Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America 9780226818498

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AWKWARD RITUALS

Edited by Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers by Charles McCrary Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance by William Robert Profaning Paul by Cavan W. Concannon Neuromatic; or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain by John Lardas Modern Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation by Ellen Gough Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism by Brenna Moore The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris by Elayne Oliphant Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona by Susannah Crockford The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity by Maia Kotrosits

AWKWARD RITUALS Sensations of Governance in Protestant America

DANA W. LOGAN

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81848-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81850-4 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81849-8 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226818498.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Logan, Dana Wiggins, author. Title: Awkward rituals : sensations of governance in Protestant America / Dana W. Logan. Other titles: Class 200, new studies in religion. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Series: Class 200, new studies in religion | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2021054314 | isbn 9780226818481 (cloth) | isbn 9780226818504 (paperback) | isbn 9780226818498 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Rites and ceremonies—United States—History—19th century. | Rites and ceremonies—United States—Case studies. | Protestants—United States—Social life and customs—19th century. | WASPs (Persons)— United States—Social life and customs—19th century. | United States— Civilization—1783–1865. | United States—Social life and customs—1783–1865. Classification: lcc br525 .l54 2022 | ddc 203/.8—dc23/eng/20211116 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054314 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 2 3 4

Uncomfortable Rites in Early Republican Freemasonry 21 Conventional Behavior in the American Bible Society 49 Involuntary Association in the American Seamen’s Friend Society 74 The Head and the Hands in Catharine Beecher’s Domesticity 98

Epilogue: Awkward Ritual, Once More with Feeling 121 Acknowledgments 125

Notes 127

Bibliography 163

Index 177

INTRODUCTION When George Washington dedicated the United States Capitol building in 1793, he did so clad in his masonic apron. He placed a silver plate upon the building’s cornerstone and adorned it with the masonic symbols of corn, oil, and wine.1 Throughout the early republic, the Freemasons of New-York (as New York City was called) also performed their role as civic leaders by attending parades in full masonic dress and dedicating courthouses, state houses, churches, and forts. During the War of 1812, masons consecrated New-York’s “Fort Masonic” by processing toward the site of the fort, where De Witt Clinton, the mayor of New-York and the Grand Master of New-York Masons, initiated the building process by calling for the voluntary participation of all citizens in “the completion of the works of defense.”2 The New-York Masons modeled this citizenship by contributing one day of work.3 The consecration of Fort Masonic was representative of ritual governance in the Northeast during the early republic: performed by an organization defined by its religious and civic mission, imbued with choreography that was standardized long before Americans rejected a monarchy, and finally, done with a bit of theatrical flourish. The members of the lodge did not build the fort, after all. It is as if they built the fort. The early republic of the United States is often illustrated through visible and inclusive rituals that represent the horizontal possibilities of the postRevolutionary world: revivals, parades, and riots. Unlike accounts of these populist practices, the history of sovereign ritual in the United States necessarily includes performances devoid of charisma, spectacle, or public visibility. While many sovereign rituals in the early United States occurred in public, they often produced their material effects behind closed doors. For example, after Freemasons consecrated buildings in public, they retired to secret meetings in which they performed rituals of initiation closely guarded

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from public view. Gathered together without an audience, masons ritualized their power in a manner distinct from Clifford Geertz’s foundational theory of sovereign ritual, or what he calls the “theater state.” Geertz emphasizes that political power is visible, and that through ceremonial spectacle it becomes real.4 Sovereign ritual in the United States, however, made political power real through rituals that invited no audience but assured a public that “business as usual” was happening behind closed doors. The experience of being governed in American life often feels unworthy of attention. By introducing the category of sovereign ritual to American public life, I am resisting several tendencies in the study of American religious history and in ritual studies more broadly. Sovereign ritual is inherently hierarchical and mimetic. It is how leaders make their power feel real. A king must create an artificial sensation of his presence far beyond his actual body.5 Sovereign ritual thus has a quality of sensual trickery: ritual actors communicate their power by artificial techniques of presentation that make them seem larger or more authoritative than they would otherwise appear. This book will argue that sovereign ritual in the United States is inherently awkward. The trick of behaving as if you are the authority feels incongruous in a country that did away with kings. Embodying authority in the context of democracy is an uncomfortable practice, like wearing a costume that was not quite made for you. As Freemasons, evangelicals, and other northeastern elites inhabited the head of the body politic in the early nineteenth century, they acted out wooden choreography, contorting their bodies into strange positions, forcing themselves to sit for hours at meetings, and speaking in foreign voices to demonstrate their capacity for moral representation. Leadership in the United States is a highly mannered, and thus trying, affect to inhabit. Focusing on American religious bodies’ cultivation of sovereign power, with its consequent contrived affects, challenges the distinction of ritual as instinctual against theatrical practice as artificial. Catherine Bell insists that ritualization is distinct from performance even if it is not defined in reference to the “religious” or the “sacred.” By distinguishing some actions as formal and special, ritualization creates “ritualized agents, persons who have an instinctive knowledge of these schemes embedded in their bodies.”6 Bell’s account thus renders ritual into a form of embodiment akin to Bourdieu’s habitus, which feels natural rather than temporary or affected. Similarly, Saba Mahmood’s influential account of piety argues that the techniques of ritual practice remake the actor through the ethical virtues she practices. Thus, even if the ritual doesn’t start out feeling natural, through ritual the

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actor achieves a lasting embodiment of her ethical tradition. Both of these accounts assume a collapse (or inherent absence) of the distance between actor and script implicit in the theatrical model of taking on a role. This assumption—that rituals are inhabited without the “as if ” of play—misses essential functions of representation in ritual. Governing rituals allow people to behave “as if ” they were a sovereign, or to take on and then shed a mantle of sacred authority. Historians of American religion tend to ask how ritual allows individuals to govern themselves rather than how ritual allows an individual to govern others. The field has emphasized religious practice’s disruption, or subtle reworking, of religious orthodoxy. Thus the study of American religious practice does not engage representation in the political or mimetic sense, which is precisely the double power of political ritual in the age of democracy.8 This disinterest in governance stems from the field’s commitment to highlighting subjects’ individual agency as well as from an anxious desire to carve out a space for religious practice, and thus religion as a category, against a broad array of practices such as political, artistic, and playful activities. But civic governance and its attendant rituals cannot be neatly divided between secular and religious authority, nor can it be divided between agential and oppressive effects. Governing in the United States is a contradictory affair, a practice that boards of directors, bosses, and college presidents enact dutifully even if they would never verbally endorse the hierarchical principles that their actions perform. Thinking with the category of sovereign ritual thus helps us step out of some well-worn debates about ritual, and in particular rituals in American life, as strategic or coercive. There is docility and agency at play in the rituals we enact as a matter of procedure. To feel awkward in a ritual demonstrates that you might have a bone to pick with the whole apparatus, but not enough to just not do it. Yet as I hope to illustrate, rituals of governance do exert force on other humans whether or not the ritual actors feel awkward. In this study I turn away from the hyper-focus of civil religion on presidents and charismatic personalities and instead turn to those ordinary people who enacted quotidian demonstrations of power in the context of American civil society. When we think about rituals that govern in American life we can too easily slip into the language of tyranny, imagining the loud despot ordering us about from the dais. I argue that we feel the sensations of ritual governance much more frequently at work, at school, in domestic economies, and in our volunteer work and activist associations. This study provides ways of describing how those key activities of American life—whose ritual qualities are often over7

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looked because they do not take place at explicitly religious institutions— move our bodies in regular if not awkward choreographies.

S O V E R E I G N R I T U A L’ S H I S T O RY

Americans violently and definitively broke with their monarchical past in the American Revolution, but post-Revolutionary Americans still participated in a culture shaped by metaphors of the king’s body. Masonic consecrations and the other governing rituals, between 1790 and 1850, that I will describe in this book share a basic formal structure with medieval conceptions of the social body. Further, in the transition from monarchs to the rise of democracies, corporations played a key role in extending the power of the king far beyond his physical body. Feeling governed in the United States depends on both of these traditions: a sense that political power is divinely endowed, and a belief that we are subject to that power through the intermediary of corporations (a category that includes businesses, nonprofits, clubs, churches, and almost every organization of American social life). Sovereign ritual developed out of legal traditions in Europe that imagined all political governance deriving from the king’s two bodies. The king’s two bodies, as a cultural and legal concept, cannot be neatly divided between religious and secular lineages. The legal concept’s most famous formulation—“The king is dead, long live the king”—is a statement of law, theology, and political science. Medieval English law argued that the king’s natural body could die while his body politic remained immortal.9 These two bodies, however, came together in one person as the “Body Corporate,” which allowed the sovereign and the surrogates of his power to work in concert.10 This medieval conception of sovereignty combined theological and biological metaphors of unity: the Christian church as a single physiological body and the union of man and wife. In this latter case, the groom—Christ— maintains dominance over the church qua bride.11 Together these metaphors formed the basis for the religious dynamic between bishop and flock, pope and church, but also the political dynamic between the king, endowed with divine power, and his people. Subsidiary bodies, such as towns and guilds, became known as corporations and acted as extensions of the sovereign’s transcendent authority.12 Corporations became the bedrock of social organization in England, as they would be subsequently in the northeastern United States. All corpo-

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rations brought individuals together into groups bound by choice rather than kinship, and governed themselves on behalf of the king.13 The corporate body thus demonstrated divine powers of cohesion parallel to the extra-human capacity for immortality inherent in the concept of the king’s two bodies. All corporate bodies—from the company to the religious confraternity—also inherited a germ of this immortality insofar as they lived as “perpetual bodies” despite being composed of mortal individuals.14 In the early modern period, corporations born from the king’s body, such as the East India Company, governed as a “social” body of shareholders and thus transcended individual will and responsibility—a quality that in the modern period would shield individuals from personal liability.15 Churches, businesses, universities, and associations extended from the king’s body, but in the colonial context they also exerted a sovereign power that became total (like an arm disconnected from its former body which nevertheless continues to move), a condition that fundamentally mixed sacred and secular definitions of governance. Even after the American Revolution and the disestablishment of American religion, religious corporate bodies maintained the mixed powers of “churchstateness.” These “ekklesia,” as Pamela Klassen, Winnifred Sullivan, and Paul C. Johnson describe them, “convened under a transcendent sovereignty” and were “authorized to act . . . [as] agents with transformative potential.”16 Thus distinctions such as sacred and secular, or authoritarian and egalitarian authority, cannot fully capture the way that Protestant voluntary associations after the American Revolution drew on this legal and social tradition. Crucially, the legal theory of the king’s two bodies—and the bodies’ superhuman capacities—is also a ritual theory.17 The legal theory developed alongside royal courts’ ceremonies designed to evoke the king’s body even in his corporeal absence.18 Courts developed new royal ceremonies as they faced the problem of accounting for the presence of the second, immortal body during the interregnum, the period between the king’s death and the coronation of a new king. When the French king died in 1422, the court began a custom of making a wax effigy of the king to put on top of his coffin.19 This effigy represented his immortal presence, and in the following centuries it took on a more active role in court life. By the sixteenth century, the French court treated Francis I’s effigy with complete solemnity as a living member of the royal court. The effigy rested on the bed of state in coronation robes and received visitors. Meals were served in his room, where “servants, the bread-carrier, the cup bearer and the carver, with the usher marching before them and followed by the officers of the cupboard . . .

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spread the table with the reverences and samplings that were customarily made. . . . The table was blessed by a Cardinal; the basins of water for washing the hands presented at the chair of the [king], as if he had been living, and seated in it.”20 Effigies, as ritual surrogates, acted on behalf of the absent king, evoking him through artful representation. But the two-bodied nature of the king more broadly required rituals that made the king’s immortal body functional in the absence of a mortal body. Thus, whether he was dead or merely far away, sovereign rituals acted out the drama of his presence. Away from royal courts, the king’s surrogates—including the princes, the guilds, and universities that governed on the king’s behalf—also dramatized sovereign authority. Beginning in the Middle Ages, at every level of political life leaders put on parades, plays, and ceremonies that authorized local power.21 The ornate processions, pantomimes, and saints’ days of early modern Europe dramatized governance in the eyes of ordinary folk.22 Sovereign ritual as practiced in European cities invoked both local and distant symbols of authority: carnivalesque and courtly stylistics, and the rhythms of the physical body with its anatomical and physiological universality, as well as Christ’s distinctively divine and human body. Through these rituals of sovereign display, local officials materialized a distant king’s authority by ritually assuming some of his sacred power for themselves. In the colonial world, where the distance between center and periphery stretched further than court and county, the king’s surrogates also cultivated the vertical and horizontal possibilities of sovereign ritual representation. Colonial corporations acted just like kings on behalf of the king, self-authorizing their rule through processions replete with royal pomp.23 These processions enacted the corporations’ very material power. Following the English model, in which corporations enjoyed monopolies and the right to tax residents via their charters, colonial companies could police, punish, and create social law for colonial inhabitants.24 But colonial corporations also behaved as horizontal governing bodies, demonstrating the equality inherent in the body-of-Christ metaphor rather than the hierarchical dimension represented by the head’s subjugation of the body. In colonial America, the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company cultivated proto-democratic practices—such as voting on colonial policy—that emphasized the potential for shared governance between white settlers and the original company shareholders. Massachusetts colonists idiosyncratically violated the spirit of corporate law by chartering other corporations, such as towns, through the power of their own charter (a move for which the English government punished them by revoking the charter in 1684).25 Away

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from the Crown that authorized their power, colonial corporations made visible their authority by acting like a little state made up of equal co-rulers. The collaboration of white settlers and corporate shareholders should not, however, be confused with a government of and by “the people.”26 American colonial corporations, even those that invited white settlers into their governance, were extensions rather than substitutions for a king. As subjects of the English crown, even if they were unruly subjects, it is unsurprising that colonial American leaders utilized sovereign rituals premised on monarchical presence and absence. What is surprising is how northeastern Americans continued to use the corporate form and its attendant rituals after the break with the Crown. Counter to histories of the United States that emphasize a radical break with monarchy, a history of sovereign ritual demonstrates the persistence of this hierarchical performative tradition throughout the early republic and antebellum period.27 Unlike studies of American life that assume a transition from the sovereignty of the king to the sovereignty of the people, this study participates in a growing body of scholarship that examines the persistence of an intermediary form of sovereignty in American life: namely, the assumed social and political authority of post-Revolutionary corporations.28 Banks, churches, tract societies, charities, fraternal organizations, municipal corporations, colleges, and other “bodies” continued the tradition of corporate sovereignty in the northeastern United States, despite the form’s association with British law.29 Unlike the state (in its federal form), these sources of governance played an immanent role in northeastern Americans’ lives in the early nineteenth century.30 In particular, religious organizations blossomed in the early republic and constituted the majority of the first corporate charters.31 Despite the very real repercussions of disestablishment, religious organizations’ dominance in civil society ensured that religion would play a central role in both early republican law and social custom.32 This book will describe organizations and individuals that played a key role in developing the ritual repertoire of northeastern civil society.33 The specificity of this location is important because it was in the Northeast, and not the South, of the United States that Americans doubled down on the pre-Revolutionary legal structure of incorporation, and in particular religious associations’ management of society via the structure of civil society.34 This book argues that northeastern white civil society defined itself against the riots, mutual aid societies, and use of incorporation by free Blacks and working-class men in the early republic. We should not confuse the proliferation of charters for new white churches and benevolence

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societies in the new republic with Black northeasterners’ strategic use and remaking of social structures during this era.35 One of the key arguments of this book is that, against the alternative forms of social organizing that bubbled up in the new republic, white northeastern civil society made the white elite body constitutive of a properly executed ritualization of social authority. Equal access to the legal structure of the corporation was not the same as equal access to a “civil” body.36 By recognizing how northeastern elites’ governing rituals were evocative of a pre-democratic sovereignty, I am not rejecting the legal and discursive breaks with the king’s body through the American Revolution.37 Rather, I am showing how ritual is a location from which we see how people talk and walk in different tones and rhythms, performing multiple ideological positions at the same time. My book is a provocation to see the ways we find ourselves enacting practices we would never discursively endorse.

R I T U A L S I N A M E R I C A N P R O T E S TA N T C I V I L S O C I E T Y

This book is concerned with the rituals that religious folk performed outside the confines of what we traditionally think of as sacred space. Between 1790 and 1850, American ritual in the Northeast took place in institutions that blended the categories of public and private, religious and secular. Variously called “civil society” or “voluntary associations,” these institutions were the medium through which religion secured an operative relationship to the state and the public sphere in the wake of disestablishment. Civil society was, of course, not the only place religious folk acted; churches and private piety were a vital aspect of early nineteenth-century religiosity, but the religious activity within civil society played a distinctive role in the operation of religion within American society. Associations such as the American Bible Society were spaces where elite northeastern Protestants presumed to act not as sectarians but as religious citizens, and in these spaces white Protestant men and women both symbolically and materially ordered the social body beyond their own congregations.38 I use the term “ritual” to show that religious folk governed beyond the confines of churches when they dominated seemingly secular spaces (corporations, associations, welfare organizations) in the northeastern early republic. As Kathryn Lofton points out, ritual, unlike its sibling “piety,” does not evoke the Christian or, specifically, Wesleyan tradition of individual prayer

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or self-discipline. Ritual, with its connotations of non-Christian religious activity, evokes a lack of intentionality between thought and action. Lofton argues that these connotations are precisely why scholars of American religion have embraced “practice” as an alternative term. “Rather than the cold etic stare of ritual, practice seemed to these scholars to offer an emic embrace, a loving individual care.”39 The people I describe in this book certainly had intentions, but I use “ritual” as a term to communicate the unselfconscious enactment of tradition and its repetitive quality.40 I also use “ritual” to communicate the communal nature of this repetition, as opposed to the crafting of a self (implied in piety) or the navigation of the social by an individual (practice).41 Finally, I use “ritual” because of its foreignness to pietistic Christian history, evoking what was strange and powerful about northeastern elites’ sense of entitlement. Northeastern elites felt empowered to govern because of the unspecific quality of their “religion” in civic spaces. In civil society, unlike in churches, governance was not supposed to feel like it stemmed from a singular religious tradition or a singular human authority. The subjects’ native terms for their own governing authority—civility, sociability, benevolence, and domesticity—evoked a vague sense of Protestant Christian virtue rather than sectarian interests. These terms rejected theological justification and instead promoted enactment, thus making it impossible to accuse any powerful northeastern elite of acting out of privatesectarian interests. I thus use the term “ritual” to get to their native sensibility that authority in civil society stemmed not from theological interests, but from the ritual itself. This sense of ritual is very much connected to the Western tradition of a two-bodied sovereignty, the physical and active body acting on behalf of an always receding head. Ritual thus describes a particular form of activity in American life that governs from an ambiguous origin. I also use the term “ritual” to argue for a different sense of ritual, as an unfashionable set of furniture that societies drag along with them, through revolutions and historical realignments. Ritual in this project linked participants to a rejected past. This book recognizes, with Tocqueville and Bellah, that American civil society was animated by Durkheimian sensations, an atmospheric bonding that united as it compelled.42 However, it also emphasizes how this form of cohesion was informed by a sense of connection to the monarchic past, in which communal coherence stemmed from hierarchies between the king and his people. And this is why historians of American social life need ritual theorists: rituals will always tell us something that law, public discourse, or personal accounts will not. The way we enact differs

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from how we legislate or journal. I argue that we tend to ritualize conservatively.43 Rituals tie us to the past, sometimes in the sense of a set of ideals we honor (this was the lesson of Bellah’s civil religion); but rituals also tie us to a past we have repudiated.

CHAPTER DESCRIPTIONS

This book provides four case studies of what governance felt like in the Northeast between 1790 and 1850. I first introduce secret initiations of white Protestant men into the informal leadership of civil society through Freemasonry. Masons after the American Revolution used initiations to demonstrate that their leadership in society was not merely a legacy of privilege, but an earned status—a quality of American privilege that continues in fraternities across the United States. I then address rituals of evangelicalism, the spiritual style that rose in popularity just as Freemasonry waned in the 1820s. Evangelicals, often defined by their embrace of revivalism, were just as interested in the solemn rituals of corporate governance. Evangelical meetings and conventions highlight the continuity between masonic rituals of civic leadership and the white evangelical sense of authority in American life. Both masons and evangelicals took part in the tradition of sovereign ritual in which corporate bodies met in private in order to govern those outside their membership. Both believed that it was the highly mannered choreography of their rituals that qualified them for civic leadership. If Freemasonry and evangelical bureaucracy demonstrate northeastern elites’ sense that the social body should be led by an elite group of civic leaders, benevolence and domesticity (the subjects of the next two chapters) demonstrate that they also imagined religious governance in more intimate terms, between a charitable Christian and a poor sinner or a mother and a servant. In the 1830s evangelical benevolence performed most of the functions that we now associate with state welfare: the provision of public education, helping the poor, and reforming cultural ills. This provision of aid, specifically in the mission to sailors, relied on a ritual dynamic in which the helper (evangelicals) represented the helped (sailors) both politically and mimetically. Evangelicals ritually adopted the role of those they helped, a form of governance that both empathetically connects those in power to marginal populations and assumes that marginal bodies are uniquely available for cultural appropriation. Much as evangelical benevolence answered

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the question of who would take care of the vulnerable and sinful, domestic ideology answered the question of who would reproduce virtuous citizens. Writers such as Catharine Beecher reimagined the home as a private haven that would cultivate public virtue. The domestic world would be ruled by the mother, and she would embody her governance through the administration of household order. In the final chapter, I describe domestic chores in Beecher’s ideology as a form of governance that hearkened back to a time when the queen was not a distant ruler. The American Bible Society, Freemasons, and Catharine Beecher, as key characters in the history of Protestants’ leadership in public life, share a performative repertoire even if they do not share an archive. They are inheritors of corporations’ sense of ritual authority to govern on behalf of distant authority and to ritualize like kings and queens within the limits of their own territories. The first two chapters of the book are case studies that help us understand the way ritual shapes American social history, and as such they address Americanist concerns of how ritual consolidated hierarchical social power within civil society even as American democracy created more opportunities for horizontal social formations. These two chapters thus demonstrate what it means to treat ritual as both historically contextual and a drag on historical change. The last two chapters, on the other hand, are American examples that speak more broadly to ritual studies’ tendency to romanticize communal bonding and the work of self-crafting. Namely, chapter 3 discusses how to think about the role of political “representation” in ritual, how people become caught up in rituals they themselves never opted into, and how a ritual can appropriate symbolic material from less powerful people. Chapter 4 argues that there is a form of gendered ritual that is useless by design and thus speaks to ongoing debates about ritual as a form of labor. In this chapter I treat Beecher as a ritual theorist who can engage with other ritual theorists such as Catherine Bell.

A W K WA R D R I T U A L

The rituals I describe did not feel natural. Freemasons wrapped themselves up in ropes and tried to pull off a turban. Evangelical missionaries showed up in spaces into which they had not been invited and tried to fit in. Catharine Beecher utilized surrogate bodies (maids) to perform her domestic rituals, creating a tricky dance between head and hand. I use the word “awk-

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ward” to describe the sensations of these rituals, but the native term for my subjects is “civil.” To behave with civility implied an effortful cultivation of artificial behavior.44 Talal Asad, in his genealogy of ritual as a category, notes that the rise of “masques” in courtly behavior in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe created an anxious desire to contrast the essential true self against artificiality of public performance.45 Scholars of ritual have been on high alert in their attempt to shield ritual interpretation from the bias of this early modern anxiety over sincerity.46 This concern, however, misses an entire range of performances that emerged precisely through this early modern distinction.47 Even as the private authentic self was valorized in theology, philosophy, and literature, ritual actors and native theorists (as I describe both Freemasons and Catharine Beecher) mused on the possibilities of artificial action. Contrived performance in the context of early American democracy, however, often took place behind closed doors, with a hint of apologetic embarrassment. I use the term “awkward” in a double sense: to get at the sense in which the embrace of artificial simulation could not entirely be reconciled with ideological positions, and to emphasize the effortful unresolved sensations of this ritual genre. Awkward ritual never becomes fully naturalized in the body. It hovers on the body’s surfaces, emphasizing the distance between head and limb and the discomfort of trying to do two things at once. Awkward ritual entails a complicated relationship with perspective: a sense of performance for another without the presence of an actual exterior audience. Catherine Bell has done crucial work in clarifying that just because a generation of anthropologists treated religious rituals as if a special proscenium had been set up for them to witness the true meaning of ritual, this is not in fact how most rituals work.48 Many of the rituals I describe, however, did anticipate an exterior witness. These prosceniums displayed rituals for the ritual actors themselves, reconfigured as both outsiders and insiders to their own action. American Freemasons, for example, cultivated the distance between ritual actor and audience by using the defining architectural feature of eighteenth-century theater: the proscenium. This frame on the front of the stage defined an ideal line of sight based on Enlightenment conceptions of visual geometry and heightened the separation between performer and spectator.49 In masonic rites, however, the frame of the proscenium was constructed through masonic regalia rather than a physical arch over the stage. This framing device established an exterior perspective on the scene of action.

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Aprons, unlike the scepters and candles used in lodge activities, were not merely props for the narrative of the rite. Worn with the flap left up or down, aprons marked the rank of a mason, making visible his progress in ascending through the ranks.50 Professional artists printed the images on the fabric or painted them by hand and sold them to Freemason clients. There is also evidence that female family members painted the highly detailed images on some aprons.51 The most typical decoration on the aprons was an image of Solomon’s Temple on the front, as well as an array of masonic symbols (the all-seeing eye, the sun, etc.). Copied from imagery on tracing boards (another learning tool within masonry) and on the certificates of membership, these images were often representational, showing not only symbols but also a scene from a biblical or masonic narrative with human or angelic figures.52 One of the most common features of these aprons is a tiled floor (the floor of Solomon’s Temple) which extends toward a convergence point on the horizon, creating an optical illusion of three-dimensional space. The floor in the aprons mirrored the floor depicted in masonic lodges. In the eighteenth century this pattern was drawn on the floor at the beginning of the rites, and in the 1820s it was formalized either as a carpet that could be rolled up or a depiction built into the permanent floor of the lodge.53 In this sense the floor was the stage of the rite, helping the initiates block their movements during the initiation. During the rites, masons performed a “circumambulation” around the floor in order to act out travel, making the floor of the lodge a stage that contracted and expanded to fit the needs of the narrative.54 Thus, the floor, remade into a stage, had no space for an audience. When the stage was drawn, rolled out, or even embedded permanently into lodge floors, all men in attendance became participants in the stage of the rite. The primary distinction between audience and participant thus came from the proscenium represented on the aprons. On aprons, the embroidery and paint depicted the floor of the lodge as an elevated stage, and columns and the border of the apron framed the space inside the image as a space set apart for the special action of ritual (see fig. I.1). Aprons’ images depicted the floor of Solomon’s temple receding to a vanishing point at the horizon line. The steps up to the floor also narrowed at the top in order to give a sense of perspectival depth.55 Through these perspectival techniques the temple floor on the apron located an idealized viewer, set back from the stage and thus capable of seeing its full length. Although masons wore these aprons in public, as I will describe in chapter 1, they argued that the symbolic meanings of their garb were unintelligible to

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Figure I.1 Master Mason Apron, 1800–1825. Probably New York. Museum purchase, Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, 87.36. Photograph by David Bohl.

the uninitiated when they wore them on the street. Thus, although nonmasons could see the aprons, masons imagined that the actions and symbols depicted in aprons could not be understood outside the boundaries of the lodge. Shielded from outside eyes, the proscenium of the apron directed masons to watch themselves, a perspectival proscription clarified by several aprons from the era that depict stories only initiated masons could (theoretically) comprehend. For instance, a Scottish Rite apron painted by hand (fig. I.2) depicts the story of two masons pulling up the body of the Master mason by a rope. The image could refer either to the particular story of two men lowering one another into the vault, or the actions of the thirteenth degree in which this story was reenacted. Both stories were secrets of the fraternity.56 In other cases, the representational figures are masons wearing contemporary dress in the process of ritual enactment.57 In an apron attributed to Lafayette by

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Figure I.2 Royal Arch Apron, 1790–1810. Attributed to Nicholas Hasselkuse (1781–1845), probably New York. Museum purchase, Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, 2014.040. Photograph by David Bohl.

the Grand Lodge of New York (fig. I.3), the artisan depicted an expansive lodge floor as well as several different scenes of ritual action. In the back right corner of the floor, masons are performing the “floor work” of the third degree, holding the candidate in a blanket.58 In the foreground another mason is performing a masonic gesture near candles and the emblem of Solomon’s grave. On either side of the implied proscenium of the temple floor stand two masons guarding the entrance, referring both to opening ceremonies and the role of guards in the various rites. The apron depicts the rites as a performance in progress rather than, as in other examples, a stage set for ritual or a story that corresponds to ritual.

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Figure I.3 Masonic Apron. Published by Brothers Desilver and Webster, 1813. Apron attributed to the Marquis of Lafayette; F4inv-276. Engraving on leather. L: 35 cm W: 28.6 cm (does not include belt). Courtesy of the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library of the Grand Lodge of New York.

In anthropology this form of representation is called “meta-pragmatics,” or the discussion of ritual by ritual actors. These scholars argue against the intuition that ritual is defined by its lack of self-consciousness and show that many rituals include discussion about the ritual by the ritual actors. Ritual manuals, as the historian of religion Laurie Patton points out, are imbued with meta-talk in which participants are not only receiving a blueprint for action but also discussing their potential experience of the action. Meta-talk, some scholars of ritual have argued, might be the very substance of ritual if we understand ritual as part of a field of action that, like play, creates a subjunctive frame around itself (as in a child announcing “we are playing now”).59 Aprons were meta-pragmatic tools, or a way for Freemasons to consider the ritual they were participating in. The implied viewer of the aprons peered into the world of the apron through a red silk lining that replicated the red veils hung in the lodge during the initiations; through this visual technique,

Introduction

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the aprons in the ritual setting became a scene within a scene, within a scene. It is odd to think of a man wearing an apron and looking at the imagery on his lap (or perhaps at the imagery on the lap of the man next to him), and it is difficult to say if this is in fact how these images were used. But the framing of the scenes on the aprons as a performance for another to witness demonstrates that these secret rites were meaningful because they were observable from an exterior viewpoint and thus allowed for the type of meta-reflection that allowed ritual actors to consider their own actions. Ritual that invites the ritual actor to watch himself and his ritual co-actors in action creates a space for an audience, and as the theorists of meta-pragmatics insist, a space for critique or social reassessment.60 Yet the experience of standing back from one’s own action, creating a distance between the viewer and the viewed, also creates a potential sensation of vertigo. The playwright, director, and Marxist theorist Bertolt Brecht counted on this potential effect of meta-reflection. For Brecht, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton argues, “the whole point of acting was that it should be in a peculiar sense hollow or void. Alienated acting hollows out the imaginary plentitude of every actions, deconstructing them into their social determinants and inscribing within them the conditions of their making.”61 As Eagleton points out, the “bad acting” of revolutionary theater is much like the bad acting of a child, miming the emotions and gestures of social convention but not experiencing the synthesis of sign and signifier.62 Meta-pragmatics, coming out of the anthropological tradition of Gregory Bateson, also sees utopian hope in the meta-reflection of play, as a stage set off from conventional behavior where the miming of conventional behavior reveals the social construction of all behavior and thus the possibility of an entirely different way of being.63 But as Eagleton points out, Brecht’s theorization of the revolutionary “alienation effect,” or the self-conscious cultivation of bad acting that will disturb the audience and thus wake them up, is also a theory of a non-liberating form of play. The good actor, or the adult who seamlessly performs the gestures of social convention, is alienated from herself and incapable of reckoning with the artificiality of her own action.64 How then to think about the “bad acting” of the ritual actor, who is neither refusing the social conventions through theatrical overacting nor displaying naively playful behavior like a child? Freemasons’ potential neck-craning, as they peered through the proscenium depicted on their aprons, should call our attention to the awkwardness of meta-ritual reflexivity. Rather than creating a rupture with social convention, awkward ritual creates situations in which ritual actors witness

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their own miming action during ritual, and instead of questioning the entire social structure that undergirds that mimetic performance, are left with sensations of strain and mild embarrassment. On the masonic apron, for example, the visual focusing mechanism of the proscenium emphasized that the performance’s value came from the distance between the performer and his own actions, as he simultaneously acted and peered through the proscenium; but this object and its ritual function also created no easy space in which this image could be contemplated and critiqued. Look! the apron asks, but the eyes have to squint and the neck to twist. Theorists of play have mused about the creativity that is opened up within that space of reflection on action, but masonic aprons produced reflexivity without reflection. If you are watching yourself do something, rather than simply experiencing the action, the distance between self and action can create a sense of fragmentation amplified by the inability to resolve the two forms of experience.65 It is important that masons depicted the proscenium of their own rituals on aprons that they wore, and crucially, that they took off. Aprons, much like the courtly masque of Renaissance Europe, could be donned and discarded based on political efficacy. These disposable frames objectivized ritual, shaping it into a category that could be consciously manipulated rather than fully integrated into the self. This is, of course, the other side of self-reflexivity. If something is a “game,” if the rules of behavior can be cultivated but dissipate as soon as the game is over, manipulation of the social field is just as possible as utopian imaginings. Asad, reflecting on Bacon’s theorization of the masque, argues similarly that when then the display of “proper” behavior is disconnected from the formation of a virtuous self and acquires the status of tactic, it becomes the object of a different kind of theorizing—a meditation not on virtue but on power. But in this case behavioral signs need to be seen as representations conceptually detachable from what they represent; only then can they invite readings in a game of power, a game in which the “true” self is masked by its representations, and where this masking is aptly done.66

Even as Freemasons cultivated civility by wearing aprons, a term we associate more with virtue than with power, they understood their own ritual comportment as an artificial simulation that allowed them to be different men in different contexts. Their claim to social power came from their apt performance of what Asad terms “masked representations.”

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My reading of awkward ritual depends on the notion that elite men and women in the early nineteenth-century Northeast experienced the various tones, choreography, and costumes of civil society with the sensibility of a mask that could be artfully applied and discarded. Yet, by emphasizing the sensation of awkwardness in these enactments, I call attention to the possibilities of discomfort evoked by this ritual posture. Their masks were, after all, a mimesis of the real thing: a king. Copying the posture, lines, and affects of the real thing, yet knowing you are not the real thing, is awkward. Much like the babysitter assuming the tone of a parent and threatening consequences, performances of surrogacy both govern (with real material consequences) and force the surrogate to be two things at once: a conduit of the parent and the avatar of the parent. This is why Asad’s description of the artfully applied, and discarded, masking is a bit misleading in the context of American democracy. For white Protestant northeasterners, sovereignty was artful but always half-heartedly applied, assumed and negated simultaneously. This reading of ritual thus relies on a sense of contradiction, and contradiction does not make sense without an oppositional pairing (thought/ action, structure/anti-structure, audience/performer), which Catherine Bell has shown pervades ritual theories. Bell critiques Geertz, Turner, and Durkheim for relying on these homologies, which unconsciously utilize a Hegelian sense of dialectic.67 But at least in the modern West, and especially in post-Revolutionary America, contradiction existed. People worried about being sincere at the same time that they cultivated their mask; they maintained hierarchical structures at the same time that they tried to distinguish their social structures from European hierarchical structures. As I demonstrate in chapter 4, Catharine Beecher very much wanted to order her maids like feudal subjects, and she also knew that there was something undemocratic about that desire. These contradictions felt uncomfortable to Beecher even as she developed highly technical solutions for navigating them. Sometimes a ritual is alienating because there is a contradiction in culture, but unlike other ritual theorists such as Geertz, I do not argue that ritual successfully mediates these contradictions.68 An awkward ritual is an enactment of contradiction that goes unresolved; thus the contradictions perpetuate themselves. Allowing for contradiction in ritual experience is crucial for recognizing the discomfort caused by Protestantism, liberalism, and capitalism’s rigid separation of subject and object as well as the constant failure of historical actors to maintain the boundaries of these overdrawn

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distinctions. Sovereign ritual in the context of American democracy felt awkward, by which I mean white Protestant northeasterners governed with a sense of contradiction that felt unresolvable. From the perspective of the United States I describe ritual in ways that expand our sense of what makes a ritual powerful: political ritual can be boring, sacred authority can be drab, and earnest ritual can be awkward. Ritual as a category does not always create a synthesis between bodily feeling and ideological commitments; in fact, it is strange that scholars who constantly perform institutional ritual with a half-hearted sigh within academic institutions have not been more sensitive to the awkward possibilities of ritual performance. Our ritual vocabulary must be flexible enough to capture the unresolving contradictions of social life: the consecration of public leaders in secret initiations, the conflation of transparency with record-keeping, as well as the American propensity for ritualizing equality and sacred hierarchy simultaneously. Awkward Rituals argues that rituals do not need to feel coherent with our ideals or natural in bodies in order to be effective. 69

0 1 UNCOMFORTABLE RITES IN EARLY REPUBLICAN FREEMASONRY Freemasonry in the early republic was a club for powerful Protestant men. It is understandably surprising that the Christian—and more specifically Protestant—northeastern United States was such a welcoming atmosphere for men practicing arcane rites; but in northeastern cities after the Revolution, Freemasonry was a popular voluntary association for white Protestant ministers, mayors, esteemed businessmen, and other less famous but propertied white men, especially artisans.1 In 1807 New York City’s Holland Lodge membership included men such as John Jacob Astor, the trade and real estate magnate; De Witt Clinton, the city’s mayor and the senator and governor of the state; and Garret N. Bleecker, founding member of the New York Stock Exchange and future member of the Board of Managers for the American Bible Society.2 Since the earliest years of the United States, communities excluded from white civil society adopted Freemasonry as an opportunity to author their own identities, provide mutual aid, and critique social norms. White male masons did not, however, see these Black, female, and Native American masons as legitimate masons.3 White masons exemplify a key thread in the history of American associationalism: the inherent promise of inclusion evoked by fraternity, and the actual marginalization of non-elite, non-white bodies from the normative body of civil society. Within white masonic ritual, these contradictions bent the white normative body into awkward positions. White Freemasonry’s position in the early republic did not, however, go unchallenged. A few critics in the post-Revolutionary early republic pointed out the absurdity of masonry’s comfortable role in a Protestant-dominated civil society. One critic cited the similarity between masonic “rites” and the idolatry of heathens as well as the liturgy of Catholicism. In an anonymous

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pamphlet from 1807, he complained that the masonic ceremonies involving vestments, sacred objects, and “grandeur” were oddly out of step with the supposed aesthetic values of Protestants. Musing on the pervasive practice of masons consecrating every public building in American cities, he asked, “Is this rite borrowed from Rome Pagan, or Rome Papal? Or from both?”4 Invocations of Temples during these consecrations seemed to discount the New Testament’s de-materialization of the Lord’s temple, the author observed, and if masons truly believed they could consecrate courthouses and other civic buildings, “we see evidence breaking forth, as it were by accident, that the leading characters do not believe in this holiness of chapels, which they would have the common people believe in.”5 At the core of the author’s shock was a sense that American Protestants were not upholding the basic sensibility of the Reformation. “Why all this pageantry and parade?” the critic asked.6 The author pointed out a distinction that would shape masonic and antimasonic positions into the 1820s: how was it possible to reconcile theatrical ceremonies with Protestant values? And secondly, did masons’ interest in theatrical and hierarchical spectacle belie an anti-democratic impulse? The same critic wrote, “Should we see the same multitudes, with [musick], pomp and [fantastic] ceremonies, even lighted candles at noon day, march to lay a corner stone of a building dedicated to the saint whose day they were keeping—a building to be consecrated, with an altar, and a mortal priest to officiate at it, should we not see them countenancing idolatry?”7 All of the accessories and mythical stories that accompanied masonic ceremonies reminded him of Catholics. He wrote: I heard a [gentlemen] lately describing a Romish chapel, and the ceremonies, with the impression, they made on the mind of him a stranger. He described in a few words, but in a lively manner, the leader or master of the ceremonies; his appearance and manner, the Latin prayers, the [chauntings], music from the [orchestra], or organ loft; burning of incense, sprinkling of holy water, &c. And added, that for a moment the question forcibly struck his mind,—Can these people seriously believe in all this pageantry?8

With all this sensory overload, with all the props and costumes, these men could not be serious. And if they did believe they were actually the characters that they played in these ceremonies, what did that say about their capac-

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ity for civic leadership? In published ritual manuals, promoters of masonic rites answered that they were indeed serious. So serious, in fact, that they were prohibited from laughing while performing the rites of the lodge. But masons did not necessarily “believe” in their own pageantry. Masons argued for rites as a category distinct from church liturgies and their own public “ceremonies,” and they argued that this distinctive category shared more with theater than with liturgy because rites cultivated artificiality. Freemasonry formed a crucial bridge between post- and preRevolutionary ideas about the social body. Unlike the aristocratic habits of courts, eighteenth-century masonry encouraged men to be equal, restrained, friendly, and socially minded, and in turn these virtues allowed them to be better capitalists and agents of representative democracy. Despite embodying these hallmarks of democratic sensibility, Freemasonry also inherited many of the ritual functions of royal sovereignty: processions, sumptuous costumes, and monument-building. Just as Protestants were never as disembodied as Calvinist ideology would have us believe, the story of sovereign ritual shows that American civil society was never as egalitarian or as liberal as democratic theory would suggest. Freemasonry preserved the fleshy and decorated body of a sovereign often assumed to be relegated to the pre-Reformation and pre-Revolutionary era within American Protestant corporate life. Masons’ ritual costumes, blocking, and enactments—as opposed to their published oratories—demonstrate the multivalent meaning of civility as both dramatic aggression and quiet restraint. Practicing civility might invoke an image of men rehearsing their table manners, but in fact masons terrorized each other during secret rites by acting out artfully staged violence. Rites that became popular in the post-Revolutionary era were surprisingly nostalgic for royal symbols, accoutrements, and regimented social order. In an era when democratic culture defined itself through the equal access to sovereign power, the temporary mimesis of masonic rites invoked hierarchical sensations. Masonic rites demonstrated that the “royal remains” of the king’s sovereignty that linger in all corporate bodies could take quite literal form behind the closed doors of elite fraternities. Mixing the repertoires of religious ritual and theatrical acting, rites were serious and thus sacred, but also not quite believable pageants.

