Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America 0812252926, 9780812252927

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Star Territory

MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors Roger Chartier Joseph Farrell Anthony Grafton

Leah Price Peter Stallybrass Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

STAR TERRITORY Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America

Gordon Fraser

Un iver sit y of Pen nsy lvan i a Press Phil adelphi a

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8122-5292-7

For Geoffrey Lee Fraser and Carol Freeman Fraser

Contents

Introduction

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Chapter 1. Almanacs in the Astronomical Nation

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Chapter 2. The Emancipatory Cosmology of the First Black Press

48

Chapter 3. Cherokee Astronomy

78

Chapter 4. The National Almanac in Peace and War

106

Chapter 5. Hawaiian Cosmography in Print

132

Epilogue. The Third Space Age

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

217

Introduction

Sitting before a committee of the House of Representatives, a high-ranking US military officer—a general—speaks of changing battlefield conditions on the “frontier.” This frontier had once been accessible only to the “world powers,” but it is increasingly “open to all.” The once-empty spaces at the extreme edge of US territory are “more contested” now than ever before.1 His warning of numerous enemies just beyond the horizon evokes a nineteenth-century discourse of territorial expansion by the United States, a time when fears of British or French imperialism gave way to wars with indigenous nations, with revolutionary nationstates such as Mexico, and with nations in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Yet this general did not give his testimony in the midst of the so-called Indian Wars of the nineteenth century, nor did he deliver it in the midst of the Cold War. The military commander in question, Lt. General William Shelton, was delivering his testimony before Congress in April 2014. And the frontier of which he spoke was the so-called space environment, a region defined by the Department of Defense as “beginning at the lower boundary of the Earth’s ionosphere . . . and extending outward.”2 Shelton was then the head of Air Force Space Command, a military unit that would in December 2019 be transformed into the sixth branch of the armed forces, the US Space Force. And Shelton’s testimony, like that of the commanders who would follow him, made clear that the United States remains committed to dominance in the increasingly contested frontier of outer space.3 This book begins from the premise that the United States is in the midst of its third space age. Tech magnates make plans to colonize Mars, mine asteroids, or other wise develop space commerce.4 NASA administrators advocate publicprivate partnerships for space exploration.5 And, with the recent creation of the Space Force, the federal government has emphasized its intent to control strategic regions above the atmosphere, to ensure that “American security is attended to” as the nation’s “private pioneers . . . cultivate the vast new expanses” of outer space.6 Observers often imagine that these developments are the culmination of

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the mid-twentieth-century space race, beginning with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 and culminating in the US-crewed missions to the lunar surface, the last of which landed in 1972.7 But this book will suggest that US efforts to exploit the cosmos have a much longer history, a history that dates to the founding of the United States itself. Elected officials, military officers, and nationalists in the United States have long sought to shape the relationship between human beings and the universe. Astronomical language and imagery permeated the political culture of the revolutionary nation and the early republic. The flag of the United States, for instance, has since 1777 featured white stars in a blue field. That year, the revolutionary Congress ordered a flag with stars because it hoped that the thirteen colonies would form a “new constellation” in the firmament of nations. As stars have accumulated—representing states such as Texas, California, and Hawai‘i, which were seized in the aftermath of armed conflicts—the flag has become an iconographic record of settler-colonial expansion.8 But the flag also preserves a particularly astronomical way of understanding the national project. Indeed, the second warship to be built under the constitutional government of the United States would be called the USS Constellation (the first was the United States), and coins minted after the revolution bore the inscription Nova Constellatio, or “New Constellation.”9 The astronomical aspirations of early US nationalists were not merely rhetorical, moreover. Beginning with the administration of George Washington and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, agents of the United States sought to map, measure, predict, and exploit astronomical space as a means of cultivating national prestige, promoting and protecting commerce, and projecting force. In short, many US political leaders sought to make their nation a space power. Today, the phrase “space power” is used by theorists of military strategy to describe the constellation of advantages that accrue to nation-states with the technological ability to map, predict, and exploit forces and bodies in space. Applied to the nineteenth century, the phrase is an anachronism, but a useful one. Space power theorists have concluded, in essence, that the ability to understand, measure, and exploit the universe enables states to project influence through demonstrations of scientific prestige, to economically reward other global actors for cooperation, often through shared commercial advantages, and to project force.10 While contemporary theorists have in mind contemporary technologies—missile defense systems, the Global Positioning System, and so on—the basic tenets of what is now called space power were very much available to nineteenth-century political actors.

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By predicting astronomical events years in advance, nation-states in the late eighteenth and in the nineteenth century could demonstrate their scientific sophistication to other empires or nations, as Vice President John Adams (1735– 1826) tried to do when he sponsored a publication predicting the appearance of a comet in 1789.11 By printing and making commercially available predictions of the future positions of the moon, planets, and stars, governments could enable merchant ships to navigate more effectively, promoting commerce between their citizens and their trading partners. This was one goal of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, a publication produced by the US Navy beginning in 1852 and annually published through the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond.12 And by creating detailed maps of the earth based on precise measurements of celestial reference points, nation-states could prepare more effectively for wars of conquest. This was a strategy the US government pursued in the Cherokee Nation in the 1830s, when the War Department sent small, inconspicuous teams of surveyors and astronomers over the mountains of present-day Georgia and North Carolina to prepare the ground for an army of conquest. That army would have been deployed if the Cherokee people resisted the forced relocation that came to be called the Trail of Tears.13 Space power, as it is understood today, enables a nation-state to cultivate prestige, promote commerce, and project force. If nineteenth-century agents of the United States lacked for this vocabulary, they did not lack for this insight. Star Territory will suggest, then, that the cosmic aspirations of present-day United States nationalists are not recent developments. Efforts to control and exploit the universe have deep roots in the nineteenth century. From John Adams to military explorer John C. Frémont (1813–1890) to astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818–1889), officials and agents of the United States participated in a large-scale effort to map the new nation onto cosmic space, what Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) referred to as “star territory.” Disgusted with the expansion of slavery into Texas, Thoreau predicted a US nation-state that would one day extend its instrumental treatment of the natural and human landscape to the solar system itself, and eventually to the entire universe. For the US state, Thoreau suggested, the cosmos would only ever serve as more “waste land in the West,” suitable for economic exploitation and colonization. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), he writes, “I know that there are many stars, I know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their orbits,—but what are they all worth? They are more waste land in the West,—star territory,—to be made slave States, perchance, if we colonize them.”14 In the 1840s, the danger was remote that other planets or star systems would become, in a literal sense, “slave States.” Unlike in the

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twenty-first-century United States, the US government in the nineteenth century could not send human crews or robotic devices to explore the moon, or Mars, or the remoter reaches of the solar system. But Thoreau recognized the solar system and the universe as a vast ecology. He imagined plants growing not only on the surface of the earth but on “all the planets.”15 He was fascinated by the possibility that Venus—seen in the morning and the evening by human beings over the course of millennia—was “another world,” a whole ecosystem hidden from those on earth by a thick layer of clouds.16 But Thoreau also understood how agents of the US government treated the universe: the land, the oceans, and even cosmic space. To the roving eye of the US military astronomer or commercial surveyor, who relied on celestial observations to navigate, to divide land into parcels of property, or to make military maps, “star territory” was akin to “waste land in the West”—at once empty and exploitable. Of course, like many nineteenth-century critics of empire, Thoreau was implicated in the very projects he critiqued. He was not merely a naturalist and an essayist but also a commercial land surveyor. Evidence suggests, in fact, that he was a better-than-average surveyor, sought after by property owners and one municipality for his ability to produce precise, sophisticated maps of land parcels.17 In 1851, for instance, Thoreau completed the complex measurements outlined in a surveying and navigation textbook popular at the West Point military academy to determine the precise position of true north from his Concord, Massachusetts, home. Thoreau’s observation of the apparent movement of Polaris, or the North Star, enabled him to include these measurements in both his commercial surveys and his more speculative maps of the land around him.18 Like many of the thinkers considered in the pages to follow, Thoreau recognized that the tools of astronomy and measurement were instrumental to the projection of space power and to its unsettlement. He admired and raised money for the radical abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859), who conducted phony surveys of the Kansas Territory to spy on proslavery militants and conducted genuine surveys of the territory to defend the land claims of the indigenous people who lived there.19 Many nineteenth-century dissenters against an emerging regime of US space power nonetheless saw in the tools of astronomy, land surveying, and navigation a means of producing alternatives to that regime. And it is to these dissenters that this book will turn for insight. From the first black publishers in the United States to writers and editors in the Cherokee Nation to the last reigning monarch of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, political actors across the nineteenth century imagined and communicated other ways of understanding and relating to the universe. The Cherokee poet Tso-le-oh-woh would

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caution against a hubristic relation to the cosmos, against dreaming that control of cosmic space would enable the projection of absolute power.20 The Cherokee newspaper editor Elias Boudinot (1802–1839), meanwhile, would frequently reprint articles speculating about life on other planets and musing on the ethics of living in a universe inhabited by conscious, nonhuman beings.21 Black newspaper editors Samuel Cornish (1795–1858) and John Russwurm (1799–1851) considered the meaning of human freedom in a universe that was not just spatially but temporally vast. What might slavery and freedom mean when considered on the almost incomprehensible timescales of the universe itself?22 And Lili‘uokalani (1838–1917)—the constitutional monarch of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and the Ali‘i ‘Ai Moku, or highest-ranking hereditary elite—privately published an account of the creation and development of the universe, giving this printed book as a gift to at least one university, to the Library of Congress, to a scholarly society, and to numerous friends and allies.23 Throughout the nineteenth century, political actors from within and beyond the United States imagined ways of understanding and relating to the universe that were not merely instrumental, not merely a means of projecting space power. Long before the Gemini and Apollo missions, and long before the creation of the Global Positioning System, or GPS, agents of the United States government sought to map and measure the universe as a means of controlling strategic territory in North America and around the world.24 But others in the nineteenth century imagined very different ways of understanding and relating to the cosmos. These dissenting astronomers, scholars, poets, prophets, and printers built far-flung networks through which they could communicate their own accounts of the universe. Recalling their dissent, Star Territory will suggest, is more urgent now than ever. As agents of the United States government embark on the work of a third space age, promoting the commerce of “private pioneers” and defending that commerce through the projection of force, we would do well to recall that there are different ways of understanding, interacting with, and inhabiting the universe.25

Printing the Universe The primary technology of space power during the nineteenth-century American space age was the printed text: the almanac, the map, the star chart. If the midtwentieth-century space race has come to be associated with images of Saturn V rockets, orbiting satellites, and television’s futurist aesthetics in The Jetsons

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(1962–1963) and Star Trek (1966–1969), our recent age has been enabled by similarly visible but more quotidian technologies: the GPS-enabled smartphone, which relies on a network of US military satellites and radio observatories; the commercial rockets of companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin; and the robotic rovers that have explored the surfaces of the moon and Mars.26 But the relationship between the individual, the state, and the cosmos was mediated in the nineteenth century by the printed text far more than by any other technology.27 National power depended on the ability of nationals to navigate across oceans, to map territory, and to tell the time. All of these tasks depended, in turn, on the use of printed texts. Clocks and chronometers were set in accordance to printed predictions about sunrise and sunset. Ocean navigators relied on ephemerides, or printed predictions about the future positions of the moon, planets, and stars, in order to chart a path across what one US Navy officer called the “pathless sea.”28 And rural people, particularly in the early part of the century, got much of their scientific education from commercial almanacs, which were miscellanies of astronomical information, jokes, histories, medicine recipes, and weather predictions.29 Of course, other technologies were important. In the nineteenth century, scientists and inventors made breakthroughs in the development of telescopes and photography, for instance. Over the course of the century, the number of telescopic observatories worldwide would rise from about three dozen to more than two hundred, according to one estimate.30 And the development of photography would enable scientists and members of the public to study in greater detail the surface of the earth’s moon. The first daguerreotype of the moon was taken from an observatory in New York in 1840, and other, similar images would soon follow.31 Despite this, the printed text would remain throughout the century the most important means by which large numbers of people would understand the universe: its current organization, its past, its future, its usefulness to the projection of national power, or its meaning independent of human desires. The findings of telescopic observatories were disseminated through print. Even the first photographs of astronomical bodies made their way to government officials, to other scientists, and to the public through printed books and periodicals.32 The story told in these pages, then, will follow printed texts. From the eighteenthcentury commercial almanac to the first black newspaper to the official Cherokee Almanac to the Hawaiian creation chant, Star Territory will trace how print enabled nineteenth-century people to make sense of the universe in radically divergent ways.

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The story will begin, then, with a popular printed text: the almanac. Chapter 1 will examine the ubiquity of the almanac in the late eighteenth-century United States. In a world of limited access to print, almanacs often provided the only publication consistently available to rural and urban readers, to black sailors, white settlers, Cherokee farmers, and numerous others. As a consequence of this ubiquity, almanacs presented an opportunity to early US nationalists. Agents of the weak, emergent US state attempted to rationalize almanac production. Government surveyor Andrew Ellicott (1754–1820) tried to convince officials to publish a state-sponsored almanac, even while he sought to establish a meridian by which all US mapmakers might make calculations. These efforts failed.33 Almanacs remained commercial. Even more importantly, commercial almanacs provided readers with a means of communing with the universe. Readers kept diaries in their almanacs, recording the deaths of family members or contesting official histories.34 Almanacs enabled a kind of shared experience of the universe—one that was plural, disaggregated, and often personal, but seldom nationalist. More challenges to the dream of a rationalized, state-ordered cosmos came in the form of two publishing projects organized by black community leaders in New York, Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All. Chapter 2 will explore how, by the 1820s, editors and writers such as Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm created a momentary, geographically dispersed print network that linked places like New York, New Orleans, and rural North Carolina. Black people, enslaved or nominally free, were able to read (and hear read aloud) accounts of the origin, future, and present organization of the universe. Across thirty-seven total sites of distribution, black readers encountered a description of the cosmos. They found, moreover, that the natural and political laws of the universe could only be understood as operating across vast timescales. Across such timescales, moreover, these laws might bend toward emancipation and justice, or at the very least augur the inevitable dissolution of US power. At the same time, officials in the new Cherokee Nation—a constitutional state—passed laws mandating the distribution of printed information about the cosmos, and they encouraged Cherokee children to attend missionary schools in order to learn astronomy and surveying.35 Chapter 3 will explore Cherokee efforts to mea sure cosmic space. But it will also examine how these efforts emerged alongside the distribution of other, more traditional ways of understanding a living universe, a place in which the stars themselves were intelligent beings who sometimes visited the earth.36 Facing the encroachment of white settlers who

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depended on legalistic, mathematical measurements of space to justify land theft, Cherokee elected leaders responded by transmitting to their constituents mathematical information about the stars and far older accounts of a living, fully inhabited cosmos. Yet efforts by US officials to more fully instrumentalize the universe continued unabated, and by 1852 the federal government had established an official almanac, an official meridian, and the beginnings of a system for standardizing time and cartography. Chapter 4 explores how a small office of the US Navy, established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and coordinating with civilian astronomers throughout the United States, rationalized geopolitical and cosmic space. The tool they created—the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac—was an unassuming publication. To the untrained observer, it was merely a collection of tables of numbers. But this book represented the most sophisticated set of predictions about the future organization of cosmic space yet made, and it functioned as a kind of astronomical armament for the US Navy and an aid to commercial navigators. Throughout the Civil War, this text would be treated as a weapon: dispatched to far-flung military stations on a moment’s notice, seized from enemy warships and catalogued, and used to plan military operations. During the war and afterward, it would also become a tool of commerce, available to commercial ship owners seeking to navigate more effectively from port to port.37 The American Ephemeris became increasingly important over the century, eventually becoming the global standard for navigation. It shaped how people throughout the world understood their relationship to time and to cosmic space. But other ways of knowing and inhabiting the universe persisted. Chapter 5 explores one such alternative. Following the overthrow of the legal government of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893, the constitutional monarch of the kingdom traveled to Washington, DC, to lobby against the annexation of the Hawaiian archipelago by the United States. During her time there, she completed and published her translation of the Kumulipo, a sacred chant recounting the creation of the universe. In published form, it was a kind of counteralmanac. Instead of predicting the future, it recounted the past. Instead of treating the universe as an instrument of power, it described the universe as a living, embodied set of relations. But, like the American Ephemeris, it was dispatched to agents of a national government (in this case, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i government) and to libraries and scholarly societies. Today, it remains an important document for members of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.38 Star Territory suggests that the deep origins of the US state’s cosmic instrumentalism, from geospatial navigation to the weaponization of space itself, can

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be found in the nineteenth century. It suggests that efforts to rationalize space have flattened difference, erased alternative epistemologies, and enabled agents of the US government to regard the cosmos as an exploitable resource, a place for “private pioneers” to accumulate wealth and for nation-states to project force. But Star Territory also suggests that there are other histories that might point our way to a more complex relationship to the cosmos, one that recognizes the universe not as exploitable “waste land in the West” but as a vast and complex system of which human beings are only a small part.

Remembering the First American Space Age Scholars in the humanities have over the course of the past several decades developed a vocabulary for describing those forms of scientific inquiry—ways of seeking to know the universe—that contrast with the “State science” of governments, universities, and scholarly societies.39 Such alternative modes of inquiry have gone by a number of names: “counter science,” “minor science,” “nomad science,” and even “fugitive science.” The philosophers and cultural historians devoted to developing this terminology have been interested not only in understanding how scientific practices emerged outside of official contexts but in understanding the ways those practices produced new possibilities for understanding human beings and the cosmos. How might we reconsider the emergence of race, for instance, if we understood the work of those black writers who, with varying degrees of formal scientific training, contested scientific racism in the nineteenth century?40 For many scholars, the examination of science’s counterdiscourses has enabled a reexamination of the past, a clarification of how the scientific revolution depended on the knowledge production of indigenous peoples, women, and the enslaved.41 Moreover, studying such “nomad” science has enabled cultural historians and philosophers to reveal that scientific inquiry is shaped by social, political, and economic conditions. Science has never been neutral.42 In the fields of American studies and American literary studies, moreover, a new cohort of scholars has been concerned with fundamental questions about the history of science as it has come down through particular scientific disciplines. Collectively, they have reconfigured how Americanists—those who study American literature and culture—understand nineteenth-century scientists. Sari Altschuler, for instance, has read nineteenth-century medicine as a site of “imaginative experimentation,” a field within which many physicians insisted on “the

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epistemological value” of classics and poetry even as others advocated an increasingly narrow empiricism.43 Britt Rusert, meanwhile, has shown how nineteenthcentury black writers, medical doctors, astronomers, and naturalists—“fugitive” scientists, to use her language—challenged the emerging consensus on the science of race, which would calcify into a pernicious common sense by the early twentieth century.44 Jared Hickman has theorized the emergence of a nineteenthcentury “metacosmography” among black and indigenous thinkers, a mode of theorizing in which “material and ideal, theory and practice, science and religion” can no longer be distinguished.45 And Kyla Schuller and Xine Yao have shown, finally, how the mid-nineteenth-century ideal of “sympathy” remained relevant to late nineteenth-century scientific inquiry.46 While this book will build on the insights of such scholarship, it is nonetheless interested in a narrower set of concerns. Throughout the nineteenth century, agents of the United States sought to use the discoveries of astronomical science to project national power: representationally, commercially, and militarily. Their interest was not in the abstract discoveries of astronomers, per se, but in how such discoveries could be used. This attitude should be familiar. The twentieth-century space race was an effort not merely to make scientific discoveries but to make such discoveries useful to major powers. In November 1962, President John Kennedy (1917–1963) confronted a frustrated NASA administrator, James Webb (1906–1992), with the stark (if now obvious) assertion that the whole point of the lunar program was to demonstrate the superiority of the United States. “Why are we spending seven million dollars on getting fresh water from saltwater, when we’re spending seven billion dollars to find out about space?” Kennedy asked. “Obviously, you wouldn’t put it on that priority except for the defense implications.” 47 Kennedy emphasized to Webb that landing Americans on the moon would show the Soviet Union that, “by God, we passed them.” 48 In the 1960s, performances of scientific prestige had become a key element in the projection of national power. But such demonstrations were also salient a century earlier. President John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) had hoped to answer the discoveries of European observatories with “light for light,” similarly demonstrating the scientific prestige of the United States.49 In 1842, Adams was pleased that the United States had converted its military Depot of Charts and Instruments into a national observatory, called the United States Naval Observatory. And in 1870, twentytwo years after Adams’s death, the Naval Observatory installed under its dome the largest telescope in the world.50 Four years later, a British military astronomer regarded his encounter with this telescope as startling. Expecting to see a

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“Washington Infant,” he described himself and his colleagues as “nearly fainting with astonishment” when confronted by this massive symbol of American space power.51 Moreover, nineteenth-century astronomical discoveries made from the United States—and often organized and paid for by the War Department—were instrumental not merely to the accumulation of national prestige but to the projection of force. Officials in the first presidential administration considered creating a national almanac, which would have assisted land surveyors and ocean navigators.52 By the time of the Civil War, such a national almanac had been funded and published. It was dispatched to naval stations and warships, often in batches of one hundred at a time, and it enabled military officers to coordinate their movements across the vast sweep of the Confederate coastline and inland river system. As a mathematically predictive model of the universe, the American Ephemeris was the forerunner of the Global Positioning System, which today is used to guide drones, submarines, and commercial smartphone users.53 The Ephemeris was a tool for the projection of military force and for the promotion of commerce. It rendered astronomy instrumental to the projection of national power, commercially and militarily. It shaped, moreover, how nineteenth-century people came to understand the universe as a vast, exploitable space—as a kind of “waste land in the West.”54 Of course, not everyone involved in the production and projection of US space power was an unreconstructed imperialist. Indeed, many were motivated by profound curiosity about the natural world or the desire to make ocean travel safer. This divergence of goals occasionally created tension between scientists and the politicians and military officers who employed them. Alexander Dallas Bache (1806–1867), for instance, administered the United States Coast Survey—a forerunner to the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. Bache very much hoped to enhance the prestige of the United States by aligning maps of the US coastline with astronomical measurements. But he also expressed impatience with the narrow instrumentalism of American imperialists who saw in scientific projects only the possibility of rendering American power more efficient. One such imperialist, a congressman, asked Bache repeatedly when he would complete the Coast Survey and cease taking measurements. Bache was reported to have answered, “When will you cease annexing territory?”55 His riposte was funny enough to have been recalled in retrospectives about his life, but it also served to mask the ways in which scientists such as Bache were implicated in national projects about which they were occasionally skeptical. Charles Henry Davis (1807–1877), who as a navy officer would command the US Nautical

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Almanac Office, was an advocate of Bache’s work, outlining its importance to “abstract science” by suggesting that it would enable human beings for the first time to determine the precise contours of the “irregularly elliptical form of the earth,” as well as to understand the earth’s composition and chart its magnetic field.56 Yet Davis also recognized the military implications of Bache’s survey. And, when promoted to the rank of admiral and asked to help plan the naval blockade of the Confederate coastline during the US Civil War, Davis immediately ordered a Coast Survey scientist to join him in the planning process. “Nothing,” Davis wrote, “could have supplied the loss” of that scientist’s knowledge.57 Then as now, scientists and mathematicians expressed motivations different from the political and military leaders who financed their inquiry. Then as now, those scientists and mathematicians were nonetheless implicated in the projection of US power that resulted from their work. Twenty-first-century technology is vastly more sophisticated than that of the nineteenth century, and yet United States strategists and policymakers have continued to regard the universe as an exploitable resource. Their only question has been how it will be exploited, and by whom. Some theorists of space power have been internationalists, arguing for a more robust system of international laws and norms to govern expansion into space. These laws and norms will benefit the United States indirectly by creating what political scientists call universal public goods, such as freedom of navigation and internationally agreed-on protections for orbital property.58 Others have argued for a more aggressive, even at times unilateral, military posture.59 This was arguably the approach of former President Donald J. Trump’s administration, which sought to deploy military power as a means of protecting those “private pioneers”—or US corporations and their investors—who sought commercial advantage in space.60 Few theorists of space power, however, question the underlying assumption that the United States should seek to control regions above the earth’s atmosphere. All, in short, regard space as exploitable. By restoring a long history of the United States as an aspiring space power, Star Territory reveals that underlying assumptions about the exploitability of the cosmos have been produced through a long history of settler-colonial practices. The language of “private pioneers” and of the space “frontier”—now used to justify efforts to exploit the region above the earth’s atmosphere—did not emerge suddenly in the twenty-first century, nor even in the twentieth. This language is, instead, part of a longstanding project to map, measure, and use various spaces: oceans, land, and the cosmos itself. By calling attention to the violence implicit in a project of instrumentalizing space, this book will suggest that

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contemporary efforts to seize strategic orbital positions or to claim the resources of near-Earth bodies depend on the very logic that animated the nineteenthcentury scramble for star territory. But this book will also suggest that there are alternative ways of understanding the relationship between human beings and the universe. Numerous writers across the nineteenth century—from Cherokee poets to black newspaper editors to the Hawaiian monarch—regarded the universe as a set of relations and forces. The universe, for many of these writers, unfolded irrespective of human desires across the vast sweep of time. It was peopled and alive, even sacred. Breaking free from the exploitative reasoning that has long characterized efforts by agents of the United States to control star territory requires, this book will suggest, that we cease to treat the cosmos as an instrument of power but instead regard it as a site of meaning, relationality, and life.

Chapter 1

Almanacs in the Astronomical Nation

When a magazine publisher in 1852 thought back on his eighteenth-century childhood in rural Massachusetts, he remembered almanacs. Denied a formal education, separated from the mother whose last name he would legally adopt in adulthood, and apprenticed to a Calvinist farm family whose reading matter other wise included only a Bible and religious tracts like the Day of Doom (1662), Joseph Buckingham (1779–1861) turned to a shelf of some fifty almanacs, dating to the 1720s. With detailed information about harvest times, such pamphlets would have been necessary for farmers. They were equally necessary for sailors, government officials, surveyors, or just about anybody who wanted to know the exact time or predict the weather. Yet Buckingham was drawn to them for another reason. The almanacs were literary. “These periodicals,” he recalled, “I read often, and with never-relaxing interest. They contained many fragments of history, scraps of poetry, anecdotes, epigrams, &c.” Buckingham’s access to literature, like that of many rural readers, was confined to the religious or the practical. But nested in these practical, paper-bound pamphlets, Buckingham found a universe. He explained, “The Declaration of Independence, and many other papers connected with the history and politics of the country, were preserved in these useful annuals. . . . But what excited my especial wonder was the calculations of the eclipses, and prognostications concerning the weather.” Arriving at his apprenticeship without a sense of history, geography, philosophy, or poetry, Buckingham received an education from the yellowing almanacs on the shelf. A small collection of inexpensive pamphlets shaped his sense of things—from natural laws to human laws, from the passage of history to the passage of seasons.1 In finding a worldview through the almanac, Buckingham was not unique. By many measures, the almanac was the single most important print genre of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. European states would capitalize

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Table 1. Almanac Imprints as a Percentage of Total US Imprints, 1789–1800 Year

Total Imprints

Almanac Imprints

Almanacs as Percentage of Total

1789 1790 1791 1792 1793 1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 Total

853 1,105 1,053 1,220 1,371 1,822 1,878 1,905 1,718 1,944 1,719 2,363 18,951

70 85 81 87 80 86 97 106 95 94 113 121 1,115

8.2% 7.7% 7.7% 7.1% 5.8% 4.7% 5.2% 5.6% 5.5% 4.8% 6.6% 5.1% 5.9%

Note: The total number of imprints does not reflect the total number of copies produced in a given year. Indeed, almanac imprint statistics can be particularly misleading because almanacs were produced in far larger print runs than other texts. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, reported that he printed 10,000 copies per year of Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–1765). Source: North American Imprints Program, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

on this importance by printing official, government editions of these texts. In North America, almanac production was entirely commercial but no less important. Indeed, it might have been more important, as almanacs provided virtually the only secular reading material for rural people like the young Joseph Buckingham. Of all the remaining printed texts from the late eighteenth-century United States, roughly six percent are almanacs (see Table 1). Almanacs have survived in such great numbers because they were steady sellers, and printers produced them in higher quantities than Bibles. Moreover, as the Buckingham story indicates, old almanacs remained important. By reprinting public documents (like the Declaration of Independence) and beloved literature (those “scraps of poetry”), almanac makers rendered their products invaluable to readers long after their celestial prognostications had become a distant memory.2 Yet the commercial popularity of the almanac challenged those attempting to build a nation in the years after the revolution. Cosmic publications in North America, such as the almanac, were at once radically local and radically universal. They were seldom national. Their pages referred to tides or planetary motion from this place at this time. Readers of almanacs in the United States found

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a universe—political, moral, and natural—over which the emergent federal state had little control. In Europe, states shaped widespread assumptions about the universe and the political forces that might rationalize it. Readers of the British government’s Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris (1766– 1958) found a thoroughly calculable cosmos. Page after page contained tables of astronomical movements, explained and approved by high-ranking government officials.3 The same can be said for the French government’s Connaissance des Temps ou des Mouvements célestes (Knowledge of Time or the Celestial Motions) (1679–1983).4 Had Buckingham encountered one of these official almanacs, he would have had little to ponder but mathematical formulae and the authority of the state. From the legalese of their introductions to the ordered tables describing distance, celestial movement, and time, state almanacs enabled European empires to calibrate their dominion over geopolitical space. Navies navigated by them. Land was surveyed and subdivided with reference to their pages. And official time was ordered in accordance with their methods. By contrast, popular North American almanacs presented readers with a radically local, often mysterious universe. Officers of the new federal government of the United States hoped to centralize information about the cosmos. The official surveyor of Washington, DC, for instance, called for the longitude of the US Capitol to be established as the national prime meridian, a kind of mathematical center of the universe for navigators and mapmakers. In his letter to Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Andrew Ellicott explained, “It would be very well when the longitude of the City of Washington is more accurately settled by a sufficient course of observations,” and he called for “an American gazetteer [to be] published, in which the longitudes should be reckoned east, and west from the capitol.”5 The problem—for nationalists such as Ellicott, at least—was that most North American almanacs reckoned time and position relative to Greenwich, based on data from the British Nautical Almanac. Ellicott believed that Washington, not Greenwich, should provide citizens of the United States with a cosmic starting point. While Jefferson supported such a move, the disorganization of the new federal government produced confusion and delay. Congressional leaders would not order the production of an official almanac until 1849. But Ellicott was hardly the only nationalist to believe that the United States needed to print and circulate cosmic information. John Adams, navy administrator Francis Hopkinson (1737– 1791), Congressman Timothy Pitkin (1766–1847), and many others would agree that the United States needed to rationalize and regulate the stars, particularly through printing.6

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Fulfillment of the dream of a state-ordered cosmos, however, would be a long time coming. In the meantime, the politics of almanac production became more confused, not less. Throughout the 1790s, farmers, navigators, and ordinary readers in the mid-Atlantic states began to purchase an almanac calculated not by a government official but by a self-taught astronomer named Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), Ellicott’s assistant in the survey of Washington. For a brief moment in that decade, Banneker’s almanacs were among the most widely published in the United States (Table  2). Meanwhile, almanacs calculated by women, Germanlanguage almanacs, and even abolitionist almanacs proliferated.7 As Ellicott was imagining the production of a state-authorized account of the cosmos, dozens of commercial printers were providing American readers with far different—far less state-centered—accounts of the universe. In 1824, government officials were still lamenting the lack of an official meridian in Washington, a condition that ostensibly endangered the “permanent security and independence of this government.”8 The universe, it seems, could not so easily be measured and controlled. Yet early state efforts to shape how individual readers understood the cosmos were a harbinger of later, more successful efforts. Today, US military and commercial power depends on such precise measurements, and the thoroughly rationalized and ordered model of the cosmos provided by the Department of Defense appears continuous with the universe itself. Things were not always thus. And the story of how US power came to depend on a measurable and exploitable cosmos begins with the almanac.

“A Very Astronomical and Learned Nation” The month he was to be sworn in as the first vice president of the United States, John Adams expected to see a comet. In fact, Adams helped to pay for a publication announcing the celestial appearance, an auspicious astronomical event for the first month of the new federal government.9 Since the classical era, comets had been imagined as ill omens for rulers. Plutarch (46–199 CE) linked the appearance of a comet to the death of Julius Caesar (c. 100–44 BCE), and William Shakespeare (bapt. 1564–1616) would invoke this association in the sixteenth century when he wrote a play dramatizing Caesar’s assassination.10 But while the traditional link between the appearance of comets and the deaths of kings had not changed by the late eighteenth century, the ultimate meaning of that association had changed entirely. Revolutions and rebellions had taken on very different associations by this time, and so comets had likewise come to embody new possibilities.11

a

2 — 6 1 1

1789 3 — 9 1 2

1790 2 1 7 1 3

1791 2 3 4 1 3

1792 2 3 3 — 3

1793 4 6 3 — 1

1794 2 1 5 — 1

1795

Imprints per Year — 4 2 — —

1796 — — 3 — —

1797 — — 1 — —

1798

— — 4 — —

1799

— — 3 — 1

1800

Source: North American Imprints Program, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts a In the case of Robert Andrews (c. 1743–1804), I have excluded the 1796 almanac attributed to Andrews by Charles Evans but likely calculated by a different philomath. (See the North American Imprints bibliographic citation.) I have also excluded those almanacs that used Andrews’s calculations but did not attribute the calculations to him. b “Isaac Bickerstaff” was a pseudonym for numerous almanac calculators, sophisticated and amateurish. Bibliographer Charles Evans attributed nearly all of the Bickerstaff almanacs to Benjamin West (1730–1813), but some of these almanacs were calculated by Nehemiah Strong (1729–1807), Eben Warner Judd (1761–1837), Nathan Daboll (1750–1818), and others. In tallying the Bickerstaff almanacs, I have excluded those pamphlets, such as the Weatherwise series, which took their calculations from a Bickerstaff ephemeris but did not credit the source. c “Abraham Hutchins,” or “Father Abraham,” was a pseudonym designed to exploit the popular reputation of the New York state philomath John Nathan Hutchins (1700 or 1701–1782). The actual calculator of the almanac was Andrew Beers (1749–1824).

