Discussants
Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles (appleby@history.ucla.edu)
Richard E. Ellis, SUNY, Buffalo (reellis@acsu.buffalo.edu)
Peter Hoffer, University
of Georgia (pchoffer@arches.uga.edu)
...suggests that impeachment precedents from the founding period may be
valuable today if they are placed in the larger context of trusteeship
constitutionalism. the paper goes on to argue that instead of taking sides
as expert witnesses for opposing parties in on-going impeachment proceedings,
historians should be hired as members of panels of disinterested special
masters.
Pauline Maier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (pmaier@mit.edu)
James Stewart, Macalester College (stewart@macalester.edu)
Papers
Richard Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology, Black Racial Politics in Jacksonian America (rsngsm@ritvax.isc.rit.edu)
Daniel Feller, University of New Mexico, A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy (dfeller@unm.edu)
In The Age of Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said: "the group which took the lead on the political stage in combating the slave power were the radical Democrats in the straight Jacksonian tradition." And again: "The Jacksonian tradition, rather than [the Whig], supplied the most solid foundations for political antislavery." But subsequent critics have found many straight Jacksonian traditions pointing in different traditions, and have identified Democratic antislavery itself as largely anti-southern, anti-slaveholder, and even anti-black. Nearly reversing Schlesinger's dictum, many scholars portray Jacksonian Democracy as pro-Southern and pro-slavery (or at least anti-anti-slavery) from beginning to end.Still Schlesinger made one striking point: among Democrats, it was the radicals, the "barnburners," who bolted earliest to the Free Soilers and later the Republicans. Yet what had defined these Democrats as radicals was nothing to do with slavery, but their anti-banking and hard-money views. Why did economic radicals become antislavery radicals?
Benjamin Tappan of Ohio, the subject of this paper, exemplifies the problem. Tappan was a hard-money, anti-corporate charter, radical Democrat. He was also both virulently anti-abolitionist and anti-slavery. He denounced slavery and heralded its overthrow even by violence. As a U.S. Senator, he collaborated with his abolitionist brother Lewis (his closest friend and confidant despite what Benjamin called "our totally different modes of thinking") to forestall Texas annexation and thwart proslavery schemes. He backed the Wilmot Proviso, helped organize the Ohio Free Soilers, and jumped to the Republicans before his death in 1857. Yet throughout all this he excoriated abolitionism, both publicly and in his highly revealing private correspondence with Lewis.
Tappan's peculiar posture on slavery stemmed from a distinctive outlook on the world, shared in large measure by his friends Silas Wright and Marcus Morton. These radicals, heavily influenced by Enlightenment doctrines transmitted via Jefferson and Paine, held both an abiding faith in progress (a favorite word of theirs) and a starkly dualistic understanding of politics and social evolution. They saw all history as a Manichean struggle - now reaching its climax in America - between Democracy and Aristocracy, truth and error, light and darkness, freedom and slavery. It was this framing perception, not a disagreement over slavery itself, that lay at the root of Benjamin's quarrel with the abolitionists. While applauding genuine [i.e. Democratic] antislavery, he viewed Christian abolitionism as a divisive tool of the hypocritical clerical-Whig Aristocracy. Their antipodal views of religion and politics involved Benjamin and Lewis Tappan in a searching debate over the proper means of advancing their shared goals of freedom and democracy - a debate which elucidated the ideological core of Democratic antislavery.
Comments
Joanne Melish, Brown University (Joanne_Melish@brown.edu)
Donald Yacovone, Massachusetts Historical Society (publications@masshist.org)
Papers
Michael Fitzgerald, Pikeville College, James
Monroe and American National Defense (mfitzger@pc.edu)
James Monroe is one of the most underestimated leaders of the early American republic. For forth years, he was a major political player within the Republican party. He was an experienced and able diplomat. His presidential administration was marked by major foreign policy achievements -- the Adams-Onis Treaty, the recognition of Latin America, and the Monroe Doctrine. This paper will develop a little-known facet of Monroe's career. His role in formulating Antebellum American military policy and strategy.Although many individuals contributed to the ideas and programs shaping United States defense before the Civil War, Monroe was the single most influential thinker, both as a strategist and as a congressional lobbyist for the policies he believed would ensure America's security. Partly, his achievement was fortuitous. He was secretary of state, secretary of war, and the president during the critical period, 1812-21, when the United States was in conflict and confrontation with Great Britain and Spain and the principal elements of American strategy were thus laid down. But his prominent role was also the result of clear, consistent, longstanding and efficacious leadership in military affairs when many Republicans remained wedded to ineffectual Jeffersonian notions of gunboats, dry-docked ships, and armed militias.
This paper will reveal Monroe's advocacy of naval power and his formulation of the strategies the American navy would adopt in the Antebellum period; his development -- in conjunction with J.J. Abert -- of the post-War of 1812 expansible army plan, inaccurately credited to John C. Calhoun; his conception of a renewed coastal fortifications program embodied in the Board of Engineers report of February, 1821; and his ideas on postwar frontier defense, also falsely attributed to Calhoun. Two generations of Republicans relied upon Monroe's ideas and political acumen to implement more effectual measures for American national defense.
Daniel Preston, College of William and Mary, James
Monroe, National Boundaries, and the Monroe Doctrine (dfpres@campusnet.org)
Peter Cash, University of Memphis, James Monroe and the Spanish Spoliation Claims (pacash@latte.memphis.edu)
Comments
Robert Forbes, Yale University (robert.forbes@yale.edu)
James Lewis
John Resch, University of New Hampshire at Manchester (jpr@christa.unh.edu)
Papers
Lori Beth Finkelstein, New York University, What Can Revolution Buy You: The Value of War Widowhood in Antebellum America (lbf6648@is2.nyu.edu)
Between 1836 and 1855 Congress enacted several pieces of legislation to grant pensions to the widows of Revolutionary war soldiers. These pension were created to compensate widows for "hardships endured" and "for the services they rendered by taking care of ... soldiers and their families." As a result of these pension acts, aproximately 22,000 elderly white and black women collected federal funds during the final years of their lives. Most Revolutionary War widow pensioners were between seventy and eighty-five years of age when they applied for pensions. Many were illiterate and infirm. While the ranks of Revolutionary War widows included a small number of southern slave owners and some middle-class officers' wives, Revolutionary War widows, for the most part, were not affluent. Pensions, however, gave widows an enhanced position in their communities and in the eyes of the nation, regardless of their economic station in life.This paper demonstrates that pensions offered widows not only financial compensation for their husbands' service, but provided recipients with a form of social currency as well. In collecting pensions, widows were elevated to the status of republican icons. Stemming from their husbands' participation in the War of Independence, Revolutionary War widows became symbols of national inception. Pensions enabled elderly women to access a cherished historical event and to gain the nation's appreciation and respect. For poor old women, who were especially vulnerable to long held Western stereotypes of elderly females as hags, shrews, and witches, the value of a pension extended well beyond its monetary worth.
Widows were not the only people to benefit from the creation of pensions laws. Younger men stood to profit as well. A widow's prestige as a revered survivor of the Revolutionary generation was realized because a younger generation of politicians, federal pension agents, lawyers, county judges, and court clerks - men who came of age after American independence - created laws and a bureaucratic infrastructure supporting the distribution of federal funds to her. By representing and assisting aged widows, these more youthful men were able to associate themselves with the founding of the nation and to project an image of themselves as loyal citizens of the republic. Power and status here flowed two ways: through pensions, widows achieved recognition for their ties to the War of Independence - and received much needed income - while a set of younger men forged a connection with an historical moment in which they never participated.
Research for this paper draws on a national sample from the historically rich, but largely ignored, National Archives' collection Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Application Files, 1800-1900. The widows' pension applications found in this collection are an invaluable source for understanding the lives of non-elite elderly women in antebellum America. Historians know little about the social and economic experiences of aged women in the 1800s and even less about their interactions with the federal government. Few Revolutionary War widows documented their lives in their own words. Were it not for pension records, their histories would be lost. This paper marks an important step toward developing an understanding old women in Young America.
Current scholarship on the Market Revolution focuses on the expansion of commercial culture as a defining feature of antebellum America without fully considering the manner in which nineteenth-century concepts of commerce and value could be applied to commodities not easily categorized as goods or services. In the mid-1800s, as this paper shows, connections to the American Revolution could be redeemed for both financial and social enhancement. Here, ties to the Revolution functioned not only as expressions of national loyalty, but as mediums of exchange.
Notes
1. Abridgement of the Debates of Congress from 1789-1856. 14 (July 1842), 458.
2. For the past two decades, historians have hotly debated the impact of the American Revolution on the status of older men in the early Republic. See David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); W. Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). Significantly less attention has been paid to the position of old women in the decades following the Revolution. One important exception is Terri Premo, Winter Friends: Women Growing Old in the New Republic, 1785-1835 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990). For negative depictions of old women by writers in the mid-nineteenth century see the following short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "The Gorgon’s Head" (1851) in A Wonder Book and Tangelwood Tales William Charvat et al., eds. (Ohio State University Press, 1972), 10-34 and "Feathertop: A Moralized Legend" (1852) in Hawthorne’s Short Stories Newton Arvin, ed. (New York; Vintage Books, 1946), 229-250.
Stephen Mihm, New York University, Acts
of Faith: The Confidence Question in the Antebellum Economy (sam6663@is.nyu.edu)
In an age when all manner of banking regulations, deposit insurance, lenders-of-last resort, and other stabilizing forces temper the worst fluctuations of the market economy, it is hard to imagine how erratic and uncertain the conduct of commerce was in the antebellum era. In that earlier time, commerce required countless acts of faith: that one's debtors would pay what they owed; that one's money wasn't counterfeit; that the paper money in hand could, at any time, be redeemed for specie. From the mid-1830s onward, these questions became ever more pressing, especially after the national bank was vetoed out of existence. In its place arose hundreds of state banks, each printing their own currency, each retaining varying amounts of specie in reserve. The instability of the system became apparent as devastating financial panics swept the economic landscape.This paper examines how central "confidence" became to the day-to-day functioning of the economy during this time. In the absence of any ironclad guarantees as to the present and future value of one's assets, participants in the market economy came to treasure the asset they called "confidence." This paper uses Herman Melville's Confidence Man as a means of exploring this theme. It examines how Melville, more than most of his contemporaries, recognized how confidence -- and not precious metals, as some people believed -- was the engine behind the creation of value. Indeed, in an economy levitated upward largely on paper "promises to pay," value was largely an act of faith. As such, it was not subject to easy calculation or rational prediction.
Mark Schmeller, University of Chicago, The
Political Economy of Opinion (mschmell@midway.uchicago.edu)
Even the most avid rational-choice economist will admit that estimates of "value" often take a variety of intangible perceptions and concerns -- credit, confidence, faith, local esteem, reputation, and opinion -- into account. And historians have given us good reasons to suspect that such "social currencies" had a particularly strong purchasing power in the antebellum market. This paper builds upon these insights, but sends them in a different direction: if credit, confidence, faith, esteem, reputation, and opinion were so essential to the estimation of worth, what can the estimation of worth tell us about the ways in which "public opinion" was estimated? Can antebellum political-economic theory be read as a species of public opinion theory? Did different visions of economic development coincide with divergent conceptions of public opinion? Long before the advent of randomly sampled opinion polls and focus groups, what might the fluctuating value of a banknote or a government debt certificate have told Americans about the state of public opinion? This paper offers a brief introduction to this "political economy of opinion." I will show how the expanding use of paper money and credit, the development of banking, and the financing of public debts generated a growing awareness of the force of public opinion. Specifically, I will read the arguments surrounding Alexander Hamilton's system of public finance as arguments about the desired role, function, and power of public opinion in American politics and society.
Comments
Patricia Cline Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara
(cohen@humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Edward Balleisen, Duke University (eballeis@acpub.duke.edu)
Shirely Teresa Wajda, Kent State University (StWajda@aol.com)
Papers
Caroline Winterer, San Jose State University, Americans Become Greek: Hellenism and Self-Formation, 1820-1860 (winterer@email.sjsu.edu)
How did American concepts of self-formation change in the early republic? Historians have long known that Americans during the revolutionary era looked to the republic of ancient Rome as a model for national and self-development. Americans, steeped in Virgilian letters, would become virtuous citizen-farmers and thereby create a new Rome in the wilderness. This paper charts a revolution in ideas of self-formation in the antebellum era: the shift from Rome to ancient Greece as a template of self-development.Specifically, the paper examines a neglected but important group of antebellum Americans: classical scholars. The study of ancient languages had dominated American higher education since the seventeenth century, imbuing Americans with a love for classical antiquity, and especially Roman antiquity. Classical language continued to dominate the curriculum in the antebellum era, but with a crucial difference. It was now ancient Greece rather than Rome that dominated the curriculum. Influenced by a revolution in scholarship emanating from German universities, American classicists now turned to ancient Greece as a site of new possibilities for forming the self. They added wholly new studies to the college curriculum, such as Attic tragedy, as a way to allow American students to encounter the Greeks.
Hellenism was much more than just the study of ancient Greek texts, however. It was a wholly new program for reforming the self and thereby purging the nation of noxious new trends. To "be Greek," as some classicists liked to put it, was to resist the cant of an emerging industrial, democratic society. Specifically, classicists feared materialism, machines, and rampant egalitarianism. In numerous public lectures and national publications, they argued that by chasing Mammon and wallowing in populist mediocrity, Americans had lost sight of higher goals of self- and national development. Becoming Greek was an antidote to this. By studying Greek texts, art, and artifacts, Americans would transport themselves back to the ancient Greek world. In doing so, they would imbibe the ancient Greek "spirit" and thereby purge themselves of the relentless acquisitiveness and anti-intellectualism that made the young republic prey to scheming demagogues. To become Greek was a newly secular ideal of self-formation, allowing Americans a chance to perfect themselves in the earthly sphere. How were these goals different from the Romanism that had dominated the eighteenth century? Eighteenth-century Americans had only imitated the Romans: they wanted to be like Cicero, like Caesar. In the nineteenth century, that rhetoric subtly but significantly changed: Americans wanted not just to imitate the ancients, they wanted to "be Greek." This paper charts the classicists' success in making Hellenism a new ideal of self-formation, erudition, and citizenship in the early republic.
Patrick Lucas, Michigan State University, It's
All Greek to Me: Lexington's 'Athens of the West' Claim (tynebrae@mindspring.com)
Names and nicknames have particular significance in helping to understand the time and place of a community, often documenting the founding or important points in history of a given settlement. Moreover, the practice of naming or nicknaming a community, and the names and nicknames themselves, establish boundaries as well as rules which dictate appropriate cultural behavior and activity for communities and individuals within those communities.In the case of Lexington, Kentucky, oral tradition maintains that, in 1775, a band of explorers named the community upon receiving news of victorious American troops at the Battle of Lexington, Massachusetts in the Revolutionary War. And while this initial naming of Lexington is quite germane to the community's identity, a nickname first coined in the early nineteenth century -- Lexington as "the Athens of the West" -- had and continues to have a more pervasive impact on the representation of Lexington as a location with significant cultural collateral in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What are the various meanings for the nickname? Is this nickname justified? How does Lexington's nicknaming fit in context with the dozen early nineteenth-century communities in the trans-Appalachian and trans-Mississippi frontiers which share some form of the same nickname? What does the nickname tell about the cultural production of the community in the simultaneous contexts of republicanism and neo-classicism?
Given the nature of early nineteenth-century settlement patterns, the nickname "Athens" presents a special challenge in its use. On the one hand, "Athens" represents an atavistic yearning for the past -- a time and space of "true" democracy and perceived cultural refinement. At the same time, "Athens" characterizes as a yearning for a not-yet-articulated utopian future -- a time and space of great American culture and communities. The "Athens" nickname assumes additional complexities in the western geography of the Early Republic -- a wide frontier of multiple facets with both physical and temporal attributes in flux and under tremendous negotiation -- a geography where a cultured "Athens" is built in contrast to a backwards "frontier."
Numerous early nineteenth-century newspaper advertisements, traveler accounts, city directories, probate inventory records, and other contemporary sources offer evidence of diversified industry in Lexington. These same resources add significantly to a contemporary understanding of the substantial cosmopolitan aspirations of this Central Kentucky community in the years of the Early Republic.
Jonathan Farris, Alabama Historical Commission, Designs
for Success: Two Patrons and Architectural Innovation on the Southern Frontier
(Jfarris@mail.preserveala.org)
Typical elite strategies for achieving fame and prestige in the Old Southwest of the early 19th century revolved around acquisition of land, slaves, and political office. A handful of eccentric and innovative country estates, however, bear witness to an alternative way to bid for social prominence (actually over and above acquisition of mere means of production). These buildings are not simply products of whimsical extravagance, but illustrate ambitions (or pretensions) of patrons who opt to utilize design and lavish hospitality as a way to impress and endear their contemporaries rather than political power, aristocratic lineage, military office, or other conventional and self-evident status bestowing qualities.Among the instances of country estates designed for acquisition of social renown that make good case studies are David Meade's Chaumiere des Prairies near Lexington, Kentucky, and James Jackson's Forks of Cypress near Florence, Alabama. Both men, in their mature middle age, would move to a frontier region of the country leaving already well developed social bonds and residences in more settled areas. What they built on their newly acquired lands would bring many visitors to their households, thereby promoting their own social status, acquiring good matches for their unwed children, and in the end make them figures of local legend.
