62 Sons of United Confederate Veterans, 267 Sorby, Angela, 200–201 South, unification of, through song, 268 Southern Flag Song Book No. 3, 265 Spalding, J. W., 292 speech-manuscript-print, in Civil War songs cooperative interplay of, 256–57, 259 —in negro spirituals, 263–65 —in songsters, 267 explanatory power of, 269–70 need for further study of, 256 Spencer, Edmund, 140 Spencer publishing house, 161–62, 163 stadial theory of media development, 349 Stafford, Barbara, 330 Stallybrass, Peter, 17 Stanton, Edwin, 284 Stanton, Henry B., 233–34 State of the Union address, 293 Stearns, Charles, 83–87 adaptation method, 85–87 career of, 83 distribution and publication of works, 83–85 on educational value of drama, 83 and growth of early American theater, 92 and identity as author, 84–85 knowledge of European theater, 85 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 204 Stephens, George, 301

I n d e x   389

stereographic images, 319–20, 320, 321 collectors of, 325–26 popularity of, 320, 336n3 stereoscopes commercial version, design of, 328, 329 as decorative items of display, 323–24 family association of, 324–25 parallel between viewing practices and reading practices, 332–35 and performance of privacy, 328–31 and performance of taste, 327–28, 335 as signifier of taste, 324–26 Sterling, Alexander, 39 Sterling, James, 39 Stevenson, Louise, 331 Stewart, Samuel Swaim, 247–50, 251–52 Stiles, Ezra, 103, 107 Stock, Brian, 16 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 204 Storrs, Miriam, 124 Story, Enoch, 73 The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (Thompson), 224 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 196n6, 222 Street, Brian, 350 string-band tradition, origins of, 251 Stuart, Gilbert, 148 Stump Speaking (Bingham), 346 stump speeches, 346, 346 Sumner, Charles, 298 Sweeney, Joel, 241, 249 Swift, Jonathan, 47n7 Swinehart, Kirk Davis, 130 A Systeme or Body of Divinity (Leigh), 21 T. H. Lacy publishers, 161 tactility, hand piety of, 30 Taggart, Tom, 167–68 Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 85 Tantaquidgeon, Gladys, 129 Tappan, Lewis, 224

taste association with vision, 327–28, 337n11 commodification of, bourgeois subjectivity and, 323 stereoscopes and performance of, 327–28, 335 Taylor, Alan, 130 Taylor, Bayard, 204 Taylor, Jeremy, 109 Taylor, John Dommett, 45 Taylor, Susie King, 225 Tears and Smiles (Barker), 74–75 technological determinism, 350 telegraph cultural mythology surrounding, 343 as emerging media in early America, 342 Thoreau and, 352 telephone, as emerging media in early America, 342 textual community, 16 Thalberg, Sigismund, 244 theater, American. See also play scripts acceptance of, 73 American suspicion of, 76, 79, 80, 83, 92 British dramas in, 74 and demand for printed plays, 75–76 development of, 344–45 dramatists’ reluctance to publish, 92 early growth of interest in, 92 (see also Stearns, Charles; Tucker, St. George; Warren, Mercy Otis) influence on American culture, 345–49 interest in moral impact of dramas, 80, 81, 83, 92 theater, English, maps as props in, 62 Theatre of the Book (Peters), 78 “There Is No Death” (McCreery), 210–11 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 278

390

Inde x

Third Regiment of Alabama Volunteers, 258–59 Thomas, Amy, 228 Thomas, Isaiah, 144, 146 Thomas à Kempis, 24 Thompson, Jacob, 286 Thorburn, David, 361 Thoreau, Henry David, 352 Thornton, Tamara, 189 Tilden Library, 167 The Times; or, The Patriot Rous’d (Tucker), 90 Togkoosen, Abiah, 132n3 Toll Bridge Graphic, 195 Toll Bridge Journal, 188 To Tell a Free Story (Andrews), 227 Townsend, George, 288 Traces of a Stream (Royster), 231 Trachtenberg, Alan, 255, 270 Tragedy of King Lear (Shakespeare), 62 transcontinental railroad expedition reports, 280 transition, aesthetics of, 361 The Travellers (Cherry), 75 Treatise of the Passions (Reynolds), 21 Treatise on Self-Knowledge Showing the Nature and Benefit of That Important Science and the Way to Attain It (Mason), 334 treaty conferences, new media impact on, 347–49 Trenton Circle, 43 Tropologia (Keach), 108 Truth, Sojourner, 222 Tubman, Harriet, 221, 230 Tucker, St. George, 87–92 background and career, 87 dissemination of plays and production efforts, 88–91 and growth of early American theater, 92 library of, 87–88 and publication, concerns about, 91–92 Tucker, Thomas Tudor, 88–89

Tucker, Veta, 222–23, 230, 231 Twain, Mark, 345 Tyler, Royall, 74–75, 79 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 2–3, 129 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Aiken), 165 United Confederate Veterans, 267 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 267 United States Exploring Expedition to the Pacific, 281, 292 Up and Ride; or the Borough of Brooklyn. A Farce (Tucker), 88 Vattemare, Alexandre, 287–88 Vaughan, John C., 306 verbal arts, changes in, as reflection of cultural changes, 3 Vermeer, Jan, 56 viewing as activity and experience, 322 reading and, relation between, 326 village, as democratic model, 177, 194 Vincent, Thomas, 29 Virginia Company, 90 Virginia Gazette, 57 Virginia Minstrels, 242 Virginia Reels (Knauff), 243 Virginia Songster, 265 The Virtues of Society (Morton), 146–47 virtue under siege, as standard of womanhood, 226 vision association with taste, 327–28, 337n11 stereoscope as education in, 327–28 visual culture, and cultural history of experience, 322 voice and political representation, 283 reports as political voice of government, 283–84 Volpe, Andrea, 336n6 Voltaire, 85