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T H E W O R L D O F E A R LY M O D E R N F R E E M A S O N RY

The history of Freemasons illustrates the shift toward corporate sovereignty in the early modern period. As the historian Philip Stern argues, the tendency to describe Western history as a direct shift from kings to nations misses the role of corporations as bodies invested with sovereign power. Further, corporations’ capacity for ritualization played a key role in this inheritance. Stern writes that “corporations possessed and employed distinct forms of franchise, ceremony, privileges, and overt and secret rituals that created social bonds and shaped institutional cultures. Such practices inevitably generated their own allegiances and identities, compatible but also potentially in competition with others, including the Crown.”9 Corporations produced, in other words, their own courtly rituals. Historians of American religion often conflate the history of corporations and business, but as scholars of early modern corporations point out, companies based around trade were only one type of corporation.10 Associational life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was legally and culturally indistinct from “corporate” life, and the companies that we associate with the history of business (such as the East and West India Companies) were also rooted in the idea of a “collegium or universitas.”11 Companies, guilds, towns, and religious confraternities were all understood as corporate fellowships endowed with the responsibility of cultivating what Phil Withington calls “corporate citizenship.” Withington describes corporations in seventeenthcentury England as groups of men who developed a culture of “civic aristocracy and honestas as the normative mode of urban governance—that is, by tiers of ‘common councils’ in which the ‘discreet,’ ‘better,’ ‘able,’ and ‘honest’ members of the community were expected to assemble, counsel, and act according to their ‘wisdoms’ and ‘discretions.’”12 In colonial America and in the post-Revolutionary period, as the historian of nonprofit organizations Peter Dobkin Hall has argued, there was little legal distinction between public and private organizations, or business and associational bodies.13 Freemasonry played a critical role in modeling the form of what we would now call a “club,” an organization that exists both for its members’ private pleasure and for a public good. Dobkin Hall argues that as “delegations of public authority—bodies empowered to do the public’s business,” all corporations after 1760 borrowed from Freemasonry’s vision of civil society.14 Thus, beginning with Freemasonry as a crucial node in American sovereign ritual allows us to see how civic leadership and private ritual were

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intrinsically tied together in the early United States, before and after the Revolution. Freemasonry began in seventeenth-century Scotland when lords and merchants began to join masons’ professional guilds. These “non-operative” masons were attracted by the artisan guilds’ esoteric mythology and fraternal bonding, a tradition that the historian David Stevenson has shown pre-dated the arrival of the non-operatives.15 After the guilds shifted to clubs consisting primarily of non-operative masons (by which I mean men who were not tradesmen), the rituals and mythology of the fraternity expanded. Replacing the original tests of membership that itinerant masons had used to recognize one another in new towns, non-operatives developed “catechisms” in which members were initiated through rituals of questioning about civilization’s history. Historians mark the transition to non-operative Freemasonry in the turn to ritualism, or the reprioritization of initiation as the fraternity’s primary function.16 Freemasonry in this new form traveled from Scotland to England, then swept the Continent, becoming especially popular in eighteenth-century France, Germany, and Holland. In all these places it was characterized by the participation of men from a variety of class backgrounds who did not share religious or political ties. Even the fraternity’s famous deism was one among many possible religious affiliations represented in the lodges. The fraternity’s rise in Europe took place contemporaneously with its development in the British colonies, making American Freemasonry part of a self-consciously cosmopolitan transatlantic brotherhood.17 Masons represent two visions of the Enlightenment sensibility: on one hand they are the sober representatives of toleration and a new form of social equality, and on the other they demonstrate the role of occult practices (such as alchemy and Rosicrucianism) in Enlightenment culture. Margaret C. Jacob’s seminal cultural history of the European Enlightenment, emphasizing the tolerant Enlightenment aspect of the fraternity, repositioned Freemasonry as central to eighteenth-century European civil society. As Jacob argues, Freemasons played a crucial role in developing the habits of democracy. Writing their own constitutions, voting on members, harmonizing disparate interests within a corporate body established by merit rather than by birth, masonic lodges effectively birthed a nascent democratic way of life.18 Yet the history of American lodges also demonstrates that the fraternal bodies linking together early democratic culture expressed themselves in forms not typically imagined as part of a discursive public sphere. Free-

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masons in fact readily adopted royal sovereignty to confirm their equal participation in fraternal bonds—a contradiction that mirrored other contradictions at the heart of the corporate form. Legal scholars have noted that corporate bodies were chartered by the king to create an extension of sovereign power, and yet the form was embraced as a model of association for early American democracy. Replicating the tension between horizontal and vertical power dynamics, American corporations were a form of local independence dependent on state regulation and largesse.19 Freemasonry’s ritual life between 1790 and 1820, a period in which masonic ritual became more baroque, points to Americans’ ambivalent reconciliation of sovereign representation and democratic participation. Masons are often imagined as men fraternizing in the back rooms of bars and giving oratories on the nature of civil society, but this description of masonic practice (which has dominated much of its historiography) includes almost none of the activities masons performed in the lodges— namely, esoteric rituals of initiation. In contrast to Margaret C. Jacob’s description of public oratories, the theater historian Pannill Camp argues in his work on eighteenth-century French masons that the fraternity was, at its core, performative. Masonic lodge activity “included a range of nondiscursive performative operations. These incorporated, meticulously staged behaviors—hand signs, choreographed steps, embraces—as well as meals, concerts, and other non-ritual activities—were the work of the lodge.”20 As Camp points out, masonic practice was not primarily the Habermasian vision of rational discussion in which men exercised their ability to put aside their interests; instead, it was a series of flamboyant and highly material rites. But this lack of discursive activity should not dissuade us from asking how masonic lodges cultivated Enlightenment mores. Rather, if masonic practice was a key location in the development of Enlightenment civility and sociability, then civility and sociability looked like men grasping each other in intimate and violent choreography and playing out narratives in which men rose from the dead. Enlightenment civility, in other words, becomes visible as an odd dance of white men. American Freemasonry, even more than its Continental counterparts, focused on ritual. After the American Revolution, Freemasonry in the new nation became increasingly focused on ritual regularization and the proliferation of degrees through the spread of the Scottish Rite.21 Due in part to this post-Revolutionary flowering, historians of American masonry have been more attuned to the fraternity’s deeply ritualistic nature. Counterintuitively, in tandem with this rise in esoteric rites, American Freemasonry

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became even more tied to the Protestant center after the American Revolution, despite its affiliation with deistic philosophy.22 The dismissal of Freemasonry as a preoccupation of revolutionary-era deism obscures the fraternities’ deep ties to a pan-Protestant piety.23 The historian Steven Bullock has demonstrated that Freemasonry after the American Revolution happily melded with republican ideology, becoming a crucial embodiment of postRevolutionary ideals of virtue and freedom despite its deep ties to Britain.24 Bullock and the American religious historian David Hackett also describe a surprisingly easy relationship between American churches (including evangelicals) and American Freemasonry.25 Despite some very vocal critics of masonry from the Baptist ministry, in the early republic there was nothing odd about being a Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, or even a Methodist, and practicing masonry. Another possible reason that Freemasonry’s easy relationship with American Protestantism has been obscured is the evangelical character of the Anti-Masonry movement (and political party).26 Initiated in the 1820s by the Morgan Affair, in which a former mason was kidnapped and murdered for giving away fraternity secrets, masonry never fully recovered its status as a neutral component of American Protestant life. But in the years between the Revolution and the Morgan Affair, American masonry experienced a heyday as the prized “handmaiden” of Christian religion, with ritualism as the fraternity’s central function. The primary character in the shift toward masonic ritualism in the United States was Thomas Smith Webb, an Albany artisan (later a shopkeeper), who first brought the Scottish Rite and the Knights Templar degrees to his Albany lodge, and then in 1797 wrote a widely published ritual manual, The Freemason’s Monitor, that helped to popularize these higher degrees around the Eastern Seaboard.27 Manuals (or “monitors”) published in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic standardized the ceremonies of newly minted “Ancient” lodges.28 The split in eighteenth-century masonry between “Ancients” and “Moderns” was in part a split over ritualism, as Ancients (confusingly, the proponents of innovation) argued for a proliferation of degrees and their attendant initiations.29 In the American colonies, unlike the British lodges, Ancients won a decisive victory: all American lodges were Ancient by the 1800s.30 With this new emphasis on initiatory ceremonies, Webb became concerned about the brotherhood’s ability to offer consistent rituals in every lodge. A system of “bright” masons, or masons who traveled around the country offering instruction to lodges, as well as local “lecturers” who helped men memorize catechisms and masonic history, grew in direct relationship to

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the proliferation of degrees. Ironically, the exposés that came out of the Morgan scandal in the 1820s not only mimicked the guides published by Webb and other bright masons but also became manuals for active Freemasons, who used them to work on their ritual training.32 The initiations of these higher degrees were so elaborate that no mason could be expected to perform them without extensive rehearsal. It was through a combination of “mouth to ear” training, published monitors (authorized by masons), and unauthorized exposés that masons learned and practiced the ornate rites and ceremonies of the lodge. This flowering of masonic ritualism initiated a discussion of the category of ritual within Freemasonry and outside the organization, especially as the brotherhood became the subject of exposés and organized opposition. Thus this period in American Freemasonry is central to the articulation of corporate activity as a kind of practice that was similar to, but distinct from, the liturgical activities of Christian piety. The primacy of religion to the activities of early republican associational activity was both obvious and unacknowledged as state-granted charters for religious organizations proliferated in the post-Revolutionary era. But in the wake of the Morgan Affair, the conflict over masonic “rituals” as a form of practice that might compete with religious and democratic loyalties demonstrates the way in which secret sovereign rituals inhabited a grey area within American thought. Further, the exposés published after the Morgan Affair focused on not only the potentially blasphemous nature of “oaths” taken during initiations, but also the curiously theatrical nature of the rites.33 Critics of elite white men performing rites behind closed doors could not decide if it was the seriousness or the frivolity of these cabals that was more dangerous to American democracy. Despite being scripted like a play and formally repeated like a ritual, masonic rites resist classic definitions of ritual and theater because the rites both emphasized a proscenium frame and eliminated any space for an audience. Thus the only audience for masonic rites was the mason himself. This sense of self-observation brings me to my final point about masonic rites: they were meant to feel artificial even as masons performed artifice in their rites as the legitimation of natural social authority. Anthropologists argue that the social body’s solidarity is often produced or expressed in ritual, depending on the extent to which scholars imagine a social body to predate the ritual.34 For scholars who see the social body and its configuration of authority as more of a proposition than an already given form, ritual has many of the elements of creative play, mimesis, and the adoption of 31

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roles that we often categorize as theater. This playful quality performs a crucial role in Victor Turner’s work because inversions of homologies, initiated by play, allow for the reinvigoration of social authority.36 It is almost too easy to locate these kinds of homologies and their inversion in the post-Reformation West, due to what historians and anthropologists have described as the semiotic ideology of Protestantism and its imperial outposts, in which homologies such as thought vs. action and embodiment vs. transcendence came to define modernity’s sensibilities.37 In sovereign ritual within the United States, the failure to maintain the distinction between authenticity and simulation did not detract from these men’s status.38 Elite, white, Protestant men in American masonic lodges after the Revolution inverted ideas like belief and sincerity with particular ease, and these inversions confirmed the social authority these men already had.39 This ability to flip the script on Protestant ideals of thought and action comes into particular clarity when masons critiqued heathens for being bad ritualists. Masons simultaneously inhabited and negated bodily sensations, and the category of ritual itself, as they established their civility. 35

MASONIC TRAINING

In his manual for masonic rites and ceremonies, first published in the United States in 1797, Webb distinguished masonic activities from a baser ritual form.40 He acknowledged that outsiders might see masonic rites as “trifling” or “superficial.” “But this is not the case,” he assured his readers. Having their use, they are preserved; and from the recollection of the lessons they inculcate, the well informed mason derives instruction. Drawing them to a near inspection, he views them through a proper medium; adverts to the circumstances which gave them rise; dwells upon the tenets they convey; and, finding them, replete with useful information, adopts them as keys to the privileges of his art, and prizes them as sacred. Thus convinced of their propriety, he estimates the value from their utility.41

Rites and ceremonies were serious because they were instructional and could be judged by the “value of their utility.” But Webb also emphasized the distance between the actor and the actions in a way that eliminated the possibility of immediate spiritual transformation of the sort associated with

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non-Protestant ritual. Masonic rites and ceremonies were not “superficial,” according to Webb, because at every step the actor stood back from the information and symbols of the rites and observed them through the proper “mediums,” a term for ritual instruction. Distance between the self and his action became the defining feature of masonic rites. Ritual mediation demonstrates masonry’s particular position within the various lineages of Continental and American Enlightenment traditions. If modernity in the eighteenth century had an ideological tendency to differentiate the sensorial from the transcendent, and the material from the immaterial, Freemasonry—drawing on the traditions of Scottish Common Sense philosophy and metaphysical esotericism—muddied this formulation by focusing on the sensorium as the locus of cognition and ethical improvement.42 Masonic training imparted rigorous instruction in masonic symbology and a habituation of the senses for proper reception. The truths of masonry required proper mediation because the symbols derived their power from an ability to titillate the eyes, ears, and touch. As De Witt Clinton, the governor of New York and the Grand Master of New York’s masonic lodge, argued: masonry’s recognition of the eye, ear, and touch as highly sensitive organs was the fraternity’s “peculiar utility.” And through the utilization of these senses, he contended, masonry could impress its lessons “with a greater force upon the mind.”43 Freemasons argued that “sensible signs” left a physical impression on the mind and thus left brothers with, as one mason put it, “the signet of heavenly TRUTH” stamped into their characters.44 Through sensory experiences, such as the costumes, sets, and props of masonic ritual, moral lessons reshaped the mason’s mind and heart. The highly charged power of rites, however, required pre-screening, training, and administrative control. If sensory impact would inevitably leave a mark on the mind, the risk of improper sensory experience raised the stakes of performing rites in a consistent and perfect form. Freemasonry relied on the psychology of David Hartley, whose theory of association proposed that sense data remained linked at the moment of reception. Thus it was crucial that the lodge stage every tableau and lesson carefully with the correct images and sensations arriving in the proper order.45 The influence of esoteric traditions also shaped masons’ sense of truth as a powerful and dangerous force requiring careful training.46 Thus rites and ceremonies, as Webb argued, were distinct from “superficial” and “trifling” activities, because the excitable and sensitive senses were carefully managed. Through the mediation of planned instruction, a mason never got overwhelmed in the action. Masonic training made masons into men who imagined themselves as

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juggling key dichotomies in the early modern world: both subject and sovereign, active and restrained, individual and corporate. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas celebrated civil society and the emerging public sphere, and masonic fraternities in particular, for creating an ideological synthesis of these contradictions. Bourgeois men, Habermas argued, could be simultaneously both public and private through a disciplining of passions and interests.47 Historians have followed this ideal of liberal democracy by describing masonry’s disciplining effect as the establishment of a fortress of the self or miniature governments within the social body.48 This emphasis on masonic men’s synthesizing capabilities, however, has missed the awkward nature of masonic rites. The training that allowed masons to stand apart from their senses also instructed men to inhabit an array of roles with different levels of theatrical commitment. This inhabitation of multiple impermanent roles asked men not to synthesize themselves, but to become ever more flexible in their comportment. Masonic instruction prepared the senses (with particular emphasis on the eye) for increasingly sophisticated performances. The first step in this process was to participate in “mere forms,” or practices that did not have direct effects in the world. Formal activities, even if they were non-effectual, were good training for secret initiations. Comparing solemn practice in ceremonies to the artificiality of acting in the theatrical sense, Webb argued that participating in an empty form could train masons for the initiatory rites. Practice, he argued, was a spectrum, and bringing verve to a lesser role was always useful training. Your tool could never be too sharp. Webb argued that some masonic practices were more frivolous than others, especially the public ceremonies that masons performed inside and outside the lodge. “Ceremonies,” as distinguished from rites, “when simply considered, it is true, are little more than visionary delusions; but their effects are sometimes important.”49 This category included the lodge’s opening and closing, public processions, consecrations of buildings, funerals, the sermons and orations that often accompanied masonic meetings, and in general any ritual that took place within the sight of the uninitiated public. In a typical ceremony of installation, masons in ceremonial aprons should march “to the church or house where the services are to be performed. When the front of the procession arrives at the door, they halt, open to the right and left, and face inward, while the grand master, and others in succession, pass through, and enter the house. A platform is erected in front of the pulpit, and provided with seats for the accommodation of the grand officers.”50 These ceremonies had an indirect purpose, Webb argued: “they

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impress awe and reverence on the mind, and engage the attention, by external attraction, to solemn rites,” and these “purposes are effected by judicious ceremonies, when regularly conducted and properly arranged.”51 While not as dramatically spectacular as the initiations, these kinds of processions could “engage the attention,” which as Webb argued was more of a preparation for rites than an end in itself. By including reciting the same words over and over at the beginning and end of the meetings, or standing and walking in lines, ceremonies insured that the more sacred rites of initiation would go more smoothly. Empty ceremony performed in public, Webb argued, played less for the public’s edification than for the practice of masons themselves. Secret rites, on the other hand, were ends in themselves, and they achieved this power through performative gravitas. In his manual for the Royal Arch rites, Webb described the role of the “High Priest” as the protector and regulator of rites. In the installation of this role, the catechism explained that the High Priest must “see that due order and subordination is observed on all occasions; that the members are properly instructed; that a due solemnity be observed in the practice of our rites; that no improper levity be permitted at any time, but more especially at the introduction of strangers among the workmen.”52 Masons had been known as a sort of drinking club for men, especially in the colonial era, but Webb argued that this celebratory tenor must be sharply delineated from the rites.53 Central to this concern was the ambiguous line between masonic activities as leisure and religion, and Webb’s emphasis on solemnity distinguished rites from leisure activities in the taverns, coffee houses, and inns in which masonry had taken place since the mid-eighteenth century. A rite, by definition, should not be amusing. Serious not only in tenor, the rites of initiation also followed dark plots in which men were hunted, punished, and raised from the dead.54 Initiatory rites that flowered in the post-Revolutionary era went beyond the first three degrees of masonry and included the Royal Arch and the Knights Templar, which included new plot elements with even darker themes.55 In both the initiations for the original three degrees and the new degrees of Royal Arch Masonry, the lodge acted out, using props, costumes, and scenery, the fraternities’ origins in the building of Solomon’s Temple and the recovery of the Master Mason’s word after his murder by jealous “ruffians.”56 This plot involved not only punishing the ruffians, but also raising the Master from the dead. Thus, even as Webb emphasized the rites’ distinction from jovial and undisciplined leisure activities, the dramatic (and thus playful) nature

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of the rites was central to their power: men wore costumes, enacted scripts, and most importantly, committed to their roles. Even as they were defined against ceremonies’ unserious inefficacy, rites’ efficacy derived from their ability to create a believable mimetic scene that could teach masons the origins, shapes, and nature of virtues. Rites also taught masons how to inhabit the virtue imbued in masonry’s symbols. This is, however, distinct from theories of discipline in which a man is shaped by an exterior and more powerful force, or from the virtue ethics tradition which argues that only the practice of virtues can reform the soul and body as they are practiced.57 Against these ideas about the relationship of ritual and virtue, masonry developed a kind of virtuous discipline that could be put on and taken off, much like the aprons masons wore for ceremonial activity.

A W K WA R D C I V I L I T Y

According to its proponents, Freemasonry and its rites cultivated the virtue of civility, that peculiar Western invention of comportment. Civility demonstrated one’s position in history at the apex of a civilizational process that had begun in an ancient past. Freemasonry, however, took the story of civilization one step further by arguing that masonry began at the moment of rupture with barbarism. Freemasonry was ancient but not primitive. In the story that masons repeated in their orations and initiations: “This science unveiled, arts arose, civilization took place, and the progress of knowledge and philosophy gradually dispelled the gloom of ignorance and barbarism.”58 Barbarism evaporated wherever masonry appeared. In order to retell this story, masons returned to the past in their lodges, in which the decor drew heavily on the aesthetics and ideals of the old social order even as they disciplined men in the practices of nascent democracy. They demonstrated their heightened virtues not just by avoiding conflict, but also by donning robes of silk and velvet and acting out the roles of ancient priests and medieval courts. Masonic garments included aprons and sashes made from white satin, lined with silk ribbons, and embroidered with symbols of the masonic order. They also wore “jewels,” or small insignia crafted out of silver in the shape of masonic tools such as trowels, compasses, and the book of constitutions.59 During the rites, masons’ garments

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and jewels became part of the costumes for the court of Solomon or the medieval order of the Knights Templar. In the rites of the Knights Templar, the lodge was arranged into a court scene with a throne, arms, and drapery. As Webb explained in his manual, “On the right of the throne, the deputy grand master and past grand master; or in subordinate encampments the past grand commander. On the left, the grand prelate and grand chancellor. The grand treasurer on the right, and the grand register on the left in front. The knights, who are entitled to seats above the standards, are so arranged as that there shall be an equal number on each side of the throne.”60 These sets, costumes, and storylines also invoked other hierarchical forms, including the hierarchy of craft workshops, the military, and the priesthood of the Old Testament. But the rites’ simulation of royal courts pointed to a crucial component of masonry’s vision of hierarchy: despite universal access to the ascending degrees, hierarchical social relations structured civilization. Counter to the story that Freemasons told themselves about civilization’s progress, civility—as civilization’s embodiment—was a fairly new affectation that began in the highly mannered gestures of early modern royal courts. Norbert Elias’s classic study of the origins of Western manners points out that in the development of Western decorum, a whole host of fashions and gestures narrowed the body’s expression into ever more tightly constricted movements. In Erasmus’s guide to courtly manners, for example, the decoration of the body with particular fashions, the ability to eat with a fork, and the capacity to address others with the proper greetings became signs for “the attitude of the soul.”61 Members of the royal court wore these fashions, Elias argued, not only for the eyes of other members of the court, but also for the wearer to observe himself.62 Civility was a self-conscious performance of the self as an observed entity, and it was the strain of self-observation that made manners so mannered. In Freemasonry elite and middling white American men developed their civility by watching themselves being watched; and they worked on their civility by looking back to eras of royal and aristocratic mannerisms. The historian Richard Bushman, in his study of the refinement of American culture, identifies this love of aristocratic trappings and royal courtliness as one of the great ironies of American culture after the American Revolution.63 Freemasons’ use of titles like “Knight” and “King” and the emerging middle class’s embrace of damask silk were both examples of Americans embracing distinctly undemocratic cultural aesthetics. Bushman also borrows from Elias’s insights on the development of manners, noting that in

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the spread of gentility in the American republic there was something about the adoption of courtliness that heightened self-consciousness. Bushman writes, “Self-aware performance came about naturally as a result of adopting genteel standards of behavior to elevate human life. People were instructed in a hundred details of how to dress, hold their bodies, and converse, all for the purpose of becoming more pleasing.”64 The rites of initiation in masonic lodges demonstrate this twofold understanding of civility in early America: first, the embrace of royal courts as the proper model for behavior, and second, a heightened self-consciousness in the performance of mannerisms. Masonry was best known as a training ground for the cultivation of men’s manners and self-restraint, a set of skills they would then exemplify to others in society. An eighteenth-century satirical image in which a mason’s arms, head, and body are replaced by all the material trappings of the lodge exemplifies the role of the body in this training (fig. 1.1). In the image, the mason’s arms became as stiff and awkward as a compass, the legs stuck in the shape of pillars. Inside the apron, the masons’ innards are replaced with the emblems, demonstrating that his corporeality has been re-molded from the inside out. The image also, however, depicts a man stuck inside inhuman objects, his legs frozen in stone and his arms permanently raised at a rigid angle. Despite its satirical edge, the image confirms masons’ understanding of rites as a way to reconfigure the body into uncomfortable shapes through mysterious practices. Discomfort contributed to the masonic capacity for tolerance, that key Enlightenment quality with which masonry is synonymous, as masons linked an ability to harmonize discordant interests to their ability to control their bodies and minds. Oratories and manuals instructed Freemasons to modulate their voices and behave courteously within the lodge, always avoiding conflict, and to be “cautious in carriage.”65 They were also expected to attend lodges regularly in order to enable memorization of long blocks of  text. Memorization as a practice of “the liberal arts,” the bright mason Jeremy Ladd Cross explained, would “polish and adorn the mind.”66 The masonic catechisms and the published monitors were also tools for memorization. The mason Charles Jackson in Newburyport, Massachusetts explained that attendance at the lodge would “inevitably ameliorate” a mason’s “manners and habits,” because even if a man had a bad temper, “Our very form of address will necessarily control any sudden intemperance of passion, and teach the virtue of mutual forbearance.”67 The ability to repeat your lines and hold your tongue in restraint allowed men to become disinterested members of civil society.68 But as the satirical image of the mason stuck in his pillar

Figure 1.1 A Free Mason Form’d out of the Materials of his Lodge, 1754. A. Slade, artist; William Tringham (1723–1770), publisher, London, England. Courtesy of the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts Collection at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, GL2004.0141. Photograph by David Bohl.

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legs and ruler arms suggests, becoming “cautious in carriage” also meant standing and sitting in contrived postures while memorizing long passages. Holding the tongue was more than silence; it was the sensation of your tongue in a closed mouth. This constriction also had a far more explicit form in the literal binding and wrapping of masons in ropes and blankets during the rites. Manners caused physical discomfort by design.

T H E H E A D O F T H E S O C I A L B O DY

Masonic adornments made men into visual displays of “perfect proportion, symmetry, and order,” and this materialized virtue demonstrated a bifurcated vision of society.69 Post-Revolutionary masons blended their belief in natural hierarchy with their self-presentation as exemplars of republican equality.70 Associations, masons argued, cultivated the social capacities of man that made civil society a natural form of human organization. The Reverend Abram Beach spoke before the Grand Lodge of the State of New York in St. George’s Chapel in 1786, three years after the British had left the city, and mused on the universal human qualities that civil society developed. “That we were originally designed for social Life,” he argued, “further appears from the Diversity of Capacities, Tempers and Inclinations which we find in Ourselves, fitting us for the various Departments of civil & social Life, whereby we are impelled to different Pursuits and Employments, that each might administer to the Wants & Necessities of others, & that the whole Building might grow up unto an Holy Temple in the Lord.”71 The skills and effort of citizens who socialized together constituted a whole social structure that could rebuild burned buildings and care for the destitute. Sociality universally appealed to all men, mirroring the democratic spirit of the Revolution, and as Beach alluded through his use of masonic building metaphors, associations provided the pillars to the social body. Despite arguing that the “social principle” universally appealed to all humanity, James Tillary argued that not everyone was equally capable of practicing “sociality” at its highest levels. The sociality that made civil society possible and natural was universal, but the civility necessary for directing and governing civil society was a virtue that some men needed to cultivate for the benefit of the rest. Society, Tillary elaborated, was made up of “such a beautiful variety,” and all of these different kinds of people might at some level enjoy the benefits of social life. Tillary qualified this generalization:

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Some rare souls are formed to lead—to direct—to refine and to civilize human life; others there are who have not such good heads, yet possess as honest hearts; they have a love of liberty, are public spirited, generous supporters of laws, order and public institutions, and of extensive humanity: And others again, who possessing neither the higher capacities of the head, nor the softer humanities of the heart, are nevertheless essentially necessary in society, by being trained and inured to the most valuable mechanical exercises.72

Leading and directing within the diversity of society did not come from the universally available sociality, but rather from the exclusive and rare ability to “civilize human life.” The term “civil society” in Tillary’s parlance implied a bifurcated society led by men who were sometimes, but not always, elected to oversee such crucial issues as public works, taxation, public safety, and welfare.73 Yet even as membership in Freemasonry opened up to the middling classes after the Revolution, it emphasized the exclusive nature of civil society as a form of association defined against an uncivilized class incapable of the virtues of civility. All associations developed sociality, but Freemasonry’s rituals created an elite dimension of civil society, directed by men with enhanced capacities. Masons’ public ceremonies demonstrated this bifurcation. As with most of masonic material culture, masonic regalia was visible to non-members but illegible to the uninitiated. In a song for the occasion of an Entered Apprentice initiation, they sang “They ne’er can divine / The word grip or sign / Of a Free and Accepted Mason. ’Tis this and ’tis that, They cannot tell what, Now why the best men of the nation, Should aprons put on, And make themselves one / With a Free and an Accepted Mason.”74 Aprons’ illegibility would not impede uninitiated viewers’ understanding of masons’ status as the “best men of the nation.” No quality of masonry seems more out of step with post-Revolutionary republicanism than masons’ insistence that secrecy was crucial to their practice of civility. This secrecy came under fire in the 1830s, and eventually would be criticized as un-transparent, much like Catholic and Mormon rituals; but masonic secrecy was not a problem for American masons between the 1790s and the 1820s. Not only did masons continue to argue for the necessity of ritual secrecy after the Revolution; they also argued that uninitiated audiences would understand the value of their secret credentials during public ceremonies. According to masons, garments bestowed virtues that would be evident to those who might not understand the symbols themselves. A prominent

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New York mason and Presbyterian minister named James Hardie explained that masons “put on white apparel as an emblem of that character, which speaks purity of soul . . . we will enfold ourselves in the garb of integrity.”75 Thus masonic integrity would be visible to non-mason audiences regardless of whether they understood the symbolic significance of the apron. The opacity of masonic symbols during public performances only clarified the bifurcated nature of a social body, with its seeing head and blind lower body, and thus emphasized to audiences that what they did not understand made masons their superiors. Despite his emphasis on the power of masonic regalia to bestow integrity and other virtues that would be visible to a larger public, Hardie emphasized that masons gained this power by “enfolding” themselves in garb, a garb that they could of course take off without losing those same privileges of civic life. As masons considered the relationship between ritual activity and their public role in society, their actions in the lodge qualified them for social leadership and yet did not leave a permanent mark. Much like King Solomon’s court costumes and the aprons that could be untied and put away for future ceremonies, masons thought of rites as a set of sensations that, if performed properly, did not permanently transform the body.

INCIVILITY

The barbarism of “foreign” and bad characters acted out in lodge rituals took place within a context of early republican anxieties about the violence on urban streets in New York City, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia. These riots were the antithesis of the associational behavior promoted by masons. In New York City, city elites like De Witt Clinton, who was both the mayor and Grand Master of the Lodge of New York, deemed Revolutionary tactics of mob-based democracy barbaric, shifting the meaning of riots from a socially acceptable practice associated with the Revolution to a threat against nascent democracy. In the years immediately following the Revolution, both Federalist and Republican mobs had gathered in the streets in order to claim that their political party had a special relationship to the tactics of resistance used against the monarchy during the Revolution; but by the 1810s these political parties began to defame each other with anti-mob rhetoric.76 Only immigrants and working-class groups used mob tactics in the 1810s, as they lacked alternative modes of expression in the

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public sphere. Without any specific plans, they gathered in the streets during the night to express their frustration with low wages and terrible living conditions through fighting, property destruction, and yelling.78 Unlike the violence of the mobs, masons thought of their own violence as reasonable and decorous because it was highly choreographed. The higher degrees, as well as the first three degrees, relied on real and threatened violence. Yet in order to terrify and kick at the right moments, masons followed highly detailed scripts that carefully ordered their movements. They demonstrated their capabilities as reasonable men who could act together for the common good by acting violently without that violence defining them indelibly.79 In their rituals of initiation, masons wielded violence against each other as they played the various dramatis personae from masonic history. In these roles the masons commanded the apprentice to come before the royal master and perform the secret gestures of the degree. A classic exposé, Jachin and Boas, explained that the initiate recited, “All this I swear, with a firm and fixed resolution to perform the same under no less penalty than to have my body severed in two; the one part carried to the south, the other to the north; my bowels burnt to ashes, and the ashes to be scattered to the four winds of the heavens.”80 Both master and initiate performed a choreography that demonstrated the threat of amputation upon giving away secrets. This choreography also included motions that mimicked the tearing out of eyes, decapitation, and disemboweling done through gestures where the initiate, for instance, “draws his right hand across his bowels, with his hand open, and the thumb next to his body, and drops it down by his side.”81 Some exposés reported that the abstract choreography included more literal beatings of the initiates, including forming two parallel lines and having the initiate crawl through as they kicked him.82 French exposés of the Scottish Rite, which gained popularity in the United States, describe multiple moments in the initiation when a candidate was terrified with manhandling, daggers, and heated rods placed near his skin. At key moments in the initiation masons also banged pots and pans, or swords, in order to make ominous sounds.83 In the performative landscape of the early United States, masons saw their violence as artful. Describing these rites as artful does not, however, mean that they were painless. The threats of violence and the procedural kicking were actually terrifying, but the terror was fleeting and expected. For instance, in the primary initiation of Entered Apprentice the initiate wore a rope or “cable tow” around his head in order to demonstrate, as the catechism explained, that he had “submitted to the manner and mode of my ini77

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tiation.” The masons then dragged the initiate around the room by the cable tow and further hobbled him by wrapping it around his legs.84 The exposé also explained that the cable tow ensured “that . . . had I recanted before being obligated, and made my escape, the people in the streets would have thought me either a crazy or a mad man; and some worthy Mason knowing my situation would have led me back to the lodge.”85 The rope around the initiate’s head was a symbol of a man’s voluntary submission to the initiation, to its “form and beauties,” but it was also a leash held by other masons, whose whims could at any moment slip beyond the prescribed limits. This induced shame emphasized what the mason might look like to “people on the streets.” Amplifying this vulnerability, the master mason applied a hood wink (a bag over the head or a blindfold) and partially undressed the initiate. According to the catechism, however, limits—or an artificial application of violence—structured the relationship between initiate and masters. The initiate, for instance, felt the rope on his naked skin, the weight of his own arms as he knelt and held them in “the hailing sign of distress,” and the cold metal “points” of the compass that the senior deacon pressed “against his naked right and left breasts.”86 The senior deacon during the Master Mason rite explained that pressing the compass’s sharp points into the naked chest “is to teach you that, as the most vital parts of man, are contained between the two breasts, so are the most valuable tenets of Masonry, contained between the two extreme points of the compass.”87 The points of the compass, much like the rope of the cable tow, dug into the skin but did not puncture. The choreography of the rites carefully orchestrated the application of these sensations, applying the exact amount of pressure necessary to make the injury of both body and mind temporary but memorable. This distinction between woundless masonic violence and uncivil wounding violence was also present in masons’ understanding of nonChristian rites. In a Massachusetts lodge’s discussion of whether to give money to the American Bible Society for foreign Bible distribution, a member asked his fellow masons, “have we no pity to show for our brothers who worship stones and infernal spirits? Whose religious ceremonies are the most bloody and obscene, and whose bodies are enslaved by a crafty priesthood of the most detestable character?”88 Heathen ritual used violence without restraint. When they acted out their “religious ceremonies,” they really believed that the stones they worshipped were inhabited by spiritual bodies. Unlike masonic ritual, which always maintained a distance between action and belief, violent heathen ritual got caught up in the action. This distinction within masonic discourse between good and bad ceremonies

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should qualify our discussion of masonic ritual, especially considering that no masonic sources before 1830 use the word “ritual” to describe their own activities.89 Masons’ critique of earnest native ceremonies sheds light on this choice of words. Ritual in the post-Reformation world, and in the context of expanding European empires and American settler colonialism, referred to a highly material and transformative religious experience that Protestants rejected.90 A “rite,” in contrast, was a controlled act that inspired emotions like terror but always maintained a separation between the sensations of enactment and the full consequences of those enactments. In the masonic rite, unlike in the imagined heathen ritual, the body experienced pain and then quickly stepped outside of pain’s indexical qualities. In the heathen worship, however, bodies were “enslaved by a crafty priesthood of the most detestable character,” and the “bloody and obscene” activities left a permanent mark.91

R I T E S A S T H E AT E R

Masons’ ability to claim rites’ superiority over both heathen ritual and the disordered bodies of mobs depended on rites’ well-staged effects. “Solemn” in comparison to their lesser cousin public ceremony, rites defined seriousness in theatrical terms—a cast of stock characters, a well-made otherworldly set. To achieve a serious performance, ritual regularizers like Webb emphasized practice, practice, practice. Although the published monitors contained the necessary scenery for each degree and the largest blocks of speech for memorization, much of the choreography for each degree could only be transmitted mason to mason (in order to maintain secrecy), and bright masons like Webb traveled around the country helping to stage rites properly. For the initiation rite into the Degree of Intimate Secretary, Webb explained, “The lodge of I.S. is furnished with black hangings, and represents the hall of audience of Solomon. It should be enlightened with twentyseven lights, in three candlesticks of nine branches each, placed E.W. and S.” For this degree, Webb described the robes, elaborate headwear, and key props (a skull and swords) used by the masons playing Solomon and the High King. Webb instructed, This lodge consists of two persons only; who represent S. and H.K. of T. They are covered with blue mantles lined with ermine, with crowns on

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their heads, scepters in their hands, and seated at a table, on which are placed two naked swords, a roll of parchment, and a death’s head. All the rest of the brethren are considered only as perfect masters, and are termed the guards. They should have white aprons, lined and embroidered with a blood colour, with strings of the same; and ribbons of the same colour round their necks, to which must be suspended, hanging on the breast, a solid triangle.92

The other brothers in attendance wore their masonic aprons to signify lesser roles as “guards,” becoming a kind of chorus to the main action.93 Webb was so concerned about masons enacting the rites precisely that in his own lodge he held rehearsals every Saturday for six weeks leading up to an initiation, and he requested that the lodge set aside money for the men to use the props of “wood and candles” during rehearsals.94 Webb and other bright masons seem to have been successful. Using the mouth-to-ear method in rehearsals, masons learned their lines and blocking by heart.95 The published monitors, however, provided guidance on the proper scenery and costumes, which masons either bought from tailors and artists, or obtained from their wives, who made them by hand.96 The line between ritual regalia and theatrical costume blurred in early nineteenth-century masonry. Jeremy Ladd Cross, who was the most active bright mason to follow in Webb’s footsteps, explained in a letter to another mason the detailed requirements for the Royal Arch degrees: “The first officer is dressed in a royal robe of purple, with a crown on the head and scepter in his hand, seated in the East behind a triangular pedestal covered with crimson with a golden triangle thereon. . . . The third officer is dressed in a royal robe of yellow, with a turban on his head, holding a hammer and a trowel, seated on the left, behind, etc., as the other two officers.”97 Cross illustrated these outfits in his published manual, showing that each role required a head-to-toe representation of the character (fig. 1.2). Several of the items that Cross illustrated, including the aprons, scepters, crowns, and turbans, were sold by tailors who specialized in “costumes” and “regalia.” As an advertisement for a Boston tailor explained, “Theatrical Costuming Articles” could be purchased alongside “Regalia and Jewels” for “all the ‘Orders.’ ”98 Theatrical and ritual clothing might be distinct categories, but they overlapped in key places: for instance, the tailor’s advertisement did not specify for whom they were selling “Battle-Swords” or “Banner Silks” (both of which masons used in their rites), because theatrical productions and ceremonial productions used many of the same props.

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Figure 1.2 Royal Arch Officers: King, High Priest and Scribe in The True Masonic Chart, or Hieroglyphic Monitor, by Jeremy L. Cross (1783–1860) (New Haven: John C. Gray, 1820), plate 36. Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, RARE 14.1.C951 1820a.

Like the actors in early republican theaters, masons also took on sharply differentiated moral roles within the rites: sometimes you played a hero and other times a villain.99 In the initiation into the Master’s degree, masons played the roles of both the skilled laborers who built Solomon’s temple and the murderous laborers who tried to steal the master builder’s knowledge. Speaking in the voice of the “worshipful master” from the original scene in Solomon’s Temple, the mason explained that twelve laborers conspired to extort the Master Mason’s word from their grand master, Hiram Abiff, and if he would not give it they would kill him. Only three had carried through with the plan. A mason playing the role of Solomon then ordered masons playing the role of twelve craftsmen “clothed in white gloves and aprons, in token of their innocence,” to be “sent three east, three west, three north, and three south, in search of the ruffians, and if found, to bring them forward.”100 The masons playing the characters in the search parties then “shuffle about the floor” to demonstrate the traversal of distance. When the searching masons finally found the three “ruffians,” other members of the lodge acted out the roles of these murderous characters. Speaking as the murderers Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, the masons embodied the dishonorable characters whose jealousy and desire for power had led to the murder of the Master. The murderers were then captured and “tried.”101 As the brothers acted out the death and rebirth of Hiram, the search for the Master’s word,

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and the hunt for the ruffians who had stolen it, they embodied unambiguous poles of the villain/hero dichotomy, and after a pre-ordered struggle demonstrated the victory of good over bad. Masonic rites’ moral drama mirrored melodramatic theater in structure and characterization. As Bruce McConachie describes in his history of American melodramatic theater, appearances were revealing, not deceiving.102 Despite what I have laid out as the theatrical nature of masonic rites, masons distinguished rites from theater and liturgy, activities that they took part in frequently. Early nineteenth-century masonic periodicals provide a small window into American masons’ theater-going habits through reviews of local productions, and based on the enthusiasm of their reviews masons regularly attended the theater.103 Similarly, Jeremy L. Cross described in his diary frequent attendance at weekly church services and Methodist prayer meetings.104 Masonic rites embraced the artificiality of theater and the liturgical regularity of church even as masons drew clear boundaries between these activities and masonic practice. By acting in a manner that was studied and temporary, masonic rites allowed powerful men to be many things, but never all at once. We see in masons’ adoption of unnatural poses and curious theatrical accoutrements a key development in Protestant ritualism as a form of action that does not risk the transformational experience of embodiment. In her study of evangelical hell houses in the twenty-first century, Ann Pellegrini describes a similar relationship between theatricality and Protestant ritual enactment, which allows conservative evangelicals to act out the roles of homosexuals and abortion doctors without becoming tainted by the embodiment of these bad characters.105 Masonic rites also show how the choreography of “civilization” in the early republic trained elite men to feel and simultaneously un-feel the sensations of the roles they acted out.