Meade's house, a sprawling villa built using diverse vernacular techniques, was a sequence of designed spaces meant to accommodate the rituals of hospitality, was served by the foil of the additional attraction of a forty acre landscape garden to draw visitors from the then burgeoning frontier polis of Lexington. Jackson's house, a traditional Georgian core surrounded by the only true domestic peristyle in Alabama and one of the first such architectural motifs in America, was designed for display and was abedded in its goal by Jackson's first rate equine stock and racetracks. With conspicuous pleasure grounds both men drew the notable and prosperous to their hospitable houses and thereby established themselves as social "powers-that-be" outside of the more traditional avenues of status.
David Meade moved in 1796 from his plantation across the James River from the Byrd's Westover to Jessamine County, Kentucky, where he immediately set about the construction of a self-designed rationally planned villa from log and frame components. The complement of rooms in the villa, which he would name Chaumiere des Prairies (thatched cottage in the meadows), were carefully arranged to accommodate visitors with lavish hospitality in a carefully diagramed set of social spaces, supporting servant and storage spaces, and private bedchambers. After the completion of the house (to which components would be added as late as the mid 1820s), Meade began work on a forty acre landscape garden, no doubt the largest in the state at that time. James Jackson was born in Ireland and subsequently lived in Germany, Philadelphia, and Nashville before settling down upon a bluff overlooking the forks of the Cypress Creek in Lauderdale County, Alabama. In the late 1820s Jackson, probably in collaboration with architect William Nichols, began the construction of what would be the only true peristyle house in Alabama and one of the first such houses in America. The house core itself was a fairly characteristic Georgian double pile with a few elaborations. The addition of the peristyle (incidentally in a manner quite different from the few lower Mississippi Valley houses that preceded it) at a time when monumental classical orders were altogether new to architecture in the region had the effect of making the house a sort of Alabama Acropolis. The new monumentality of the house certainly interested local elites, and visitors were certainly also welcome here--Jackson like Meade was well known for hospitality. Jackson additionally improved his grounds with barns, a racecourse, and a great deal of fine and expensive equines.
Jackson and Meade both built notable houses, different from the conventional elite forms of display on the southern frontier. These houses were notable in their role as "machines for entertaining in" and would have made a great impression on visitors with their ground-breaking designs. Both men also, however, used the grounds of their estates as a vehicle to draw visitors out to the properties and to elevate their images as elites in the New Republic. Meade's landscape garden would hold its own as a local attraction well into the 1820s, when many houses had been built in the area which surpassed his somewhat motley assemblage of hospitable rooms. Jackson's temple on a hill certainly became a landmark image, but for those with earthier tastes (of which their were no doubt many in frontier Alabama), his horse racing facilities and fine animals (one of which, Glencoe, was worth more than ten adult slaves) were certainly worth the trip to the estate.
Hospitality and spectacle would become the roots of both men's prestige. Both men were thwarted and/or disinterested in political and military office. With little temporal power, these men brought to bare their economic powers in combination with their creative energies to obtain a social level above simply "a man of wealth". This served to assure their fame into the next century, at least in a regional sense, as well as to generate social connections which would be favorable for their children. The instances of James Jackson and David Meade illustrate a pattern which allows a view of the "follies" of the early 19th century in the Southeast that moves beyond decadence as the explanation for their presence. These estates and others dotting the region were a means of negotiating through an unsettled frontier society, assuring a lordly status for their owners in a turbulent but burgeoning region.
Comment
Alexis McCrossen, Southern Methodist University (amccross@post.cis.smu.edu)
Douglas Egerton, LeMoyne College (egertodr@maple.lemoyne.edu)
Papers
Stephen Vincent, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, Free Blacks in the Old Northwest Countryside: Towards a More Inclusive Understanding of Life 'North of Slavery' (vincents@UWWVAX.UWW.EDU)
By 1860 more than forty-five thousand African Americans lived in the countryside of the five states of the Old Northwest. Together, they represented nearly one-tenth of the nation's free black population and one-fifth of all blacks in the North. Professional historians have generally shown only a dim awareness of this collectively large group and even less understanding of its broader dynamics. This paper represents an attempt to begin to redress these limits to our understanding by offering a preliminary composite portrait of free blacks in the rural Northwest, one that focuses specifically on the group's origins and the structure of economic opportunity available to them..The basic argument is that the region's African-American pioneers were a varied people both in their origins and in their economic progress over time. Some, perhaps even most, fared no better than the majority of blacks in the urban North. At the same time, however, a large and significant portion experienced a much more favorable fate. Aided by some combination of modest economic resources, the timing of their move, and settlement near non-hostile whites, they were able to acquire land of their own and, with others, create largely autonomous, stable, and often quite prosperous farm communities. To a large extent the varying fates of African Americans in the rural Northwest reflected the settlers' premigration backgrounds. A disproportionate number of the most successful were tri-racial people from families with longstanding heritages of freedom and landownership in the Old South. Those who faced the most difficult fate, in contrast, were often either former slaves who had been recently emancipated or slaves who were sent to the Northwest to be freed .
Erica R. Armstrong, Columbia University, Maneuvering,
Manumission, and Citizenship: Policing, Politicizing, Morality, and Motherhood
in Black Philadelphia, 1780-1830 (era6@columbia.edu)
Thomas Will, Penn State University, A Prescription for Black Civic Participation: Public Virtue, Acquisitive Individualism, and Christian Charity in Black Thought in the Early Republic (tew139@psu.edu)
This paper analyzes how two black ministers in early national Philadelphia, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, selectively incorporated both liberal and classical republican principles into a model of social relations that served their own community's peculiar needs. In defending past black sacrifices and presenting a blueprint for future black civic participation, Jones and Allen sought to demonstrate to anxious white Philadelphians that African-Americans merited full inclusion in the state. Their thought sheds light on an early phase of the black struggle for citizenship and reflects the ideological tensions between liberalism and republicanism inherent in the larger American community's search for ties to bind together the young nation.Jones and Allen defended both the disinterested self-sacrifice and the acquisitive individualism manifested by black Philadelphians during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Their assumption that people naturally pursued strategies of acqisitive individualism placed limits on their faith in the efficacy of republicanism as an organizing principle for society. Neither, however, did they regard liberalism as capable of tying individuals to the state and to each other. Allen constructed an alternative model for social relations--Christian charity--that incorporated the benefits but not the drawbacks of both liberalism and republicanism. Advising black Philadelphians that God would reward their charitable actions with eternal salvation, Allen promoted sacrifice for the common good, but not disinterested sacrifice of the classical republican mold. In depicting Christian charity as a market transaction, whereby immediate sacrifice returned a greater reward later, Allen disclosed his own liberal assumptions. Allen's sermons thus reconciled the contradictions between republicanism and liberalism, harnessing acquisitive individualism for the greater good of the whole while conversely rendering public virtue appealing to the acquisitive individual.
Comments
Peter Hinks, Yale University (peter.hinks@yale.edu)
Douglas Egerton
Jan Lewis, Rutgers University, Newark (janlewis@andromeda.rutgers.edu)
Papers
Lacy Ford, University of South Carolina, 'Free, White, and Twenty-One': Slavery, Race, and Citizenship in the Jacksonian South (ford@garnet.cla.sc.edu)
Across the South, the state constitutional reform movements of the Jacksonian era fought to democratize Revolutionary and early national era state constitutions which, as a rule, restricted suffrage to property holders and left state legislative bodies malapportioned. At first glance, any appraisal of the egalitarian crusade of the Jacksonian era might justifiably conclude that constitutional reformers achieved only partial victory. But under closer scrutiny, a more striking success emerges. Throughout the South, the political and constitutional debates of the Jacksonian era also produced a discussion over the role and meaning of race in southern society. In the upper South, the debate over the coming of racial modernity occasionally focused on the future of slavery itself, and addressed the problematic role free blacks played in a slaveholding society. As a whole, the upper South remained committed to a conception of slavery as a necessary but possibly temporary evil, an evil that could be at odds with the ideals of white independence and equality over the long term. Thus the arguments over race in the upper South often centered on how the region might whiten itself, either through gradual emancipation and colonization of ex-slaves, the colonization of free blacks, a gradual shift to free white labor facilitated by the sale of slaves to the cotton growing areas of the deep South, or some combination of these approaches. By contrast, in a heuristic middle South of Tennessee and North Carolina, few saw slavery as a positive good but nevertheless sentiment favoring emancipation, on any terms, seemed on the decline. In these states, the discussion of race centered on whether or not free people of color should have a political voice. In the middle South, Whiggish paternalists defended the idea of promoting uplift and respectability among free blacks, while subordinationists, both conservative and egalitarian, championed disfranchisement. In the lower South, the case for slavery as a positive good remained in its infancy at the beginning of the Jacksonian era, but most political leaders considered slavery essential to the region's staple economy, which, despite fits and starts in the international market and vulnerability to unpredictable credit crunches, remained the bellwether of the region's prosperity. In the cotton South, the Jacksonian debate over race centered more on the prevention of insurrections, tighter regulation or removal of free blacks, and the desirability of regulating or even eliminating the interstate slave trade. Together, these three subregional debates constituted the larger Jacksonian South's attempt to define racial modernity and render it tangible in their political arrangements.Through an examination of southern state constitutional debate and action on issues related to slavery and the political status of free blacks, my essay will argue that egalitarians in the Old South proved as driven by their interest in sharpening the racial boundaries of popular republicanism as they were by their commitment to obliterating public recognition of class distinctions among whites. Indeed, the advancement of herrenvolk egalitarian ideology, the drawing of civic and political boundaries along strict racial lines in order to secure the domination of one race and the subordination of another, emerged as arguably the most consistent and remarkable outcome of the era's constitutional "reform" movement in the South.
Lois Horton, George Mason University, From
Class to Race: Gradual Emancipation and Racial Reconstruction (Lhorton@vms1.gmu.edu)
The gradual end to slavery in the North after the American Revolution brought an ambiguous black freedom, emancipating only some of the 55,000 slaves and their children. In colonial America, social and political life had been divided by both class and race, as the multiracial lower classes worked, played, and engaged in political action together. The expanding democracy in the new nation granted more political rights to unpropertied white men but often limited the rights of blacks. At the same time, fading slavery and the long-term black indentures of gradual emancipation brought still unfree African Americans into direct competition with white wage workers, increasing racial antagonisms. Thus, by the Jacksonian era, race became more important to the organization of the social and political lives of northern workers.
Comments
Emma Lapsansky, Haverford College (elapsans@haverford.edu)
Jan Lewis
Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University (eb16@columbia.edu)
Papers
Jamie Bronstein, New Mexico State University, Gender and Work Accidents in the Early Republic (jbronste@nmsu.edu)
It was not just another day on the job for Miss O'Byrne, a little Scottish girl. After she had been employed in the clay mill for only nine days, and was just getting used to the rattle and hum of the machinery, her supervisor ordered her to remove clay from between some rollers while the rollers were running. Of course, her clothing became caught in the machinery and she was horribly mangled. Yet unlike many other injured workers from the early industrial period who remain nameless to us, the girl made her mark in the historical record by suing her employer.Surprising all, and overturning the historical precendent of both English and American common law, the Scottish judge in the girl's case ruled in her favor. He did so not on the grounds that a worker had some abstract right to a safe workplace, but rather because she was a child, and a female child at that. "She was an inexperienced girl employed in a hazardous manufactory, placed under the control, and, it may be added, the protection, of an overseer, who was appointed by the defendant, and intrusted with the duty; and it might well be considered that by employing such a helpless and ignorant child, the master contracted to keep her out of harm's way in assigning her to any work to be performed."
While the incidence of serious workplace accidents in both Britain and the United States is thought to have increased sharply after about 1840, in response to the building and running of the early railroads and to the mechanization of the textile industry, workers had little legal recourse before 1880, when the first employers' liability legislation was passed. Courts generally defined an employer's duty of care to his employees narrowly, refusing to hold him liable when fellow workers or managers were at fault for accidents, or where there was any contributory negligence on the part of the injured worker. In this time of burgeoning technology, the law considered workers to be free agents, who entered into contracts for employment fully cognizant of ordinary risks.
Yet even as workers as a category were construed as free agents -- in a discourse which fed into the political definition of "free labor" -- not all workers fit under the rubric. In particular, slaves, women, and child workers occupied a liminal position, in which the total rejection of employer responsibility was unacceptable. The distinction forged in law between white male free agents and lesser beings was two edged. Labor advocates might use the more generous treatment meted out to women and children in order to undermine the idea that employers owed no responsibility to their workers for their injuries incurred on the job. After all, a legal precedent was a legal precedent. But these differences might also be deployed to forge a common definition of masculinity across class lines -- preventing workers who were always conscious of the importance of "manliness" from seeking legal redress. Every description of workplace accidents and their aftermath which dates from this period -- sources from court cases, to newspaper accounts, to private letters, brims with ideas about gender in the workplace. My paper examines the language of gender in the workplace as it relates to workplace accidents, and offers an analysis of the way in which this language was deployed in the period of the Early Republic.
Kathryn Tomasek, Wheaton College, Women's
Work: Exploring the Boundaries Between Public and Private in Fourierist
Communities (ktomasek@wheatonma.edu)
Looking back on the history of intentional communities in the United States in 1870, Oneida Perfectionist John Humphrey Noyes argued that for Fourierists, as for Owenites, the "main idea" had been "the enlargement of home--the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations." For Noyes, Fourierism merited study as a precursor to his own community. For late-twentieth-century students of gender and labor, Noyes's observation provides an opening into questions about the ways utopian communities manipulated the boundaries of "public" and "private" that were so much a staple of nineteenth-century gender ideology. This paper examines such manipulations in Fourierist communities (or phalanxes) of the 1840s, with particular attention to the consequences of plans to pay women for housework.Such plans raise questions about the relationship between family and economy, a relationship obscured in the dominant culture through the ideological separation between the "private sphere" and the "public sphere." On the one hand, one might follow Noyes and view the phalanxes as privatized, familial spaces in which Fourierists sought to dissolve artificial divisions between home and work. On the other hand, one might notice the Fourierist preoccupation with compensation and individualism. Fourierists argued that everyone should be paid for their labor and that everyone--women, men, and children--should be treated as individuals by the communities, without families as intermediaries. Such principles suggest that one might view Fourierist phalanxes as economies, or "public" spaces in the parlance of separate spheres ideology. These Fourierist economies made visible household labor that was hidden in the official economy of the dominant culture by the ideological separation between home and work.
Ideally, the economic individualism extended to women within Fourierist communities would give them autonomy unavailable to them in the world outside the phalanxes. In practice, the phalanxes encountered a variety of obstacles when they tried to extend this autonomy to women. Some of the most insurmountable were women's own tendency to privatize some of their labor within their families and men's tendency to protest the costs to them of paying women for housework. Such difficulties suggest that the phalanxes were neither the entirely privatized spaces described by Noyes nor the entirely public ones envisioned by Fourierists. Rather, the Fourierists' manipulations of the boundaries between private and public point to a plasticity that has significant implications for historical study of the public sphere.
Joshua Greenberg, American University, 'Bachelors
Look Out': Creating a Masculine Worker Identity through Prescriptive Literature
in 1830s New York City Labor Newspapers (jg0837a@american.edu)
CommentIn the spring of 1835, during the height of the first labor crisis in American history, New York City's National Trades' Union ran an article called "Choice of a Wife." A week later, the paper, which served as the official organ of the citywide General Trades' Union, followed up with "New Way to Get a Husband." While scholars have used these same labor papers to paint this historical moment as an era of crisis that inspired the formation of early class consciousness, the discussion of gendered issues exemplified by these anecdotes requires further investigation. This paper examines 1830s New York City labor newspapers and argues that these so-called light reading articles were just as important to the construction of a masculine worker identity as articles that cover more explicit "worker" issues.The mid-1830s produced an unprecedented strike wave in the nation^Òs northern seaport cities, ushering in the first period of mass union-building in the country. With union members spread throughout New York City's fifteen wards, working in isolated five- or ten-man garrets, coordinated union communication was imperative to unified action. While mass meetings did occur on a monthly and weekly basis, it was the union newspapers that kept workers informed of daily events. By reading penny press papers like The Man, the National Trades' Union, and the Working Man's Advocate, artisans learned about the bank war, Democratic politics, and labor unrest. However, these were not the only articles that working men turned to the papers for; each edition also contained poetry, marriage announcements, humorous aphorisms, and other light reading. These articles were not just included as an afterthought; often they could occupy two full pages of a four page paper. Anti-bank discussions appeared side by side with anecdotes about how an artisan's wife should act and were not seen as mutually exclusive.
Labor issues still accounted for most of the discussion in the papers, but the two types of articles need to be viewed together as part of the same body of prescriptive literature. Both explicit labor and non-labor articles functioned in working men's papers as prescriptive literature that instructed artisans on the contours of the worker identity being formed in the new industrial economy. While the historical investigation into this worker identity has focused mostly on the creation of an economic consciousness, more work needs to be done to understand the whole picture. The inclusion of non-labor articles in these papers shows that at this crucial moment in the formation of early American trade unionism, the men involved were clearly sensitive to the importance of masculinity and gender imagery to working men's consciousness and needed to construct their identity around more than just economic issues.
