Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

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Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris

LEttERs AND CUltURAl TRANsFORmAtIONs IN thE UNItED StAtEs, 1760-1860

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Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Edited by ThEREsA StROUth GAUl Texas Christian University, USA ShARON M. HARRIs University of Connecticut, USA

© Theresa Strouth Gaul, Sharon M. Harris and the contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi.ed as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 Wey Court East Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Letters and cultural transformations in the United States, 1760-1860. 1. American letters – History and criticism. 2. Epistolary fiction, American – History and criticism. 3. American literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 4. American literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 5. Literature and society – United States – History – 18th century. 6. Literature and society – United States – History – 19th century. 7. Letters in literature. I. Gaul, Theresa Strouth. II. Harris, Sharon M. 813.3’009–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Letters and cultural transformations in the United States, 1760-1860 / edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6622-6 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9504-2 (ebook) 1. American letters—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Letter writing—United States—History—18th century. 3. American letters—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Letter writing—United States—History—19th century. I. Gaul, Theresa Strouth II. Harris, Sharon M. PS416.L48 2009 816’.309—dc22 2009003064 ISBN 9780754666226 (hbk) ISBN 9780754695042 (ebk.V)

Contents

List of Illustrations   Notes on Contributors   Introduction   Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris

PART I 1

vii ix 1

LETTERS AND TRANSNATIONALISM

“�����������������������������������������������” “A continual and almost exclusive correspondence”: Philip Mazzei’s Transatlantic Citizenship   Chiara Cillerai

17

2 ����������������������������������������������������������������� Letters on the Use of Letters in Narratives: Catharine Macaulay, Susannah Rowson, and the Warren-Adams Correspondence   Eve Tavor Bannet

35

3 ���������������������������������������������������������������� Anticipating Colonialism: U.S. Letters on Puerto Rico and Cuba, 1831-1835   Ivonne M. García

57

PART II

LETTERS AND AUTHORSHIP

4

The �������������� Authentic Fictional ���������� ����������� Letters of �������������������������� Charles Brockden Brown   79 Elizabeth Hewitt

5

Keys to “the labyrinth of my own being”: Margaret Fuller’s Epistolary K������� “�����������������������������”��������������������������������� Invention of the Self   99 Jeffrey Steele

6

“������������������������”������������������������������������������� “Two single married women”: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stoddard and Margaret Sweat, 1851-1854   117 Jennifer Putzi

vi

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

PART III 7

LETTERS AND PERIODICALS

Cherokee ��������� Catharine ���������������������������������������������� Brown’s Epistolary Performances   139 Theresa Strouth Gaul

8 “Does “�����������������������?”���������������������������������� such a being exist?”: Olive Branch Readers Respond to Fanny Fern   Bonnie Carr O’Neill

161

9 ���� ����� Walker ���������������������������� Dr. Mary and the Economies of ������� Letter ������������ Writing   179 Sharon M. Harris 10 �� A Less ����� Costly ������������ Ink: John ������������� Brown’s Prison Letters and the Traditions of American Protest Literature   197 Zoe Trodd

PART IV

LETTERS AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EDITIONS

11 ��������������������� Authorship, Network, ������������ Textuality: �������� Editing ������ Mercy ����� Otis ��������� Warren’s Letters   Jeffrey H. Richards

223

12

239

���� The ������������� Request of a ������ Line: ������������������� On Editing Harriet ��������� Jacobs’s “Life ������������ Among the Contrabands”   Scott M. Korb

13 ������������������������������������������������������������ Edited Letter Collections as Epistolary Fictions: Imagining African American Women’s History in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends   Linda M. Grasso Index  

249 269

List of Illustrations

6.1 Elizabeth Stoddard’s letter to Margaret Sweat, 13 January 1853, courtesy of Allison-Shelley Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, The Pennsylvania State University Libraries 7.1 Catharine Brown’s letter to Flora Gold, 16 April 1821, courtesy of Herman Landon Vaill Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library 7.2 Frontispiece illustration, Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation (1825; 2nd edition), courtesy of DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas E90.B87A5 10.1 “Photogravure facsimile of the last written words of John Brown,” Souvenir of the World’s Columbian exposition, Chicago, 1893, courtesy of Library of Congress 10.2 “John Brown,” pictorial envelope, Stimson & Co., 1861, courtesy of New York Historical Society

125

148

156

207 215

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Notes on Contributors

Eve Tavor Bannet is George Lynn Cross Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her books include The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Johns Hopkins, 2000); Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence (Cambridge, 2005); and most recently, a four volume edition entitled English and American Letter Manuals, 1680-1810 (Pickering & Chatto, 2008). She is working on a book on transatlantic literature, the “holding title” of which is Migrating Fictions. Chiara Cillerai has recently received a Ph.D. from Rutgers University and is currently working on a book manuscript on the connection between Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the formation of early American national identity. She is an assistant professor of English in the Institute for Writing Studies of St. John’s University, New York. Ivonne M. García is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College, where she teaches courses on nineteenth century U.S. literature, Latin(a), trans-hemispheric and postcolonial studies. She received her Ph.D. in English from Ohio State University and has a master’s in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is currently working on a book project that examines the trans-colonial connections among writers from the U.S., Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines and Hawai’i between 1830-1902 Theresa Strouth Gaul is Associate Professor of English at Texas Christian University. She is editor of To Marry An Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839 (North Carolina, 2005), the author of a number of articles on race and women’s writings, and co-editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. She is currently at work on a project involving letters emerging out of white-Cherokee contacts in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Linda M. Grasso is Professor of English at York College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she teaches courses in U.S. Literature, Women’s Literature, African American Literature, American Studies, and Women’s Studies. She is the author of The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820-1860 (North Carolina, 2002), as well as several essays on U.S. women writers and culture. Currently she is writing a book that explores how Georgia O’Keeffe and feminism are linked in scholarship, popular culture, and the public imagination.



Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Sharon M. Harris is Director of the Humanities Institute and Professor of English at University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is the author of several books, including Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical (Rutgers, 2009) and Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law (Ohio State, 2005). Harris is also editor of several collections of essays, most recently Periodical Literature in Early America (Tennessee, 2005), co-edited with Mark Kamrath. She was founding President of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and is currently co-editing with Linda K. Hughes a three-volume collection of international feminist writings from Sappho to the present (Cambridge, forthcoming). Elizabeth Hewitt is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University, Columbus and the author of Correspondence and American Literature, 17701865 (Cambridge, 2004). Her work on letter writing is part of a larger interest in antebellum exchange systems of affection and property. Her current project is a study of nineteenth-century American fiction as an exercise in political economy. Scott M. Korb is Associate Editor of the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (North Carolina, 2008), and co-author, with Peter Bebergal, of The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God (Bloomsbury, 2007). Korb has written for Harper’s magazine, Gastronomica, Commonweal, and for newspapers, throughout the country, and internationally, including the Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Jerusalem Post. His next book is Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine (Riverhead, forthcoming 2010). Bonnie Carr O’Neill is Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University. In addition to her work on Fanny Fern, she has published essays on Whitman and Emerson. She is currently working on a book examining the interrelations of celebrity, reading, and authorship in the public life of the nineteenth-century U.S. Jennifer Putzi is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Women’s Studies Program at The College of William and Mary. She is author of Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America (Georgia, 2006) and editor of Elizabeth Stoddard’s Two Men (Nebraska, 2008). She is currently working on an edition of Elizabeth Stoddard’s letters and a study of Adam Kessel, an early American silent film producer. Jeffrey H. Richards is chair and Professor of English at Old Dominion University. He is the author of, among other works, Mercy Otis Warren (Twayne, 1995), Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (Cambridge, 2005), and several forthcoming essays on eighteenth-century American drama, fiction, and culture. He is editor with Sharon M. Harris of Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters (Georgia, 2009).

Notes on Contributors

xi

Jeffrey Steele is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance (North Carolina, 1987), The Essential Margaret Fuller (an anthology of Fuller’s writing, Rutgers, 1993), and Trans.guring American: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Missouri, 2001), as well as articles on Fuller, Douglass, Whitman, the American Renaissance, and the politics of mourning. He is currently working on two book-length projects: the first on representations of New York City and urban experience in antebellum writing, the second on representations of race and gender in nineteenth-century American literature and advertising. Zoe Trodd is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the Center for the Study of the American South. Her books include Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (Blackwell, 2004), American Protest Literature (Harvard, 2006), To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves (Cornell, 2008) and Modern Slavery (Oneworld, 2009). She has also published numerous articles on protest literature and abolitionism.

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Introduction Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris

An article published in 1831 in the Lady’s Book seems almost prescient in its delineation of the characteristics of epistolary writing that would attract critical and scholarly attention nearly two centuries later: Few persons are ever obliged to produce a treatise, or a poem; but there is scarcely any one who is not occasionally compelled, by the circumstances of life, to write a letter. It is the remark of a very celebrated author, that the epistolary style deserves to be cultivated almost more than any other, since none is of more various or frequent use through the whole subordination of human life.... [T]he ability of writing letters clearly, and to the purpose, finds an opportunity of frequent exertion and display in every department of business, in every profession and employment, and in all the endearing offices of social relation. Most authors, who have occupied themselves with this subject, admit the difficulty—or, rather, the impossibility—of reducing it to any fixed rules; as letters are written on all subjects, and in almost every situation in which “the tide of event” can carry individuals. The general rules which govern other styles of composition, are, for the most part, applicable to letter writing: ease and simplicity, an even flow of unlaboured diction, and an artless arrangement of obvious sentiments, have been pronounced to be the qualities most frequently required: but it has also been stated, that a letter, having no peculiarity but its form, nothing is to be refused admission to it which would be proper in any other mode of treating the same subject.

The anonymous author suggests that many of the dominant critical insights about epistolary writings in the scholarship of recent decades were nothing more than the commonly held assumptions of epistolary practitioners of the early nineteenth century. The writer simply presumes that readers share certain understandings of the letter: its status as the literary genre practiced by the widest range of Americans, potential to be put to more “various” uses than any other kind of writing, functionality in a variety of contexts ranging from the business and professional world to the sphere of intimate relations, resistance to “fixed rules,” diversity of subject and situation, characteristic and recognizable formal qualities, and broad openness to wide ranging kinds of content. The modern critic might append some additional characteristics to this listing, even while being forced to acknowledge 

 “The Escrutoire.”

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860



the nagging and somewhat sheepish sense that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letter writers seemed to have understood the genre and practice of letter writing in terms more sophisticated and theoretical than our own. For, as Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860 demonstrates, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century correspondents conceived of the letter as a literary genre worthy of study, emulation, and practice. So significant did letter writing seem to Judith Sargent Murray, who also wrote in the genres of essays, poetry, and fiction, that she characterized it as the distinguishing trait of her very humanity. Writing to her sister in 1797, Murray explains that: when setting with the pen of a letter Writer in my hand, it is then I am conscious of the value, and superiority of my existence .... A correspondence by letter partakes more of spirit than any other intercourse which, while cloathed with mortality, we can support—and by this privilege we are more particularly distinguished from our four footed, and party coloured brethren of the creation who can not, as far as we know, boast a mode of communication that bears any resemblance thereto—I say then—blessings on the Man who first invented letter writing—

Murray’s comments reflect the late eighteenth-century’s interest in practicing and theorizing letter writing as an artistic, communicative, and potentially transformative mode, one that situates correspondents in the world that surrounds them and allows them to explore and construct their relation to that world. Letters and Cultural Transformations heeds Murray’s insight in its examination of how letters link individuals to the world. Rejecting limiting binaries of public/private, written/oral, or print/manuscript, Letters and Cultural Transformations advances emerging scholarship on U.S. letters by demonstrating the genre’s persistent and often public engagements with transformations in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American culture that have attracted recent critical notice. Letter manuals, letters to editors, epistolary novels, and multiple other forms of the letter have pervaded U.S. culture and literary practices from Murray’s era on, making them particularly well situated to broaden understandings of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum periods. Although literary scholars of the early to mid-twentieth century failed to maintain earlier writers’ interest in theorizing letter writing, critics in recent years have returned to epistolarity as a significant site for critical exploration. Rejecting the view of letters as historical documents valuable only for revealing information about famous people or events, many scholars today accord letters an independent literary status. Yet how to 

 Recent critics have also examined letters’ production by multiple authors, tendency toward intertextuality, relationship with other genres, connection to oral forms, resistance to closure, attunement to various audiences, shaping by material and technological factors, and participation in local, national, and international systems of transportation and exchange.   “Judith Sargent Murray’s Letterbooks.”

Introduction



consider letters on their own terms—not merely as a source of information nor only as a plot or structural device within fiction—proved an obstacle to scholars developing the field of inquiry. Studies in autobiographical writing in the 1980s identified letters’ potential literary value by categorizing them as an important form of life-writing; Domna Stanton’s edited collection The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (1984) contained several essays on letters, for example. Often lumped into a catch-all category with diaries and journals, however, letters received little distinct analysis as a unique genre within the broad field of autobiographical analyses. Janet Altman’s Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (1982) importantly facilitated consideration of the letter as an independent genre by providing a model of how to approach the letter on its own terms. Still important to scholars of letter writing today, her analysis emphasized the means by which the genre’s formal characteristics create meaning. Perhaps her most influential formulation was her pinpointing of the letter’s ability to function as either a “bridge” or “barrier” between writer and recipient by either facilitating or interfering with the exchange that characterizes correspondence: “As an instrument of communication between sender and receiver, the letter straddles the gulf between presence and absence; the two persons who ‘meet’ through the letter are neither totally separated nor totally united. The letter lies halfway between the possibility of total communication and the risk of no communication at all.” The social and political implications of what Altman called the letter’s “ambivalence as intermediary” has proven a fruitful terrain for recent critics’ explorations. Yet even as Altman’s influential text remains a standard in the field, it illustrated a common tendency of much criticism on letters in its reliance on readings of epistolary novels as a basis for theoretical postulations. Indeed, the most persistent emphasis within literary criticism has been on the epistolary as it is manifested within and through fictional forms—as the sheer number of books published on the epistolary novel reveals—rather than a focus on letter writing in its own right. While this focus has perhaps slowed the development of theories useful to scholars working with “actual” letters, many studies that focused primarily on epistolary novels—usually English and French—have nonetheless proven generative as these scholars searched for usable methods of examining and theorizing letters. Major texts in this phase of theoretical development included Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook’s Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (1996), Mary Favret’s Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (1993), Elizabeth Goldsmith’s collection Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (1989), Linda Kauffman’s Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (1986) and Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992), and Elizabeth Jane MacArthur’s Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary  Janet Altman, Epistolarity, 43.  Ibid., 19.

 



Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Form (1990). The recovery of early American novels relying on epistolarity as either a structuring principle or a plot device—especially Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797)—prompted an array of critical efforts that guided scholars to increasingly complex understandings of the function of the letter in U.S. fiction. Two important early works in this vein were Ronald J. Zboray’s article “The Letter and the Fiction Reading Public in Antebellum America” (1987), which recognized the ways that Americans’ engagement with letter writing had implications for their fiction reading habits and vice versa, and Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word (1984), which modeled a critical approach to early American epistolary novels that inspired many scholars to follow. To cite only one additional example of the substantial body of scholarship dealing with the early American epistolary novel, Julia A. Stern’s The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997) argues that the epistolary brings together performative, vocal, and textual modes to produce affect. Some recent scholars have rejected the subordination of the epistolary to fictional forms, and a number of books largely focused on British or European letters opened up useful avenues of inquiry. Rebecca Earle’s collection of essays, Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-writers, 1600-1945 (1999) presented a wide-ranging exploration of specific forms of letter writing (from the polite letter to diplomatic correspondence) in a mostly European context while emphasizing the means by which letters functioned as an important site for the construction of historically contingent versions of selfhood. Amanda Gilroy’s and W.M. Verhoeven’s collection Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (2000) examined the cultural history of Anglo-American letters. Essays in the volume point to the ways that letters interrogate the supposed distinctions between the public and private spheres, with their implicitly gendered and ideological valances. Departing from the typical focus on the content of letters or what is expressed within them, the essays in David Barton and Nigel Hall’s Letter Writing as a Social Practice (2000) examined the activity of letter writing, letters as a genre, and letters as objects. Examining Anglo-American and European correspondence, the essays in Caroline Bland and Máire Cross’s collection Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing, 1750-2000 (2004) considered letters as discursive, politicized spaces within which writers explore their identities as gendered subjects. In Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa (2003), James How examined how improving postal services shaped writers’ epistolary exchanges, allowing for the development of various arenas of English political, cultural, and social life. Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants (2006), edited by Bruce S. Elliot, David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke, explored a phenomenon the editors call “transnationalized rootedness,” wherein migrants attempt to maintain continuity with their pasts even as they move into new environments and communities. The essays in the volume illuminate migrants’ use of letters to sustain contact with their homelands.

Introduction



Scholarship on U.S. letters has lagged behind that on epistolary novels and British and European letters. William Merrill Decker’s Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (1998) made an argument, however, for the need to attend to letters within a specifically U.S. context in order to advance understandings of the letter’s place in the broader history of evolving systems of communications. A foundational consideration of letter writing as an influential genre and meaningful practice in the United States, Epistolary Practices claims that two prominent, if not exclusive, traits of American experience created a distinct development of the epistolary—mobility and migration, which created large-scale geographic separations amongst families and friends, and widespread literacy, which allowed large numbers of individuals to practice the genre. Building on Decker’s scholarship and embodying Barton and Hall’s assertion that the attention to the particularized social contexts out of which letters are produced can reveal important clues to letters’ cultural meanings, recent scholars of U.S. letters have radically rethought the range of letters’ manifestations and their cultural impact. This work on U.S. letters has inevitably developed alongside and been influenced by trends in a number of related fields, particularly Cultural Studies’ broadening of definitions of what comprises a text worthy of study, New Historicism’s emphasis on examining the political, social, and historical contexts within which texts took their meaning, the History of the Book’s attention to the condition of production, circulation, and consumption of manuscript and print texts, Women’s, Race, and Working-Class Studies’ reorienting of attention to the writing and reading practices of marginalized groups possessing uneven access to publication, and Early American Studies’ opening up of the colonial, revolutionary, and early republican eras as crucial periods for understanding processes of nation formation, as well the origins and full development of important political, cultural, and social formulations in American society. Two contributors to this volume have published important books that encapsulate trends in scholarship at the current moment. In their focus on letters’ centrality to transatlantic and national political, cultural, and social developments, Elizabeth Hewitt’s Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (2004) and Eve Tavor Bannet’s Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (2005) establish the groundwork upon which Letters and Cultural Transformations builds, while also indicating the growing importance and centrality of epistolary studies within literary scholarship. One of the most important works in recent years has been Elizabeth Hewitt’s Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (2004). As Hewitt argues, the letter allowed for the interrogation of national union in the antebellum era, as writers for whom “issues of social mediation are paramount repeatedly turn to letter writing as both practice and theoretical model for conceiving of social reciprocity. Various considerations of union and disunion converge around both literal and theoretical correspondence.” Hewitt recognizes that, in spite of the  Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature 1770-1865, 3.



Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860



common assertion that the letter as a genre has no national distinctiveness, the uses of the letter by U.S. writers in the early federal and antebellum eras articulates the exceptionalism of American democracy. While letter writing can veil the contradictions between power and liberty, coercion and consent, epistolarity also functions to critique its own ideological assumptions. Because of the spatial and temporal distance a letter must span, letter-writing emblematizes not only a fully legitimized political model in which social intercourse is predicated on consent and unanimity, but it also reveals the obstacles to such socio-political organization. The possibility of dead, purloined, and/or miscarried letters serves to underscore the ways in which national ties may not be so easily secured.

Thus Hewitt skillfully inserts Altman’s universalizing formulation of letters’ potential to either bridge or increase distances between writers and recipients within particularized early American social and political contexts. Further, Hewitt articulates the ways in which arguments over U.S. federalism put into competition differing epistolary theories—the anti-federalist emphasis on political reciprocity through individual citizens’ correspondence with one another versus the federalist preference for a template correspondence that arranged political conversations between citizens and the nation. Examining the writings of Emerson, Fuller, Melville, Jacobs, and Whitman, Hewitt demonstrates the ways each writer’s engagement with national debates is figured through his or her epistolary practices. Eve Tavor Bannet’s influential and comprehensive Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (2005) returns attention to the importance of the eighteenth-century book trade and letter-writing manuals to emphasize the political anatomy in which instruction in letter writing circulated. As Bannet recognizes, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were paradoxical eras, at once extraordinary moments of a developing democratic public sphere and yet equally defined by evolving systems of state control over individuals’ actions. Within this polarity, letters became the instruments of spreading news and information—“intelligence”—not only by governments but by individual citizens. As Bannet exposes, letter-writing manuals worked to the benefit of these seemingly disparate systems. Their inclusion of letters by and for masters and servants, the aristocracy and the middling class, the businessman and the young student offered a democratic genre in which all classes could find expression; at the same time, however, they reinscribed hierarchies through these social types—businessman, artisan, lady, servant—and could act as guides for exclusion as well as inclusion. As she examines how letter writers negotiated complex social hierarchies in their manipulations of conventional aspects of the letter, such as the date, superscription, and subscription, Bannet follows Altman in 

 Ibid., 13.

Introduction



turning to form as an important interpretive tool in understanding letters and joins Hewitt in anchoring Altman’s generalizable principles regarding letters’ functions to a specific moment of Anglo-American social and political formation. With her delineation of the recommended conversational style, which strove to achieve the instantiation of the writer’s presence for the recipient, Bannet also importantly reminds scholars of an oft-forgotten dimension of epistolarity: because letters were so often read aloud to the recipient’s family and friends (and manuals encouraged the writer to read the letter aloud before sending it), orality was integral to the practice of letter writing. Two additional recent books indicate the heightened attention letters are receiving within varying interdisciplinary frameworks. David A. Gerber’s Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (2006) explores how nineteenth-century immigrants who settled in the United States and Canada strove to conserve a continuous sense of self by relying on letter writing to maintain the relationships that formed the basis of their personal identities. Given the dramatic ruptures in their lives that immigrants experienced, letters functioned as a powerful reiteration of personal identity by consolidating the writer’s relations to the people and places which contributed to the construction of that identity. Attuned to such contingencies as literacy, fluency with the postal system, and immigrants’ positioning in internationalized networks of transportation, commerce, and exchange, Gerber examines how even the seemingly most insignificant generic conventions of letters engaged and revealed correspondents’ complex emotional needs. His outline of three types of epistolary negotiations into which immigrants entered is particularly useful: the regulative, which served to organize and maintain relationships; the expressive, which displays itself in writing about emotions and the orientation of writer and reader in time and space relative to each other; and the descriptive, comprised of expository writing about events and affairs. In his in-depth analyses of four widely divergent immigrants’ correspondences with family and friends at home, Gerber, a historian, demonstrates the ways he has been influenced by and contributes ably to literary scholarship in his attention to purpose, voice, theme, and rhythm in letters. David M. Henkins’s The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2006) traces the transition of the postal service from a bureaucracy intended to distribute information in the form of newspapers to an institution which profoundly transformed the lives of ordinary Americans. Because mid-century postal acts lowered the rates for mailing a letter and thus made letter writing an affordable activity, Americans for the first time conceived of themselves as correspondents who could maintain regular, not occasional, relations with people they could not see. As writing letters became an activity in which the mass of Americans engaged and on which they increasingly relied, Henkins details these new letter writers’ participation in the formulation of the norms of this cultural practice. Henkins considers the shifting of older epistolary practices, such as correspondents exchanging newspapers through the mail, to emerging newer ones, like the sending of valentines, in order to enumerate the

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860



cultural meanings that adhered to the mail. Henkins reads the content and formal characteristics of letters as indicators of how correspondents were reconsidering and reconceptualizing notions integral to conventional ideas about letters, including what he calls “the elaborate mythology of epistolary privacy.” Other noteworthy studies indicate that the study of letters can move in alternative and fruitful directions. Phillip H. Round’s essay “Neither Here Nor There: Transatlantic Epistolarity in Early America” (2005) argued that colonial American letters must be read with an awareness of early modern European uses of epistolarity. Konstantin Dierks’s several articles, taken together, revealed how early American letter writers participated in an emerging consumer culture which solidified and demonstrated their class status. Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris’s Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America (2005) highlighted the prolific use of letters in magazines and newspapers. In another study not focused solely on epistolary writings, Hilary Wyss examined numerous letters as some of the earliest manifestations of a longstanding tradition of Native American writing in Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (2000), and Dickson D. Bruce similarly recovers early examples of African American letter writing in his The Origins of African American Literature: 1680-1865 (2001). Theresa Strouth Gaul’s To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839 (2005) demonstrated letters’ ability to function as a supple venue for negotiating fraught racial attitudes. Gaul’s substantial introduction established a theory for making sense of how material factors constrain and shape the form and content of letters; in her reading, for example, marginal insertions, often prompted by concerns about paper conservation and postage rates, become an important formal tool for understanding letters’ significance. Letters and Cultural Transformations begins its consideration of U.S. letters in the pre-Revolutionary moment when colonial letter writers began to imagine themselves as American and use the space of the letter to construct a notion of American identity. The volume concludes on the eve of the Civil War, an event which threatened to splinter that identity and which prompted vast numbers of Americans to engage in letter writing, perhaps more than any other preceding moment in U.S. history. The span of the book thus encompasses important federal transformations of the postal system, including the Postal Act of 1792, which initiated the national system that transported letters, and Congress’s Acts in 1845 and 1851 to lower the cost of sending a letter, which granted access to the mails for vast numbers of ordinary Americans. While attending to the social and political dynamics of letters which have preoccupied recent critics, the essays in Letters and Cultural Transformations seek to define the “correspondences” between letters and developing facets of the U.S. cultural sphere. Noah Webster’s 1847   David M. Henkins, The Postal Age, 99.



Introduction



definition of “correspondence” in his American Dictionary, which gives “Relation; fitness; congruity; mutual adaptation of one thing to another” as its first definition, foregrounds the central aim of this volume: charting the “mutual adaptation” existing between letters and transforming dimensions of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture and advancing the “congruity” between manuscript letters and contemporary scholarly critical and editing practices. To consider the ubiquitous and wildly varying manifestations, uses, and effects of letters during the century the volume traverses, Letters and Cultural Transformations is divided into four sections. The first three sections emphasize letters’ imbrication in transforming dimensions of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture, while the fourth section extends the volume’s consideration into the present by examining contemporary scholarly editing practices. The essays in “Part I: Letters and Transnationalism” explore the ways writers composed, exchanged, and read their letters in situations shaped by currents and concerns that transcended national borders, giving a compelling demonstration of the fact that letters cannot be adequately considered within limiting national frameworks. Because letters as material objects traversed national borders, the genre offers particularly potent opportunities to dismantle nationalist paradigms that have heretofore dominated critical interpretations of early American literature. Chiara Cillerai’s “‘A continual and almost exclusive correspondence’: Philip Mazzei’s Transatlantic Citizenship” explores Italian émigré Philip Mazzei’s uses of letters during the revolutionary era to craft a cosmopolitan notion of American identity rooted in imperial commerce and internationalism. Eve Tavor Bannet extends the interrogation of American identity formation into the early republican era in “Letters on the Use of Letters in Narratives: Catherine Macauley, Susannah Rowson, and the Warren-Adams Correspondence” with her examination of Mercy Warren and John Adams’s exchange over the proper use of letters in narrative histories of the Revolutionary War. This correspondence emerged out of and responded to transatlantic debates over the nature of revolution and republicanism, and Bannet demonstrates, as does Cillerai, the ways that early Americans rejected narrow national identities to imagine themselves as participants in a global arena. Extending this analysis into the antebellum period, “Anticipating Colonialism: U.S. Letters on Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1831-1835” by Ivonne García investigates the ways in which the letters that Edward and Charles Emerson and Sophia Peabody mailed from Puerto Rico and Cuba back home to New England postulated an American identity premised on imperial power. These transoceanic letters conveyed images of the Spanish Caribbean region among New England’s intelligentsia and contributed to the United States’ emerging identification as a nation-empire. “Part II: Letters and Authorship” examines the ways letter writers who also actively sought publication—including Charles Brockden Brown, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Stoddard—used the epistolary form at crucial moments in their early careers as a means to construct various, shifting, and sometimes fictive authorial personas. Although all three essays amply demonstrate that letters are an

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important means for authors to try out and test techniques and ideas for publication, this group of essays most importantly demonstrates that authorial selves emerge through epistolary exchange with others; the process of constructing an authorial persona does not occur in isolation but through the mechanisms of dialogue and response that letters facilitate. Elizabeth Hewitt’s “The Authentic Fictional Letters of Charles Brockden Brown” shows how Brown in his early writings simultaneously appealed to and challenged letters’ longstanding association with sincerity and in doing so called into question the divide between authentic and fictive letters. Hewitt’s analysis culminates in a critical reassessment of the relation between the early novel and epistolarity while further elucidating her understanding of the letter as a central medium for theorizing social relations. Jeffrey Steele and Jennifer Putzi take their examination inward, exploring personal correspondence as a space within which women writers could prepare themselves and their ideas for publication. In “Keys to ‘the labyrinth of my own being’: Margaret Fuller’s Epistolary Invention of the Self,” Steele illuminates how, by exploiting the dialogic and relational nature of letters, Fuller engaged in a project of self-construction even as she first explored ideas and theories that would later appear in her published works. Her letters, as carefully crafted, literary productions, provided her with a flexible discursive space of exploration; Steele reads Fuller’s letters as an epistolary bildungsroman of sorts. Putzi similarly considers the means by which letters mediate selves and relationships in “‘Two single married women’: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stoddard and Margaret Sweat, 1851-1854.” Putzi reads Stoddard’s letters to Margaret Sweat as textual performances in which Stoddard, as a fledgling writer who is publishing her first works, negotiates her developing identity as a woman and an artist within the epistolary intimacy of an intense female friendship. “Part III: Letters and Periodicals” explores the central role letters have played in U.S. print culture. Dispersed through the same bureaucratic system of the post office, letters and newspapers also shared similar functions in conveying information across geographic distances. Indeed, early newspaper editors filled their columns with the contributions of “correspondents”—letter writers, not formal journalists—to fill their columns; one might go so far as to say that letters are the foundational genre of American journalism. Focusing on letters that reached a wide audience because of their publication in periodicals, the essays in this section force a reconsideration of the assumption that letters are primarily private documents, a limiting critical commonplace that has dogged much scholarship on letters and possesses little usefulness for the analysis of many letters. Theresa Strouth Gaul examines letters from Catharine Brown, a young Cherokee woman, which were regularly published in religious periodicals and widely reprinted, though readers today know her only through her posthumously published memoir. In “Cherokee Catharine Brown’s Epistolary Performances,” Gaul recovers Brown’s letters published in periodicals and investigates how reading Brown’s letters within the contexts of periodical publication, epistolary education, and Cherokee and evangelical oral traditions profoundly alters critical assessments of

Introduction

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Brown’s agency as a writer. Bonnie Carr O’Neill examines the dynamic exchange between a popular author, Fanny Fern, and her readers by turning to the pages of the Olive Branch in “‘Does such a being exist?’: Olive Branch Readers Respond to Fanny Fern.” Interrogating reader’s responses to Fern’s public manipulations of her identity, O’Neill examines how Fern’s readers engage her in a dialogue that reformulates notions of female identity and, indeed, interrogates the very gendering of identity itself. Sharon M. Harris considers the means by which the printing of letters in reform-oriented periodicals enabled the construction of communities of women driven by a common cause. In “Dr. Mary Walker and the Economies of Letter Writing,” Harris argues that letters’ foregrounding of exchange led Mary Walker, a physician, health reformer, and women’s rights activist, to use them as her primary genre for social interventions during her long career. Turning her attention to the powerful impact letters can have on readers in “A Less Costly Ink: John Brown’s Prison Letters and the Traditions of American Protest Literature,” Zoe Trodd focuses on the letters John Brown wrote from his prison cell in 1859. Circulated among northern abolitionists and reprinted in newspapers, Brown’s letters transformed public opinion of his raid of Harpers Ferry and initiated what Trodd terms an “abolitionist aesthetics” that anticipated later traditions of protest literature. The final section, “Part IV: Letters and Twenty-First Century Editions,” brings the volume’s purview into the present by interrogating the politics and practices of letters’ editing and publication in today’s scholarly arena, especially as revealed in forthcoming and recently published editions. Prompted in part by William Merrill Decker’s questioning in Epistolary Practices as to whether published letters rightfully occupy a distinct generic category because of the substantial transformation they undergo in the process of publication, the essays in this section consider the correspondences—or lack thereof—between manuscript and print forms. The first two essays in the section speak to the complexity of editing practices, as editors who have recently engaged in the work of publishing editions of correspondence meditate on their methods. In “Authorship, Network, Textuality: Editing Mercy Otis Warren’s Letters,” Jeffrey H. Richards explores the effects of an editorial shift of attention away from the contents of a letter to a focus on the letter as text, a “situated document” which is shaped as much by multiple cultural, social, and technological contexts as by the writer’s experiences or ideas. Scott M. Korb illuminates the myriad tasks a documentary editor must address, including selection, transcription, research, and annotation, by focusing on a single letter, Harriet Jacobs’s second longest piece of writing, in his essay, “The Request of a Line: On Editing Harriet Jacobs’s ‘Life Among the Contrabands.’” In the final piece in this section, Linda Grasso shifts the focus; by reading an edition of correspondence as an epistolary novel of sorts, she interrogates the editorial politics surrounding the production of scholarly editions in the twenty-first century. In “Edited Letter Collections as Epistolary Fictions: Imagining African American Women’s History in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends,” Grasso reads an edition

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as a fiction collaboratively constructed by editor, reader, and texts which fulfills twenty-first century readers’ desires for community and collectivity.

With the recent and forthcoming publication of editions of correspondence by writers such as Samson Occom, Charles Brockden Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, and Eve Tavor Bannet’s multi-volume reprinting of American and British letter-writing manuals, the genre is rapidly reshaping early American literary studies by forcing the recognition of the significance of letters to the emerging nation as its most prevalent literary form. Taken together, the essays in Letters and Cultural Transformations indicate compelling directions for future scholarship. Some directions require the tracing of letters’ links to other genres; their pervasive presence in contemporary periodicals, for example, suggests the need for even more exploration of the genre’s engagement with print culture. Other directions necessitate the exploration of new interpretive frameworks and tools. Attending to the ways formal and material/ technological properties shape letters’ contents offers a challenging but potentially transforming lens, for example. Similarly transformative is the recognition that letters—by virtue of the fact that they traverse the continent and globe, rather than only spaces within New England—offer literary critics the opportunity to refocus their gaze from one limited region to broader national and transnational contexts. And, perhaps most obviously, a major contribution of epistolary studies rests in the potential of such scholarship to foreground the textual productions of broader and more diverse cross-sections of the U.S. populace than studies of some other literary genres. The wide-spread access to authorship through letter writing suggests that countless opportunities for innovative scholarship reside in the letters of “ordinary” people as well as in the process of rethinking and revising received notions about famous or otherwise noteworthy figures. As scholars seek to recover and find new ways to make meaning of the full range of women’s, working class, and people of color’s writings, the field of the epistolary can only become a more and more significant terrain of inquiry.

Works Cited Altman, Janet Gurkin, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005).   See Joanna Brooks, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan; Jean Fagin Yellin, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers; Mark L. Kamrath, Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and John R. Holmes, The Letters and Selected Poetry of Charles Brockden Brown, Vol. l; Bannet, British and American Letter Manuals, 1680-1810. 

Introduction

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—– (ed.), British and American Letter Manuals, 1680-1810 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). Barton, David and Nigel Hall (eds), Letter Writing as a Social Practice (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Johns Benjamins Publishing, 2000). Bland, Caroline and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing, 1750-2000 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). Brooks, Joanna (ed.), The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Bruce, Dickson D., The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Davidson, Cathy, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Decker, William Merrill, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 1998). Dierks, Konstantin, “The Familiar Letter and Social Refinement in America, 1750-1800,” in David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds), Letter Writing as a Social Practice (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Johns Benjamins Publishing, 2000). ——, “Letter Manuals, Literary Innovation, and the Problem of Defining Genre in Anglo-American Epistolary Instruction, 1568-1800,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 94.4 (December 2000): 541-50. ——, “Letter Writing, Stationery Supplies, and Consumer Modernity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Early American Literature, 41.3 (2006): 473-94. Earle, Rebecca (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter writers, 1600-1945 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1999). Elliot, Bruce S., David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke (eds.), Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants (New York: Palgrave, 2006). “The Escrutoire,” Lady’s Book (Mar. 1831): 121-4. Favret, Mary A., Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Gaul, Theresa Strouth (ed.), To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters:, 1823-1839 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Gerber, David A., Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North American in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006). Gilroy, Amanda, and W.M. Verhoeven (eds), Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

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Goldsmith, Elizabeth (ed.), Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989). Henkins, David M., The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Hewitt, Elizabeth, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004). How, James, Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). “Judith Sargent Murray’s Letterbooks,” ed. Bonnie Smith Hurd, 10 December 2006. www.hurdsmith.com/judith/letterbooks.htm Kamrath, Mark L. and Sharon M. Harris (eds), Periodical Literature in EighteenthCentury America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005). Kamrath, Mark L., Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and John R. Holmes (eds), The Letters and Selected Poetry of Charles Brockden Brown (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, forthcoming). Kauffman, Linda, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). ——, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). MacArthur, Elizabeth Jane, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Round, Phillip H., “Neither Here Nor There: Transatlantic Epistolarity in Early America,” in Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer (eds), A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). Stanton, Domna C. (ed.), The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (1984; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Stern, Julia A., The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Webster, Noah, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1847; Reprint, Chicago: 1890). Wyss, Hilary E., Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Yellin, Jean Fagan (ed.), The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Zboray, Ronald J., “The Letter and the Fiction Reading Public in Antebellum America,” Journal of American Culture, 10.1 (Spr. 1987): 27-34.

PARt I LEttERs AND TRANsNAtIONAlIsm

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Chapter One

“A continual and almost exclusive correspondence”: Philip Mazzei’s Transatlantic Citizenship Chiara Cillerai

The Italian émigré Philip Mazzei (1730-1816) is best known for his friendship with Thomas Jefferson, who was his neighbor in Virginia between 1773 and 1785. Critics have presented Mazzei’s life as either the story of a man who embraced a new American identity and was a founder of Italian immigration to the United States in the revolutionary period, or as the story of a European cosmopolitan man of letters who traveled and corresponded with his international colleagues. In truth, Philip Mazzei’s life and the writings that emerge from it epitomize both of these seemingly opposed narratives. Mazzei rooted his idea of American identity in the Enlightenment cosmopolitan ideal of universal citizenship and correspondence. For Mazzei, being an American and being a cosmopolitan were not two contradictory possibilities. His cosmopolitanism provided him with the vocabulary to describe America and Americans, while his letters embody Mazzei’s sense of his being part of a world that is both American and transatlantic. Indeed, epistolarity is the generic form that expresses Mazzei’s merging of cosmopolitan and patriotic features. His letters parallel his representation of an identity that was informed by both the colonial and international environments in which his ideas had developed. Mazzei’s burgeoning patriotism as well as his cosmopolitanism provided the ground for developing the revolutionary project for which he made himself a speaker soon after his arrival in Virginia in 1773. After being raised in Italy, a period practicing medicine in Turkey, and a stint as a London merchant, Mazzei immigrated to the British north-American colonies and became a member of a circle of colonial businessmen and intellectuals that included Benjamin Franklin. As a consequence of his involvement in the diverse    Mazzei had settled in the British capital in 1756 with the plan of moving to one of the South American Spanish or Portuguese colonies. Instead, after living in London for a decade and a half, he developed friendships and contacts with North American colonials and eventually decided to move to North instead of South America. He settled in Virginia in late 1772 where he lived for the next thirteen years, after which he returned to Europe. After a few years in Paris, Mazzei returned to Italy and settled in Pisa, where he married and had one child. His letters and other writings, although published in Virginia and Europe,

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environments that surrounded him, Mazzei’s sense of identity became based on two of the features that defined it: exchange and correspondence. In this essay, I show how these two features of the eighteenth-century American culture that Philip Mazzei represents are deeply embedded in notions of imperial commerce and cosmopolitan trans-nationalism and that they are fundamental in the formation of an early sense of identity among colonial Americans like Mazzei. Mazzei saw and sought correspondences between different realms, and he modeled his definitions of self and group identity on the domain of commerce, the republic of letters, and the imperial environment within which he lived and operated. Eventually, he translated this model to the context of revolutionary America. The relationship among these different realms was established as a correspondence, and it existed within and as an epistolary medium. The correspondences that established his status of cosmopolitan intellectual and the correspondences that made his living as a businessman intersected and became the basis of Mazzei’s representation of his sense of identity. The use of the idea of correspondence to talk about oneself, one’s career, and the relationships between the various aspects of one’s life was a peculiar feature of the eighteenth-century realm of letters. Jerome Christensen has argued that “an enterprise of ramifying correspondences” defined the career of the Enlightenment intellectual. Ultimately, all these correspondences made individuals like Mazzei, who lived in the physically stretched environment of the colonial world, develop an identity that depended on ties and allegiances defined by the mobile medium of exchange rather than the fixed notion of geographical belonging. The eighteenthcentury definition of cosmopolitanism as a state of mind that allowed individuals to become members of a community that went beyond national borders, national loyalties, and their limitations depended on various forms of correspondence to exist. Such a notion of cosmopolitanism is found in the model of epistolary correspondence (these individuals’ main means of communication) and in the epistolary genre that is its essential means of expression. Embodied in the letter and in the ideas which it carries is Mazzei’s understanding of his world and of the individuals who inhabit it.  remained forgotten until the bicentennial celebration of the American republic. The late 1970s saw the reprinting of his autobiography and history of the American Revolution, while his collected papers were made widely available for the first time in a microfilm version soon followed by a printed edition of selected works.    I refer to the definition of the eighteenth-century notion of “man of letters” that Jerome Christensen gives in his introduction to Practicing Enlightenment, 11-12.   In the 1751 edition of the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot describes the cosmopolitan as a man without a home and a citizen of the universe, and ultimately a man whose compatriots are not only his fellow nationals, but humanity in general. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers 4:297.   In this context, the notion of republic of letters is one that both opposes and depends on the imperial world. As Dena Goodman has argued in The Republic of Letters, the

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The body of Mazzei’s writings consists of personal letters, newspaper articles written in the epistolary form, and, like Benjamin Franklin’s, an autobiography that began its existence as a personal letter to a friend. Mazzei’s oeuvre highlights one of epistolarity’s distinctive features, the progressive character of text and content. Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of letters as always “half someone else’s” concisely describes how the notion of epistolary correspondence relies on the qualities of incompleteness and lack of closure and depends on the presence of two entities, writer and addressee/receiver, for its existence. And so does Mazzei’s epistolary self, as it becomes defined in its correspondence with other selves and in its dialogic relationship with his interlocutors. Characterized by the ways their formation is always in progress, emerging from the written discussion underway, the ideas that a letter conveys are often subjected to a revision by the response that the letter-writer expects from the correspondent. Mazzei’s construction of identity (his own and that of the groups to which he belongs) takes place within and re-enacts the spatial and temporal movement of the correspondences that embody it. The following essay is organized in two sections, which explore the ways the notion of correspondence and the letter form shaped Mazzei’s idea of self and the identity of the American country he imagined during the revolutionary period. I begin by analyzing a short political pamphlet written in letter form that Mazzei penned early in his career. Even before arriving in colonial America, the epistolary model provides Mazzei with a place in the British imperial environment without having to lose his adopted cosmopolitan self and without experiencing the marginalization that his position of immigrant would have otherwise generated. In a personal letter to John Page and a propagandistic article in letter form published in the Virginia Gazette, the same idea of self reappears in Mazzei’s works to describe his experience in the North American colonies and to define the identity of the emerging nation. In the late colonial American context, the representation of group identity that Mazzei had outlined in his earlier writing becomes a model for the republican identity that he suggests Americans should adopt after the separation from Britain.

republic of letters emerged in early modern France as “a polity parallel to the monarchy but entwined with it.” In its eighteenth-century manifestations, the entity to which the republic is connected has transformed into an empire and reached outside of the European cultural and geo-political environment. As was the case with the earlier counterpart, the citizens of the Enlightenment republic of letters have a dual relationship with the geo-political entities that produced the republic itself (4). Mazzei’s work and his cosmopolitan views epitomize this duality by being both a product of and a continual challenge to the discourses of empire and the imperial impulses toward homogenization and cultural uniformity.   M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 293.

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Letters of Exchange The various roles that Mazzei assumed during his long and varied career (merchant, intellectual, and diplomat) evolved along a series of correspondences articulated in epistolary exchanges and were reflected in most of his writings. Significantly, Mazzei wrote his memoir as a personal letter to his friend Giovanni Carmignani in 1811, five years before Mazzei’s death. The letter to Carmignani begins with a description of the significance of letter writing in Mazzei’s career. As he mourns the loss of some of the letters he wrote during his many travels, Mazzei tells his friend that the letters he wrote and received constitute “the story of my life”: “they would apprise you of my conduct, first in the State of Virginia as a good citizen of my adoptive country, then as its agent in Europe, then as agent of King Stanislaus of Poland, and later as chargé d’affaires of the King and Republic of Poland at the French Court.” The epistolary form defines Mazzei as a cosmopolitan intellectual. Similarly, the subject that emerges from his writing is an epistolary subject, one that develops through discursive and intellectual exchange. Mazzei’s first literary work was published in 1768, when he lived in London and worked as a merchant whose clients and acquaintances included Benjamin Franklin. The text is an anonymously printed political pamphlet taking the form of a personal letter written in Italian and accompanied by an English translation. The pamphlet shows the extent to which the dynamics of epistolary correspondence and its forms affected Mazzei’s vision of subjectivity and group identity, which will later become the foundation of his view of an American national identity. The text of A Letter on the Behaviour of the Populace on a Late Occasion, in the Procedure against a Noble Lord from a Gentleman to his Countryman abroad, despite its wordy title, is very brief, and the English translation faces the original Italian. The pretext for its topic is a debate over a cause célèbre that had kept England arguing for over a decade. The case in question is that of a woman, Elizabeth Canning, who had faked her kidnapping and, after having had her presumed kidnappers arrested and convicted, had been found guilty of perjury and deported to the North American colonies.  The case took place in 1753 and during the following decade it had been widely publicized. The prosecution of the woman   Philip Mazzei, My Life and Wanderings, 25.  In 1753, after disappearing for over a month, the maid Elizabeth Canning had returned home and accused a Gypsy woman and other accomplices of having kidnapped her and forced to prostitute herself. Despite the flimsiness of the evidence, the judge in charge of the trial, Henry Fielding, the novelist, had accepted Canning’s version of the story and convicted the accused Gypsy. The Mayor of London, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, questioned Fielding’s decision and reopened the case. The second trial ended with the acquittal of the Gypsy woman and Canning’s conviction as perjurer. Canning was sentenced to deportation to the British colonies where she lived in Connecticut until her death in 1773. The story of Elizabeth Canning is extensively analyzed in Judith Moore, The Appearance of Truth.  

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had involved a series of judges, including the novelist Henry Fielding, and had produced a variety of written responses similar to Mazzei’s. When the case had been reopened and Canning was convicted of perjury for forging the story, Sir John Barnard, the magistrate who presided over the trial, had been harshly attacked by Canning’s supporters and received a series of death threats. In his pamphlet, Mazzei takes Sir John Barnard’s side, whom he calls Lord B., and refers to the attacks against him. Throughout his pamphlet, Mazzei justifies Barnard’s ruling against the woman and explains the reasons for the English public’s reaction, which he sees as a misunderstanding of the magistrate’s final ruling against Canning. In the pamphlet’s opening, Mazzei suggests that in a previous letter his correspondent had referred to the death threats to Lord B. as a sign of a people rejecting the rule of law while embracing a mob-like behavior. Mazzei agrees with his fictional Italian correspondent regarding the need to support the woman’s conviction. However, he also admonishes his friend for his presumed attack on English customs and laws. From the beginning, it is clear that Mazzei is not as interested in the story per se as he is in discussing the relationship between the law, its administrators, and the public. The narrative strategy that Mazzei uses to deploy his argument consists of employing two correspondents: the original letter writer (whom Mazzei does not name, but, who is likely to be himself because he is described as an expatriate living in England and to whom I will refer as Mazzei in what follows) and the Italian correspondent. In this correspondence, the commerce of letters ensures the viability of the two parties involved in the exchange and, ultimately, the possibility of change and improvement for the Italian as well as the British side of the correspondence. The epistolary subject that emerges from this text is characterized by an ability to translate and reshape its features as the two parties engage in the epistolary exchange. The narrative voice changes its position as the letter unfolds and the narrator imagines the responses of his reader. The identity of this subjectivity is based on three forms of correspondence: epistolarity, intellectual exchange, and the linguistic and cultural correspondence that the translation of Italian into English establishes. Each of these forms finds a place in the literary genre of the text, in its content, and in its formal structure respectively. The 1768 letter is introduced by an editorial note in which the Englishspeaking editor explains the reasons for the publication of such a correspondence and summarizes the terms of the dispute that the pamphlet discusses. The editor    Mazzei’s views on these issues are based on Cesare Beccaria’s popular theories of just punishment, which Mazzei uses to frame his judgment of the woman’s conviction and the English public response. Of Crime and Punishment was originally published in 1764 and translated into a number of different languages, including English, in the following two years.    It is impossible to know if Mazzei or the publisher wrote the introduction. In the copy of the pamphlet held at the Library of Congress among Jefferson’s papers, the introduction is the only part of the text that is only in English, which may be taken as a sign

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introduces the formal relevance of the notion of correspondence through a reference to linguistic translation as a means to compare the opinions of two countries: As there can hardly be a matter of greater utility to the public of any nation, than its comparing with its own the opinion of other countries, especially on any points relative to its internal administration of justice; the following letter, on a topic, which has taken up so much of the public attention, from a very ingenious gentleman, to a countryman of his, appeared to me so well meant, so dispassionate, so full of candor, and just reasonings, that I imagined the publication of it could not but meet with a favourable reception.10

The passage shows that the function of the pamphlet is to establish a correspondence of ideas on a topic that affects both writer and reader. The parties involved communicate with each other through linguistic and cultural translation. The epistolary terms that inform the exchange between writer and correspondent become a metaphor for the pamphlet’s claim: a country’s internal structure can be transformed only by “comparing with its own the opinion of other countries.” The author addresses the Italian correspondent, who embodies the original audience of the letter, while the editor, who is in charge of the English translation, addresses the extra-textual audience in England. The published work, in its bilingual and epistolary form, is imagined as capable of bringing the two groups together. The body of the letter develops through a series of comparisons that project various images against each other. The letter opens with a reference to a previous exchange in which the Italian correspondent had criticized the form and the use of the British laws, accusing them of protecting the masses at the disadvantage of the nobility. Mazzei reprimands his Italian friend for adhering to this position. Mazzei argues that England has a system of laws that protects everybody and entitles everybody to express their judgment, and, through the exercise of such laws, maintains people’s freedom. His friend’s attitude toward common people, Mazzei says, is mistaken and the reflection of an Italian elitist attitude towards justice in general. By demanding the punishment of a representative of the highest social ranks, the British people showed their confidence in their nation’s legal system. So Mazzei responds:

of a different authorship from that of the text and its translation. The title as well as the body of the text are both in English and Italian, with the English translation facing the Italian on the opposite page. Writing pamphlets in epistolary form and publishing them with a note that explained the editorial choice and the history behind the text were common practices of the time. What is most interesting in the use of such a convention in this pamphlet is the conflation it makes between the notions of translation and epistolary correspondence, which Mazzei then places at the basis of his argument about identity formation in the letter that follows. 10   Philip Mazzei, Philip Mazzei: Selected Writings and Correspondence I, 24.

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Don’t you think that it must be a check to many villains, to be sure that at the cry of a child [,] persons of all ranks and conditions would fall upon them? You cannot deny, that the hope of an escape, or pardon, does encourage crimes. You ought then to applaud, and admire that unprejudiced general spirit of a nation, by which everyone thinks himself obliged to pursue a delinquent, even though he were his friend the minute before he committed the crime. Better turn your reproaches against that maxim, which, in our earliest years, we imbibe in our own country, that it is a shame, and an infamy, to assist the officers of justice, and to do their office in putting an offender into the hands of the law.11

In this passage Mazzei praises the actions of the British people who opposed the magistrate’s decision to convict Canning. In doing so, Londoners showed confidence in their legal system. Such a system, Mazzei explains, is there to protect citizens and be “a check to many villains” (26). Those who wanted the magistrate to be prosecuted after convicting Canning did so because they thought he had abused the system. A people’s confidence in their law system is something to be proud of. The Italian reader who thinks that the episode signifies a flaw in the British laws looks not at the laws from the right cultural standpoint, but in fact, Mazzei continues in the final part of the passage, reproduces a pattern that characterizes attitudes of his own country towards the law. The change in pronoun from “you” to “we” in the last sentence of the passage is very important and indicates a new level of involvement on Mazzei’s part. It illustrates the peculiar identity that Mazzei takes on as a letter writer and as the epistolary subject. This identity is fluid and can be adapted to changing rhetorical circumstances. The subject of the letter acquires the features of the cosmopolitan man of letters whose position enables him to communicate both inter- and intra-culturally. In order to understand what happened and provide his friend with the tools for reading and interpreting a different cultural act, Mazzei changes the position of the narrative voice. Rather than talking of you versus them or me, he now refers to his friend’s customs, as “ours.” It is a “maxim” that “we imbibe in our own country,” which the final lines of the passage attack. Mazzei includes himself among those Italians who had previously misjudged other people’s customs by applying the wrong interpretive standards and makes of his experience the example to follow. This final switch of pronouns suggests that, before comparing his own norms to the British, Mazzei himself was guilty of misreading and misinterpreting. Once he was able to understand both contexts and move his terms of comparison from one context to the other, his vision expanded. This narrative voice has now acquired a compound identity, an identity that has been created through translation from Italian to English and from English to Italian again. The act of learning a new language and a new interpretive code produces the change and supplies audiences with the method for a better understanding of their reading. The letter writer’s experience of being in and outside both Italian   Mazzei, Philip Mazzei, 26.

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and English cultural environments makes him the interpreter of the systems of laws that he presents. Mazzei is the cosmopolitan judge and, as he takes back his original Italian identity by switching pronouns, he sides with the judged subject of his letter. When Mazzei conflates the two roles of judge and judged, he places the narrative subject inside and outside both positions. The duality of such an identity and his ability to adopt either one of its features make Mazzei the ideal translator of the terms employed in the discussion. Textual interpretation and the ability to do it correctly are essential to the functioning of a legal system, and the subjectivity that Mazzei has begun to portray is the most apt to cover such a role. Its fluid identity and its ability to shift from one rhetorical paradigm to another enable it to generate the model interpreter that Mazzei is and wants his reader to become.

Transatlantic Letters Mazzei’s ability to generate his identity through letters’ mobility and pliability enables him to eventually become an American. The letter form and the ideas of correspondence as cultural and linguistic translation and of correspondence as universal communication among individuals are essential features of Mazzei’s American identity as well. The identity of the new nation that emerges from works that Mazzei composed after he moved to Virginia and became involved with the revolutionary movement is then based on features that derive directly from the notion of correspondence. These features include open-endedness, inclusiveness, a comparative nature, and the power to establish universal channels of communication. According to the terms that he had set up in A Letter on the Behaviour of the Populace, Mazzei conceived of identity formation as a process that happened in letters. Similarly, his American identity is produced in letters and, as a consequence, it becomes a process that can happen anywhere. Significantly, Mazzei begins to represent himself as an American in a personal letter while he travels between England and Italy to buy some of the products he wants to sell in order to support himself in the colonies. In a letter that he writes to his agent in Virginia, Mazzei projects an already-shaped American identity: I have been all this while in expectation of an agreement with Capt. Watts to carry us to Virginia, and to send him back here with a cargo of wheat. This having failed I am upon an uncertainty as to the time of my getting off. … but if all misfortune should pursue me and prevent me [from] coming to our blessed Land as soon as I desire, I will take the opportunity of the first fishship, which will be about the latter end of October, and in the meantime bear with patience this exile from my dear Country, mine by choise, not by chance.12 12

 Ibid., 46.

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In Mazzei’s account, the national is conceived as a transnational phenomenon that takes place away from the geographical limits of a country. In fact, not only does Mazzei employ a Lockean terminology to assert his power of decision as the fundamental feature of his own identity, but he also invalidates the contemporary assumption that national characters are pre-determined.13 Travel and geographical mobility are necessary conditions to the formation of identity. The sale of the wheat, however, is the other essential factor involved in the process. Such a sale will repay Mazzei’s expenses. Mazzei exhorts his correspondent to “engage all your best friends in buying all the wheat you can, and let it be heavy and clean at least as the Philadelphia [wheat] is.”14 For the exercise of free choice, identity change is dependent on commercial exchange as well. The figure of the cosmopolitan subject who can be a citizen of each and every country in which he chooses to live and, at the same time, can be a citizen of the whole world depends on intellectual and commercial exchanges. After Mazzei’s arrival in Virginia, the notions of correspondence and its by-product, cultural translation, re-emerge as fundamental to the description he provides of how Americans can claim a unique, and yet fluid, national character. In the propagandistic works written and published at the onset of the war of independence, Mazzei suggests that, by creating a cosmopolitan subjectivity similar to that of the author of the letter he had written while he lived in London, Americans will be able to abandon their colonial identity and become representatives of a new national character. The figure of the letter writer and the epistolary genre are essential to this process. We find a first example of Mazzei’s sense of how national subjects are written in letters in a personal letter that Mazzei addressed to John Page in June 1776. In the letter, Mazzei requests his friend’s help with the translation of an article that he plans to submit to the Virginia Gazette. The letter expresses Mazzei’s fear that his written English might not be good enough for the press. Mazzei explains that Page’s translation skills would help him better understand his own ideas and improve the original writing: I have had nobody to help me to digest one single idea. I would take it as a great favor from you, Sir, and from any of the Gentlemen, if I was to see upon the News-Papers, my sentiments not only put in good English, but even corrected and improved. Several things, I am confident, will be better out, & several others could be added with great propriety. My composition is italian with english

 The contemporary leading theorist on the topic was Montesquieu whose work, The Spirit of the Law, had led the movement in favor of a deterministic idea of national character. Antonello Gerbi’s The Dispute of the New World still provides one of the best historical analyses of eighteenth-century debates over the relationship between climate and national characters. 14   Mazzei, Philip Mazzei, 46. 13

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words. You know that what is elegance in one language is sometimes nonsense in another, &c. &c.15

In acknowledging his linguistic limitations and asking for help from a native speaker of the English language, Mazzei also proposes a definition of translation that goes beyond the linguistic level. There is a parallel, in fact, between the request Mazzei makes to Page and the function he attributed to translation in the epistolary pamphlet analyzed earlier. Mazzei describes to Page that he needs the translation in order to “digest” his ideas and be able to establish a conversation with other intellectuals. “I would take it as a great favour,” he writes, “if I was to see upon the News-Papers, my sentiments, not only put in good [E]nglish, but even corrected and improved.”16 Mazzei’s ideas, his words suggest, will be fully developed only after having been processed through the filter of a language different from the one of their original articulation. Ideas will be exchanged during this conversation and the text will undergo a linguistic and a cultural development. The notion of translation at work in this passage resembles the epistolary exchange between Mazzei and Page that makes it materially possible: it fosters dialogue, develops new ideas, and enriches perspectives. The translator’s task is to create a linguistic, cultural, and geographical relationship without breaking down national differences. In fact, the permanence of such differences becomes essential to the idea of translation that emerges from Mazzei’s text.17 Translation then does not replace the “Italianness” in Mazzei’s composition, but it articulates and refines it. His Italian—or perhaps one should simply say “other” identity—becomes displaced within a new context and acquires new characteristics. In translation, Mazzei’s composition would acquire the propriety and the “elegance” that it lacked in its original Italian utterance. Page’s translation would perform a revisionary transformation and provide a discursive as well as a cultural context for Mazzei’s ideas to mature in a process that parallels the one in the bilingual letter he wrote thirteen years earlier. Mazzei’s representation of translation as an instrument to establish a cultural correspondence between nations implies that the identity given him by his native cultural and linguistic background is twofold. Such an identity can be both a frame of reference and a potential constraint. It stops being a frame of reference and becomes a limitation if it is not placed in a dialogue with other forms of identity. In addition, similar to what the shift in personal pronouns had accomplished in A Letter on the Behaviour of the Populace, the translation of Mazzei’s words will also produce a subject in the narrative that can be both within and outside 15

 Ibid., 116.  Ibid. 17  I use the term translation in a loose sense of transference from one place to another or one context to another. Translation itself initiates a process by which the literal translation of words introduces cultural characteristic and habits into a new realm and allows for exchange and transformation. 16

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the narrative itself. The article that Mazzei sent to Page was published as “Observations of a Citizen of the World in answer to an American” in the August 24, 1776 issue of the Virginia Gazette. The piece exemplifies how the process of national identification derives from the power of individuals to both identify and separate themselves from what defines the national itself. In its original version in the Virginia Gazette, the essay is presented as the translation of an anonymous letter.18 Like its predecessor, this essay is written as a familiar letter and introduced to the public by an editorial note that summarizes the circumstances surrounding its writing and publication.19 The prefatory note that opens the article illustrates how the idea of epistolary correspondence has both a formal and a thematic relevance in the article that follows and in the culture in which this type of text circulated. In the note, the editor explains that the representation of the American situation in the following article had been originally written for a European audience, but, given that its subject was recognizably a representation of Americans, it needs to be brought back to an American audience. In this passage, Mazzei outlines a strategy of reflection that becomes the rationale through which he envisions a new American identity: The following is a copy of a letter sent the other side the Atlantic [Europe] in January last. Although it appears to contain a number of observations for the use of an american, we believe it was written with the only intent of giving a true account of the situation of things on this continent, to some people in power, who might be induced to interfere, and form their deliberations accordingly; and we have thought proper to publish it, in order that our customers may have an opportunity to see the sentiments of every member of the community, not only in respect to the present doings, but even to what may probably be expected.20

By observing themselves represented in the article, Americans can reflect upon themselves as a nation. The editorial note becomes a mirror for the reader and it originates a new level of correspondence. The note in fact implies that bringing back to America a representation of the American situation originally written for a transatlantic audience will provide a more objective picture. Americans will then be able to observe themselves at a distance, which everyday experience with 18

  Years later in his memoir, Mazzei reveals how the article’s epistolarity was always a fiction when he describes how he used the piece as a diplomatic tool in 1781 when, as an agent for Virginia in Europe, he had tried to raise funds for the state with the French foreign minister Count De Vergennes. 19  An extensive analysis of eighteenth-century conventions and practices in newspaper writing can be found in Jeffery Smiths, Printers and Press Freedom. Verner W. Crane’s introduction to Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758-1775 is also useful to understand the variety of standardized persona writers used when writing for the eighteenth-century American press. 20   Mazzei, Philip Mazzei, 120.

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the revolution and its complexities does not allow. According to the introductory note, then, Mazzei’s letter functions backward. It gains efficacy by being delivered first to a transatlantic audience and then re-routed to the American context. As a consequence, the transatlantic context in which the article/letter circulates legitimizes the argument that Mazzei wants to make in it. Both the American community and the community across the Atlantic should see the same picture.21 Such a purpose can be achieved only by exchanging the text back and forth. The main characteristics of Mazzei’s role of “citizen of the world,” as he is identified in the article’s title, unfolds as the letter progresses. As the writer of the letter, Mazzei functions as the middleman in charge of the most important part of the exchange—namely, the writing, translating, and transmitting of a representation of America for insiders and outsiders as well. The result of this process is the creation of a new version of community that is original in the Enlightenment sense of being the result of an ingenious reproduction.22 As the author of the representation of America in the article, Mazzei also produces the language that Americans should use to represent themselves. The editor, in fact, explains that the letter will provide information “not only in respect to the present doings, but even to what may probably be expected.”23 The language that Americans need to master could be defined as a discursive fluency in diplomatic politics.24 This language would free them from the national constraint that their 21

  The American audience that Mazzei describes in the introductory letter to the reader has the same features that William Dowling has attributed to the “epistolary audience” in the context of the eighteenth-century verse epistle in The Epistolary Moment. This is an audience, Dowling explains, “at one remove … as overhearing or listening in on the epistolary exchange between letter-writer and addressee.” This characteristic of the verse epistle, Dowling contends, derives from the genre’s participation in contemporary ideological debates. The poem, he explains, is seen as a symbolic act with the potential to intervene in the domain of the real. At the same time, Dowling continues, the position of this audience is profoundly ambivalent. It is caught between the demands of a traditional “organic” society and those of the new money or market society that is gaining more and more ground (11-12). It seems to me Dowling’s idea could be extended to the larger genre of eighteenth-century epistolarity, in particular to its use in early American newspaper writing as a means of revolutionary propaganda. Mazzei’s letter takes the shape of an intervention in the identity crisis that the secession from England has generated and, through it, he attempts to provide his public with an alternative form of self-representation. 22  Jerome Christensen clearly describes the connection for the Enlightenment men of letters between the notion of originality and those of reflection, duplication, and transformation in Practicing Enlightenment, particularly in the “Introduction” and ch. 1. 23   Mazzei, Philip Mazzei, 119. 24   At the same time that Mazzei is promoting an egalitarian fluency, the process he describes is one of indoctrination that he directs and stages from the beginning of his essay. This view, however, is not at odds with Mazzei’s perception of the cosmopolitan letterwriter that he embodies. Traditional cosmopolitan literary figures and personas, such as Thomas More’s Raphael Hythloday in Utopia and Montesquieu’s narrators in The Persian

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historical identification with England had created and, at the same time, it would define them as a nation that could speak for itself. When the editorial note explains that the retranslating of the letter into English will provide a democratization of opinion by presenting the audience with “the sentiments of every member of the community,” (120) we see a reflection of what Mazzei had proposed Page’s role to be in the work of translating the original material. The exchange that the prefatory note suggests then becomes the foundation of a dialogue between the European and the American audience that is rearticulated within the body of the letter that follows it. As Mazzei discusses the form of cultural and epistolary correspondence that Americans should develop and with which they should exchange cultural representations with Europe, he also develops a vision of American identity established upon a process of reflection and revision. The letter begins with a series of conventional images. The colonial relationship to England is shaped in terms of master/servant. Slavery describes the colonists’ state of subjugation. And familial imagery shows how the British political deceit has violated the intimate relationship between the two countries and has led the colonists to rebel. Mazzei then claims that France and Spain’s non-intervention policy in the conflict between England and the North-American colonies has been a positive one. Contrary to the prevailing view, these two powers’ immediate intervention on the American side would not have helped the colonists’ cause. Instead, Mazzei suggests, the British would have been immediately alerted to the danger of such an alliance and would have sought a peaceful reconciliation, with the effect of forestalling the American Revolution: If those powers [France and Spain] had made the least movement, the British Ministry, as soon as they had received the second and last petition from the General Congress, would have become advocates for the colonies; they would immediately have called the Parliament, would have declared that things had been strangely misrepresented, and badly understood by both parties; and that modest Senate, at the first hint from their Master, and without any further examination, would undoubtedly have declared that this was even the case; terms of reconciliation would have been proposed, and you [Americans] would eagerly have embraced them, because the wounds were not as yet so deep as to have eradicated from your hearts that sympathetic affection which arose from a blind veneration for the land that gave birth to your ancestors, and was nourished by the similarity of customs, language, and religion, and by a continual and almost exclusive correspondence.25

With his discussion of reconciliation, Mazzei introduces the images of misreading and misinterpreting that lay at the basis of his project for constructing a new identity Letters, among others, are placed in a similar textual position of superiority and overarching power of choice and decision. 25   Mazzei, Philip Mazzei, 120.

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for Americans. The reference to the ideas of representation and understanding as the tools with which England exercises its power over the colonies implies that England itself has manufactured a representation of America. The combination of the ideas of representation and deceit enables Mazzei to explain that the reconciliation would take place through rhetoric, as a rhetorical construction rather than a historical reality.26 The English would willingly manipulate the American colonists by appealing to an American identity dependent on Britain’s identity that they have constructed in language. When Mazzei states that “terms of reconciliation would have been proposed, and you [Americans] would eagerly have embraced them,” his focus shifts from governmental politics to the politics of interpretation. Within this context, political acts are made to depend on interpretive acts. Besides the ties of blood and ancestry, the colonists have remained attached to England because of a “continual and almost exclusive correspondence.”27 Thus, Mazzei implies, national identification has two components: Americans have identified with England because of their descent; and England, corresponding with them, has established the cultural and political ties that allowed the colonial system to exist. The two components are indeed separate, but, as the language of this passage suggests, the British have used a series of corresponding activities within the discursive realm which have had the effect of preventing the colonists from seeing the distinction and interpreting the concept of national identity properly. That is, this strategy has made Americans identify with England. Mazzei’s next step is to appropriate this strategy, produce a new correspondence, and provide Americans with new terms of identification. In the last sentence of the passage Mazzei explains that “Americans would eagerly have embraced” England’s terms of reconciliation because of the ancestral tie with it. This tie, he continues, “was nourished by the similarity of customs, language, and religion, and by a continual and almost exclusive correspondence.”28 The term “nourished” in this final sentence evokes the image of mother/child relationship and the intimacy that such a relationship implies. Mazzei explains that with its correspondence England has blurred the difference between the personal realm (the original familial and cultural ties with colonial America) and the political realm (England’s sovereignty over the colonies). This representation, Mazzei continues in his letter, through a number of “false and unexampled

 In Voicing America, Christopher Looby makes a similar claim regarding Benjamin Franklin’s understanding of the American revolution. In Looby’s view, Franklin’s contribution to the process that brought the revolution about took place at the communicative level. Each intervention that Franklin made, through letters, political and journalistic writings, etc., contributed to the beginning and continuation of such a process (67-78). 27   Mazzei, Philip Mazzei, 120. 28  Ibid. 26

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impudent relations” has “deluded” (120) the world and established the wrong image of Americans as the officially accepted European one.29 Both Mazzei’s recourse to the metaphor of correspondence to describe the identification of the American colonists with England and his recourse to the epistolary mode to write his article reveal how he manipulates this expressive form to draw a new national model. The conceptual conjunction between the notion of literary correspondence and that of national identity is made formally possible by a feature of the genre that Mazzei adopts to express it. In fact, a distinguishing characteristic of epistolarity is that, when used outside the private realm of personal correspondence, it conflates the two categories of the private and the public. Mazzei resorts to the intimacy associated with the private letter to establish a sympathetic correspondence with his reading public. He exploits the genre’s features in order to create a literary document with which his audience can establish an intimate connection—indeed a connection of the same type that England had nourished with America during colonial times. A document in the form of a letter creates a connection between its writer and reader that allows the transmission of information to take place in a manner similar to the one Mazzei produced with his use of the verb “nourished.” Yet, as a newspaper article, the letter has the public visibility that political propaganda requires. Mazzei’s decision to write the article as a personal letter shows how he assumes, as writer and translator, a role reminiscent of the one he assigned to the British. Through the private channel of the personal letter, he provides his audience with a new language to represent themselves publicly, thus combining the private features of the familiar letter with those of the newspaper that publishes it. The transformation that Mazzei imagines his American readers undertaking, once they have learned how to represent themselves, will enable them to assume the role of “citizens of the world” that he himself had assumed for writing the essay. This type of self-representation provides the cosmopolitan subjectivity with the knowledge necessary to establish a correspondence between different texts and, at the same time, to generate new ones. Americans, like Mazzei, are now cosmopolitan nationals, in that they have the double perspective that the editor in the preface had hoped the publication of the letter could help his readership to acquire. Mazzei employed this letter five years after its publication in a diplomatic effort to convince the French foreign minister Count de Vergennes to promote financial support for the impoverished colony. In the letter that accompanied the published document, Mazzei describes the history of the essay, illustrating the ambassadorial and cosmopolitan role that he had assigned to himself when he first wrote it:

29   The word “relations” is an Italicism for “accounts.” Because of the word’s semantic roots, it also seems an appropriate thematic choice on his part.

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In the paper in question, I pretended I was answering an American and gave an idea of the state of affairs in America then, and of what I thought the House of Bourbon ought to do. When my friends learned that the first copy had fallen into enemy hands, they thought it advisable to have a translation published in the gazette, for they were convinced it would make a favorable impression on the people at a time when the opposition tried as hard as it could to fill them with prejudices. What I can assure Your Excellency is that I have very much at heart the honor and prosperity of France and America both by inclination and sense of duty; that I speak as I think; and that in matters concerning America and the character of Americans I feel better qualified to judge than the Americans themselves, for I see without spectacles and weigh on the scale of comparison, which is not likely to be the case, from what I have been able to observe, with someone who was born and lived almost all his life in America.30

Here Mazzei’s sense of identity is determined by the textual space that contains it. What he describes as a posture for the article, however, is also the type of identity he assumes in this letter. In fact, the “I” who addresses Americans and suggests that they take off their spectacles and look at what England has done to them from a different point of view makes deception—manifested in his exploitation of the fictive role of “Citizen of the world”—the means by which Americans can find their new identity. With this new representation, Americans too will be able to see themselves “without spectacles” and weigh “their position on the scale of comparison.”31 Like Mazzei, his readers will have assumed a cosmopolitan viewpoint and assumed the identity that best fits the context. Instead of arguing for a separation of the political and the personal realms that the British have merged with their “almost exclusive correspondence,” Mazzei has actually reproduced this exclusive correspondence in his essay. His use of the epistolary form and his establishment of a transatlantic context as the background for it perform the same function that the British use of sympathetic affection and correspondence had had in the past. A new representation of America written in letters, and as letters open to renewal by correspondence, is then the alternative model of identity that Mazzei offers his American audience. Hybridity, exchange, and flexibility, features that characterize epistolarity as well as Mazzei’s cosmopolitanism, become distinguishing features of this identity. Recent scholarship on the role of correspondence in the colonial period has begun to highlight its historical, sociological, and literary roles. Eve Tavor Bannet, for example, suggests that we rethink the process of early national formation by considering epistolary writing’s fundamental place in the process. Focusing on the role of letter manuals as representative of the genre in its varied manifestations, Bannet claims that epistolary writings “contributed to forging the nation and the   Mazzei, Philip Mazzei, 290-91.  Ibid., 119.