K E E P I N G A S T R A I G H T FA C E

When they came under fire for violence and ritual excess in the aftermath of the Morgan Affair, in which a former member was kidnapped and possibly murdered for exposing secrets of the fraternity, masons relied on the artificiality of their ritual acts to justify themselves. Anti-Masons were obsessed with the “oaths” that masons swore during the rites, and they focused on the threats of violence within the oaths (in particular the gestures of amputation

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and throat-cutting as punishment for violating the oaths). Anti-Masonry exposés proliferated in the scandal’s wake and focused on “ritual” activity, a term for instance employed in Avery Allyn’s 1831 exposé A Ritual of Freemasonry. Ritual, as we can see from anti-masonic exposés and Freemasons’ own use of the term as a description of heathen practice, was a useful epithet in the 1820s and 1830s. Written by men who had left the organization, the exposés provide exhaustive descriptions of the initiations as well as editorial asides that help situate masonic ritual within a spectrum of acceptable and unacceptable early republican behavior. As exhaustive catalogs of the lodge activity, they included details such as the secret gestures and blocking in terms so precise that even practicing masons referenced them to memorize the rites.106 Allyn also inserted editorial asides into his descriptions in order to classify masonic behavior within a performative lexicon. He reclassified the rites as “rituals” and focused on the intent, affect, and behavior exhibited during the initiations.107 As Allyn wrote in the dedication, “Often, when I have seen clergymen enter with so much zeal and spirit into the knock-down and drag-out ceremonies of making a Mason, I have thought to myself, You are a good fellow for a scrape, but I rather question your piety.”108 Allyn wondered whether all the ritual exertion truly aimed at Christian virtue. For Allyn it was not the strange or foreign nature of masonic symbols or narratives that made masonry potentially un-Christian; rather, it was the ambiguity of masonic rites as a form of action. The rites straddled too many categories—a playful tussle among friends, silly pantomime, and a sacred act akin to communion. Allyn considered what masons “meant” by their ritual behavior. He explained that following the Morgan scandal, he had come to realize that ceremonies he had understood as playful were in fact earnest. Specifically, in the context of Morgan’s abduction, he worried that the ritual threat of violence central to masonic oaths led to violence in non-ceremonial space. In his introduction to the exposé, Allyn wrote, I saw, it is true, many things in the ceremonies, and in the “oaths and obligations,” that were in point of phraseology, exceptionable; but never having been required to act up to the letter of these exceptionable points, such as require the concealment of crimes like murder, treason, &c. though fully expressed in the oath, I supposed it was form merely, retained to preserve the ancient landmarks.109

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By arguing that the oaths were more than mere “form,” Allyn reframed the ceremonies as “morally or legally Binding upon any member of the fraternity.”110 If in the act of initiation a man swore that he would dismember anyone who gave up the secrets of the brotherhood, Allyn argued, this oath was as serious as a man testifying in a court. In the aftermath of this criticism, published monitors from active Freemasons spent more time clarifying that oaths were actually empty gestures. As the monitor author Z. A. Davis clarified, “the terror of the penalty” did not add “anything to the obligation.” Without the terrifying gestures, he argued, the oath would be “equally binding.”111 Rites were civil, masons argued, when ritual violence was an additional and unnecessary component, a theatrical flourish that no civilized man really believed was true. When anti-masons compared mason’s oaths to legal oaths, masons could respond by explaining that with all sincerity, they had not really believed in the content of the rite at all. But Allyn’s descriptions hint at a failure of this ritual framework. Maybe these men did get caught up in the frenzy as they hit and kicked. It seems that the violence sometimes slipped from theatrical flourish into something more intentional, and masons also occasionally failed to maintain the crucial boundary between play and solemnity. Anti-Masons argued that despite the mandate by bright masons like Webb to maintain an air of gravitas, masonic rites in practice became “farces.”112 Allyn remarked that he had struggled to keep a straight face during the drama of the rite. In a small footnote to his description of the initiation for the Master Mason’s Degree he wrote, “I have seen candidates here make great contortions in derision and mockery, to turn the solemnity of prayer into ridicule, and the master of the lodge who was a professing Christian, stand indifferently for five minutes, and look on, and frequently shake his sides in silent laughter, to see how admirably the candidate performed his part of the ceremony.”113 Rites, as Allyn pointed out, could become comedic because they demanded theatrical commitment, and these “contortions” could shift into comedy if the gestures or line-readings became too broad. Both the exposés and Webb’s manual stressed the high stakes of solemnity in a masonic drama. The bright mason Jeremy Cross also worried about this slippage, writing after visiting a lodge in Wilmington that he was “much disgusted in the light trifling manner in which they conducted those [solmn seremonies] & I was not a little astonished to observe the Rev—who seemed to participate in such absurdities, [alass] what a [pitty] such sublime ceremonies should be so perverted that they should get so [fair] from the ancient land marks.”114

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Cross confirmed anti-masonic accusations of genre-bending by describing lodge practices that tipped over into amusement. These instances of failed solemnity demonstrate masonry’s precarious ideology of unbelieving ritualism. If the “garb of integrity” was a costume, and the oaths dramatic flourishes, the mason walked a difficult line between committing fully to the role and staying firmly aware of his own mimesis.115 Masons trained themselves to believe in their own actions temporarily, experiencing the sensations of violence and then leaving those sensations at the door of the lodge. Even within their own terms of efficacy, however, masonic rites were vulnerable to misfires. Masonic authority, after all, was premised on the notion that when people saw masons’ mysterious processions and symbols, they would simply understand these signs to be authorizing. Thus, in the face of early republican commitments to the democratization of politics and religion, it became more difficult to pull off a royal turban, even behind closed doors. Anti-Masons’ successful reframing of the rites as genuinely dangerous and stylistically absurd demonstrates that no authorizing ritual is immune to changing cultural moods. But even as masonic rites fell out of style, the notion that some men were especially suited for the serious business of civil society persisted. Governance in the early republic and the Jacksonian period shared a fundamental set of characteristics: an artificial performance served as proof that those who led society had earned their position through a meritocratic process, even if that process took place behind closed doors. The evangelicals who took on a central role in the administration of the American social body after 1820 did not wear elaborate costumes of velvet or act out dramas of ancient divine kingship, but they also privileged a mannered expression of civility. Some of the very same men belonged to both New York’s Holland Lodge and the evangelical American Bible Society, the subject of the next chapter.116 As I will argue in the following discussion of evangelical bureaucracy, the elaborate and hierarchical nature of Protestant corporate life did not disappear, but took on aesthetics of transparency, endurance, and agreement.

0 2 CONVENTIONAL BEHAVIOR IN THE AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY As a type of relationship, awkwardness describes the coterminous but independent dynamic between parts and whole. Here I highlight another performative dynamic of corporate sovereignty: the head and the lower body working at the same time (which, to be clear, is not the same thing as a head and body working together). Corporate governance relied on the awkward dynamic of tethered and disconnected functionality. Think of rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time. Through the case study of the American Bible Society, I show how corporate governance relied on the relationship between a board of directors and the society’s subscribing members. These two groups enacted two separate practices: the board’s meeting, where decisions were made; and the members’ convention, in which (mostly female) subscribers gathered but had little impact on the decision-making of the society. Convention attendees functioned as a passive and voluminous base to the decision-making head, accomplishing their task through inert presence. Awkwardness captures the dynamic of this inactive component in an active body. I consider this form of awkwardness relational, an unequal contribution between parts of a whole. It is the atmosphere of a classroom discussion where students who didn’t do the reading silently “participate.” Relational dysfunctionality, I argue, also comes with a range of aesthetics and affects that accumulate without communicating much specificity: opacity, minimalism, non-narrative lists, and endurance. This is ritual governance as facts on the ground, an unavoidable mass that asks you to look away from its procedural regularity. The archival records of corporate governance in the early northeastern United States convey a sense of constant and uninteresting activity. Annual

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reports, personal diaries, and newspapers describe an early republic full of meetings and conventions, a form of conventional behavior almost too ubiquitous to merit elaboration. John Pintard, a leading cultural figure in New York, listed his meetings in letters to his daughter. In a particularly busy week he attended a Bible society meeting, a Fuel Saving Fund meeting, a meeting of the members of the Sailor’s Snug Harbour fund, a meeting of the St. Thomas Scholarship Society, and a Savings Bank meeting.1 What happened at these meetings? Pintard’s letters, in the passive voice, detail that reports were finalized, letters from absent members and auxiliaries were read, and presidents of societies were elected.2 How these things happened did not make it into Pintard’s letters. He did not detail who read the correspondences at these meetings, who sat where, whether people said yay or nay aloud. From his letter it is unclear how the meeting decided Col. Varick was the appropriate president for the American Bible Society.3 Pintard frequently attended events in which little was noted other than attendance itself. “Minutes,” that form in which these events materialized, both record and obscure, resisting thick description of this cultural ritual. Pintard’s attendance at meetings contributed to his stature as a leading Christian citizen of the city, much as masonic rites qualified men for civic leadership. Both activities were obligations, but not necessarily acts of piety. Meeting participants, unlike masons who theorized their ritual play through manuals and other forms of meta-reflection, rarely thought about how to meet, unreflectively attending to their duties. Much of religious life in the early republic does not fit with conceptualizations of piety as a spiritual discipline pursued in mundane activities.4 The individuating formation inherent in the category of “piety” or “practice” misses the way Protestants in the Northeast zealously participated in communal activities that were obligatory and accrued no specific spiritual rewards. And yet, even with little meta-reflection, under-theorized meetings and conventions defined American norms of leadership, characterized by affects of agreement and endurance. Through an aesthetic of banality, a symbolic vacuum that makes the eyes glaze over, bureaucratic practices reproduced historical conceptions of the social body that Americans ideologically rejected. Much as Freemasons characterized civil society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, evangelicals structured civil society between the 1820s and 1840s through a diverse array of activities: compulsively joining, redeeming, and printing.5 Following Tocqueville, this activity is often characterized as religious citizens’ crucial contribution to American democracy. Work on the history of the American Bible Society and the American

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Tract Society highlights these particular organizations as predecessors of the for-profit mass media industry, but their corporate form also laid the groundwork for business and charity corporations alike as institutions that would lead in American social life. The state of New York incorporated religious print societies to do civilizing work on behalf of the state, and as such these organizations exemplify the ambiguous “churchstate” bodies that enacted legal and social sovereignty in the wake of the Revolution.6 While there is something predictable about evangelicals perfecting the production and distribution of The Word (perhaps the modern definition of evangelicalism), the labor of sovereignty—which became entangled in the United States with corporate bureaucracy—reveals another side of evangelicalism, less enthusiastic and more formal.7 Yet corporatism as a distinct set of affects and choreography was just as characteristic of evangelicalism as revivals and personal reform. As printing concerns, these societies produced a flurry of ink and pages that historians have identified as the basis of both the publishing industry and the reading public in the early United States, but this production of immaterial words had material foundations. By flooding the streets with printed matter they hoped to make readers out of Americans, and in order to do so they built massive infrastructures for delivering texts to every corner of the United States.8 As John Lardas Modern argues, the evangelical vision for a republic of circulating words stemmed from a vision of unmediated mediation: texts, in other words, disseminating themselves.9 Thus these organizations ideologically found more romance in images of migrating word flurries than they did in the heavy machines and slow human flesh that delivered the tract or Bible into the intended recipient’s hands.10 Print societies were also animated by bodies that subscribed to and promoted the project, also known as the “subscribers” who met annually to celebrate the societies’ work. These assembled bodies participated in a highly structured set of practices, such as sitting quietly, listening to non-narrative accounts, and reproducing the many procedures of the societies’ meetings and conventions. Much like the heavy and slow machinery of production and distribution, assembled bodies were powerful but not especially worthy of description. Evangelicals did not simply call down the Spirit in revivals and shower the American landscape with Bibles; rather, the relationship between evangelical print and practice relied on attending large bureaucratic meetings, counting subscriptions, sitting through interminable addresses. Just as scholarship has called our attention to these societies’ pivotal role in defining modern sensibilities of publicity and the mechanisms of mass

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production, evangelical print societies should be seen as sites of governance in the early republic. Historians reckoning with evangelicalism’s role in early nineteenthcentury democracy offer two different conclusions: (1) that evangelicalism was an inherently democratic social form that resolved the tensions between moral leadership and equal access to political power through the mechanism of willful conversion; and (2) in the absence of monarchy, Federalist organizations, and in particular evangelical Federalists like Lyman Beecher, represented a crypto-theocratic aristocracy that presumed American democracy could only be saved from itself by moral elites.11 Sovereign ritual provides a different way of answering how evangelicalism relates to democracy: regardless of political affiliation, sovereign aesthetics remained within the repertoire of American culture. Evangelical organizations enacted hierarchical rituals sapped of their spectacular sensations. In the 1820s evangelical associations bore a new burden of demonstrating their commitment to egalitarianism. I begin by showing how evangelicals balanced transparency and privacy through their bifurcation of the corporate body into the private board and the public subscribers. Evangelical benevolence societies presumed these two different parts of the corporate body required different rituals: an opaque meeting of the elected officials, and the highly visible membership convention. In the second half of the chapter, I describe the public convention and subscribers’ performance of ineffectuality in relationship to the board of directors. Inactive presence, endurance, attending in order to be counted—these are the sensations of egalitarian and well-ordered governance.

A GOOD MEETING

In deciding how to behave as an organization in the early nineteenth century, the key was not to innovate. The American Bible Society borrowed from a range of eighteenth-century corporate models, which as the standard for organizational structure carried through into post-Revolutionary law.12 Evangelical corporate structure derived from denominational structures (such as the Presbyterian synod), British trading corporations, and city, state, and national governments.13 New York state did not charter the ABS until 1841, but the society began considering incorporation in 1816, hoping to reap the benefits of free postage, the ability to remit books free of duty,

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and the capacity to receive, hold, and legally defend property. The Constitution and By-laws, adopted in 1816, followed standard corporate practice and demonstrated that the Board was familiar with all aspects of administrative, financial, and parliamentary practice that the state would require of them.15 In forming the by-laws and procedures Elias Boudinot, the ABS’s first president, called on his experience in incorporating the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the state of Pennsylvania as well as his experience with The Bank of the United States, arguing that he knew from experience how to participate in a well-run corporation and its meetings.16 The foundation of a good meeting was the presence of men such as Boudinot who attended many of them. ABS reports represent these gatherings as devoid of imagery, poetry, and expressive movements. In 1816 the Board of Managers, comprising ministers in an advisory role and donors, met thirteen times.17 First, the “Recording Secretary” delivered notice of the meeting in person to all attendees. Then the men met in a “N.Y. Institution” (most likely a hotel or tavern room).18 After all participants had entered the meeting room, a “prayer was offered” before representatives of various subcommittees, including the Treasurer and the chair of the Auditing committee, read their reports.19 At the Annual Meeting that took place once a year, the Board of Managers met once in their normal location before processing to the public convention, and then retired to a private meeting once again after the convention.20 At this second meeting of the day, understood as the first meeting of the next fiscal year of the organization, they nominated and elected new managers and resolved to publish the proceedings from the Annual Convention for the general public.21 These activities—convening, reading aloud, and resolving—composed the primary elements of the of the ABS’s meetings as recorded in their minutes. The few actions that could possibly be described as exciting or worthy of our descriptive attention include a Secretary serving as a “door-keeper,” protecting the meeting from prying eyes, and the tradition of “ballot voting,” in which the men wrote their votes on pieces of paper, thus maintaining anonymity on key votes.22 These familiar procedures hide the most mystical element of corporate meetings: their tendency to produce archives of action during the enactment. These meetings left their trace in two sources: published notices of the meeting and the minutes taken during meetings and kept within the institution. Both archive and script, the unpublished minutes enabled the next meeting to unfold because the last meeting had been captured accurately. Minutes took a particularly material form within the meeting as the 14

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Secretary laid the books that contained all the minutes of all past and current meetings “on the table at each meeting for the inspection of the Managers.”23 Sitting in the center of the meeting table, the minute books initiated the next meeting. At the end of the meeting the Chairman read aloud the freshly written minutes, approved them, and signed them, signaling the end of the meeting.24 The corporate rules dictated that the minutes must be kept “in the custody of the Agent” and “so assorted as to give the utmost facility to a reference” in case managers required access.25 Minutes are civil society’s defense against the ephemerality of performance, and a method of selective erasure. As the performance scholar Peggy Phelan writes, “Performance . . . becomes itself through disappearance.”26 Yet scholars in the field of performance art show that a “repertoire,” or the embodied archive of performance, allows performance to endure historically, creating wider social and political effects.27 Minutes as a corporate practice show that white evangelical men worried about their practices’ spatial-temporal transcendence and were not content to rely on an embodied repertoire. Written as the action unfolded, minutes came with a stamp of objectivity as complete transcriptions of reality. And yet the minutes are full of gaps: there are no transcriptions of individual statements or directions for where and how bodies should be arranged. Thus, as with all performance archives, these minutes do not provide a perfect window into the action of the performance. The material remains of performance, as the theater scholar Barbara Hodgdon writes, “leave traces endowed with agency,” and these “material remains” are sites of “re-performance.”28 Hodgdon is encouraging us to understand these material remains of performance as live mines that can themselves spark action. Minutes, however, work differently from a theatrical script or promptbook or a ritual manual. They do not spark creative reenactment or invite another staging, but rather confirm to their reader that all the action unfolded as expected. The minutes depict an impressionistic landscape of motion and words, fuzzy on the interstitial details, unresolvable to potential viewers who were not already in attendance. Minutes also accumulated in weighty materiality that called attention to their own endurance. The founding of the New York Historical Society anticipated the increasing abundance of corporate minutes “civil or ecclesiastical” that followed the growth of early republican incorporation. In the minutes of the New York Historical Society’s initial meeting, “The following persons, viz: Egbert Benson, Dewitt Clinton, Rev. William Linn, Rev. Samuel Miller, Rev. John M. Mason, Doctor David Hosack, Anthony Bleecker,

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Samuel Bayard, Peter G. Stuyvesant and John Pintard, being assembled in the Picture Room of City Hall of the City of New York, agreed to form themselves into a Society the principle design of which should be to collect and preserve whatever may relate to the natural, civil or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general and of this State in particular.” The organization existed to “collect and preserve” the records of New York’s burgeoning civil society, and they invited the public to donate “Proceeding of Ecclesiastical Conventions, Synods, General Assemblies, Presbyteries, and Societies of all Denominations of Christians. . . . Minutes and proceedings of Societies for the abolition of Slavery and the transactions of Societies for Political, Literary and scientific purposes.”29 Even as white Protestant organizations sedimented their own authority through books and books of minutes, the same men (John Pintard, for instance, served on the board of both the ABS and the New York Historical Society) created other institutions to store and house their own archives. Corporate meetings in the early republic were a performance for posterity created by institutions organized in order to be remembered and to remember. Producing performance and archive simultaneously resulted in a performance style distinct from both royal pomp and emotive piety. Newspapers and journals (of both the society and other religious journals) published a skeleton version of ABS minutes that functioned as a profane copy of the sacred original. These accessible words allowed the absent public to directly account for the meetings’ proceedings by presenting a body of text to the eye that stood in for the bodies who assembled at the meeting itself. For example, the ABS published the minutes of the May 14, 1818, Second Annual Meeting as the “Annual Report,” which they sent to foreign Bible societies and domestic auxiliaries. 30 Held in the City Hotel, New-York, on Thursday, May 14, 1818.—The Hon. Elias Boudinot, President of the Society, in the Chair. The Meeting was opened with the reading of the 49th chapter of Isaiah, by the Rev. John M. Mason, D.D. Secretary for Foreign Correspondence. Letters of non-attendance were read, from the following VicePresidents, who were unavoidably prevented from being present at the Meeting, viz. Hon. John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State of the United States. Hon. Smith Thompson, Chief Justice of the State of New-York. Hon. William Tilghman, Chief Justice of the State of Pennsylvania.

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Hon. Andrew Kirkpatrick, Chief Justice of the State of New-Jersey. Joseph Noursk, Esq. Register of the Treasury of the United States. Hon. Francis S. Key, of Georgetown, District of Columbia. Also, a letter from Rev. John B. Romeyn, D.D. Secretary for Domestic Correspondence, absent in consequence of ill health. The Annual Report of the Board of Managers was read by the Rev. Samuel Blatchford, D.D. of Lansingburgh, N.Y.—after which, the following Resolutions were passed unanimously. I. On motion of Mr. John Murray, Jun of New-York, seconded by the Rev. Samuel Miller, D.D. of Princeton, New-Jersey. Resolved, That the Report of the Board of Managers now read, be accepted as highly satisfactory and encouraging; and that it be published under the direction of the Board. II. On motion of the Rev. James Milner, of New York, seconded by the Rev. James M. Mathews, of the same place, Resolved, That the thanks of this Society be presented to its President, for his continued and watchful attention to its interests, and for his munificent liberality toward its funds. III. On motion of the Rev. John Chester, of Albany, seconded by General Stephen Van Rensselaer, of the same place, Resolved, That the thanks of this Society be rendered to the several Vice-Presidents for the patronage which they have given to the Institution.31

This body of text lists names and resolutions, but no record of discussions.32 The formatting commemorates without communicating any particular quality of how this meeting was distinct from others. Rather than asking the reader to track every speech and report, the published minutes re-performed the meeting with the ambiguity of a sped-up reel. The listing actively rejects narrative reading. If read as an actual account, the text mostly describes a series of men deciding to thank one another: a circle of verbal back-pats. Associations such as the ABS claimed social authority by meeting behind closed doors but making their private meeting accountable to a public through recording the meetings’ proceedings, demonstrating private ritual’s capacity to address an excluded public. Even if other members of the public could not directly watch corporate board meetings, they could in theory assess these boards’ capacity for governance through the minutes. Unlike the parades of city officials through the streets or the pomp of a royal ceremony, board meetings as a sovereign ritual demonstrated authority through

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opacity. Blocks of text, mutual congratulation, some rising and sitting, and the presence of elite members of New York society confirmed that what happened in these meetings was predictable, effective, and not worth watching. In his analysis of Balinese sovereign ritual, Geertz describes how royal displays of power demanded obedience from a public through visual awe. Royal ritual, he argued, “enacted, in the form of a pageant, the main themes of Balinese political thought: the center is exemplary, status is the ground of power, statecraft is a thespian art.”33 To study governance as performance, Geertz argued, is to recognize human vulnerability in the face of spectacle. How then do we account for rituals of governance that repel close attention by a public? Meetings and their archives both accumulate and withdraw from sight. Nothing to see here; it is just business as usual. To account for the power of American rituals of governance, we need to understand the minimalism of bureaucratic ritual as a mannered aesthetic of its own that can dazzle even if it does not display thespian artistry. Proceduralism is a genre of performance that idealizes redundancy, which is not to say that proceduralism is successful in its production of redundancy. The promise of complete consistency despite the pragmatic truth that all performances will sometimes misfire, unfold differently, or take a surprising turn, is a helpful fiction.34 Associated with the practice of law, the term has taken on higher stakes with philosophers such as Rawls and Habermas who have seen proceduralism as the path to fairness in liberal society. Democracy, these philosophers have explained, will be fairer because everyone will have the same opportunities to engage in conversations and processes if they unfold with total regularity. Even if these procedures take place in private and include a select group of citizens, the regularity of these performances secures the public’s trust.35 The ABS and evangelical members of civil society placed their hopes in regularity as a form of just governance that both fulfilled the need for equal access to power and correctly ordered the social body, but their proceedings are also helpful for demonstrating the failures of this overpromised consistency.

C O R P O R AT E S O V E R E I G N T Y I N T H E E A R LY R E P U B L I C

We can see this hope for the public utility of private ritual taking form in early republican voluntary societies as they published the proceedings of their associations (the bylaws and constitutions, the stripped-down min-

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utes). When the ABS invited subscribers and non-members to read their proceedings, they believed that people would see the democratic nature of their association. In this desire to be seen both as transparent and as special caretakers of the social order, voluntary societies such as the ABS demonstrated their ambivalence toward the possibility of equality in American civil society. While the urban elite had initially taken on the mantle of leadership immediately following the Revolution, by the 1830s northeastern associations felt the need to justify their leadership role in cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, through more than inherited privilege. Yet in many ways civil society was no more materially equal in 1830 than it had been in 1810. The men who prospered in business were mostly the same men who led in civil society twenty years before. Political historians have often argued that with the decline of the Federalists this sense of an elite American aristocracy gave way to a rowdy participatory democracy, yet the history of voluntary associations (peopled by both Federalists and Republicans) demonstrates a pervasive sense of elite men inheriting the responsibility of sovereignty in cultural sensibilities that transcend political affiliation.36 As the historian Amy Bridges explains in the context of New York City, “it is impossible to determine where government began and noblesse oblige (and the church) ended.”37 What changed in this period was the influx of an increasingly class-conscious population of laborers and the rise of evangelicalism in civil society.38 The work of charity shifted from an implicit responsibility of elites to an explicit evangelical project shared by both the elite and the emerging middle class, and in the process civil society took on a more bureaucratic structure as national societies replaced local societies.39 Members of civil society in this new effortful mode could not simply rely on an overlap between social privilege and civic responsibility; instead they had to prove their credentials as leaders. Thus, a new performative dimension entered civic governance. In the ABS’s corporate rituals we can see a tension between a need to demonstrate civil society’s rejection of aristocratic privileges and the assumption of sovereign power as the natural responsibility of middle-class and elite evangelical men. In 1830 these tensions between institutional access and elite patronage came to a head in an exposé written by a former member of the ABS. If the point of the Annual Reports was to allow the public to assess the finances of the Society, the former member argued, then “never was an exhibit so unsatisfactory to a community as this.”40 The general abundance of receipts, donations, and costs seemed designed to conceal the actual financial goals

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of the Society by hiding some figures among others. For instance, the exposé showed that in the lists of the Society’s costs the report listed dissimilar items. Buried in the same list as postage and fuel for the headquarters’ stove was the salary of the General Agent.41 The dissimilarity of line items, the exposé argued, made it impossible for members to assess the Society’s costs. Not only did the organization of data hide particular costs, but the sheer volume of numbers listed on page after page of the reports, and read at length during meetings, were impossible to decipher. For any ordinary member to look at “the Annual Reports of the Society, and examine them in the course in which they have been presented” would be impossible without other information. “Unless he has knowledge that is not to be gleaned from these Reports, he must give up the pursuit as entirely hopeless.”42 A reader would need to be a financial expert in benevolence society accounting in order to assess the ABS’s reports, which ran counter to the entire premise of the Society publishing accounts for a general public. Much as the author of the ABS exposé worried, some men in the early republic were experts in benevolence accounting. These men were highly skilled (but unpaid) meeting-attenders, and their job was synonymous with a particular cultural status. In 1815 Elias Boudinot, a congressman from New Jersey and future president of the ABS, debated the value of a national Bible society by arguing that men who ran important institutions were competent and fair leaders for other important institutions. Baptist ministers were dubious of Presbyterian and Congregationalists’ ability to remain neutral in their sectarian priorities, but Boudinot defended his ability to run a non-sectarian organization by referencing his involvement with the Bank of the United States (he also was the director of the US Mint). He argued, “let me remind you of a civil Institution as a model. The late Bank of the United States, respected the whole Union. The Stockholders belonged to every State in the United States. . . . The Directors served without fee or reward for twenty years. I was one of about Eighteen, and I never heard of any complaint, jealousy of Rivalry, or uneasiness about the [Expence], or any charge of ostentation, though we have had them come from Boston and from Georgia, but believe we gave universal satisfaction, though we had seven branches to attend to and support.”43 Bank directors were trustworthy in several ways that qualified them for leadership in the ABS. They had experience representing stockholders “from every State in the United States.” They served “without fee,” thus demonstrating through their donation of time a commitment to more than their individual interests. The simple fact that they had served on one board without “complaint, jealousy of Rivalry,

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or uneasiness” qualified them to serve on other boards. Boudinot was not alone in preparing for leadership at the American Bible Society through his association with banks. Leonard Bleecker, a member of the Board, was a former director of the Bank of Manhattan; the future ABS president Matthew Clarkson served as president of the Bank of New York; and the rest of the directors had equally impressive resumes as the presidents and board members of other northeastern institutions and companies.44 Reflecting the sense that these men’s behavior was beyond reproach, the ABS maintained a distinction between closed board meetings and public conventions. In defining their own internal hierarchy of participation, the ABS specifically looked to their British Bible society counterparts to formulate a constitution and develop an array of organizational titles and roles: president, vice presidents, managers, directors, secretaries, governors, and “governors for life.” In the constitution of the American Bible Society, William Jay laid out the responsibilities of all these different roles, mostly consisting of monetary donation requirements. In order to become a “Director” of the Society, for instance, a subscriber needed to pay the society fifteen dollars, and the hierarchy of the society continued in that fashion. Matthew Clarkson, the acting vice president of the Society at the first meeting, explained, “Each subscriber of one hundred and fifty dollars at one time, or who shall, by one additional payment, increase his original subscription to one hundred and fifty dollars, shall be a Director for life.”45 This gesture of inclusivity, that anyone could become a member by contributing money, had been a feature of British charities since the late seventeenth century, when charities adopted the model of the joint-stock corporation. Unlike the previous model, in which one person wielded singular power through endowing an organization, in the “subscription” model your donation bought you participation in the organization’s governance.46 But in antebellum benevolent societies, only directors had the privilege of attending and voting at the board meetings, which were the primary decision-making venues.47 Peter Wosh, in his history of the American Bible Society, shows that important technical decisions about the organization’s direction took place in the meetings of the Board of Managers, the complete minutes of which were not published.48 It was in these meetings that directors formed committees, elected officers, and made decisions on financial expenditures.49 A committee then prepared an Annual Report that summarized these decisions for the subscribers.50 Conventions, in which all the subscribers demonstrated their co-governance of the organization but in which no substantial deci-

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sions were actually made, thus help us understand the crucial role of an inert public in the corporate functions of the ABS. The public bodies assembled for conventions played an awkward role in the function of the organization. Commenting on the logic of the ABS’s constitution, William Jay pointed out that “As the respectability . . . of the society will depend in a great degree on the personal character and zeal of its officers, the selection of these officers is wisely [confided] to the deliberate vote of the committee, and not left to the hasty inconsiderate choice of a promiscuous assembly at a general meeting.”51 The mass assembly of subscribers was untrustworthy compared to the elite men whose success had qualified them for important decision-making and the operations of the society needed to be actively guarded against the input of the convention. But Jay’s unfavorable comparison between the respectable officers and the questionable subscribers belied the crucial work of the subscribers’ attendance at conventions. Their dysfunctional relationship with the board produced the critical sensations of governance I will now describe: endurance, silent agreement, and the unmarked banality of the normative. These passive sensations only work in relationship to an active head. Jay’s dismissal of the promiscuous assembly ignored the necessary, if not awkward, dynamic between a thinking head and an unthinking body.

A N N I V E R S A RY W E E K

Unlike managers’ closed meetings, journalists reported on conventions in person. Newspapers and popular journals published the proceedings, constitution, and first-person accounts, detailing not only the mechanisms of institutional procedure and membership, but also the feel of the assembly.52 Evangelical societies made resolutions at the conventions even if they voted on key questions within the selective board of directors.53 How they behaved during these resolutions, however, eludes description, because it felt routine to its audience and to journalists who publicized the events. But a successful convention had limits, authorized spaces, and genre distinctions. There was a correct form of the convention even if no witnesses made these rules explicit. Conventions shared many spatial and visual distinctions with revivals, but convening evangelically came with a set of gestures and bodily rules that set benevolence societies’ corporate behavior apart from enthusiastic

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piety. In conventions evangelicals cultivated endurance, an under-studied aspect of evangelical aesthetics. Conventions, called “Anniversary Weeks,” occurred annually in northeastern cities. During an 1834 Anniversary Week, New Yorkers moved from church, to hotel, to various headquarters around Chatham Street in lower New York. Reports buzzed with the thrill of simultaneity and crammed schedules. The event brought together all subscribers to the Northeast’s key benevolence societies: the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, the Sabbath Union, and many more. Attendees tried to make the most of the Anniversary Week by attending multiple meetings a day.54 Hoping to boost meeting attendance, evangelical leaders decided to centralize the event by creating a permanent home for the convention in the Chatham Street Theater.55 The arrival of New York’s first permanent evangelical architecture, Chatham Street Theater, enabled a range of evangelical performative styles both energetic and staid. The Chatham Street Theater represents the consolidation of evangelical civil society in northeastern cities during the 1820s and 1830s as evangelicals continued the efforts of the mission and tract societies that had been in operation since the late eighteenth century, but extended these missions into the Western frontier and urban slums. What made northeastern evangelical civil society in the 1830s distinct, however, was an aesthetic of inclusion and openness. Leaders of the “Free Church Movement” in New York, including the wealthy Tappan brothers, hoped to create revivals in New York City that rivaled those in upstate New York and the West by forming churches that did not charge rent on pews. As an investment in this plan, they purchased the Chatham Street Theater and subsequently built the Broadway Tabernacle. The men behind the Free Church Movement obtained a ten-year lease on the Chatham Street Theater in 1832 as part of a plan to install the famous evangelical preacher Charles Finney permanently in the city and encourage the lower classes to participate in urban evangelical revivals. It was no accident that the theater had previously been a playhouse serving mostly working-class audiences in lower Manhattan. Free Church funders thought that this proximity to the lower classes might draw them into the church.56 The Chatham Street Theater also provided a more permanent solution to the problem of hosting the numerous anniversary conventions of benevolent societies, which required large spaces that could hold thousands of members. Massive meeting spaces physicalized evangelicals’ commitment to transparency as an institutional ethic and a performative style by allowing

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thousands of attendees to see speakers during associational meetings and revivals. The evangelicals using Chatham Street Chapel (as it was renamed) retained the characteristics of theater, demonstrating a shift within American Protestant Christianity toward evangelical oratory that touched every attendee through a combination of visual and auditory spectacle. The church’s funders intentionally used the building’s existing theatrical elements to draw in new converts and amplify the dramatic sermons of ministers.57 Oratorical spectacle in turn induced dramatic responses. Emotional outbursts, both oral and physical, characterized the revivals that New York evangelicals embraced. In the New York Evangelist, the leading Presbyterian journal of the city, the editor affirmed: “Every man who is under the influence of religious feeling, will invariably make that feeling manifest.” 58 The author chided his fellow evangelicals who worried too much about “animal feeling” during a revival and thus “seem to say, by their practice, that religion consists in an almost stoical insensibility.”59 Evangelical practice included a range of affects, both “stoical” and exuberant, but what was appropriate during a revival was not appropriate during a benevolence association meeting. Despite our association of spaces like Chatham Street with theatrical oratory and emotional outbursts, civil society’s use of this quintessentially evangelical space for business meetings and annual conventions tells a different story about evangelical tropes of speaking, listening, and feeling. Visitors’ and participants’ accounts of conventions often noted the disciplined attention of audience members. The New York Evangelist specified that the ideal audience for a Sunday School Union meeting sat in “silence and order.”60 The British visitor Andrew Reed, who toured the American churches and published his findings in A Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches, brought an outsider’s perspective to New-York Anniversary Week, which he described at length by noting the distinctive behavior of attendees. Reed observed audience members giving their full attention as reports and addresses were read out loud, an impressive feat given that meetings often ran four hours.61 Long readings made for long meetings, and the length of meetings seemed to be a particular virtue of the form. As Reed noted at Anniversary Week, “The meetings were mostly held in the morning and evening; commencing at ten and half past seven, and finishing at an uncertain time. The evening meetings closed about ten o’clock, and the morning about two; and the one I have described finished at half past two. The meetings, as a whole, were pronounced to be more interesting than they had ever been, and this was said in [connexion] with the assurance that they had been much longer.”62 Attendees did not know when multi-hour

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meetings would end, and according to Reed, a good convention could be judged by its interminability. Attending a convention required a give and take between speakers and listeners. Reed noted that speakers appealed to the audience’s benevolent feelings as a means of gaining approval for proposed resolutions. During speeches about the facts of intemperance, the lives of heathens, or the experiences of tract distributors, audience members responded in a manner that demonstrated the emotional resonance of these facts but never spilled over into the kind of animation that characterized revivals. Reed described Anniversary Week as a “most solemn and delightful occasion” in which “the profound silence showed that all were engaged in one act; and sweet and refreshing tears were shed in abundance.”63 Silent tears signaled emotional engagement on the part of the audience, but complete stillness extended to attendees’ heads, which Reed approvingly noted did not even nod in agreement with the speaker. In one instance an attendee made his agreement known through a nod and audible sound, but he was “severely put down by a rigid chairman.”64 Reed noticed that in the most successful convention assemblies the speaker addressed “himself to a people who can wait on his lips with intelligent smiles, and silent tears, and with what, after all, perhaps, is his highest compliment, silence itself—deep and sublime—like the silence of heaven.”65 This careful balance of behavioral cues required a sort of vigilant passivity: tears streaming past restrained smiles on immobile heads.

C O N V E N T I O N A L B E H AV I O R

Benevolence societies naturalized a quiet, placid, and harmonious vision of civil society. Yet these are not words usually associated with the Jacksonian period, in which the first political machines spewed vicious partisan rhetoric.66 Nor are these descriptions often connected with the physical affirmation that characterized revivals—either in the Methodist meetings where participants cried out in pleasure and anguish, or in the New Measures revivals where participants signaled their choice by moving to the anxious benches in the front.67 In the emphasis on subdued agreement, evangelical civil society contrasted with other forms of evangelical performance and with other forms of expression and consent in New York’s burgeoning public sphere.68 Where revivals excited, conventions soothed. At an ABS convention, people sat through as many as eight speeches

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(not counting resolutions and prayers). In his notes on the founding of the institution, William Jay explained that in order to avoid sectarian conflict, “The manner in which the annual meeting of the society shall be conducted, will be of great importance.”70 Because the “Quaker and the Episcopalian cannot cordially unite in any one form of external worship,” the ABS would model themselves after their British counterparts, who “have banished from their meetings all religious exercises. In the place of these, they have substituted voluntary addresses from the members, both Clergy and Laity, and have found the experiment attended with the most beneficial effects.”71 Thus speeches, in place of sermons, would distinguish conventions from sectarian liturgy. Andrew Reed, the British visitor to Anniversary Week, reflected on the rhetorical style of these conventions, describing Dr. Berman at the Foreign Mission Society as “argumentative, but popular, serious, but urgent, embracing large views of a great subject, and making strong claims on the conscience.”72 The exchange of information and attention between speaker and audience members was a meeting of “men who have a serious business in hand.”73 When Reed himself contributed a resolution at the meeting for the Foreign Mission Society, he judged his success as a speaker by audiences’ emotional consistency. “What was said was received with the greatest indulgence and attention; and I was thankful if it did not disturb or allay the state of feeling which happily existed.”74 Speeches by ministers at these anniversaries did not introduce new ideas with exhilarating rhetoric. Rather, they demonstrated what conducting “serious” business looked like and they “confirmed” without altering the existing feelings of the audience. In distinction from many of the rhetorical forms of their era, the convention speech did not aim to entertain or proffer new information.75 Resolutions during the meeting reaffirmed that the members were happy to continue doing what they were already doing, in the manner in which they were already doing it. Agreed upon months before the convention, “The Committee on Arrangements for the Annual Meeting” crafted resolutions and arranged for particular people to make motions and to second these motions.76 The committee, for example, chose the Reverend Mr. Hodgson to offer a resolution at the annual meeting. His resolution invited the members to do the same work, in the same manner, in the upcoming year: “Resolved, That while the members of the society are grateful for what has been accomplished the past year, in supplying youth and children with the holy scriptures, in accordance with resolutions passed at the last anniversary, they would affectionately urge the prosecution of the same work, and with increased vigor, during the year to come.”77 Rather than riling up 69

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the crowd, a skillful speaker did not disturb the progress already underway or trouble the pre-existing ideas about the mission and strategies of the association. Speakers instead reiterated, they urged “affectionately,” and they always resolved to continue their work. In their resolutions speakers restated over and over, with slightly different words, the core mission that all in attendance had already agreed upon.78 This is not to say meetings did not contain moments of jubilation, as speakers did interject prayers and hymns. Still, these bits of celebration were framed by hours of respectful attention to restatements of what everyone already believed to be right and true.79 Passive listening, after all, relies not just on an absence of new information, but on the trust that everything will be repeated and the general sense that the listener already knows what’s being said. By saying nothing new, the ABS’s articulations of purpose and resolve recirculated but inched forward in a progressive loop. Passive listening led to communal happiness. The manager, and city father, William Jay wrote to the recording secretary John Pintard in 1817 that the society’s reports must avoid controversy. “The society . . . must know no enemy—her sphere is one of love & harmony. . . . It ought not to appear from her Reports, that a single individual on earth viewed her with jealousy & dissatisfaction.”80 In this sense, evangelicals shared with their Freemason predecessors a basic distaste for political parties and religious sectarianism, which they framed as barriers to cooperative social engagement.81 The “Evangelical United Front,” as the historian Charles Foster called it, established an agreement between all the major denominations of the day that resources and energy should be pooled into benevolence organizations.82 Disagreements in theology between Methodists and Presbyterians ignited spats in New York’s religious journals, but the same religious journals also emphasized the necessity of putting these conflicts aside for the general good of the “Christian Union.”83 The trans-denominational meetings for associations such as the Society for Promoting the Sabbath, the Sunday School Union, and the American Bible Society and American Tract Society modeled agreement and unity in marked contrast to the public disagreements that took place in denominational conferences.84 Pan-evangelical benevolence societies did not just retreat from sectarian conflict—they diffused it, striving for consensus even as their members performed passionate debate in other spaces of their civic and religious lives. When disagreement bubbled to the surface, the convention pulled its constituents together through a melding of feeling. Members of the American Tract Society, for example, expressed concern about the possibility of trans-

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denominational tract distribution at an annual meeting in 1825. The journalist for the Zion’s Herald wrote that “the more the subject was discussed . . . the more perfectly accordant appeared to be the views, entertained by different gentlemen, of what the character of the publications of the society ought to be.”85 They began with debate, but debate at some point fell away as the differing views transformed into the same views. The process had a transcendent resonance that brought the attendees into closer kinship as “a bond of Christian affection immediately encircled them, and at the public meeting it grew stronger and stronger.” At the meeting of the American Tract Society this radiating aura of agreement seemed to surround the President as he closed the meeting, and the Zion’s Herald pronounced: “We believe there was not a Christian present, who did not feel that he was standing on holy ground.”86 The Annual Report of the American Bible Society stated that the pleasure in agreement was just as sweet for those who had initially disagreed with a resolution. “Many who had doubted of the practicability of the plan, yielded to the pleasing conviction that they were mistaken, and joined with those who had never doubted on the subject.”87 Agreement, as a “pleasing conviction,” could only be achieved through the process of raising the resolutions, hearing a few concerns, and then submitting to the inevitable agreement. A small amount of debate thus served the crucial purpose of beginning the process of reconciliation, about which observers at the American Bible Society’s meeting spoke in terms of an affective atmosphere. Agreement, earned through the process of limited debate, filled the room of a convention with “harmony, cordiality, and forbearance.” It felt good to debate a little before accepting the resolution and yielding to the preauthorized decisions of the managers who had written the resolutions. Andrew Reed observed at the Foreign Mission Society meeting that the passing of the resolution came as a sort of relief after all that good feeling had been built up. Reed wrote, “After a slight pause, the Rev. Mr. Blagden, of Boston, rose, and referring to the felt state of the meeting, proposed that contributions should be immediately made, and that we should resolve ourselves into a prayer-meeting, to seek the especial blessing of God on our object and ourselves.”88 Apparently the Reverend, in his anticipation of this pleasurable release, had spoken a little too soon. “The president and one or two senior members about the chair thought that they had better first pass through the usual and remaining business. This was conceded.” But the meeting lost some of its magic after this refusal of the Reverend’s suggestion. According to Reed’s observations, the following speakers “spoke under some disadvantage.” The “general

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feeling” of the meeting “required not to be excited by continuous appeal; but rather to be relieved by devout supplication.”89 The meeting’s atmosphere, as a force distinct from the participants themselves, could be worked up and then brought down in a well-timed and thorough set of steps. Skilled speakers kept the energy on a consistent low simmer until all the business items had been worked through. But as the mistake of Rev. Blagden demonstrates, this atmosphere could be stirred up too quickly, and relieved too soon. Apparently, the conflicting need for the requisite procedural order could sometimes frustrate those who looked ahead to the inevitable gratification of the resolution passing.