Mark Hanley, Truman State University (ss04@truman.edu)
Papers
Judith Hunter, SUNY, Geneseo, Religion and the Continuing Relevance of Republicanism in Antebellum America: Philadelphia Nativism as a Test Case (jahunter@alumni.princeton.edu)
There is no doubt that the concept of republicanism has suffered from overuse by historians. Almost inevitably, many scholars have recently argued that republican ideology is not the powerful explanation for many developments in American history that it once seemed. Even those who still maintain that the "republican synthesis" was central to the American Revolution seem reluctant to find republicanism persisting beyond the Revolutionary era. The most compelling statement of this perspective remains Gordon Wood's claim in his influential The Creation of the American Republic, 1770-1787, that 1787 marked "the end of classical politics" (i.e., politics based on republican beliefs) because the new federal constitution was based on an acceptance of the idea of competing self interests, rather than the republican insistence that all men of virtue strive to achieve the common good. What can scholars do, then, who study antebellum America, only to find their sources permeated with what seem undeniably to be the republican beliefs of nineteenth-century Americans? The most plausible explanation seems to be that the scholarship about the republican synthesis has often lacked discussion of an element that gave republican ideals continuing resonance well into the nineteenth century: religion.The nativist movement in antebellum Philadelphia provides a compelling illustration of this. An extremely diverse and broad group of Philadelphians united in the 1840s to combat what appeared to them to be a serious threat to the survival of the republic, the influx of foreign immigrants (mostly Irish Catholics) to their city. Nativists came from many different perspectives -- some formed a political party which dominated the political culture of Philadelphia county during the period, some were clergy who mounted a campaign to educate the public about the danger posed by the immigrants, still others were women who joined the movement to protect their homes -- but all were united and motivated by republican beliefs. The many newspapers (including one published by women), pamphlets, sermons, and other sources that survive reveal that nativists were sure immigrants jeopardized the United States, and they expressed their fears in an unmistakably "republican style." But immigrants were not a new feature of Philadelphia life in the 1840s, nor did they stop arriving after the movement's demise. The coalescence of so many citizens around nativist beliefs in that particular setting and time is due to the fact that in 1843 the immigrants' leader, the bishop of Philadelphia, requested that Catholic children be excused from the readings of the King James Bible that were routine in the common schools. This request sparked a furor that resulted in a powerful movement that charged Catholic immigrants and their leaders with endangering the very foundation of the nation, the most damning evidence being what nativists consistently termed an attempt to "remove" the Bible from the public schools. In their newspaper women nativists asked, "Can not every man see that the war against the Bible by Romanists, is the entering wedge of the subversion of liberty in this country?" Nativism was not simply anti-Catholicism (although it was that); republican fears and beliefs were inseparable from traditional Protestant convictions about the political dangers posed by Catholics. The combination of these factors is what gave nativism its potency in antebellum Philadelphia.
Jim German, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Virtue
and Depravity in Post-Revolutionary Calvinist Political Argument
(german@platte.unk.edu)
My paper examines the use of moral language in political argument by Northern Calvinist clergy in the 1780s and 1790s. As scholars have often noted, the clergy sometimes used a language of virtue that paralleled civic humanism in its demand that individuals suppress their self-interest on behalf of the common good. But the discourse of virtue was balanced by a discourse of depravity. The Calvinist clergy insisted that ordinarily, wicked instincts and passions governed human behavior. Any serious discussion about political economy had to begin with the reality of depravity, not the possibility of virtue. The commercial development envisioned by the clergy and their Federalist allies increased opportunities for sin, and hence for guilt, and thereby promoted institutional religion.
James Simeone, Illinois Wesleyan University, Calvinism
and Republicanism in the Early Republic: The Case of Daniel Parker
(jsimeone@titan.iwu.edu)
The impact of the anti-mission movement on the political culture of the Early Republic has not been ignored so much as underappreciated. Between 1820 and 1845, this national movement led mainly by Baptists to stop the use of money in religion had broad political overtones. Antimissionaries supported the separation of church and state and attacked "aristocratic" privilege generally; their opinions were a political force wherever backcountry populations reached majority proportions, as they did in the West. There the movement's most prominent leader was Daniel Parker. He interpreted republicanism through a plain folk Calvinist prism, from which vantage it became a tool for dissent. Parker's arguments are indicative of the mental universe of one branch of backcountry political thought as it migrated West.
Comments
Philip Goff, California State University, Los Angeles (pgoff@calstatela.edu)
Mark Hanley
Nathaniel Sheidley, Wellesley College (nsheidle@wellesley.edu)
Papers
Leonard Sadosky, University of Virginia, 'In the White Town of the Grand Council': Indian Images and Geopolitical Realities in the Treaty of New York, 1789-1790 (sadosky@virginia.edu)
During the summer of 1790, a delegation of Creek Indian chiefs traveled from the Georgia-Florida frontier to the federal capital city of New York. While there, they completed negotiations on what would be the first treaty ratified under the new Federal Constitution. Spending nearly a month in the capital city, the Creek leaders interacted, in a variety of settings, with many federal leaders as well as with many of New York City's leading citizens. Most prominent among the latter group was the New York Tammany Society. This paper explores the significance of these public and private interactions in light of the year-long process of negotiation which preceded them. The paper argues that the meaning of the various modes of public presentation and performance surrounding these negotiations becomes evident when one examines them within the political and diplomatic contexts understood by contemporaries.
Phyllis Gernhardt, Bowling Green State University,
Trade,
Treaties, and Removal:
'Justice and Public Policy' at Fort Wayne on the Early Republic's Frontier
(pgernha@bgnet.bgsu.edu)
This paper presents the history of traders in northern Indiana and their role in United States Indian policies on the early frontier. The Miami and Potawatomi nations who traded at Fort Wayne relied on these merchants by 1826 for their livelihood through purchasing their goods on credit. The traders used the influence they thus gained to control Indian treaties, land cessions, and removal. These frontier entrepreneurs soon expected, and even demanded, the expenditures of national monies in their region until they helped affect the final Miami removal in 1846. The critical role this civilian population had in shaping relations between the Native Americans and the young Republic exemplifies the significant connection between the United States federal government and its citizens on its early frontier.
Comments
John Finger, University of Tennessee (jfinger@utk.edu)
Nathaniel Sheidley
Daniel Dupre, University of North Carolina, Charlotte (ddupre@email.uncc.edu)
Papers
Sarah Kidd, University of Missouri, 'I have lost a fortune and scarcely able to stand my ground': Failure and the Other Side of the Self-Made Man (C646781@showme.missouri.edu)
Ric Northrup Caric, Morehead State University, To the Convivial Grave and Back: John Fitch as a Case Study in Cultural Failure, 1785-1792 (rcaric@moreheadst.edu)Failure in the early nineteenth century was a difficult and complex concept for Americans to grasp. This condition--according to prevailing cultural and ideological norms--applied to those deemed "unable" to succeed in the market because of character flaws such as intemperance, a weak work ethic, or the moral failings of the confidence man. The dominant value of success and the example of the self-made man seemed to assure middling Americans that upstanding character would result in financial security and independence. The Panic of 1819, however, upset the existing definition of failure and cast a new moral burden on those thought to be above such vice. For middling Americans, the stigma of failure provided a painful lession on their frail position in a fickle market. Once perceived as positive indicators of stability and financial prosperity, these failing individuals learned that the path to a self-made man might take a wrong turn and instead end in a self-made failure.
This paper is a study of cultural failure in the case of a Philadelphia artisan and entrepreneur in the 1780's and 1790's. In analyzing cultural change between 1785 and 1850, Paul Faler and Bruce Laurie focus on the interplay between "persisting" traditional culture and "rising" industrial culture. However, the failure of traditional popular culture was also a significant dimention of cultural transformation. This paper traces the process by which John Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat, found himself incapable of representing himself through early modern languages of masculinity. After his second year of work on the steamboat project, Fitch stopped representing himself in terms of an early modern language of "independence" and "community." Instead, he began to represent first his situation, and then himself, in terms of images of captivity, torture, and execution. I argue that this shift indicated that Fitch was representing himself and his surroundings in terms of threats to his bodily integrity rather than representing himself as opposed to such threats in the traditional manner. Unable to live his cultural inheritance, Fitch groped his way to a self-representational imagery of amputating his own limbs, surrendering for execution, and letting himself be burned alive. Fifty years later, the embrace of bodily exposure as a pre-condition for individuality would be the object of extensive ritual on the part of temperance societies and fire companies. By that time, however, Fitch has long since committed suicide, unwilling to survive his borderline experience between early modern and industrial culture.
Comments
Scott Sandage, Carnegie Mellon University (sandage@andrew.cmu.edu)
Daniel Dupre
Discussants
Cornelia H. Dayton, University of Connecticut (dayton@sp.uconn.edu)
Laura Edwards, University of California, Los Angeles (edwards@history.ucla.edu)
Sarah Gordon, University of Pennsylvania (sgordon@oyez.law.upenn.edu)
Walter Johnson, New York University (wj1@is2.nyu.edu)
Diane Sommerville, Lafayette College (sommervi@aol.com)
Christopher Tomlins, American Bar Foundation (clt@abfn.org)
Donald J. Ratcliffe, University of Durham (D.J.Ratcliffe@durham.ac.uk)
Papers
Marc Egnal, York University, Class not Creed: Rethinking the Second Party System (megnal@yorku.ca)
Contemporaries argued about the makeup of the Whig and Democratic parties, and twentieth century scholars have kept this debate simmering. Early in this century, Progressive historians made the case for wealth and class as the chief determinant of loyalty. More recently the ethnocultural historians have contended that religion, place of birth, and a person's cultural outlook shaped party lines. This paper looks at the northern states, and contends that the Progressives were right: wealth was the key factor shaping the composition of the Whigs and Democrats.The paper examines Presidential voting between 1840 and 1852 and shows that Whigs predominated in the wealthiest farming and manufacturing areas. Democratic strongholds were in the less developed parts of the North. The paper uses individual-level data as well as county returns.
Finally, the talk suggests that the Second Party System was characterized by the politics of class. The issues separating the parties for example, banking, currency, and debtor relief were ones that divided wealthier citizens from poorer. But the politics of class allowed cooperation between sections. Only in the 1850s as new parties formed were the politics of class replaced by the politics of sectionalism.
J. Chris Arndt, James Madison University, State's
Rights and Party Formation in the Antebellum North: Maine and the Northeastern
Boundary Controversy, 1825-1833 (arndtjc@jmu.edu)
During the late 1820s and early 1830s, American politics evolved into a new party system dominated by Democrats and National Republicans/Whigs. Political historians have traditionally focused on the impact that market change, religion, slavery and ethnocultural factors had upon party formation. More recently increased attention has been paid to the role which federal/state relations played in this process. While historians of the South might readily concede this point, few have looked at the impact of state's rights sentiments north of the Mason-Dixon line. This essay examines the role these views played in shaping the second party system in Maine. Here, the northeastern boundary controversy and the resulting dispute over thousands of acres of land guaranteed that assertions of the state's right to the territory would become a central issue.As loosely organized factions of Maine Republicans began to evolve into a new, more formalized party structure, they had to compete for votes in an increasingly democratic environment. Local issues of great importance proved useful in attracting voters to the emerging parties. No local issue played a greater role in state politics during this period than the northeastern boundary. Maine's citizens increasingly viewed the disputed territory as one of the state's most treasured resources; when the federal government showed a willingness to negotiate a settlement, Maine voters looked to local politicians to protect their interests. It therefore became imperative for all politicians in Maine to take a solid stance on the issue. Initially, friends of the Adams administration counseled restraint and cooperation with the federal government, while anti-administration forces attacked the president and offered clear assertions of state power.
Andrew Jackson's victory at the polls in 1828 and 1832 transformed how the local parties dealt with the issue. With both political camps evolving from local factions into more highly structured entities with close ties to national organizations, each had to pay some heed to national party policy. Local Democrats had to reconcile their state's rights views with the imperatives of the Jackson administration. The result was a failed effort by administration supporters to finesse the state's rights issue and have the national government resolve the boundary. Although Democrats became more muted in their criticism, they continued to insist in asserting a recognition of such rights, often in a tortured and convoluted manner. Efforts to broker a settlement combined with the nullification crisis to bring party divisions into the open. Nullification made obvious serious divisions among Democrats. When news of a secret boundary agreement that would have required Maine to alienate part of the disputed territory came to light later in the session, the dominant and more moderate faction among Maine Democrats paid with a loss of political power. The emergence of the younger, more state's rights-minded faction not only showed a willingness to buck the administration on the boundary issue, but demonstrated that the party was adamant about asserting state's rights.
National Republicans, on the other hand, had urged cooperation while Adams was president, but vociferously criticized the Jackson administration's handling of the issue. But aside from appeals to state honor designed primarily to embarrass the Democrats, they refused to make a coherent policy statement asserting state's rights. Still, events of the late 1820s and early 1830s made clear that despite differences over how much theoretical right Maine had to determine a boundary settlement, no political party could survive without aggressively asserting Maine's right to the territory.
Comments
Major Wilson, Memphis State University
Donald Ratcliffe
Greg Knouff, Keene State College, 'Whiteness' and National Identity: Revolutionary Veterans Remember the Frontier War (gknouff@keene.edu)
In the period circa 1818-1840, Revolutionary War veterans gave oral pension depositions in local courts that described their experiences in the War for Independence. These public recollections of the American Revolution closely related to emerging constructions of national identity. Many veterans who applied for pensions had never fought with the main armies against the British. For men from the greater Pennsylvania backcountry (upon whom this paper focuses), their war was a struggle over the future of the Trans-Allegheny West. Their narratives reveal that the frontier war produced an American identity predicated on an increasingly biologically-oriented notion of "whiteness." This concept created unity among diverse backcountry settlers and implicated Indians as "non-white." The development of white racial consciousness grew haltingly during the colonial wars of the 1750s and 60s. By the War for Independence, however, concepts of race became central to defining "Americaness." Revolutionaries were then able to adapt Indian culture, especially methods of warfare, with no peril to their belief in their superiority. "Otherness" on the Pennsylvania frontier was no longer defined by cultural differences, but according to perceptions of skin color. The veterans' understandings of the Revolution and national identity helped solidify the early republic's equation of white manhood with citizenship. With property ownership largely vanishing from suffrage requirements, early Americans placed a greater emphasis on gender- and race-based notions of exclusion in defining the body politic. This of course helped mitigate potential class conflict in the political arena among whites. Historians have already noted how in the Revolution's aftermath racism became a way to formally deny rights to African Americans, both slave and free. I argue that Pennsylvania backcountry veterans' pension depositions reveal a significant parallel process in which Indians, no matter how culturally assimilated, could never be accepted in the Republic by virtue of their lack of "whiteness." The perceived skin color of European Americans was, therefore, crucial to the construction of national identity in the early United States.
Peter Messer, Texas A&M University, Commerce,
Savagery and Civilization: Imagining Republican Citizenship in the Early
Republic (Peter_Messer@tamu-commerce.edu)
This paper explores how historians of the newly independent United States used images of Native Americans in their attempts to create a national identity. In particular, it argues that these authors used the supposed strengths and weaknesses of Indian culture in order to define the common bonds that united thirteen disparate states into a single nation. In the process, they redefined the notion of republican citizenship. Historians replaced the classical ideal of the arms bearing men of the community taking an active interest in the political affairs of the nation with an ideal of male headed families pursuing economic self-sufficiency and embracing the Christian religion as the foundation of a stable polity.In the 1780s and 1790s a devoted group of nationalists set out to promote both a feeling of union among a diverse population and the values upon which they believed the survival of the republic depended. Images of Native Americans offered an ideal way to accomplish this task because these peoples were seen as intellectually and physically equal to Europeans but nonetheless trapped in a state of barbarity and savagery. Identifying the weaknesses of Indian society allowed historians to illustrate what Americans must do if they hoped to build a stable and prosperous republic in the New World. These authors agreed that Indian peoples were not saddled with oppressive governments, or with a corrupt and vice ridden population, in fact in the last area they outshone the allegedly superior whites. Native American society, they argued, was held back by its lack of clearly defined patriarchal families, its inability to transform the land to produce surplus, and its irreligion. Consequently, the survival of the United States depended first and foremost on its citizens' actions with regard to family, the transformation of the land, and religion, and not on their interest or activities in political or military affairs.
Carolyn Eastman, Johns Hopkins University, Performing
the Words of the Eloquent Indian: Defining American Responsibility, Memory,
and Virtue (caro@jhu.edu)
This paper will examine the way that Indian eloquence was represented in print media, primarily schoolbooks, to white Americans in the early Republic. Far from simply constructing the Indian as "other" for American readers, the reprinted speeches of these eloquent Indians usually articulated in shocking clarity how Anglo-americans had abused their relationship with the increasingly less powerful Indian tribes, breaking promises and treaties, stealing land, and extolling Christian morals which they themselves failed to uphold. Such speeches were printed in schoolbooks, alongside the eloquence of Washington, Patrick Henry, and other American leaders, they contextually gained status as examples of a nascent American literature.Building upon the works of Philip Deloria, David Murray, and Richard White, I will elucidate how those Indian speeches and other stories about Indian eloquence helped construct a nationalist American identity in several competing and contradictory ways. First, these representations fabricated a composite Indian identity, erasing distinctions between tribes -- a composite identity which permitted writers similarly address their white readers as a unified body of "Americans" who shared the blame for wrongs against the Indians. On another level, those readers used schoolbooks in particularly active ways -- specifically, to learn to read, and to learn the skills of reading aloud and public speaking. Therefore, the schoolchildren and budding orators who used these texts "played Indian," taking on an Indian voice with which to censure their fellow Americans -- and themselves? -- for generations of misconduct. Finally, by analyzing how those popular representations of eloquent Indians changed over the period 1780-1830, I will show how the invention of American identity frequently necessitated silencing that Indian censor and aestheticizing "Indian-talk" as style rather than substance.