30 31

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first British empire as much as improved roads and transportation, the institution of the post office and of regular shipping routes, the periodical press, and national days of celebration and commemoration.”32 Philip Mazzei’s writings provide an example of the role that Bannet attributes to letter writing in the shaping of an identity for the communities that are part of the British empire and its aftermaths. Additionally, Mazzei’s work shows how a conception of early America founded on the language of correspondence and epistolary dialogue lacks the exclusive features usually associated with the idea of a national community. Mazzei’s imagined American community is in fact what Benedict Anderson has argued a nation is not, namely, an entity “coterminous with mankind,” a cosmopolitan community that exists because of transgressing rules that make community insular and exclusive.33 Mazzei’s work and its dependence on epistolarity demonstrate that in late colonial cultural and geographical contexts, “central” and “peripheral” were two relative and contingent concepts. By identifying his community through the dynamic relationship between the local milieus and the larger arenas of the British and European metropolises, Mazzei, like many others of his contemporaries, was ultimately able to imagine the future of the American nation as more than simply nationalistic in nature.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Bakhtin, M.M., The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006). Beccaria, Cesare, An essay on crimes and punishments, translated from the Italian; with a commentary, attributed to Mons. de Voltaire, translated from the French (London: Printed for E. Newbery, 1785). Christensen, Jerome, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Crane, Verner W., Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758-1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950). de Secondat, Charles, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (New York: Prometheus Books, 2002). ——, Persian Letters, trans. and ed. C.J. Betts (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973).  Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters, x.   Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5.

32 33

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Diderot, Denis, et al., Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris: Chez Briasson, David, Le Breton, Durand, 1751-65). Dowling, William C., The Epistolary Moment: the Poetics of the EighteenthCentury Verse Epistle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Gerbi, Antonello, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 17501900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). Goodman, Dena, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Looby, Christopher, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Mazzei, Philip, Philip Mazzei: My Life and Wanderings, trans. S. Eugene Scalia, ed. Margherita Marchione (Morristown, NJ: American Institute of Italian Studies, 1980). ——, Philip Mazzei: the Comprehensive Microform Edition of His Papers, 17301816 (Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publication, 1982). ——, Philip Mazzei: Selected Writings and Correspondence, ed. Marcherita Marchione (Prato, Italy: Cassa di Risparmi e Depositi di Prato, 1983). Moore, Judith, The Appearance of Truth: The Story of Elizabeth Canning and Eighteenth-Century Narrative (Newark, MD: University of Delaware Press, 1994). More, Thomas, Sir, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Smiths, Jeffery, Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Chapter Two

Letters on the Use of Letters in Narratives: Catharine Macaulay, Susannah Rowson, and the Warren-Adams Correspondence Eve Tavor Bannet

The virulent correspondence between Mercy Otis Warren and John Adams of 1807 in which Adams critiqued and Warren defended her History of the Rise and Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) was published by Charles Francis Adams at the end of the nineteenth century to vindicate his grandfather for posterity. It has had the opposite effect. Seen as reflecting poorly both on Adams’s character and on the reliability of Warren’s version of events, it is now generally treated as a rather unpleasant footnote to the history of a history. But setting aside the nastiness and vituperation, this correspondence contains an enlightening and wide ranging argument about the proper use of letters in narrative histories, which has not been explored. This argument becomes fully intelligible when the correspondents’ many implicit and explicit allusions to Catharine Macaulay’s History of England from James I are recovered and understood, for it was on her corpus, so to speak, that each of the combatants took their stand. While offering rare contemporary readings of both celebrated “female historians,” Warren and Adams’s correspondence reminds us of much that we have forgotten about eighteenth-century letters. Their differences about the apparently trivial question of whether letters should be reproduced in or excluded from narrative histories also sheds light on what was at stake in contests between letters and narrative that played out while historical writing was still hovering on the cusp between “antiquarianism” and the great conjectural neoclassical master-narratives, and the novel was moving from its predominantly epistolary to its predominantly narrative form.

 Charles F. Adams (ed.), Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren.   For two fairly recent examples, see Joseph Ellis, Passionate Sage, 72, 60 and Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma, 153. For a different view, see John Ferling, Setting the World Ablaze.   Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History and The Battle of the Books; David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment; Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History 

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In many ways, this is the same transition. Like epistolary novelists who left their characters to represent events and themselves through their own letters, antiquarians offered their readers direct access to documents in which historical actors represented their acts and times. These documents often took the form of letters because these were the primary medium of written self-representation and of political, commercial, legal, and social action both in Britain and across the Atlantic world. The classically educated recognized, as we do again since Hayden White, that fictional and historical narratives both used the same exemplary, causal plots, the same methods of characterization, the same notions of “poetic” or “historical” justice, and the same representational devices. This is why historical and fictional narratives were both called “histories,” and why David Hume observed in his Treatise of Human Nature that the real difference between “true” and “fictional” history lay in readers’ heads: we sit down to read the same story differently if we believe it historically true or if we think we are reading fiction. The argument between Warren and Adams about different possible relations between the letters of historical actors and historical narratives therefore also has analogues in literary texts. I will illustrate some, by way of conclusion, from two of Susanna Rowson’s transatlantic novels: Charlotte Temple and Reuben and Rachel.

The Stakes Both Adams’s attack and Warren’s defense of her use of letters in her historical narrative turn on Adams’s recollection that Warren’s History of the American Revolution was not only modeled on Catharine Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James I, but designed as its continuation. Macaulay’s History had played a significant role in the American Revolution through its influence on figures as various as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Josiah Quincy, Benjamin Rush, Richard Henry Lee and Adams himself. Macaulay met many of the American patriots when they were in London through her booksellers, the Dillys, and corresponded with many others, including Adams and Warren. During the 1780s, when she traveled to America to take a look at the new Republic, she stayed with the Warrens and the Washingtons, and Abigail Adams reports that she was disappointed that America was not more republican. Relying on Warren’s familiarity with Macaulay, then, Adams used his reading of Macaulay’s History to critique and correct the narrative that embodied Warren’s understanding of her friend’s narrative and methods.

and English Culture; Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 17901825.    Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago, ch. 9. Also Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History and Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren.

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In Mercy Otis Warren’s reading, Macaulay was not what we now argue she represented to contemporaries: the celebrated historian of radical republican ideas; the champion of the British Old Whig opposition in which her brother, John Sawbridge, played a leading role; the spokesperson for British supporters of Revolutionary America. For Warren, Macaulay was the historian of failed revolutions. I think Warren had this right. For in recounting the history of the English Civil War and of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Macaulay’s narrative construes every successive attempt by Parliament to preserve and restore the peoples’ liberties against the arbitrary power of tyrannical rulers as having failed or fallen short—not because it proved impossible to rid Britain successively of Charles I, of Cromwell, of the restored Stuarts and of the House of Orange—but because each time, at the very moment of success, the patriot opposition split between the few who remained true to democratic and republican principle and the many whose personal ambitions and private interests led them back to absolutism in some form. Warren’s History emplotted the American Revolution as a further transatlantic episode in Macaulay’s serial plot. Warren identified “the principles of the [American] Revolution” with “the principles of the Saxon ancestry of the British Empire” as defended by her brother, James Otis, John Dickinson and Josiah Quincey, and by Algernon Sydney, John Milton and James Harrington before that; and her narrative argues that these principles were betrayed, almost as soon as American patriots succeeded in getting rid of the British, by a “struggle between monarchists and republicans” that put “monarchists” like George Washington and John Adams in the Presidency. Recognizing that in Britain by the middle of the eighteenth century, conflicts “once expressed in direct, brutal and bloody confrontations” were giving way to “struggles in which the weapons and stakes are representations” of leaders, factions, ideologies and groups, Macaulay had emphasized that the task of the historian was to “do justice to the memory of our Illustrious ancestors.” The battle for republican liberty was, she argued, a battle for the national memory against “Memoirs of past time,” like Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’s, whose “fraud and sophistry” consisted of “deceiving” the people by teaching them to venerate kings, ministers, courtiers and other wicked defenders of arbitrary power and to “regard the champions of liberty as disturbers of the peace.” Macaulay’s language echoed the opening paragraph of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil  J.G.A. Pocock, “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian;” John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots. For a different view, see Barbara Schnorrenberg, “An Opportunity Missed.”    Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise and Progress and Termination of the American Revolution II, 629-30.   Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, 23.    Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover I, ix. See also David Cressy, “National Memory in the Early Modern Period.”    Macaulay I, xv. 

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Wars in England, which had been written to ensure “that posterity may not be deceived” and that “the memory of those few” who had remained loyal to the Stuarts during Britain’s Civil War “may not lose the recompense for their virtue.” For she conceived of the battle for Republican liberty as a battle for the memory of the people against false and self-serving representations of the characters and conduct of political actors. As John Adams put it in a letter he wrote to Macaulay in 1770, her History of England was “calculated to strip off the gilding and false luster of worthless princes and nobles and bestow the reward of virtue, praise, upon the generous and worthy only.”10 Adams correctly read Warren’s History as doing the same thing, at a moment in the early Republic when, according to Robert Ferguson, the “hagiography” of Founding Fathers as “transcendent individuals” was beginning to be used to “create an instantaneous set of traditions, an imaginary national landscape for controlling space and understanding of the world.”11 In the epistolary argument between them in 1807 regarding what Warren’s narrative “remembered” about Adams, therefore, what was at issue for both Adams and Warren was whose virtues and traditions, and which founding fathers would represent them in the nation’s imaginary. Warren’s narrative emplotment helped to construct and substantiate the story that would, despite John and Charles Francis Adams’s best efforts, become dominant in the national memory: the story according to which the principles of the American Revolution and the flourishing path of America’s new, uniquely open society, flowed through Jefferson not Adams. The difference between Macaulay’s and Warren’s histories lay in their use of letters. Warren, Adams and Macaulay, in common with most eighteenthcentury people, shared two fundamental assumptions about letters which gave this difference its significance. They shared the conviction that, as Warren put it, “nothing depictures the characters, the sentiments, and feelings of men more strongly than their private letters at the time;” or, as Mr. Spectator had said, that “Men are better known by what can be observed by a Perusal of their private Letters than any other way.”12 They also shared the conviction that letters are nothing but “silent speech” or written addresses to others, preserved in durable written form so that the “discourse of the absent” could again be made present by reading it (preferably aloud with all the intonations of speech) at some other time and place. Regardless of when and where they were written, then, letters were thought to have durable performative, illocutionary and even perlocutionary force, and to carry their “depicture” of the character, sentiments, and feelings of their authors across the chasms of time and space. In Michel de Certeau’s terms, letters are “the voice of the Other” whose return “speaks for itself, to whatever present, in whatever time or place.” During the second half of the eighteenth   Quoted in Lucy Martin Donelly, “The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay,”193.  Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820, 32. For the role of history in building the new nation, see Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, ch. 3. 12   Warren, II, 388; The Spectator, no. 27. 10 11

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century Kames used his post-Lockean, semiological view of language to extend this long-standing property of letters to true and fictional narratives. Through verbal and written signs, Kames argued, “ideal presence supplies the want of real presence” so that “in idea we perceive persons acting and suffering precisely as in an original survey.”13 This is why, in Adams and Warren’s epistolary argument of 1807, the truth and veracity of Warren’s historical narrative did not turn on the narrative’s correspondence to a past reality from which it had been separated by some originary rupture. That would be a nineteenth century and indeed postmodern formulation of the problem, since both realists and anti-realists locate the truth of a narrative in its correspondence to some “mute” or “lost” original reality.14 For Warren and Adams, by contrast, as long as letters were not lost, the past was not mute. Epistolary and narrative texts were equally performative, equally present at the moment of reading, regardless of when each had actually been written. The question of historical truth and veracity therefore turned for them on how letters in which historical actors “depictured” their own character, sentiments and acts in their own voice, figured in, were integrated into, omitted from, or silenced by the narrative. The issue was whether, by silencing and supplanting their epistolary self-representations, the historian’s narrative put historical actors in what Lacan called the position of the dead; and whether the truth about the past should be represented by the historian’s narrative, by the historical actors’ own letters and words or, as in Macaulay, by a combination of the two. Macaulay had borrowed and adapted the practice of “glutting” her history with the letters and speeches of historical actors because she argued that it was in the archivist’s “voluminous collections in which can only be found a faithful representation of the important transactions of past ages.”15 Narratives were, she said, intrinsically partial, biased and deceptive. This is why, though she drew character sketches of the principal historical actors, she mostly used narrative to structure the debates between successive kings and parliament, and to frame and comment upon the extensive transcriptions of the historical actors’ own letters and addresses that she provided. Macaulay emphasized that “prolax quotation” of the actors’ own letters and addresses in the text and the notes was a key and “transgressive” difference between her history and that of neoclassical historians like David Hume, whose History of England she contested. She identified the method of neoclassical historians and historiographers such as Rapin de Thoyras, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke and David Hume—who pronounced it “tedious” for readers to have to read voluminous letters and speeches from the past, and replaced them with their own representations of characters and events (to the point of putting their own words in the mouths of historical actors)—with the   Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 70.   See Richard Terdiman, Modernity and the Memory Crisis 3, 22; Lionel Grossman, Between History and Literature, 259; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, 47; Jacques le Goff, History and Memory, xii. 15   Macaulay I, ix, xv. 13 14

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faction against liberty. She argued that their dominating narratives sought “not truth but victory” over their readers: they taught “passive obedience” and “necessary servitude” in the act of reading; and they “wilfully conversed in generals” to reserve entirely for the historian-narrator the right to interpret public affairs and the prerogative to judge public men.16 “Prolax quotation” of whole letters and speeches, on the other hand, made a political point in keeping with Macaulay’s democratic and republican principles by giving readers direct and abundant access to what historical actors had actually said and written. This would, she pointed out, enable readers to form for themselves a “just idea” of those “accurate sentiments of liberty, personal and political” that had moved the patriots, and of the deceptions practiced on the people by the champions of arbitrary government.17 Making entire letters and addresses evident in the text and notes as the continuous accompaniment and counterpoint of her narrative would allow readers to “investigate” and judge for themselves the narrative’s “labour to attain truth.”18 For Macaulay the embedding of whole letters and speeches in the narrative was an issue of power precisely in the sense in which narratologist Marie Maclean now speaks of narrative as “a game for the power of the text over the readers, where the narrator schemes to overcome the power of the narratee” and of quotation as “involving the loss of textual control, as the voice of the original speaker can still be heard even when its values are being questioned.”19 Macaulay was not using letters and addresses as what Dominick LaCapra calls “the correlate of research” and a “referential component that serves to differentiate history from fiction.”20 On the contrary. She was capitalizing on the vividness and eloquence with which, whether true or fictional, letters and addresses “depictured” the characters and sentiments of their authors, and relying on readers’ ability to see what they depictured for themselves. In the “Address to the Inhabitants of the United States” with which she prefaced her History of the American Revolution, Warren too based the authority and truth of her narrative on letters from the past. While presenting herself as an eyewitness to the Revolution as Nina Baym has shown, she assured her readers that her “habits of confidential and epistolary correspondence with several gentlemen employed abroad in the most distinguished stations, and with others since elevated to the highest grade of rank and distinction” had given her “the best means of information through a long period” for whatever she had not actively witnessed herself. 21 John Adams, who had served America in Holland, France and England before being elevated to the Presidency, had been one of these correspondents. Indeed, Jeffrey Richards has pointed out that Warren “relied heavily on letters 16

 Ibid., xii, xv.  Ibid., 382. 18  Ibid., xv. 19   Marie Maclean, Narrative Performance, xii, 19, 135. 20   Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 5-6. 21  Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860; Warren I, xli. 17

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from John Adams throughout the History.”22 In a brilliant appropriation for women of the self-representation of the neoclassical historian as a gentleman of high standing whose banishment from public office had given him the leisure to write a history of his own time, Warren also claimed that her “female duties” had given her the “leisure” during the Revolution, that men occupied “in the cabinet or the field” lacked, to ensure that “the most interesting circumstances were collected, active characters portrayed.”23 The Address therefore located Warren’s stature and authority as an historian, and the truth and impartiality of her narrative, in her privileged access to letters from the key political actors, and in a temporal coincidence between the Revolution, the letters and the narrative. But though she used the real letters of historical actors, even lifting whole passages from her epistolary correspondence and sliding them silently (without attribution or quotation marks) into her narrative, Warren did not follow Macaulay’s practice of offering the reader multiple, evident and prolax quotations from those correspondences, much less offer letters whole. Warren dramatized her ongoing thematic opposition between republican liberty and monarchical tyranny, and her warning that the ambition, lust for power and duplicity of political leaders led to arbitrary power and to the ruin of nations, by contrasting characters who typified the moral traits she identified with republican and monarchical systems of government. But she did not allow their own words to be heard.24 It was on this difference between Warren and Macaulay that the epistolary argument of 1807 turned.

The Argument Over Narrative John Adams inscribed the first part of his critique of Warren’s History in the gap between her “Address” and the opening paragraphs of her introductory chapter, which characterize the historical narrative as a retrospective that was designed, like Macaulay’s History, to reawaken the “disinterested virtue” and republican principles of the Revolution, and to warn the rising generation that the ambition, love of domination, and duplicity of political leaders led to arbitrary power. Adams pointed out that Warren’s narrative portrayal of his character and career was “grossly inconsistent with all the former principles and professions both of  Jeffrey Richards, Mercy Otis Warren, 146.   Warren, I: xliii, xli. 24   In the first half of her narrative, there are virtually no quotes in the text—a few already published letters by Thomas Hutchinson are put in an appendix, as in Edmund Burke’s Annual Register, which was one of her sources. In the second half, where quotations proliferate, Warren wove short, carefully managed unattributed snippets of letters into her narrative. There is an exception for part of a letter that Washington wrote to her husband. 22

23

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yourself and your husband from the year 1761, as all his and your letters abundantly testify,” and that those “letters are not lost.”25 The mere existence of the Warrens’ letters dating back to the year 1761 testified that Adams had been active in the “theater of politics” long before 1774, when Warren’s History first brought him onto the stage with a passing mention, and that she knew it. These and other discrepancies between those “letters [which] are not lost” and the narrative also proved that “the characters are not such as you esteemed them at the times when they acted” as she had claimed in the Address.26 From the first chapter’s opening paragraphs and from the narrative’s repetition of the “slanderous” representation of Adams as a monarchist that Jeffersonian Republicans had used to oust him from the presidency in 1800, it appeared that Warren was in fact “writing to the taste of the nineteenth century” in order “to gratify the prejudices of the present ruling party in America.” Adams was arguing, in other words, that Warren was using her narrative to intervene in an ongoing argument between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans about whether America was going to be a hierarchical society like Britain, governed by status and by what Washington called “the steady hand of the rich, the able and the well-born,” or whether the new nation was going to be a participatory and upwardly mobile society governed by “equality of respect” as the Jeffersonians urged.27 To take sides in this debate, Adams wrote, Warren had used “the mustard after dinner” (post-revolutionary vitriol) to alter and reshape the past. She had written what Foucault calls “a history of the present,” reshaping characters and events retrospectively from the point of view of the end, in order to interpolate a new and differently politicized audience and intervene in her present.28 Though he observed that “a man never looks so silly as when he is talking or writing concerning himself,” Adams used his own example—or that of Henry Laurens or Francis Dana, where he had letters and detailed knowledge—to contest what Warren called her “general and concise narrative of American affairs through the Revolution” because an important part of his argument against neoclassical narratives like hers was that “fraud lurks in generals.”29 Adams thus invoked against Warren the argument that Macaulay had made against Hume: that the “fraud and sophistry” of opponents of liberty manifested itself in “wilfully conversing in generals and never entering into those particulars that may investigate the subject.”30 Adams was suggesting that by abandoning Macaulay’s practice of prolax quotation 25

 Adams, 354.  Ibid., 463. 27  Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution; Arthur M. Schlesinger (ed.), History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968. 28   Warren’s History was also received as a party political work, and some would therefore not sign Warren’s list of subscribers. See Maud MacDonald Hutcheson, “Mercy Warren, 1728-1814.” 29  Adams, 354, 417, 432. 30   Macaulay I, xii, xv. 26

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of the letters of the historical combatants, Warren was belying the democratic and republican principles that her narrative wished to defend. Warren was imitating the narrative practices of conservative neoclassical historians like Hume, who, in Leo Braudy and Everett Zimmerman’s words, thought “the role of the historian is to generalize” and who “accepted the present as a standpoint from which a never before construed meaning is to be constructed” for the past.31 By invoking Macaulay and confronting Warren’s narrative generalizations with epistolary and historical particulars, Adams tried to show her where it was intrinsically fraudulent to write history from the standpoint of the present, according to whatever generalities about “republicanism” or “monarchism,” “liberty” or “oppression” were presently being contested, and according to whatever exemplary politico-moral categories the narrator chose to impart. Adams’s specificity was not “pettiness,” but an effort to demonstrate where veracity and impartiality were the casualties of such “narrative performances”—Lester Cohen’s term for “the active and creative way in which historians give voice and shape to their theories as well as to the events themselves.”32 Warren’s response was that letters were a double-edged sword, both for their writers and for historians, but in different ways. For the writer, letters were far too “faithful representations” of his character and sentiments: “These letters, you observe, are not lost. I have never been ashamed of them; neither are your former letters lost; nor do I intend your more recent ones ever shall be lost; they shall be safely deposited for future use, if occasion requires it.”33 If Adams thought that the way he figured in the people’s memory had been damaged by Warren’s silencing of his letters, this was nothing to the damage that would be caused by laying the letters he had addressed to her before the public as they stood, unassisted and unmitigated by narrative: “The thwartings of the minister, the Comte de Vergennes, and the vexation and complaints you have uttered against him, as well as the Dr. [Franklin], would make a considerable pamphlet from your own letters now lying in my cabinet.”34 To present confidential letters to the public unalloyed by the generalities of a shaping and concealing narrative, and unmitigated by the “judgement” embodied in character sketches—to present confidential letters with all the resentments, complaints, vexations and stratagems they had disclosed at the time to the person to whom they had been addressed—was an act of hostility, not of friendship. Warren claimed that she had treated Adams with the greatest possible friendship and generosity, precisely by not transcribing the letters he had written to her into her narrative, and by not “disseminating” their conversations.35 And this may have been the case. The publication of confidential letters had been 31   Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History; Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction. 32   Lester H. Cohen, The Revolutionary Histories, 18. 33  Adams, 356. 34  Ibid., 420. 35  Ibid., 362.

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reserved during the Revolution for the Patriots’ enemies, and this principle may have continued to guide Warren’s treatment of confidential letters in her History. But if Warren argued, on one level, that a person’s letters had to be concealed by narrative because they were far too faithful representations of their character and sentiments to be made public as they stood, she also argued, on another level, that letters had to be generalized, carefully controlled by the narrator, reduced to small, carefully managed citations, and represented from the point of view of the end, because a person’s letters were not consistent enough over time to permit the narrator to tell her story in a clear, consistent and convincing manner. This was something she knew that Macaulay had learned the hard way. By the end of Volume II of her History, it became clear to Macaulay—as well as to David Hume who wrote her a devastatingly polite letter about it—that her prolax quotation of letters and addresses was not “enriching and enforcing the matter in the text” as she had expected they would.36 On the contrary. They were undermining her narrative argument that Parliament was fighting for the principle that “Law is Liberty” against abuses of both law and liberty by Charles I and his villainous minister, Strafford.37 The narrative presented the Earl of Strafford’s trial and execution as his just deserts, and as prefiguring what would happen to Charles if he did not mend his ways. But as she transcribed their letters and addresses, it became clear to Macaulay herself that those letters and addresses depictured Strafford’s admirable courage, loyalty and duty, Charles’s willingness to put himself at risk for his faithful servant, and all the ways in which Parliament was failing to act within the law, as Charles kept pointing out. Macaulay’s villains threatened to turn into heroes or victims; and her heroes into villains. Macaulay’s prose began to struggle to contain what she called Strafford’s “talents as an orator,” to mitigate the rhetorical force of his letters and addresses, and to “apologize” for Parliament. After another volume of this, however, she was honest and honorable enough to correct her historical thesis. Macaulay began to argue in her narrative that the slogan “law is liberty” was a myth because men made the laws, and framed them to promote their own interests and selfish ambitions. Abandoning her initial thesis that history had been a battle over principles, therefore, Macaulay’s narrative began to represent political battles as driven by men’s ambitions, rivalries and “jealousies.”38 Adams and Warren both began from this conclusion. In his Defense of the Constitutionof the Government of the United States of America (1787), the text that first branded him a monarchist in the eyes of contemporaries, Adams took the problem that Macaulay’s History had identified—that men in power tried to make the law say and do whatever furthered their own goals and ambitions— as the fundamental issue that constitutions needed to resolve. As C. Bradley 36

  Macaulay II, 214.  Ibid. III, 3. 38  From Vol. III, this word jealous begins to appear at least once every four or five pages, applied impartially to all political camps. 37

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Thomson has shown, he represented the ambition for distinction and superiority as the universal characteristic of human nature in all ages and asked the question which followed from that: “What combination of powers in society or what form of government, will compel the formation, impartial execution and faithful interpretation of good and equal laws, so that the citizens may constantly enjoy the benefit of them and may be sure of their continuance?”39 Warren, for her part, began her continuation of Macaulay’s History with a summary of the truth about history that her friend had learned at such cost: that revolutions revolved on men’s relations to power, understood not as some abstract and invisible force, but as an existential question facing every revolutionary leader once he revolved into what Lacan in “The Purloined Letter” calls “the place of the King.” The question was whether or not , after he held power and the liberty it gave him, a man still had the moral character to resist the seduction of using them to satisfy his own ambition for distinction and superiority by reestablishing hierarchies and due subordination. This was why, Warren reminded Adams in their correspondence of 1807, she had begun her narrative by observing that “it is not possible to pronounce decidedly on the character of the politician or statesman till the winding up of the drama.”40 It was why she believed that “the character of men is never finished until the last act of the drama is closed.”41 And it was why portraying Adams as he was perceived at the close of his political career, when he was ousted from the presidency for seeking to re-institute hierarchies and subordinations, was not “the mustard after dinner” at all. It was evidence of the truth about history, politics and the dangerous ambition of public men that her narrative had been designed to impart. Adams can be pardoned, however, for seeing some “malignancy of heart” in the clever way she turned his own characterization of human motives in Defense of the Constitution against him while, as he said, ignoring his writings altogether. The collapse of Macaulay’s initial thesis was also an object lesson in what “prolax quotation” from letters could do to a narrative, for instance when the letters of the narrative’s villains demonstrated a rare and disturbing nobility or showed they were right. As Warren put it to Adams in 1807, the trouble with transcribing the letters of historical actors was that letters over time were too inconsistent: “there is a variety of circumstances that may exhibit a man’s opinions and his transactions in a varied point of view from what they have been at different portions of his life.”42 There were inconsistencies, in the epistolary record and in men’s words and actions in different circumstances and at different times of their lives. These inconsistencies made it difficult for the narrator to “pronounce decidedly” on a “living character.” A living character who was allowed to speak for himself directly to the reader was likely to prove what Johnson called a “mixed character” who defied, by the constative and illocutionary power of his letters, the  C. Bradley Thompson, “John Adams and the Science of Politics,” 248.   Warren I, 4. 41  Adams, 330. 42  Ibid. 39 40

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binary of heroes and villains on which the perlocutionary and instructive power of an exemplary historical narrative depended. It was therefore far safer to do what Warren and neoclassical historians did— to adopt the “dominating perspective” that Ferguson finds in post-revolutionary writings,”43 and to offer readers the narrator’s character sketches of historical actors, some general representations of their sentiments and acts, and a few carefully managed summaries or snippets of their real or invented words to add a touch of dialogue—than it was to let a man’s letters and words speak directly, profusely and unrestrainedly to the reader for themselves. The living character had to die for the truth of the narrative to live; the inconsistency of his letters at different times and in different circumstances had to be suppressed for the narrative emplotment to remain consistent; and the actor’s own words had to be subordinated to those of the narrator for the narrator to convincingly present his or her text as the true and authoritative version of events. Like Hume, in Philip Hicks’s unintentionally amusing characterization, Warren was “aware of the need to preserve the integrity of the narrative against the continual threat of erudition.”44 To safeguard narrative from the threat of letters and keep power over persons and events firmly in the hands of the neoclassical narrator, it was best to supply the place of letters—which could not be permitted to become evident in any proximity to the narrative—by means of all the devices of neoclassical scholarship that marked the spaces now voided of letters: footnoting, appendices, managed limited quotation, ventriloquism, and silent incorporation into the text.

The Performance of Letters Adams’s response to Warren was to begin to transcribe whole letters, complete with their superscriptions and subscriptions, and to model what he considered the proper function of narrative in relation to letters. He surrounded the letters he transcribed with narrative that described the circumstances in which they had been written, the concerns they were designed to address, who had been privy to the letter or to discussion about it, the responses of its correspondents, and the social or political effect that the letter had had. For instance, his narrative about a letter he wrote to Samuel Adams from Paris explains that it was written to get himself out of his impossible relationship to Franklin there and describes what rhetorical strategies it had deployed; why it had been addressed as a confidential letter to a friend in Congress rather than directly and openly to Congress; the fact that upon receiving it, Samuel Adams had shown the letter to Richard Henry Lee, who had written back to John Adams to inform him that his letter had succeeded rhetorically by assuring him that their view of matters in Paris now corresponded to his; and the fact that Lee and Sam Adams had then acted on his letter by showing 43

 Ferguson, 29, 34.   Hicks, 189.

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it, confidentially, to so many members of Congress that the letter and the talk it generated finally effected “that revolution” in the distribution of offices in Paris that Adams had sought to achieve by his letter. Here Adams was using narrative to recount what a letter cannot say about its rhetorical aims, trajectory, reception and effects. This allowed the narrative to remain close to events as they unfolded, to fill the lacunae that letters unassisted by narrative necessarily left, and to avoid the fraud that lies in generalities. Juxtaposition of letters with narrative in the text allowed the letters to function as a present measure of what Macaulay called the narrative’s “labour to attain truth.” It introduced into the narrative itself, at the very moment of reading, a corrective for the narrator’s misjudgments, mistakes, or misreadings that would allow at least some readers to silently correct the narrative as they went. At the same time, the transcription of whole letters in such narrative histories re-marked Adams’s own belief, a belief he shared with Macaulay and with America’s other Founding Fathers, that the most faithful representation of a man and his times was to be found in “voluminous collections” of letters and papers, rather than in historical narratives; and that if they were not lost, a man’s letters and papers would always be capable of returning to challenge and correct, by their “depicture” of his character, sentiments and acts, the partial representations of retrospective histories. It is not by chance that Adams and other Founding Fathers constituted themselves as their own antiquarians and archivists to carefully preserve (and in Jefferson’s case, selectively burn) the papers that would represent them for posterity. Adams insisted on the importance of surrounding the letters one transcribed whole and entire with narrative that put them back into what Lionel Grossman has called “the dense and complex web of their contemporary relations” from which neoclassical narratives had torn them,45 because Adams also remembered that the meaning of a letter lay less in its “reflection of reality” than in what I will call the transactional meaning or meanings that the letter obtained in the course of its circulation, and in the real effects it produced. For historical actors throughout the eighteenth century, letters were performative acts that assumed what Angela Esterhammer describes as an “experiential sense of history, according to which the formation of subjectivity takes place through utterances and responses to utterances, generating a continual readjustment of the speaker’s relation to other speakers, to objects and to language itself.”46 One wrote letters for a purpose, to produce certain consequences, present a certain image, have certain effects. As Adams reminded Warren, in the personal, political, social and economic realm of “transactions,” letters were moves in a game—acts designed to establish or preserve relationships, get business done, and confirm or alter the course of events—whose meaning and effectiveness depended entirely on how others received, shared, transmitted, responded to and acted upon what they read. A transactional meaning does not have to be based on a “correct” reading of a letter, any more than upon its   Lionel Grossman, Between History and Literature, 42.  Angela Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative, 20.

45 46

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having the desired effect/s. A letter was an act; like all acts, it could go awry and have unintended consequences, but these were as much part of its meaning as the spectacle of events it offered or the characters, personae and disguises assumed by the writers. In using his narrative to represent the embedded letters as acts, performed by historical actors with particular goals, in particular historical circumstances, on or behind a particular historical stage, in response to particular events, situations, letters and conversations, Adams also indicated that this sort of narrative gave letters a different relation to the “end” or “closing of the drama” than retrospective narratives did. By following a letter’s effects on different recipients and readers, Adams’s form of narrative represented letters as the causes of consequences that might ripple down to the present day. Adams observed in his narrative about some letters of Commission from Congress that he transcribed in his fifth letter that “on these Commissions hangs a very long history. Many intrigues have grown out of the subjects of them, especially that for commerce, and the consequences are not ended.” An historical narrative that understood that letters embody and effect transactions with others, and thereby create realities, would not constitute causation retrospectively or be written from the point of view of the end. It would, instead, show letters functioning within the very texture of events, as part of that texture itself. Strange and unlikely as this use of narrative may seem to us now, Adams was invoking a long-standing eighteenth-century novelistic practice, and modeling its applicability to historical narratives and to the real letters of historical actors. For whether embedded in a letter or in a narrative, interpolated letters in eighteenthcentury novels invariably contained the three elements Adams described: a prefatory account of the occasion on which the letter was written or received and of its intended purpose; the transcribed letter (usually set off on the page); and the reactions of its addressee/s and of other readers over time. Because this tripartite structure—prefatory contextualization, transcribed letter, reactions of reader/s —was so conventional, it could be varied in innumerable ways. Susanna Rowson’s use of this conventional tripartite topos in Charlotte Temple is particularly apropos here because, in the example I have chosen, narrative and letter are juxtaposed in such a way as to invite readers to supply what her narrator does not say. Rowson thus called on readers to play an active role, and to use their reading of a letter to supply the narrative’s lacks, a point that Macaulay and Adams both held to be essential. In chapter XII of Charlotte Temple, Rowson transcribes in full an apparently innocuous letter from Charlotte’s mother, informing Charlotte that she has requested permission of Madame du Pont (the governess of her boarding school) for Charlotte to come home to spend her birthday with her family. Rowson’s narrative extends and develops the prefatory context over several chapters, giving an account both of the letter’s reception and of its writing. The occasion on which the letter was written is described at length in Chapter VIII, where Mr. and Mrs. Temple lovingly plan a surprise birthday party for their “good ... grateful,

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affectionate girl.”47 In between the letter’s writing and its reception are intervening chapters in which the “innocent and artless girl” falls in love, and is persuaded by Montraville and La Rue to agree to elope with him to America. The occasion on which the letter is received is then described in Chapter XII, immediately before the transcription of Mrs. Temple’s letter: Mme du Pont, Charlotte’s “affectionate governess,” gives her mother’s letter to Charlotte when the latter is “depressed in spirits” after passing a sleepless night. After transcribing Mrs. Temple’s letter in full, Rowson uses Madame du Pont, who knows its content, to raise questions by remarking on the discrepancy between the expected reception of the letter and Charlotte’s reaction: “Why these tears, my love? ... I thought the letter would have rejoiced, instead of distressing you.”48 The questions Mme du Pont raises are not answered; the narrator does not explain, but leaves it to the reader to work out. At the same time, interjecting the narrative of Montraville’s courtship between the writing of the letter and its reception makes it impossible either for Charlotte or for the novel’s reader to read Mrs. Temple’s letter without the intervention of Charlotte’s decision to elope. This allows the novel reader to realize for herself that the letter requires Charlotte to choose between eloping and going home, and that at the point of reception, the letter is no longer about her birthday party; it is a spur to reevaluate her choice. The presence of the letter in the text does the rest. For by the warmth and affection of its style rather than by its very commonplace contents, the transcribed letter makes present to Charlotte (and to the reader) the warm and loving mother she would be hurting if she eloped: “As tomorrow is the anniversary of the happy day that gave my beloved girl to the anxious wishes of a maternal heart, I have requested your governess to let you come home and spend it with us ...”49 The letter stands (in) for her parents, by allowing Charlotte (and the reader) to hear the love and caring in her mother’s voice. Leaving the reader to interpret the letter for herself, along with the cause of Charlotte’s tears, the narrator turns directly from the tears to the choice. Describing Charlotte’s subsequent reflections about the letter, she shows Charlotte realizing that since the step is not yet irrevocably taken, she can still change her mind about eloping; and she does. As she tells Mlle La Rue: “This letter has saved me: it has opened my eyes to the folly I was so near committing: I will not go.”50 Interpersonally, in the particular context of its reception, then, Mrs. Temple’s letter means something different from anything it actually says; its effect too is quite different from that intended by Mrs. Temple—rather than giving her daughter pleasure and occasioning a birthday party, her letter causes tears and reverses Charlotte’s decision to elope. The presence in the text of Mrs. Temple’s letter demonstrates the distance between what a letter can mean to its writer and to its addressee, as well as the disproportion between

  Susanna Haswell Rowson, Charlotte Temple, 34.  Ibid., 45. 49  Ibid. 50  Ibid., 46. 47

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the letter’s words and effects. It also shows quite terrifyingly how fateful and portentous the most ordinary letter can become. But as Adams pointed out, a letter continues to produce effects as it continues to circulate. Rowson too makes this point by showing that when Charlotte brings the letter to Mlle La Rue, it once again changes the course of events. For La Rue reacts to the letter not only by trying to “confuse” Charlotte, but also by persuading her to go to the place of assignation to inform Montraville of her change of mind and, more implicitly, by informing Montraville of the letter and of Charlotte’s response. La Rue’s reactions thus transform the elopement thwarted by the letter into an abduction necessitated by it; Montraville carries Charlotte off despite her protests: “Oh, my dear forsaken parents!”51 Indeed, the letter inviting Charlotte to come home for her birthday may be said to have precipitated as well as necessitated the abduction. The final effect of the letter, then, is to make Charlotte an essentially unwilling participant in an act whose “consequences are not ended” even by the end of the novel, since its impact continues to be felt by Charlotte’s illegitimate daughter, Lucy. Rowson thus places Mrs. Temple’s interpolated letter at a turning point in the narrative, to encapsulate Charlotte’s choices, and underscore her fundamental innocence. But she also makes it do a lot of other work. She draws together all the principal parties (Charlotte, her parents, Mme du Pont at the boarding school, La Rue and Montraville) through their access to the letter, before parting them by the abduction it effects for most of the rest of the novel. And she weaves the letter itself into the very fabric both of characterization and of the plot through the reactions, effects and actions it provokes, to represent the outcome as the fortuitous outcome of a confluence of many small decisions and missteps. Things could easily have turned out differently if only there had been one error less: if Mme du Pont had taken the trouble to discover the reason for Charlotte’s tears; if Charlotte had not gone to La Rue with the letter; if Charlotte had not spoken to Montraville in person; if the Temples had sent Mr. Eldridge and their chaise for Charlotte with their letter instead of a day after it; or even (as Mr. Eldridge points out) if Mme du Pont had been more conscientious about investigating the character of her teachers. Rather than embodying exemplarity in an overarching master-narrative, Rowson uses the conventional tripartite structure of epistolary interpolation to distribute negative examples liberally among all the characters participating in the everyday interactions surrounding the sending and reception of a fairly ordinary letter. In her historical novel, Reuben and Rachel: Tales of Old Times (1798), which she wrote in Boston to “lead young readers” (like the pupils in her school) “to the attentive perusal of history in general, but more especially the history of their native country,”52 Rowson—who admired Macaulay’s work and considered it

51

 Ibid., 47.   Susanna Rowson, Reuben and Rachel, Preface.

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“inferior to none”53—went out of her way to explain the value of mixing letters and narrative in fictional/historical accounts of “old times.” Rowson made this the primary topic of conversation between Cora and Columbia in Volume I, where Columbia is trying to discover the history of her family from Columbus’s time on. Columbia has two sources of information about the past: Cora, an eyewitness to past events; and a large packet of letters collected by her grandmother, who was Columbus’s wife. Cora objects to the fact that Columbia periodically interrupts her narrative to “examine the papers.” Cora denies that there is anything worth attending to in the letters, arguing that she could “tell you everything that happened as well as those letters,” and insisting that “I like to tell a story in my own way.”54 Columbia acknowledges the pleasure to be gained from an eyewitness’s story: “in listening to the recital of a person who was present whilst the events they relate happened, it seems as if you were transported to the very scene, and are witnesses to the events recited.”55 As Kames had said, narrative permitted one to “perceive persons acting and suffering precisely as in an original survey.” But Columbia argues against Cora’s one-sided view that “there may be letters which may serve to elucidate your relation, and explain events which happened antecedent to the time of your remembrance” and that the letters “must contain facts necessary for me to know or they would not be thus carefully preserved.”56 Narrative by itself is not enough. Nor is one witness or one point of view. Columbia therefore insists on reading the letters in her packet aloud to Cora, thus interpolating them in Cora’s narrative both on the fictional oral level of the verbal exchanges in the text, and in their written representation, which is the novel itself. In the event, however, the prolix letters which interrupt Cora’s eyewitness narrative and are interrupted by Cora and Columbia’s conversations partly belie Columbia’s assumptions. While confirming that the letters contain events and relations that Cora could not possibly know as an eyewitness, reading of the many voluminous letters shows that they too were written “whilst the events they relate happened” and that, like Cora’s narrative, they can “make it seem as if you were transported to the very scene, and are witnesses to the events recited.” Letters can tell a story too. On the other hand, juxtaposition of Cora’s historical narrative with the letters demonstrates that, in their way, the letters are as limited as narrative, for Columbia rapidly discovers that they do not tell her things she wants to know,57 and that she is obliged to Cora or to her mother’s narration of events to supply their lacks. For instance, the packet contains a letter from Columbus to the Queen of Spain, written when he did not expect to survive his voyage. Columbia (and the novel reader) initially read this as his last letter, for the letter cannot by itself tell 53   Qtd in Dorothy Weil, In Defense of Women, 88. Rowson made this evaluation in “Sketches of Female Biography” in A Present for Young Ladies (1811). 54  Rowson, Reuben and Rachel, 13, 22. All references in this essay are to Vol. I. 55  Ibid., 21. 56  Ibid., 13. 57  Ibid., 61.

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Columbia what Cora’s narrative adds—that Columbus in fact lived to sail on many more voyages. Thus if letters are required to supplement or correct a narrative, narrative is also required to supplement or correct a letter. The principal difference between these genres for Rowson, as for Adams, lies in letters’ transactional character. This is most powerfully illustrated in the distance between the proposed and actual effect of the packet of letters itself. Columbus’s wife had added to the packet of “confidential letters” which she had first collected and preserved for Isabelle, Columbia’s mother, a letter explaining why Isabelle must not leave the Catholic faith or marry out, on pain of being disinherited. But misjudging the situation, Isabella’s guardian gives her the packet of letters only after she has fallen in love with a British Protestant, Arundel. The packet of letters therefore fails to have its intended effect; as Isabelle tells her guardian, had he shown her the letters before she was irrevocably in love with Arundel, she would have sent him away before it was too late. Rowson shows that this “too late” too has “consequences that are not ended.” For Isabelle’s decision to marry Arundel, move to England and become a Protestant opens a long history of religious persecutions, beginning with Arundel’s execution by Catholic Queen Mary, which ultimately lead to the birth of Reuben and Rachel and to their migration to the new world. One might construe this as showing that letters have important long-term, transactional effects, even if one is determined to ignore them.

Looking Forward and Looking Back Before closing their correspondence, Warren dismissed Adams’s demonstration of what he considered the proper use of letters in historical narrative as suitable for lives or memoirs rather than for histories: “It was not the design of my historical work to write a panegyric on your life and character . ..”58 She insisted that it was not necessary to include the letters he sent her, or to research “all the diplomatic Commissions and Resolves of Congress,” to write “a general and concise narrative of American affairs through the Revolution” and a “correct and not laboured detail of character.”59 Though she mistook what he was trying to show her, Warren’s judgments proved fundamentally right—if we look forward, that is, from this correspondence down the long corridor of nineteenth-century practice. For in the course of that century, combinations of narrative lives and transcribed letters did come to be reserved almost exclusively for biography. And as Lionel Grossman has shown, neoclassical historical narrative transformed itself into nineteenthcentury historiography, and the eighteenth-century novel into the nineteenth, by highlighting the features of neoclassical narrative that Warren defended:

58

 Adams, 449.  Ibid., 417, 424.

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The dominant feature of both fictional and historical narrative in the nineteenth century is the replacement of the overt eighteenth century persona of the narrator by a covert narrator, and the corresponding presentation of the narrative as unproblematic and absolutely binding. The nineteenth century narrator appears as a privileged reporter recounting what happened. The historical text is not presented as a model to be discussed, criticized, accepted or repudiated by the free and inquiring intellect, but as the inmost form of the real, binding and inescapable.60

One might add, as Lukacs famously pointed out, that classical nineteenth-century realist novels were told, like Warren’s History, from the point of view of the end. But if, instead of looking forward down the nineteenth century, we look back from the Warren-Adams correspondence to the eighteenth, to Rowson and Macaulay, and to a host of other “true,” “secret” and “fictional” histories both in Britain and in America, Adams appears as one of the last champions and avatars of the great antiquarian tradition of letters. Despite his supposed “monarchism,” he speaks for a time which is also still with us—and will be with us until all manuscript letters as well as all printed books are available to all online—when archives of political, economic, and social letters were closed to all but a small, privileged and well-connected group of scholars, and when the publication of letters was itself a democratic and transgressive act. By ripping the veil of narrative which for so long silenced letters, he also allows us to see the eighteenth century as an age when readers were fascinated with all that narrative could tell them—and allow them to figure out and conjecture—about the intentions, meanings, writing, readings, circumstances, uses, misunderstandings and effects of letters.

Works Cited Adams, Charles F. (ed.), Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren (rept. New York: Arno Press, 1972). Adams, John, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Hall and Sellers, 1787). Allan, David, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). Appleby, Joyce, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). ——, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994). Baym, Nina, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).   Grossman, Between History and Literature, 244.

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Braudy, Leo, Narrative Form in History: Hume, Fielding, Gibbon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). Chartier, Roger, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Cohen, Lester, The Revolutionary Histories: Contemporary Narratives of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Cressy, David, “National Memory in the Early Modern Period,” in John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Davies, Kate, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). de Certeau, Michel, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Donelly, Lucy Martin, “The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 6.2 (April 1949): 173-207. Ellis, Joseph, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993). Esterhammer, Angela, The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Ferguson, Robert A., The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Ferling, John, Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson and the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Grossman, Lionel, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Hicks, Philip, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (London: Basingstoke, 1996). Hill, Bridget, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Home, Henry, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (New York: 1855). Hutcheson, Maud MacDonald, “Mercy Warren, 1728-1814,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 1.1 (July 1953): 378-402. LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). le Goff, Jacques, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Levine, Joseph M., The Battle of the Books: History and Literature of the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). ——, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). Looser, Devoney, British Women Writers and the Writing of History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

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Macaulay, Catharine, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover (5 vols; 3rd edn; London: 1869). Maclean, Marie, Narrative Performance: The Baudelairian Experiment (New York: Routledge, 1988). Pocock, J.G.A. “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian,” in Hilda L. Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Richards, Jeffrey, Mercy Otis Warren (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). Rowson, Susanna, Charlotte Temple, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). ——, A Present for Young Ladies (Boston: John West, 1811). ——, Reuben and Rachel; or Tales of Old Times (Boston, 1798). Sainsbury, John, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America (Kingston: McGill-Queens Press, 1987). Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. (ed.), History of American Presidential Elections, 17891968 (4 vols, New York: Chelsea House, 1971). Schnorrenberg, Barbara, “An Opportunity Missed: Catharine Macaulay on the Revolution of 1688,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 231-40. The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965): no. 27. Terdiman, Richard, Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Thompson, Bradley C., “John Adams and the Science of Politics,” in Richard Alan Ryerson (ed.), John Adams and the Founding of the Republic (Boston: Massachusetts History Society, 2001). Warren, Mercy Otis, History of the Rise and Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (2 vols, Liberty Fund, 1989). Watson, Nicola, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Weil, Dorothy, In Defense of Women (College Park: Pensylvania State University Press, 1976). Zagarri, Rosemarie, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995). Zimmerman, Everett, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the EighteenthCentury British Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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Chapter Three

Anticipating Colonialism: U.S. Letters on Puerto Rico and Cuba, 1831-1835 Ivonne M. García

By the time John Quincy Adams characterized Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1823 as “natural appendages to the North American continent” and Cuba, in particular, as “an object of transcendent importance to the political and commercial interests of our Union,” expansionist desire for the Spanish Caribbean had a long history in the United States. As early as 1761, Benjamin Franklin categorized Cuba as a high priority for acquisition, and by 1808, Thomas Jefferson was arguing that the similarity between U.S. and Cuban interests meant that “the object of both must be to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere.” In December 1823, President James Monroe articulated Jefferson’s hemispheric vision by issuing a warning to Old World empires that “the American continents ... are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” Monroe’s carefully chosen words reveal that the U.S. objected to European colonial intrusion into the Americas, not to colonialism per se. In claiming the entire hemisphere under U.S. control, Monroe naturalized U.S. imperial desires while basically sounding the death knell for European imperialism in the Americas. In the same year that Monroe issued his doctrine, Jefferson advocated for the acquisition of Cuba, noting that it was “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states.” Jefferson, like Franklin and Adams, saw Cuba as a resource to fulfill “the measure of our political wellbeing.” Even as the United States was fully engaged in colonizing and consolidating the territory of what would become its intra-continental borders through the various campaigns of Indian Removal, Puerto Rico and Cuba remained desired overseas territories. In the 1830s, after most of the Spanish empire had crumbled with the SpanishAmerican Revolutions from 1808 to 1826, Puerto Rico and Cuba remained as Spain’s last two colonies in the Caribbean. U.S. policy makers never lost sight    Qtd in Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov, Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History, 8.    Qtd in Frank Donovan, The Thomas Jefferson Papers, 285.    Qtd in Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings, 4-6.    Qtd in Donovan, 287. See also Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, 69.

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of the Spanish Caribbean, especially in the 1840s, when the concept of Manifest Destiny was articulated to justify U.S. expansionism as a God-given mission and when the United States annexed Texas in 1846 and acquired half of Mexico in 1848. In the years prior to the Civil War, colonial desire for the large slave plantations of Cuba peaked as Southerners perceived that acquisition of the colony would strengthen their cause. Desire for Cuba’s annexation resurfaced once more after Reconstruction, especially in the late 1880s, when the U.S. government again considered purchasing the island from Spain. Finally, the Spanish-American War of 1898 enabled the United States to invade and acquire Cuba and Puerto Rico, thereby becoming “master of empires in the Caribbean and the Pacific.” Little more than a century after the Founding Fathers had identified Puerto Rico and Cuba as objects of colonial desire, the United States acquired the two islands as its colonial possessions. Within that historical context, we can find evidence of what John Carlos Rowe calls “the imperial heritage of the United States” in the letters and journals written by early nineteenth-century U.S. writers. Specifically, two particular sets of writers who traveled to Puerto Rico and Cuba in the 1830s articulated initial literary expressions of a colonial vision, which anticipated the discourses that later served to legitimize U.S. imperial ambitions. Letters sent from Puerto Rico and Cuba were conveyors of colonial meaning-making as they circulated among (and beyond) the renowned Emerson and Peabody families of New England between 1831 and 1835. Two younger brothers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Bliss Emerson (1805-34) and Charles Chauncy Emerson (1808-36), traveled to Puerto Rico in their twenties, between 1831 and 1834, to recover from tuberculosis. Both brothers, especially Charles, maintained a substantial correspondence with relatives in New England. Edward, who found employment as a clerk with the U.S. consul in Puerto Rico, also kept a detailed journal.10 Like the Emerson brothers, Sophia Amelia Peabody (1809-71) was also in her twenties when she traveled to the tropics to recover from chronic and disabling migraines.11 Peabody lived in Cuba between 1833 and 1835 with her sister, Mary Tyler Peabody (1806-87), who worked as a governess for a doctor and plantation owner, and the sisters maintained   For more on Manifest Destiny, see Mark S. Joy, American Expansionism, 1783-1860.    See Rodrigo Lazo, “Against the Cuba Guide,” 191.    See Ernest R. May, American Imperialism, 3.   John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 3.   Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, The Emerson Brothers, 153. 10  Upon his return, Charles gave a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in 1833 titled “One of the West India Islands.” Ralph Waldo excerpted sections of Charles’s journal and published them in 1843 in The Dial, under the title “A Leaf from ‘A Voyage to Puerto Rico.’” See also Frank Otto Gatell, “Puerto Rico in the 1830s.” 11  For background on Peabody’s health, see Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters, 190.

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an extensive correspondence with their relatives in New England.12 Over her 18 months in Cuba, Sophia Peabody sent home 56 letters, which were edited, collated and bound by her mother and older sister, Elizabeth. The three bound volumes were transformed into a home-published manuscript in 1835, which they titled The Cuba Journal. This compilation of her letters circulated widely among the intellectual elite in Boston and Salem, including her future husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who read it before proposing and later excerpted sections of it in his writings.13 As some of the first textual representations of Puerto Rico and Cuba in the United States, the Emerson and Peabody letters provide evidence that a decade before Manifest Destiny was articulated publicly as a political ideal, and several decades before the United States expanded into an extra-continental empire in that region, colonial desire for the Spanish Caribbean was expressed in literary and cultural terms.14 The two sets of siblings traveled to the Spanish Caribbean for their personal gain and wellbeing at a time of significant economic transition in the region. By the 1830s, these two islands had become increasingly dependent economically on the United States and less so on Spain.15 Because of increased U.S. financial presence, Edward and Mary were able to secure positions with U.S. citizens settled in Puerto Rico and Cuba, respectively. These occupations not only helped them earn a living, but also enabled their younger siblings, Charles and Sophia, to travel there to recover from illnesses. The Emersons and Peabodys were thus beneficiaries of the early economic incursion of the United States into Puerto Rico and Cuba. Not only are the Emerson and Peabody letters on the Spanish Caribbean of interest because they reflect the cultural ramifications of a fledgling U.S. economic colonialism, but also because the writers were directly related to influential families 12   My focus here is on the letters by Sophia Peabody, whom I refer to as Peabody throughout this essay. I will specify first names when referring to her sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Mary Peabody’s letters, which she later adapted into a novel published posthumously in 1887, are also of interest though outside the scope of this work (Mary Peabody Mann, Juanita). For a consideration of the novel, see Ivonne M. García, Anticipating 1898, 115-56. 13   In her introduction to “‘The Cuba Journal’ of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Volume I,” Badaracco explains that Elizabeth Peabody circulated Sophia’s letters among her circle of friends in Boston, describing them as the first volume of the journal. These letters may have been further circulated by Mrs. Peabody in Salem (xcviii, xxcii). Badaracco further notes that scholarly work on the journal has been largely limited to examining it as a cultural artifact or as part of the courtship between Peabody and Hawthorne (iii-iv). 14  I prefer to use the term extra-continental and intra-continental, rather than extra-territorial or extra-national because the latter terms naturalize the territory within U.S. borders as available for expansion, thereby eliding the fact that the dispossession of American Indian nations was an act of colonialism, whether or not it was intra-territorial or intra-national. 15   Luis Martínez-Fernández, Torn Between Empires, 12.

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who played significant roles in the development of a national U.S. culture in the nineteenth century. The Emersons were actively engaged in molding the social, political and religious elements of U.S. intellectual life.16 By traveling to Puerto Rico and articulating a colonial vision through their particularly U.S. intellectual lens, Edward and Charles were, in effect, early “American Scholars,” who anticipated Ralph Waldo’s later representation in 1837 of what the U.S.-version of such a scholar should achieve. For Emerson, the American Scholar was to plant himself “indomitably on his instincts, and there abide [so that] the huge world will come round to him.”17 Like the Emersons, and basically during the same time period, Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia Peabody made significant contributions to the development of a national culture in philosophy, literature, art, education and politics.18 Sophia and Mary sent their letters to Elizabeth, who circulated Sophia’s journal among at least two dozen Bostonians and sponsored readings of the letters at different venues. The Peabody sisters’ influence on men of renown, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hawthorne, and Horace Mann, secured the preservation of their letters and documents. Recently, the Peabody letters, especially Sophia’s, have received substantial scholarly attention, mostly in biographies that argue for their standing as noteworthy producers of cultural knowledge separate from, and in addition to, their connections to famous men.19 Although their letters have been considered separately in biographical works, this essay not only considers these writings together, but also analyzes the Puerto Rico and Cuba letters specifically as expressions of an early extra-continental U.S. colonial vision. Texts on Puerto Rico by U.S. Americans prior to 1898 are rare, and the Emerson letters may well be the first and most relevant of their kind. While the Peabody sisters were not the first U.S. Americans to visit Cuba, or to write about their experiences there, Rodrigo Lazo argues that their writings about Cuba are significantly different from those of their contemporaries, which he has categorized as the genre of “Cuba guides.”20 For this study, I selected specific 16

  Bosco and Myerson argue that the lives of the Emerson brothers “were shaped by assumptions about their place in family history and position in the world-at-large” (14). 17  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Emerson and Fuller, 73-4. Edward’s and Charles’s letters suggest a new way of reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous lecture, hailed as the U.S. “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” The duties of this national scholar included “the conversion of the world,” and while Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas about an American Scholar articulated a cultural mission that antedated that of Manifest Destiny, they did so after Edward’s and Charles’s experiences in Puerto Rico. 18   Marshall, xvii. 19   Marshall, xviii. See also Bruce A. Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti’s Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and Monika M. Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katharine Rodier (eds), Reinventing the Peabody Sisters. 20   Lazo distinguishes both Sophia’s and Mary’s writings as “unusual in U.S.-Cuba literary and cultural history” because “they were unwilling to package the island for readers” in the styles of Cuba guides. For Lazo, The Cuba Journal is not a Cuba guide “because the

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passages that reflect the similar and different ways in which Edward and Charles Emerson and Sophia Peabody anticipated and promoted the colonial representations that the United States eventually disseminated about these islands by the start of the twentieth century. My claim is not that Edward, Charles, and Peabody acted as literal colonial agents who planted the U.S. flag in Puerto Rico and Cuba in the 1830s in anticipation of 1898. Rather, I am interested in the more subtle and arguably more influential colonial visions that these writers both deployed and anticipated in their letters. Specifically, I focus on the way in which these writers, separately yet simultaneously, anticipated not only the precepts of Manifest Destiny that were more than a decade away, but also the colonial discourses about these islands that were deployed decades later after 1898. Edward, Charles, and Peabody were among the first writers to articulate the extra-continental colonial aspirations of a nation in the midst of a violent expansionist campaign to build its intra-continental empire.21 The colonial visions articulated by these three writers reveal not only how they represented the colonial subjects in Puerto Rico and Cuba, but also how they saw their U.S. selves in contrast to those representations. For both Edward and Peabody, their respective stays in Puerto Rico and Cuba served to disconnect them from the strict moral and religious obligations of life in New England. They also shared an interesting silence about the atrocities of Caribbean slavery, which they seldom, if ever, mention in the letters I examined. In contrast, Charles directly addressed slavery in his writings (as did Mary Peabody in hers), and his exposure to colonial slavery contributed to his eventual self-identification as a vocal abolitionist. Edward, Charles, and Peabody all expressed disdain for what they represented as the docile, child-like inhabitants of the islands, who could be entertaining but could offer nothing intellectually or politically significant to be learned. In the letters on which I focus, none of these three writers refers to the inhabitants of these islands as Puerto Ricans or Cubans. In this way, they all ignore a national identity that many in Puerto Rico and Cuba struggled to establish through the early 1800s and beyond. Charles and Peabody also shared a strong and sexually inflected colonial desire for the land, for its fertile richness and bountiful resources. In many ways, island is a backdrop, an excuse for a woman’s quest to define herself while away from her Salem home” (185). 21   I locate the temporal marker of empire in 1830, when the campaign of Indian Removal was sanctioned by the U.S. government, and the process of removing the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee from their lands began. The forcible removal of American Indian nations from their lands, and their relocation to sites chosen for them by the U.S. government, was an act of violent colonial invasion on the part of the United States. For a history of federal policy toward American Indian nations, see David E. Wilkins, American Indian Politics and the American Political System. Shelley Streeby argues that to claim imperialism began only with extra-continental, overseas incursions and invasions in 1898 is to naturalize the violent and colonial history of intracontinental expansion. See Shelley Streeby, American Sensations, 7.

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the 1830s letters of Edward, Charles, and Peabody thus anticipate the colonial visions that later justified extra-continental U.S. colonialism.

Colonial Letters One way to understand the significance of the Emerson and Peabody letters from the Spanish Caribbean is to locate them within the context of the “contact zone” as described by Mary Louise Pratt.22 As sites of “colonial meaning-making,” contact zones are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”23 Pratt identifies travel writing, such as letters, as a key genre in the contact zone for creating and propagating colonial structures of knowledge. At the time when the Emersons and Peabodys traveled to Puerto Rico and Cuba, the islands were contact zones already in transition from one colonial power to another. While the islands were among the few remaining colonies of a weakened and diminished Spanish empire, they also were coming under the growing economic influence of the United States. In supporting Spain’s debilitated control over Puerto Rico and Cuba, the United States sought to protect its expanding economic interests as well as to prevent Britain from expanding its power in the region. Through the 1830s, the United States began to consolidate its economic influence over Puerto Rico and Cuba, quickly becoming the islands’ most important market.24 Given that Puerto Rico and Cuba were islands “torn between empires,” I use the term “colonial letters” to describe these letters, which reveal the rhetorical structures of a budding discursive U.S. colonialism.25 In the transitional contact zones of Puerto Rico and Cuba, Edward, Charles, and Peabody invariably represent themselves and the United States in a position of cultural and intellectual 22   Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 5. In her text, Pratt seeks to discover how travel and exploration writing “produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist trajectory? How has it produced Europe’s differentiated conception of itself in relation to something it became possible to call ‘the rest of the world’?” (5) In like manner, I argue, these early texts on Puerto Rico and Cuba helped to “produce” these islands for the consumption of U.S. Americans. 23   Mary Louise Pratt, 4. 24  For discussion of the United States’ expanding economic influence in this region, see James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development, 12 and Martínez-Fernández, 3. 25   I am influenced here by Martínez-Fernández’s attention to “the relatively ignored middle decades because it was then that the tide shifted toward U.S. hegemony in the Hispanic Caribbean,” which contrasts with most studies that focus on “either on the first stages of the opening of trade and diplomatic relations (1800-1830) or on the culmination of U.S. expansionism (1880-1900).” Martínez-Fernández explains that the term “torn between empires” reflects his own experience “and those of millions of fellow Antillanos who have also been torn by a struggle between empires” (5-7).

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superiority over the island inhabitants. These letters thus fall within the colonial writings, mostly of travel and exploration, which Pratt argues first deployed a rhetoric of “strategic innocence.”26 Under this strategy of representation, European travel writers and naturalists set themselves apart from the “older imperial rhetorics of conquest” to establish their own innocence while still asserting a clear colonial hegemony over the lands they visited. Pratt describes this rhetorical strategy as the “anti-conquest” because in such writings “the European male subject” gazed on the colonial landscape with “imperial eyes” that “passively” possessed through the act of gazing.27 My work expands on Pratt by showing that while Edward, Charles, and Peabody were neither Europeans nor naturalists, and Peabody was a woman, their colonial letters echo their Old World counterparts. By taking possession of Puerto Rico and Cuba discursively, the Emerson and Peabody colonial letters evidence a U.S.-style “anti-conquest.” In articulating their early U.S. colonial visions, the Emerson and Peabody letters also add to our understanding of the kinds of historical and cultural work that letters as a genre performed in the context of early U.S. expansionism. As the intra-continental boundaries of the United States stretched farther apart throughout the 1800s, the letter became “the essential technique of nation formation” through which a national identity and culture were theorized and disseminated.28 Because of its discursive power, both in terms of its persuasiveness and ease of dissemination, the letter became the textual medium through which the U.S. nation and its brand of democracy were conceived, debated, finessed and promoted both in the political and literary arenas across increasingly vast distances between citizens.29 Elizabeth Hewitt argues that the letter became an important political tool in nationbuilding, especially as the distances between citizens in the fledgling nation became more vast. Not only did letters have the unique ability to “collapse distances,” but letters also persuaded writers and readers alike that their union was inevitable.30 These distances became more challenging when letters had to mediate extracontinental rifts across the Atlantic Ocean, as the Emersons’ letters from Puerto Rico or the Peabody letters from Cuba did.31 William Merrill Decker identifies the colonial legacy of the transoceanic, or transatlantic, letter by noting that this type of missive is rooted in Christopher Columbus’s colonial enterprise. Decker argues that the transoceanic letter in the Americas originated within the colonial context that set in motion the eventual establishment of a Spanish Empire in this hemisphere. In his letters to the Spanish sovereigns, Columbus crafted the representations of the New World’s land and its people that became staple colonial discourses about America. Columbus represented the Indies in ways that collapsed the distance 26

  Pratt, 7.  Ibid. 28  Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865, 13. 29  Ibid., 15. 30  Ibid., 2, 13, 15. 31   Decker, Epistolary Practices, 5. 27

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between the new and the old worlds, and stereotyped the “Otherness” of the New World in order to subjugate it to the political will of Spain. Within the context of colonialism, the sub-genre of the transoceanic letter added a level of complexity to the letter’s “immediacy and intimacy” by contributing to discursively domesticate and colonize the foreign.32 The colonial letters of the Emersons and Peabody fall within Decker’s category of transoceanic letters because they, like Columbus’s letters, mediated across an ocean between different geographical locations and cultures within a colonial context. By constructing the New World as it was being “discovered” and colonized, Columbus’s letters persuasively represented imperial rule over impossibly distant lands as possible, promoting and cementing Spain’s discursive and political colonial project. In like manner, the colonial letters by Edward, Charles and Peabody were not only written under a waning Spanish colonialism, but they also anticipated U.S. colonialism within the context of nineteenth-century national expansion and consolidation. The Emerson and Peabody colonial letters also contribute to the discursive representation of an “Americanness” predicated on its separateness from and superiority to its national and racial “Others.” Expanding on Hewitt’s theories about the cultural work that the letter performed as a genre in U.S. nation-building and culture, I argue that the Emerson and Peabody colonial letters reveal how the genre concomitantly contributed to create and disseminate early U.S. extra-continental colonial discourses. These letters reflect how U.S. nation-building in the nineteenth century not only included philosophical musings about how the nation would remain united, but also about how the nation might conceive of itself as a potential colonial power. Within this context, the colonial letters by Edward, Charles and Peabody functioned as channels of cultural transmission between the United States as a potential colonizer and some highly desired and economically profitable extra-continental colonies.33 Not only were the letters circulated among the Emerson and Peabody relatives, but the main concepts therein found more public audiences through the circulation of Edward’s, Charles’s and Peabody’s letters, as well as through Charles’s lecture and published journal. The representations of Puerto Rico and Cuba found in the Emerson and Peabody letters anticipated the U.S. imperial agenda by making such a colonial project in the Spanish Caribbean seem not only desirable but also easily accomplishable.

  Ibid., 61, 63, 5. Decker argues that letters speak “with an immediacy and intimacy unavailable in the face-to-face conversation that letter writing typically takes as its model.” Such “immediacy and intimacy” contributes to the genre’s powerful persuasiveness (5). 33   Decker, 11. For Decker the “familiar letter served as an important channel of cultural transmission.” 32

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Edward and Charles in Puerto Rico Frank Otto Gatell argues that Edward’s and Charles’s “ambivalent attitudes” about life in Puerto Rico are as interesting as the historical details that they recorded. Gatell praises the Emersons for being “honest enough ... to point out areas in which their beloved New England might learn from what they considered an erring, puerile society.”34 Unlike Gatell, I find little ambivalence in the Emersons’ colonial vision. Their letters consistently establish New England in binary opposition, and as superior, to the Puerto Rico society, and while they desired the colonial space, they disdained the people. Because they articulated an early colonial vision in philosophical and literary ways, the Emerson letters served to anticipate the possibility of U.S. intervention in Puerto Rico, both to improve its people through U.S. cultural influence, and to exploit and consume its bountiful resources. Before U.S. historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, journalists, essayists, political scientists, photographers and writers traveled en masse to Puerto Rico to study and categorize its colonial subjects after 1898, the Emersons’ writings collapsed the distance and mediated between the United States and Puerto Rican cultures. Having just recovered from a mental breakdown and suffering from tuberculosis, Edward left Boston in 1830 for St. Croix and then traveled on to Puerto Rico, beginning what he described as his “exile” and hoping that the tropical climate would cure him.35 During most of the time he was in Puerto Rico, Edward worked as a clerk for Sidney Mason, who was the U.S. consul there, as well as a merchant and plantation owner. Edward learned Spanish, and only traveled back to Boston once, in 1832, for a two-month visit with his family, before his death in Puerto Rico on 30 September 1834. Charles visited Edward in San Juan from December 1831 through April 1832 because he also ailed from tuberculosis. It was a stay which exposed him to slavery and helped forge his later views on abolition and on the rights of American Indians. Once back in Boston practicing law, Charles in 1833 delivered his first public lecture about life in Puerto Rico. He died suddenly in 1836.36 Edward’s private musings about the differentiation between New England/ himself and the people of Puerto Rico make it into his early letters home with a twist: a seemingly ironic discussion about the possibility of “learning” from the people in the colonial contact zone. In October 1831 he writes to his step-grandfather, the Rev. Ezra Ripley, and states: “You are aware I suppose that this island like a docile child follows the mother country, & rests in the bosom of the Catholic Church.” After remarking how he enjoys “the repose & liberty” of his Sundays in Puerto Rico because no one expects him at service and no one would censure him for failing to attend Mass, Edward adds that he “forgets to regret” that he will not be taking a seat in the congregation. Living in Puerto Rico, 34

  Gatell, “Puerto Rico Through New England Eyes,” 282.  For the biographical information in this paragraph, I rely on Bosco and Myerson. 36   Bosco and Myerson, 178-9. 35

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Edward reveals, allows him a freedom from strict religious observance that would be impossible in New England. Edward continues by suggesting that “Every man may learn something from every other man, & perhaps every sect much from every other sect.” But Edward goes on to describe an exchange of lessons that does not put the two cultures or religions on equal terms: While the Catholics of St. Johns [San Juan] might learn in New England to show their respect for the Sabbath by a more general suspension of labor & traffic than is here observed, I think the religionists of the north might also learn in Porto Rico the advantage of admitting relaxation & some amusement to enter into their holy time. 37

As Edward describes it, the exchange in the contact zone would definitely be easier on New Englanders because they already have the upper hand. Edward does suggest to his Protestant reader that New England “religionists” might learn a thing or two about diversion from the Catholics in Puerto Rico. But Edward’s purpose seems neither perfectly honest nor ambivalent but ultimately ironic, because the only activities he mentions as preferred by island people are gambling, drunkenness and open commerce on “the Sabbath.” In that same letter, Edward says: If we could exclude cock fighting, house scouring, occasional drunken follies, some labor in the country required during the mornings, & much of the marketing & shopkeeping carried out on the city from the Sundays here, & if in the other ... the prohibitions laid, by custom or precept, upon innocent diversion or pleasant conversation ... could be removed from the New England Sunday—the Sabbath might be better used and valued in both places.38

While Edward’s initial acknowledgment that strict Calvinists might learn a thing or two from Catholics reflects what Gatell identifies as Edward’s open-mindedness, his chosen examples contradict this ostensible purpose. Gambling, drunkenness and trade are not obvious choices that would persuade any northern “religionist” to loosen up the strictures on “pleasant conversation and innocent diversion” among New England Protestants. Surely, Edward was keenly aware of the Calvinist fear that “loosening” strictures could degenerate into openly irreligious behavior. What I read as irony, then, serves to establish that Edward’s implication is that while New Englanders might learn something from this contact zone, the only value of that knowledge is in what it provides in entertainment and moral relaxation. In this colonial letter, Edward clearly suggests that Puerto Rico residents would be the ones to learn how to “better use and value” their Sabbath after exposure to Protestant influence. 37

 Ibid., 27-8.   Qtd in Bosco and Myerson, 28.