MIXED ASSEMBLIES AND COUNTERPUBLICS

Despite this veneration for consensus, disagreement crept into the open conventions of trans-denominational benevolence societies. In 1835 the American Bible Society aired a public internal conflict over Bible translations in foreign missions, a disagreement that ultimately resulted in the splintering off of Baptists from the society.90 But the most dramatic conflict that moved out of the private board meetings and committees and into the public space of conventions surrounded slavery. A reporter attending the 1858 American Tract Society meeting wrote that the topic of whether to print pro- or anti-slavery tracts “invested the occasion with unusual interest, and produced a debate for which, probably, the history of the Institution furnished no parallel.” The chairman chided the assembly for applauding after remarks, unidentified “voices” shouted at the stage, and directors tried to restate their arguments because they feared members, who shouted them down, had not fully understood their position. Capturing the sensation of a meeting with an undetermined outcome, the reporter sprinkled in the descriptor “[confusion]” regularly throughout his account.91 The meeting provided a stark contrast to the model of soothing agreement and procedural regularity that white benevolence societies cultivated. Anti-slavery societies, which met alongside the ABS, the ATS, and Sabbath Unions during Anniversary Week, also could not suppress conflict and noise as they discussed slavery. During conventions members found some resolutions “unworthy of notice,” participants vehemently disagreed on language (was slavery merely wrong, or a sin?), and audience members walked away from the meetings in disgust over speeches and selected speak-

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ers. Speakers could hardly be heard over the din of “members and spectators . . . constantly coming in” and “invariably ‘asking for information’ what was doing.”93 Even with their moments of disharmony, anti-slavery meetings attempted to mirror the practices of sister societies like the American Bible Society.94 Most resolutions were restatements of the society’s core mission, allowing for a series of unanimous decisions.95 These meetings, like benevolence society meetings in general, aimed to achieve quiet attention, even if they failed. What truly set the anti-slavery meetings apart, however, was the membership’s non-homogenous corporate body. In the 1840s, reporters and society members both remarked on the visuals, textures, and smells of the antislavery conventions. Describing these assemblies, a reporter for the New York Herald lingered on the skin and hair of attendees: “The galleries and body of the Tabernacle, were well filled . . . varying from the fairest blond to [Afric’s] sable hue. Here sat a beautiful girl—her auburn hair falling in luxurious tresses over her neck of alabaster whiteness—and by her side, in close conversation, a huge thick-lipped negro. . . . The average color of the audience we should judge, was about that of a Bath brick.”96 Reports in local newspapers (reprinted in the Liberator) spent many words on these lists of phenotypes. In a description of the Annual Meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the reporter described 92

two gentlemen of color, and one in whose composition milk and molasses seems to have been used in about equal portions—seven or eight sisters varying in hue from the jet black to the brunette—and one picaninny, so black that he looked as if he might have been dipped twice after the color was set. On the left of the desk was a very rum lot of yellow girls, a handsome yellow boy, and three or four greasy wenches, big enough to yield half a barrel of oil a piece. . . . By this time the body of the church had got quite full, and numbers were standing in the aisles. Some dozen or twenty blacks entered with others, and one fellow, as black as a thunder cloud, with unctuous lips an inch thick, marched up and took a seat on the pulpit stairs along side of Lewis Tappan.97

Reports of a bad smell accompanied this hyper-description of color and texture.98 Non-white attendees became consumables—milk, molasses, oil— reflecting the sense that the very presence of Black people stimulated the eyes and ears, but also overwhelmed the reporter’s body by turning on his sense of taste. Even the white people at these meetings received visual notice,

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as reports described the accessories and style of speakers’ clothes and the tone of their white (“alabaster”) skin and red (“auburn”) hair. For instance, the paper described the activist Lucretia Mott as “dressed in the style of a Quakeress, a white shawl being added to the stern garb.”99 Scholars of abolitionism note the ways in which the diversity of these meetings sparked fears of gendered and racialized “amalgamation” for respectable northern whites who became enmeshed in a disordered sociality that was beyond the pale.100 But it is also crucial to see the verbal illustrations of these meetings’ visual, haptic, and aural variety as a descriptive overload that elided the textural and visual sensations of their negative image: the homogeneous white meeting of voluntary societies like the American Bible Society. Evoking no sensual stimuli by white writers, the unmarked bodies of American Bible Society members go undescribed in the archive. The over-description of the anti-slavery societies, however, makes visible the invisible corporate bodies of less controversial evangelical voluntary societies. The fact that homogenous white bodies were unremarkable demonstrates the presumed universality of white evangelical civil society.101 Anti-slavery societies’ public display of disagreement and bad feelings at Anniversary Weeks highlights the interaction between evangelical civil society and what scholars of the women’s suffrage movement and African American civil society have described as “counterpublics.” These scholars have been particularly perceptive ethnographers of the convention as a formal practice, as a place where alternative forms of public assembly became possible. Enacted by white women and Black men, conventions became forms of dissent against a dominant form of representation in the public sphere. When Nancy Isenberg describes the women’s suffrage conventions of the 1840s as an opportunity for white women to inhabit the form of constitution-writing associated with the constitutional convention of 1787, we might amplify her argument by pointing out that these women were also performing the kind of conventions that benevolent societies and political parties had been staging throughout the 1820s.102 As Derek Spires and Erika Ball argue in their descriptions of Black Conventions, the dissenting nature of these meetings did not come from their innovation, but rather from their reproduction of the established formal procedures of their white counterparts, performed by alternative bodies.103 Spires writes, “The organizers of the 1840 New York convention were keenly aware that the convention’s legitimacy depended as much on how well the proceedings showed it executing its business as a deliberative body (or at least how well it presented this execution to the public) as it did on what the convention

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actually decided.” Spires shows that this formal requirement came not only from procedural precedent, but also from enacting the kind of comportment associated with a respectable (white) convention. One participant, Spires explains, emphasized “that the ‘Proceedings’ represent the convention’s ‘respectable and noble’ character, revealing the delegates’ ability to conduct business without ‘angry debate,’ settling differences ‘amicably and yet without compromise.’”104 Even as African American societies appropriated the repertoire of white evangelical proceduralism and agreement, these societies could not perform a key quality of conventional behavior: they could not become an indistinct corporate body that elided sensual description for an outside audience. An optimistic reading of early American democratic life often emphasizes the simplicity and regularity of early American civil society; anyone, after all, could apply for a charter, write bylaws, hold meetings.105 The repertoire of conventional behavior, however, included particular types of bodies that made a convention look and feel civil. When reporters did acknowledge distinctive bodily qualities at white ABS conventions, it was in reference to women. White women’s bodies played a key role in demonstrating the unity and uselessness of an assembly of subscribers in a normative convention. I say “bodies” because despite other historians’ useful work on the role of women in authorizing men’s civility at early republican parades and antebellum political conventions, I want to emphasize that women did not signify virtue—or at least they did not represent “virtue” in the ways we often describe feminized virtue in the early republic and then the antebellum period (namely, virtue as restraint and Christian morality).106 Instead, reporters’ brief acknowledgments of white women’s bodies at conventions emphasized uniformity and sheer quantity as a civic virtue. A report of an 1844 Anniversary Week marveled at the “imposing sight” of three thousand people in the Tabernacle, noting the conformity and size of the assembly of clergymen and society directors on the stage. “The whole gallery behind, up to the organ, was filled with clergymen,—all, of course, dressed in black, and most of them wearing white neck-cloths. Their appearance was very imposing.”107 Facing these rows of white men garbed in black, the reporter described an impressive quantity of women’s bodies. At the 1844 convention, the reporter described “upward of two thousand ladies, habited in their summer attire, and interspersed with a moderate sprinkling of gentlemen.”108 In other words, the reporter estimated that twothirds of the assembly were women. As work on nineteenth-century women’s history has demonstrated so amply, the unpaid labor of benevolence

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was primarily performed by middle-class white women, either in their fundraising for national societies like the ABS or in their more local reforming work directed at lower-class women and children.109 In these descriptions of the assembled bodies of conventions, however, we see another aspect of their labor: their bodies as markers of a consistent and respectable corporate body.110 White women’s bodies, so often noted for their difference in the antebellum era (as morally superior to competitive men and capable of heightened moral influence), were not beyond absorption into the homogeneity of the corporate body. The reporter who noted that the audience was mostly made up of women went on to write, “As we looked upon the living mass and saw sitting side by side men of all evangelical denominations, zealous and united in the promotion of a noble cause, we could not help thinking that one of the most beneficial results to be anticipated from such conventions—apart from the immediate aim—is the feeling of Catholicity which they must engender even in the minds of men.”111 Women’s bodies fused into “a living mass,” creating unity, or “Catholicity,” through their bodily amalgamation. In the early years of the American Bible Society’s formation, reports of the convention commended women’s contribution to the “impressive scene,” which in its assembly of women in particular “was numerous and respectable.”112 After being commended for taking the lead in fundraising, the women faded again into a wall of bodies that delighted the author as an “exhibition of such living proof.”113 Women’s bodies animated the societies through their leading role as fundraisers and attendees at events, but they also provided the hard data of the corporate body’s strength. Their presence contributed to the feeling of universal sameness that marked assemblies of benevolence societies like the ABS as beyond precise description. Every woman, as a sister in sympathy in her “summer attire,” was essentially interchangeable. This feminine mass, a listening breathing organic system, cohered without effort but was itself inert in relationship to the non-visible source of true decision-making: the board of managers. Women’s replicating bodies thus provided proof that serious business was indeed taking place, but elsewhere. Evangelical civil society enacted two bodies: an assembled mass, weighty in its numbers and capable of endurance and attention, and an absent head that met behind closed doors and managed the details of accounting and decision-making. Both bodies governed through acts of transparency. They published their minutes and their accounts, the numbers of Bibles distributed and the collection of subscriptions, and women (in particular) made themselves visible as a breathing, listening edifice at conventions. In this

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sense, convening represented a quintessential democratic rite. These organizations’ mores, as Tocqueville described them, were at the core of the activist spirit of American democratic participation. Yet, in tethering the active head to a passive body, conventional behaviors embodied the contradictions of American governance, the promise of including everyone in the process and maintaining the privileges of those steeped in the repertoire of serious business. Attendees at conventions bypassed this contradiction through the wellworn mimetic tricks of surrogation. Much as a corporation acted as if it were the king in order to govern, society members acted as if they were making decisions by participating in resolutions through stoical sitting. Their presence for the reading of resolutions temporally mimicked the actual moment of decision-making at the board meeting. But conventions clarify how strained the meaning of “participation” can get. Silent endurance as participation would be a bit embarrassing to name out loud as a communal norm, but these norms repelled description and reflection by endlessly producing opaque archives of their own regularity. The hallmark of dysfunctional relationality, the awkward relationship between two bodies working proximately but not collaboratively is the reassuring ticking off of boxes: the fact that a meeting occurred is more important than whatever actually happened there. White evangelical civil society’s organizational power asserted its role in the administration of American society not only through printing concerns but also through their care of the poor, an activity that further clarified the center and periphery of the normative social body. Benevolence to the city’s poor and sinful required another differentiated set of mores defined by particular emotional and tonal registers very different from the vigilant passivity of conventions. During associational conventions evangelicals could be silent and endure, or, as I show in chapter 3, these same people could extend their sympathy to people radically different from themselves. If evangelical conventions allowed white Protestant civil society to demonstrate its solidity and volume, benevolence allowed white Protestants to feel the pleasurable edge of their own respectability.

0 3 INVOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION IN THE AMERICAN SEAMEN’S FRIEND SOCIETY Awkward encounters are, perversely, a form of bonding; the imperfect attempt to connect pulls actor and audience together in a tense atmosphere of recognition that something is not quite right. In teenage social dramas the inept socializer is usually the victim, but “trying to fit in” is not exclusively a tactic of the weak. For example, candidates for office seek to demonstrate that they are just like the little people through their homespun affectations. The improbability of the meat sandwich and beer in their hand, however, does nothing to limit their material power. As in American politics, American philanthropy in the antebellum Northeast was also characterized by this awkward dynamic: white Protestant reformers attempted to fit into the cultures of the sinful people they sought to reform. This effort to reach out, not just to reform, but also out of a genuine desire to feel kinship with the lower classes, is a ritual format that both confirms and complicates a central assumption about ritual: that it tends to bind people together. But not all binding experiences feel good. An overly familiar hug from a boss demonstrates equality, and it certainly produces intimacy, but it also coerces. Benevolence, I am arguing, is inextricable from the awkward sensations of coerced connection. Evangelicals in the antebellum Northeast played a key role in the development of American society through their charitable impulses: housing the homeless, providing books for the poor, and creating schools that provided education free of charge. In these societies evangelicals acted as a surrogate of the state, tending to the poor and controlling the terms of welfare.1 In charitable associations evangelicals functioned as a

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governing force in two distinct modes: they governed themselves through incorporation, as we saw with the American Bible Society’s procedural rituals, and they governed the poor.2 Associations for the sailor, the orphan, the widow, and the prostitute were governing bodies directed at these populations rather than organizations to which these particular groups belonged. Incorporation in benevolent societies, as a ritual form, involved a process of involuntary association in which the social bonds and bodies of poor people contributed to the symbolic system of the organization but remained exterior to the organizing body. Benevolent rituals in antebellum America closely resembled missionary encounters, another performative trope that brought white evangelicals into uncomfortable spaces with people they understood as sinful, needy, and reformable. Indeed, within the large umbrella of what historians refer to as the Benevolent Empire, societies such as the American Seamen’s Friend Society and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions met together at the annual anniversary of benevolence societies, they were supported by the same laymen and ministers, and understood themselves to be taking part in the same mission of Christianizing the world and the nation.3 Scholars of global missions, as well as missions to the American frontier, have usefully demonstrated that evangelical missions created situations of “encounter” in which missionaries’ self-conception was recalibrated through the mutual participation of native communities.4 But “encounter,” with its implications of cross-cultural conflict and syncretic creativity, does not quite capture the particular ritual structure of benevolence. Although many reform societies used the word “mission,” their role in antebellum society was closer to what we might now call charity, philanthropy, advocacy, or membership in a club. As such, evangelical benevolence brought reformers into contact with the “underclasses” of their cities, but did not necessitate the arduous journey away from home that characterized missionary work. Benevolence in one’s own city was an activity that came with little danger of the messy effects of colonial cohabitation and intimacy.5 After a comfortable day in their own homes, white evangelical reformers went downtown to the seedy docks of New York for a couple of hours and gathered next to sailors for church services aboard the ships. As I will show, these visits were more than a chance to observe; evangelical reformers genuinely wanted to feel what sailors felt. And after participating in onboard services, reformers returned to their homes uptown. This ability to dip in and out of sailors’ lives also characterized their reading and writing practices. Reformers wrote essays and poems in their associational journals, using

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the narratives and technical jargon of sailing in an attempt to fit in with the sailors they addressed. Speaking as the sailor, evoking his voice in poems and hymns, and standing next to him in the port imagining themselves as part of a crew, middle-class evangelicals parroted the sailor. By temporarily inhabiting the voices and spaces of men imagined as tragic and highly social, evangelicals experienced the pleasure of a fraternity very different from their own; but moving in and out of their sailors’ lives in the context of their own city, reformers risked little in their adoption of these affects. This chapter will show that sailors in particular reveal the representational pull of benevolent governance, a type of association that blended welfare with evangelical outreach through tracts and Bibles.6 In the journals and tracts produced by evangelical publishing concerns, reformers produced written representations of the people they were trying to help. Writing about sailors and physically going to the sailors’ urban spaces allowed reformers to know their subjects for the purposes of more accurate and compelling representation. For the evangelicals who played an expanding role in defining the terms of civil society in nineteenth-century New York, charity toward destitute New Yorkers became not only a spiritual duty, but also an aesthetic and political project. Here I am drawing on the double meaning of representation as both delegation and depiction. Representational surrogates (or delegates) in democracy act out and perform in a manner that we typically think of as mimesis.7 Reformers represented sailors by reproducing the likeness of the sailor, and they spoke on behalf of the sailor in civil society. Benevolence does much of the work we expect religion to do—it creates shared symbolic meaning and fuses individuals together—but benevolent rituals also demonstrate the coercion of that coherence. Benevolence built out the social body through incorporation, by which I mean a graftingon of foreign parts. By ventriloquizing people they aimed to help, making them more useful than expendable, benevolent reformers extended the social body’s reach and vitality. In benevolence, people imagined as abject played a starring role as conduits of the dynamic bonding often associated with theories of ritual (in which difference resolves into solidarity). But through benevolence we learn something crucial about the possibility of ritual’s consolidating power: as governing classes cohere in ritual they often cite traditions and fantasies of alterity, drawing on the imagined cohesion of foreign bodies to fortify themselves. This attempt to play the part of the abject is, however, an implausible effort. The do-gooder trying to fit in with his needy subjects, taking on the cadence of their speech, trying out the slang—it is all a bit awkward.

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INTERSTITIAL DEPENDENTS

Urban benevolence in northeastern cities focused on people who worked but were not part of household economies. Religious reformers focused on these people because their social instability made them not only destitute, but also morally vulnerable. But as the mission to sailors demonstrates, benevolence also heightened the instrumental utility of benevolent subjects. Interstitial dependents, people who received care from benevolence (rather than from a male head of household), played a key role in the nation’s social body. They stood halfway inside the corporate bodies that bound together American social life, attached but fluidly participating in economies of global trade, sex, and wage labor. Benevolence heightened the instrumental utility of interstitial subjects by making them into sources of representational possibility. In pre-1820 New York City and Boston, elites felt a paternalistic commitment to providing relief to the poor. Elites saw poverty, widows, orphans, and the occasionally out-of-work laborer as endemic parts of society, and charity as their privileged responsibility. With the rise of evangelical benevolence beginning in the 1820s, the history of benevolence underwent a major shift in which a rising middle class joined the elite in configuring the poor as objects of both care and spiritual reform.8 The American Seamen’s Friend Society shared many of the same members with other evangelical benevolence organizations in the city and fit firmly into the mold of this new evangelical class of reformers.9 Like the American Tract Society and the American Bible Society, the ASFS included both prominent citizens and members of the middling classes, with an emphasis on merchants, all hailing from a range of Protestant denominations.10 As a whole, the group was typical of an evangelical commitment to benevolence as a pan-Protestant mission that would transform the structure of poverty by focusing on sin.11 By providing ministry designed for the sailor’s lifestyle and writing hymns and tracts to distribute among sailors, members of the ASFS believed that they could convert the merchant marine and save them from their sinful habits.12 The societies’ journals, first The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine (1821–1824), and then The Sailor’s Magazine (1828–1914), focused on the specific interests of the sailor despite their wider distribution among interested non-sailor readers and funders.13 The journals were filled with notices of shipwrecks and shoptalk that would appeal to the professional sailor, as well as admonitions against drinking and testimonies of piety

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among sailors. The society also went beyond distributing spiritual texts by designing churches specifically for mariners, including a Floating Chapel in the harbor of New York. In the 1840s, the society added a new component to its mission in the form of boarding houses for sailors that were run by members of the society.15 Boarding houses for sailors provided a retreat from the greedy boarding-house owners who stole sailors’ wages and tempted them with alcohol and prostitutes, and served as a moral haven for sailors in port.16 Evangelical reformers considered sailors to be a particularly problematic population in New York City because of their lack of permanent homes and their culture of drinking and carousing, but reformers also focused on sailors because ships pervaded the city’s landscape. New York’s port drove the city’s economy and played a key role in the city’s dominance within global markets. By the 1820s New York had surpassed Boston and Philadelphia in imports and exports, thus becoming the largest port in the nation.17 With all these trade ships, the port also brought sailors. During the 1830s, around 30,000 sailors entered the port every year.18 As New York’s shipping industry boomed, sailors remained members of the working class, following a larger trend of New York’s expanding income gap during the early republic.19 The American Seamen’s Friend Society shaped its mission around the idea that sailors led distinctive lives among the sinning lower classes. Despite general concern for sailors’ involvement with prostitutes, alcohol, and disorderliness, the ASFS recognized that unlike many wage workers, sailors also spent the majority of their lives within the regimented and highly masculine structure of a ship at sea. Sailors represented a kind of rugged competence that reformers could not help but admire. Labor historians too have admired how sailors forged a fraternity of the forecastle that enforced cooperation and competence while also maintaining a space for dissent. These historians have shown that when the captain became tyrannical or when wages were not forthcoming, sailors specialized in strategies of rebellion such as mutiny and desertion.20 Sailors controlled their own livelihoods (relative to other wage workers), and their unique independence also extended to the particular ways they dressed, walked, and spoke. Their comportment expressed their worldly professional experiences.21 Sailors’ mobility made them categorically unstable, neither dependents nor independent property owners, and these characteristics thrilled ASFS members even as they critiqued sailors’ lifestyles. Sailors could never fully achieve the moral lives of men who lived consistently with families and attended church regularly, and thus the ASFS 14

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argued that sailors lacked a complete Christian life. Sailors’ isolation from women during their travels and immersion among prostitutes in port caused reformers the most concern. Living at sea and in ports could not necessarily be fixed, but the ASFS imagined that the sailor lifestyle created longing for the comforts of mothers and wives that could never be truly fulfilled. The Sailor’s Magazine often presented stories of sailors’ longing for home as evidence of their moral capabilities.22 In a story about a young sailor dying, he declared: “O! If I could be privileged to die at home, I should be happy.”23 The young sailor’s enduring love for home represented a larger ideology of domesticity, in which an idealized domestic sphere remained separate from the world of work and commerce, and femininity’s moral force tempered men who returned to the domestic harbor.24 Sailors, the publications of the ASFS argued, were capable of such tempered morality, but their work denied them continuous cultivation of a stable home life. But most importantly, this was not a fixable problem. Unlike the image of preyed-upon female innocents driven to a life of prostitution, sailors could not stop being sailors.25 And even if sailors could be domesticated, reformers were not sure that they wanted sailors’ hypermasculinity to be tempered by feminine domesticity. Members of the ASFS wanted to harness the power of sailors’ chronic homelessness without changing the nature of sailors’ professional behavior. As evangelicals, ASFS members envisioned Christianity spreading across the globe, with sailors playing a key role. For all their concern about sailors’ lack of domesticity, the ASFS celebrated sailors’ entrenchment in flows of capital. With converted sailors on merchant ships, trade tied foreign nations to the flow of Christianization. One writer for the ASFS explained, the cities which employed them to bring home the productions of other nations, should be compelled to send back the Gospel. It is that seamen should cheerfully aid the progress of our holy religion, and by their own efforts, as well as their example, help on the conversion of the world—that the ships of Tarshish might be FOREMOST in bringing sons of Zion from far, with their silver and gold, to the name of the Lord our God.26

The “ships of Tarshish” could potentially bring about the Christianization of the world, not despite their sullied relationship to money and trade, but because of their intrinsic ties to “silver and gold.” The failure to convert sailors also threatened to bring the spread of Christianity to a halt. As the ASFS pointed out, foreign cultures encountered Western trade and culture as synonymous with Western religion. The ASFS

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feared that heathens would confuse unconverted sailors with representatives of the Christian religion. Heathens who encountered sailors, “hardly capable of making nice discriminations, and hav[ing] never seen the best proofs of the power of the gospel, will very naturally take such conduct as a fair specimen of the excellency of the Christian religion; and they will be likely to condemn the whole, as a system of hypocrisy and fraud.”27 Thus, if Western trade and religion were fundamentally indistinguishable to the foreign heathen, it was necessary to bring trade and religion into harmony through sailors. Trade and religion, after all, inextricably mingled in the practical execution of Christianity in a world that contained oceans. Writers for the Sailor’s Magazine pointed out that “knowledge of navigation is not only of great use in the commercial world, but . . . is an indispensable requisite in completing the scheme of redemption. The Jews can never be carried home to Palestine, the gospel can never be proclaimed on all the islands of the sea, without the skill of mariners.”28 But beyond their practical necessity for the transportation of bodies and goods in the trade routes of a Christian empire, the millennium required sailors because sailors were spiritually imperfect.29 The authors of the Seaman’s Magazine believed that sailors’ imperfections made them perfect solutions to the problem of how trade and religion would be presented simultaneously to foreign populations. Heathens would look at converted sailors and wonder “how soon would they take knowledge of them, that they came from a region of superior light, purity and benevolence.”30 Heathens would be impressed by converted sailors, these reformers hoped, because sailors were closer to heathens than a fully moral missionary who had grown up in a good Christian home. Sailors did not embody “purity and benevolence” themselves, but they could embody the potential synthesis of Western capitalism and religion in a partial and emergent image that paralleled the also unfinished idea of how foreign populations would join the Christian world. A heathen Christianity could take shape between the ships of Christian sailors and foreign frontiers, all underwritten by capitalism’s expansion. Members of the ASFS were not alone in their desire to save sailors while keeping them afloat on the seas of capital. The federal government also advanced a program to save sailors based on an ambivalent vision of sailors as dependent free men. Beginning in 1798, the federal government set up the first public healthcare service in the United States in order to care for the merchant marine.31 Sailors paid twenty cents per month out of their wages in order to receive the care of doctors contracted by the government in various ports. In larger ports, the government set up complete hospitals or separate

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wards for sailors. The legal scholar Gautham Rao has shown how this system, a model of public healthcare that the federal government provided to no other population in the United States, made sailors into a special class. The government’s categorization of sailors mirrored missionaries’ representation of sailors as dependents in need of saving and yet so instrumental to society and the economy that they must remain in their precarious position. The federal government weighed several interests in their decision to construct a sailor safety net in an era when national social safety nets were not typical:33 the necessity of transatlantic trade for the health of the American economy, the extreme likelihood of sailors becoming injured and sick on the sea, and finally sailors’ “moral character.”34 Sailors could not be trusted to save their own money and take care of their own health, a concern that also led the ASFS to create savings banks especially for sailors.35 Thus the federal government felt compelled to save sailors’ money in a health care trust—a tax based in the socio-legal classification of sailors as dependents subject to the authority of their captains and thus incapable of managing their own money.36 Judges also saw sailors as a class that needed protection from their shipmasters; thus, Rao shows, over “the course of the 1790s, federal judges became well accustomed to coercively handling, limiting, distributing, redistributing, or garnishing mariners’ wages.”37 Mirroring the ASFS description of sailors’ character, the federal government felt sailors could not be trusted to take care of themselves. Like destitute women and children, sailors inspired the benevolence awarded to dependents; but unlike women and children, they served such an instrumental purpose that they must be kept in danger for the common good. Sailors’ instrumental value to private and public interests connects them to a longer history of benevolent subjects defined by categorical indeterminacy, as both threat and necessity (think, for example, of the migrant farmer).38 Reform societies sprang up to address the problems of these vulnerable urban populations, which they defined as much by their resistance to middle-class values as by their income.39 Women in particular came to cities without husbands or fathers, looking for employment, and subsequently became the focus of the antebellum prostitution panic. Missions to sailors and missions to prostitutes both addressed interstitial dependence, or people who functioned outside the traditional labor and family structure, a category that also included orphans and widows. The crisis of prostitution, like the benevolent mission to sailors, responded to a newly flexible form of capitalism that broke down traditional structures of dependence through wage labor and promoted an increasing circulation of bodies through 32

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space. Sailors, however, exemplify the utility that both the government and evangelical reformers saw in categorical indeterminacy. Saving sailors allowed the ASFS to participate not only in a local project of maintaining the health of their port, but also in a more global project of maintaining the flows of capital necessary for national expansion. The editor of the Christian Herald and Seamen’s Magazine expressed his conjoined hopes for sailors’ protection and American trade expansion when he wrote, “the Bethel flag shall be the best protection of ‘free trade’ and sailors rights, and one of the surest safeguards against piracy, plunder, and death.”41 The state of New York also saw the ASFS’s work of establishing boarding homes as a necessary step in protecting sailors for the purposes of better trade. The Legislature granted the society ten thousand dollars in interest-free loans to construct their boarding homes.42 Through programs such as Savings Banks, the Bethel Union, and the boarding homes, reformers incorporated sailors into the state’s economic project while keeping them on the margins of the social body. Saving sailors had other instrumental uses to reformers on a much smaller scale than millennial visions or the expanding reach of the national economy. For the purposes of trade, sailors were a kind of appendage, roaming globally, serving the national project, but reformers also valued sailors’ bodies for their communal coherence and hypermasculine style. Sailors’ distinctiveness as a group inspired analysis and cataloguing by non-sailor society members who took great pride in knowing their subject inside and out. Benevolence, in this sense, was a kind of interest group, and middleclass evangelicals’ interest was sailors. 40

AUTHENTICITY AND KNOWLEDGE OF SAILOR LIFE

Benevolence societies devoted to sailors provided solutions to the “problem” of sailors’ sinful lifestyles, yet they also spent quite a bit of time in their journals cataloguing the life of the sailor with obsessive pleasure. Two audiences received these journals—the sailors and the landlocked society members—but it was the latter who contributed to the journal and consumed it with more enthusiasm.43 Editors, ministers, and non–sailing society members wrote most of the articles, reports, and letters that made up the Seaman’s Magazine, although a few letters and testimonies from sailors

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played a key role in demonstrating the mission’s victories. For the most part, however, middle-class reformers wrote the journal for other middle-class reformers.44 ASFS members strove to understand the ins and outs of sailor life, and in the Sailor’s Magazine connoisseurship became a crucial aspect of benevolence. Through authoritative representations of sailing, members of the ASFS confirmed their privileged position as the judges and saviors of New York City’s vulnerable sailors. In both literary and reform texts about sailing in the antebellum period, authenticity was at a high premium. The maritime genre took off as a popular form due to memoirs of common sailors and more literary contributions from James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. The literary historian Jason Berger argues that maritime authors emphasized their credentials because sailing texts promised autobiographical insight into a dangerous and foreign world, and with the genre’s growing popularity counterfeit tales became a growing threat.45 Sailors writing for the society’s periodicals emphasized their deep knowledge of maritime conditions against the many fakes who were peddling sailing stories in the literary world. In “A Sailor’s Address to his Seafaring Companions,” published in the Sailor’s Magazine, a sailor author laid out his bona fides in his preamble: “Permit me then, a sailor, and the son of a sailor, to speak with you on a subject, in which both you and I are equally and everlastingly concerned. During ten years devoted to a sailor’s profession, I tasted the pleasures, endured the hardships, and was exposed to the perils connected with a sea-faring life.”46 Only fellow sailors, the author argued, could understand the pleasures and challenges of the “sea-faring life.” The defensive reminder that only experience qualified one to speak of the sailor’s life is understandable, considering the many nonsailors writing in the Sailor’s Magazine, but his self-presentation also points to the way authentication became a central trope of sailing literature—thus creating a strange predicament for reformers who wanted to perform not only their expertise in sailors, but also their expertise in sailors’ expertise. While the Sailor’s Magazine respected the authoritative experience of sailors in describing the storms and hazards of sailing, the journal also provided a venue for the special authority of non-sailor ASFS members and subscribers who dedicated themselves to sailors, referred to in the journal as “landsmen.”47 Sailors obviously were the authority on sailor life, but “landsmen” were true friends of seamen.48 They fit into the maritime world as observant and dedicated consumers of information related to sailors. Society members might not understand the professional skills of sailing that

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appeared in the Sailor’s Magazine, but the magazine provided many recitations of the technical words that sailors used. One sailor, in his address to fellow sailors and the members of the ASFS, instructed that “should you, at any time, see even a frigate or a three-decker, athwart your fore foot, make sail, and throw on board a chart and a book; and if necessary you may bear away a little for this purpose; but if they will not heave too, nor take a chart, warn them of their danger; ‘Lift up thy voice like a trumpet,’ (Isa. 1viii. 1,) and directly haul your wind again.”49 The Sailor’s Magazine thus provided a window into the life of sailors and a primer to the technical terminology of the maritime world. As amateurs, reformers learned the professional language of sailing through reading these texts. Fore foot, frigate, three-decker, bear away, heave too—the practice of reading expert sailor talk in benevolence journals became a form of initiation, in which enthusiasts gained proximity to authentic sailor knowledge. Reformers’ appreciation for representations of sailing bound them together as a special interest group. The ASFS, like all other northeastern benevolence societies, enacted governance within American society by participating in legal activities of bylaw and constitution writing, distributing money and resources, building infrastructure, and speaking to governmental authorities about the needs of the city, region, and nation.50 But before they could participate in these functions of governance they had to belong to civil society—a membership, in the case of the ASFS, premised on arcane knowledge of liminal subjects. Sailors, in contrast, were not themselves agents of the governance associated with benevolence.51 Captains participated in the governance of the ASFS and the Marine Bible Society, and sailors contributed money (principally in the form of buying the society’s print materials), but the entire structure of these associations originated from the premise that non-sailors should be responsible for the welfare of sailors.52 Captains and local and federal (and foreign) governments agreed that sailors were not autonomous subjects, and as semi-dependents, were subject to impressment by foreign governments, flogging by their own captains, and curfews within ports.53 They had a strong political consciousness, but their desire for self-determination manifested in forms like marches, piracy, and strikes.54 Sailors in New York, for example, marched on city hall during Jefferson’s embargo and successfully demanded financial relief from the Common Council, and they organized on their own behalf to protest impressment.55 Unlike artisans, however, sailors did not create their own associations, a strategy that many labor historians have seen as the momentary glimmer of working-class political consciousness in the United States.56

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Even the “Bethel Union,” an association of sailors who were invested in sobriety and the gospel, was primarily funded by captains, merchants, and evangelical reformers on both sides of the Atlantic.57 Thus when the ASFS spoke on behalf of sailors—to the government, captains, and merchants— they spoke on behalf of a group who otherwise had no seat at civil society’s table. For example, the ASFS lobbied the city to ensure that port fees went to the care of old and indigent sailors; at the national level, they lobbied to end legal justifications for corporal punishment in the merchant marine and the Navy.58 Reformers’ desire to represent the sailor politically and through mastering their knowledge and style derived not from a simple need to control or dominate, but rather from a loving pull.

THE APPEAL OF THE REPUGNANT OTHER

Reformers felt compelled to understand and represent the sailor’s essential character through poems, stories, and hymns. This process of representation was fraught with desire for the sailor’s otherness. Saving sailors involved plumbing the depths of sailors’ difference and learning to love their sinful exoticism. But loving sailors was not easy. In poems and hymns developed specifically for the Sailor’s Magazine and the Mariner’s Church, ASFS members contemplated the sailor’s tragic life with the sadness of an unfulfilled admirer. In O. D. Prentiss’s “The Dead Mariner,” the author wrote: Sleep on, sleep on! Above thy corse The winds their Sabbath keep; The waves are round thee, and thy breast Heaves with the heaving deep. O’er thee mild eve her beauty flings, And there the white gull lifts her wings, And the blue halcyon loves to lave Her plumage in the deep blue wave. Sleep on! No willow o’er thee bends With melancholy air; No violet springs, nor dewy rose Its soul of love lays bare; But there the sea flower, bright and young, Is sweetly o’er thy slumbers flung,

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And like a weeping mourner fair, The pale flag hangs its tresses there.59

The poem plays with the imagery of feminized ocean winds that seduce and caress the sailor. A sea flower and the pale flag are beautiful maidens that float above and below the sailor as he sleeps, and the gull “loves to lave” in sensuous alliteration. The poem instructs the sailor to “Sleep On!” in the sensational cemetery of a ship’s wreckage. In poems and hymns such as “The Dead Mariner,” written by non-sailor reformers, the sea, the wind, or a yearning wife on shore mourn the sailor.60 In these poems and hymns, reformers’ desire moved through different bodies in multidirectional flows. Sometimes the narrator was the ocean describing the sensations of caressing a sailor; in other poems and hymns the narration shifted to the sailor’s experience of his own desires. But the author’s tribute, when inhabiting the desires of the sailor, also inhabited his body, participating in the social reform tradition of feeling the suffering subject’s sensations on one’s own skin. This slippage into the first person of the benevolent subject also happened in anti-slavery literature, as abolitionist authors attempted to evoke the pain of the slave’s body by empathetically describing the wounds of slavery.61 ASFS members imaginatively drew on pain’s multivalent possibilities as pleasure and suffering. In an untitled poem in the Sailor’s Magazine, the author used a ship as a metaphor for the sailor’s body and explored the flows and propulsions of a sailor’s desires moving through his interior. The journal presented most poems written by sailors with full names and further information about their employment; thus the Sailor’s Magazine presented this poem as an imaginative musing by a landsmen rather than as a sailor’s contribution.62 The poem fantasized “The world’s a sea; my flesh a ship” and then flushed out the metaphoric mechanisms of the ship’s architecture. “The gusts of wind,” the author wrote, That fill these wanton sheets are worldly lusts, My will’s th’ inconsistent pilot that commands The stagg’ring keel; my sins are like the sands; Repentance is the bucket, and mine eye The pump, unused (but in extremes) and dry; My conscience is the plummet that does press The deeps, but seldom cries, Oh, fathomless!

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Smooth calm’s security, the gulf ’s despair; My freight’s corruption, and this life’s my fare;63

The poem explored the sensations of disrupting “Smooth calm’s security,” thus providing its landsmen audience with the sensations of the sailor’s sinful compulsions from the inside out. The sailor’s sins—or “the sands” sifting through the ship—moved through the crevices of the subject as ship, as sailor, and ultimately as reader. These sensations were “staggering,” dry and wet in the wrong parts, moving without direction; and yet all of these descriptions of sin’s movement also evoke a constant, repetitive touch that fills and churns and has no end in sight. The poem communicated sin’s pleasures as a form of sensational overload, even as it denounced the sailor’s corrupting conditions. This desire for the subject of reform pervaded nineteenth-century benevolence, as the historian Seth Koven demonstrates in his history of slumming and philanthropy in England. Concern for the destitute widows, orphans, and tramps of the slum were deeply bound up with well-to-do men and women’s “insistent eroticization of poverty.”64 In other words, when privileged men and women visited the slum in order to broadcast the crisis of poverty, they discovered what Koven calls an “attraction of repulsion.”65 In the poems and hymns of the Sailor’s Magazine, members of the ASFS similarly played with the repulsive desirability of the seaman’s otherness by adopting his voice. The poem, like other articles and poems in the Sailor’s Magazine written by non-sailors, used components of maritime language’s vocabulary, rhythm, spelling, and emotional register in the first person.66 Evoking the sailor’s point of view emphasized that sailors saw the world differently, and that they expressed themselves in a distinct manner. The representational style of “The Dead Mariner” also points to the pervasive sense in the nineteenth-century United States that all sailors existed between the comfortable boundaries of nation, race, and religion. This fantasy was supported by the fact that sailors’ speech was distinct from the language of middle-class whites in the northeastern United States. As a transnational community, sailors fashioned a new language in order to communicate across national and racial borders. By the seventeenth century, ship’s logs show specific maritime phonetics that combined nautical English, the “sabir” of the Mediterranean, and a West African grammatical construction. Forged partially through the slave trade, the pidgin of sailor talk expressed racial ambiguity.67 American maritime trade had utilized a transnational community of

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sailors since the early eighteenth century, and by 1813 about one-fifth of sailors in the American merchant marine were foreigners (a proportion that only grew throughout the nineteenth century).68 Diversity existed within the crews from the United States as well. Black men had an important tradition of merchant sailing, both as enslaved laborers and as free men, throughout the nineteenth century.69 When authors for the Sailor’s Magazine used sailor’s language, as they did often, they also invoked sailors’ long history of commingling with other cultures and their connections with lower classes and European, Near Eastern, and African cultures. The authors’ use of this maritime style in their ventriloquism of sailor experience called attention to the foreign nature of the sailor because the sailors’ language was symptomatic of their national, racial, and social difference. Adopting the voice of the sailor invoked the dangerous marginality of men who rarely lived to an old age, and playing with that voice sparked liminal sensations.70 The ASFS, unlike the American Tract Society or the American Bible Society, was a society for sailor lovers, a category that commingled attraction and pity, and this distinction demonstrates a line within benevolence between associations aimed at broad goals, such as papering the world and cities with tracts and Bibles, and those defined by their incorporation of specific abject subjects into a specially interested corporate body. In this category we might include societies dedicated to prostitutes, benevolent prison reformers, abolitionists, and anti–Indian removal campaigns, all of which organized around a specialized affection for their subjects.71 The ASFS demonstrates the way in which associations devoted to particular groups cultivated impulses of mimicry with traces of envy.72

“US” AND “THEM”

That benevolence relied on an excess of empathy ordering bodies into social relations has been noted by several scholars thinking through the cultural and legal meanings of benevolence in the antebellum era.73 The literary historian Susan M. Ryan points out that benevolence emphasized social responsibility and social difference simultaneously as a keyword in cultural discourse and in governmental policy during the nineteenth century. The term, like its close relative “sentimentalism,” signified “familial bonds of responsibility and affection, through which other kinds of social responsibility might be understood.”74 But unlike sentimentalism, benevolence fueled

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the vast bureaucratic organizations that made up the “Benevolent Empire” and created processes for determining “whom to aid and to what extent.”75 Sentimentalism emphasized a sympathetic identification that could transform the self and other, but benevolence emphasized the incompleteness of that identification and the importance of maintaining a difference between the helper and the helped.76 In the work of the ASFS we can see the tension between the structural conditions of benevolence as a way to mark difference and hierarchy—or who was inside and outside of civil society—and the pull of identification. The work of the ASFS shows how benevolence maintained a hierarchy between helper and helped through the reformers’ awkward encounters with the other. It was not enough to represent sailors abstractly; reformers wanted physical participation in their fantasies of inhabiting sailor bodies. In their representations of sailors the ASFS favored a form of language that allowed for close identification with sailors, a first step to blending in with sailors in person. The demonstration of sailor vocabulary that ASFS reformers used in the Sailor’s Magazine usually made it clear that the author was distinct from the sailors the ASFS evangelized and served; in other poems, however, the landsman’s adoption of sailor language blurred the boundary between the sailor and the middle-class reformer. In this twist on playing sailor, landsmen advocated a partial dissolution of the self. Landsmen authors in the Sailor’s Magazine moved back and forth between identification and distinction in their representations of sailors by using both the distancing “they” and the inclusive “we.” In his poem “The Sailor’s Confidence,” the Reverend G. C. Smith started with a passage from the Bible— “O God of our salvation, who art the confidence of them that are far off upon the sea. Ps. Lxv. 5”—a passage that clearly draws the lines between a firstperson plural and a third-person plural. Then in his poem Smith addresses a more inclusive first-person plural: “Confidence of sailors! Hear us, / When the howling tempest roars, / Thou alone canst sleep, O Jesus! / Far off from each friendly shore: Captain, Saviour! / Steer us till the storm is o’er.”77 The poem describes the immanent need for God’s grace in the face of tempests as a need that includes both distant sailors and those who evangelize from the shore. The poem begins with the distinction between “us” and “them,” then goes on to dissolve that boundary. Like many other ASFS members who contributed to the Sailor’s Magazine, Smith clearly signaled to readers that he was not a sailor, even as he performed an earnest solidarity with their plight.78 But nothing allowed reformers to loosen up the boundaries between

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sailors and landsmen quite like an actual physical meeting. The society created opportunities for these interactions through regular circuits of tract distribution and worship services along the docks.79 Sailors also received a version of “home visits” from society members, a typical part of antebellum benevolence in which society members would drop by the homes of poor people in order to distribute tracts, assess their moral condition, and provide charity.80 Sailors, unlike other working poor, were less likely to be at home, but the minister Rev. Henry Chase often visited sailor boarding houses, or the ships in port, in order to “persuade them to forsake their sins and turn to God.”81 Other than distributing tracts and advice on behalf of the missions, Chase also set up evening prayer meetings for the men in boarding houses.82 Chase’s attentions were not limited to the sailors themselves. He spent many of his days visiting the homes of sailors’ wives and widows, and as he went from home to home he would monitor the relative religiousness of the sailor’s family and record their status in his diary.83 Other society members also visited sailors’ places of residence, attended public worship at the Mariner’s Chapel, and participated in the prayer meetings for sailors in the boarding houses.84 With physical proximity to the sailors, evangelical reformers reckoned with the conditions of poverty and testimonies from working-class folk on the state of their souls. Unless sailors or their widows shut their door or refused to open it in the first place (which they often did), reformers reveled in meeting their benevolent subjects face to face.85 These visits allowed for rituals of benevolent bonding: an attempt to experience the world through the abject subjects’ eyes, blending into the world of dangerous sin temporarily, and as I will argue, awkwardly. In accounts of their visits, society members described participating in the public worship services that took place on board the ships in the harbor.86 The Bethel Movement encouraged sailors to raise a “Bethel flag” to invite other sailors to join them in prayer on evenings they were in harbor. Reformers understood the Bethel flag as an invitation to landsmen as well.87 Despite some lingering fear about their safety at night, white evangelical men and women made their way down to the docks and boarded Bethel ships that signaled a reformed crew.88 Captains arranged seats for the ladies and erected awnings to protect the visitors from inclement weather.89 Regarding the New-York Bethel Union’s work, the committee reported that at “a meeting held on board the Scotch brig, Trafalgar . . . probably 60 were present about 40 of whom were seamen. To the people of God it was a season of refreshment, and to all present apparently an hour of deep interest and solemnity.”90 When ASFS members attended a Bethel service or a Floating Chapel service, they were

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not passive visitors. A committee member “offered up a short and appropriate prayer, the object of which was to invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit on the meeting, and an especial blessing on our seafaring brethren.”91 The reformers also sang along to the special hymns written for sailors, done up with the authentic sailor voice and themes, as if they too had experienced the dangers of maritime labor.92 All on board the ship heard a sermon specially tailored for the sailor’s lifestyle both in content and in form.93 On deck the minister observed that “The broad expanse of water with all the finny tribes; the wide-spread firmament with all its starry orbs; present a grand and imposing display of the Creator’s wisdom and power, at once fitted to raise the thoughts in admiration of the glorious Architect—to purify the mind from sinful delights, and attach the heart to holiness and heaven.”94 All present were invited to imagine the endless expanse of sky, and its imposing display of “the Creator’s wisdom and power,” from the perspective of the ocean, and thus also from the perspective of the sailor. By attending the services for sailors, the members of the ASFS ruminated on the awesome nature of the ocean while standing among their “brothers” on the deck. Reformers in these spaces felt the sailors’ bonds and their own simultaneously. In the company of sailors, members of the ASFS felt their own outreach to the sailor turn back on themselves. These ruminations on ship life were accompanied by addresses to an inclusive “you,” which included the ASFS landsmen and sailors in one congregation. One minister at an onboard service attended by ASFS members preached, “You who go down to the sea in ships, exposed to tempests and dangers when on the high-rolling billows— you who mount up to heaven and then go down to the depths—when the lofty mast trembles in the gale, and deep surging waves lash the trembling bark.”95 The minister’s lack of delineation between the sailors and non-sailors attending the service opened up the circle of identification. The “you” of his sermon addressed all present. By inserting themselves into the onboard community, society members included themselves in the address to the sailor and thus in the fraternity of the sailors’ profession; and at least for an evening, reformers audibly, orally, and physically experienced the thrills and tragedies of sailor life. An image of one of these services, however, demonstrates the awkwardness of the reformers’ presence. Relational awkwardness develops in the space between people. It is not inherent to either the initiator of action or the person who receives the stiff hug or hears the age-inappropriate lingo; it is the atmosphere between doer, audience, and the context of the action that is uncomfortable.