Comment
Caroll Smith-Rosenberg
Andrew R.L. Cayton, Miami University (caytonar@muohio.edu)
Papers
Susan Branson, University of Texas at Dallas, 'A Man must ask our sex if he shall be free': Women and Political Culture in the 1790s (sbranson@utdallas.edu)
My paper explores the extent and nature of women's contribution to American popular political culture in the 1790s. With a focus on events and circumstances in the capital city of Philadelphia, I discuss female participation in the public parades, celebrations and protests which were part of the American response to the French Revolution between 1789 and 1798. The political, economic and social implications of the revolution in France influenced the thinking and activities of American women and challenged them to articulate and actively demonstrate their ideas concerning the Revolution and its implications for both American politics and American women's political roles. Women's public political activities were an integral part of American domestic politics, especially as theFed eralists helped shaped it. Federalists scathingly criticized female Jeffersonian Republicans for their public support of the Revolution, and branded them with the names of prominent Jacobin women. Yet these same men subsequently lauded the American women of a more Federalist bent who, through their public activities, urged the defense of America's shores against an expected French invasion in 1798. All these activities touched off political animosities, but more importantly, they contributed to the ongoing discussion of gender roles in this era. Women used the events and controversies s sparked by the French Revolution to expand their place in the public sphere. Politicians in turn used women, either by condemning them or encouraging them, to further specific political agendas. Though with very different motivations, the endeavors of both groups fostered change in women's roles in the early American Republic. Women attained a visible presence in the streets and on the parade grounds of the capital city. They drew on a trans-Atlantic political ideology, articulated in both France and Britain, to construct a political identity that was uniquely American.
Todd Estes, Oakland University, Politics
and the Public: The Federalists and Popular Politics in the Early 1790s
(estes@oakland.edu)
Contrary to much of the prevailing historiography, the Federalist party in the early 1790s frequently engaged in the practices of popular politics. Furthermore, Federalists were highly successful as they managed to build public support for President George Washington and his administration's policies in three key issues: the Neutrality Crisis and the Genet affair, the Whiskey Rebellion and the Democratic Societies, and the Jay Treaty debate. In all three episodes Federalists deployed similar tactics and struck recurrent themes as they successfully elicited public support for their positions. Yet in a few short years, of course, Federalists found themselves turned out of office, their views and methods rejected by the very public that they once so effectively persuaded.This paper will explore these three cases and will argue that the Federalists were able to frame issues in a way that had popular appeal and developed public support. However, the methods and symbols they used and their conception of the public, the duties of citizens, and the responsibilities of elected officials were increasingly anachronistic in a democratizing political culture. Thus, Federalists were not incapable or unwilling to engage in popular politics; rather, what constituted popular politics as well as popular political culture and the public sphere was shifting in the dynamic 1790s in such a way as to quickly render obsolete the Federalists' more traditional, old-fashioned practices. While they were able to take advantage of a number of other factors to succeed in the short run, they were eventually enveloped by the changes in politics and a defensiveness and a reactive posture which further hastened their decline. In a few years the drift of democratization carried the nation's political culture well beyond the point where Federalists were comfortable going. This paper argues that Federalist efforts at popular politics in the early 1790s should be examined closely to understand their logic, not dismissed or explained away as mere anomalies.
Andrew Shankman, Grand Valley State University, Hamilton
and His Historians: The Social and Cultural Aims of High Federalist Political
Economy (ShankmaA@gvsu.edu)
Comments
Herbert Sloan, Barnard College (hs85@columbia.edu)
Andrew Cayton
Amy Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University (asg5@psu.edu)
Papers
Andrew Lee Feight, University of Kentucky, The Life and Times of Rev. James Blythe: Slavery, Religion, and the Development of a Southern Border State (alfeig00@pop.uky.edu)
With American Independence, large numbers of white southerners pulled up their stakes and headed west to the lands bounding the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. This migration, of much scholarly interest of late, had a profound impact on the demographics of the southern states, and thereby on the political and religious developments of the whole nation during the antebellum period. The pattern of settlement established on the first frontier of Kentucky and the Old North-West would ultimately end in a bloody sectional conflict over the future settlement of the New West. James Blythe of North Carolina is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of antislavery-minded evangelical Protestants that followed a migratory path from the south-eastern Atlantic states to Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Blythe's life provides an insightful perspective on the forces that turned Kentucky into a border state and divided American Protestant denominations and political parties along sectional lines.Antislavery evangelicals were both pushed and pulled into Kentucky and the old North-West. The promise of a land free of slavery, fast growing communities in need of ministerial leadership, the possibility of successfully fighting to end slavery -- these all attracted men like James Blythe. But forces in the south-east also propelled antislavery southerners out of the region. Public hostility towards antislavery evangelicals, resistance within congregations and church governing bodies to antislavery pronouncements, and a less-than-receptive local press all pushed antislavery evangelicals to consider removing north-westward. Rather than accommodating to slavery, evangelical churches in the south-east simply lost their antislavery members, as they increasingly left the region for more hospitable climes. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, the small number of active antislavery evangelicals in the deep South had left the region. After unsuccessfully pressing their cause in church pulpits and denominational bodies, moderate and radical antislavery evangelicals crossed the Appalachian Mountains and settled on both sides of the Ohio River. In the process, they turned Kentucky from a frontier region into a border region, which separated an increasingly proslavery South from an increasingly antislavery North.
This paper will uses the life of James Blythe to illustrate the migration of antislavery evangelicals out of the Deep South. As a Presbyterian minister and chemistry professor at Transylvania University in exington, Kentucky, Blythe associated with many of the leading antislavery evangelicals that relocated to Kentucky and the states north of the Ohio River. As a gradual emancipationist and colonizationist, Blythe reflected the sentiments of Border South antislavery thought in the years before the rise of Abolitionism in the 1830s. The migratory patterns of men like James Blythe changed the geographical alignment of national church denominations and political parties, thereby paving the way for a bloody civil war that pitted North against South, Protestant against Protestant over the future of race-based slavery in our nation.
Elizabeth Osborn, Indiana University, Culture,
Gender, and Law in Antebellum Kentucky (eosborn@indiana.edu)
This paper will use the law as a means to explore the relationship between gender, culture and law-making in antebellum Kentucky. It is a part of a larger project that will look for similarities and differences in the culture and law of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. These states share not only geographic, but constitutional space as well. Indiana borrowed sections from both Kentucky and Ohio's constitutions when it wrote its own in 1816. Within an eighteen-month period in 1849-51 all three states held second conventions. In the recorded debates and personal papers, convention delegates explicitly articulated fears about how potential sections of the new constitution challenged societal constructions of masculinity and femininity. How perceptions regarding gender surfaced during the debates and proceedings surrounding the issue of dueling in the Kentucky and Ohio conventions is the focus of this paper.
Holly Taylor, University of Texas, 'The
Heart of the Union': Expansion, Sectionalism, and St. Louis Politics, 1846-1850
(hztaylor@mail.utexas.edu)
From its earliest days as a French and Spanish possession, the city of St. Louis played an important sectional role that persisted and intensified after Missouri became part of the United States. St. Louis, situated south of the junction of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers, seemed to more than meet the necessary criteria for success in an age when commercial potential was the primary concern for city planners and rivers were the lifeblood of the American economy. The city became a shipping hub and served as the last outpost of ìcivilizationî for those moving further West while it marked the edge of the frontier to those in the East.Many politicians in St. Louis, both Whigs and Democrats, believed that national politicians were neglecting the West in their policy-making decisions. The drive to obtain land for the United States west of the Mississippi that culminated in the Mexican War seemed to be an opportunity to change the countryís focus. With the expansion of the United States to the Pacific, St. Louis would become ìthe heart of the union,î poised almost exactly in the middle between North and South, East and West, ready to become the pre-eminent social, political, and economic center of the country. To many in St. Louis, it seemed unreasonable to govern such a vast country from one of its coasts, and some speculated that St. Louis would one day become the national capital.
St. Louis and the state of Missouri were enthusiastic supporters of the Mexican War in the 1840s, partially because of the benefits the addition of new territory could bring to the country and state. However, St. Louisís position at the center of the union did not bring about the hoped-for results, nor did the addition of new territory. The acquisition of the far western territories intensified rather than lessened the existing sectional disputes. St. Louis, which had spent the years before the Mexican War being pulled between eastern and western interests, found itself torn between north and south as well. The urban economic center had strong political and social ties with the North and East, while the rest of the state remained predominantly rural and agrarian, and was therefore more closely allied with the South. As sectional issues became more divisive, St. Louis became more isolated from the rest of Missouri.
Faced with such sectional problems, St. Louis and Missouri chose their traditional stance, neutrality. After all, the state owed its very existence to sectional compromise. The issue of the extension of slavery complicated many existing conflicts in the Missouri Democratic party. St. Louis remained the stronghold of support for Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who emphasized the stateís westernness in an attempt to neutralize sectional disputes, while the rest of Missouriís Democrats, led by Claiborne Fox Jackson and David Rice Atchison, allied themselves with the southern extremist views espoused by John C. Calhoun.
St. Louis politics between 1846 and 1850 reflected many national concerns and foreshadowed many of the decisions that the city, state, and country would face in 1860 and 1861. St. Louis had political, social, and economic ties to the North, South, East, and West. The agitation of the sectional conflict meant that it would have to decide which section to support. Neutrality proved to not be an option. The Mexican War and the acquisition of new territory in the West forced the city and later the country into a contest of sections. St. Louis politicians tried to avoid being forced into a sectional conflict by focusing on the advantages of expanding the United States. However, expansion, which had seemed to many to be a possible solution to the sectional dilemma about slavery, only exacerbated the problem.
Comments
Chris Waldrep, Eastern Illinois University (cfcrw@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu)
Amy Greenberg
Michael A. Morrison, Purdue University (morrisom@purdue.edu)
Papers
Julie Jeffrey, Goucher College, Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres (riezler@aol.com)
Laura McCall, Metropolitan State College of Denver, 'Shall I Fetter Her Will?': The Feminine Virtue of Assertion (mccalll@mscd.edu )
Comments
Carol Lasser, Oberlin College (Carol_Lasser@qmgate.cc.oberlin.edu)
Mary Kelley, Dartmouth College (Mary.C.Kelley@dartmouth.edu)
Alan Gallay, Western Washington University (algallay@cc.wwu.edu)
Papers
Peter J. Kastor, Washington University, After the Louisiana Purchase: Nationality and Incorporation in Louisiana, 1803-1820 (pjkastor@artsci.wustl.edu)
Article III of the Louisiana Purchase mandated that the residents of Louisiana "be incorporated in the union of the United States." That brief statement left tremendous disagreement in its wake. At a time of contested borders and competing definitions of citizenship, incorporation carried numerous meanings. As this paper will show, the Louisiana Purchase initiated a battle over nothing less than the definition of American nationhood as the struggle to settle the status of Louisiana's residents traversed the national landscape.The Louisiana Purchase came in a context of occasional, often unpredictable changes in national boundaries. With each moment of expansion came the simultaneous addition of new people and a perplexing question: could the national community expand as well? If not, could the nation survive with a large population of permanently alienated residents? These queries proved so troubling because they came at exactly the time when Americans were arguing about the definitions of nationality and citizenship. Crafting answers compelled people to consider what it meant to be an American. Likewise, it forced them to decide just how much differentiation the United States could accommodate.
Nowhere were these questions more pertinent than in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the years following the Louisiana Purchase. Federal policymakers faced the unprecedented task of incorporating a large foreign population without the traditional means of an extended period of naturalization. They sought a method to convert white Louisianians from foreigners into American citizens while simultaneously reinforcing white supremacy. For all the policymaking problems that came with this task, the vagueness of Article III also provided the springboard from which Americans attempted to settle who was or was not an American.
White Louisianians responded in kind. They proved eager to join an American union, but on their own terms. They demanded membership in political, commercial, and administrative networks that would connect them to the rest of the United States. Diplomatic contingency and regional instability, which seemed to pose the greatest threats to Louisiana, also created the conditions in which white Louisianians could press their claims on the federal government. They successfully deployed elements of the contemporary debate about citizenship, elements which emphasized individual identity and political belief over cultural homogeneity. They also found common cause with American policymakers in establishing new racial boundaries which rejected the competing notions of citizenship articulated by slaves, Indians, and free people of color.
Scholars of the early republic have usually seen expansion in a geographic terms. When it comes to the people living on land claimed or acquired by the United States, the familiar story is one of cultural imperialism or racial genocide. While this narrative accounts for the end result of a nation that spanned the continent, the death or dislocation of Indians, and the entrenchment of white supremacy, it fails to account for the fundamental problems of citizenship and nationhood that came with expansion. The incorporation of Louisiana suggests a more complicated system of federalism than historians usually describe. So too does it indicate the need for greater sophistication in dealing with expansion. While Louisianians occasionally resented their treatment at the hands of their new fellow-countrymen east of the Mississippi, this was no simple story of cultural imperialism or the tension between center and periphery. Instead, Louisianians and Americans found ways to reconcile the presence of an anomalous population and created institutions designed to subvert the problems of a vast republic. The case of Louisiana reveals just how much was at stake in the incorporation of new territory, and just how much people in the Americas could disagree about the shape of a nation.
Andrew McMichael, Vanderbilt University, Slavery
on the Southwestern Borderlands: Anglos, Slaves, and Receding Spaniards
(drew@panix.com)
The West Florida frontier area presented both slaves and slaveowners with a unique set of problems as they grappled with an influx of Americans into an area under the legal control of the Spanish. They lived in an area that from 1785-1810 was controlled by the Spanish legal system, but whose population retained many of the sensibilities of American slavery. This dualism created a unique set of assumptions regarding the role of slaves in the social and legal system. At the same time, the American and then French Revolutions spawned slave revolts in Pointe Coupee across the river, St. Domingue, a major trading area for Louisianans, and back in Virginia, from where many of West Florida's residents had migrated. The adult slaves, predominantly African, constituted a foreign population within the borders of West Florida. Between 1785, at the beginning of British Tory migration into West Florida, and 1807, when Louisianans firmly protected slavery through the Black Code and the Act of 1806, the institution of plantation slavery in the southwest was characterized by instability for masters living in a land controlled by a foreign government.
Jane Landers, Vanderbilt University, A
Separate Nation: Free Blacks and Indians on the Florida Frontier
(jane.landers@vanderbilt.edu)
This paper examines the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of free blacks and Indians to carve out an autonomous middle ground--a separate nation--on the volatile Floirda frontier in the early nineteenth century. It argues that self-interest rather than abstract national idoelogies shaped the politics of these interstitial groups. The paper compares two loci of resistance: the so-called Negro Fort at Prospect Bluff upriver from pensacola, and the black and Seminole villages along the Suwannee River. At Prospect Bluff runaway slaves and Choctaws, supported by British agents and traders, rejected both U.S. and Spanish efforts to "reduce" them. At Bowlegs Town on the Suwannee free "village Negroes" and Seminoles, suported by Spanish aid, waged their own desperate resistance to U.S. forces. Drawing on archival materials from Spain and Florida, this paper also considers how the black/Indian alliances affected the course of Spain's political fortunes in the region.
Comment
Gregory Nobles, Georgia Institute of Technology (gregory.nobles@hts.gatech.edu)
Thomas H. Appleton, Jr., Kentucky Historical Society (tom.appleton@mail.state.ky.us)
Papers
Stephen Asperheim, University of Illionois, Indian Warfare
and Cultural Nationalism in Kentucky, 1790-1795 (s-asper@students.uiuc.edu)
Honor Sachs, University of Wisconsin, Rethinking Resistance: Popular Dissidence in the Kentucky Backcountry (hrsachs@students.wisc.edu)
Harry S. Laver, United States Military Academy, 'An Organized Cabal for Electioneering': Politics and the Kentucky Militia in the Early Republic (kh4685@exmail.usma.army.mil)This paper explores militia desertion and insubordination as forms of subtle resistance, reflecting a low and sustained murmur of disaffection in the Kentucky backcountry that was equally significant to the development of the early republic as explosions of violence. Focusing on Kentucky's first ten years of formal settlement, 1774 - 1784, I will examine how the everyday resistance, and minor, forgotten mutinies, characterized everyday life in the backcountry of the new nation. In many ways, these less confrontational, even plodding forms of resistance provide a better perspective on the more consistent conflicts experienced by the westering population of the early republic than do the brief explosions of violent rebellion often cited as central to backcountry political opinion.When Thomas Jefferson asked whether or not a country could maintain its liberties "if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance," he posed a question that has been as problematic as it has been useful for understanding backcountry rebellion. This paper expands definitions of protest to include quotidian political expression alongside radical action to reveal how rulers were not merely "warned from time to time" by their people. Rather, including forms of everyday protest shows how authorities experienced an almost constant cycle of reminders, however subtle, of their own fragility. While my initial observations about militia desertion and insubordination are distilled for the purposes of this paper, I hope that my larger questions and conclusions about redefining protest will suggest a new framework through which to uncover additional examples of obscured opposition, and forums for political expression.
From Kentucky's earliest days of settlement in the 1780s to the Whig and Democratic squabbles of the 1830s, militia companies functioned as political organizations by agitating for specific goals, by campaigning for favorite candidates, and by providing a path to elected office for their politically-ambitious members. In addition, militia-sponsored holiday celebrations and political rallies facilitated the dissemination of political ideologies and partisan agendas, and fostered the creation of a national mythology. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before mature political parties developed, the militia's high visibility, especially the notoriety of the officers, coupled with their preexisting organizational structure to make companies proto-political organizations.During the Jacksonian era, citizen-soldiers joined the rest of the American population and enthusiastically embraced the rabid partisanship and maturing two-party system that permanently altered the political landscape. The militia, while continuing to expand participation in the political process, became increasingly partisan during the hotly contested campaigns of the 1830s and 40s. Like it or not, the expanding and increasingly partisan political process captured the militia, just as it had the rest of America. By educating Kentuckians and engaging them in the political process, the militia furthered the process of democratization that proliferated throughout the nation during the first half of the nineteenth century. In the early republic, militiamen often trained more with political slogans than firearms, and prepared for the next election rather than the next war.