Robert Andrews Benjamin Banneker Isaac Bickerstaff b Andrew Ellicott Abraham Hutchinsc

Philomath

Table 2. Notable Almanac Calculators, 1789–1799

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If comets augured the deaths of kings, perhaps they equally augured the lives of republics. Perhaps the appearance of a visible comet streaking across the sky as a new president and vice president were inaugurated would bode well for the young, revolutionary nation. There was only one problem: the comet never appeared. Adams likely learned about the comet that never was from a series of newspaper advertisements appearing throughout Massachusetts in 1788 and 1789.12 An astronomer and war veteran named Bartholomew Burges was hoping to publish his cometary prediction, accompanied by a foldout chart that was probably the first accurate-to-scale diagram of a cometary orbit to be published in North America.13 Adams not only subscribed to the publication but invited the amateur astronomer to his home in Braintree. It was there that Adams expressed interest in Burges’s other area of expertise—Asia. Burges described this meeting in a letter to Adams a little more than a year later, writing, “on your understanding that I had been some many years in the East Indies, your Excellency was pleas’d to intimate that you would present to your friends in Congress a memorial if I prepar’d one pointing out the eligibility of the Americans establishing factories in the East Indies and of striking up Commercial treaties with the Indostan, and other Asiatic powers.” Burges would receive sporadic support from the vice president, including an introduction to George Washington (1732–1799). In many ways, this is unsurprising. Burges embodied a set of interlocking possibilities. As an experienced navigator, he might produce charts and open a school to train sailors in the American commercial fleet.14 As a merchant seaman with genuine knowledge of the East Indies, Burges might contribute to the new nation’s mercantile ambitions in Asia. The number of US merchant vessels reaching Canton, for instance, grew more than thirtyfold between 1784 and 1800.15 And, indeed, Burges would go on to write a book about Asia for American traders, copies of which were purchased by both Washington and Adams.16 Finally, as an astronomer, Burges’s calculation of astronomical events coinciding with national events might lend credence to the dream of a stable, revolutionary nation— a paradoxical political formation if ever there was one. Yet the disorganized patronage model of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and plain bad luck ruined these possibilities. With Adams’s assistance, Burges found backers to fund two editions of his book about comets, A Short Account of the Solar System, and of Comets in General (1789).17 Included in this short text was an engraving entitled Soli Deo Gloria / The Solar System Displayed, and dedicated to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Figure 1). With a chart depicting the relative sizes of planets, their annual revolutions, and their diurnal rotations, the engraving was an ambitious work of calculation. Perhaps

Figure 1. This chart predicts the appearance of a comet in April 1789. The predicted comet never appeared, however. The chart is likely the first accurate-to-scale representation of the solar system published in North America. See Bartholomew Burges, A Short Account of the Solar System, and of Comets in General: Together with a Particular Account of the Comet that will Appear in 1789 (Boston: B. Edes & Son, 1789). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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most importantly, the document predicted the appearance of a comet “on or before the 27 of April 1789”—in essence, during the first month of the new federal government’s operation. But the comet never appeared. Burges’s calculations had been correct. They had even been in agreement with those of the British Astronomer Royal.18 The comet had simply vanished. Today, astronomers theorize that this mass of ice and rock, which observers had recorded in 1532 and 1661, broke apart sometime during the seventeenth or eighteenth century. What is thought to be a remnant of the original comet can still be found in an elliptical orbit around the sun (it was last seen in 2002), but finding it would have been beyond the abilities of any eighteenth-century astronomer.19 The actual cosmos was not as predictable a metaphor as nationalists might hope. Things got worse for Burges after that. His business partners pocketed the money from the sale of the book and he took on debt to publish a series of coastal charts for sale in Boston. By 1790, he was broke and reaching out to Adams again for support.20 Burges’s comet is revealing of scientific publication in the late eighteenthcentury United States and of the informal role astronomical study played in US politics. For nationalists such as Adams, the new nation was exceptional in a cosmic sense. Celestial language was ubiquitous among the cohort of early leaders. Most obviously, boosters described the new United States as having emerged from a “revolution,” an astronomical metaphor connoting a return to older orders. This formulation, as Hannah Arendt pointed out a half century ago, was radically misapplied to the United States, a nation not so much reestablishing an older order but attempting to establish a new one. Yet “revolution” stuck.21 And the astronomical metaphors did not stop there. From 1777 onward, the Continental Congress described the union of the “Thirteen United States” as a “new constellation” in the firmament of nations. Appropriately, the national flag was covered in stars.22 For Thomas Paine (1737–1809), the new nation would be a “primary planet.”23 To navy administrator Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, it would be “a new Planet in the System, called the American Empire.”24 The nation’s first chief executive was widely described as a “polar star,” the guide by which a sovereign people might navigate.25 The authority of the new federal government would travel in a wide “ORBIT,” according to Alexander Hamilton (1755 or 1757–1804).26 The nation’s warships bore names like USS Constellation and its coins bore Latin inscriptions like Nova Constellatio, or New Constellation.27 The aspirations of many eighteenth-century US nationalists were cosmic, even universal, in scope. More critically, numerous US leaders hoped that, through print, they might render cosmic space and time instrumental to national development. John Adams

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was not the only federal official to imagine that the print production and circulation of scientific discoveries might enable the expansion of US power across multiple vectors. For these leaders, the laws of print circulation and social cohesion were as certain as the laws of natural philosophy, or what we would call physics. Americans were drawn together, Thomas Paine wrote, by a force as inexorable as that of “gravitation.”28 After the war, Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) called the emergent postal system the “true nonelectric wire of government.”29 (By “nonelectric,” he meant insulated—in essence, an insulated wire transmitting electrical current.) Indeed, some of the earliest acts of Congress were calibrated to enable the production of a national consciousness through the distribution of print. The Post Office Act of 1792, for instance, admitted newspapers to the mails at a reduced charge. Government reports and speeches were likewise subsidized, and roughly one-quarter of total imprints in the 1790s were official, public documents, which traveled through the mail for free.30 US leaders believed that print production and circulation would be central to both the “Progress of Science” and to national development.31 Comets and pamphlets. Planets and newspapers. Revolution and circulation. Why were US leaders such as Adams concerned with this strange intersection between the universal diffusion of print and the universe itself? I propose two answers. First, the cosmos-in-print enabled the practical control of space and time and as a result promised to unite and regularize a disordered and fragmented nation-state. Printed almanacs, charts, maps, and even star charts enabled surveying operations; ocean, coastal, and river navigation; farming; and military planning. An emergent nationalism predicated on settlement, land “improvement,” and global trade required the widespread diffusion of spatial and temporal information. Print technology provided this, or at least promised to. Second, and much more significantly, the universe provided a sense of the inevitable in a contingent political landscape. More than three decades ago, Benedict Anderson observed that the “dawn of the age of nationalism” in the late eighteenth century “brought with it its own modern darkness.”32 In an era of religious pluralism, political revolution, and doubt, individuals led lives of spiritual uncertainty. At the same time, nationalists invested the idea of the nation with profound, even cosmic, meaning. While nationalism did not displace faith in any simplistic way, an emergent faith in the nation nonetheless took on many of the characteristics of religious devotion. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno made a similar observation when they described the Enlightenment as a reenchantment of ancient institutions for modern purposes.33 Think here of Adams’s comet, the death of kings, and the future of the new republic. Describing the new

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nation’s cosmic dimensions (referring to it as a new constellation, for instance) provided a means of communicating the profound, even spiritual, aspirations of the national project. But many individuals were already making sense of the universe through print, and their conclusions were not necessarily nationalist.

Nation Building as a Practical Enterprise The work of building an empire presents material challenges, not just ideological ones. Print promised to meet and master these challenges. Print was the primary technology by which people in the eighteenth century charted geopolitical and temporal space, and agents of the fragile, emergent state had much to gain by mastering the print circulation of cosmic discourses. To understand why, it helps to consider the role played by the universe—or printed accounts of it, at least— in the daily lives of eighteenth-century people living along the Atlantic coast. Few had access to clocks, and maps were often inaccurate.34 As a result, the easiest and least expensive way to tell time or distance, to predict the weather, or to navigate the ocean was to rely on printed pamphlets, such as almanacs. These pamphlets listed the times for sunrise, sunset, and other astronomical events for a particular location. The New-England Almanack for 1789, for instance, included tables identifying the distance between cities in the United States and Quebec, enabling readers to plan long journeys.35 Farmers relied on almanacs for (typically inaccurate) weather reports.36 For ocean navigators, the possession of an almanac could mean the difference between life and death. From the 1760s onward, the most widespread and inexpensive means of determining one’s position on the earth was called “working lunars,” or the lunar-distance method. To chart time and space in this way, a navigator at sea would observe the moon against the background of stars. By comparing the moon’s position in relation to known stars with what its position should be from the observatory in Greenwich (information available in an almanac), the navigator would be able to determine the difference between the time in Greenwich and the time in his present location. That measurement of temporal difference would give him his precise longitude, or his eastwest distance from the Greenwich observatory. (The problem of latitude, a ship’s north-south position on the earth, had been largely solved by the 1730s with the invention of the octant.)37 With a chronometer, a navigator could carry Greenwich Time aboard ship, but chronometers were expensive. Even worse, they lost seconds or even minutes over the course of a long voyage. Often, even those navigators in possession of a chronometer would check the instrument’s time against

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the lunar-distance method. The well-known South Seas voyages of Captain James Cook (1728–1779) had transformed navigation, in part, because he had insisted on checking the regularity of chronometers against repeated lunar-distance calculations. By continually verifying the accuracy of his instruments, Cook established norms of scientific exploration that would be observed by navigators throughout the following decades. Partly as a consequence of these norms, printed lunar tables remained aboard ships well into the nineteenth century.38 If the United States could control the production and dissemination of cosmic knowledge, it could in theory regularize navigation and time keeping, organize naval and other military operations, and even, it was thought at the time, predict the weather. But the problem for officers of the new federal government was that print distribution was not nearly as even or predictable as it would later become. For many years, scholars of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century “print culture” have argued that the dissemination of print produced the cultural transformations that enabled the rise of nationalism and the nation-state, displacing older forms of empire.39 More recent scholarship has not contested the basic outline of this claim but has revealed that that the distribution of printed texts was far from simultaneous. Often, local printing was idiosyncratic, shaped by a small number of individual printers and their own networks of correspondents. Moreover, printing press availability, mail service, and even literacy varied tremendously from city to city and town to town.40 As a result, the reach and power of the nascent federal state varied, as well. Yet print had significant potential value to the emerging class of US nationalists. If the state could communicate a single, organized model of the new nation, it could organize land settlement, military operations, and time keeping. Andrew Ellicott recognized this potential value when, a dozen years after Burges’s faulty comet prediction, he suggested to Thomas Jefferson that “It would be very well when the City of Washington is more accurately settled by a sufficient course of observations . . . to have an American gazetteer published, in which the longitudes should be reckoned east, and west from the Capitol.” 41 This suggestion was no mere lark on Ellicott’s part. As the official surveyor for the city of Washington, Ellicott had attempted to establish the longitude of the national capital in his first printed map of it. (As the result of a printing error, the map included two different sites of zero longitude, rendering it useless for coordinated navigation.)42 In many ways, Ellicott would have been the ideal astronomer for such a project. His astronomical observations would settle the border between the United States and Spanish Florida in accordance with the Treaty of San Lorenzo, and it would be Ellicott who trained Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) on

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surveying techniques before the latter departed for his now-famous expedition through the Louisiana Territory—the colonization rights to which were purchased from France in 1803.43 Ellicott recognized the importance of printed, astronomical information to the project of nation building. The United States would not print anything like Ellicott’s proposed “gazetteer” for another half century, and yet one can catch a glimpse of what the astronomer had in mind from a thirty-six-page almanac Ellicott privately printed in Baltimore in 1792. Unlike his earlier series of commercial almanacs, Ellicott calculated this pamphlet from the new capital. It was, he wrote to George Washington at the time, intended to “assist other (laudable) endeavours [sic], in bringing the City of Washington into Public notice.” 44 Lest there be any doubt about Ellicott’s ambitions, the title page reveals his hope that the federal state might rationalize—perhaps even govern—the cosmos. The almanac’s title, in full, reads, ELLICOTT’s New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia ALMANAC, and Ephemeris, for the Year of our LORD 1793; Being the First after Leap Year, the Seventeenth of American Independence, and the Fifth Year of our Federal Government—Which May be the GOVERNOR of the World proper!45 The grammatical slippage (is the new federal government the governor of the world proper, or is this almanac?) hardly matters. By describing the federal government as continuous with the “World proper,” and by mapping the cosmic center of the universe onto the political center of US power, Ellicott attempted to bring the state and the cosmos together into a single, rationalized artifact of print production. Washington shall provide a cosmic and political point from which readers would make calculations of space, time, or politics. Ellicott’s almanac suggests, moreover, that such calculations (or perhaps even the state that enables such calculations) will be the governor of the entire world.

Cosmic Nationalism as a Spiritual Project Grandiose claims about world governance reveal the second, far less practical reason that nationalists might attempt to seize control of cosmic space through the production of print, and why political leaders such as John Adams might promote the prediction of a national comet. The printed cosmos was already a fundamental part of how numerous people lived their everyday lives, in ways quotidian and spiritual. Nationalists, Ellicott especially, hoped that the state might mediate between individuals and their sense of the universe. Maps, charts, and scientific treatises might be part of this project, but no genre was more important than the almanac.

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On land or at sea, almanacs were ubiquitous. The “old Almanack” became an easy metaphor for any out-of-date ephemera. Abigail Adams (1744–1818) was particularly fond of describing unsent or unreceived letters in this way. “It is a long time since I wrote to you, or rather since I sent a Letter, for an unfinished one has lain by so long that like an old Almanack it is out of date,” she wrote in 1808 to her daughter-in-law, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams (1775–1852).46 The “old Almanack” functioned as a referent for Adams and others because many people kept their out-of-date astronomical pamphlets close at hand. Remember Joseph Buckingham’s farmhouse apprenticeship. Almanacs were collecting on the shelf there for a half- century, at least. Extant almanacs, moreover, show evidence of the close, daily engagement people had with them. Often, readers would leave inky scratches on their pages as they tested a writing implement. Others would record natural events in almanacs, contradicting the predictions of the texts themselves. The minister Amariah Frost (b. 1750) kept a meteorological log in his copy of Bickerstaff’s New-England Almanack for 1787. He noted “Terrible Hurricanes” between August 15 and 20 of that year, when the almanac had predicted “pleasant weather.” 47 Almanacs were often close by—on desks, hanging on the wall, or up on a shelf—and they functioned as the principal technology by which people made sense of the natural world. For many elites committed to the prospect of a national literature or a national culture, the ubiquity of almanacs (in that everybody seemed to have them lying around) and the radical locality of almanacs (in that they were calculated for a particular place, rather than for the entire nation) represented a challenge. The novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) observed, “A stranger who should meet, in every hovel, with a book, in which the relative positions of the planets, the diurnal progress of the sun in the zodiac, [and] the lunar and solar eclipses” were described, “would be apt to regard us as a very astronomical and learned nation.” The ubiquity of almanacs suggested to Brown a plan that might render them instrumental to social cohesion. If custom has determined that almanacs shall be in the home of every family, Brown explains, then the almanac itself can serve as a powerful, nationalist publication. If the most popular literature in the United States is almanac literature, then almanac literature should be nationalist in its scope and politics.48 But even if people throughout the new United States owned almanacs, the pamphlets would remain radically local phenomena, calculated by local philomaths and sold regionally. Indeed, for many, almanacs were highly individual. Readers would often interleave them with blank pages, keeping personal diaries alongside printed astronomical ones. Almanac owners not only contested

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Figure 2. Christopher Columbus Baldwin (1800–1835) kept a diary in his copy of the New England Farmer’s Almanac (Boston: Thomas G. Fessenden, 1828). On April 24, he recorded the death of his mother, Abigail Ware Force (1768–1828). The next day, he recorded her burial. On the opposite page, the almanac notes historical events, such as the birth of Oliver Cromwell. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

weather predictions and made their own reports of the natural world in these diaries, but they also kept daily records of their lives. Christopher C. Baldwin (1800–1835) recorded the death of his mother in a copy of the New England Farmer’s Almanac for 1829 (Figure 2). On the page for April, he writes, “24. On Friday morning twenty minutes before dawn she dies without a strug gle.” For the next day, he writes, “The remains of my mother are deposited in the family Tomb. Her maiden name was Abigail Ware Force, born at New Braintree 16th of June 1768.” On the opposite page, under the heading “memorable days,” the almanac notes,

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“25 / Oli. Cromwell, bn. 1599.” Through the almanac-diary, Baldwin mapped his mother’s life and death onto public history. He also mapped his own life onto the natural world. At the bottom of the page, under an entry for April 30, he writes that the month “has been unusually cold: old men say there has been nothing like it since 1794.” 49 Through Baldwin, this copy of the New England Farmer’s Almanac now provides a lived and natural history that is accurate, human scale, and spiritually meaningful. A text that was intended to provide a record of the future (of next year’s weather and next year’s sunrises), and only incidentally provided a record of the public past (Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599), now provides a record of life and death as experienced by human beings. Baldwin, along with numerous others, located himself through print and script in geographic space, in time, and in the natural world. A day-to-day perspective that brought together the complete cosmos—from celestial movements to meteorological changes, from public history to the lived experiences of individuals—might have offered literary nationalists (such as Charles Brockden Brown) and political nationalists (such as John Adams) the possibility of a totalizing national literature. In reality, however, astronomical publications remained regional and universal. The scale of the almanac’s subject matter was a bad fit for the project of a national literature. The inadequacy of the almanac as a national genre, moreover, is best emblematized by the publications of Benjamin Banneker. A self-taught astronomer living in rural Maryland, Banneker would go on to produce one of the most widely circulated almanacs of the 1790s. Many readers throughout the mid-Atlantic states would come to recognize the universe as discernable, even controllable, by this man. While Ellicott predicted a future of state-authorized world governance through astronomical print, while Brown hoped for a nationalist almanac literature, and while Burges predicted the appearance of a comet overhead during the presidential and vice presidential inaugurations, the reality of the printed cosmos was far different. Successful commercial almanacs, such as Banneker’s, unsettled the dream of a state-rationalized order. And it is to Banneker’s almanac that the next section of this chapter turns.

Benjamin Banneker’s Cosmos In 1794 and early 1795, the most widely republished North American almanac was that of Benjamin Banneker. It was also one of the most reliable. One study of eighteenth-century almanacs found that Banneker’s calculations were more

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accurate even than those of Andrew Ellicott, who had been described at the time by one university president as a “better qualified” astronomer than anybody “upon the Continent.”50 While it would be impossible to know precisely how many copies of Banneker’s almanacs circulated, the scope of their distribution was formidable. Banneker’s first publisher likely printed 4,000 copies of the first edition, for instance, and the Banneker almanacs were distributed across at least seven states in eighteen separate editions.51 For an almanac, such distribution was merely above average, but almanacs were among the most widely reproduced publications at the time. Major London publishers in the 1790s were producing novels in print runs of, at most, 750 copies. Meanwhile, the “first best-selling” American novel, Charlotte Temple (1791/1794), appeared in just two editions the year Banneker’s almanac appeared in six.52 Banneker’s pamphlets, in short, were no mere curiosity. They were, instead, among the most popular and accurate celestial guides in the United States. They were purchased by social elites, including the physician and a signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush.53 And copies of Banneker almanacs likely hung by “packthread” in the homes of many farmers and laborers throughout the mid-Atlantic.54 Most shockingly for readers of this almanac, Benjamin Banneker was a black man. The proliferation of Banneker’s almanacs, I suggest, reveals the radical limits of an effort—by Adams, Burges, Jefferson, Ellicott, and others—to organize the state’s relationship to geopolitical space and time. Banneker would become a significant symbol of black intellectualism in his own time, and as a symbol he would shape the work of black writers, activists, and even scientists throughout the decades following his death. Noting his later importance, one scholar has referred to the first half of the nineteenth-century as the “Banneker Age.”55 Despite his significance in later abolitionist thought, however, Banneker’s almanacs did not reveal a coherent, antinationalist cosmic vision. In fact, the opposite was true. Banneker’s almanacs were unruly. The politics of each varied because different printers published different editions. But the political unruliness of the almanacs nonetheless revealed the limits of a US effort to describe and regulate space and time. Only a year before the publication of Banneker’s first pamphlet, the United States Congress had limited citizenship through naturalization to “ free white” people.56 The national project was to be a racial project, representatives declared through this law. These leaders, moreover, hoped that the astronomical dimensions of US power would enable their national project to succeed. A few months after the Naturalization Act, under orders from the same federal government, Andrew Ellicott used his

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astronomical expertise to establish a line of longitude running through the site of the future US Capitol, a meridian from which surveyors would map newly acquired land.57 It is no accident that US political leaders had described their nation-state in cosmic terms—the “primary planet,” the “new constellation,” the “new Planet in the System, called the American Empire.” What might it mean, then, that one of the most accurate accounts of celestial movement, from planetary orbits to the moon’s phases to the tides, came from a black man descended from formerly enslaved Africans? In practice, the proliferation of Banneker’s almanacs revealed that a black astronomer had the power to describe the cosmos: its scope, dimensions, and temporality. That Banneker’s almanacs varied in their politics from edition to edition hardly mattered. The figure of a black astronomer anchored each pamphlet. As a result, readers encountered a radical challenge to an emerging racial project that had been justified in cosmic, even universal, terms. Despite the radical challenge to US power represented by the Banneker almanacs, however, the astronomer himself was typically ventriloquized. The Banneker persona served as an “author-function,” a recognizable marker that readers could plausibly associate with the author. Printers variously positioned this persona as a dutiful imperial functionary, as a savant with insight into the workings of the cosmos, and as an antinationalist prophet. Readers encountered a highly mediated version of “Benjamin Banneker” for two reasons. First, printers usually controlled the content of almanacs. They chose the essays, poems, and even monetary exchange tables that appeared in these pamphlets. Those who actually calculated almanacs—the so-called philomaths, such as Banneker or Benjamin West (1730–1813)—sent their calculations to the printer, who then compiled other important texts to include in the final, published pamphlet. Second, the abolitionist printers who promoted Banneker’s astronomical findings actually suppressed his writing. The only text he explicitly requested be included in his almanac, a poem protesting the enslavement of Africans, was not published in his lifetime.58 Moreover, much of the writing that ostensibly came from Banneker was actually written by others. Despite these acts of ventriloquism, however, the Banneker almanacs represented a radical challenge to the dream that astronomers such as Ellicott might shape a nationalist cosmos.

Banneker as an Agent of the State Although Banneker came to confound the US imperial project, he was initially a part of it. Born free in November 1731 to a mixed-race mother and a West Af-

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rican father, Banneker was a landowner by age five.59 His father, possibly concerned that Benjamin would not be able to inherit because of restrictive racial laws in Maryland, included the five-year-old boy’s name on the 1737 indenture of purchase for a 529-acre farm. By age twenty-two, Benjamin Banneker had gained local notoriety for having taught himself the mathematical method of double position, a substitution for algebra, and having designed and built a wooden clock based on his examination of a pocket watch.60 But the major transformation in Banneker’s life occurred when a mill and a general store were established on the nearby Patapsco River in 1771. George Ellicott (1760–1832), one of the mill’s founders, was an amateur astronomer and cousin to would-be national almanac calculator Andrew Ellicott.61 Through the Ellicott family, Banneker was gifted or loaned books on astronomy, including James Ferguson’s Easy Introduction (1759), Charles Leadbetter’s Compleat System (1728), and the Tables of Tobias Mayer (1752, English 1755). He also received astronomical equipment, including a telescope and a worktable. From this beginning, Banneker trained himself to calculate a complete ephemeris, or a total predictive map of the movements of celestial bodies in the solar system for the coming year. In 1791, when George Washington ordered Andrew Ellicott to survey land near the Potomac River for what would become the United States capital, George Ellicott recommended Banneker for the position of assistant to his cousin.62 Banneker first came to the attention of the state, then, as a potentially useful imperial functionary. As Ellicott’s assistant, his task was to take measurements with a zenith sector—a kind of telescope that pointed at the sky directly overhead. This particular zenith sector had been made by the famed astronomer David Rittenhouse (1732–1796), and it was probably the most accurate scientific instrument in North America at the time. By peering through this device, and by referencing a regulator clock, Banneker was able to note the exact time when particular stars passed near the zenith, or the point in the sky directly above an observer. Banneker took these measurements six or seven times a night, repeated this process several nights in a row, and then averaged and corrected his observations. By this means, Banneker and Ellicott were able to determine the precise longitude of particular locations in the District of Columbia.63 In short, the observation of stars, with reference to a precise measurement of time, enabled these agents of the state to reorder space. This reordering, moreover, was made manifest materially.64 The first stone marker in the district, for instance, was set in a place called Jones Point in an April 15, 1791, ceremony, which Banneker most likely attended. Celebrants poured corn, wine, and oil over the stone marker to commemorate the “uncommon events which have given America a name among

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the nations.” 65 The chief celebrant treated the stone as synecdotal: as the representative part of a larger, imagined whole under which “even the Savage of the Wilderness” would take “shelter.” 66 The authority of the state had given material form, a stone marker, to an imaginary demarcation of physical space and time. Standing near the banks of the Algonquian-named Potomac River, celebrants were invited to imagine the marker as the first stone in an imperial structure, the cornerstone of the coming cosmic empire. Although Banneker served as an imperial functionary, his role as agent of the state would be obscured—for white readers, at least—by his race. Nearly all of those who responded to Banneker in script and print fixated on his blackness and not on his constitutive role in helping to build a US empire. Banneker burst into public view late in 1791. Possibly urged on by abolitionist allies, Banneker wrote in August to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, transmitting a copy of his ephemeris for the following year and holding himself up as an example of black intellectual ability. He urged Jefferson and others to “wean yourselves from those narrow prejudices which you have imbibed with respect to” black people.67 Most strikingly, Banneker positions himself in this letter as one capable of becoming “Acquainted with the Secrets of nature” through mathematics and celestial observation. Banneker’s letter is fulsome and eloquent in its demand for political and intellectual recognition, and it would be through the publication of this letter that Banneker came to public notice. Strikingly, Jefferson’s response to this letter attempts to subsume Banneker’s work into the operations of the state. Nearly a decade earlier, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781/1783), Jefferson had acknowledged the existence of black poets and writers but had suggested that the dearth of black mathematicians demonstrated the intellectual inferiority of black people. He wrote, “I think one [black person] could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.”68 When confronted by a black mathematician and astronomer who was very much capable of “comprehending” Euclidian geometry, Jefferson changed his approach. He praised Banneker’s accomplishment and asserted his own commitment to finding “proofs” that “nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men.” 69 Why did he do this? One answer might be found in Jefferson’s subsequent letter to the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), in which the secretary of state takes credit for having discovered Banneker. Jefferson writes, “I procured him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city.”70 This was technically true, but only in the most legalistic sense. In his official capacity as secretary of state, Jefferson had been in charge of the Washington surveying operation. But George

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Ellicott, not Jefferson, had recommended Banneker to the director of the survey. And Andrew Ellicott, that director, had hired the Maryland astronomer. Nonetheless, Jefferson reads in Banneker’s accomplishment a story about the cosmic independence of a new nation and its emerging scientific power. Others would understand the Maryland astronomer’s accomplishments very differently. Early in 1792, abolitionist Philadelphia printer Daniel Lawrence (d. 1812) published Banneker’s letter and Jefferson’s reply in the form of a pamphlet, which was then reprinted in the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine.71 At the same time, and at the urging of abolitionist James Pemberton (1723–1809), the Baltimore printer William Goddard (1740–1817) published Banneker’s first almanac. In the course of a few months, the obscure amateur astronomer became a nationally recognized challenge to the emerging science of black inferiority. By the end of 1792, news of the new almanac and its author had spread from Maryland to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire.72 By 1796, at the latest, Banneker’s name was known in South Carolina.73 By 1799, news of Banneker had traveled as far as Hamburg, Germany.74 Reactions to the American astronomer varied. For some, he represented a profound challenge to Jefferson’s claim of white racial superiority. The Georgetown Weekly Ledger suggested that Banneker’s abilities “clearly prove that Mr. Jefferson’s” racial theories are “without foundation.”75 Others, by contrast, were enraged by news of Banneker’s accomplishments but even more enraged by Jefferson’s accommodating reply to them. South Carolina Congressman William Loughton Smith (1758–1812) asked, “What shall we think of a secretary of state thus fraternizing with negroes, writing them complimentary epistles, stiling them his black brethren, congratulating them on evidences of their genius, and assuring them of his good wishes for their speedy emancipation?”76 Smith’s characterization of the exchange between Jefferson and Banneker was far from the mark. Jefferson did not need to wish Banneker well on his “speedy emancipation,” for instance, because the latter man had never been enslaved. These responses to Banneker’s sudden publicity reveal a shared horizon of possibility. Few understood Banneker as an imperial functionary, sponsored and enabled by agents of the nascent federal state. The oversight is striking, considering Banneker’s instrumental role in establishing the dimensions of the capital city. Although self-taught, Banneker’s expertise was nonetheless enabled by state agents, such as Andrew Ellicott. And Banneker’s work was instrumental to establishing the cosmic independence of the United States. Banneker and Ellicott had established a national meridian, which would have aided in the production of maps and almanacs had not printing errors and government disorganization

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prevented the dissemination of their data. For most readers, however, Banneker was defined by his blackness. And blackness was associated—for many white readers, at least—with threats to national stability and cohesion.

The Intellectual Life of “Dark Bodies” It was Banneker’s persona—not only an astronomer but a black astronomer— that enabled his Federalist and abolitionist backers to amplify their critique of US politics by speaking through him. Printers typically represented their almanac calculators as fictionalized personae. Most famously, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) invented the character of “Poor Richard,” or “Richard Saunders,” to be the ostensible philomath for his popular series of Philadelphia almanacs. Other almanac personae proliferated, as well. The seemingly ubiquitous eighteenth-century philomath, Isaac Bickerstaff, was long believed to have served as a front for almanac calculator Benjamin West, but recent scholarship has revealed that printers also attributed the “Bickerstaff” name to calculations by Nehemiah Strong (1729–1807), Eben Warner Judd (1761–1837), and Nathan Daboll (1750–1818).77 Almanacs required an astronomer, but that astronomer was very often fictional. In Banneker’s case, conditions were somewhat different. The calculations remained stable from almanac to almanac. A historical person named Benjamin Banneker really had completed the calculations for each pamphlet. But the printers of the almanacs compiled their own collections of essays, poems, historical documents, and tables of monetary exchange. The average reader might easily have believed that “Benjamin Banneker’s Almanack” contained Benjamin Banneker’s writing, but she would have been mistaken in nearly every instance. Banneker wrote none of the prose to appear in his almanacs, aside from his frequently reprinted letter to Jefferson. Instead, printers and members of abolitionist societies selected the prose and poetry for each publication. James Pemberton (1723–1809) was the first of these editors. In September 1791, Pemberton coordinated with Baltimore printer William Goddard to publish the first edition of Banneker’s almanac, an edition that included an unattributed essay on extraterrestrial life in the universe and another on the nature of time itself.78 While other essays in the pamphlet were attributed to specific authors or publications, essays on those subjects about which an astronomer might well be expected to have expertise were included without reference to their authors or

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sources. In short, less sophisticated readers could easily have attributed these scientific essays to Banneker. And what did “Benjamin Banneker” write? The Banneker persona warned of life on other planets and predicted that the new US republic would come to a bloody and ignominious end. Printers, beginning with William Goddard, put words in Banneker’s mouth. The result was a speaking astronomer who warned of an inhabited universe and of the smallness, even the meanness, of the US nation-state’s cosmic aspirations. “Banneker’s” universal perspective began with the very first issue of the almanac, in which Goddard and his partner, James Angell (1761–1797), printed an unattributed excerpt from an essay by English theologian James Hervey (1714–1759). Very likely, the printers cribbed this essay from a version that appeared nearly four decades before in London’s Universal Magazine. In Banneker’s almanac, however, Hervey’s meditation on the cosmos would take on a very different character. Hervey warns of mysterious “dark bodies” orbiting in the heavens, of “intellectual life” on other planetary worlds, and of the overwhelming smallness of human political affairs. “That which we alternately call the morning and the evening star,” the almanac explains of the planet Venus, “is a planetary world, which with the four others, that so wonderfully vary their mystic dance, are in themselves dark bodies, and shine only by reflection; have fields, and seas, and skies of their own, are furnished with all accommodations for animal subsistence, and are supposed to be the abodes of intellectual life; all which, together with our earthly habitation, are dependent on that grand dispenser of divine munificence, the sun.”79 The essay, which appeared on the page immediately following Banneker’s detailed calculations of celestial movement, suggests to the reader not only that “dark bodies”—planets—are tracing unseen orbits through the cosmos; it also suggests that the universe is full of inhabitable spaces. The planet Venus, like the other planets in the solar system, has “all accommodations for animal subsistence.” Yet these planets are not exploitable. At Jones Point, those sanctifying the first stone marker in the District of Columbia had hoped that they were planting the cosmic cornerstone of a continental empire, one that would bring even the “Savage of the Wilderness” under its dominion.80 Yet the radically different territorial configuration of the planet Venus, at least as described by “Benjamin Banneker,” challenges the dream of settler-colonial dominion. Yes, the universe is full of exploitable fields, seas, and skies, and yet these spaces are already the “abodes of intellectual life.” The “dark bodies” of the cosmos contain dark bodies of their own—intellectual beings,

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perhaps staring back through telescopes at the people of the earth with discernment and calculation. Context matters, and Hervey’s essay took on different valences when Goddard and Angell presented it as the work of the first black astronomer in the United States. In the middle of the eighteenth century, James Hervey had mused about the potential for intelligent life on other worlds, and his thinking had been in line with a long tradition of hypothetical writing that ran from the seventeenthcentury French intellectual Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) through Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).81 Each of these thinkers, and others, had mused about the potential of “intellectual life” elsewhere in the universe. But such suggestions take on a different cast when they appear to come from the pen of the first black astronomer in the United States. Banneker’s almanacs circulated at the edge of the Enlightenment intellectual tradition. The almanac, after all, was as quotidian as it was ubiquitous. And yet Banneker’s ostensible writing cut with a different kind of edge, a critical edge, when it seemed to suggest that cosmic empire was a structural impossibility. The Banneker/Hervey essay warns, in particu lar, about the irrelevance of human-scale military power. As a thought experiment, the author considers what it might mean to fire a cannon at another world: “a ball, shot from the loaded cannon, and flying with unabated rapidity, must travel at this impetuous rate almost seven hundred thousand years, before it could reach the nearest” star.82 Hervey’s point is prosaic, at least from a contemporary perspective. The universe is vast, and we should regard political violence from the perspective of that vastness. Essentially, this would be Carl Sagan’s point in his famous first chapter to Pale Blue Dot (1994). Considering a photograph of the earth taken by the Voyager spacecraft in February 1990, Sagan writes, “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that . . . they could become the momentary masters of that fraction of a dot,” that “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”83 Politics matter far less, in other words, when considered from a universal perspective. But Banneker had been an agent of US nationalism. He had been trained by astronomer Andrew Ellicott and had calculated the exact position of Jones Point—the cornerstone of the cosmic empire. And this state functionary, whose loyalty was made ambiguous by his blackness, was now warning of an inhabited universe and of the uselessness of artillery. It is not clear why Goddard and Angell chose Hervey’s essay to include in the almanac, but one can make an informed guess. The Banneker/Hervey warning echoed latent anxieties that were already circulating among the early astronomical nationalists in the United States. If cosmic language—the “new

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constellation,” the “polar star”—functioned as a means of expressing nationalist certainty, then speculation about otherworldly life provided a means of expressing uncertainty about the project of empire. At the time, other agents of the new United States were likewise concerned about the movements of dark bodies, both across the North American continent and throughout the solar system. Consider, for instance, Boston astronomer Bartholomew Burges. In addition to predicting the appearance of a comet that did not arrive in time for the presidential inauguration and warning of the perfidiousness of Asian potentates, Burges had pondered the possibility of intelligent life in the cosmos, particularly on comets. In his short pamphlet on comets, Burges added two warnings. First, he wrote, comets occasionally pass close to planetary bodies or even collide with them, causing floods and fires that could kill thousands, perhaps millions. “Comets,” he warns, “are capable of doing great injury to the planets.” Second, these comets might be inhabited by intelligent beings with great knowledge about the workings of the universe, particularly because the cosmos is “more plainly to be observed” from the extensive orbit of a comet than from the narrow orbit of a planet like the earth.84 While Burges’s detailed diagram of a cometary orbit had illustrated the auspiciousness of astronomical phenomena and the tremendous scientific power of a US astronomer, the content of Burges’s pamphlet revealed deep uncertainties about the ability of human beings to understand the cosmos— uncertainties that might well have been confirmed when the long-anticipated presidential comet never appeared. Banneker’s printers played on widespread doubt about the fate of the new republic. One Baltimore printing firm, for example, published a Banneker almanac that prophesied the destruction of the United States. The “Banneker” of this almanac reads national doom in the heavens. He predicts, IN North-America there shall arise Three forms of government—the first most wise, Shall spread its influence like the cheering sun, Whilst it is governed by a WASHINGTON— The second (like a star) less glorious will appear: The third (and last) a bloody robe shall wear.85 The astronomer persona not only warns about uncertainty surrounding the emergent US political system; he warns, also, that national instability is legible to those who read the firmament. George Washington is like the sun: central, illuminating. But his successor will be like a star: cooler, more distant. Here the