Figure 3.1 Title page, Sailor’s Magazine & Naval Journal. October 2, 1828. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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In the image of a Bethel Meeting shown in figure 3.1, the space between reformers and sailors is neither a stage nor a completely shared religious space. Rather, it is, uncomfortably, both. The women in bonnets and the men in their frock coats sit and stand, watching the sailors perform their faith from the same vantage point as the minister who addresses the sailors. This formation is in between several ritual formations. It is almost like standing in a circle, unified. It is almost like a disciplining surveillance of the sailors. And as the accounts of reformers singing along to the sailor hymn illustrate, it is almost like sitting among the sailors, blending into the ship’s sociality. But the ASFS members’ presence created a social connection that hovered somewhere in between these possibilities. The reformers are an unavoidable physical presence in the sailors’ line of sight, staring back at the sailors, sharing the spiritual experience of the service and distancing themselves from the sailors all at once. In this awkward form of solidarity reformers could never truly pass as sailors, because in fact they did not want to be sailors. They wanted to be like sailors just enough to be loved by sailors.

RITUAL BINDING

This description of benevolence, as a ritual that binds, sounds similar to classic anthropological theories of communal ritual as the basis of social coherence.96 Victor Turner, for instance, describes liminal ritual experience as a space in which social structures disappear for a short period of time and the absence of categorical distinctions creates feelings of danger that then resolve into communal identity when the social structures return.97 Clifford Geertz also argues that rituals are key moments of reconciliation between a sense of the world as it should be and a sense of the world as it is, creating communal bonding through the synthesis.98 Rituals of synthesis often utilize representations of chaos or danger (anti-structure for Turner), with certain members of the community embodying that chaos, in order to bring the world back into balance.99 Within these symbolic theories of ritual, symbols are represented during rituals, reaffirming the shared conceptual universe of their participants. These classic descriptions of representational ritual, however, miss ritual’s ability to represent unevenly. The trickster, certain marginal classes, even particularly gendered folk might remain identified with

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the liminal danger of anti-structure long after the ritual is over, but there is another kind of unevenness in benevolent rituals: namely, an uneven flow of symbols, in which a liminal character like the sailor provides a disproportionate amount of images, affects, and bodily sensations to the ritual in which both reformers and their benevolent subjects participate. Selectively participating in someone else’s (assumed) symbolic system allows for a kind of unburdened solidarity in which you use the symbols and tones of another group without experiencing the day-to-day existence of their profane life. Benevolent activities on Bethel ships and in sailors’ boarding houses produced all the feelings of ritual solidarity without the communal melding that would bind the participants together permanently. Sailors, a surrogate appended to the body of middle-class evangelicals, supplied the imagery and affects of the group gathered aboard the Bethel ship, and the value of these symbols for reformers stemmed from sailors’ permanent liminality. To hope that “these meetings should be undisturbed, was all that the most sanguine ventured to predict,” commented one reformer. “When it was considered that . . . these meetings would be held under the shades of night; and within the borders of that empire which Satan had for ages claimed as his own, the timid Christian might well be pardoned, if he felt some anxious forebodings. But it was no time to take counsel from fear.”100 Sailors, even those who were pious, existed permanently between the borders of sin and salvation even if visiting them frequently bound them into the Christian body. As the mission of the Bethel Union stated: “The object of the Society is to extend to seamen the instructions of the Gospel.”101 But even if they were converted as an effect of this extension, sailors could not shed their deep association with the “shades of the night.” Sailors’ permanent association with liminal feelings kept them on the edge of the social body, irrevocably dangerous but always available for connection. Benevolent ritual created a mimesis of fellow-feeling, allowing middleclass evangelicals to feel sailors’ camaraderie through proximity. If we think of mimesis less as a depiction and more as a contact high, these feelings of solidarity certainly felt real to reformers. But the bonds that sailors experienced were surely different from reformers’ experiences of these bonds. Maritime historians have argued that certain qualities of maritime labor did make sailors’ communal practices distinct from northeastern religious practice in the antebellum United States, and particularly ripe for sensations of solidarity. In practices such as rites of crossing the equator, or the King Neptune rite, sailors practiced high-stakes rituals of solidarity. During the King Neptune rite veteran sailors inducted new sailors by seizing them

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and throwing them into the forecastle. Inside, the new sailors heard the voice of King Neptune, God of the Seas, board the ship and then proceed to introduce himself to his new children through a painful hazing process of physical violence.102 In these rituals sailors emphasized how a man became a part of the crew through the act of surviving.103 Reformers were thus correct in their assessment of sailors as a deep reservoir of solidarity from which they might draw, but in the mission to sailors reformers acted out sailors’ spiritual tropes of hardship in a pantomime of these markings of survival. In the hymns that society members read in the society’s magazine and sang on the ships in harbor and in Mariner Chapels, they experienced spiritual struggle as a trial of life-threatening danger. In a hymn written by the Reverend J. W. Scott, and sung in the Mariners’ Church in Philadelphia, the reformers present (as well as those who read the hymn as it was published in the Sailor’s Magazine) sang of a spiritualty that persisted in the face of “gloomy storms and fearful roar / Of tempests threaten death.” Against this threat, it was sailors’ communal labor that allowed for both survival and salvation. “See hoisted high the flag of love, / By heav’nly breezes waved! / Here Sailors, stop, and orders hear,—‘Obey, and you’ll be saved.’ The Captain of Salvation calls, / ‘O wretched Seaman stay! / Now change your course and heaven’s-ward steer, / The Pilots show the way.’”104 Reformers, through their blurring of the boundaries between helper and helped, infused the experience of civil society with sensations of men who had earned their place within a fraternity. This fantasy of collectivity, however, demonstrates the representational violence at play in coerced bonding. Sailors’ experiences were a currency in the exchange of spiritual and material aid, a mandate that asked sailors to suffer in order to be saved. Reformers not only demanded that sailors share their traumas and communal feelings, but also required their physical presence and temporary kinship in chapels, Bethel ships, and boarding houses for transfusions of these binding affects to reformers. I say temporary because sailors did not take these kinship relations with them after the services were over. Reformers entered sailors’ workplaces, their homes, and their churches, but when sailors entered a church away from the docks, as a minister explained, “they are known and marked as sailors.”105 The reformers and the sailors were bound together on board as they took part in maritime-themed meetings, but sailors did not take that bond with them when the Bethel service ended. There is no evidence of sailors attending the reformers’ churches, entering their work spaces, or visiting their homes. The fraternal bond between the working poor and the middleclass evangelicals was limited to particular times and places.

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To imagine oneself as part of a collective body, endowed with sovereign powers, is also to imagine oneself as capable of extending appendages of that body. Sailors contributed to evangelical associations as exterior members, half in and half out, richly endowed with symbolic possibility. By speaking on behalf of the sailor, evangelical reformers enjoyed proximity to this symbolic vocabulary, always renewed on the margins of society and on the frontiers of trade. But reformers risked little in their use of these symbols of death and survival. This is an observation borrowed from work on performance theory, such as the rich historiography of playing Indian and blackface, which has been particularly sensitive to the effects of citation within speech acts.106 Theorists of ritual have had less interest in appropriation as an aspect of ritual’s power; but as Amy Hollywood argues, ritual is subject to the same inconsistent citation implicit in all performative acts in which the citation of tradition is always open to mistakes, small differences, or playful misinterpretations.107 This misfiring has been read mostly as an opportunity for creative change and new social possibilities within ritual structures, but ritual also innovates and misfires because it cites exterior traditions and foreign bodies as it iterates.108 People endowed with ritual authority replicate their authority not just through an unceasing repetition that makes any historical difference seem impossible, but also by speaking in new languages, making new gestures, and embodying new affects that clarify the social distinction between those who cite and those who are cited.109 These appropriative citations are also a form of temporary bonding that emphasize the appropriator’s capacity to capriciously extend and withdraw the kinship of ritual. The ASFS’s ritual appropriations were not particularly exceptional, just as its associational form was not particularly distinctive: a group that included inactive participants who had no role in the administration of the group. This is in fact a defining characteristic of many of the charities and nonprofits that have come out of the corporate model of the early nineteenth-century United States. Unlike mutual aid societies, such as those founded by African Americans in the Northeast in the antebellum period, white benevolence societies for the welfare of the poor relied on a model of incorporation in which the membership did not overlap with the benevolent subjects themselves.110 In an unequal flow of symbols, reformers such as the ASFS benefited from the affects and stylistics of benevolent subjects’ distinctive lifestyles. It was sailors’ distinctive flair, after all, that made community feel so tribal for reformers who joined them on the dock. Thus, even as sailors were asked to change spiritually, evangelicals also imagined

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that they would remain culturally distinct from the normative social body. Benevolence thus provides an opportunity to see ritual as a form of social cohesion that coheres unevenly. If benevolence as a ritual logic allowed white Protestant northeasterners to imagine an integrated but differentiated social body, domesticity allowed them to imagine the social body as continuously regenerated through harmonious private homes. Domesticity, much like benevolence, balanced the drive for capitalist expansion with a mechanism for anchoring society in Christian virtue. Domestic ideology also created a framework for thinking about governance outside the framework of the state. People might be governed by associations as surrogates of the state, but in a functioning democracy they would also need to be governed by the intimate authority of a mother. The state and the mother provided parallel and interconnected forms of authority, according to domestic theorists such as Catharine Beecher, and domestic rituals inculcated a proper sense of what it meant to be governed at every scale. Domestic chores, much like acts of charity, were deeply political acts in American democracy. Benevolence and domesticity share significations of affection and feminine sympathy that can be misunderstood as an organic form of kinship, in opposition to the artificial bonds of politics and governance. But antebellum Protestants practiced governance within the intimate spaces of home and charity with an artful sense of play, acting out the roles of sovereign leadership and subordination until they got them just right.

0 4 THE HEAD AND THE HANDS IN CATHARINE BEECHER’S DOMESTICITY With the mother placed at the head of the antebellum home, domestic advice writers in the nineteenth-century northeastern United States argued that mothers made their homes beautiful without strain. In the 1840s Catharine Beecher articulated a theory of domesticity that explained the critical role of ritual in domestic life, arguing that by ritualizing labor women controlled the territory of their home. As Beecher wrote, “She, who is the mother and housekeeper in a large family, is the sovereign of an empire, demanding more varied cares, and involving more difficult duties, than are really exacted of her, who, while she wears the crown, and professedly regulates the interests of the greatest nation on earth, finds abundant leisure for theatres, balls, horseraces, and every gay pursuit.”1 The domestic queen truly did it all, both regulating “interests” of the nation and attending all those balls. But the most impressive balancing act in Beecher’s depiction of domesticity was a mother’s synthesis of hierarchy and democracy. The mother, Beecher argued, was an absolute sovereign; and yet through carefully ritualized life, her sovereignty did not feel despotic. In this book I have invoked awkwardness as a somatic and social experience in order to trouble a central assumption about ritual: that it feels natural.2 The same assumptions that fuel ritual studies—a tendency to look for solidarity, embodiment, and agency—inform normative accounts of democratic practice in the United States. Governance in the United States, theorists of American democracy from Tocqueville to Bellah tell us, feels uncoerced because of its ability to meld a social body out of ritual.3 But the

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rituals of white Protestant northeasterners in the early republic illustrate the half-hearted pleasures of governing in the context of democracy. The satisfaction of making a system run smoothly, hemmed in by an inability to relish power, creates a sensation I describe as awkward. This chapter describes the awkwardness of directed action in advice literature for middle-class white northeastern women. These prescribed domestic rituals maintained a distance between the initiator of action and the enactor of action, distinguishing between the thinking head and the unthinking hand. There are plenty of environments in which directed action is not awkward: it is the dynamic between the architect and the construction workers, the choreographer and her company, or the director and the actor. Theorists of Afro-Atlantic spirit possession have also been particularly attuned to forms of ritual enactment in which the devotee moves at the behest of a divine being in ways that challenge agential descriptions of ritual embodiment.4 Unlike spirit possession or willful submission, antebellum northeastern domesticity calls our attention to the uncomfortable dynamic of a person governing another person’s movement while simultaneously disavowing their power to coerce. In Beecher’s careful delineation of domestic rituals, mothers did not make their servants produce goods (that would be slavery, after all). Rather, mothers made everyone and everything (including the linens) crave order. Which is also to say that domestic rituals produced nothing at all, other than a humming buzz of activity. Utilizing Catharine Beecher’s unapologetic definition of domestic ritual as hierarchical and unproductive contributes to two theoretical discussions around ritual. First, I push back against the scholarly consensus around conservative women’s piety that celebrates self-formation (as a form of unlikely productivity) in lieu of freedom; second, I call attention to the undertheorization of ritual surrogacy in which directors direct another body’s action.5 Ritual chores, we learn from Catharine Beecher’s writing on domesticity, were powerful because they were disembodied and unproductive. Counter to the sense of achievement that comes with labor, ritual “chores” did not produce closure. This endless performance evokes the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of habitus as a form of practice that regularizes and hardens around the individual much like a home materializes around the housewife. But Beecher’s theory of domestic ritual troubles classic definitions of habitus. In the dynamic between the mother directing activity and her household enacting those directives, a distance opened up between actor and script. We cannot, in other words, understand ritual chores in American domestic ideology without recognizing the dynamic of sovereign

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and surrogate. The ritual subject of domesticity as domestic sovereign had more in common with a theatrical director than with a busy monk or a skilled cabinet maker. As the mother choreographed and directed the action of her surrogates, this delegation freed up the sovereign for other duties. Catharine Beecher was an unlikely evangelist of domesticity, as she herself never married or had children; thus her promotion of the heteronormative white household is full of contradictions.6 Her passion for education and writing took up most of her time, and the rest was devoted to her father and siblings, who remained at the center of her life throughout her adulthood. After publishing her bestseller in 1843, A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, she briefly held more public attention than her younger siblings, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher.7 The oldest of seven, she grew up in the shadow of their father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, who fought to keep a Calvinist sensibility alive in the early republic. Lyman provided a bridge between the Puritan and the evangelical Northeast, arguing for religious reforms such as Sabbatarianism and temperance.8 His children would go on to elaborate critical theological developments for the rest of the nineteenth century, creating theological ties between middle-class refinement and a gentle version of salvation. Catharine also participated in this redefinition of American Christianity by placing the Christian mother at the center of moral development.9 As an unmarried woman who advocated for female education, Catharine never ran her own household. After her mother’s death the teenaged Catharine cared for her siblings and managed her father’s house; but in the wake of her fiancée’s death at sea, Catharine began a life of striking independence. In 1823 she raised enough funds to open a school for young women in Hartford, Connecticut.10 She envisioned this school as a unique space for female education, blending education in the arts with the practical skills of household management. Unlike the finishing schools that turned out genteel ornaments, Catharine argued that her school would produce capable women who knew how to do the work of keeping a household.11 During her years in Hartford she first rented a room above a harness shop, then a house in which she lived with her sister, aunt, and boarders. Later she boarded with her sister’s family, after running the boarding house became too strenuous.12 Counter to the ideal family with a wife at home that she described in her work, Catharine supported herself financially and lived with strangers and siblings her entire life. Like Catharine, most people in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century did not live the domestic ideal. Despite this distance between reality

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and fantasy, the idea of a separate sphere and its unique activities became the subject of a broad range of literature, advertising, and minister’s proclamations during the 1840s. Female authors in the same mold as Beecher developed guidelines for domestic practice in the pages of the nation’s most popular magazine, Godey’s Lady Journal, and in book-length “domestic manuals” that Godey’s promoted.13 Catharine Beecher’s Treatise, one of many domestic manuals published during the era, guided the mother of the home through the philosophical and practical necessities of domesticity, but also touched on political theory, connecting the domestic and the political by positing symmetry between the health of the nation and the health of the home.14 The political nature of Beecher’s work should not, however, obscure the central obsession of A Treatise: the proper execution of chores, social engagements, and family gatherings that made up the choreography of domesticity. Beecher crystalized the sensibilities of her era by describing chores as both process and an end unto themselves, powerful because they were unproductive (a word which she herself did not use, but which captures the stakes of her argument). Describing domestic labor as unproductive might seem like a rejection of fifty years of feminist scholarship that has clarified the centrality of domestic labor to a capitalist economy, but calling attention to domestic ritual’s lack of productivity does not negate any of the arguments scholars have made about the political influence of American domestic ideology or the economic value of domestic labor. A ritual can be unproductive, economically significant, and politically influential simultaneously. Many historians have sensed that we need the term “ritual” to describe what was at play in antebellum domesticity. The historian Mary P. Ryan described domesticity as a “liturgy” in 1982, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg described domesticity as a space of “love and ritual” in 1972, both building on the Durkheimian connotations of previous historians’ coinage: “the cult of domesticity.”15 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s description of the domestic sphere as a world of “love and ritual” emphasized the ideology’s ability to bind together a certain class of white women. Nancy Cott’s history of female affection shows that these ties were not mere ideology; women in this era produced genuine bonds that would go on to inspire the consciousness necessary for women’s rights campaigns. An entire generation of historians has further demonstrated that this cult, based on the distinction between the “home” and the “market” (with female mapped onto home), was never really home-bound at all. Women enacted domesticity on stages, in print, and in the voluntary associations of civil society. Religion’s central role in domestic-

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ity made the church another space for women that transcended the home.16 Even with these fresh insights into the domestic sphere’s spatial fluidity and its tendency to overlap with empire and civil society, it is still clear that the “cult” of domesticity effectively promoted a fantasy of a securely bounded home. Scholars’ use of “cult” language to describe this form of practice demonstrates the double-ness of this ideology as an object of scholarly inquiry: it is both the ritual of a very specific tribe and the pervasive ritual that still haunts all Western moderns who seek differentiation between public and private identity. It feels like a cult because even as we find ample historical records of women and men breaking its codes, domesticity’s ideals still capture us as an inescapable system of distinctions and unattainable tableaux.17 Beecher prescribed a complete system of domestic activities: methods of receiving visitors, training the children, choosing the appropriate food, properly washing the linens, putting together a perfect parlor, and Bible reading. Her system did not, however, separate the Bible reading and prayer from the meal planning, suggesting an interconnection between the Protestant affirmation of worship in the home and the proliferation of chores that authors like Beecher enumerated. Although living spaces had been used throughout the history of Protestantism for worship, Protestant worship in the era of domesticity distinctively framed the home and the special nurturing role of the mother as a unique and necessary element of worship. Along with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the liberal minister Horace Bushnell, Beecher argued that the child learned something spiritual from mothers that only a mother could teach.18 Thus through their labor in the home, women “are to be made effectual in the regeneration of the Earth.”19 Women contributed to the larger project of national reform and Christian salvation by “moulding and forming young minds.” All women who participated in child-rearing, Beecher argued, “are agents in accomplishing the greatest work that ever was committed to human responsibility.”20 This emphasis on a mother’s role in moral education also made the home into sacred space. Between the 1830s and 1850s a whole new category of religious objects emerged to accompany the specific piety of the home, including family Bibles, samplers, and handmade seasonal crosses. Colleen McDannell provocatively compares this kind of Protestant home altar to the ritual requirements of Catholicism.21 Indeed, proponents of Protestant domesticity argued for a highly sensual ritual supplement to Protestant church practice that played a central role in the cultivation of national morality. Beecher suggested not only that the domestic sphere was a crucial supplement to the piety of churches, but also that the activities at home were

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equal to all other forms of religious work. The moral instruction of children and the creation of a serene and nurturing private space was the foundation on which all other moral projects rested. Describing women as the busy laborers constructing the moral edifice of the nation, Beecher argued that the “builders of a temple are of equal importance, whether they labor on the foundations, or toil upon the dome.”22 Instructing children, however, was only one aspect of housework as temple work. Washing the linens and keeping the families’ bodies clean was also part of the sacred work of the domestic hearth. As Kathleen Brown argues in her history of cleanliness, middle-class families felt new standards for purity in their households in the 1840s, increasing the amount of washing, bodily care, airing out, sweeping, and reordering that needed to be accomplished every day.23 Thus the mounting equivalencies between domestic labor, moral instruction, and talismanic protection from pollution turned domestic practice into a religious practice that Brown describes as “at once strenuous and ephemeral.”24

A W E L L - R E G U L AT E D H O M E

In her manual Beecher described a home in which “there is no daily jostling” as the model of perfect domestic regulation. In even “the best-regulated families, it is not infrequently the case, that some act of forgetfulness or carelessness, from some member, will disarrange the business of the whole day, so that every hour will bring renewed occasion for annoyance.”25 But that was no reason to stop reaching for more regularity and structure. The goal was to create a schedule in which labor, rest, and intellectual enrichment all balanced harmoniously. Beecher realized that “some must devote more, and others less, attention” to activities such as cooking and cleaning. But in the best possible scenario, if all members of the household followed her guide, leisure also became a nonnegotiable part of the schedule. After cleaning and food preparation, “the remainder of time . . . might be divided somewhat in this manner: the leisure of two afternoons and evenings, could be devoted to religious and benevolent objects, such as religious meetings, charitable associations, school visiting, and attention to the sick and poor.”26 Religious activity outside the home, such as participating in benevolence or prayer meetings, also had a place in the domestic schedule even if these activities took family members outside the home. In order to meet these goals Beecher provided a schedule for dividing the chores of mending, food

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preparation, and clothes-washing between the days of the week. In a wellscheduled home there was time for a variety of activities, from the social to the mundane. This vision of domestic “regulation” prefigures twentieth-century visions of efficiency, but it referenced quintessentially antebellum metaphysics.28 Inspired by physiological explanations of human experience and the American Enlightenment’s convoluted explanations of habits, nerves, and morality, Beecher fantasized about domestic practices as a series of interpenetrating systems. These systems—the nervous system, the bowels, and the laundry—all craved order and symmetry but were constantly disrupted by overstimulation and under-regulation. Anxiety around proper and improper excitation of the body was true of the broader antebellum literature responding to Benjamin Rush and Sylvester Graham’s physiological musings. The world was full of stimulating forces that could push modern bodies over the edge; thus their systems, from their nerves to their guts, required support and encouragement to run smoothly.29 Beecher contributed to theories of bodily regulation in this period by putting the mother at the head of the biological maze, directing the flow of energy throughout the house and the bodies of her family, making sure that neither activity nor stillness dominated. The mother monitored the stimulation of her children and husband by limiting their intake of spicy foods, meat, alcohol, or sugar, which tended to speed up the nerves. Devoting large sections of A Treatise to the mechanisms of the body, Beecher wrote: “A person who thus keeps the body working under an unnatural excitement, lives faster than Nature designed and the sooner the constitution is worn out. A woman, therefore, should provide dishes to her family, which are free from these stimulating condiments, and as much as possible prevent their use.”30 A woman’s selection of condiments at the dinner table played an essential role in the regulation of nervous excitement within the body, and yet simply avoiding them was not enough to achieve bodily health. The under-stimulated body also tended toward illness. A lack of exercise induced “softness in the bones, weakness in the muscles, inactivity in the digestive organs, and general debility in the nervous system.”31 Mothers carefully calibrated the input and output of these biological systems. Bodies tended toward inefficiency if left unregulated by mothers. Activated by industry, school, or creative pursuits, “feeling” took over and disengaged the muscles and bones; or, as Beecher put it, “the nerves of motion” became “unemployed.” In Beecher’s understanding of physiology, borrowing directly from Sylvester Graham’s work, all components of the self were 27

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physical, including the intellectual mind, which she described as the “nerves of feeling” or the nerves of “sensation.”32 If overused, the mind also became weak. “If this is continued, for a long time,” she wrote, “the nerves of sensation lose their strength, from over action, and the nerves of motion lose their power, from inactivity. In consequence, there is a morbid excitability of the nervous, and a debility of the muscular system, which make all exertion irksome and wearisome.” Paradoxically, the mind became tired from overuse and the bones and muscles of the body became tired from under-use. She argued that the “only mode of preserving the health of these systems, is, to keep up in them an equilibrium of action.”33 It was Beecher’s special contribution to the culture of antebellum physiology to identify the role of maternal direction within this physiological balancing act. Forces of atrophy and vitality mixed in the bodies of her children, husband, and employees. It was the mother’s role to help them think less and move more. Objects in the house also craved regulation. Beecher described in detail the look of a systematized home and its arrangement. For instance, in her chapter on the table setting she described the disordered and the ordered table. The tablecloth would never be “put on awry; the plates, knives, and dishes thrown about, without any order;” the table would never have “the butter pitched on the plate, without any symmetry; the salt course, damp, and dark; the bread cut in a mixture of chunks and slices; the dishes of food set on at random, and without mats; the knives dark or rusty, and their handles greasy; the tea-furniture all out of order, and every thing in similar style.”34 Unlike the civilizing table arrangements of the seventeenth century, where gentility was expressed through the baroque arrangement of foods and dishes, Beecher was less concerned with opulence.35 Rather, a symmetrical table demonstrated regularity through the consistency of bread slices and tableware settings. The ordered table participated in the regularity of the home’s residents as a system regulated by a thoughtful leader in full control of her territory. When it came to dictating the specific actions and gestures of the woman in charge of the home, as opposed to the outcomes of her systematic regulation, the most detailed instructions Beecher gave related to list-making. Before any regulation can be accomplished, Beecher instructed, the woman of the house must list her duties. “Let her select that hour of the day, in which she will be least liable to interruption, and let her then seek strength and wisdom from the only true Source. At this time, let her take a pen, and make a list of all the things which she considers as duties.”36 (Notice that Beecher suggested scheduling a time to schedule). In her description of list-making

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Beecher invoked the solemnity of prayer as the woman lifted her pen to paper in the early morning light. In this pious mood she then “let a calculation be made, whether there be time enough, in the day or the week, for all these duties.” Beecher pointed out that if in fact there was not adequate time for all these activities, it was the duty of the mother to think deeply about the true nature of necessity and desire. Beecher wrote, “let a woman remember, that, though ‘what we shall eat, and what we shall drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed,’ are matters requiring due attention, they are very apt to obtain a wrong relative importance, while social, intellectual, and moral, interests, receive too little regard.”37 The mother could overemphasize household chores at the expense of civil and spiritual activities, as if the momentum of domestic labor could overtake a woman’s body if she were not careful. The necessary check on this tendency was to hold back from the impulse to do more chores and instead delegate these tasks to domestic servants. It is tempting to imagine domesticity as an organic system overtaking the female body, trapping her in its rhythms; but Beecher argued that domesticity, properly performed, manifested through the woman’s radiating thoughts as a kind of psychic force. Most of the instructions for chores outlined in A Treatise are for women to instruct a domestic servant in the proper method of execution. The lists that Beecher encouraged women to write in the early hours of the day, under the influence of the Lord, were primarily scripts for servants that would turn the servant’s hands into extensions of the housewife’s own systematic habits. For instance, Beecher writes on the topic of “Setting the Table” that many of the possible mistakes stem from the “great difficulty of finding domestics,” or at least ones “who will attend to these things in a proper manner, and who, after they had been repeatedly instructed, will not neglect nor forget what has been said to them. The writer has known cases, where much has been gained by placing the following rules in plain sight, in the place where the articles for setting tables are kept.”38 Beecher then provided a detailed example of the instructions that should be left for the domestic servant. Yet even instructions might not be enough. As Beecher explained, she had heard of a case where a “young girl had been repeatedly charged to avoid a certain arrangement in cooking. On one day, when company was invited to dine, the direction was forgotten, and the consequence was, an accident, which disarranged every thing, seriously injured the principal dish, and delayed dinner for an hour.” Even when she carefully gave directions, it was essential that “the mistress of the family . . . held her peace” despite roiling with anger internally. “After a minute or so, she gave directions, in a calm voice, as to

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the best mode of retrieving the evil, and then left, without a word said to the offender.”39 Beecher argued that even with well-written scripts for servants’ actions, the housewife’s direction was not done. Beecher explained that controlling one’s emotions while correcting servants’ mistakes was an essential skill of domestic management. The woman as domestic sovereign did not comfortably inhabit her home or relax as her hired help took on the chores of the day. She was constantly vigilant both to the servants’ actions and to her own emotions. The two, after all, were intrinsically linked. Antebellum domestic chores were disembodied. Or, to put it differently, these rituals took place between bodies, planned by one woman’s mind and enacted by people who had no plan. Within the tradition of the king’s two bodies, in which surrogates of the king act like a king at the king’s behest, the corporation was uniquely empowered to govern; but mimicking power that you yourself do not have is awkward. In her vision of domestic sovereignty, Beecher hoped that all contortions of mimicry could be eliminated through a system that activated, rather than empowered, her servants. But Beecher’s disempowerment of surrogates produced a different type of awkwardness: think of the marionette jerking into position at behest of the marionettist; then imagine if the marionette was supposed to feel equal to the marionettist.

T H E S E RVA N T P R O B L E M

The middle-class white women that Beecher addressed stood at the head of a domestic corporate body that would have seemed very unfamiliar to American women thirty years earlier. Despite the flourishing of institutions and repertoires of governance in northeastern cities between 1790 and 1820, before 1820 most northeastern Americans were farmers, and the family provided the central social structure in their lives.40 The rural family of the 1810s functioned like a business that used its children as labor. Even unrelated laborers lived with the family. This corporate family economy, as the historian Mary P. Ryan argues, “bound family members together, like a single body, in the common enterprise of subsistence. With it came a set of ideas about the family, an inner structure of households, and a placement of family in society that seems, at first glance, like ‘the little commonwealth’ reincarnate.”41 With the move toward wage labor, in which people no longer lived with their employers, the family remained a central source of sovereignty in

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American life, but with the mother instead of the father as the head of the domestic body and employees coming and going unbound by the intimacy of living in close quarters. As the head of this new corporate entity, middleclass and elite white women’s focus turned toward child care and insuring a clean household; thus the other chores were left to domestic employees.42 The historian Faye Dudden points out that this shift also created a transition in the terminology for hired help, from “help” (girls from neighboring families or relatives who were hired out by their families) to “domestics” (girls who received a wage).43 “Domestics” developed a reputation as grumpy young women, often Irish and Catholic, who required appeasement and discipline. This reputation stemmed from domestics’ dissatisfaction with long hours and poor wages, and a growing consciousness that other employment opportunities were available to them. In the economy of the 1830s and 1840s, working-class women could turn to dressmaking, factory work, or a different domestic employer.44 Domestic manuals thus provided advice for navigating this tricky relationship. As she advised housewives on how to manage their servants, Beecher acknowledged that sovereignty came uneasily to the American woman committed to democracy. A Treatise pointed out that there was something a little odd about having servants in a nation defined by equality, perhaps even more so in a region defined against the slavery of its neighbor. As Beecher mused on the shortage of help in the North, she noted that this was a problem particular to “the non-slaveholding States.”45 Middle-class white women juggled the management of beautiful sanctuaries, the economic reality of a domestic servant shortage, and the need to demonstrate the freedom of non-coercive labor relations.46 Thus Beecher explained the necessity of exerting more control, but not coercion, over untrained immigrant women. Servants required close supervision and instruction in order to wash and mend the clothes and linens without damage, but they also required higher wages and special care in order to retain them once they had been trained.47 Beecher suggested that domestics would be happier and more skilled in their labor if the mother of the house instructed them on how to care for their own bodies and taught them to read.48 The employer should “supply the place of parents” as a solution to the contradictions of balancing equality and hierarchy within a democratic home.49 Domestic sovereignty mirrored the basic problem at the heart of antebellum northeastern democracy: a region (in distinction from the South) defined by equality maintained a class system.50 Beecher used the home economy to intellectually sort out the relationship between vertical and

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horizontal power structures. Domestic laborers, she argued, needed a firm hierarchy of command to demonstrate the larger themes of American democracy: “It should be shown to them, that, in this Country, labor has ceased to be degrading, in any class; that, in all classes, different grades of subordination must exist; and that it is no more degrading, for a domestic to regard the heads of a family as superiors in station, and treat them with becoming respect, than it is for children to do the same, or for men to treat their rulers with respect and deference.” These differentiations, between the parent and the child, the manager and the worker, existed “not because they are inferior beings, but because this is the best method of securing neatness, order, and convenience.”51 Hierarchy was not necessarily the natural order, but it was the most efficient, and in democracy those subjected to authority appreciated a well-run organization. Beecher expanded on this theme in her book Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service, a book that served as a mirror to the one she had written for servants’ mistresses. Advising that the book be given to domestics as a New Year’s gift, Beecher wrote the book as a clarification of domestics’ role. Letters begins with a haunting hypothetical: imagine if a group of random people were cast away on an island and had to build a society from scratch. At first everyone would want to live in the nicest places and use all the nicest goods, but eventually they would realize that this was too chaotic, and they would allow God to randomly select the wisest people to be masters and others to be servants. So too in the United States, Beecher argued, each kind of work has overseers appointed to direct others. Who these overseers shall be, in most cases, also, is decided on the same plan as in the story. Those who know the most, generally, become overseers. In cases where persons hire laborers to work on farms, or in their families, then the master of the house, or the farm, is the overseer, and directs those he hires, because they agree, for reward, to do as he directs. But in almost all trades and professions, it is those who know the most, who rise to stations where they are overseers to others.52

Beecher stressed that this hierarchy originated in consent. For a reasonable amount of pay servants entered into this dynamic, but they were happy to remain within the hierarchy because it allowed them to flourish through the wisdom of their betters. Unlike other professions, such as sewing or factory work, domestics developed good character through the relationship with

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the family that they helped. “A person, then, who goes into a family and agrees, for a suitable compensation, to do the work, under the direction of those who hire, is in a state of constant training, which has a most beneficial tendency in preparing for future life, both here and in another world.”53 It was the very lack of mastery implied by domestic service, the constant direction of the mother, that made domestic work so moral. Finally, Beecher reminded women who worked in domestic service that even in a democracy subordination was the highest virtue: “It is because the duties of subordination are so important to the happiness of those who are to be controlled, as well as to society at large, that God so often and so earnestly urges these duties in the Bible. And we cannot fully realize the force of these directions, unless we bear in mind the state of things that existed when they were written.”54 At every level of American society, rulers held back the tide of chaos through exerting sovereign power. At companies “employers are appointed by God, as the rulers and overseers of the family, and those they hire are under obligation to obey, in all matters relating to family work, just as a citizen is under obligations to obey rulers, when they administer the laws of the state. The master and mistress of a family are rulers of their house, just as magistrates are rulers of the people.”55 Crucially to Beecher’s theorization of American democracy, domestic servants, just like all other subordinates, entered this plan of subordination out of choice because it was the most rational plan. As part of well-run homes, domestics should focus on listening and honoring their mistresses because they would flourish through constant direction.