Comment
Craig Friend, Georgetown College (cfriend@georgetowncollege.edu)
Matthew Schoenbachler, Kentucky Wesleyan College (mschoenb@kwc.edu)
Papers
Sarah C. Hand, University of Virginia, Maintaining Troop Morale: Chesapeake Alcohol Provisions and Gender in the American Revolution (sch3m@Virginia.edu)
Diane E. Wenger, University of Delaware, [Foot Soldiers in the Market Revolution] Markets in the Back Country: A Rural Merchant and the Pennsylvania Iron Industry (dwenger@udel.edu)
This paper argues that country storekeepers played an important, but as yet unexamined, role in the complicated economy of the mid-Atlantic during the early national period. One of these storekeepers was Samuel Rex, whose daybooks, ledgers, receipts and correspondence survive to provide a case study of a business operating in this era. In focusing on Rex's relationship with the regional iron industry, the paper demonstrates that iron plantations were not self-sufficient communities, but were dependent on middlemen such as Rex for goods and provisions to run the furnaces and forges and to compensate and feed their workers. This examination of Rex's business adds complexity to the Market Revolution model and also illuminates the economy of the mid-Atlantic, a region that has not yet received the scholarly attention afforded the Chesapeake and New England.In December 1790, Rex opened his store in Schaefferstown, Pa., a crossroads village 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The location was a good one for a country merchant because of its proximity to regional iron works, including just a few miles to the east, Cornwall Furnace and "mine holes," the richest iron ore deposit in America. Also, within one day's ride were Elizabeth, Mount Hope, and Berkshire Furnaces, and Hopewell, Speedwell, Charming, and Schuylkill Forges. Teamsters driving to and from these sites with loads of ore and bar iron traveled through Schaefferstown often stopping for provisions at the town's stores and taverns.
Rex was one of the town merchants who benefited from this trade, selling such items as tobacco, tea, linen, curry combs, whiskey, and lanterns to the teamsters for their own use or for the iron plantation. But, Rex's relationship with the ironworks went beyond the occasional sale to the workers or ironmasters. He presided over a network of credit and debt that enabled the ironmasters to get the goods they needed to operate the iron works and also pay and feed their workers, while spending little of their scarce cash. Rex served as an auxiliary company store for these ironmasters, allowing them to pay their workers with store goods and repay the storekeeper with bar iron, the commodity that was most readily available to them. Rex also supplied the iron sites each year with considerable quantities (over 20,000 pounds annually) of meat that he gathered from local farmers. This system was mutually beneficial to all parties. In exchange for their fresh pork or bacon, farmers received cash or credit at the Rex store and the ironmasters received meat to feed the plantations. Rex received as payment for the meat, some cash but, mainly bar iron that he resold at a profit locally or in Philadelphia.
Joseph T. Rainer, College of William and Mary, 'A
Revolution in Trust?': Character, Class, and Sectionalism and the Paradoxes
of Mercantile Confidence (jtrainer@erols.com)
In many communities impacted by the Market Revolution the social contract of the marketplace eventually supplanted traditional relationships based on mutualism and reciprocity. Anonymity, mobility, and impersonal market mechanisms fundamentally altered economic and social relationships. One profession peculiar to this era, clock peddling, illuminates many of the transformations which relationships of exchange underwent during the Market Revolution. Between the 1810s to the mid 1840s transactions between Yankee clock peddlers and rural consumers numbered in the tens of thousands. All exchange relations in the cash-poor Early Republic relied heavily on the advance of credit and a concomitant extension of trust. The measures of confidence built between Yankee clock peddlers, their employers, and their clientele illustrate the strains placed on the credit system as trade extended across ever greater distances. The ramifications of Yankee clock peddlers' dealings extended beyond the conquest of distant markets. Yankee clock peddlers' business practices crossed class and cultural boundaries as well.Most Yankee clock peddlers were employees of companies which specialized in the marketing of mass produced clocks. The relations between employers and their peddlers demonstrate the strains placed on mercantile confidence when it crossed class lines, which were in the very process of formation. Clock manufacturers and entrepreneurs covered their risks by requiring their peddler-employees to provide sterling recommendations of their character and to sign stringent contracts. Peddlers who performed well in the marketplace selling goods were rewarded with higher wages, commissions, and increased credit. Yankee peddlers gained their employers' and creditors' trust through a traditional demonstration of character, but they advanced through sharp trading in the marketplace.
The credit arrangements made between clock peddlers and their customers heeded traditional agrarian credit practices, but also linked backcountry consumers to the wider national market. Through the examination of business correspondence and several clock peddlers' account books, I offer an example of how market-driven practices insinuated themselves into local trade - a history of mercantile confidence in the Early Republic from the bottom up.
Comment
Elizabeth Perkins, Centre College (perkins@centre.edu)
Catherine Kelly, Case Western Reserve University (cek2@po.cwru.edu)
Papers
Eileen Ka-May Cheng, Hanover College, Origins and Originality in the New American Nation: Citation, Authorship, and Impartial Truth in American Historiography, 1784-1850 (cheng@hanover.edu)
In a survey of historiography on the American Revolution, published in 1912, the historian Sydney George Fisher offered a scathing indictment of his eighteenth and nineteenth-century predecessors. The very title of his paper, "The Legendary and Myth-Making Process in Histories of the American Revolution," suggested the general thrust of his critique. By his account, the revolutionary generation of historians and their early nineteenth-century successors had drastically oversimplified the Revolution. Blinded by patriotic zeal, these historians glorified their ancestors as uniformly heroic figures. As they did so, they demonstrated their uncritical standards of scholarship and their lack of impartiality. For Fisher, the methodology used by these historians was both a cause and a symptom of this problem. He ascribed their one-sided interpretation of the Revolution to their propensity for plagiarism. Conversely, he believed, their biased perspective prevented them from adopting more systematic and scientific methods of historical writing. To do so, Fisher argued, would reveal the tenuous basis for their claims.Ironically for someone attempting to demystify the Revolution, Fisher was engaged in some myth-making of his own. Namely, he contributed to a myth about the uncritical and unscientific character of historical writing in the early American republic. Modern scholars have, by and large, accepted Fisher's characterization of historiography in this period. Like Fisher, they have assumed that early national historians disregarded footnotes and made plagiarism a routine practice. Yet early national attitudes toward citation were more complex and sophisticated than Fisher and his successors have acknowledged. Contrary to Fisher's claims, historians in this period developed increasingly rigorous standards for citation and began to stigmatize plagiarism in historical writing. My paper examines the sources and implications of this trend. Changing conceptions of authorship contributed to the rise of interest in footnotes. In particular, citation became increasingly important as historians put a new premium on originality and uniqueness as scholarly ideals. The growing demand for citation also signified a concern with impartiality and a desire to solidify the foundations of historical truth. In this way, looking at the treatment of citation can illuminate deeper assumptions about the nature of historical knowledge among early national historians, and show how these historians had begun to develop many of the doctrines that scholars ascribe to the modern historical consciousness of the twentieth century.
Paradoxically, this seemingly modern concern with citation was very much the product of its time. Specifically, the transition from Enlightenment to Romantic aesthetics, the shift to liberal capitalism, and nationalist imperatives all contributed to this transformation. Thus, by reassessing the theory and practice of citation in early national historiography, this paper seeks at once to revise the conventional narrative of American historiography, and to shed light on the political and social transformations of the early republic.
Alan Golden, Lock Haven University, Jefferson, Republican
Virtue, and Hume's History of England (agolden@eagle.lhup.edu)
Mary Kupiec Cayton, Miami University, Jacob Norton's Reading: The Print Revolution and the Intellectual Universe of a Massachusetts Congregational Minister, 1787-1824 (caytonmk@casmail.muohio.edu)
Comment
Catherine Kelly
Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles (saron@ucla.edu)
Papers
Lisbeth Haas, University of California, Santa Cruz, Images and Iconography of Spanish and Mexican California (bethsf@aol.com)
Ross Frank, University of California, San Diego, Images and Iconography of Spanish and Mexican New Mexico (rfrank@ucsd.edu)
A short but intense economic boom in New Mexico from the 1780s to about 1810, led to a redefinition of provincial society and culture. Unlike in the other northern provinces of New Spain, the Franciscan missionaries favored the cultural assertion of the non-Indian, ìVecinoî (citizen) population, over the Pueblo Indian communities that they served. As a result, generations of saintmakers (santeros) developed new vocabularies of visual expression and iconographical meaning which reflected a particular New Mexican cultural resonance. The paper presents a number of examples that illustrate the growth of the first genre of religious art made by Europeans in North America, and offers comparisons with contemporary art from Spanish metropolitan centers, as well as elsewhere on the northern frontier.
Comments
Steven Hackel, Oregon State University (Shackel@orst.edu)
Charles R. Cutter, Purdue University (ccutter@sla.purdue.edu)
Stephen Aron
Len Travers, Massachusetts Historical Society (csneh@masshist.org)
Papers
Marty D. Matthews, University of South Carolina, Thomas Jefferson's Natural Bridge: A Monument for the New Nation (martmat@ix.netcom.com)
Ned Irwin, East Tennessee State University, Writing Memory: Early Historians of America's First Western Frontier (irwinn@access.etsu.edu)
The approach of the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was marked by a sudden flurry of histories, which attempted to highlight the young nation's history and the figures who had shaped it. Many of these histories were of a regional, state, or local nature and focused on the people and events in those areas that had contributed to the American character and to an "American" history. This paper examines the work of two such early historians, John Haywood (1753-1826) of Tennessee and Humphrey Marshall (1760-1841) of Kentucky, whose state histories were the first important attempts to preserve the "memory" of the people who had settled those states and to raise the "heroes" of the early western frontier as models of citizenship for the later generation for which they were writing, parochial figures to match the national images of the "heroes" of the Revolution like Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. In so doing, Haywood and Marshall helped give future scholars an historical base on which to build and provided their contemporaries with a greater sense of regional identity and pride.
Kevin Gannon, University of South Carolina, ''The
Sabbath of Liberty': The Invention of Palmetto Day in 1850s Charleston
(jobu25@aol.com)
As the sectional crisis escalated in the 1850s, one of the hallmarks of southern "nationalism" was an attempt to create a continuity with the past. Nowhere was this more evident than in South Carolina, and especially Charleston-the bellwether of secession sentiment in the South. As tensions grew higher throughout the decade, and loyalty came to be defined by sectional rather than national concerns, southerners in general, and Charlestonians in particular, became increasingly preoccupied with their revolutionary heritage. The reassurance that this heritage offered was vital to a people who were convinced that they were the true guardians of the republican legacy, even if that duty required that they sever their ties to the Union. This preoccupation was evident not only in the realm of politics, but throughout the activities of Charleston society as well. For example, the rituals and ceremonies that accompanied celebrations of this revolutionary heritage underwent a transformation in the 1850s. As the South seemed to drift further apart from the rest of the Union, the act of commemorating the Revolution took on a new meaning and urgency, as public celebrations of the Revolution served to legitimize the current course of actions for anxious southerners.This paper analyzes the transformation that took place in the meaning of Revolutionary commemorations by examining the way Charlestonians of the period celebrated their Revolutionary heritage.The battle of Fort Moultrie, which occurred on June 28, 1776, became the focus of a ritualized form of southern nationalism for Charlestonians in the 1850s. Commemorated regularly-albeit fairly innocuously-throughout most of the antebellum period, the June 28 anniversary took on new significance as "Palmetto Day" in the decade before Civil War. The addition of a distinctly sectional component to the celebration of revolutionary heritage mirrored the southern belief that the republican heritage of the Revolution was being subverted by the North, and that southerners-Carolinians (and especially Charlestonians) in the lead-were its last true defenders. The "invented tradition" of Palmetto Day had a specific function and pervasive relevance to anxious Charlestonians. As Eric Hobsbawm illustrates, the "invention" of tradition finds particularly fertile ground "when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which 'old' traditions had been designed." South Carolina's political culture in the 1850s was undergoing precisely this sort of transformation, an unsettling process that required some sort of affirmation. The defense of what they saw as true "republican" values in the face of severe social and political challenges is what drove South Carolinians to embrace secession in 1860. Massive economic and social changes built the foundation of Charlestonians' edginess. The birth of the free labor ideology in the North, with its implicit critique of the very nature of southern society, refined the already-existing edginess to create the full-blown secessionist sentiment that defined South Carolina nationalism. The development of Palmetto Day was South Carolina's answer to both outside criticism and an inner need for reassurance that its was the true republican course-in short, Palmetto Day became an important "invented tradition." The anniversary of the battle of Fort Moultrie became the occasion for much more than mere commemoration in the 1850s. By analyzing Palmetto Day as an "invented" tradition for Charlestonians, this paper illustrates how their increasingly sectional orientation rested upon the assumption that Carolinians were acting firmly within the bounds of their revolutionary heritage. It also reveals how this assumption's legitimacy depended upon, and received, ritualized validation through the acts of celebration and commemoration.
Comments
Joan Waugh, University of California, Los Angeles (jwaugh@history.ucla.edu)
Len Travers
Graham Hodges, Colgate University (ghodges@center.colgate.edu)
Papers
David Quigley, Boston College, The Jim Crow North: New York City and the Legacies of 1821 (david.quigley@bc.edu)
David Gellman, University of Illinois at Chicago, 'Sins of the Fathers': Unraveling Freedom and Slavery in New York's Constitution of 1821 (d-gellman@nwu.edu)
Two hundred years before this year's SHEAR conference--on July 5, 1799--New York commenced the gradual abolition of slavery, ensuring that an entire region of the new nation would become the slaveless portion of America's "house divided against itself." Indeed, gradual abolition in New York sowed seeds of a slaveless democracy throughout the American North.In 1821, New York's state constitutional convention enfranchised the great mass of white men while denying all but the wealthiest blacks access to the polls. Placing racial exclusion in constitutional bedrock, white New Yorkers simultaneously repudiated and echoed the state's history. This paper examines why and how New York's political leadership embraced the legacy of racial stigma rather than that of inter-racial democracy. The paper does so by placing the Constitutional Convention's disenfranchisement of African Americans in the context of gradual abolition.
The disfranchising majority overcame historical arguments about slavery and abolition that initially formed an effective bulwark against racial exclusion. Although readily assuming that slavery and prejudice had left African Americans "degraded," opponents of black suffrage sought to minimize the relevance of emancipation's political history. Most delegates concluded that a majority had the right to restrict the franchise in the name of greater public interest. Disenfranchisement involved an ideological and rhetorical reorientation that transcended partisanship. Black New Yorkers became the exemplar of the principle that, for franchise expansion to have been acceptable and legitimate explicit, limits had to exist. In reaching this conclusion, the Convention treated the past with a selectivity at odds with the historical record available to them and to us.
Comments
Michael Vorenberg, SUNY, Buffalo (vorenber@acsu.buffalo.edu)
Graham Hodges
Paul Newman, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown (pnewman+@pitt.edu)
Papers
Stan Deaton, Georgia Historical Society, Expanding the Boundaries of Democracy: Rethinking the American Revolution in South Carolina, 1783-1800 (dutch1@savannahga.net, gahist@ix.netcom.net)
Owen S. Ireland, SUNY, Brockport, Pennsylvania Federalists and the Invention of Democratic Politics in the Early Republic (oireland@brockport.edu)
President John Murrin once asked me what I saw as the implications of my work on Pennsylvania politics in the 1780's for our understanding of national politics in the 1790's. This paper, a long-delayed and highly speculative answer, argues that:
- In the 1780's the Federalists in Pennsylvania learned how to govern a culturally heterogeneous and democratic polity.
- The ratification of the Constitution in 1788 created a new polity that resembled Pennsylvania. It united into a single political unit a number of quite different, and often suspicious and sometimes hostile, political cultures.
- The Washington and Adams administrations failed to the degree that they ignored the lessons learned a decade earlier by their fellow Federalists in Pennsylvania. Indeed, the national Federalists in the 1790's, sinned in much the same way that Pennsylvania's Antifederalist had sinned in the 1780's, and with much the same result. They lost because they equated one particular people with the American people, and thus spoke for and to a narrow constituency while alienating all others.
Johann Neem, University of Virginia, Politics and
the Public Sphere in Early National New England (jneem@virginia.edu)
Comment
William Pencak, Pennsylvania State University (wap1@psu.edu)
Barbara Oberg, Princeton University (boberg@princeton.edu)
Papers
Jacquelyn C. Miller, Seattle University, Fever and Family Formation: Defining Philadelphia's Middle-Class Families during the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic (jcmiller@seattleu.edu)
According to diarist Elizabeth Drinker, on August 28, 1793, one of her servants Joseph Gibbs became ill and had "gone away sick to some Negro House, where they have promised to take care of him."[1] This anecdote, along with many others, demonstrates, at the most intimate level of social dynamics, a change in family identity that was occurring in Philadelphia during the latter half of the eighteenth century. While definitions of family, ranging from one that encompassed everyone who lived under one roof to a meaning that excluded servants and often relegated anyone other than the father, mother, and their children to a secondary position within the household, it is clear that a person's race, class, gender, and marital status were major determinants of where he or she ranked in terms of this family hierarchy. For example, the position of unmarried or widowed sisters was more precarious than that of wives, as unattached females often filled roles that were more akin to servants than did their married counterparts.The aim of this paper is to relate how the severity of the epidemic compelled people to define the family more clearly and carefully. Attempts made by Philadelphia masters and mistresses to create boundaries between family and non-family members of their households, an event that took several decades elsewhere, was shortened in Philadelphia under the force of the yellow fever crisis. I will examine this process during the epidemic in order to capture people in the act of sorting out their human relationships in this rather contracted domain, and to reveal some of the values, assumptions, and expectations that were implied, but not often made explicit, in those relationships.