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astronomical metaphor collapses. The third president shall wear a “bloody robe.” The national project will fail, according to the fictitious Banneker persona, and it will fail in a deluge of blood. With such predictions circulating at the time, contemporary readers should not be surprised that, after Banneker’s death, the astronomer came to be associated with the occult.86

Black Astronomy as Popular Literature Banneker and Ellicott had worked together to lay out the dimensions of the US capital, to establish a line of meridian through the Capitol Building, and to locate the center of the emerging US nation-state in geographic space and in time. Both had also calculated almanacs. Yet Ellicott’s almanac for 1793—the “GOVERNOR of the World proper”—was of limited reach.87 Ellicott privately published it in a single edition. Few readers remarked on it. By contrast, Banneker’s almanacs for the same period received widespread public notice. But how did individual readers interact with Banneker’s almanacs? Like printers at this time, many readers were obsessed with the astronomer’s blackness. Those who purchased almanacs were almost never equipped to check the predictions of a philomath (at least not until after the fact), and so purchasers came to rely on a particular almanac because of its reputation, or because it was the only choice available locally, or because of its novelty. This novelty could be relatively harmless. After the first hot air balloon launched in Paris, the Balloon Almanac (1785–1789, 1792–1796) began to appear in Pennsylvania. It was an ordinary almanac, but it featured a picture of a hot air balloon on the cover. In other cases, the novelty was more perverse. Think back to Joseph Buckingham, the young almanac reader with whom this chapter began. His most vivid memory of childhood reading involved a quasi-pornographic pamphlet cover, which featured “a large picture of a female, representing America, in a recumbent position, held down by men representing members of the British ministry, while Lord North was pouring Tea down her throat from an immense teapot.” Buckingham did not reflect later in life on the erotic—and sadistic—dimensions of this political cartoon, except to observe that the image made “a deep impression on my mind.”88 It is easy to imagine, however, that the almanac printer regarded sadism and protest politics as an easy means of accruing readership in a marketplace of nearly indistinguishable astronomical guides. In the case of Banneker’s almanacs, novelty took a somewhat different form. Readers encountered a black man who could peer into the “Secrets of Nature,”

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and they encountered a warning of national doom and extraterrestrial life. And these readers frequently wrote on Banneker’s almanacs, sometimes inscrutably. Consider the Banneker almanac owned by a Thomas W. Keen, likely a Baltimore area reader. Keen’s copy has been written on at many times, potentially by many readers. One person has used the area above Banneker’s portrait to copy out a portion of the alphabet: “a b c d e f g h I j k” (Figure 3). Who is this writer? A child acquiring literacy? An enslaved person practicing the act of writing just above the portrait of the first black astronomer in the United States? Swooshes, doodles, and practice signatures appear throughout the pamphlet, and in some cases enough ink and pressure have been applied that the reader’s marks have leeched through several pages.89 It would be inadvisable to overinterpret the motives of these doodling readers—fascination, anger, absentmindedness?—except to suggest that Banneker’s portrait provided the psychic and material terrain on which Keen (and possibly others) wrote. The portrait of Banneker on which these readers drew, moreover, was not an accurate representation of the astronomer, but it was a common one. The woodcut image first appeared in late 1794 on the cover of John Fisher’s (d. 1794) edition of the almanac. The picture depicted a young man of average build who was dressed in a suit of clothes that would identify him as a Quaker. At the time, Banneker was sixty-three years old and described by those who knew him as stocky, even overweight. Moreover, there is no evidence that Fisher (an engraver as well as a printer) ever met Banneker or other wise received a description of the astronomer’s physical appearance, nor is there evidence that he sent an artist to take a portrait from life.90 But although the Banneker portrait was an act of imagination, competing almanac publishers immediately copied it. The results were unsettling. The initial, clearly delineated image lost detail with each copy. After several iterations, the portrait would come to be reproduced as the black outline of a face, which stares out at the viewer with paper-white eyes. Coupled with dire warnings about life on Venus and the inevitable end of the Republic, one would be forgiven for thinking that this project of abolitionist propaganda also expressed a kind of xenophobia. As the image of Banneker’s body proliferated, it came to appear less and less human. And these later portraits—of the uncanny, inky black body of the Maryland astronomer—were the images that a plurality of readers would come to recognize. Many readers, moreover, wrote in the margins of Banneker’s almanacs, as was common in the eighteenth century.91 As a result of this practice, the almanacs contain the material traces of interactions that were scripted though the anomaly Banneker represented: the astronomer was both a functionary of

Figure 3. This almanac was inscribed by Thomas W. Keen, likely a resident of Baltimore or the surrounding area. It appears that multiple readers have written on this almanac. One person has used the area above Banneker’s portrait to copy out a portion of the alphabet: “a b c d e f g h I j k.” Benjamin Banneker, Banneker’s New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris for the Year of Our Lord 1795 (Baltimore: S. & J. Adams, 1794). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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the US empire and the symbol of that empire’s limits. Virginia reader John Parham, for instance, was a white enslaver who used the Banneker almanac to assure himself about the political powerlessness of black people (Figure 4). In a pamphlet for 1797, Parham used the margin of a page to calculate the total number of free white people in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and to subtract from that the total number of enslaved people. The result was a plurality of some 149,000 whites in 1790.92 Perhaps he found this “Comparative View,” as he described it in the space next to his calculation, to be reassuring. Considering Parham’s social position, such an interpretation would make sense. The Sussex County landowner appeared in the 1810 census as the enslaver of twelve people.93 Parham was also a member of an elite clan of enslavers, one of whom was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates three times.94 The region where Parham made his home, however, did not resemble the rest of Virginia. Blacks outnumbered whites by nearly two to one in Sussex County and by six to one in Parham’s own household.95 If indeed Parham was trying to convince himself or others that the danger of black revolt was low, then there is an irony in the fact that he sought evidence for this “Comparative View” in the expertise of a black man. Parham’s marginal figures were derived from the printed census table included in the almanac. “Banneker” (in actuality, Banneker’s printer) provided the proof that blacks were a minority in the state of Virginia and in the United States as a whole. US leaders had hoped that the union of the “Thirteen United States” might become a “new constellation” in the firmament of nations, the “primary planet” of human freedom, and the “polar star” of sovereignty and justice.96 Yet the cosmos was an unstable and largely unknown space. Mysterious “dark bodies” traced unseen orbits through the heavens, and nationalists increasingly worried that these bodies might be inhabited by intelligent beings. The inhabitants of comets were better positioned to study the universe than those confined to the earth, according to Bartholomew Burges, and cosmic collisions remained as much a possibility as political upheaval. Most frighteningly, the person with the greatest insight into the cosmos increasingly did not look like a person at all. Rather, he was a blot of black ink with uncanny eyes, staring back at US readers even as he predicted that the United States would not survive past its third president. An observer in 1793 might easily have concluded that astronomy, as a political discourse establishing the authority of the emergent US state, had played out. The cosmos provided a poor justification for US power. But Thomas Jefferson, who ultimately did become the third president of the United States, was more committed than his predecessors to the project of astronomical, even cosmic, nationalism.

Figure 4. Virginia enslaver John Parham owned this almanac, in which a reader has calculated the plurality of white people in the state. The calculations made by the reader are as follows: 110,936 “Free white Males of 16 & upwards” plus 116,135 “Free white Males under 16 years” plus 227,071 “Free white Females”, equals 442,117 minus 292,627 “Slaves” equals 149,490. This calculation excludes the 12,866 “All other free persons” in Virginia, which was also available in Banneker’s almanac. See Benjamin Banneker, Banneker’s Virginia and North Carolina Almanack . . . for . . . 1797 (Petersburg, VA: Prentis & Murray [1796]), 19. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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And it would be Jefferson, ultimately, who insisted on precisely locating the United States in space, in time, and in the universe.

City Without an Almanac: Time and Place in the Nation’s Capital Jefferson was the first president to spend his entire term in the new, swampy capital of Washington, DC. He recognized firsthand, then, that the astronomical project of US empire was not nearly the success that he had once hoped it would be. The Ellicott survey had established a national prime meridian to which US military officers, explorers, and settlers could refer, at least in theory. Ellicott’s first printed map of Washington, released to the public in 1793, had located the national prime meridian at the site of the Capitol—describing that location as 38°53′ N and 0°0′.97 At the time, Jefferson’s instruction for this printing had been obsessive. He dictated the orientation of the map, the proportions of the paper on which it would be printed, and even the means by which it should be hung.98 But the Washington meridian did not come into widespread use. In 1800, for instance, Jefferson had to write to Ellicott to ask where the meridian was actually located.99 Two years later, and with increasing annoyance, Jefferson observed of the new capital city, “There is no such thing as a meridian or any other means of keeping our clocks & watches right at this place.”100 Without recourse to almanacs—a basic, commercial product available elsewhere in the United States— the capital city’s clocks could not be properly set. Indeed, around the time of Jefferson’s complaint, celestial calculations based on “the city of Washington” had become something of a notorious scam. In 1800, for instance, an almanac written by “John Nathan Hutchins” and calculated for a site “3 degrees east” of the nation’s capital appeared in Hudson, New York. There were only two problems. First, the astronomer John Nathan Hutchins (1700 or 1701–1782) had died eighteen years earlier and—being dead— would have been unable to make the necessary calculations. Second, the calculations themselves had not been made for Washington at all. They were merely copied from Andrew Beers’s (1749–1824) calculations for New York City and adjusted by three degrees for the city of Troy, New York. Granted, the longitudinal difference between Washington and New York City was about “3 degrees,” but presenting a copied New York City almanac as an accurate celestial map for “the city of Washington, the capital of these United States” was more than a little misleading.101

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The distribution of accurate scientific information, then, was a core concern for Jefferson. “[M]y own opinion,” he wrote to Ellicott, “is that government should by all means in their power deal out the materials of information to the public.”102 Indeed, the Jefferson administration went to extreme lengths to accomplish this. When the explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) visited Washington, DC, officials in the state department not only copied his maps of North America but had them printed—without his permission—before he was able to print them himself.103 Yet efforts to distribute spatial and temporal information were successful only intermittently. Reports from the Louisiana Territory reveal the failure of scientific publishing at the time. In 1803, the United States purchased from France the rights to colonize the 827,000-square-mile tract. This $15 million deal theoretically doubled the geographic size of the United States. The maps pirated from Humboldt were a first step in attempting to shape what settlers would learn about the region, but Jefferson hoped to dispatch a scientific expedition to map the newly acquired land. The now-famous Corps of Discovery—known to US schoolchildren today by the names of its leaders, Lewis and Clark—faced significant problems communicating with the public. Meriwether Lewis’s celestial observations were accurate and taken with great care. Indeed, Lewis spends considerable time in his journal describing his efforts to measure the positions of stars and to tell the time. The problem—for the US state, at least—was that few had access to Lewis’s findings. In 1806, preliminary accounts of the expedition reached some members of the public through a published address by President Jefferson, through newspapers, and through a republished letter from William Clark (1770–1838) to his brother. But as Lewis prepared the official report for publication, false accounts began to proliferate. In 1806, an anonymously written account was published by Zadock Cramer (1773–1813), a printer in Pittsburgh. In 1807, a low-ranking member of the exploring party published his own account, which reviewers at the time regarded as wholly unscientific. This account was nonetheless reprinted in Philadelphia, Paris, London, and elsewhere. The Philadelphia edition even included illustrations, which David S. Shields points out were the work of a “fanciful” imagination. By 1808, an essentially fictional account of the expedition began to appear. Reprinted in London and Leipzig, as well as Pennsylvania and Maryland, this account became more baroque with each iteration. It would not be until 1814—a full six years after Jefferson left office—that an official account of the expedition was finally printed.104 By 1809, the state’s failure to regularize spatial and temporal information had prompted a US Congressional investigation. Connecticut congressman Timothy

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Pitkin led a special committee to study maps and charts printed in the United States and found that they did not agree on basic elements of geography. The problem, he reported, was astronomical. US astronomers and mapmakers did not have a single, agreed-on meridian from which to make calculations. Those printing almanacs, navigational guides, maps, globes, and coastal charts variously (and imperfectly) relied on the British and French meridians. Of course, agents of the United States government—namely, Ellicott and Banneker—had established a national prime meridian. But nobody seemed to know where it was. Even Jefferson, who had overseen the capital survey, had to ask about its location. In later years, Jefferson grew peevish on the subject of Banneker. “We know he had spherical trigonometry enough to make almanacs,” the former president wrote to poet Joel Barlow (1754–1812) in 1809, “but not without the suspicion of aid from Ellicot [sic], who was his neighbor & friend, & never missed an opportunity of puffing him.”105 Attempting to trace Jefferson’s motive here is probably a fool’s errand. Was he annoyed that his private correspondence with the Maryland astronomer had been published and used against him? Was he suspicious of Banneker’s relationship with the Ellicott family? Was he frustrated that Banneker’s almanacs had been more widely popu lar than any comparable state effort? Perhaps he believed that all of the “puffing” by various Ellicott family members explained why Banneker’s almanacs went on to be reprinted more frequently than anything Andrew Ellicott himself had calculated. In the end, however, Jefferson’s motives matter far less than the political reality. State efforts to shape the relation between individual people and the cosmos had largely failed.

The “Permanent Security” of the Cosmic Empire When Jefferson expressed annoyance that the city of Washington had no “meridian or any other means of keeping our clocks & watches right,” he was revealing the ways in which the cosmos structured both the practical and the ideological elements of nation building.106 The United States government had gone to considerable trouble and expense in building a capital city, but the result was quite literally a city out of time. Apart from Ellicott’s single publication, the vast majority of almanacs referencing the US capital were misleading. Recall the deceased astronomer John Nathan Hutchins, who, readers in 1801 were led to believe, somehow managed to make posthumous calculations for a city that did not exist in his lifetime.107 The marketplace for print was messy and unreliable. Despite

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continued efforts by agents of the US state—from Adams to Jefferson, Burges to Ellicott—that marketplace remained a place of pirated editions, fraudulent calculations, and uncorrected errata. Moreover, the emergent print capitalist marketplace functioned as a site in which astronomers such as Banneker, who were marginal to state power, were able to shape how large numbers of readers understood astronomy, geography, and temporality. The United States might well have been a “very astronomical and learned nation,” as Charles Brockden Brown would have it, but it was hardly a centralized one.108 The everyday texts that located people in space and place, in time and history, were a site of contest. Jefferson and his allies intuitively understood that in order to control geopolitical space, one had to control the discourses by which people described, measured, and understood that space. Jefferson’s curt dismissal of Banneker—“he had spherical trigonometry enough to make almanacs”— protests a bit too much.109 Almanacs were everything. For thousands, the almanac was a catalog of time, space, literature, history, and even family life. As the letters of Abigail Adams attest, the “old Almanack” was ubiquitous.110 As Charles Brockden Brown observed, the almanac was very often the only book available in the homes of poor and working people. As Andrew Ellicott suggested, the almanac might even serve readers as the “GOVERNOR of the World proper!”111 Almanacs and other astronomical publications were the literary territory that an “American Empire” would need to capture if, indeed, it were to become “a new Planet in the System” of European colonialism.112 And yet for nearly the first half of the nineteenth century, the US state would fail to capture this territory even as it imperfectly and intermittently seized new land. In December 1823, President James Monroe transmitted a report to the United States Senate, informing senators that the “permanent security” of the United States depended on the astronomical calculations of foreign powers and that attempts to disseminate astronomical “knowledge among our fellowcitizens” had largely proved a failure.113 There were numerous reasons for this failure. Government surveyors printed their reports in small batches, numerous printers sold fraudulent or incorrect calculations, and philomaths marginal to US power created some of the most popular and accurate astronomical calculations in North America. By midcentury, this story would change. In the 1840s and 1850s, government astronomers would undertake a massive effort to shape how enslavers and soldiers, sailors and surveyors, speculators and citizens understood the nation-state in astronomical terms. The US Navy would regulate the production of maps, charts, and, most important, a national almanac. This will be the story of Chapter 4.

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Before considering how the state ultimately came to shape everyday assumptions about the cosmos, however, it will be important to first consider how others challenged US efforts to control astronomical, geographic, and temporal space. Who contested the star territory on which agents of the US state hoped to build a nation? The answer, I suggest, is manifold. Black publishers, Cherokee legislators, Hawaiian resistance leaders, and others would challenge the US project of territorializing the cosmos. Nineteenth-century people looked up at the sky and made meaning from what they saw. And they communicated this meaning across vast distances and across time.

Chapter 2

The Emancipatory Cosmology of the First Black Press

The sun was green. Witnesses reported that the uncanny color was “bright,” even “lively,” at dawn. As the day wore on, the color changed from “pea green” to blue to silver white to pale yellow, and then back to blue. After sunset, those peering through the gathered haze perceived “a large fire” burning on the horizon.1 To contemporary vulcanologists, these meteorological phenomena are the telltale signs of a far-off volcanic eruption. Tiny bits of ash launched into the air can circle the earth, forming a color-changing haze thousands of miles from the initial explosion.2 But in Southampton County, Virginia, an enslaved man interpreted these changes in color very differently. He would witness the phenomenon twice. First, in 1825, he noted that “the sun was darkened.” Throughout the United States at the time, witnesses had observed odd changes in the appearance of the earth’s star, which hung behind a haze of “smoke or vapour.” Others saw a “brilliant rainbow” that formed “a complete semicircle with the horizon.”3 These events were perhaps due to the eruption of Shishaldin, a volcano in the Aleutian Islands.4 Then, six years later, he would again see changes in the sky. Observers fifty miles away in Norfolk reported that the sun exhibited a rainbow of colors— green to blue to white to yellow to blue. These changes made clear to the Southampton man that he needed to begin his work.5 One week after witnesses reported the haze, this man would lead the largest uprising of enslaved people in the history of the United States. In the aftermath of his failed rebellion, Nat Turner (c. 1800–1831) explained that he had plotted his uprising by reading the sky for clues. From the first darkening of the sun in 1825, he had come to believe that the Lord would reveal to him “the knowledge of the elements, the revolution of the planets, the operation

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of tides, and changes of the seasons.” 6 In essence, he would receive a complete theory of the cosmos, realizing the dream of a scientist, a prophet, or, indeed, a maker of almanacs. Turner would have a total system for understanding the relation between the celestial and the meteorological and the political, for knowing the past and predicting the future. He watched the sky closely. In 1825, probably in the autumn, he witnessed a strange darkening of the sun. In February 1831, he witnessed a solar eclipse. This prompted him to reveal his revolutionary plan to four others.7 Then, when the sun turned green in August 1831, Nat Turner and his coemancipationists embarked on the work of rebellion. Turner was a revolutionary and a prophet, but he was also a vernacular astronomer.8 He made meaning from his observations of the sky. Indeed, the phenomena he observed were subjects of intense scrutiny by scientists elsewhere in the United States. The Nantucket astronomer William Mitchell (1791–1869) and his twelveyear-old daughter Maria—who would go on to become one of the most significant US astronomers of the nineteenth century—observed the same February 1831 solar eclipse, for instance (Figure 5). They used their eclipse observations in determining more accurately the longitude of Nantucket, critical information for the Atlantic whaling fleet.9 The extent of Turner’s violence might have been anomalous, then, but his acts of astronomy were not. Rather, observation of the sky was commonplace during the antebellum period, including among the enslaved. According to white antislavery authors, the enslaved were perpetually gazing upward at the North Star—a beacon guiding the way to freedom and to Yankees. One literary scholar has referred to this trope as the “North-Star Cult in White Antislavery Literature,” singling out poets James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) and John Henry Pierpont (1785–1866) as the cult’s key proponents.10 But one need not be the member of a cult, literary or other wise, to recognize the importance of celestial navigation to the enslaved. Antislavery activists often retold the story of an African man who arrived in New York in 1840, speaking limited English and suffering from infected lacerations—the result of attacks by bloodhounds. Smuggled into the south in defiance of the slave-trade ban, this man knew little of US geography or politics. But he had heard that one could escape enslavers by going north. And he knew enough of the starscape to find Polaris, the North Star, and to follow it.11 Astronomy was not merely an instrument of navigation, moreover. It was an instrument of meaning making. Turner, certainly, made meaning from his repeated acts of astronomical observation. But he was hardly the only person to do so. The textile art of enslaved quilter Harriet Powers (1837–1910), for instance, reveals that vernacular astronomy functioned as a form of community history.

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Figure 5. This map of a solar eclipse path reveals that the February 1831 event was visible both from Southampton County, Virginia, where it was witnessed by revolutionary Nat Turner, and from Nantucket, Massachusetts, where it was witnessed by the future astronomer Maria Mitchell. See American Almanac and Repository of Useful Information (Boston: Gray & Bowen, 1831), 313. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

One of her quilts, dated to 1895 and held today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, records celestial events as early as May 19, 1780, when “seven stars were seen” at noon and the sun went “to darkness.”12 Contemporary scientists believe that this day of “darkness” was the result of smoke from a massive forest fire, although the phenomenon baffled observers at the time.13 The stories of celestial events were transmitted across decades, making their way from oral accounts into

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Figure 6. This quilt panel by Harriet Powers (1837–1910) depicts an event on May 19, 1780, when “The seven stars were seen 12 N. in the day. The cattle all went to bed, chickens to roost and the trumpet was blown. The sun went off to a small spot and then to darkness.” Pictorial quilt, cotton plain weave, pieced, appliqued, embroidered, and quilted, 1895–1898, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

material forms of record keeping, such as textile art, ceramics, script, and print (Figure 6).14 But the practices of black vernacular astronomers were disconnected. Unlike the increasingly networked functionaries of the US state, vernacular stargazers such as Powers and Turner observed the sky independently. For a brief moment in the late 1820s, however, disconnected acts of black astronomy came together in print. In 1827, a group of black activists and intellectuals in New York

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founded Freedom’s Journal, a newspaper edited by, distributed by, and read by black people throughout the United States, Canada, Haiti, and the United Kingdom. Editors Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm did not set out to communicate information about the cosmos when they began editing Freedom’s Journal, at least not exclusively. And yet their newspaper revealed a close engagement with the universe as a site of meaning making. Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829) and its successor newspaper, The Rights of All (1829), communicated a form of black star science that was ongoing in the north and the south. The print distribution of these newspapers, moreover, enabled an emancipatory cosmology: a total system for understanding the relation between human politics and the cosmos. By linking instances of black astronomy, these newspapers did more than simply reveal the practical benefits of astronomical observation, such as enabling an individual to find true north. Rather, those circulating astronomical information offered a complete theory of the universe. Their cosmology, or theory, was very different from the astronomical instrumentalism of the US state. In the pages of Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All, black star science revealed that freedom and unfreedom unfolded across millennia, subject to natural forces. These newspapers united past, present, and future, time and space, to suggest that freedom was cyclical, that universal laws tended against despotism, and that nation-states organized on a basis of slavery and land seizure were doomed by the very physical forces that those nations sought to regulate. There is no evidence that Nat Turner ever encountered a copy of Freedom’s Journal or The Rights of All—or, for that matter, that Harriet Powers ever did. Yet other enslaved people in the south did read these newspapers, or heard them read aloud. Moreover, these newspapers recorded and linked astronomical practices that were ongoing in the south and the north. Correspondents from New York and North Carolina wrote for Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All, and these correspondents offered thoughts about comets, meteors, earthquakes, thunderstorms, kinetic energy, and the historical operations of freedom and despotism.15 In short, writers and readers collaborated to produce a complete, yet variegated, theory of the universe. Collectively, they authored an emancipatory theory of the cosmos.

The Cosmological Assemblage Since the eighteenth century, “cosmology” has been operative in both science and philosophy as an account not simply of the movement of bodies through space

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and time but of the laws that govern these movements.16 Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All described (in their pages) and modeled (through their circulation, distribution, and seriality) a broader, revolutionary historical pattern. Both newspapers depicted a black collectivity that—like a moon in orbit—waxed and waned with each revolution, all the time drawing new bodies into its gravitational field. Readers, north and south, encountered a textual space that mapped the celestial and political universes onto each other by accounting for recent scientific discoveries about the heavens and offering histories of the political revolutions that were their worldly corollaries. Accounts of political orbits, which predicted the return of black power, were validated by an ever-widening circulation of blackauthored print, made legible in the expanding list of circulating agents and cities of distribution on each newspaper’s final page (Figure 7). The overlap—celestial, political, textual—produced a cosmology: a mobile, interconnected system governed by a set of predictive laws. The first black newspapers offer a window onto this emergent cosmology. The newspapers are particularly striking, moreover, because they linked individual readers and writers across vast distances. To disseminate the more than eight hundred issues of Freedom’s Journal published each week, editors Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm built a network that included forty-seven authorized agents and extended from Waterloo, Ontario, to rural North Carolina, from Port-au-Prince to Liverpool to Richmond, Baltimore, and New Orleans (See Table 3).17 The Rights of All maintained this network. Importantly, readers from these locations wrote back—and the result is an archive of largely unacknowledged black writers offering firsthand accounts of life in the antebellum south published alongside articles describing the operations of space, time, and the cosmos. And articles in Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All made sense of the operations of the universe as a site of unfolding freedom. Southern enslavers were troubled by—probably should have been troubled by—the potential for political solidarity brought about by the distribution of both newspapers. While neither publication promoted the violent overthrow of the slave system, both promoted black unity. More significantly, articles in both newspapers treated black political emancipation as revolutionary in every sense: latent potentials that traced political orbits modeled on their celestial corollaries. Writers for these publications frequently depicted black politics as existing in motion, having emerged from a past of political power and tracing a path toward renewed greatness. One result of the orbital metaphor was that all political orders appeared temporary because they were in motion. Indeed, these newspapers warned of the very political and natural universe that Boston astronomer

Figure 7. The first issue of Samuel Cornish’s Rights of All featured many of the same authorized agents as had appeared in the last issue of Freedom’s Journal—and listed them in the same location, the bottom right corner of the newspaper’s final page. See “Authorized Agents,” The Rights of All, June 12, 1829. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Table 3. Distribution Agents for Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All Site of Distribution

Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829)

The Rights of All (1829)

North Yarmouth, ME Portland, ME Waterloo, Ontario Rochester, NY Utica, NY Buffalo, NY Albany, NY Hudson, NY Schenectady, NY Troy, NY Brooklyn, NY Flushing, NY

Calvin Stockbridge Isaac Talbot Rev. Samuel George Austin Steward Tudor E. Grant Frederick Holland Rev. Nathaniel Paul Joseph Pell R. P. G. Wright William Rich Wm. Thomas Rev. W. P. Williams

Salem, MA

Calvin Stockbridge Isaac Talbot, Reuben Ruby Rev. Samuel George Austin Steward Tudor E. Grant Frederick Holland Rev. Nathaniel Paul Joseph Pell Rev. R. P. G. Wright William Rich George DeGrasse Paul P. Williams; Rev. W. P. Williams John Remond (or “Remmond”)

Boston, MA Providence, RI New Haven, CT New London, CT Norwich, CT Trenton, NJ Princeton, NJ New Brunswick, NJ Newark, NJ Philadelphia, PA

David Walker; Rev. Thomas Paul George C. Willis John Shields; S. C. Augustus Isaac Rodgers; Isaac Glasko Isaac Glasko Leonard Scott Theodore Wright James Cowes Rev. B. F. Hughes Francis Webb

Columbia, PA Carlisle, PA Baltimore, MD

Stephen Smith J. B. Vashon R. Cowley (sometimes “Cooley”) Charles Hackett Hezekiah Grice John W. Prout Thomas Braddock W. D. Baptist Rev. R. Vaughn; John Shepherd John C. Stanley Lewis (Louis) Sheridan Seth Hinshaw, P.M. (Postmaster) Peter Howard W. R. Gardiner; Wm. Bowler Samuel Thomas Thomas Dickinson

Washington, DC Alexandria, DC Fredericksburg, VA Richmond, VA New Bern, NC Elizabethtown, NC New Salem, NC New Orleans, LA Port-au-Prince, Haiti Liverpool, England

John Redman (later “Remmond”) David Walker George C. Willis S. C. Augustus None Isaac C. Glasko Leonard Scott None James C. Cowes Rev. Mr. Charles Anderson Francis Webb; Charles Leveck Stephen Smith J. B. Vashon Thomas Green J. W. Prout Thomas Broddock W. D. Baptist W. D. Baptist John C. Stanley Lewis (Louis) Sheridan None Peter Howard Wm. Bowler R. Dickinson Samuel Thomas

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Bartholomew Burges had warned of in 1789: a universe in which new nations might be destroyed by the vicissitudes of history or by natural phenomena, such as collision with a comet. The orbits of history and the orbits of celestial bodies had revolutionary potential in more than one sense. The editors of the two newspapers did not set out to transmit scientific information, at least not exclusively. In their inaugural editorial, they suggested that their goal was to “make our Journal a medium of intercourse between our brethren in the different states of this great confederacy.”18 In essence, they sought a means by which people separated across vast distances and different legal systems might communicate. Cornish and Russwurm accomplished this goal, distributing their newspapers to readers as far south as Louisiana and as far north as Canada. The far-flung assemblage enabled by Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All formed, moreover, just as a national print culture began to emerge in the United States. As historians of printing have observed, abolitionists were leaders in the experiment of widespread print distribution. Benjamin Lundy (1789– 1839) famously expanded the distribution of his newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, by hand-carrying it to distant locales.19 Ultimately, fractures appeared in the collective readership nurtured by Cornish and Russwurm. In September 1827 Cornish stepped down as senior editor to become a “General Agent.” Russwurm then guided the financially struggling newspaper until March 1829, when he shuttered the publication to depart for Liberia.20 Russwurm’s decision outraged a number of readers, who viewed the American Colonization Society’s plan for settlement in Liberia with repugnance. Cornish responded by founding The Rights of All, which restored the anticolonization stance of the original Freedom’s Journal.21 Cornish’s newspaper failed within a matter of months, however. He published issues of The Rights of All from New York before closing the paper in the autumn of 1829, although he briefly revived the paper in Belleville, New Jersey.22 In their time, and despite the appearance of political fissures, these two newspapers offered something radically new. What did Cornish and Russwurm communicate across this vast network? Often, their newspapers turned to questions about the universe, and they revealed an emergent theory about the organization of the heavens and of politics. For Cornish and Russwurm, political transformation and cosmic transformation were united in movement. Consider, for instance, a short article about Encke’s comet, which appeared in Freedom’s Journal early in 1829. This piece, excerpted from an 1828 essay by the Scottish astronomer David Milne-Home (1805–1890),

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is emblematic of much of the scientific writing that appeared in the two New York newspapers. The article is worth quoting at some length because it suggests for the celestial sphere precisely the movement that Freedom’s Journal suggested for the political sphere: Others have computed that in the course of 18,000 years this comet will come as near to us as the moon; that in four millions of years it will pass at the distance of about 7,700 geographical miles, when if its attraction should equal that of the earth, the waters of the ocean will be elevated 12,000 feet that is, above all European mountains except mount Blanc. The inhabitants of the Andes and the Himalaya mountains therefore, would alone be able to escape such a deluge; which would probably, leave upon our globe, records of its existence, similar to those discoverable at the present day.—After a lapse of two hundred and nineteen millions of years, according to the calculation of the same astronomer, an actual collision will take place between this comet & the earth, severe enough to shatter its external crust, alter the elements of its orbit, and annihilate the various species of animated beings dwelling on its surface. Hence we may conclude that, in the course of two hundred and nineteen millions of years, our globe will certainly be smashed by a comet.23 In 1829, this was cutting-edge astronomical research. Milne-Home had won the astronomy prize at the University of Edinburgh and was one of a growing body of astronomers to recognize that although the relative mass of comets was less than previously imagined, their velocities nonetheless made them threatening to planetary bodies.24 He and others revealed the impermanence of the world as it appeared in the present. And yet if, as one historian of science writes, midnineteenth-century scientists were increasingly committed to “separating the object of science from the human observer,” Russwurm’s use of scientific research here could not be more out of step with contemporary trends.25 Russwurm shares scientific discoveries because they bear directly on human politics. Excerpted in this way, Milne-Home’s writing reveals that the past and, more significantly, the future, were and would be radically different from the world today. In four million years, the only civilizations on Earth will sit atop the Andes and the Himalayas. In 219 million years, there will be no human civilization at all. This is grim news, in many ways. But the news fits into a larger cosmological pattern, one that treats all positions as contingent and mobile. These changes over time, moreover,

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were revolutionary. Encke’s comet would return and return and return again, each time producing a new organization of bodies and bringing about catastrophic changes in the human lifeworld. Freedom’s Journal treats both past and future as part of an explicable, ordered, and mobile set of patterns—patterns that tend toward justice and emancipation. This way of thinking about the political and the cosmological was by no means original or unique. As early as 1758, historians had been referring to the “revolutions of history,” treating the movement of time as a set of explicable, regular, and curved trajectories.26 And this line of thought became central to emancipatory political movements.27 The Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (1810–1860) called on this metaphor of political action as cosmological calculation in an 1853 sermon, in which he said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. . . . I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”28 Parker’s metaphor would be made famous by Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1929–1968) speech on the steps of the Montgomery, Alabama, capitol building in 1965, in which he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”29 In compressing—and arguably improving—the expression, King elided a nineteenth-century way of thinking about the universe that drew on a metaphor of political revolution as orbital and subject to calculation. The moral universe would not have an arc at all, in other words, if it were not traveling in an orbit, if it were not revolutionary. When Parker said that he could not “calculate the curve and complete the figure,” he was invoking a cosmological way of reading history and the future. Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All are forerunners to this revolutionary pattern of thought in emancipatory black politics. But they would be a mere footnote if they had not combined this mobile, cosmological worldview with an equally mobile and capacious plan of distribution. The newspapers strove to become “a medium of intercourse between . . . brethren in the different states.”30 Contrary to the assumptions made by reactionary southerners, neither newspaper openly advocated rebellion. But both proposed something perhaps more dangerous: an emancipatory worldview, or cosmology, in which equality and justice would be the inevitable consequence of predictable political transformations. These newspapers offered an alternative to a fixed, hierarchical politics, suggesting instead that powerful civilizations wax and wane as they revolve. In one editorial, for instance, Samuel Cornish warned against state and local governments defying federal authority, writing that “if the proper authorities do not check this evil disposition while in embryo we soon shall have 24 Independent Republicks or

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petty Kingdoms.”31 Cornish’s specific complaint was with the economic and political exclusion faced by African Americans in the Cincinnati area, which would prompt more than one thousand to leave and begin a colony in Canada.32 But Cornish’s implicit point is more radical. The United States is, like all nations, subject to the revolutions of history. The current arrangement of political bodies is temporary and contingent. The future arrangement of these bodies, Cornish suggests, may be radically different. And Cornish suggests this, finally, to readers living in the heart of the slave system, readers who might well be enslaved themselves. Astronomical observation provided a means of reflecting on the unfolding operations of the cosmos—of the natural world, of politics, of the past and future. But why? Why were the first publications edited, written, and distributed by free black people in the United States concerned with the astronomical and the cosmic? Why was astronomy, in particular, a scientific field through which emancipatory black thinkers could theorize freedom? To answer that question, we need to consider the context in which the two newspapers emerged.