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Along with the binary that Edward establishes in his letters between New England and Puerto Rico, he begins to anticipate the ideals of Manifest Destiny by discursively appropriating the hemisphere and suggesting that Puerto Rico’s salvation might lie in the hands of the United States. In a 13 November 1833 letter to Ralph Waldo, Edward writes: “I welcome you home again; that is to the Western Hemisphere, to the new world of Columbus, for at least within such limits our straggling fortunes are again united.”39 By referring to the Western Hemisphere as “home,” by appropriating the New World as his own and by articulating the hemisphere as limited and bounded but as uniting the two U.S. brothers in their “articulates,” Edward introduces some of the concepts that Manifest Destiny would turn into U.S. cultural commonplaces a few years later. These ideals included a sense of ownership over the entire Western Hemisphere and of entitlement to its resources. In a letter that similarly anticipates the mission of Manifest Destiny, Edward writes to Ralph Waldo on 29 June 1834, in ways that suggest a connection between his own individual salvation at the hand of God and Puerto Rico’s salvation at the hands of the United States. In that letter, Edward says: My moral powers I was about to say—but no, there is never a moment when these ought not to be in exercise—what I would say, is that the provinces of sentiment, of fancy, of pure intellect, the regions of thoughts, the mines where reason labors & sifts the mountains where speculation climbs, all these I seem to contemplate as a past of my domain lying a far distance off—unvisited almost by a glance,—oh, that the fallow ground may one day render in at least the great Land lord’s [sic] interests.40

Again, Edward promotes the binary opposition between the elegant (as opposed to passionate) sentiment, speculative intellect, rational thought, and prevailing reason that he associates with New England, and their polar opposites, which he identifies with Puerto Rico. We can read Edward’s concluding remark as his own parting prayer that his “fallow ground,” a biblical metaphor for the soul ready to be cultivated by God, will ultimately render what is in God’s interest. But we also can interpret Edward’s prayer as describing Puerto Rico as the “fallow ground” in need of the Protestant guidance of the United States to “one day render in at least” in the “interests” of God. The choice of “Land lord” to describe God’s power evokes the images of the actual possession and ownership of the land in Puerto Rico, which the United States would eventually acquire. The fact that we can read the passage as referring both to Edward and to Puerto Rico is important because it again resonates with the mission of Manifest Destiny, especially as Ralph Waldo first envisioned it in terms of the role of an “American Scholar.” This imperialist 39

  Gatell, “Puerto Rico Through New England Eyes,” 288.   Edward Bliss Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 29 June 1834, Emerson Papers, MS Am 1280.226 (222), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. By permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. 40

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ideal represented the United States, nationally, and U.S. Americans, individually, as responsible for rendering extra-territorial “fallow grounds” in God’s name both for the nation’s own and for the potential colonies’ salvation. In this letter, Edward conflates the personal and the national while simultaneously acknowledging that his known “domain” of New England is in his past while Puerto Rico has become his present domain, albeit one much in need of salvation. Ultimately for Edward, the difference between New England and Puerto Rico is one based on intellect and nature, not nurture. In his journal, Edward notes how “Men do not strive here as in N[ew] E[ngland] after the perfect man. It is present pastime or gainful industry or chance which they follow as their stars.”41 For Edward, Puerto Rico is a site where philosophical or moral perfection is unattainable for those who do not already possess it because its inhabitants are more interested in entertaining themselves. Edward goes further by suggesting that the people of Puerto Rico might be fated to remain at that level. Edward’s “perfect man,” a notion that again anticipates Ralph Waldo’s fashioning of an “American Scholar,” is not to be found in the colonial contact zone where the United States has had no influence. Like Edward’s, Charles’s representations of Puerto Rico evidence the strategies of anti-conquest in that contact zone. Charles directly and repeatedly declares his innocence as an intellectual observer by separating himself from what Pratt describes as “overtly imperial articulations of conquest, conversion, territorial appropriation, and enslavement.”42 Also like Edward, Charles gazes at Puerto Rico through his U.S. lens and takes possession of the island, in the passive colonizing style that Pratt identifies as possessing through the act of gazing. I expand on Pratt’s categories to argue that Charles personifies another category of the imperial gaze, namely that of the intellectual, not the capitalist scout, the naturalist, or the travel writer. In this manner, Charles again anticipates the ideals that Ralph Waldo had in mind years later when he developed his notion of the American Scholar. Indeed, Charles takes the stance of this proto-American Scholar a step further than Edward. For Charles, the intellectual rift between Puerto Rico and New England is so immense that he does not see any areas in which U.S. culture might learn from Puerto Rico’s. Further, Charles’s imperial gaze is mostly cast upon his natural surroundings and much less than Edward’s upon the activities of the native people. In keeping with what Pratt describes as “textual apartheid” in European naturalist and travel writings, Charles separates the landscape from the people, focusing his interest almost absorbedly on the former.43 In his earliest letter dated 23 December 1831, Charles describes to Ralph Waldo how he planted his “foot on foreign soil” on “the anniversary of the Pilgrim Landing.”44 Charles seems to echo the Pilgrims when he states that “though the 41

  Gatell, “Puerto Rico in the 1830s,” 69.   Pratt, 38. 43  Ibid., 61. 44   Gatell, “Puerto Rico Through New England Eyes,” 283. 42

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features of the country were strange, yet the mere rest of the eye upon solid land and green vegetation, was refreshing.” 45 Such echoes continue as Charles notes how “my feelings of recognition & familiarity died all away” as he is confronted with a completely unfamiliar language and culture. Charles then notes how Puerto Rico is as much “mundo nuevo” to him in the 1830s as it was to the Spanish Crown in the fifteenth century, suggesting that he also is a kind of discoverer. Using the two words in Spanish to describe this new place, Charles draws a parallel between himself and the “decayed” Spanish Empire he will later disavow in this and other letters. Charles adds that he finds in Puerto Rico “exactly what you would expect to have made out of a delightful climate, and commercial spirit acting on the colony of a decayed empire on a people who want the principle of civilization.”46 A cursory reading proposes that we understand Charles to mean that Puerto Rico residents lack the basic principles of civilization. But his choice of words also suggests that the inhabitants might desire the principles of U.S. civilization, whose foundational myth is traced back in its dominant expression to the Pilgrims he previously mentioned. But while Charles identifies with the colonial enterprise of the Pilgrims in that letter, in another early letter written in December 1831, he engages in anti-conquest strategies by directly differentiating himself from James Cook and from Columbus. In that letter Charles states: I am no statesman charged with the interests of a nation—no Cook nor Columbus going out to seek new territory for civilization—no missionary bound on an errand which absorbs his soul—not even a merchant, tributizing wind & wave to my private gains, but I am a simple citizen in search of all the good I can get out of all things.47

Charles’s insistence that he is different from the Spanish and English colonial agents is part of a fledgling U.S. anti-conquest rhetoric, especially because he describes himself, innocently, as “a simple citizen.” Charles thus articulates the distinction between the old European colonialisms that sought to conquer, convert and exploit, and what he casts as a more benevolent colonial vision based on ideas of individual prosperity and citizenship. In setting himself apart from the actual agents of empire through the strategies of the anti-conquest, Charles anticipates the ways in which the United States would, only a few years later, articulate the difference between its own colonial project and that of its European predecessors. In 1898, for instance, the U.S. project of empire in Puerto Rico and Cuba cloaked itself with the language of republican democracy and freedom, promising the liberation of the islands from Spanish colonial rule and extension of the benefits and rights of living under the protection 45

 Ibid.  Ibid. 47   Qtd in Bosco and Myerson, 155. 46

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of a democratic republic. For his part, Charles positions himself as an innocent citizen of the United States, who seeks to obtain “all the good” that can be had from “all things.” The colonial undertones may be subtle but still identifiable as Charles feels entitled to whatever benefit can be had from “all things,” even those to which he has no claim in Puerto Rico.

Sophia Peabody’s Cuba Almost at the same time that Edward and Charles were producing their colonial visions of Puerto Rico, Sophia Peabody was writing prolifically from Cuba in similar ways. Pamela Lee has recently argued that the letters collected in The Cuba Journal should be read not only as the description of a place she traveled to, but also “within the discourse, or context, of colonialism,” especially since they are “written in colonial Cuba by a North American woman.”48 Like Gatell, Lee argues that the aesthetics of “visual imperialism” in Peabody’s letters, especially as these representations relate to Cuban slavery, are examples of colonial ambivalence. For Lee, Peabody’s letters exemplify this type of ambivalence because her representations cannot “evade the paradoxical nature of [Peabody’s] colonial experience.” Unlike Lee, who argues that Peabody’s private reflections offer “a problematic, rather than unilateral, reading of the workings of an imperial subject,” I read Peabody’s poetics as reflecting little, if any, ambivalence, and more the desires of an early discursive agent of colonialism along the lines of Pratt’s notion of the anti-conquest.49 We certainly can locate Peabody’s representations within the “aesthetic sentimentalization,” which Lee argues was the U.S. cultural development that “contributed to the visual and discursive appropriation” of the western frontier.50 Peabody’s colonial aesthetics clearly represent the extra-continental version of Lee’s notion of an intra-continental imperial sentimentalization. However, what Lee perceives as ambiguity in Peabody’s attitudes toward Cuban slavery, and in her deployment of an aesthetically imperial gaze, I see as consonant with Peabody’s vision of Cuba as her personal paradise, undisturbed by political or moral unpleasantness.51 A sickly girl who developed into a chronic invalid, Sophia was also highly artistic and gifted in drawing and painting. She was the most overtly ambitious of the three Peabody sisters, variously articulating desires to become president of the United  Lee, “‘Queen of All I Surveyed,’” 163.  Ibid., 176-7. 50  Ibid. 51  Ibid., 163, 176-7. Lee notes how Sophia’s narrative “reinscribes slavery to accommodate an aesthetic vision of harmony. She erases her knowledge of the horrendous conditions of slavery from her firsthand experience at La Recompensa” (173). Lee cites instances in which Sophia is repulsed by signs of oppression among the slaves and argues that “the slave occupies an ambiguous place in [Sophia] Peabody’s representation” (175). 48 49

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States, attend college and become a minister. Despite Peabody’s weak physical constitution, her sister Elizabeth would state of her, “I never knew any human creature who had more sovereign power over everybody.”52 After a particularly bad bout of illness left Peabody weighing only eighty pounds, the rest cure in the Spanish Caribbean materialized when Mary Peabody took a job as governess for a coffee plantation owner in Cuba, who also accepted paying guests. Once in Cuba, Peabody wrote daily to her mother in detailed letters that serialized her daily activities there. The collection of letters, bound by her sister and mother, was later described by them as a journal, but the volumes consist of the separate letters sent home by Peabody. In her highly poetic letters, Peabody focused repeatedly on the natural wonders and colors that she encountered in Cuba, but was mostly silent (similar to Edward in his letters) about the issues of slavery and political repression.53 In her colonial letters, Peabody greatly enjoyed the freedom and the power that being away from New England provided her, especially when the trip enabled her to fashion herself as a pampered “queen,” which she could not easily do back in her financially strapped home in Salem. The first letter in the volume is dated 20 December 1833 and ostensibly written 40 miles from Cuba. As she tells her mother of her adventures aboard the ship, Peabody notes how: “I felt like the queen of the atlantic [sic], perched upon that high place, ploughing [sic] so gracefully and majestically through the deep, deep blue sea.”54 This self-fashioning as queen is repeated later in that letter when she tells of how: “the first mate known by the generic name of Smith, made me a call at the foot of my throne, and told me tales of Sailor superstition.”55 In the same letter, Peabody tells her mother: “It is very interesting to watch the sailors, especially one, which is a splendid looking creature, with as much grace as strength, fine features and large blue eyes, which he has a way of casting down quite bewitchingly.”56 Peabody’s sexual objectification and feminization of the sailor suggests that the ship has become a liminal space, which acts as a transitional space between the staid New England and the vibrant Cuban cultures, and empowers her to freely express her sensuality. Once in La Recompensa, the large estate of the slave-owning Morrells who hosted her while Mary worked as their governess, Peabody begins to express a sensual delight for a life in which her every desire or need is quickly met, 52   Qtd in Marshall, 214-15. For biographical information on Peabody, I rely on Marshall. 53   Bosco and Myerson, 154. Charles does mention slavery in Puerto Rico but does so to highlight how it is better than in the United States. Still, he states that he abhors the institution and comments on it negatively. After his return to New England from Puerto Rico, Charles became an abolitionist. 54   Peabody, 3. All references to Peabody’s letters are from The Cuba Journal, Vol. I, unless otherwise noted. 55  Ibid., 7. 56  Ibid., 4.

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especially by the slaves. In a 17 January 1834 letter, Peabody describes the profusion of lovely trees, flowers and hedges on the plantation, and when she mentions the outlying buildings she notes “the dwelling of Pierre Luis, a faithful and excellent negro who takes care of the estate—or rather acts as guard.”57 There is no acknowledgment of what the slave might be guarding against, but Peabody scholars have suggested that the Morrells had their slaves heavily policed to prevent insurrections and that the slaves on the plantations were routinely tortured and even killed.58 None of this, however, makes it into Peabody’s vision. In that same letter, Peabody mentions “Tomas, an old negro, [who] takes care of the turkeys— the most quizzical old thing I ever saw ...”59 Peabody’s remark about Tomas is echoed later in the letter when she describes another slave, a woman called Tekla, as “ancient.” While for Peabody these are adjectives that personify the slaves for her mother, we can glean through them the fact that the Morrells exploited their slaves even when they were elderly. For Peabody, however, the Morrells are “a lovely family—Eduardo [the youngest son] is extremely interesting & makes a delightful little cavalier for me.”60 Openly seduced by the life of leisure on a Cuban plantation, she continues to fashion herself in queenly terms, appointing Eduardo, the Morrells’ pre-adolescent son, as her personal knight. The freedom and pleasure of Peabody’s daily routine was quite different from Mary’s, who was responsible for educating the Morrell children and was often weary after working all day.61 In a letter dated February 3, 1834, Peabody tells her mother about “her day” and describes how she rises “at dawn, & sometimes just before” and: as soon as possible get dressed enough to go and rouse my Knight Eduardo, who springs at my call with the most laudable eagerness. Then Tekla with enthusiastic devotion & reverence serves me oranges to break my fast, whenever I meet her in my way to Eduardo’s chamber.62

In reading Peabody’s colonial letters one understands why she complained to Elizabeth that Mary “thought me very selfish and self indulgent in Cuba.”63 Patricia Ard argues in her introduction to Mary’s 1887 romance about Cuban slavery, Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago, which she based on her letters from Cuba, that while the trip turned Mary into a committed abolitionist, “‘it prompted Sophia to decide not even to think about slavery.’”64 57

 Ibid., 17.   Patricia Ard, “Introduction,” xviii. 59   Peabody, 18. 60  Ibid., 20. 61  Ard, xv. 62   Peabody, 26. 63  Ard, xv. 64  Ibid. 58

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Each Peabody sister, like the Emerson brothers in Puerto Rico, had an opposite reaction to slavery in the Spanish colonies. Sophia and Edward opted for silence and elision, while Mary and Charles became abolitionists. This split also reflects the debate within the United States not only about slavery but also about the possible annexation of Cuba. By highlighting the sensual benefits of life in Cuba, without acknowledging that they are directly dependent on slavery, Peabody’s letters articulate her version of the anti-conquest. Peabody’s imperial gaze discursively naturalizes the institution of slavery, making Cuba patently desirable. Because of its evident restorative powers, Peabody claims Cuba as her personal Paradise, repeatedly calling the people with whom she associated there, including the Morrells, her “Paradisiacal People.”65 Peabody’s deployment in her letters of the colonial discourse associating the Americas with Eden, which dates to Columbus, becomes even more evident when she re-writes the biblical story of The Fall of Man. In describing another “lovely ride round the plantation,” Peabody tells how Eduardo “plucked a Guava from the tree, arrived at its most delicious state for eating. I ate, and had there been an Adam near, I am afraid that with Eve I should have said, ‘Take thou & eat like wise.’”66 In Peabody’s rendition, the young Eduardo stands in for the serpent that woos Eve in the Garden of Eden before Adam arrives. But she translates the tool of seduction from the proper New England apple into the lush Cuban guava, a native fruit with a hard green skin and plump pink flesh. Peabody appears to suggest that what is missing is an American Adam to whom, just like she was offered the Cuban guava, she would likewise offer her Eden-like Cuba.67 In appropriating Cuba, and re-enacting the Fall not as the biblical eviction from paradise but as a colonial re-possession of Cuba-asEden, Sophia justifies, albeit at a personal level, the notion of Thomas Jefferson on how Cuba would ensure the national “wellbeing” of the United States. Through her imperial gaze and her aesthetic style of U.S. anti-conquest, Peabody’s colonial letters connect the U.S. extra-continental expansionist project in Cuba with her own personal empowerment and restoration.

Anticipating Colonialism The transitional contact zones of Puerto Rico and Cuba in the 1830s, within the context of a growing presence of the United States in those islands, made the articulation of colonial visions in Peabody’s, Edward’s, and Charles’s colonial letters largely unavoidable, even if they were largely involuntary or later to be disavowed. After her marriage to Hawthorne, for instance, Peabody found that her letters were too overflowing with a sensuality and sexual excitability that she 65

  Claire M. Badaracco, “Introduction,” lxx.   Peabody, 42. 67  For more on how the “American Adam” became a cultural trope from 1825 to 1850, see R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam. 66

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was no longer comfortable with, and she disavowed them. But before she felt the need to downplay her Cuba experience, Peabody found the colonial contact zone to be a space where she could exercise an aesthetic anti-conquest that was focused on her own physical wellbeing and sensual expression, without fear of censure or repression. As her rhetorical opposite, her sister Mary used her Cuba experience as a springboard from which to advocate firmly against slavery and against U.S. colonialism, especially the annexation of Cuba. In their colonial letters, the Emersons and Peabody gazed at and passively possessed Puerto Rico and Cuba at the same time that they “produced” these islands as places of Eden-like natural beauty, and their people as inferior inhabitants in dire need of the benevolent influence of U.S. civilization. These colonial visions anticipated the representations that would later justify the mission of Manifest Destiny, and that functioned as the discursive engine for U.S. extra-continental colonialism in 1898. The cross-cultural and colonial contexts in which these writers lived supplied them with the material to create and promote immediately knowable and intimately believable representations of the long-desired and romanticized Spanish Caribbean, and of its national, racial and cultural “Others.” The colonial letters of the Emersons and Peabody thus reveal the presence of an important third element in the relationship between U.S. epistolarity and nation-building in the early nineteenth century: extra-continental colonial desire.

Works Cited Ard, Patricia, “Introduction,” in Patricia Ard (ed.), Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Badaracco, Claire M. “Introduction,” in “‘The Cuba Journal’ of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Volume I, Edited from the Manuscript with an Introduction” (diss., Rutgers University, 1978). Bosco, Ronald A. and Joel Myerson, The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Decker, William Merrill, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Dietz, James L., Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Donovan, Frank, The Thomas Jefferson Papers (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1963). Elbert, Monika M., Julie E. Hall, and Katharine Rodier (eds), Reinventing the Peabody Sisters (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006). Emerson, Charles Chauncy, “A Leaf from ‘A Voyage to Puerto Rico,’” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, 3:4 (1843): 522-6. Emerson, Edward Bliss, Emerson Papers, MS Am 1280.226 (222), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The American Scholar,” in John Carlos Rowe (ed.), Emerson and Fuller: Selected Works (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). García, Ivonne M., Anticipating 1898: Writings of U.S. Empire on Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawai’i (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2008). Gatell, Frank Otto (ed.), “Puerto Rico in the 1830s: The Journal of Edward Bliss Emerson,” The Americas, 16.1 (1959): 63-75. —— (ed.),“Puerto Rico through New England Eyes, 1831-1834,” Journal of Inter-American Studies, 1.3 (1959): 281-92. Hewitt, Elizabeth, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Holden, Robert H. and Eric Zolov, Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Joy, Mark S., American Expansionism, 1783-1860: A Manifest Destiny? (London: Pearson, 2003). Lazo, Rodrigo, “Against the Cuba Guide: The ‘Cuba Journal,’ Juanita and Travel Writing,” in Monika M. Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katharine Rodier (eds), Reinventing the Peabody Sisters (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006). Lee, Pamela, “‘Queen of All I Surveyed’: Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s ‘Cuba Journal’ and the Imperial Gaze,” in Monika M. Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katharine Rodier (eds), Reinventing the Peabody Sisters (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006). Lewis, R.W.B., The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Mann, Mary Peabody, Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago (1887), ed. Patricia Ard (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Marshall, Megan, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005). Martínez-Fernández, Luis, Torn Between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840-1878 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). Murphy, Gretchen, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Peabody, Sophia, The Cuba Journal, Vol. 1, in Claire M. Badarraco (ed.), “The Cuba Journal of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Volume I, Edited from the Manuscript with an Introduction” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1978). Pérez, Jr., Louis A. (ed.), Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992). Pratt, Julius W., Expansionists of 1812 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1957). Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). Ronda, Bruce A., Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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Rowe, John Carlos, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Streeby, Shelley, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Valenti, Patricia Dunlavy, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 1 (1809-1847) (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004). Wilkins, David E., American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

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Chapter Four

The Authentic Fictional Letters of Charles Brockden Brown Elizabeth Hewitt

In the genre of familiar letters the topic that emerges more than any other is authenticity. The letter, epistolary writers and theorists tell us repeatedly, is the form best suited to convey sincerity, the genuine expression of self and soul. Indeed, historians of the novel argue that the novel first took the epistolary form not only because the letter was the mode in which the rising middle class communicated, but because familiar letters constituted the kind of writing that gave access to the very things that novels strove to record: sentiment and sensibility. Of course, if the value of the form (whether a real letter written to another person or the invented letters that populated novels, magazines and newspapers of the eighteenth century) was authenticity—that one could read in their pages real and sincere expressions of self—then the letter’s danger was predicated on the very same pretense. That is, insofar as they presumed and testified to authenticity, so too could they be a powerful tool for artifice and emotional counterfeiting. The letter was the vehicle of social exchange that demanded and assumed the full faith of its creditors: if and when this faith burst, so too did the delicate structure of social intercourse framed and maintained by the inauthentic letter. Even as letter-writing manuals disciplined the practice of epistolary writing by offering standardized models and forms for successful letters, the primary imperative was that the letter be sincere and natural. H.W. Dilworth’s very popular (and widely reprinted) Familiar Letter-Writer (1758) explains, When you write to a friend, your letter should be a true picture of your heart, the style loose and irregular; the thoughts themselves should appear naked, and not dressed in the borrowed robes of rhetoric; for a friend will be more pleased with that part of a letter which flows from the heart, than with that which is the product of the mind.

Using the same sartorial metaphor, The Complete Letter-Writer (1758) advises its practitioners that their letters should “wear an honest cheerful Countenance, like one who truly esteems, and is glad to see his Friend; and not like a Fop, admiring   H.W. Dilworth, The Familiar Letter-Writer, vi.



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his own Dress, and seemingly pleased with nothing but himself.” The necessity that the letter be a natural and genuine expression of self is highlighted most apparently in many of the standardized subscriptions that these manuals provide as models: “yours with greatest sincerity” or “sincerely yours.” Of course, there is something almost humorous in the injunction to abandon affectation even as these same manuals offered models to be imitated. Yet as Eve Tavor Bannet explains in her study of letter-writing manuals, we ought not see these two claims as paradoxical. Imitation was not understood as the antithesis of genuine expression. Letter writers were instructed to follow epistolary models, learning the grammar of English syntax, of clarity and conciseness, but also of a natural and unaffected style. The more letters one read and wrote, the more effortlessly one could “sit down and write ... immediately in the words that nature dictates to him.” Given the insistence on the letter as the polished version of authentic sentiment, it is no surprise that early novelists used the epistolary form as the narrative mechanism for recording interiority. Rarely, in fact, do we see epistolary novels that offer inauthentic letters. Letters instead serve plots as the means to expose the disguises of rakes and coquettes who dominate the pages of the early novel: in other words, even characters defined by their talent for dissimulation write genuine letters. They may misrepresent themselves on the public stage, but they confess their true desire in their intimate correspondence. We know who and what Clarissa and Lovelace really desire because we get to read their letters. The Coquette similarly uses correspondence to secure access to genuine motivations: we know that Sanford is a rake because his letters to his friend reveals him as such. And, of course, familiar letters have frequently been used as a primary archive for critics seeking out authentic authorial interiority—as the source material for the biographical details of literary artists. Even as we recognize the ways that letters are highly attentive to the style and means by which they represent their authors, we nonetheless feel authorized to assume they are genuine expressions of some kind of authentic self. As one of the earliest novelists of the United States, and one who used both epistolary and non-epistolary structures for his own novels, Charles Brockden Brown’s correspondence is typical—it has been understood as an archive from which literary biographers might draw their assessments of both work and life.   The Complete Letter-Writer, 47.  Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters. Bannet argues that the “natural ease” that the manuals advised as the idealized epistolary style was the “art of concealing and naturalizing the well-elaborated social, conversational and rhetorical arts ... rather than a signifier of spontaneity or sincerity” (262). While she wisely advises contemporary readers not to anachronistically assume all familiar letters as expressions of the soul, it is also the case that the manuals insist that letter writers represent themselves and their news with sincerity. Whether or not the letter really does convey “sincere” information is not the crucial issue: the convention is to say that one writes with sincerity.   John Tavernier, The Newest and Most Compleat Polite Familiar Letter-Writer, 3-4.  

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Yet, as we shall see, from the beginning of his career, Brown’s use of the epistolary form challenged this assumption of epistolarity as delivery system for authentic sentiment. Even more interesting, in his fiction and personal correspondence, we see an appeal to letter writing as the vehicle for genuine expression even as he flagrantly violates this principal. Indeed, because Brown’s earliest letters are both stereotypical in their employment of generic conventions and maddening in their refusal to abide by the genre’s most essential law, which is sincerity, they offer an ideal case study for the study of familiar letters. In what follows, I will demonstrate the ways that Brown theorizes the dividing line between familiar letter and epistolary fiction. This theorization challenges common scholarly assumptions not just about Brown’s letters, but about the use of biographical letters more generally. Historically, literary scholars have attended to familiar letters for two primary reasons. First and most frequently, they are used as biographical source material— as texts through which to discover information about intimate relationships, authorial ambitions, economic conditions, mental and physical health, and any other number of subjects that are relevant to literary biography. Second, critics read biographical letters as stylistically and thematically contiguous with published writing. We read letters, then, either as the antithesis of literature (a mechanism through which to uncover the “authentic” or “genuine” motivations behind the artist) or as identical to literature (as source material for the author’s published writing). Moreover, we often read them as both simultaneously. What makes Brown’s letters so uncharacteristically difficult for both projects is that they appeal to and violate our confidence in these expectations. We might, for example, turn to Brown’s first accomplished published writing, “The Rhapsodist” series published in 1789 in The Columbian Magazine, in which he begins with a meditation on the sincerity of the anonymous writer. Notably, Brown’s initial explanation as to why he chooses the term “rhapsodist” is highly reminiscent of the stylistic requirements of letter writing manuals: the Rhapsodist, Brown announces “will write as he speaks, and converse with his reader not as an author, but as a man.” The Rhapsodist, as Brown frames him, is a genuine man who will use writing as the means by which he can secure himself honestly and authentically to others. Thus the Rhapsodist explains that his nom de plume “serves as a bond of union between parts utterly dissimilar, and otherwise unconnected with each other.” Yet this commitment to social intercourse, legitimated by the pseudonymous author’s desire for sincere and authentic expression, is substantially undercut in the second Rhapsodist essay, when he announces that while his writing emerges   In The Romance of Real Life, Stephen Watt argues that this series points to Brown’s desire to posture at both authenticity and isolation, which (for Watt) is a consequence of Brown’s “uneasiness in a liberalizing social milieu of competitive individualism” (45).   “The Rhapsodist 1,” 466.   Ibid.

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“from an intimate acquaintance with the world,” he is nonetheless “an enemy to conversation.” Here our Rhapsodist announces his desire to “preserve his dignity sacred from promiscuous intercourse,” declaring writing as essentially debasing since it is used in the service of “social passions.” This contradictory depiction of both a commitment to and repugnance for social intercourse is somewhat rationalized when our writer confesses that he is a fraud: “I am least of all disposed to assert that the writer of these papers displays in his life and and [sic] actions, a true and genuine representation of a rhapsodist. I have indeed assumed the name.”10 This betrayal becomes even more apparent in the next sketch when the assumed rhapsodist includes in his sketch a letter from the “real” Rhapsodist (nonetheless addressed “To the Rhapsodist”) testifying to his “amiable disposition” and authorial talents.11 There is, of course, nothing especially surprising about such counterfeiting in a literary sketch published pseudonymously: increasingly familiar with the conceit of epistolary sketches and novels, readers of the Columbian Magazine would recognize that a single author was likely writing both sides of the correspondence. But Brown extends such epistolary games and confusions into his personal correspondence—that is, into the familiar letters that he writes and distributes to friends and associates. And for this reason, critics are sometimes at a loss to discover whether Brown’s individual epistolary utterances are real or fictional.12 Perhaps the best example of this dilemma is the series of sixteen letters written between “CBB” and a young woman, Henrietta. Originally published in David Lee Clark’s biography of Brown as real letters to a real young woman, subsequent critics argued that they instead constitute Brown’s early attempt to write epistolary fiction following the example of Rousseau and Richardson.13 Contemporary critical consensus largely assumes that the letters are fictional, but one critic, Peter Kafer, has recently offered his assessment about the biographical identity of the fictional Henrietta, the daughter of Chews (senior partner in the 

 “The Rhapsodist 2,” 537.  Ibid., 538. 10  Ibid. 11  “The Rhapsodist 3,” 600. 12  In “Benevolence and the ‘Utmost Stretch,’” Paul Witherington argues that an “[e]xamination of Brown’s letters shows little difference in style and tone between the real and the fictional” (179n3). Thus, he claims, Brown is “seduced to the epistolary novel because it more nearly resembles the writing of ‘real’ letters” (178). 13  In Charles Brockden Brown, David Lee Clark publishes the letters under the heading “The Journal Letters.” John Holmes, who has established the most recent census of Brown’s correspondence, assumes the letters are fictional and follows the standard practice of not including them in a listing of Brown’s complete correspondence. The editors of the forthcoming edition of Brown’s correspondence, The Letters and Selected Poetry, are still deliberating whether or not to include the Henrietta letters in the volume. See also Eleanor M. Tilton, “‘The Sorrows’ of Charles Brockden Brown,” 1304. 

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law firm, Wilcox, where Brown was working in the very same period in which the letters are said to be written).14 Even accepting his argument that the letters are “real,” it is nonetheless the case that the letters, as recorded by Brown into his journal, appear simultaneously authentic (missives that a young couple actually exchanged) and fictional (letters that a young couple might write if they wanted to depict themselves as something out of a Rousseau novel). As Kafer admits, “Occasioned by a real person and a real relationship ... they effloresce into a world of their own. They are a fiction, too.”15 Certainly one fictional aspect of the letters is that both sides of the exchange are stylistically similar (and indeed Henrietta declares herself as learning her epistolary skills from “CBB”). In many ways, however, determining whether or not these letters represent a “genuine” amorous relation for Brown is beside the point. The very fact that these letters exist and that, 200 years later, critics continue to debate their authenticity points to a rather remarkable feature of Brown’s early correspondence more generally. He uses letters as a mechanism for intimate confession as well as for what seems to be creative obfuscation of self. I am especially interested in the surviving letters of Brown’s correspondence with his two most intimate friends from the period in which he begins to define himself as a writer: William Wood Wilkins and Joseph Bringhurst, Jr. Brown corresponds regularly with Bringhurst from 1792 until 1797, and almost fifty of these letters survive in manuscript form. There are fewer letters between Brown and Wilkins, but they regularly wrote between 1791 and 1793.16 One reason why so many of these letters survive is that they comprise the text of both Paul Allen and William Dunlap’s first early nineteenth-century biographies of Brown.17 The title of Dunlap’s biography, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the Rarest of His Printed Works, from His Original Letters, and from His Manuscripts before Unpublished (1815), is telling as it indicates that for Dunlap (with whom Brown also had a regular epistolary relationship) the author’s life is to be composed out of his writing, both epistolary and narrative, both published and manuscript, both personal and public. In fact, this literary biography in many ways effaces the distinction between fiction and autobiographical epistolary writing in that it suggests that both genres are   See Peter Kafer, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Pleasures of ‘Unsanctified Imagination,’ 1787-1793.” 15  Ibid., 550. 16   Most of Brown’s letters are currently only accessible in manuscript form. For this essay, however, I have relied on transcriptions of manuscript letters prepared by John Holmes for the forthcoming volume, The Letters and Selected Poetry. I cite the letters by addressee and date, or [date] if this is uncertain. Wilkins dies in 1795. 17   See Paul Allen, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown and William Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown. Originally hired by Brown’s family to write the biography, Allen’s work was never published. Dunlap finished the project, publishing Allen’s first volume (with some emendations and deletions) as well as an additional second volume. 14

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equally useful to account for the “life.” Or rather, the implication is that both kinds of writing equally compose the life they mean to record. In many ways, then, Dunlap and Allen offer a better way to conceive of Brown’s own understanding of epistolary writing’s purpose than do some of Brown’s more recent biographers. Although Stephen Watts, Brown’s most recent biographer, dismisses Dunlap and Allen as offering no “interpretive value,” his own critical biography of Brown’s career (like those of his predecessors, Clark and Donald Ringe) use Brown’s letters according to a simpler formula: as a data mine for biography and for early examples of techniques Brown will later use in his published writing.18 Indeed many critics have remarked on the similarities between the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Brown’s early letters and those he will later incorporate in his fiction. Many letters, for example, record dialogue, even rendering voice in dialect, thereby effectively translating the letter into third-person narration.19 Brown describes himself as an interloper spying from the closet, a conceit that that will emerge in later novels. Additionally, in these early letters, Brown practices writing in the persona of other correspondents: a young widower, a married supporter of Charles James Fox, a young man whose childhood was spent in Pennsylvanian prisons.20 He likewise assumes the character of his own correspondents, scripting their replies into his own letters. In short, what is most striking about Brown’s epistolary writing is not so much that it stylistically resembles his fiction, but that it is so fictional. The line between his familiar letters and his published writing is an infinitesimally fine one. Caleb Crane characterizes these letters as a “transitional literary form, somewhere between autobiography and fiction,” arguing that Brown engages in such epistolary subterfuge as a protective response to recognition of his own emotional and sympathetic incapacities. 21 Reading Brown in the context of his passionate friendships with Bringhurst and Wilkins, Crane views Brown’s letters as a corrective strategy to fix the emotional attachments that were either too fast (Brown loved these men too passionately) or too loose (Brown was emotionally reticent). Thus, in his letters to Bringhurst, Brown lies so as to “get rid of himself” and preserve himself as “fictional,” while in his letters to Wilkins, Brown commits an “imposture” on his correspondent, effectively fictionalizing his friend. Although  Watt, 226. See also Clark, and Donald A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown.   Notably, an early unpublished and unfinished epistolary “novel,” which Allen and Dunlap print in their biographies, between two young girls (Sophia and Jessy) likewise strains at the epistolary form insofar as the letter becomes less invested in addressing its recipient, and more dedicated to recording and narrating events (which includes the production of dialogue). 20   See Kafer’s “Charles Brockden Brown and Revolutionary Philadelphia” for debate on whether Brown ever did spend time in jail, as he stated in a letter to Bringhurst. Reflecting on the controversy this claim has produced, Caleb Crane reflects that “in the matter of Brown’s truth and lies, it does not pay a scholar to be overconfident” (American Sympathy, 284n25). 21   Crane, 55. 18

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Crane’s depiction of the liminal status of Brown’s letters (between fictional and autobiographical) is accurate, his assessment that Brown’s “lies” and “imposture” testify to the author’s psychological insecurity contradicts the larger point Crane means to make. In other words, given that Crane recognizes the capacity and tendency for fictional representation in these letters, it seems an odd gambit to use these unreliable letters as source material for psycho-biography. In fact, this critical paradox is characteristic of a general tendency in scholarship on the literature of letters: even when critics announce their recognition of the necessarily fictive and constructed status of epistolary writing, they nonetheless turn to letters as the textual space of psychological revelation. In many ways, Brown’s early letters almost compel such paradoxical usage insofar as he routinely invokes the need for epistolary writing to offer sincere confessionals even as his letters thwart this demand. While it would seem that such stylistic choices would yield a critical decision to obfuscate the distinction between familiar letter and fictional narrative, the aura of authenticity attached to the familiar letter remains. This is the problem, after all, posed by the Henrietta letters. Brown’s distinctive employment of the epistolary form, I propose, will help us to see the inadequacies of the conventional uses to which familiar letters are put and will also reveal the ways that Brown highlights both inadequacies and possibilities in the epistolary form itself. An early letter to Wilkins from 1791 nicely demonstrates some of the characteristic features of Brown’s epistolary experimentation. Evidencing both epistolary and narrative impulses, Brown both addresses his friend and introduces the fictional scenario that his letter describes: “Listen my friend, the dialogue is short but singular.”22 The letter then narrates an imaginary scene of a “visionary youth” expectantly waiting to receive a “precious ... inestimable letter” from his beloved. The letter establishes a fictional conceit that Brown will return to in his fiction—that of the secret witness, squirreled away in the closet watching the transpiring events. Brown’s letter also turns toward narrative when he records the dialogue between the anticipating lover and the family member who delivers the letter (and articulates his own desire to penetrate the contents of the letter). Describing the youth perusing the “voluminous correspondence,” Brown addresses his own epistolary confidant, Wilkins: “Ah! my friend: Shall I tell you what these letters contained: by whom they were written or to whom they were addressed?” Although the pleasure of the moment would seem to be the possibility of this disclosure—that Brown will reveal the private letters that the youth’s own friends cannot see—this revelation does not, in fact, happen. Neither Wilkins nor the youth’s family is made privy to their contents. Instead, the letter makes a strange shift, and Brown turns his imperative away from the recipient of his own letter (Wilkins) towards the recipient of the fictional letter he has just described. 22   Brown to William W. Wilkins, [Late 1791], Papers of Charles Brockden Brown, MSS 6349, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library (hereafter UVL).

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Addressing his visionary youth, now sleeping atop the letters he has spent the evening devouring, Brown writes: “May the image of her whom thou adorest be present to thy mental sight, which sleep still suffers to be exercised ... Happy youth! Of what importance is it whether the misjudging world should frown or smile upon thee?” It is not merely, then, that the letter has depicted a fictional scene for Wilkins’s amusement, but that the scene has collapsed on itself—Brown’s familiar letter has turned into an intimate address to a fictional character—an address of prophetic knowledge (the kind only a novelist would have) in which he beseeches his character to be “happy while thou may,” even as he knows that his “blissful period of intellectual liberty will speedily expire.” Brown is not merely using the letter as a space to try out a fictional narrative; he is proposing that the relationship between author and character is one founded on a kind of epistolary intimacy—that to write a character is also to write to a character. Brown suggests, in other words, that the novelist’s relationship to his character is an affectionate one. But, insofar as he is writing this in a letter to Wilkins, he also implies that the relationship between friends is like that between an author and his character. Brown seems to recognize, however, the potential impediments to this project since instead of luxuriating in the narrative pleasure of full and complete disclosure and knowledge, his letter shifts suddenly again, calling attention to the deux ex machina power of the writer. “Hah!” he writes, “By what invisible agent was the Scenery instantaneously changed? Wither have the actors vanished?” Now Brown, his correspondent Wilkins, and his visionary youth find themselves in the private closet of a “Student or some secluded and contemplative and literary person, who immunes himself from all Society, and spends his life in musing or serious solitude.” Letter writer (Brown) and letter reader (not Wilkins, but Brown’s lovelorn and soon to be ruined fictional character) engage in a dialogue, which Brown records in his letter. As they peruse the library of this young scholar’s literary hermitage, the visionary youth articulates his desire to know the identity of the one who has so compiled his books, reminding us of Brown’s assertion that his own correspondent, Wilkins, would want to know the content of the letters that he describes his own character as reading. Their mutual perusal is interrupted, however, by the return of the occupant and Brown whisks both from the scene: “Hark! The tenant of the closet is himself approaching. ... We are gone.” Because the letter has negotiated such scenery changes before, we understand the conceit, and yet even that expectation is foiled when in the very next paragraph Brown addresses a new “thou” as he apostrophizes “Memory”: “Memory! Thou witch! Thou art busy to pernicious purposes. I have told thee to forbear, and have menaced thee with the punishment of disobedience; but thou slightest my injunctions. ... Art thou not the cause of all my Infelicity?” Here we no longer know who speaks (is this our visionary youth? Brown? Wilkins?), nor do we understand from where comes this castigation of memory. Given that only our transcendent narrator possesses knowledge of events past or future, we have not been offered any scenes that give an account of

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consciousness, let alone memory. And yet the first-person speaker attacks memory as “imperious” and “tyrannical,” and as the “source of plagues.” Brown’s letter then scripts memory’s reply to the accusation: “But Fancy (thou sayest) is thy self. Thy Sister. In destroying one I destroy the other and that fancy is the cause of all those evils and not thyself.” In response, the narrator (“I”) refuses this kinship between memory and imagination, declaring memory to be a “witch” and a “hag,” while imagination is the “mother of ten thousand nameless joys”—the mother who will shield her child from the horrors that memory forces upon the speaker. In this dialogue, then, Brown establishes the rationale behind the wild flights of imaginative fancy that this letter scales: the shifting scenes and addresses are a reprieve from memory, which is depicted as the real stuff of biography, but also as a tyrant who refuses the restorative freedom of fancy. Sounding a note that will be repeated in other letters, as well as in Wieland and Edgar Huntly, Brown claims that he writes so as to give utterance to his true sentiments, but that this “voluble” pen will only speak if he can “ascertain the death of memory.” Here, then, the argument seems to be that the fantastic elements of Brown’s epistolary writing are a reprieve from memory: an attempt to vanquish memory in favor of imaginative freedom. Significantly, however, it is not a respite from any particular memories (since Brown offers no details about the real psychic events that might be troubling his consciousness): it is instead a refusal of memory as abstraction, as an allegory for the emotional eloquence Brown insists that he does not possess. He describes himself as “Slave of an involuntary and irremediable awkwardness and reserve.” Despite the letter’s appeal to the “milder queen,” imagination, her reign is brief, as the letter is interrupted again, this time not by another fantastical invention, but by the much more prosaic call to dinner. Returning then to the more explicit frame of a letter written to Wilkins, Brown insists that epistolary writing is the best means to secure his emotional attachment to his friend, but he also apologizes for allowing melancholy to dominate his letters. The letter’s mission, Brown theorizes, is to render a document of affectionate attachment, but one that will not dwell on Brown as melancholic subject: the letter should offer intimacy without revelation. Thus when Brown returns to the letter ostensibly after an hour’s leave (the first section is dated “Thursday Evening at 10 o’clock,” and the second “11 o’clock”), he proposes shifting the epistolary duties to Wilkins, instructing his friend that if he does not like the “subject on which I have hitherto so copiously written,” he should himself devise one so as to relieve Brown of the “irksome necessity of talking of myself.” Brown’s letters repeatedly try to negotiate a social dynamic somewhere between intimacy and disassociation. Moreover, they often acknowledge their inability to secure the reciprocity that should be the proof of friendship. His letters generate responses he neither anticipates nor intends. Writing Joseph Bringhurst, for example, Brown apologizes for sending a letter that causes his friend’s “uneasiness.” Castigating himself for using “detestable weapons” that have destroyed the “holy sympathy” of friendship, Brown asserts that he is “haunted by some malignant dæmon” that forces him to “utter Sentiments, which it is my interest and duty

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to conceal.”23 Brown here articulates the central paradox of epistolary writing that almost all these letters both repeat and attempt to solve. As the technology of friendship, the letter is supposed to be a sincere document, and yet it also must resist the dissemination of melancholy and solipsistic musings that might cause pain to the other. Thus, although Brown declares the letter’s duty as the production of a sympathetic friendship, he also asserts that the basis of this friendship cannot be disclosure. For example, in a letter to Bringhurst, Brown asserts his desire to have his whole soul “visible to [Bringhurst’s] discernment,” insisting that his friend’s “penetration can easily divest my failings of their mask.” Yet this acknowledgment of his friend’s perspicacity compels Brown to want to banish letter writing, as if to suggest that the very tool of sympathy, insofar as it presents the possibility of disclosure, ruins the foundation of friendship. Therefore, Brown declares that he will “Throw my pen upon the floor and crush it with my heel.” Here Brown restores himself to fantasy (since the selfsame crushed pen is also writing the letter that describes it), and so here he returns to the equipoise of simultaneous confidence and counterfeiting, the very basis on which friendship should depend. Forcing his letter to enact the essence of this paradox, Brown engages in a fantastical description of his own possible suicide, as he sits on a “jutting promontory” awaiting the “Angel of destruction.” Again, the letter takes a strange form when he shifts his second-person address away from the real recipient of his letter, Bringhurst, to this “Angel,” and yet back again to “My Bringhurst” who is now rendered as physically present to Brown: “I caught a momentary glimpse of my Correspondent. I saw him buried in profound and tranquil sleep.” Changing his own setting from the suicide perch on the promontory, Brown becomes Bringhurst’s own angel, descending on his correspondent’s bed chamber and attempting penetration of his sleep: “He looks upon me with regard. He dreams of me. His lips inarticulably and involuntarily utter my name.” Here is Brown’s fantastical production of intimacy with Bringhurst—in which he strives to be certain of his friend’s nocturnal fancies, even as he admits that his soul is “not, indeed, the Inhabitant of his Sensorium” nor the “witness to the operations of his fancy.” But nonetheless he asserts he “will not be mistaken” and that within Bringhurst’s dream, together they converse and feel “Heavenly Sympathy!” The daunting complexities of this epistolary attachment can also be seen in the strange subscription to the letter: “Excuse the faults and esteem, as they deserve, the virtues of him, who, in calling thee his friend, will receive as much pleasure, as it is possible for him to confer on Brown.” Brown scripts Bringhurst’s relationship to him, as the imperative is that he both “excuse” and “esteem” Brown. This subscription in many ways enacts the idealized economy of the letter in which the writer both gives and receives pleasure at once, rendering a perfect reciprocity between correspondents. 23   Brown to Joseph Bringhurst, Jr. 5 May 1792, Charles Brockden Brown Papers, George J. Mitchell Dept of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, New Brunswick, Maine (hereafter BCL).

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Pleasure, for Brown, is repeatedly the barometer by which to determine if the letter does its office. So, for example, Brown writes that there is no need for Bringhurst to write back, since the “pleasure” he takes from writing letters is sufficient currency to “forgive” the epistolary “debt.”24 Similarly Brown describes the pleasure that will come from subsequent reviewing of their letters: “How infinitely and inexpressible agreeable is this correspondence and what pleasure shall we not hereafter derive from reviewing it!”25 The problem, however, is that while Brown declares pleasure as the goal, he cannot settle on the proper means by which to secure it. And the crux of the problem is whether the letter ought to reveal or conceal in its attempt to secure affection between correspondents. Writing Bringhurst, for example, Brown says that his friend’s letter has brought him “pleasure” that has come from his “more accurate” knowledge of his friend, and that with this increased understanding, his affection and attachment for his friend has also amplified. Brown frames this increase of knowledge in terms of a social contract: the more Bringhurst reveals, the more Brown knows, and the more he knows, the more certitude he has that Bringhurst is “worthy” of the affection that Brown himself brings to the relationship. Yet, although Brown asks, “shall [Bringhurst] not possess [his affection],” he also asserts the irrelevancy of reciprocity—that regardless of what Bringhurst feels for Brown (whether “he esteem or despise me”), his affectionate attachment to Bringhurst is secured. If his knowledge of Bringhurst is irrelevant to his love, he nonetheless declares the need to reveal himself to Bringhurst so as to attempt to compel the selfsame affection from his friend: “is it not necessary that he should know me before he loves me?”26 Brown here describes mutual confidence as the “test of friendship,” but it is not entirely clear what constitutes this “confidence,” since the letter also pledges him to the friendship without needing to receive “any proofs of reciprocal affection.” Indeed, the language of social contract entirely evaporates when Brown confesses that his desire to provide deep access to his own secret stores is the means by which Bringhurst will “master” his soul. Additionally, if Brown here announces his desire to expose himself completely, many of his other letters insist on the illegitimacy of this desire: “Our sorrows ought, in our promiscuous intercourse, to be studiously concealed.”27 Brown, therefore, alternates between claims that his epistolary persona depends on disclosure of confidences (that “any degree of reserve is incompatible with genuine friendship”)28   Brown to Bringhurst, 9 June 1792, BCL.   Brown to Bringhurst, [1792], BCL. Dunlap explains Brown’s practice of “journalizing,” explaining that he would “retire … to his chamber” to “journal all the incidents and reflections which had occurred in that space of time. He composed and transcribed letters and even copied into his journal the epistles he received from his correspondents” (15). 26   Brown to Bringhurst, 20 May 1792, BCL. 27   Brown to Bringhurst, 9 June 1792, BCL. 28   Brown to Wilkins, [1792], UVL. This letter is transcribed by Allen, 50-55. 24 25

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and an insistence that the basis of his friendship ought to entail the suppression of anything that does not bring pleasure to the recipient. Revelation of his own misery is in these latter terms an affliction to the correspondent: “I dare not send you the second letter ... it would appear too much like the ravings of a Lunatic. It would afflict your sensibility with mortal pangs.”29 Thus, he announces that he has formed “a thousand resolutions to conceal from you, from every one, my sorrows, my vexations.”30 This resolution, of course, is belied by the very letters that Brown sends to his friend, which repeatedly vent his sorrows and vexations, as Brown even admits, writing, “I hourly infringe them, and weary the ears of my friend with murmurs and complaints.”31 But Brown also justifies this infringement, asking: “yet does not the mere disclosure: the mere participation tend in some degree, to alleviate the calamity?” Indeed, Brown repeatedly announces that the “purpose of friendship, is to alleviate affliction by participating in it.”32 To Bringhurst, he writes, “The chief end of friendship is the alleviation of sorrow, and of sorrow what antidote is there more powerful than Sympathy”; to Wilkins, he asks, “for what are the purposes of friendship but the alleviation of sorrow and the increase of happiness by participating in them with another? And if we are never suffered to speak of ourselves, how will those purposes be effected?”33 Thus, even as he reckons such disclosures as an infringement on the time and patience of his friends, and certainly not productive of any happiness on their part, he cannot forgo the belief that disclosure might do something to “alleviate [his own] calamity.” Brown’s paradoxical rendering of what the letter should accomplish perhaps explains the strange experience of reading this correspondence, in which we feel we are witnesses to the musings of a solipsistic young man, and yet we also learn almost nothing about him. Thus, although many have read these letters as single-mindedly dedicated to self-revelation, using the letters to make claims about Brown’s “shattered” psychological status or his “erratic and hyperemotional character,” what is striking is that his letters are surprisingly lacking in biographical or psychological detail.34 In fact, it may be that Brown’s first biographers, Dunlap and Allen, better represent this correspondence in their characterization of Brown’s epistolary duties as essentially selfless. They claim that Brown never engaged in anything approaching self-revelation. Allen, for example, characterizes Brown’s letters to Wilkins as “testimonies of affection,” but also notes that Brown does 29

  Brown to Bringhurst, 7 May 1792, BCL.   Brown to William W. Wilkins, [1792], UVL, transcribed by Allen, 50-55. 31   Brown to Bringhurst, 10 June 1792, BCL. 32   Brown to Wilkins, [1792], UVL, transcribed in Allen, 50-55. 33   Brown to Bringhurst, 9 August 1792, BCL; and Brown to Wilkins, 3 November 1792, transcribed by Clark, 93-5. 34   Watts portrays young Brown as “shattered,” as a writer in “intense and persistent emotional crisis” (47), arguing Brown’s letters demonstrate his “obsessive preoccupation with self” (39). Crane describes him as “erratic and hyperemotional” (75-6). 30

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not presume affection and revelation as synonymous. For Brown, the fact that a friend’s “tongue and his pen, his actions and his written speculations were as opposite to each other as the poles” is evidence of neither hypocrisy nor falsification.35 Likewise Brown assumes there is nothing contradictory between his own commitment to intimacy and his commitment to imagination. We can perhaps best see this logic in a letter to Bringhurst in which Brown begins by proposing that letters be used towards sympathetic “alleviation of sorrow.” Asserting his need to reveal himself to his friend, he announces, “O Bringhurst! Thou shalt be master of my heart.” Remarkably, however, despite his demand that his friend touch the tender spot of authentic self, he proceeds to reveal something that we know to be biographically untrue: That I loved that I wedded. That, ere a lunar revolution was accomplished death snatched from me the object of my vows. She left behind her a wretch forever desolate forever sad. What a tale could I unfold. What a striking comment on the fictions of Goethe and Rousseau. How eternal is the difference between truth and falsehood, between nature and imitation! And how evidently discernable is this difference rendered by my experience! But thou shalt be told it at another time.36

In alluding to this tragic tale from his past, Brown appeals to confidence and sincerity; he offers a “confession” designed to produce a sympathetic response from Bringhurst. Yet this tale is neither a trick nor a deceit, since there is nothing to suggest that Bringhurst would imagine that Brown’s “sincere” confession was true. Brown’s fictional revelation is not, therefore, as Crane argues, the “rhetoric of imposture.”37 Indeed, Brown makes it clear that there is no attempt to deceive given his explicit reference to the confession as a “tale” that rivals the “fictions of Goethe and Rousseau.” Rather, his appeal to sincerity is necessary to the production of the particular kind of affective attachment that the letter strives to establish. His tale, delivered in the letter, is the infrastructure for emotional attachment between friends. His imaginative tale can engender a “genuine” emotional response that will alleviate sorrow more effectively than any biographically authentic recounting. And thus, although Brown’s letters seem to theorize an impossible demand for both emotional reticence and revelation at once, these experiments with authentic fictional letters are the attempts to secure both. 35

 Allen, 44.   Brown to Bringhurst, 9 August 1792, BCL. 37  Although Crane suggests “imposture” may not be the best word to describe the “lies that Brown told to Bringhurst and the duplicity he believed that he detected in Wilkins” (75), he nonetheless characterizes these letters according to this term. Additionally, the essential connotation of either the term “imposture” or “lie” implies Crane’s understanding that because these are biographical letters (letters written to real people), they should represent memory and not imagination. My argument is that this is a generic distinction that Brown wants to refuse. 36

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In fact, Brown even goes so far as to argue that friendship depends on fiction. He offers a romantic theory of friendship: Between friends there must exist a perfect and entire Similarity of dispositions. Not only the same excellences but the same defects must be common to both. Soul must be knit unto Soul. The fictions of Romance must be realized—They must adhere to each other, by a kind of magnetical influence.38

Although Brown describes perfect identity as the bedrock for social intercourse, he also recognizes that the only space in which such absolute correspondence can happen is in the “fictions of Romance.” The letter is the textual form that is dedicated towards crafting the identity he describes: in which the other’s soul is merely the magnetic reflection of the other. Brown’s letters, therefore, are not fictional because they are generically the same as his fiction, but because the letter absolutely requires imagination (or romance) in order to serve its generic function: the production of “entire Similarity.” Brown’s extended epistolary debates with Bringhurst about suicide, for example, are all framed as the mechanism by which their respective positions will be brought into conformity. Brown claims that the receipt of Bringhurst’s letter is sufficient to radically alter his position: Can I stifle the burst of tenderness or check the tears of rapture, with which my heart was agitated and my eyes suffused on the perusal of thy letter? ... You have need only to assure me of your friendship, and withersoever you lead I shall inevitably follow.39

Brown maintains that their identity will follow from their correspondence: that Bringhurst’s letter reassures him of his friendship, and with this surety, his friend’s “temper and opinions and pursuits ... instantly become my own.” Indeed, Brown even proposes that Bringhurst is effectively the writer of his own letter: that his authentic self is Bringhurst’s: “It is you only to whom he who wishes to survey the mind which governs this pen, must have recourse.”40 The problem with this particular kind of epistolary fiction, however, is that the romance becomes difficult to negotiate when there are more than two participants. Brown, in fact, asks Bringhurst if “friendship can subsist between three persons?”41 As Brown negotiates this particular social network, he clearly imagines it as a zero-sum economy in which affection offered to one man will inevitably remove it from another. Brown even compares the relationship between 38   Brown to Wilkins, [before 1 May 1792], Charles Brockden Brown Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 39   Brown to Bringhurst, 7 May 1792, BCL. 40  Ibid. 41   Brown to Bringhurst, 20 May 1792, BCL.

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the three men to “that of a lady who has two lovers.”42 The implication is that if Brown obliges either correspondent into intimacy, the affection for the other will diminish. Not abandoning the possibility of an epistolary romance with both men, Brown instructs Bringhurst to show Wilkins “all that I write.” In this triangulated exchange, Brown proposes dropping the “lamentable strain” that calculates the inequitable distribution of affection between the three correspondents and instead offers “an imperfect narrative … of fictitious adventures” with which to “amuse” and “pleasure” his friends. Brown proceeds to sketch the epistolary romance, “The Story of Julius.”43 As was the case in the Henrietta Letters, here too there is no critical consensus as to the authentic status of this “story.” In this case Brown clearly identifies the tale as a fiction, but what is less clear is whether or not there really was an epistolary tale (Brown claims that the completed story would size “twenty duodecimo volumes”) or whether the only “Story of Julius” is the “sketch of the plan” that he outlines in this letter to Bringhurst.44 In either case, of course, the story is epistolary. Moreover, Brown elaborately frames his story with an emphasis on epistolary writing: he tells Bringhurst that he writes it as response to his reading of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise, and that he read that novel with the “excellent and amiable Henrietta G.”45 Certainly the reference to Henrietta was also an allusion to the Henrietta Letters (which Brown had been circulating to friends). The fictional status of this particular Henrietta (even as she is described as real in the letter) is implied by the fact that, at the end of the letter, Henrietta has become “Miss J___.” As such, we read an almost labyrinthian set of epistolary relations and fictions: his letter to Bringhurst describes a plan for an epistolary fiction based on a reading of Rousseau’s epistolary novel that he has read with his own (probably fictional) female correspondent, which has itself been crafted into letters that he has circulated to his own friends and correspondents. Brown explains that despite his admiration for La Nouvelle Héloise, Henrietta refused to allow him to continue it, finally giving rise to his proposal that he write a version of Rousseau’s epistolary romance that would detail “love and friendship 42  Ibid. Allen compares their romance to that depicted in a story by Brown of a complicated amorous relationship between three individuals (which is also notably compared to the plot of Clara Howard) (47). 43   Ibid. Herbert Brown reprints the entire Julius story from the letter: see his “C.B. Brown’s ‘The Story of Julius.’” He argues that there is little in the pages sent to Bringhurst that “suggest that the sketch is anything more than one of Brown’s early attempts to write a sentimental romance in epistolary form” (50). 44  Watt and Brown classify it as an early example of Brown’s fiction, suggesting that they take Brown at his word when he tells Bringhurst that the epistolary outline is a version of some other piece of writing he has accomplished. Crane very differently proposes that “Julius never existed, neither as a person nor as a novel, any more than Henrietta did” (66). 45   Brown to Bringhurst, 20 May 1792, BCL.

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in all their purity” and in which he would make explicit a moral that demonstrated the triumph of virtue over vice, and duty over inclination. As he describes his novelistic experiment to Bringhurst, he admits that he fancied himself as the model for his protagonist, Julius: “I confess at this time my ambition extended no farther than to act and speak like Julius.” And as he sketches out the scenario for the novel, his focus is on depicting Julius’s own writing to his intimate friends: “Julius gives his friend an account of his present Situation, of his resolutions and opinions with regard to study and to the conduct of life. He relates his dayly avocations, his ramblings and musings, and draws minute pictures of the adjacent country and of the manners of the inhabitants.” These letters, with which Brown intends to begin his novel, sound of course strikingly similar to Brown’s own letters to Bringhurst and Wilkins. In fact, Brown tells Bringhurst that he planned to use his own “The Journal of a Visionary” as the source material for Julius’s letters. (He changes the plan, however, when he worries that in so doing the proposed novel becomes “too voluminous.”) Moreover, when he crafts Julius’s romantic letters to the object of his affection, Brown insists that he “assume[d] the person of my hero.” This assumption is so perfect, according to Brown, that when it comes time to write his protagonist’s final letters, having determined that Julius will die, he becomes so distressed that he was “scarcely able to proceed to the Catastrophe.” And he even confesses that he is no longer entirely capable of sorting out the difference between himself and his character—the nature of the sympathetic attachment that he has written into and through the narrative is such that he frequently “confounds” his own personal tragedies with those of “my invention heaped upon the head of Julius.” In this way, Brown’s attempt to reprieve himself from the messy intercourse of the epistolary romance between Wilkins and Bringhurst only inserts himself into another still messier epistolary romance. And the collapse between imagination and memory that we saw earlier (in which Brown offers fictional stories in “sincere” utterances) is replicated here when he sincerely becomes his fictional character. Indeed, Brown concludes the letter with the announcement that he will imagine himself as Julius writing a letter to Julius’s beloved correspondent, Lauder Allen: “that young man so worthy to be called my friend.” The grammar here shows the slippage—the fictional Lauder Allen isn’t worthy of Julius’s friendship, but Brown’s. And Brown further argues that, in the following week, he will “personate my good friend Allen” and dedicate himself to the Law and not to writing voluminous letters (this letter is 17 pages long). Brown, of course, doesn’t choose to impersonate Allen, and famously devotes himself not to the law, but to the writing of voluminous letters. This particular long letter justifies the decision, as he describes the abundant “pleasures” that he and Bringhurst reap from their perusal of it. In particular, Brown is delighted by Bringhurst, who has responded so emotionally to Brown’s story of Julius that Brown declares him a “child of Sensibility” who is particularly susceptible, and even vulnerable, to “fictitious representations of distress.”46 In so characterizing his 46

  Brown to Bringhurst, [1792], BCL.

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friend’s response, Brown also remarks that Bringhurst would be even more “torn and rended by the violence of a genuine passion, or by scenes of real Calamity.” While Brown asserts a distinction between an emotional response to genuine and fictional events, he implicitly proposes that his technique for the production of a tale of melancholy is sufficiently “genuine” and “real” as to compel an affective response on the part of his friend. Yet the real compliment here seems to be directed at Bringhurst who can feel so strongly that he too might have unique capacities at representational art: thus Brown asks, “what power might not be ascribed to a pathetic or descriptive pencil wielded by such a hand!” Writing Bringhurst, Brown analogizes between the pain and pleasures that can emerge from “genuine passion” and those that come from “fictitious representations of distress.” Remarking on Bringhurst’s susceptibility to fiction, Brown worries (and relishes in) the possible power that one who wields a “pathetic or descriptive pencil” might hold over his friend. Brown writes Bringhurst that he means to engage in an intercourse in which he would speak to his friend “as I would speak to myself”: “[I] cannot expect from you, answers equally sincere, and with less probability of erring?”47 This is the problem for Brown—the impossible desire to transform the correspondent into the self by way of textual production. And so he appeals to Bringhurst as “my other self,” insisting again that “sincerity” is the “test” of friendship. He asks, “without confidence and mutual sincerity, what is friendship but a confederacy of villains or a compact of imposture?” and this appeal to candor precedes his demand that Bringhurst confess what others say about him. And yet, as if to efface the very distinction between villainous conspiracies and sincere friendships, Brown proposes that Bringhurst needs to “personate my better angel” so as to “deal sincerely with me,” and to demonstrate his point, he appeals to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison as the model to explain his conviction that he can transform himself into whatever Bringhurst desires. Bringhurst will play Richardson constructing his friend and character, Brown, as sincere and virtuous. In a later letter Brown returns to the topic of Richardson’s Grandison as an exemplary text of moral education. Writing Bringhurst, he proposes that Jesus offers a problematic model for moral modeling because the text in which the character of Jesus is rendered is so dissimilar from his own nation, language, and style: “Cannot I find one whose actions are perfectly and uniformly virtuous, who more nearly resembles me in language country, rank and other incidental circumstances.”48 Demanding the need for a character of moral perfection, Brown admits that “no real personage ... answers to this description,” but that he can find such a one in the fictional Grandison. Richardson’s novel, Brown proposes, offers a new gospel more useful because Brown resembles Sir Charles Grandison more than he resembles Jesus. Here Brown affords the Bible the status of truth, but praises Richardson’s moral portraiture as superior precisely because it is fictional: 47

  Brown to Bringhurst, December 1792, BCL.   Brown to Bringhurst, 21 December 1792, BCL.

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“as a work of invention, [it is] more accurate and uniform, and consequently more instructive.” Although the polemic here comes from Brown’s provocative claim to his friend that the Bible is a “Romance,” the key to the claim is found in Brown’s declaration that “it is indifferent to me whether the Subject of this narrative be a real or fictitious being.” In so doing, Brown asserts that his appeals to sincerity and virtuous confession have nothing to do with their correspondence to truth, but merely with what he has earlier described as the first principle of “true friendship,” which is the “promotion of another’s true interest, by all honourable means, but virtue is his genuine interest.” Whatever promotes virtue promotes friendship, and the promotion of virtue can emerge as much, if not more, from fictional texts as from “authentic” ones. For Brown, both kinds of writing, when they take the epistolary form, depend on sincerity— a sincerity that has nothing to do with what really happened, but rather with how one really feels. We see arguably the best example of Brown’s theorization of the inscrutable boundary between fiction and authenticity in a letter to Bringhurst that tells a tale, which Brown confoundedly describes as both “strictly true” and as an “imaginary letter.” 49 His letter includes another embedded letter, addressed “My Dear Friend” and dated seven years earlier (20 March 1786), which depicts a drunken Irishman who heaps “the most brutal cruelties on his innocent and helpless family,” eventually killing his wife. Brown proposes that the story might “form the groundwork of a noble tale,” even intimating that he hopes to deliver the “imaginary letter” to the Belles Lettres Society. Crucially, however, the purpose of this tale is not to be found in its conventional and maudlin plot of domestic tragedy. Rather, we find its function in the formal structure of the tale. The unnamed letter writer has himself learned about the story not through first-hand experience, but by way of a neighbor. Despite this circuitous path, the letter writer announces that the “melancholy narrative” has unfit him for any other employment save the capacity to “repeat ... the gloomy tale.” And, indeed, he concludes his letter with a statement of the ways that the story has “affected me more than I wish.” Significantly, this sensibility has been secured not through genuine experience, but through the delivery and receipt of epistolary letters. This, for Charles Brockden Brown, is what letters can deliver, and they do so whether their tales be “strictly true” or “imaginary.” When Brown now sends this “imaginary letter” to his own friend he means to cause this same experience of authentic sensibility: art is found in the “authentic” melancholy produced by the transmission of the tale. In this way, the epistolary is Brown’s privileged form not because it is “strictly true,” but because the letter form is explicitly devoted to managing its readers’ affective (and effective) responses. This explains why Brown proposes that the letter is not only the ideal written form for social intercourse, but the privileged form for all writing. In a somewhat later letter to Bringhurst (1795), he remarks:

  Brown to Bringhurst, 29 July 1793, BCL.

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The epistolary and narrative forms of Composition have each their respective advantages, but I have no doubt about the superiority of the former if it were well executed; but the latter is in itself, an easier task, though abundantly difficult, and one to which, I approach very near to the discovery, that my powers are absolutely inadequate. It being however easier than the other whatever I write with a view to the amusement of the world, will certainly be in the form of the narrative.50

Brown’s insistence that epistolary writing is the more difficult form in which to write might require us to reconsider his final two novels, Jane Talbot and Clara Howard (1801). Perhaps he determines to write these novels in the classic epistolary mode because, having written numerous narrative novels and essays, he finally feels equipped to undertake the more difficult task of epistolary composition. Contrary to the traditional critical understanding of these last epistolary novels as a retreat, we can see the letter form as the goal to which all novel-writing should lead. Brown’s devotion to letter writing is not merely an apprenticeship before his entrance into the more diffuse and public conveyance system of the periodical and book. Instead, the letter is the formal structure that best describes and enacts the social economy that Brown asserts is at the center of his intellectual interests.51 As such, Brown’s theorization of letter writing demands both our reconsideration of the conventional understanding of epistolary writing’s role in the history of the novel and requires all literary scholars to recognize the letter’s formal challenge to the antithesis between truth and fiction.

Works Cited Allen, Paul, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (1814; Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975). Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Brown, Charles Brockden, Charles Brockden Brown Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

50

  Brown to Bringhurst, 24 October 1795, BCL.  Although epistolary writing is “superior,” Brown also recognizes the ways in which it frequently fails: “Letters, indeed, as they are usually written, are the ghosts, the skeletons, of Conversation—‘with bones as marrowless & blood as cold’ ... . Of such mockeries of wit & ease, such shadowy resemblances, of life & nature, it is not easy to speak in any other language than that of anger or ridicule.’” Brown’s assessment is cited by his friend, Elihu Hubbard Smith, in one of his letters in which he bemoans the inadequacy of contemporary letters, the variety of ways in which letters fail to “unfold the treasured volume of our soul;” see The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith 1771-1798, 101-2. 51

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——, Charles Brockden Brown Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine. ——, The Letters and Selected Poetry, ed. Mark L. Kamrath, Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and John R. Holmes (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, forthcoming). ——, Papers of Charles Brockden Brown, MSS 6349, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. Brown, Herbert, “C.B. Brown’s ‘The Story of Julius,’” in James Woodress (ed.), Essays Mostly on Periodical Publishing in America: A Collection in Honor of Clarence Gohdes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973). Clark, David Lee, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham, NC, 1952). The Complete Letter-Writer: or, Polite English Secretary (5th edn, London: Stanley Crowder, and Co., 1758). Crane, Caleb, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and the Literature of the New Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Dilworth, H.W., The Familiar Letter-Writer; or Young Secretary’s Complete Instructor (London: G. Wright, 1758). Dunlap, William, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the Rarest of His Printed Works, from His Original Letters, and from His Manuscripts before Unpublished (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815). Kafer, Peter, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Pleasures of ‘Unsanctified Imagination,’ 1787-1793,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 57.3 (July 2000): 543-68. ——, “Charles Brockden Brown and Revolutionary Philadelphia: An Imagination in Context,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 116 (1992): 467-98. “The Rhapsodist 1,” The Columbian Magazine (August 1789): 464-7. “The Rhapsodist 2,” The Columbian Magazine (September 1789): 537-41. “The Rhapsodist 3,” The Columbian Magazine (October 1789): 587-601. Ringe, Donald A., Charles Brockden Brown (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966; rev. edn 1991). Smith, Elihu Hubbard, The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith 1771-1798, ed. James E. Cronin (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1973). Tavernier, John, The Newest and Most Compleat Polite Familiar Letter-Writer (Berwick, R. Taylor, 1762). Tilton, Eleanor M., “‘The Sorrows’ of Charles Brockden Brown,” PMLA 69.5 (December 1954): 1304-8. Watt, Stephen, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origin of American Culture (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Witherington, Paul, “Benevolence and the ‘Utmost Stretch’: Charles Brockden Brown’s Narrative Dilemma,” Criticism, 14.2 (Spring 1972): 175-91.

Chapter Five

Keys to “the labyrinth of my own being”: Margaret Fuller’s Epistolary Invention of the Self Jeffrey Steele

During the winter of 1840-41, Margaret Fuller began publishing in her essays expressions of spiritual and intellectual independence that paralleled Ralph Waldo Emerson’s model of “self-reliance.” Like Emerson, Fuller founded her vision of self-reliance upon the profound intuition of divinity within the self. Such independence, she later asserted in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was of preeminent importance for women, who needed to realize that they, as well as men, were “in themselves the possessors of ... immortal souls” and could escape the “precepts” of “guardians” that had “impeded” their minds with “doubts.” Achieving “self-reliance” or “self-dependence,” Fuller affirmed, women would no longer “learn their rule from without” but “unfold it from within.” One of the challenges of Fuller scholarship has been to explain how she achieved this sense of independent selfhood. What has been little noted is that many of its most important features first emerged in her letters. Moving between Cambridge, Groton (Massachusetts), and Providence, Fuller was often geographically separated from her closest intimates. By necessity, she found that letter writing was the only effective means to share her self with them in an age before the telephone or even rapid transportation. The slow tempo of nineteenth-century mail delivery, as well as the common practice in Fuller’s circle of saving and sharing letters as treasured personal documents, ensured that she treated much of her correspondence with the care given to any literary production. When friends had to wait days for a response to their last letter, she chose her words carefully, knowing that misimpressions could easily magnify over time and that the give-and-take of interpersonal communication was taking place in slow motion. One of Fuller’s responses to such exigencies was to construct micro-narratives in her letters—miniature stories in which she lingered over striking events or, in some cases, played the parts of imaginary characters. At other times, she used a highly condensed figurative language that took on the dimensions of a personal mythology. Such writing practices reveal her assumption   Margaret Fuller, Essential Margaret Fuller, 272-3. Hereafter cited as “EMF.”  EMF, 262.

 

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that her letters were texts to be lingered over, pondered, and carefully interpreted. Utilizing the reactions of different correspondents to evaluate the different facets of her being elicited by them, Fuller used her letters as a workshop in which she fashioned many of the symbols, themes, and literary personae found in her mature works. Very little of this material is found verbatim in the published essays. Rather, Fuller’s correspondence functions as the “textual unconscious” of her public work. It is the site where she began transforming the crises of her private life into literary elements that purified and abstracted personal energies into generalized emblems of being. At the heart of Fuller’s writing lay a profoundly dialogic imagination. Renowned as a conversationalist, she developed many of her most brilliant insights in dialogue with others—a practice that later carried over into the dialogic structures found in many of her essays. Like Emerson, Fuller saw the development of “self-reliance” as a profoundly private process composed through intense moments of personal insight and meditation, but she also believed that self-construction was social and inter-subjective to its very core. Through social relationships, she argued, individuals “not only know themselves more, but are more for having met, and regions of their being, which would else have laid sealed in cold obstruction, burst into leaf and bloom and song.” The harmonious development of the self, “the Union in the Soul,” she insisted in her poem “The Sacred Marriage,” depended upon the proximity of a significant other who enabled one’s “whole force” to be “drawn out more and more.” Fuller first discovered the centrality of social dialogue in her correspondence. Rather than working out her most important insights in the privacy of her journal, as Emerson did, she found that she needed the presence of others to engage her sense of emerging selfhood. In the process, her letters served as a tool of self-discovery, allowing her to explore with and through others the changing dimensions of her self. The most social of literary forms, the letter embodies “a real dialogue intended or imagined with the recipient/reader.” More than any of her male contemporaries, Fuller needed this relational field in order to map the fluid geography of her soul. Fuller’s correspondence with a small central circle of intimate friends provided her with the reflective surfaces she needed to inspect the self she was fashioning. None of these individuals seems to have fully comprehended the complex and multi-faceted person that was emerging on the pages of Fuller’s many letters. She provided each of them with a partial view—projections that meshed with their talents and interests. Early on, Fuller used the reactions of her childhood friend James Freeman Clarke, her former student Jane Tuckerman, as well as Caroline Sturgis, to evaluate the different facets of her being elicited by them.    I borrow the term “textual unconscious” from Susan Friedman, “(Self)Censorship and the Making of Joyce’s Modernism,” 22-9.   EMF, 40-41.   EMF, 378.    Máire Cross and Caroline Bland, “Gender Politics,” 7.

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At the height of her spiritual crisis of 1840-41, Fuller’s correspondence with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Caroline Sturgis, and William Henry Channing allowed her to examine in detail different dimensions of her self. The most important subject of these letters was the intellectual, imaginative, and spiritual development of “Margaret Fuller.” Using her most intimate correspondents as sounding-boards, she continually projected in her letters images of what she hoped she might become, as well as emblems of what she feared she might have lost in the daily vicissitudes of living. The human drama that emerges from these texts is that of an extraordinary woman negotiating an identity for herself in a social world that had not yet encountered the personality that she was constructing. The invention of “Margaret Fuller,” these letters reveal, was a difficult and painful process. At times, Fuller likened this fashioning of the self to alchemical transformation, as she tested, refined, and purified the contours of her personality in the crucible of her correspondence. Constituting a “site of self-reflection and self-construction,” Fuller’s letters provided her with a discursive space in which she could explore this new identity, as she measured the limits of her life against increasingly expansive images of what she might become. But the drama of Fuller’s correspondence lay in her gradual discovery, which culminated in a profound spiritual and psychological crisis during the winter of 1840-41, that no single individual could completely “minister” to her emerging self. Writing to Emerson at the height of her crisis, Fuller complained: “I felt that you did not for me the highest office of friendship, by offering me the clue of the labyrinth of my own being.” But in the same letter, she realized, “I am now so at home, I know not how again to wander and grope, seeking my place in another Soul.”10 The transition from the first state to the second, from “labyrinth” to “home,” measures the distance that Fuller covered in her early correspondence. The dialogue that she refined through writing to others eventually became a conversation that Fuller learned she must conduct with herself. In the terms of the philosopher Kelly Oliver, she hoped that Emerson would provide her with an inter-subjective space of witnessing in which her difference could circulate freely. But what she discovered was that her subjectivity was ultimately founded on her ability to address and witness projected facets of her own being.11 Recording this crucial insight in her 1841 essay “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” Fuller 

 Anne-Françoise Gilbert, “Deconstructing Gender,”48.   It is striking that out of the voluminous archive of over 1100 letters collected and edited by Robert N. Hudspeth, nearly ten percent of the whole—one hundred and ten letters—represent the years 1839 and 1840. While we know that some crucial letters are missing and that Fuller’s letters to many individuals have not been preserved, the sheer volume of the surviving texts that remain testify to the importance of this period.   Fuller, Letters of Margaret Fuller 2: 159. Hereafter cited as “LMF.” 10   LMF, 2:160. 11  Kelly Oliver, Witnessing, 15. Oliver stresses the importance of being witnessed as a being, “real or imaginary, actual or potential” (17, emphases added). 