DIRECTED ACTION

As middle-class women focused more on the beauty and organization of their homes and less on the production of goods for use and sale, proponents of domestic ideology described a domestic economy filled with busy chores. The enactment of a “chore,” however, did not come instinctually to women. Beecher wrote that “much depends upon habit, as a systematic mode of performing duty; and, where no such habit has been formed, it is impossible for a novice to start, at once, into a universal mode of systematizing, which none but an adept could carry through.”56 One could read Beecher’s description of domestic habits as affirmation of the body’s capacity for unselfconscious enactment in the mode of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s

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habitus. Habits for Bourdieu express themselves in the body as a type of common sense. The body repeats the actions so many times that no thought is needed for execution. Further, these habits create a habitat that makes the enactment of the same actions likely and seamless. In Bourdieu’s language, habits make a home, or a “structured structure” that then enables predictable behavior.57 In Beecher’s theory of domestic practice, however, habits did not unfold through this automatic dynamic between environment and body. Rather, they had to be initiated and completed as a duty, implying a sense of stop and start, an authority that instructed the actor in the process, and a keen eye evaluating the action’s completion. 58 Unlike Bourdieu’s habitus, which functions “without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor,” Beecher argued that the woman of the house initiated and managed domestic practice.59 In her emphasis on habit as a learned practice, Beecher’s description of domestic practice shares key qualities of ritual theories that emphasize the role of skill and education in ritual enactment. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss described ritual as habitus (a term he used before Bourdieu), not as a thoughtless enactment, but as an “acquired ability” refined into technique through repetition.60 Mauss’s definition, however, lacks a distinction between the body as repository of “embodied aptitudes” and the body as a repository of direction.61 When Mauss described American girls walking like French girls from the movies, or his own experience of learning how to run with his hands in a different position, he did not imagine a continuing relationship between the source of the technique (the teacher, or the original model) and the adept.62 Beecher, on the other hand, argued that servants never truly operated on their own within the home. Domestic harmony required the mother’s careful planning so that once she initiated the action of children and domestic servants, they hummed with the regularity of a singular system. Her subjects acted on her behalf as if they were components of her skilled body rather than as newly empowered agents armed with their own mastery of technique. Domestic practice for Beecher required surrogacy, a form of practice that certainly required practiced skill but took shape between people rather than through the cultivation of the self. Beecher’s theory of domestic practice thus resonates with Bourdieu’s sense that some systems cannot be escaped because we do not even know that we are in them. Without Bourdieu’s sense of critique, Beecher optimistically hoped her system of practice would feel like an invisible set of strings propelling her subjects into motion. Beecher often described a mother’s influence as akin to the sun, “imparting a cheer-

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ing and vivifying power, scarcely realized, till it was withdrawn.” As the children and servants arranged the tables and cut the bread, Beecher described actions unfolding according to the mother’s direction but feeling like they were being performed by extensions of one body, neither over nor understimulated, led with the precision of a skilled leader. “A woman, who is habitually gentle, sympathizing, forbearing, and cheerful, carries an atmosphere about her, which imparts a soothing and sustaining influence, and renders it easier for all to do right, under her administration, than in any other situation.”63 Domestic practice thus relied on the initiating act of the mother but did not feel like close supervision for those under her direction. In the case of “early rising,” for example, simply by waking early the mother started a chain reaction in the home that allowed her to retire early in the evening along with “children and domestics, wearied by play or labor.” Regulated in this way, children and domestics would wake early the next morning, creating more productivity and happiness in turn.64 Domestic activity thus relied on initiation by the mother but felt completely natural to her surrogates. They moved not upon command, but upon activation. The language of ritual also reveals domestic practice’s place in a larger economy of action. As historians of the family point out, middle-class and elite women’s work contributed to the economic productivity of the family, but this point does not fully capture Beecher’s understanding of chores as a good in and of themselves.65 Beecher argued that women should enact chores because the sensations of the chores were good for those who enacted them, whether it be the daughters or the domestics. A woman could labor all day and produce piles of clean laundry, but this product was not proof of domestic success because domestic chores were good for women while they were doing them. This was an assessment of action akin to the midnineteenth-century evangelical definition of piety, often enacted through devotional reading, as a practice that was quantifiable only through its duration and frequency but never through its effects.66 In her own life Catharine Beecher also thought about her religious reading as a bit of a chore. In her diary she resolved: “I will devote one hour each day to reading the Bible and religious books with prayer and meditation and also a portion of time before I sleep. On the Sabbath I will endeavor to devote the whole day to public worship, reading and serious reflection, and at other times I will attend religious meetings whenever it is in my power.”67 Frequency, or doing the pious action as much as possible and within a regular schedule, defined the spiritual activity’s value. Beecher set out on this piety regimen as part of her quest to feel the sense of spiritual assurance as defined by her Calvinist

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father, and thus theologically she could expect no immediate benefit from a discrete spiritual act (which would fall into the dreaded Catholic category of “works”).68 Beecher’s theorization of domestic practice, much like her own private sense of piety, emphasized the excess of ritual not through the abundance of meaning produced, but through the inefficiency of its performance. Chores as ritual are never done. Beecher eventually found her father’s Calvinism insufficient in understanding her experience of piety as a ceaseless unproductive project. When she joined her father’s church in 1823 still not having experienced assurance of salvation, she wrote, “if I can not be a Christian I will try to be as near like one as I can.”69 Behaving like a Christian would be an artificial role that she did her best to pull off. Beecher’s arguments in A Treatise on Domestic Economy redefine piety in light of this sense of resignation: a woman’s inhabitation of domestic regularity imparted the sensations and choreography of piety, or an experience of assurance that was, in her words, “as near like” an assurance of salvation as she could get. This formulation of piety shares some key characteristics with Saba Mahmood’s description of female piety in her ethnography of the Egyptian Islamic Revival, in which the work rather than the meaning of women’s piety (veiling, praying, etc.) defines the practices’ value.70 The repetition of these disciplines comes before any desire to do them, but by enacting religious rules women discipline themselves into pious subjects.71 But for Beecher spiritual discipline did not lead to the self-formation that Mahmood argues her subjects find through the enactment of ritualized behavior. Domestic ritual created the momentum of an activated system, propelling the mother and those around her into constant momentum. This busy energy produced synchronicity, and this synchronicity produced order within the home, but these outputs are not equivalent to a “self ”—either in Mahmood’s terms, or in Beecher’s own Protestant quest for assurance. In a letter to her brother, Beecher confided that “I am so much engaged in moulding, correcting, and inspecting the character of others . . . that I sometimes fear that my own will be a ‘cast away.’ ”72 For all her accomplishments, she worried that her spiritual disciplines might in fact be draining her of some essential self. Famous for arguing against women’s suffrage because women exerted more power through the home than through the ballot box, Catharine Beecher prefigures the religious conservative women who have inspired exciting new theories of practice, specifically Marie Griffith’s study of twentieth-century evangelical women in the United States and Saba Mahmood’s study of Egyptian women involved in the Islamic Revival. These

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studies have given ritual studies a new frame for thinking about ritual, gender, and agency. Not all women, Griffith and Mahmood teach us, want to be free. Liberation is in fact a very narrow Western secular benchmark by which to judge the value of women’s religious lives.73 The women that Mahmood studies practice religious rituals in order to become more pious, a form of piety that includes practices loaded with symbols of submission (including the practice of veiling). In the end these practices are productive of piety as a type of skilled behavior. Against definitions of ritual that highlight the non-instrumental quality of ritual, Mahmoud argues that for her female subjects ritual life is a highly practical affair, and they produce skilled and virtuous selves forged through practice rather than will.74 Catharine Beecher’s theorization of domestic rituals, however, provides a necessary alternative to these celebrations of submissive women’s piety. Beecher was not optimistic about the production of skilled selves through the busywork of Christian housekeeping. Technique in Beecher’s theory of piety was not so much practiced as constantly displaced onto other laboring bodies. Domestic sovereignty felt like a ceaseless flow of activity that was inherently unproductive.75 The field of women’s studies, tracking the changing nature of housework in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provides ample evidence that industrialization has created more, and not less work for mother.76 Despite domestic servants’ ubiquity in middle-class and elite households of the antebellum Northeast, hired help did not result in less labor for the mother of the house. On top of her work as the chief educator of her children and the administrator of benevolence, she could not outsource certain chores, according to household manuals. These motherspecific chores included nursing the sick and fine handiwork.77 In addition to those tasks, supervising the surrogates also created an excess of work. In particular, educating young women in domestic tasks consumed time and resources. Teaching girls to become experts in domestic work did not show immediate economic gains for the family, but if a little girl was “properly trained,” Beecher argued, “by the time she is ten, she can render essential aid.”78 That utility, however, would need to be sacrificed between the ages of ten and fifteen, during which time “it should be the principal object of her education to secure a strong and healthy constitution, and a thorough practical knowledge of all kinds of domestic employments. During this period, though some attention ought to be paid to intellectual culture, it ought to be made altogether secondary in importance.”79 To be clear, this pause in a daughter’s utility to the home was not a result of her immersion in the liberal arts but a result of her immersion in the domestic arts. Beecher

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specified that “the sweeping, dusting, care of furniture and beds, the clear starching, and the nice cooking, should be done by the daughters of a family, and not by hired servants. It may cost the mother more care, and she may find it needful to hire a person for the express purpose of instructing and superintending her daughters, in these employments; but it should be regarded as indispensable to be secured, either by the mother’s agency, or by a substitute.”80 Training daughters came at the expense of raw efficiency, considering that an employee, or the mother herself, could also do the task more quickly than the girl. Teaching the young woman might even come at an additional expense if another employee were hired to instruct her. But instructing young women in the art of chores was a moral, not an economic, investment. Young women must be taught chores because chores created future sovereign bodies, a process that included practices not entirely native to the white middle-class woman’s sensibility. When Beecher instructed mothers to allow their young ladies to engage in “drudgery,” she allowed that “longprotracted daily labor hardens the hand, and unfits it for delicate employments; but the amount of labor needful for health produces no such effect.”81 In other words, the mother would instruct the child to do the amount of work necessary to make her healthy rather than the amount required to accomplish tasks. By assigning specific tasks of washing, sweeping, and errands that required travel, the mother secured a balanced level of activity for her household.82 Mothers assigned cleaning and laundry to their children, but especially their daughters, in order to regulate their nervous and muscular systems. Beecher wrote, “a young lady, who will spend two hours a day at the wash-tub, or with a broom, is far more likely to have rosy cheeks, a finely-moulded form, and a delicate skin, than one who lolls all day in her parlor or chamber, or leaves it, girt in tight dresses, to make fashionable calls.”83 The young lady’s “moulded form” provided visual evidence of a wellregulated system with activity and inactivity correctly balanced. Chores thus produced moral bodies capable of directing their own future households, rather than clean laundry, dinner, or mended socks.

RELIGIOUS CHORES

When women’s studies scholars in the 1970s and 1980s used the term “domestic ritual” to describe labor imbued with morality, they intuited

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that ritual tends toward excess and thus lacks the efficiency of labor; yet ritual theorists, describing practices in temples and churches rather than in the home, argue that ritual is a laborious practice. 84 “Ritual is work!” says Jonathan Z. Smith, his exclamation point chiding the ritual theorist who describes ritual as a frivolous or mindless pursuit.85 In both of these intellectual traditions, women’s studies and ritual studies, labor and ritual are rearranged in order to elevate an activity and to emphasize that practice is serious. Domestic rituals, however, can be serious without being productive. I want to think instead using the term “chores,” a gendered form of practice defined by its difference from skilled labor and unconscious embodiment. As women became the sovereigns of the domestic sphere in the nineteenthcentury United States, ritual chores simultaneously governed the household and constituted labor without end. Chore is not “work!” and it is also not “ritualization,” the category that has dominated ritual studies since the historian of religion Catherine Bell’s masterful redefinition of the field. According to Bell, “The ability to produce schemes that hierarchize and integrate in complex ways is part and parcel of the practical knowledge acquired in and exercised through ritualization.” Ritualization, Bell’s idea of practices that delineate between the special and the mundane (rather than ritual’s universalizing tendencies), focuses on “nothing other than the production of ritualized agents, persons who have an instinctive knowledge of these schemes embedded in their bodies, in their sense of reality, and in their understanding of how to act in ways that both maintain and qualify the complex miscorrelations of power.”86 What then is the difference between producing bodies with a sense of ritual and the production of bodies at work in Beecher’s domestic rituals? What, in other words, is the difference between ritual labor and ritual drudgery? Following Bourdieu, Mauss, and Foucault’s reassessment of discipline as a possible locus of resistance, Bell sees ritual as productive of strategies and techniques that are most likely unconscious and that resist homologies between thought and action. In the mother’s training of subordinates Beecher also valued the creation of bodies that operated without conscious deliberation. Beecher’s surrogated bodies, unlike skilled bodies or Bell’s ritualized bodies, are unproductive in precisely the way that champions of ritual have argued so vigorously against. Beecher’s ritual scheme demonstrates that not all work is coherent within the body, or productive (of goods, meaning, or a self). Beecher’s domestic ritual activated an extended body whose limbs completed the labor; but neither the head nor the limbs felt the excellence

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of mastery. That “instinctive knowledge” that Bell argues is the product of ritualization does not reside within the body of the actor compelled by a director. The magic of ritual chores dwells not in their products, mastery, or instinct, but in the lingering aura of their initiation by a sovereign mother who made the lists and plans that activated the rhythm of labor. As with all sovereign ritual, domestic ritual in the antebellum Northeast communicated a sense of sacredness through the lingering sensation that someone, at some point, empowered this body to act on its behalf. Middle-class and elite daughters, unlike their mothers or domestic servants, embodied a version of domestic ritual less riddled with surrogacy. As domestic novices, and future domestic queens, Beecher believed that young women should spend their time acquiring what Bell would call “a sense of ritual” that would make them ritual specialists in their own right.87 This principle manifested in Beecher’s commitment to training young middle-class women in her “female seminaries,” first in Hartford and then in Cincinnati, which in effect became the first forms of female higher education in the United States. At these schools, young women learned “the best modes of communicating knowledge as well as of acquiring it,” and they learned to become women who could shape others by teaching basic arts and sciences or by instructing their household surrogates.88 Education made young women into powerful leaders. Beecher wrote that “when by example, and by experience she shall have learned her power over the intellect and the affections . . . then we shall not find woman returning from the precincts of learning and wisdom, merely to pass lightly away the bright hours of her maturing youth. We shall not so often find her seeking the light device to embroider on muslin and lace, but we shall see her, with the delighted glow of benevolence, seeking for immortal minds, whereon she may fasten durable and holy impressions, that shall never be effaced or wear away.”89 Higher education solved the ambiguity of transitioning from one sovereign to another, or how a young woman clearly subordinate to her mother assumed her own household. In the process this institution created a different definition of female work. Catharine Beecher designed her educational institutions to support the domestic sphere, and she believed the women taking on children’s schooling would contribute to the moral sanctity of the family; but she underestimated her students’ commitment to this vision. Female teachers trained at these colleges quickly challenged the notion of women solely cultivating morality within the home. These intrepid young women did not always marry, and they took advantage of

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their lack of domestic responsibilities to participate in lectures, reading, and political life. 90 This new independent class of women, in short, tended to lead lives unstructured by domestic sovereignty, much like Catharine Beecher herself. Catharine Beecher’s theory of domestic practice as sacred ritual emerged through her own biographical contingencies. Throughout her youth Catharine wanted desperately to feel the assurance of salvation that her father expected for her, and yet it never came. It would take her fifteen years to give up on her father’s expectations and develop an alternative theory of salvation. Perhaps, she argued, salvation did not come in a sudden rush after rigorous preparation. Perhaps it was the preparation itself that slowly disciplined the self into something like salvation.91 For women in particular, Catharine insisted, the daily work of life was the central path to moral achievement. As her biographer Kathryn Sklar describes, Catharine dabbled with creating revivals both in her schools for young women and through prayer meetings in her own home, in a manner that anticipated Phoebe Palmer’s domestic revivals a decade later.92 The home thus became a space of conversion, which she described as “quiet and gentle as the falling of the dew.”93 Despite these small successes as a revivalist in her own right, she failed to achieve either the spiritual clarity that her father expected for her or the domestic life that she advocated in her own work.94 In fact, little of her life looked like the portrait of domesticity she described in her schools or her books. Supporting herself financially throughout most of her life, Beecher lived with siblings and boarders after moving out of her father’s home. In these alternative domestic arrangements Beecher avoided directing the domestic labor of servants and children. At one point she tried to raise money for a dormitory at her school, hoping that she could live in it and thus be saved from the tedious labor of managing her own home.95 If we read these ironies of Catharine Beecher’s life through the lens of ideology, her “failures” might be cracks in an oppressive system; but read through the lens of ritual these dissonances are predictable. After all, ritual is just as much about the failure to produce the life you want as it is about the successful reproduction of the life you think you should have. Jonathan  Z. Smith points out that “Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.”96 Smith argues that even the routinized quality of ritual is an ideal, not a lived reality. Unlike Geertz’s argument that in ritual

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“lived” and “imagined” worlds become one, Smith emphasizes ritual’s tendency to contrast our ideal ritual with our actual ritual experience.97 Life, both within and outside the temple, is wildly unpredictable and prone to irregularities. The hope that each action within a sacred space will unfold within a predictable frame is, as Smith says, “recollected” even as the action unfolds otherwise. Ritual is nostalgia for a place we’ve never been. As far as we know from the best historical work on women’s lived experience in the antebellum Northeast, middle-class and elite women did not feel successful in achieving the routine prescriptions that Beecher gave them. The historian Kathleen Brown, through a broad assessment of diaries and ledgers kept by women in the 1840s, shows that women tried to keep a strict schedule for household chores, assigning particular days of the week for each task just as Beecher had directed.98 But chores, in actuality, spilled over onto different days, mothers failed to delegate cleaning and cooking to the domestics as Beecher had prescribed, and young women’s hands became rough from washing, rather than pleasingly molded.99 The routinized regularity of domestic rituals were memories of a time and space that no woman, much less Beecher herself, had ever quite lived. We learn from Beecher that women’s rituals are drudgery. I emphasize these sensations of interminability and disembodiment because those of us working at the intersection of religious studies, anthropology, and ethics have become quick to describe female submission as a form of agency that, if not recognizable in liberal secular terms, is satisfying on subjects’ own terms.100 The notion of homemaking in Beecher’s terms, however, was not an act of skillful self-disciplining with the possibility of self-mastery. It was the act of making other people do things without feeling like anyone had coerced them in the process. Beecher teaches us to be sensitive to both the acts of gendered submission and the force that those gendered acts impose, even gently, on others. Mothers in Beecher’s era lacked an ability to govern much of their own lives despite the complete despotic power that Beecher ascribed to them within their own limited sphere of influence.101 But perhaps this lack of agency was precisely what protected Beecher’s domestic queen from the critiques of despotism aimed at Andrew Jackson and Joseph Smith.102 Unlike presidents or sectarian leaders who acted like kings, sovereign power in Beecher’s formulation did not coerce anyone because the “commands” of a mother were made on behalf of a quiet authority hidden behind her lists. Beecher theorized the domestic sphere as a form of private association that would make the nation more virtuous through its bounded harmony, but

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the mother at its center was not authorized in the same manner as churches, associations, and charities. In Beecher’s vision mothers would control their subjects on behalf of the nation, but with no legal authority to do so. Domestic governance, much like domestic chores, was a bit of a put-on, without the weight of real authorization by the state. Mothers governed like a queen, which is not the same thing—at all—as being a queen.

EPILOGUE Awkward Ritual, Once More with Feeling The historical actors in my study are tethered to their rituals by grudging acceptance, shameful pleasure, unthinking duty, and in the case of Catharine Beecher, a sense that one must keep busy. I feel empathy for these people. Like Beecher, I too have created domestic projects merely to feel the buzzing hum of activity. I have tried on the voice and cultural rhythms of people I want to help in a manner that is not dissimilar to the American Seamen’s Friend Society. I certainly have attended conferences akin to the American Bible Society’s annual meeting in order to add volume to my professional record, experiencing my attendance as an act of endurance that accomplishes nothing except proof that my corporate body is active. I want to use this sense of recognition to better theorize how ritual feels. Ritual is the sedimentation of repetition in spite of misfires, revolutions, and reform. But what does this sedimentation feel like? It is like standing in quicksand, sitting in a slowly filling bath, or wearing an ill-fitting garment. By focusing on the persistence of ritual, my account of American rituals participates in a subset of ritual studies interested in the history of particular ritual “traditions” and how they repeat and unfold over time.1 This version of ritual studies echoes the work of the anthropologists Stanley Tambiah and Marshall Sahlins, who emphasize the continuity of cultures and cultural specificity, even in the midst of a constantly moving and overlapping global context, and in the wake of revolutions against the structures of the past.2 Motivated by a similar observation of cultural endurance, Awkward Rituals asks us to consider what lingers in a cultural repertoire even when discourse obscures the enactment of tradition. Whereas focusing on ritual’s stability in some cultural situations obscures political dynamics and social conflict,

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from where I stand as an Americanist the durability of ritual provides a useful intervention in a dangerous American ideology of willful self-creation.3 The “tradition” that I have identified in the rituals of northeastern civil society is one that its practitioners repudiated and yet continued to use: the corporation as an extension of the king’s body. This institutional connection is different from history’s pull on the present through ghostly haunting or genealogical reappearances.4 The white Protestant northeasterners I describe are connected to a repertoire of action, and to the lingering sensations of royal authority, through institutions that bridged the medieval and early modern Anglo world—namely, the masonic lodge, evangelical voluntary societies, and the sacralized home. The feeling of awkward ritual is one in which persistent institutional form works through you. The word “awkwardness” allows me to describe the tradition of European civility, which is the word my subjects used to describe what they were up to in their associational activities. Civility is the ethic and style of associationalism that connects the corporate form of post-Revolutionary life to the corporate forms of European social life in the early modern period. By describing civility as awkward, I highlight civility’s strange logic of hierarchy and egalitarianism: to behave with civility is to make a show of your effort and thus to demonstrate the earned nature of your position within the social structure. This mode of performance was institutionalized in corporations, which ritualized their status as surrogates of the king by performing a form of ritual that called attention to its own mimetic nature. The king’s surrogates act on behalf of the king, but as in a Brechtian play, make themselves a bit absurd in the dramatic signaling that they are like a king but not the king. Thus, as I stress in the chapters on evangelical conventions and domestic ritualism, there is something meaningless in American sovereign ritual. It performs authority that already exists, often behind closed doors, and without much to show for it except for lists of how many Bibles were distributed, and tastefully decorated drawing rooms. In his study of Vedic ritual Fritz Staal provocatively theorized “meaningless ritual,” arguing that meaninglessness is exactly what sets ritual apart from more quotidian behavior. Unlike the anthropologists who have emphasized ritual’s capacity to express symbols, Staal argues that ritual actors are primarily concerned with the rules of the ritual: “There are no symbolic meanings going through their minds when they are engaged in performing ritual.”5 The historian Marko Geslani usefully clarifies what is at stake in Staal’s definition by explaining that “Staal understands meaning in a referential sense: rituals do not refer to

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anything but themselves.” So ritual for Staal is not pointlessness. Ritual constantly points back to itself, affirming the authority of the ritual and the need for the ritual’s repetition. It preserves formal consistency over expressive meaning, a quality of ritual that may account for some rituals’ durability (in particular, both Staal and Geslani are interested in the temporal durability of Vedic rituals within Indian culture).7 There is a similar “meaninglessness” of ritual in Maurice Bloch’s theory of ritual’s function within the maintenance of traditional authority. Bloch’s eerie description of courts, temples, and other formal spaces of traditional authority as places where words “drift out of meaning” seeks to explain the way in which a ritual space sets the limits of linguistic possibility. Formalization, as Bloch calls it, is the “the ability of language to corner reality by adapting communication to past perception and connecting this with future perception.” Language in these ritual spaces “excludes explanation and hides this exclusion.”8 For both Staal and Bloch there is something inherently redundant in ritual, as there is in, for example, taking notes in a business meeting, where the very purpose of notes is that they should be regular. Unlike Staal and Bloch’s theories of meaningless ritual, however, I want to emphasize how American sovereign ritual felt less like a dark tunnel or an ever retreating goal, and more like bad acting. To treat ritual as durable is also to treat it as potentially alienating, uncomfortable, and simulated. For much of its academic history, however, ritual studies has been caught up in the romance of wholeness.9 Since the early 1990s, scholars of dance, performance, and religion all leaned into the radical possibilities of bodies; ritual became a location of “embodiment,” a feeling of oneness with the self, a coherence of physicality that resists and withstands oppression.10 Catherine Bell’s landmark work in ritual studies simultaneously rejects the dialectical synthesis of Turner and Geertz, embraces the post-structural critique of systemic power, and sees the ritual participant “as a ritualized agent” who “naturally brings to such activities a self-constituting history that is a patchwork of compliance, resistance, misunderstanding, and a redemptive appropriation of the hegemonic order.”11 Thus for Bell, there is an unpredictable dynamic between the “ritualized agent” and their “hegemonic order,” but the seamless fit between agent and order remains stable. Ritualization for Bell might resist its own microcurrents of power, but the ritualized body is always a body that participates fluidly within its own cultural distinctions.12 We debate whether ritual is oppressive or liberating, but these are not the only options if we give up the romance of ritual wholeness. Awkward ritual allows us to see cultural conflict without resolution, the sensations of boredom, the foot-dragging 6

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effort, or (crucially, in light of looming power structures) the push and pull of direction on our bodies from exterior agents. The fantasy of embodied ritual, as an experience of homecoming to one’s body and culture, misses white Protestant northeasterners’ experience of American social life: a curious sense of detachment between self and action, head and limb. In the case of Freemasonry and benevolence to sailors I argue that the space between self and action can be cultivated for purposes of social dominance. As people play with their ability to put on and take off symbolic systems during ritual, they dramatize their own flexibility within a social structure. In these examples, the effort to connect feels good but cannot be fully reconciled with everyday performance, which is why it feels awkward. This sense that dramatizations of social power are best kept behind closed doors also demonstrates a distance between how a leader should experience their own dominance and how it should be expressed publicly in American life. In evangelical conventions and in Beecher’s wellappointed home, social dominance was demonstrated not through pomp, but through a sense of endless propulsive activity. In these examples I describe laboring rituals in which the ritual body is evidence not of transformation, but of endless momentum. Beecher’s housewife and evangelical civil society demonstrate through ironed tablecloths and numeric tables that their dominance is a fact on the ground. But to feel oneself as a data point of normativity is not an experience of Durkheimian melding between self and community. American sovereign ritual is the experience of acting on behalf of a distant authority whose power you are constantly imitating, and fleetingly partaking of, but never fully inhabiting. So, what does institutional ritual feel like in American life? It feels awkward, by which I mean it feels like a poor imitation of some original movement you never learned properly; it feels interminable; it feels like putting on a tiara, ordering folks around, and then sheepishly taking it off. My theorization of awkward ritual is an invitation to think of other rituals that might feel uncomfortable but persistent, embarrassing but dominating. Of course, it is also an invitation to visualize the alternative. I’m squinting my eyes right now, trying to imagine a form of American social enactment that feels both unpredictable and authentic, like a well-fitting garment that you didn’t know you could pull off.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No one has read and reread this book more than Sonia Hazard, the sharpest and most supportive tool in the box. John McGlothlin called me every morning at 8 a.m. to write with me, introduced me to performance studies, and taught me so much about my terrible writing ticks. SarahNeel Smith swooped in when I needed her most to clarify and organize my thoughts and to remind me that I can write whatever book I want to write. Charles McCrary provided essential feedback, and friendship, at the end of this process. This book is very much a love letter to Religious Studies as it was introduced to me at Reed College. Ken Brashier, Mike Foat, and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri made me believe in categories such as “ritual” as touchstones for the discipline of the discipline. At Harvard Divinity, David Hempton and David Hall taught me how Protestants are never quite what they say they are. Micol Seigel’s influence is all over this book: she introduced me to governance as a category that is both institutional and cultural. The Danforth Center on Religion and Politics was a critical space for me to rethink this entire project with the incredible luxury of financial support and an expert group of American Religion scholars. I’m particularly grateful to Christine Croxall for modeling archival precision and ethical adulthood, and for listening to me go on and on about pregnancy-induced sciatica. Fanny Bialek, Marie Griffith, Lerone Martin, Mark Valeri, Gene Zubovich, Moshe Kornfeld, and the Center’s colloquium generously read parts of this project and helped me rethink who my audience might be. Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Leigh Schmidt not only provided crucial feedback on this project but also pulled me over the finish line of my professional race to security. Candy Gunther Brown has tirelessly helped me stay afloat for the past ten years, and I am deeply grateful to have her in my corner. My new department at UNCG helped me

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reframe this book (at my on-campus interview!), which says a lot about their intellectual generosity. John Lardas Modern, Kyle Wagner, and the anonymous reviewers for Class 200 made this a better book by encouraging me to bang my writerly cowbell. My copyeditor, Evan Young, has spared me embarrassment; I’m forever in his debt. Super special thanks to Kathryn Lofton for writing work that makes me love our field and for believing in this project. Thank you to Jeff Croteau and John Coelho at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, Morgan Aronson and Catherine Walter at the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library, Mary Cordato at the American Bible Society, and the archivists at the New York Public Library, the NewYork Historical Society, and the Mystic Seaport Museum, who all provided invaluable research support. To Mom, Jamie, Suzie, Joseph, Kerry, Liz, Laine, and Christiane: thank you for caring about my career and for helping me define myself outside of it. And finally: Will, an incredible partner who has gone wherever the fellowships and jobs took us, cheerleading me the entire way and reminding our kid that Mama is “writing a book.” Your brain intimidates me and I’m very grateful that I get to talk to you every night. One chapter of this book appeared previously in published form. My thanks to Oxford University Press and the Journal of the Academy of American Religion for permission to reproduce my work in this book. Thank you to the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and The Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library for permission to reprint images.

NOTES INTRODUCTION

1. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 137. 2. W. K. Walker, “Masonic Forts in the War of 1812,” Transactions—The American Lodge of Research Free and Accepted Masons 3 (1938): 32. 3. Walker. 4. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 123. 5. Joseph R. Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 46. 6. Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 221. 7. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revolution and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 128. 8. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Mark R. Valeri, Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 9. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7. 10. Kantorowicz, 9, 15. 11. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 255. 12. Muir, 255, 192. 13. Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7. 14. Stern, 54. 15. Stern, 8–11. 16. Winnifred Sullivan, Paul C. Johnson, and Pamela Klassen, Ekklesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 4.

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17. Klassen, Sullivan, and Johnson also point to the essential role of performativity in the combination of political and religious authority. Sullivan, Johnson, and Klassen, Ekklesia, 4. Historians working on the sacred quality of kingship have also stressed the role of ritual in constituting sovereignty. Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010). 18. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 275. 19. Muir, 276. 20. Quoted and translated in Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: Droz, 1960), 5. 21. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 255 22. Muir, 254. 23. Stern, The Company-State, 29–30. 24. Peter Dobkin Hall, “Historical Perspectives on Nonprofit Organizations,” in The JosseyBass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management, ed. Robert D. Herman (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 5. 25. P. Hall, 244; Elizabeth Mancke, “Chartered Enterprises,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 249. 26. Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 125. 27. Slauter argues that the idea of the body politic died in post-Revolutionary America, replaced by the idea of the state as a work of art. Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 46. 28. For this scholarship on the rise of corporations, a category that includes both businesses and what we now think of as non-profit organizations, see Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1993): 51–84; Peter Dobkin Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Amanda Porterfield, Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Andrew M. Schocket, Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). 29. These organizations had a wide range of powers in England and continued to hold these powers in the nascent United States. P. Hall, “Historical Perspectives,” 5. 30. Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3. 31. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property before the Civil War,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 162, no. 2 (January 2014): 307–72. 32. See David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 51–59; Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 82; John L. Brooke, “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and

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the Composite-Federal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,” Journal of the Early Republic 29, no. 1 (2009): 11. 33. This book describes sovereign ritual in the urban Northeast between 1790 and 1850 but does not touch on ritual governance in the South or the emerging frontier of the United States. The differences and similarities between rituals of governance in these proximate spaces would no doubt be useful for understanding how sovereignty felt during the emergence of American democracy, and I look forward to thinking about these regional differences and continuities. The characters in this story are also white, middle-class, and elite (in the sense that some American northeastern families participated in a pseudo-aristocracy). They are not Catholics or members of the many burgeoning sects that developed in this period. My subjects are the amorphous center to American religion’s vibrant hothouse of theological and social creativity. Scholars have struggled to name this center. Sometimes it goes by the name of evangelicalism despite including members of non-evangelical Protestant camps; sometimes it is called the Protestant establishment, despite including people who celebrated disestablishment. What connects the Protestants I discuss is a commitment to managing the American social body from within civil society as authorized by the state. 34. Sometimes studies of the northeastern United States are called “American history,” and scholars of the Southeast or West are designated as studying “regional history.” This book narrowly addresses northeastern cities (I also do not address the experience of governance in the rural areas of New York or Connecticut or other nonurban spaces of the Northeast). More specifically, however, I do not address southern slavery because Peter Dobkin Hall provocatively points out that white southerners rejected incorporation (the University of Virginia is an important example of this preference for public institutions). Despite a growing body of literature that demonstrates that the Northeast was deeply intertwined in the finances of slavery, a study of governance rituals within American slavery deserves its own book that thinks through the ritual structure of governance within the slaveholding South. P. Hall, “Historical Perspectives on Nonprofit Organizations,” 11; Anne Farrow and Joel Lang, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006). 35. The historian Sarah Barringer Gordon argues that incorporation and the associational model allowed Black men, in particular, to participate in civil society. Sarah Barringer Gordon argues that the equal access to incorporation, in particular for Black churches in the North, is the true sign of the early republic’s democratization. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 3 (2015): 385–422. I am, however, struck by the distance between what “mutual aid” meant for free Blacks and what it meant for white masons (who also practiced mutual aid). The work of Leslie M. Harris on Black mutual aid societies in New York and David G. Hackett on Black Freemasons also demonstrates that Black mutual aid societies existed precisely because of Black folks’ exclusion from white civil society. David G. Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 157; Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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36. It may seem counterintuitive to look to religious corporations as a location of hierarchical ritual. Sarah Barringer Gordon argues for the proliferation of postRevolutionary corporations as a form of democratization, particularly in the sphere of religion—Gordon, “The First Disestablishment.” There is also a body of literature that reads the proliferation of corporations after the Revolution as a consolidation of pre-Revolutionary pseudo-aristocracy. A study of ritual practices amplifies this argument. P. Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector; Schocket, Founding Corporate Power; Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 238–39. This argument challenges that of Eric Slauter, who argues that the Leviathan of the King’s Body transformed “the State” into a work of art constructed by “the People” after the Revolution. But the difference in our methods is notable here: Slauter looks at how people spoke, wrote poetry, and drew about this idea. I ask: did associational rituals look radically different after the Revolution? The answer is no. Slauter, The State as a Work of Art. 37. Even in the face of riots and revivals in the early republic, sovereign ritual continued to represent an absent authority and sacred hierarchy in the early United States. In some instances, the absent “head” of the king’s body was very clearly the state, which after the Revolution replaced the king in authorizing corporations; in other cases seemingly anti-monarchist Americans dressed up as kings and knights to participate in voluntary associations such as the Freemasons. This focus on the persistence of kingly authority differs, however, from what Eric Santner describes as the royal remains of the “the king’s two bodies,” which he describes as a kind of vitality that flows through the nerves of modern democratic governance as a haunted absence. I depart from this idea of the royal remains by describing a highly embodied corporality, more akin to what Joseph Roach describes as surrogation, when dead kings inhabited the bodies of living actors. Neither Santner nor Roach, however, see the connection as institutional. This is the distinction between my work and theirs: the corporation is a continuous structure bridging this historical distance. Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 38. Highlighting the role of ritual in religion’s special relationship to American democracy builds on a long tradition of scholarship. From Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Bellah to Catherine Albanese, scholars of American democracy have noted ritual’s centrality to American democracy. These thinkers pointed to religious habits and symbols embedded in democratic life, and in the case of Bellah in particular, the creation of a religiously inflected democratic life through public ceremonies. Social historians of the early republic have also paid particular attention to the wealth of public rituals, such as parades, riots, and orations, that constituted emerging national, regional, and class identities. David Waldstreicher’s study of American nationalism’s emergence through festive rituals paved the way for imagining how ritual constitutes ideology rather than reflecting already consolidated ideological forms such as nationalism. I build on Waldstreicher’s insight that northeastern Americans ritualized their political

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and social identities before they even quite knew what they were. I also build on the tradition of scholarship that argues that religious bodies in particular shaped American habits of democracy. My study differs from these previous studies in two key ways: unlike Waldstreicher and Bellah, I describe a range of rituals that were not public, from secret initiations to corporate board meetings. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 294–301; Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 117, no. 3 (1988): 104; Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1976); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 8,10, 14. 39. Kathryn Lofton, “Piety, Practice, Ritual,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America, ed. Philip Goff (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 245–49. 40. Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24. 41. Lofton, “Piety, Practice, Ritual,” 245–49; Maffly-Kipp, Schmidt, and Valeri, Practicing Protestants. 42. See note 38 above. 43. I am indebted to Tambiah’s defense of ritual as a synchronic force in social life that persists through social change. Unlike Tambiah, however, I see the coexistence of the old and the new in social life as a sort of layering as opposed to an opportunity for synthesis. Stanley Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 517; Stanley Tambiah, “At the Confluences of Anthropology, History, and Indology,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 21, no. 1 (1987): 194. 44. Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in EighteenthCentury Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 21. 45. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 65. 46. Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 103–4. 47. Webb Keane goes further than tracing the genealogy of sincerity’s opposition to ritual, describing the actual practices of Protestants who privileged sincerity and the consolidation of their language ideology in relationship to “heathen” converts. Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 187. 48. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 28. 49. Eric Bentley’s classic formulation is “A impersonates B while C looks on.” Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 129. 50. Barbara Franco, Bespangled Painted & Embroidered: Decorated Masonic Aprons in America 1790–1850 (Lexington, MA: Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, 1980), 7.

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51. Aimee E. Newell, The Badge of a Freemason: Masonic Aprons from the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library (Lexington, MA: Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, 2015), 18. 52. Newell, 64. 53. John D. Hamilton, Material Culture of the American Freemasons (Lexington, MA: Museum of Our National Heritage, 1994), 35. 54. Henrik Bogdan, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 51. 55. Master Mason Apron, Unidentified Maker, Possibly Connecticut (1800–1820), Ink on Silk 19 x 17½ inches, Museum purchase, 2014.033.11, Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library; Master Mason Apron, Unidentified Maker, Probably New York (1800–1825), Silk on Silk, 16 1/8 x 16 ¾, Museum purchase, 87.36, Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library; Royal Arch Apron, Unidentified Maker, New York or Pennsylvania (1800– 1820), Watercolor on silk, cotton, 18 ¼ x 15 inches, Special Acquisitions Fund, 84.15, Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library. 56. Newell, Badge of a Freemason, 29. 57. Newell, 47. 58. Jabez Richardson, Richardson’s Monitor of Free-Masonry (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1860). 59. Laurie L. Patton, “The Enjoyment of Cows: Self-Consciousness and Ritual Action in the Early Indian Grhya Sutras,” History of Religions 51, no. 4 (May 2012): 364–81; Stephen Nachmanovitch, “This Is Play,” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 1–24. 60. Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences, 74. 61. Terry Eagleton, “Brecht and Rhetoric,” New Literary History 16, no. 3 (1985): 633. 62. Eagleton, 636. 63. Nachmanovitch, “This Is Play,” 12. 64. Eagleton, “Brecht and Rhetoric,” 636. 65. Nachmanovitch acknowledges this aspect of meta-reflexivity as a consequence of Erving Goffman’s discussion of social role-playing as well as in the potential confusion of Bateson’s discussion of the double bind. Nachmanovitch, “This is Play,” 3, 9. 66. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 65. 67. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 36. 68. Bell identifies this sense of synthesis or resolution in Geertz, Turner, and Tambiah. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 20. 69. Keane, Christian Moderns, 41.

CHAPTER ONE

1. This chapter will focus in particular on New York City’s lodges, which had an exceptionally high proportion of wealthy and influential members. “Powerful” in the context of the early republic, however, is a highly freighted term. Post-Revolutionary masons cared very much about differentiating themselves from the European aristocracy and

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the colonial elite, but early republican lodges continued to provide economic and political opportunity to men who already had material power, while using the small proportion of members who were upwardly mobile as evidence that they were not like the aristocrats of the eighteenth century. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 154, 210, 236. 2. Holland Lodge Freemasons, No. 8 (New York, NY), The Bye-Laws of Holland Lodge, No. 8, in the City of New-York (New York: s.n., 1813), New York Historical Society; American Bible Society, “Abstract of the 18th Annual Report. New Auxiliaries. Receipts. Bibles and Testaments Issued. New Bible. Re-Supply. Supply of Sabbath Schools. Agents of the Society. Female Bible Societies. Young Men’s Bible Societies. Supply of the World within a Definite Period. Books Received and Ordered. Foreign Distributions. Grants of Money to Distribute the Scriptures in Foreign Countries,” (May 10, 1834); New York Evangelist 5, 74. 3. For the most robust account of the diverse forms of masonry in the United States, see David G. Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). White masons did not accept Prince Hall Masons as Freemasons. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 159. 4. Three Essays on the Modern Practice of Consecrations, and Ancient and Modern Idolatry with Strictures on an Oration Lately Pronounced and Published, entitled “Masonic and Social Address, &c.,” (Portsmouth [NH]: Printed by Peirce & Gardner, 1807), 21. 5. Modern Practice of Consecrations, 5. 6. Modern Practice of Consecrations, 12. 7. Modern Practice of Consecrations. 8. Modern Practice of Consecrations, 6. 9. Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8. 10. John Corrigan, Amanda Porterfield, and Darren E. Grem, The Business Turn in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–19. 11. Stern, The Company-State, 8. 12. Phil Withington, “Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): 1027. 13. Peter Dobkin Hall, “Historical Perspectives on Nonprofit Organizations,” in The JosseyBass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management, ed. Robert D. Herman (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 5. 14. Hall, 7. 15. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590–1710 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 16. This account, however, coexisted with other circulating narratives of their ancient lineage, which many masons believed to be unbroken since the ancient Egyptians. Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts & Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 11–13. 16. Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry, 117. For more thorough analysis of the catechisms’ development at this juncture, see Douglas Knoop, G. P. Jones, and Douglas Hamer, The Early Masonic Catechisms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1943).