The New York School of Black Astronomy Astronomy was central to black education in the city of New York, where Cornish and Russwurm established Freedom’s Journal. Teachers at the NewYork African Free School, for instance, taught astronomy alongside geography, surveying, and arithmetic.33 This was typical of nonelite schooling in the United States. While classical languages such as Greek and Latin were reserved for the children of the elite, scientific and mathematical disciplines—at least in their most instrumental form—were widely available across lines of race and gender among those students who attended school.34 Importantly, this astronomical education was not cosmological. The origin and future of the universe were not discussed, and the laws governing universal motion were treated not as matters of scientific inquiry but as matters of rote calculation. Yet astronomical education nonetheless enabled black children in New York to consider the universal forces that moved moons, planets, and stars. And, importantly, this education shaped their employment prospects. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a dramatic expansion in the number of black men employed in the US merchant fleet. In 1740, most sailors operating off the coast of North America were white. By 1803, some 18  percent of workers in the US merchant fleet were black.35 This expansion in

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the number of black sailors occurred just as sailing became more mathematically and astronomically complex. As one historian writes, “Those who practiced advanced celestial navigation [in the nineteenth century] were of a different kind than those who determined their positions with dead reckoning,” an eighteenthcentury method by which a navigator estimated the ship’s course and speed from a known location. While eighteenth-century sailors seldom advanced beyond trigonometry, nineteenth-century sailors employing the lunar-distance method regarded the sky as “a source of data they could rely on and manipulate with advanced mathematics into vital knowledge.”36 Bartholomew Burges had been concerned about the education of such sailors when he proposed to John Adams that navigational schools be established in major US ports, such as Boston.37 The New-York African Free School, which offered courses in both navigation and astronomy to male students, taught precisely the skills that Burges had envisioned for white students planning to serve in the merchant fleet. Indeed, the mathematical sophistication of black navigators at sea took on the quality of apocrypha in the early nineteenth century. In one occasionally reprinted account, a ship’s cook—a black man—was challenged by an aristocrat in Genoa to prove that he could calculate a ship’s longitude and latitude and the exact time. The cook put down the carcass of a chicken, took out his book of logarithmic tables and his almanac of astronomical positions, and demonstrated the requisite calculations. In the meantime, he also explained that he preferred the method of calculation innovated by British astronomer Richard Dunthorne (1711–1775) to that of British Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811). The story of the mathematically sophisticated cook was clearly intended to be humorous and might or might not have been based on real events. Yet the account reveals a kind of democratic pride in the diffusion of mathematical and astronomical knowledge. (In the same story, a white child onboard likewise reveals himself a sophisticated reader of lunar distances.)38 The story’s author was suggesting, in short, that the United States was a “very astronomical and learned nation,” a nation with astronomers and mathematicians of every race, class, and age.39 Claims of ubiquitous astronomical sophistication were exaggerations. Yet such education was nonetheless an ongoing reality for black men, particularly in New York. The principal of the New-York African Free School, Charles C. Andrews, suggested that astronomy class, held at half past ten in the morning, provided an opportunity for students both to do “themselves much credit” and to develop mathematical and spatial awareness. Andrews particularly praised two of his teenage pupils for having correctly calculated the relative magnitude and

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position of each known planet, as well as the total radiation received by each from the sun.40 Editor Samuel Cornish, moreover, played a critical role in the success of the school. While serving as general agent for Freedom’s Journal, and before he founded The Rights of All, Cornish traveled house to house in New York City. He visited the parents of each Free School pupil, inquiring of them what they needed in order to get their children to class each day. Often, the answer was a warm coat. One consequence of this discovery was the establishment of the African Dorcas Association, a group of black women who sewed clothing for Free School students who other wise would not be able to attend classes.41 Education, particularly scientific education, was for Cornish the cornerstone of political and economic emancipation. Indeed, Cornish explained that The Rights of All would outpace its predecessor newspaper in becoming a medium of education for black people throughout the United States. Writing in a column that he would later call the “Literary and Scientific Department,” Cornish explained that each issue of The Rights of All would explore “some phenomenon or description of the natural world.” He went on: “It is much to be desired that the coloured population of our country should become more acquainted with men and things, some knowledge of the history of nations, the Geography of countries, and their moral and physical resources.” 42 As one recent scholar has observed, black scientific inquiry throughout the nineteenth century challenged an emerging “American School” of race science, a body of scientific thought that sought to bolster claims of black inferiority.43 Cornish did occasionally rely on scientific claims to challenge race prejudice. More often, however, Cornish was concerned with how science might shed light on geopolitics. His “Literary and Scientific Department” reported on the effect of geological changes on political organizations, on population measurements, and on the organization of ancient cities.44 Cornish suggested that by understanding the natural world, black people could understand—perhaps even predict or shape—changes in the political world. In recent years, political theorists, literary scholars, and cultural historians have called attention to the relation between the environmental and the political, confirming and extending Cornish’s theory of a politics shaped by universal forces unfolding over time. One school of thought, known as vital materialism, suggests that observers can understand social change only by looking to the operations of both political agents and nonagentic environmental actors. Our “analyses of political events,” a theorist of vital materialism suggests, would radically change if they accounted for the environmental factors—from electricity to earthquakes—that partly shape the course of human events.45 Another scholar

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similarly suggests that human impacts on the environment produce a nearly imperceptible, but ultimately violent, feedback loop. The use of chemical defoliants in one generation, for instance, produces cancers and poisoned groundwater generations later. These outcomes, in turn, shape human politics across timescales much longer than the length of a human life. An observer inattentive to the “slow violence” of such systems is blinded to the operations of power as they unfold over decades, centuries, or even millennia.46 Cornish never articulated a theory of political change as fulsomely as have these contemporary humanists, and yet his editorial decisions made clear his commitment to understanding the complex and unfolding relation between the environmental and the political, between natural laws and political oppression. For Cornish, environmental forces were politically salient, and an environmental education was a necessary component of a political education. Perhaps most significant among Cornish’s editorial choices was his decision to reprint scholarship by the British theologian and astronomer Thomas Dick (1774–1857), who theorized that the solar system was inhabited by trillions of “sentient beings” of different races.47 By the late 1820s, Dick’s writing had become extremely popular in the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), for instance, owned a copy of Dick’s Christian Philosopher (1824).48 But for a black clergyman, editor, and educator such as Samuel Cornish, Dick’s writing would have come with profound implications for human freedom. Dick’s work indicated not only that civilizations and political orders rose and fell over time but that different sorts of peoples—indeed, even nonhuman people—existed in harmonious balance throughout the universe. Cornish’s first contribution to the “Literary and Scientific Department” was a selection from The Christian Philosopher (1823), the book in which Dick speculated about life on other worlds.49 For Dick, as for Cornish, political organization was inseparable from the environment. He theorized, for instance, that intelligent life would be less likely to exist on planets that were tidally locked, forever presenting only one side to the face of the sun. On such a planet, Dick observed, two “distinct” people would develop. “While one class” would find itself “basking under the splendours of perpetual day, the other would be involved in the horrors of an everlasting night.” The people living in darkness would be “bound in the fetters of eternal ice.”50 Dick describes a world of profound inequality—of light and darkness, of freedom and fetters. The planet he imagined could easily have functioned as a metaphor for the United States. But God, Dick suggested, would not long countenance such a world of inequality. One can easily imagine why Samuel Cornish found The Christian Philosopher an appealing source of scientific information.

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Unabashed in its dedication to protestant theology, speculative about unexplained phenomena, and critical of inequality in all forms, Thomas Dick’s watershed book provided an editor such as Cornish with an opportunity to shape scientific discourse in the direction of freedom and emancipation. Dick’s writing enabled Cornish to theorize an ongoing relation between the fulfillment of universal rights and the structural operations of the universe itself. For Cornish, universal forces were inseparable from natural rights, and understanding these forces would be critical to the work of political emancipation. But while Cornish came to these conclusions through the influences of a New York scientific education and Christian philosophical doctrines from Europe, the people to whom he and Russwurm communicated lived in a very different context. The year 1827 marked the first moment in which black readers and nonliterate auditors in the US south were able to hear from and communicate with black publishers, writers, and editors across space through the intermittent and uneven distribution of newsprint. These readers were largely unfamiliar with the astronomical discoveries of European scientists, with the “Christian Philosophy” of Thomas Dick, and with the astronomical education of the northern black working class. But black people in the south had developed a culture of reading (by the literate) and listening (by the nonliterate), which would enable them to participate in the emerging black print culture of northern cities.

Reading the Cosmos in Print Who were the readers of Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All, and what did they make of the newspapers? A growing body of scholarship has begun to answer these questions, and the emerging picture is one of a readership far more varied in geographic distribution, in access to wealth and education, and in legal status than had previously been understood.51 Freedom’s Journal was read and distributed not only by members of the emerging black professional class in the north but also by a Quaker postmaster in rural North Carolina, a free black ice dealer in Baltimore, Maryland, and visitors to a black boardinghouse in Elizabethtown, North Carolina.52 Both newspapers printed a list of their distribution agents on the final page (Figure 7). Readers interested in a subscription to the newspaper would have been able to secure it from such an agent. News from each publication, moreover, would travel far beyond its subscription list. Some would read a copy of the newspaper, or even hear stories from the paper read aloud, and then pass along the information they received by word of mouth.

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In Elizabethtown, North Carolina, distribution agent Louis Sheridan kept copies of the newspaper available in his boarding house. His decision to do so vastly amplified the reach of the ten or twelve subscriptions he received there. A merchant and landowner, Sheridan was described by those who knew him as a free mulatto—although census agents in 1810, 1820, and 1830 recorded that he was white.53 The ambiguousness of his race might have enabled him to succeed financially under a legal regime that was continually restricting the property rights of free black people. Indeed, Sheridan was an enslaver, albeit an ambivalent one. He would legally own other human beings until his emigration to Liberia in 1837, although one source claims that he freed at least some individuals “for conscience sake.”54 Sheridan is significant, moreover, because he left an account of how he circulated Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All. In 1830, after a local newspaper accused him of fomenting political unrest, Sheridan wrote a letter to the editor explaining why he subscribed to the two black newspapers. His defense—he “pitied” the poverty of the newspaper editor—is implausible. Cornish and Russwurm were not especially poor, and Sheridan was an early and constant subscriber. But Sheridan’s explanation is nonetheless revealing of how readers received the newspaper in Elizabethtown. Sheridan revealed that his boardinghouse received twelve Freedom’s Journal subscriptions and ten subscriptions to The Rights of All.55 He claimed, moreover, that the newspaper “was always open for the perusal of travellers and other persons.”56 His openness about the newspaper serves as an argument that he has nothing to hide. Yet Sheridan’s practice of providing access to anybody who wished to read the newspaper reveals a means of distribution that would have greatly extended the power of ten or twelve subscriptions. Black-owned boardinghouses in the north, for instance, played a powerful role in the dual projects of racial uplift and emancipation. Travelers from various social classes could share news and discuss politics in these houses.57 For Sheridan to suggest that the newspaper was harmless because guests in a boardinghouse had access to it was a strange suggestion indeed. Sheridan’s precise motives for serving as a node in an emerging network of black readers are unclear, but the effects of his choice are not. The newspaper was part of an emerging black assemblage, a temporally limited and geographically disaggregated organization of people writing, reading, and transmitting the artifacts of print. For readers in politically isolated black communities such as Elizabethtown or New Bern, North Carolina, access to Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All had the potential to be transformative. Enabling people to

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imagine themselves in space and time—to understand the relation between their geographic and temporal positions and other potential positions—is liberatory. Such knowledge liberates, in part, because it enables people to achieve immediate, short-term aims. Recall the African man who, in 1840, made his way from slavery in the south to nominal freedom in New York City based on a sketchy understanding of US geography.58 It should not be surprising that this man was able to read the stars even if he was unable to read or speak English. As historians have long noted, West Africa had been a major center of scientific and religious learning. Books and ideas about astronomy produced at the three prominent centers of learning in Timbuktu—the Sankoré Madrasah, the Djinguereber Mosque, and the Sidi Yahya Madrasah—spread throughout West Africa as matters of “popular interest” from the sixteenth century onward.59 But there are less practical, more theoretical reasons to regard such knowledge as liberatory. Geography enabled nineteenth-century people to develop a sense of themselves as political agents. As one literary scholar suggests, “spatial feelings”—about the home, the nation, the globe, and the universe—had “concrete effects” in the nineteenth-century political world.60 Early black newspapers, such as Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All, enabled readers to develop such feelings across a much larger frame of reference. These newspapers provided a mobile, transformative space of discourse, one as accessible to people in New Orleans as to those in New Haven.61 It is difficult to overstate the importance of this development. For the first time, far-flung readers might connect with those working for black education and community development in New York. Black readers in North Carolina and Louisiana might learn about the emancipatory efforts of their “brethren” in the north. White observers noted a change in black reading practices and responded alternately with surprise, enthusiasm, and alarm. One account appeared in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator in May 1831. Garrison’s correspondent recalls seeing readers of a black newspaper as they responded to an “inflammatory” article. The correspondent writes, A few years since, being in a slave state, I chanced one morning, very early, to look through the curtains of my chamber window, which opened upon a back yard. I saw a mulatto with a newspaper in his hand, surrounded by a score of colored men, who were listening, open mouthed, to a very inflammatory article the yellow man was reading. Sometimes the reader dwelt emphatically on particular passages, and

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I could see his auditors stamp and clench their hands. I afterwards learned that the paper was published in New-York, and addressed to the blacks.62 The northern white correspondent—identified only as “V.”—does not tell the reader where this act of quasi-illicit reading took place, but the newspaper to which he refers was either Freedom’s Journal or The Rights of All. There were simply no other “New-York” newspapers “addressed to the blacks” circulating in the south at that time. (Most scholars suspect he was referring to Freedom’s Journal and not to its short-lived successor.)63 Moreover, the setting of this illicit reading seems urban or semiurban: his chamber window opens onto a backyard. But the impressiveness of the Freedom’s Journal distribution network leaves us with several options: Fredericksburg or Richmond, Virginia; Baltimore, Maryland; New Bern, New Salem, or Elizabethtown, North Carolina; or New Orleans, Louisiana.64 Agents distributed Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All to places where free black people lived alongside enslaved people, and the newspapers were consumed by communities of literate readers and nonliterate auditors. This was a common practice in the antebellum south. The white southerner John George Clinkscales (1855–1942) remembered of his childhood on a South Carolina plantation, for instance, that an enslaved man named Dick “spent the long winter evenings reading to the other slaves. Sometimes a score or more of them would assemble in his cabin to hear him.” 65 Moreover, most nineteenth-century readers shared periodicals, regardless of their level of literacy. Nineteenth-century newspapers are replete with articles by editors and publishers decrying this practice, and Freedom’s Journal was no different.66 In the south, however, these practices of reading aloud and sharing newspapers would have political ramifications. In 1830, the editor of the Recorder, of Wilmington, North Carolina, identified The Rights of All as part of a vast conspiracy by free blacks in the north to radicalize the southern black population. Archibald Hooper (1775–1853), who edited the Recorder, reported that “emissaries have been dispersed, for some time, throughout the Southern states, for the purpose of disseminating false principles and infusing the poison of discontent.”67 The Rights of All had been defunct for eleven months by the time he published this complaint.68 But Freedom’s Journal had been traveling to New Bern and Elizabethtown, delivered by the same agents, since at least 1828. In many ways, Hooper was overreacting. Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All never overtly advocated violence or rebellion. And yet the black-authored newspapers did offer messages to their southern readership that

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would have been shocking to enslavers. And distribution agents circulated this reading material across networks that were largely invisible to white observers. When Hooper, the editor of the Recorder, voiced a complaint about black newspapers, he was concerned about the proliferation of subversive politics. But had Hooper paused to consider the black newspapers more thoroughly, he might have reflected on the strange collection of scientific articles about comets, earthquakes, and weather patterns. He might have noted that the newspaper was concerned with the scientific theories of Thomas Dick and the astronomy of David Milne-Home. He might have observed that news from the south was making its way north via the work of black correspondents in North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland.69 And he might have noted, finally, that some of these correspondents communicated their thoughts about the ongoing movements of the cosmos. Accounts of southern celestial observation, in other words, were heading north.

George Moses Horton and the Southern Starscape Few twenty-first-century stargazers have experienced the kind of nighttime darkness that would have been common in the early nineteenth century, before the invention of electric light. In Edgar Huntly (1799), a novel about sleepwalking, the writer Charles Brockden Brown observed, “Intense dark is always the parent of fears. Impending injuries cannot in this state be descried, nor shunned, nor repelled.”70 Indeed, as one historian has described it, merely walking down a street at night during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could be dangerous. The wakeful “regularly collided with posts, fell into pits and open cellars, and tripped over piles of rotting fish and garbage.”71 Yet those who were awake in the night were also moved by its brilliance. One visitor to the South Carolina coastline in the late eighteenth century describe the ocean “transmuted to liquid silver” and the sky lit by “thousands of glittering orbs,” the stars.72 Darkness at night was not total darkness. Rather, with a clear sky, the silvery-gold streak of the Milky Way could draw the eyes upward from the unlit cellars, the open pits, and the piles of garbage. The night was a time of terror and injury but also a time of reflection and awe. For an enslaved poet in North Carolina, the brilliance of the moon and the short flashes of shooting stars in the night sky were a sign of freedom. In a poem, the thirty-year-old George Moses Horton (c. 1797–c. 1883) described a young man remaining awake after sunset. The calls of “dismal” owls made the night a time of dread, but to the “swain” of Horton’s poem the night was also a period of

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autonomy, solitude, and stargazing. Admittedly, the poet described a landscape more British than North Carolinian. Like many poets and writers in colonized contexts, and like many white poets in the antebellum United States, Horton wrote verse that echoed the conventions of the European metropole. In this case, he adopted the style and the imagery of the British Romantics, populating his poetry with sheep, shepherds, and rolling hills instead of with tobacco farms, enslaved workers, and uncultivated wetlands.73 And yet Horton’s account of the night sky, a place where “meteors play along” and the moon spreads its “glowing mantle,” nonetheless conveys a point that might as easily apply to an enslaved North Carolina farmworker as to a wandering shepherd in the Welsh countryside.74 The serenity and brilliance of a moonlit night provides an occasion for meditating on the eternal. Readers of Freedom’s Journal, moreover, came to know Horton well. Between July and October 1828, editor John Russwurm published four of Horton’s poems, including the poem described above. Russwurm also printed several articles about Horton, attempting to raise funds to purchase the poet’s freedom. Horton, in turn, even wrote a poem specifically for the readers of Freedom’s Journal, entitled “Gratitude,” expressing his thanks for those who sought to liberate him from slavery.75 The efforts to free Horton by legal means were a failure, however. He would ultimately escape enslavement during the Civil War the same way many other enslaved people would: by emancipating himself during the chaos of the fighting.76 Nonetheless, in the pages of Freedom’s Journal, Horton came to stand in as the representative southern stargazer. Horton was an enslaved North Carolina poet, but he was also a vernacular astronomer. Astronomy, in fact, would function throughout the poet’s verse as the science of liberation. “Astronomy, with her aerial powers, / Lifts us above this dreary globe of ours” Horton observed in an 1845 poem.77 That science would come to play a key role in his poetry is unsurprising. By his own account, university culture profoundly influenced Horton’s literacy. In the 1820s, before learning how to write, Horton would compose poems and hymns in his mind to be copied down by “such persons as would write them while he dictated.”78 During this period, he walked nine miles each Sunday to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to sell fruit and poetry.79 Horton’s relationships with students there shaped his education. Many undergraduates asked him to declaim on the spot for their entertainment, a practice that initially gratified his vanity but that he soon found humiliating. He ceased declaiming. But he did begin to sell students original poems, often acrostics composed for the various “belles” of North

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Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia for whom the young men pined.80 In exchange for this work, Horton received money and used books, including Jedidiah Morse’s Geography—a textbook so common that it went through at least forty-three separate editions between 1784 and 1828.81 While it is likely impossible to know which of these editions Horton received, many begin with the observation that “A complete knowledge of Geography cannot be obtained, without some acquaintance with Astronomy.”82 Morse’s Geography described various astronomical discoveries, the orbits of planets, and the rotation of the earth on its axis. Much of this information, moreover, found its way into Horton’s verse. (The earth, Horton observed in one poem, rotates “unperceived” around a “well-poised axis placed upon the poles.”)83 In short, Horton’s astronomical education was similar to—if not as mathematically rigorous as—that of students attending the NewYork African Free School. But unlike Cornish and other black intellectuals in the north, Horton concluded that scientific analysis is inadequate. Astronomy is the science that vaults even the enslaved to celestial heights, according to the North Carolina poet, but it fails to grapple fully with the unknown. According to Horton, scientific astronomers fail to understand the operations of eternity because they are obsessed with mathematical measurement. He writes, Astronomy, with her aerial powers, Lifts us above this dreary globe of ours; ................................ And marks her rolling planets as they shine; Describes the magnitude of every star, And thence pursues her comets as they roll afar. But nature never yet was half explored, Though by philosopher and bard adored; Astronomer and naturalist expire, And languish that they could ascend no higher; Expositors of words in every tongue, Writers of prose and scribblers of song, Would fail with all their mathematic powers, And vainly study out their fleeting hours.84 One can imagine Horton, who spent evenings outdoors teaching himself to read by the fire of a brush light, believing that the astronomical descriptions provided

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by a geographer were thoroughly inadequate to the task of understanding stars, planets, and comets.85 Horton’s poem, in fact, prefigures Walt Whitman’s (1819– 1892) frustration with nineteenth-century astronomy, a discourse of “charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure” the cosmos. In Whitman’s poem “When I Hear the Learn’d Astronomer,” the speaker abandons an astronomy lecture to gaze “up in perfect silence at the stars.”86 Like Whitman, Horton suggests that the astronomer’s concern with measurement and mapping fails to account for the sublime. But Horton was also writing as an enslaved person for whom the science of astronomy offered an opportunity to observe geographic space from a position of elevation. There was more at stake, in other words, than mere spiritual transcendence. Elevation to the stars, for the poet, was a means of theorizing escape. “Rise” is the fifth most frequently used word in Horton’s first book of poems, The Hope of Liberty (1829). “Away” is the fourth most frequently used word.87 For Horton, freedom was a form of mobility in all directions—including up. Indeed, the possibility of flight was not unimaginable in the early nineteenth century. An Alabama minister recalled witnessing a hot air balloon landing on a plantation in 1852. The overseer and several others fled in terror, never having seen a balloon before. But one enslaved man ran toward the balloon, shouting, “Lord, I’s been looking for you so long a time, and now you’s come at last!” The balloonist, interpreting the man’s words to mean that he believed the balloonist himself to be God, brushed the greeting aside. “Go away, boy,” he said. “I’m nothing but a man.”88 And yet there are other ways of interpreting the enslaved person’s words. “I’s been looking for you so long a time,” the man shouted at an apparatus that would enable him to take flight. More than a half-century earlier, Thomas Jefferson had mused about the risks of balloon flights to national commerce. Customs duties were “made on the supposition of goods being brought into some port” and would need to be revised if balloonists were bringing contraband down from the sky.89 In 1850s Alabama, one enslaved man recognized in flight the possibility of subverting commerce in just this way, of stealing himself away from the plantation on which he had been imprisoned. Even if Horton never imagined literal flight from enslavement, he certainly imagined its figurative manifestations in poem after poem, and he made astronomical observation central to the discourse of freedom. In his first poem for Freedom’s Journal, he would escape “On wings of liberty.”90 In his second, he observed, “in the air the meteors play along.”91 In his third, he writes, “Far, far above the world I soar.”92 And in his fourth and final poem for the newspaper, Horton writes, “I’ll fly to liberty.”93 For Horton, freedom was lift and space and

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orbit and atmosphere. It was flight. His poetry prefigures that of Maya Angelou (1928–2014), for whom elevation and astronomy were likewise powerful, interdependent discourses. “Just like moons and like suns, / With the certainty of tides,” Angelou writes, “Just like hopes springing high, / Still I’ll rise.”94 Horton could access the astronomical in a schoolbook, but he had to read that schoolbook out of doors and at night—making out its words by the flickering of a brush light under a night sky that was to him more than mere measurable space, more than mere celestial territory. The editor of Freedom’s Journal, and some of its subscribers, tried to rescue Horton from enslavement. “George M. Horton must be liberated from a state of bondage,” Russwurm wrote.95 Nearly a month later, Russwurm would report that Boston reader and distribution agent David Walker (c. 1796–1830) had begun to raise a collection for Horton’s emancipation.96 These efforts brought very little money, but readers of Freedom’s Journal nonetheless came to recognize Horton as a poet of emancipation, of flight, and of the astronomical. Decades later, a writer for a black periodical would recall that Horton’s verse very nearly “transport[ed]” the poet out of slavery.97 Even at the time, readers noted the transporting power of the poet’s verse—and the tragedy of its potential loss. “It seems somewhat hard,” Russwurm would write, that Horton’s talents “should be buried.”98 The newspaper editor’s observation inverts the logic of Horton’s lyrics. If freedom is flight, and rise, and lift, then slavery is a kind of burial. Horton spent the next three decades enslaved, managing to escape from bondage only in 1865, but he was never entirely buried. During his enslavement, and with the help of black and white benefactors, he managed to publish two books of poetry and to publish individual poems in numerous newspapers and periodicals. Horton’s poetry revealed to the readers of Freedom’s Journal that enslaved people in the south were making sense of the universe through vernacular forms of astronomical observation. While Russwurm published the findings of astronomer David Milne-Home, the appearance of Horton’s poetry in the pages of the first black newspaper made clear that the transmission of astronomical ideas would not be unidirectional. Rather, observers of the sky exchanged astronomical knowledge across a geographically extensive and variegated network. Of course, Horton’s poetry reached a relatively small audience. Samuel Cornish printed about 800 copies of The Rights of All each month, and Russwurm likely produced a similar number of copies of each issue of Freedom’s Journal.99 But Horton was not the only vernacular astronomer to operate in the south, nor was he the only one to communicate his observations to people throughout the

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United States. Soon, Nat Turner’s astronomical conclusions, and the death toll associated with them, would become available to readers. Turner would reveal the horrors of an emancipatory cosmology. A universe of ongoing revolution is a space of transcendence, but also of catastrophe and bloodshed. Geologic and cosmic timescales moderated the terrifying conclusions of astronomer David Milne-Home, who predicted that encounters between celestial bodies would ultimately kill nearly all life on Earth. Turner revealed that celestial predictions of mass death could be realized far more immediately.

Nat Turner’s Astronomy The revolt blasted across Southampton County, Virginia, like the explosion of a meteor. On August 22, 1831, the black evangelist and lay preacher Nat Turner organized an uprising that would ultimately include some sixty to eighty active rebels. As they marched toward the small city of Jerusalem, now Courtland, they killed between fifty-seven and sixty-one people. Accounts differ. The rebels failed to reach the city, however. Roughly two dozen black people would be killed in the conflict with white militiamen and in the ensuing official executions. More than one hundred more would be killed in acts of retaliatory violence.100 The event reshaped how white enslavers understood black resistance, but it also shaped how they understood black astronomy. Even before his capture, Turner’s coconspirators reported on his astronomical predictions. As search parties of Virginia militiamen scoured the countryside for Turner, one periodical reported, “the late singular appearance of the sun and moon, &c. was the signal from heaven for” the uprising to begin. Other periodicals disseminated similar reports.101 The full story of Turner’s astronomical project, however, became clear only when a lawyer named Thomas R. Gray (b. 1800) published the results of three days of interviews with the revolutionary, who awaited execution in a jail cell. Parsing Turner’s confession is extraordinarily difficult. Gray was not a sympathetic interlocutor, and there is significant evidence that Gray attempted to frame Turner’s confession in ways that confirmed white assumptions about the lay preacher’s supposed madness. And yet, as one historian writes, Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner periodically reveals the “voice of Nat Turner” on the subjects that would not much have interested Gray or about which he had limited knowledge. Astronomy is one such subject.102 To many, the revelation that Nat Turner had been watching widely reported astronomical events came as a shock. Newspapers reprinted excerpts from Gray’s

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pamphlet, dwelling on Turner’s astronomy. The Essex Gazette, for instance, reprinted a passage of Gray’s Confessions and then offered only six words of commentary: “the strange appearance of the sun!” The editor expected his reader to know, apparently, why Turner’s astronomical observations were shocking, perhaps even more shocking than his acts of revolutionary violence. The Gazette goes on to selectively quote Gray’s Confessions, ending on a brief exchange that might explain the newspaper editor’s abbreviated exclamation: Turner “was asked ‘if he knew of any extensive or concerted plan?’ His answer was, ‘I do not.’ When I questioned him as to the [rumored] insurrection in N. Carolina happening about the same time, he denied any knowledge of it; and when I looked him in the face, as though I would search his inmost thoughts, he replied, ‘I see, sir, you doubt my word; but can you not think the same ideas, and strange appearances about this time in the heavens might prompt others, as well as myself, to this undertaking?’103 The editor of the Gazette, along with many others, reported on an emergent cosmic system of black resistance, linked as much by celestial movement as by the movements of black bodies, or of secret messages, or of newspapers. Turner does not need to organize a plot across state lines. The “strange appearances . . . in the heavens” will prompt thousands to act. This is the emancipatory cosmos in motion—interconnected and inexorable. While white investigators hoped to find a clear link, in documents or confessions, between acts of black resistance across geography, Turner describes an interconnected universe of natural forces and political transformation. Ideas move across boundaries regardless of formal restrictions. Sometimes, people will transmit these ideas through print, through script, or by word of mouth. But, just as often, universal forces will transmit the news of onrushing political change. Turner almost certainly never encountered a copy of Freedom’s Journal or The Rights of All. The nearest distribution agent for the newspaper was in Richmond, about seventy miles distant. Yet the remoteness of Southampton County did not stop local authorities from panicking about the revolutionary possibilities of black literacy. Governor John Floyd (1783–1837) explained that he was “convinced” that the “spirit of insubordination” derived from reading. “[O]ur females, . . .” he explained, “were persuaded that it was piety to teach negroes to read and write.” Soon, he wrote, black preachers were reading “incendiary publications” from the pulpit.104 Others agreed. The black writer Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) would recall her experience in North Carolina following Turner’s revolt. White vigilantes searched her grandmother’s home, looking for text. On finding a letter, the leader of the white posse asked Jacobs if she could read. She

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explains, “When I told him I could, he swore, and raved, and tore the paper into bits.”105 Literacy threatened to unsettle the subordination of enslaved people, and officials in the aftermath of the Southampton rebellion sought to control and suppress such reading. But Turner revealed that the enslaved were not merely reading alphabetic texts. Turner’s astronomy promised another sort of reading, a kind of reading that could make its way into the pages of newspapers but was not dependent on the circulation of print. Turner asked his interrogator to imagine that “the same ideas, and strange appearances about this time in the heavens might prompt others” to rebellion. Black people in the south did not need to read Freedom’s Journal, The Rights of All, or even Jedidiah Morse’s Geography. They could watch for “the strange appearance of the sun!”106 They could read the sky. The unsettling irony—for white US nationalists, at least—was that reading the heavens was a military necessity for sailors and soldiers. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, US military leaders had concluded that astronomy was an indispensable discipline for a modern fighting force. An introductory astronomy textbook available to cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point made clear that astronomical study was a means of asserting control over geopolitical space. The book explained that astronomy was the science by which a person could “ascertain positions of places on [the earth’s] surface.”107 It was a critical science for soldiers on the move. Moreover, West Point graduates who sought a position in the topographical office—the repository for war plans— required extensive knowledge of astronomy and surveying.108 By 1833, in fact, a Board of Visitors report would conclude that West Point cadets, who already received significant astronomical instruction, required significantly more instruction in that discipline if they were to command soldiers in a modern army.109 For soldiers, astronomy was a means of controlling space. Yet Turner made a far different kind of meaning from his observation of the sky. And his acts of vernacular astronomy rattled enslavers. People at the time recognized that the Nat Turner revolt was the outcome of a complex interaction between enslaved people and the natural world. Without the greenish haze on August 15, the revolt would not have begun on August 21. While soldiers in the US Army were encouraged to master the universe—to examine it precisely as a means of regulating and measuring space—Turner instead obeyed the dictates of the universe, at least as he understood them. Turner challenged not only the instrumental common sense of educated, practical astronomers. Rather, he challenged fundamentally the strategies by which enslavers attempted to maintain control over their labor force. A professor of

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metaphysics at the College of William and Mary, Thomas R. Dew (1802–1846), articulated the problem. Turner’s worldview, Dew explained, depended on an imagined relation to the natural world. Turner’s extensive revolutionary plot remained concealed until the very last moment, the professor continued, because “there was no extensive plot.” Turner and his followers moved when they saw “an eclipse” and “the greenness of the sun.” Without a plot to uncover, without secret meetings to break up or secret messages to intercept, officials had been oblivious to Turner’s plans. Might future “strange appearances” in the sky prompt future uprisings? If so, white authorities would be unable to listen in, to disrupt networks of communication, to halt the inexorable forces of social and political change. Dew ultimately concluded that this outcome was unlikely. Turner was a lone fanatic, he thought. But Dew had read Turner’s Confessions.110 He recognized that if “the same ideas, and strange appearances about this time in the heavens might prompt others” to rise up, white officials would have no way of predicting or preventing such uprisings. Dew suggested, then, that white authorities simply ignore a problem they would have no means of solving in any case.111

Return Orbits Black vernacular astronomy waxed and waned in the nineteenth century. The Rights of All folded in 1829, and a black-edited periodical would not circulate again in the United States until Philip Bell (1808–1889) founded the Weekly Advocate in 1837.112 In the aftermath of the Nat Turner uprising, moreover, southern officials would pass a series of repressive laws. Black reading was further restricted.113 The North Carolina legislature, among others, established new and more stringent regulations for patrolling communities of the enslaved.114 In the first issue of The Liberator, the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805– 1879) suggests that his newspaper will produce a “revolution in public sentiment.” But Garrison hoped to produce a revolution in the sentiments of white people, and he had few ties to the south.115 Later that year, Garrison explained, “Unfortunately I have not a single subscriber, white or black, south of the Potomac.”116 Garrison’s project simply could not fill the role played by the publications of Cornish and Russwurm.117 But for a brief period, from about 1827 to 1831, black vernacular astronomy flourished. And the writers, editors, distribution agents, and vernacular astronomers who emerged from this early phase of emancipatory science shaped later generations of black intellectuals and radical abolitionists.118

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Black author and soldier Martin Delany (1812–1885) regarded science as essential to emancipation, and he wrote extensively about comets, magnetism, and other phenomena.119 The revolutionary movements of black-authored print during this period reveal what the scholar Cedric Robinson more than thirty years ago called a revolutionary black “world-consciousness.” Vernacular astronomy— connected through print, through poetry, and through revolution—stood as an alternative to an emerging scientific instrumentalism, an emerging belief in the exploitability of the natural world through mathematics and state-organized science.120 Black astronomy, moreover, functioned as a powerful alternative to the exceptionalist astronomy of the United States because it produced a complete theory of the human relation to the cosmos, and it bolstered that theory with accounts of the astronomical sophistication of black people. Black publishers transmitted this emergent theory, this emancipatory cosmology, just at the moment when the dreams of US astronomy were foundering. The United States had failed to develop a centralized system of astronomical measurement, a condition that endangered its “permanent security and independence,” one government report concluded in 1824.121 Army cadets at West Point, moreover, lacked adequate training with astronomical equipment, according to an 1833 report.122 Meanwhile, teenagers at the New-York African Free School were successfully calculating how much radiation each planet in the solar system received from the sun.123 Cornish’s attempts to educate readers throughout the United States— attempts modeled on the work of the Free School—indeed challenged attempts by the US state to educate its soldiers and navigators, its mapmakers and almanac makers. Black star science, moreover, threatened the very premises of an emerging, state-sponsored astronomy in the United States. Many US nationalists assumed that better astronomy would produce greater geopolitical power. But what if this assumption was false? Samuel Cornish’s theory of scientific education had been premised on the belief that political action depended on a population that understood the operations of natural forces across time. He believed, in short, in a kind of distributed agency. To understand political events, his editorial choices suggested, one must examine the interactions between human beings and the natural world. The astronomical nationalist Bartholomew Burges had worried about just these sorts of interactions. He warned of a potential collision, or even a close pass, between the earth and a comet.124 In 1789, this was merely the worried prediction of an astronomer whose cometary calculations had turned out to be incorrect. But writers in the United States would grow increasingly concerned

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with the relation between political upheaval and the forces of an indifferent, or even hostile, universe. By the middle of the 1850s, writers were frequently offering up the commonplace observation that the United States of America sat atop a smoldering volcano.125 This conceptual metaphor—the potential energy of revolution as potential eruption—had a literal corollary. A volcanic eruption had changed the appearance of the earth’s star, the sun, and had provided the signal for Turner’s revolution to begin. But even as black vernacular astronomers offered up a challenge to the dream of a centralized state astronomy, another group of printers was circulating a far different cosmic vision, one that also challenged the dreams of a settler-colonial empire. In the state of Georgia, far from the nearest distribution agent for Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All, a Cherokee newspaper editor was developing his own theory of the relationship between the politics of empire and the science of the stars.