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moved from an echo of her epistolary dialogue with Emerson to a more profound level—the conversation she was conducting with herself. She was both the essay’s narrator, a person who had absorbed many of Emerson’s key ideas, and the enigmatic being—the Magnolia—who emerged in the textual space of her writing. Two years later, in “The Great Lawsuit,” Fuller perfected this technique, when she constructed a dialogue between her narrator and a figure named “Miranda,” who was clearly an idealized self-portrait embodying her vision of female potential. In the dialectical structure of her imagination, Fuller learned how to project idealized images of herself, give them life, and then test them in profound moments of intra-personal encounter. This technique of dialogic intra-personal engagement became the hallmark of her writing.12 It was as if Fuller had learned how to compose letters to herself, internalizing the self-other dialogues of her correspondence. This process of self-exploration began for Fuller in the 1830s, as she began constructing her correspondence as a relational field that would facilitate the growth of her self. One of the friend’s most important responsibilities, she asserted, was to help her discover her true being. A key aspect of this process, she informed James Freeman Clarke in 1830, was the ability to “enter into and sympathize with my feelings.”13 Such identification gave her the freedom to explore different roles and feelings without fear of censure or rebuke. Like the nurturing garden later outlined in Fuller’s 1840 “Autobiographical Romance,” the sympathetic correspondent would provide her with a place where she could feel “at home” and allow her “thoughts” to lie “in the nest ... fed and kept warm.”14 Over the years, a number of individuals were cast by Fuller into the role of ideal, nurturing friend, able to correspond to the perfected self that she saw emerging. The ideal friend, she confided in 1831 to George T. Davis, should be a “person who can appreciate my true self.”15 Such individuals, Fuller observed the following year as her relationship with Davis was waning, have “influenced me, and helped form me to what I am.”16 An important part of this selfconstruction, she asserted, involved the articulation of both letter writer and recipient as better selves, brought into being by the idealizing act of letter writing. “I shall follow the instructions of the great Goethe,” she informed one of her female friends in 1834, and “address you as if you were what you ought to be.”17 But Fuller held herself to a similar standard of personal perfection, using her letters to evoke images of “my better

 Lori Lebow identified a similar quality in Emily Dickinson’s correspondence, which she labels “epistolary autobiographic self-construction.” The autobiographical narratives in letters, she explains, facilitate “commentary from the writer as participator in the context of the story being constructed and as critical interpreter reviewing these past episodes.” See “Woman of Letters,” 76. 13   LMF, 1:161. 14  EMF, 31, 32. 15   LMF, 1:174. 16  Ibid., 176. 17  Ibid., 199. 12

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world,” hoping that she might “live to show myself worthy to be its denizen yet.”18 But the dilemma of Fuller’s existence was that no single individual was able to play the part of her spiritual mentor. Asserting in a letter to Clarke that the ideal friend and correspondent should be able “to minister to me,” Fuller recognized at the same time that in the future “I must live alone” and “take care of my ideas without aid.”19 Instead of finding her better self mirrored in her correspondence, Fuller was forced to realize that a recurring theme in her life would be the thwarting of her hopes and aspirations. “The seemingly most pure and noble hopes have been blighted;” she reflected in 1833, “the seemingly most promising connections broken. The lesson has been endlessly repeated... .”20 If Fuller’s imagination supplied the bright crucible in which she saw reflected dreams of a better self, pain was the solvent that facilitated the necessary transformation. This lesson was brought home with a vengeance in October 1835, when her father died abruptly from cholera at their family home in Groton, Massachusetts. Putting an end to Fuller’s dream of traveling to Europe, Timothy Fuller’s death forced Fuller to face the harsh realities of domestic responsibility (caring for her younger siblings) and of financial necessity (finding paying jobs to help support herself and her family). At the same time, the loss of her father also seared onto Fuller’s consciousness one of the most bitter lessons of gender difference. Although she was the oldest child, she was not “an eldest son” able to “administer the estate,” which was handled with some ineptitude by her uncle Abraham Fuller.21 But at the same time that Fuller was recording in her letters the difficult lessons of renunciation, she solidified her position in the new circle of Transcendentalist intellectuals. In July 1836, she commented on her forthcoming visit with Emerson, whom she had long desired to meet and had admired from afar as “a mind which had affected mine so powerfully.”22 The following month, she wrote to Bronson Alcott, asking about a teaching position in his Temple School. Key conduits for many of the most radical spiritual ideas of the age, both Emerson and Alcott deepened Fuller’s knowledge of the theological and philosophical languages of selfhood. Equally important, Fuller was quickly accepted by both as a valued confidant and intellectual colleague. Alcott shared his journals with Fuller and taught her important lessons in the art of conversation (his main pedagogical method), while Emerson invited her into both his home and his expansive intellect. As she began to map the spiritual geography of her soul, Fuller imagined Emerson’s home in Concord as a place of refuge that might shelter her from the emotional trials of everyday existence. It was a “Lethe” (mythical river of forgetfulness) and “Paradise of thought,” that—she imagined—might “purify and strengthen” her.23 At other 18

 Ibid., 211.  Ibid., 178. 20  Ibid., 180. 21  Ibid., 237. 22  Ibid., 213. 23  Ibid., 268-9. 19

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moments, in Fuller’s emerging mythology of selfhood, she represented Emerson himself as a place of repose—the endpoint of her arduous pilgrimage through life. Imagining Concord as a “haven of repose,” she wrote Emerson in June 1837: “I look forward to your presence as the weary traveller does to the Diamond of the Desert—Flowers will, I trust, spring up. ...”24 A second imaginary refuge for Fuller was a realm of maternal nurturance that she associated with her mother’s home, a place where she dreamed of “vegetat[ing] beneath her sunny kindness.”25 The third, and perhaps most important, sanctuary in Fuller’s spiritual geography was her own soul. “I had excellent times at home, with my own soul,” she wrote Jane Tuckerman in 1838, in a letter that associated such assured self-awareness with “overpowering moonlight.”26 By October 1838, Fuller was able to equate the moon’s cycles with the phases of her soul, writing Jane Tuckerman of an “hour of vision” that “came upon my soul” when the “rosy clouds of illusion ... vanished” and “the moon has waxed to full.”27 Over the next several years, Fuller solidified her equation of the moon with the transfigured female self, as she explored the moon imagery associated with Diana, Isis, and the other great goddesses of classical antiquity. Beginning in her 1841 essays, the moon became one of the cornerstones of her personal mythology. Throughout her 1844 journals and poetry, the moon and moonlight evoked for her scenes of imaginative and emotional intensity; while, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller’s passing reference to “tides that betoken a waxing moon” provided a useful shorthand for her sense of mythic female power emerging in American culture.28 But if Fuller could feel at home in Emerson’s home, in her mother’s garden, or—occasionally—with herself, she frequently recorded in her letters a wrenching sense of estrangement and dislocation. Much of the difficulty resided in excruciating bouts of ill health and physical pain, such as her periodic migraine headaches that lasted days and sometimes weeks. In one letter, Fuller described how “my head is oppressed and a dry feverish heat irritates my skin and blood so that each touch and sound is scorpions and trumpets to me ... .”29 Such physical disability, moments of “extreme weakness,” she revealed to Caroline Sturgis, made her feel “homeless” and “forlorn.”30 Added to the physical pain of ill health, Fuller dwelt in her letters upon the emotional pain of failed relationships. In the reactive crucible of her correspondence, such losses provided the stimulus that catalyzed Fuller’s most profound epistolary narratives of personal discovery, as she recorded the bitter life lessons that had been deepening and strengthening her own character. In 1837, she had told Jane Tuckerman that the memory of “heavenly, heroic strife” 24

 Ibid., 283.  Ibid., 272. 26  Ibid., 341, 342. 27  Ibid., 348. 28  EMF, 305. 29   LMF, 2:83. 30   LMF, 1:338. 25

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enabled a person to face “after trials” of loss and grief.31 The following year, she commiserated with Sturgis, “We are, we shall be in this life mutilated beings, but there is in my bosom a faith that I shall sometime see the reason. There is in my bosom a glory that I can endure to be so imperfect ... . And if one cannot succeed, there is a beauty in martyrdom.”32 We see the consolidation of this process of self-discovery in an extraordinary letter that Fuller wrote to Jane Tuckerman in October 1838. (October, the month of her father’s death, became the period of Fuller’s most profound meditations.) Returning to what Hudspeth provisionally identifies as “her unhappy experiences with George Davis,”33 Fuller recalled: an era in my own existence; it is seven years bygone ... . At this time I never had any consolation, except in long, solitary walks, and my meditations were so far aloof from common life that on my return, my fall was like that of the eagle which the sportsman’s hand calls bleeding from his lofty flight to stain the earth with his blood. In such hours we feel so noble, so full of love and bounty that we cannot conceive that any pain should have been needed to teach us. It then seems we are so born for good, that such means of leading us to it were wholly unnecessary. But I have lived to know that the secret of all things is pain. ... I was not without hours of deep spiritual insight, and consciousness of the inheritance of vast powers. I touched the secret of the universe, and by that touch was invested with talismanic power which has never left me, though it sometimes lies dormant for a long while.34

Linking “pain” to “insight,” Fuller—in the next paragraph of this pivotal letter— suggests that the key to her new-found wisdom was the ability to abstract insight from “griefs,” turning raw emotion into what she describes as “the thought of each object which had been taken from me.” In an echo of Emerson’s principle of “compensation,” she stoically asserts that suffering tempers and disciplines the soul—the idea, as Fuller phrases it in a later letter, that “pain and passion” have “passed into Experience.”35 But the earlier phrase “talismanic power” suggests the distance between Fuller’s model of selfhood and that of Emerson, who had stressed the abstraction of wisdom out of suffering. Pain, for Fuller, leads to more than philosophical wisdom (Emerson’s idea of “compensation”). It also generates mythic intensity, unlocking the door to a realm of reverie and insight. Moments of intense suffering, Fuller perceived, led her into what she described as

31

 Ibid., 263.  Ibid., 331. 33  Ibid., 348n. 34  Ibid., 347. 35   LMF, 2:35. 32

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“vestal solitudes,” “deep places of silent thought, where alone I am perfected.”36 This insight became one of the foundations of Fuller’s representation of female self-reliance, manifesting itself later in the vision of “vestal” seclusion in “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” and the spiritual independence of both Miranda and Minerva in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In her letters, Fuller began establishing a field of reflection in which imagination and perception, dream and desire, could meet and mingle.37 Functioning as a psychological crucible, her correspondence allowed her to crystallize models of self-representation and analysis out of the powerful symbols she had been discovering in her reading. From Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Fuller absorbed the symbols of the carbuncle (glowing, magical gemstone) and the phoenix, as well as an important vein of subterranean imagery. In Goethe, whom she had been reviewing for a planned biography and as she worked on her translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, she found symbols of the inner genius or “daemon,” as well as the Faustian landscape of mythical ‘Mothers.” German ballads provided her with the evocative legend of the “drachenfels” —the forbidding landscape in which maidens were sacrificed to devouring dragons. In Greek mythology, Fuller encountered symbols of powerful mother goddesses, while Persian mythology gave her moving images of transcendent love and spiritual pilgrimage. Much of this material began coalescing in a striking letter that she wrote Caroline Sturgis in January 1839. Evoking the ability of the “Greeks” to balance the “divine” and the “human,” Fuller’s letter explodes into a welter of mythical imagery, as she charts for her friend her new-found geography of the soul: I love the stern Titanic part, I love the crag, even the Drachenfels of life—I love its roaring sea that dashes against the crag—I love its sounding cataract, its lava rush, its whirlwind, its rivers generating the lotus and the crocodile. ... I love its dens and silvery gleaming caverns, its gnomes, its serpents, and the tigers sudden spring. Nay! I would not be without what I know better, its ghostly northern firs, haggard with ice, its solitary tarns, tearful eyes of the lone forest, its trembling lizards and its wounded snakes dragging to the se[c]retest recesses their slow length along.38

The next paragraph expands Fuller’s mapping of psychic space, as she refers to “my own particular star,” the moment when “my wings be grown,” “flowers,” and “nearer kindred yet, stones with ... veins worn by fire and water, and here and there disclosing streaks of golden ore.” Stabilizing her repertoire of symbols, Fuller by 36

  LMF, 1:351, 2:31.  Nathaniel Hawthorne later developed an analogous idea in “The Custom House” introducing The Scarlet Letter, when he discussed the “neutral territory” where imagination and perception mingled. 38   LMF, 2:40. 37

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1839 had begun synthesizing multiple literary and mythological traditions into a syncretic psychological vocabulary—a process that accelerated in the fall when she dedicated her first Conversation series to Greek mythology.39 But during 1839, Fuller’s epistolary and mythological explorations received a jolt, as her personal life became even more complicated. This sense of disturbance crops up in her letters to Caroline Sturgis. Writing her about a mutual friend’s failed romances, she observed that unreturned love “became a deep passion and gave the needed crisis to his character”; while, earlier, she had written Sturgis of the importance of facing the “Titanic era” in her life, a time of “tremendous strife.”40 By May 1839, Fuller wrote Elizabeth Hoar that it “seems all mockery ... to play the artist with life, and dip the brush in one’s own heart blood,” for “we mount the heights of our being, only to look down into darker colder chasms.”41 The “chasms” of being gaped even wider for Fuller in July 1839, when she learned that Samuel Ward was rejecting her for another (who turned out to be Fuller’s “beloved,” Anna Barker). Utilizing the floral imagery that was becoming one of her central symbols, she wrote him that: “The kernel of affection is the same, no doubt, but it lies dormant in the husk. Will ever a second Spring bid it put forth leaf and flower?” Ward’s rejection, Fuller continued, brought home to her once again the “bitterness of checked affections, the sickness of hope deferred, the dreariness of aspirations broken from their anchorage.”42 But the following month, in a letter to Jane Tuckerman, Fuller began to transform her “gloom, black as Hades” into a further accession of achieved wisdom. “What demon resists our good angel, and seems at time to have the mastery?” she asked; but “Only seems,” she countered, “I say to myself, it is but the sickness of the immortal soul, and shall bye and bye be cast aside like a film.”43 Fuller’s Goethean reference to the inner “demon” above reveals that her model of “self-reliance,” as well as of the “immortal soul,” would be quite different from Emerson’s. For example, one of the primary coordinates in her geography of spirit was the Goddess, a figure that she often paired with lost male companions. Venus and Adonis, Isis and Osiris, and Mary and Jesus, were all becoming analogues for the painful absences scarring her life. Fuller’s use of mythical analogues to psychic phenomena was greatly facilitated by her reading for her first Conversation series for Boston women, focusing on Greek mythology, which commenced in November 1839. Describing the first class in a letter, Fuller revealed her tendency to read classical deities as personifications of psychological faculties: Jupiter representing the will; Mercury, “the Understanding”; Apollo, “genius, 39   Describing the first Conversation class in a letter, for example, Fuller revealed her tendency to read classical deities as personifications of psychological faculties. See LMF, 2: 102. 40   LMF, 2:43, 2:34. 41  Ibid., 66. 42  Ibid., 81. 43  Ibid., 82.

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perception and transmission of divine law”; and Bacchus, “Genius.”44 Two months later, Fuller repeated her identification of Jupiter, Apollo, and Bacchus, but added as well Venus Urania (“Ideal Beauty”), Cupid and Psyche (“Redemption of the soul by human experience”), and Pallas [Athena] (“inadequately treated” by her class).45 Providing her with an additional repertoire of psychological narratives and symbols, Fuller’s interpretation of classical mythology helped her stabilize representations of personal crisis by casting them into well-known mythic narratives. In September 1839, for example, Fuller’s break with Samuel Ward occasioned one of her most intense moments of epistolary mythmaking. Writing to Ward, she was finally forced to acknowledge that his love would not be “a shrine at which I could rest upon my weary pilgrimage” (echoes of the refuge that Fuller had earlier imagined with Emerson). Instead, Ward had become the missing companion (like Adonis or, in this case, Christ), the entombed being cut off from maternal nurturance: “You have given me the sacred name of Mother ... . But Oh, it is waiting like the Mother beside the sepulchre for the resurrection, for all I loved in you is at present dead and buried, only a light from the tomb shines now and then in your eyes.”46 Four years later, in her poem “To the Face Seen in the Moon,” Fuller asserted that the transfiguration of the self into the “worthy Angel of a better sphere” depended upon one’s ability to “win the secrets of the tomb.”47 One sees this process of crystallizing in 1839, as Fuller faced the disintegration of her inner circle of friends: Samuel Ward, Caroline Sturgis, Anna Barker, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The year was marked by an increasing distance from Caroline Sturgis, one of the two women she held dearest and “would have held by the hand.”48 Turning from Sturgis to Anna Barker in October 1839, Fuller felt momentarily secure in the presence of “that eldest and divinest love,” that of “my beloved” whose presence filled her with intense “tides of feeling.”49 But just as Fuller invested her imaginative energies in Barker, it became clear that she was losing Anna as well, because Barker was engaged to Samuel Ward, the person Fuller had just been forced to relinquish. Emerson’s letters during this period reveal that he was also shaken by this event, which necessitated the reconfiguration of his closest circle of friends: Ward, Barker, and Fuller. But Fuller, he realized, would be most deeply affected. “But ah! My friend,” he wrote her, “you must be generous beyond even the strain of heroism to bear your part in this scene ... .”50 While the approaching nuptials of Barker and Ward occasioned in Emerson a new sense of solitude, Fuller felt bereft. Entering an emotional season of “autumn” and “chill wind,” she struggled to transform her sense of loss into stable insight. 44

 Ibid., 102.  Ibid., 118. 46  Ibid., 90. 47  EMF, 241. 48   LMF, 2:93. 49  Ibid. 50  Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2: 327. 45

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“My attachment was never so deep as now,” she wrote Ward in October, “it is quite unstained by pride or passion, it is sufficiently disinterested for me to be sure of it.”51 “I should grieve,” she continued, “to be the ghost to cross the path of true communion in the Elysian grove.” But if Fuller feared to be the “ghost” haunting Ward and Barker’s “Elysian” romance, the uncanniness of her psychic position found voice in a poem she mentioned in a November 1839 letter to Emerson—“Drachenfels.” “[A]ll the verses” in her “poetical journal,” she told Emerson, “bear some reference to Anna, W[ard], and myself.”52 “Loneliness so profound,/” Fuller’s poem “Drachenfels” opens, “’Tis almost desolation here I see!/ Awe-struck, I gaze around,/ While common life seems far apart to me.”53 “A high mysterious mood/ Breathes from the scene, —“ Fuller writes several stanzas later, “like that which might be known/ To some keen spirit, from the shackles flown/ Of human flesh and blood ... .” Poised between life and death, faced with the dangerous “Dragon-brood” that might take her life, Fuller’s speaker confronts the mystery of her enigmatic isolation. She longs to unlock the secret of this “moment poised in space,” a “hieroglyphic spell” beyond the “bonds of common language.” But the only pathway through this strange psychic space, she realizes, is to woo the “phantoms of [one’s] being,” an elusive presence that might reveal the hidden “Angel in [one’s] being,” an unrevealed “power” that she “feels” but cannot yet see. But despite the hope for revelation articulated in her poem, Fuller found it difficult to escape the position of the sacrificed maiden, awaiting death and an unknown revelation. “I am on the Drachenfels and cannot get off;” she wrote Emerson in December 1839, “... I remember you say, that forlorn seasons often turn out the most profitable. Perhaps I shall find it so.”54 In 1840, Fuller achieved the sense of insight that had been eluding her. By the end of the year, she finally began writing the Dial essays that would articulate her hard-won sense of spiritual independence. Even more than previous years, Fuller’s letters reveal her epistolary invention of the self, as she tested on different friends the various facets of her new personal mythology. Many of Fuller’s 1840 letters, among the most important texts she ever wrote, have the quality of psychic improvisation, as she tries on different personae and postures to see how well they function. One senses in many of her letters the desire to establish emotional compacts with her self, as if the articulation of a specific stance might stabilize a motive or mood that—in some cases—still hovered on the edge of indecision. If as Robert Hudspeth has evocatively asserted, Fuller’s accomplishment in her letters was “to create a ‘Margaret Fuller’ for the world,” one sees most clearly in the 1840 letters the contours of this process.55 These texts reveal the ways in which Fuller’s concept of self-reliance grew out of personal crises and events. 51

  LMF, 2:95.  Ibid., 98. 53  Fuller, “Drachenfels.” 54   LMF, 2:104. 55  Robert N. Hudspeth, “Introduction,” LMF, 1:26. 52

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Faced with a radical reordering of her most intimate relationships, she defined a new foundation for her sense of self, one that sacrificed the emotional and erotic satisfactions of intimacy for a higher calling. During 1840, Fuller continued to transform painful emotional attachments through a psychological dialectic that elevated the images of her friends into transfigured, mythical beings. Writing Caroline Sturgis about their love for each other, for example, Fuller declared that—like her tie with Samuel Ward—it “has been redeemed from the search after Eros,” a phrase she repeated in another letter claiming that their bond had now become “soothing and mystical to me.”56 The “fire” of such renunciation, she continued, “can burn away some useless parts of [one’s] being and leave the pure gold free!” But at the same time that Fuller asserted the purified tranquillity of transfigured feeling, she revealed in an aside that the process was not yet complete. “I write hastily;” she added, “I know not what daemon hurries my pen ... .” Writing to William Henry Channing (who during the year would become one of Fuller’s most important confidants), she described the country’s need for “higher sentiments” (a political process paralleling Fuller’s emotional development). Fuller revealed to Channing that her desire for spiritual intensity led her to sympathize with “what is called the ‘Transcendental party,” but she presciently added that her “position as a woman” would probably cause her to “differ from most of them on important points.”57 By the end of the year, Fuller’s letters would mark her distance from Emerson—a divergence that she defined for Channing by asserting her preference for Hamlet’s “deep-searching tendency” over Julius Caesar’s “worldly sagacity.”58 Caesar was one of Emerson’s heroes, playing a key role in his definition of “dominion” at the end of Nature. But as Fuller expressed in her “Autobiographical Romance” (begun while visiting Emerson later in the year), Shakespeare represented for her a “counterpose to my Romans” and in some ways to Emerson himself.59 Not only did the introspection of Shakespeare’s greatest heroes provide Fuller with an alternative model of being, their lives manifested a social dimension missing in Caesar’s (and Emerson’s) world of mastery and dominion. Fuller continued her struggle for independent being through a series of epistolary micro-narratives that articulated a new emotional and intellectual awareness. Her “life,” she jokingly wrote Frederick Henry Hedge in January, “is rather a subject for metaphysical romance than a gazette.”60 One of the most striking chapters of that romance occurred in a letter she wrote Emerson late in February. Adapting the discursive mode of Persian poetry, Fuller imagined herself on a pilgrimage toward an inaccessible shelter. Instead of offering the refuge of earlier years, Emerson now seemed a distant and inaccessible companion: 56

  LMF, 2:105, 2:107.  Ibid., 108. 58  Ibid., 110. 59  EMF, 35. 60   LMF, 2:113. 57

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I am like some poor traveller of the desert, who saw, at early morning, a distant palm, and toiled all day to reach it. All day he toiled. The unfeeling sun shot pains into his temples; the burning air, filled with sand, checked his breath; he had no water, and no fountain sprung along his path. But his eye was bright with courage, for he said, “When I reach the lonely palm, I will lie beneath its shade. I will refresh myself with its fruit. Allah has reared it to such a height, that it may encourage the wandering, and bless and sustain the faint and weary.” But when he reached it, alas! It had grown too high to shade the weary man at its foot. On it he saw no clustering dates, and its one draught of wine was far beyond his reach. ...61

Representing the pilgrimage of the self toward a distant and elusive ideal, Fuller in this letter transformed her relationship with Emerson from the 1837 model of “the weary traveller” looking forward to “the Diamond of the Desert.”62 Instead of seeming an accessible treasure, Emerson in Fuller’s psychological narrative has now become an elusive “fruit,” like the nourishment constantly receding from the outstretched hands of the hungry Tantalus. But rather than bemoaning her distance from a once nurturing friend, Fuller in this letter reorients herself toward a new center—one located in her own unfolding imagination. “With dawn,” she continues, “he arose. The palm stood as tall, as inaccessible as ever; its leaves did not so much as rustle an answer to his farewell sigh. On and on he went, and came, at last, to a living spring ... .”63 The “living spring,” Fuller intimates in this letter, lay in the depths of her own mind—a turn toward self-reliance far removed from Emerson’s own understanding of the term. “My Persian and Arabic you love not.” she chided him at the end of her letter, “Why do I write thus to one who ever must regard the deepest tones of my nature as those of childish fancy or worldly discontent?” The strains between Emerson and Fuller increased during the remainder of 1840, climaxing with the marriage of Samuel Ward and Anna Barker in October— the month which was the five-year anniversary of Timothy Fuller’s death. During the summer, Fuller revealed to Emerson that she had “moods of sadness unknown I suppose to those of your temperament.”64 But if those “terrible seasons of faintness and discouragement” were linked to disappointments in her private life, she was learning how to crystallize the painful vicissitudes of experience into powerful symbols that transcended personal pain.65 Rather than revealing to others her own emotional involvement with Ward and Barker, for example, Fuller insisted that “I know how to keep relations sacredly separate. ... I shall speak to none other. ...

61

 Ibid., 121.   LMF, 1:283. 63   LMF, 2:122. 64  Ibid., 145. 65  Ibid., 146. 62

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The monument should be made of the purest marble alone.”66 Ostensibly referring to the “monument” of Ward and Barker’s marriage, Fuller’s image seems—at the same time—an evocative symbol of the imaginative sublimation of turbulent feeling into permanent imaginative stasis. Commenting upon visits by both Ward and Barker during July and August, Fuller stressed her sense of sweetness, tranquillity, and happiness.67 If, as Heidi Kolk has suggested, Fuller’s early correspondence transfigured pain through “an experimental logic of sublimation,” it is striking that she moved through and beyond the painful narratives of “the prodigal” (Kolk’s focus) and abandonment into an imagined realm of monumentality.68 Moments of loss and separation, in Fuller’s unfolding mythology of selfhood, might become a purifying fire burning away the transient aspects of being. As Fuller eventually described the process in her 1841 mystical essay “Leila,” she “plucked from the burning” —an “elected pain” —her “divine children.”69 This acceptance of the purifying power of pain became a turning point in Fuller’s understanding of the self, for it allowed her to see immediate losses as necessary steps toward a future unfolding of being. What remained in the crucible of psychological purification, Fuller discovered, was a crystalline essence that she identified as the “carbuncle” —the glowing red gemstone of alchemical lore. Representing the “philosopher’s stone,” the endpoint of the alchemical quest for purified matter, the carbuncle—in Fuller’s usage—transfigured passion into a glowing talisman of spiritual desire. In her essay “Leila,” for example, when the Goddess retreats “into the secret veins of earth,” there then “glows through her whole being the fire that so baffles men ... the blood-red, heart’s-blood-red of the carbuncle.” This glowing energy provides Leila (and one might read, Fuller herself) with “her own light” —a self-reliant illumination enabling her to aspire toward her “purest self.”70 Such passages give a reader the uncanny sense of reading Emerson transposed to an entirely different key—one that highlights the mythical dimensions of self-reliance in feminist terms. Given the key role that the alchemical symbol of the “carbuncle” plays in Fuller’s narrative of self-reliance, it is of great interest that this symbol first appeared in her letters during the autumn of 1840. Displacing the turbulent emotional energies of her life onto a higher, mystical plane, Fuller recorded in her correspondence an intense moment of spiritual awakening that she came to regard as the turning point of her life. “I live, I am—” Fuller ecstatically wrote Sturgis on 8 September, “The carbuncle is found And at present the mere sight of my talisman is enough. The hour may come when I wish to charm with it, but not yet. I have no future, as no past.”71 The following month, on 22 October Fuller stressed that “the revolutions 66

 Ibid., 147.  Ibid., 150, 157. 68   Heidi Kolk, “Tropes of Suffering and Postures of Authority in Margaret Fuller’s European Travel Letters,” 385. 69  EMF, 57. 70  Ibid., 55. 71   LMF, 2:157. 67

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of being” transpiring in her soul demanded an intense spiritual discipline that would lead her “into the very heart of the untrodden mountain where the carbuncle has lit the way to veins of yet undreamed of diamond” (168). But “I am not yet purified,” Fuller lamented, “Let the lonely Vestal watch the fire till it draws her to itself and consumes this mortal part.”72 Near the end of this crucial letter, in a passage recalling the intensity of her grief just after the death of her father, Fuller generalized this process of transformation into the central principle of her spiritual life: “O, it has ever been thus, from the darkest comes my brightness, from Chaos depths my love.”73 Registering her passage through a wintry season of renunciation and loss, Fuller’s letter of 22 October to Caroline Sturgis celebrated as well the future emergence of reborn creative power. “Winter is coming now;” she observes, “I rejoice in her bareness, her pure shroud, her judgment-announcing winds.”74 But out of the “statuesque moons of the Northern winter,” she intuits, “... Phenix [sic] like rises the soul into tenderest Spring.”75 She may have become a “dead-seeming seed,” but “far fairer shall it bloom again.”76 Two years later, looking back upon this period of emotional turmoil in her journal, Fuller explicitly linked the crystalline imagery of ecstatic vision to her capacity to transform the “gleaming” image of Anna Barker into a glowing alchemical symbol. “I loved Anna,” she reflected, for a time with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel—Her face was always gleaming before me, her voice was echoing in my ear, all poetic thoughts clustered round the dear image. This love was a key which unlocked for me many a treasure which I still possess, it was the carbuncle (emblematic gem) which cast light into many of the darkest caverns of human nature.77

In terms of her personal relationships, Fuller’s figurative idealization of her relationship to Barker as a spiritual quest for enlightenment provided her with what Ann Cvetkovich terms an “archive of feeling.”78 Registering and recording the traumas of personal life, the symbol of the carbuncle allowed Fuller to treasure and simultaneously transform passion into permanent insight. The erotic energy radiating from the glowing emblem of the carbuncle both recorded desire, while it provided Fuller with a new center of imaginative orientation—one seemingly impervious to the vicissitudes of personal losses. At the same time, this narrative maneuver stabilized for Fuller a deeply rooted imaginative structure that provided

72

 Ibid., 167.  Ibid., 168. 74  Ibid., 169. 75  Ibid. 76  Ibid., 167. 77  EMF, 23. 78   See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, ch. 1. 73

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the gateway to self-reliance, imagined as a personal quest for a transcendent inner illumination. As early as age twenty-one, Fuller had periodically undergone profound moments of awareness that seemed to portend a future flowering of awareness. One such moment occurred on Thanksgiving 1831, when she experienced what she later described in her 1840 journal as a sense of “the inneffable, the unutterable.”79 The “statue” of her identity, Fuller reflected—looking back on her life—“has been emerging, though slowly, from the block.” In this passage, as in many of her letters, Fuller adopts the stance of witnessing that Kelly Oliver identifies as the “constitutive event” of subjectivity—the capacity to acknowledge what lies “beyond recognition,” whether in oneself or another.80 Unable to locate this capacity of witnessing in any of her closest friends, Fuller finally learned how to discover it in herself during her season of crisis culminating in the winter of 1840-41. Although she followed a radically different route from Emerson, Fuller’s epistolary record of her experiences brought her to an analogous, but parallel, intellectual position. From Emerson’s perspective, it was as if he and Fuller spoke different languages. As he wrote Fuller in September 1840, they seemed to inhabit “two thoughts” and were compelled to “meet & treat like foreign states, one maritime, one inland, whose trade and laws are essentially unlike.”81 As Emerson later reflected in the posthumous Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, it was difficult for him to acknowledge that Fuller’s crystallization of personal feeling might represent a spiritual center akin to his own distillation of religious wisdom. What most bothered him is what readers today find most compelling in Fuller’s writing—her anchoring of insight in the dense texture of her own existence. But from Emerson’s perspective, Fuller’s insistence upon the authentic dimensions of her emotional and spiritual life was “as if each of us should date his letters and notes of hand from his own birthday, instead of from Christ’s or the king’s reign, or the current Congress.”82 It was difficult for him to acknowledge that important spiritual truths might grow out of personal events, as a distillation of experience, rather than being seen as transcendent forces ordering them all along. Fuller, of course, had been picking up on Emerson’s skepticism and distance. It was painful for her to perceive the gap between herself and the individual who first taught her “what is meant by an inward life.”83 But when she wrote Emerson on 29 September 1840, begging for “the clue to the labyrinth of my own being,” the terms of her letter already acknowledged the enormous distance between them. “How often have I said,” she reflected, “this light will never understand my fire; this clear eye will never discern the law by which I am filling my circle;

79

 EMF, 11.  Oliver, 7. 81  Emerson, 2:336. 82  Fuller, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 1: 222. 83   LMF, 6:138. 80

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this simple force will never interpret my need of manifold being.”84 Postulating a self-reliance predicated upon passion’s “fire” and her own sense of difference, Fuller articulated a principle of psychological insight based upon the recording and yet alchemical purification of pain into insight. Different friends, she had discovered, had called forth different aspects of her self. But none of them had supplied all the elements she needed to complete the being she was seeking. Barker (and, to a lesser extent, Ward) had given Fuller an erotic energy fueling her imagination, while Emerson had provided her with a profound intellectual definition of personal transformation. But what Fuller learned, and amply recorded in her letters, was that she needed to trust that only her own ineffable and unforeseen combination of “fire” and illumination might provide the key to her being. The crucial lesson she learned was that “the clue to the labyrinth” could only come from herself. In a profound act of homage to Emerson, Fuller articulated her own model of self-reliance, while simultaneously marking her intellectual separation from him. For from this point on, she could cease being Emerson’s disciple and begin writing her life on her own terms—a vocabulary of selfhood that opened up pathways of illumination for herself and her contemporaries. In order to understand the significance of Fuller’s epistolary accomplishment, we might turn to the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, who pioneered the critical analysis of what he characterized as the “dialogic” aspects of literature. Novels, he argues, frequently dramatize moments of dialogue between an “authoritative word” that “demands that we acknowledge it” and an “internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege.”85 The representation of this conflict becomes a cogent reminder that language is “populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others.”86 As Margaret Fuller represented her struggle with Emerson’s authoritative model of self-reliance, she worked on a much smaller stage—not on the vast field of narrative, but rather the more circumscribed domain of individual consciousness. But the stakes were similar. Fuller’s choice of letter writing as a medium of personal exploration kept before her the dialogic qualities of self-representation. The challenge was to create her own mode of “authoritative discourse” without foreclosing the possibility of communicating with others. Emerson was well-known for his monologues; Fuller, for her conversations. In her hands, the act of correspondence modeled what she saw as the necessary social give and take with others. But, characteristically, such exchanges worked for Fuller on two parallel levels. Her voluminous correspondence testifies to the important role that other people played in her life, but a second—more intimate—exchange of viewpoints took place within her. Developing an ‘epistolary’ habit of mind, Fuller learned how to stage profound dialogues between different facets of her own being. Sending letters to ‘the interior,’ she found that the act of corresponding with herself opened up new vistas of awareness, enabling her to translate Emerson’s powerful words 84

  LMF, 2:159, emphases added.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 342. 86  Ibid., 294. 85

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into messages that she could use to read her own undiscovered intentions. Perhaps the finest letter writers have always written for two audiences. Allowing others to eavesdrop on their interior monologues, they end up listening to themselves, waiting patiently for responses to their own unfolding missives.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M[ikhail] M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Cross, Máire and Caroline Bland, “Gender Politics: Breathing New Life into Old Letters,” in Caroline Bland and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing, 1750-2000 (Hampshire, England & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). Cvetkovich, Ann, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (6 vols; New York: Columbia University Press, 1939). Friedman, Susan, “(Self)Censorship and the Making of Joyce’s Modernism,” in Joyce: TheReturn of the Repressed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Fuller, Margaret, “Drachenfels,” Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library, Margaret Fuller Papers, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts. ——, The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). ——, Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth, (6 vols; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983-94). ——, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, eds James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (2 vols; Boston, MA: Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1852). Gilbert, Anne-Françoise, “Deconstructing Gender: Henriette’s Correspondence with Rousseau,” in Caroline Bland and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing, 1750-2000 (Hampshire, England & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 43-53. Hudspeth, Robert N., Introduction to vol. 1, in Robert N. Hudspeth (ed.), Letters of Margaret Fuller (6 vols; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983-94). Kolk, Heidi, “Tropes of Suffering and Postures of Authority in Margaret Fuller’s European Travel Letters,” Biography, 28.3 (2005): 377-413. Lebow, Lori, “Woman of Letters: Narrative Episodes in the Letters of Emily Dickinson,” Emily Dickinson Journal, 8.1 (1999): 73-96. Oliver, Kelly, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Chapter Six

“Two single married women”: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stoddard and Margaret Sweat, 1851-1854 Jennifer Putzi

The friendships of women become more interesting and of greater importance as the biographies and correspondences of women win a larger space in our literature. ... When light is needed on the character of the women themselves, their correspondence is of course the richest source of information. —Margaret Sweat, Review of William Rounseville Alger’s The Friendships of Women (1868)

When Margaret Mussey Sweat reviewed William Rouseville Alger’s The Friendships of Women in the late 1860s, she could hardly have imagined that her own correspondence with a female friend would attract scholarly attention one hundred years after her death. Yet her assessment of researchers’ interest in the letters—and the friendships—of women is oddly prescient. In the last thirty years scholars have increasingly turned their attention to women’s lives and women’s words, as documented in published and unpublished texts. Women’s perspectives on social and cultural phenomena have also been recognized as central to a more thorough reconstruction of the past. For Elizabeth Stoddard scholars, the existing forty-five letters from Stoddard to Sweat, for example, provide “vivid pictures of men and manners” in mid-century New York City, as well as Portland, Maine, and coastal Massachusetts. They are also the best known source for information about Stoddard’s life and “character” in the early 1850s. Most importantly, at least for my purposes, these letters shed light on what is widely considered one of the most important relationships of her early life, her intimate friendship with Margaret Sweat, and thereby contribute much to our understanding of “romantic friendships” between nineteenth-century American women. Stoddard and Sweat were friends for three years, from 1851 to 1854, and while they frequently exchanged visits, much of this friendship took shape through their correspondence. The few critics who have looked at Stoddard’s letters to Sweat   Margaret Sweat, Review, Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat Papers (hereafter cited as Sweat Papers).   Ibid.

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have focused on what they can tell us about Stoddard’s marriage to Richard Henry Stoddard and the genesis of her writing career. Critics generally ignore Sweat’s role in the correspondence. This is, no doubt, at least partly due to the absence of any letters from Sweat to Stoddard; although it is clear that Sweat wrote frequently to her friend, these letters appear to be missing. As a consequence, when Sweat is discussed as the correspondent, critics have doubted her commitment to the friendship; James Matlack, for example, says that “[t]he term dependency may not be too strong to describe Elizabeth’s side of this association” and confidently asserts that “Elizabeth’s affection and commitment to Mrs. Sweat exceeded the reciprocal feelings of the Portland bluestocking.” Such statements are not clearly supported by the textual evidence and do not explain why the correspondence continued as long as it did or why Sweat seems to have matched Stoddard’s epistolary output letter for letter. A careful reading of the available letters reveals that both women valued and maintained the friendship, as well as the correspondence that crossed the geographical, mental, and emotional spaces between them. The absence of Sweat’s letters is unfortunate, yet Stoddard’s letters can be mined for clues to Sweat’s side of the correspondence, and additional materials—Sweat’s diary from the same period and other primary documents—provide scholars with a sense of Sweat’s own life and contribution to the friendship with Stoddard. As Patricia Meyer Spacks argues, the addressee of a letter is crucial to the “writing self” performed therein; “the writer’s tone and material shift from one correspondent to another” within a lifetime of letters, and readers “see sometimes virtually different selves emerging in different epistolary relationships.” Rather than being incidental to the letters addressed to her, Sweat’s engagement in the correspondence allowed Stoddard to negotiate a very particular epistolary self. As a newly married woman who also had literary ambitions, Stoddard often felt crushed by indecision and depression. Writing letters to Sweat, who seemed to be undergoing similar struggles, allowed her to voice her frustrations as well as her victories, to chart her development, in a sense, over the three years in which letters passed between them. The epistolary—“the genre that inscribes social intercourse”—provided her with the perfect space in which to explore her relationships with others, especially as she came into a sense of herself as an “individual soul” and an artist. Stoddard likely met Sweat while visiting Portland in mid- to late-1851. Stoddard was still unmarried—she had met her future husband, the poet Richard   Stoddard’s letters to Sweat make it clear that she destroyed some of Sweat’s letters, but kept others. Some letters may still exist, but the dispersed nature of Stoddard’s correspondence makes it difficult to determine their location.   James Matlack, “The Literary Career of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard,” 45.    This assumption is based on the fact that Stoddard rarely complains about not having received a letter from Sweat. This sort of complaint occurs frequently in Stoddard’s other correspondence.    Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Forgotten Genres,” 51, 56.   Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865, 2. 

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Stoddard, just months earlier—and was most likely in the city with her favorite brother, Wilson Barstow. Stoddard makes a cryptic allusion to this journey in a letter to Sweat: “It seems so strange that I should have gone to P[ortland] at all for the purpose I did so, and strange that I should find you as much out of place as I was.” The two women were likely introduced through Sweat’s sister-in-law, Sarah Sweat (married to Lorenzo’s brother, William); Sarah may have grown up with Stoddard in Mattapoisett and her sister lived there during the course of the correspondence. However they met, Margaret Sweat seems to have initiated the correspondence. “My dear Mrs Sweat,” Stoddard responds, “I remember you well. Your letter I brought with me—and answer it thus.” Her reference to bringing the letter with her may indicate that Sweat wrote to her before Stoddard left Portland to return home to New York City after their first meeting; if this is true, she must have made quite an impression on her new friend. Stoddard immediately makes the purpose of the correspondence clear: “I wish that I could know your inner life to have your contrasted experiences.” She acknowledges that there might be differences between them, “but knowledge will bring the antipodes together.”10 Thus, for Stoddard at least, letter writing was a way to gain access to Sweat’s “inner life” and to reveal herself in turn to her friend. Although Stoddard often expresses her desire to see Sweat and writes fondly about their time spent together throughout the correspondence, she never indicates that she would exchange their letters for face-to-face contact, as she does in later correspondence with other female friends.11 “[K]nowledge” of one another will not bring them together physically or make them more alike; rather, it will make the friend’s foreign nature familiar and perhaps allow for a level of intimacy precluded by proximity. This preference for the epistolary may be the result of Stoddard’s understanding of her own “exacting affection” and difficult personality.12 Or perhaps, as she indicates in several letters, she believes that the “inner life” is revealed as much by how one writes a letter as it is by what one writes. In one such letter, Sweat, who Stoddard insists is more even-tempered than she, is complimented for her “fair smooth letters”;13 even Richard, with whom Stoddard occasionally shares Sweat’s letters after their marriage, remarks that Sweat “writes beautifully” and, Stoddard tells her,    Elizabeth Stoddard, Letter to Margaret Sweat, 4 June [1852], Allison-Shelley Collection (hereafter “Shelley Collection”).    Sweat, Diary, 2 October 1852, Sweat Papers; Stoddard, Letter to Sweat, 23 December 1852, Shelley Collection. 10   Stoddard to Sweat, undated, Shelley Collection. 11  For example, in a later correspondence with writer Elizabeth Akers Allen, Stoddard begins a letter with this preference for her friend’s physical presence: “Your letters are always welcome, but they make me feel how much rather I would like to talk than write” (9 October, n.y.). Colby College Special Collections (hereafter Colby Collection). 12   Stoddard to Sweat, 4 June [1852], Shelley Collection. 13  Ibid.

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“says that you have more method than I have.”14 Stoddard, on the other hand, is “a rasper in style,” she laments, “and with the pen am what I am in tongue quick and sharp and hard.”15 Epistolary style for Stoddard, then, was a window into the self, a natural reflection of the writer’s personality, as so many nineteenth-century instruction manuals insisted it was.16 Despite their differences in personality and writing style, the two women had much in common and, more importantly, hungered for an emotionally and intellectually intimate friendship with another woman. Both were born in 1823 and were twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old when they met. Both had grown up in coastal towns, Stoddard in Mattapoisett and Sweat in Portland. Their families were similarly involved in the shipping business, although the Barstow family was significantly less successful than the Musseys. Stoddard’s father went bankrupt several times during Stoddard’s lifetime, and she lived on the brink of financial insolvency throughout her adolescence and married years. Sweat, on the other hand, was born into and married money and privilege; her father, John Mussey, was a civil engineer, ship owner and merchant, while her husband, Lorenzo, whom she married just prior to meeting Stoddard, was a lawyer who would go on to serve in the Maine House of Representatives and the United States Congress. Both Stoddard and Sweat were also ambitious, in an almost inchoate way, and their late marriages seem to have been the result of careful planning as well as a desire for independence and solitude. Most importantly, both women desired a female friend with whom they could discuss books, ideas, and culture (particularly the theater, about which they were passionate); in an early letter, Stoddard asks Sweat, “Is it not most difficult to find an intellectual woman empathizer? I am nigh disgusted with the search—.”17 Although neither Stoddard nor Sweat had published anything at this point in their lives, both prided themselves on their intellect and both had literary ambitions. Stoddard’s education paled in comparison to Sweat’s, but she was a careful observer of New York’s literary salons and would soon publish her own short stories, sketches, and poetry in literary journals such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s. Soon after the correspondence with Sweat ended, she began writing a bi-weekly column for the Daily Alta California. She published three novels in quick succession in the 1860s only to leave off novel-writing and publish in periodicals for most of the rest of her life. She wrote a children’s book, Lolly Dinks’ Doings, and a volume of poetry later in life, but she and Richard were often forced to compromise themselves intellectually and artistically in order to make money. Sweat did not share Stoddard’s economic worries, but she too struggled for public recognition of her literary talents. In 1859, Sweat published her first and only novel, Ethel’s Love Life. Throughout the rest of her career, she was much 14

  Stoddard to Sweat, 4 October [1853], Shelley Collection.  Ibid. 16  Rebecca Earle, “Introduction,” Epistolary Selves, 5. 17   Stoddard to Sweat, 14 April [1852], Shelley Collection. 15

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better known for her literary criticism, published in the prestigious North American Review as well as newspapers like the Portland Transcript, the Boston Courier and the New Orleans Picayune. She was also a prolific travel writer whose work includes Highways of Travel; or, A Summer in Europe (1859) and Hither and Yon by Land and Sea (1901). The friendship between the two women seems to have been essential to their growing sense of themselves as literary women, as authors, and as artists in the early 1850s. “I have all your aspirations and all your discouragements,” Stoddard assures Sweat, and goes on to ask, “What is there for such women as you and me are?”18 One way in which Stoddard attempted to answer this question in their correspondence was to position herself as an authority on literary culture in New York City; as she became more and more familiar with literary salons, publishers, and well-known writers and artists, she shared her experiences with her friend, welcoming her, in turn, into this society as well. Even prior to her marriage to Richard, Stoddard was attending literary salons at the homes of Anne Lynch, Caroline Kirkland, and George Putnam. In her first letter to Sweat, Stoddard asserts, “I have not fairly made a debut, but expect to in various ways be an admiring spectator of men & things. My friends frequent the famous evenings of Miss Lynch whenever an agreeable lion prepares to roam ... [and] things of interest constantly bubble to the surface to amuse idle people—.”19 She clearly positions herself and Sweat among the “idle people” to whom the literary gossip gleaned from such events would appeal. Although we cannot know exactly what Sweat offered her, Stoddard replied, almost without fail, with “literary on-dits,” assuring Sweat that she “shall have more if [she] like[s] them.”20 Stoddard uses such gossip to create, in the words of William Merrill Decker, a “self-presence that persuasively asserts a continued relevance to [the one] from whom the writer is absent.”21 She eventually adds to the allure by inviting Sweat to attend such gatherings during her next visit to New York. In April 1854, toward the end of their correspondence, Sweat and her husband did finally accompany the Stoddards to Anne Lynch’s salon; “I was quite delighted with Miss L.,” Sweat writes in her diary, “and she treated us with a degree of cordiality which quite astonished me as we are not lions.”22 Over the course of the correspondence with Sweat, Stoddard clearly becomes more than “an admiring spectator” of literary New York. Between her marriage to Richard, her own conversational skills, and her burgeoning writing career, she is able to announce triumphantly to Sweat in October 1853, “it is not too   Stoddard to Sweat, 20 July 1852, Shelley Collection.   Stoddard to Sweat, undated letter, Shelley Collection. 20   Stoddard to Sweat, 23 [August 1852], Shelley Collection. The most intriguing of these “on-dits” is Stoddard’s assertion that “The Harpers think Melville is a little crazy” (23 August 1853, Shelley Collection). 21  William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices, 64. 22   Stoddard to Sweat, 30 March 1854, Shelley Collection. 18 19

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much for me to say that I succeed.”23 She was not always so self-assured about her own success, however. Her opinion of Richard’s “genius” and his role as her literary mentor often cause her to doubt her own abilities, despite several early publications. “I go to school daily to my master poet,” she tells Sweat. “We have soirees consisting of [Bayard] Taylor, [Fitz-James] O’Brien, and Stoddard. I play a quiet part I assure you, and the most I learn is my own insignificance.”24 Toward the end of her correspondence with Sweat, Stoddard sends her a few poems, telling her, “It is the best I have done. I hope you will be pleased. Stoddard is a severe master and I get so discouraged that I cry dreadfully, then his hands are full.”25 Richard’s critical severity may have contributed to Stoddard’s reluctance to commit to marriage. She seemed to have other considerations in mind as well, including the demands of family ties—both her existing family and the family that she most likely would produce if married. Even as the relationship with Richard became increasingly serious and their wedding day approached, Stoddard continued to plan to go to California with her brother Wilson, who wanted to prospect for gold. California itself did not appeal to her; her plan to accompany Wilson seems more likely attributable to her love for her brother, a love that at least one critic has labeled incestuous.26 Almost two months after her marriage, Stoddard initially accepts the fact that this new relationship ties her irrevocably to Richard and to the east coast, yet she still seems unable to relinquish proximity to Wilson: “I do not realize anything of Wilson’s going, if I did I should be frightfully unhappy. ... I expect to go to California in the coming year.”27 Whether she will “go to California” as an emigrant or a visitor, her unwillingness to accept the change in plans is striking. The position of this letter in a longer sequence allows us to recognize her hesitance, her inability to settle on a plan for her future, as part of her general ambivalence toward marriage. Stoddard’s tendency to define herself through a man—first Wilson and then Richard—is certainly practical (she cannot remain in New York City without her brother unless she is married), but also reveals a conceptual struggle to think of the self outside of relationships. In the letters to Sweat, Stoddard explores such questions, articulating her fears about the loss of self that marriage seemed to require from women. “Please call me Mrs EDBS,” Stoddard concludes one such letter. “I do not like the adoption of the lords initials.”28 The nature of Sweat’s marriage is difficult to determine, yet general opinion seems to be that it was largely one of convenience.29 The only substantial support for 23

  Stoddard to Sweat, 4 October [1853], Shelley Collection.   Stoddard to Sweat, 24 August 1853, and Stoddard to Sweat, 31 August [1854], Shelley Collection. 25   Stoddard to Sweat, 20 March [1854], Shelley Collection. 26   See Lisa Radinovsky, “(Un)Natural Attractions?”, 202-31. 27   Stoddard to Sweat, 1 February [1853], Shelley Collection. 28   Stoddard to Sweat, 14 March [1853], Shelley Collection. 29   William David Barry, Reference Assistant, Maine Historical Society, e-mail to the author, 2 February 2007. 24

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this representation of the relationship comes from Stoddard’s letters. In a rhetorical move quite out of the ordinary for her, Stoddard gently approaches the issue of Sweat’s marriage; perhaps in response to a question in one of Sweat’s letters, she tells her, “You seem wifely to me always. Sometimes I fear your husband may not feel your womanliness as he should. If you are happy in him as you appear, then he does.”30 Stoddard seems to be addressing a discrepancy that she has observed between Sweat’s assertion of her happiness in marriage and her doubts about her own “womanliness” or aptitude as a wife. The subject seems to have arisen more frequently following this comment, and on 14 September 1853, Stoddard more assertively insists, “One thing I shall discuss with you and that is your pertinacious staying with your husband. You may be sure that it is sometimes best for each mind to be in circumstances of its own choosing and creating. To fall out as it were of the monotony of marital affairs.”31 Whatever Sweat has complained of in her marriage, Stoddard clearly believes that it justifies leaving her husband. Had Lorenzo had an affair, as a later letter to Elizabeth Akers Allen, another Portland woman writer, suggests?32 Or was Sweat simply unhappy within the institution of marriage, as Stoddard feared that she herself would be? Sweat had known about Richard’s courtship of Elizabeth for some time prior to their wedding; Stoddard’s second letter to Sweat mentions “my friend Stoddard” and subsequent letters detailed the progression of their relationship.33 While Stoddard told Sweat about her marriage either just before or just after the ceremony itself, she waited almost two months to make a general announcement in either Mattapoisett or New York City.34 Her decision to make the marriage public was ultimately based on her desire to “avail [her]self of marital freedom, or Stoddard’s protection 30

  Stoddard to Sweat, 14 April [1853], Shelley Collection.   Stoddard to Sweat, undated letter, Shelley Collection. 32   Stoddard to Elizabeth Akers Allen, 7 June n.y., Colby Collection. 33   Stoddard to Sweat, 13 November [1852], Shelley Collection. 34   Several critics have insisted that Stoddard did not tell Sweat about her marriage to Richard until just before making a general announcement in Mattapoisett and New York City. See Boyd, Writing for Immortality; Matlack; and Lynn Mahoney, Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture. This reading is based on a 10 February 1853 letter, written from New York, which begins, “I have been married two months and have concluded since I came here to make a announcement of the marriage in order to avail myself with marital freedom, or Stoddard’s protection during Wilson’s absence” (Shelley Collection). Yet textual evidence from other letters written after the 6 December wedding suggests that Stoddard did, in fact, tell Sweat that she was to be married and identified Richard Stoddard as her husband soon after the wedding took place. On 23 December, for example, she tells Sweat, “The man I have chosen for a husband idealizes my reality.” In the same letter she assures her, “You will know all. Meantime, will you be silent in the matter—” (Shelley Collection). Three weeks later, writing from Mattapoisett, Stoddard explains that Richard “has been staying a few days with me & as you may have guessed he is the man” (13 January 1853, Shelley Collection). Sweat’s diary does not support or refute either reading of the letters. 31

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during Wilson’s absence” in California. Stoddard is characteristically hesitant about making the announcement, telling Sweat, “I have no time to be in love. ... Only two more things, a baby and death—.”35 In earlier letters Stoddard had celebrated her passion for Richard, but here “love” clearly signifies marriage, which, along with motherhood and death, seems to be all that life has in store for women. The worst of this triptych, for Stoddard, is clearly motherhood, and sexuality and its seemingly unavoidable consequences preoccupy her throughout the months immediately prior to and following her wedding. Pregnancy threatens the sense of self that Stoddard struggles to assert in this correspondence with Sweat, and as it becomes a more realistic danger after marriage, Stoddard turns to the only female friend she has. Stoddard clearly identifies herself as a passionate, even sensual, individual early in her correspondence with Sweat, insisting, “I have stronger passionate powers than most women, therefore I run riot in these matters.”36 In explaining how she knew that Richard was the right man for her, she insists that he “idealize[d] her reality” both physically and intellectually.37 Stoddard was distinctly interested in sex, but not in motherhood. When her brother Zac married a woman whom he had impregnated, Stoddard laments his stupidity, exclaiming, “What a fatal dog, an ignorant, faded, child-bearing fussy woman!”38 For Stoddard, motherhood made a woman “ignorant, faded, ... [and] fussy”; in short, anything but an intellect or a genius. Richard reinforced these beliefs. “I shall have no children yet I hope,” Stoddard confides to Sweat, “I do not want my purposes averted. [Richard] says in talking of Wm C Bryants daughter, that genius is expressed by poems, pictures, statues, but not by the fruit of the body—.”39 Richard’s insistence upon the incompatibility of motherhood and genius places Stoddard in an impossible position, forced to choose between her sexual desire for her husband and her literary ambitions. This inability to control her body, or to reconcile the intellectual and the corporeal, results in pain, frustration, and fear, which manifests itself in a letter written 13 January 1853: The air is thick and white with snow, the wind howls and the sea heaves gray & misty. I am full of pain. ... Do you have many feminine pains. I have read Dr. Holenck’s book lately he says it cannot be denied that “Nature in the female constantly labors at one function,” that it is the organic business of our lives to be preparing for conception! Talk to me about women’s rights, good heavens, it is as much as we can live under to struggle with our idiosyncrasies.40 35

  Stoddard to Sweat, 10 February [1853], Shelley Collection.   Stoddard to Sweat, 4 June [1852], Shelley Collection. 37   Stoddard to Sweat, 23 December [1852], Shelley Collection. 38   Stoddard to Sweat, 24 August [1853], Shelley Collection. 39   Stoddard to Sweat, 14 March [1853], Shelley Collection. This is a reference to Frances Bryant Godwin (1822-93), eldest daughter of William Cullen Bryant and wife of journalist and editor Parke Godwin. The couple had four children. 40   Stoddard to Sweat, 13 January 1853, Shelley Collection. 36

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First page of a letter from Elizabeth Stoddard to Margaret Sweat, dated 13 January 1853

As in much of Stoddard’s later writing, nature here is a reflection of her own physical and emotional being. This romantic perception of correspondences between self and environment, however, allows Stoddard no room for a societal explanation of her sense of oppression. She is unable to reflect on Richard Stoddard’s insistence that a mother cannot be a creative, intellectual woman or the medical establishment’s misogynistic perception of female physiology;

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instead, she falls back on a seemingly futile, always solitary resistance against the indomitable force of “Nature.” Because her literary ambitions were in so many ways intertwined with the correspondence with Sweat, childlessness was essential to their friendship. “I hope you will have no children,” she asserts just after her marriage. “I have signified my intention to that effect—and we will walk the world two single married women.”41 Children are seen here as a disruption of her relationship with Sweat; without children, the two women are “single” even though they are married, free to “walk the world” together even though they are otherwise attached to husbands. As a married woman herself, Stoddard can only express her desire for their partnership by insisting that both she and Sweat remain childless. Yet she clearly cannot make such an assertion with any confidence; in an era when women had little control over reproduction, the most she can do is hope that she will not get pregnant. In this sense, it is possible that the importance of the relationship with Sweat lay in the fact that it allowed Stoddard intimacy, passion, and creative collaboration without the danger of procreation. While the relationship with Sweat was intellectual in many ways, it was also very clearly an emotional necessity to both women. In 1853, Stoddard writes to Sweat, “I do thank & love you for liking me & mine. You are now the only woman friend on a par I have. I hope I shall not lose you.”42 Both Stoddard’s sister, Jane, and their mother had died in 1849, and Stoddard mourned their loss deeply. “I have only men relations,” she reminds Sweat. “You are my only woman correspondent. I feel I have reason to say with Lady Macbeth—unsex me here. Please to bear this fact of correspondence in mind.”43 Stoddard’s use of the word “correspondence” is crucial here. She asks Sweat to note the “correspondence” between her and Lady Macbeth, who demands that the spirits “unsex” her, render her impervious to any feminine urge to empathize with others, in order to allow her to commit murder. Stoddard seems to imply that in the midst of her “men relations,” she too feels unsexed—without emotion, unfeeling and cold. Sweat, Stoddard’s “only woman correspondent,” is her last surviving link to her own feminine self and a “female world of love and ritual” shaped by relationships between women.44 This “fact of [their] correspondence” makes their exchange of letters crucial to Stoddard. While Sweat was not similarly 41

  Stoddard to Sweat, 23 December [1852], Shelley Collection.   Stoddard to Sweat, 14 April [1853], Shelley Collection. 43   Stoddard to Sweat, 18 May [1853], Shelley Collection. The reference is to Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5, ll. 39-48. In a soliloquy Lady Macbeth asks the spirits to “unsex” her so that she might have the courage to kill Duncan, the King. 44   Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” 1. While most critics use this essay to discuss romantic friendships (as I do later in this essay), it is also important to recognize that Smith-Rosenberg positions such friendships within a larger “female world of varied and yet highly structured relationships ... rang[ing] from the supportive love of sisters, through the enthusiasms of adolescent girls, to sensual avowals of love by mature women” (1-2). For an elaboration of this argument, see Carol Lasser, 42

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isolated—she mentions frequent visits from female friends in her diary during this period—she seems to have found something in Stoddard that was not available to her in her other friendships. The romantic rhetoric that Stoddard uses to describe her friendship with Sweat was so striking to the letters’ first reader that he sent them to the Kinsey Institute to be analyzed.45 Matlack also appears to have relied upon this language to make his assessment of Stoddard’s “dependency” on Sweat. Scholars now recognize such rhetorical effusiveness as evidence of a nineteenth-century romantic friendship between women. These passionate same-sex relationships often preceded or coexisted with heterosexual marriage and they frequently involved intimate physical contact. Looking at Stoddard’s discussion of Lady Macbeth in this light allows us to rethink her request to “unsex [her] here.” If the relationship between Sweat and Stoddard was, in fact, physical in some way, it is possible that Stoddard is asking her friend to treat her as an unsexed woman—not quite a man, but not a woman either, a potential romantic and sexual partner. Throughout the correspondence, Stoddard refers several times to the limitations of her gender identity. “I am not like other women,” she tells Sweat early in their correspondence, “yet a woman.”46 Just months later, she closes another letter by explaining, “My life is busy in the passing time merely, a street and Omnibus life. I employ all the physical faculties possible. I have more sensuous moods than I have had. I live very much as a man lives—whether well or not I don’t know.”47 These frequent references to a fluid gender identity may be one key to the nature of the relationship between Sweat and Stoddard. The allusion to Macbeth is rendered more intriguing by the fact that one of Stoddard’s favorite actresses, Charlotte Cushman, was internationally regarded for her performance in Shakespearean roles such as Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo. While other actresses, both British and American, had attempted male roles, Cushman’s interpretation of Hamlet was distinctive. As Lisa Merrill explains, “Unlike other actresses who played up the possibility of titillating the predominantly male audience by displaying shapely bodies and legs, ... Cushman ... could actually attempt to personify male characters.”48 Thus Stoddard, a woman “not like other women,” may have identified with the gender-bending Cushman, as well as the figures she personified on stage. Stoddard was, without doubt, attracted “‘Let Us be Sisters Forever,’” and Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators. 45   Burns, “Private Sphere/Public Sphere,” 50. According to Burns, “The fifty-five letters from Stoddard to Sweat written between 1851 and 1854 came into the possession of a Portland rare book dealer, Francis O’Brien, in the 1960s when Sweat’s personal effects were sold on the sidewalk prior to the renovation of the [McClellan-Sweat] mansion. O’Brien sent them to the Kinsey Institute, where the question of their Lesbian content was considered to be indeterminate.” 46   Stoddard, Letter to Sweat, 11 July [1852], Shelley Collection. 47   Stoddard, Letter to Sweat, 10 September [1852], Shelley Collection. 48   Merrill, 111.

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to the actress and the possibilities she embodied. Early in their correspondence, Stoddard tells Sweat of meeting Cushman. “She is a wonderful creature,” she gushes, “most splendidly superior, odd, brilliant energetic & independent I never saw a woman I was so much attracted by.” “One thing she said that I remember,” she adds, “that only a woman knows how a woman should be loved.”49 Although Sweat, an avid fan and critic of the theater herself, would have been fascinated by any news of Cushman, there can be no doubt that Stoddard’s emphasis here is on the actress’s attractiveness as well as her comment on the distinctive love between women. At the time of the meeting with Stoddard, Cushman had been in a relationship with another woman, writer and actress Matilda Hays, for four years; she would soon retire from the stage (temporarily) and go to Rome to live with Hays in an American expatriate community of artists. It is unclear whether or not Stoddard was aware of the nature of the relationship between Cushman and Hays; just after relating Cushman’s comment about loving women to Sweat, she explains, “Miss Matilda Hayes an English woman who is a translator of George Sand’s books is her friend and companion—.”50 Lisa Merrill argues that Cushman’s “performance of Romeo produced multiple ‘meanings’ and made available to spectators who could decode it, ways of perceiving and articulating female erotic desire that called into question the heterosexual framework of the texts in which she appeared.”51 Stoddard seems to have been one such spectator of the actress, both on and off stage, although her interpretation seems to have been facilitated by Cushman’s own observation about “know[ing] how a woman should be loved.” In the correspondence between Stoddard and Sweat, the theater and Cushman in particular are noted as a shared passion; in fact, Cushman may be an object through which Stoddard can indicate her own passion for other women. Perhaps inspired by Cushman or even by the relationship with Stoddard, Sweat herself would explore the parameters of romantic friendship in her 1859 novel Ethel’s Love-Life: Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men. .. . Freed from all the grosser elements of passion, as it exists between the sexes, it retains its energy, its abandonment, its flush, its eagerness, its palpitation, and its rapture—but all so refined, so glorified, and made delicious and continuous by an ever-recurring giving and receiving from each to each. The electricity of the one flashes and gleams through the other, to be returned not only in degree as between man and woman, but in kind as between precisely similar organizations. And these passions are of much more frequent occurrence than the world is aware of—generally they are unknown to all but the parties concerned, and are jealously guarded by them from intrusive comment.52     51   52   49 50

Stoddard to Sweat, 4 June 1852, Shelley Collection. Stoddard to Sweat, 4 June 1852, Shelley Collection. Merrill, 126. Margaret Sweat, Ethel’s Love-Life, 82-3.

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Sweat insists that such relationships lack “the grosser elements of passion,” but goes on to describe love between women as “electric,” almost orgasmic. This passage suggests that, contrary to critics who insist that romantic friendships were regarded as completely socially acceptable, women who loved other women knew better than to expose such relationships to “intrusive comment” from friends, families, and perhaps most importantly, husbands.53 It is not clear whether or not she and Stoddard had such a relationship, although the language in Stoddard’s letters seems to indicate that they did. These “two single married women” epitomized such an “ever-recurring giving and receiving from each to each”—in their letters, at least, and quite possibly in person. Stoddard’s letters confound such a distinction between the textual self and the corporeal self; she insists, “Knowing me only from my letters you would picture me, red faced, black eyed, dry fine curly hair, a lithe figure and a quick tongue full of tears and loud laughs—.” Thus the “giving and receiving” of their three-year correspondence both figures and stands in for a physical relationship between the two women, separated by geography and societal convention as they are. It is tempting to speculate on the extent to which this correspondence influenced the writing careers of both women, which accelerated soon after the demise of the friendship itself. Both employed the epistolary form—Sweat in Ethel’s Love Life and Stoddard in her “Letters from a Lady Correspondent” column for the Daily Alta California. It is impossible to know whether or not Sweat’s epistolary fiction bears any resemblance to the letters she wrote to Stoddard; the letters in the novel, written by a character named Ethel to her fiancé Ernest, detail her past relationships with both men and women. Stoddard could very well have been the inspiration for at least one if not both of the women with whom Ethel is romantically involved. The language used to describe relationships between women is also reminiscent of that of Stoddard’s letters to Sweat, but, as Smith-Rosenberg has explained, such rhetoric was fairly common in letters between female friends. Stoddard’s “Lady Correspondent” columns, on the other hand, are very clearly reminiscent of her own letters to her friend. Filled with literary gossip, theater reviews, and other reflections on New York City life, the column is quite assertively epistolary, playing with the conventions of letter writing and establishing a relationship with her “friends” in California.54 These are, however, letters without a specific audience, a friend to whom Stoddard can reveal her “inner life.” It is quite possible that Stoddard never had that kind of friend again. Early in their correspondence, Stoddard presciently warns Sweat of her strengths and her limitations as a friend: If you have a heart and soul to be deeply moved, I shall move you. And you will love me. You will find perhaps little benefit and finally little pleasure in your

 Merrill also makes this argument in her book on Charlotte Cushman (8).  Elizabeth Stoddard, “From a Lady Correspondent,” 1.

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knowledge of me. I am a fatal person to those who love me. Perhaps all will be different.55

In the absence of any letters from Sweat to Stoddard, we cannot know for certain what Sweat’s role in the relationship was—whether or not she fully reciprocated Stoddard’s passionate affection, how she dealt with Stoddard’s harsh tongue and quick temper.56 To complicate matters further, according to Matlack, “[t]en additional letters were removed from the sequence” from Stoddard to Sweat “by Mrs. Sweat or her executors.”57 We can only speculate as to where these letters might have been positioned in the correspondence. The largest gaps in the series of letters from Stoddard to Sweat are at the beginning (from 13 November 1851 to 14 April 1852); just before Stoddard’s wedding (from 22 October to 12 December); and at the end (from 31 August to 29 October 1854). What might these letters add to our understanding of this friendship? Stoddard wrote Sweat two letters in June 1852, three (most likely—one remains undated) in July, three in August, one in September, and one in October, but then she seems to remain silent until a week after her wedding on 6 December 1852. She may have simply been busy, making decisions about her future given Wilson’s decision to travel to California. Yet the regularity of her letters to Sweat suggests otherwise. Might these letters elaborate on Stoddard’s relationship with her brother, a discussion deemed inappropriate by Sweat or her executors? Might Stoddard have written more about her feelings for Richard and their impending nuptials? The missing letters may also have referred to Sweat’s marriage, about which she opened up to Stoddard in 1853. It seems fairly certain that the missing letters at the end of the sequence would provide more details about the end of the friendship between Stoddard and Sweat. Stoddard was clearly aware that she was a “fatal person to those who love[d]” her; throughout her life, one after another relationship was either ended or   Stoddard to Sweat, 24 [June] [1852], Shelley Collection.  There is some evidence that Sweat was also a difficult personality. In a notebook (Sweat Papers) containing Sweat’s contributions to a literary society called “The Chimney Corner Club” (formed the year after the end of her friendship with Stoddard), Sweat includes a series of poems teasingly cataloguing the personalities of the club members. Her self-tribute reads as follows: 55 56

Among all the women what you must have met I’m not sure you’d notice one small Mrs. Sweat. She saw with her eyes & she walked with her feet. And said a great many things we won’t repeat. It is said that she thought a good deal of herself And never was willingly laid on the shelf. Some loved her, some hated & some didn’t know When she went from this world, to what other she’d go.  Matlack, 44n2.