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17. For the most extensive treatment of European Freemasonry, see Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 18. This vision of Freemasonry was inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s historical insights about the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. Jacob, however, has a different understanding of causation, arguing that civil society created a sense of private sociability, as opposed to Habermas’s notion of the domestic sphere as the source of a private sensibility. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 21. 19. Andrew M. Schocket, Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 7. 20. Pannill Camp, “The Stage Art of Brotherhood: Sentimental Dramaturgy and MidCentury Franc-Maçonnerie,” Philological Quarterly 93 (Winter 2014): 188. 21. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 240. 22. Bullock, 178. 23. This is how Amanda Porterfield has situated Freemasonry in American religious history, arguing that while the Revolutionary period was marked by an embrace of deism and rational doubt, the post-Revolutionary years gave way to a popular evangelicalism that stamped out allowance for Enlightenment deism as well as practices like Freemasonry. Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 28. 24. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 132, 152. 25. Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree, 66. 26. The most extensive treatments of Anti-Masonry as a political movement are William Preston Vaughn, The Anti-Masonic Party in the United States, 1826–1843 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983); Ronald P. Formisano and Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest 1826–1827,” American Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1977): 139–65. Goodman argues that Anti-Masonry was a religious movement and gained its support through an evangelical coalition. Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 27. Herbert T. Leyland, Thomas Smith Webb: Freemason, Musician, Entrepreneur (Dayton, OH: The Otterbein Press, 1965), 74 28. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 243. 29. The split in the American colonies also represented a dispute between the Moderns as colonial elites and the Ancients as a middling and artisanal class who wanted to participate in Freemasonry as a performance of class distinction. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 86. 30. Bullock, 90. 31. Bullock, 244–45. 32. Bullock, 245. 33. Scholars of early twentieth-century masonry have argued that in its later flowering the brotherhood became self-consciously theatrical. In 1996 the University of Minnesota put on an exhibition called “Theatre of Fraternity: Staging Ritual Space,” in which its curators argued that masonry at the turn of the twentieth century became self-

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consciously theatrical through the use of stage lights, moving sets, sound machines, and other technologies of popular theater. The catalog, with contributions from Mark C. Carnes, Kenneth L. Ames, and William D. Moore, argues that the popularity of the fraternal order grew with these developments. C. Lance Brockman et al., eds., Theatre of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1896–1929 (Minneapolis: Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996). 34. Maurice Bloch summarizes this thread of anthropology. Against Robertson-Smith, who understood the ritual to solidify the clan that already existed, “intellectualists” and “symbolists” understand ritual to make propositions and solve societal problems. Bloch, however—in contrast to these theories—is interested in the ways in which ritual is useful to a society that changes over time, and how it remains durable and yet accommodating of new relationships of domination and submission. Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4–6. 35. This theatricality is part of the creative force of ritual that Turner describes in the regeneration of communitas, but Bloch also describes a space for costume and roleplaying when he argues that “Political dominators put on a mantle that has been worn by different types of dominators before them, they do not make this mantle anew.” This quality is key to the shifting role of authority over time, as new people play new roles in the ritual. Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982); Bloch, From Blessing to Violence, 191, 160. 36. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). 37. Whereas Keane posits that these homologies are overdetermined in the West and its empire because of the powerful role of Protestant epistemology in creating the sensibilities of modernity, Catherine Bell argues that these kinds of homologies are overdetermined because they are in fact an invention of scholars. Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 38. Keane, Christian Moderns, 41. 39. As studies of carnival or rites of passage demonstrate, an inversion of key dichotomies can reinforce rather than disintegrate social structures. John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, “History, Structure, and Ritual,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 136. 40. Leyland, Thomas Smith Webb, 74. 41. Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or, The Illustrations of Masonry in Two Parts (Salem, MA: Cushing and Appleton, 1821), 17. 42. Masonic theology shared with evangelical theology what Mark Noll calls a “methodological commonsense,” or a theory of learning. Both traditions took from Locke the idea that truth was gained through the “irreducible facts of experience.” But they differed on what Noll calls “epistemological commonsense,” or the question of whether

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human sense revealed the world as it was with or without the mediation of ideas. Unlike evangelical theology, which borrowed from Thomas Reid, masonic theology relied on the psychology of David Hartley. Freemasons’ interest in commonsense epistemology came through a different lineage of the Enlightenment than that of evangelical theologians, but they generally shared the idea that physical senses were gateways to moral reasoning. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 234. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 140; Hackett, Religion on Which All Men Agree, 151–63; Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 43. De Witt Clinton, An Address Delivered before Holland Lodge, December 24, 1793 (New York, 1794), 3. 44. Clinton. 45. Tracing boards, images that helped masons learn the sequence and meaning of each symbol in its proper place, are material evidence of this aspect of masonic training. John D. Hamilton, Material Culture of the American Freemasons (Lexington, MA: Museum of Our National Heritage, 1994), 39. 46. Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry, 105; Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 52. 47. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 158–59. 48. The historian David Hackett has argued that this quality of masonic rites cultivated a disciplined inner self that could provide a strong inner sanctum against the forces of market capitalism and social dislocation. Hackett, Religion on Which All Men Agree, 5, 100. Margaret Jacob argues that in refining their own habits through the activities of the lodges, masons made civil society into a harmonious space, transforming the public through intensely private sociability. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 21. Despite their different descriptions of the flow of influence (the public flowing into the private and being buffered, the private flowing into the public and creating a sense of fraternal bonds beyond local interests), both historians imagine these rites creating bodies capable of being private and public simultaneously and thus capable of a unique kind of self-governance. Masonry is thus uniquely capable of synthesizing the dialectic of public and private in both of their analyses. 49. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, 20. 50. Webb, 83. 51. Webb, 20. 52. Webb, 214. 53. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 79. 54. The myth of Hiram re-narrates the biblical story of Solomon by describing the murder of Solomon’s architect, Hiram Abiff. One day Hiram was accosted by three junior masons who wanted to steal his technical secrets. Jubela, Jubelum, and Jubelo killed Hiram and hid his body (these men are called “the ruffians”). The next day, King Solomon sent out a search party to look for Hiram and the ruffians. After capturing the ruffians, they located the Master Builder’s body and “raised him” up from the grave, and a temple was built in his honor. William D. Moore, Masonic Temples: Freemasonry, Rit-

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ual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 9. 55. Henrik Bogdan, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation, SUNY Series in Western Esoteric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 96. 56. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, 265–67. 57. I nod here to ethical traditions such as the virtue ethics of Aristotle which have also shaped Foucault’s historical treatment of Western rituals. Mahmood argues that this kind of virtue ethics is useful for understanding the rituals and comportment of women in Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 58. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, 13. 59. Hamilton, Material Culture of the American Freemasons, 97. 60. Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or, Illustrations of Masonry: In Two Parts (Salem, MA: Cushing and Appleton, 1818), 235. 61. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 78. 62. Elias, 79. 63. This argument is reformulated succinctly in Bushman’s 2014 reflection on class. Richard L. Bushman, “The Genteel Republic,” The Wilson Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2014). 64. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf/Random House, 1992), xiv. 65. Jeremy Ladd Cross, The True Masonic Chart, or Hieroglyphic Monitor; Containing All the Emblems Explained in the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow-Craft, Master Mason, Mark Master, Past Master, Most Excellent Master, Royal Arch, Royal Master, and Select Master: Designed, and Duly Arranged, Agreeably to the Lectures by R. W. Jeremy L. Cross, G. L. to Which Are Added, Illustrations—Charges—Songs—&c. (New Haven, CT: Flagg & Gray, 1819), 63; Amasa Trowbridge, “A Masonic Oration, Delivered at Lanesborough, on the 24th June, A. L. 5807, on the Festival of St. John the Baptist, by Dr. Amasa Trowbridge.” 1807, 4. 66. Cross, True Masonic Chart, 37. 67. Charles Jackson, “An Oration, Delivered before the Right Worshipful Master and Brethren of St. Peter’s Lodge, at the Episcopal Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on the Festival of St. John the Baptist; Celebrated June 25 5798. By the Worshipful Brother Charles Jackson, P. M.” (1798), 15. 68. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 21–22. 69. William Gibbes Hunt, A Masonic Eulogy on the Character and Services of the Late Thomas Smith Webb . . . . Delivered before the Lexington Royal Arch Chapter and the Grand Lodge of Kentucky, September 1st, 1819 (Lexington, KY: [publisher not identified]), 9. 70. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 108. Masons, as John L. Brooke shows, were even capable of making their particular brand of civil society transcend Federalist/Democrat identifications. Despite Federalist and Republican use of voluntary societies for partisan agendas, Freemasonry was able to provide an ideal of “civil society” as above partisan strife because it was always protected from attacks of narrow interests by its claims to ancient history. When George Washington attacked republican societies as the

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claims of a few dominating the whole public arena, his membership in the Freemasons went unquestioned because Freemasons’ association was understood as originating in the interests of a tradition that long predated the interests of the men who currently belonged to the society. John L. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 323. 71. Abraham Beach, “Discourse, 1786, 1789,” (1786), New York Historical Society. 72. James Tillary, An Address, Delivered in the Assembly-Room of New-York, on the Festival of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1788. In the Presence of the Officers and Brethren of St. Andrew’s and Holland Lodges, and a Number of Visiting Brethren of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Free Masons (New-York: Printed by Francis Childs, n.d.), 18, New York Historical Society. 73. This summary mirrors Neem and Brooke’s definition of early republican civil society. See Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); John L. Brooke, “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the CompositeFederal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,” Journal of the Early Republic 29, vol. 1 (2009): 1–33. 74. Grand Lodge of the State of New York, The Constitutions of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons in the State of New-York/ Collected and Digested by Order of the Grand Lodge (New-York: Brother D. Longworth, At the Shakspeare Gallery, Anno Lucis 1801 [5801]), 61, New York Historical Society. 75. James Hardie, The New Free-Mason’s Monitor; or, Masonic Guide for the Direction of Members of that Ancient and Honourable Fraternity, as Well as for the Information of Those, Who May Be Desirous of Becoming Acquainted with Its Principles (New-York: George Long, 1818), 144. 76. Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 118. 77. Gilje, 125. The participants in mobs were also tinged with foreignness. Despite the lack of records before 1812, historians approximate that the population of about 1,000 (mostly Irish) Catholics in 1790 dramatically surged to approximately 25,000 by 1829 (Gilje, 126). This made them about one-eighth of the total city’s population. John Webb Pratt, Religion, Politics, and Diversity: The Church-State Theme in New York History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 122. 78. Gilje, Mobocracy, 235. 79. Hackett, Religion on Which All Men Agree, 85. 80. Gentleman belonging to the Jerusalem Lodge, Jachin and Boaz; or, An Authentic Key to the Door of Free-Masonry, Both Ancient and Modern Calculated Not Only for the Instruction of Every New Made Mason (New York: John Tiebout, 1808), 28. 81. Elder David Bernard, Light on Masonry: A Collection of All the Most Important Documents on the Subject of Speculative Free Masonry: Embracing the Reports of the Western Committees in Relation to the Abduction of William Morgan . . . with All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master’s Lodge . . . (Utica, NY: William Williams, 1829), 90.

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82. Gentleman belonging to the Jerusalem Lodge, Jachin and Boaz, 30. 83. Kenneth Loiselle, Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 53–60. 84. Avery Allyn, A Ritual of Freemasonry . . . to Which Is Added a Key to the Phi Beta Kappa, the Orange, and Odd Fellows Societies, Etc. (Philadelphia: John Clarke, 1831), 66. 85. Allyn, 46. 86. Allyn, 69. 87. Allyn, 67. 88. Manuscript copy of a memorial to Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, 1818 December 28; Papers relative to 1814–1820 endeavor to engage Masonry in Bible-cause. Collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, Lexington, Massachusetts. MA 260.007. 89. The historians Stephen Bullock and David Hackett describe the increase in “ritualistic behavior” and a “private world of ritual” as key distinctions of post-Revolutionary masonry. Both inside and outside the fraternity, historians turn to scholars like Victor Turner to understand why masons perform rites of passage. In the 1967 Preston lectures, a lecture series that commemorates the regularization of ritual in the late eighteenth century, the masonic historian Henry Carr traced the notion of ritual from barbaric gatherings to civilized masonic initiations. By “masonic historian” I mean a fraternal member who performs antiquarian work on the organization’s own past. This is a substantial category within masonry because studying masonic history is considered a core activity of “the liberal arts,” which is a masonic duty. Until the opening of masonic archives in the 1990s, these were also the only historians writing substantive studies of nineteenth-century American masonic history. Their work is published in the internal periodical the AQ and is immensely useful, but does not always use academic conventions such as the citation of sources. Harry Carr, Freemasons, and No. 2076 (London Quatuor Coronati Lodge England), The Collected “Prestonian Lectures” (London: Quatuor Coronati Lodge, no. 2076, 1965). 90. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, “Assembling Bodies and Souls: Missionary Practices on the Pacific Frontier,” in Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Mark R. Valeri, Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 58. 91. Manuscript copy of a memorial to Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, 1818 December 28; Papers relative to 1814–1820 endeavor to engage Masonry in Bible-cause. Collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, Lexington, Massachusetts. MA 260.007 92. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, 260–61. 93. A mason’s role in the action was determined by his rank. In the initiation of the Elected Knights, for example, the Master Mason played the role of Solomon, while Fellow and Entered Apprentices played the roles of Warden of the West, the traitors, and the workmen who hunted the traitors. Webb, Monitor, 235–36. 94. Leyland, Thomas Smith Webb, 114. 95. It is difficult to prove a negative, but in light of the abundance of ritual manuscripts in which masons kept personal notes on the degrees that remain from before and after this period, it seems likely that masons actually memorized their lines and blocking more successfully during Webb’s era.

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96. Aimee E. Newell, The Badge of a Freemason: Masonic Aprons from the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library (Lexington, MA: Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, 2015), 18. 97. Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor, 36. 98. Newell, The Badge of a Freemason, 168. 99. Gary A. Richardson, “Plays and Playwrights: 1800–1865,” in The Cambridge History of American Theater, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1870, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and C.  W.  E. Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 260, 258; Bruce McConachie, “American Theatre in Context, from the Beginnings to 1870,” in The Cambridge History of American Theater, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1870, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and C. W. E. Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 132, 139. The clear schematics of this moral universe would often be amplified by the use of “tableaux” where the actors would freeze in their action, allowing the obvious dynamics to become even more obvious to an audience and, as Richardson argues, “suggesting simultaneously both the flux of events and the timeless moral truths against which that action was taking place.” Richardson, “Plays and Playwrights: 1800–1865,” 262. 100. William Morgan, Illustrations of Masonry (New York: Printed for the author, 1827), 58. 101. Morgan. 102. Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820– 1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 41. 103. M, “THEATRICAL REVIEW: Jan. 16. Laugh When You Can, and Lock and Key,” NewEngland Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, January 23, 1818; “THEATRICAL REVIEW: March 2. Douglas and The Forty Thieves,” New-England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, March 6, 1818; “THEATRICAL REVIEW: Jan. 28, Every One Has His Fault and The Padlock DALZEL’S COLLECTANEA,” New-England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, January 30, 1818. 104. Freemasons, United States, Royal and Select Masters, General Grand Council, Eugene E. Hinman, Ray Vaughn Denslow, and Charles C. Hunt, A History of the Cryptic Rite; Preparation Authorized by the General Grand Council, R. & S. M. of the United States, 1918 (Cedar Rapids, IA, 1931), 1253. 105. Ann Pellegrini, “‘Signaling through the Flames’: Hell House Performance and Structures of Religious Feeling,” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 911–35. 106. Following other historians of Freemasonry, I use the exposés as accurate depictions of early masonic rites. Bullock has argued that masons used these exposés as cheat sheets. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 245. 107. Allyn, A Ritual of Freemasonry, 73–74. 108. Allyn, vii. 109. Allyn, xiii. 110. Allyn, xvii. 111. Z. A. Davis, The Freemason’s Monitor; Containing a Delineation of the Fundamental Principles of Freemasonry, Operatives and Speculative, as Well in a Religious as a Moral View (Philadelphia: Desilver & Muir, 1843), 133. 112. Davis. 113. Allyn, A Ritual of Freemasonry, 73–74.

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114. Cross, A History of the Cryptic Rite, 1252. 115. Hardie, New Free-Mason’s Monitor, 144. 116. Garret Bleecker and John Pintard, for example, were both Freemasons and ABS leaders. Holland Lodge Freemasons, No. 8 (New York, NY), The Bye-Laws of Holland Lodge, No. 8.

CHAPTER TWO

1. John Pintard, Letters from John Pintard to His Daughter, Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, 1816–1833. . . . (New York, 1940), 2. 2. Pintard, 21–22, 4. 3. Pintard, 22. 4. Bell’s notion of distinction via ritualization obscures the proliferating practices of Protestant life that do not neatly sort into categories of banality and specialness—or in Catherine Bell’s terms, the activities that undergo ritualization and those that do not. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The anthropologist Saba Mahmood also makes this critique of ritual theory when she describes the importance of “conventional behavior” in Muslim women’s religious lives. Mahmood, in a move similar to that adopted by American religious historians who have embraced Pierre Hadot’s notion of spiritual discipline, argues that the category of ritual can obscure the way that some religious people attempt to make every aspect of their lives spiritually rigorous. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revolution and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 126–28; Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Mark R. Valeri, Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 2. 5. Tocqueville proposed that American civil society was anchored by religious voluntary societies. However, what was as much prescription as description for Tocqueville has been amply described by historians of the early republic. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 445; Michael Warner, “The Evangelical Public Sphere,” paper presented at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, March 23, 25, and 26, 2009; Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Peter Dobkin Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 35; Johann N. Neem, “Of, By, and Instead of Politics—Civil Society and American Nationalism, 1776–1865,” in Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present, ed. Elisabeth Stephanie Clemens and Doug Guthrie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 6. Daniel Vaca has noted the “business” model employed by the Bible Society in particular. Daniel Vaca, “Believing within Business: Evangelicalism, Media, and Financial Faith,” in The Business Turn in American Religious History (New York: Oxford Uni-

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versity Press, 2017), 24, 7, 72–74. These evangelical printing concerns fundamentally shaped the structure of for-profit printing (or mass media) while remaining “charity” organizations, but this simple dichotomy between profit and nonprofit organizations ignores the similar structure of for-profit and charity organizations in the early republic. Both were corporations entrusted with the welfare of the social good, and the ABS is a prime example of the “churchstate” bodies that Paul C. Johnson, Winnifred Sullivan, and Pamela Klassen describe as characteristic of American secularism. Winnifred Sullivan, Paul C. Johnson, and Pamela Klassen, Ekklesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 4. 7. I follow Edward Muir’s delineation of “Protestant ritual” as both the self-conscious negotiation of ritual in a post-Reformation world and the production of quotidian practices that made white Protestant culture distinctive. Further, I think we can describe these different modes through affective stylistics. Daniel Walker Howe has noted, in his attempt to see evangelicals’ revival and reforming activities as part of the same narrative, that there was something both “hard” and “soft” about antebellum evangelical activities. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 157; Daniel Walker Howe, “Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North,” in Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 126. 8. Several historians have pointed out that print became a central practice of evangelicalism in the antebellum era. See Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9. John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 60. 10. Sonia Hazard, “The Touch of the Word: Evangelical Cultures of Print in Antebellum America,” PhD diss., Duke University, 2017. 11. Nathan Hatch sees evangelicalism and populism as natural allies contributing to the egalitarianism of the Jacksonian period, and Sam Haselby describes the Federalist evangelical role in American democracy as religious nationalism. See Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 12. Despite a rejection of many British governance structures, Americans (particularly in the Northeast) preserved the legal capacities and functions of corporations in the British model. Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1993): 51–84. 13. Amanda Porterfield, Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 58, 76. 14. Eric M. North, “ABS Historical Essay #19: The Board of Managers at Work, Part 1, 1816 to June 1820,” 1963, 11, 37, 39, American Bible Society Archives.

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15. Eric M. North, “ABS Historical Essay #19, Extra Section: The Board at Work, Part II. The ABS By-Laws, 1821–1860,” 1964, 1–2, 27, American Bible Society Archives. 16. North, 39. 17. North, 19. 18. North, 21. 19. North, 27, 34. 20. North, 34. 21. North, 34. 22. North, “The Board at Work, Part II,” 17. 23. North, “The Board of Managers at Work, Part 1,” 310. 24. North, 27. 25. North, 29. 26. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996), 146. 27. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 27. 28. Barbara Hodgdon, “Materials Remains at Play,” Theatre Journal 64, no. 3 (October 2012): 374. 29. “New-York Historical Society Management Committee Records, 1804–1938,” NewYork Historical Society Management Committee Records, NYH-RG 1, Box 1, Folder 1, New York Historical Society. 30. North, “The Board at Work, Part II,” 34–35. 31. American Bible Society, Annual Report of the American Bible Society, vol. 1–22 (New York: Reprinted for the Society by Daniel Fanshaw, 1816), 43–44. 32. American Bible Society. 33. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 120. 34. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 16. 35. Todd Hedrick, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 80. 36. John L. Brookes, “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the CompositeFederal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,” Journal of the Early Republic 29, no. 1 (2009): 1–33. 37. Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 72. 38. See Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 39. The changes in civil society’s relationship to the poor demonstrate these continuities and changes. Religious organizations fed and clothed the poor, orphans, and widows in New York during the early republic, but around 1810 a new kind of religious organization sprang up in the city that was less directed at this localized form of welfare and instead participated in a transatlantic mission of tract distribution. The New-York Religious Tract Society was the first of this new form of organization, and it was primarily aimed at supplying the growing frontier of upstate New York, as well as the various

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missions of the Caribbean and the world, with printed material. The urban poor were not forgotten when societies were consolidated under the umbrella of the American Tract Society in 1825, headquartered in New York, but the nature of the work shifted from a local form of charity to a national project of distribution. This post-1820s version of benevolence combined social reform with welfare distribution, making the conversion of the poor and sinning a prerequisite of relief. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812– 1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 9; New-York Religious Tract Society, “The Third Annual Report of the New-York Religious Tract Society” (New-York, 1815), 5–6; “Extracts from the Fourth Annual Report of the New-York Religious Tract Society,” The Christian Herald 1 (April 1816): 42; Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City, 76. For the history of benevolence as both charity and reform, see Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City, 59, 68. 40. A Member, An Exposé of the Rise and Proceedings of the American Bible Society, during the Thirteen Years of Its Existence (New-York, 1830), 21. 41. A Member, Exposé, 25. 42. A Member. 43. Elias Boudinot, An Answer to the Objections of the Managers of the Philadelphia BibleSociety against a Meeting of Delegates from the Bible Societies in the Union to Agree on Some Plan to Disseminate the Bible in Parts without the United States (Burlington, NJ: David Allinson, 1815), 16. 44. John Fea, The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 21. 45. American Bible Society, First Annual Report, 10–11. 46. Amanda B. Moniz, From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 25. 47. Citizen of the state of New-York, “A Memoir on the Subject of a General Bible Society for the United States of America” (New-Jersey, 1816), 12. 48. Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 70–71, 158–59. 49. Pintard, Letters, 21–22; North, “The Board at Work, Part II,” 1. 50. North, “The Board of Managers at Work, Part 1,” 19. 51. Citizen of the state of New-York, “A Memoir,” 13. 52. American Bible Society, First Annual Report, 21. “The American Bible Society: Constitution,” Religious Remembrancer 39 (May 25, 1816): 155. 53. The American Bible Society’s conventions also differed in this sense from its close antecedent, the federal constitutional convention. For an analysis of the federal constitutional convention compared to later women’s conventions, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 17. Daniel Walker Howe argues that benevolence societies were the beginning of this style of convention, but that it was popularized in party politics by

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the Anti-Masons. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought? The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 269. The movement began as a special interest group committed to revealing masons as un-Christian and disproportionately powerful civil leaders, but transformed into the first third party in party politics. Anti-Masons clarified the stakes of transparency by comparing their open electing conventions with masonic opacity, creating a new standard for republican procedure in party politics. Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 278–81; Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 29, 281; Henry Dana Ward, The Anti-Masonic Review and Magazine 1, no. 1 (1828): 5; United States Anti-Masonic Convention, The Proceedings of the United States Anti-Masonic Convention, Held at Philadelphia, September 11, 1830, Embracing the Journal of Proceedings, the Reports, the Debates, and the Address to the People (Philadelphia: 1830), 4. 54. “Anniversary Week: Monday, May 5, Tuesday, May 6, Wednesday, May 7, Thursday, May 8,” New York Evangelist 5 (May 3, 1834): 70. 55. New-York City Tract Society, Third Annual Report of the New-York City Tract Society Auxiliary to the American Tract Society; with the Eighth Annual Report of the Female Branch of the New-York City Tract Society (1830), lxiv. 56. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29. For other descriptions of the Free Church movement see Kyle B. Roberts, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996). 57. Kilde, When Church Became Theatre, 36. 58. “Preaching in the Open Air,” New York Evangelist 1 (August 14, 1830): 80; “Religious Feeling,” New York Evangelist 1 (November, 1830): 1. 59. “Religious Feeling,” 1. 60. “New-York Sunday School Union and Southern Sunday School Union,” New York Evangelist 5 (May 10, 1834): 75. 61. Andrew Reed, A Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches: By the Deputation from the Congregational Union of England and Wales (London: Jackson and Walford, 1835), 52. 62. Reed, 42. 63. Reed, 51. 64. Reed, 53. 65. Reed. 66. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 237–78. 67. Roberts, Evangelical Gotham, 20; Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney, 39. 68. David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York, Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 69. “Anniversaries of Benevolent Societies,” The Missionary Herald, Containing the Pro-

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ceedings of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions 26, no. 6 (June, 1830): 191. 70. Citizen of the state of New York, “A Memoir,” 14. 71. Citizen of the state of New York. 72. Reed, Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches, 50. 73. Reed. 74. Reed, 41. 75. Lyceums, in comparison, aimed at edification. See Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005). 76. North, “The Board of Managers at Work, Part 1,” 19. 77. “American Bible Society: The Anniversary,” New York Evangelist 7 (May 14, 1836): 79; “Reports of Presbyteries: Sunday-School Sermon. Anniversary Services. Meeting of Delegates. Annual Report. Missionaries. Agents. Co-Operation of Church and Pastors.” New York Evangelist 1 (May 29, 1830): 35. 78. “American Bible Society: Contributions to the American Bible Society. Donation to the American Bible Society. The Marine Bible Society of New-York,” Christian Herald 5 (May 16, 1818); “American Bible Society,” Christian Register 22 (December 2, 1843): 6. 79. “Anniversary Week: Monday, May 5, Tuesday, May 6, Wednesday, May 7, Thursday, May 8,” New York Evangelist 5 (May 3, 1834): 70. 80. Eric M. North, “ABS Historical Essay #19: The Board of Managers at Work, Part 1, 1816 to June 1820,” 1963, 42. 81. Gardiner Spring, The Danger and Hope of the American People: A Discourse on the Day of the Annual Thanksgiving, in the State of New-York (New York: John F. Trow, 1843), 1–2. 82. Foster, An Errand of Mercy, 121. 83. Ed. Evan, “Meeting for Christian Union in New-York: Remark,” New York Evangelist 8 (January 7, 1837): 1. 84. “Letter 1—No Title,” New York Evangelist 1 (May 29, 1830). 85. “American Tract Society,” Zion’s Herald 3 (May 25, 1825): 1. 86. “American Tract Society.” 87. “The First Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the American Bible Society, Presented May 8, 1817,” The Evangelical Guardian and Review 1 (July 1, 1817): 137. 88. Reed, Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches, 41. 89. Reed. 90. “American Bible Society: The Anniversary,” New York Evangelist 7 (May 14, 1836). 91. “American Tract Society. Interesting and Exciting Debate,” New York Times, May 13, 1858. 92. “N. England Anti-Slavery Convention,” New York Evangelist 6 (June 6, 1835): 92; “‘The American Union.’ Is Slavery a Sin? Immediate Emancipation. Good Wishes to Other Societies.” New York Evangelist 6 (January 25, 1835): 15. 93. Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 90; “Refuge of Oppression: New York Anniversaries,” Liberator 16 (May 24, 1839): 88.

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94. Caleb W. McDaniel, “The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and Radical Interracial Reform,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 129. 95. No count of votes was republished in journals such as The New York Evangelist or The Liberator. “American Anti-Slavery Society,” New York Observer and Chronicle 20 (May 14, 1842); “American Anti-Slavery Society,” New York Evangelist 6 (May 16, 1835) 96. “Refuge of Oppression,” 88. 97. “REFUGE OF OPPRESSION. Great Anniversary Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society—Practical Amalgamation—Speeches of Garrison and Others. Annual Meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator 11 (May 21, 1841): 1. 98. “REFUGE OF OPPRESSION.” 99. H. F., “The Anniversaries,” Liberator 18 (May 26, 1848): 82. 100. Walters, American Reformers, 109. 101. This assumption of normalcy is typical of a public. Michael Warner argues that they misrecognize “the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy.” Warner, however, underestimates the centrality of bodily performance for a normative public, a quality that he assigns to counterpublics. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2002), 122, 123. 102. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, 15. 103. Derek Spires, “Imagining a State of Fellow Citizens: Early African American Politics of Publicity in the Black State Conventions,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Jordan Alexander Stein and Lara Langer Cohen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 282; Erica Ball, “Performing Politics, Creating Community: Antebellum Black Conventions as Political Rituals,” in The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, ed. P. Gabriel Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 156–59. 104. Spires, “Imagining a State of Fellow Citizens,” 282. 105. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 3 (2015): 385–422. 106. Nancy Isenberg and David Waldstreicher similarly argue that women’s presence at antebellum political events authorized male civility. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 19; David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 84. 107. “Our Religious Anniversaries: New-York Bible Society. American Seamen’s Friend Society. Convention of the Friends of the Abolition of the Punishment of Death. Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. American Anti-Slavery Society. Sunday School Union. Foreign Evangelical Society. Exhibition for the Blind. Colonization Society. The Home Missionary Society. American Anti-Slavery Society. American Peace Society,” The New World; a Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art and News 8 (May 18, 1844): 628. 108. “Our Religious Anniversaries.” 109. For a synthesis of this literature, see Anne M. Boylan, “Women and Politics in the Era before Seneca Falls,” Journal of the Early Republic 10, no. 3 (1990): 363–82. For an account of the labor of fundraising and administration of benevolence, see Lori D.

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Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 110. Ginzberg also anticipates this argument in her analysis of the intersection between class, religion, and gender in the meaning of morality and respectability in the antebellum period. The presence of middle-class women in benevolence societies made benevolence moral through a conflation of femininity and class-based standards of conduct. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 15. 111. “Our Religious Anniversaries,” 628. 112. “American Bible Society: Contributions to the American Bible Society. Donation to the American Bible Society. The Marine Bible Society of New-York,” Christian Herald 5 (May 16, 1818): 123. 113. “American Bible Society.”

CHAPTER THREE

1. The state’s interest-free loans to the ASFS were one mechanism through which the society acted as a surrogate of the state. Records of the American Seamen’s Friend Society, “Box 1 Folder 1, Correspondence and Reports, 1838–1845,” G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport. 2. Several scholars have pointed to the close relationship between religious voluntary association in the early republic and the legal category of incorporation. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property before the Civil War,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 162 (January 2014): 307–72; William J. Novak, “The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development [Cambridge] 15 (October 2001): 163–88; Peter Dobkin Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 3. “Anniversary Week: Monday, May 5, Tuesday, May 6, Wednesday, May 7, Thursday, May 8,” New York Evangelist 5 (May 3, 1834): 70. 4. See Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, “Assembling Bodies and Souls: Missionary Practices on the Pacific Frontier,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630– 1965, ed. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Mark R. Valeri (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); David Hempton, The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century: The Tauris History of the Christian Church (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 57–104; James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 145–173. 5. For a description of the possibilities and dangers of colonial encounters, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 6. For the ways in which reform blended charity, missions, and reform, see Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-

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versity Press, 2002); Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Lori D. Ginzberg; Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the NineteenthCentury United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Several historians have pointed out that print became a central practice of evangelization in the antebellum era. See Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7. Webb Keane also argues for the interconnections between representation as depiction and delegation. Webb Keane, Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. 8. Scholars like Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have argued that the Second Great Awakening and the new emphasis on free will within evangelical theology made evangelical benevolence societies optimistic about their ability to end poverty. See Carroll SmithRosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812–1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 100. An emerging middle class defined antebellum evangelicalism, but in cities like New York the old elite families remained central figures of civil society, and in particular, of benevolence societies. Thus, to see reformers as synonymous with middle class would miss the crucial role of established elites in the work of societies like the American Bible Society. See Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 10–13. 9. The ASFS shared many members with other leading evangelical societies. The most prominent example of these intra-organizational alliances was Joshua Leavitt, who left his tenure as pastor of the Congregational Church in Stratford in 1828 to become secretary and general agent of the American Seamen’s Friend Society, as well as the editor of The Sailor’s Magazine. Leavitt was a good friend of the wealthy evangelical Lewis Tappan, and worked with him on tract distribution at the New York City Tract Society as well as in the establishment of free-churches within the city. Hugh Davis, Joshua Leavitt, Evangelical Abolitionist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 57. William P. Powell was also a prominent missionary to sailors and an abolitionist. He was on the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society when he became the proprietor of the ASFS-sponsored “Sailor’s Home” on Cherry Street in 1841. “Sailor’s Home,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (July 19, 1841): 45–48; William Lloyd Garrison, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 72. 10. The mission was led by a group of ministers from different denominations, converted captains and merchants, and a minister to sailors. The mission to sailors in the northeastern United States existed before the ASFS and was led by captains initially, beginning with the Marine Bible Society (1817), the Society for Promoting the Gospel among Seamen in the Port of New York (1818), and the New York Marine Missionary Society (1818). But these societies’ membership increasingly shifted toward the merchants. The society also represented the ecumenical nature of the mission to sailors, which was

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demonstrated by the presence of a Presbyterian, an Episcopal, and a Methodist minister at the building’s dedication. The minister hired by the society was encouraged to reflect these ecumenical values despite his own denominational affiliations. Kyle B. Roberts, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 101; Davis, Joshua Leavitt, 50–51; “New-York Bethel Union: General Meeting,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (January 19, 1822): 539; “Second Annual Report of the Society for Promoting the Gospel among Seamen in the Port of New-York: Presented June 4, 1822,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (June 15, 1822): 87. 11. Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City, 100. 12. For a history of the transatlantic mission to sailors, see Roald Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions: Their Origin and Early Growth (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1986). 13. Davis, Joshua Leavitt, 52. 14. “Preface,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (August 1829): iv. 15. “Boarding-Houses,” The Sailor’s Magazine 11 (June 1839): 308. 16. “The Salvation of Seamen Is Difficult,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 11 (March 7, 1824): 153. 17. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 227. 18. Davis, Joshua Leavitt, 49. 19. On the labor practices that kept sailors in poverty, see Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 11–23; on the income gap in early republican New York City, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 6. 20. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 199. 21. Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 11–12; Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 25, no. 3 (July 1968): 372. 22. “The Homeward Bound Ship,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (March 1829): 216. 23. S. W., “The Cabin Boy’s Locker,” The Sailor’s Magazine 14 (September 1841): 2. 24. See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780– 1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 25. Stansell, City of Women, 91. 26. Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (May 19, 1821): 4. 27. “Review: The Conversion of Mariners Will Enlarge the Praises of Zion,” Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (September 15, 1821): 285. 28. “Review,” 284. 29. For the idea that American Protestants imagined their work creating a Christian empire, see Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970); Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Con-

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nie A. Shemo, eds., Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010); Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 30. “Review: Conversion of Mariners,” 285. 31. Gautham Rao, “Administering Entitlement: Governance, Public Health Care, and the Early American State,” Law & Social Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 627. 32. Rao, 628. 33. Brian A. Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 153–54. 34. Rao, “Administering Entitlement,” 628. 35. “Sixth Annual Report of the American Seamen’s Friend Society,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 6 (May 1834): 289. 36. Rao, “Administering Entitlement,” 632. 37. Rao. 38. Like immigrants in the twenty-first century, who simultaneously fulfill crucial labor needs and yet open up networks of illegal bodies and substances that threaten the autonomy of the nation, sailors were a dangerous precondition of a growing economy. On the role of migrant populations in moral panics, see Ato Quayson and Antonela Arhin, Labour Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations: The Commodification of Illicit Flows (New York: Routledge, 2012). 39. For the ways that income and values were conflated in reformers’ assessment of the poor’s condition, see Lori Ginzberg’s general summary of reform and benevolence during the antebellum era. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 34; Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 7. 40. Regardless of their employment, women’s status as dependents (people who could not be citizens because they were the responsibility of white men) was at odds with their independence as women seeking employment outside the household economy. Women who violated their definitional status by trying to provide for themselves and their families thus became suspected prostitutes. Many women in the antebellum city were sex workers, and it is the historian Christine Stansell’s crucial intervention to hold apart the representation of prostitution by reformers from the sex work of working-class women as subjects of historical inquiry. The panic over prostitution denied welfare to a broad swath of working-class women who could not enter institutions like the Asylum for Lying-In Women unless they proved their distance from prostitution. Simultaneously, the panic over prostitution was a denial of the basic fissures in the ideology of dependence and independence—an idealization that did not actually fit the reality of working women’s lives. Stansell, City of Women, 21, 171–72. 41. “New-York Bethel Union—Second Report,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (January 18, 1823): 533 42. Records of the American Seamen’s Friend Society, “Box 1 Folder 1, Correspondence and Reports, 1838–1845,” G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport. 43. “There has always been a difficulty in disposing of the Magazine among seamen,” wrote

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the editor. “The Sailor’s Magazine,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 3 (June 1830): 322; “Duty of Increased Efforts for Seamen,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (September 1828): 9–10. 44. There were far more letters from non-sailor readers than there were from sailors. In a three-month period, out of thirty correspondences published in the magazine, three were from two sailors and a captain. The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 3 (December 1830): 116. 45. Jason Berger, Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 31; Jason Berger, “Antebellum Fantasies of the Common Sailor; or, Enjoying the Knowing Jack Tar,” Criticism 51, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 40. 46. “A Sailor’s Address to His Seafaring Companions—on the Interesting Voyage over the Ocean of Life to the Haven of Eternity,” The Sailor’s Magazine 8 (April 1839): 233; C. S. Stewart, “Stewart’s Journal,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (February 1829): 165. 47. The use of the word “landsmen” to designate middle-class society members was ironic, as the term had class connotations in Europe of working the land, while in the US navy it corresponded to a rank of sailor who did not sail. Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets,” 374. 48. “Sailor’s Magazine,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (May 1829): 281. 49. “A Sailor’s Address,” 233. 50. “The Seaman’s Magazine: SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING THE GOSPEL AMONG SEAMEN IN THE PORT OF NEW-YORK,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (July 7, 1821): 121; for a description of the relationship between incorporated bodies and civic development, see Andrew M Schocket, Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). 51. Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 150. 52. “Second Annual Report of the Society for Promoting the Gospel among Seamen in the Port of New-York: Presented June 4, 1822,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (June 15, 1822): 87; “New-York Bethel Union,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (January 4, 1823): 511. 53. Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets,” 378. 54. Paul A. Gilje, “On the Waterfront: Maritime Workers in New York City in the Early Republic, 1800–1850,” New York History 77, no. 4 (1996): 418. 55. Gilje, 423. 56. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17. 57. “NEW-YORK BETHEL UNION: General Meeting,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine; New York 8 (January 19, 1822): 539. 58. Gilje, “On the Waterfront,” 411. 59. O. D. Prentice, “The Dead Mariner,” The Sailor’s Magazine 15 (December 1842): 120. 60. “The Claims of Seamen—Written for the Ladies’ Fair, Exeter, N.H.,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 6 (October 1833): 57. 61. Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture

Notes to Pages 86–89

153

of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 482. 62. “The Homeward Bound Ship,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (March 1829): 216. 63. T. J. N., “From the Evangelical Magazine,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (September 1828): 24. 64. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4. 65. Prentice, “The Dead Mariner,” 120. 66. L. H. S., “A Sailor’s Hymn,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 6 (November 1833): 88. 67. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 152–53. 68. Despite a law that was passed in 1917 to preserve a minimum number of spots for American sailors on every American merchant ship, most captains simply lied about their numbers. Morison, Maritime History, 108. 69. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 174. 70. Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets,” 375. 71. Stansell, City of Women, 72; Jennifer Graber, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons & Religion in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 136; Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 19– 20, 26. 72. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25, 54; Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 1 (2008): 95. For an example of how this impulse toward loving mimicry plays out in twentieth-century charity, see Hillary Kaell, Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 67. Kaell shows that Christian charity in the twentieth century also involves instances of mimicry. 73. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak,’” 476. 74. Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 17. 75. Foster, Errand of Mercy, 121; Ryan, Grammar of Good Intentions, 17. 76. Ryan, Grammar of Good Intentions, 19. 77. Rev. G. C. Smith, “The Sailor’s Confidence,” The Sailor’s Magazine 11 (April 1839): 256. 78. A. Z., “Mariner’s Hymn,” Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (Saturday, July 21, 1821): 160; Thayer, “The Watch Tower Light,” 344; L. H. S., “A Sailor’s Hymn,” 88; Miss Pardoe, “The Beacon Light,” The Sailor’s Magazine 14 (November 1841): 24; “Sailor’s Morning Hymn,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 3 (November 1830): 91.

154

Notes to Pages 90–93

79. C. P., “Prayer—Sailor’s Boarding House,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (December 15, 1821): 475. 80. Stansell describes the encounters at home between New York Tract Society members and the poor. Stansell, City of Women, 65. 81. “Report of the Rev. Henry Chase, to the Board of the Society for Promoting the Gospel among Seamen,” Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (August 18, 1821): 217. 82. Henry Chase, “Diaries, 1821–1836,” 1821, entry for November 18, 1821, Mss Collection BV New York City—Marriages Non-circulating, New York Historical Society. 83. Mariner’s Church (New York, NY), “Marriage Records, 1830–1852,” vol. 1, Mss Collection BV New York City—Marriages Non-circulating, New York Historical Society. 84. “New-York Bethel Union, First Report, Presented at the Public Meeting, Dec. 31, 1821,” Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (January 5, 1822): 505; “An Interesting Fact,” The Sailor’s Magazine 14 (September 1841): 162. 85. Mariner’s Church (New York, NY), “Marriage Records, 1830–1852,” vol. 1, Mss Collection BV New York City—Marriages Non-circulating, New York Historical Society. 86. From the beginning of the formation of the ASFS, a space for “public worship” was a key goal of the mission. “Public worship” meant that the sailors were gathered as a congregation and that anyone was free to attend. Before the establishment of the Mariner’s Chapel, the ASFS provided a minister to walk onto to ships in port and preach onboard. “Journal of the Bethel Flag,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 10 (December 20, 1823): 480. 87. “Journal of the Bethel Flag,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (June 15, 1822): 95. 88. “Journal of the Bethel Flag,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (September 7, 1822): 255. 89. “Journal of the Bethel Flag.” 90. “New-York Bethel Union—Second Report,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (January 18, 1823): 533. 91. “Journal of the Bethel Flag,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (June 15, 1822): 95. 92. “Journal of the Bethel Flag,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (July 7, 1821): 128. 93. “Journal of the Bethel Flag.” 94. “A New Temperance Ship,” The Sailor’s Magazine 6 (November 1833): 72–73. 95. “A New Temperance Ship.” 96. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). As Webb Keane points out, anthropology is grounded in the connection between representation, culture, and ritual, starting with Durkheim and Mauss’s notion of representation in ritual as a mimesis of the preexisting social groups. Keane, Signs of Recognition, 10. 97. Turner, The Ritual Process, 94–116. 98. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 96. For a summary of how Turner and Geertz’s definitions of ritual have contrib-

155

Notes to Pages 93–98

uted to and been revised by the field of anthropology, see John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, “History, Structure, and Ritual,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 119–50. 99. Turner, The Ritual Process, 125. 100. “Journal of the Bethel Flag,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (September 1, 1821): 252. 101. “NEW-YORK BETHEL UNION: Origin and Object of the New-York Bethel Union Conclusion,” The Pittsburgh Recorder, Containing Religious Literary and Political Information (March 14, 1822): 113. 102. Margaret S. Creighton, “Fraternity in the American Forecastle, 1830–1870,” The New England Quarterly 63, no. 4 (December 1990): 534. 103. Creighton, “Fraternity in the American Forecastle,” 435–456. 104. For the Seaman’s Magazine, “The Mariners’ Church: A Mariners’ Hymn, C. M.,” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 9 (July 7, 1821): 127. 105. Ward Stafford, The New Missionary Field: A Report to the Female Missionary Society for the Poor of the City of New-York, and Its Vicinity (New York, 1817), 35. 106. See Lott, Love and Theft; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 107. Amy Hollywood, “Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization,” History of Religions 42, no. 2 (2002): 115. 108. Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 5. 109. Maurice Bloch describes ritual’s creation of power dynamics through the appearance of timeless repetition. Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 182. 110. For descriptions of Black mutual aid societies that posed an alternative to white benevolence, see Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Harry Reed, Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775–1865 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994).

CHAPTER FOUR

1. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (Boston: Thomas H. Webb & Co., 1843), 157. 2. “Embodiment” or “embodied” practices have been popularized by readings of Catherine Bell’s argument that ritual is “embedded” in the body. Ritual studies scholars, including Ronald Grimes, a number of scholars who publish in the journal Ritual Studies, and Thomas J. Csordas, use the term “embodied” to argue there is not a distinction

156

Notes to Pages 98–101

between the mind and the body during ritual, that the body becomes the receptacle of knowledge, that people experience wholeness through the integration of the mind and body/individual and community, and that the body is the conduit to phenomenological understanding of others. Ronald L. Grimes, The Craft of Ritual Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 196; Damon Lycourinos, “Sexuality, Magic(k) and the Ritual Body: A Phenomenology of Embodiment and Participation in a Modern Magical Ritual,” Journal of Ritual Studies 31, no. 2 (2017): 61–77; Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18, no. 1 (1990): 5–47. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 294–301; Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 117, no. 3 (1988): 97–118. 4. J. Lorand Matory, “Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37, no. 3 (2007): 415; Paul C. Johnson, Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 186–87. 5. I invoke two influential ritual theories here. First, Saba Mahmood’s argument that piety need not be agential to be feminist; and second, Talal Asad’s recasting of habitus as self-directed action of the Christian monk. Finally, in my argument that habitus has been read as a “cozy” environment I point to Catherine Bell’s work, which elides the alienating possibilities of ritual. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 122; Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 75. 6. Mary Kelley points out that many of the proponents of sentimental domesticity, including Catharine’s sister Harriet, were also contradictory figures. Mary Kelley, “At War with Herself: Harriet Beecher Stowe as Woman in Conflict within the Home,” American Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 1978): 26. 7. It sold so well that the book was reprinted annually for fifteen years. Paul C. Gutjahr, ed., Bestsellers in Nineteenth-Century America: An Anthology (New York: Anthem Press, 2016), 177. 8. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 421–22. 9. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 3–16, 56–58. 10. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 59. 11. Sklar, 76. 12. Sklar, 59, 62, 92. 13. Cynthia Lee Patterson, Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s (Jackson: University Press Of Mississippi, 2013), 4. 14. Michael McKeon points out that domesticity is the product of a separation between the public and the private that exists only to be conflated. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 15. Further, women’s studies shows that this

Notes to Pages 101–105

157

ideological system was central to consolidation of national and imperial political identification. Anne M. Boylan, “Women and Politics in the Era before Seneca Falls,” Journal of the Early Republic 10, no. 3 (1990): 363–82; Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581–606. 15. Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity 1830–1860 (New York: Haworth Press, 1982), 17. 16. On the limitations of taking the separate spheres ideology at its word, see Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader, Next Wave (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). For a study of women’s inhabitation of the public sphere, see Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 17. Kathryn Lofton, “Religion and the Authority in American Parenting,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84, no. 3 (September 1, 2016): 806–41. 18. Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 79, 82, 129. 19. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 37. 20. Beecher, 38. 21. McDannell, Christian Home, 17. 22. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 37. 23. Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 265. 24. Brown. 25. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 150. 26. Beecher, 160. 27. Beecher, 162. 28. Domestic efficiency in the early twentieth century borrowed directly from industrial rather than physiological models. See Diane Lichtenstein, “Domestic Novels of the 1920s: Regulation and Efficiency in ‘The Home-Maker,’ ‘Twilight Sleep,’ and ‘Too Much Efficiency,’” American Studies 52, no. 2 (2013): 65–88. 29. Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 56. John Corrigan also shows that this idea of interpenetrating systems extended to the economic and emotional systems. John Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 61. 30. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 99. 31. Beecher, 128. 32. James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 43; Sylvester Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life: Containing Three Lectures—Eighth, the Organs and Their Uses; Thirteenth, Man’s Physical Nature and the Structure of His Teeth; Fourteenth, the Dietetic Character of Man (Battle Creek, MI: Published at the office of the Health Reformer, 1872), 153. 33. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 130. 34. Beecher, 308.