Chapter 3

Cherokee Astronomy

On a Monday morning in May 1832, a Cherokee family was sitting at their breakfast table, very near to the back door of their home, when a group of Georgia militiamen and land surveyors suddenly appeared. One of the surveyors drove a long pole into the ground about three feet from the back door and began taking compass mea surements. As the family watched in astonishment, another surveyor carved two land-lot numbers—93 and 124—into the exterior wall of the house, “on each side of the door.” A short distance away, surveyors carved the same numbers into the sides of a shade tree. Then the surveyors headed west without uttering a word to the family who watched from inside.1 In early 1832, such events were common. The Cherokee Nation was in crisis. By this time, the nation had a written constitution, an executive, a legislature, a judiciary, and a police force called the Cherokee Light Horse. It had a body of law, a capital, and recognized borders. And yet the state of Georgia had opted to ignore these legal institutions. Georgia officials mapped new divisions across Cherokee Nation territory and raffled the subdivided land in the form of “gold lots” (40-acre plots believed to contain gold ore) and “land lots” (160- or 100-acre plots). The conflict between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation was, fundamentally, a crisis of geopolitical space. The crisis pitted two systems of land division, two bodies of law, and two mechanisms of state enforcement against one another. The conflict was, moreover, astronomical. In order to do their work, land surveyors rely on compass mea surements and fixed monuments establishing longitude and latitude. The division of land is a fiction but a fiction that relies on reference to the earth as a rotating body in space.2 Recognizing the astronomical basis of white land claims against indigenous peoples, Cherokee leaders sought to master the discourse of astronomy, to dis-

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seminate its core principles and practices among the wider Cherokee population, and even to challenge claims made by astronomers themselves. And while these efforts were concentrated during the Georgia land crisis of the early 1830s, they began nearly twenty years earlier and extended well into the middle of the nineteenth century. As early as 1813, one Cherokee leader insisted that “Many of our youth of both sexes have acquired such knowledge of letters and figures as to shew to the most incredulous that our mental powers are not by nature inferior to yours—and we look forward to a period of time, when it may be said, that this artist, this mathematician, this astronomer, is a Cherokee.”3 He would not have to wait very long. By 1819, Cherokee students would earn plaudits for their astronomical sophistication.4 The Cherokee Phoenix (1828–1834), the first newspaper published by an indigenous nation in North America, would print various accounts of the cosmos—from speculation about extraterrestrial life to guides for farming according to lunar cycles.5 Indeed, in 1836, the Old Settler council of the Western Cherokee Nation would be the first government in North America to officially sanction the production of a national almanac. The Cherokee Almanac was to be distributed to Cherokee people in the east and in the west, and it was sent at least as far as Boston (see Figure 9). Coming immediately before the forced migration now known as the Trail of Tears (1838–1839), the Almanac sought to educate a people who would be forced to adapt to the challenges of farming in a different climate (Figure 8).6 Moreover, the Cherokee Advocate (1844–1906), the second newspaper to be authorized by the Cherokee national government, continued to publish accounts of the cosmos throughout the nineteenth century, including a lecture by a well-known scientist about the principles of land surveying.7 In coordinating a response to the settler policies of the US nation-state and individual states, indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century faced a set of challenges different from those faced by editors such as Cornish and Russwurm. The editors of Freedom’s Journal sought to connect people scattered across geographic space and divided by separate histories. But Cherokee editors and publishers could call on shared understandings of space and time. As the noted Creek-Cherokee scholar Craig Womack pointedly observes, “Native people have been on this continent at least thirty thousand years, and the stories tell us we have been here even longer than that.”8 The problem faced by nineteenthcentury Cherokee elected officials, publishers, editors, and writers, then, was not how to build an assemblage out of disparate peoples and histories but how to ensure the continuity of Cherokee political sovereignty. Astronomical discourses

Figure 8. The first issue of the Cherokee Almanac appeared in 1836, but the total number of copies printed each year would range from as few as 500 to as many as 2,000. Printer John Candy produced 1,000 copies of the 1842 edition, pictured here. This copy, signed “Rev.d A. Alex [. . .],” likely belonged to the Reverend Archibald Alexander (1772–1851), the founder of Princeton Theological Seminary and president of the Board of Publication of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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were central to this project, as they were for the agents of other nineteenthcentury states. The French empire produced a national ephemeris beginning in 1679. The British empire produced its own ephemeris beginning in 1766.9 The Cherokee Almanac was similar, if less detailed and less well funded. Cherokee leaders hoped it would help them to preserve national sovereignty and diffuse astronomical knowledge that might help to develop agriculture and commerce. But there were, of course, differences. Leaders of the Cherokee Nation did not seek to expand their territory. They merely wanted to preserve it. Nor did these leaders have access to sophisticated observatories, highly trained astronomers, or the computational clerks known throughout the nineteenth century as “computers.”10 The differences between Cherokee astronomy and that of European empires, then, are as crucial as the similarities. Cherokee officials produced a body of statesanctioned astronomical knowledge, but this knowledge combined the instrumental and the sacred. For agents of a settler-colonial project, such as the Georgia surveyors, starscapes are exploitable. They provide a means of locating longitude and latitude and of dividing geographic space in order to extract resources. But from the establishment of the first Cherokee printing press at New Echota in 1828, to the forced dislocation of Cherokee people through the Trail of Tears in 1838, to the establishment of a new printing operation at Tahlequah, in what is now the state of Oklahoma, in 1844, Cherokee printers and writers grappled with the divergence between instrumental and embodied models of the cosmos. And Cherokee astronomical printing can be understood as an index of the continuity between the secular and the sacred, the universe as instrumental to state power and the universe as vast, changing, and alive. Cherokee officials, publishers, editors, and writers did not simply dismiss the cosmic instrumentalism of states such as Georgia or of the United States. Instead, they attempted to understand it, shape it, and even remake it. The project of printing astronomical information, then, was part of a larger effort to position the newly rationalized Cherokee state in the universe. Publications such as the Phoenix and the Cherokee Almanac communicated astronomical information. Cherokee schools taught astronomy. Cherokee poets wrote of comets, planets, and stars and linked their cosmic movements to the rational order of states and of governmentality. The heavens provided a discursive space through which Cherokee writers articulated competing cosmic perspectives. The distribution of printed astronomical information, then, did more than simply provide proof of Cherokee civilization, as was often claimed by nineteenthcentury observers. Rather, Cherokee astronomy provided a means of reconciling

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different knowledge systems and using them to counter the settler-colonial project of an expansionist US state.

Astronomical Divisions When a writer for a religious periodical in 1845 needed a metaphor for an utterly absurd state of affairs, she or he imagined a Cherokee purchasing astronomical equipment, asking, “Would you send a blind man to Europe to choose optical instruments for a new observatory at Washington; or even a young christian [sic] Cherokee, who knows nothing of Astronomy?” Such a decision, the writer remarks, would be “preposterous.”11 Ironically, a “young christian Cherokee” in the middle of the nineteenth century would likely have known a great deal about astronomy, since the Cherokee children who attended the English-language schools of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had by that time been studying astronomy for decades. The Christian Cherokee writer Catharine Brown (Kā tỳ; 1800–1823) excelled in the subjects of astronomy, geography, and natural history, for instance.12 The Christian convert Elias Boudinot (Gallegina Uwati) calculated a complete lunar eclipse diagram at the age of seventeen. Boudinot’s Cornwall, Connecticut, teacher was so impressed that the elder man sent the diagram to Jedidiah Morse (1761–1826), the famous American geographer who was at the time completing a report on “Indian Affairs” for the US Secretary of War.13 More than a decade after the graduation of Brown and Boudinot, Christian schools for Cherokee children continued to make astronomy a central part of the curriculum.14 Of course, Cherokee astronomy had not always been narrowly scientific. Like other indigenous peoples in North America, the Cherokee developed an extensive cosmological tradition. But by the nineteenth century, it was clear that traditional Cherokee ways of knowing the cosmos existed alongside astronomical ways of measuring and understanding it. When the anthropologist James Mooney (1861–1921) conducted interviews with Cherokee people for a US-sponsored ethnography between 1887 and 1890, he received what seemed to him to be contradictory answers to his questions about astronomy. Asking individual Cherokee people what stars were like, he was told that they were “balls of light” floating in empty space. He was also told that they were fur-covered creatures with round bodies and heads like terrapins—two of whom had been captured by Cherokee hunters but had escaped into the heavens.15 The night sky

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was, for these Cherokee storytellers, at least, an inhabited place in which multiple, seemingly contradictory stories could simultaneously be told. Mooney might well have been cataloging the end stage of a long nineteenthcentury process of training Cherokee readers in both centuries-old sacred traditions and contemporary astronomy. Astronomical training was a key element in the process of “civilizing” the Cherokee nation and people, a project organized by Cherokee leaders hoping to preserve their territory, culture, and political autonomy. The years following the American Revolution were catastrophic for the Cherokee, who had allied with the British during the war. By 1794, conflict with the United States had resulted in the deaths of roughly one-third of the Cherokee population and the loss of one-half of Cherokee territory. The subsequent decades were defined by the encroachment of white settlers onto Cherokee land and the displacement of indigenous people in waves of westward emigration.16 And yet, starting in 1809, the Cherokee organized a program of political and social renewal. In that year, the Upper Towns and Lower Towns began to meet in a single, national council—a forerunner to the Cherokee Nation. The council produced written laws and a rationalized system of governance.17 Previously, Cherokee governance had been decentralized, with significant power delegated to clans. Women and men both had a say in clan governance, with leaders often appointed through popular acclamation. And while individuals could own property, most farmland had been subject to shared ownership through the clan. The new legal system formalized these modes of property ownership and governance. Individuals could own land improvements (such as fences or houses) or personal property (such as livestock or clothing), but the land itself constituted a natural resource that could not be individually owned.18 When the legislature in 1825 ordered the creation of a capital city at New Echota, for instance, they ordered that the site be established on a grid pattern by surveyors, with one hundred private lots of one acre each. Bidders could purchase occupancy rights to these lots, but those rights were transferrable only to other Cherokee citizens.19 The project of state formation was, by nearly every measure, a success. By 1821, a Cherokee named Sequoyah (c. 1770–1843) had produced a syllabary, or written language, which enabled the preservation and transmission in writing of numerous new ideas, including ideas about astronomy. Cherokee medicine people took up the script form of this new orthography by keeping manuscript notebooks and cataloging traditional practices, while the council of the Cherokee Nation itself began to see uses for a printed form of the langauge.20 In 1825, the council asked Elias Boudinot, now a graduate of the Foreign Mission School

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in Cornwall, Connecticut, to embark on a speaking tour to raise funds for the creation of a “National Academy” and the purchase of a printing press outfitted with English and Cherokee type.21 And by 1835, more than half of all Cherokee households contained at least one reader literate in the Sequoyah syllabary, in English, or in both.22 Indeed, this literacy was noticeable well before the 1830s. One vistitor to the Cherokee Nation in the 1820s, for instance, expressed amazement at the reading habits of Native American people. While snooping through the home library of a Cherokee family with whom he had stayed the night, this visitor found works of American history and back issues of the Spectator. A few days later, just outside the borders of the Cherkee Nation, this visitor stayed at an inn whose owner kept on hand the works of Adam Smith and James Ferguson, the astronomer whose star charts had been a key source for Benjamin Banneker. The Scottish Enlightenment was well represented in the private book collections of the Native American southeast.23 Reading, including reading about astronomy, would play a significant role in the politics of the Cherokee Nation during the late 1820s and beyond. Throughout this period, moreover, Cherokee officials invited missionary organizations to establish schools within their territory, often with the goal of providing Cherokee children with a technical and scientific education. As one cultural historian has pointed out, native parents at the time often saw a missionary education for their children as “a key strategy in their ongoing fight to retain their landholdings.”24 But while Cherokee leaders and parents valued missionary schools for their potential to disseminate scientific principles, missionaries to the Cherokee Nation had a different aim. Many believed that a scientific education would undermine Cherokee ways of knowing the universe. One report by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions admits as much. The report’s authors explain that “even a superficial acquaintance with [geology, natural philosophy, and astronomy] would explode” nonChristian systems of belief, leaving indigenous students receptive to religious conversion.25 Yet Cherokee children tended to be less receptive than missionaries hoped. Consider, for instance, the case of a Cherokee child referred to in missionary records from 1831. The Arkansas minister Asa Hitchcock (1800–1849) identifies this boy, recently arrived from Georgia, as his school’s star pupil. He “has been nearly twice through Woodbridge’s Geography,” Hitchcock explained. The choice of textbook is telling. Readers of William Channing Woodbridge (1794–1845) not only learned definitions and terms but learned to read modern

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maps, to calculate time at different latitudes, and to compare the positions, sizes, and orbital periods of planets in the solar system.26 These are indeed valuable skills for young people whose recent experience has been astronomically justified displacement and land theft. It is noteworthy, then, that Hitchcock’s only frustration with this student was his unwillingness to convert. “The young man just referred to we consider quite promising,” Hitchcock writes. “This would be especially the case if he should become pious.”27 It is not clear if this Cherokee student converted, but the larger trend among Cherokee students distinctly suggests that conversion to Christianity was not a forgone conclusion. Between 1817 and 1833, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions educated 882 Cherokee students. The Board recorded only 167 Cherokee converts by 1830, however, and these converts were divided between students and nonstudents.28 Hitchcock’s star pupil, in other words, might well have been an avid convert to cartography and astronomy without manifesting a similar avidity for Christ. For Cherokee leaders, the wide diffusion of scientific knowledge was central to the project of state formation, of maintaining national sovereignty, and of promoting the dignity of the Cherokee people. Cherokee leader John Ridge (1802–1839) observed that “If an Indian is educated in the sciences, has a good knowledge of the classics, astronomy, mathematics, moral and natural philosophy, and his conduct [is] equally modest and polite,” he might receive the respect of educated whites, even as he is confronted by the ignorant prejudice of the uneducated.29 Another Cherokee writer, Young Beaver, echoed Ridge’s observation, writing, “How pleasing it is to see aboriginal sons and daughters climbing together the hill of science.”30 Young Beaver’s praise of scientific education is shot through with subtle critiques of missionary educators and with hopes that the Cherokee themselves might take responsibility for such education in the future. Missionaries provided two-track instruction: a limited education for girls that stopped short of high school and a more comprehensive education for boys. Yet Young Beaver was pleased to see Cherokee “sons and daughters” achieving education together. Moreover, Young Beaver’s choice of metaphor—“climbing together the hill of science”—is hardly incidental. Mountain quests play a significant role in Cherokee knowledge production. To climb the hill of science is a particularly Cherokee way of achieving, rather than merely receiving, an education.31 Scientific and technical education, including education in astronomy, was central to the nation-building efforts of Cherokee leaders. In such a context, then, it is not surprising that the first Cherokee

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newspaper, the Phoenix, provided its readers with an extensive astronomical education.

The Cherokee Phoenix and the State in the Universe The Cherokee Phoenix (1828–1834) was, among other things, a state-sponsored astronomical publication. Various issues of the newspaper included, for instance, a guide to understanding astronomical terms,32 an account of the discovery of a meteorite,33 a description of the relative sizes and placement of the planets in the solar system,34 numerous descriptions of comets,35 detailed predictions about the transit of Mercury across the sun,36 a guide to the relation between lunar cycles and crop yields,37 an ironic commentary about the possibility of emigrating to the moon as a means of escaping white settlers,38 and a discussion of whether intelligent life inhabited other planets.39 In short, the Phoenix was very much concerned with the state of the universe. It was, moreover, concerned with the role of the state in the universe—of governance according to universal laws and principles. One typical example was an essay entitled “Natural Law,” reprinted from the Encyclopedia Americana, which suggested a link between reasoned observation of the natural world and the political rights enjoyed by people across nations. The essay locates natural rights in the mind of God but suggests that these natural rights might be discerned only through sustained, reasoned observation of the universe itself. In other words, these rights are universal in the cosmic sense, and they apply across space and time.40 The newspaper repeated a view common among thinkers of the Radical Enlightenment, one that would have placed the natural rights of all people, including Cherokee people, above the secular laws of Georgia or even the United States. One might be tempted to attribute the newspaper’s astronomical fixation to its first editor, the Christian Cherokee writer Elias Boudinot. At age seventeen, Boudinot distinguished himself among his Connecticut schoolmates by calculating a predictive diagram of a coming lunar eclipse.41 Certainly, Boudinot’s tenure as editor (1828–1832) reflected an interest in astronomy and science, which might well have been whetted by his scientific education. Yet Boudinot did not have total control over the newspaper. As Principal Chief John Ross (1790–1866) explained in a speech before the National Council in 1828, the newspaper would be the “public property of the Nation.” 42 (Once the Phoenix began publishing, moreover, elected officials would periodically direct the editor to print particular material.)43 Even after Boudinot was forced to resign for supporting a westward

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emigration plan, and the Cherokee government replaced him with Elijah Hicks (1796–1856), the newspaper continued its tradition of reporting on scientific theories about the solar system—including speculation about the possibility of life on other planets.44 The Phoenix, then, only partly reflected Boudinot’s interests. In printing detailed accounts of astronomical discoveries, the newspaper represented the will of the state.45 But what interest did the Cherokee state have in transmitting news of meteorites, comets, and planets, or in considering whether intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe? There are several answers to this question. First and most simply, the Phoenix was a mechanism of education. Young Beaver and John Ridge had hoped to see individual citizens of the Cherokee Nation become educated in scientific discourses, and Boudinot sought to provide this education through his state-sponsored publication. Consider, for instance, the newspaper’s treatment of Encke’s comet. An account of this comet’s probable future collision with the earth, you will recall from Chapter 2, appeared in the pages of Freedom’s Journal. It also appeared in the pages of the Cherokee Phoenix, although it was not widely publicized elsewhere in the United States.46 For readers of Freedom’s Journal, the story of the comet’s future collision with the earth aligned with the newspaper’s broader claims about the cosmos and about history: that time was cyclical, that oppression’s period was finite, and that doom might suddenly descend on the present rulers of the earth. And yet, in the Cherokee Phoenix, the same obscure article serves an entirely different function. Boudinot reprinted without comment the prediction of a cometary collision in March 1829. Three years later, however, he came across an article debunking the original prediction, which he also reprinted. “The probability of ” a collision between the earth and Encke’s comet, “is all but infinitely removed,” the Phoenix informed its readers.47 As editor, Boudinot served as a key public official in the Cherokee Nation—an official responsible for reporting up-to-date information about global affairs, about threats to the nation, and even about the cosmos. When Boudinot learned that an astronomer of significant international reputation was predicting a future collision between the earth and an astronomical body, he reported it to his readers. When he learned that this prediction had been discredited, he corrected the record. Second, and more importantly, astronomical discourses functioned as a means of locating the Cherokee state in space and time for a diverse array of readers. In many ways, the Phoenix was a minor publication. Printers produced only two hundred copies per issue (a quarter of the eight hundred copies of The Rights of All printed each month). And, while the list of cities to which it was distributed

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varied over time, the newspaper typically reached fewer than fifteen cities and towns beyond the borders of the Cherokee Nation itself.48 Yet the narrow scope of the newspaper’s distribution belied its ambition. Its readers were figures of national and international prominence. Ralph Waldo Emerson read the Phoenix, as did the Turkish American polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783–1840).49 Boston philologist John Pickering (1777–1846) received two subscriptions, one for himself and another on behalf of Prussian linguist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).50 Moreover, because the newspaper was printed in two languages—English and Sequoyah—it was theoretically available to half of all Cherokee households, which by the end of the newspaper’s run would have at least one reader who was literate in at least one of those written languages.51 The founders of the Phoenix, in short, manifested local and global ambitions. And accounts of the universe, which appeared frequently in the pages of the newspaper, provided a means of articulating these ambitions. The Phoenix’s treatment of the potential for intelligent life on other planets emblematized the universalizing scope of its ambition. Since the seventeenth century, European intellectuals had mused about the possibility of such life.52 But what functioned in the eighteenth century as a philosophical thought experiment had, by the first half of the nineteenth, become a matter of widespread popular interest and occasional alarm. The British theologian and astronomer Thomas Dick published in 1823 his theory that the solar system was inhabited by numerous intelligent beings.53 And, in 1835, the New York Sun published what came to be known as the Moon Hoax, a false account of the discovery of lunar life: from great biped beavers to city-dwelling man-bats. The British writer Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), who was traveling through rural Massachusetts at the time of the Moon Hoax, reported on a “company of ladies” engaging in an unexpectedly heated debate about the existence of lunar life. Indeed, Martineau compared this mania about moon-people to the religious ecstasy produced by Christian revivals. For white protestants such as those met by Martineau, an inhabited cosmos represented a challenge to the centrality of the human in God’s creation.54 But Cherokee people had long been comfortable with the idea of a living, conscious, and fully inhabited universe. Many held sacred the relationship between human beings and “ little people,” or Yunwi Tsunsdi, who facilitated spiritual transformations and shared secret knowledge.55 Recall, also, the story of the stars that Cherokee storytellers reported to sociologist James Mooney: A long time ago, two stars descended to the earth. These creatures, with heads like terrapins and round bodies covered in gray fur, were captured by a group of

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hunters. The stars remained seven nights, and then ascended into the heavens, where they remain.56 Far from being concerned about creatures from the heavens, Cherokee storytellers regarded themselves and their nation as part of an expansive, living universe. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Phoenix reprinted for readers numerous arguments in favor of the existence of intelligent life on other planets. One account, attributed to the Hungarian astronomer Baron Franz Xaver von Zach (1754–1832) but likely copied from a US periodical, explained that there could be as many as “ten thousand millions of globes like the earth, within what are considered the bounds of the known universe. As there are suns to give light throughout all these systems, we may infer that there are also eyes to behold it, and beings, whose nature in this one important particular, is analogous to our own.”57 This particu lar article was popu lar throughout the United States. It would go on to be printed in various newspapers and periodicals.58 But its central claim was in fact typical of astronomical claims published in the Phoenix. Four years earlier, for instance, the newspaper offered a basic primer on astronomy, which explained that “Astronomers supposed that the fixed stars are to other systems of planets what our sun is to this.”59 Another essay in the newspaper asked, “why should we think our earth the only planet in our system that is peopled?” 60 Such accounts recurred throughout the Phoenix, which is understandable when one considers how Cherokee political leaders understood their nation. It was not merely one nation in a comparative field of nations, although it certainly was that.61 The Cherokee Nation was also linked through time to its ancestors and linked across space to particular geographic formations, such as rivers and mountains and even constellations in the sky directly overhead. Principal Chief John Ross’s frequent reference in political speeches to the “Great Ruler of the Universe” emphasized the nation’s emplacement in time and space.62 The phrase, which recurred throughout his public statements, functioned not merely as a way of speaking across religious divides in the nation itself (some Cherokee were Christian converts, many others were not, but Christians and non-Christians alike could acknowledge a numinous creator). Rather, Ross’s Great Ruler of the Universe served as shorthand for illustrating the cosmic stakes of contingent arguments about geopolitical space. Displacement of the Cherokee from their unique place in the universe would constitute a catastrophe of cosmic proportions. Such arguments about cosmic emplacement—that stars and people and geographic formations should remain in their proper places—did not come just from major political figures in the nation. The Phoenix became a clearinghouse for political speech by now largely forgotten Cherokee and Creek

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readers, who wrote to the newspaper to express their own views, or whose extemporaneous speeches in public meetings were recorded and published by Boudinot and his successor, Elijah Hicks. Just as for Ross or John Ridge, astronomical language and even astronomical measurement functioned for these largely unknown writers as a means of understanding the place of the nation in the cosmos. One such writer, signing as “Marshal,” referred to elected officers of the Cherokee state as “solitary stars in the political sky of our country,” for instance.63 Cherokee editors printed accounts that located the nation in the cosmos. Despite an extensive education in the discourses of astronomy and geography, however, most Cherokee correspondents to the newspaper continued to communicate in a cosmic language that far predated the introduction of mission schools to the Cherokee Nation. Indeed, perhaps no cosmic metaphor appeared more frequently than that of the setting sun, which provided an explanatory apparatus that would have made only partial sense to white US and European readers such as Emerson, Pickering, and Humboldt. In the Phoenix, sunsets at once provided cardinal directions and the sense of an ending. According to many Cherokee stories, the land to the west is Us’ûñhi’yï, home to the ghost country of Tsûsginâ’ï. To “go toward the setting sun” is at once to travel west and to travel toward the land of the dead.64 Correspondents to the newspaper frequently made use of this confluence of meanings. In the spring of 1829, for instance, an assembly of “common citizens of the country” gathered in the town of Hiwassee and drafted a letter to the Phoenix, expressing support for the Cherokee Nation government and opposition to any proposed emigration. Whites might have been under the impression that the Cherokee people wanted to emigrate west even as the Nation’s leaders prevented it, yet these “common citizens” argued forcefully that the government of the Cherokee Nation had their full support in resisting displacement. In eight short paragraphs, these writers repeat the phrase “setting sun” five times. “Some of our brethren have gone towards the setting sun,” they write. “What is their situation? Their fires are put out; their homes are unsettled; they are not at peace.” 65 The letter—written in Sequoyah but translated by Boudinot into English—relies on the refrain of the setting sun to locate the Cherokee people temporally and geographically. The letter also communicated the democratic will of a community. It was signed by thirteen representatives but unanimously approved by a meeting of the Aquohee District, one of the eight political divisions of the Cherokee Nation. Elite and common people, Christian converts and traditionalists, joined together in the printed space of the newspaper page and described their strug gle for continuity in cosmic terms. At stake was the future, land, governance, and the

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sovereignty of the Cherokee people. And they agreed not to go toward the “setting sun”—the place of death, ghosts, and unsettlement—but to remain in the living geography of the nation itself. Cherokee readers, in short, made meaning of the heavens in spite of the astronomical education provided by missionary schools and reprinted scientific articles. Ultimately, the Cherokee Nation printing press would be lost in a dispute over who would control it. In August 1835, the Cherokee legislature ordered the press moved from the capital of New Echota to a site beyond the reach of the Georgia state militia. At this time, however, the nation was riven by conflict between the so-called Treaty Party, a group favoring emigration to the west, and the party of John Ross, who wanted to stay in the east even if remaining meant continued conflict with Georgia and the United States. Boudinot and Stand Watie (1806–1871) were leading members of the Treaty Party, and Watie feared that removal of the press would enable the Ross party to exercise full control over Cherokee publishing. Watie, then, collaborated with the Georgia militia to seize the press. One US official described this action as part of an effort to secure printing “for all Cherokee people.” Unsurprisingly, however, the Cherokee people entirely lost control of the equipment, which vanishes from the historical record after 1835. The Cherokee state would lose for roughly a decade the ability to print laws and newspapers.66 But Cherokee readers would not entirely lose access to an astronomical education. Indeed, astronomy in the Cherokee Nation would persist, albeit in an instrumental and desacralized form.

Displaced Stargazers: The Cherokee Almanac, 1836–1861 A commercially available spyglass in the first decades of the nineteenth century would have magnified objects by slightly more than ten times.67 With that degree of magnification, an amateur stargazer would have been unable to see the whirling storms of Jupiter or the poisonous, multicolored clouds of Venus. But a simple spyglass, or day glass, could nonetheless change a person’s understanding of the heavens. Train such a device on Jupiter at its closest approach to Earth— as it was, for instance, in January 1836 or June 1841 or December 1858—and one would see a glowing disk, far larger than a star, surrounded at various times by one, two, or even four of its small moons.68 Train the same device on a galaxy or nebula, and it would appear not as a small, twinkling dot but as a hazy, white cloud.69 The night sky, an expanse of darkness illuminated by a river of tiny stars, would suddenly become a place of dimension and depth. The thousands of readers

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who flipped through pages of the Cherokee Almanac were reminded of this depth with each passing month and year. “A good hand telescope or large spy-glass is sufficient to enable one to see the Moons of Jupiter,” the Almanac explained in one emblematic essay. “Try it. Look carefully and steadily close to the planet, in a clear sky, and you may see two, three, and occasionally all four at the same time.”70 The Almanac, printed nearly without interruption between 1836 and 1861, provided Cherokee readers not only with month-by-month calendars and exhortations to live temperate, Christian lives but also with a tremendously detailed, and at times poetic, astronomical education. Readers learned to identify specific stars, such as Rigel, Sirius, Regulus, and Spica.71 They learned how to track the positions of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn across the heavens throughout the year.72 They learned, in short, to read a measurable and desacralized night sky. A concern for the locations of planets and stars might seem strange, particularly when one reflects that the Cherokee Nation was in the midst of a strug gle for survival in 1836, the year the Almanac first appeared. What does it matter that one can locate Rigel or Venus, or see the moons of Jupiter, when US soldiers are forcibly removing Cherokee people from their homes? In December 1835, the Cherokee signatories of the Treaty of New Echota ceded lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for $5 million and other concessions. Principal Chief Ross was away at Washington when the treaty was signed in the capital of the Cherokee Nation. But Cherokee Supreme Court Justice Walter Adair (Red Wat) (1791–1854) was present at the treaty signing, and he kept a tally of the vote: seventy-nine in favor of emigration, seven opposed. Yet in what was purported to be a vote of the Cherokee people, some twenty of the voters were white men who had married into Cherokee society. Numerous elected officials, moreover, were absent. Ultimately, some twelve thousand Cherokee Nation citizens who never agreed to the land cession would in 1838 be forcibly removed from their homes and held in wintertime internment camps, then force marched from present-day Georgia to present-day Oklahoma. Thousands died.73 Ross, the chief executive, described the treaty not merely as a crisis of territorial integrity but as a crisis of access to the status of the human, writing, “We are denationalized; we are disenfranchised. We are deprived of access to membership in the human family!”74 By denying the Cherokee people a voice through republican forms of governance, the so-called Treaty Party and the United States had undone the nation-building project that had given dimension to the Cherokee state since 1809. Ross recognized that the fictions of legality and statehood provided the means by which human beings might materialize recognition of their humanity.

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For Ross and others, the nation-state had been an answer to the precariousness of nineteenth-century indigenous experience. The Cherokee Almanac, then, can only be understood in the context of its emergence at a time of extreme national crisis. The white missionary Samuel Worcester (1798–1859), who had spent time in a Georgia prison for refusing to recognize the state legislature’s authority over Cherokee lands, concluded even before the treaty that the Cherokee Nation’s position in the east was untenable. Worcester and his wife, Anne Orr Worcester (1799–1840), emigrated to the western Cherokee lands and lobbied the local council for permission to establish a printing operation there.75 And while Samuel Worcester’s press was largely funded by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the organization he served, the printing operation required and received the approval of the local Cherokee government.76 By approving Worcester’s detailed plan to contribute to “the welfare of the Cherokee people by the promotion of knowledge,” the “Old Settler” Cherokee council in 1835 became the first national government in North America to officially approve the production of an almanac.77 And its reasons for approving the almanac can be guessed at based on what the pamphlet itself provided to local readers. The Cherokee Almanac told readers how to locate themselves in time by giving instructions for setting clocks and following calendars.78 It provided an education in scientific matters, such as the time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun.79 Most importantly, the Almanac located the transformed Cherokee Nation and its people in a larger, cosmic field. Publishing in a time of crisis, Worcester did not initially place much faith in the future popularity of the pamphlet. “I fear our success will not be great,” he wrote in 1836, explaining that he nonetheless planned to send two hundred copies to the old nation in the east and sell the remaining 250 copies in the western Cherokee settlements.80 The early printing record bears out his concerns. Worcester produced no Cherokee Almanac for 1837, for instance. And after he grew confident enough to print 2,000 copies of the 1839 pamphlet, he complained that sales plunged after “a pictured almanac”—probably the Davy Crockett Almanac—“came into the market.” He continued, “I despair of selling so as to cover expense, or anything near it.”81 Sales got worse from there. The 1843 pamphlet was paid for by the cash-strapped Cherokee Nation itself—apparently the only way to keep the volume in print.82 And yet the initial failure of the Cherokee Almanac belies its later success. Sales stabilized by the middle of the 1840s (see Table 4). Worcester even began to report that Cherokee readers spoke to him about the pamphlet’s lessons on celestial orbits and civilized living, expressing by turns approbation and doubt. After printing an article about installing windows

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Table 4. Cherokee and Choctaw Almanacs, 1835–1865 Year Published

Short Title

Copies Printed

1836

Cherokee almanac for the Year of our Lord 1836 Chahta almanac for the year of our Lord 1836 Chahta almanac for the year of our Lord 1837 Cherokee Almanac for the Year of our Lord 1838 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1839 Chahta almanac for the year of our Lord 1839 — Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1840 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1842 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1843 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1844 Chahta almanak [for 1844] Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1845 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1847 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1848 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1849 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1850 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1851 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1852 Cherokee almanac for the year of our Lord 1853 Cherokee Almanac 1854 Cherokee Almanac 1855 Cherokee Almanac 1856 Cherokee Almanac 1856 Cherokee almanac 1858 Cherokee almanac 1859 Cherokee almanac 1860 Cherokee almanac 1861

500 [unknown] 450 [unknown] 2,000 [unknown] [unknown] 1,800 1,000 1,000a 1,000 400 600 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 [unknown]

1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860

Source: Lester Hargrett, Oklahoma Imprints, 1835–1890 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America and R. R. Bowker, 1951). a Printed at the expense of the Cherokee Nation.

in private homes, for instance, Worcester reported that he asked a Cherokee friend whether people in the community had read it. “They had read what I wrote, and pronounced it good,” Worcester discovered and reported in the next year’s almanac, although he also noted with annoyance that none of these readers had followed his advice.83 The pamphlet was even sold and carried beyond the borders of the nation itself. One copy, for instance, was purchased by “Wm. Jenks” in or around Saint Louis, Missouri, on May 10, 1836. This might have been the Reverend William

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Jenks (1778–1866), a prominent white Congregational leader from Boston, although there are no records of this purchase in his extant papers. More likely, this almanac was purchased by one of the several Cherokee or Choctaw men named in Jenks’s honor by white missionaries. Indigenous children were often given new names when they entered missionary schools, and these names were typically those of benefactors or prominent church leaders. Jenks’s name was common. As one historian explains: “A seven-year-old ‘full Choctaw’ received the name ‘William Jenks’ in 1824, . . . but missionaries explained that ‘this was the second boy, taken as a beneficiary, to whom this name has been given.’ The first had spent a year in school at age twelve and then had run away.”84 The sevenyear-old William Jenks would have been nineteen in 1836. The twelve-year-old William Jenks would have been at least twenty-four. Many indigenous people, moreover, spent time in St. Louis as they emigrated away from the western Cherokee Nation and its political conflicts.85 By the twentieth century, the almanac belonging to “Wm. Jenks” had found its way into an archive in Wisconsin, where it remains.86 The fortunes of the Cherokee Almanac improved over the course of the 1840s, at least in part, because the pamphlet itself improved. For the first issue, Worcester merely copied a competing almanac and applied a “correction” factor to calculate sunrises and sunsets in the Western Cherokee Nation, now eastern Oklahoma. Worcester soon realized that he had, like the eighteenth-century commercial almanac makers who had done the same, produced an only intermittently reliable pamphlet.87 Two years later, Worcester hired philomath Marshall Conant (1801–1873) to produce original calculations for the pamphlet. Conant, and later the astronomer Benjamin Greenleaf (1786–1864), provided a reliable set of calculations for sunrises and sunsets, for lunar phases, and for eclipses. Worcester explained from the first year of the pamphlet’s publication that its primary function would be to divide space and time.88 But this pamphlet did not merely provide readers with a calendar and a reliable way to keep time. The Cherokee Almanac was insistent in its efforts to educate readers in a secular, nonmystical method of understanding astronomical space.89 Worcester often condemned superstitious behavior. In one essay, he explained, “Many people look to the age of the moon to tell them when to kill their pork, when to plant one thing or another, when to lay their fence, or set their stakes, when to brand their cattle; and I know not how many other things. The Cherokee Almanac has said before that all these things are folly; but it is hard to convince people that this is so.”90 As a result, Worcester writes, he spent a year conducting experiments to demonstrate that the moon exerts no influence over pork, or planting, or fences.