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suspended as the result of an argument. In an attempt to describe Elizabeth’s difficult personality, one friend of the Stoddards labeled her “the Pythoness,” while another insisted (in a letter to Stoddard herself, no less) that she was an “incorrigible bundle of contradictions and constancies, of whims, philosophies, absurdities, truth, and grandness.”58 Stoddard herself admits to Sweat that she has an “ugly temper.”59 In a letter written to Elizabeth Akers Allen twenty years later, Stoddard describes what she remembered as the breaking point in the relationship, but clearly places the blame for the argument on Sweat and her husband: I hate the memory of [Portland]—There is a bad man there Lorenzo Sweat and a pedantic vain prig his wife Margaret Sweat. They asked us in NY, years ago, to visit them—circumstances took us there, and we went to their house intending to stay one or two nights. It was the dead of winter. In our bedroom the pretence of a fire made it colder. We piled our clothes over us and kept awake. At dinner the first [night], there was a decanter of sherry on the table—Stoddard helped himself to a second glass (tiny glasses) You never saw such a cloud. Mr. Sweat began to talk violently about indulgence, self-control, and that he would die before giving way etc—I was thunderstruck, before dessert was over, I announced my intention of leaving the next train—and there was a sudden access of politeness on their part. After I got home she wrote me an insulting letter, said I had attempted to get her husband from her—While I was there, I noticed she wore a pin, which Mrs. Little his mistress had given him. So our acquaintance ended. I could tell you much more about that Sweat. She wrote a still born novel. If at any time you have the power to hit them between the eye brows do so for my sake.60

According to Matlack, Richard’s friends appear to have been concerned about the poet’s drinking in the years prior to his marriage.61 It is clear from the letters that Stoddard herself was fond of alcohol, especially her “favorite tipple iced brandy,”62 and it is possible that she teases Sweat about her belief in temperance. In a letter written 14 September 1854, Stoddard spares no one in her scathing critique of a “temperance convention” she had attended. “Why did you not come and give your testimony as to the observance of the maine law,”63 she asks Sweat, and goes on to ridicule female temperance activists: “Those ridiculous women. Lucy Stone has   George Boker to Bayard Taylor, 30 July 1894, and Bayard Taylor to Elizabeth Stoddard, 28 September 1861, Bayard Taylor Papers. 59   Stoddard to Sweat, 13 January 1853, Shelley Collection. 60   Stoddard to Elizabeth Akers Allen, 7 June n.y., Colby Collection. 61  Matlack, 67 n24. 62   Stoddard to Sweat, 28 July [1854]. 63   In 1851, Maine passed “An Act for the Suppression of Drinking Houses and Tippling Shops” which outlawed the manufacture and sale of liquor. “The Maine Law,” as it became known, was the first prohibition law to be passed in the United States. 58

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nothing beyond a miserable egotism. Most of them have wretched lives with their husbands.”64 If she was in fact aware of Sweat’s favorable opinion of temperance, this dig at women activists and their “wretched” marriages may have hit too close to home and contributed to a cooling of the friendship between the two women. If words like this were exchanged during the visit to Portland, Sweat may have avenged herself by accusing Stoddard of being too friendly with her husband. Or perhaps the flirtation was real; the presence of the pin from Sweat’s mistress indicates both that an affair was not beyond him and that Margaret Sweat was well aware of this fact. Stoddard herself clearly enjoyed male attention, although Lorenzo Sweat does not exactly seem the type of man to whom she was attracted. We cannot be sure the missing letters would have filled in these gaps, but the timing is notable. It is possible to see the seeds of conflict or perhaps simply exhaustion in the last few extant letters from Stoddard to Sweat. In much of the correspondence, Stoddard seems painfully aware of the differences in the women’s financial situations. The most extreme instance of this is in the final letter, in which Stoddard tells Sweat, “I hate you because you are having such beautiful rides now.” Although Stoddard is clearly exaggerating, what follows seems to imply that what she hates is what the rides stand for—Sweat’s privileged position in society and her financial security. “S and I rush out of the city, vainly seeking a small glimpse of country,” she complains. “The surroundings of New York are mangy, arid, ugly. I am tired of being shut up in lodgings, little dark rooms, the walls narrowing towards you, till you feel cramped.”65 Perhaps these differences in lifestyle were finally insurmountable for the two women. They do seem evident in the letter to Allen, in which Stoddard complains of “the pretence of a fire” and a rather stingy distribution of the sherry. Against the backdrop of the Sweat’s wealth, such economy would have seemed inexcusable to Stoddard. Financial worries and the relationship with Richard drained Stoddard of physical and emotional resources. In a letter written on 31 August 1854, she laments her inability to write as often as she would like: I don’t think I have much to write you I don’t have much feeling nowadays. Stoddard and I get more involved in each other and we seem to recede more and more from other people and things—my physical lassitudes ruin me. I have strength hardly equal to my day. I wish you were near me to perceive and realize what vitality I have you would understand that I could love you in a tired sort of way not precisely disagreeable to you perhaps.66

Here the distance that the correspondence must cross simply seems too much for Stoddard; if Sweat were “near,” she insists, she might be able to carry on the 64

  Stoddard to Sweat, 14 September 1854, Shelley Collection.   Stoddard to Sweat, 29 October 1854, Shelley Collection. 66   Stoddard to Sweat, 31 August 1854, Shelley Collection. 65

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relationship, but otherwise it seems beyond her strength. Although the letters are full of complaints of physical pain and illness, it is also possible that Stoddard’s weariness in the final letter is at least partly due to the fact that she is one month pregnant; her son Wilson was born on 20 June 1855. This pregnancy and the birth of her son may have interfered with her friendship with Sweat, not only because of the amount of time and energy that a child requires, but also because remaining childless was such an important part of her relationship with her “only woman friend.” In this sense, Stoddard’s reference to Sweat’s “still born novel” in the letter to Allen is intriguing. Is Stoddard saying that Ethel’s Love Life was an attempt to compensate for Sweat’s childlessness? Is she somehow revising the history of their friendship here, given the frequently expressed hope that both women would remain childless? Finally, is there a judgment implicit in this description of the novel?67 Sweat and her husband went abroad in 1855; in 1856 they visited New York City but appear not to have seen the Stoddards. For whatever reason, the friendship and the correspondence were over. As Decker points out, however, all letters have a second life, of sorts, “reconstituted” as “object[s] of inestimable value” when they are read by scholars and reprinted in full or part.68 Sweat’s review of Alger’s The Friendships of Women shows that she clearly understood the potential value of letters; she did, after all, save Stoddard’s letters for the rest of her life, despite the fact that their friendship had ended more than fifty years before her death in 1908. Yet Stoddard also recognized that the letter had a life beyond that of its author or its intended audience. In the last year of their correspondence, Stoddard assures Sweat that her “letters are not all saved. I have more of your early letters than any.” She goes on to privilege the value of these letters over her own: “I should like much to save yours in a book. Don’t put my stupid letters into binding.” 69 Ironically, only Stoddard’s letters have survived as testament to this complicated friendship. Attempting to read Sweat back into this correspondence is both an impossibility and a necessity, especially if we believe that the letter writer presents a different self to each correspondent. Letters must always be read with issues of audience in mind, even when that original recipient seems lost to history, as Sweat originally did. This approach to the epistolary archive allows us to reconsider our understanding of both sender and receiver of the letter, as well as the text of the letter itself. Reading the correspondence between Stoddard and Sweat responsibly requires a confrontation with absence, as well as a nuanced understanding of intimate relationships between women in nineteenth-century America. 67

  This letter does indicate that Stoddard stayed aware of Sweat’s writing career. There is some evidence that Sweat also followed Stoddard’s career; in a commonplace book from 1856, Sweat pasted a clipping from the Atlantic Monthly announcing a rumor that Stoddard was preparing a volume of poems for publication. The announcement was followed by a reprint of Stoddard’s poem “November” (“Drift Weed,” Sweat Papers). 68   Decker, 7. 69   Stoddard to Sweat, 19 January 1854, Shelley Collection.

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Works Cited Bayard Taylor Papers, #14-18-1169, The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Boyd, Anne E., Writing for Immortality: Women Writers and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Burns, Connie, “Private Sphere/Public Sphere: Rethinking Paradigms of Victorian Womanhood through the Life and Writings of Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat,1823-1908” (M.A. thesis, University of Southern Maine, 1993). Decker, William Merrill, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Earle, Rebecca (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999). Hewitt, Elizabeth, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Lasser, Carol, “‘Let Us be Sisters Forever’: The Sororal Model of NineteenthCentury Female Friendship,” Signs, 14.1 (1988): 158-81. Mahoney, Lynn, Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Matlack, James Hendrickson, “The Literary Career of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1967). Merrill, Lisa, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). Radinovsky, Lisa, “(Un)Natural Attractions? Incest and Miscegenation in Two Men,” in Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinauer (eds), American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003). Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, in Alfred Harbage (ed.), The Complete PelicanShakespeare (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977). Smith-Rosenberg, Carol, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs, 1.1 (1975): 1-30. Spacks, Patricia Meyer, “Forgotten Genres,” Modern Language Studies, 18 (1988): 47-57. Stoddard, Elizabeth, “From a Lady Correspondent,” Daily Alta California (29 January 1845): 1. ——, Letters to Elizabeth Akers Allen, Colby College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine. ——, Elizabeth Stoddard Papers, Allison-Shelley Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, The Pennsylvania State University Libraries. ——, Ethel’s Love-Life (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859). ——, Lolly Dinks’ Doings (Boston, PA: William F. Gill, 1874). Sweat, Margaret J.M., Highways of Travel, A Summer in Europe (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1859).

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——, Review, William Rounseville Alger, The Friendships of Women (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868). In Sweat Papers. ——, Hither and Yon by Land and Sea (Privately printed [Cambridge, MA: Riverside P], 1901). Sweat, Margaret Jane Mussey Papers, Maine Women Writers Collection. University of New England.

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PARt III LEttERs AND PERIODIcAls

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Chapter Seven

Cherokee Catharine Brown’s Epistolary Performances Theresa Strouth Gaul

What little attention literary critics have paid to Catharine Brown (Cherokee) has been directed toward her status as the subject of Rufus Anderson’s Memoir of Catharine Brown (1825), one of the earliest book-length, published works on a Native American person, male or female, to emerge in the United States. A mission-educated Cherokee who converted to Christianity and died at a young age, Brown’s extraordinary piety and her story’s effectiveness as a rebuttal of the belief that Native Americans could not become “civilized” served as the impetus for the publication of her memoir. Rufus Anderson, working under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the organization which ran the mission school Brown attended, assembled the memoir in the year following her death. Like many biographies of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Memoir includes a selection of Brown’s own letters, along with letters written after her death by people who knew her. Anderson compiled and edited the I wish to thank Sharon M. Harris, Hilary Wyss, and the anonymous Ashgate reader for their generous and helpful comments at various stages of this essay’s development.    Born in 1800 to biracial parents, Brown was raised in a traditional Cherokee manner until she entered the Brainerd Mission School, established in 1817 by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. Many Cherokees, including Brown’s parents, were receptive to the American Board’s efforts, seeing educating their children in western ways as one strategy that would enhance their ability to negotiate to maintain their land holdings. Brown proved an apt pupil and was baptized within a year of entering the school, the first Cherokee convert at the Brainerd Mission. She later became a teacher at the Creek Path mission school, newly organized to educate Cherokee girls, before dying at the age of twenty-three of tuberculosis. For histories of white-Cherokee contacts during this period, see McLoughlin, The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794-1870, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839, and Cherokee Renascance in the New Republic; Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women; and Mary Young, “The Cherokee Nation.”   In The Autobiographical Subject, Felicity A. Nussbaum explains that James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, published in 1791, exemplifies biography as a “hybrid genre” with its inclusion of “autobiographical memoranda, rough notes, ... journals ... letters, diaries and conversations”(118). Scott E. Casper situates this “life and letters” type of biography within early American Christian evangelical movements; see Constructing American Lives, 107-16.

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letters and wrote paragraphs providing contexts for them, and, in doing so, imposes the contours of a powerful narrative on Brown’s life emphasizing her successful attainment of the Christian values and “civilized” behaviors the missionaries had taught her. Anderson’s resulting portrayal of Brown appears to have resonated with readers. Memoir was widely reviewed and excerpted in periodicals at the time of its publication. Within six months of release, papers were reporting that 2500 copies had already been sold and a second edition was in production (“Memoirs [sic] of Catharine Brown”). Nine subsequent editions of Memoir appeared in the years after its initial publication, including editions in Glasgow and London, and it has been reprinted at least three times in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet years before the publication of Memoir, readers had come to know Brown through the genre of letters. Because of her celebrated status as the first Cherokee convert to Christianity, Brown wrote numerous letters to benevolent northerners who supported Christian mission efforts among the Cherokees, and many of those letters made their way into print through their publication in the pages of religious periodicals, which also printed missionary-authored letters reporting on her activities and progress. As a correspondent and as a frequently recurring figure in the columns of religious publications, Brown’s textual existence predates Memoir by more than half a decade, beginning with her own acquisition of literacy and extending to the public realm with the widespread publication of her letters. The first letter of Brown’s own composition seems to have been written in November of 1818, and the first publication of one of her letters appears to have been in April 1819. Religious publications such as The Panoplist, or Missionary Herald, Religious Intelligencer, Religious Remembrancer, Christian Watchman, The Guardian, or Youth’s Religious Instructor, Boston Recorder, Christian Secretary, Christian Repository, and Weekly Recorder gave her letters prominent play in the following years. Resisting the academy’s privileging of the printed book, which has made Memoir the most durable and only lasting representation of Catharine Brown, this essay recovers Brown’s larger body of letters—letters collected in Memoir, printed in periodicals, and surviving in manuscript form—and considers them outside of the framework provided by Anderson’s controlling biographical narrative. Rather than viewing Brown’s writings as supporting evidence for Anderson’s claims, this essay considers Brown’s letters as letters within the contexts that informed their production and reception, including nineteenth-century letter-writing instruction and the cultural attitudes and assumptions about race, class, gender, and character out of which letter-writing practices emerged. Read within these contexts and   For Brown’s first published letter, see Brown to William and Flora Chamberlain and Anderson, Memoir of Catharine Brown, 38-40. The interest in Brown continued through her death and beyond, with periodicals printing notices of her demise, publishing poems on her life even years after her death, and recording the powerful effects of her letters, which ranged from conversions to donations.   All current scholarship on Brown focuses on Memoir; no one has examined her writings or representations in other contexts. See Joshua David Bellin, Medicine Bundle,

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with attention to the ways the formal conventions of letters reveal their authors’ navigation of social hierarchies, Brown’s letters force a new appreciation of her status as an independent writer, an author whose epistolary productions’ subsumption into the missionary discourses which enabled their publication also led to her near erasure from the authorial ledger. Perhaps because Brown’s writings circulated through the mails or appeared in periodicals, took the form of letters rather than genres more favored in literary history such as the novel and autobiography, and were occluded by their inclusion in her posthumous biography, she has not received due recognition and consideration as one of the earliest, if not the first, Native American women who published in the United States.

“To show that an Indian could improve”: Letter Writing as Performance Early American letter-writing manuals, which contained sample letters that actual letter writers were encouraged to emulate in various social situations, present distinctly limited models for American Indian letter writers like Brown. Manuals scripted the interactions between correspondents of varying classes in profoundly hierarchical societies with sample letters that in their forms and content “register hierarchies and acknowledged relations of power.” Most of the letters in manuals offer examples of how to mediate hierarchies of power within families arranged along axes of gender and age but within the affluent classes. Sometimes, a few examples of apprentices’, servants’, and tradesmen’s letters present working-class subjectivities and therefore additionally negotiate class relationships. Nowhere in a book like The Complete Letter-Writer (1802), though, is there a sample letter from an American Indian writing to her white benefactors, the exigency Brown faces in her correspondence. Indeed, based on a perusal of this particular letterwriting guide and others like it, one might conclude that no non-white letter-writing subjectivity was available in the United States in the nineteenth century. ch. 2; Virginia Moore Carney, Eastern Band of Cherokee Women; Joel M. Martin, “Almost White,” The Land Looks After Us, and “Visions of Revitalization in the Eastern Woodlands;” Joshua B. Nelson, “Integrated Circuitry;” Theda Perdue, Sifters; and Bethany Schneider, “New England Tales.”   Karen Kilcup’s anthology of Native American women’s writing, for example, presents Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s poems and tales of the late 1820s as the earliest self-authored publications by a Native American woman (as distinct from women producing oral texts which another person translated into English and wrote down). The anthology omits Brown altogether.   Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters, 65.   Earlier generations of native people did write letters, of course, though their writings were probably unknown to Brown. See Hilary E. Wyss’s descriptions of various examples of Indian correspondence in Writing Indians and Joanna Brooks’s edition of Samson Occom’s writings (including his letters), The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan.

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Despite the lack of models for her particular situation, Brown’s letters do, nonetheless, show familiarity with conventions outlined in manuals. She probably gained facility with such conventions in two ways common to many nineteenthcentury letter writers. One way was to consult other model texts, such as the Brainerd library’s copy of Leonard Woods’s Memoir of Mrs. Harriet Newell, a book quite popular in missionary circles and one that Brown read. The book, like Brown’s own memoir, is constructed posthumously out of Newell’s letters and diary. A second way Brown probably learned to write letters was through letter-writing instruction, which Brown likely experienced in her missionary education. Letter-writing had long functioned, of course, as “a social behavior through which one’s courtesy and civility were exhibited and measured.” The instruction children received in letter writing, which increasingly became an important part of educational curricula in school settings, functioned to “inculcat[e] children with the manners and morals of polite society in 19th century America.” Through letters, teachers instructed children in “particular and circumscribed behaviours” that showed them “behaving according to the culture’s dominant values.”10 The era’s association of women with letter writing made it an especially effective mode of exhibition for girls. Merging “gender and genre,” nineteenth-century manuals on epistolary practices presented “letter writing as an indispensable form of middle-class literacy and a performance of gendered decorum.”11 More than any other genre, then, letters were capable of showcasing Brown’s assumption of western values as well as her attainment of her proper gender identity, according to Euroamerica’s notions. While any of Brown’s schoolgirl productions might have been published, it is telling that all of her published writings are letters.12 In the writing of letters, Brown, like many other girls and women, demonstrated her achievement of the expected values and behaviors of middle-class, white womanhood. But Brown’s letter-writing performances were inevitably invested with racial meanings that scholars have not explored as thoroughly as the classed and gendered ones more frequently enumerated. The common belief that letters in   Anderson, 29; “List of Books belonging to the Cherokee Mission Library” (1822), American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers, 18.3.1, vol. 2, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter ABCFM Papers). The Brainerd library does not seem to have contained an explicit letter-writing manual like those Bannet examines.    Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 43. 10   Lucille Schultz, “Letter Writing Instruction in 19th Century Schools in the United States,” 110-11. 11   Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, 94. 12  It is also important to consider the fact that letters, as material documents mailed through the post and circulated to the North, entered the sphere of potential publication in ways other writings she might have produced (school writings or her diary, for example) did not. 

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their materiality seem to instantiate actual bodies facilitated the complex racial dynamics of Brown’s performance. As Elizabeth Hewitt explains: [T]he frequent conceit of familiar letters is that there is no essential difference between the letter-writer’s body and her letter. Hence Nathaniel Hawthorne will describe himself kissing Sophia Peabody’s letters, or Emily Dickinson will mail her tears to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. At the same time, however, letters are also necessarily textual: they represent their senders in epistolary form.13

According to this logic, Brown’s letters would be read as representing her body to readers. In an era during which “Indian dramas” would soon become one of the most popular forms of stage entertainment, Brown’s letters thus enacted another kind of performance, putting forth her raced body as a spectacle for white audiences. At the same time, the textuality of this epistolary representation exemplifies the degree to which this particular Indian body had been trained and schooled in the values and behaviors of Euroamerica. In addition to representing the physical body of its writer, a letter in its material dimensions also was “read as a representation of the character of the writer.”14 To the extent that Brown wrote correct letters in terms of penmanship, spelling, and grammar, she defied stereotypes of Indian illiteracy while providing evidence of the authenticity of her conversion and sincerity of her assumption of white womanly character traits and duties. When encountering her letters as printed in periodicals, however, readers would have lost some of their ability to evaluate Brown’s aptitude for letter writing because of the ways traits of her manuscript letters were inevitably transformed in the letters’ transition into print. Editors preserved the possibility of readers appraising her character, however, by adding prefatory remarks describing the appearance of her manuscript letters. One editor explains that he possessed Brown’s original, handwritten letter and had “altered the grammar in two sentences only, but the sense in none,”15 while another testifies, “We have endeavored to give an exact copy of the letter, in respect to orthography, punctuation and the use of capitals, and if we mistake not it will be found with some trivial exceptions, as handsomely written, as it would have been by a great majority of the young ladies in any portion of civilized community.”16 When editors amended Brown’s texts or made comments on the appearance of her handwriting, they were thus commenting not only on the letter itself but on the writer as well, evaluating the competency of the racial performance enacted by the letter. Working without models specific to her experience and identity but within letter-writing conventions and assumptions transmitted through educational  Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865, 1-2.   Schultz, 121. 15  “Specimens of Indian Improvement.” 16  “Cherokee Mission.” 13 14

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practices, Brown’s very act of writing letters—however conventional those letters’ contents may seem to readers today—takes on agential dimensions, as a missionary account of another student’s production of a letter reveals. Brainerd missionary Ann Paine records the following incident involving Delilah Field: I had brought some presents from the children of Miss G’s school to the children of Brainerd, and as Delilah frequently wrote letters, I requested her to write to Miss G. She declined said she should not have time. One evening however she came into my room and said she would now write. I immediately supplied her with pen and paper, but she said she did not know what to write. I dictated the first sentence and thought perhaps I must tell her all but being much engaged forgot the subject. Perhaps in half an hour Delilah brought me the letter finished. I was surpized at her facility in writing and exclaimed, “Not one of Miss G’s schollars could write as well.” The spelling of one or two of the last sentences I corrected but the rest remained unaltered. It could hardly be believed in this vicinity that either the writing or composition was the performance of a child not yet twelve years old much less of a Cherokee girl, who had been in school but two years. An agent for the Religious Intelligencer requested a copy for publication and it was reprinted in the Herald.17

The occasion of this letter’s writing is marked by complicated power dynamics. Initially, the Cherokee schoolgirl resists the white teacher’s “request”; she then undertakes the task at her own convenience, shaping the terms of the encounter by choosing the time and place when the writing of the letter takes place. An already experienced letter writer, Field claims to be inadequate to the task. Paine’s underlining serves to allow the child’s voice to echo through the passage; that Field did not know what to write suggests the uncomfortable fit between her experiences and the letter genre. Like Brown, Field has no perfect models for her letters, yet her education at Brainerd has apparently introduced her well to the mode of self-presentation most likely to please white benefactors such as Paine and “Miss G.” Field’s independence in the composition process seems to startle Paine. She assumes that she as the teacher will supply the content of the letter just as she supplied the materials for writing, but Paine’s distraction allows Field to claim the space of the letter as her own; Paine has only the minimal instructional role of correcting spelling.18 The letter Field writes in this context offers purely conventional Christian sentiments and shows resemblance to many of Brown’s letters.19 Indeed, it is the very conventionality of Brown’s letters that has led some critics to conclusions   Ann Paine, Notebook 2.   In her corrections of Field’s spelling, Paine takes on an editorial role and is similar in her interventions to newspaper editors who printed Brown’s correspondence. 19   The text of Field’s letter appeared in the Religious Intelligencer; see Delilah Field to Miss G. 17 18

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like those put forward by Barry O’Connell, the editor of William Apess’s complete works, who describes Brown as “an Indian fully converted to the ways of civilization and Christianity,” and Arnold Krupat, who describes Brown as “defining [herself] exclusively in relation to Salvationist discourse: if there is a Cherokee dimension to Brown’s text and to her sense of herself ... [it] is not apparent to me.”20 But as the anecdote of Field’s writing displays, it is the act of writing itself, not necessarily the content of the letter that demonstrates the letter writer’s agency. Conversely, the act of not writing can also take on agential dimensions, as this missionary reminiscence illustrates: [Brown] was much distressed that so many of her letters had been published, and for a season, it was with difficulty, that we could persuade her to write to her correspondents. “I suppose,” she said, the object at first was to show that an Indian could improve. But two or three letters would have answered this purpose as well as all I have ever written.21

Although Anderson includes this anecdote in Memoir as evidence of Brown’s womanly humility, it seems equally possible that by protesting her publication Brown resists performing in the public prints to satisfy the purposes of the American Board. Her subsequent refusal to write is a further attempt to reject this objectification of her literacy and, paradoxically, to claim agency as an author through that refusal. David Murray suggests that the awareness Brown exhibits in this statement is one characteristic of all Native American writings: “the awareness of being overheard by a white audience, or even of having them as primary audience is an important and continuing feature of Indian literature.”22 The keen consciousness Brown reveals here of her readers’ expectations, various audiences, and broader significance of her writings disrupts any notion of the private, with which modern critics have too often mistakenly invested letters: Brown’s writings are always already public, vulnerable as they are to publication once they leave her hands. Their public nature Brown recognizes, temporarily resists, as the anecdote above reveals, and then reshapes into a forum capable of expressing of her views of the relationships between whites and Cherokees.

  Barry O’Connell, Introduction to On Our Own Ground, xl; Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin, 147. A number of scholars have critiqued the notion of authenticity which undergirds these comments; see Susan Benardin, “The Authenticity Game” for a distillation of those arguments. Additionally, Wyss, among others, has demonstrated the complex subjectivities fashioned by converted Indians, thus rebutting the either/or dichotomy suggested by these comments. Bellin, Carney, Nelson, and Martin have turned away from this critical consensus in their readings of Brown to begin to explore how she can be read as demonstrating adaptability and Cherokee leadership. 21  Anderson, 129. 22  David Murray, “Translation and Mediation,” 75. 20

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“From your affectionate sister and friend”: Brown’s Assertions of Equality One of the most democratic of forms in its accessibility to writers with a broad range of literacy skills, letters nevertheless reinscribe preexisting hierarchical relations between correspondents. Examining the text of Brown’s letters with an eye to interrogating her use of formal markers of hierarchy reveals how Brown subtly insists upon an equalitarian status with her correspondents, especially in one particular category of her letters: those she wrote to benevolent northern women whom she had never met. Many of her letters to these usually unidentified women seem to fit the definition of “polite letters to social superiors,” which demonstrate the “fulfil[lment of] a certain set of formal rules displaying deference” operating within “a prevailing context of hierarchy.”23 Eve Tavor Bannet has catalogued the many ways the material form, “language, style, and sentiments” of letters reveal the dimensions of the hierarchical relationship of writer to addressee. In particular, Bannet argues, “superscriptions and subscriptions registered hierarchies and acknowledged relations of power” and can provide “the key to the interpretation” of a letter.24 Yet Brown rejects these hierarchical positionings in letters to northern women, insisting instead on an equality of address premised by the words “friend” or “sister” in the superscription and the subscription. Most of her letters to northern women are addressed to “Very dear friend,” “My beloved friend and sister in Christ,” “Dear Sister in Christ” or some variation, and her subscriptions reiterate the equal relationship: “From your affectionate sister in the Lord” or “From your affectionate sister and friend in Christ.”25 Susan Ryan has argued that in nineteenth-century benevolent interactions, there was a firm insistence on the maintenance of the distinction between helper and helped; any blurring of that distinction threatened to collapse the hierarchy upon which the rhetoric of benevolence relied.26 Yet Brown refuses such gestures. Surely she was not ignorant of them, as her facility with the conventions of letter writing demonstrates. Her Christian identity, however, allows her to assert equality with her correspondents with confidence. She claims status as their “sister and friend in Christ,” after all [emphasis added]. Indeed, there seemed to be no guarantee that northern women could achieve this equality of status; only after being assured by a mutual friend that Jane Murray was a Christian would Brown grant their relationship: “Sister Hall has often spoken of you, and told me that you love the Saviour Jesus Christ: therefore I rejoice to tell   Konstantin Dierks, “The Familiar Letter and Social Refinement in America, 1750-1800,” 36. 24   Bannet, 65-6. 25   Brown to “a young lady in Philadelphia”; to “Mrs. A.H.”; to Jane Murray; to “My beloved friend and sister in Christ”; to “Dear Friend.” Most of the letters quoted in this essay did not appear in Memoir. If the letter does appear in Memoir, I indicate this fact by also citing Anderson. 26   Susan Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions, 19. 23

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you that we are sisters in Christ.”27 Brown, in effect, asserts the power to name the relationship. To Flora Gold of Cornwall, Connecticut, Brown writes: I hope we are indeed of one family ... . Although personally unacquainted, and far distant from each other yet the faith which we profess ought to endear us to each other and animate us to press forward that we may meet in the kingdom of our redeemer. Let us then go on in the path of the Christian.28

Brown identifies the defining factor of their relationship not as their “distance”—a term literally referring to a geographical separation but which could figuratively describe the many other differences between them—but as the mutual journey on which they are embarking as members of the Christian family. Gold is not a superior person who must reach out to instruct Brown in the ways of Christians; according to Brown, they share a mutual identity and set of goals which supersede their differences, differences that can only seem superficial from a Christian point of view. Such assertions of equality, with their implied pride in her Cherokee identity, might seem to be in tension with statements some critics have read as demonstrating her full rejection of her Cherokee identity.29 Brown’s use of the word “wilderness” in her letters is a case in point, given the longstanding associations attached to the word in its descent from Puritan discourses. When her parents threaten to take her from the mission to accompany them as they remove to Arkansas, Brown writes, “I feel grieved when I think of leaving my Christian friends, and of going far from all religious people, into a wild howling wilderness, where no star shines to guide my wandering feet to the Babe of Bethlehem; where no warning voice is heard to keep me in the straight path that leads to heaven.”30 Bethany Schneider has designated Memoir’s reliance on Puritan rhetoric as evidence of Brown’s “geographical reeducation,” training undertaken by missionaries that requires Brown to radically shift the ways she thinks about the physical world. Her traditional understanding that “the Cherokee nation was located at the center of the world”   Brown to Jane Murray.   Brown to Flora Gold, 16 April 1821, Herman Landon Vaill Manuscript, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT; this letter was also printed in the Religious Intelligencer. This is the only letter for which I have been able to locate both manuscript and published versions. The periodical version shows minor editing, primarily of punctuation. There is a second manuscript letter to Flora Gold, also in the Herman Landon Vaill Manuscript, that does not seem to have been published. 29   Krupat, for example, has argued that there is little “trace of a traditional Cherokee world-view” in the narrative (147). 30  Anderson, 37. This letter had previously been published in periodicals; see Brown to Mrs. Williams. The two versions are identical, with the exception of a variant spelling of Arkansas in the periodical publication (Arkansaw) and the omission of a paragraph of greetings to particular individuals in Memoir’s version. 27 28

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Figure 7.1

Catharine Brown’s letter to Flora Gold, 16 April 1821. Recipients and editors of Catharine Brown’s letters often commented on her handwriting, spelling, and facility with English grammar. These skills indicated traits of character, according to nineteenth-century letter-writing conventions.

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shifted to a “reloca[tion of] Brown’s center to—in this case—New England and the outskirts to—in this case—her own ‘wilderness home.’”31 Schneider’s reading of Brown, however, seems wholly constrained by the narrative Rufus Anderson presents in Memoir and stands as an object lesson illustrating how encountering Brown’s letters only within the context of Memoir reproduces a single kind of critical interpretation. Schneider privileges Anderson’s narrative in Memoir to such an extent that she allows Brown no space for agency, virtually recapitulating Anderson’s argument: Brown enters Schneider’s argument only as a Christian “poster child” who feels “hatred” for and a “loss of faith” in Cherokee ways.32 I argue, in contrast, that extracting Brown’s writings from Anderson’s narrative and reading them on their own terms as letters and within their original periodical publication contexts opens up additional interpretational possibilities. In the sentence following her reference to the “wild howling wilderness,” Brown writes, “When I look into that dark region, I start back; but when I think of my two brothers there, and my dear parents, who are soon to go, I feel reluctant to stay behind, and leave them to perish alone.”33 This sentence is interesting on a number of levels. First, it aptly illustrates the liminal positioning of the Cherokee convert to Christianity, poised between the Christian community and the “wilderness.” Even while demonstrating her facility with Puritan rhetoric for her readers, Brown manages to invest the wilderness with positive valances as the site of close familial and affectionate ties. Second, and more subtly, the sentence engages debates surrounding removal to Arkansas, a “removal crisis” taking place in 1817-19.34 The political factors surrounding the removal to Arkansas do not enter into Anderson’s Memoir, which abstracts Brown out of her immediate political and historical circumstances in order to present her as a representative Christian convert; the only background on Arkansas that Anderson provides is the description of it as the place “whither a part of the Cherokee nation of Indians have emigrated, within the last fifteen or twenty years.”35 The inadequacy of this statement renders Brown’s parents’ recurrent desire to remove her from the school and take her with them to Arkansas arbitrary and capricious. Informed readers of religious periodicals, in contrast, would have been familiar with the crisis from a number of references printed in their pages. A nuanced consideration of this second possible reading suggests that the wilderness to which Brown alludes does not exist in opposition to Christian communities; instead, the wilderness in Brown’s imagination is the area of Arkansas to which the Cherokees are removing. She thus juxtaposes the Arkansas wilderness with the Cherokee homeland in Tennessee and Georgia, a view that maintains the primacy of Cherokee lands in Brown’s conception of the world and contradicts Schneider’s assertion that Brown 31

  Bethany Schneider, 360.  Ibid., 358, 362. 33  Anderson, 37-8. 34   McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 108. 35  Anderson, 10. 32

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has simply acceded to the missionary’s geographical training, thus implicitly validating “the logic behind Indian removal.”36 Brown resists embracing the wilderness imposed by removal, yet she also fears the impact of the communal disruptions occasioned by removal on her family members if she is not there with them. As Jace Weaver (Cherokee) explains, “The linkage of land and people within the concept of community, reflecting the spatial orientation of Native peoples, is crucial ... . When Natives are removed from their traditional lands, they are deprived of numinous landscapes that are central to their faith and their identity, lands populated by their relations, ancestors, animals and beings both physical and mythological.”37 Brown’s reluctant entry into the wilderness thus represents her unwillingness to leave the Christian community she has entered, but also, perhaps more importantly, her resistance to removal from Cherokee lands and the established Cherokee community which resides on them. In a letter to an unnamed correspondent in Philadelphia, Brown uses the term again. Explaining that she has left the mission school to return to her parents’ home, Brown writes, “Although I am here in this wilderness where I can see no Christian friend to converse with, or hear any thing of the humble religion of the gospel; but blessed be God he is always with us wherever we are. At home or abroad; on the land, or the sea.”38 The so-called wilderness, Brown asserts, is equally the space of God as any other arena. The terrains wherein Cherokees make their homes, falsely classified as wilderness regions by Euroamerican Christians, are as much within God’s dominion as Christian mission schools, she implies. For early nineteenth-century Christians, the wilderness was both a spiritual idea and a physical terrain that lacked cultivation. Missionaries at Brainerd, living out the U.S. government’s policies, taught Cherokees, who had long practiced agriculture, how to cultivate the wilderness according to Euroamerican standards as part of their civilizing program. Throughout her letters, however, Brown subtly insists that the only differences that matter between Cherokees and whites are manifested on a religious plane rather than the cultural one at stake in civilizing programs. She refuses to denigrate Cherokees’ manner of living, customs, or traditions in any way, only bemoaning their unconverted state. In order to heighten the contrast, consider the description made by Laura Potter, Brown’s teacher and friend, of the Cherokees living near the Creek Path mission and printed in a periodical that also regularly printed Brown’s letters: Two years since Creek Path was a place of the grossest ignorance. The Saviour’s name had scarcely been heard among the people. They passed their time in idleness and dissipation; and most of those who were clad at all, were covered with rags. The Sabbath was known but by few, and these had been taught by the whites to consider it a holly day. But now, how changed the scene! many of them 36

  Bethany Schneider, 360.  Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live, 38. 38   Brown to “a young lady in Philadelphia.” 37

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have become sober and industrious. They assemble regularly on the Sabbath for the worship of God, and manifest a tender solicitude for the welfare of their immortal souls. Their dress though coarse, is very neat and becoming. Seldom is a dirty garb seen in our little sanctuary. They frequently speak of their former ways of living, and express much gratitude that missionaries have been sent to teach them better things.39

Drunken, lazy, dirty, naked Indians are transformed into neat, regular churchgoers who have adopted the “better things” of the whites. Potter voices little concern over the “welfare of their immortal souls”; she is instead preoccupied with the overt indicators of cultural assimilation that she sees and applauds. A letter by Brown, published in the same religious periodical only two months after Potter’s, in contrast, dwells on her spiritual concerns for the Cherokees: It is not long since the joyful sound of the gospel of Christ was never heard in this place, and the bible was unknown to us ... . [I] praise God for sending Missionaries out from a distant land, to shew us the way to heaven, and to preach the gospel to us, poor ignorant people. We have long been in darkness, and were perishing for lack of knowledge. But we now see a little light. The missionaries have directed us to the shining Star of Bethlehem, which will guide us to a seat of glory. ... The Lord has been truly gracious to me and to my beloved people, in sending us the glad news of salvation, and in sending his Spirit with his word to enlighten our minds, and move us to embrace the blessed Saviour. But, O my dear sister, how many of our brethren and sisters are yet in darkness, living without God and without hope in the world. They have precious and immortal souls to be lost or saved.40

Brown does not thank the missionaries for teaching the Cherokees how to dress in western fashions, tidy themselves, take the temperance pledge, or work hard. She situates her description of the Cherokee’s transformation wholly in the spiritual realm, reiterating in several letters in sharp terms her rejection of what she calls worldly values, which might be read as a critique of western materialism and the capitalist drive for acquisition. Because the civilizing program of the missionaries takes place on the worldly plane, Brown seems unconcerned with its progress or success. Cherokees are simply people with “precious and immortal souls,” and in this they resemble Brown’s correspondents, thus justifying her claims to equality with them. Significantly, Brown precedes the above quotation with the words, “I fear I do not feel thankful enough to our Heavenly Father, and to the friends of Missionaries, who are giving their property to promote the Saviour’s kingdom in this heathen land.” It is somewhat remarkable that Brown admits to a lack of gratitude in the context of this letter thanking a donor for her benevolent society’s  Laura Potter, “Creek Path.”   Brown to “Mrs. A.H.”

39 40

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shipment of a box of clothing; perhaps the impediment to her gratitude has to do with the merely material nature of the contributions of donors. Tellingly, Anderson does not include this letter in Memoir. A recurring motif in Brown’s letters emphasizing her equal status—and indeed the equality of all Christian Cherokees—with Christian northerners is that of prayers simultaneously ascending to heaven. To Flora Gold, Brown details exactly when the female society she has organized meets to pray. She instructs Gold, “May our Christian Sisters in Cornwall Meet at the same time that our united prayers may ascend together.”41 She gives the same instruction to an unnamed woman in Philadelphia and also claims that in answering an unspecified request of the correspondent, “our prayers have unitedly ascended together.”42 In her repeated use of this motif, Brown unites Christian and Cherokee. Also significant is the fact that Brown does not ask the northern women to pray for her or the Cherokees, a request which might suggest that their prayers had more efficacy. Instead, she suggests that the northern women pray at the same time as the Cherokee women so that their prayers mutually effect their goals. Her organization of a female benevolent society similarly signals her rejection of the view of Cherokees as dependent supplicants of northern benevolence, granting Cherokee women the agency to extend benevolence to others as well.43

“I am happy to speak with you”: Brown’s Epistolary Exhortations After asserting a status of equality with her northern correspondents through her identity as a Christian woman, Brown at times in her letters takes on a hortatory tone, seeming to preach Christian doctrines to her correspondents. Her letters—written exhortations, in effect—to northern women are filled with lengthy paragraphs extolling God’s goodness, bemoaning her own sinful nature, describing her struggles to abide by Christian teachings, and hoping for her fellow Cherokees’ salvation. Effectually preaching, she implicitly reverses the dynamic whereby white Christians instructed the Cherokees. But perhaps as importantly, she demonstrates what Bannet characterizes as “the connections between speech and writing, between correspondence and conversation” which “informed every stage of the letter’s trajectory, embraced familiar social practices and entered into the very imaginary of epistolary form.”44 Brown overtly participates in this 41

  Brown to Flora Gold.  Ibid.; Brown to “a member of the Brainerd Society in Philadelphia.” 43   Mentions of Brown’s organization of a female benevolent society occur in Anderson 71, 93, 100; Brown to Flora Gold; and to “a member of the Brainerd Society in Philadelphia.” Ryan discusses examples of nineteenth-century African Americans similarly achieving “benevolent agency, which entailed both freedom from dependence and the capacity to aid others” (7). 44   Bannet, 49. 42

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Anglo-American understanding of epistolary forms as linked with oral speech when she writes in her letters, “I am happy to speak to you” and “Surely I ought to consider it my greatest privilege, to converse with those whom I hope to meet in Heaven.”45 But her letters’ more implicit engagement with orality offers readers an indication of the ways her letters might extend Cherokee oral practices into the textual realm. Anderson’s Memoir gives ample if reluctant evidence that Brown took on informal ministerial roles within her family and community. In addition to her teaching at Creek Path, which most likely had a religious component given the American Board’s dual focus, Brown translated the Bible, interpreted sermons, offered religious instruction to interested Cherokees, instructed African American slaves in reading and religious teachings, and organized a female prayer society, within which she took “an active part in the devotional exercises.”46 Anderson confirms that Brown’s activities crossed into the spheres of exhorting and preaching, although he is quick to reinforce her feminine traits, as if perceiving the potential transgressiveness of these activities for a woman: “she was not backward, with the meekness of humility and with the earnestness of affection, to warn and exhort.”47 Traditionally, white Christian women faced rigid proscriptions on public speech, though the emphasis on enthusiastic, extemporaneous speaking that was part of the Second Great Awakening had to some degree legitimated women’s religious speech. Cherokee traditions had allowed for women’s participation in public venues such as councils. Though women’s public roles had eroded by Brown’s lifetime, such traditions perhaps facilitated the Cherokees’ acceptance of her public performances as interpreter, exhorter, and teacher.48 Since the majority of the missionaries could not understand Cherokee, there is no record of exactly what Brown said when exhorting or teaching in Cherokee or when interpreting. Indeed, missionaries were left in the position of having to “trust that the interpreter grasped the message in English and faithfully delivered it.”49 Missionaries noted that the Cherokee language apparently had no words to express Christian religious dogmas. As one Cherokee interpreter gave up the task of translating a catechism in frustration, she explained that for most of the key words “not only the expression but the concept was wholly unknown to the Cherokees; for instance, the word forgiveness ... is completely unknown among the Indians and ... therefore there is no word to be found in their language by 45

  Brown to “a dear friend”; to “a member of the Brainerd Society in Philadelphia.”  Anderson, 70. 47  Ibid., 66. 48   Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power, 51; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 10; Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women, 55. Although the American Board did not license its first native exhorter until 1838, evidence suggests that American Board-converted Cherokees were informally exhorting publicly at a much earlier date; see McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries. 49   Homer Noley, “The Interpreters,” 58. 46

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which this idea could be expressed.”50 Brown’s interpretive acts must then have been quite necessarily creative ones, drawing on Cherokee understandings to craft her explanations to successfully convey seemingly intranslatable concepts to her listeners. In effect, the interpreter functioned as “the preacher who was heard and understood by the native listener.”51 Cherokees seemed to have perceived the interpreter as a person bearing authority over listeners, as proven by anecdotes historian William McLoughlin records of Cherokee elders who rejected the use of young people as interpreters: In 1825, the Reverend Frederick Elsworth, the American Board minister at Haweis, asked Sally Ridge, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Major Ridge, to assist him by intepreting [sic] for him at a preaching service. An old chief in the audience named Noisy Water considered it inappropriate that a child should be given the role of instructing her elders. He came to the front of the room and told Sally to sit down because he would interpret the sermon. But Noisy Water was not a Christian nor was he familiar, as Sally was, with Christian theological terms. “I told him,” Elsworth reported, “that I did not consider him a proper person to interpret.” Noisy Water took great offense. He had been embarrassed in front of his friends when he had only wanted to be of assistance and do what he considered proper and fitting. He left the meeting threatening angrily “to come again and whip me,” Elsworth said.52

Based on this anecdote, it seems safe to conclude that listening Cherokees similarly would have perceived Brown not as a passive conduit but as an active teacher. As someone who “delight[ed] to be present in the public assembly” and who “love[d] to gather little circles of her Cherokee friends for social prayer,”53 Brown was apparently uncommonly effective at imparting teachings orally, despite the fact that a number of commentators mentioned that “she was naturally reserved, & not talkative.”54 The physician who treated her in her last illness concurred in the estimation that Brown was “backward to enter into free conversation. A diffident reserve was a prominent trait in her character.”55 Yet she transformed when speaking on religious topics, according to the doctor:

  Qtd in McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 66.  Noley, 58. 52   McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 200. The girl’s gender was apparently not a point of contention for the man, since McLoughlin records other incidents of Cherokee elders similarly protesting the use of young men as interpreters. 53   McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 115. 54  Moody Hall to Jeremiah Evarts, 14 February 1824, ABCFM Papers, 18.3.1, vol. 3. 55  Anderson, 133. 50

51

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With her friends, she was at all times communicative and interesting; but when He became the theme of conversation, the faculties of her soul appeared to receive new vigour, and she became doubly interesting. ... Although on other subjects she was not generally very animated, her whole soul seemed to feel the importance of this, which produced an earnestness of expression and manner.56

Brown’s letters, then, can be read as written extensions of her oral exhorting activities among the Cherokees. Her exhorting emerges through the highly conventionalized Christian rhetoric that led some earlier critics to assume that Brown’s Christian identity completely subsumed her Cherokee identity, to the extent that she only gave voice to the wholly assimilated Indian. To be sure, in her epistolary demonstration of her facility in penning approved Christian sentiments, Brown performed a version of Cherokee identity that emphasized her attainment and mastery of western knowledge and values. Yet as David Murray reminds us, “we need always to ask about the conditions of production and circulation of any text ... in any situation where we have a text written by an Indian certain sets of conditions have to have been met. ... it needs to have been in the interests, whether commercial, political, academic, or whatever, of those who controlled the publishing outlets.” Because most Native Americans who wrote were educated by Christian missionaries, “the only things deemed worthy of publishing were those which expressed views consonant with Christian teachings.”57 In the act of preaching to northern women through her letters, Brown assumes a status of authority over them that threatens to violate the benevolent compact Susan Ryan describes. While the benevolent relationship relies on the maintenance of the superiority of the helper over the inferiority of the helped,58 Brown first asserts an equalitarian relationship through her assertions of friendship and sisterhood and then inverts the expected positioning of the parties by assuming the authoritative stance of exhorter/preacher.

Conclusion In a frontispiece illustration in the second edition of Memoir, the artist depicts Catharine Brown reclining on her deathbed, a large open book, presumably a Bible, resting nearby on the bedcovers. Near the bed sits a female missionary, pen in hand and positioned before a writing desk, avidly listening to Brown’s words. The caption beneath the illustration refers the reader to the section of the book detailing Brown’s dictation of her last letter to her brother, who was away at school. While the inclusion of the book in the illustration is clearly meant to 56

 Ibid., 114.   Murray, 74. 58  Ryan, 19. 57

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Figure 7.2 Frontispiece illustration, Memoir of Catherine Brown (Rufus Anderson, 1825, 2nd edn). In this engraving, Brown reclines on her deathbed dictating her last letter to a white missionary. The image belies the authorial agency Brown’s letters display.

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signify Brown’s literacy, it is significant that Brown is not depicted as writing her own letter. Instead, a female missionary accomplishes the task, thus placing Brown’s writings within a tradition of as-told-to narratives wherein white writers transcribed American Indian oral transmissions for subsequent publication. While the illustration deprives Brown of authorial agency and reduces her to a supine object of white representation, it is in some ways a fit visual metaphor for Memoir’s textual genesis and the ways critics have interpreted Brown since its publication. Considering Catharine Brown’s letters—those published as part of Memoir, those published in periodicals, and those existing in manuscript form—on their own terms, as distinct from Memoir and within the contexts opened up by epistolary studies, in effect places the pen back in her own hand, grants her due agency as an author, and reveals her subtle and sophisticated manipulations of letter-writing conventions to counter her period’s dominant attitudes toward Native Americans.

Works Cited Anderson, Rufus, Memoir of Catharine Brown, A Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation (2nd edn; Boston: Crocker and Brewster; New York: John P. Haven, 1825). Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Bellin, Joshua, Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Bernardin, Susan, “The Authenticity Game: ‘Getting Real’ in Contemporary American Indian Literature,” in William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis (eds), True West: Authenticity and the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Brooks, Joanna, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Brown, Catharine, Letter to “Dear Friend,” 8 March 1820, Christian Watchman, 1.30 (8 July 1820): 2. ——, Letter to Flora Gold, 16 April 1821, Vaill Manuscript, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT; printed in Religious Intelligencer, 6.17 (22 September 1821): 264-5. ——, Letter to “a member of the Brainerd Society in Philadelphia,” 2 June 1821, Religious Remembrancer, 46 (7 July 1821): 184; The Weekly Recorder, 7.45 (25 July 1825): 357. ——, Letter to Jane Murray, 26 May 1820, Religious Intelligencer, 5.18 (30 September 1820): 283-4.

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——, Letter to “Mrs. A.H.,”17 April 1820, Religious Remembrancer, 43 (17 June 1820): 172; Religious Intelligencer, 5.4 (24 June 1820): 60-61. ——, Letter to Mrs. Williams, 1 November 1818, The Panoplist, 15.7 (July 1819): 317; The Guardian, 1.11 (November 1819): 386-8. ——, Letter to “My beloved friend and sister in Christ,” 1 January 1820, Religious Remembrancer, 29 (11 March 1820): 29; Boston Recorder, 5.12 (18 March 1820): 46-7. ——, Letter to William and Flora Chamberlain, 12 December 1818, The Panoplist, 15.4 (Apr. 1819): 170-71; Religious Intelligencer, 3.49 (8 May 1819): 785-6; Religious Remembrancer, 6.37 (8 May 1819): 148; The Guardian, 1.11 (November 1819): 388-9. ——, Letter to “a young lady in Philadelphia,” 28 January 1820, Religious Remembrancer, 45 (1 July 1820): 177; Christian Watchman, 1.30 (8 July 1820): 2. Carney, Virginia Moore, Eastern Band Cherokee Women: Cultural Persistence in Their Letters and Speeches (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005). Casper, Scott E., Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). “Cherokee Mission,” Religious Intelligencer, 6.17 (22 September 1821): 264-5. The Complete Letter-Writer (Salem: Hunt, 1802). Dierks, Konstantin, “The Familiar Letter and Social Refinement in American, 1750-1800,” in David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds), Letter Writing as Social Practice (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000). Field, Delilah, Letter to Miss G., Religious Intelligencer, 6.6 (7 July 1821): 96. Gustafson, Sandra, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Hall, Moody, Letter to Jeremiah Evarts, 14 February 1824, American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions Papers, 18.3.1, vol. 3, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Hewitt, Elizabeth, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Johnson, Nan, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002). Kilcup, Karen, Native American Women’s Writing, 1800-1921: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). Krupat, Arnold, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). “List of Books belonging to the Cherokee Mission Library” (1822), American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers, 18.3.1, vol. 2, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Martin, Joel W., The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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——, “Almost White: The Ambivalent Promise of Christian Missions among the Cherokees,” in Craig R. Prentiss (ed.), Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2003). ——, “Visions of Revitalization in the Eastern Woodlands: Can a Middle-Aged Theory Stretch to Embrace the First Cherokee Converts?” in Michael E. Harkin (ed.), Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). McLoughlin, William, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). ——, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). ——, The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794-1870: Essays on Acculturation and Cultural Persistence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). “Memoirs [sic] of Catharine Brown,” Recorder and Telegraph, 10.28 (8 July 1825): 112. Murray, David, “Translation and Mediation,” in Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Nelson, Joshua B., “Integrated Circuitry: Catharine Brown across Gender, Race, and Religion,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 30:1 (2006): 17-31. Noley, Homer, “The Interpreters” in Jace Weaver (ed.), Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998). Nussbaum, Felicity A., The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). O’Connell, Barry, Introduction, in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Paine, Ann, Notebook 2, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission Papers, 18.1.1, vol. 3, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Perdue, Theda, Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). ——, Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Potter, Laura, “Creek Path,” Religious Intelligencer, 6.47 (20 April 1820): 742-3. Ryan, Susan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Schneider, Bethany, “New England Tales: Catharine Sedgwick, Catharine Brown, and the Dislocations of Indian Land,” in Shirley Samuels (ed.), A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Schneider, Gary, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005).

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Schultz, Lucille, “Letter-Writing Instruction in 19th Century Schools in the United States,” in David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds), Letter Writing as Social Practice (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing, 2000). “Specimens of Indian Improvement,” Panoplist, and Missionary Herald, 15.4 (April 1819): 170-71. Weaver, Jace, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Woods, Leonard, Memoirs of Mrs. Harriet Newell (London: Booth, 1816). Wyss, Hilary E., Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Young, Mary, “The Cherokee Nation: Mirror of the Republic,” American Quarterly, 33 (1981): 502-24.

Chapter Eight

“Does such a being exist?”: Olive Branch Readers Respond to Fanny Fern Bonnie Carr O’Neill

Fanny Fern began writing for the Olive Branch in June 1851 and published more than one dozen articles there before the year’s end. From the start, her public identity was unsettled: before resolving on “Fanny Fern,” she tried several pseudonyms such as “Tabitha” and “Olivia Branch.” Her distinctive style made her an immediate success among both male and female readers, some of whom wrote letters responding to her and her columns. Some letter writers offered enthusiastic praise or criticism for Fern’s sentimental and satirical sketches portraying women’s concerns, but many speculated about the “real” identity of the writer whose blunt style challenged conventions of women’s writing. In 1852, the Olive Branch published several of these inquiries and some of Fern’s letters in response. The result is an extraordinary set of published correspondence that reveals much about the influence of epistolarity in Fern’s early career. According to Janet Gurkin Altman, “the epistolary experience” is “a reciprocal one. The letter writer simultaneously seeks to affect his [or her] reader and is affected by him.” In the Olive Branch correspondence between Fern and her readers, the presumptions of reciprocal exchange drive Fern to define and refine her public identity in response to her correspondents’ questions and speculations. Through these epistolary exchanges, Fern seeks to shift social relationships and reconceptualize identity itself by encouraging ongoing exchange and response that liberates identity from conventional and ideological fixtures. Fern’s confrontational vernacular style both presumes and elicits debate among readers. While that debate ostensibly concentrates on Fern’s identity, questions about Fern open up larger considerations about women’s public voice and the gendering of identity. Readers of Ruth Hall will recognize a parallel. Karen E. Waldron argues that Fern’s novel aims “to publicize the private, by reaching across and through the presumed separation of spheres.” Letters help make this point. Destitute and rejected by her family, Ruth assumes the pseudonym “Floy” and begins writing for the “Weekly Standard”: “while Ruth scribbled away in her  Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity, 88.  Karen Waldron, “No Separations in the City,” 92.

 

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garret, the public were busying themselves in conjecturing who ‘Floy’ might be. Letters poured in upon Mr. Lescom [her editor], with inquiries, even bribing him with the offer to procure a certain number of subscribers, if he would divulge her real name.” Protecting “Floy’s” identity, Mr. Lescom preserves Ruth’s privacy, but readers’ inquiries reflect the difficulty Ruth faces in maintaining separate “spheres” of selfhood. As in the case of Fern’s Olive Branch correspondence, these letters are not all positive; among declarations of love and appreciation, “Floy” receives cheeky marriage proposals, brazen requests for money, and the harsh rebukes of a male writer who calls her writing “unmitigated trash” and argues that “the female mind is incapable of producing anything which may be strictly termed literature.” These fictional letters are almost certainly modeled on letters Fern herself received. In both the novel and the Olive Branch, Fern exposes the fiction of the gendered public-private dichotomy by ironically revealing the degree to which women’s experience in the “private sphere” is in fact always open to scrutiny, always public. Letters from readers who identify as both male and female suggest that Olive Branch readers did not reach consensus about Fern’s personal identity, let alone her social standing or moral character. Instead, readers latched onto Fern as the focal point of their debates over the constellation of issues that comprise the “woman question.” In that subtle shift in focus from Fern herself to the ideas and values readers claim she represents, Fern becomes a celebrity; her public identity provides the occasion for debate over matters of sexuality, marriage, and personal values that are typically understood to be outside the realm of public discourse. Correspondence is an ideal vehicle for such discussion, because its dialogic structure can support debates of public significance. Elizabeth Hewitt explains that “insofar as the letter approximates conversation, it offers something like the Arendtian model of the public sphere with its accent on agonistic relations; and insofar as it is a written mode it serves as a paradigmatic genre for describing the ties that bind a nation too large to be present to itself.” This comment aptly describes the often heated exchanges between Fern and her far-flung readers over the role of women in contemporary society. Fern’s readers understand that her public presence in the Olive Branch grants her an authoritative air, and they debate her significance as representative, or potentially representative, of American women. With her distinctive style, however, Fern stands out as a singular figure. Hence, readers’ letters reflect Fern’s double status as both representative and unique. This simultaneous meaning likewise emerges from the epistolary form,

 Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall and Other Writings, 133.  Ibid., 166.   My understanding of celebrity as an object of public discourse concentrating on the representational status of a particular public figure draws from P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power.   Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 12.  

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which “offers a template for a central problem of democratic politics, which is the reconciliation between individual liberty and public solidarity.” Fern’s reader correspondence in the Olive Branch shows both the specific ways that public and private concerns are interrelated and also the ways in which men and women worked to maintain the fiction of separate spheres. Exposing the intersections of private and public is crucial to Fern’s emerging project in the Olive Branch, the rethinking of identity, especially as it is inflected by gender and shaped by ideology. Using pseudonyms, Fern and her readers both conceal and reveal the self. On one hand, this dual tendency suggests a model of the self as “ambiguous.” But Fern’s model of selfhood actually sought clarity rather than promoted ambiguity. It sought a means of assessing the authentic elements of individual character, which is to say, the aspects of individual selfhood that were uninfluenced by ideology or social convention. The use of pseudonyms was important in this effort, as it unmoored the writer from biographical and social particulars that might prejudice readers and it facilitated complex performances of irony and affect. At the same time, personal correspondence provided a model for individual expression that was understood to be true to the writer. For this reason, Fern’s most vehement correspondents should be understood as emulating her practice of self-identification even when they stridently oppose her views or portray her as an aberration of womanhood—or even when they claim to love her. It is clear from Fern’s use of pseudonyms that she sought to protect her identity. At the same time, however, Fern’s earliest Olive Branch writings assume a distinctive, first-person point-of-view and a lively conversational style that suggests its potential roots in the familiar letter. She incorporates direct address with either named or implied readers. Because letters are one genre of writing that traditionally has been deemed acceptable for women,10 it is significant that Fern uses the letter form, which enables her to offer trenchant criticism of social life as nothing more than the casual claims of an isolated if outspoken individual. For instance, in an early piece that takes the form of a letter to her editor, Fern asserts that the failure to live up to the popular ideals of femininity leads to a kind of death sentence for women—an idea that becomes a motif in her early writing: “Between you and I, and the door-post, Mr. Editor, a woman might as well cut her throat at once, if she isn’t pretty,” she writes as “Tabitha.”11 Indicated by the conventional 

  Hewitt, 7-8.   Laura Laffrado, “‘I Thought from the Way You Writ, That You Were a Great SixFooter of a Woman’,” 87.    See Joyce Warren, Fanny Fern, 102. 10  On letter writing as an acceptable form of writing for women, see Brandt, EighteenthCentury Letters and British Culture, 15. On the other hand, in Epistolary Histories, Amanda Gilroy and W.M. Verhoeven argue that the popularity of epistolary novels written by women leads to the association of epistolarity with women’s writing. 11   Boston Olive Branch, 21 August 1851. Subsequent citations will be made parenthetically in the text, using the abbreviation “OB” and the date of publication. 

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figures of speech, grammatical improprieties, and italics, the conversational qualities of Fern’s writing are consistent with conventions of letter writing. In addition, by transmitting the qualities of everyday speech to writing and even to print, Fern takes advantage of the particular malleability of the letter as a genre.12 Throughout the Olive Branch correspondence, Fern uses the formal qualities of the letter and the associations of letter writing with women’s expression to her rhetorical advantage. Because readers readily associated her writing voice with her personal voice, Fern’s dexterous movement between satire and sentiment within the pages of the Olive Branch creates the appearance of an unstable identity. If the two modes seem incompatible to some modern critics,13 the published responses from readers suggest that her sentimental and satirical work was equally provocative to readers. The exchanges follow a pattern whereby a reader’s letter to the newspaper—often via the editor, Reverend Thomas Norris—elicits a response either from Norris or Fern or both. While they ostensibly respond to a specific reader’s letter, once published in the pages of the Olive Branch these exchanges appealed to an even wider audience, the newspaper’s general readership. In this way, Fern’s correspondence reflects epistolarity’s ability to embrace plural audiences and resonate on both the personal and public levels.14 Olive Branch readers’ curiosity about Fern’s identity peaked in 1852, following an exchange between Fern and a reader “Eva” who expressed romantic interest for another contributor, provocatively named “Jack Fern.” In her letter to “Eva,” Fern not only addresses the original questions about her sex, but she also extends that response into a more general reflection on the social conventions that pressure women’s identities. Revealing that she was no “Jack,” Fern provides a satirical selfportrait: “I’m a poor, long-faced, draggle-skirted, afflicted, down-trodded female … . Can’t do anything I want to cause it ‘never’ll do.’ Have to laugh when I feel sober, cry when I’m merry, and be as artificial as a waxdoll, for fear ‘somebody will say something.’”15 This darkly humorous letter marks the origins of Fern’s signature satirical mode, the “female complaint.” Lauren Berlant defines the complaint as “an international mode of public discourse that demonstrates women’s contested value in the patriarchal public sphere by providing commentary from a generically ‘feminine’ point of view.”16 It is important to note that Fern’s complaints originate in a context of correspondence with a reader. As in her previous letter as “Tabitha,” Fern takes license from the letter’s conversational tone, and she uses the context of semi-private exchange between two women as a premise for her pointed social  Eve Tavor Bannett, Empire of Letters, xvii-xviii.  Anxiety about Fern’s mixture of sentiment and satire in Ruth Hall has a long critical history; for an overview of critical reception of the novel in the twentieth century, see Susan K. Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels, 111-13. 14   Bannett, 281. 15   OB, 17 January 1852. 16   Lauren Berlant, “The Female Woman,” 433. 12

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critique. Although Fern claims the masculine pseudonym grants her license to express her views more completely, ironically it is the letter that liberates Fern from the restrictions on women’s expression that she complains about. Thereafter Fern is able to use the female pseudonym while maintaining the satirical writing style that many of her readers identify as unfeminine.17 Fern’s satire catches her in a double-bind: she can publicly claim her sex, but she cannot escape the gender stereotypes that affect public perception of her status as a woman. The dilemma induces her to attempt to redefine “woman” itself. Berlant identifies Fern as one practitioner of the complaint who “developed a counterstrain, which aimed critically to distinguish ‘women’ in their particularity from ‘woman’ in her generic purity.”18 Berlant’s discussion of Fern’s complaint literature suggests that Fern brings together discourses on women’s sentimentalized, social identities and individualism. Fern’s response to “Eva” excoriates the generic version of woman as “waxdoll”—a pretty but passionless objectification of femininity. Subsequently, Fern develops an even more particular identity by explaining her dark humor: “it’s a way I have, when I can’t find a razor handy to cut my throat!”19 In this instance, her “black humor” defies gender stereotypes20— again, Fern is no “waxdoll”—but such self-expression is also a form of suicide, a poor substitute for the razor. Her satiric honesty cost Fern nothing less than her identity as a woman. In owning her feelings about social and gender roles while admitting her female sex, Fern gives up any claim for acceptance as a conventional or generic woman—that is, a woman whose behavior and professed sentiments comply with the norms and expectations of gender ideology.21 In other words, Fern demonstrates that the attainment of individualism comes at the cost of established gender identity. Henceforth she seeks a new articulation of selfhood in which her sex is a contributing but not a limiting factor. Controversy, provocation, and the verbal exchange modeled in correspondence are critical to her identity-formation project.

17   Later, Fern’s mature complaints borrow from the correspondence model in their premise of responding to a piece of conventional wisdom or an overheard comment. Occasionally, she replaces the actual or implied superscription to a specific correspondent with an epigraph taken from another newspaper piece. (See, for example, “Don’t Disturb Him!” OB 4 September 1853; reprinted in Fern, Ruth Hall, 250-51.) Instead of incorporating her complaint into a letter to a sympathetic reader, Fern incorporates it into a letter to the public at large, the numberless readers affected by the ideologies reflected in the selected inscription. 18   Berlant, 434. 19   OB, 31 January 1852. 20   Warren, 100. 21   Those norms and expectations are discussed in Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 151-74, and Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, and Woman’s Place,” 159-99.

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Apparently, Fern’s letter to “Eva” did little to satisfy readers’ curiosity. In March 1852, the Olive Branch published a letter to the editor asking, “Who is Fanny Fern? pray tell me. I almost tear the Olive Branch in pieces in my eager haste to read the productions of her magic pen.” Signed “Jack Plane” of Groton, the letter was printed above the editor’s reply: Friend Jack,—you may as well keep quiet, for Fanny utterly refuses to allow us to use her true name. She is not ambitious of notoriety. We will inform Jack and others, however, that the lady belongs to one of our most respectable families, and is very highly esteemed in a wide circle of friends, in and out of our good city. But Jack, you need not tease her for her name, for you should know, that if a woman won’t, then she won’t, and there’s an end on’t.22

This exchange might carry the scent of a publicity gag, protesting perhaps too much that Fern does not want notoriety. The last line in particular carries the aroma of Fern, with its playful repetitions and ironic emphasis. It would be easy to dismiss all the letters the Olive Branch printed concerning Fern, considering the possibility that they were manufactured either by Fern or her editors for publicity’s sake, but I think we should take these letters seriously for a couple of reasons. First, Warren reports that Fern received quantities of mail from readers, and she answered some in person and others in her New York Ledger column.23 It is not implausible that reader correspondence began while she still lived in Boston. Second, even if the letters are fabrications for the sake of publicity, the correspondence between “Jack Plane” and editor Norris models the epistolary expectations the paper’s producers and readers could bring to the paper, the site of their mutual interaction. It is significant that Norris publishes Plane’s letter as a letter—he does not incorporate it into an editorial statement about Fern’s identity, for instance, but rather he represents the issue as one of exchange between himself and a reader. At the same time, however, he maintains his authority as both the author of the letter and the editor of the Olive Branch. In spite of the letter’s apparent openness, Norris’s response really says very little about Fern. Reverend Norris leads readers to see Fern primarily as a woman, with all the stereotypical qualities that implies: respectability, esteem, and stubbornness masked as resoluteness. A few days later, Fern uses the letter form to provide another self-portrait that contradicts Norris’s suggestions that she is resolute. This self-portrait is the cornerstone of Fern’s public persona. Titled “To Jack Fern,” the letter demonstrates that her primary stance as a writer is reactive and contrarian, and more than that, it incorporates those qualities into a philosophy of individuality and personal identity:

  OB, 6 March 1852.   Warren, 258-60.

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I’m a regular “Will o’ the Wisp;” everything by turns, and nothing long. Sometimes I’m an old maid, sometimes a wife, then a widow, now a Jack, then a Gill, at present a “Fanny.” If there’s one thing I abominate it’s sameness; no article of furniture in my premises stands in the same spot two days in succession. If I’d been born a twin, I should have poisoned t’other one. … I always contrive to make people to love, or hate me, with a vengeance. I don’t care which; anything but a milk-sop indifference! … That’s what I am, and as to the “who,” I’m rather mystified myself, on that point. Sometimes I think, and then again I don’t know!!24

Her own pseudonym enclosed in quotation marks, Fern does not yet fully associate her private self with her public moniker, as she eventually would do.25 The claim of a changeable nature challenges the categories of identification that are governed by gender ideologies, categories that are moral and sexual—a wife, an old maid— and also literary. Claiming “I am everything by turns and nothing long,” Fern explicitly links her individual identity to the model of Romantic temperament popularized by the British poet Lord Byron, suggesting that however radical her writing may appear, she seeks to represent herself in a manner that has a foreground in literature, as distinguished from the more popular traditions of either familiar letters or newspaper writing.26 Like Fern, Byron comes across as so various a character that modern critics wonder at times whether he possessed a “self” at all, or if he lived entirely through his creations. It is plausible that he used his reputation for changeableness to insulate himself from the exposure of celebrity.27 Byron’s apparently diverse sexual experience—allegations of hetero- and homosexual liaisons, his incestuous relationship with his sister, and his dissolute marriage— appealed to audiences as the ultimate expression of autonomous individualism even as it appalled as a transgressive form of otherness. Seen through the framework of Romantic individualism, Fern risks being interpreted as a grotesque “other.”28 The persona Fern claims is welcome to a range   OB, 13 March 1852; emphasis in original.   Warren, 103. 26   Commonplace throughout the century, the quote “I am everything by turns and nothing long” is first attributed to Byron by his friend the Countess Marguerite Blessington, who published her Conversations with Lord Byron in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, July 1832-December 1833. It is also published in a modern edition as Conversations of Lord Byron. 27   See Frances Wilson (ed.), Byromania and Jay A. Ward, “The Gloomy Vanity of ‘Drawing from Self.’” 28  My use of “grotesque” and “human grotesque,” here and throughout, is influenced by Leonard Cassuto’s analysis of the “racial grotesque” in representations of race; see The Inhuman Race. Also relevant are discussions of freak shows and other displays of the non-normative human form such as Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies. For instance, discussing P.T. Barnum’s exhibitions, Thompson writes, “By highlighting 24 25

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of friendships, intimacies, and associations; expression is not constrained by social decorum, because any utterance can be justified by a changeable character—which is to say, a character unconstrained by gender, political association, or social status. Fern seeks readers who will regard her for “what,” not “who,” she is because, she suggests, identity arises from the exercise of an autonomous will, not arbitrary categories or socialized decorum. Likewise, she seeks an emotional response borne of analytical interpretation that, in its intensity, challenges conventional affective expression: she wants her audience to love or hate her “with a vengeance.” Her own identity follows her public expressions of ideas and feelings; as a public phenomenon, her identity is enhanced by the readers’ responses to her expression. And, in turn, those responses, publicly expressed, reveal the identities of individual readers. Residing in the intersections of expression and intense emotional response, therefore, identity emerges in sentimental relation to other selves such as those developed through letters. In this construction, indifference to others is selfeffacement. Fern seeks to turn the tables on a gender-based identity that destroys women who diverge from the ideological norm. As with Byron, however, Fern was reviled as much as loved for her changeability and passion. Olive Branch readers emphasize the grotesque character of a woman who defies entrenched expectations of feminine thought and behavior. Their letters engage a give-andtake of authority and judgment, particularly where claims of selfhood are seen to reverberate in the social or public realm as suggestions of sexual liberty. For instance, “Eliza” contributes a four-stanza poem dedicated to the puzzle of Fern’s identity. I quote two verses, first and last, in full: Oh mirth-provoking Fanny, Pray tell me if you will, What sort of being you really are, And whether a Jack or a Gill; And much I wonder Fanny, If you are maid or wife; On the shady side of forty, Or in the bloom of life. …

ostensible human anomaly of every sort, Barnum’s exhibits challenged audiences not only to classify and explain what they saw, but to relate the performance to themselves, to American individual and collective identity. … The freak show thrived in an era of unbounded confidence in the human ability to perceive and act upon truth. These collective cultural rituals provided dilemmas of classification and definition upon which the throng of spectators could hone the skills needed to tame world and self in the ambitious project of American self-making” (58-9). While Cassuto and Garland concentrate on representations of race and disability, respectively, I am proposing an analogy with transgressive representations of gender identity in light of clearly defined and recognizable gender norms.

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The ideal picture I have sketched, Is a being kind and true, And all that’s good in womankind I’ve credited to you. Oh mirth-provoking Fanny, If the genius of your pen Can stir the heart of woman thus, How is it with the men?29

In its second-person address to Fern, the poem builds on the letter’s model of reciprocal expression. Like the subject of her poem, “Eliza” takes advantage of the letter’s tendency for shape-shifting to generate her own literary performance. Even as she writes in praise of “the genius of [Fern’s] pen,” “Eliza” makes the sentimental claim to have been touched at the heart by Fern’s wit and humor. Her ability to stir such affect among women, however, raises the question of whether she can translate feminine affect into heterosexual desire. “Eliza” recognizes that the womanly goodness manifest in Fern’s irreverent mirth may keep her out of the heterosexual economy that governs women’s social livelihoods. Fern’s willingness to write like a man, represent herself as “Jack or Gill,” and even to “stir the heart of woman” with her phallic pen all point to a potential sexual deviance. By combining tactics of sentimental appeal to “womanly” virtues and ironic portrayal of deviance from social norms, the poem imitates and competes with Fern herself. Imitation is flattery, but also critique and, potentially, theft—of Fern’s style and her very persona.30 If “Eliza” gets away with encroaching on Fern’s territory, it may be because “Eliza” engages Fern’s tactics in a dialogue with Fern herself that continues a week later in Fern’s response to “Eliza.”31 Her letter answers “Eliza’s” direct questions about her appearance and even gives a hint of how it is for her with the men: I’m a female woman! and I wish the day had been blotted out of the calendar, that wrote me down one. Such a “Jack” as I might have been! It makes me mad to think of it. No help for it now. I shall know better next time. It is my   OB, 10 April 1852.   Later in her tenure with the Olive Branch, Fern responds angrily to writers whose imitations of her style she sees as a direct threat to her intellectual property. See Melissa Homestead, “‘Every Body Sees the Theft,’” 210-37, and also Michael Newbury, Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America, 186-99. 31  That dialogue apparently continues in Fern’s sentimental sketch “A Peep Behind the Scenes” in the same issue of the paper (OB, 10 April 1852). There, two young women, Kitty Fay and Nellie, discuss Kitty’s willfulness. Nellie worries that Kitty is altogether too outspoken and bound to be the target of gossip and scandal (frequent topics of Fern’s). Kitty, however, thrives on “astonishing people.” Like Kitty, Fern clearly values the impulse to break with convention, even to “astonish.” 29 30

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present intention to get married as soon as I can get a chance. I have black eyes and hair, and am very petite, please your ladyship. I am as sensitive as the “Mimosa,” spirited as an eagle, and untamable as chain lightening. Can make a pudding or write a newspaper squib, cut out a child’s frock or cut a caper, and crowd more happiness or misery into ten minutes than any Fanny than ever was christened.32

The letter echoes the self-portrait Fern previously directed to “Jack Plane,” emphasizing Fern’s changeability, energy, and power. But here, she is powerful despite the limitations on her sex, not merely by working around them. This significant shift positions Fern for a more pointed critique of gender ideology. Aware her behavior transgresses gender categories, Fern turns to images from the natural world to describe herself; as she is a nearly super-human power, no human imagery applies. This very super-human capability comes under fire from another reader, “S,” in the same issue of the paper. “S” reacts to an earlier, contradictory claim of Fern’s: having received a marriage proposal from “Bachelor M.O.,” Fern declares, “I won’t say ‘obey’ for any priest in the land; no! not if you held a pistol to my head!”33 In this claim and in other instances, “S” argues, Fern portrays women as rather too capable, and she criticizes Fern for failing to take sides in the gendered power struggles being fought out in the nation’s parlors and bedrooms: By and by, I dare say you will make a call upon some woman, who does all her drudgery without a single domestic, and after you have painted her to her arm-pits in soap-suds, and the same afternoon in a corn-colored bonnet, as brisk as a bee, making calls before she takes in her clothes, every man will imagine his wife can or ought to follow the same recipe. Your lessons are not at all palatable, Fanny—but then you have no sort of mercy on either sex. ... Talk about your obeying [a husband]—such a will-o’-wisp, helter-skelter, jack-o-lantern creature! Why, your husband would unite with the choice spirits at a club house before you had been married twenty-four hours. Men won’t be caudled as they once were—there are amusements now away from home, when the wife flies off the handle.34

In her response to Fern’s comments on matrimony, “S” reveals that Fern’s claims for herself have a much wider significance for women in general and their security within the heterosexual economy of marriage. For this writer, Fern’s efforts to bring women recognition for their domestic labors does not advance women’s cause, because Fern encourages men to see women as endlessly energetic. The letter writer hints that a wife’s sexual relationship with her husband would suffer   OB, 17 April 1852.   OB, 28 February 185. 34   OB, 17 April 1852. 32 33

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when he expects her to possess endless energy. Not limiting herself to a critique of Fern’s arguments, however, “S” indicts Fern personally. She insinuates that her hypothetical husband would become unfaithful, since his staying out of the house implies his rejecting the “amusements” offered by his wife. The bottom line for this writer is that Fern assumes too much power for her sex in a culture that grants men a wide array of privileges, including sexual license. Fern’s dissent therefore does not indicate her progressivism so much as her difference. Having “no sort of mercy on either sex,” Fern is portrayed here as crossing categories of gender that are marked by sympathy. As a result, the writer implies, she identifies as neither female nor male. Hence she is a “jack-o-lantern creature,” a figure of grotesque distortion and fun that frightens. This interpretation is amplified four months later in a letter from “Francesca Lowell”: “Well, Miss Fan, it seems we have found you out. A female woman! What made you tell? we might, perhaps, have imagined you a mermaid, or a fairy with invisible green eyes. … My husband thinks you have been disappointed in love, and that is what makes you so flighty.”35 Berlant points out that “female woman” was a term Fern coined to designate women who identified with the patriarchal ideals of femininity.36 The term satirizes them by combining their biological sex (female) with their ideological identity (woman), suggesting that they fuse, or confuse, two distinct aspects of their selfhoods. For Fern to call herself a “female woman” is then ironic, much like her referring to herself earlier as a “waxdoll.” In her reaction to Fern, however, “Francesca Lowell” accepts “female woman” as a positive, conventional construction of femininity, and she scoffs that Fern could claim to embody it. Interestingly, it is the very absence of irony in “Lowell’s” response that indicates the success of Fern’s satire: prompting her reader to “hate her with a vengeance,” Fern elicits a judgment that reveals “Lowell’s” values and locates her in the social and ideological landscape. In attributing Fern’s otherness to failed romance, “Lowell” reveals her inability to see Fern as anything except a woman, however failed. This double vision is consistent with Leonard Cassuto’s theory of human grotesque: observers of the grotesque, he argues, are never able to separate the human from the inhuman; the very duality of the subject’s identity renders her grotesque. Moreover, the letter writer (and her husband) accuses Fern of being “flighty,” a term meant to diminish Fern’s grandiose claims for exemption from social categories. Criticizing Fern as both intellectually and morally inconstant, “Lowell” upholds the feminine virtues of fidelity, piety, and submissiveness. In addition, by attributing Fern’s inconstancy to failed romance, the writer strikes even lower, suggesting that Fern is unable to get or keep a man—she is, frankly, undesirable. Clearly the ideal of womanhood that “Lowell” adheres to associates women’s moral consistency with her “virtue” or sexuality. In this construction, the woman who withholds herself

  OB, 28 August 1852.   Berlant, 429-54.