Historians have long pointed to the post-war era as the period when the affective, middle-class family and individualism were increasingly touted as the ideal social and political forms upon which the new nation would be built. For instance, Ruth Bloch has provided evidence for this change in her essay on the privatization and feminization of ideas about virtue, which documents how these notions shifted from an emphasis on military courage and civic glory to a meaning that located virtue in churches, schools, and families[2]. The view that women as wives and mothers were to be guardians of this virtue in the new republican state has been discussed by a number of scholars[3]. It is my contention, however, that at the same time that political theorists were locating community in the home, masters and mistresses were denying their servants and non-nuclear kin membership in their families. Consequently, this change narrowed the scope of communal responsibility.
Labor historians, who have primarily focused on social relationships surrounding craft production, have paid very little attention to non-craft workers[4]. Because domestics and non-nuclear kin lived on such intimate terms with the nuclear family members, they were the last group of workers to experience the consequences of the evolution of the household from a public institution that served as the seat of economic production, with all the political and social functions that such a structure entailed, to a more privatized realm whose central purpose was childrearing. It is, therefore, important to remember that this transition was closely related to the formation of the middle-class sense of family identity.
My contribution to this literature is threefold. First, I will examine some of the critical elements of middle-class family formation, including the desire on the part of the middle class to distance themselves from the lower sorts, while simultaneously advocating the glories of companionate marriages and promoting the benefits of love and affection as the glue that would bind family members together. Second, I will consider the interaction of gender construction and class formation by looking at what the relatively higher status of wives and mothers meant for the other members of the household, particularly for servants and unmarried female kin. And third, I will evaluate Mary Beth Norton's assertion that women are "the keepers of the nation's conscience, the only citizens specifically charged with maintaining the traditional republican commitment to the good of the entire community" in light of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia[5]. Because the domestic sphere was the location where people dealt with these issues on a personal level, that is the place to which we must turn.
ENDNOTES
1. Elizabeth Drinker, The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 3 vols., ed. Elaine Forman Crane (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), Aug. 28, 1793, I: 497.2. Ruth H. Block, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs 13 (1987): 37-58.
3. Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W. W. Norton & company, 1986), 265-88; Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689-721; and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980), 228-99.
4. Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 (New York: Oxford, 1980); and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford, 1984). Christine Stansell did devote a chapter of her study, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 155-168, to domestic service, focusing almost exclusively on female Irish immigrants.
5. Mary Beth Norton, "The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America," American Historical Review 89 (1984): 617.
Sean Taylor, Northern Illinois University, The
Politics of Disease: Yellow Fever and State Building in Philadelphia, 1793-1805
(pstaylor@niu.edu)
On April 17, 1799, the Health Office of the Port and City of Philadelphia published in the city newspapers a complete copy of the health laws of the state of Pennsylvania. Buried in this rather routine publication was a new section of the act designed to aid agents of the Board of Health in carrying out their appointed tasks. Section 18 of the 1799 health laws contained a new and important provision: it was now a crime to assault at any time, including after an epidemic, any member of the Board of Health for enforcing the health regulations. Specifically, the act stated that ìif after the expiration of the quarantine, any mariner or other person, who shall have complied with the regulations hereby established, shall commit any violence on the person of a member of the board of health . . . for anything done, in the execution of his duty, such persons shall be subject to a fine of two hundred dollars, and . . . be sentenced to imprisonment at hard labor, for any term not exceeding three years.î This addition to the laws of Pennsylvania culminated several years of health policy determined by the Board of Health that effectively limited the freedom of Philadelphiaís poor. Section 18 of the 1799 health laws, clearly directed at the laboring poor, shows that not all Philadelphians agreed with the health laws and were willing to use force to voice their displeasure. Lacking political power to change the health laws, the poor used the only means at hand to resist the health actsóviolence. Assaulting members of the Board of Health, or their charges, allowed the poor some measure of retribution against their perceived oppressors.Recent interest in Philadelphiaís yellow fever outbreaks has focused solely on the 1793 epidemic. By focusing on the impact of this one infestation, current studies miss the full impact of endemic disease on Philadelphia society over the course of more than a decade. While the 1793 outbreak devastated the lives of Philadelphians, especially the laboring poor, this was not the only visit from ìthe black goddessî in the early national period. Every year between 1793 and 1805 yellow fever infested Philadelphia or the neighboring cities of New York, Baltimore, and Wilmington, bringing with it fear, death, and devastation to the citizens of these cities. This on going threat to the lives of Philadelphians extended far beyond the five thousand deaths that occurred in 1793, spurring fundamental changes in the way Philadelphians met the challenge of epidemic disease in the coming years.
This paper argues that one of these changes was the development of a health office that increasingly controlled the lives of the laboring poor of Philadelphia. As city health officials and elites learned about epidemic disease they passed new health laws that in practice only affected the ìlower sortî. During each epidemic, citizens not dependent on a hand-to-mouth existence fled to the countryside to stay at country homes or with friends and relatives at the first sign of yellow fever appearing along the wharves. By 1799 those left behind during the nearly annual epidemics, too poor to leave the city, faced stringent health laws that forced them from their homes and prevented them from earning their daily bread. Always on the edge of destitution, the poor found it impossible to earn a living with the dual hardships of epidemic yellow fever and a Board of Health that closed the wharves and merchant houses that provided them with daily employment. Legislation criminalizing any assault of a health officer at any time emphasizes the effect the health laws had on the lower sort.
Comment
Chandos Brown, College of William and Mary (cmbrow@mail.wm.edu)
Monique Bourque, University of Pennsylvania (mbourque@sas.upenn.edu)
Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis (astaylor@ucdavis.edu)
Papers
Naomi Lamoreaux, University of California, Los Angeles, Accounting for Capitalism in Early American History: Farmers, Merchants, Manufacturers, and Their Economic Worlds (lamoreaux@econ.ucla.edu)
When and how did the American economy acquire its capitalist character? Scholars writing in what I call the Merrill/Clark/Henretta tradition have been united in their conviction that farmers, on the one hand, and merchants and manufacturers, on the other, stood on opposite sides of a critical dividing line in early American society, and that the mentalité of farmers, as opposed to that of merchants and manufacturers, was pre- or even anti-capitalist. These scholars supported their position by presenting evidence that seemed to indicate that farmers' economic behavior did not fit conventional notions of capitalist exchange-that the transactions that farmers entered in their account books were not mediated by money, that the credits that rural producers granted each other did not circulate as means of exchange, that farmers typically did not charge each other interest on debts, that they engaged in a wide variety of cooperative activities, that they made decisions that put family and community before profit, and that their goal was to achieve a competence not to accumulate capital. These scholars, however, neglected to test whether the behavior of merchants and manufacturers was in fact different from that of farmers along the dimensions they singled out for consideration. Hence in the first half of the paper I show that abundant evidence is readily available to indicate that farmers had more in common with merchants and manufacturers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than scholars in this tradition would like to admit. It does not necessarily follow, however, that farmers, like merchants and manufacturers, were capitalist. We are only forced into such a position, I argue, if we restrict our theoretical toolbox to the traditional versions of neoclassical theory employed by scholars on both sides of this debate. In the second half of the essay I show that more recent theoretical developments in economics can help us move beyond such simple dichotomies and, when combined with the insights of historians influenced by cultural anthropology, can help us develop more complex understandings of the economic cultures of these groups. I then return at the end of the paper to the various definitions of capitalism available in the literature and find that they yield strikingly different conclusions about the extent and nature of the economic transformation that the agricultural sector experienced by 1850. The problem is that, in some ways, the worlds of farmers and merchants and manufacturers became more broadly similar during the first half of the nineteenth century, but in other ways the experiences of members of these groups increasingly diverged. In the end, therefore, I conclude that capitalism is not a very useful concept for understanding the transformations of this period, though it by no means follows that we must also give up on notions of mentalité.
Tamara G. Miller, Independent Scholar, 'Many
Kinds of Busyness': Women's Household Labor in Early Ohio (tamaramiller@netscape.net)
Focusing on the women of Washington County, Ohio between 1788, when the county was first settled by Anglo-Americans, and 1850, this paper will trace both the changing nature and valuation of women's household work as the region's economy shifted from one characterized primarily by agriculture and household production to a more market-oriented economy by the mid-nineteenth century.During the early years of settlement, women's energies were devoted to household production, and that work was deemed valuable by both men and women.
Women's household production increased during the first several decades after settlement, and the period between 1800 and 1830 became the golden age of household production. But by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, as Washington County's farmers became more extensively involved in commercial agriculture and as cash began to permeate the local economy, women's household production began to decline and women's work for their families became less visible. Women did not lament the change. Men, however, were more concerned, and feared that women were abandoning productive and "profitable" work. A growing number of men began urging women to take up dairying, one of the few branches of female production that could be readily marketed for cash. As household textile production declined, women were encouraged to cultivate silk worms and manufacture silk, another marketable commodity. Women, however, did not respond to these suggestions. In fact, much of women's work had changed very little and remained an integral part of the agricultural economy upon which the growth of the commercial center of Marietta was based. Women did not reject the market, and in fact were involved in the market in numerous ways. In fact, it was often the products of women's labor that first brought cash into rural household. Rather, women's work, like men's, adapted to changing market conditions and was intricately tied to the growth of a commercial economy in early Ohio. Women continued to engage in "profitable" work, but because their new forms of work, unlike textile production and dairying, were not defined exclusively as female work, women's work became less visible, and perhaps less appreciated.
Comments
James Henretta, University of Maryland (jh53@umail.umd.edu)
Carol Sheriff, College of William and Mary (cxsher@facstaff.wm.edu)
John M. Belohlavek, University of South Florida (belohlav@chuma1.cas.usf.edu)
Papers
Gene A. Smith, Texas Christian University, EverChanging Loyalties: Arsène Lacarrière Latour and the Struggle for the Southwest (G.Smith@tcu.edu)
Arsène Lacarrière Latour was characteristic of the adventurers attracted to the southwestern frontier during the early national period. Born and educated in France in 1778, the French Revolution shattered his world, prompting him to travel to Haiti in 1802 to secure family lands and financial comfort. Unfortunately, the revolutionary slave insurrection engrossing that island forced the architect turned military-engineer to move on to Louisiana, most likely as an advance French agent for Napoleon's planned occupation of the region; Latour prepared detailed maps that were later turned over to the Spanish agent, American general James Wilkinson. Latour also made important personal contacts--Edward Livingston, Jean Lafitte, Carlos Grand Prê‚--and began designing and constructing buildings in the New Orleans area. By the time of the War of 1812 Latour had become an American citizen and one of the most important architect/engineers in the city.During the Battle of New Orleans Latour served as General Andrew Jackson's principal engineer, designing the defensive works behind which the rag-tag American army fought the British. Afterward, Latour collected first-hand information and wrote the first book-length historical account of the battle--a patriotic book in which he attributed the glorious American victory to Jackson's selfless service. Although Latour appeared to be a patriot-historian, he soon began another career. Working as a Spanish operative, he explored the American Southwest and wrote thoughtful reports warning Spanish officials of the continued land desires of American settlers; Spanish officials in Cuba, Mexico, and Madrid paid little attention to his prophetic warnings. Latour lived in Cuba from 1818 to 1834, before returning to his native France, where he died three years later.
Latour's service with France, the U.S., and Spain and his changing loyalties reflect the international uncertainty that the Gulf borderlands experienced during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. By 1820, however, increased American westward expansion had settled the uneasiness by removing most French and Spanish influences from the region; Latour's arrival, services, and departure illustrate the opportunities that existed for adventurers who were willing to divide their loyalties between many flags.
Kenneth R. Stevens, Texas Christian University, Daniel
Webster and Intervention on Behalf of American Prisoners (K.Stevens@tcu.edu)
This paper will focus on the prisoners of the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition of 1841. In 1841, Texas sent an expedition to "liberate" Santa Fe from Mexico. Captured by Mexican forces, the members of the expedition were held in Mexico under dire conditions. Many claimed American citizenship and U.S. requested assistance for their release. This paper examines the domestic pressures placed on Secretary of State Webster to secure their release and the impact of their captivity on U.S. foreign policy.
Robert E. May, Purdue University, Agents of Manifest
Destiny?: The Filibusters and America's Commercial and Territorial Expansion
in the Antebellum Period
Comments
Kinley Brauer, University of Minnesota (braue001@tc.umn.edu)
John M. Belohlavek
Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania Papers
Megan Fritschel, University of Iowa, "The Most Sudden Transition from Darkness to Light": The Creation of Political Spaces in William Bartram's Travels (megan-fritschel@uiowa.edu)
William Bartram, botanist and traveler, Flower Hunter and rattlesnake killer, was also a man with political visions. He left Philadelphia in the midst of Revolution, and embarked upon his travels with the project of the nation in his mind. What he saw in the Southeast -- the varied prospects, the paradise of fishes, the potential for agricultural development -- appeared to him a text in which to read the future of America. The Southeast, a place of potential strife and rebellion within the Union, becomes, through Bartram's narrative of discovery and gaze of development, an integrated part of the United States. Bartram does not focus on the drastic contrasts and expound upon the wild differences between North and South in Travels, but pays more attention to transition zones, to borderlands.His sketch Alachua Savanna is an embodiment of his entire project, and by extension, the Federalist project that sought unity in the midst of difference. In it, Bartram figures the landscape in such a way as to organize it, order it, and bring it into a recognizable frame of reference for his American and European viewers. Alachua Savanna pictures the economic possibilities of this region that would make its union with the North all the more profitable. It also reveals "pleasing" zones of transition in which one kind of landscape blends into another. This attention to dynamic binaries is aesthetic, but also profoundly political. In his depiction of the southern climes as naturally dissonant yet also inherently mellifluous, Bartram figures a future for the region of the South within the national political project. In doing so, Bartram gives readers of Travels a way to think about regions that is fundamentally geographic and botanic in nature. He also provides a way for later sectionalists to discuss the differences of region in a way that elides the true root of that difference -- black slavery. Bartram's Travels is far from a simple natural history or an autobiographical glimpse at the botanist's heart; it is a profoundly political text, and one which in its search for geographical harmony, ironically, helped to shape the rhetoric of disunion.
Edward Gray, Florida State University, An
American in Siberia: John Ledyard (Edwardgray@worldnet.att.net)
In the spring of 1787, the American traveller, John Ledyard(1752-1789), set out to traverse the globe by travelling from East to West across Europe, Siberia, the Bering Straits, and finally the North-American continent. Ledyard made it no further than the remote Siberian town of Yakutsk, but during his time there and elsewhere in Siberia, he produced a series of letters and a journal which, taken together, provide a rich portrait of a little known frontier society. In addition, though, these writings reveal the author's preoccupations--preoccupations, my paper argues, shaped by the author's own peculiar predicament as a traveller. To illuminate that predicament, my paper analyzes Ledyard's impression of Siberian society, and evaluates those impressions in light of Ledyard's own experience as a member of an Anglo-American society still shaped by patron-client relationships. In more general terms, the paper suggests ways in which travel was implicated in larger political and cultural processes, including the production novel characters such as Ledyard himself.
Sarah Purcell, Central Michigan University, 'Terrestial
Paradise': Western Expansion, Travel, and the Romantic Imagination of Mary
Austin Holley (Sarah.Purcell@cmich.edu)
Mary Austin Holley was one of the most eloquent apostles of American expansion in the 1830s. As the author of the first English-language book about Texas and a land-holder in the colony run by her cousin, Stephen Austin, Holley unabashedly promoted a vision of American expansion westward and mapped out the practical benefits of American and European emigration to "the west."But Holley's frontier visions and her eloquence as a travel writer had deeper roots in her life during the Early Republic. When her husband, Horace Holley, became president of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky in 1818, Mary Austin Holley established herself as a prominent social and literary figure in the "Athens of the West." Her time in Lexington shaped in Holley a sense of the tension between "culture" and the thrill of the "natural" west that she would carry through the remainder of her public and private career as a traveler, land speculator, and writer. After Horace Holley died, Mary Austin Holley (a native New Englander) moved freely between Lexington, New Orleans, and Texas for twenty years-recording her impressions and ideas both in print and in an extraordinary series of letters to her daughter.
This paper examines some of Mary Austin Holley's most interesting travel writings to uncover how her Romantic imagination, shaped by her devotion to de Staël and particularly evident in her descriptions of the natural world, informed her advocacy of western settlement. For Holley, the "frontier" was simultaneously wild and thrilling, the perfect expression of the sublime, and in need of civilization. Her eloquent expression of this basic tension in early republican and ante-bellum public attitudes takes on particular importance in light of her popularization of Texas settlement and her active support of Texas independence. Holley emerges as a major transitional figure in the history of "intercultural frontiers" between the 1810s and 1840s.
The paper relies on evidence from Holley's extensive correspondence, her published poems and articles, her Texas Diary, and her two books: Texas: Observations Historical, Geographical, and Descriptive (1833) and Texas (1836).