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One can detect in Worcester’s comments about the moon a key aim of the scientific education provided by the American Board missionaries, who thought that “even a superficial acquaintance with” natural science “would explode” nonChristian systems of belief.91 Indeed, even in his acts of translation, Worcester sought to desacralize the cosmos. Worcester employed John Walker Candy (Daguwada) (c. 1806–1868) as a translator tasked with converting English-language astronomical information into Sequoyah. Candy had served as an apprentice translator under Boudinot at the Phoenix, which provided readers with a miscellany of incommensurate accounts of the cosmos. But in the Cherokee Almanac, Candy hewed to Worcester’s project of publishing a desacralized account of the universe. He described the sun as “ᏅᏙ ᎢᎦ ᎡᎯ,” or the “large celestial body that exists at day” (“nvdo iga ehi”), and the moon as “ᏒᏃᏱ ᎡᎯ,” or the “[large celestial body] that exists at night” (“svnoyi ehi”), and the movements of these bodies were described mathematically. Sunsets did not mark the movement toward death but merely marked the end of the day.92 Candy and Worcester employed ordinary, workaday cosmic language. Ultimately, however, these rationalized, desacralized accounts of the cosmos would provoke many Cherokee readers. This was particularly the case when astronomical science proved useless in predicting astronomical events. In 1859, for instance, Worcester was forced to acknowledge that the almanac had failed to predict the appearance of a comet, visible to the naked eye, during the previous autumn. “You all saw” this comet, Worcester reported, “and saw it often.” He continued: “At first it was visible at night in the North-West, and in the morning in the North-East; but afterwards it was to be seen in the evening only. We need not describe it—you all saw it for yourselves—a splendid thing. We did not foretell it, because we did not foreknow it.”93 We did not foretell it, because we did not foreknow it. The Cherokee Almanac had for more than two decades promoted a predictive, rationalized relation between human beings and the cosmos. Sunrises and sunsets were predictable. The moon’s phases were predictable. All astronomical movement could be observed, measured, and foretold. Yet Cherokee readers of the pamphlet could see for themselves the failures of mathematical prediction. Comets, previously unseen and unknown, could sweep into view without warning. The comet Worcester’s almanac had failed to predict is known today by the name of the Italian astronomer who discovered it: Giovanni Battista Donati (1826–1873). Donati’s comet (C/1858 L1) was the second brightest such body to appear in the nineteenth century. It was, moreover, a major news event in the region. Newspapers in Arkansas and Missouri frequently mocked the credulous

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fear of rural people, some of whom apparently expected the comet to strike the earth or believed that it portended the return of Jesus Christ. The Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat expressed smug unconcern about whether the comet would “come into collision with the planet in which the State of Arkansas is situated.”94 But many were genuinely afraid. Francis Grierson (1848–1927), who spent his youth in Illinois during this period, recalled widespread panic at the “noiseless march of the comet” as it came “nearer and nearer to the earth” that autumn. Grierson explained, “While it frightened some into silence it made others loquacious.”95 This was the astronomical event about which the Cherokee Almanac had failed to warn its readers.

The “Mystic Eternities” of Deep Space Comets provide an impor tant index of the all-embracing relation to the universe—analytical, sacred, wondrous—adopted by many Cherokee readers. While the Cherokee Almanac was straightforwardly analytical in its descriptions of comets that had already passed by the earth, Cherokee people were often more speculative. Seventeen comets visible to the naked eye were seen from the United States between 1850 and 1910, and Cherokee observers were no less attentive to these celestial objects than others.96 Indeed, the slow approach of a visible comet forces a consideration of the universe in a way that few other celestial appearances do. Comets hang in the sky morning after morning, evening after evening. They grow brighter as they move ever closer to their encounter with the earth. They are, moreover, visitors from deep space. Their orbits carry them far beyond the warm embrace of the yellow dwarf star around which we circle. Contemplation of such objects demands a confrontation with the unknown. Will this comet collide with the earth, causing fires, floods, and extinctions? Since the eighteenth century, astronomers have recognized that collisions between planets and other celestial bodies are possible—even, over time, likely.97 Might life, perhaps intelligent life, be discovered on other bodies in space? And what might such a discovery suggest about the origin and future of life on Earth? Much of nineteenth-century scientific education in the United States— particularly the philanthropically funded education of indigenous children, of black children, and of girls of all races—attempted to settle or avoid scientific questions such as these. A discomfort with uncertainty occasionally led to implausible pronouncements. One popular astronomy textbook from midcentury asserted that the moon was likely incapable of supporting life but that Mars, Jupiter, Sat-

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urn, Mercury, and Venus were likely able to support life.98 More often, however, nineteenth-century educators avoided such mysteries entirely, focusing instead on what could be measured or quantified. What is the orbital period of the planet Venus? When will Saturn make its closest approach to the earth? Poets of the period were often baffled by the impulse to quantify in the face of mystery. In Drum-Taps (1865), for instance, Walt Whitman wrote that the astronomer’s impulse to “add, divide, and measure” the universe made him feel “tired and sick.”99 In essence, Whitman channeled the writing of Alexander von Humboldt, whose scientific prose had demonstrated the interrelatedness of natural phenomena and who will be discussed in the next chapter.100 For now, however, it is important to know that the very interrelatedness that Whitman and Humboldt took as a given was ignored in most textbooks for nonelite children, including Cherokee children. These children learned to measure the cosmos, not to understand it. This quantifying education had been precisely the sort Worcester provided to readers of the Cherokee Almanac. Worcester’s universe contained surprises (the moons of Jupiter suddenly visible in the lens of a spyglass), but they were explicable surprises, staged in advance for the Cherokee reader. Worcester’s pamphlet addressed that reader in the tone of an exasperated schoolmaster, perpetually annoyed at the superstition of the Cherokee stargazer who watched the phases of the moon for signs of the future or who thought of the heavens as a place of life and intelligence, rather than as a place of predictably orbiting bodies. Yet these Cherokee readers were not simply receptive to Worcester’s account of the cosmos. Just as Cherokee students who accepted the education of missionary schools frequently rejected its Christian indoctrination, numerous Cherokee writers and readers from the 1830s to the 1850s rejected the narrow instrumentalism of Worcester’s cosmos even as they sought to know more about celestial observation and measurement. To the Cherokee poet Tso-le-oh-woh, the appearance of a comet prompted consideration of far more than mere orbital periods.101 Rather, the comet invited consideration of fundamental questions about life in the universe itself. Little is known about Tso-le-oh-woh, who published two poems in the newly established Cherokee Advocate, the 1844 successor newspaper to the Phoenix. Printed in the western capital of Tahlequah, with the motto “Our Rights, Our Country, Our Race,” the newspaper functioned as an effort by the Cherokee Nation government to reassert Cherokee nationalism and restore Cherokee publishing.102 Tso-le-ohwoh’s poems aligned with the newspaper’s assertive editorial mission. The first poem, for instance, mocked white missionaries for believing that they were the “fathers” of native peoples.103 But the second poem, “What an Indian Thought

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When He Saw the Comet,” offered a more complicated investigation of how a modern Cherokee observer might encounter a cosmos mediated by traditional stories, by a missionary education, and by an unfolding political crisis shaped by US expansionism. In 1853, observers from Paris to Tahlequah—including, apparently, Tso-leoh-woh—saw the comet Klinkerfues (C/1853 L1-Klinkerfues) moving across the sky. But the Cherokee Almanac had failed to predict this appearance, just as it would fail to predict Donati’s comet five years later. Tso-le-oh-woh’s thirty-fourline poem, published in the immediate aftermath of the Klinkerfues appearance, is not so much a critique of Worcester (whom the poet does not mention) but instead is a probing series of questions about the comet itself. The poet ends with a scathing critique of how white Americans, and even some native people, regard the cosmos as an instrument for the accumulation of power. What is this object, the Indian of Tso-le-oh-woh’s poem asks, streaking across the sky at sunset, all “Tinsel fire” with a long tail “fluttering / Far behind”? Only a few years before, a popular astronomy textbook had explained that “the luminous part of a comet is something of the nature of smoke, fog, or other gaseous matter.”104 This was one theory. But there were others. Recall here that the Massachusetts navigator Bartholomew Burges had wondered in his study of comets whether they were in fact planet-like worlds of their own, inhabited by intelligent beings who enjoyed a varied and capacious view of the solar system as they traveled through it.105 Like Burges, Tso-le-oh-woh wonders about this possibility. The Indian of the poem asks of the comet, Art thou some erring world now deep engulph’d In hellish, Judgement fires, with phrenzied ire And fury, hot, like some dread sky rocket Of Eternity, flaming, vast, plunging Thro’ immensity, scatt’ring in thy track The wrathful fires of thine own damnation . . . ? Tso-le-oh-woh’s speculation is shot through with the tropes of Christian damnation (“Judgement fires”), with images of war (“some dread sky rocket”), and with the realization that comets are physical objects traveling through space (“plunging / Thro’ immensity”). For the Cherokee poet, comets might well be other worlds. But if so, they are worlds of damnation, careening through the vast emptiness of space and throwing off clouds of smoke from the blazing fires with which they torment those condemned to burn.

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Or perhaps they are not burning worlds at all. As soon as the poem proposes that the comet is another world, inhabited by the damned, its speaker changes his question. The Indian now asks the comet, “Or wingest thou with direful speed, the ear / Of some flaming god of far off systems / Within these skies unheard of and unknown?”106 In other words, might the comet be a messenger, sent by an unknown god from another solar system? Implicit in this question is a set of assumptions about comets that come only from the astronomical education one would receive in a missionary or common school: parabolic comets are celestial bodies that orbit within a single solar system, but nonperiodic comets travel across solar systems—moving so quickly that they escape the gravity of a star and pass beyond the reach of one system and, possibly, into another. Tso-le-oh-woh’s poem asks if the comet is such a nonperiodic body, hurled by a “god of far off systems” unknown to earthly observers. But whatever the comet might be, the Indian speaker of Tso-le-oh-woh’s poem observes in this celestial body an opportunity to seize power for himself. “How proud,” he writes, “the thought to mount this orb / Of fire.” The poem’s speaker, the Indian, explains that if he could but ride the comet he would boom thro’ the breathless oceans vast Of big immensity—quick leaving Far behind all that for ages gone Dull, gray headed dames have prated of— Travel far off mystic eternities— Then proudly, on this little twisting ball Returning once more set foot, glowing with The splendors of a vast intelligence— Frizzling little, puny humanity Into icy horrors—bursting the big Wide-spread eyeball of dismay—to recount Direful regions travers’d and wonders seen!107 For the poem’s Cherokee speaker—the Indian who “Saw the Comet”—the appearance of a celestial body provokes first curiosity and wonderment, then delusions of grandeur. The British traveler Francis Grierson had explained that mid-nineteenth-century observers in the rural Midwest met the appearance of a comet with a fear that by turns quieted them or prompted nervous speech. “While it frightened some into silence,” he wrote, “it made others loquacious.”108 The Indian of Tso-le-oh-woh’s poem experiences something akin to both reac-

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tions. At first, he is shocked. What is this “flaming” body in the sky? Is it hell? Is it the message of some powerful, far-off god? But soon he recognizes the cosmos as an instrument for his own aggrandizement. He might climb onto this comet, leaving behind the “Dull, gray headed” women of the Cherokee Nation, a matrilineal society. He might travel far, roaming beyond the boundaries of the nation, of the earth, of the solar system. And then, with “the splendors of a vast intelligence” produced through his ability to instrumentalize the cosmos itself, this Indian would return to the earth—“Frizzling” people into “icy horrors.” What the casual reader of this poem would not realize until its final three lines is that the Indian who sees the comet is an utter fool, a believer in his own power to harness and control a universe that is mysterious, vast, and dangerous. As the poem concludes, the Indian reflects that his power to burst eyeballs and frizzle people would make him a great man. Indeed, he thinks, “I’d be as great a man as Fremont / Who cross’d the Rocky Mountains, didn’t freeze / And got a gold mine!”109 The joke—by a Cherokee poet to a Cherokee readership—is that John C. Frémont was no great man. He was a gold-obsessed agent of a settlercolonial state, the servant of an imperialist military establishment who participated in the very surveying operations that enabled Cherokee displacement. Tso-le-oh-woh’s readers would have been aware of this and would have suddenly recognized that all of this discussion of how a comet could be used reflected the very same instrumental relation to the natural world that prompted white settlers to wonder how the lands of the Cherokee people could be used—for farming, for mining, for speculating. White Americans at midcentury would have known Frémont as the Pathfinder—a hero of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) celebrated in the penny press, the military governor of California, and the new Republican Party’s first nominee for president. But decades earlier, in the winter of 1837/38, Frémont had participated in a military survey of Cherokee territory, a step by the US government to map the Cherokee Nation in preparation for a possible war if native people resisted deportation. This had been quick, cold, and difficult work. Teams of three surveyors, each with a guide, traveled on foot across Cherokee land, making mea surements.110 Gold was discovered on Cherokee territory in 1828, setting off the first gold rush in the United States. In 1830, Georgia governor George Gilmer had proposed a land lottery, raffling Cherokee lots to white settlers. To organize the lottery, the Cherokee Nation had to be surveyed, and by 1831 Gilmer was reporting the results of those surveys. (Georgia newspaper writers at the time complained that the boundary markers left on Cherokee land had a tendency to disappear after the surveyors left.)111 But by the late 1830s, the

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surveying operation had been taken over by the US War Department. This is when Frémont, a US soldier, became involved. His efforts were part of a larger project by the War Department to drive Cherokee people from their homes. Another member of the operation, Private John G. Burnett, who reported for duty as an army translator in May 1838, recalled Cherokee removal as “the most brutal order in the History of American Warfare.” He went on: “I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at bayonet point into the stockades.” For Burnett, the event revealed that “murder” might be perpetrated by “uniformed men stepping to the strains of martial music.”112 Frémont had a far different experience, reflecting afterward that it was during the 1838 operation in Cherokee territory that he “found the path which I was ‘destined to walk.’ ”113 Indeed, Frémont’s military career would take him from Georgia to California, from one gold rush to another. When Tso-le-oh-woh ends his poem with the line “Why I’d be as great a man as Fremont,” he is depending on a readership acutely aware of how white settler-colonials exploit the natural world. The desire by whites to “get a gold mine” had caused the deaths of thousands of Cherokee people and the near destruction of the Cherokee state. The Georgia gold rush had set the entire landseizure operation in motion. Moreover, Tso-le-oh-woh is expecting his readers to recognize Frémont’s most recent claim on the public’s attention. In 1845, he had published Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843–44. This book would go through twenty-five editions by 1855 and would make Frémont a major public figure.114 As news of gold in California became public, Frémont updated his account of the California expedition, telling his readers that California is “the modern Canaan, a land ‘flowing with milk and honey,’ its mountains studded and its rivers lined and choked, with gold!”115 It was this sort of advertising that caused so much suffering in the Cherokee Nation. The famous observation about the Georgia Gold Rush made by Matthew Fleming Stephenson (1802–1882)—“In that ridge lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There’s millions in it”—referred to Findley Ridge, a mountain northwest of the Chattahoochee River and within the original territorial boundaries of the Eastern Cherokee Nation.116 Cherokee readers would have quickly recognized that the gold fever enabled by men like Frémont was a powerful and dangerous force in nineteenth-century politics. Astronomy, moreover, enabled the division of land on which gold rushes depended. Tso-le-oh-woh’s Indian becomes a “great” man only after he masters the astronomical world, just as Frémont had. For all his vaunted heroism—in surviving freezing temperatures and dodging potential attacks by unruly natives—

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Frémont’s fame depended on his success as an imperial functionary and practical astronomer. Traveling with his sextant, artificial horizon, barometer, spyglass, and compass, he and his team made detailed astronomical and meteorological observations—in Georgia, California, Oregon, and elsewhere. Frémont’s own account of his adventures, moreover, render heroic the struggle to perform astronomical calculations. Traveling by boat through a narrow channel, for instance, Frémont must catch his sextant as water sweeps it overboard. He grabs the instrument just in time. Later in his account, he makes “astronomical calculations” despite the threat of nearby Indian “war parties.” (In reality, indigenous visitors to his camp are more interested in trading with him than in killing him.) Frémont is, by his own account, an imperial stargazer. Astronomy, and the cartography it enabled, was the fundamental purpose of his journey to California, as it was the purpose of his journey to the Eastern Cherokee Nation years before.117 To be “as great a man as Fremont,” at least according to Tso-le-oh-woh, is to seek adventure in navigating the starscape, to take a trip of “icy horrors” straight to a gold mine.

A Settler Universe Worcester’s Cherokee Almanac provided readers with an instrumentalized universe: the measurements and predictions in the almanac’s pages enabled people to set clocks, track seasons, and chart the positions of stars and planets. But for Tso-le-oh-woh—and others—an instrumental cosmos was merely another tool of illegitimate power.118 One can detect in the Cherokee poet’s critique a common complaint among nineteenth-century political thinkers. The naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, for instance, observed this instrumental relation between the United States of America and the cosmos. It appalled him. Disgusted with the expansion of slavery across the North American continent, Thoreau imagined a US nation-state that would one day extend its instrumental treatment of the natural and human landscape to the solar system itself, and eventually to the entire universe. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), he writes, “I know that there are many stars, I know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their orbits,—but what are they all worth? They are more waste land in the West,—star territory,—to be made slave States, perchance, if we colonize them.” Thoreau did not mean to suggest that he had no interest whatsoever in the cosmos. He was fascinated by the possibility that the planet Venus—seen in the morning and the evening

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by human beings over millennia—was “another world,” the makeup of which was wholly unknown to those on Earth who could not see beneath its thick layer of clouds.119 Rather, Thoreau’s concern was with the “worth” of the cosmos to an enslaving, colonizing settler state. For expansionists and nationalists, the cosmos was at once a metaphor for the inevitability of US territorial gains and an instrument of colonization itself. Thoreau recognized the instrumental relation between US power and efforts to map and mea sure the universe. Celestial observations in the nineteenth century enabled new and better land surveying techniques, necessary to crafting unequal treaties with indigenous tribes and nations. Celestial observations and timekeeping enabled US naval power and the extension of the US commercial fleet. To the roving eye of the imperial astronomer, “star territory” was akin to the “waste land in the West,”—at once empty and exploitable. Of course, Thoreau’s insight—that a settler state ready to expand slavery to Texas would as readily expand slavery to the moon and stars—was a commonplace among the indigenous critics of US foreign policy. Tso-le-oh-woh expected his readers to regard any Indian admirer of John C. Frémont as a dangerous fool. And Tso-le-oh-woh was hardly the only Native American thinker to make this critique. In 1829, a Creek man named Speckled Snake made much the same case, explaining that the settler state would observe no limits in its efforts to control the earth and, eventually, reach into the sky itself. “When the white man had warmed himself before the Indian’s fire, and filled himself with their hominy,” Speckled Snake explained, “he became very large. With a step he bestrode the mountains, and his feet covered the plains and vallies [sic]. His hands grasped the Eastern and the Western sea, and his head rested on the moon.”120 For Speckled Snake, the mastery of geographic and cosmic space was not a question of rationalized forms of knowledge and governance. The settler state was monstrous. Indeed, Speckled Snake’s speech recalls a critique made by another writer in the pages of the Cherokee Phoenix. Reporting on a proposal to emigrate west, this Native American writer asks, “Emigrate where, to the Moon? Any other removal would never save [native people] from the cupidity of their white brethren.”121 Thoreau, Speckled Snake, and Tso-le-oh-woh would warn that even an emigration to the moon might not protect indigenous people from the expansionist settler state. The settler monster “grasped” the seas and the sky. Throughout the nineteenth century, the discourses of astronomy remained central to the project of Cherokee statehood. Despite occasional skepticism of Worcester’s Almanac by Cherokee readers, the publishers of the second statesponsored newspaper, the Cherokee Advocate (1844–1906), nonetheless insisted

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on printing stories about the methods and results of astronomical inquiry. One such article, for instance, explained the principles of land surveying.122 From the earliest period of Cherokee unification, national leaders recognized the significance of science—especially star science—to preserving the sovereignty of the Cherokee people.123 And yet many of these leaders also recognized that merely copying the settler’s understanding of the universe would lead to disaster. The Indian who seeks to transform a comet into a mere tool for space travel winds up “frizzling” humanity in his quest to capture a gold mine. The cosmos is more than an instrument for the realization of human desires. It is a complex, interconnected web of living things, the rights of whom can be discerned through the observation of nature itself.124 Such a view of natural rights is incompatible with an account of the universe that is merely instrumental, that reduces the movements of stars, planets, and moons to the measurable and the exploitable. Stars, in other words, are not mere territory. In the Cherokee universe, stars might descend to the earth. In such a cosmos, distant, unseen planets are quite possibly home to intelligent beings whose moral legitimacy is neither greater nor less than the moral legitimacy of a Cherokee, or a Creek, or a white American. For Principal Chief Ross to invoke the Great Ruler of the Universe was no mere turn of phrase; it was instead a claim to the vast, universal vision of Cherokee politics.125 Rights, derived from nature, were enshrined in the very organization of the cosmos. And yet even as Ross made this claim, the United States of America increasingly pursued a very different approach to studying the universe. John C. Frémont was no outlier in his use of the sextant and the spyglass in his quest to territorialize geopolitical space. In 1807, the United States established the Office of the Coast Survey, a scientific agency ordered to map the US coastline for commerce and defense.126 In 1830, the Depot of Charts and Instruments was established, responsible for maintaining and setting chronometers to keep accurate time across military units. In 1844, the United States opened the first national observatory at Foggy Bottom, near the present-day State Department, to make scientific discoveries, to regularize timekeeping, and to provide accurate information for maps and coastal charts. And then, by the 1850s, the United States government began to publish and disseminate predictive accounts of the movements of the solar system. With the advent of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac (1852–1980), the federal government began printing detailed charts of the “star territory” it hoped to regulate, monitor, and exploit. And it is to this publishing project that the next chapter will turn.127

Chapter 4

The National Almanac in Peace and War

In the autumn of 1864, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, office of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac buzzed with activity. The office was a clearinghouse for the calculations of a far-flung group of scientists, all making predictions about the future movements of planets and other celestial bodies. The astronomer Maria Mitchell, for instance, transmitted to the office that autumn her calculations for the movements of the planet Venus.1 But the American Ephemeris office also received urgent orders for printed almanacs. On October 12, the navigation officer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard requested one hundred almanacs be forwarded to the naval station at Union-occupied Port Royal Sound, in South Carolina.2 Three days later, he requested that seventy-five copies be sent to the naval station at Key West, adding that he required another one hundred copies for use in his own office.3 On October 20, New York bookseller George Blunt requested 2,025 almanacs for commercial sale.4 By November 7, the navigation officer in Brooklyn would write again, asking this time for one hundred more almanacs and explaining that “our supply for issue here is nearly exhausted.”5 The small office of the American Ephemeris operated at once as a center for scientific study, as a commercial publisher, and as the manufacturer of an important tool for warfighters in the midst of a bloody struggle for the preservation of the Union. The office had, in this sense, realized the dream of those political leaders who first proposed it. Although a scientific and commercial publisher, it was nonetheless devoted to the “permanent security” of the United States of America.6 Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, many of those advocating the expansion of US power had grown increasingly vocal in their calls for the development of astronomical education and publishing. The president of what is now the University of South Carolina declared in an 1831 lecture that

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sciences, such as “the higher mathematics and astronomy,” constituted “the indispensable basis of all national power, national wealth, prosperity, reputation, and happiness. The nations that possess them in the greatest degree, are the most powerful.”7 This university president, Thomas Cooper (1759–1839), was himself an Oxford-educated professor of chemistry, and he explained that Great Britain and France were the mightiest powers on Earth because they were the most scientifically advanced. Cooper’s point of view had many advocates in the United States War Office and the Department of the Navy.8 As a key element in the extension of US astronomical power, then, the American Ephemeris was an instrument of war. A writer for the North American Review observed, for instance, that when the United States had been forced to rely exclusively on the British Nautical Almanac in the 1840s, “It was as if our navy had been armed with foreign ordinance,” or ammunition.9 But if the American Ephemeris was a kind of ammunition for warfighters, it was a kind that appeared unassuming and even inscrutable to the uninitiated. First printed by the Boston firm Metcalf and Company, sold commercially in New York by the bookseller George Blunt, and published “by the authority of the Secretary of the Navy,” the book of more than five hundred pages provided comprehensive predictions of future movement in the observable universe. But it contained few maps, diagrams, or illustrations. Instead, the Ephemeris featured columns of numbers and pages of equations. Even some US policymakers were baffled by the almanac they had approved, prompting administrator Charles Henry Davis to offer in 1852 a detailed explanation of how this book of numbers—produced at the high cost of more than $17,000 that year—could possibly be of use to the United States.10 The almanac, he reported, would provide an indispensable means of winning the future. He explained that its “business” was “to predict, one or more years in advance, the events and phenomena” that the ocean navigator would observe “on the other wise pathless sea, in order to pass in safety from country to country.” Davis wrote, moreover, that the methods of calculation used in the British almanac had not been updated in accordance with the latest discoveries—including, even, discoveries made by British scientists themselves. Those “irregularities” could result in “an error of ten miles in the determination of a ship’s longitude at sea.”11 The American Ephemeris offered greater precision in navigation—and, through precision, advantage. Granted, the publication of the American Ephemeris was merely one step in the emergence of the United States as a nineteenth-century space power. The confusion that characterized efforts by early US political leaders to measure and

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map the cosmos had by the middle of the nineteenth century given way to a wellfunded and thoroughly organized program of astronomy. Between 1838 and 1901, the US government sponsored no fewer than sixteen astronomical expeditions: to Chile (1849–1852), Tasmania (1874), Sumatra (1901), and elsewhere.12 And this state-organized program for measuring the cosmos produced publications. Starting in 1852, the Nautical Almanac Office published each year a “large” (roughly five hundred pages) version of the American Ephemeris and a “small” version, compressed for commercial navigators. In addition, the office published predictions about the future movements of newly discovered asteroids and tables of star positions.13 Nor were these astronomical publications the only ones produced by the United States. By 1908, the Naval Observatory alone had published more than 350 books describing celestial motion or providing guidance to navigators.14 According to one historian, the nineteenth-century US government and private philanthropists in the United States spent as much in inflation-adjusted dollars on measuring stars, planets, and asteroids as NASA currently spends on robotic interplanetary missions.15 By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States of America had made a budgetary and political commitment to becoming a major power in the developing field of astronomy. But while the new US almanac functioned in the 1860s as an instrument of war, it was not initially described that way to scientists or to the public. The almanac was a tool of space power in multiple senses. Military theorists today describe space power not only as a means of projecting force but as a means of improving navigation and time keeping, of economically rewarding other global actors for cooperation, and of cultivating prestige.16 And these other uses—public safety, commercial advantage, reputation—were taken as the primary purposes of the American Ephemeris from its first printing in 1852. By describing the almanac office’s aims in terms of the public good, of commerce, and of abstract science, the United States Navy was able to incorporate some of the most competent astronomers in the world into its project of predicting the future movements of bodies in space. By the time of the Civil War, these scientists were already committed to the project, although their views about the war varied. The development of space power depends on the cooperation of multiple segments of society, and the American Ephemeris drew on astronomers, meteorologists, publishers, bookbinders, universities, and military officers for its production, distribution, and reception. The result was inconspicuous—merely a book of number tables and equations. But the almanac was nonetheless an important

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instrument by which the US state not only promoted commerce and cultivated prestige but projected force throughout a war for its very survival.

Civilian Astronomers in the Time of Disunion The building looked like an “intelligence office,” or one of the many small storefronts in northern cities where employment agents would recruit free laborers for work.17 Yet this unprepossessing structure housed not a free-labor market but a slave-labor market. And Maria Mitchell—thirty-eight years old, a Nantucket Quaker turned Unitarian, and already an internationally recognized astronomer—stepped inside. “Men, women, and children were seated on long benches parallel with each other,” she reported in her journal. “All rose at our entrance and continued standing while we were there.”18 Mitchell had been a figure of international notoriety since, ten years earlier, she had discovered a comet (C/1847 T1).19 Having built for herself a reputation as a significant scientist in the intervening years, Mitchell’s plan in 1857 was to make a tour of major European observatories, meeting with other leading astronomers. But, as an unmarried woman, Mitchell could not travel alone. She traveled, then, as governess to Prudence Swift, the daughter of a wealthy Chicago banker on a European tour. And the Swifts were traveling to Europe by way of New Orleans. That is how Mitchell found herself standing with H. K. Swift, Prudence’s father, in a New Orleans slave market on April  3, 1857. The Nantucket scientist was unprepared for the encounter. One young enslaved woman she described as “whiter than I” and immediately realized that the woman was being sold as a fancy girl, or concubine. “I could not speak to her,” Mitchell wrote, “for the past and the future were too plainly told in her face.” Mitchell reported that she tried to “hold my tongue and look around without much outward show of disgust.”20 Before this encounter, slavery to Mitchell had been an abstraction—an evil, but a distant one. Now it was close. Although Mitchell held her tongue that day in the slave market, she did not hold her tongue throughout her southern tour. As Mitchell reported in her journal, she argued with many of those she met. White southerners defended slavery to her on religious grounds, dismissing the biblical arguments of abolitionists. They defended slavery on moral grounds, suggesting that enslaved people were better off in the United States than black people were in Africa. (“I make no answer to this,” Mitchell wrote, “for if this is an argument, it would be our duty to

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enslave the heathen, instead of attempting to enlighten them.”)21 Throughout her trip, Mitchell found herself criticizing the institution of slavery, then going quiet as slavery’s defenders offered arguments that struck her as mystifying, antiintellectual, and bizarre. Finally, she came to a conclusion that was common among slavery’s New England opponents but is often overlooked or forgotten in popular accounts of the political crisis of the mid-nineteenth century. About a week after her visit to a New Orleans slave market, Mitchell wrote fifteen words in her journal that a family member would ultimately erase in the version published after her death: “I say to those to whom I talk that I think the Union cannot last.”22 Disunion was Mitchell’s only answer to people who would support sexual servitude on religious grounds or who would insist that a life of forced labor was preferable to life in the ostensibly benighted places of the earth. Mitchell was hardly alone in her conclusion, moreover. Since the late 1830s, the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) had spoken of the possibility of disunion—more often as a hyperbolic rhetorical strategy than as a fully realized political plan. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, Garrisonian abolitionists had increasingly come to see the US Constitution as a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell.” Calls for disunion among New Englanders had ceased to be mere rhetorical strategies and had become serious proposals.23 For Mitchell, in 1857, and seeing for the first time how people in the south were bought and sold, disunion had come to seem like the only moral path for northern people whose political and economic connection with enslavers made them complicit in the institution of slavery. Four years later, in January  1861, Mitchell had returned to the island of Nantucket. South Carolina had seceded from the Union, along with Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. Permanent disunion appeared imminent. Moreover, Mitchell’s mother was dying. In a letter to a friend, Mitchell explained that she had abandoned the “pleasant sitting room” where she usually worked and had moved permanently into her mother’s bedroom. While Mitchell watched the “painful peculiarity” of her mother’s final days, in which the elder woman became disoriented by an “occasional wandering of the mind,” the astronomer would remain by the sickbed. Mitchell intermittently made calculations during those final days, but only “when it is a duty.” She and her family refused to leave her mother “alone for a moment,” she reported. “Doubtless there are parties and dances and tea drinkings,” she went on, “but our circle becomes smaller and smaller.” Duties of care and calculation defined Mitchell’s hours as she kept watch over her bedridden mother. Despite this, she did take a

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moment to consider the national crisis. “I really never thought that these things could get so far,” she wrote on January 4. “We may as well meet the trouble now as postpone it for a few years. I hope we may not have civil war.” Mitchell voices the exhaustion that many must have felt—exhaustion with the rancor, the recrimination, and the violence that had characterized the strug gle over slavery throughout the 1850s. Disunion was inevitable, she had thought during her visit to New Orleans four years earlier. Now, thinking with “great anguish” of how her mother’s periodic delirium reminded her of the slow creep of dementia she had seen before in others, Maria Mitchell hoped only for the woman who raised her to pass away as painlessly as possible and for the nation to get on with the grim business of its dissolution.24 But what was Mitchell calculating—“only when it is a duty”—during those hours spent at her mother’s bedside? A significant portion of her calculations were made for the Nautical Almanac Office.25 Since having been invited in 1849 to make calculations for the American Ephemeris, Mitchell had been the primary calculator for the movements of the planet Venus—predicting years in advance its exact, future position relative to Earth and transmitting these calculations to the military office in Cambridge. Her letters to this office were impersonal and business-like, particularly during the period of her mother’s illness. “Dear Sir,” she wrote to Charles Henry Davis, then a navy commander, in the autumn of 1860, “The corrections, necessary in consequence of the error made in one of the quantities computed for the Longitude of Venus 1862, were made . . . at the time of my first writing to you on the subject. . . . Fearing that [these corrections] may not be easily read, I send another copy.”26 Her communications to this office indeed appear to be the products of duty: meticulous, exact, and timely. Mitchell’s commitment to the American Ephemeris was, moreover, a longstanding one. She produced calculations for each volume of the almanac from 1852 to 1868.27 Unlike naval officers such as Davis, for whom the production of a statesponsored almanac was a matter of national pride and even, by the time of the Civil War, national survival, Mitchell’s commitments were scientific and financial. Calculating the movements of Venus was interesting and prestigious, and it paid. Although Mitchell’s salary of $500 per year was significantly lower than that of many of the other American Ephemeris astronomers, who were with one other exception men, her salary was nonetheless five times as much as she had earned as librarian of the Nantucket Athenaeum.28 Moreover, Mitchell during the 1850s was coming into her own as a professional astronomer. Her appointment to the Nautical Almanac Office placed her among a leading group of scientists: Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880), then the Perkins Professor of Mathematics

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Table 5. Employees of the Nautical Almanac Office, 1856 Name

Residence

Salary

Prof. Benjamin Peirce Mr. J. D. Runkle Prof. W. C. Kerr Mr. C. Wright Mr. J. Downes Mr. E. J. Loomis Mr. J. E. Oliver Mr. C. H. Sprague Prof. E. O. Kendall Mr. G. Eastwood Mr. E. Schubert Mr. T. H. Jafford Mr. E. J. Morrow Miss. M. Mitchell Miss [Mrs.] M. B. Foote Prof. M. Van Vleck Mrs. E. C. Bache Mr. Isaac Bradford Mr. J. H. Lerned