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ultimately finds sexual fulfillment. Fern stands accused of the twin transgressions of her gender, being both unvirtuous and sexually cold, and is doubly monstrous. Thus, Fern is not a “female woman,” but “a mermaid with invisible green eyes,” a physical oddity such as P.T. Barnum exhibited at his American Museum. The cultural lines are clear: a woman’s attitude may be explained by her level of participation in the heterosexual economy, or else she may be deemed a freak of nature. Freaks like Barnum’s Feejee mermaid appealed to audiences because they defied conventional understandings of biological organization. They seemed to combine biological species, such as a fish and a human. In these combinations, freaks challenged observers to confront the categories of life that structured their thought. The possibility of difference might dazzle and tantalize the imagination, but the dominance of the observer’s judgment over the object is always affirmed: the freak is a passive object on which the viewer’s interpretive and intellectual authority is exercised. The similarities to the human grotesque should be clear: an object of spectatorship and judgment, the human grotesque is also the object of interpretation that ultimately affirms both the intellectual and the social superiority of the observer. “Lowell’s” letter claims similar intellectual and social authority. It attempts to redesignate Fern as a freak and diminish any social authority that goes with her role as a published author. “Lowell” can never have the last word, however, because unlike the freak or grotesque, Fern is not a passive object on display, and the correspondence between a newspaper writer and her reader is not an exhibit by Barnum. The newspaper does not presume from the outset that its author is a freak or grotesque, as the freak show does, and so it does not lend institutional sanction to the observer’s judgment. As a genre, letters tend to be “sites of contestation,” where author and readers grapple over issues of social authority and relations based on class, gender, or race.37 The genre’s expectations of response naturally limit any one letter’s authoritative claims. Publication of letters opens up the possibility for multiple points of view and suggests they are equally valid. Just as the reader’s judgment acts as a check on Fern’s authority to speak for all women, the newspaper’s publication of the correspondence provides only a limited power for readers. Hence, in the same issue of the paper, reader “Fanny Dade” writes, “About your identity, as to the who or the where, has troubled me very little. I know very well what you are to me in the weekly visits of the Olive Branch—a kind, loving sister, with a flashing smile that breaks through the drolleries, making me long to shake hands with you.” Juxtaposed with the accusatory letter from “Francesca Lowell,” “Dade’s” letter embraces Fern as part of the sorority of women, sympathetic to the trials each faces as a wife and mother, vulnerable to loss. It is significant that “Dade” responds explicitly to Fern’s sentimental pieces—she alludes to the piece “Incident at Mt. Auburn,” in which a mother spends all her time by the graveside of her very young child, only to be brought back to reality by the ghost-like presence of her other,   Theresa Strouth Gaul, To Marry an Indian, 29.

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living child. The pairing of “Lowell’s” and “Dade’s” letters points out the mixed effects of Fern’s mixed styles. She challenges as well as comforts, and willfully resists readers’ categorization. In this sense, even her style is grotesque. Most of the letters I have examined so far are from women. But the Olive Branch’s letters from male readers demonstrate that women’s social status reverberated in male identity as well as female identity. Two letters demonstrate this point—both, interestingly, from men claiming to be from Alabama. First, “Albert” addresses his impassioned declaration to editor Norris, like a love-struck young man asking for a father’s permission to marry his daughter: …but the fact is, unless I find out something about Fanny, I shall go crazy, commit suicide, or do some other desperate act that will cast a shadow of gloom over the enlightened millions of our happy and prosperous country … Born and reared amid the wilds of Alabama, the genial warmth of her Southern sun has infused into my nature a fiery, impulsive temperament; and basking amid the shades of her pine-clad forests and magnolia groves, have I been taught to love. Does Fanny know what it is to love—to hope? Don’t think me crazy, Mr. Norris. Who is Fanny Fern? Does such a being exist? or am I worshipping at the shrine of some imaginary divinity, of whom I shall never know aught save the weekly pencillings that have so maddened my fiery brain?38

This letter portrays “Albert” as a man of feeling whose emotional effusiveness indicates the depth and genuineness of his ardor. In his efforts to identify as unconventional a woman as Fern, “Albert” relies on conventions of Southern masculinity and romance, as well as of nationalism. Transcending regional boundaries and sectional differences, “Albert” claims, Fern’s appeal also threatens to undermine national peace. Deeply entrenched social and ideological conventions clearly provide a stability that Fern’s vigorous difference threatens, yet Fern’s influence affirms “Albert’s” masculinity and virility: even in erotic dissolution, he continues to exert a far-reaching male power by creating in his letter an ironic comedy of gender equal to Fern’s.39 Another male reader from the South provides a different interpretation of Fern’s influence. “Harry” reflects that Fern threatens masculinity by advocating women’s potential independence from men. Specifically, he worries that by advocating the single life for women, Fern would reduce men’s chances for happy marriage—an idea that is comical in its exaggerated sense of one writer’s influence, but deadly earnest in the letter writer’s expression. By addressing his concerns to Norris, “Harry” appeals to the wider privilege of male authority. In this way, he attempts   OB, 19 June 1852.  My reading of “Albert” is in keeping with Vincent J. Bertolini’s argument that the culture “domesticates” the bachelor in an effort to curtail or contain his threat to the heterosexual social structure. See “Fireside Chastity.” 38 39

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to put Fern in her place as a woman, circumventing any social authority she may claim as a writer with a public voice: We want you to tell Fanny Fern to hush her palavering about marrying. She is corrupting the minds of the “fair sex.” She’ll ruin all our prospects for doubling. … It don’t concern her who marries. She thinks because she’s an “old maid,” and don’t (?) want to marry, and hates “babies,” and “don’t want to touch them except with a pair of tongs,” no one else wants to marry. She thinks because her little bit of an odd heart is cold, every body’s is so. Why, Fanny, ain’t you ashamed? What, a woman take hold on a baby with a pair of tongs? Fy! fy! I know now you are a soulless old maid, or you are no woman at all. I know you can’t be a man. Nor you can’t be a “mother.” Nor you can’t be any “of the girls.” No, you are certainly an old maid. And because you couldn’t marry, you are just talking as you are, to keep the girls from marrying. But you can’t come it. For we intend to expose your designs. And if we can’t, we’ll just petition Mr. Norris not to let you write in the Olive Branch any more.40

As he purports to speak for all men, “Harry” claims the letter writer’s function as representative rather than purely individual. In contrast, he regards Fern as an idiosyncratic figure, whose access to the public forum raises the worrisome prospect that her oddball views will gain traction. “Harry’s” real worry, then, is that women may in fact come to recognize their own potential power—that they may opt out of the ideological structures of marriage and separate spheres altogether. “Harry” argues that Fern’s rejection of conventional gender roles suggests she is not “one of the girls.” In criticizing Fern, he invokes one of the most persistent and damning judgments available to him: if she is biologically female, he asserts, Fern is by no means a “true” woman, because she rejects conventional ideals of womanhood like matrimony and motherhood. Letters from both “Albert” and “Harry” indicate that Fern wields a power out of all balance with that of ordinary women. That power comes from her having a public voice. And in both cases, her power is threatening: either she causes erotic dissolutions that wreak social havoc, or she causes similar empowerment in other women, which also wreaks social havoc. As with the female letter writers, admissions of love and hate for Fern identify the letter writers according to their ideas, expectations, and desires regarding women. They represent different versions of Fern’s public identity, thus affirming that in interpretation, at least, her identity is inconstant. But at the same time the men clarify their own public identities through letters giving voice to those interpretations. This epistolary use of interpretation as self-expression is entirely in keeping with Fern’s reciprocal process of self-identification. A final sample demonstrates the range of readers’ letters as rhetorical performances. For several weeks in April and May 1852 the Olive Branch   OB, 24 July 1852.

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published a flurry of reader correspondence. Reader “Nick Notion” defends Fern against “S’s” criticism with a fantasy of marrying her.41 “Patience Pepper” shares her own story as a wife whose husband deserted her because she was too outspoken, and she encourages Fern to stay single.42 “Jenny Jessamine” reflects on the economic advantages she could glean from the knowledge of Fern’s identity: “It’s not out of curiosity that I wish to find out …. but you see I intend to sell Fanny Fern Bonds to the anxious ones at a dollar a-piece.”43 In a letter to Norris, “Dorcas Dandelion” claims Fern’s writing proves she is not a single but a married woman: “I don’t believe her knowledge of hu−−−−brutish nature (she calls the men brutes) was all picked up by observation. It must have been by experience.”44 All of these letters help to feed curiosity about Fern among the Olive Branch’s readership, and hence they work to Fern’s and the paper’s advantage. In their responses to Fern, moreover, the writers use letters to stake out their own positions in debates over the significance of sex and gender in social life and relations. Fern herself is the ostensible subject of their letters, but in fact she provides the occasion, not the substance, for readers’ discussion. As Fern’s reader correspondence indicates, that discourse involves active and ongoing acts of reading or interpretation of Fern, the celebrity, that occur simultaneously with the reading of the Olive Branch and the letters it publishes. The publication of individual reader correspondence provides a compellingly dramatic representation of that reading act. Taken together, the letters model reading and writing as acts of critical interpretation. These critical acts, moreover, closely imitate Fern’s epistolary style, including the conversational italics and the use of sentimental pseudonyms. Reinventing herself as “Fanny,” Fern makes her own critical intervention into sentimental gender ideology. Her claims to have a variable character draw on recognizable Romantic models of autonomous selfhood that directly challenge conventional expectations of women’s constancy. Fern uses correspondence with Olive Branch readers to reformulate identity as a matter of individual judgment and expression that is often at odds with others’ values and sensibilities. Following her lead, readers use her own tactics to parse and critique her methods and conclusions as well as establish their own identities, however masked.

Works Cited Altman, Janet Gurkin, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982).

41

    43   44   42

OB, 24 April 1852. OB, 1 May 1852. OB, 15 May 1852. OB, 22 May 1852.

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Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Berlant, Lauren, “The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment,” American Literary History, 3.3 (Autumn, 1991): 429-54. Bertolini, Vincent J., “Fireside Chastity: The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850s,” in Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (eds), Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Blessington, Marguerite, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovall, Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). Boston Olive Branch, 1851-55. Brant, Clare, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006). Cassuto, Leonard, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Fern, Fanny, Fern Leaves From Fanny’s Portfolio (New York: Derby and Miller, 1853). ——, Ruth Hall and Other Writings, ed. Joyce Warren (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). Gaul, Theresa Strouth, Introduction, in To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Gilroy, Amanda and W.M. Verhoeven (eds), Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Harker, Jaime, “‘Pious Cant and Blasphemy’: Fanny Fern’s Radicalized Sentiment,” Legacy, 18.1 (2001): 52-64. Harris, Susan K., Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Hewitt, Elizabeth, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Homestead, Melissa, “‘Every Body Sees the Theft’: Fanny Fern and Literary Proprietorship in Antebellum America,” New England Quarterly, 74.2 (June 2001): 210-37. Kerber, Linda, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, and Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” in Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays by Linda Kerber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997): 159-99. Laffrado, Laura, “‘I Thought from the Way You Writ, That You Were a Great SixFooter of a Woman’: Gender and the Public Voice in Fanny Fern’s Newspaper Essays,” in Sherry Lee Linkon (ed.), In Her Own Voice: Nineteenth-Century American Woman Essayists (New York: Garland, 1997). Marshall, P. David, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

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Newbury, Michael, Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Thompson, Rosemarie Garland, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Waldron, Karen, “No Separations in the City: The Public-Private Novel and Private Public Authorship,” in Monika M. Elbert (ed.), Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000). Ward, Jay A., “‘The Gloomy Vanity of “Drawing from Self”’: Byron and Romantic Self-Fashioning,” in Larry H. Peer (ed.), Inventing the Individual: Romanticism and the Idea of Individualism (Provo, UT: International Conference on Romanticism, 2002). Warren, Joyce, Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966): 151-74. Wilson, Frances (ed.), Byromania (London: Macmillan, 1999).

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Chapter Nine

Dr. Mary Walker and the Economies of Letter Writing Sharon M. Harris

Recent scholarly attention to literary economies such as Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman’s Traveling Economies on travel narratives or Leon Jackson’s The Business of Letters on the history of book publishing reveals both the monetary basis of writing and publishing and, especially, the vast system of non-monetary “economies” that circulate around the publishing industry. These latter economies are systems of exchange rituals such as gift exchange, the establishment of social or literary standing, and group identification through specialized discourses that constitute the means by which writers, publishers, and their readers sustain the literary enterprise. These systems of exchange were essential to periodical literature as well as to book publishing. Typically less expensive than books, periodicals came into the reader’s home more frequently, and for some authors were the first place of publication for writings that could then be published in book form. Several stories about letter writing between publisher and author are part of literary history—Henry James confiding to his publisher his disdain for popular women writers; James T. Fields’s insistence that Rebecca Harding Davis tone down the realistic aspects of her fiction during the Civil War; Annie Adams Fields’s role via letters as go-between for contributors and her publisher-husband. Yet greater attention is needed to the significant role that published letter writing plays in the economies of exchange between writer, publisher, and reader. As a genre whose primary goal was that of exchange and reciprocity, the letter makes explicit the process of exchange necessary to sustain periodical publishing. Through the examination of Dr. Mary Walker’s letters to the radical reform newspaper the Sibyl as exemplary of broader writing and publishing practices, I will demonstrate the means by which these systems of letter exchange offered the perfect blending of economies through the monetary challenges of publishing a reform newspaper, its emphasis on community-building, and yet the allowance for personal advancement that publishing in the Sibyl provided. The letter became the most appropriate genre for social mediation because of its blending of individual authorship with its inherent expectation of such reciprocity.

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Letter-writing Economies and Community Building Dr. Mary E. Walker (1832-1919) had already established herself as a reform activist by 1857 when she sent her first letter to the editor of the Sibyl, a dress reform and women’s rights periodical. Raised in an abolitionist home, one of the earliest women physicians in the country, and an advocate of dress reform since her medical school days, Walker brought impressive reform credentials to her letter-writing career. But embarking on a public career as a writer was nonetheless daunting. Her schoolgirl essays and poems had been praised and her medical school graduation speech had been published in the American Medical and Surgical Journal, but to demand recognition through the written word was a new avenue of political involvement for Walker. Although she would publish two books, dozens of articles, and several broadsides during her long career, letters to editors of newspapers and magazines would remain a major part of her life as a writer. In addition to hometown newspapers, her letters to editors after the Civil War repeatedly appeared in the most prestigious newspapers in the country, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Herald, and Los Angeles Times. Her letters in the 1850s to an encouraging editor in an obscure weekly served as much more than apprenticeship; it was an education into the power of letter writing as a tool for radical social mediation, and she continued to use the letter to an editor as a primary genre for political activism throughout the remainder of her sixty-year career. Dr. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck and her husband, John S. Hasbrouck, had founded the Sibyl in the summer of 1856 after Amelia Bloomer’s the Lily ceased publication. John was integral to the success of the magazine, but he remained behind the scenes and the Sibyl quickly became identified with Dr. Hasbrouck, I would like to thank Theresa Strouth Gaul for her astute readings and critique of this essay; her comments helped strengthen my argument and modeled the exchange economies that continue in email letters today.   Walker’s parents, Vesta and Alvah Walker of Oswego, New York, were involved in the abolition movement, and she worked for equal rights throughout her lifetime. She graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1855; as an Eclectic physician, medical training coincided with her familial education in the interrogation of received opinions, from religion to civil rights (see Sharon M. Harris, Dr. Mary Walker). For an example of the philosophy of interrogation in Eclectic medicine, see Albert E. Miller, “The Liberal Thinker.”   “Commencement of Syracuse Medical College,” 147-8.   Although Bloomer, Stanton, and other initial advocates of it had abandoned the reform dress, thousands of women continued to wear some version of a shortened skirt with “pantaloons.” The Hasbroucks’ idea of founding a journal had emerged at the Dress Reform Association’s first meeting in Glen Haven, New York, in February 1856. Dress reform associations continued sporadically until the late 1860s, sputtered through the 1870s, and then regained momentum again in the last decades of the century, but the number of women wearing reform dresses remained fairly steady throughout the nineteenth century.

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who developed an impassioned yet professional, business-like editorial voice for her readers. Hasbrouck’s correspondents fulfilled that role in its many implications—they reported on dress-reform events across the country and they did so primarily through letters sent to Hasbrouck, which she in turn published in the Sibyl, often with her own response or a brief preface to the letters. She and her correspondents established a tone of cause-driven camaraderie that was intimate and conversational, but professional. Much like Sarah Josepha Hale, Hasbrouck talked directly to readers in long editorials and published short directives to individual subscribers, but there was little attention to domesticity. The conversations were overtly political. Hasbrouck’s magazine had a unique cast of correspondents for the 1850s, especially professional women who were involved in public activism. Hasbrouck’s major contributors were women physicians who had adopted one of several reform dress styles, were active in the National Dress Reform Association (NDRA), and lectured widely on the physiological benefits of dress reform and medical issues. As Hasbrouck understood, letters embraced the broader implications of exchange—a genre that encouraged discussion and was an integral instrument of business practices, including the business of publishing periodicals. But when a reform agenda is added to the goals of a periodical, the exchange nature of letters becomes central to the success of the enterprise, both in its economic and activism realms, and Hasbrouck worked assiduously to advance the Sibyl’s success on both fronts. The Sibyl’s published letters embraced both the practices of exchange economies and the literal and figurative economics that supported the journal, its subscribers, and the NDRA. Thus the emphasis on community in letters’ signatures or “subscriptions” was often accompanied by the literal emphasis on the need to increase subscriptions in order to maintain the journal’s public presence. The usual calls for subscriptions were published by the Hasbroucks, but many letters from contributors also encouraged sister activists to subscribe. When Mary Walker was unable to attend an 1861 convention because she was on the battlefield treating wounded soldiers, for instance, she penned a letter to On the continuation of the movement, see Gayle V. Fischer, Pantaloons and Power; Carol Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] Dress; Smith and Grieg, Women in Pants.   “The Bloomer” was often used for all reform dresses, but several designs appeared, beginning with Elizabeth Smith Miller’s “American Dress.” Walker designed her own reform dress, which is illustrated in her second book, Unmasked (1878).    Most of the physician contributors were homeopaths and eclectics, the two medical “pathies” that had trained their physicians in the areas of physiology and hygiene, which were central to arguments for dress reform.    See Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865, Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris, Eighteenth-Century Periodical Literature in America, and especially David Paul Nord’s Faith in Reading, in which he examines the systems by which Bible and religious tract societies became mass-market publishers through community-building around religious values and a faith in reading.

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Hasbrouck in which she sought support for the magazine. Like all periodicals, the Sibyl’s future was precarious during the Civil War; thus Walker urged her sister dress reformers to engage actively in support of its continuance, first by using an extended address—“Dr. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck.--Dear Sister”—and second with a call for every member of the convention to subscribe to the Sibyl, for themselves not only, but that each one shall send a copy for a year to some friend, and thus enable our Organ (which in fact it is) to continue its semimonthly issue. The Sibyl, as all will admit who are unbiased, has done more to promote Dress Reform than all other efforts combined. It is the church and class-meeting and preacher combined, to encourage the members of mental and physical reform.

Subscription thus became a formal part of a letter’s address, a monetary means of support for the periodical, and a means of representing that one “subscribed” to the philosophy of dress reform. Creating the atmosphere of professional camaraderie through a print exchange of letters increased the symbolic and social capital of publisher-correspondents as well as the market capital of the journal and its publishers. Hasbrouck’s physician correspondents especially understood the economics of business. Maintaining a successful practice was an ongoing challenge for physicians in the antebellum era; that was doubly true for women physicians and exponentially more so for women physicians who wore reform outfits. Thus Hasbrouck could rely on her audience’s interest in business rather than domestic economies. The first issue of the Sibyl contained a long article by Hasbrouck on “Woman, The Physician,” to which correspondents responded with letters describing events at women’s medical colleges and the exclusion of women from male-only medical institutions. This series of exchanges was followed by another Hasbrouck-penned essay, “Taxation and Representation,” emphasizing the unfairness of taxing businesswomen when they had no civic representation or right to vote. Thus part of the exchange economies of the Sibyl became the submission of letters that embraced the understanding of medicine as simultaneously a business and a reform cause. Dr. Mary Tillotson described her experiences as a dress reformer, for instance, and defined her version of reform attire as an “improved work dress” while Dr. Ellen Beard Harman, whose letters on dress reform conventions appeared several times, also published her marriage protest in the Sibyl in which she detailed the economic losses she would sustain as a married woman—property rights, lower  Walker, Untitled letter, 941. The Sibyl had changed to a semi-monthly in mid-1861.  In Outline of a Theory of Practice and “The Forms of Capital,” Pierre Bourdieu defines symbolic capital as the system of prestige and legitimacy that comes from mastering other forms of capital (economic, cultural, and social) and social capital as the system of connections and group memberships that may lead to symbolic capital; see also Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters, 31-7.  

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wages, inequalities in estate laws, and her legal existence as an individual. The Sibyl’s insistence on adherence to dress reform as requisite to publication made its contributors and readers feel a part of an exclusive band of activists.10 Even though that exclusivity created a sense of community between publisher, correspondents, and readers, there was another inner circle of physician-contributors who could appreciate an even narrower sense of community, one that offered sympathy and support to the woman doctor who doubly challenged social conventions by her profession and by wearing the reform dress. The business nature of the periodical was also evident in the many business messages Hasbrouck sent to authors via the pages of the Sibyl, most often requesting letters that reported on specific events or people, including the cryptic message in July 1859 to Walker in which she noted that “The papers give us no reliable information. Please send us facts.”11 While such editorial notes served as an easy means of contacting correspondents, they also served as important advertising vehicles for periodicals. Such notes often named well-known correspondents, and in the above instance, emphasized that the Sibyl would be able to provide first-hand information that readers would not be able to obtain simply by reading newspapers. It was an equally efficient means of encouraging someone like Walker, whom Hasbrouck wanted as a regular contributor, to continue writing for the periodical. Hasbrouck was adept at integrating her own editorial commentary as a frame to contributor’s letters in such a manner that it encouraged the writer—most of whom were using the Sibyl as their first foray into print publication—to continue submitting letters by either supporting their argument or offering encouraging words of hoping to soon see more commentary from this writer. At one point, she published an editorial commentary on Walker, encouraging her to continue “the great work in which she is engaged” and to “press onward, (though the way be difficult,) to her high calling, and she will receive what she so richly merits, the blessings of millions now weak, suffering and faltering.”12 Not only did Hasbrouck thereby create a strong cadre of regular contributors among women physicians and other advocates of dress reform, but such encouragement clearly was reflected onto the general readership. After Walker had been successfully recruited by Hasbrouck as a regular correspondent, Walker’s mother felt comfortable in writing a letter to the editor as well.13 

 Dr. Mary E. Tillotson, “Experience of a Dress Reformer,” 167; Dr. Ellen Beard Harman, untitled letter, 587. 10  Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman, Traveling Economies, 160. Steadman claims this was not a hierarchical exclusivity, but the inner circle of physician-contributors challenges this assertion. 11   Hasbrouck, untitled note, 580. 12   Hasbrouck, “Costume of ‘Enlightened Nations,’” 285. 13   Vesta Walker, “Let Your Women Keep Silent,” 417. This letter is the only extant writing that remains by Vesta Walker.

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Expanding Exchange Systems The Sibyl’s first issues included serialized fiction, poetry, articles, and letters. While all of these elements would continue to appear, letters soon came to dominate. As scholars of epistolarity have argued, letters may serve as connecting or distancing devices (in Janet Altman’s terms, they function between correspondents as a bridge or a barrier; in Elizabeth Hewitt’s terms, they are the instruments that shaped national union or disunion). While Hasbrouck clearly used letters as a means of building a community of reformers, viewing these correspondences as exchange economies helps us to understand the multilayered networks of exchange into which the letter entered. Through an emphasis on letters, Hasbrouck was textually constructing a community that included the business of publishing with networks of relationships, both of which aided the goal of social mediation. Letter-writing economies have their own reciprocities, exchange rituals, and moral parameters. Through these economies, the genre of letter writing became essential to effecting the larger goals of dress reform. Unlike the early epistolary novel that primarily used letter writing as a means of creating conflict and misunderstandings, the Sibyl’s emphasis on the genre sought to unify writers and readers. As Hewitt has articulated, “a particularly charged aspect of correspondence ... is that it highlights the very relations between readers and writers that are for the most part rendered invisible by other kinds of literary texts and genres. Letters necessarily emphasize social mediation in its two requisite generic features: an address (or superscription) to another person, and a signature (or subscription) that assigns the writer’s relationship to that recipient.”14 While Hewitt looks to the ways epistolarity’s addresses and signatures mediate notions of national identity, it is equally important to understand how reform organizations integrated diverse peoples. If the “most crucial question of national construction [was]: how will we be united?”15 the same question echoes in the antebellum dress reformers’ organizational development. The magnet that drew these diverse individuals together in the Sibyl was the exchange facilitated by Dr. Hasbrouck. As Walker understood, “It is a comparatively easy matter to make converts, but there must be an encourager to keep and strengthen them,” and no one was better at that than Hasbrouck.16 Hasbrouck’s supportive commentary introduced and framed the letters, most of which were superscribed directly to her, though they additionally spoke to a broad readership. In her use of letters, Hasbrouck built on longstanding traditions whereby absent members of reform organizations could “participate” in national conventions through the reading of their letters at conventions as a means of invoking their presence and support. These letters were subsequently published in organizational reports and periodicals to indicate unification in spite of physical absence. Thus Walker’s report on the January 1857 NDRA convention noted, 14

  Hewitt, 1.  Ibid. 16  Walker, Untitled letter, 941. 15

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A number of letters, addressed to the Convention, were read, and appeared to make quite an impression on those present. An interesting one, signed by forty-seven ladies of Hopedale, Mass., expressed their interest in the movement, and regrets at not being able to be present at the Convention. Also a lengthy one from Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of Seneca Falls, and Mrs. Charlotte A. Joy, of Milford, Mass.17

Stanton’s letter was then published in a subsequent issue. Further, Hasbrouck understood that she needed a means of increasing participants in the movement and subscribers to the periodical, and she was astute in recognizing that appealing to adolescent girls would help establish a second generation of dress reformers. Thus in January 1859 a new column appeared, “Youths’ Corner,” which was designed to publish letters from “young friends” interested in dress reform. These young contributors were initiated into both dress reform and the economies of letter writing. On a broad scale, Dr. Mary Walker’s letters demonstrate that contributors and readers alike learned to engage in the rituals of address and signature that helped to unify dress reform activists. Engaging in unifying epistolary aesthetics was a learned process, and Walker’s first letter to the Sibyl was simply signed “Yours, etc.,” following letter writing’s conventional signature phrasing. But she quickly learned the language of this group, which paralleled that of woman suffrage organizations; soon her signatures were expressive gestures in community solidarity—“Yours ever in the elevation of our own sex” or “Yours in every woman’s cause.”18 This ritual of signatory unification was essential in a movement whose goal of wearing reform attire put women in constant jeopardy of verbal and physical attack. The social union established through letter exchange, with the seeming instantiation of the writer before the reader, served to effect experiential solidarity and a sense that the individual activist was not confronting public challenges alone. As the periodical’s letters reveal, dress reformers were fighting the battle on a wide geographic landscape; yet they were often isolated in small towns—from Faribault, Minnesota, to Huntley Grove, Illinois. As Walker understood, wearing a reform dress often meant for these women “the cutting of chains of professed friendship,” and thus the exchange of letters in the Sibyl was an important means of forming new bonds. Further, unifying aesthetics of epistolarity include specialized languages that speak to specific audiences.19 With a large portion of contributors who were physicians, the discourse of medicine was often used in letters published in the  Walker, “Dress Reform Convention,” 1.  Walker, “Synopsis of a Sermon,” 355; Walker, “N. York State Foundling Hospital,”

17 18

594. 19   See Jackson’s discussion of similar aspects in book publishing that he terms “currencies,” 32-5. In letter writing, however, this feature is inherent in the genre’s aesthetics, not additional to it.

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periodical—both literally, to discuss the physiological benefits of dress reform, and figuratively. Thus when Walker published a lengthy letter critiquing a newspaper’s disparagement of a dress reformer’s attire and calling for a return to “the flowing drapery” appropriate to the female sex, she was assured that her audience would embrace her physiological terminology: “We would like to inquire if Mr. X candidly thinks that the amount of cents-worth that a woman carries externally, is an indication of a corresponding supply of cranial sense? If he has such an idea of woman, [I] wonder if he does not judge man as correctly? Perhaps he thinks that all are men that wear the human form.”20 She may have cheated her graceful form of “flowing drapery,” Walker adds, but “she has cheated the grave of its victim, when it is supposed that it would soon open its portals to receive its victim!”21 There were many such unifying aesthetics within the dress reform movement’s epistolary exchanges but none was more important than the phrase of “taking a hit.” Scholars have debated why Walker titled her first book Hit, but a recognition of this group’s discursive aesthetics exposes the title’s means of connecting her to sister reformers. “Hit” referred to enduring the verbal and physical attacks that came with wearing reform dresses in the 1850s, and a “hit” could also be a verbal response to such attacks. Thus J.R. Beden described in the Sibyl how she responded to comments made by neighbors who attempted to humiliate her as “A ‘Hard Hit’ Returned,” and Walker uses it as a book title to signify solidarity with the movement.22 Through these embedded economies, dress reformers used the letter to convey information about conventions, personal experiences, and philosophical ideals, but they also created a sense of safety and support through a different kind of “imagined community,” one that could only be captured through the sense of instantiation that letters provided. Numerous other exchange economies appeared in the letters to the Sibyl as well. Hasbrouck’s repeated attention to the injustice of “taxation without representation” for businesswomen was echoed by many of her letter-writing contributors. Walker used that theme, for instance, when she wrote in 1859 about women’s contributions to national causes. “We have never conversed with a conservative about the injustice of ‘taxation without representation,’” she observed, “who did not repeat the war cry, ‘Shoulder the musket and go to the battle field.’ ... Well, women have gone to the ‘battle field,’ fought and died in their country’s cause, been willing martyrs, and you have not heard of them! Women have helped to gain the elective franchise that you to-day enjoy, and now you thrust her away from the polls, as though she were not worthy to enjoy what she has fought for by your sire’s side.”23 The letter contained a historical view of women’s contributions to wars for independence, and it resonated prophetically for a nation on the brink of civil war. Other economies invoked in the Sibyl included widely used systems  Walker, “A Bloomer in the Street,” 398.  Ibid. 22  J.R. Beden, “A ‘Hard Hit’ Returned,” 426. 23  Walker, “Women Soldiers,” 610. 20 21

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such as that of gift exchange, albeit on a grand scale. Walker sought to garner funds to establish a foundling hospital in New York, and she used the pages of the Sibyl to recruit donations of money and land in exchange for the recognition the donors would receive for their benevolence in helping women who were pregnant outside of marriage and the children they bore.24 But other discursive exchanges were used to exclude non-reformers. Most important was the practice of comparing dress reformers’ progressiveness to the backwards-thinking nature of women who accepted conventional fashion dictates. This discourse dominated the periodical, of course, and its contributors soon learned catch-phrases that would signify conventionality. For example, in the letter about women on the battlefield, Walker argues, But Mr. or Miss Conservative, you say that only very young and inconsiderate women ever expose themselves to the fury of the cannon’s mouth or anywhere else out of their sphere. You are not as ignorant as you are malicious, for you wish that you could trample all women who aspired to notoriety in any other direction, than owning a “love of a bonnet,” “queenly robes,” “white arms and necks,” &c. I forbear repeating any more of such butterflyism, for it really seems like insulting the above women [soldiers] that we are talking about, to speak of such male and female nonsensities, in connection with them.25

Having dismissed “butterflyism,” the letter concludes with accounts of women’s bravery on the battlefield. Being a member of an exclusive club reinforced the idea of membership’s privilege and exceptionalism that fueled the reformers’ idea of community as surely as did its discourse of sisterly support. Pity was the common note used for women who could not escape fashion’s fetters. In relation to the Sickles-Key trial, for instance, Walker wrote: Every lady who takes a false step in upper-tendom [sic] should be pitied more than censured, as such women are generally stimulatedly dieted, and unphysiologically dressed, both of which are direct excitements of the base of the cerebellum. All should understand the effects that diet and dress have upon the mental, moral, and physical being. De Witt Clinton once remarked that “Education will prevent evils in society, that are beyond the sphere of legislation.” I would that ladies who have no time to read, had sense enough to throw aside their embroidery, and read Mental Philosophy, Moral Science, and Physiology, and then go to a smith’s and have their dressical and dietical chains severed, that they may go forth free, sensible women, “slow to judge, and slower to despise.”26  Walker, “N. York State Foundling Hospital,” 622.  Ibid. 26  “Sickles and Key Tragedy,” 593. 24 25

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Walker also understood that the importance of reciprocity in the exchange system was integral to maintaining the dress reform movement and letter writing itself. Thus when she was serving as a surgeon during the Civil War and could not write as often, she was careful to acknowledge that she was still devoted to the exchange: “Do not think because I have been silent thus long,” she began a December 1861 letter to Hasbrouck, “that I have returned to dressical chains, and am consequently unfitted for the battles of life—for such is not the fact. You are aware that it is more than five years since I commenced wearing the Reform Dress ... . I have been in ten of the United States and Canada, within the past five years, since I have worn the Reform Dress, and find that the comfort, convenience, and healthfulness of the same overbalances all the annoyances from those who are ignorant of the principles involved, or have not moral courage to adopt the same.”27 Having established her commitment and credentials in order to maintain the social bonding of readers with the moral courage to support dress reform, Walker also exposes the other side of the exchange system—to withhold reciprocity is itself a critique. Thus she encourages her sisters in reform to take a hit from their critics without responding: “I have found that there is nothing that will so annoy and perplex the ‘would-be somebodies,’ as to pass them as though you neither noticed or cared to see those with whom you had no business to transact.”28 The power of exchange economies, then, is that they exclude as well as include, and failure of reciprocity is one means of exclusion; also evidenced in the letter is the means of excluding through language that links the “business” of dress reform to terminologies known only within the circle, including “hit” and “dressical.” Walker continued these practices in a July 1862 letter to Hasbrouck. Blending her commitment to dress reform with her work as a surgeon in a military hospital, she remarks, “I still report myself at the call of the dress reform roll, with as emphatic a presence as ever.”29 In this letter she captures the ways in which a group’s specialized language and social bonding were integral to letter writing itself. She writes, Let not those whose understandings have been enlightened listen to the sophistry of those who blind their eyes to the truth, or whose perceptions are too dull to grasp it, or whose moral power is too weak to advocate and appropriate the same. Let the God within manifest itself in the preservation of “the casket that contains the soul,” and all the physical machinery that keeps us in a manifestable shape to the terrestrial. There never will be any progress if all are to wait until a sufficient number embark in the ark of reform so as “not to be conspicuous.” Hundreds are always ready to flock around and appropriate advantages that have been gained through

 Walker, “What Can Woman Do?”, 1011.  Ibid. 29  Walker, “Letter from Dr. Mary E. Walker,” 1059. 27 28

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martyrs, when they are the very ones who have cried the loudest to “crucify” them, and so will it be in the distant future.30

“The casket that contains the soul” was appropriate terminology for a reform movement that argued for bodily restoration to health through altered clothing and that was populated by so many physicians, but it also resonates for letter writing itself. The practice of letter writing’s codification through manuals and schooling seemed to have made the letter form into a kind of dead container with scripted prose, but as Walker recognized, “the soul” was within. How the letter was adapted to function in support of exchange economies desired by dress reformers—those wise, moral beings on “the ark of reform”—denied the sense of its codification and demonstrated its viability as an instrument for activists. As she wrote a few years later, using economic metaphors, “Were the queenly grace of long dresses put in one side of Jane Taylor’s ‘scales,’ and a pure, true, noble, aspiring, intelligent spirit in the other, ninety-nine hundredths of Fashion’s votaries would declare, that the former actually broke the scales with its weight!”31 The Sibyl insist on the pairing of theory and practice,32 and thus by re-forming the genre to meet their own needs, Walker and other contributors demonstrate the importance of reform not only for their group and more broadly for American society but also expose the correspondence and exchange at the heart of letter writing. Thus the circle of support is made through the exchange of letters, with each acting as a link to sustain the whole: It matters not whether future generations of women shall “rise up and call us blessed” for having been one of the most active and zealous in the cause of dress-ical enfranchisement—for having been one that has lived in principles in the most trying times and under the most unfavorable circumstances, and for the greatest length of time. The goal gained will be just as precious, and in any case, we shall feel that we have only performed our duty in setting a physiological example to our own sex, (who have a right to look to physicians for such examples,) and providing ourself “a good divine, by practicing what we preach.”33

Economies of Exchange and Individual Advancement For all that the Sibyl and other reform periodicals of the 1850s worked to create a sense of community and solidarity, they were publishing in the heyday of 30

 Ibid.  Walker, “The True Spirit,” 1123. 32   Steadman, 142. 33  Ibid. As a business, the Sibyl also practiced its theory by hiring only female dress reformers for its production staff. 31

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transatlantic philosophies of individualism and self-reliance. For women-oriented periodicals, these were especially important aspects of personal development that they encouraged alongside group support because they were facets of women’s lives that had been too long suppressed or denied. Hasbrouck astutely negotiated the terrain between support of the dress reform cause and her publication and the needs of her individual contributors. While a few of her contributors, such as Dr. Harriet Austin (daughter of dress reform leader James Jackson), had extended circles of support for their individual advancement, most did not. Dr. Mary Walker’s family was active in reform movements and encouraged her interest in medicine and dress reform, but they had no network of medical professionals and publishers to aid her interest in the cause or in writing. Thus she, like most other contributors, relied heavily on Hasbrouck’s encouragement of her personal development. Walker’s first letters to the Sibyl employed the collective “we” solely and remarked only on the activities of other women physicians. But the comfort of being able to present her comments in a letter format and seemingly to only one recipient afforded her an opportunity to begin thinking of herself as someone who voiced her opinions in print. The magazine’s preference for letters as a means of presenting information or arguing for a particular philosophy allowed Walker to move quickly from cryptic letters that effaced her own activities to critical analyses addressed in a letter to the editor. In the letter published in July 1858 in which she defended a “bloomer” appearing on the streets of Oswego, Walker blends the intimacy of “we” with the “I” of individual opinion. Thus she declares in her opening to Hasbrouck, “There are several points in the [hit] that we should like to notice, if you will permit us to do so.”34 Both unity and recognition of Hasbrouck’s role are massaged into this short introductory statement. More importantly, however, was Hasbrouck’s encouragement of her correspondents’ interest in women’s rights that broached taboo subjects. Letters had long been a vehicle for expressing culturally unsanctioned ideas. As early as 1807, the anonymous author of the letter-writing manual A New Classical Selection of Letters asserted, “there is no subject whatever, on which one may not convey his thoughts to the public, in the form of a letter.”35 Women activists would take this genre’s sanctifying of broad subject matter to avenues of discussion unimagined by the early authors of letter-writing manuals. Within two years of her first letter to the editor, Walker used the genre to enter into national political debates. In addition to dress reform, she extended her political use of the genre to comment on legal cases, the founding of institutions, and women’s right to pursue professional careers. The letter form also allowed Walker to discuss topics considered inappropriate for a woman— adultery, abortion, infanticide, and national scandals—as she worked to hone her analytical skills in print. At this stage of her writing career, she occasionally used the common tactic of self-denigrating apology to assert her entrance into print: “We venture upon the writer’s sea, with no barque but a foolscap, and no sail  Walker, “A Bloomer in the Street,” 398.   A New Classical Selection of Letters, v.

34 35

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but a quill.”36 But the letters soon became substantive analyses, running several columns and sometimes two or more pages in the oversized magazine, and the contents countered such apologies through her increasingly overt assertions of the right to engage in political debate. The case of the infamous Sickles-Key murder trial afforded her the subject matter necessary to open the door to issues she wished to discuss in print, and the Sibyl’s emphasis on letters’ intimacy and conversational yet professional style complemented the sense of “privacy” that would be expected for a woman to discuss such subjects in print. The trial had dominated the national scene for months not only because it titillated the public with crimes of adultery and murder, but also because the male participants included well-known political figures. On 27 February 1859, Congressman Daniel Sickles shot Phillip Barton Key on the street in front of Sickles’s home in Washington, D.C. The congressman believed his wife and Key were having an affair. Key was one of Washington’s social elite—District Attorney for the District of Columbia and son of Francis Scott Key. It was the perfect mix of ingredients for a national scandal that raised questions of what constituted morality and justice, and it served as a titillating distraction from fears the nation was moving toward civil war. Sickles’s attorney argued his client could not be held responsible for his actions because he had been driven insane by his wife’s infidelity. Newspapers across the country vilified Teresa Bagioli Sickles and supported Sickles’s insanity plea. Walker used a letter to Hasbrouck and the collective “we” to assert sympathy for Teresa Sickles and to turn the debate toward women’s education and lack of equality. “Never, until women as a mass are better educated physiologically—until they are considered something besides a drudge or a doll—until they have all the social education and political advantages that men enjoy; in a word, equality with them, shall we consider vice in our sex any more culpable than in men.”37 Signing the letter “Yours in charity for our own sex,” Walker had found her voice of personal outrage. Hasbrouck’s acceptance of the Sickles-Key letter empowered Walker and gave her the courage to use letter writing to advance other medical and political agendas, including the controversial subject of foundling hospitals. The poet Bayard Taylor had commented on the intensity of New York citizens’ objections to the building of such an institution, “If some benevolent millionaire should propose to build one in New York, pulpit and press would ridicule with the red hot shot of holy indignation.”38 Using this comment as a touchstone, Walker argued for such a hospital and against the cultural attitudes that condemned so-called fallen women. In two long letters published in the Sibyl, Walker used the periodical’s accepted inclusive sense of sisterhood via the collective “we” to encourage support from readers. Hasbrouck titled most letters she published that included reports, arguments for a cause, or lengthy discussions, and she titled Walker’s letter  Walker, “Sickles and Key Tragedy,” 553.  Ibid., 554. 38   Quoted in Walker, “N. York State Foundling Hospital,” 593. 36 37

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“A Hastily Written Whisper to Every Woman.” “Hastily written” was a common trope of letter writing to accentuate the immediacy of the genre.39 The phrase was embedded with implications: it suggested the subject matter was of great urgency, signaled the correspondent’s active life, excused a lack of formality, and often suggested the need for a prompt response from the recipient. The use of “whisper” captures the potentially secret nature of letters’ contents,40 suggesting that the content is something about which one does not typically speak in public. This point is the heart of Walker’s letter, since it is the silencing of the realities of life that she seeks to rectify. She argues that establishing a foundling hospital and home will provide necessary neonatal care for infants born outside of wedlock and a safe haven for their mothers. Further, she notes, such an institution would significantly decrease the numerous abortions and acts of infanticide currently being committed in the state. She also admonishes socially accepted women for failing to come to the aid of members of their sex when they most need assistance. For a readership that had itself often faced ostracizing gestures from the public, this argument resonated. “Shall a woman’s few sins merit everlasting condemnation?” Walker asks. “Does she not deserve one kind word or look? Has she forfeited all claim to being recognized as a human being? Do you expect that kicking her down the hill will in time transform her into an angel with wings to fly to the top again?”41 It is her profession that has led her to understand the right way to approach the subject, Walker asserts, calling on the magazine’s currency of medical practitioners to make her point: “Few see into the heart of society unveiled as the physician does, and it is impossible for any one to do so as unmistakably, as a female physician. There are no class of persons that are confided in as the physicians are.”42 Walker posits herself as a viable director of the institute and seeks subscriptions that she intends to ask the state of New York to match. The letter thus presents the project as both an act on behalf of “every woman,” as her signature insists, and for her own professional benefit. But to serve as the director of such an institution would raise an extraordinary level of criticism against any woman who associated with “fallen” women, and thus Walker not only uses the letter to call for a change in attitudes regarding women who have children outside of marriage but to set herself as an example of what women can and must do personally to bring about change. It is the perfect blending of personal advancement through social reciprocity, and the letter served as the most appropriate tool for social mediation because of its inherent expectation of such reciprocity. Both the subject content and the “whispered” nature of Walker’s conversational tone in the foundling hospital letter reveal the genre’s ability to allow for 39   Altman argues in that the typical usage of the present tense in letters makes them “of the moment” and creates a sense of immediacy of thought (117). 40  On the issue of letters’ secrecy and its political implications, see Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters, ch. 2. 41  Walker, “N. York State Foundling Hospital,” 594. 42  Ibid.

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emancipatory techniques, and the decidedly intertextual nature of the letter also reflects its ability to serve as a multilayered system of exchange. Walker draws on this textual inclusiveness as a means of eliciting emotional and intellectual responses from readers. Since her goal was to compel her readers to action, the connection between herself as the letter writer and readers as her recipients must obtain reactions strong enough to move them to actively participate in raising funds for the hospital both from private citizens and from the state. Thus her letter develops into a blending of literary and legal texts, political and cultural analyses, and emotional and intellectual arguments. In this text Walker radically expands the style and function of her letters. While she initially used letters to be accepted by Hasbrouck and other dress reformers and women physicians, the freedom of expression accorded her by Hasbrouck has allowed her to develop the letter as her primary vehicle for social intervention and reciprocity. It was a genre she would use for the next five decades to call for radical reform in dress, equality for women and African Americans, the abolishment of capital punishment, the illegality of U.S. imperialism, and every other cause for which she sought public support. At the first outbreak of war, Walker volunteered her services at the Battle of Bull Run, and she settled in Washington, D.C. where she worked as a surgeon in the military hospitals and on the battlefield throughout the war.43 Yet she continued occasionally to write letters to Hasbrouck for publication in the Sibyl, although her letters were often signed, “Yours in haste.” In these letters, she turned her ideals for collectively advancing women’s causes to the importance of recording women’s histories. Hasbrouck had opened the door to such writings when she encouraged readers to send her letters that were autobiographical narratives about their experiences when wearing the reform dress. Walker extended the idea to women’s activities during the war. In a July 1863 letter to Hasbrouck, she wrote, “Not until this ‘cruel war’ has ceased, and peace shall again be ours, and a dozen histories be written containing all the facts and events that each historian shall have collected, and the noble women from all be compiled, not, I say, until then shall the world know how much women have done.”44 Offering a beginning via this letter, she recorded the many contributions of women in the Corps Hospitals along the Potomac. Other forms of exchange were predicted by Walker as well. “Much good to woman is sure to result from this war,” she wrote, “for her true worth will be seen in a thousand ways that, had not the occasion demanded action at a time when none but women were at hand, men would still have supposed women incapable.”45 These nontraditional duties can never again be defined as outside “woman’s sphere,” she declared.46 Following the tradition of the Sibyl in emphasizing women’s economic opportunities in the professions and elsewhere, 43  Walker would become the only woman to be contracted as a surgeon during the Civil War and the only woman ever to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. 44  Walker, “Soldiers’ Appreciation of Noble Women,” 1157. 45  Walker, “Positions that Women Ought of Right to Occupy,” 1196. 46  Ibid.

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Walker chastised those who could not see the correlations between the work women were doing in the war and their greater rights: I confess I have not such a depth of reasoning powers that I can persuade myself that it is any more unfeminine for a woman with natural affections to go from home and act as a clerk in some business office, while her children are at school, or cared for by a competent servant, than it is for an uneducated woman to leave her children in school, or with no care and go and clean business offices the same length of time. Do any of these men say she is unfeminine, or has not the natural affections for her children that she should have? I confess myself equally unable to see how respectable men can allow a laundress to go with their regiment, and then shake their wise heads at the respectability of an educated lady acting as surgeon, when they at the same time do not consider an ignorant woman out of her “modest sphere.”47

This passage of the letter signifies the Sibyl’s interest in forging links among all oppressed women, regardless of class, education, or experience—and in encouraging self development—through letter exchanges and its own specific authorial economies. By studying various sets of letters and letter writers to understand how distinct letter-writing economies emerge, what they include and exclude, and their specialized discursive exchanges, we can move beyond seeing letter writing in sweeping terms that are meant to apply to all letters and begin to better understand the ways in which the genre served specific groups and the great variety of economies that circulated within these exchanges.

Works Cited Altman, Janet Gurkin, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence,1680-1820 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Beden, J.R., “A ‘Hard Hit’ Returned,” Sibyl (15 September 1858): 426. Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Forms of Capital,” in J.G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986): 241-58. ——, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). “Commencement of Syracuse Medical College,” American Medical & Surgical Journal, 7 (April 1855): 141-53. 47

 Ibid.

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Fischer, Gayle V., Pantaloons and Power: A Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001). Harman, Dr. Ellen Beard, “Marriage Protest,” Sibyl (1 March 1859): 587. Harris, Sharon M., Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). Hasbrouck, Dr. Lydia Sayer, “Costume of ‘Enlightened Nations,” Sibyl (15 December 1857): 284-5. ——, “Taxation and Representation,” Sibyl (15 March 1857): 140. ——, “Woman, The Physician,” Sibyl (1 July 1856): 4-5. Hewitt, Elizabeth, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Jackson, Leon, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Kamrath, Mark L. and Sharon M. Harris (eds), Eighteenth-Century Periodical Literature in America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005). Mattingly, Carol, Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in NineteenthCentury America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002). Miller, Albert E., “The Liberal Thinker,” American Medical and Surgical Journal, 7 (March 1855): 101-104. A New Classical Selection of Letters Interspersed with Some Original Productions Designed for this Work (Boston, MA: John M. Dunham, 1807). Nord, David Paul, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of the Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Schultz, Lucille M., “Letter-Writing Instruction in 19th Century Schools in the United States,” in David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds), Letter Writing as a Social Practice (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2000). Smith, Catherine and Cynthia Grieg, Women in Pants: Manly Maidens, Cowgirls, and Other Renegades (New York: Henry M. Abrams, Inc., 2003). Steadman, Jennifer Bernhardt, Traveling Economies: American Women’s Travel Writing (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). Tillotson, Mary E., M.D., “Experience of a Dress Reformer,” Sibyl (1 May 1857): 167. Walker, Mary Edwards, M.D., “A Bloomer in the Streets,” Sibyl (15 July 1858): 398. ——, “Dress Reform Convention,” Sibyl (15 January 1857): 1. ——, Hit (New York: American News Co., 1871). ——, “Letter from Dr. Mary E. Walker,” Sibyl (July 1862): 1059. ——, “N. York State Foundling Hospital,” Sibyl (1 August 1859): 593-94. ——, “N. York State Foundling Hospital,” Sibyl (15 September 1859): 622. ——, “Positions that Women Ought of Right to Occupy,” Sibyl, 8.6 (December 1863): 1196. ——, “Sickles and Key Tragedy,” Sibyl (15 May, 1859): 553-4. ——, “Soldiers’ Appreciation of Noble Women,” Sibyl, 8.1 (July 1863): 1157.

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——, “Synopsis of a Sermon by Rev. A.S. Wightman,” Sibyl (1 May 1858): 354-5. ——, “The True Spirit; Go On Faithfully,” Sibyl, 7.9 (May 1863): 1123. ——, Unmasked, or The Science of Immorality. To Gentlemen; By a Woman Physician and Surgeon (Philadelphia: William H. Boyd, 1878). ——, Untitled letter, Sibyl (15 June 1861): 941. ——, “What Can Woman Do?” Sibyl, 6.7 (January 1862): 1011. ——, “Women Soldiers,” Sibyl (1 September 1859): 610-11. Walker,Vesta, “‘Let Your Women Keep Silent,’” Sibyl (15 February 1859): 508.

Chapter Ten

A Less Costly Ink: John Brown’s Prison Letters and the Traditions of American Protest Literature Zoe Trodd

“All the great charters of humanity have been writ in blood. I once hoped that American democracy would be engrossed in less costly ink” —Theodore Parker, 1859

At midnight on 16 October 1859, John Brown gave the order: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.” With his interracial band of 21 men, Brown launched an attack against the institution of slavery. He captured the town of Harpers Ferry, intending that slaves use weapons from its arsenal to rise up and claim their freedom. Federal forces overwhelmed the band after 36 hours, and Brown was taken to a Virginia jail cell, then indicted on counts of assault, murder, conspiracy, and treason. On 2 November he made his final address to the court (a speech ranked by Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) and stood to hear his sentence. He would be publicly hanged in Charlestown on 2 December 1859. Brown returned to prison and asked the jailer: “Have you any objections to my writing to my wife and telling her that I am to be hanged on the second of December?” That letter was one of more than one hundred that Brown wrote from his jail cell during the six-week period before his execution—letters that turned his “forty days in prison” into “the mightiest Abolition document that America has known,” as W.E.B. Du Bois would later put it, and helped cement and forge several major traditions of American protest literature.

  Qtd in W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown, 108.   Qtd in Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859, 545. For more on John Brown’s life and the Harpers Ferry Raid, see Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood.    Du Bois, 365. For more on the genre of American protest literature, see Zoe Trodd (ed.), American Protest Literature.  

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John Brown’s Politics of Form Brown’s prison letters were ostensibly private, addressed to his family, friends and acquaintances, with details of his family life as well as Biblical themes and his wider political philosophies. But within the context of a thriving antislavery print culture, and aided by the daily and extensive press coverage of his raid, trial and execution, most of the letters were published in Northern newspapers (including the New York Tribune, which had the largest circulation of any American newspaper at the time). “Having taken possession of Harpers Ferry,” quipped the abolitionist Wendell Phillips on 15 December 1859, “[Brown] began to edit the New York Tribune and the New York Herald for the next three weeks.” Widely read, Brown’s prison letters helped shape public perception of his raid. Abolitionists sought to transform Brown from madman to martyr by circulating the letters and publishing them in anti-slavery newspapers like the Liberator. Across the North, derision turned to praise, and in the South, journalists’ contemptuous dismissals gave way to warnings that Brown was a portentous omen. Brown’s survival at Harpers Ferry seemed fortunate for the abolitionist cause. He might have perished but instead, as Phillips averred in his funeral oration for Brown on 8 December, “God ordered better” and granted “those noble prison hours.” Echoing Phillips’s gratitude for those “prison hours,” Frederick Douglass added that the prison letters were central to Brown’s legacy: “Fortunate for his memory … fortunate for the truth of history, John Brown survived … . [Had he] gone down in the shock of battle, the world would have had no true basis for its judgment.” But the public impact of Brown’s ostensibly private letters was not only due to their circulation by abolitionists. Brown himself wrote the letters for a dual audience: his family and friends and the newspaper-reading public. He used the freedom afforded by his seemingly private communication to publicly define the meaning of his raid, perform an act of testimony, shape the debate over violent versus nonviolent abolitionism, and offer Harpers Ferry as a text for interpretation. His letters therefore bridged the divide between the “autobiographically undressed” / “rhetorically addressed” original letter and its reinscription as “readdressed” / “redressed.” Brown performed an epistolary fusion of addressed/readdressed and undressed/redressed. He engaged a concept of inferred audience and shattered the traditional distinction between “private” letter (to friends and family) and “public” letter (to the editor)—even making explicit, in numerous letters, that they were a public lesson for a broad audience. For example, on 21 November he told his wife to “keep this letter to refer to” and requested that she show his replies to people, and in other letters he referenced the interest from “all sorts of papers, throughout

  Qtd in Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom and Blacks on John Brown, 111.   Zoe Trodd and John Stauffer (eds), Meteor of War, 213.   Ibid., 207.   William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices, 19.  

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the whole country” and his “dear friends at a distance.” Or, while replying to one Quaker woman, he used the opportunity to communicate with all Quakers, reimagining his weapon at Harpers Ferry as a “sword of the spirit” in order to reach out for Quakers’ support in spite of their non-violent stance. Replacing his broadsword and rifle with a pen, Brown fought a battle for public opinion from his jail cell. He combined memoir, political treatise, and epistle, to craft a rhetorically powerful marriage of the public and private. To read Brown’s prison letters is to encounter a man who was conscious and manipulative of historical and mythic precedent and who wrote himself into both myth and history—while retaining the aura of intimacy and authenticity conferred by the conventions of “private” correspondence. Watching this process in 1859, Henry David Thoreau noted of Brown’s expert stagecraft that “no theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words.”10 In fact, Brown saw the letter form as an ideal site of self-construction, precisely because of the possibility for a dual audience that would collapse the boundary between public and private. Two years earlier, in July 1857, he had sent a long letter to Henry Sterns, the 12 year-old son of George Stearns, an abolitionist and one of Brown’s benefactors. The letter narrated Brown’s life and is the only autobiographical sketch he ever wrote. Reaching out to a dual audience (the boy Henry but also George, a man whose support Brown wanted for the Harpers Ferry raid), he offered Henry his biography as a morality tale (a story of “follies and errors” that should “encourage any young person to persevering effort”) while also carefully reinventing himself for his benefactor, so that his business failings vanish behind a trajectory of determination and eventual success.11 Pain and disappointment are rarely his own fault; he was simply “placed in the School of adversity.”12 Brown collapses the boundary of private and public by sending a letter addressed to Henry but intended for George’s eyes. Further collapsing that boundary, he even narrated his life in the third-person throughout the letter. So wide is the distance between the narrator and the subject that Brown does not always know what the child John feels; for example he can only guess that John cried about the loss of his marble (“I think he cried at times about it”).13 Fusing private first-person letter and public third-person biography, Brown was experimenting with the form he would soon adopt in prison. In 1857 as in 1859, he used the letter form for “self-creation, self-invention,” as Linda Kauffman puts it in a definition of epistolarity more generally.14 And prison gave Brown an even greater opportunity for self-invention. During the six-week 

  Trodd and Stauffer, 141, 138.  Ibid., 139. 10  Ibid., 234. 11  Ibid., 37. 12  Ibid., 38. 13  Ibid., 38. 14   Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, 25. 

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wait for his execution he used his prison letters to sketch a public martyr identity across the newly-blank slate of his approaching non-identity (death). To aid this transformation, he invoked the authority of the epistolary form: the New Testament letters to the Philippians, Colossians, Ephesians, and Philemon, written by Paul during imprisonment. Brown’s personal suffering within the prison’s confined space expanded to fill the space of Christian martyrdom’s master narrative. Further, Brown was able to use the prison letter genre to offer his reading public a mirror for their own, national identity. Letters are a “mirror” where writers “not only seek themselves and/or another but attempt to change their lives to reflect the mirror image,” explains Elizabeth Campbell.15 In outlining his philosophy of freedom and equality, Brown was attempting to change America so that it reflected his letters’ image. His transportation from prison cell to newspaper pages, as well as his self-transformation from warrior to martyr, symbolized the country’s potential transformation / transportation from slave society to land of the free. He invested in what Decker identifies (with regard to Emerson) as the letter writer’s “desire to construct an alternative, utopian domain of social relation.”16 To aid this national transportation, Brown used the aesthetic of absence (inherent to the epistolary form more generally, and writ large in the prison letter because of the fixed separation forced by imprisonment) to construct the responses of his public audience.17 Expressing himself as a husband, father and friend, imagining his family’s concerns and presuming their unequivocal support in return, he created a bond of sympathy across the miles. Brown’s choice of the letter form—rather than the essay—inscribes an anticipation of response, his ostensible readers (friends and family) answer “yes” in their anticipated replies, and the Northern stranger who reads Brown’s personal letters in the pages of a newspaper then experiences the direct address as an intimate presence (husband, father, and friend). That presence is made even more intimate by Brown’s solitude, suffering, and attempts to connect with his family through the prison walls. Now an implicit extension of Brown’s explicit support network, the imagined reader’s response is an affirmation of Brown’s philosophy. Yet in spite of Brown’s use of the prison letter to address a dual audience, collapse the boundary between public and private, and invite strangers into his intimate circle, his letters have never been examined as prison letters (rather than as essays from prison or simply letters). Barbara Maria Zaczek makes a brief mention of the prison letter as a genre but terms it a “new literary genre born in the twentieth century,” thereby ignoring Brown’s letters, and there has been

  Elizabeth Campbell, “Re-Visions, Re-flections, Re-creations,” 332.   Decker, 105. 17  For more on this notion of absence, see Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity, which analyzes the ways in which “the letter straddles the gulf between presence and absence” (42). 15 16

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little other examination of this subgenre in American literature.18 In fact, Brown’s letters are rarely examined for their politics of form at all. Instead, historians tend to approach the letters as documents that reveal the motives behind his raid. In Brown’s own time, however, and in the years immediately following his death, they were read for their literary quality as well. For example, Thoreau separated Brown’s actions and his words: To omit his other behavior, see what a work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks! He wrote in prison … an American book … . I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.

He thought Brown’s letters should be “framed and hung over every mantelpiece in the land” and relished their effect on American literature, noting: “Where is our professor of belles-lettres … who can write so well? … words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American; such as ‘It will pay.’”19 Thoreau was correct to focus on Brown’s literary achievement. The letters should be read within the context of an abolitionist print culture that had begun in the 1820s and extended through the 1850s. Literary abolitionists made from central to political protest, developing an abolitionist poetics of engagement in their novels, stories, poems, pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, and autobiographies. Brown’s prison letters confirm abolitionism’s roots in aesthetics as well as ideologies. In particular, they were part of an abolitionist aesthetic that 18   Barbara Maria Zaczek, Censored Sentiments, 175. While critics (including Altman and Decker) have recently begun to explore epistolarity as a discrete genre and literary art form—responding in part to Bruce Redford’s call in The Converse of the Pen for critics to do this very thing—they have not examined the prison letter in any detail. For example, Decker discusses the subgenres of travel letter, courtship letter, condolence letter, war letter, but not the prison letter. For a brief discussion of Kate Richards O’Hare’s prison letters, see Sally M. Miller, From Prairie to Prison, 70-71, and for a rare attempt to define the prison letter genre (though in the context of Eastern European literature) see Stanislaw Baranczak, Breathing Under Water and Other East European Essays, 50: “The prison letter in countries ruled by oppressive regimes,” concludes Baranczak, “is governed by a detailed set of strict prohibitions and injunctions regulating its size, structure, tone, and content. The author’s mastery lies precisely in how he handles these rules, complying with them yet managing to slip his message through, remaining within the standardized model of utterance yet imbuing it with the urgency of his individual voice.” For two rare examinations of the abolitionist epistolary tradition, see Jami Carlacio, “‘Ye Knew Your Duty, But Ye Did It Not’” and Kristin Vonnegut, “Poison or Panacea?” For scholarship on prison literature more generally (focused on fiction, memoir and poetry written by prisoners), see Ioan Davies, Writers in Prison, H. Bruce Franklin, Prison Literature in America and Kate Millet, The Politics of Cruelty. 19   Trodd and Stauffer, 233-4.

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redrew the blueprints of sacred and secular scripture (the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution). Firstly, the letters offered a new scripture. Adding Brown to the Judeo-Christian tradition’s pantheon of saints and martyrs, they made his raid a sacred text, ripe for prophetic readings and interpretive action. Secondly, the letters offered a new Declaration and Constitution—ones that did not fail to condemn slavery. They made him an heir to the Founding Fathers while creating a new founding document that included the presence of black people as equals.20 Brown’s letters offered a third blueprint as well. Countering his confinement in prison with the libratory potential of self-reinvention and making the pen a weapon to continue the anti-slavery struggle as though the walls of his prison did not exist, he offered an emancipation proclamation three years before Lincoln’s. Beyond his inferred audience, self-invention, presence-absence, and national mirror—all part of his unacknowledged initiation of the American prison letter genre—Brown also contributed from jail a three-fold abolitionist protest aesthetic.

The Prophetic Tradition While Brown wrote and waited in prison, his fellow abolitionists exchanged letters debating the correct course of action. Some planned rescue attempts and others saw his death as inconsequential to universal justice: “Let the American State hang his body and the America Church damn his soul,” wrote the anti-slavery minister Theodore Parker to Francis Jackson: “the Infinitely Perfect God will make him welcome home.”21 But still others believed Brown was more useful dead and welcomed his martyrdom. “To all outward appearances all is defeat and ruin. Yet in reality what a glorious success! What a splendid martyrdom,” proclaimed Lydia Maria Child a few weeks before Brown’s death, and Henry Ward Beecher voiced the feelings of many when he pronounced in a sermon: “Let Virginia make him a martyr. Now, he has only blundered. His soul was noble; his work miserable. But a cord and a gibbet would redeem all that.”22 Browsing through Beecher’s sermon in prison, Brown found this passage and wrote in the margin: “good.” The scaffold may have been a “manner of dying assigned to” him, as he acknowledged in one letter, but he believed, as he explained in other letters, that he was “worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other 20  Douglass explained that these two elements, of sacred and secular scripture, undergirded Brown’s wider philosophy. “He believes the Declaration of Independence to be true, and the Bible to be a guide to human conduct, and acting upon the doctrines of both, he threw himself against the serried ranks of American oppression,” he explained in November 1859 (Trodd and Stauffer, 204). 21  James Redpath, Echoes of Harper Ferry, 87. 22  Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland (eds), Lydia Maria Child, Selected Letters, 329; Henry Ward Beecher, Patriotic Addresses, 207.

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purpose” for “in no other possible way could I be used to so much advance the cause of God.”23 For many years he had felt himself an instrument of God: his son, John Jr., recalled that on one occasion Brown began to punish him with lashes and ended up taking two-thirds of the lashes on his own back, to pay his son’s debt and enact the doctrine of Atonement.24 Now, in prison, Brown embraced the martyr role. As the month galloped by, he remarked that he was “cheerful,” that his mind was “very tranquil,” and that time passed “quite pleasantly.”25 Echoing scenes in popular sentimental fiction, including the death of Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Brown insisted: “Eternal life is what my soul is ‘panting after’ this moment.”26 Like Eva and Uncle Tom, he intended to die for the nation’s soul. Even his enemies acknowledged the possibility that a politically effective martyrdom was on the horizon; one journalist for a pro-slavery newspaper, the New York Journal of Commerce, warned that to “hang a fanatic is to make a martyr of him.”27 Brown went still further in his self-fashioning as a martyr, explicitly connecting his own labor to that of God’s prophets and disciples. He instructed his family to remember that “Jesus of Nazareth” also “suffered a most excruciating death on the cross as a felon,” and that Brown shared the fate of “prophets and apostles and Christians of former days.”28 He compared himself to Peter and Paul and when he wrote Reverend McFarland, his unacknowledged quotation from Jesus on the cross (“they know not what they do”) extended his martyrdom: I think I feel as happy as Paul did when he lay in prison. He knew if they killed him, it would greatly advance the cause of Christ; that was the reason he rejoiced so. On that same ground “I do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.” Let them hang me; I forgive them, and may God forgive them, for they know not what they do.29

Joining social critique to spiritual renewal, Brown not only entered an abolitionist tradition that analyzed and disproved Biblical authorities on inequality, but also offered himself as a Biblical character. This self-fashioning allowed abolitionists to repackage Brown’s image for their cause. Ministers sermonized him into the tradition of Saint Stephen and Saint Paul, and the black minister J. Sella Martin concluded that “John Brown … has

23

  Trodd and Stauffer, 156, 142, 157.   Brown had even prophesied his own death in early 1859. Visiting an abolitionist, he had balanced the man’s tiny daughter on his palms and said: “when … I am hanged, you can say that you stood on the hand of Old Brown” (qtd in Oates, 272). 25   Trodd and Stauffer, 138, 145, 154. 26  Ibid., 158. 27   Qtd in Villard, 501. 28   Trodd and Stauffer, 141. 29  Ibid., 150. 24

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had to bear just what John the Baptist bore.”30 Some ministers and commentators took up Brown’s own comparisons to Christ. “The gallows from which he ascends into heaven will be in our politics what the cross is in our religion—the sign and symbol of supreme self-devotedness,” noted Edwin Wheelock in late November; “From his sacrificial blood the temporal salvation of four millions of our people shall yet spring.”31 Thoreau observed that “some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified” and that if Brown was hung, these would be “two ends of a chain, not without links,” and Emerson agreed, describing Brown as “the Saint … . whose martyrdom … will make the gallows as glorious as the Cross.”32 Throughout the six weeks, Brown also balanced his persona of forgiveness (based on Paul, Jesus and the New Testament) with one of righteous violence (based on Samson, Gideon and the Old Testament). Fusing New Testament redemption with Old Testament millennialist violence, he compared himself to Samson and to Moses. And commentators followed his lead. Shifting between Old and New Testament narratives to explain Brown as a Biblical hero for the modern age, they fashioned him as David, Joshua, Samson and Moses. Franklin Sanborn believed that Brown’s death, “like Samson’s, was to be his last and greatest victory.”33 Douglass noted that Brown, “like Samson,” had “laid his hands upon the pillars of this great national temple of cruelty and blood” and that “when he falls, that temple will speedily crumble to its final doom.”34 Douglass described Brown as an American Moses too, as did Osborne Anderson, one of Brown’s black raiders, who claimed in 1861: “there is an unbroken chain of sentiment and purpose from Moses of the Jews to John Brown of America.”35 Even one of Brown’s earliest prison correspondents, E.B., a Quaker woman from Newport, offered the comparison: “If Moses led out the thousands of Jewish slaves from their bondage and God destroyed the Egyptians in the sea because they went after the Israelites … then surely … we may judge thee a deliverer who wished to release millions from a more cruel oppression.”36 Personal freedom secured by righteous violence through a sense of Biblical mission is part of the national teleology, and Brown gave human shape to this poetics of faith. He was rooting the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament in an American context. Invoking divine law and the word of God, writing on behalf of a transcendent truth, and ignoring expediency and pragmatics, Brown’s letters engaged what James Darsey describes as the prophetic mode: “meaningful incivility … radical 30

 Ibid., 215.   Qtd in Redpath, 191. 32  Trodd and Stauffer, 232; Emerson quoted in Louis Ruchames (ed.), A John Brown Reader, 296. 33  Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown, 623. 34   Trodd and Stauffer, 204. 35  Ibid., 175. 36   Qtd in Sanborn, 582. E.B.’s letter was first printed in the Providence Daily Journal on 7 November 1859. 31

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engagement … ‘fire and strength’ … mystery and transcendence.” Writers and speakers in the prophetic tradition do not use “‘civility,’ ‘civil discourse,’ ‘reasonable debate,’” Darsey adds.37 This prophetic mode has been central to the protest tradition, as John Stauffer explains (in one of the only genre definitions of “American protest literature”): “Prophecy—the belief that you are heeding God’s will—is a crucial component of American reform … The prophetic voice extends throughout American protest literature, from Tom Paine … [through] James Baldwin.”38 Like the Hebrew Prophets, Brown and other protest writers have stood apart from society and tried to instigate its transformation. Brown offered in his letters a pre-millennialist vision whereby a new world would be preceded by an apocalypse of violence and the shedding of his own blood. Brown argued as a prophet, from the perspective of a changed world, noting in a letter that he had “no doubt” that “our seeming disaster; will ultimately result in the most glorious success.”39 He professed “assurance that God reigns and will overrule all for his glory” and, preparing his family for the future, he added in another letter: “should many of you live to see the time when you will not blush to own your relation to old John Brown, it will not be more strange than many things that have happened.”40 On the other hand, change would not come entirely of its own accord. His raid had been a radical interpretation of the Bible and his letters belong within an abolitionist culture of dissent that wielded the Bible as a weapon. Even more importantly for the prophetic tradition of protest literature, after interpreting the Bible with his raid and in his letters, Brown made his own actions a text to be interpreted and his letters a call to action after interpretation: “God makes him the text,” observed Phillips, who recognized Brown’s strategy—adding that “all [Brown] asks of our comparatively cowardly lips is to preach the sermon.”41 To assist this process, Brown’s letters not only opened up his raid as a text for interpretation but contained a guide to that interpretative process. He made himself an example (exhorting his readers in one letter “to remember and follow my advice, and my example too, so far as it has been consistent with the holy religion of Jesus Christ”) and offered his own judgment of his actions as the first bloodshed of a larger conflict.42 His body on the gallows would be a bridge to the new world that others might cross: Brown’s letters made him the solution to the problem of slavery. He would be a “portent,” as Herman Melville put it in his poem about Brown, but also a

37  James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America, x. For more on the prophetic tradition, see William B. Rogers, “We Are All Together Now.” 38  John Stauffer, Foreword, in Trodd, American Protest Literature, xiv. 39   Trodd and Stauffer, 138. 40  Ibid., 142. 41   Qtd in Redpath, 55. 42   Trodd and Stauffer, 138.

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catalyst.43 For example, as dawn broke on 2 December, Brown handed his last letter to a prison guard (see Figure 10.1). A mere two sentences, it read: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think; vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.”44 This letter, and his others, were intended to sow further seeds of sectional discord and help push the nation past the point of accommodation and compromise. They were a scripture that contained his prophecies and attempted to assist the fulfillment of those prophecies. The “Blood” referred to the bloodshed of his raid, of his execution, and of the conflict over slavery that Brown knew lay ahead. The bloodshed of his execution, connecting that of his raid and of the future conflict, made inevitable more bloodshed; though a submissive martyr in the New Testament tradition, Brown could still offer himself as an active tool in the fight against slavery. Heeding Brown’s guide to his proffered scripture, abolitionists used the letters to prepare the country for slavery’s inevitable end. Phillips insisted that Brown had dealt the slave system a death blow. Its extinction was just a matter of time: “John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system,” he said. “It only breathes—it does not live hereafter.”45 Other abolitionists eventually claimed that the shots fired at Harpers Ferry were the first of the Civil War: “not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal, not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic,” declared Douglass.46 If the war had a noble aim, then Brown was its prophet and early hero. His soul marched on, as the popular Union marching song, “John Brown’s Body,” confirmed.