Comment
Michael Zuckerman
Robert F. Jones, Fordham University (Rjones@Murray.Fordham.Edu, cplus@bellatlantic.com)
Papers
Robert M.S. McDonald, United States Military Academy, Why Jefferson in 1800 was the Federalists' Biggest Campaign Issue (kr6691@exmail.usma.edu)
Present-day pundits claim that presidential politics have sunk to unprecedented depths. Never before, they maintain, have questions about a public official's private character so much occupied partisans' attention. The election of 1800, however, contradicts these ahistorical contentions. More than anything else, the issue of Thomas Jefferson's persona dominated Federalists' campaign to defeat him as a candidate for the nation's highest office. "The question is not what he will do" as president, said one of his detractors, "but what he is."This paper seeks to answer a simple but salient question: Why? Scholarly literature on the election of 1800 avoids this line of inquiry. Instead, it tackles important but less sweeping tasks, such as chronicling what specific groups and individuals said about Jefferson during the campaign, how different constituencies in different locales reacted to this rhetoric, and what consequences ensued. In an attempt to contextualize existing historiography, this paper posits that two factors led to the Federalist demonization of Jefferson.
The first was the weakness of their own partisan alliance. By making Jefferson the issue, they drew attention away from President John Adams, the titular Federalist leader who alienated members of his constituency through his erratic behavior and conciliatory posture toward France. None other than Alexander Hamilton exposed the rift in Federalist circles by calling Adams to task in a published pamphlet, and some in 1800 so much doubted the president's scruples that they wondered aloud if he and Jefferson had "made a coalition." The party lacked not only a unifying leader, but also a compelling agenda. For more than a decade they had rallied behind George Washington and a vague constitutional vision. But Washington was now dead, and their nation-building project seemed, essentially, accomplished. For what did they now stand?
The second factor flows from the first. Unable to define for themselves a positive agenda, they defined themselves in opposition to Jefferson. Vilifying him confirmed, for them, the things that they had been saying about Jefferson for the better part of a decade. It also verified their self-image as virtuous and enlightened men, unselfish, disinterested, and independent--everything, in short, that Jefferson and his flock supposedly were not. They supported order, but Jefferson harbored a secret attachment to anarchy. They loved the Constitution, but Jefferson hated it. They were realists, but Jefferson was a visionary. They were men of faith, but Jefferson, as one Federalist said, was "a confirmed infidel" known for "vilifying the divine word, and preaching insurrection against God." Jefferson, the head, heart, and face of Republicanism, gave it its character; he was its personal embodiment and he embodied all of its faults. Federalists stood against him and all that they thought he stood for.
Within this context, Jefferson's inaugural address, moderate in tone and conciliatory in content, seems especially shrewd. He proclaimed that "we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." By asserting that "we have called by different names brethren of the same principle" the triumphant new president minimized the factional distinctions on which his enemies depended for survival.
Cameron Addis, University of Texas, Austin, The
Debate Over God & Secularization at Jefferson's University of Virginia
(cam@mail.utexas.edu)
The debate over Thomas Jefferson's proposed secular university took place in the midst of a broader political and religious struggle over the civic role of Christianity in Virginia, a state whose 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom constituted the radical end on the spectrum of church-state relations. The controversy first stirred up in Virginia during the Revolutionary era, when the Anglican (Episcopalian) church was dis-established and Jefferson and James Madison thwarted Patrick Henryís general assessment idea. It carried over into the nineteenth century, when much of the debate focused on the control of higher education in the 1810's and 20's. Here Jefferson's old allies from the Revolution, the Presbyterians, continued to share many of Jefferson's educational goals and moderate Enlightenment sentiments, but still fought him tooth-and-nail for control of the state's literary fund. Presbyterians wanted the money spent on Washington College (formerly Liberty Hall and later Washington & Lee), Hampden-Sydney and Union Theological Seminary, while Episcopalians struggled to maintain respectability at William & Mary with little help from the legislature. Jefferson wanted all the money spent on a scientifically-grounded university with no chapel, chaplain or divinity courses, a curriculum unheard of in the 1810's even at other public schools like North Carolina and Transylvania (both of which were firmly under Presbyterian control at the time Jefferson's university opened in 1825).Like the controversies in Chapel Hill and Lexington that preceded it, Jefferson's struggles with the clergy in Virginia involved much more than simple questions of curriculum and discipline, and transcended our modern distinction between secularism and religious faith. Instead, the debate reveals two distinct but overlapping visions for Revolutionary America, both rooted in political liberty and both predicated on religious faith. They shared a commitment to education, but no consensus emerged in Virginia as to who bore the responsibility.
This story has mainly been told from the perspective of Jefferson, who is presented as carrying the torch of Enlightenment against an ignorant and intellectually repressive clergy. This talk complicates (but does not entirely contradict) that view. Unlike most research done on this topic, I have utilized the records of Presbyterian and Episcopal opponents of Jefferson, presenting a fuller interpretation of their positions. The talk focuses on the public debate between Jefferson and prominent clerics such as the Presbyterian John Holt Rice and the Episcopalian William Meade, both of whom brought elements of evangelism into the Christianity of the state's middle and upper classes and vied with Jefferson for control of those classes. Rice published the most articulate positions on the necessity of faith and the most unrelenting criticisms of "Mr. Jefferson's University." Meade shocked University of Virginia students and faculty by giving a dramatic sermon in the Rotunda in which he blamed a recent wave of deaths from typhoid fever on Jefferson's alleged atheism. The event helped encourage the Board of Visitors to embrace a more compromised position toward Christianity in the school's subsequent history. I'll briefly trace the roots of the controversy in the Revolutionary era, analyzes the common ground and points of friction between Jefferson and the clergy, and finally show how the debate between Jefferson and evangelical Presbyterians and Episcopalians played out in the early history of the University.
Robert Churchill, Rutgers University, Manly
Firmness, the Duty of Resistance, and the Search for a 'Middle Way': Democratic
Republicans Confront the Alien and Sedition Acts (churchil@uscom.com)
Most historical discussions of the opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 center on the resolutions passed by the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures during the period 1798-1800. Because these resolutions articulated a state compact theory of the Constitution that would later become the basis of Confederate secession, many historians regard them as the most radical statement of Democratic-Republican opposition between 1798 and 1800. There was, however, another language of radical opposition during the Alien and Sedition Act Crisis. In newspaper essays, political speeches, and public meetings at the county level, Democratic-Republicans asserted the right and duty of the people to resist unconstitutional legislation. These statements pronounced the Alien and Sedition Acts void and of no force, and insisted that the people must defend their liberties against any threat, including that posed by their own representatives. This language of opposition suggested that the people might nullify objectionable laws of their own authority. In Virginia, Kentucky, and New Jersey, Democratic-Republicans, assembled in militia companies, announced that they would refuse to enforce the acts and even that they would not submit to them.The language of popular nullification influenced both the framing of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions and their reception. Madison's argument that the states alone were parties to the Constitution suggested an increasing discomfort with the more radical implications of popular sovereignty. Madison and John Taylor, sponsor of the Virginia Resolutions, saw state interposition as an attractive middle ground between submission and popular nullification. Jefferson went much further than Madison to outline an alternative based on state authority. Nevertheless, his declaration that the Alien and Sedition Acts were "void and of no force" evoked the language of popular nullification and suggested that popular disobedience might be legitimate.
Neither these resolutions nor the language of popular nullification led to open insurrection in Virginia and Kentucky. Armed resistance did take place, however, in Pennsylvania. German-American farmers led by John Fries adopted the language of popular nullification in 1799, and used force to nullify the 1798 federal Direct Tax on houses, lands, and slaves. Close examination of the ideology of these Pennsylvania insurgents reveals that they expected that the radical Democratic-Republicans of Virginia and Kentucky would march to their aid. The resistance in Pennsylvania convinced Jefferson and other leading Republicans to avoid "all show of force" and to restrict the opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts to "the constitutional means of election and petition." Thus, it was the real consequences of the language of popular nullification, acted out in Fries' Rebellion, that led the Democratic-Republicans to abandon state nullification of the Sedition Act in favor of "temperate obedience."
Comments
Robert J. Imholt, Albertus Magnus College (rjimholt@yahoo.com)
James Rogers Sharp, Syracuse University (jrsharp@maxwell.syr.edu)
John W. Quist, Shippensburg University (jwquis@ship.edu)
Papers
Aaron Hoffman, University of Aberdeen, The Anti-Spirits Temperance Movement in a Southern Border City and a North-East Scottish City: Louisville, Kentucky and Aberdeen, Scotland, 1830-1839 (ahoffman@niner.uncc.edu)
This paper examines the early years of the temperance movement in two cities, Louisville, Kentucky and Aberdeen, Scotland. In the 1830s Louisville and Aberdeen were rapidly growing port cities economically dependent on commercial and shipping-related businesses. By 1830 both cities had established temperance societies whose membership in a few years would number between six to nine hundred.This study analyses the leadership of the two organizations by focusing on the leaders' occupations, age, religion, and their participation in other philanthropic causes. A detailed study of the socio-economic background of these reformers will help to provide some answers to why many joined in the anti-spirits temperance campaign.
The cause in Louisville was led by young business, professional, and clergymen. In Aberdeen it was members of the lower middle-class and upper working-class, mainly small merchants and artisans along with members of the clergy, who led the movement. While the temperance leadership in Louisville corresponds with the traditional historiography, the lack of upper class leadership in Aberdeen may have been influenced by the national Church of Scotland's negative stance on temperance.
In addition, from the large number of philanthropic activities of both cities reformers, it is evident that they were not just focused on intemperance, but that their temperance work was only one aspect of a greater impulse to do good. The study of Louisville and Aberdeen will raise many new questions on the early trans-Atlantic temperance movement.
Julie Winch, University of Massachusetts at Boston,
'Immoralities
and Criminalities Excepted': The Debate Over Wealth, Virtue, Power, and
Reform in the Free Black Community (julie.winch@umb.edu)
Katherine Chavigny, University of Chicago, Heroic Confessions: Masculinity, Sobering-Up, and Public Culture in Antebellum America (kachavig@midway.uchicago.edu)
Comment
John W. Quist
Doron Ben-Atar, Fordham University (doron.benatar@yale.edu)
Papers
Kariann Yokota, University of California, Los Angeles, A Culture of Insecurity: PostColonial Americans in a Transatlantic World (kyokota@ucla.edu)
Americans in the post-Revolutionary period teetered between the promise of a glorious future as an independent nation and the cultural insecurity created by their colonial past. My paper, drawn from my dissertation project, explores how American society during the early republic was permeated by a post-colonial culture which outlasted the separation from the British empire. The historical record is replete with evidence of the American desire for British recognition of their efforts to both emulate and distinguish themselves from the mother country. Recent scholarship on the condition of post-coloniality has brought a greater awareness of the cultural transitions involved with the process of de-colonization. These studies have yet to be applied to the American context, but the potential insights are manifold. An added awareness of the post-colonial nature of the new American nation highlights transnational perspectives as well as the politics involved in cultural practices. In light of the call of scholars such as T.H. Breen and Jack Greene to take a broader, less parochial perspective when studying the rise of American nationalism in the eighteenth century, my study examines the political implications of post-colonial American fascination with how British and Europeans understood America.Judging themselves by seemingly universal standards that found them wanting, post-Revolutionary Americans eagerly embraced opportunities to establish the country's reputation in the community of "civilized" nations. Post-colonial Americans involved in activities as diverse as maritime commerce and evangelical missions found in their daily practices a recurrent need to prove themselves as good as their British brethren. They did this both by trying to emulate the achievements of European culture, and by playing to European fascination with things 'native' to the Americas.
The need for ex-colonials to marginalize Native Americans and African Americans can be intimately connected to their own marginalization within British Atlantic civilization. Much scholarly work has focused upon the oppression of racial minorities as part of the process of creating the American nation. Through application of the insights of post-colonial scholars, my project adds to this scholarship by analyzing the specific significance of Anglo American insecurity as a driving force in this process. In examining the early republic as a post-colonial period, my goal is not to portray "white" Americans as somehow analogous to "colored natives" suffering from the domination of Britain in later eras of the British empire. Instead, by interpreting Anglo Americans as both colonizers and as colonized within the British empire, I hope to see the intimate relationship between domination and subordination in the early republic.
The simultaneous position of inferiority to the "civilized" culture of Britain and the assumed superiority to African Americans and "native" Americans were linked, and generated both a local denigration of Native Americans as well as a celebration of the "Native" culture of the new nation. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, had no difficulties assuming the inferiority of Native Americans at the same time that he extolled to Europeans the virtues of Native contributions to American life. I argue that the formation of American national identity pivoted around these paradoxical relationships of celebration and denigration, and that both stemmed from the post-colonial insecurity of Americans in the early republic.
Francois Furstenberg, Johns Hopkins University, George
Washington's Death and Conceptions of American Identity (francois@jhu.edu)
CommentsIt is striking to realize that the most prevalent metaphors of nationalism stem from the "private" sphere: the nation as family, as home, as body. The provenance of these kinds of nationalist metaphors may suggest that the still-emerging private sphere in the early nineteenth century -- which would be defined as the realm of women and slaves -- was more integral to the creation of American nationalism than has generally been considered. This brief paper uses the widespread commemorations following Washington's death in December 1799 to ask broad questions about the relationship between slavery and American nationalism. Specifically, the paper takes issue with, and tries to complicate, the argument among historians and literary critics that White-American identity was in large measure created through a process of "othering."The paper connects Washington's role as a public figure leading the nation in war and politics to his role as private citizen -- and owner of hundreds of slaves. It argues that these roles could not be, and were not, neatly separated into public and private selves. It argues that slavery was not so much seen as an "Other" against which a free American identity was constructed. Rather, slavery was -- and was seen as -- an integral part of American life at the time; it was intimately connected to the nationalism being created in the nineteenth century. The paper ranges from George Washington, and some of his more eloquent eulogists, to Martha Washington to P.T. Barnum in suggesting new ways of thinking about the connections between slavery and American nationalism. In sum, it argues that if we wish to understand what tied nineteenth-century Americans together, we must begin with the bonds of American slavery, and see how they in turn forged the bonds of American nationalism.
David Waldstreicher, Yale University (david.waldstreicher@yale.edu)
Doron Ben-Atar
Don Hickey, Wayne State College (dhickey@wscgate.wsc.edu)
Papers
David Nichols, University of Kentucky, The Return of the Fathers: Franco-American Relations and the Politics of Nostalgia in Native North America, 1778-1803 (danich0@pop.uky.edu)
The trans-Appalachian frontier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an open field for negotiation, mediation, and intrigue, and few played the diplomatic game better than the region's Native American leaders. Since Indians traditionally negotiated from a weak military position, they became skillful political operators, "playing off" European powers (and the U.S.) against one another to preserve their people's political independence and improve their economic situation. During the 1780s and '90s, however, the United States occupied a similar position of weakness, and sought to make up for it in the same fashion: through diplomacy and mediation. And in at least one case, Anglo-American officials sought to "play" one power -- France -- against the Indian nations whom the U.S. had fought during the Revolutionary War.Anglo-American leaders were keenly aware of the respect which France had formerly commanded among the Indians, and after the two powers concluded a military alliance in 1778, U.S. officials tried to use the new connection to win the allegiance of the western tribes. They invited French officers like Rochambeau and Lafayette to speak at treaty conferences, employed French traders and habitants as intermediaries in the Old Northwest, and informed Native American leaders that France had approved and legitimized the transfer of sovereignty in North America to the United States.
The Oneidas, Chippewas, and other nations initially welcomed Anglo-Americans' portrayal of themselves as the successors of the French, hoping (albeit cautiously) that the United States would restore the atmosphere of conciliation and mutuality that had characterized eighteenth-century Franco-Indian relations. By the 1790s, however, it had become obvious to all the western Indians that their new Anglo-American "fathers" were quite different from their French predecessors -- U.S. officials were generous, but they expected to be repaid for their generosity in land, and they informed their Native "children" that they would henceforth have to obey Anglo-American laws and yield to the authority of U.S. officials.
As relations soured between the U.S. and the French Republic, some Indians (like the Creeks) began to entertain rumors that France was planning to return in force to mainland North America, and to contemplate a military or diplomatic alliance with their old "fathers." Where they had once used the French to mediate disputes with the western Indians, Anglo-American officials now had to separate the two groups in order to prevent a second French & Indian War. Their efforts culminated in a series of negotiations in 1802-3 wherein American officials sought to purchase all Indian lands on the east bank of the Mississippi River, to resettle those lands with white farmers, and thereby create a barrier between the U.S. and French Louisiana. Like their Native American counterparts, Anglo-American leaders had learned that using one nation to gain concessions from another was a difficult enterprise, with potentially dangerous (though in this case certainly ironic) consequences.
Sheri Marie Shuck, Auburn University, Power-Brokers
of the Southern Frontier: The Alabamas and Coushattas, 1820-1839
(shucksm@mail.auburn.edu)
In the past three decades, scholars in Native American studies have labored to recover the histories of tribes and to include them in the larger portrait of American history. Despite this development, few have recognized the Alabamas and Coushattas, two small but significant southeastern tribes. The paper for this panel will explore the cultural, social, political, and economic facets of the Alabama and Coushatta experience from 1820 to 1839.The Alabamas and Coushattas, once members of the Creek Confederacy in the eighteenth century, migrated west to the Louisiana-Texas frontier to avoid American encroachment in 1812. By the early 1820s, the Alabamas and Coushattas joined an anti-Comanche union with the western Cherokees, Shawnees, Delawares, and Kickapoos. This union established a successful inter-tribal confederacy -- one that ultimately enhanced the tribes' political influence when later dealing with the Mexican and the Texas-American governments. These tribes witnessed the dramatic increase of American immigrants to east Texas after Mexico gained its long-awaited independence from Spain. The Alabamas' and Coushattas' increased reliance on the land motivated them to take an aggressive stance against the Americans. Mexico and Texas had experienced an unprecedented level of political upheaval between 1834-35, and therefore the Mexican government acceded to the tribes' demands.