Cambridge, MA Dedham, MA Cambridge, MA Cambridge, MA Washington, DC Cambridge, MA Lynn, MA Malden, MA Philadelphia, PA Somerville, MA Berlin, Prussia Cambridge, MA Cambridge, MA Nantucket, MA Cambridge, MA Middletown, CT Washington, DC Cambridge, MA Cambridge, MA

$2,000 $1,600 $1,400 $1,000 $1,000 $900 $900 $900 $900 $800 $800 $600 $500 $500 $500 $300 $300 $200 $120

Note: With the exception of astronomers Maria Mitchell and M. B. Foote and copyist E. C. Bache, all employees of the Nautical Almanac Office in 1856 were men. Source: Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, Box 1, Letters Sent, 1852–1856, National Archives, Washington, DC.

and Astronomy at Harvard; Ezra Otis Kendall (1818–1899), who would in 1855 be appointed to a professorship in astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania; and John Downes (1799–1882), an agent for the US Coast Survey and a highly regarded mathematician (see Table 5).29 Davis’s goal was to produce a military almanac that built on the scientific sophistication of what astronomer Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) would call the “aristocracy of intellect.” This group of scientists would, Davis hoped, advance the American Ephemeris to a position ahead of its “one rival,” the almanac produced at the Greenwich Observatory in Great Britain.30 The US Navy—indeed, any national navy—simply lacked the expertise to produce such an instrument. Only by marshalling the resources of the civilian scientific community was Davis was able to develop precise, accurate predictions of future movements in outer space. For some, the idea of paying thousands of dollars from the US Navy budget to civilian scientists and university professors—in one case a foreign university

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professor—was baffling. Senator John P. Hale (1806–1873), for instance, put forward a resolution in 1852 demanding answers of the Nautical Almanac Office: who was being paid from the navy budget, Hale wanted to know, and why was the office unable to answer all of the necessary astronomical questions by consulting the staff of the new national observatory in Washington, DC?31 Davis’s answer was meticulous but a bit exasperated. The American Ephemeris was not a work of direct observation, which could be conducted at the US observatory. Rather, he explained, the Ephemeris was a work of prediction, calculated by the most sophisticated mathematicians and astronomers the United States could cultivate.32 Such work required the labor of scientists such as Peirce and Kendall and Mitchell and could not be performed by the few government clerks available. Of course, working with civilian astronomers, whose motivations were not those of martial duty or patriotism, had its drawbacks from the perspective of the Department of the Navy. Davis and his successor, Joseph Winlock (1826– 1875), particularly strug gled with Ernst Schubert, an astronomer and university professor from Berlin who calculated the movements of the asteroid Iris. Schubert repeatedly complained that the United States government did not pay enough and several times hinted that he might quit. “I must declare,” Schubert wrote from Berlin in February 1865, “that in the future it is impossible for me to undertake such work, to spend my energies and [illegible] my brains for a whole year in order to get the means of subsistence for a couple of months.”33 The staff at the Nautical Almanac Office would politely attempt to assuage Schubert’s demands, and the Prussian astronomer continued to work for the Ephemeris even after the Civil War. “The postage shall not be subtracted from your pay,” the US Navy office assured him. “You will see that [the] exchange [rate] is falling and that you are getting the Benefit of it,” the office added.34 The navy office’s treatment of Schubert—whose $800 annual salary was more than Mitchell’s but less than half of Peirce’s—was firm. In 1856, Davis informed Schubert that while he would “say nothing to disturb our connection,” it might nonetheless be more convenient for the US Navy to have its asteroid calculations made “nearer home.” Schubert took the hint and continued his work for the US Navy for more than a decade.35 Schubert’s concerns were primarily financial, and he made no remarks about political questions in the United States. But other astronomers had definite views on the emerging secessionist crisis. Mitchell was disgusted by the south and by slavery, and she had concluded by 1861 that the so-called United States should simply get on with the nasty business of severing their ties. Peirce, the Harvard professor, had a far different view. Indeed, a short time after Mitchell’s visit to

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New Orleans, Peirce likewise made a visit to the south—in his case, to Columbia, South Carolina—and saw slavery firsthand. In contrast to Mitchell, Peirce was confirmed in his proslavery views by the visit. “Here I am in the capital of South Carolina surrounded by the horrid institution of slavery,” he wrote to his wife, “and for the life of me I could not as yet suspect that I was served by such a downcast race—for the countenance is cheerful, eager—and having no external aspect of servitude about it.” Indeed, Peirce appreciated the aristocratic gentility of elite southern living. “My constant text,” he wrote after his journey, “is I have seen slavery and I believe in it.”36 Peirce’s support for slavery, and elite status more generally, hardly made him a secessionist, however. Although a Democrat, he was an ardent unionist, believing that any disloyal enslavers should have their enslaved property liberated as punishment for their treason. His daughter reported that she saw her father and the Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz (1807– 1873) throughout the war “talking over some bad news from the front . . . with tears running down their cheeks.”37 While Mitchell in 1861 held antislavery and antiwar views, Peirce supported both slavery and war with the south. Neither, however, wavered in their commitment to helping the US Navy produce the astronomical “ordinance,” or ammunition, it would require to prosecute a war along the Atlantic coastline.38 Most, but not all, of the almanac’s calculators were northerners, but even those who were born south of the Mason-Dixon Line remained committed throughout the war to calculating the Ephemeris. The astronomer and meteorologist William Ferrel (1817–1891), for instance, was a native Virginian who moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1857 and worked for the federal government throughout the war and afterward. In April  1865, three weeks after Robert E. Lee’s (1807–1870) surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Ferrel reported uncomfortable encounters with Confederate soldiers returning to the region around his family homestead in what had become West Virginia. “Every thing in a military way has been quiet since I arrived here,” he wrote to colleague Joseph Winlock, “but from the number of personal encounters, as the rebel soldiers return, I do not think the Millennium will commence here for a while yet, when the lion & the lamb shall lie down together.”39 Ferrel, who would transform the science of meteorology through his research on midlatitude atmospheric circulation, served the US government throughout his career. Indeed, for decades he labored on a machine—a kind of protocomputer—for calculating tidal movement, which was completed for the War Department in 1885.40 Despite its scientific and commercial uses, the American Ephemeris was inescapably a military project. And it was the product of a US military that had

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increasingly come to concern itself with the current and future organization of cosmic space. While scientists such as Mitchell could not summon much hope of maintaining a union with slaveholders, and while scientists such as Schubert only wanted to receive adequate pay for the difficult and complex work they were performing, their reasons for calculating the movements of celestial bodies were ultimately irrelevant to the utility of those predictions. The American Ephemeris became the tool of a nation-state facing an existential crisis, and it played a small but important role in enabling the state to weather that crisis. Civilian astronomers, concerned more with scientific innovation or with making a living, nonetheless helped to produce a sophisticated tool for the United States military, one that was urgently needed at naval stations from New York to Key West and beyond.

The Future as a Weapon To understand how the American Ephemeris functioned as a tool of military power, it is first important to understand how planners in the War Department conceived of such power during this period. Historians have long observed that US defense strategy between the close of the War of 1812 and the first shots of the Civil War was dominated by two interdependent schools of thought. First, officers were guided by the writing of Swiss military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779–1869), an intellectual competitor to the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831).41 If Clausewitz is known today for stressing war’s psychological and political dimensions, Jomini is known for stressing its organizational challenges. Indeed, for Jomini, organizing forces, supplying them, and ensuring their arrival in an agreed-on place were the key to success in warfare.42 “The general staff,” he writes, “should be employed in time of peace in labors preparatory to all possible eventualities of war. Its archives ought to be found provided with . . . all the documents statistical, geographical, topographical, and strategical of the present and future.” 43 For Jomini, success in war depended on a detailed understanding of the natural environment in which the future war was to be waged, as well as knowledge of how that natural environment might change over time. Second, and more important, the US War Department committed to what its leaders called the Third System, a plan to establish masonry forts at strategic positions along the US coastline.44 Planners assumed that a major European empire—such as Great Britain, France, or Spain—would seek to blockade US

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Atlantic ports during a conflict. Masonry forts would prevent such a blockade. Yet the Third System shaped US defense policy beyond the mere establishment of fortifications. It shaped how the US military was organized. Engineering and surveying became the central elements of military training, and more than half of West Point graduates in the 1820s and 1830s were assigned to civil engineering or surveying tasks at some time in their military careers.45 Recall here John C. Frémont’s first major military operation, during which he “found the path which I was ‘destined to walk.’ ” 46 Frémont had been ordered to surreptitiously survey the Cherokee Nation’s territory in preparation for a war of conquest. This approach—first create detailed maps of a territory, and only then fight a war on it—was precisely what Jomini would have advised, and it was an approach that depended on military personnel educated in the techniques of surveying and mapmaking. The American Ephemeris, then, can best be understood as emerging from a military culture that increasingly valued the detailed, predictive study of the natural environment as a means of prosecuting wars.47 While US military planners in the 1840s and 1850s hardly anticipated fighting a war against their own comrades or against their own Third System fortifications, they absolutely sought to understand in meticulous detail the future theater of war: the Atlantic coastline, the inland river systems, and the topography of individual states, of Indian country, and of the frontier. The Ephemeris not only provided this detail but anticipated changes in the theater of war over time. As Davis explained to the US Senate in 1852, the book’s aim “is to predict, one or more years in advance, the events and phenomena . . . which the navigator compares, observes and calculates.” 48 By Davis’s own standard, the effort was an enormous success. A writer for the North American Review observed in 1865 that the US Navy in prior decades had been forced to estimate tides along the US coastline “as given in the British Almanac.” The results had been hopelessly inaccurate and had left the navy vulnerable.49 Writing three months after the surrender of Confederate forces, the North American Review concluded that the astronomical armament of the Union Navy—the American Ephemeris itself—had been indispensable to the projection of US power along its own coastline during the recent war. This writer was not exaggerating. The Civil War transformed naval operations, and the American Ephemeris arrived in time to contribute to that transformation. This conflict was the first to feature the widespread use of steam propulsion, underwater mines, rifled artillery, and telegraphs.50 The Union Navy comprised at its height nearly seven hundred ships and more than 50,000 personnel, up from ninety ships and 7,600 personnel at the start of the war.51 This

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force would be asked to, in the words of one historian, “blockade half a continent”—some 3,500 miles of coastline and at least 180 potential ports.52 The American Ephemeris was only one part of the project of modernizing the naval force, but it was an important part. As Ohio congressman John A. Gurley (1813– 1863) pointed out just before the outbreak of the Civil War, publishing was an irreplaceable tool for militaries. He explained, “For ships you can wait; for guns you can generally wait; and, ordinarily, you are in no special hurry for the various munitions of war; but you cannot be deprived of your printing for a single day without serious embarrassment and loss of time. . . . The public printing underlies your armies, it underlies your navies, and every other arm of the national ser vice.”53 Printing enabled the widespread transmission of information, the coordination of movements across geographic space, and the synchronization of clocks and chronometers. For a naval force that would grow seven times larger over the course of little more than four years, such coordination was imperative. Indeed, the extant wartime records of the Nautical Almanac Office reveal the importance of the American Ephemeris to the prosecution of the naval conflict. While the records from the start of the Civil War through the autumn of 1864 are entirely missing from the National Archives, the records from the last eight months of the war remain. And these records reveal that the US Navy regarded the American Ephemeris as central to the work of maintaining a blockade of the Confederate coastline, from Virginia to Florida to Texas. Requests for almanacs varied, and in some cases urgent calls for a “box” of almanacs obscure the total number distributed. Yet the larger pattern is clear: the United States military ordered hundreds of copies of the American Ephemeris for its wartime naval stations, for its naval academy, and for its northern naval bases. The calls for more almanacs came in the form of official military orders, signed by each naval station’s ranking navigation officer, and they were quickly filled. An order for one hundred almanacs sent from New York by post on October 12, 1864, for instance, was marked as received only five days later, on October 17.54 The almanacs were, moreover, treated as contraband of war. When the Union Navy in June 1863 captured a crew of Confederate privateers operating from a ninety-ton fishing schooner, the Archer, they completed a detailed inventory of their seizure. The Archer’s privateer crew had been plying the coast of Maine in an effort to disrupt Union commerce, and the Union sailors who completed the inventory of the captured ship virtually ignored most of the printed matter discovered onboard, marking it down merely as a “Lot of books, novels, etc.” But guides for calculating a ship’s geospatial position were recorded with great care. Sailors noted the ephemerides, coast pilots, and logbooks found on board, as well

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the seven muskets, the five cartridge boxes, and the single brass howitzer. Union sailors even noted that the nautical almanac on board the Archer had originally been the property of W. G. Munday, the captain of a four-hundred-ton commercial ship, the Tacony, which had been seized by privateers and converted into a Confederate warship only a few weeks before. This nautical almanac was at once an important tool of warfare and evidence of Confederate naval activity. Cataloguing its capture was, moreover, as important as cataloging the capture of rifles, ammunition, and artillery.55 The American Ephemeris was ubiquitous on warships throughout the Civil War, and so its importance often went without comment. Yet the daily practices of this five-year conflict depended on the ability of officers to accurately chart their course relative to the sun, the moon, and the four most reliably visible planets: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.56 Moreover, the urgent military orders for and the carefully recorded seizures of the American nautical almanac reveal that this unprepossessing book was critical to the movement of ships and personnel. The American Ephemeris had been calibrated to facilitate this movement: to enable naval ships to navigate along the coastline, across the open ocean, and deep into the inland rivers. Planning an attack, a retreat, or a rendezvous depended on knowing one’s precise position in geographic space and in time, information very often derived from the American Ephemeris.

A Space Power Nation Books such as the American Ephemeris helped to transform the United States into a nineteenth-century space power. But unlike previous commercial almanacs, such as those envisioned by Andrew Ellicott and discussed in the first chapter, the Ephemeris was almost exclusively a book of numbers and equations. In fact, it might be more aptly compared to twentieth-century military tools, such as the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System. This system—known today simply as GPS—is a military network of satellites that enables the United States to precisely track longitude, latitude, altitude, speed, and time. Designed to guide and track weapons systems, it also guides commercial airplanes, rental cars, and smartphone users. A 1977 US military film about the creation of the NAVSTAR network promised that “With this system, a ship could determine its position on any ocean in the world within thirty feet. A tank unit could accurately determine local time for a coordinated attack.” The Air Force also promised “precise weapons delivery” and “more efficient search and rescue operations.”57

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The narrator’s promise of improved military navigation and targeting is overlaid with images of an aircraft carrier, a tank, a fighter jet, and a bomber dropping its payload over a jungle landscape. The Global Positioning System, in short, promised military supremacy via spatial and temporal precision. It was a force multiplier, a tool that enabled a more efficient projection of military power. But it also promised economic benefits. Beginning in the 1980s, commercial airlines received access to GPS data, the first step in a long process that has culminated in the availability of GPS to smartphone users. The nineteenth-century US War Department similarly regarded mathematical models of space as a means of more accurately projecting force, advancing commerce, and cultivating scientific prestige. Of course, GPS is far more sophisticated than the American Ephemeris, but the differences between them are more of degree than of kind. Like GPS, the Ephemeris provided precise information about longitude and latitude. Like GPS, the Ephemeris enabled sailors to locate the positions of ships at sea. And like GPS, the Ephemeris enabled military officers to determine local time for coordinating an attack. Both systems promised a predictive, mathematical mastery over space and time. But while the Global Positioning System began as an exclusively military project, only to be incorporated later into global commerce, Davis made sure to tie the Ephemeris to the scientific and commercial world from the beginning. By decentering the military utility of the Ephemeris, Davis was able to count on the cooperation of civilian scientists and commercial booksellers who might otherwise have balked at contributing to American militarism. When work began on the Ephemeris in 1849, the United States had just successfully prosecuted a war of conquest against Mexico, a nation that banned slavery. To many northerners, the war had been yet another unjust attempt to expand the slave power in the United States. And debates about American militarism would persist throughout the 1850s. Mitchell had come to oppose union with slaveholders by 1857. Schubert felt no particular loyalty to the Union cause. Ferrel and Peirce had, for different reasons, complicated feelings about the south and about the expansion of slavery into the western territories. One might have expected some of these scientists, at least, to balk at the militarism of a national almanac project, but they did not. Instead, they uncomplainingly contributed to the production of an almanac that would be urgently needed by the US Navy in its prosecution of a war. Indeed, the archival record only occasionally reveals any acknowledgment by scientists that the Ephemeris was a tool of military power. In June 1854, for instance, the astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould (1824–1896) wrote to Davis

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on behalf of a colleague, the administrator of the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg. Gould explained that this colleague, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve (1793–1864), “expresses great anxiety to obtain for the Pulkowa [sic] library copies of the American Ephemeris.” But because the Ephemeris was a military project, Gould was unsure whether the book could be transmitted to potential adversaries. He wrote, “I do not know whether your regulations apply to not giving copies to foreigners or foreign institutions or not.”58 Gould need not have been concerned. The US government had already organized a program for sending copies of the American Ephemeris to scientific institutions throughout the world. Shipments had been sent only a month before.59 Struve, moreover, ultimately received a copy of the American Ephemeris and declared it as accurate as the British version and more accurate than the French.60 Gould was scrupulous about his loyalty to the state. Indeed, during the war he would conduct research for the US Sanitary Commission on the physiology of Union soldiers. His findings, later discredited, would be used to bolster claims of innate black inferiority.61 But Gould’s acknowledgment of the military uses of the Ephemeris was rare—indeed, almost unheard of—among his scientific colleagues. Most remained focused on the book’s value to commerce and discovery, and as a result they expressed little concern about their own role in developing a set of calculations that would be used by warfighters. As Davis explained in the pages of the American Journal of Science and Arts, the almanac would be “the textbook of the navigator” aboard commercial ships and “the vade macum,” or reference book, “of the astronomer.” 62 As Davis predicted, astronomers did rely on the Ephemeris for their predictive models of the solar system. Such predictions—where one might find the moons of Jupiter, for instance, on such-and-such a date and at such-and-such a time—were important for any scientist making direct observations of the night sky. Davis had early insisted that the American Ephemeris be detailed enough to accommodate the needs of such scientists, modeling the movements of asteroids and other small celestial bodies that could not possibly be tracked by an ocean navigator peering through a spyglass.63 And, indeed, the American Ephemeris became a valuable tool for astronomers, schoolteachers, and university professors. Scientists from Chicago to Albany to Saint Petersburg came to depend on the predictive model of the universe created by Mitchell, Schubert, Ferrel, Peirce, and others. And commercial booksellers sold the American Ephemeris just as they would any other reference book. The Ephemeris was valuable to commercial navigators and instrument makers, as well. The Nautical Almanac Office established a complex web of rela-

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tionships with commercial printers, bookbinders, and booksellers. In New York, the bookseller George W. Blunt served as the general agent for sales of the almanac, but the Ephemeris was sold at retail prices by booksellers in twenty-eight other cities, including Boston, San Francisco, and London.64 Occasionally, a retailer would attempt to circumvent this highly organized system for printing, binding, wholesaling, and retailing the Ephemeris. The owner of a navigational instrument dealer in New York, D. Eggert and Son, contacted the Nautical Almanac Office directly in March 1865 to ask whether he could acquire copies of the Ephemeris more cheaply than he could through Blunt. He could not, although the office would occasionally fulfill orders at retail prices.65 Indeed, the printing and sales records of the Nautical Almanac Office testify to its success as a commercial bookdealer. Although the War Department published only one thousand copies of the first edition in 1852, officials had by 1860 decided to publish the Ephemeris in print runs of more than ten thousand.66 By 1865, wholesaler George Blunt was placing orders for thousands of almanacs at time.67

Lobbying for the Ephemeris If the American Ephemeris was a tool of warfighters, why did scientists and university professors contribute to its development? Individuals such as Mitchell, Peirce, and Schubert had various motivations, of course. Most correctly believed that their contributions would produce a wide array of benefits: safer ocean travel, greater accuracy in celestial observations, and greater respect for the innovations of American science, among them. Moreover, working for the Nautical Almanac Office provided financial support at a time when science was not nearly as institutionalized as it would be in later years. And yet a significant part of the success of the American Ephemeris can be attributed to Davis’s success in advocating for it. Davis modeled his advocacy on that of the US Coast Survey, a predecessor agency. Congress had created the Coast Survey in 1807 in an effort to regularize coastal maps of the United States in accordance with star positions, as well as to catalogue ocean depth, currents, tidal movements, and weather.68 An American scientist born in Switzerland, Ferdinand Hassler (1770–1843), initially led the project. Hassler was, in the words of one historian, “a much better scientist and surveyor than he was a lobbyist,” and funding shortfalls plagued the agency for decades.69 Hassler’s successor, by contrast, was an inspired lobbyist. When Alexander Dallas Bache (1806–1867) took control of the Coast Survey office, he

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began to distribute jobs across congressional districts, to communicate his findings regularly through the periodical press, and to incorporate members of the public into the work of the Coast Survey by asking them to submit their amateur star and weather observations. Bache even brought a group of scientists to a meeting of Wall Street insurance agents and merchants to explain how the survey would improve “investment security.” 70 In essence, Bache recognized that public scientific projects could not succeed unless they had broad support. In modeling his leadership of the Nautical Almanac Office on Bache’s leadership of the Coast Survey, Davis separated his efforts from the more obvious militarism of his colleagues, particularly Naval Observatory director Matthew Maury (1806–1873). Maury, a Virginian who would ultimately serve in the Confederate Navy, believed the military should direct professional science in the United States.71 Davis took a more diplomatic approach, defending the use of civilian scientists but also advocating for the Nautical Almanac Office from within the War Department.72 Davis regularly communicated with the public, with scientists around the world, and with members of Congress. Indeed, when he publicly articulated his goals for the Ephemeris, he hardly mentioned the project’s military uses at all. The almanac’s value to the US Navy went without saying. Instead, Davis spoke of how the Ephemeris would enhance the national prestige of the United States and promote scientific research worldwide. Publicly, Davis advocated “abstract science,” such as investigations into gravitation and magnetism.73 As one nineteenth-century biographer put it, Davis sought to “advance the scientific character and standing of the country” and to produce “a work . . . likely to give an additional stimulus to pure research.”74 Space power, that modern blending of military force, economic supremacy, and national prestige, depends on tools that marshal the resources of multiple segments of society.75 And the American Ephemeris, under Davis’s direction, was very much an instrument of space power. Davis’s public advocacy of commerce and abstract science has the potential to obscure the military role that the Ephemeris played, however. Despite his public advocacy, Davis maintained no illusions about the utility of such calculations for the prosecution of a war.76 His private correspondence reveals that the kinds of calculations made in the almanac remained critical to naval officers. Consider the Battle of Port Royal Sound in November 1861. Before the battle, Davis met with the other commanders to discuss the navigational challenges that a Union assault on the Confederate port would entail. In a letter to his wife, Davis explained that he was grateful for the advice of a civilian agent of the US

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Coast Survey, Charles Boutelle (1839–1901). Davis knew Boutelle through his earlier work at the Nautical Almanac Office, and he knew that Boutelle had “made the triangulation, the groundwork of the survey, of the whole coast of South Carolina.” Davis went on: “nothing could have supplied the loss of his knowledge.” When it came time to make plans for the assault, Davis and Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont (1803–1865) referred to Boutelle’s calculations and their own navigational tables as they “wrote . . . the secret orders communicating the place of rendezvous in the event of separating.” 77 Success, Davis believed, depended on knowing the coastline and being able to navigate it as the battle unfolded, separating and coming together as necessary. Davis’s thinking was precisely in line with midcentury US military strategy. Victory or defeat would be determined by the ability of naval officers to coordinate their movements over time—an ability that depended on the charts and tables of the Coast Survey and the Nautical Almanac Office. In the end, the Union Navy achieved success at Port Royal Sound. The channel was captured, and it would become a major Union naval station throughout the war. Indeed, efforts to create a free black labor economy at Port Royal made the sound synonymous with the project of emancipation.78 But the station also became a supply depot and command post. It was to Port Royal that the Nautical Almanac Office transmitted one hundred copies of the Ephemeris in early October 1864, where at the time twenty warships were stationed.79 Even as naval officers catalogued the capture of almanacs as meticulously as they catalogued the capture of firearms, Davis and his successor, Joseph Winlock, were careful to cultivate an image of the almanac as a disinterested work of scientific inquiry. They refrained from discussing the almanac’s military uses to the general public, except in the vaguest possible terms, and they made numerous donations to universities and other institutions, particularly when military orders slowed. For instance, in February 1865, two months before the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia surrendered, military orders for almanacs had been reduced to a trickle. The navigation officer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard even returned a box of eighty-nine unused almanacs.80 The reduction in military orders made space for the office to redouble its efforts to distribute publications to universities, observatories, and libraries. That February, the office donated copies of the American Ephemeris to twenty-nine separate institutions, including Harvard, Union College, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as well as to observatories in Chicago and Albany, New York (see Table 6).81 The total number of donations during that month is notable but nonetheless represents a continuation

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Table 6. Extant Orders for the American Ephemeris, September 1864 to May 1865

September 1864 October 1864 November 1864 December 1864 January 1865 Februrary 1865 March 1865 April 1865 May 1865 Total

Military a

Commercial

Donations to Libraries, Universities, and Observatories

21 >275 101 — >426 3 (89)b — — 50 >787

2 2,052 701 2,658 >1,511 3,573 — 1,736 — >12,233

5 3 1 — 4 29 1 — 1 44

Source:Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC a . Denotes direct military orders to the Nautical Almanac Office. Commercial orders by US government agencies, made through booksellers, are not included. b . Denotes orders (returns).

of the long-standing project of promoting the American Ephemeris as a tool for scientific education and as a symbol of the sophistication of astronomical science in the United States.

The Universe, Simplified That the Ephemeris benefitted from a canny lobbying effort does not mean that its simplified, instrumental model of the universe entirely avoided criticism. In order to function as a valuable tool for warfighters, commercial navigators, and astronomers, the American Ephemeris offered a predictive model of the universe. Such a model, however, is necessarily simplified and desacralized. Delineated in the almanac’s pages, the universe was a space of mathematically precise future movement, but little else. As the philosopher James C. Scott has observed, the advantage of a mathematical vision “is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an other wise far more complex and unwieldy reality.” A mathematical model renders the universe “susceptible to careful measurement and calculation”—and thus to use.82 But such a model, Scott notes, is also easily disrupted by unexpected or inexplicable phenomena. In some cases, these disruptions come in the form of mathematical error. In other cases, mathematical

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models merely invite an illusion of mastery that blinds users to other ways of interacting with the complexity of the universe. And the American Ephemeris certainly invited illusions of mastery. Early tests of the Ephemeris revealed it to be the most precise mathematical model of the solar system yet created. When an eclipse offered scientists the opportunity to test the predictions of the Ephemeris against its British counterpart, for instance, the US almanac proved more accurate.83 Davis’s public-spirited defense of abstract science meant that even many critics of militarism and empire often regarded the American Ephemeris as an important contribution to astronomy. Henry David Thoreau owned a copy of the Ephemeris, and in fact quoted approvingly from Davis’s scientific writing in his own private journal.84 The Ephemeris represented an attempt to map the entire solar system in motion—no small feat. Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) had published the first two volumes of his Mécanique Céleste, or Celestial Mechanics, by 1799, and this work transformed such mapping efforts. The Newtonian model of the solar system had been full of secular inequalities, or movements that could not be easily explained. Jupiter and Earth’s moon were speeding up. Saturn was slowing down. By all appearances, only the miraculous intervention of God prevented dramatic collisions. But Laplace explained the movements of nearly all the bodies in the solar system with reference to a single principle: universal gravitation. He demonstrated how the gravitation of various planets, moons, and asteroids interacted to produce the irregularities long observed by astronomers. In essence, Laplace’s work made possible a complete, predictive model of the solar system. The so-called clockwork universe now associated with the eighteenth century was not fully articulated until the first third of the nineteenth. In 1829, moreover, the American astronomer Nathaniel Bowditch (1773– 1838) translated Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste into English, updating the French astronomer’s model with more recent innovations and discoveries.85 Bowditch’s publication made available in English the principles of celestial mechanics, laying the groundwork for increasingly sophisticated predictive models of the solar system, such as the model provided by the American Ephemeris. Of course, Laplace’s celestial mechanics were not entirely free of error, and false predictions crept into the Ephemeris as a result. Davis had hoped to solve the problem of Mercury’s orbit, for instance. Nineteenth-century astronomers would make calculations for Mercury just as they would for other planets, and yet direct observation would reveal that Mercury’s orbit did not follow the predicted path.86 The cause of incorrect predictions remained a mystery. Astronomers offered explanations: perhaps the sun was slightly flattened at the poles, and

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thus differently affected bodies in its immediate proximity, or perhaps there was another planet (prematurely named Vulcan by the proponents of this theory) orbiting nearby and disrupting Mercury’s path, or perhaps Mercury passed through small “corpuscles,” or asteroid-like bodies, whose gravity tugged the planet first this way and then that.87 Writing in 1852, Davis had predicted that the Ephemeris would solve this problem, but it didn’t. In a scientific paper published three decades later, astronomer Simon Newcomb dismissed the various theories but continued to note that the problem of Mercury’s strange orbit persisted.88 Indeed, the planet’s movements would remain inexplicable until Albert Einstein (1879–1955) published his theory of general relativity in 1915, demonstrating that Mercury’s orbit was affected by the pronounced curvature of space and time in the region around the sun.89 But even when the mathematical model provided by the American Ephemeris was inaccurate, as in the case of Mercury, it nonetheless invited the illusion of mastery. And it was this illusion of mastery that made a few nineteenth-century thinkers uncomfortable. In the Ephemeris, astronomical bodies were as predictable as the gears of a mechanism—ticking along in elegant, reliable orbits. Precisely predicting these orbits, as the Ephemeris did in most cases, constituted at once a scientific achievement and a diminishment of human imagination. The mathematical modeling pioneered in the United States by the scientists of the American Ephemeris brought into stark relief particu lar, “ limited aspects” of outer space, which was a “far more complex and unwieldy reality” than one would ever realize by studying the Ephemeris alone.90 For all its complexity, the Ephemeris represented a simplification of the cosmos. Some observers at the time noted the limitations of the Ephemeris. Among the book’s scientist-calculators, Maria Mitchell was probably the most skeptical of its ultimate utility. In an essay that would not be published until after her death, she wrote that the science of astronomy depends on three incongruous modes of thought: the predictive, the observational, and the prophetic. Writing in 1857, Mitchell suggested that the ideal astronomer should be able to predict mathematically the future movements of cosmic bodies (as the Ephemeris attempted), to make conjectures and hypotheses based on direct observation, and to look up at the stars with a sense of speculative possibility. These three modes of thought, according to Mitchell, are seldom manifested in a single work of scientific inquiry, or even in a single mind. Indeed, Mitchell believed that the prophetic mode could more often be found in the minds of poets than in the minds of astronomers themselves. And even astronomers, she explained, are very often merely predictive or merely observational in their inquiry.91 The greater project

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of discovery depended on the contributions of prophetic minds able to speculate about the previously unimaginable. By Mitchell’s standard, then, the American Ephemeris was a necessary scientific work, but a limited one. The poet Walt Whitman took a far more critical line. Whitman spent much of the Civil War in Washington, DC, where he came into contact with the militarized science of astronomical prediction. He disapproved. “When I heard the learn’d astronomer,” Whitman begins in a poem published in his collection, Drum-Taps (1865), When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.92 Calculation leaves Whitman’s speaker enervated. The “learn’d” astronomer’s rendering of the universe—as a space simplified to the predictable motions of clockwork astronomical bodies—severs the vital relation between individual human beings and the cosmos. At least one scholar has suspected that Whitman based this poem on a real lecture, possibly sponsored by the US Naval Observatory. Whitman, after all, frequently attended scientific lectures in Washington, and he periodically complained about them.93 But regardless of whether the poem was based on an actual lecture, it was certainly based on common trends in midnineteenth-century astronomy. By this period, predictive models of the celestial motion were increasingly coming to serve as the central object of astronomical inquiry and education. Like Mitchell, Whitman regarded mathematical prediction as but one part—and, to his mind, an extremely limited part—of a larger effort to know the cosmos. In all of his astronomical writing, Whitman sought to understand the connections between things—stars and planets and air and water and life and consciousness. Like Mitchell, Whitman was influenced by the writing of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian scientist whose multivolume work, Kosmos (1845–1862), had been an international bestseller. By 1851, Humboldt estimated that more than eighty thousand copies of Kosmos had been shipped

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to booksellers around the world, and his publisher reported that some bookdealers were offering bribes for priority access to newly printed volumes.94 At the core of Kosmos was an insistence that phenomena, from the biological to the geological to the astronomical, were interrelated. Grasping a complex reality first demanded a recognition of that complexity. Whitman embraced this view, extending it even to the study of his own body and consciousness. In his first edition of Leaves of Grass, he described himself as “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos”—retaining the German spelling of a Humboldtian idea.95 Whitman was hardly the only American to be inspired by the possibilities of Humboldt’s cosmic inquiry. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared his era to be the “Age of Humboldt.”96 And Mitchell herself made a point of meeting Humboldt when she traveled to Germany in 1858, describing in her diary his generosity and self-confidence. “You never heard of Humboldt’s complaining that anyone had stolen his thunder,—” she reflected shortly after meeting him; “he knew that no one could lift the bolts.”97 Humboldt shaped how many in the United States understood the universe as a complex, interconnected, and living set of relations. In light of this influence, it makes sense that a poet such as Whitman would be offended by an attempt to reduce the universe to the measurable and predictable. When Whitman describes wandering out into the “mystical moist nightair” to look at the stars, he is describing the feel of the universe pressing on the body, as moisture. Skin, atmosphere, and stars are all part of the same living, pulsing, feeling whole. In comparison, a mathematical model of the universe seems to invite a false belief in human mastery over the natural world. Sometime around 1855, Whitman had scribbled on a scrap of notepaper: “We are so proud of our learning! As if it were anything . . . to map out stars.”98 Whitman had hoped to produce a series of “grand” poems, including possible “Poems of the Stars—? Astronomy—? Suns, planets, and moons.”99 While these poems were never written, one can guess at what Whitman might have attempted by examining the meditative final lines of “When I heard the learn’d astronomer.” Predicting celestial movement, Whitman concludes in that poem, is not the same as actually understanding the universe. Instead, Whitman calls for a relation to the cosmos defined by connection through the body. Such a relation, while mystical, is no mere mystification. As one recent popularizer of astrophysics explained, all life is made up of “molecules . . . traceable to the crucibles of the centers of stars,” which exploded and dispersed enriched molecules “across the galaxy into gas clouds that would later collapse to form next generation star systems.” He concludes: “ These atoms and molecules are in us because, in fact, the universe is in us.”100 Whitman understood what was then a

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Humboldtian premise and is now a commonplace among scientists: the universe is a vast ecology. Even if biological life turns out to be exclusive to the earth, the molecular composition of that life is nonetheless similar to that of matter found throughout the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe itself. A clockwork cosmos of predictably orbiting bodies hardly accounts for this vast, complex system, this ecology of which human beings are a minuscule, if conscious, part. But while Whitman’s eloquence was unique, his central insight about astronomy was not. Humboldt had recognized that astronomy is not exclusively the study of predictable motion but is instead the study of a vast, interconnected system. Mitchell had made the same point. Even more significantly, as examined in the previous chapter, indigenous writers had long regarded the cosmos as a vast, interconnected arrangement of the living and the nonliving. The American Ephemeris was a transformational book, providing previously unimagined precision in the study of planetary movement. It was also, inescapably, a simplification of the universe.