The Re-constitutive Tradition At some point during the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown sent his men to capture Colonel Lewis Washington, a prominent local planter and the great-grandnephew of George Washington. He told the hostage: “I wanted you particularly for the moral effect it would give our cause having one of your name as a prisoner.”47 To complete this effect, Brown seized the Colonel’s sword, which Frederick the Great had given to George Washington, and wore it until he was overpowered. Indicating that Brown was a patriot and a revolutionary hero, it had great symbolic value. Having used this sword to connect the struggle for national independence and the struggle for emancipation, Brown used his pen to make the same connection. In his prison letters, he went beyond Christian mythology and persistently invoked the imagery of the American Revolution as well. He wrote to Thomas Musgrave 43

 Ibid., 248.  Ibid., 159. 45  Ibid., 212. 46  Ibid., 210. 47   Qtd in Oates, 291-2. 44

Figure 10.1 “Photogravure facsimile of the last written words of John Brown,” Souvenir of the World’s Columbian exposition, Chicago, 1893. At the same time as Brown’s letters entered the protest tradition and inspired social reformers, they also went on sale to consumers as souvenirs.

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on 17 November: “Strange change in morals, political as well as Christian, since 1776!”48 And he even traced a literal lineage back to the time of the Revolution: “You cannot have forgotten how and where our grandfather fell in 1776,” wrote Brown to his cousin on 19 November. “[H]e, too, might have perished on the scaffold had circumstances been but a very little different.”49 Echoing Brown’s self-fashioning, abolitionists took up the theme of 1776. The Reverend Henry Newhall called Harpers Ferry “the Bunker Hill of our second Revolution,” and insisted that Brown was “true to the logic of Lexington and Concord.”50 Phillips reminded Americans that while Brown’s raid might “be treason … the fact is it runs in the blood. We were traitors in 1776.”51 Brown also morphed into Ben Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette, though most often George Washington. “If the American people honor Washington for resisting with bloodshed for seven years an unjust tax, how much more ought thou be honored for seeking to free the poor slaves,” observed E.B., the Quaker woman who had also compared Brown to Moses. “Posterity will do thee justice,” she insisted in her letter to Brown.52 “I believe John Brown to be the representative man of this century, as Washington was of the last,” said George Stearns, while the Reverend Moncure D. Conway claimed that Brown was a greater patriot than Washington: Brown was “armed only with his faith” yet marched on to certain death.53 Yet Brown had a deeper purpose than to validate his actions through historical precedent. In invoking the American Revolution, and attempting to fashion himself as a literal and symbolic heir to the heroes of 1776, he wanted to reconstitute the meaning of America’s founding. Thomas Jefferson had originally drafted a denunciation of the slave trade and the Declaration’s eventual failure to condemn slavery left America’s “original sin” (as James Madison once put it) lurking between the document’s lines.54 As Phillips commented to Douglass, “the fathers, in 1776, signed … with the halter about their necks.”55 The Declaration made no new world. Scholars have suggested that the Civil War produced that new world—calling it a Second American Revolution that produced a new Constitution in the form of the three Reconstruction amendments.56 Before those amendments, however, Brown’s prison letters were part of an abolitionist print culture that tried to re-declare independence, reconcile the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and banish the original sin of slavery from America’s garden of equality. Nat 48

  Trodd and Stauffer, 145.  Ibid., 145-6. 50   Qtd. in Redpath, 183, 189. 51   Trodd and Stauffer, 13. 52   Qtd. in Sanborn, 582. 53   Trodd and Stauffer, 18; qtd. in Redpath, 355. 54   Qtd. in Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography, 627. 55   Qtd. in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), Douglass Autobiographies, 12. 56   See for example Eric Foner, “The Second American Revolution.” 49

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Turner planned his slave revolt on 4 July 1831, and William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution on 4 July 1854. David Walker made repeated references to the Declaration in his Appeal to the Colored Citizens (1829) and 1776 loomed large in Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852), Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), and Garrison’s “So Perish All Compromises With Tyranny” (1854).57 Stowe’s fugitive slave character George in Uncle Tom’s Cabin declares: “‘You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!’”58 Similarly, in Clotel (1853), William Wells Brown’s rebel slave George explains his rebellion with reference to 1776: “‘You say your fathers fought for freedom—so did we … Had we succeeded, we would have been patriots too.’”59 And in Douglass’s 1853 novella The Heroic Slave, Madison Washington justifies his violence and claims his freedom with the words: “We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they.”60 Like his “Provisional Constitution” of the previous year, which rewrote the Declaration and Constitution, Brown’s prison letters were part of this abolitionist historical memory. The letters were founding documents for a new, slave-free nation, where skin color would have no bearing on social status or identity, and everyone would be free, equal, and enfranchised.61 Brown went even further with this radical egalitarian ethos. As part of his blueprint for a free America, he identified himself with the Founding Fathers, but also with the slave. Calling all readers to “[r]emember them that are in bonds as bound with them,” he reminded them that he himself was “in bonds as bound” with the slaves.62 In his identification with the slave, he also drew upon the tropes of slave narratives: imprisonment, wounds, chains, and the soul’s freedom nonetheless—emphasizing that “[m]en cannot imprison, or chain, or hang the soul,” as he put it in one letter.63 He even wanted to die alongside the slaves: 57  John Brown, “Sambo’s Mistakes,” in Trodd and Stauffer, 52-8; Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” in Trodd, 92-98; William Lloyd Garrison, “So Perish All Compromises With Tyranny”, 412; Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” 171-96; David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. 58   Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 187. 59   William Wells Brown, Clotel, 224-5. 60  Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 235. 61   Brown’s Provisional Constitutional Convention ran from 8-10 May 1858. He outlined plans to attack western Virginia, arm his men, and march south. After arming slaves with stolen weapons, he would establish a slave-free state under the constitution adopted at the convention. Freed blacks would be organized and a new state would be founded in the Appalachian Mountains. By the end of the first day, the convention had ratified a provisional constitution and elected Brown as commander-in-chief of the provisional forces and the paper government. On 10 May Brown appointed a committee with full power to fill all the executive, legislative, judicial, and military offices named in the Constitution. 62   Trodd and Stauffer, 138. 63  Ibid., 145.

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“I have asked … that my only religious attendants be poor little dirty, ragged, bareheaded, and barefooted slave boys and girls, led by some gray-headed slave mother,” he wrote to Mrs. George Stearns.64 Here Brown’s letters accessed a second element of the protest tradition: the attempt to represent and provoke empathy. In his outline of protest literature’s rhetorical strategies, Stauffer focuses on “empathy”: “Empathy is central to all humanitarian reform, and protest literature encourages its readers to participate in the feelings of the victims, to ‘feel their pain,’” he explains.65 Brown’s identification with slaves while he was in prison places his letters within the empathetic tradition of protest literature. He felt the pain of slaves—was “in bonds as bound with them,” as he put it—and he used that identification to bind his readers to the slaves through him. In a letter to E.B., for example, he equated prisoners with slaves: “may the Lord reward you a thousandfold for the kind feeling you express toward me; but more especially for your fidelity to the ‘poor that cry, and those that have no help.’ For this I am a prisoner in bonds …. I mingled with our prisoners and so far sympathized with them and their families that I neglected my duty in other respects.”66 Brown encourages his reader to empathize—have “kind feeling”— with “those that have no help” and notes that he had done this too (in empathizing with the “prisoners” he had taken during the raid, to the point that he failed to escape from Harpers Ferry in time). By reminding his reader that he is now a “prisoner in bonds” himself, Brown asks E.B. to imitate this empathy. He accompanied this call with other encouragements to empathize. He made references to his “poor children,” offered lyrical, heartfelt observations (“I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day, nor a storm so furious and dreadful as to prevent the return of warm sunshine and a cloudless sky”), and included stoic reassurances (“I have fought the good fight, and have, as I trust, finished my course”) but also moments of vulnerability (“I trust that God who has sustained me so long; will not forsake me when I most feel my need of Fatherly aid”).67 For if readers could empathize with Brown, whom they now knew through these letters, they might also empathize with the slave; a stranger who was nonetheless also in chains. Brown’s identification with the slave in his letters came alongside his identification with the Founding Fathers. This meant that his letters developed the traditions of protest literature in another sense: as he sought to narrow the gap between his readers and the slaves, he also reminded readers of the gap between the Founders’ ideals and the nation’s realities. Until all men were equal in America, Brown was living in a partially achieved nation. And when he placed the slave at the center of his prison experience, asking his readers to empathize with the slave as a human individual, Brown was asking America to be America. 64

 Ibid., 156-7.   Stauffer, “Foreword,” xiii. 66   Trodd and Stauffer, 138-9. 67  Ibid., 145, 141-2, 154. 65

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By trying to close the loopholes in America’s founding documents in this way, Brown was taking Jefferson at his word. In the last letter he wrote, Jefferson said of the Declaration: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be ... the signal of arousing men to burst the chains.”68 Jefferson also wanted to “provide in our Constitution for its revision at stated periods,” believing that “[e]ach generation is as independent as the one preceding” and should hand on the Constitution with “periodical repairs.”69 Sure enough, Brown was attempting to repair both the Declaration and the Constitution, by liberating slaves and then restoring their full humanity in his letters through empathetic identification. Here, again, he engaged the abolitionist protest aesthetic. Accepting, like Brown, that democracy was not inherited but achieved, abolitionists used the language of 1776 to call for change and invoke the right of continuous revolution. They too were trying to close the gap between “what is” and “what ought to be,” as Douglass put it in 1864: “Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and achievements—they see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”70 From the liminal space of his prison cell, as he waited to die, Brown had seen a whole group of people trapped in the no-man’s land between “what is” and “what ought to be.” In prison letters that traced his literal and symbolic lineage back to 1776 but also bound him to the slave as a brother, Brown offered his own words as the light by which America might see “what ought to be” and “what is.” And, like Douglass and others in the abolitionist protest tradition, he tried to “remove the contradiction.”

The Libratory Tradition On 24 November, Brown wrote to Mrs. Marcus Spring about the prison’s strict censorship conditions. “There are objections to my writing many things while here that I might be disposed to write were I under different circumstances,” he explained. “[P]rison rules require that all I write or receive should first be examined by the sheriff or State’s attorney.”71 In emphasizing the restraints upon his written expression (as well as the restraints upon his person—with descriptions in other letters of his shackles), Brown made sure his readers recognized the boundaries that his letters were trying to overcome. The letters overcame those boundaries, reaching beyond his prison walls, in three major ways. Firstly, Brown’s identification with the slave shattered the colorline. Brown had begun this process in “Sambo’s Mistakes” (1848), an essay that he contributed to The Ram’s Horn, a black abolitionist journal based in New York,   Qtd in Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:390.   Qtd in Ford, 10:43. 70  Douglass, “Pictures,” n.p. 71   Trodd and Stauffer, 151. 68 69

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where he posed as a black moralist offering constructive criticism by way of a pseudo-autobiographical example. As an exercise in creative autobiography, the essay marked the early stages of Brown’s self-transformation to a white man with a black heart.72 The editor of the Ram’s Horn, Willis Hodges, preserved Brown’s black identity by publishing the story anonymously: he believed Brown’s black persona to be authentic (rather than a caricature like blackface minstrelsy). Brown then continued to break down racial hierarchies in 1849, when he moved to the black community in the wilderness of Timbucto, in the Adirondacks, to help farm the land given to free blacks by the white philanthropist Gerrit Smith in 1846. Observing Brown’s actions throughout the late 1840s, Douglass claimed that Brown was “in sympathy a black man … as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”73 Secondly, Brown’s identification of himself with the Founding Fathers, as well as with Biblical martyrs and prophets, broke the restraints of the historical timeline and further shattered the myth of coherent personality. His self-reinvention as a martyr, prophet and revolutionary-era hero was the climax of his longstanding interest in identity as fluid and ever-changing. For years, Brown had relied on his self-constructed public image because he had no identity in a career, little education, and an unimpressive history of bankruptcy. To be an insider he needed a public persona, and he used the chronic social upheaval of his times and the instability of his life as opportunities to constantly redefine himself. Indicating his sense that identity was multivalent, he often changed his name (for logistical reasons but perhaps also to express his shifting selfhood): in April 1857 he was Nelson Hawkins; in May 1857, James Smith; in June 1858, Shubel Morgan, complete with a long white beard; and in May 1859, Isaac Smith. Brown’s repeated self-fashionings had always involved mythic representations. According to Oswold Villard, one of Brown’s first biographers, in preparing for his Harpers Ferry raid Brown “pictured himself a modern crusader as much empowered to remove the unbeliever as any armored researcher after the Grail.”74 He underwent a “metamorphosis,” Villard explained, from “staid, somber merchant and patriarchal family-head” to “John Brown of Osawatomie” (a warrior with an Indian name). One of Brown’s friends even recalled Brown invoking Spartacus: [Brown told] me of Spartacus and his servile war, and was evidently familiar with every step in the career of the great gladiator. He then went on in a very elaborate way to explain the mistakes of Spartacus, and tried to show me how he could easily have overthrown the Roman empire.75

 For more on Brown’s “black heart,” see John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men.  Douglass to William C. Nell, 5 February 1848, qtd in Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men, 172-3. 74   Villard, 77. 75   Trodd and Stauffer, 187. 72 73

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In addition, Brown, who read John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs repeatedly, had likened himself to Samson before his prison letters, writing to Sanborn in 1858: “God has honored but comparatively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards … . I expect to effect a mighty conquest even though it be like the last victory of Samson.”76 While imprisoned, writing his public letters, Brown’s skill for self-fashioning was finally on public display. Brown’s third strategy for symbolically emancipating himself from the constraints of his prison was to shatter not only the color-line and the historical time-line, but also the physical lines of geographical space. He looked beyond the prison walls—reminding his readers in one letter that “in this world you have no abiding place or continuing city” and that, by implication, the places and cities described in other letters were Brown’s home-from-home.77 He described the “brink of Jordan” and “the opposite shore,” his “Father’s House” and “the land” of the Lord, and then eventually announced, on 28 November, that he has “scarce realized” that he is “in prison.”78 Perhaps even more important in the context of the prison letter genre, Brown made the letters themselves shatter physical constraint. While critics have situated the letter form in relation to time and geography, Brown explodes the physical constraints of time-space. Written for the reading public, the letters made his cell a pulpit or stage and enabled him to take further action on behalf of the abolitionist cause. Stauffer explains that one important “characteristic of protest literature is ‘symbolic action,’ to borrow a term from Kenneth Burke,” and Brown’s words now continued the action of emancipation that he had begun at Harpers Ferry.79 Instead of a sword, Brown had a pen—or what he called in a letter the “sword of the spirit”: “Christ … saw fit to take from me a sword of steel after I had carried it for a time,” he wrote on 15 November; “but he has put another in my hand (‘the sword of the spirit’), and I pray God to make me a faithful soldier.”80 He took up the pen as a sword to shatter the constraints of his prison walls and effect a symbolic emancipation.81 Observing this process, Phillips claimed that Emancipation itself should be dated to 1859: “He has abolished slavery,” he observed in his funeral oration for Brown. “History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harpers Ferry.”82 Phillips also saw the importance of Brown’s pen-sword to this process. “Hearts are   Qtd in Sanborn, 444.   Trodd and Stauffer, 143. 78  Ibid., 146, 148, 156. 79   Stauffer, “Foreword,” xiii. 80   Trodd and Stauffer, 143. 81   Before Brown, Thoreau had expressed this notion of unjailed ideas in his famous description of his own night in prison, in Owen Thomas (ed.), Walden and Civil Disobedience, 236. 82   Trodd and Stauffer, 212. 76 77

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stronger than swords,” he continued, and Brown’s “words … are stronger even than his rifles” for they “have changed the thoughts of millions, and will yet crush slavery.”83 Thoreau agreed, noting of the prison letters that their art was like the “discharge of a bullet from a rifle.”84 Bridging the divide between cell and world, words and action, with his sword-pen—sending out his words to continue the fight on the pages of America’s newspapers—Brown had emancipated himself. In a final symbolic joining of pen and sword, Brown gave his jailers two gifts before he died: the rifle he had used during the raid and his Bible (with notations). Even on the day of his execution, he continued to imaginatively reach beyond his immediate circumstances. Turning to the undertaker as they approached the gallows he focused on the view and said: “This is a beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of seeing it before.”85

John Brown’s Legacy By noon on 2 December 1859, Brown was dead. But through their publication and inflammatory use by abolitionists, Brown’s letters forced closer to fulfillment his own interpretation of Harpers Ferry as the first battle of a civil war. In so doing, the letters helped to forge yet another element of protest tradition. As Stauffer explains, protest writers have sought to diagnose and cure society: “Protest literature functions as a catalyst, guide, or mirror of social change. It not only critiques some aspect of society, but suggests, either implicitly or explicitly, a solution to society’s ills.”86 Brown’s letters, which made him an active agent in the fulfillment of his own prophecy, and a solution to the problem he was laying out, put him squarely within this final element of the protest tradition. As well, confirming his place in the protest tradition, Brown’s other three protest aesthetics were taken up by later writers. Firstly, Brown’s prophetic mode formed a connecting link between the prophetic tradition of early American protest rhetoric (Paine, Walker, Nat Turner, Stowe and Joseph Smith), and the prophetic tradition of modern protest literature. After Brown’s death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walt Whitman, Eugene Debs, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin (several of whom explicitly reference Brown as a protest ancestor) continued to imagine new worlds in order to change society. Secondly, modern protest writers took up Brown’s strategy of re-constituting American equality. They continued to invoke 1776, sometimes with reference to Brown: “The Negroes who are aggressively fighting for their rights have the same spirit that animated the founders of this nation,” proclaimed Reverdy Ransom of activists in the Niagara Movement, adding that “[i]n them the soul of John Brown 83

 Ibid., 213.  Ibid., 234. 85   Qtd in Villard, 555. 86   Stauffer, “Foreword,” xii. 84

Figure 10.2 “John Brown,” pictorial envelope, 1861. One of a series of patriotic envelopes produced during the Civil War, this piece of stationery recalls Brown’s own status as a letter writer. The text, “I die for the inalienable right of mankind to freedom, whatever hue the skin may be,” repeats his letters’ themes of martyrdom.

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

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goes marching on.”87 And they continued to develop his protest empathy, many celebrating his identification with slaves. Du Bois commented that Brown “worked not simply for Black Men—he worked with them; and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot.”88 And in 1964 the black radical historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., concluded: “It was his sister that a slave-owner was selling, his wife who was being raped in the gin house. It was not happening to Negroes, it was happening to him … . John Brown was a Negro, and it was in this aspect that he suffered.”89 Across the twentieth century, Brown has been heralded by African Americans in the protest tradition as sincere in his attempt to empathetically blur racial categories. Thirdly, protest writers have used the strategy of Brown’s symbolic emancipation—again referencing Brown himself. For example, the socialist Michael Gold explained in 1924 that Brown was “still in prison in America; yes, and he has been hung and shot down a hundred times since his first death” but that this perpetual, symbolic imprisonment means “his soul is marching on; it is the soul of liberty and justice, which cannot die or be suppressed.”90 Brown’s prison letters had offered America an early emancipation proclamation, and his libratory aesthetic continued to reach beyond the prison walls. Those rarely examined letters are therefore central to any consideration of the protest tradition, of the prison letter genre, and of the epistolary tradition more generally. To the field of epistolary studies they offer an example of dual audience construction, suggest a complication of the divide between public and private, and show an explosion of the time-space constraint. To examinations of the prison letter genre they reveal the epistolary aesthetic of absence writ large, suggest that this subgenre of the letter form is uniquely positioned for audience construction, and propose a libratory aesthetic of words breaking through walls. They are also the origin point of a prison letter tradition that includes Kate O’Hare, Sacco and Vanzetti, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Leonard Peltier, and Tupac Shakur. And within the protest tradition, they not only climaxed and closed out an era that had seen abolitionists

 Reverdy Ransom, “The Spirit of John Brown,” 417. For some of many invocations of 1776, see the following items cited in Trodd, American Protest Literature: The National Independent Political Union’s “Negro Declaration of Independence” (1876), The National Woman’s Right’s Association’s “Declaration and Protest” (1876), The Socialist Labor Party’s “Declaration of Interdependence” (1895), Romain Rolland’s “A Declaration of Intellectual Independence” (1919), The National Unemployed League’s “Declaration of Workers’ and Farmers’ Rights and Purposes” (1933), and The Black Panther Party’s “What We Want, What We Believe” (1966). 88  Du Bois, 7. 89  Lerone Bennett, Jr, The Negro Mood and Other Essays, 100–101. 90   Michael Gold, The Life of John Brown, 4. 87

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use the power of words to reimagine American society, but connected that protest aesthetic to a new chapter in the history of American literature. With their three-fold protest aesthetic, they became one of the foundational pieces of modern American protest writing. Many writers protesting the failed promises of the democratic experiment returned to Brown’s politics of form as they redrew the country’s blueprints: from Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair to Langston Hughes and Jacob Lawrence, protest writers and artists interpreted and reinterpreted Brown’s life and words for changing political climates. “If you are for me and my problem … then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did,” concluded Malcolm X.91 Brown’s letters had revised the blueprints of Bible, Declaration and Constitution, offered a blueprint for emancipation, and helped forge the protest tradition of which Malcolm X was a part—a tradition comprised of writers who rage and reason from the margins of America’s documented democracy, and legislate that democracy with their own words. Of course, Brown’s last letter had expressed doubts as to the power of this protest literature tradition, proclaiming that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with Blood.” Here he unknowingly echoed a letter by Theodore Parker, written a week earlier, on 24 November 1859: “A few years ago, it did not seem difficult first to check slavery, and then to end it, without any bloodshed,” wrote Parker to Francis Jackson: “I think this cannot be done now … . All the great charters of humanity have been writ in blood. I once hoped that American democracy would be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain now that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red sea.”92 Sure enough, the “costly ink” of blood would write slavery’s next chapter and finish what Brown and other abolitionists had begun with pen and paper. Yet the “charter of humanity” was writ in ink as well as blood. As John Brown’s body lay moldering in the grave, the words of his prison letters marched on to become a living protest legacy.

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Brown, William Wells, Clotel (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1853). Campbell, Elizabeth, “Re-Visions, Re-flections, Re-creations: Epistolarity in Novels by Contemporary Women,” Twentieth Century Literature, 41.3 (1995): 332-48. Carlacio, Jami, “‘Ye Knew Your Duty, But Ye Did It Not’: The Epistolary Rhetoric of Sarah Grimké,” Rhetoric Review, 21.3 (2002): 247-63. Darsey, James, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997). Davies, Ioan, Writers in Prison (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1990). Decker. William Merrill, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Douglass, Frederick, The Heroic Slave in Autographs for Freedom (Boston, MA: John P. Jewett and Company, 1853), 174-239. ——, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852), Zoe Trodd (ed.), American Protest Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006): 92-8. ——, “Pictures,” Unpublished manuscript. Late 1864. Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress. Du Bois, W.E.B., John Brown (1909; New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). Foner, Eric, “The Second American Revolution,” in In These Times (16-22 September 1987): 12-13. Foner, Philip S. and Yuval Taylor (eds), Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). Ford, Paul Leicester (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols (New York: Putnam, 1892-99). Franklin, H. Bruce, Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Garrison, William Lloyd, “So Perish All Compromises With Tyranny” (1854), in Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life (New York: The Century Co., 1885-89, Volume 3): 412. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (ed.), Douglass Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1996). Gold, Michael, The Life of John Brown (1924; New York: Roving Eye, 1960). Kauffman, Linda S., Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). Ketcham, Ralph, James Madison: A Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990). Meltzer, Milton, and Patricia G. Holland (eds), Lydia Maria Child, Selected Letters, 1817–1880 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982). Miller, Sally M., From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O’Hare (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993). Millet, Kate, The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994).

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Oates, Stephen B., To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). Quarles, Benjamin, Allies for Freedom and Blacks on John Brown (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001). Ransom, Reverdy, “The Spirit of John Brown,” Voice of the Negro, 3 (1906): 416-17. Redford, Bruce, The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the EighteenthCentury Familiar Letter (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Redpath, James, Echoes of Harpers Ferry (Boston, MA: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860). Rogers, William B., “We Are All Together Now”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Prophetic Tradition (New York: Garland, 1995). Ruchames, Louis (ed.), A John Brown Reader (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959). Sanborn, Franklin B., The Life and Letters of John Brown (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885). Stauffer, John, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). ——, Foreword, in Zoe Trodd (ed.), American Protest Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006): xi-xvii. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852; New York: Penguin, 1986). Thomas, Owen (ed.), Walden and Civil Disobedience (New York: Norton, 1966). Thoreau, Henry David, “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893, Volume 10): 171-96. Trodd, Zoe (ed.), American Protest Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). —— and John Stauffer (eds), Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (New York: Blackwell, 2004). Villard, Oswald Garrison, John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, PA: Houghton Mifflin, 1910). Vonnegut, Kristin, “Poison or Panacea?: Sarah Moore Grimké’s Use of the Public Letter,” Communication Studies, 46 (Spring 1995): 73-88. Walker, David, Appeal to the Colored Citizensof the World (Boston, MA: The Author, 1829). Zaczek, Barbara Maria, Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997).

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PARt IV LEttERs AND TwENty-FIRst CENtURy EDItIONs

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Chapter Eleven

Authorship, Network, Textuality: Editing Mercy Otis Warren’s Letters Jeffrey H. Richards

During her active adult life as a playwright, poet, political writer, essayist, and historian, as well as friend, sister, wife, and mother, Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) wrote hundreds of letters, leaving behind a rich trove of words and ideas from one of the new republic’s first true intellectuals and one of its most politically committed women. One letter, a warning to a son not to be seduced by the amoral advice contained in the published letters of Lord Chesterfield, appeared in print in her lifetime. Others, particularly advice letters to young women, circulated in hand-copied versions among other women, who shared Warren’s words of wisdom with each other. Many letters Warren had copied at her behest by her oldest son, James, to be passed to posterity. The rest, spread to numerous recipients, remained in various family papers or over time disappeared. There is no complete catalogue of extant Warren correspondence, no complete collection. To be sure, a number of letters have appeared in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century compilations of letters by multiple hands, but until Sharon Harris and I edited a volume of selected correspondence, no one had tried to make Mercy Warren’s letters the core of a published book. After I had finished a monograph on Warren more than a decade ago and having worked with many of her letters, I had in mind to prepare a selected letters volume to correct what I thought was a gap in the resources available on this important Revolutionary-era writer. After some preliminary work, however, I realized that   Mercy Otis Warren to “My Dear Son.” The letter first appeared in the Boston Independent Chronicle, 18 January 1781. For a history of the letter and reprinting of it, see Edmund H. Hayes, “Mercy Otis Warren versus Lord Chesterfield, 1779,” 616-21.   Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris, Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters. For an overview of Warren’s career as a letter writer, see Jeffrey H. Richards, Mercy Otis Warren, 26-50; and for a more particular study, Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 180-219. Warren’s biography can be found in a variety of reference works as well as Jean Fritz, Cast for a Revolution; Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma; Richards, 1-25; and Jill Marion Stauffer Maney, “A Bold Design.” The largest repository of her letters rests in the Massachusetts Historical Society, which has the Mercy Otis Warren Papers (hereafter referred to as MOWP) and other individual letters scattered among many different collections. The author thanks MHS for permission to quote from the letters.

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the task was more time-consuming than originally anticipated—best to put aside for a more propitious hour. It was not until Harris asked if I were interested in dusting off my files and co-editing a volume of selected letters that I took up the project in earnest. All that we needed to do, I thought at the time, was pick out the proper letters, transcribe them, and find a publisher. The rest would take care of itself. I learned quickly, however, that dealing with correspondence both as letters in themselves and as copy-text presented many more challenges than I had been willing to admit when Harris and I began the project. For a twenty-first-century editor of Warren’s letters, the basic facts about Warren’s life and the state of her correspondence are mere starting points for engaging with a writer of the eighteenth in preparing a modern volume of her letters. It is one thing to write about Warren, using her letters as material in a book or essay; it is quite another to consider the letters themselves as the focus, as the centered texts, by which an editor—and thus, finally, a reader—will encounter the American author and her times. To begin such a project as a book of letters by a single author begs questions of purpose, theme, and selection; to continue the project means to tackle matters of material condition of a manuscript, the hand or hands who literally penned it and those that received it, the words that appear on the page—and the words that do not—and dozens of questions concerning punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, spelling, greeting and salutation, not to mention an editor’s reading an often linear and indistinguishable set of marks that look remarkably like other linear and indistinguishable marks and which therefore affect interpretation of ten to 40 or 50 words per letter. In short, what appears to be at first a “fun project” —assembling some remarkable letters by a remarkable woman—turns out to be work: letter by letter, word by word, mark by blotch, choice by choice, eye-aching work. “Welcome to the world of manuscript editing,” the sign reads at the top; “Beware all who enter,” says the sign at the bottom. Part of the challenge of editing Mercy Warren’s letters—or really, any writer's from the period—involves comprehending the larger framework of letter writing in the late eighteenth century in social, material, and artistic terms. In the social arena, the act of writing letters established an immediacy only available otherwise through face-to-face interaction. For Warren, that meant more often condoling over an illness or death than depicting her daily events, leaving us with relatively few details of her physical life, but very many ideas about how she constructed herself as, say, a woman, a sister, or a friend. At a time when travel even to a town four or five miles away posed challenges, letters also served to bind families and friends or create networks of association otherwise not possible within the limits of contemporary transportation, particularly for women, who had less access to the machinery of mobility than men. For Warren, letters circulated in several such social networks, some of them overlapping: familial, political, and sororal connections dominate the surviving correspondence. Among family communications, a large portion of surviving letters went to various Otis relations, her husband James Warren (often away

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from home on government business), and her five sons. One is left to wonder, for instance, why some letters remain in her papers and others do not. Because many of the letters survive as copies (about which more below), Warren must have chosen to keep those she thought went some distance toward validating an identity as a particular kind of writer. For an editor, this means not only identifying correspondents by name and tracking birth/death dates, but also understanding where a particular family member stood in Warren’s own conception of herself as a composer and keeper of letters. For example, Warren kept copies of a few letters to Sarah Walter Hesilrige, the Massachusetts-born wife to an English baronet. Even by 1773 or 1774, the differences in politics (Warren a Whig, Hesilrige a Tory) would have in many cases been insurmountable, but because her correspondent was also a sister-in-law through Warren’s brother Joseph, Warren felt sufficiently the family tie to continue writing as long as practicable. This meant, of course, avoiding politics but finding a common interest: in one case, contemporary poetry by women, including their fellow provincial, Phillis Wheatley. For an editor, the value of that commentary both demonstrates and supersedes the family connection that for Warren was the true purpose in writing. Another network, the political, is well reflected in the surviving letters. Her brother James Otis, Jr., was early involved in the issues that led to American questioning of the propriety of British rule over the colonies, and Warren’s letters often mention or extol her brother for his appearance on the “theater of action,” as the common phrase of the day would have it. Letters to female friends, especially Abigail Adams and Hannah Winthrop, as often recur to politics as personal matters, and many of those to men (both inside and outside the family) are almost entirely taken up with political issues. Of the many Warren letters that have appeared in print, the majority are political in nature; collections of letters by John Adams, George Washington, and Elbridge Gerry, for example, have printed Warrenpenned missives. Because of the prominence of such letters in existing resources, Harris and I decided to limit those in our selected letters volume but to be careful not to suppress this most important dimension of the correspondence. Some of Warren’s most characteristic cadences emerge in her political exchanges, as in the following passage from a letter to Winthrop, a friend who shared Warren’s antiadministration feelings in the days before the war. Condemning the British prime minister Lord North and the Massachusetts royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, she asks rhetorically, “Will not the infamy of a North and a Hutchinson be written in characters of blood, while the crimsoned stream will mark to future ages, the glory, and the virtue, of a patriotic race, who (if necessary) will cheerfully sacrifice life and its enjoyment, to extricate posterity from the threatened bondage.” On the other hand, we chose to stress a third network, the sororal—and in fact, the letter just quoted represents overlapping networks. Warren was unafraid to  Warren to Sarah Walter Hesilrige, 1773 or 1774, MOWP [microfilm reel 1].  Warren to Hannah Fayerwether Tolman Winthrop, August 1774, MOWP [microfilm reel 1].  

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address prominent men of her day on matters of the public interest, but she clearly valued her role in establishing or participating in woman-to-woman circulations. An editor/reader needs to be sensitive to slight shifts in tone, though, between letters to political women in the writer’s camp, radical republicans like Winthrop, and other women who either shy from politics or come from more conservative families. In letters to her friend Hannah Lincoln, for example, Warren has to counter some remarks by an unidentified person to Lincoln on the dangers of Lincoln’s writing to her as well as her correspondent’s own reluctance to support the anti-administration positions the Warren and Otis families took prior to the Revolution. In the following passage to Lincoln, for instance, written as a single sentence, one discovers a complex set of attitudes both toward political action and to her friendship with her conservative correspondent that show how Warren negotiated the overlapping boundaries of association: It is with reluctance I must differ in opinion from some whom I esteem; —but my friend must excuse me if I cannot agree with her that the people of this province have been remarkably refractory in their opposition to the late manoeuvres of administration; —nor can I concede that we must be transmitted to posterity as deficient either in loyalty to our sovereign, or a due submission to rulers; —but think the faithful historian must bear testimony to the patience and forbearance of this generation, who have been betrayed by those, who were bound by all the ties of humanity and gratitude to protect them; —and insulted by a hostile parade in the streets of their cities; —new impositions and additional oppressions have been the answer to each remonstrance, and dragooning, and blockading, the only arguments on the side of power, to heal the breach and cement a union between Britain and the colonies.

Warren tries to accomplish many things in this sentence—continue her conversation with Lincoln, maintain a friendship of long standing, insist that women can talk politics without reproach, and still argue for a particular side in the looming division between radical colonists and their British masters, all while paying close attention to a certain elegance of expression. It is that complexity of voice, here, that led Harris and me to include in our volume this letter to a person of little historical standing but who for Warren was an important woman at the nexus of multiple networks of association. The material aspect of correspondence also affects editing. For example, in early British America, paper was sometimes hard to obtain; therefore, letter writers often constructed texts to meet the size of sheets available, sometimes filling both sides of a small page without leaving any margins. A surviving letter written this way presents challenges from the density of text on a page, for instance, or from loss of text over time as edges of leaves get damaged or torn or when ink on one side of the sheet bleeds through and complicates reading the other. In addition,  Warren to Hannah Quincy Lincoln, 3 September 1774, MOWP [microfilm reel 1].



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many letters were sent without envelopes, as nothing more than folded and wax-sealed sheets with the address written on a blank side. Without the protection of envelopes, many letters would have arrived to their addressees already damaged, not to mention the wear that would occur over hundreds of years as they would be handled by heirs and scholars. Because there was no universal postal service before the early national period, letters often traveled with friends or acquaintances rather than postal carriers, and allusions in letters to those carriers appear in references to “the bearer.” A writer like Warren might compose several long letters in one sitting in order to accommodate an often anonymous “bearer” who would be leaving soon for Boston or some more far-flung location from the author’s home town of Plymouth, but then not write for a relatively long period if no obvious means of conveyance could be obtained. Both content and the material text must often be read in light of the physical conditions of letter writing and transportation. Technologies of writing and reproduction must also be considered under material concerns, particularly in the case of Warren, a highly self-conscious composer of letters, but also for many other writers who had reason to refer to their own previous correspondence. Now, of course, one need only consult the Sent file on a computer to find the precise copy of an email written a week or a year ago, or pop a hard copy on a photocopy machine and file the exact reproduction in a drawer. Thirty years and more ago, a correspondent might have typed on a typewriter with carbon paper to preserve a copy. A century before that, a person of means would have hired a secretary to copy a letter by fountain pen before it went its way to the intended recipient. Mercy Warren, writing primarily in the period 1770 to 1810, often composed her letters first as drafts in quill and ink, and then wrote them out a second time the same way to send to addressees. The practice of writing multiple drafts, and thus her being able to afford the paper to do so, suggests that she inhabited an economic station above the norm of the time, but also that she valued knowing what she said to correspondents weeks, months, or years after original composition. Many of the letters preserved under Warren’s name exist as drafts rather than recipient’s copies or have been preserved in both states, draft and delivered letter. Draft versions present special challenges. Frequently, such letters lack any addressing or even dating; one has to make guesses by tone and content about the correspondent and time of writing. Warren’s least guarded letters tend to be to her husband, but for the most part the Mercy Warren Papers preserves recipient copies to James Warren—a great help in establishing those few letters that exist in other forms. Other drafts may only say “Dear Son” —and because Warren had five sons, one has obviously to pay attention to nuance and context to determine a clearly intended recipient. But a draft also catches the writer in the moment of composition. In a draft letter to James Warren, she notes her enclosure of a letter to Janet Livingston Montgomery, the newly made widow of General Richard Montgomery, who was killed in action at Quebec in late December 1775: “Compassion is all we can offer to the Distressed & Commiseration is at all times due to our fellow Men under the common misfortunes of Life.... This Consideration Induces me to think

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it A Duty to Endeavour to console the Bleeding Breast of a Widow, Rob[b]ed of the Companion of her life in supporting the Common Cause of America.” There is the revealing word, “duty”: for Warren condolence is both a sororal gesture and a political one. Montgomery is a woman who has lost her spouse, read in the same terms Warren saw her own companionate marriage, but she is also a widow to a just war, and therefore must be embraced for her sacrifice to the “Common Cause.” Although only an accompanying note to James Warren to get him to forward her direct letter to Montgomery, this hastily composed draft frames the longer communication (preserved as a more formal draft) and reflects the multiple considerations at work in even the most perfunctory of Warren letters. When both draft and recipient versions survive, one often finds differences, sometimes slight shifts in phrasing, other times whole paragraphs added or deleted from the draft version to the one sent. These differences then raise important editing questions. If one follows in the school of scholarly editing promulgated by W.W. Greg, then one might prefer the draft version in her hand as the closest to the author’s original intention, when the writer was least constrained. However, in published volumes of correspondence by other American writers, the overall preference by editors has been for printing recipients’ copies—the letters actually received, read, and replied to in their time. For example, in the volumes of the Adams correspondence published by the Belknap Press—which, by virtue of the sometimes close and otherwise long history of letter exchange among John Adams, Abigail Adams, Mercy Warren, and her husband James Warren, include Warren letters among the texts—draft versions tend to be relegated to footnotes to recipients’ copies, except where no other version than a draft exists. From the historian’s point of view, such a choice makes practical sense. To follow the epistolary chain, one wants the precise language of letters received in order to comprehend references in subsequent letters to correspondence actually in hand. However, if one considers the position of the writer of a letter as an author rather than simply as a historical personage, as a conscious constructor of a text rather than recorder of events as they happen, then choosing the recipient’s copy always does not necessarily render fairly or completely the thinking of a writer as she conceives originally of her epistolary enterprise. In Warren’s case, because she decided as early as 1776 to write a history of the Revolution then just beginning, she often composed letters as if chapters of a book; and indeed, one finds passages from letters written to Catharine Macaulay in 1777 inserted into her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). For the volume of selected letters that Harris and I have undertaken, we have decided not always to make recipients’ copies the privileged texts, particularly in situations  Warren to James Warren, 20(?) January 1776, MOWP [microfilm reel 2].   W.W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” 374-91.   L.H. Butterfield, et al. (eds), Adams Family Correspondence; Robert J. Taylor, et al. (eds), Papers of John Adams.   On this process of turning draft letters into historical text, see Richards, 133-4.  

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where recipients’ copies had already been published in other contexts. Thus, we were willing to violate editing strictures on consistent rules of selection in order to bring out from the archives texts that traditional procedures minimize or ignore. A more complex issue connected to Warren correspondence has to do with another version of her draft correspondence, the so-called Letterbook. Scattered among the manuscripts in the Mercy Warren Papers, the chief repository of her writing at the Massachusetts Historical Society, are numerous drafts in her hand, easy enough to spot as originals. However, there is also a bound manuscript volume made from copied drafts but composed late in her life, most likely after 1800. All those compiled letters are written in the hand of James Warren, the Harvardeducated oldest son of Mercy and James Warren, who served as his mother’s amanuensis in her declining years, when she suffered from partial blindness and other physical debilities. Unlike drafts in Mercy Warren’s own hand, whose authenticity as the writer’s documents creates no serious problem, this collection of copied drafts, in another hand, has long caused scholars difficulties in terms of the utility of the texts. For one thing, the letters are often irregularly or inaccurately dated. This may have occurred because the original drafts lacked dates or because the date line had been damaged or had deteriorated in some way as to make the date uncertain. In any event, one learns after a short time working with the Letterbook versions to be suspicious of dates, not only by month and day, but also year, even decade. To work with these texts, then, requires editorial decisions on dates based on as much internal and external evidence as one can muster. For another thing, in some cases, the copied drafts do not specify an intended recipient either or indicate an addressee that internal or external evidence might challenge. This latter could easily occur because Warren did not always name the intended recipient in her draft copy. In the former case, several letters addressed “To a Very Young Lady” with nothing further seem nearly impossible to date or identify any more precisely than among a range of possible addressees because there is little by way of corroborating text or reference in these letters of advice. The existence of the bound volume of copied drafts forces one to ask the question why Warren kept these letters in this form instead of merely passing on the firsthand drafts with the others. In fact, it seems that many, if not most of the Letterbook versions no longer survive in extant original Mercy Warren drafts (although some do in other collections as recipient copies). In other words, the modern cost of this early nineteenth-century decision to preserve the letters on better paper, in a more elegant hand, and bound has been the loss of dozens of original drafts to history and literary study. Although scholars refer to this manuscript volume as a “letterbook,” it is not quite that. A true letterbook is the record of drafts as they occur in the actual time of writing. This one was consciously constructed as a kind of heirloom piece, a deliberate choice of particular letters and correspondents that Mercy Warren wished to memorialize. In textual terms, the letters contained there appear to be neither fish nor fowl. In the scholarly editing school of Fredson Bowers, one prefers the last version of a text composed while the author was still alive as the text that best reflects the

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writer’s final intention.10 The letters contained in the bound volume cease to be letters per se—actual documents that exchange hands—but become literary texts that have been rewritten, even reconstructed, to meet the author’s later-life wishes as to both style and content. In other words, the Letterbook is something akin to Henry James’s late-life New York Edition of his works, with each text slightly or significantly altered twenty, thirty, or more years after the original composition. Not surprisingly, where multiple versions do survive, one often finds that Warren excised more personal comments from the rewritten drafts in order to frame the bound texts as having more universal significance. Unfortunately, such omissions leave the reconfigured letters without some of the most interesting of her original remarks. Sometimes, however, the Letterbook copies betray something else: combination or augmentation. A 1780 letter to her son Winslow, a young man who traveled many years in Europe, may, in the Letterbook, actually be two original letters combined into one text.11 This text-combining thus removes material from its original context and repackages it not for the intended recipient but for readers as yet unknown, as if Winslow, who died in 1791, stands in 1800 for all rising youth of a rising people and ceases to maintain his historic individuality. In some cases, this combination can be identified through other surviving texts. The Warren Papers preserve many recipient copies of the letters to Winslow, to name one case, which thus makes this process of rewriting apparent. More often, however, Warren introduced changes to soften or intensify rhetoric, to rid originals of factual errors (many Warren letters are filled with rumors or incomplete stories about Revolutionary or international events in a tumultuous period), or simply to have her secretary son apply a more standardized spelling and pointing to her less polished drafts. However, the process often seems haphazardly applied, and the reasons for difference are occasionally obscure. Thus, when one finds both a recipient’s copy and a Letterbook draft, an editor may struggle to determine what precisely causes the differences. In some cases, the changes have been introduced ex post facto, in the rewriting; in other cases, the differences appear to have been at the time of composition, between the draft, which Warren kept, and the addressed version, as frequently happened when a new thought occurred or some new event intervened between the two contemporary drafts. A Letterbook copy straddles multiple time periods and purposes, between, for example, the anxious mother concerned about her son’s welfare overseas (and in fact, Winslow was arrested during the war when his passenger vessel was seized by the British) and the older political woman, still mourning a lost child, but 10

  See especially his reply to Greg’s essay, cited above: Fredson Bowers, “Current Theories of Copy-Text, with an Illustration from Dryden,” 277-88. 11   Mercy Warren to Winslow Warren, 20 November 1780, MOWP, as written in the Letterbook, combines recipient’s copies from 6 November and 7 November to produce a letter that seems not to have been sent, unless the 20 November version represents another one sent later as a precaution against the earlier ones miscarrying.

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concerned now about the nation’s direction. Making the editorial decision to print or not such a letter involves thinking about the importance of a draft as a unique copy and the value of having readers encounter a document by a writer who saw her correspondence more in terms of a permanent legacy than the words of the moment. Part of the legacy included the writer’s own notion of artistry. In that sense, the material issues surrounding Warren texts tie directly into those connected to authorship and craft. All the known Warren letters date from her maturity, ages 41 to 86. There is nothing childish about her tone or manner and not very much by way of unguarded comments, giddiness, or spleen. She wrote to write well as much as express political opinions or give advice; indeed, she could not have separated the rhetorical and artistic packaging from the commentary itself. Although sometimes she can be curt or abrupt, she much prefers a style that one might consider as oratorical. This style involves often long, complex sentences, with measured cadences, rising and falling phrases, and latinate diction. In selecting letters to represent her work, one must pay attention to the matter of craft. Even in a letter to her husband, preserved in the recipient’s copy, Warren takes care to present her thoughts and anxieties in a formal mode, as if any expression of hers might be read not just for the intended eyes but those of generations to come. For instance, in a 1777 note to James Warren, she laments his absences on government business, But after a day or two has succeeded such a Restless Night & No Ill tidings arrive my Restless Bosom is again hushed into peace & I can calmly hope the same providential Care which has hitherto protected will still preserve your Valuable Life; yet when I reflect how many years have Rolled over our heads we have Little Reason to Expect many more should be Added to the Tale.12

The fact that each Warren lived more than 30 years after that letter does not detract from the careful consideration of each word and phrase in the expression to her intimate partner of doubt about the future. Beyond the matters of social, material, and artistic considerations, other decisions wait in selection. Warren’s letters have appeared primarily in five collections: a cluster of angry letters (first printed in 1878) she exchanged with John Adams when the latter finally got round to reading her history of the Revolution and fumed at her portrayal of him; a two-volume compilation of texts by several people, the Warren-Adams Letters, printed in 1917 and 1925; two series of Adams letters, the Adams Family Correspondence, and The Papers of John Adams; and a collection of letters between Elbridge Gerry and James and Mercy Warren, A Study in Dissent.13 Sharon Harris and I did not want to overlap significantly with those collections but at the same time did not want to omit any letter on  Warren to James Warren, 30 December 1777, MOWP [microfilm reel 2].  Charles F. Adams (ed.), Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Warren; Warren-Adams Letters; Butterfield; Taylor; C. Harvey Gardiner, ed., A Study in Dissent. 12 13

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that ground alone that might prove crucial to the Warren we wished to present. That meant, naturally, we had to decide which Warren we wanted to display. The political animal, about whom there is a modestly substantial secondary literature? The domestic person, in charge of two households (a farm in the country and a house in Plymouth proper) and five children? The literary woman, writing in what must have seemed a cultural void? The equal companion to a then-well-known political figure? The friend not only to the famous—Abigail and John Adams, George and Martha Washington, Elbridge Gerry, Catharine Macaulay—but also to people, primarily women, whom history has overlooked? In truth, we wanted to have the Mercy Warren of our volume reflect all those and more but chose to bring out aspects of her not often given full play in current scholarship, as in her correspondence with now lesser-known women. One cluster of letters that has been noted in biographies but otherwise not much discussed in critical literature is her correspondence with Winslow Warren, a son on whom she pinned many of her hopes to launch a cultured young man on the new republic. That he failed to become the person she desired is only part of the story. The letters to Winslow represent a unique Warren voice, one not used with other correspondents, even other sons. Her abiding interests in politics, philosophy, religion, and literary culture all emerge in these letters—not to mention her powerful need to project on a footloose young man many of her own dreams for fame and literary achievement that as a woman she felt she had to constrain even as she pursued them. Therefore, the volume Harris and I have prepared looks imbalanced as far as recipient goes; there are more letters addressed to Winslow than to any other single correspondent. At the same time, however, we felt one could learn more that was new about Warren from those letters than from many of the others that were better known, such as those to John Adams. The letters to Winslow are filled with advice—advice not just for a child but for an entire generation whom Mercy Warren feared would forget the lessons of classical republicanism: sacrifice, devotion to duty and country, and constant participation in the public welfare of the nation. The fact that many letters to her second son made their way into the Letterbook suggest how much hope she put in the advice for those of her son’s generation who without him would carry the torch for the republican cause: “Observation and reflection must be the substitute for experience to enable him to parry the successful arts of intrigue and seduction, that have been practised by both sexes to ensnare the steps of the unwary, whom neither time nor misfortune has led to suspect the delusory nature of the sudden advance and the sanguine promise of attachment.” She continues to warn a vulnerable young man about the dangers of his impending trip to Europe—not the very real threat of capture on the high seas during wartime, but those “highest refinements of luxury and the most elegant pleasures shining through the enchanting vizard of politeness.”14 Thus whether the letter she actually sent contained these words precisely or not matters less than that Warren wanted such words (and similar  Warren to Winslow Warren, 25 March 1780, MOWP [microfilm reel 1].

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admonitions appear in other recipient copies) to persist for posterity as the warning to future generations not to be seduced by material pleasure. Yet she could step out of the more formal republican mother role in her letters to Winslow, as in a recipient’s copy sent to him when she received word that he had returned to the United States after three years in Europe. “And is my son—my dear Winslow, again on the same continent with myself. Words cannot express the joy—the gratitude—the tenderness that pervaded my bosom when the tidings reached my ears.”15 Without that personal note, the elemental mother’s joy at the return of a missing (and prodigal) child, a volume of letters with otherwise only the high sentences about republican virtue would not be sufficient to catch all the registers of the writer’s voice. Naturally, there are additional decisions one must make based on intended recipient and content. There are other choices, too, based on material condition of letters and access to them. Over the course of several years, we transcribed many more letters than we actually ended up using in the volume. Some letters looked interesting in their manuscript form, but once transcribed to type lost their interest, either because the typed version allowed for a reconsideration of content or style or, more often, the transcription could not be made accurate enough to print without more uncertainties than we felt comfortable in publishing. Because we decided early on to print whole letters, not portions of them, some otherwise interesting pieces were sacrificed to other needs, notably to have full texts that were readable. By editorial decision, we agreed to recognize Warren as writer in full rather than the occasional penwoman of witty or quotable lines. Others, of course, might have chosen to do otherwise to save the one clear paragraph in an otherwise damaged text. The act of transcribing involved a variety of decisions—and in practical terms, took the most time. One might, for instance, try to recreate in print as accurately as possible the experience of encountering a Warren manuscript. This would involve, in the manner of recent editors of Emily Dickinson, using multiple length dashes and other punctuational oddities to match what at times appear to be idiosyncratic markings. However, Warren often pays relatively little attention to punctuation and frequently omits end punctuation marks, end quotations, and other markers. Trying to determine at times when a sentence begins or ends is not always easy, especially with her sometimes erratic capitalization. For the most part, we tried to honor Warren’s choices where she gave some concrete sign of making them, but at the same time we agreed that we did not want a printed text that looked simply like a long string of words when her intention clearly was to speak in discrete sentences. Therefore, we decided to insert end punctuation and regularize her practices as far as practicable while ensuring that we did not create a sentence where only a clause of a larger sentence was intended. Editing these letters proved to be a constant negotiation between a text as written, the attempt to perceive

 Warren to Winslow Warren, 19 May 1783, MOWP [microfilm reel 1].

15

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authorial intentionality, the need for a modern reader to have clear access to the texts, and the principles of scribal accuracy. Capitalization was another area that gave considerable difficulty. Eighteenthcentury practice often mandated capitalizing not only first words and proper nouns but also all substantive words in a sentence. Warren follows that to a certain degree and therefore one is not surprised to find “Honour” not only spelled in the traditional British way but also capitalized mid-sentence. However, over time, she changes her practice slightly, to meet the more modern typographical practices coming out of England and replicated in American urban publications, ones that included dropping the capitals for common nouns. Thus over the history of her correspondence, one finds words that she capitalized in 1772 she no longer did in 1792. In those cases, we tried to follow her practice at whatever time period. The trickier cases involved capitals that appear as a result of her penmanship rather than orthographic choice. Her letter C can be hard to determine as lower or upper case, for instance. Thus over the course of an epistle one might find every initial C appear as a capital even when eighteenth-century practice would have the letter appear in lower case, as in the phrase quoted in the note to James Warren, “Common Cause,” where one might expect the capital in Cause but not in Common. The same thing occurs with Warren’s letter R, again, more in her earlier than later letters. What do you do? Print every initial R as capital, regardless of situation, and thus clutter the printed text for a modern reader? Convert some to lower case to meet standard eighteenth-century practice and thus seem to intrude on the author’s unique style? By the same token, Warren rarely writes a P as a full letter above the line; her dateline routinely appears as “plimoth” rather than “Plimoth,” yet when we encounter that same place name in the rewritten drafts of the Letterbook, it is uniformly “Plymouth.” We have to assume, then, that her intention was to capitalize even though the letter appears not to be so; there is no point to using lower case beyond her chronic shaping the letter to appear that way in almost all contexts. The Adams editors, who are quite scrupulous in their practice, routinely capitalize the P when it appears in situations where upper case would be expected. One has to sort out what advantage to a modern reader there would be to a kind of hyper-accuracy that might otherwise detract from what Warren actually says in her correspondence. With spelling, one again encounters, not unexpectedly, a variety of idiosyncratic formations. Where legibility is not an issue, we took the simple line to honor spelling as we found it, without any attempt to assert a Warren system over Warren practice. However, in cases where the intended word is clear but the author’s angular marks might be interpreted in more than one way, we chose the more regular spelling from the period, unless it is a word that Warren consistently spells the same way in other contexts—then we took her usual spelling as the norm. Thus Warren’s “immediatly” in the letter to Winslow of 19 May 1783, we wrote as such, even though the conventional spelling of the era was “immediately.” With words damaged or otherwise only partly legible but otherwise clear from context, we spelled the words as above but with brackets for letters recreated or

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inserted by us for clarity. Still, though, we took a fairly conservative approach to editorializing with words; some spellings are guesses, but many we declined to guess and indicated them with brackets and question marks. One could go on with such small details. We had to learn, for instance, that her final -s, rather than look like either a long -s or the short one, often appears to modern eyes as a mark almost identical to a manuscript comma. By the same token, her comma, when it does appear, often looks to be a period. Rather than my rehearsing all those choices, as they obviously differ from writer to writer, it is enough to say that transcription questions occupied the bulk of our editorial time. In writing a book about Warren, one need only quote those passages one can read clearly; in printing letters, one has to be responsible for everything. Strangely, this kind of technical consideration, seemingly dry and pedantic, actually forces an editor into an imagined intimacy with the writer, as if her hand and yours were the same, yours trying to feel her tracings and scratchings as the flow of thought and hope and anguish in every minute particular. One other issue to raise is annotation. One has to decide on the level of annotation based upon probable audience. Neither a specialized nor a broadly conceived audience needs an editor to identify George Washington in a footnote, but that same audience probably requires that the editors pinpoint his location or a particular battle when in a letter Warren refers only obliquely to something involving the general. In situations where she quotes, we tried as far as possible to identify the source, but sometimes one runs into a stumper. As a textual editor, do you insist on finding the source, even if it delays publication, or do you go with what you’ve got when the publisher calls time? We have chosen the latter, even if it means incomplete references. In essence, this meant a recognition that a letters volume can never be complete (unless, perhaps, one has a team of scholars and continual institutional support) —that in ways like Warren’s own practice, letters evolved, changed—and unless one were to preserve every version in print, the fact of choice and identification must be seen as “in process” rather than fixed. This idea of texts as changing to meet different ages comes through in Warren’s own copying practices. Warren herself used footnotes in the Letterbook, as if she already recognized that younger generations might no longer comprehend either her veiled references or even the names of persons once famous in her own time but now fading fast from the collective memory. Warren gives warrant, it seems, to the use of explanatory notes by her own notational practice. Notes, as she understood, provide bridges across eras or mediate between centuries, even if one cannot always conceive what questions a reader might have about this or that detail. Textual editing can be practiced in a variety of ways. One can choose to prepare a scholarly edition in accordance with prescribed guidelines, as with the Modern Language Association’s official rules for determining an authorized edition under their imprimatur; or one can try to bury editorial decisions for content-related issues only; or one can try to make decisions, case by case, to split the competing demands between fidelity to original text and acceptable textual practice on the one

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hand, and present-day issues of access and readability on the other. For Warren, we decided to follow the last, even if we knew others might make different choices for perfectly good reasons. In the end, we wanted readers to encounter her letters with as few barriers as possible but without our submerging entirely the practices of an earlier century, practices that may hold keys to meaning we otherwise might miss in too heavy-handed an editorial policy designed by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mr. Smooth-it-away.16 We no doubt open ourselves to questions about these decisions, but in the end we felt we gave Warren her best chance to speak to the century reading her printed letters and be understood in the context of her own. In the end, textual editing offers opportunities for recapturing the writing experience of someone long moldering in the grave. Writing letters, like editing them later, involves a series of choices related to materials, transportation, handwriting, epistolary style, diction, spelling and punctuational practice, and external influences (like contemporary typography), not to mention such things that affect choice, like the author’s state of mind (depression, for instance, or mourning), location, and even her response to the time of year (Warren sometimes records the coldness of a long Massachusetts winter). Rather than see letters as historical documents only, something to mine for information or ethnographic or biographical detail, both editors and readers do well to see them also as situated documents, texts growing out of a complex of cultural and technological practices as well as the mind and experience of a writer. The correspondence of Mercy Otis Warren provides a laboratory for exploring an enormous variety of writing stances and habits, whether radical republican politics, the woman as writer, or modes of paragraphing in the eighteenth century—and to follow the thoughts, fears, and hopes of one particular and remarkable person writing in the immediacy of the birth of a nation.

Works Cited Adams, Charles F. (ed.), Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Warren (1878; New York: Arno, 1972). Bowers, Fredson, “Current Theories of Copy-Text, with an Illustration from Dryden,” in Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975). Butterfield, L.H., et al. (eds), Adams Family Correspondence (7 vols. to date; Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1963-). Davies, Kate, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Fritz, Jean, Cast for a Revolution: Some American Friends and Enemies, 17281814 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

16

 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Rail-road.”

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Gardiner, C. Harvey (ed.), A Study in Dissent: The Warren-Gerry Correspondence, 1776-1792 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). Greg, W.W., “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” in J.C. Maxwell (ed.), Collected Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “The Celestial Rail-road,” in Michael J. Colacurcio (ed.), Selected Tales and Sketches (New York: Penguin, 1987). Hayes, Edmund H, “Mercy Otis Warren versus Lord Chesterfield, 1779,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 40 (1983): 616-21. Maney, Jill Marion Stauffer, “A Bold Design: The Life of Mercy Otis Warren” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2002). Richards, Jeffrey H., Mercy Otis Warren (New York: Twayne, 1995). —— and Sharon M. Harris (eds), Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). Taylor, Robert J., et al. (eds), Papers of John Adams (13 vols to date; Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1977-). Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren. 2 vols. Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 72-3 (1917; 1925). Warren, Mercy Otis, Letter to “My Dear Son,” Boston Independent Chronicle, 18 January 1781. ——, Mercy Otis Warren Papers [MOWP], Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Zagarri, Rosemarie, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995).

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Chapter Twelve

The Request of a Line: On Editing Harriet Jacobs’s “Life Among the Contrabands” Scott M. Korb

Of the approximately sixty-five letters written by the former slave Harriet Jacobs and collected in the two-volume edition of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, one in particular offers an excellent opportunity to consider the methods, challenges, and historical and literary worth of documentary editions. Written in the summer of 1862, Jacobs’ letter was published in the 5 September issue of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator under the title of “Life Among the Contrabands.” Penned in a refugee camp in the District of Columbia, the letter is her second longest extant piece of writing, after Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and marks her first appearance as a war correspondent. Taking advantage of her celebrity—and her vouched-for credibility—as the author of Incidents, Jacobs signs “Life Among the Contrabands” using her pseudonym “Linda.” In April 1862, following votes in both the House and Senate, President Lincoln signed a bill abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. In addition to freeing some 3,100 slaves living in the capital itself, passage of this law opened the city to poor black refugees from the South freed by the advance of Union forces and the general upheaval of war. At first, the government had lacked a sound, or even

  Though rare for women to fill what was considered the “manly” role of a newspaper correspondent, Jacobs’s letter to Garrison exhibits the typical subjectivity and “air of authority” that would come to exemplify the correspondent of the Victorian-era publisher’s newspaper (Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News, 17-19).   Despite debates over the authorship of Incidents that in the twentieth century persisted until Jean Fagan Yellin’s definitive scholarly edition in 1987, in her own day Jacobs, often referred to as “Linda,” was universally recognized as having written her own narrative.   While Jacobs had several other reasons for writing under her pen name—namely, as in Incidents, to protect the privacy of others (especially those who aided her escape from slavery), to conceal her own sexual history, and now to take advantage of her celebrity— most Victorian-era newspaper correspondents also wrote pseudonymously (Barnhurst and Nerone, 17).

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clear, policy concerning the newly freed slaves. Considering it a military matter, officials developed ad hoc guidelines for confiscating property deemed useful to the Union army without considering the needs of the human “contraband” left to fend for themselves. Initial efforts to organize former slaves into self-sufficient communities were mainly headed by Northern relief workers serving under the auspices of private associations with unofficial ties to the government. The Union capture of Port Royal and the South Carolina Sea Islands in November 1861, which left some eight to ten thousand former slaves in the hands of the Union army, led eventually to the first real experiment, carried out with mixed results first under the joint authority of the War and the Treasury Departments, to organize the labor of the freedpeople and provide them both relief and education. This “rehearsal for Reconstruction” also spurred the formation in March 1862 of three key Northern philanthropic agencies organized for the benefit of former slaves: Boston’s Education Committee (later renamed the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society), New York’s Freedmen’s Aid Association, and Philadelphia’s Port Royal Association. Lincoln’s signature ending slavery in the District of Columbia came the following month. In early June, Jacobs gathered with other reformers at the meetings of the Progressive Friends at Longwood, Pennsylvania, where Garrison proposed drawing up an appeal to the president calling for total emancipation. Jacobs was energized after the meetings and, departing from there, made her first relief trip to Washington, carrying “some things for Contrabands,” according to William Cooper Nell, and “also with a view to selling Books.” Back in Boston following the Longwood meetings and confident in Jacobs’s ability as a reporter  Officials responded to these poorest of African Americans with lack of urgency and resolve not totally unfamiliar today; consider, for example, the government’s failures in the wake of hurricane Katrina.   First applied by General Benjamin Butler in June 1861 at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, the controversial formulation “contraband” basically denied the humanity of newly freed slaves by labeling them as property confiscated during wartime. While the designation protected them from being retaken as fugitives, this much-hated term essentially justified continued condescension and often vicious abuse of blacks by Northern racists.    Although officially sponsored by the New York Quakers, Jacobs’ relief work in Washington and Alexandria, Virginia, would put her in touch with all of these groups and many of their agents in the South, including Julia Kendall, Hannah Stevenson, and the young black teacher Charlotte Forten, whom Jacobs recruited to join the work in Port Royal. Forten notes in her diary on 17 August 1862, “Since Mrs. J[acobs]. has given me such sad accounts of the sufferings of the poor freed people my desire of helping them has increased.—It is but little I c’ld do, I know, but that little I w’ld do with all my heart” (Jean Fagan Yellin, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers 2: 415-17 [hereafter referred to as Papers]); Laura Wood Roper, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Port Royal Experiment,” 272-84; see also Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” and Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction).    Yellin, Papers 2: 399-400. 

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and her sway among readers of the Liberator, Garrison requested of her “a line on the condition of the contrabands” in Washington. Her response, the long letter that opens the second volume of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers with “Dear Mr. Garrison,” presents a vivid narrative with a host of characters, conversations in dialect, and a direct appeal on behalf of the poor, sick, and dying refugees and orphans in the capital and environs, including Alexandria, Jacobs’s eventual home for the duration of the war. Like many of Jacobs’s letters, especially those written during the war years, this letter demonstrates the blurred line between the private and public; although it appears to be a private correspondence and contains material specifically meaningful to its addressee (a warm, personal greeting to Garrison and opening lines about their time together at the Longwood meetings), it is written to be read by a large audience and its main purpose is essentially political (in this case, to promote the abolitionist cause, raise funds and collect goods for the former slaves, and find a home for refugee orphans).

Collection, Selection, Transcription, and Annotation A documentary edition like The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers manifests what Janet Altman has identified as the paradoxical effect of “preserving the ephemeral.” This crucial work of preservation is no small task, however, and my partial narrative here recounting aspects of the preparation of Papers illustrates several of the challenges we faced. Collected from repositories and private collections throughout the United States, England, Australia, and elsewhere, the documents comprising The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers span more than one hundred years, beginning with the mention of Jacobs’s grandmother Molly and her uncles Mark and Joseph in an 1810 petition by Thomas Horniblow to divide his father’s property, and ending with a 1917 diary entry by a family acquaintance that notes the death of Jacobs’s daughter Louisa. Despite this wide range, nearly a full third of the more than three hundred and fifty documents in the two volumes of the Papers were written or published during the five years between the start of the Civil War and the end of Jacobs’s official work in early Reconstruction. This concentration, reflecting Jacobs’s rapid transition from solitary writing and domestic work in the home of Nathaniel Parker Willis into political activism and public service following the publication of Incidents, is also found among the documents we collected and accessioned but through our selection process chose not to publish.10   Yellin, Papers 2: 400.  Janet Gurkin Altman, “The Letter Book as a Literary Institution 1539-1789,” 17-19. 10   We provide a complete list of these unpublished documents as an appendix to volume two of the Papers. While as a writer I speak for myself, when referring to my work as an editor on the Papers it is only fair to use the plural—indicating the entire editorial staff 



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The collection, accession, and selection of texts for publication was our first task, a complex and lengthy process. Most of the approximately 1,100 documents accessioned for The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, including letters, public court documents, newspaper articles, printed annual reports, etc., were gathered by Jean Fagan Yellin as she prepared her 1987 edition of Incidents, the expanded 2000 edition, and her 2004 biography Harriet Jacobs: A Life. While with only a few exceptions all of the one hundred three documents written by Jacobs, her daughter Louisa, and her brother John S., and the nine written to them, have been selected for publication in the Papers, in other cases, we were required to make decisions about what to include in the published volumes. While for documentary editors selection is never a perfect science, our principle, in short, reads: We have selected material that reveals biographical information about the Jacobses, their lives as slaves, their resistance to slavery, their work for reform, and their lives in freedom. In addition, we have prioritized material chronicling the inception, composition, publication, and reception of Jacobs’s Incidents—as well as her brother’s “A True Tale of Slavery”—to provide a comprehensive context that does not exist for any other slave narrative.11

Once selected for publication, documents were transcribed and proofread multiple times against the original. Retaining original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation from the source texts, our transcriptions also indicate interlineations, marginalia, obliterated or illegible print or handwriting, and any other textual information of note. Some textual information, when not easily described in the transcription itself—for instance, when one word is written over another word—is handled in endnotes. We then created a cross-referenced index, or database,12 of those people, places, organizations, events, publications, abbreviations, quotations, and archaic and foreign words and phrases that would need to be identified in the endnotes following each transcription. Research followed, carried out by a group of largely volunteer student interns from Pace University, an international corps of graduate students, some paid research associates, and The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers editorial staff,13 with help from a long list of librarians, archivists, private researchers, and other scholars.14 and our many, many volunteer and paid researchers and writers—especially when talking about the hopes we have had in putting this collection together. My errors in judgment or fact, however, where they exist, are, of course, my own. 11   Yellin, Papers 1: xxxix. 12   In other words, our database of annotation points allowed us to see quickly which documents contained references to the same people, places, organizations, etc., making it easier to maintain accurate records of the research we’d completed. 13   Editor, Jean Fagan Yellin; Executive Editor, Joseph M. Thomas; Associate Editor, Kate Culkin; Associate Editor, Scott Korb. 14   Consequently, the Papers includes a very lengthy “Acknowledgments.”

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Being among the longest of the documents in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers—and, again, the very longest in our volumes by Jacobs herself—“Life Among the Contrabands” presents the documentary editor a wide variety of research queries. Because this was originally a published document, and because it was written by Jacobs,15 questions of selection and transcription were of little consequence. And so, identifying over forty points for annotation, we set to work contextualizing this document within our larger story (principally the work of document headnotes and the short essays that open each of the Papers’s twelve parts) and conducted research from over seventy individual sources to provide explanatory endnotes. Traveling through Philadelphia after the Longwood meetings, Jacobs arrived by train in Washington—“without molestation,” she reports, suggesting either that she rode in a Jim Crow car or that she passed as white.16 The following morning she began her tour of the capital, starting with a visit to the government headquarters for the refugees, Duff Green’s Row, a group of tenements named for the editor of the United States Telegraph and located on East Capitol Street, just east of the Capitol itself. In March, nearly four hundred refugees had been relocated to Duff Green’s Row from the Old Capitol Prison, largely, according to Ira Berlin, to keep them “more apart from the respectable white people.”17 As Jacobs describes, large numbers of refugees, “fresh additions of the hungry, naked, and sick” arriving day and night, were “huddled together, without any distinction or regard to age or sex.”18 They lay on filthy rags; disease was rampant. Confined in crowded rooms when used to living and working outdoors, “little children pine,” Jacobs writes, “like prison birds for their native element.”19 Clearly, the writing of Incidents had prepared Jacobs well for the writing of this letter, which launched her journalistic career. Her seemingly natural ability to set a vivid, desperate scene and her frank, yet delicate, way with matters of sex and gender appealed to the middle-class Northern readers of the abolitionist press. Writing from Washington, Jacobs would leave no question in the minds of her readers first of the growing needs of the poor refugees and then of the means already in place to provide them relief. She writes:

15  In only one case were we able to locate both the holograph and the published version of a Jacobs letter: one written on 25 April 1867 to Ednah Dow Cheney during a brief trip back to Edenton, NC and published in an abbreviated form in the July 1867 Freedmen’s Record. Both versions are included in the Papers, directly addressing the questions surrounding how much of Jacobs’s writing is actually her own work and how much is the work of her editors. Put to this test, Jacobs’s literary talent, evident throughout her personal correspondence, becomes quite clear. 16   Yellin, Papers 2: 400, 407n3. 17  Ira Berlin, et al., The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor, 245-6. 18   Yellin, Papers 2: 400. 19  Ibid.

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In the early part of June, there were, some days, as many as ten deaths reported at this place in twenty-four hours. At this time, there was no matron in the house, and nothing at hand to administer to the comfort of the sick and dying. I felt that their sufferings must be unknown to the people. I did not meet kindly, sympathizing people, trying to soothe the last agonies of death. Those tearful eyes often looked up to me with the language, “Is this freedom?”20

Yet Jacobs follows these descriptions immediately with the introduction of the newly engaged superintendent of the refugees, Danforth B. Nichols, who, she writes, “seemed to understand what these people most needed. He laid down rules, went to work in earnest pulling down partitions to enlarge the rooms, that he might establish two hospitals, one for the men and another for the women.”21 Nichols, a Methodist minister with ties to both the American Missionary Association and the National Freedman’s Relief Association of the District of Columbia, would help set things right. Jacobs’s strategy in this letter is first to prove real need among the freedpeople, while assuring readers those same refugees were also being hired for work and so had some means to self-sufficiency. She then assures potential donors that sufficient order had been established so that any relief they sent would be used efficiently. Finally, she flatters her readers: “There is a small society in Washington—the Freedman’s Association—who are doing all they can; but remember, Washington is not New England.”22 New Englanders, she seems to say, you are needed! Still reporting from Duff Green’s Row, Jacobs encounters two white relief workers, Hannah Stevenson and Julia Kendall, both from Massachusetts and apparently, Jacobs assumes, well known to the readers of the Liberator. Stevenson, the first Massachusetts woman to volunteer for the war, had arrived in Washington from Boston in 1860, and over the following three years worked as a nurse and nurse supervisor at Columbia College Hospital in Washington, Brigade Hospital in Poolesville, Maryland, Union House Hospital in Georgetown, and Duff Green’s Row. Sponsored by the Education Committee (later the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society), in 1863 she would return to Boston and continue as the organization’s secretary. A regular Jacobs correspondent who in the late 1860s served as vice president of the New England Branch of the Freedmen’s Union Commission, Stevenson appears several times throughout the Papers.23 From an editor’s perspective, Jacobs was right to say in her letter that “[t]he names of these ladies need no comment”—at least in regards to Stevenson.