I n d e x   391

Wajda, Shirley, 336n6 Walden (Thoreau), 352 Waldstreicher, David, 356 wampum, 347, 348, 348 Ward, William Hayes, 208–9 Warkentin, Germaine, 126 Warner, Michael, 271nn3–4, 272n7, 273n17, 350, 361n2 Warren, James Jr., 79, 81 Warren, Mercy Otis, 78–83 audience of, 80, 81, 82 background and career, 78–80 circulation and publication of dramas by, 80, 82–83, 91 and growth of early American theater, 92 influence of, 80–81 Morton (Sarah W.) on, 139 on printed plays, moral usefulness of, 80, 81 Washington, George, 79, 80, 279, 347, 348 Washington, Mary Helen, 225 Waukeet, Ruth, 103–4 weaving, by Native American women, as communication, 128–29 Webster, Daniel, 282, 347, 353–57, 354 Wednesday Evening Post, 191 Weekly Anglo-African, 299–300, 303, 305 Weetamoo, 127–28 Weld, Thomas background of, 19 and indexical reading, 28 miscellany of —anecdotes and jokes in, 14–15, 20, 21–22 —as commonplace book, 19–20, 20–21 —composition of, 19 —and performative literacy, 30–31 —as performative text, 15, 20–21 —as spatial volumes with multiple access points, 19

and subjective state of devotion, interest in, 21 Werner, Marta, 359 The West Indian (Cumberland), 74 Weston, Horace, 249–50 Wheelock, Eleazar correspondence with natives, 113, 122, 124 education of Native Americans, 101–2, 103, 110, 111, 112 and education of native women, 124, 133n9 The Wheel of Fortune (Tucker), 89 Whipple, Edwin P., 356 Whitaker, Thomas, 333–34 Whitefield, George, 345 Whitehead, Colson, 255 Whitfield, George, 112 Whitman, Walt, 352 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 204, 205, 206, 210, 212, 235n4 “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature” (Harrington), 200 Why Read? (Edmundson), 351 Wignell, Thomas, 89–90 Wilkes, Charles, 292 Williams, Eleazar, 109, 113 Williams, James, 235n4 Willig, George, 243 Wilson, Harriet E., 222 Wirt, William, 90 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 35 Wogan, Peter, 98–99, 100 womanhood, white standards of, and black women, 226–27 women abolitionist work, male appropriation of, 222–23 feminine activities of midnineteenth century, 336n2 nineteenth-century poets, neglected, 202 reading and writing by, views on, 181 role in rural lyceums, 177, 178, 179, 180, 191, 196n6

392

Inde x

women (cont.) second-class status of, and slave narratives by women, 227 women, black, views on literacy and language, 222 women, enslaved in abolitionist literature, stereotyping and objectification of, 220, 222, 225 and maternal trauma, 224–25, 233–34 recovering speech of, 230–34 silencing of, in traditional history, 230 women, ex-slave abolitionist work, male appropriation of, 222–23 court cases involving, 235n12 and second-class status of women, 227 views on literacy, 221–22 women, Native American communicative practices, nonliterate, 126–31 education of —literacy education, 102, 118, 121–22, 124 —obstacles to, 125–26 —views on, 123–24 —writing instruction, 110–11, 115n8 reading by, 120 and writing —alternative means of expression, 126–32 —education in writing, 110–11, 112, 115n8 —evidence of writing ability, 119–21, 122–23, 126 —lack of interest in, 126 —lack of written production, 118–19, 131 —letter writing by, 122, 124, 130, 132n6 —reluctance to exhibit writing ability, 122

women’s education in Anglo-American culture, 119, 121 Native Americans —literacy education, 102, 118, 121–22, 124 —obstacles to, 125–26 —views on, 123–24 —writing instruction, 110–11, 115n8 oratory in, 2–3 writing and, 119 women’s handiwork as alternative means of expression, 127–29 reading of, as history, 3 Wompanummoo, Rachel, 120 Woodmansee, Martha, 139 Worrall, James, 43 writing in Anglo-American women’s education, 119 intellectual improvement through, 182–83 as social act, 181 writing, Native Americans and education in writing, 110–11, 112, 115n8 meaning of writing to Native Americans, 111 Native American missionaries’ writing, 111–13 penmanship, importance of, 112 self-consciousness, 113 women —alternative means of expression, 126–32 —education in writing, 110–11, 115n8 —evidence of writing ability, 119–21, 122–23, 126 —lack of interest in, 126 —lack of written production, 118–19, 131 —letter writing by, 122, 124, 130, 132n6

I n d e x   393

—reluctance to exhibit writing ability, 122 writing as political instrument, 113–14 Young People’s Society for Mutual Improvement, 196n5

The Young Woman’s Guide to Excellence (Alcott), 181 Youth’s Companion, 206, 207–8, 209 Zenger, Peter, 40, 41, 42, 43 Zimiru, Pio, 278