158

Notes to Pages 105–112

35. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 137. 36. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 166. 37. Beecher. 38. Beecher, 308. 39. Beecher, 153. 40. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought? The Transformation of American 1815– 1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19. 41. Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 19. 42. Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 7. 43. Dudden, 45. 44. Brown, Foul Bodies, 253. 45. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 41. 46. Brown, Foul Bodies, 253. 47. Brown, Foul Bodies, 273; Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 206. 48. Beecher, 207. 49. Beecher. 50. It is crucial to note that this self-definition did not in fact reflect the reality of the North’s investment in slavery both economically and culturally. Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006); Douglas A. Jones, The Captive Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 51. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 268. 52. Catharine E. Beecher, Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service (New York City: Leavitt & Trow, 1842), 46. 53. Beecher, Letters, 72. 54. Beecher, Letters, 93. 55. Beecher, Letters, 100–101. 56. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 166. 57. Pierre Bourdieu, A Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72. 58. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 166. 59. Bourdieu, A Theory of Practice, 72. 60. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 75. 61. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 75. 62. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (February 1, 1973): 72, 73. 63. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 148–49. 64. Beecher, 126–27. 65. Jeanne Boydston, Home & Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 130. 66. Reading the ample output of evangelical publishers was a primary form of private devo-

Notes to Pages 112–114

159

tion, often judged by the minutes devoted to the practice and one’s general well-being, rather than by the impact of the print’s didactic lesson. Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 199. 67. Quoted in Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 283. CB’s personal papers: Beecher-Stowe Collection (Radcliffe), folder 315. 68. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 49. 69. Sklar, 65. 70. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 122. 71. This particular understanding of self-formation, influenced by Mahmood, has allowed ethicists to see connections between the tradition of “virtue ethics” and religiously specific contexts that emphasize “subjection.” Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 126; Jonathan Schofer, “Ethical Formation and Subjection,” Numen 59, no. 1 (2012): 1–31. 72. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 80. 73. See Marie R. Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 107; Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 10. 74. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 128. 75. My use of the term “unproductive” is inspired by the anthropologist David Graeber, who argued that capitalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries creates jobs that provide limited value to workers and society (and sometimes both). These jobs, or “bullshit jobs” in his parlance, are the white-collar jobs of finance, corporate lawyers, and human resources that pay very well (in comparison to “shit jobs” like janitor or daycare provider, which pay very poorly and are in fact essential). Graeber’s definition of “bullshit” is in direct opposition to a very flexible sense of “valuable,” a term he defines in a hybrid social and economic sense: a valuable job is both good for society’s overall well-being and for the well-being of the worker herself, because we as humans (in the words of Karl Groos) “take pleasure at being the cause” of real effects in the world. Graeber, however, misses a potential historical antecedent to the experience of short-selling, paper pushing, and middle management: the northeastern domestic home in the nineteenth century as promoted by domestic writers such as Beecher. Graeber argues that the reproductive labor of home (cleaning and raising babies) is an excellent example of a valuable and necessary job that we devalue. But Graeber is incorrect in assuming that reproductive labor—the necessary grunt-work of childbearing and cleaning the toilet—is all that happens in the middle-class American home. Beginning with Beecher and with the rise of domestic rituals in the antebellum Northeast, homes became a critical training ground for the type of bullshit work that Graeber saw as endemic to the modern corporate structure. I think Graeber would agree that ticking boxes on forms and ironing sheets have much in common. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Shuster), 222. 76. See Ruth Schwartz Cohen, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 77. Dudden, Serving Women, 1, 31. 78. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, 49.

160

Notes to Pages 114–119

79. Beecher. 80. Beecher, 50. 81. Beecher, 55. 82. Beecher, 131. 83. Beecher, 55. 84. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother, 17. 85. Quoted in Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), xiv. 86. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 221. 87. Bell, 134. 88. Catharine Esther Beecher and Hartford Female Seminary, Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education, Presented to the Trustees of the Hartford Female Seminary, and Published at Their Request (Hartford, CT: Packard & Butler, 1829), 9. 89. Beecher and Hartford Female Seminary, 55. 90. Andrea L. Turpin, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837–1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 40; Mary Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America,” The Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (September 1996): 403; Jo Anne Preston, “Domestic Ideology, School Reformers, and Female Teachers: Schoolteaching Becomes Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century New England,” The New England Quarterly 66, no. 4 (December, 1993): 544. 91. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 49, 79. 92. Sklar, 67. 93. Sklar, 71. 94. Sklar, 65. 95. Sklar, 92. 96. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” History of Religions 20, no. 1/2 (1980): 125. 97. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 112. 98. Brown, Foul Bodies, 265. 99. Brown, 268–69. 100. On this broad interest in recognizing the dignity in female religious submission see Pamela E. Klassen, “Agency, Embodiment, and Scrupulous Women*,” The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 592–603. 101. I here refer to Hendrik Hartog’s point that women had rights before the 1850s, but those only belonged to them as a participant in marriage, or in other words as a “wife” rather than as a human. The self, Hartog writes, “could only exist in relation to a spouse.” Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 98. 102. Print culture satirized Andrew Jackson by depicting him as a king in a cartoon titled “King Andrew the First.” Periodicals also pilloried Joseph Smith with the term “despot.” John L. Brooke, “Print and Politics,” in A History of the Book in America, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, vol. 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 187;

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Notes to Pages 121–123

J. Spencer Fluhman, A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 89.

EPILOGUE

1. For studies of Vedic ritual as an example of a tradition enduring through time, see Marko Geslani, Rites of the God-King: Santi and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Axel Michaels, Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and Its Significance for Ritual Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Michael Witzel and Richard K. Payne, eds., Homa Variations: The Study of Ritual Change across the Longue Durée, Oxford Ritual Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Within the study of American religion I count Leigh Schmidt’s study of revivalism as another example of this type of ritual analysis. Schmidt argued that despite the general association of evangelical revivalism with American democratization, revivalism is the continuation of a Scottish Presbyterian tradition. Leigh E. Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2001). 2. Marshall Sahlins, “Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5, no. 3 (September 1999): 413; Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, “At the Confluences of Anthropology, History, and Indology,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 21, no. 1 (1987): 194. 3. I am emphasizing ritual’s endurance, but much of recent work on ritual has been concerned with ritual innovation. This work is also concerned with dynamics of power, but it is generally focused on ritual as a tool of the weak and less on ritual as a tool of governance. See Ronald L. Grimes, “Reinventing Ritual,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 75, no. 1 (1992): 21–41; Sarah M. Pike, For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); David H. Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Brian K. Pennington and Amy L. Allocco, eds., Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018). For a treatment of the dangers of white Americans’ ideology of self-creation, see Philp J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 4. As the performance scholar Joseph Roach demonstrates, people can be visited and animated by the ghosts of the dead, whose charisma reappears in history through surrogate bodies. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Joseph R. Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 5. Fritz Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26, no. 1 (June 1979): 3. 6. Geslani, Rites of the God-King, 235. 7. Geslani, 235–36 8. Maurice Bloch, “Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an

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Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?” European Journal of Sociology 15, no. 1 (1974): 55–81. 9. Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 34. 10. Ronald L. Grimes, The Craft of Ritual Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 196; Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18, no. 1 (1990): 5–47; Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Sharon Māhealani Rowe, “We Dance for Knowledge,” Dance Research Journal 40, no. 1 (2008): 31–44. 11. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 208. 12. Bell, 106.

BIBLIOGRAPHY P R I M A RY S O U R C E S

Manuscript Collections New York Historical Society Mariner’s Church Collection Papers related to Grand Lodge of New-York Papers related to Holland Lodge New-York Historical Society Management Committee Records Collection G. W. White Library, Mystic Seaport Records of the American Seamen’s Friend Society Collection Scottish Rite Museum and Library Anti-Masonic Broadsides Collection Grand Lodge of Massachusetts Collection Ritual Exposé Collection Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Schlesinger Library Beecher-Stowe Family Papers Collection Livingston Masonic Library Masonic Aprons American Bible Society Eric M. North’s Historical Essays

Periodicals Christian Herald (1816–1821) The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine (1821–1824) Christian Register (1821–1835) The Evangelical Guardian and Review (1817–1819) Liberator (1831–1865) The Missionary Herald (1821–1906) National Anti-Slavery Standard (1840–1870)

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INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to figures. actors, ritual, 2, 3, 12, 15–17, 122 African Americans. See Black Americans agency, 3, 54, 98, 114, 115, 119 Allyn, Avery, 46–47 American Bible Society (ABS), 8, 11, 21, 41, 48; annual reports of, 54–56, 58–59, 60, 67; Board of Managers of, 49–50, 53–57, 60–61, 72; Chatham Street Theater, 62–63; conventions of, 49, 61–68, 71–73, 144n53; corporate structure of, 52–53, 75; and leadership, 58–60, 149n8; minutes of, 53–58; subscribers of, 49, 57, 60, 62, 77; women members of, 71–72 American Seamen’s Friend Society (ASFS): and benevolence, 76–78, 82, 88–90, 93–94, 96–97; and middle-class evangelism, 76, 77, 82–83, 89–95, 149n9; and representing sailors, 76, 79–81, 84–89, 92–96. See also Sailor’s Magazine American Tract Society: conventions of, 62, 66–67, 68; as publisher, 143n39 Anniversary Weeks, 61–65, 68, 70–71. See also conventions antebellum period: and benevolent societies, 60, 74–75, 88, 90, 96, 151n39; domesticity of, 98–99, 101, 107, 114, 117, 119, 159n75; and evangelism, 97, 142nn7–8, 149n6, 149n8; and maritime literature, 83; and women, 71–72, 147n106, 148n110, 151n40 Anti-Masonry movement, 22, 27, 45–48, 134n26, 145n53

appropriation: of corporate behavior, 71; cultural, 10, 96; in ritual, 96, 123; of symbolic material, 11 aprons, masonic, 14–16; decoration of, 13–18, 33, 35, 43; and masonic rank, 13, 43; masonic viewing of, 16–18; and public performance, 1, 13–14, 31, 38–39; as regalia or costume, 43, 44 aristocracy: civic, 24, 52, 58, 129n33, 130n36; courtly, 23, 34, 58, 132n1 artificiality: of action, 12, 17, 18, 28; of behavior, 12, 41, 48, 113; and simulation, 12, 18; and theater, 2, 17, 23, 31, 45 Asad, Talal, 12, 18, 19, 156n5 associational life: and Black men, 129n35; and evangelical conventions, 63, 73; masonic, 21, 24, 39; religious, 28, 75, 96, 122; rituals of, 130n36 audiences: of benevolent society journals, 82, 87; at evangelical conventions, 61, 63–65, 68–69, 72; lack of in masonic ritual, 2, 12– 13, 28; presence of in masonic ritual, 12, 17, 28, 38–39; theatrical, 17, 62, 74, 140n99 authenticity, 12, 29, 82–84, 91 authority: in civil society, 9, 11, 24, 128n17, 135n35; domestic, 97, 109, 111, 119–20; maritime, 81, 83; and masonic ritual, 28– 29, 48; and Protestant corporations, 55–56, 84, 122; religious, 3, 5, 10, 20, 128n17; ritual, 96, 123; royal, 2, 3–7, 122, 124, 130n37; secular, 3, 5, 7–8

178 Ball, Erika, 70 Bateson, Gregory, 17, 132n65 Beecher, Catharine: and the body, 104–5, 111– 12, 114–15, 116; and domestic hierarchy, 19, 98–99, 106–10, 117, 119–20; and domestic servants, 106–10, 111, 114, 115, 118; and moral education, 102–3, 115; personal life of, 100, 112–13, 118; and ritualization of labor, 98–99, 101–3, 105–6, 110–12, 116–17, 159n75; as theorist, 11–12, 97–99, 101–4, 111–14, 118–20; A Treatise on Domestic Economy, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108, 113 Beecher, Lyman, 52, 100 behavior: civic, 18, 31, 33, 35, 60, 122; and disagreement, 68–71; domestic, 111, 113–14; as expected at conventions, 50, 61, 63–68, 71–73, 141n4; and masonic ritual, 18, 26, 39, 46, 139n89; and rituals of piety, 113–14, 137n57; of sailors, 78–79 Bell, Catherine, 12, 19, 116–17, 123, 135n37 Bellah, Robert, 9–10, 98, 130n38 benevolence: as authority, 9, 10, 76, 88, 144n53; and domesticity, 103, 114, 117; performance of, 73–76, 83–87, 89–93, 94, 97; societies, 7, 52, 59–75, 96, 149n8; subjects of, 75, 94, 96, 143n39, 151n39. See also individual benevolent societies Benevolent Empire, 75, 89 Berger, Jason, 83 Bethel Union, 82, 85, 90, 93, 94–95 Black Americans, 7–8, 21, 69–71, 88, 129n35 Bleecker, Garret N., 21, 141n116 Bloch, Maurice, 123, 135nn34–35, 155n109 boarding houses, 78, 82, 90, 94, 95, 100 boards of directors: and governance, 3, 49, 55–56, 61, 72–73; of Protestant corporations, 52–53, 59–61, 68, 72–73, 75. See also corporations bodies: assembled, 51, 55; Black, 69, 70, 80, 86; care of, 103, 108, 115; comportment of, 34–35, 61; enslaved, 80, 86; foreign, 41–42, 76, 96; fraternal, 25, 136n48; governing, 75, 115; health of, 104–5; integration of in ritual, 12, 20; kingly, 4–6, 9, 23, 107, 122, 130nn36–37; marginal, 10, 21, 42, 69, 73,

Index 151n38; masonic, 21, 35, 40–42, 136n48; normative, 21, 70, 73, 97, 147n101; ritualized, 2, 110–11, 116–17, 123–24, 155n2; of sailors, 80, 81–82, 86, 89; somatics of, 20, 29, 39, 41, 94; of women, 71–72, 104–6. See also corporate bodies; embodiment; kingly bodies; surrogacy Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 99, 110–11, 116 Brecht, Berthold, 17, 122 Bridges, Amy, 58 Brown, Candy Gunther, 125, 142n8, 158n66 Brown, Kathleen, 103, 119 Bullock, Steven, 27, 139n89, 140n106 Bushman, Richard, 34–35, 137n63 Calvinism, 23, 100, 112–13, 118 Camp, Pannill, 26 Catholicism, 21–22, 38, 102, 108, 113, 138n77 ceremonies: corporate, 24; masonic, 15, 22–23, 27–34, 38–39, 42–43, 46–47; native, 41–42; political, 2, 6, 130n38; royal, 5, 56. See also rites character, moral, 39, 41, 61, 71, 81, 109 charters, 6–7, 28, 52, 71 Chatham Street Theater, 62–63 choreography: civil, 10, 19; corporate, 10, 51; domestic, 100–101, 113; masonic, 1–2, 26, 40–41, 42, 45 chores: exclusive to mothers, 114–15; as governance, 11, 103, 106–8, 115, 119–20; as habit, 110, 112; and ritual, 99, 101, 102, 107, 112–13, 116–17. See also domesticity Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine, 77, 82 Christianization: and evangelicalism, 52, 63, 118, 143n39; and sailors, 75, 77, 79–80, 94, 149n10. See also missions civility: behavior, 12, 122; cultivation of, 18, 29, 38; as governing authority, 9, 37, 48; and masonic ritual, 23, 26, 33–35, 45; as virtue, 38, 122; and women, 71, 147n106 civil society: and benevolence, 73, 76, 85, 89, 95, 143n39, 149n8; and Black Americans, 7–8, 21, 69–70, 129n35; and corporations, 54–55, 57; and egalitarianism, 11, 23, 48, 58, 71; and evangelicals, 50, 57–58, 62, 72–73,

179

Index 124; and evangelical societies, 7, 8–9, 62– 64, 70; and Freemasonry, 10, 21, 24–26, 31, 35–38, 136n48; northeastern, 7–8, 19, 58, 62, 84, 122; Protestant, 8, 10, 21, 73, 129n33; and ritual, 9, 11; and sailors, 76, 84–85, 89, 95; and whiteness, 7–8, 21, 70, 73, 129n35; and women, 70, 71, 72, 101–2 classes, social. See elites; lower classes; middle classes; poor, the; working classes Clinton, De Witt, 1, 21, 30, 39, 54 communality: and Protestant culture, 50, 66, 73; and ritual, 9, 11, 93; and sailors, 82, 94, 95 consecration, 1, 4, 20, 22, 31 consistency: and domesticity, 103, 105, 111, 113, 119; and evangelical societies, 57, 65, 68, 72–73; and masonic ritual, 26, 27, 30, 42, 45, 139n89; and ritual in general, 57, 96, 123; and ritual governance, 49, 57. See also regularity; repetition conventions: anti-slavery, 68–70; consensus at, 66–68, 72; endurance at, 62, 63–65, 73; evangelical, 10, 49–53, 60–70, 71–73, 124, 144n53. See also Anniversary Weeks corporate bodies, 4–7, 10, 23, 24, 25–26, 49; of benevolent societies, 77, 152n50; bifurcation of, 52, 72–73; domestic, 107–8; at evangelical conventions, 61, 69–72; as governing bodies, 75, 129n33, 130n38, 141n6; minutes of, 54–55; and subscribers, 51, 61 corporations: annual reports of, 55, 58–59, 60, 67; and authority, 7, 122; of Black Americans, 70, 129n35; and charters, 6, 7, 26, 28, 52, 71; and democracy, 4, 8, 26, 130n37, 142n12; as governing bodies, 5–7, 11, 24, 75, 107, 142n12; masonic lodges as, 25–26; procedures of, 10, 53, 54, 73; proceedings of, 53, 55–56, 57–58, 61, 70–71; religious, 51, 52, 60, 130n36, 141n6; and royal legacy, 5, 23, 26; sovereignty of, 7, 24, 48, 57–61; trade, 5, 52. See also boards of directors costumes: civil, 2, 19, 48; ritual, 22–23, 30, 32– 33, 34, 39, 43; theatrical, 32–33, 43, 135n35 Cott, Nancy, 101

counterpublics, 68–73, 147n101 Cross, Jeremy Ladd, 35, 43, 44, 45, 47–48 democracy: and corporations, 6, 130n36; and domesticity, 98–99, 108–10; and evangelical corporations, 52, 58, 73, 76, 97, 142n11; Freemasonry as promoting, 23, 25–26, 31, 33, 37; Freemasonry as undermining, 22, 34, 48; and hierarchy, 2, 11, 22; and performance, 12, 19; and regularity, 57, 71; and religion, 50, 130n38, 161n1; and sovereign ritual, 3, 20, 28, 130n37; transition to, 4, 8, 39, 129n33, 129n35 dependents: interstitial, 77–82; sailors as, 80– 81, 84; women as, 81, 151n40 discipline: and domesticity, 108, 113, 116, 119; and evangelical audiences, 63, 71, 93; and Freemasonry, 31–33, 35, 136n48; individual, 8–9, 141n4; and salvation, 118, 119 discomfort: and benevolence, 75, 91, 93; and domesticity, 19, 99; and Freemasonry, 35– 37; and ritual action, 12, 19, 123–24 display: and behavior, 17, 18, 70; and Freemasonry, 12, 37; sovereign, 6, 57 Dobkin Hall, Peter. See Hall, Peter Dobkin domesticity: as choreography, 100, 101, 104–5, 111–15, 116–17, 119; cult of, 101–2, 118, 156n6; as element of Protestant worship, 102; as governing authority, 9, 10, 96–100, 106; as ritual, 97–99, 99–101, 107, 114, 115–19; and sailors, 79; sphere of, 79, 101–2, 116–17, 119, 134n18, 156n14. See also chores; public sphere domestic servants, 106, 108–12, 114, 117, 119 Dudden, Faye, 108 Durkheim, Émile, 9, 19, 101, 124, 154n96 Eagleton, Terry, 17 East India Company, 5, 24 education: female, 100, 111, 114–15, 117, 118; moral, 102; public, 10, 74. See also schools effigies, 5–6 egalitarianism: and authority, 5, 6, 20, 52, 108; and civil society, 23, 25, 37, 58, 122; and evangelical societies, 52, 142n11

180 Elias, Norbert, 34 elites: and board meetings, 23, 57, 61; and civility, 19, 45; and domesticity, 108, 112, 114, 117, 119; and Freemasonry, 28–29, 34, 38–39, 134n29; and leadership, 8–10, 58, 129n33, 132n1, 149n8; and morality, 52, 77 embodiment: of authority, 2, 11, 54, 73, 96; and civility, 34, 80; of democracy, 23, 27, 29, 73, 98, 130n37; and domesticity, 99, 111, 116, 117; in ritual, 2–3, 44–45, 93, 99, 123–24, 155n2 endurance: as evangelical aesthetic, 54, 61–62, 72, 73; and the evangelical civil body, 49, 54, 72, 73; as governance, 50, 52, 61, 62 Enlightenment, the, 12, 25, 26, 30, 35, 104, 134n23, 135n42 ethics: and corporations, 62, 122; and Freemasonry, 30, 33; and virtue, 2–3, 33, 119, 137n57, 159n71 Europe: courts of, 12, 18, 19, 132n1; Freemasonry in, 25, 134n17; and sovereign ritual, 4, 6, 19 evangelicals: antagonistic to Freemasonry, 27, 134n23, 134n26; and authority, 2, 10, 58, 74, 122; and benevolence, 11, 58, 74–78, 81–85, 88–97, 149n8 (see also individual benevolent societies); and civil governance, 2, 48, 50, 52, 73, 124; and corporate governance, 57, 61–62, 64, 66, 72; corporations of, 10, 51–52, 54, 63, 70–72, 149n9; endurance as aesthetic of, 54, 61–62, 72, 73; friendly to Freemasonry, 27, 48, 135n42; and piety, 112, 113, 158n66; and political philosophy, 142n11, 161n1; printing traditions of, 51, 73, 141n6, 142n8, 158n66; and representations of sailors, 85–88, 89, 91, 92, 95; and ritual, 10, 45, 142n7. See also Protestantism exposés: American Bible Society, 58–59; antimasonic, 28, 40–41, 46–47, 140n106 Federalists, 39, 52, 58, 137n70, 142n11 Finney, Charles, 62, 145n56 Foreign Mission Society, 65, 67 Foster, Charles, 66 Foucault, Michel, 116, 137n57

Index fraternities: and corporate sovereignty, 7, 23; evangelical, 76, 95; religious, 5, 24, 95; and sailors, 78, 91. See also Freemasons free Blacks. See Black Americans Free Church Movement, 62, 145n56, 149n9 Freemasons: Ancient, 27, 134n29; and authority, 1, 24, 28–29, 48; bright, 27–28, 35, 42– 43, 47; catechisms of, 25, 27, 32, 35, 40–41, 133n16; and civility, 12, 18, 23, 26, 29, 33–38; and democracy, 22–23, 25–26, 28, 31, 33; history of, 24–25, 27, 40, 137n70, 139n89; Modern, 27; and the Morgan Affair, 27– 28, 45–46; oaths of, 28, 45–48; proscenium imagery of, 12–18, 14–16, 28; publications of, 27–28, 35, 42–43, 44, 47; and religion, 25, 27–28, 32, 41, 48; rituals of, 11–18, 21–33, 38–48; rituals of as theater, 12–15, 22–23, 26, 28–32, 40–47, 134n33; and the senses, 22, 30–31, 39, 41–42, 48; and sincerity, 29, 47; and solemnity, 22–23, 28–29, 31–32, 42, 47–48; and violence, 23, 26, 40–41, 45–48. See also Anti-Masonry movement; manuals; rites, masonic Geertz, Clifford, 2, 19, 57, 93, 118, 123 gender: and conventions, 69–70; femininity, 72, 79, 97, 119, 148n110; masculinity, 78, 79; non-normative, 93; and ritual, 11, 114, 116 Geslani, Marko, 122–23 governance: American Bible Society, 57–61, 75; and benevolent societies, 10, 75–76, 84; and civility, 37, 48; corporate, 5, 6–7, 10, 24, 49, 107, 142n12; domestic, 11, 97, 99, 116, 119–20; and evangelical corporations, 49, 52, 56–57, 72–73; federal, 52, 80–82, 84, 85, 88; rituals of, 3–4, 8–9, 49, 57, 76, 129n34; as sensation, 2, 4, 10, 61, 98; sovereign, 4–7, 10, 19–20, 73, 129n33; and surrogacy, 19, 130n37 Graham, Sylvester, 104–5 Griffith, Marie, 113–14 Habermas, Jürgen, 26, 31, 57, 134n18 habitus, 2, 99, 111, 156n5 Hackett, David, 27, 129n35, 136n48, 139n89

Index Hall, Peter Dobkin, 24, 129n34 Hartley, David, 30, 135n42 heathens: conversion of, 64, 80, 131n47; rituals of, 29, 41–42, 46 hierarchy: domestic, 98–99, 108–9, 116; of the head over the body, 6, 37–39, 49, 61, 73, 99; natural, 37, 109; and Protestant corporations, 52, 60, 89, 130n36; rituals of, 3, 22–23, 34, 52, 130n36; sacred, 20, 130n37; of social power, 11, 19, 34, 122; and sovereign ritual, 2, 7, 9 history, masonic, 24–25, 27, 40, 137n70, 139n89 history, religious, 2, 27, 134n23, 141n4 Hodgdon, Barbara, 54 Hollywood, Amy, 96 homologies, 19, 29, 116, 135n37 ideology: and contradiction, 30, 31, 48, 50, 118, 156n14; domestic, 11, 79, 97, 99, 101–2, 110; Protestant, 29, 51, 131n47, 151n40; and ritual, 8, 12, 20, 122, 130n38 idolatry, 21–22, 29, 41–42, 46 Isenberg, Nancy, 70, 144n53, 147n106 Jacksonian period, 48, 64, 119, 142n11, 160n102 Jacob, Margaret C., 25, 26, 134n18, 136n48 Jay, William, 60, 61, 65, 66 Johnson, Paul C., 5, 128n17, 141n6 king’s body, 4–6, 9, 23, 107, 122, 130nn36–37. See also sovereign ritual Klassen, Pamela, 5, 128n17, 141n6 Koven, Seth, 87 labor: and coercion, 108, 109; of corporations, 51, 71–72, 147n109; domestic, 101, 102–3, 106, 118, 159n75; enslaved, 88, 99, 108, 158n50; and health, 112, 115; maritime, 78, 84, 91, 94–95, 150n19, 151n38; ritual, 11, 44, 98–99; rural, 107, 115–17, 124; and surrogacy, 100, 107, 112, 114, 116–18; unemployed, 77, 81; unpaid, 59, 71; wage, 77, 81, 107, 109, 150n19 law: corporate, 6, 53, 57, 71, 84, 110; English, 4, 6, 7; of the United States, 7, 52, 153n68

181 leadership: as affect, 2, 50, 97; in civil society, 10–11, 23, 24, 39, 50; by corporations, 52, 58; of corporations, 59–60. See also authority liminality, 84, 88, 93–94 liturgy, 21, 23, 28, 45, 65, 101 Lofton, Kathryn, 8–9 lower classes, 62, 72, 74, 78, 88 Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, 127n8, 139n90 Mahmood, Saba, 2, 113–14, 137n57, 141n4, 156n5, 159n71 manners, 23, 34, 35, 37 manuals: domestic, 101, 103, 108, 114; Freemason’s Monitor, 27–28, 29, 32, 34; masonic, in general, 23, 35, 47, 50, 54; masonic, Royal Arch, 32, 43; ritual, 16; See also Cross, Jeremy Ladd; monitors, masonic; Webb, Thomas Smith Marine Bible Society, 84, 149n10 Mauss, Marcel, 111, 116, 154n96 McConachie, Bruce, 45 McDannell, Colleen, 102 middle classes: and benevolence in general, 58, 71–72, 95; and benevolence to sailors, 76–77, 82–83, 87, 89, 94; and domesticity, 99, 100, 103, 107–19; and Freemasonry, 34, 38, 134n29; values of, 81, 129n33 mimesis: and domesticity, 107; and evangelicals, 73, 76, 88, 153n72, 154n96; and Freemasonry, 23, 48; and ritual, 18, 19, 28. See also simulation missions: and benevolence, 75, 77, 148n6; foreign, 62, 65, 67, 68, 75, 143n39; missionaries, 11, 75, 80–81, 149nn9–10; to sailors, 10, 74–95, 149nn9–10, 150n12, 154n86. See also Christianization Modern, John Lardas, 51 monitors, masonic, 27–28, 35, 42–43, 44, 47. See also manuals morality: of domestic work, 110, 115, 118; and evangelical leadership, 52; and masonic ritual, 30, 44–45, 47, 135n42; mothers’ importance in developing, 100, 102–4, 106, 115, 117; representation of, 2, 140n99;

182 morality (continued) of sailors, 77, 78–81, 90, 151n38; of women, 71, 72, 79, 117, 148n110 Morgan Affair, 27–28, 45–46 mothers: as domestic authority, 98, 99, 108, 117, 119–20; as domestic choreographers, 100, 104–5, 111–15, 116–17, 119; as guides of domestic servants, 108, 110, 114–15, 116; importance of in developing morality, 100, 102–4, 106, 115, 117; and ritual governance, 10, 11; as sovereign, 98, 110, 117, 119–20 mutual aid societies, 7, 21, 96, 129n35, 155n110 New York Evangelist, 63, 147n95 New York Historical Society, 54, 55 normativity: of bodies, 21, 61, 71, 124; of evangelical conventions, 61, 71; of governance, 24, 98, 124; of sexuality, 100; of the social body, 73, 97, 147n101 organizations, fraternal. See fraternities Patton, Laurie, 16 Pellegrini, Ann, 45 performance: and artificiality, 12, 20, 28, 48, 124; and benevolent rituals, 75, 89, 96; and civility, 34–35, 122, 147n101; and corporations, 49, 54–56, 57, 58; and domesticity, 99, 106, 112–13; and evangelical civil society, 62–63, 64; and evangelical society subscribers, 52, 62–63, 66, 70; and masonic culture, 1, 26, 31–32, 39, 134n29; and masonic rites, 13–15, 17–18, 28, 32, 39–42, 46–47; and ritual, 2, 123; and ritual authority, 11, 128n17; of sovereign ritual, 1, 7; and surrogacy, 19, 161n4 Phelan, Peggy, 54 philanthropy, 74–75, 87. See also benevolence philosophy: and civil society, 27, 31, 33, 57; and domesticity, 101; and the self, 12, 30 piety: domestic, 102, 113, 114; and Freemasonry, 46, 50; private, 8, 9, 50, 113; Protestant, 27, 28, 50; public, 55, 62, 77; and ritual

Index practice, 2, 8, 112–14; of women, 2, 99, 113–14, 156n5 play: and alienation, 17, 122; and masonic rites, 32–33, 46–47, 50; and mimesis, 89, 96; and reflexivity, 18, 132n65; and ritual, 3, 18, 28–29, 50, 135n35 politics: body politic, 2, 4, 128n27; and conventions, 70, 71, 147n106; and corporations, 7, 54; and democracy, 48, 52, 58; and domesticity, 97, 101, 118, 156n14; and identity, 18, 121, 130n38; masonic disregard for parties of, 25, 66; and partisanship, 39, 64, 144n53; and representation, 3, 10–11, 76, 85, 135n35; and resistance, 39, 84; rituals of, 3, 20; and sovereign ritual, 4, 6, 52, 128n17 poor, the: and benevolence, 37, 76, 77, 81, 103, 151n39; and benevolence societies, 10, 73, 74–75, 90, 96, 143n39; bonds with evangelicals, 87, 95, 96. See also lower classes power: of chores, 99, 101; civil, 51, 73, 76, 99; and civility, 18, 39; corporate, 4, 6–7, 24, 26, 60; divine, 80, 81; divinely ordained, 4–5, 6; domestic, 113, 117, 119; horizontal, 26, 109; and masonic rites, 30, 32–33, 45; and mimesis, 10, 107; political, 2, 3, 52, 132n1; and ritual, 57, 96, 116, 123–24, 155n109, 161n3; sovereign, 26, 58, 96, 110, 119, 124; and sovereign ritual, 2, 4–5, 6–7, 23–24; vertical, 11, 26, 108 private meetings: corporate, 10, 56, 72; masonic, 1, 17, 23–24, 28, 32, 48; and sovereign rituals, 1–2, 12, 23, 122, 124 privilege: and benevolence, 77, 83, 87; and corporations, 24, 60, 73; and earned status, 10, 39, 58 prosceniums, 12–15, 17–18, 28 prostitution, 75, 78–79, 81, 88, 151n40 Protestantism: and benevolence, 73–74, 77, 97, 124; and civil society, 8–10, 50, 122, 129n33; and domesticity, 102, 113; and evangelical associations, 5, 48, 55, 63, 142n7; and Freemasonry, 10, 21–22, 27, 29, 42, 45; and leadership in public life, 11, 19–20, 23, 99, 129n33. See also evangelicals

Index public sphere: and fraternal bodies, 25, 31; and religion, 8, 64; and social power, 39–40, 64, 70, 157n16; synthesis with the private sphere, 31, 143n17. See also domesticity: sphere of queens, 11, 98, 117, 119, 120 Rao, Gautham, 81 Reed, Andrew, 63–64, 65, 67–68 Reformation, the, 22, 23, 29, 42, 142 regularity: and domesticity, 103, 105, 111, 113, 119; in masonic ritual, 26, 32, 42, 45, 139n89; and ritual governance, 49, 57, 68, 73, 90, 123. See also consistency repetition: and conventions, 66; and domestic work, 106, 111; and masonic rites, 28, 33, 35; and ritual, 96, 111, 113, 121, 123, 155n109; and tradition, 9, 121. See also consistency representation: literary, 76, 81, 83–87, 89, 95; political, 10, 11, 70, 81, 85; in ritual, 3, 6, 11, 18, 93, 154n96; in visual art, 5–6, 13, 14–15 riots, 39, 130nn37–38 rites: King Neptune, 94–95; of passage, 94, 135n39, 139n89. See also ceremonies; Freemasons: rituals of rites, masonic: and civility, 12, 18, 23, 26, 29, 33–38; Degree of Intimate Secretary, 42; Entered Apprentice, 38, 40; and idolatry, 21–22; initiatory, 13, 16, 27–28, 31–32, 38, 40–47; and King Solomon’s Temple, 13, 14–16, 32, 44; Knights Templar, 32, 34; prosceniums in, 12–15, 17–18, 28; Royal Arch, 32, 43, 44; and royal sovereignty, 23, 26, 34–35, 40, 43, 44; Scottish Rite, 14, 26–27, 40; and seriousness, 22–23, 29, 32, 42, 47; as theater, 12–15, 22–23, 26, 28–32, 40–47, 134n33 ritual, sovereign: and domesticity, 117, 119–20; and evangelicalism, 52, 56; and Freemasonry, 24, 28–29; and governance, 3, 10, 20, 124, 130n37; history of, 1, 4–7; and political power, 2, 23, 122; theory of, 2, 57, 123 ritualization, 2, 8, 24, 116–17, 123, 141n4

183 rituals: benevolent, 75, 76, 94; and consistency, 27, 30, 123; domestic, 97–99, 101, 107, 113–14, 115–19; and governance, 1, 3, 49, 129n33; possession, 99; private, 24, 56, 57; processions, 6, 23, 31–32, 48; Protestant, 45, 142n7 Ryan, Mary P., 101, 107, 157n16 Ryan, Susan M., 88 Sabbath Union, 62, 68 sacredness: and authority, 3, 5–6, 20, 128n17, 130n36; and domestic work, 103, 117, 118; and masonic rites, 22, 23, 28, 32, 46; and ritualization, 2, 117, 118; and spaces, 8, 102, 119 Sahlins, Marshall, 121 sailors: as agents of Christianization, 79–80; Bethel Union of, 82, 85, 90, 93, 94–95; boarding houses for, 78, 82, 90, 94, 95; salvation of, 89, 94, 95; sinful nature of, 78–79, 80–81, 82, 87, 96; worship services for, 75, 78, 90–93, 154n86 Sailor’s Magazine, 77, 79–80, 83–84, 85–89, 95; “The Dead Mariner,” 85–86, 87; “A Sailor’s Address to his Seafaring Companions,” 83; “The Sailor’s Confidence,” 89; “That fill these wanton sheets are worldly lusts,” 86–87 salvation: Calvinist, 113, 118; and domesticity, 100, 102, 104; and sailors, 89, 94, 95 Schmidt, Leigh, 127n8, 161n1 schools: and benevolence, 74, 103; and domesticity, 102, 104, 117; Sunday, 63, 66; for women, 100, 117, 118. See also education secrecy: and masonic civility, 38; and masonic initiation, 10, 17, 20, 31–32, 40; and masonic lore, 14, 27, 40, 42, 45, 47; and masonic rites, 23–24, 46; and sovereign ritual, 1, 28 secularity, 3, 4, 5, 8, 114, 119 self, the: and action, 18, 30, 31, 124; authentic, 12, 18, 113, 136n48; and the body, 104, 123; crafting of, 9, 11, 89, 99, 118–19, 122; as performance, 34, 37, 83

184 senses, the: and masonic ritual, 22, 29, 30–31, 41–42, 135n42; and sailors, 86–87, 94 seriousness: and evangelical conventions, 65, 72–73; and masonic ritual, 22–23, 28, 29, 32–33, 42 servants, domestic, 106, 108–12, 114, 117, 119 simulation, 12, 18, 29, 34, 123. See also mimesis sin: and benevolent ritual, 11, 74, 75, 90, 91; and poverty, 73, 77; and sailors, 77, 82, 85, 86–87, 90, 94 sincerity, 12, 19, 29, 47, 131n47 Sklar, Kathryn, 118 slavery: anti-slavery literature, 86; anti-slavery societies, 55, 68–70, 88; and northeastern identity, 108, 129n34, 158n50; and sailors, 87–88 Smith, Jonathan Z., 116, 118–19 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 101, 149n8 sociability, 9, 26, 134n18, 136n48 society, civil. See civil society Solomon, King, 34, 39, 42, 44, 44, 136n54, 139n93; grave of, 15; temple of, 13, 14–16, 32, 44 sovereign ritual. See ritual, sovereign spaces: civic, 8, 9, 46, 66, 136n48; conventional, 61, 62–63, 68; domestic, 97, 101, 102, 103, 113; public, 68, 154n86; ritual, 13, 17–18, 28, 123; sacred, 8, 102, 119; uncomfortable, 75, 76, 91, 93. See also domesticity: sphere of; public sphere sphere, private. See domesticity: sphere of Spires, Derek, 70–71 Staal, Fritz, 122–23 Stern, Philip, 24 Stevenson, David, 25, 133n15 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 100, 102, 156n6 submission, 41, 114, 119, 135n34, 160n100 subordination, 32, 97, 109, 110, 116, 117 subscription: and convention audiences, 51, 60–61, 62, 71, 72; and corporate proceedings, 58; and ineffectual membership, 49, 52, 60–61; and Sailor’s Magazine, 83; and women, 49, 71, 72 Sullivan, Winnifred, 5, 128n17, 141n6 Sunday School Union, 63, 66, 147n107

Index surrogacy: of bodies, 99, 107, 111–12, 114, 116, 161n4; and domesticity, 99–100, 111–12, 114, 116–17; and evangelical benevolence, 94; of governance, 19, 73, 74, 97, 148n1; and ritual, 6, 99–100; of royalty, 4, 6, 107, 122, 130n37 symbolism: of authority, 6, 23; of evangelical associations, 75, 76, 93–96; of Protestant civil society, 8, 50, 130n38; masonic, 1, 30, 33, 38–39, 41, 48; on masonic aprons, 13– 14; and ritual, 114, 122, 124, 135n34 synthesis, 17, 20, 31, 80, 93, 98 Tambiah, Stanley, 121, 131n43, 132n68 Tappan, Lewis, 62, 69, 149n9 theater: masonic, 12–15, 22–23, 26, 28–32, 40–47, 134n33; public, 12, 17, 54, 62–63, 134n33 theology: Protestant, 9, 66, 100, 113, 129n33, 149n8; masonic, 135n42; medieval, 4 Tillary, James, 37–38 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9, 50, 73, 98, 130n38, 141n5 transparency, 38, 52, 58, 62, 72, 144n53 Turner, Victor, 29, 93, 123, 135n35, 139n89 Valeri, Mark, 127n8 violence, 23, 26, 39–41, 45–48, 95 virtue: Christian, 9, 46, 71, 97, 110; civic, 11, 37–38, 71; ethics of, 2, 137n57, 159n71; masonic, 18, 23, 27, 33, 35, 37–39 voting, 6, 25, 53, 60–61, 147n95 wages: and domestic labor, 107–8, 109–10; and the lower classes, 40, 78, 81; of sailors, 78, 80, 81, 150n19 Washington, George, 1, 137n70 Webb, Thomas Smith, 27–28, 29–32, 34, 42– 43, 47 welfare: and benevolent societies, 10, 74, 76, 84, 96; and civil society, 38, 141n6, 143n39, 151n40 Withington, Phil, 24 women: as benevolent subjects, 72, 81, 151n40; and domesticity, 98–120; education of,

Index 100, 114–15, 117, 118; as participants at conventions, 70–72, 144n53, 147n106, 148n110; and piety, 2, 99, 113–14, 156n5; and prostitution, 81, 151n40; and ritual, 97–99, 101, 107, 113–14, 115–19; as sailors’ wives, 79, 86, 90; as widows, 77, 81, 87, 90,

185 143n3; as wives in general, 43, 99–100, 106–7, 108, 124, 160n101. See also mothers working classes: in general, 7, 62; and mobs, 39; sailors as, 78, 84, 90; women, 108, 151n40 Wosh, Peter, 60