20

 Ibid., 400-401.  Ibid., 400. 22  Ibid., 400. 23   Yellin, Papers 2: 401, 408-409n9; “New England Branch of the Freedmen’s Union Commission, Officer listing,” (Yellin, Papers 2: 401, 408-409n9); Freedmen’s Record 3, no. 5 (May 1867): 36. 21

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Identifying Stevenson for our readers was quite easy.24 Her family papers are held by both the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Julia Kendall, on the other hand, like Stevenson decorously referred to by Jacobs only as “Miss” (that is, unfortunately, not by her first name), posed more complicated research problems.25 We first identified Kendall from a passing reference in a letter from the renowned Civil War nurse Hannah Ropes to her daughter, Alice, written upon Ropes’ arrival in Washington.26 Following notes provided by the editor of Ropes’ letters that identify Kendall, we proceeded to cemetery records in her hometown of Plymouth, Massachusetts27 and to the Stevenson Family Papers, where we thought she might turn up. We discovered her birth and death dates and learned that although she had requested a position with Stevenson as early as August 1861, because of crowded conditions, she was unable to begin her work as a volunteer nurse until 25 June 1862, when Stevenson sent for her, stating that the hospitals were in need of “superior nurses.”28 Making this one appearance in our collection, Kendall represents a central ambition of our work with the Papers: to document as comprehensively as possible the major and often unheralded role women played in abolitionist and reform circles; as relief workers, teachers, nurses, and “embedded”   Yellin, Papers 2: 401, 408-409n9.   Another research conundrum came in our efforts to find Jacobs’s 1852 bill of sale, arranged for through the efforts of Cornelia Grinnell Willis and the Colonization Society. Although in Incidents Jacobs recounts rejecting any efforts made to purchase her freedom, upon hearing that Willis had nevertheless bought her, her “brain reeled.” She adds, “I had objected to having my freedom bought, yet I must confess that when it was done I felt as if a heavy load had been lifted from my weary shoulders.” And further, she imagined the documentation of her sale would be of great use to future historians: “The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquarians, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States” (200). After examining deed books from 1852-53 in Norfolk City and Norfolk County, Virginia (the home of Jacobs’ former owners, Daniel and Mary Matilda Norcom Messmore), along with federal records in the U.S. Marshall’s Office and U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and New York City records in the Municipal Archives, the City Hall Library, the Division of Old Records, the records of the County Clerk, and the Minutes of the Common Council, we never discovered the bill of sale. We thought this was ironic. 26   Kendall is not, in fact, even mentioned by name in this letter, but rather identified as Ropes’s companion during her travels south. “I did not feel like writing yesterday though we arrived here at noon; and on route here, the country was too delightful a picture for me to take other notes than in my memory. ... Miss Stevenson gave us a most cordial welcome, and rooms at this house till we are rested and our work is arranged.” (John R. Brumgardt, Civil War Nurse, 49.) 27  Cemetery lists of Oak Grove and Vine Hills Cemeteries, Plymouth, MA. 28   Yellin, Papers 2: 409n10. 24 25

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journalists during the war and throughout Reconstruction; and after the war, in the equal rights and suffrage movements and as government employees. Our hope is that through publishing not just Harriet Jacobs’s writing, but the letters and diaries of women like Julia A. Wilbur, Charlotte Forten, Sarah Wistar Cope, Sarah Russell May, and, of course Harriet’s daughter, Louisa Matilda Jacobs, to name a few, these women will have a first opportunity to speak widely for themselves, and that at some point Jacobs’s remarks may read more true: “The names of these ladies need no comment.” The remainder of “Life Among the Contrabands” follows a pattern similar to its opening pages. Jacobs tours the rest of Washington and the surrounding areas, including Arlington Heights, General Robert E. Lee’s abandoned residence, which, she claims, “has been so faithfully guarded by our Northern army.”29 Visiting hospitals, recently-opened free schools, regiments of Union soldiers, and small gatherings of freedpeople at work, stopping occasionally to speak with refugees (which, again, for the sake of provocative and stylized storytelling, she records in dialect), Jacobs offers her remarks on the pitiable conditions with the hopes of generating more and more sympathy among her readers. Her remarks are occasionally sharp. Visiting a house in Alexandria, she writes, “Here I looked upon slavery, and felt the curse of their heritage was what is considered the best blood of Virginia,” which recalls a similar attack on miscegenation from Incidents, where she writes, “what tangled skeins are the geneaologies of slavery!”30 Demonstrating her ease with allusion, Jacobs dots her prose with biblical quotations and possible references to David Lee Child’s Despotism of Freedom (1833) and Richard Hildreth’s The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836). Offering her readers “a word about the schools,” Jacobs highlights the importance of moral instruction and defends the commonly held belief that women, who, according to an American Missionary Association pamphlet, possessed “special faculty and adaptations” and the “sweetest sympathies and . . . boundless charities,” were better suited for the classroom than men.31

Life after “Life Among the Contrabands” Like many other Northern “celebrities”—including Walt Whitman, who worked for a time at Washington’s Armory Square Hospital,32 and Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, who recruited former slaves into the U.S. Colored Troops—Jacobs returned South to be of service during the war, not long, in fact, after Garrison 29

 Ibid., 404.   Yellin, Papers 2: 403-404, 412n26; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 78. 31   Yellin, Papers 2: 404-405, 413n31; Robert C. Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction, 58-9. 32   Washington, 160. 30

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published this letter. She quickly settled in Alexandria and later recruiting her daughter Louisa and another black teacher, Sarah Virginia Lawton, to help her open a school. And beginning with this long letter by Jacobs, the second volume of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers fully documents her life in Alexandria. As an agent of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends, Jacobs would find an ally and lifelong friend in fellow relief worker Julia Wilbur, whom she first encountered in April 1849 at a Rochester, New York antislavery reading room opened by her brother John S. and with whom she would be reconnected in Alexandria in December 1863. Wilbur’s daily diary, held at Haverford College and begging for the attention of a documentary editor, is perhaps the greatest single lens we have on Jacobs’s life following the publication of Incidents. In addition to Wilbur, Louisa Jacobs, Charlotte Forten, and the other women mentioned above, our collection, offering perspectives on Jacobs’s entire life and her reform circles beyond her time in Alexandria, also gathers the writings of John S. Jacobs, whose 1861 narrative “A True Tale of Slavery” is included, and Samuel May Jr., Jonathan Walker, Adin Ballou, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Josiah Collins, William Cooper Nell, members of the Nathaniel Parker Willis family, and many, many others. The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers is the first, and perhaps the only collection we will ever have, of the papers of a woman held in slavery. “Life Among the Contrabands” is just one of the wide variety of documents—letters, diary entries, wills, court documents, cemetery records, annual reports, and so on—that the Papers will now make readily available. This essay, in its narrow focus on one letter, nevertheless highlights some of the larger processes and principles involved in documentary editing, while demonstrating the ways that the close examination of even a single letter can enrich broader scholarly conversations, suggest new literary and historical understandings of a now-recognized major nineteenth-century author, and powerfully reveal the continuing need for scholarship investigating letters and their contexts.

Works Cited Altman, Janet Gurkin, “The Letter Book as a Literary Institution 1539-1789: Toward a Cultural History of Published Correspondence in France,” Yale French Studies, 71 (Men/Women of Letters) (1986): 17-62. Barnhurst, Kevin G. and John Nerone, The Form of News: A History (New York: Guilford Press, 2000). Berlin, Ira, Stephen F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland (eds), The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South, series 1, volume 2 of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Brumgardt, John R., Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980).

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Child, David Lee, Despotism of Freedom; or Tyranny and Cruelty of American Republican Slave-Masters (1833; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971). Hildreth, Richard, The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (Boston: John H. Eastburn, 1836). Jacobs, Harriet A., Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Morris, Robert C., Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Pierce, Edward L., “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” The Atlantic Monthly, 12 (September 1863): 291-315. Roper, Laura Wood, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Port Royal Experiment,” The Journal of Southern History, 31.3 (August 1965): 272-84. Rose, Willie Lee, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Washington: City and Capital. Federal Writers’ Project Works Progress Administration, American Guide Series (Washington, D.C.: United States Printing Office, 1937). Yellin, Jean Fagan, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). ——, et al. (eds), The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Chapter Thirteen

Edited Letter Collections as Epistolary Fictions: Imagining African American Women’s History in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends Linda M. Grasso

In the mid-nineteenth century, two free-born African American women sustained a loving friendship through an exchange of letters over the course of nine years. How, when, and where the women met is not part of the historical record. One of the correspondents, Rebecca Primus, was a member of a distinguished Hartford, Connecticut family who went south to teach newly freed men, women, and children from 1865 to 1869. The other correspondent, Addie Brown, was an itinerant laborer who worked as a domestic servant, factory hand, assistant cook, seamstress, and teamster in Connecticut as well as in New York. The approximately 150 letters Brown wrote to Primus between 1859 and 1868 are preserved in the Primus Family Papers housed at the Connecticut Historical Society. The letters Primus wrote to Brown are not; they are either destroyed or lost. What is part of the collection, however, are 60 letters that Primus wrote to her family while she was teaching freed people and helping to establish a school in Royal Oak, Maryland. Recognizing the historical significance of the women’s relationship and life stories, Farah Jasmine Griffin transcribed, edited, and assembled the letters and published them in a volume called Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868 in 1999. In Griffin’s introduction to the collection, she notes that Primus’s and Brown’s letters reveal “stories about their lives, ambitions, struggles, and dignity; their I wish to thank Bonnie Anderson, Nancy Berke, Theresa Strouth Gaul, Sharon M. Harris, Carol Quirke, Michael Rieser, Jonathan Silverman, Krystyna Zamorska, and the Ashgate reviewer for offering valuable comments on earlier drafts of this essay.    Biographical information and the estimated number of letters are provided in Farah Jasmine Griffin’s introduction to Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends, 3-4, 18, and Karen Hansen’s “‘No Kisses Is Like Youres,’” 154, 157. Hansen cites a slightly lower number of existing letters than Griffin: approximately 120 letters from Brown to Primus, and 50 letters from Primus to her family.

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politics, reading, and community; their commitment to black equality and to each other.” What Griffin does not consider, however, is that the letters tell another story as the result of being organized, annotated, placed in the company of other sources, and published in book form. It is this other story, the one that Griffin authors, that I focus on here. The protagonist is the book itself, the material and psychic space in which Primus’s and Brown’s letters are contained. In this other story, Beloved Sisters is an artistic creation forged from historical documents, interpretation, and desire. As such, it can be regarded as a fictional text that plots and dramatizes the imagined meeting of characters who live in different centuries. The yearning for communing, comprehension, and collective historical memory is the book’s major theme. The primary value of Beloved Sisters, Griffin contends, is the way in which the “extraordinary ordinary women” whose letters we read broaden our understanding of black women’s history and inspire future research projects. In this essay, I propose another way of thinking about the book’s importance. Conceiving of the text as an epistolary fiction enables an analysis of its artistry, structure, and politics. Examining each of the book’s constituent texts—as well as the whole they create—makes clear a practice and aesthetics of collectivity: a specifically historical African American ethic. As a series of imagined encounters between the letter writers and their interpreters, the reader and the text, and nineteenth- and   Griffin, 7. The pagination for the hardcover and paperback editions is the same except for the acknowledgements and preface. In this essay, I cite page references from the paperback edition.    This plot structure places Beloved Sisters in the company of other contemporary novels written by women scholars in which the drama involves a female scholar protagonist and her relationship to a female historical figure. Barbara Novak’s The Margaret-Ghost and Joanne Dobson’s Northbury Papers are two prime examples.    Griffin, xii.   I read Beloved Sisters as part of an historic epistolary tradition that includes novels plotted by the exchange of letters, and real-life letters written like those in novels. Using Brown’s and Primus’s real-life letters as the book’s structuring device, Griffin creates a letter fiction that encodes several key features of epistolary discourse. Most notable is the book’s interplay between the actual and the imagined, which mimics eighteenth-century epistolary novels, only in reverse. Whereas eighteenth-century novelists use fictitious letters to create the illusion of real-life occurrences, Griffin uses real-life letters to create the illusion of historical communing. Regardless of whether the authors use letters that are fictitious or real, both strive to convey the authenticity of their stories. See Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity, 6; Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, x.    This ethic emerges from the collective historical struggle of African Americans to attain rights, justice, equality, and freedom. There is a vast body of scholarship in AfricanAmerican literature and history that examines the importance of community in social and economic relations as well as in the literary tradition. Perhaps the most stunning evocation of the latter is Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Gathering of Old Men in which several elderly black men all claim responsibility for killing a Cajun farmer on a Louisiana plantation. 

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twentieth-century novelistic forms, Beloved Sisters enacts a political desire for historical connection and continuity, a seamless legacy not thwarted by violence, censorship, and erasure.

Cross-Century Communing and Collectivity Letters create presence out of absence, nearness out of distance. Griffin wants Brown’s and Primus’s letters to appease the sorrow of black women’s historical absence just as previous generations hoped that their letters would ease the ache created by separation from loved ones. This impulse, William Merrill Decker notes, was “pervasive” “in pre-twentieth century letter writing.” The potentially permanent loss of a loved one inspired “a nostalgic or otherworldly fantasy of future reunion,” Decker writes. “[T]he epistolary construction of utopian scenes that restore the full presence of the lost or absent friend is one of the most pervasive and interesting motifs in pre-twentieth century letter writing.” The text Griffin authors “restore[s] the full presence” of African American women by scripting a reunion fantasy. In the same way that letters metaphorically embody absent writers to their recipients, so, too, does Beloved Sisters metaphorically embody nineteenth-century black women’s subjectivity for modern readers. As in an epistolary novel, anticipation of intimate revelation structures the book’s overall conception. The reader soon discovers, however, that the text is far from transparent. Collected by Griffin into a 284-page volume, the letters written by Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown are not the volume’s sole inhabitants. On the contrary, the text is crowded with speakers and materials from both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Griffin’s preface, introductions, explanations, and commentaries, letters from Primus’s and Brown’s contemporaries, illustrations and photographs, scholarly apparatus in the form of footnotes and a bibliography, and two autobiographical essays about the research process, one written by Griffin, the other by a male scholar, surround, embed, and illuminate the women’s letters. To complicate matters further, the Primus and Brown letters are not a direct twoway correspondence. While Addie Brown’s letters are written to Rebecca Primus, Rebecca Primus’s letters are written to her family. The editor’s and reader’s attempts to imagine the missing half of the correspondence compel imaginative

  William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices, 22-3. Also see Altman, who writes, “Epistolary language, which is the language of absence, makes present by make-believe” (140).   On the letter as metaphorical body for the absent writer, see Rebecca Earle, Epistolary Selves, 6, Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 158, and Perry, 130.    See Perry, 70-72, for a discussion of the ways in which eighteenth-century readers regarded letters as “the means to secret information” (72).

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engagement, just like a one-sided letter exchange in an epistolary novel.10 The result is a collaborative fantasy created by editor, readers, and the texts. In effect, Griffin constructs an “epistolary mosaic” using novelistic techniques that Janet Gurkin Altman identifies as constitutive of the form.11 To achieve this “epistolary mosaic,” Griffin relies on letters’ ability to transcend time. Writing about the letter writers’ experiences, Griffin’s interjections create the illusion that she, the letter writers, and we—the readers—are connected across a multitude of temporal existences. “[A]ny given epistolary statement is relative to innumerable moments,” Altman notes, “the actual time that an act described is performed; the moment when it is written down; the respective times that the letter is dispatched, received, read, or reread.” As we read Griffin’s words interspersed with those of the letter writers, we are transported into a continuous present in which the book, like a letter, becomes a bridge between different realities. The act of reading is the connecting link. “In no other genre do readers figure so prominently within the world of the narrative and in the generation of the text,” Altman argues. In Beloved Sisters, Griffin reads and imagines the letter writers; the letter writers read and imagine each other; and we, the external readers, read and imagine everyone who speaks in the text, fulfilling what Altman terms an “epistolary pact—the call for response from a specific reader within the correspondent’s world.”12 Editor Farah Jasmine Griffin is the text’s beloved sister and loving friend as much as the two letter-writing women are to each other and to the black community within which they physically and psychically reside. A central character in Beloved Sisters, Griffin is guide, interpreter, commentator, and historian. Her voice is steady, soothing, a reliable presence. Especially when the texts are most opaque, the reader is glad to know she is there, grateful for the information and explanations she provides. Speaking before, after, and in between the texts, Griffin is the collection’s unifying center. This does not mean, however, that Griffin is the central focus of Beloved Sisters. Rather, she assumes the role of organizer, facilitator, and enabler in the spirit and tradition of nineteenth-century African American female activists, specifically in the abolitionist and post-Civil War club movements. In many ways, Griffin’s voice and vision echo those of her predecessors. Like the black women who organized the first Female Anti-Slavery Society in Salem, Massachusetts in 1832, Griffin values what the nineteenth-century women called “the importance of union,” collective action “to promote the welfare of our color,” and participatory inclusiveness: “Any member who wishes to speak, is allowed the privilege: when any member speaks, there shall be no interruption,” the Society’s constitution mandated.13 Griffin’s editorial decisions support the same imperative. “I have tried to remain 10

 Ibid., 84.  “Epistolary mosaic” is Altman’s term (183). 12  Altman, 118, 117, 88-9. 13  “Constitution of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem,” 113. 11

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true to the integrity of each woman’s voice,” she tells us in the book’s preface.14 By minimizing spelling and grammatical corrections as well as deletions, Griffin makes sure the nineteenth-century letter writers speak to contemporary readers with as little “interruption” as possible. It is of course Griffin’s scrupulous, painstaking labor in collecting, deciphering, and interpreting the letters, as well as in finding a publisher, that makes it possible for the women’s voices to be heard. Yet Griffin downplays her effort and envisions it instead as part of a larger, ongoing historical justice project. In doing so, Griffin creates connectivity and common cause with previous generations, and perpetuates the ethic and practice of collectivity. We’ve come together, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin proclaimed in an address to the First National Conference of Colored Women in 1895, because “we need to feel the cheer and inspiration of meeting each other, we need to gain the courage and fresh life that comes from the mingling of congenial souls, of those working for the same ends.”15 Like her distinguished predecessors, Griffin wants readers to be cheered and inspired by Brown’s and Primus’s stories. Fellowship with the nineteenth-century women makes possible “the mingling of congenial souls” and the ability to continue “working for the same ends” from one century to another. For Griffin, valuing black women’s lives is the work that is most essential. The book’s preface makes this most evident. Griffin situates herself as one of many in a community of researchers and writers committed to documenting and interpreting the history of black women in the United States. She credits scholars who suggested the need for Beloved Sisters and who advanced the field of black women’s history more generally. In doing so, Griffin privileges collective enterprise over individual scholarly achievement and implicitly suggests that collectivity fosters intimacy and collaboration: “I came to know [Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown] through various encounters with their letters as well as through conversations with and the writings of” professors, historical commission directors, and graduate students.16 The nineteenth-century women are knowable to Griffin, the twentieth-century scholar, not only through the letters they have written, but also through other twentieth-century individuals’ interpretations of those letters. The result is cross-historical continuity and communing: nineteenthcentury women live in twentieth-century scholars’ imaginations and discourse communities. It is as if a kind of conjuring has occurred: the twentieth-century collectivity literally enables the nineteenth-century women’s existence and subjectivity. And the collectivity is a model democracy: male and female members in different professional positions contribute equally to the historical creation. Griffin collapses the boundaries between men and women, researchers and historical   Griffin, xiii.  Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women,” 441. 16   Griffin, xi. 14 15

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subjects, written and oral scholarship, and professional academics and graduate students. The scholarly community includes all those who participate in the work of historical reclamation. Like the twentieth-century researchers, the nineteenth-century letter writers also participate in a cross-class relationship. Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown occupy different economic, social, and material class positions, yet they share an identity and culture. Although Primus is a member of a property-owning family and Brown is a domestic laborer, the women form an intimate relationship in which they share news, gossip, criticism, impressions, and ideas about the white and “colored people” around them.17 Thus the collapse and the collectivity are central to the text’s greatest fantasy: that class and status divisions do not fracture African American history, culture, and politics. Beloved Sisters abounds with examples of cross-century communing. Griffin’s humility in the preface, for example, links her voice, stance, and project to those of nineteenth-century black women writers such as Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Anna Julia Cooper. I write not to aggrandize myself, these nineteenth-century writers make clear in their books’ prefaces, but rather to serve a larger cause: to sustain human life, hasten slavery’s demise, and call attention to southern black women’s needs and predicaments in the post-Civil War United States. Like her nineteenth-century predecessors, Griffin wants to reach an audience beyond her immediate discourse community. In the acknowledgments, Griffin thanks her mother and cousin for “convinc[ing] [her] that [the Brown-Primus] letters had to be made available to readers outside the academy.”18 Yet another example of cross-century communing is the way the text’s collaborative creation reenacts what Griffin terms an “ethic of care and concern” that is practiced by members of nineteenth-century black communities.19 The alliance of late twentieth-century scholars works for the common good of black women’s historical reclamation in the same way that New England blacks and freed people work for the common good of “the col’d. race.”20 Although the scholars are in different professional locations, they are brought together by the shared purpose of documenting and interpreting black women’s lives. Similarly, free-born northern blacks and newly freed southern blacks are brought together by the shared purpose of educational, political, and social uplift. 17  Ibid., 90. The women’s letters suggest that Primus did not hold more power because of her economic advantage. While Brown does ask to borrow money on several occasions, it appears that this was not a one-sided exchange. Primus mentions in a letter to her family that she wants them to repay Brown what she owes her (137). Moreover, there are several indications that Brown may have had the emotional upper-hand. In a few instances, she assures Primus of her trust and commitment, and reaffirms her love; see 44-5, 60-61, 68-9, 121, 156, and 228-9. 18   Griffin, xii. 19  Ibid., 202. 20  Ibid., 199.

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As Griffin makes clear, Beloved Sisters is one contribution to a larger historical reclamation project in which many people participate and contribute. Making it possible for Brown’s and Primus’s letters to become part of the public historical record, Griffin continues the work begun by “older generations of scholars” who researched, documented, and analyzed the lives and work of nineteenth-century black women.21 Griffin places herself in the company of these scholars as both recipient and practitioner. “In their writings, these pioneering scholars pushed me to look for the records of black women in attics, in storerooms, in churches.”22 Recognizing that “these pioneering scholars” laid the foundation of the field, Griffin pays tribute to “[t]hese brilliant and brave historians—most but not all of whom were African American—[who] at times risked their careers to discover the ordinary women.”23 These risk-taking visionary scholars not only make Griffin’s contribution to black women’s history possible; they also demonstrate that the field is built upon “an ethic of care and concern” among scholars, as well as between scholars and their subjects. This same “ethic of care and concern,” Griffin makes clear, unified nineteenthcentury African Americans within and across communities, generations, and geographical locations. In an explanatory interjection about a series of post-bellum letters written by Primus to her family, Griffin notes: The compassionate Rebecca gives an in-depth portrait of ‘old man Moore,’ an elderly man who is sustained by the Royal Oak community. For the remainder of the correspondence she will respond to her family’s inquiries about him. Eventually the Hartford family will also send packages to him as well. This demonstrates the ethic of care and concern that maintains a sense of connection and community for struggling black communities North and South.24

Once again, we encounter cross-century communing, for the “sense of connection and community” exists as much for twentieth-century scholarly practitioners of “the ethic of care and concern,” as it does for nineteenth-century African American citizens. The conception, design, and execution of Beloved Sisters tangibly demonstrate that nineteenth-century values and practices continue to be present in, and connected to, twentieth-century realities. Griffin underscores throughout Beloved Sisters the scholarly community’s openness to exchange, collaboration, and communal problem-solving. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Griffin describes how she solves one of the many mysteries in the letters. In an 1867 letter to her family, Primus casually remarks: “I have been variously employed this morning so that I’ve only just got through

21

 Ibid., xiii.  Ibid. 23  Ibid., xiv. 24  Ibid., 202. 22

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to take up my pen, the last of my doings was to wash out my Nubia ...”25 Baffled about what a “nubia” was, Griffin devises an investigative plan that includes reasoning, deduction, and most importantly, collaboration with other African American women. “There are some mysteries that require a little teamwork,” Griffin informs us, thereby including readers in the problem-solving community. “One of Rebecca’s references in the above letter forced me to enlist the services of my mother, my aunt, and all of my own sister-friends.” Not only is collaboration key; it is collaboration among and between female members of different discourse communities that is essential. “We solved [the mystery],” Griffin assures us, “but only by a process of elimination.”26 The collective problem-solving also involves collective imagining. Shifting her stance and tone from authorative historian to wistful journalist, Griffin confides that the “process of elimination” includes detective-like deduction as well as historical fantasizing. Nubia? Judging from the context I thought she might have meant her hair. I could very well see it taking some time to wash her hair, especially in the days before the enterprising Madame C.J. Walker, who became the first African American woman millionaire by creating hair straightening products and tools for black women. But I had never heard of hair referred to as Nubia. What a lovely, Afrocentric-sounding name for a black woman’s hair, I thought. I began to imagine the implications: Upon publication of the letters black mothers might begin to refer to their daughter’s soft, kinky mane as Nubia.27

Cross-century communing is at the heart of Griffin’s fantasy. Twentieth-century African American women will begin to use the same language as their nineteenthcentury forebears. Black women will thus be connected across time through language, practice, mothering, and pride. Although Griffin eventually realizes that nubia refers not to hair, but rather to “a wrap for the head,” she continues to emphasize the value and importance of collaboration when confronted with historical mysteries: “There are those things about Rebecca and Addie that remain mysterious. Hopefully they will continue to be taken up by readers, historians, and poets, and other such mythmakers and image weavers.”28 When the mysteries are continually “taken up” by a variety of thinkers in a variety of psychic and material locations, the result is a sustained, nuanced historical record, a story containing multiple plots, characters, and conclusions.

25

 Ibid., 191.  Ibid., 193. 27  Ibid. 28  Ibid., 194. 26

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Reading the Plot of Beloved Sisters Whether readers of Beloved Sisters are historians, poets, mythmakers or image weavers, they are required to work hard when they enter the text’s fictive universe. Although lovingly guided by Griffin, readers encounter a puzzling, sometimes maddeningly abstruse set of documents that demand patience, attention, and imaginative engagement. There is, to begin, the issue of the one-sided correspondence: to date, only Addie Brown’s letters written to Rebecca Primus have been recovered. The repeated idea that Primus’s letters exist somewhere, yet to be discovered by an enterprising researcher, is an expression of longing as well as an invitation to script the story of historical discovery. “Addie writes of picking up a bag of Rebecca’s letters and rereading them,” Griffin tells us. “This certainly suggests that she saved Rebecca’s letters. One hopes they are waiting to be found.”29 In her letters, Brown consistently refers to the women’s shared experiences as well as to what Primus said in her letters to Brown. Thrust into this dramatic void, readers become like novelists as we “surmise Primus’s responses to Brown.”30 We write the dialogue, imagine the details, flesh out the characters. For much of the book, Griffin fulfills the traditional editorial role of providing facts and information whenever the letter writers refer to specific people, places, books, or events that readers may not know. But when Griffin imagines along with us, she becomes a fellow novelist. Take for example, Griffin’s interpretation of Brown’s response to a Henry Ward Beecher speech. In an 1866 letter, Brown tells Primus that she has “been reading the speech by Henry Ward Beecher[,] the duties of the hour[.]” Brown then informs Primus what Beecher says and what she thinks about his ideas. “[H]e is very plain. He says the recent history of the nation may be divided into three periods. Discussion, martial conflict, and reconstructing[.] I should think it was four.”31 By providing interpretation of the letter before we read it, Griffin not only guides our understanding of Brown’s remarks; she also makes it possible for us to conceive of Brown as a fictional character. Brown’s “commentary on Henry Ward Beecher’s speech demonstrates her intellectual independence,” Griffin writes. “In spite of his stature, she is not too intimidated to challenge his interpretation of history. She is beginning to read more critically and is displaying a greater degree of confidence in her ideas.”32 Here Griffin offers us an admirable protagonist who acquires intellectual and personal power throughout the course of the narrative. Smart, strong-minded, and a successful learner, Brown is also unafraid of white patriarchal power. In addition to imagining Brown into being by endowing her with personality traits, Griffin proposes a genre and plot structure within which to make meaning of Brown’s development as a letter writer. Griffin’s observation, in this instance 29

 Ibid., 137.  Ibid., 4. 31  Ibid., 140-41. 32  Ibid., 140. 30

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and else where in the text, that Brown grows over the course of the nine-year correspondence in skill, competence, and independence suggests that we can read her story as a female Bildungsroman. In female fictions of development, feminist theorists posit, a protagonist’s growth does not necessarily occur in youth, nor does it happen in a linear series of stages. Moreover, unlike stories that center on male experience, women’s formation tales dramatize the protagonist’s growth in relation to others, usually other women. Finally, the “narrative tensions” in women’s stories of development are also significantly different from those of men’s. For women, tension “between autonomy and relationship, separation and community, [and] loyalty to women and attraction to men” are essential themes in the coming-of-age story.33 In many ways, Brown’s literacy experiences fit this paradigm.34 In spite of daunting limitations imposed by gender, race, and class status, Brown acquires literacy, improves her skills in her early twenties through systematic reading and letter writing, and uses her language proficiency to sustain relationships and participate in cultural conversations. In an 1866 letter to Primus, Brown reveals an intense desire to “own” writing tools and ability. “Dear Rebecca,” Brown writes, “Thomas has just handed me his gold pen to write with[.] I like it very much[.] [I]t writes very easy[.] I would like to own one.”35 Brown’s desire to “own” a “gold pen” that writes “very eas[ily]” metaphorically encapsulates her desire to possess the valuable resources of literacy, which in this case belong to one of her black male employers. Although Primus also “owns” the “gold pen” that Brown covets, she does more than lend Brown her instrument. As her correspondent, Primus actively participates in Brown’s literacy training: she reads Brown’s letters and responds to them thereby aiding Brown’s familiarity with, and immersion in, literate conversation. Brown’s letters to Primus make clear that her “apprenticeship” as a serious reader and writer occurs when she is a self-supporting laborer, not in childhood. As Griffin notes, Brown was as much an “avid [reader] of both the mainstream and the black press, as well as of novels, sermons, biographies, and books on history and religion” as was Primus.36 In several letters, Brown mentions a book she is reading, asks Primus whether she has read it, and offers a brief comment.37 What is also clear is that Brown’s acquisition of literacy was an ongoing process that included a reliance on published texts and Primus’s responses to facilitate her learning. In one letter, Brown copies pages from a novel, Grace Aguilar’s Women’s Friendships, telling Primus she “wish[es] [she] could send it to [her] to read[, but]

33  Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, Introduction to The Voyage In, 12. 34  For analysis of this development, see Griffin, 4, 78-9. 35   Griffin, 104. 36  Ibid., 13. 37   See ibid., 61, for example.

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it dos [sic] not belong to me or even to the family.”38 Unable to share the whole text because she does not yet have the resources to “own it,” she manages to acquire it nevertheless by including an excerpt as part of her letter. Copying a passage word for word, Brown practices the act of writing as well as experiences the pleasure of ownership. This is probably also occurring when Brown either copies pages from a text or has someone write a letter for her.39 Brown’s desire to share with Primus her own writing as well as that of others suggests that Primus plays an integral role in Brown’s coming-of-age tale. Primus’s and Brown’s relation through literacy is just one potential plot structure. Brown’s professional maturation, culled from her discussions of work, is another possibility. So, too, is the story of Brown’s evolving sense of identity that could be ferreted out of her dreams, stories, and self characterizations. Regardless of how we choose to weave the tale, imagining the women’s relationship is our greatest challenge. For at the heart of this text lies the mystery and awe of the women’s relation to each other. The Brown-Primus correspondence, Griffin argues, “moves us beyond the silence” that characterizes black women’s lives both personally and historically.40 I would like to suggest that this is not necessarily the case. Yes, the letters reveal what so often remains unwritten, censored, or destroyed. Ironically, however, at the same time that they do so, they also reveal lacunas, the unknowable, and inscrutable secrets. What story do we ultimately make of a working-class New England black woman who uses the language and conventions of romantic love to address an absent female friend whose family could be her employer? Are these “beloved sisters and loving friends” erotically entangled—literally, imaginatively, psychically—as Griffin and Karen Hansen believe?41 Is this a tragic love story in which the lovers are doomed to live apart because of class differences, economic imperatives, and normative heterosexual requirements? Is some other plot imaginable? Could, for example, the romance plot be enshrouding another story? Might Addie Brown be employing the language and conventions of romantic love to express a desire for a different kind of life, one in which she could enjoy the privileges that class mobility, literacy, and status make possible? “You are the first Girl I ever love,” Brown tells Primus early in the correspondence, “[I]f you was a 38

 Ibid., 59.   In these instances, Griffin notes that although the “sentiments” expressed in the letters are Brown’s, “the language clearly is not” (64). 40   Griffin, 7. Hansen makes the same point; see “No Kisses,” 153. 41  In a review of Beloved Sisters published in the Journal of Southern History, Diane Batts Morrow is highly critical of Griffin’s interpretation of the erotic nature of the women’s relationship. Batts Morrow notes that “The most explicitly erotic portions of Brown’s letters refer to her own thoughts, dreams or feelings” and that “Brown’s allusions to actual physical contact, beyond kisses and embraces, involve women other than Primus” (175). Hansen provides a compelling counter argument in “No Kisses,” 160-61. 39

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man what would things come to [?] [T]hey would after come to something very quick.”42 Sometime later, Brown indulges the fantasy even further: “My True & only Dear Sister[,] What a pleasure it would be to me to address you My Husband and if so do you think for one moment you would be where you are with out me?”43 For women in the nineteenth century, heterosexual union culminating in marriage promised economic stability. Throughout the letters, Brown’s discussion of potential male marriage partners demonstrates that she embraced this belief. “Dear Rebecca if I should ever see a good chance [of marrying] I will take it for I’m tired roving around this unfriendly world.”44 By wondering “what would things come to ... something very quick” if Primus “was a man,” Brown is also imagining a different kind of daily existence, one in which she would be able to use her mind, work for the common good of the community, exert power in the world, and achieve something beyond herself. Brown would then, like Primus, be able to use “the advantages of knowledge and Christian culture [to] lift up the standard of truth and peace.”45 What I am suggesting, then, is that the love story may be about more than the personal relationship between the two women, that Brown’s desire for Primus is also a desire for status, privilege, and a literate life. Brown’s longing for the kind of achievements Primus had accomplished is poignantly expressed in a letter she wrote to Primus while the latter was teaching in Maryland: Dear Rebecca I do try and take the best of care of myself[.] ... I do not envy your injoyment but I would like to be there and be a silent preticipant[.] [H]ow much knowledge one can obtain by that way. Dear Sister I am please to know that you are some where you can be drawn out for there is no one her was capable of so doing. Your interlectual powers like a deep well. Mr. Johnson inform one of the members of your family a very highly compliment of you from Springfield[.] I feel proud of it.46

In wanting “to be there” with a woman who has succeeded in finding a place and a means of enrichment beyond her home town and whose “interlectual powers” inspire pride, Brown expresses her own aspirations for the same opportunities and experiences. In this case and in several others, Brown’s yearning for health,   Griffin, 21.  Ibid., 87. 44  Ibid., 35. 45   Ibid., 275. These are the words of Josephine Booth, one of Primus’s teaching colleagues, written in an 1866 letter to Primus. In A Very Social Time, Hansen discusses Brown’s “fantasy of a marriage to Rebecca,” positing that the women’s passion for each other was mutual, and that both recognized that a practical, heterosexual marriage could threaten their relationship (56-7). 46   Griffin, 95-6. 42 43

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economic stability, intellectual adventure, and recognition is as ardent as her yearning for a romantic relationship with a “beloved sister and loving friend.” In essence then, Brown’s hunger for erotic merge is itself and more: the uniting of physical bodies symbolically represents the uniting of class bodies. In this fantasy, Brown gets to keep the positive attributes her laboring status bestows upon her— confidence in her own worth, a capacity for strenuous physical endurance—and add what Primus at one point calls being “comfortably situated.”47

“I must I must be near you”: Articulating Epistolary Longing Whether we choose the Bildungsroman, romance, or ambition plot, Brown’s letters to Primus tantalize our imagination in their allusions, elisions, and pathos. Painful, distraught, unfulfilled longing is a recurrent theme. Repeatedly, Brown employs metaphors of heart sickness, dreams, and substitution to express frustrated desire. In an especially anguished letter early in the women’s relationship, Brown expresses vulnerability, desperation, and an intense craving for togetherness. My Beloved Friend[,] [D]o not be surprise to hear from me again[.] I am heart sick to see you once more again[.] [I]t commence snowing this morning[.] [H]as done so all day[.] [T]he snow is two feet deep[.] I thought I would be able to be with you to night[.] [H]ow I did miss you last night[.] I do not my Dear love know how long I have got to live. My Dearest Dearest Friend let it be long or short I must spend my days near with you if it tis the Lord will[.] ... I cannot be happy if I was to stay a way from you. Rebecca my Dearest Love could any one love a person as [I] love you[.] I cannot I cannot stay here any longer with out you[.] I must I must be near you[.]48

In this letter, emotional urgency is conveyed through the repetition of words such as “Dearest” and phrases such as “I cannot I cannot.” Clearly Brown’s “heart sickness” may be as fatal as the “very heavy cold” that incapacitates her. Her inclusion of comments about the “two feet deep” snow that has been accumulating “all day” symbolically encapsulates the blizzard-like emotional and physical duress she experiences as she writes the letter. The following year, while Brown is working in New York, her yearning for maternal tenderness and feelings of frustrated desire bring her to the point of fantasizing relief through self-inflicted violence. “How I have wanted to see you[.] [I]f only I could have rested my head on your bosom for a moments[,] give vent to my feeling[.] I have been sad[.] I am so full some time that I could take a knife and cut my heart out[.] [P]erhaps then I feel better[.]”49 Here Brown imagines being 47

 Ibid., 147.  Ibid., 21-2. 49  Ibid., 33. 48

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able to control the “fullness” that overwhelms her. If she can “take a knife” and cut out her sad heart, she can excise the pain from her body and psyche. The letters make clear, however, that Brown’s feelings for Primus are not easily quelled; they occupy her awake as well as asleep. “I think of you daily & dream of you nightly,” Brown tells Primus.50 “Think my Dearest Sister I am near the breathing the same air ... But alas the dream is over the charm is broken I alook to the stern realities of my position to find myself alone ...”51 In this conscious dream, the longing for togetherness inspires a fantasy of barter. “I wish I could exchange pen and paper for a seat by your side ...”52 In the unconscious dreams, Brown’s anxieties about loss and separation become tangible. In one especially evocative dream she reports to Primus, she describes being dressed in black, poised to marry another woman, and worried that her male suitor, Mr. Tines, would find out. In the same letter she tells Primus, “I also dreampt of you two night[.] [O]ne night I was standing and seeing you caress another lady and not me[.] [H]ow bad I did feel[.]”53 More than anything else, the letters reveal the intense, complex emotional entanglement between the two women, which was complicated even further by the men with whom they were variously entwined. Expressions of jealousy are pervasive, regarding both male and female rivals. “I dont thank Miss C hugging you lip so closely,” Brown writes in a long, chatty letter in which she also reports that “time will tell” whether she will get more “attached” to Mr. Tines.54 Conflict and tension arise over issues of trust and fidelity between the women, as well as between the women and the men. An example of the former occurs when Brown is working in a boarding school in 1867 and she attempts to assuage Primus’s fear of sexual competition. “If you think that is my bosom that captivated the girl that made her want to sleep with me[,] she got sorely disappointed enjoying it for I had my back towards her all night and my night dress was button up so she could not get to my bosom. I shall try to keep you favorite one[,] always for you,” Brown assures Primus.55 Brown finds herself in Primus’s position, however, when Mr. Tines becomes too “friendly” with another woman, provoking her own jealousy.56 “I dont know about being Mr. Tines hearts Idol. I don’t think I am,” she reports to Primus.57 What are we to make of the male lovers, suitors, and bedmates who are a constant presence throughout the correspondence? Griffin suggests that the women’s openness about the men in their lives is evidence that they did not see 50

 Ibid., 55.  Ibid., 65. 52  Ibid., 142. 53  Ibid., 108. 54  Ibid., 91-2. 55  Ibid., 228. 56  Ibid., 219. 57  Ibid., 190. 51

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“these secondary flirtations as threats to their relationship.”58 I would like to offer a different interpretation, fodder perhaps for yet another narrative: the two women maintain an intimate relationship that both excludes and includes men. Thus coupling and triangling occur simultaneously. Brown’s references to the two men with whom she is most seriously involved, one of whom she eventually marries, make this most apparent. According to Brown’s letters, Mr. Lee and Mr. Tines not only know Primus and interact with her; they also regard Primus as an active participant in their relationship with Brown. “Darling I rec those things by Mr. Lee,” Brown reports to Primus in an 1861 letter.59 A year later Brown writes, Mr. Lee “inquired very particular for your health and what do you think he wants to know[?] [W]hat do you think of me tramp over his heart? Weather you approve of it are not.” After telling Primus that Lee wants to marry her, Brown says, “Dear Rebecca I never shall love any person as I do you.” 60 Although Brown proclaims her true fidelity is to Primus, she nevertheless remains involved with Lee. This same situation recurs with Mr. Tines. In an 1865 letter, Brown writes that Mr. Tines “told me twice to give his kindest regards to you ... he also said he spent a very pleasant time in your society.”61 Tines is clearly in Brown’s consciousness, since she reports “wak[ing] up in the night and keep[ing] awake for an hour at a time” thinking about Primus and “sometime once in a while Mr. Tines.”62 But again, Brown also assures Primus that although she loves Tines, she is “not fasinated and never will [be].”63 In both these cases, Brown is connected to Primus at the same time that Primus is connected to the men and the men are connected to Brown.

Conclusion: The Past is Ultimately Unknowable Ruminating on these complicated, triangular relations brings us back to the complicated, triangular relations Beloved Sisters also creates. As readers we are connected to Griffin, our “mythmaker” and guide, as well as to the nineteenthcentury letter writers. Through this relation, we are rooted in the present moment and we also transcend it. Held safely within the parameters of the text, we inhabit a utopia in which we know our origins as civic-minded freedom-fighters, confirm   Ibid., 37. Griffin reiterates this point when she comments on Brown’s response to Primus’ disclosure that she “slept with a fellow.” “This surprising tidbit goes unexplained in Addie’s next letter,” Griffin writes, “but it certainly suggests that Rebecca shared the most intimate details of her life with Addie and that the suggested relationship was not viewed as a threat to their own” (130). 59  Ibid., 49. 60  Ibid., 63. 61  Ibid., 88. 62  Ibid., 104. 63  Ibid., 142. 58

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our belief in communal values, and recognize that love and desire cannot be constrained by class divisions and heterosexual norms. Paradoxically, however, the triangular relations also place us in an unstable, indeterminate, postmodern fiction, a hallmark of epistolary novels.64 Griffin concludes Beloved Sisters in triangular relation: an afterword, appendix, and essay. While on the one hand, the three pieces together reinforce the theme and aesthetics of collectivity, on the other, they underscore the text’s inability to tell a coherent story and effect a seamless merge between centuries. In the final analysis, the concluding triangular texts expose the illusion of historical continuity, communing, and transparency that Griffin so fervently attempts to author. It is the yearning for this utopian condition that ultimately remains. In the first text of the triangular configuration, Griffin narrates the story of her research trip to Royal Oak, Maryland where she goes to find the school in which Primus worked. The language, texture, and emotional resonance of Griffin’s afterword evoke Alice Walker’s now classic description of locating Zora Neale Hurston’s grave. Thus Griffin unites herself to Walker in a shared political project: the memorialization of both the search for, and the rediscovery of, black women in history. Like Walker, Griffin affirms the central importance of the black community as active agents in the preservation of historical memory. 65 It is, after all, only because the “handsome, fortyish black” male cab driver suggests that Griffin would “do better to talk to some of these older black folk down here,” that Griffin finally locates the correct building. Griffin concludes the essay by paying tribute to the ethic of collectivity: “I find Rebecca’s school, not in the Inventory of Historic Sites or in the silence of the library, but through the insistence of a black entrepreneur and the memory of a gracious lady who offered me a cold drink on a hot July day.”66 The second text in the triangular configuration is an appendix that contains additional letters from members of Brown’s and Primus’s community. Once again, this section reinforces the themes of collectivity and connection in that it presents a variety of voices, speaking in different registers, to different recipients. We hear, for example, Primus addressing her employer in a formal, business-like cadence, asking him to send her paycheck to her mother because it would be more convenient “as the nearest bank is eight miles” away.67 We hear Charles Thomas, whom we learn in the next section eventually becomes Primus’ husband, thanking

64

 Altman, 211.  There are several parallels between Alice Walker’s “Looking for Zora” and Griffin’s afterword. Both, for example, include details of the journey such as how they travel, where they conduct research, and whom they interview. For both Walker and Griffin, the most important information comes from older black people who have some kind of connection with the historical subjects and the black community with which they were associated. 66   Griffin, 267-9. 67  Ibid., 271. 65

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Primus’s mother for a donation and extolling the virtues of her “highly esteemed daughter.”68 Yet the appendix also makes us question how much we think we know about the letter writers and their community. Why, for example, does a black female colleague of Primus’s, writing in a letter to Primus’ sister, Belle, relate that she is “astonished at Addie Brown [and does] not know what to make of her”?69 Who preserved “the only letter to Addie that we have”?70 Is it written by Joseph Tines, the man to whom she was married? How did this letter writer come to be a miner? Does the letter end abruptly because parts of it are missing, or because the letterwriter was interrupted? The third and final text is an essay by David O. White entitled, “Rebecca Primus in Later Life.” In the essay, White describes his discovery of the Primus family papers and the interviews he conducted in the 1970s. By ending the book with White’s first-person narrative, Griffin once again situates her work in relation to others. Significantly, she chooses to conclude the book not with her own words, but rather with those of a fellow scholar who “shared much of his early research on the Primus papers and was always there to answer a question, send a photograph, and offer encouragement.” 71 This decision reinforces the notion that historical reclamation is a recurring process in which Griffin is just one individual contributor. Moreover, by sandwiching the nineteenth-century primary sources in between the essays by the two twentieth-century researchers, Griffin once again creates the illusion of a dynamic connection between historical periods. Unlike Griffin, however, White suggests that this relation is possible because of institutional repositories. The letters that Primus kept for so many years, White informs us, ended up in a Hartford Hobby Shop, but they were eventually acquired by the Connecticut Historical Society in 1934.72 In the afterword, Griffin offers a different perspective. It is not the archive that preserves history, she suggests, but rather the living embodiment of African American collectivity. Yet, when Griffin’s view is read alongside White’s, it is clear that she is arguing for the necessity of both: the archive and the oral transmission of African American descendents make the past accessible. Ultimately, however, Beloved Sisters demonstrates that neither archival sources nor living memories guarantee the past’s accessibility. Although Griffin attempts to author a satisfying story of historical communing, in the end the cacophony of voices destabilizes her efforts. The final chapters of the text leave us confused and uncertain, confronted with the awe-inspiring realization that the past is ultimately unknowable. In 1868, Brown’s letters to Primus “cease after February”; she dies

68

 Ibid., 274.  Ibid., 272. 70  Ibid., 276. 71  Ibid., xi. 72  Ibid., 284. 69

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two years later at the age of twenty-eight.73 Primus moves back to Hartford in 1869 and reenters, in White’s words, “the world of historical obscurity.”74 What White does discover, however, is that Primus married Charles Thomas “[s]ometime between 1872 and 1874.” White’s observation that Thomas’s move to Hartford “and his immediate association with Rebecca indicates that they had made a greater impression on each other than her letters reveal,” reminds us that letter writers sometimes exclude as much as they include. White then reports that he can find no evidence of the death of Thomas’s wife. Were Primus and Thomas involved in an adulterous relationship? White refuses to believe it: “My personal journey in the study of Rebecca and her values makes me believe that somewhere in the records of Maryland is a different explanation. I only wish I had found it.”75 Human imagination fills in what the records lack. White’s interviews make clear that stories about Rebecca Primus are part of the community’s collective memory. Relatives report that “family lore had always been that Sarah Thomas ‘died of a broken heart’ when her husband left her for the New England schoolteacher.”76 Is the adulterous Primus the same woman who “attended church every Sunday,” “read the Bible every day,” and was known as “‘the nearest thing to being a saint’ that anyone knew”?77 Like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, Rebecca Primus invites the community’s fanciful imaginings. One person thought Primus had taught in South Carolina; another believed she and her husband “had been missionaries in Africa”; and yet others were convinced she and Thomas were the parents of a son whose picture they recalled seeing in “Rebecca’s room.”78 Encountering this information in the last pages of Beloved Sisters compels us to remember that interpretation is key to historical narrative. It also makes us long for a story that transforms the mysterious and contradictory fragments of the “epistolary mosaic” into a coherent narrative. The longing, however, is generative rather than precluding: it invites readers to invent other kinds of stories, thereby keeping Brown and Primus alive and present. Like an epistolary novel that defies closure, Beloved Sisters assures that these two African American letter-writing women will continue to live in readers’ imaginations.

73  Ibid., 235. Hansen says that Brown is twenty-nine when she dies. Hansen suggests two possible reasons why Brown stops writing in 1868: Her marriage to Joseph Tines may have fractured the women’s relationship, or “subsequent letters were lost or destroyed (“No Kisses,” footnote 68, 180). 74   Griffin, 280. 75  Ibid., 281. Hansen provides information about Thomas that differs from White’s. In her account, Thomas and Primus marry in 1872 when Thomas was a “recent widower” (“No Kisses,” 171). 76  Ibid., 281. 77  Ibid., 283. 78  Ibid., 283-4.

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Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (eds), Introduction, in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983). Altman, Janet Gurkin, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). “Constitution of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem” (1832), in Dorothy Sterling (ed.), We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984). Decker, William Merrill, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Dobson, Joanne, Northbury Papers (New York: Bantam Books, 1999). Earle, Rebecca (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). Gaines, Ernest J., A Gathering of Old Men (New York: Knopf, 1983). Griffin, Farah Jasmine (ed.), Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). Hansen, Karen V., “‘No Kisses Is Like Youres’”: An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American Women During the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Gender & History, 7.2 (August 1995): 153-82. —— A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Hewitt, Elizabeth, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Morrow, Diane Batts, Review of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends, ed. by Farah Jasmine Griffin, The Journal of Southern History, 67.1 (February 2001): 175-76. Novak, Barbara, The Margaret-Ghost (New York: George Braziller, 2003). Perry, Ruth, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1980). St. Pierre Ruffin, Josephine, “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women” (1895), in Gerda Lerner (ed.), Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1973). Walker, Alice, “Looking for Zora,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).

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Index References to illustrations are in bold

abolitionism aesthetic 201-2 John Brown 201, 208, 211 print culture 208-9 Walker 180 see also slavery Adams, Abigail 225 Adams, John 35, 40, 46 Defense of the Constitution ... of the United States 44, 45 on letters 48 see also Warren-Adams correspondence Adams, John Quincy 57 Adams, Samuel 46 Aguilar, Grace, Women’s Friendships 258 Alcott, Bronson 103 Alger, William Rouseville, The Friendships of Woman 117, 133 Allen, Elizabeth Akers 123, 131 Allen, Paul 90 Life of Charles Brockden Brown 83 Altman, Janet Gurkin 6, 7, 161, 184, 192n39, 241, 251n7, 252 Epistolarity 3, 200n17 “American Adam” 73n67 American Revolution invocation of, by John Brown 208 Mazzei on 29 Warren on 35, 36, 37, 40-41, 44, 228 American Scholar notion, R.W. Emerson 60, 67, 68 Anderson, Benedict 33 Anderson, Bonnie 249n1 Anderson, Osborne 204 Anderson, Rufus, Memoir of Catharine Brown 139-40, 145, 149, 152, 153 Brown on deathbed 155, 156 and Native Americans 139 popularity 140

Ard, Patricia 72 Atlantic Monthly 120 Austin, Dr. Harriet 190 authenticity, in letters 79, 80, 83, 145 Bakhtin, Mikhail 19, 115 Bannet, Eve Tavor 9, 12, 32, 33, 35, 80, 142n8, 146, 152 Empire of Letters 5, 6-7, 192n40 Barker, Anna 107, 108, 111, 112 Barnard, Sir John 21 Barnum, P.T. 172 Barry, William David 122n29 Barstow, Wilson 119 Barton, David & Nigel Hall, Letter Writing as a Social Practice 4 battlefield, women on 186, 187, 194, 246 Beden, J.R. 186 Beccaria, Cesare 21n8 Beecher, Henry Ward 202, 257 Benardin, Susan 145 Bennett, Lerone Jr. 216 Berke, Nancy 249n1 Berlant, Lauren 164, 165, 171 Berlin, Ira 243 Bertolini, Vincent J. 173n39 Bildungsroman, female, Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends as 258-9 biography as hybrid genre 139n2 use of letters 81, 83-4, 85, 139-40 Bland, Caroline & Máire Cross, Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing, 1750-2000 4, 100n6 Bloomer, Amelia 180 Bolingbroke, Viscount 39 Booth, Josephine 260n45 Boston Courier 121 Bourdieu, Pierre, symbolic capital 182n8

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Bowers, Fredson 229 Brainerd Mission School 139n1 Braudy, Leo 43 Bringhurst, Joseph Jr., Charles Brockden Brown letters 83, 84, 87-90, 91, 92, 94-5, 96-7 Brown, Addie 254, 257 literacy development 258-9 Primus, letters to 249, 251, 257, 258-9, 261-2 relationship 259-63 Brown, Catharine (Cherokee) address to readers 146-7, 152 Cherokee identity 155 conception of world 149 cosmology 147, 149 on deathbed 155, 156 exhorting activities 153-5 letter writing, models 142 letters 140-57 performance 142-3 sample 148 life 139n1 readers’ expectations, awareness of 145 on wilderness 149-50 Brown, Charles Brockden 12 on the anonymous writer 81 biographies 83-4 on friendship 87-8, 89-90, 92, 93-4, 95, 96 on letter writing 87-8, 97 letters adopted personae 84 authenticity/fictionality 81-6, 96 Bringhurst 83, 84, 87-90, 91, 92, 94-5 Henrietta 82-3, 85, 93 authenticity debate 83 to Wilkins 83, 84, 85-7, 94-5, 96-7 on memory 86-7 novels Clara Howard 97 Edgar Huntly 87 Jane Talbot 97 Wieland 87 “The Rhapsodist” series 81-2 “The Story of Julius” 93 Brown, Herbert 93n43

Brown, John abolitionism 201, 208, 211 as Biblical hero 203-4 Harpers Ferry raid 197, 198, 206, 214 legacy 214-17 martyr role, acceptance of 202-3 name changes 212 pictorial envelope 215 prison letters 197-217 in abolitionist historical memory 209 American Revolution, invocation of 208 call to action 205 Foundation Fathers, identification with 210-11, 212 identity formation 199-200, 212-13 last letter, facsimile 207 protest tradition 214-17 slaves, empathy with 209-10, 211-12 time-space abolition 213, 216 “Provisional Constitution” 209 Brown, William Wells, Clotel 209 Bruce, Dickson D., Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865 8 Burns, Connie 127n45 Byron, Lord, individualism 167 Campbell, Elizabeth 200 Canning, Elizabeth, faked kidnapping 20-24 carbuncle symbolism, Fuller 112-13 Carmignani, Giovanni 20 Caspar, Scott E., Constructing American Lives 139n2 Cassuto, Leonard 171 Channing, William Henry 101, 110 character, in letters 143 Charles I, King of England 44 Cherokee people conversion to Christianity 151 removal from land 61n21, 149-50 western education 139n1 see also Brown, Catharine (Cherokee) Cherokee language 153-4 Child, Lydia Maria 202 Christensen, Jerome 18, 28n22

Index Cillerai, Chiara 9, 17 Clark, David Lee 82 Clarke, James Freeman 100, 102 Cohen, Lester 43 Columbian Magazine 81, 82 Columbus, Christopher 69 use of letters 63-4 Complete Letter-Writer, The 79-80, 141 Concord Lyceum 58n10 contact zone, Spanish Caribbean as 62 “contraband” designation, slaves 240 Conway, Rev. Moncure D. 208 Cook, James 69 Cooper, Anna Julia 254 Cope, Sarah Wistar 246 “correspondence,” Noah Webster’s definition 9 cosmopolitanism 17 definition 18 in letter writing 18 Mazzei’s 17, 20, 25, 28 Crane, Caleb 84, 85, 91, 93n44 Cross, Máire see Bland Cuba 57 American annexation 58 slavery, Mary Peabody, abolitionist stance 74 Sophia Peabody anti-conquest aesthetic 74 colonial gaze 70, 73 letters 70-73 on slavery 72 Cushman, Charlotte Hays, relationship with 128 Stoddard’s admiration for 127-8 Cvetkovich, Ann 113 Daily Alta California 120, 129 Dana, Francis 42 Darsey, James 204-5 Davidson, Cathy, Revolution and the Word 4 Davis, George T. 102 de Certeau, Michel, on letters 38 de Thoyras, Rapin 39 Decker, William Merrill 63, 64, 121, 133, 200, 201n18, 251 Epistolary Practices 5, 11 Delany, Martin 246

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Dickinson, Emily 233 Diderot, Denis 18n3 Dierks, Konstantin 8 Dilworth, H.W., Familiar Letter-Writer 79 Douglass, Frederick 198, 202n20, 204, 206, 211, 212, 246 The Heroic Slave 209 Dowling, William 28n21 dress reform and friendship 185 and “hit” 186 and letter writing 184 in Sibyl 182, 183, 184-5, 186, 187-9 Walker 180, 188-9 Du Bois, W.E.B. 197, 216 Dunlap, William 90 Life of Charles Brockden Brown 83 Earle, Rebecca, Epistolary Selves 4, 251n8 Eckermann, Johann Peter, Conversations with Goethe 106 economies, of letter writing 180-83 economies of exchange and individual advancement 189-94 Sibyl 186-7 Elliot, Bruce S., David A. Gerber & Suzanne M. Sinke, Letters Across Borders 4 Emerson brothers 58 Puerto Rican letters 65-70 Emerson, Charles 65 Puerto Rico anti-conquest rhetoric 69 colonial gaze 68-9 Emerson, Edward, Puerto Rico-New England comparison 65-8 Emerson family, influence 60 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 108 American Scholar notion 60, 67, 68 Fuller, epistolary dialogue 101-2, 110-11, 114 self-reliance 99, 112, 115 epistolary novels 79, 80, 82n12, 84n19, 93, 97, 184 Beloved Sisters as 11, 36, 250, 251, 257, 264, 266 scholarship 3-4 Esterhammer, Angela 47

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Federalists, vs Jeffersonians 42 Female Anti-Slavery Society, Salem 252 Ferguson, Robert 38, 46 Fern, Fanny “female woman” challenges 172 self-designation 169, 171 freak, designation as 172 identity changeable 167-8, 169-70 curiosity about 164, 166, 168-9, 172, 173, 175 formation 163, 165 letters male readers 173-4 Olive Branch 161-75 satire 164-5 on marriage 170-71 Ruth Hall and Other Writings 161-2 Fielding, Henry 21 Forten, Charlotte 240n6, 246, 247 Foster, Hannah Webster, The Coquette 4, 80 Foucault, Michel 42 Fox, Charles James 84 Foxe, John, Book of Martyrs 213 Franklin, Benjamin 17, 20, 46 Friedman, Susan 100 friendship Charles Brockden Brown on 87-8, 89-90, 92, 93-4, 95, 96 Brown-Primus 249 and dress reform 185 female 10, 126n44, 127 The Friendships of Women (Alger) 117, 133 Fuller on 101 Mazzei, with Jefferson 17 Stoddard-Sweat 117-18, 120, 121, 126-7, 129, 130, 132, 133 Sweat on 128-9 Warren-Adams correspondence 43-4 Warren-Lincoln 226 Fuller, Abraham 103 Fuller, Margaret alienation, feelings of 104 carbuncle symbolism 112-13 on friendship 101

imaginary refuges 103-4 letters Emerson, dialogue 101-2, 110-11, 114 and identity formation 100-107, 109, 112 Sturgis 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112-13 mythical analogues, use of 107-8 nurturing friends 102 self-reliance 99, 100, 107, 114, 115 on suffering, and insight 105-6 works “Autobiographical Romance” 102, 110 Dial essays 109 “Drachenfels” 109 “The Great Lawsuit” 102 “Leila” 112 “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” 101, 106 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli 114 “The Sacred Marriage” 100 “To the Face Seen in the Moon” 108 Woman in the Nineteenth Century 99, 104, 106 Fuller, Timothy 103, 111 García, Ivonne 9, 57 Garrison, William Lloyd 209, 240 Gascoyne, Sir Crisp 20n7 Gatell, Frank Otto 65 Gaul, Theresa Strouth 1, 10, 139, 180n1, 249n1 To Marry an Indian 8 Gerber, David A., Authors of Their Lives 7 see also Elliot Gerbi, Antonello, The Dispute of the New World 25n13 Gilroy, Amanda & W.M. Verhoeven, Epistolary Histories 4, 163n10 Godwin, Frances Bryant 124n39 Gold, Flora 147, 152 letter to 148 Gold, Michael 216 Goodman, Dena 18n4

Index Grasso, Linda 11, 249 Greg, W.W. 228 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends 249 African American ethic 250 and collective historical memory 250, 264, 266 cross-century communing/collectivity 252-6, 264-5 editorial apparatus 251 editor’s role 252-3, 263-4 as epistolary novel 11, 36, 250, 251, 257, 264, 266 as female Bildungsroman 258-9 male presence 262-3 one-sided correspondence 251-2, 257 plot structures 257-61 unfulfilled longing 261-3 and unknowability of the past 265-6 Grossman, Lionel 47, 52 Hale, Sarah Josepha 181 Hall, Nigel see Barton Hansen, Karen V. 260n45, 266n73, n75 Harman, Dr. Ellen Beard 182 Harper’s 120 Harris, Sharon M. 11, 139n1, 223, 224, 228, 231, 232, 249n1 see also Kamrath Hasbrouck, John S. 180 Hasbrouck, Lydia Sayer 180, 184-5, 190, 193 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 59, 73, 106n37 Hays, Matilda, Cushman’s relationship with 128 Hedge, Frederick Henry 110 Henkins, David M., The Postal Age 7 Henrietta letters (Charles Brockden Brown) 82-3, 85, 93 see also Brown, Charles Brockden, Henrietta Hewitt, Elizabeth 5, 6, 7, 10, 63, 79, 143, 162, 184 Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 5-6 Hicks, Philip 46 hierarchy, in letters 146 historian, role 43 “hit”, and dress reform 186

273

Hoar, Elizabeth 107 Hodges, Willis 212 Holmes, John 82n13 Home, Henry see Kames, Lord How, James, Epistolary Spaces 4 Hudspeth, Robert N. 105, 109 Hume, David History of England 39 Treatise on Human Nature 36 Hutchinson, Thomas 225 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England 37-8 identity formation, via letter writing 19, 24, 33, 92 colonial Americans 8, 18 Fern 163, 165 Fuller 100-107, 109, 112 John Brown 199-200, 212-13 Mazzei 18, 19, 24-5, 27, 32 North American immigrants 7 imagination, and memory 94 individual advancement, and economies of exchange 189-94 Jackson, Francis 202 Jackson, James 190 Jackson, Leon, The Business of Letters 179 Jacobs, Harriet 12, 254 freedom, purchase 245n25 letters, “Life Among the Contrabands” 239, 241, 243, 246, 247 life in Alexandria 246-7 as reporter 240-41 works Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 239, 242, 246 context 243-4 purpose 241 The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers 239, 247 editorial issues 241-2 Jacobs, John S., “A True Tale of Slavery” 247 Jacobs, Louisa Matilda 246, 247 Jefferson, Thomas 57, 208, 211 friendship, with Mazzei 17

274

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Kafer, Peter 82, 83 Kames, Lord (Henry Home) 39, 51 Kamrath, Mark L. & Sharon M. Harris, Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America 8 Kauffman, Linda 199 Kendall, Julia 240n6, 244, 245 Key, Phillip Barton 191 Kilcup, Karen 141n5 Kirkland, Caroline 121 Kolk, Heidi 112 Korb, Scott M. 11, 239 Krupat, Arnold 145 Lacan, Jacques 45 LaCapra, Dominick 40 Lady’s Book 1 land, and Native Americans 149-50 Laurens, Henry 42 Lawton, Sarah Virginia 247 Lazo, Rodrigo 60 Lebow, Lori 102n12 Lee, Pamela 70 Lee, Richard Henry 46 letter writing characteristics 19 Charles Brockden Brown on 87-8, 97 in colonial period 32-3 contexts 5 cosmopolitanism in 18 and dress reform 184 economies of, and community building 180-83 formal characteristics 3 and identity formation 19, 24, 33, 92, 163 as literary genre 1-3, 201n18 manuals 6, 79-80, 141, 190 Murray on 2 and orality 7, 152-3, 155, 157 as performance 142-3 and personality 120 physical conditions of 227 and postal service development 7 and privacy 8 scholarship 4-12 fictional forms 3-4 speech forms in 152-3

suitability for women 163 technologies of 227 see also letters letters Adams on 48 American colonial vision in 58-74 and American journalism 10 American nation-building in 64 authenticity in 79, 80, 83, 145 and authorial interiority 80 biography, use in 81, 83-4, 85 character representation in 143 Charles Brockden Brown, authenticity/ fictionality 81-6 in Charlotte Temple (Rowson) 48-50 Cherokee Catharine Brown 140-57 Columbus’s use of 63-4 as connecting/distancing devices 6, 184, 252-6, 264-5 and contextual narrative 47, 51-2 de Certeau on 38 draft, and historical text 228 Fern, in Olive Branch 161-75 Fuller, identity formation 100-107, 109, 112 hierarchy in 146 information role 6 as life-writing 3 of living persons 45-6 Macaulay’s use of 39-40, 44 in narrative histories 35 as performative acts 47-8 and personal character 47 and public debates 162 Puerto Rican, Emerson brothers 65-70 in Reuben and Rachel (Rowson) 50-52 Stoddard-Sweat 117-33 missing letters 118, 130 and taboo subjects 190, 192 as text 143 transactional character 52 transoceanic 63-4 Walker, in Sibyl 179-94 Warren on 43 Warren’s use of 40-41, 44 see also epistolary novels; prison letters Liberator 198, 241, 244

Index Lily, The 180 Lincoln, Abraham 239 Lincoln, Hannah, Warren, friendship 226 Looby, Christopher, Voicing America 30n26 Lynch, Anne 121 Macaulay, Catharine 228 History of England from ... James I 35, 37-8 influence 36 letters, use of 39-40, 44 narrative, use of 39-40 Maclean, Marie 40 McLoughlin, William 154 “Maine Law” 131 Manifest Destiny concept, United States 58, 59, 67, 74 Martin, J. Sella 203 Martínez-Fernández, Luis, Torn Between Empires 62n25 Matlack, James 118, 127, 130, 131 May, Sarah Russell 246 Mazzei, Philip A Letter on the Behaviour ... 20, 26 narrative strategy 21-4 on the American Revolution 29 cosmopolitanism 17, 20, 25, 28 friendship, with Jefferson 17 letters on the Canning case 20-24 identity formation 18, 19, 24-5, 27, 32 transatlantic 24-33 patriotism 17 translation, notion of 25-7 writings 19 Melville, Herman 205 memory abolitionist, J. Brown’s prison letters 209 C. B. Brown on 86-7 collective historical, Beloved Sisters 250, 264, 266 and imagination 94 national 37-8, Merrill, Lisa 127, 128 Monroe, James 57 Montesquieu, Baron de, The Spirit of the Law 25n13

275

Montgomery, Janet Livingston 227-8 Morrow, Diane Batts 259n41 Murray, David 145, 155 Murray, Jane 146 Murray, Judith Sargent, on letter writing 2 Musgrave, Thomas 206 Mussey, John 120 narrative contextual, and letters 47, 51-2 Macaulay’s use of 39-40 National Dress Reform Association (NDRA) 181 Native Americans 155, 157 and Memoir of Catherine Brown 139 removal from land 61n21 see also Cherokee people Nell, William Cooper 240 New Orleans Picayune 121 New York Herald 198 New York Journal of Commerce 203 New York Ledger 166 New York Tribune 198 Newhall, Rev. Henry 208 Nichols, Danforth B. 244 Nord, David Paul, Faith in Reading 181n6 Norris, Rev. Thomas 164, 166, 173 North American Review 121 North, Lord 225 Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen 106 Nussbaum, Felicity A., The Autobiographical Subject 139n2 Occom, Samson 12, 141n7 O’Connell, Barry 145 Oliver, Kelly 101, 114 O’Neill, Bonnie Carr 11, 161 orality, and letter writing 7, 152-3, 155, 157 Paine, Ann 144 Parker, Theodore 202 Peabody, Elizabeth 59n13, 71 Peabody, Mary Tyler 58 Cuba, anti-slavery 74 Juanita 72 Peabody sisters, influence 60

276

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Peabody, Sophia Amelia 58 Cuba anti-conquest aesthetic 73 colonial gaze 70, 73 letters 70-73 on slavery 72 The Cuba Journal 59, 70 performance, letter writing Cherokee Catharine Brown 142-3 Warren-Adams correspondence 46-52 Perry, Ruth 251n9 personality, and letter writing 120 Phillips, Wendell 198, 208, 213-14 Portland Transcript 121 postal service, development, and letter writing 7 Potter, Laura 150-51 Pratt, Mary Louise 62, 63, 68 Primus, Rebecca 249, 254, 255-6 Addie Brown, relationship 259-63 letters from Addie Brown 249, 251, 257, 258-9, 261-2 to family 249, 255 missing 249, 257 prison letters, John Brown 197-217 and abolitionist historical memory 209 as new founding document 202 as literary genre 200-201 privacy, and letter writing 8 Puerto Rico 57 American annexation 58 Charles Emerson anti-conquest rhetoric 69 colonial gaze 68-9 Emerson brothers’ letters 65-70 New England, comparison 65-8 Putnam, George 121 Putzi, Jennifer 10, 117 Quirke, Carol 249n1 Ram’s Horn, The 211, 212 Reconstruction era 58, 208, 240, 241, 246 Richards, Jeffrey H. 11, 40-41, 223 Richardson, Samuel, Sir Charles Grandison 95 Rieser, Michael 249n1

Ringe, Clark & Donald 84 Ripley, Rev. Ezra 65 Ropes, Hannah 245 Round, Phillip H., “Neither Here Nor There” 8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, La Nouvelle Héloise 93 Rowe, John Carlos 58 Rowson, Susanna Charlotte Temple 4, 36 letters in 48-50 Reuben and Rachel 36 letters in 50-52 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre 253 Ryan, Susan 146, 155 St. John, Henry 39 Sawbridge, John 37 Schneider, Bethany 147, 149 self-reliance Emerson 99, 112, 115 Fuller 99, 100, 107, 114, 115 separate spheres issue 163 Sibyl business nature of 183 contributors, physicians 181, 185 dress reform in 182, 183, 184-5, 186, 187-9 economies of exchange 186-7 foundation 180 medical discourse 185-6 subscriptions, Walker’s call for 182 Sickles, Daniel 191 Sickles-Key murder trial 187, 191 Silverman, Johathan 249n1 Sinke, Suzanne M. see Elliot slavery abolition 239-40 Cuba 72, 74 see also abolitionism slaves “contraband” designation 240 John Brown’s empathy with 209-10, 211-12 philanthropic agencies 240 Smith, Elihu Hubbard 97n51 Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll 126n44, 129 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 118

Index Spanish Caribbean 9, 57, 58, 59 as contact zone 62 see also Cuba; Puerto Rico Spanish-American War (1898) 58 speech forms, in letter writing 152-3 Stanton, Domna, The Female Autograph 3 Stauffer, John 205, 210, 214 Steadman, Jennifer Bernhardt, Traveling Economies 179, 183n10 Stearns, George 208 Steele, Jeffrey 10, 99 Stern, Julia A., The Plight of Feeling 4 Stevenson, Hannah 240n6, 244 identification 245 Stoddard, Elizabeth 117 Cushman, admiration for 127-8 difficult personality 129-30, 130-31 drinking 131 letters, to Sweat 117-33 literary salons, frequenting 121-2 Lolly Dinks’ Doings 120 Macbeth allusion 127 marriage 122, 123-4 motherhood, attitude to 124, 126 self-doubt 122 Sweat friendship 117-18, 120, 121, 126-7, 129, 130, 132, 133 rupture with 131-3 sample letter 125 see also letters, Stoddard-Sweat Stoddard, Richard Henry 118, 119, 121, 125 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 203, 209 Strafford, Earl of 44 Sturgis, Caroline, Fuller, correspondence 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110 Sweat, Lorenzo 120, 123, 131, 132 Sweat, Margaret Mussey difficult personality 130n56 on friendship 128-9 letters, Stoddard 117-33 marriage 122-3 review, Friendships of Women (Alger) 117, 133

277

works Ethel’s Love Life 120, 128-9, 133 Highways of Travel 121 Hither and Yon by Land and Sea 121 Stoddard, friendship 117-18, 120, 121, 126-7, 129, 130, 132, 133 rupture 131-3 see also letters, Stoddard-Sweat Sweat, Sarah 119 taboo subjects, and letters 190, 192 text, letters as 143 Thomson, C. Bradley 44-5 Thoreau, Henry David 199, 201, 204, 209, 213n81, 214 Tillotson, Dr. Mary 182 Tilton, Eleanor M. 82n13 translation, Mazzei’s notion 25-7 Trodd, Zoe 11, 197 Tuckerman, Jane 100, 104, 105, 107 Turner, Nat 209 United States anti-conquest rhetoric 69-70 colonial vision, in letters 58-74, 64 Cuba, annexation 58 Manifest Destiny concept 58, 59, 67, 74 Puerto Rico annexation 58 Texas, annexation 58 United States Telegraph 243 Verhoeven, W.M. see Gilroy Virginia Gazette 19, 25, 27 Waldron, Karen E. 161 Walker, Alice 264 Walker, Alvah & Vesta 180n1 Walker, David, Appeal to the Colored Citizens 209 Walker, Dr. Mary abolitionism 180 American Civil War, service 193 dress reform 180, 188-9 foundling hospital, call for 192-3 Hit 186 letters on dress reform 186, 188

278

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

to Sibyl 179-94 on Sickles-Key murder trial 187, 191 on women on battlefield 187 Walker, Vesta 183 Ward, Samuel 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 Warren, James 229, 231, 234 Warren, Mercy Otis Hannah Lincoln, friendship 226 History of the ... American Revolution 35, 36, 228 letters, use of 40-41, 44 identities 232 letter writing, working methods 227-8 on letters 43 letters annotation 235 capitalization 234 collections 231 editing issues 224-5, 226-30, 233-4, 235-6 Letterbook 229-31, 235 networks 224-6 punctuation 233 spelling 234-5 see also Warren-Adams correspondence on Macaulay 37 Winslow Warren, correspondence 232-3 Warren, Winslow, Mercy Otis Warren, correspondence 232-3 Warren-Adams correspondence 35, 39, 41-53, 231

friendship 43-4 narrative argument 41-6 performance of letters 46-52 Washington, Col Lewis 206 Watt, Stephen 81n5, 84, 90n34 Weaver, Jace 150 Wheelock, Edwin 204 White, David O., “Rebecca Primus in Later Life” 265, 266 White, Hayden 36 Whitman, Walt 246 Wilbur, Julia A. 246, 247 Wilkins, William Wood, Brown letters 83, 84, 85-7 Willis, Nathaniel Parker 241 Wilson, Harriet 254 Winthrop, Hannah 225 Witherington, Paul 82n12 “woman question” 162 women, on the battlefield 186, 187, 194, 246 Woods, Leonard, Memoir of Mrs. Harriet Newell 142 Wyss, Hilary 139n1, 145n20 Writing Indians 8, 141n7 Yellin, Jean Fagan, Harriet Jacobs: A Life 242 Zaczek, Barbara Maria 200 Zamorska, Krystyna 249n1 Zbornay, Ronald J., “The Letter and the Fiction Reading Public in Antebellum America” 4 Zimmerman, Everett 43