When the Texas Revolution erupted in 1835, both Texas-American and Mexican agents vied for the various tribes' allegiance. In contrast to the once prevalent stereotypes that portrayed Native Americans as being merely reactive to such overtures, the Alabamas and Coushattas played the American and Mexican agents against each other by brokering their relationship with the larger tribes in the anti-Comanche union, chiefly the Cherokees. In the process, the Alabamas and Coushattas received gifts, favorable trade, and protection from emissaries. Only after Texas agents offered the Indian confederacy a land grant in east Texas did the tribes sign a peace treaty.
The Alabamas and Coushattas were left in a precarious position by the end of 1839. The United States' desire to incorporate Texas into the Union encouraged American surveyors and settlers to encroach on the east Texas tribes' designated land. Despite past successes of averting American settlement by their migration further west or by their roles as power brokers during conflict between nations, they could no longer escape white impingement. The Alabamas and Coushattas had to fight for their own survival in the contest of cultures while struggling to keep their tribal heritage intact.
Comparable to most tribes on the "middle ground," the Alabamas and Coushattas utilized their influence to play foreign powers against one another, fought American claims to their ancestral tribal lands, and adapted to a frontier exchange economy. Their persistent roles as power brokers set the Alabamas and Coushattas apart from most southeastern tribes. Although other Native American tribes assumed similar roles during the American struggle for hegemony on the southern frontier, the Alabamas and Coushattas maintained their tribal identities, regardless of their small numbers, and avoided total absorption into a larger, more powerful tribe. Yet, despite their repeated success as power brokers, the two tribes faced uncertainty and extreme hardship before obtaining their most valued possession -- a permanent claim to land in east Texas.
Comments
Daniel K. Richter Dickinson College (richter@dickinson.edu)
Don Hickey
Eric Christianson, University of Kentucky (ehchri01@pop.uky.edu)
Papers
Michael Dorn, University of Kentucky, Regulars, Heretics, and Quacks, Rereading Urban Topographies of Medical Practice and Medical Reform in the 1840s Ohio Valley (mldorn00@pop.uky.edu)
This paper focuses on the relation between medical geographic expression and therapeutic practice in a locale undergoing extreme economic and social dislocation. As the fastest growing city of the west of the Appalachians in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Cincinnati assumed a leading position in the training of Western physicians. During the 1840s, a decade of rapid industrialization and intensified reform activity, Ohio was a battleground for medical practitioners of different sectarian affiliations. In the volatile medical marketplace, the authority of physicians became more closely associated with the reputation of their medical systems. Their medical and moral authority in the West depended upon claims to therapeutic effectiveness and responsibility.Medical geographic writings of the period exhibit preoccupations that can only be explained with reference to these struggles. For example, the 1840s writings of the West's leading 'regular' medical spokesman, the editor, educator and geographer Daniel Drake, depict the millennial vision of urban society under occupation by the votaries of heresy and quackery. Just as Drake's competitors in the 1840s medical marketplace were compelled to contest his depictions, so have succeeding generations of Ohio Valley medical reformers traded on Drake's writings and reputation. In order to demonstrate how the Drake legacy is continually being reread in response to each new wave of reform, I will also briefly visit the debates that surrounded the introduction of full-time scientific medicine to Cincinnati General Hospital in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the era of health alliances and the privatization of the University of Cincinnati hospital at the close of the twentieth century.
Scott Martin, Bowling Green State University, Diagnosing
'The Intemperate': Medicine, Gender, and Early National Temperance Reform
(smartin@bgnet.bgsu.edu)
Physicians' contributions to early nineteenth-century temperance reform have long been recognized but insufficiently scrutinized. Temperance advocates relied on physicians for scientific proof of the deleterious effects of alcohol on the human body and mind, which doctors happily provided. As they did so, they inevitably confronted questions about gender: did alcohol effect men and women differently? Physicians' attempts to answer these questions reflected both the current state of scientific and medical knowledge, and their own culturally-mediated notions about male and female qualities.This paper focuses on the interplay between medical opinion and popular ideas about gender and temperance in the work of Charles D. Meigs, a Philadelphia physician and pioneer of American gynecology. Based on research into medical writing and popular culture, it demonstrates how Meigs used popular images of women suffering from male intemperance -- notably, Lydia Sigourneyís story, "The Intemperate," to illustrate the "Natural" qualities of the female character: fidelity, obedience, and perseverance. Meigs' work as a doctor and temperance reformer illustrates the reciprocal relationship between medical science and popular culture during the early national. period, and sheds light on the evolution of nineteenth-century gender ideology.
Michael Flannery, Lloyd Library and Museum, Trouble
in Paradise: Therapeutic Contention and Medical Reform in America, 1790-1864
(flannema@email.uc.edu)
Almost from the moment that European explorers set foot upon the New World descriptions of the flora and fauna were cast in idyllic images of paradisaical wonder: terra incognita transformed into terra miraculosa. Early accounts suggested that much of the North American flora held special medicinal virtues, and physicians like Nicholas Monardes tried to promote this Edenic wilderness as nature's apothecary. But as Great Britain solidified its hold upon the New World, its Old World culture became a more significant feature of colonial life. This was no less true of its medicine. The common folk generally practiced the healing arts with the confidence instilled by some popular medical guide like any one of several editions of Nicholas Culpeper's herbal. In David Cowen's words, "the book is noteworthy as a giant step by which a homely version of classical medicine crossed the Atlantic." Published in Boston in 1720, it is no wonder that Culpeper's popular but unofficial translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, or The London Dispensatory was the first complete medical book to issue from a North American press. Likewise, colonial physicians were tied to the familiar materia medica they had known in England. Mineral agents like mercury and antimony as well as vegetable products common to European practice such as belladonna, asafetida, and henbane formed prominent articles in every regular physician's armamentarium.Thus by the time of independence two healing traditions had been imported from Europe: one comprising home remedies drawn from popular culture, another developed out of professional practice. But the new American republic, based upon the democratizing influences of the Enlightenment, awakened a special confidence in the people. Recently liberated from the Old World bondage of titled privilege, Americans looked away from Europe and toward the hinterland for answers to their own social, political, and economic future. As egalitarian freedoms and native intelligence were wrought from a pristine wilderness, medicine was imbued with this new spirit as well. If America's frontier was filled with such bounty, surely it must hold wondrous cures for the scourges of man and it must certainly be possible for every man to know those remedies so freely bestowed by God and nature.
Such notions clashed with those of the medical elite. Formal training in the academy, an extensive and complicated nosology, and long-established medicinal agents given in even more complicated combinations dictated professional practice; anything less was challenged as quackery. Although both popular and professional healing traditions had been transplanted from Europe to the New World, the former became especially alluring to a nation engaged in a democratic experiment of epic proportions. Jacksonian democratic ideals added to the recently successful revolution, largely unsettled frontier, and long-established tradition of folk healing produced a volatile mix ready to explode against a medical establishment identified as distinctly Old World and English. For regular practitioners, there was trouble in paradise.
Comment
John S. Haller, Jr., Southern Illinois University Carbondale
(jhaller@notes.siu.edu)
Jon Earle, University of Kansas (jonearle@eagle.cc.ukans.edu)
Papers
Nicholas Marshall, University of California, Davis, The Problem of Separation in the Antebellum North: A Generalized Source for Antislavery's Success (nfmarshall@ucdavis.edu)
The personal papers of antebellum northerners reveal an almost universal fixation on sickness, death, and parting, within a context of strong, emotional relationships. Much historical work has described the sentimentalizing culture and accompanying glorification of family bonds in this period. In this context, the problem of death and separation, so noticeable in public and private culture, has been interpreted as intimately linked to an increasingly mawkish sentimentality. As recent scholarship has shown, however, life expectancy in America actually began falling in the 1790s, declining by some eight years by 1860. Simply put, Americans experienced earlier deaths and increased suffering at the hands of diseases.This paper argues that these new demographic facts of life placed enormous strain on individuals. Antislavery advocates, of course, were enmeshed in this process. Their most successful propaganda couched its appeals in language and symbol that resonated with the northern public's deepest fears about separation from loved ones. Recognition of the generalized sensitivity in the North to images of sundered slave families helps explain the broad-based nature of the antislavery constituency.
Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Harvard University, Towards
a Reconsideration of the Origins of Abolitionism (tmccarth@fas.harvard.edu)
Historians have long debated the specific historical circumstances that gave rise to American antislavery agitation in the late 1820s and 1830s. Some have placed abolitionism within a broad international framework of ideas and social attitudes by looking at the development of antislavery impulses throughout the West in the "age of revolution."Others have argued persuasively that antislavery fervor is best understood by looking at various forms of religious influence: Quakerism in the late eighteenth century, as well as the vast evangelical wellsprings produced by the Second Great Awakening. Still others have argued that a broad "humanitarian impulse," of which abolitionism was an important example, derived from the fundamental shifts that occurred as a result of the changing relationship between production and ownership that defined market capitalism. Regardless of where they place their particular emphasis, however, historians agree that to understand American abolitionism is, in part, to understand the vast social and cultural transformations that took place in the early republic and antebellum eras.
Without displacing reform, religion, or markets in my study of antislavery agitation, I nonetheless argue that we cannot fully or adequately understand the origins of abolitionism unless we take seriously the nearly universal resistance of free blacks to colonization and the development of mass print culture in the first third of the nineteenth century. Building on the pioneering work of historians like Benjamin Quarles and Paul Goodman, as well as relevant scholarship in literary and African-American studies, I locate the origins of radical abolitionism in the emerging culture of dissent that developed primarily within northern African-American communities from 1817 to 1830. If, as most historians argue, the two most significant characteristics of radical abolitionism were an uncompromising insistence on the immediate abolition of slavery and the absolute equality of blacks and whites, then we must look to African Americans themselves to determine the extent and nature of their influence on what historians have called "Garrisonianism." Indeed, long before the spectacular debut of William Lloyd Garrison in 1831, northern free blacks rejected white conceptions of a "herrenvolk republic" (an imagined community in which blacks, once emancipated, had no place) and instead pushed for a more inclusive democratic society that guaranteed full citizenship to all Americans.
In my paper, which distills the first two chapters of my dissertation, I will look at the extent to which the early mobilizations of free blacks helped to lay the ideological and cultural foundations for radical abolitionism. By examining the founding and distribution of newspapers like Freedom's Journal and The Rights of All, as well as the impact of radical pamphlets like David Walker's Appeal, I will attempt to situate the early activities of free blacks within the broader context of the development of mass print culturea phenomenon that would become essential to the abolitionist crusade leading up to the Civil War.
I will use these print sources to explore a developing abolitionist consciousness among African Americans around issues such as the Haitian Revolution, slave revolts in the United States, abolition laws in the Northern states, July 4th and 5th celebrations, and, most importantly, widespread white support for African colonization. All told, my paper will argue for a reconsideration of the origins of American abolitionism by highlighting the central role that African Americans played in defining the terms of the movement that sought, at last, to redeem the nation.
T.K. Hunter, Columbia University, 'So
the cause goes': The Influence of the Somersett Decision on the Med Case
(tkh4@columbia.edu)
The Somersett case, a contemporarily well-known legal action tried and decided in London in 1772 had favorably asserted the freedom of a runaway black slave on the basis of being on free soil. While the arguments were framed around the narrow question of wrongful detainment, at stake, in fact, was nothing less than the legitimacy of slavery in England (and by extension - though erroneously so - of slavery in the British Empire). Although the interest it generated in and around late 18th century Britain and America is to be expected while America was still part of the Empire, the persistence of an 18th century English legal action in American courts indicates that it was more than a single moment - locked in time and space - in the quest to define freedom.Sixty-four years later and over 3,000 miles away, in 1836 the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society persuaded a Massachusetts lawyer to test the limits of the Commonwealth's stance against slavery - thus the case of Commonwealth v. Aves was born. The case concerned the detention of a six-year old enslaved girl called Med - born in Louisiana and temporarily brought to Massachusetts by her mistress for a summer. The 1772 Somersett case (employed in American courts by both counsel for the prosecution and for the defense) served as legal precedent for the Med case: while counsel for the defense attempted to downplay the 1772 English case, prosecution used it to insist upon the immorality of slavery. In the end, the Chief Justice ruled in favor of little Med's freedom while the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society provided her with a curious new identity.
The blow that the sixty-four year old Somersett case had dealt to slavery on both sides of the Atlantic continued to be significant in America. Though narrowly defined legally, it struck to the heart of the nature of slavery and freedom and thus was ideologically attractive to all who pressed for freedom. With the Med decision added to the canon of the freedom cause, courtesy of Somersett, enslaved African-Americans and their advocates built on an important tactic for arguing for their freedom in free states or on free soil. As the question of the presumptive right of the master over his slave continued to be raised in interstate actions, the cultural and legal bases for understanding freedom changed deepening the rifts between north and south that would, in time, brutally divide the country.
Comment
Jon Earle
Stuart Leibiger, LaSalle University (leibiger@alpha.lasalle.edu)
Papers
Christopher Curtis, Emory University, ''Can These be the Sons of Their Fathers?' A New Look at the Debate on Slave Property in the Virginia House of Delegates, 18311832 (cmcurti@learnlink.emory.edu)
The 1832 Virginia slavery debate affords a rare opportunity to examine candidly expressed ideas of property relations. This paper reconsiders that debate by examining these discussions of property relations that were instrumental to the outcome of the legislative debate and engendered a fundamental transformation in subsequent proslavery discourse. To varying degrees, previous historians of the Virginia debate have understood this failure to abolish slavery as an ideological movement away from the enlightened, "Jeffersonian" liberalism of the Revolutionary era and toward a contradictory, essentially aristocratic proslavery ideology. By considering the 1832 effort at abolition a mere extension of previous antislavery sentiments, these studies have created a perception of sharp discontinuity between Virginia's revolutionary and proslavery ideologies. Such historical interpretations, however, are inconsistent with the contemporary understanding of the significance of the legislative debate.In an essay summarizing the recently transpired events of the 1831-32 legislative session, Benjamin Watkins Leigh noted that the effort to abolish slavery had constituted the beginnings of "a direct attack" upon the very principle of property itself. Leigh, an eminent legal theorist and social commentator argued that this assault, if successful, signaled an end to republican government in Virginia. Leigh's detailed critique largely has been discounted as a mere proslavery jeremiad. Yet, his defense of slavery notwithstanding, an examination of the speeches made during the legislative debate supports Leigh's basic premise that an effort was being made to re-conceptualize property.
During the legislative debate, antislavery delegates rejected the traditional Lockean conception of property upon which government in Virginia had been based, and instead, advanced Rousseauian ideas of property and society. This new antislavery discourse suggests a fundamental movement away from the ideological orthodoxy of liberal republicanism, and instead, signaled the advancement of an alternative liberal vision where the constitutive principle of political equality trumped that of civil liberty.
Terri Halperin, University of Virginia, The
Special Relationship: The U.S. Senate and the States, 1789-1821
(tdh2t@virginia.edu)
"Tell Bibb that he and you must make your joint instructions to me, relative to Florida, and which, as I acknowledge the right of instruction, I shall of course obey, or disobey under my responsibility."[1] So, Henry Clay joked to his friends and former Kentucky senators, John J. Crittenden and George M. Bibb. Although Clay, in 1819, was a member of the House of Representatives, he knew how troublesome instructions could be. He also knew that many of his colleagues would not agree with his understanding of the doctrine. Senators and state legislators frequently clashed over the right of states to dictate senators' actions. Some senators, like Clay, believed that as representatives of their states they were bound to follow the dictates of their electors or resign. Other senators thought that instructions inhibited deliberation and that they should be free to use their own best judgment. This paper will examine the Senate's relationship with the states, and thus the meaning of the Constitution and union in the Early Republic.As an institution, the Senate emerged from the Philadelphia Convention and ratification debates without a well-defined identity. Many Federalists and Antifederalists expected the Senate to act as a council of states. Small state delegates in Philadelphia insisted on state representation in at least one chamber of the national legislature. While the Convention acceded to these delegates' wishes, it adopted several proposals, which directly weakened the Senate's role as a council of states. Long terms without the possibility of recall, per capita voting, and salaries paid from the national treasury all undermined the idea of senators as their states' ambassadors. The ratification debates only further confused the issue of the Senate's character and its relationship to the states.
State legislatures were never shy about expressing their opinions either as recommendations or instructions. All states sent resolutions and remonstrances to the Senate, and on important subjects they sent instructions. For the most part, senators and state legislatures peacefully co-existed. In the most significant episode, the Virginia legislature censured Senators William Branch Giles and Richard Brent -one for disavowing the obligation to obey instructions and the other for outright disobedience of its command to oppose the rechartering of the First Bank of the United States (BUS) in 1811. This episode engendered an extensive debate in the Senate and the states about instructions, the Senate, and the Senate's relationship with the states and the union.
[1] Henry Clay to John J. Crittenden, December 14, 1819, in The Life of John J. Crittenden, ed. Mary Ann Crittenden Butler Chapman (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1871; reprint NY: Da Capo Press, 1970), I: 39.
Comments
William G. Shade, Lehigh University (wgs0@Lehigh.edu)
Stuart Leibiger