The United States of America as a Space Power For military agents such as Davis, the simplification of the universe to a set of predictable orbits was a necessary step in rendering space usable by the state. The Ephemeris functioned as a narrowly designed tool of space power, the unarticulated but emergent doctrine that sought to render the cosmos instrumental to the projection of force, the development of commerce, and the cultivation of prestige. The US state sought to produce instruments by which the universe might be made to do work. For Mitchell, the cosmos was a thing to be understood. For Whitman, it was a space of mystical wonder and connection. Davis spoke in similar ways about the universe and about abstract science. He was an excellent advocate for the Nautical Almanac Office. But throughout his career, and particularly during the Civil War, Davis advocated an approach to research that transformed space into a kind of raw material that could be refined for use. By rendering the cosmos useful—to military navigators, to commercial shipmasters, and to the United States itself—the Nautical Almanac Office produced a thoroughly desacralized model of the universe. Through printing, the United States of America became a space power. Between 1845 and 1908, the Naval Observatory would release more than 350 separate publications—from star maps to meteorological charts to administrative reports.101 Meanwhile, the Nautical Almanac Office released numerous

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publications each year: the long and short versions of the American Ephemeris, the regularly printed guide to the zodiacal stars, and the intermittently published guides to the movements of various planets and asteroids. Throughout the world, governments, scientific organizations, and individual scientists noticed the developing astronomical sophistication of the United States military. The British Association for the Advancement of Science acknowledged that the American Ephemeris reflected “great credit on the astronomers” of the United States.102 Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, the Russian astronomer, declared the Ephemeris as accurate as the British version and more accurate than the French.103 The American Ephemeris was, in short, a widely recognized tool of commerce and marker of American scientific prestige even as it was a tool for warfighters. Most importantly, though, the Ephemeris was a predictive model of the cosmos. And as a predictive model, it brought “into sharp focus” particular ways of understanding the universe, while rendering other potential relations invisible.104 Measured against scientific and speculative works of the period, then, the American Ephemeris can be understood as much by what it did not accomplish as by what it did. It did not provide an account of the universe as a complex site of unexplained phenomena. It did not provide a means by which individual readers might make notes or record their own observations, as commercial almanacs in earlier generations had. It did not provide diagrams or illustrations of past observations. And it did not speculate about the ecologies of other worlds, the origin of the universe, or the relation between the individual and the cosmos. Instead, the American Ephemeris established a usable, mathematically predictive model of celestial motion. Like today’s Global Positioning System, the Ephemeris was a force multiplier. It enabled the US state to coordinate movements across space and time. And, like GPS, it invited an illusion of mastery. It reduced a vast and complex cosmos to a space of precisely measurable movements, in this case movements that the state could “predict, one or more years in advance.”105 Agents of the United States government have since 1789 been concerned with demonstrating the state’s mastery over the cosmos, although their ability to predict celestial events and to transmit those predictions to citizens and foreign governments had been extremely limited. John Adams sponsored an astronomical publication that inaccurately predicted a comet would appear for inaugural celebrations in 1789. By the time of the Civil War, however, the US government had become vastly more sophisticated at predicting movements in space. The Ephemeris, dispatched to far-flung naval stations and to warships, enabled the coordinated projection of force. Sold

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by booksellers, it aided commercial shipmasters. And transmitted to scientific societies, universities, and observatories around the world, it advertised the scientific sophistication of the United States of America. The development of nineteenth-century US space power would ultimately shape how agents of the United States government came to understand the universe. By the close of the nineteenth century, astronomical agents of the federal government could make reference to hundreds of publications and mathematical models to demonstrate that the US state had thoroughly mastered the cosmos. And yet this mode of understanding the universe was but one among many, and challenges to the simplified and desacralized cosmos would persist.

Chapter 5

Hawaiian Cosmography in Print

Observing a region they called the Vale of Triads, a group of scientists noted that the inhabitants of this lush, volcanic territory were “less dark” than their neighbors and were “an improved variety of the race.” From a distance, the scientists watched as the subjects of their study lounged on the ground, “chiefly engaged in eating a large yellow fruit like a gourd.” These tropical people were “lovely” and “eminently happy” but indolent. “We had no opportunity,” the scientists wrote, “of seeing them actually engaged in any work of industry or art; and so far as we could judge, they spent their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, . . . bathing, and loitering about on the summits of precipices.”1 A reader of this 1835 account might have recognized it as similar to accounts of islands in the Pacific Ocean, particularly the Polynesian archipelago of Hawai‘i. American writers during this period often described Hawaiians as beautiful, indolent, and uncivilized.2 But the people of the Vale of Triads did not live in Polynesia, a region of more than one thousand islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. They lived, instead, on the surface of the moon. The Vale of Triads was not merely a fiction—it was a hoax. A writer for the New York Sun invented the story as a satire about those who believed in life on other worlds. Yet some found the hoax plausible. British social theorist Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) reported that a few women in rural Massachusetts were so convinced that they discussed trying to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the lunar surface.3 Even after the hoax was debunked, it remained popular.4 Artists depicted the moon as a tropical fantasia. One Italian illustrator drew nude, butterfly-winged lunar women lounging in the petals of pink flowers as black-hatted missionaries peered at them.5 In the United States, meanwhile, the lunar hoax became part of the wallpaper of daily life—literally. The Nantucket Historical Association preserves a swatch of wallpaper offering “A Peep at the

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Figure 9. This wallpaper fragment, taken from a home in Nantucket, features a group of astronomers gazing at the moon’s surface, discovering a land of palm trees, volcanoes, and inhabitants not unlike those of Polynesia. Ink on paper, 14 × 30 inches. Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association.

Moon.” It depicts scientists very much like those of the moon hoax gazing through telescopes at the lunar surface, a place dotted with smoldering volcanoes, palm trees, and native inhabitants (Figure 9).6 From the perspective of white Americans, the resemblance between Hawai‘i and the moon made sense. Throughout the nineteenth century, Hawai‘i came to symbolize for people in the United States the remotest reach of the explorer, the missionary, the whaler, or the naval warship. Captain James Cook led the first European expedition to make official contact with the Hawaiian Islands, arriving in 1778. But more Europeans and Americans followed. Commercial ships were the first vessels from the United States to arrive, with missionaries following closely after in March 1820.7 In 1826, a United States naval ship reached Honolulu. The USS Dolphin arrived that year with a small crew that included Midshipman Charles Henry Davis, the naval officer who would go on to direct the US Nautical Almanac Office.8 To readers in the United States, Hawai‘i was a far-off, alien land.9 It was a kind of star territory: an otherworldly and potentially exploitable landscape found only by navigating the “pathless sea” according to the signposts of the moon, the planets, and the stars.10

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By the close of the century, however, the islands would come to serve as a different kind of star territory. The Hawaiian archipelago is among the best places on earth from which to observe the night sky. A tropical inversion layer—an atmospheric region where moist air meets dry air—sits below the summits of some Hawaiian mountaintops, such as the peak of Mauna Kea on the Big Island. This layer renders the sky above Hawai‘i ideal for celestial observation.11 Today, Hawai‘i hosts humankind’s largest ground-based observatory complex, a presence that many in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement protest.12 Even in the nineteenth century, major powers recognized Hawai‘i’s astronomical value. US scientists performed experiments on the earth’s gravitation in Hawai‘i as early as 1841, and the Yale naturalist Chester Smith Lyman (1814–1890) established the first American observatory there in 1845. The British government dispatched a team of military astronomers to Hawai‘i in 1874, moreover, and by the 1880s the US Coast Survey was sending expeditions to the islands on a regular basis: in 1883, 1887, 1891, and 1892.13 Hawai‘i was, in short, strategically valuable territory for astronomical research. The Kingdom of Hawai‘i government (1810–1893) was no mere passive observer of this research. King Kalākaua (1836–1891) sought to render astronomy beneficial to Hawaiians themselves. One British military scientist complained about this in his official journal. “His Majesty,” the officer wrote in October 1874, “paid us a private visit in the evening and remained 2 hours. He proposed that as soon as all the Instruments were mounted we should throw open the grounds to the public for a week.”14 Kalākaua was likely trying to cultivate among Hawaiians an interest in British and American astronomical practices. A short time afterward, he wrote to a trustee of the Lick Observatory, in California, suggesting that “Something of this kind”—an observatory—“is needed here very much.”15 Indeed, Kalākaua’s government would a short time later build a “small observatory,” which was outfitted with a transit instrument, or telescope for observing star positions.16 When in 1893 white settlers overthrew the government of Kalākaua’s successor, Queen Lili‘uokalani, astronomy functioned as an important means by which the struggle for power played out.17 The coup established an oligarchical government that ruled until the islands were annexed by the United States in 1898. For white imperialists, annexation would provide a means of projecting sea power—the ability to send “great ships-of-the-line” across vast oceans guided by “observations of the moon and stars.” Hawai‘i provided a safe harbor, a coaling station, and a site for research.18 But the universe and stars were deeply important to Hawaiians themselves. Like Kalākaua, Lili‘uokalani recognized the

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significance of astronomy to national power in the nineteenth century. But rather than promoting the kind of star science practiced by agents of foreign nationstates, she sought to disseminate an ancient story about the cosmic origins of the Hawaiian nation, or Lāhui. Polynesian astronomical knowledge had for centuries enabled indigenous sailors to navigate the vast, seemingly undifferentiated seascape of the Pacific Ocean.19 Lili‘uokalani turned to this cosmic tradition. In 1897, she privately published her translation of the Kumulipo—a cosmography, or account of the creation of the universe.20 Printed by the Boston firm Lee and Shepard but not available for public sale, this book became a means through which the deposed Hawaiian monarch cultivated relationships with key Hawaiian and US leaders. In the pages to follow, then, this chapter will explore how the Kumulipo enabled Lili‘uokalani to claim the authority of the universe itself. As a cosmography, the chant provided a theory of the origins of the cosmos. But it also provided a genealogy, enabling readers to trace the development of the universe from its origins to the living members of the royal family. Like the American Ephemeris, the Kumulipo described the scope and trajectory of the universe. It was also paid for by a national government and dispatched to that government’s agents and to international allies. But unlike the American Ephemeris, the Hawaiian creation chant described the deep past of a universe that pulsed with life. As described in the Kumulipo, the universe was not merely an instrument of power. It was a living set of relations. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers in the United States regarded Hawai‘i as a kind of alien world, available for study and exploitation. But Hawaiian leaders, such as Lili‘uokalani, responded by describing their own relation to the universe, a relation that was ancient, living, and sacred.

Hawai‘i as Star Territory Where is Hawai‘i? This question is more complicated than it might at first appear. To the nineteenth-century navigator, Honolulu Harbor could be found at 21 degrees north of the equator and 157 degrees west of the prime meridian at Greenwich. Examining a map in the late nineteenth century, an observer would quickly realize that this small cluster of islands occupied an important, central location in the Pacific Ocean: 2,400 miles from San Francisco; 3,800 miles from Tokyo, then the capital of the Meiji government of Japan; 5,500 miles from the British territory of Hong Kong; and 5,500 miles from Melbourne, the gold rush capital of Victoria, Australia. Supporters of annexation were quick to note the

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geographic importance of the Hawaiian Islands. “Located as it is at the ‘Cross Roads of the Pacific,’ midway between San Francisco and Japan, and equidistant from nearly all the principal Pacific ports, Hawaii is the Key of the Western Ocean,” explained one such supporter of annexation in the pages of the North American Review.21 In the late nineteenth century, advocates of a US empire were increasingly attentive to what military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840– 1914) came to call “sea power,” the ability of a nation-state to project force and protect trading routes on the open ocean. (Indeed, Mahan’s work has proved influential among modern theorists of space power, as well.)22 As a coaling station at the center of the Pacific, Hawai‘i would be invaluable to any empire attempting to project force in that region. Several US military leaders warned that British control of the islands would permanently imperil the US Pacific Coast.23 Native Hawaiian astronomers and navigators likewise regarded the Hawaiian archipelago as centrally located, but such centrality had a very different meaning to the people who looked out from Hawaiian shores to the Pacific Ocean, to distant lands, and to the stars. The grid system of longitude and latitude by which we locate places today decisively displaced other, older forms of navigation. European navigators in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had plotted direction by dead reckoning. They followed coastlines to a particular point opposite their intended destination, and then they attempted to follow a straight line from one side of an ocean or sea to another.24 Polynesian and Micronesian navigators in this period and earlier used a different system. They mentally mapped the locations of islands to their left and right as they imagined the sea moving around them. In this way, they made journeys of hundreds or thousands of miles.25 Hawaiian oral traditions describe a history of navigation, exploration, and contact with other peoples of the Pacific. Kahiki, today known to speakers of English as Tahiti, features prominently in Hawaiian stories and histories because many Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, or Native Hawaiians, trace their origins to waves of migration from that island.26 The word “Kahiki,” however, also refers to a mythical place and not merely to a terrestrial one. One Hawaiian-language song dating to the period before European contact, moreover, references the islands of Nu‘uhiwa (Nuku Hiva) and Polapola (Bora Bora). The Hawaiian scholar David A. Chang suggests that one could construct a Pacific “gazetteer” from the precontact Hawaiian place names, although several of the more than thirty he lists are difficult to positively correlate to contemporary, English-language maps. Indeed, some of these places might have been hypothetical—islands that navigators acknowledged to be fictions but that provided useful navigational reference points. Even before contact with Europeans, Kānaka imagined themselves

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as part of a larger world that was “unseen but not truly unknown,” according to Chang.27 After contact, moreover, many Hawaiians set out to explore this world, serving on whale ships, circumnavigating the globe, or receiving an education in the United States.28 But the central position of the Hawaiian archipelago in the Pacific Ocean rendered it an object of foreign desires. The islands had been the subject of curiosity by European and US scientists since the late eighteenth century, and experiments on the earth’s gravitation and magnetic field, as well as astronomical observations, were conducted there throughout the nineteenth.29 More significantly, the Hawaiian Islands were instrumental to the economic objectives of a rising class of capitalists from the United States. By midcentury, Hawai‘i had become a nexus for global trade, with silver specie bound for Canton passing through Hawaiian ports, and tea, silk, whale oil, and yellow Nankeen cloth passing through en route to North America. As many as five hundred whale ships visited Hawai‘i in a given year in the 1850s and 1860s.30 But the growth in sugar production was the most powerful economic factor in the transformation of the islands. In 1850, planters in Hawai‘i exported 400 tons of sugar. By 1890, they exported nearly 130,000 tons.31 This trade was dominated by planter capitalists with ties to the United States, who brought migrant laborers to the islands.32 The arrival of settlers and laborers—from Europe, the Americas, and Asia—brought diseases such as measles, smallpox, and leprosy, killing thousands. One observer in Maui in 1848 reported that measles killed one-third of the people there. In 1853, a smallpox epidemic killed nearly the “whole population” of several communities in the Hana district, on Maui.33 By 1900, census takers reported that fewer than forty thousand people in the Hawaiian Islands were Kānaka.34 While archeologists and historians have debated the size of the precontact Hawaiian population, the first British explorers to reach the islands estimated the population to be roughly four hundred thousand in 1778.35 The white settlers who initially rebelled against the Kingdom of Hawai‘i were motivated by their own economic interests, rather than scientific or geostrategic goals. But science and strategy would play a key role in the debate over whether the United States should annex the islands. A group of planter capitalists and their allies declared independence from the Hawaiian monarchy in January 1893.36 The recently crowned Hawaiian monarch, Lili‘uokalani, had attempted to dismantle the 1887 “Bayonet Constitution,” a document forced on her predecessor by the same group of planters.37 The constitution restricted Native Hawaiian voting rights by establishing property requirements. Because the system of land tenure in Hawai‘i before 1848 did not include ownership titles, many Native

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Hawaiians did not legally own the land on which they lived and worked. Recent immigrants from the United States and Europe, however, brought with them currency and the ability to purchase new titles. Some 6,500 Kānaka had petitioned in support of the queen’s efforts at reform.38 Key to the planters’ strategy, then, was intervention by the United States. On January 16, this group asked the United States minister to land Marines from the USS Boston in Honolulu to “protect life and property.”39 The next day, he did. Seeing the Marines, Lili‘uokalani stepped down under protest. But she astutely placed the responsibility for the overthrow at the feet the United States, setting up a subsequent legal claim for the restoration of her government.40 By casting the coup as an accidental US imperial project, the queen attempted to undermine any effort to characterize it as a people’s movement for revolutionary justice. Nonetheless, the coup plotters still described their uprising as a “Revolution” by “Citizens.” 41 These “revolutionary” leaders soon faced revolutions against their own rule, however. The United States government was not immediately interested in annexation, and in 1895 a group of quasi-royalists led by Robert Wilcox (1855–1903) and Sam Nowlein (b. 1868) fought a counterrevolutionary attempt to restore the queen to power.42 While Wilcox, in particular, had been an antimonarchist in the past, the leaders of the uprising were considered heroes by many Native Hawaiians after the fact. Observers cheered Wilcox as the soldiers of the oligarchy-controlled Republic of Hawai‘i marched him through the streets after his arrest.43 Officials of the new government immediately accused the queen of having taken part in the plot, and they arrested her.44 At this point, the queen’s strategy for resistance became more complex. When she was tried by a military tribunal for having knowledge of the Wilcox countercoup, she submitted her statement of protest in the ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, or the Hawaiian language.45 When she was held under house arrest after a forced abdication, she composed Mele Lāhui (songs of the nation) and had them published in a Hawaiian-language newspaper.46 She also wrote letters for publication in Ke Aloha Aina, another Hawaiian-language newspaper edited by a close ally.47 As Noenoe K. Silva has documented, the queen and her allies organized a petition drive among Native Hawaiians to protest annexation. Lili‘uokalani also published an English-language account of her life in an effort to shape US public opinion and, importantly, published her own translation of the Kumulipo, the chant recounting the creation of the universe.48 Lili‘uokalani, in short, marshalled the nascent discourse of international law on behalf of her government, but she also sought to unify the people of Hawai‘i with reference to their shared connection to the land, to each other, and to the origins of the universe itself.

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Her effort to prevent the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the United States would ultimately fail, but just barely. Republican president Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) had signed a treaty of annexation in 1893, but he left office before the US Senate could ratify it. President Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), a Democrat and an opponent of annexation, withdrew the treaty as soon as he took office. But Cleveland’s successor, Republican William McKinley (1843– 1901), was a supporter of annexation and signed a second treaty. Under US law, treaties require the support of a two-thirds majority of the Senate for ratification. With the possibility of permanent annexation looming, Lili‘uokalani led a delegation of four Hawaiian negotiators to lobby the US Senate against the treaty. They initially succeeded, and the Senate declined to ratify McKinley’s annexation plan. But the proannexation faction was undaunted. After the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, this faction tried an alternative approach: a joint congressional resolution, which required a simple majority in both houses rather than a two-thirds majority in the upper chamber. House Joint Resolution 259, the Newlands Resolution, passed in Congress and was signed into law by President McKinley on July 7, 1898, transferring control of the Hawaiian archipelago to the United States of America.49 The proannexation faction in the United States coveted the Hawaiian Islands for several reasons, most of them economic or military. US-owned sugar companies in Hawai‘i had long sought greater integration with the United States.50 More significantly, military planners imagined that control of the Hawaiian archipelago would make the United States dominant in the Pacific, enabling it to protect its own commerce and deny access to rivals. Sea power, like space power today, depended on controlling the information and commerce that passed through “the great thoroughfares of the world’s traffic.”51 Yet the fantasy that Hawai‘i might serve as exploitable territory went deeper than the short-term instrumental ends of military planners and capitalists. The islands of Polynesia—Hawai‘i, in particular—had long offered people in the United States a symbolic means of contemplating the possibilities of boundless expansion. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) consigned the expansion of the United States to the past: “four centuries from the discovery of America, . . . the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” Turner’s suggestion that historians study the frontier as a shaping influence in American culture could as easily be read as a lament for the loss of the “vital forces” of expansion, settler colonialism, and conflict that had shaped American character and culture.52 But Americans throughout the nineteenth century had regarded the Hawaiian Islands, in particular, as a potential new frontier in their westward expansion, a “frontier

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post of Christendom” available even after the official closure of the frontier on the North American continent.53 Perhaps the United States could expand endlessly. Indeed, as some nineteenth-century writers imagined expansion into the Pacific, they also imagined expansion into the solar system. Edgar Allan Poe (1809– 1849), for instance, had noted with annoyance the link between fantasies about Polynesia and fantasies about outer space. In an essay, he criticized the moon hoax with which this chapter began. The hoax had proved more popular than Poe’s own account of a trip to the moon, “Hans Phaall—A Tale” (1835). But the New York Sun’s moon people, Poe explained with annoyance, looked strikingly like the fictional Pacific Islanders imagined by a British novelist nearly a century earlier. They were “but a literal copy” of the islanders found in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1750).54 Of course, any reader of Poe could easily have pointed out that his own account of the moon, filled as it was with “innumerable volcanic mountains” and a native ambassador dressed in a vest of “bright yellow” Nankeen cloth, likely conjured for readers a picture of the Pacific “frontier.”55 Polynesia provided color, texture, and specificity to fantasies about life on other worlds. Such depictions persisted, and by 1902 the filmmaker Georges Méliès (1861–1938) had at his disposal a preestablished visual grammar when he filmed Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), a film as popular in Detroit, Cleveland, and Kansas City as it was in Paris.56 In Méliès’ film, a group of scientists travel to the moon in a space capsule, discovering volcanoes, a tropical grotto, a tiny waterfall, and dangerous natives ruled over by an alien potentate. Hawai‘i was, from the earliest visits of sailors from the United States, a site of imaginative projection for American readers and consumers. Many US writers regarded the islands as exploitable territory: geostrategically important to an increasingly sophisticated blue water navy, available for commercial development, suitable for scientific research, and even subject to fantasies about life in outer space. Yet the last monarch of Hawai‘i made clear a different set of relations between the Hawaiian nation and the cosmos. The Hawaiian Islands were not merely an important node in an increasingly sophisticated network of global power, or a site of fantasy about the potential of endless expansion over the face of the earth and into the solar system. Hawai‘i was the origin point of the universe itself.

The Creation of the Universe Just as the Hawaiian archipelago is located in space, it is located in time. The Hawaiian Lāhui—which can be roughly translated into English as “nation”—

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emerged in the ancient past, with Pō (the darkness) in the chaotic time of akua. It scope and temporality is articulated through ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (the Hawaiian language), and it is connected to the present through mo‘okū‘auhau (a genealogy that extends into the past, unbroken, to the beginning of time). Finally, as a nation-formation, it is affectively experienced through aloha ‘āina (a love of the land as immediate as the love of an elder sister), and reimagined and rearticulated through mo‘olelo (stories and histories).57 But the Lāhui, or Hawaiian nation, is very much unlike the imagined communities of the nineteenth-century European tradition. While the first Hawaiian state, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i (1810–1893), borrowed from, adapted to, and built on European and US political ideas, the Lāhui represented a parallel and in some ways independent means of articulating affiliation. The Lāhui is the single nation. It does not exist in a “comparative field,” as in Benedict Anderson’s famous formulation, because there is no nation to which it could be compared.58 It singularly dates to the beginning of the universe. Faced with the overthrow of the Hawaiian state, Lili‘uokalani called on this ancient, independent form of affiliation, which existed in parallel with the Kingdom government. She was not only the head of state for the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, a legal formation with a constitution, a body of law, and treaty relationships around the world. She was also the Ali‘i ‘Ai Moku, the highest-ranking Hawaiian elite, who like all Hawaiians could trace her origins to the formation of the universe. Her Native Hawaiian supporters, moreover, acknowledged this claim to political legitimacy. In the pages of Ke Aloha Aina, for example, the monarch was referred to as “ko kakou [our collective] Alii Aimoku.”59 In her struggle to prevent the annexation, Lili’uokalani drew on both roles—Queen and Ali‘i ‘Ai Moku—to legitimate her government. These efforts, moreover, largely took the form of writing: letters, petitions, mele (or songs), and, significantly, the Kumulipo, or creation chant. Much of this writing was transmitted to an audience of Kānaka for whom translation was unnecessary. But Lili‘uokalani chose to translate and publish the Kumulipo and distribute it to a varied group of readers, including Englishlanguage readers wholly unfamiliar with Hawaiian cosmology. In giving the published translation of the chant as a gift to supporters or potential supporters, she reified the relationship between these recipients and the ancient, cosmic past. As one scholar explains, “Hawaiian identity is, in fact, derived from the Kumulipo, the great cosmogonic genealogy. Its essential lesson is that every aspect of the Hawaiian conception of the world is related by birth, and as such, all parts of the Hawaiian world are one indivisible lineage. Conceived in this way, the

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genealogy of the Land, the Gods, Chiefs, and people intertwine with one another, and with all the myriad aspects of the universe.” 60 For the Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, genealogy provides far more than a family tree. It forms the scaffolding for an entire cosmological system explaining the relations between the universe, the land, the more than nine hundred generations of Native Hawaiian Ali‘i, or hereditary elites, and the Hawaiian people more broadly.61 Moreover, genealogy shapes the human relationship with time itself. In the Hawaiian language, the past is Ka wā mamua, or “the time in front,” and the future is Ka wā mahope, or the “time which comes after or behind.” 62 In short, a Hawaiian stands with her back to the future and looks into the past. (While this might seem strange initially, it makes sense when one reflects that the future is unknown and the past is, in some senses, visible.)63 When a Hawaiian looks into the past, moreover, she sees genealogy: both mo‘okū‘auhau, or lists of names, and mo‘olelo, or the sequences of words forming stories and histories.64 She sees, in essence, the richly interwoven fabric of embodied relations over time. The Kumulipo, then, functions as an account of the trajectory of the universe, an account that looks backward toward the beginning of time. Unlike the American Ephemeris, discussed in the previous chapter, the Kumulipo does not predict future events. Indeed, it does not concern itself with the future, which is in any case behind the human observer and unknowable. Instead, it traces a route back through the origins of human history to the Hawaiian archipelago and to the creation itself. Importantly, the Kumulipo was not only the shared inheritance of the Hawaiian people, but it was also the “special property” of Lili‘uokalani’s family. The version of the Kumulipo translated by the Ali‘i ai Moku between 1895 and 1897 was not an oral history but a written text: a transcription of a chant first composed in the eighteenth century to celebrate the family through which Lili‘uokalani traced her lineage.65 Kalākaua, her predecessor, had possessed the manuscript version of this Hawaiian-language chant, and in 1889 had ordered it printed as a gift for a few political allies or foreign scholars.66 Published by Lili‘uokalani as An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition (1897), the queen’s translation links the deep past to the present strug gle. The printed title page explains that this version of the Kumulipo, although composed in the eighteenth century, was “translated by Liliuokalani during her imprisonment in 1895” and “completed at Washington D.C.” 67 Lili‘uokalani links the ancient Hawaiian story to her own story and to the United States of America. Washington and Honolulu are linked here not through the sophisticated measurements of the Nautical Almanac Office but through the careful cultivation of ancestral knowledge by the highest ranking

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Hawaiian Ali‘i. Through her personal inscriptions, moreover, Lili‘uokalani includes the recipients of her book in this story. “For the Catholic University of America,” she writes in the edition donated to that institution, “Compliments of Liliuokalani of Hawaii.” 68 To her publisher and his wife, relatives through marriage and supporters of the restoration of her government, she writes, “Presented to Mr and Mrs William Lee by their affectionate cousin Liliuokalani of Hawaii.” 69 Among Hawaiian Ali‘i, gift giving was both a means of establishing reciprocal relationships and a means of asserting authority, of demonstrating that one was empowered to grant gifts and expect reciprocity.70 Inscribed and offered as a gift, then, the Kumulipo provided Lili‘uokalani with a means of favoring particular people and institutions and of inviting them into a relationship with the ancient Lāhui and its highest ranking descendant. By design, not all observers were privy to the varied strategies by which Lili‘uokalani attempted to defend the legitimacy of her government. Although her translation of the Kumulipo was published, it was not available to the general public. On her release from house arrest in October 1896, the Hawaiian monarch traveled to the United States to lobby against annexation and to call on the aid of her US allies—especially friends and relatives of her late husband, the Americanborn John Owen Dominis (1832–1891). Newspapers in the United States were eager to report on the Hawaiian queen’s activities, from her social calendar to her bout of influenza, and yet many profoundly misunderstood the relationship between her lobbying efforts and her writing. One newspaper suggested that “Queen Liliuokalani has settled down to authorship as her final career.”71 Another characterized her efforts as a “literary retirement.” To many observers in the United States, the Hawaiian monarch—or “ex-queen,” as she was sometimes called—was puttering through her “retirement” as a literary tinkerer and folklorist.72

Publishing the Creation The translation of the Kumulipo hardly constituted a retirement, however. In fact, the Hawaiian monarch drew on her family connection to the Boston publishing world to shape how Americans and Hawaiians would come to understand the Lāhui, the deposed Hawaiian government, and the Kanaka ‘Ōiwi strug gle for autonomy. Her arrival in the United States was very much part of a lobbying campaign, but a campaign that was often inscrutable to observers in the United States. The Lee family was central to her efforts. William Lee (1826–1906), a relative of the queen through marriage, was a founding partner in the Boston

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publishing firm Lee and Shepard. Mostly known for publishing popu lar juvenile fiction, such as the now-forgotten Oliver Optic series, this company did little business in Hawai‘i. Indeed, the firm’s extant papers contain only a single letter from the Hawaiian Islands, and that letter complains about how difficult it is to get Lee and Shepard books in Honolulu.73 Moreover, by 1897, Lee was looking to retire. The firm’s other founding partner, Charles A. B. Shepard (1829–1889), had died nearly a decade earlier, and Lee had been working at the publishing house since he helped to found it nearly forty years before, in February 1861.74 But William Lee and his wife, Sara (White) Lee, nonetheless took an active role in promoting the cause of the deposed Hawaiian government. Sara Lee used her position as a philanthropic Boston Brahmin to promote the Hawaiian monarch, in one case turning her speech at a benefit for “crippled children” into an antiannexation jeremiad. She explained, “I am American by ancestry from the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and I love the American flag, and would be the last to see it hauled down if rightly raised; but”—the Boston Globe recorded here that she spoke with “visible emotion”—“if a Captain Kidd or any other pirate should raise the American flag simply as a decoy in order to destroy, we should be the first to resent it.”75 While Sara Lee used the Boston charity circuit to promote the cause of Hawaiian independence, William Lee turned his Boston publishing company to the same effort. He published both Lili‘uokalani’s autobiography and her translation of the Kumulipo, recognizing that these two books would have different, although occasionally overlapping, audiences. Hawaii’s Story, the autobiography, would be advertised primarily in women’s periodicals devoted to liberal causes, from women’s suffrage to anti-imperialism.76 The Kumulipo, by contrast, would be given only to those who personally knew the queen or her close allies.77 In January 1897, Lili‘uokalani took an overnight train from Boston, where she had been visiting the Lees, to Washington, DC. She arrived in the early morning hours on January 23. At the time, she insisted that she was traveling as a private individual without any political objective in mind. Julius Palmer (1840–1899), her private secretary and spokesman, explained to a Baltimore Evening Star reporter the morning of her arrival that she had “persistently refused to give her views on any political subject” while in Boston and that she intended to follow the same practice while in Washington. When the reporter asked whether she hoped to meet with President Cleveland, who had rejected the treaty of annexation but would be leaving office shortly, Palmer answered, “I do not even know that she would desire an audience.”78 Unsurprisingly, she did desire an audience, and she met with Cleveland the following Monday in

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the Blue Room of the White House. She brought a reporter from a newspaper wire service. Her fifteen-minute meeting with Cleveland—an exchange of pleasantries and talk of mutual acquaintances—set the tone for her lobbying efforts. She would meet with officials and their families in a “personal capacity,” keeping herself in view of the press but keeping her ultimate objectives at least partially obscured from the general public.79 “Cousin William,” or publisher William Lee, would be instrumental to her efforts to shape public opinion without explicitly positioning herself as a foreign head of state lobbying the US government. Lili‘uokalani corresponded with the Lees throughout her stay in Washington and by the end of 1897 had completed her two books for publication.80 Her autobiography would be available for public sale, bound in cloth and sold for two dollars. It would, she hoped, shape public opinion in the United States. But only one hundred copies of her translation, An Account of the Creation of the World, would be printed—and they were not for sale. Eighty were bound in blue cloth and twenty were bound in paper. Possession of a copy would mark an individual or institution as a noted friend of the Hawaiian monarch.81 “It is not designed for general circulation,” she would explain later, “but for my friends.”82 The two books were completed at roughly the same time. A printed copy of Hawaii’s Story arrived in the copyright office on January 27, 1898, two days after the queen’s meeting in the White House.83 That office had received two copies of Creation of the World, one inscribed by Lili‘uokalani herself, a little more than a month earlier, on December 9 of the previous year.84 Lee and Shepard published Hawaii’s Story for the kind of mass audience that was the firm’s specialty, although Lee took care to advertise in anti-imperialist venues.85 In Hawaii’s Story, Lili‘uokalani presented herself, as one scholar explains, “as more Westernized than her Western readers,” as a kind of Hawaiian Queen Victoria.86 This act of self-presentation was shaped, at least in part, by Lili‘uokalani’s concern with how the press in the United States would regard her book and her cause. She deferred to the Lees on the timing of the publication and many of the revisions. “You and Mrs. Lee could judge best whether it would be best to publish it now or to postpone the publication to some future date,” she wrote from Washington in October 1897. Her deference to their publishing expertise, she explained, was motivated by her concern over the book’s reception. She added, “there is this that should be kept in view, that the side in opposition to me will do everything in their power to make my book unpopular.” Lee promised to cover most of the cost of publication and advertising, although Lili‘uokalani paid $300 for the electrotype plates, paid for the copyright registration, and paid wholesale prices for any copies of her autobiography that she gave away as gifts.87

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But even as Hawaii’s Story was composed for an audience of American readers, activists, and policymakers, the queen’s translation of the Kumulipo was published only for a select array of confirmed and potential allies. The Lee and Shepard firm followed the queen’s instructions in this regard, transmitting copies to her that she could give away personally. Such gifts were not unprecedented. Kalākaua had given copies of his privately printed, Hawaiian-language version of the Kumulipo to various acquaintances.88 And yet Lili‘uokalani’s efforts were nonetheless new. Her translation was the first to render the creation chant into English, and her introduction described how she made the translation while imprisoned by “the present rulers of Hawaii”—reminding readers that the story of the Hawaiian universe was threatened by foreign usurpation.

Distributing the Creation To whom did Lili‘uokalani present her translation of the Hawaiian creation chant? The question is impossible to answer fully, but extant records suggest that she sought to use the translation as a means of maintaining close alliances, of creating new ones, and possibly even of reminding some of her political enemies about the sources of her authority. “There are several reasons for the publication of this work,” she explains in her introduction to the completed edition, “the translation of which pleasantly employed me while imprisoned by the present rulers of Hawaii.” She continues: “It will be to my friends a souvenir of that part of my own life, and possibly it may also be of value to genealogists and scientific men of a few societies to which a copy will be forwarded.”89 Publicly, she only identified a single recipient: the Polynesian Society of New Zealand.90 In a private letter to William Lee, she asked him to keep a copy for himself and his wife, as well as to forward copies to two other Boston men: her private secretary and another cousin related by marriage.91 Today, there are at least eleven extant copies of the 1897 translation, housed in museums and libraries from Honolulu to Washington (see Table 7). These eleven copies paint a picture of the queen’s efforts to maintain and cultivate alliances. Recipients included leaders in the Hawaiian resistance movement, an elite Washington society woman, a university in Washington, DC, the Library of Congress, and even, possibly, the Republic of Hawai‘i’s representative in Boston.92 This list of recipients paints a picture of a far-flung plan of gift giving that enabled Lili‘uokalani to cultivate allies, linking the ancient Hawaiian Lāhui and its highest-ranking Ali‘i to universities, to political supporters, and even to rivals.

Table 7. Extant Copies of Creation of the World, or Kumulipo First Known Recipient

Present Location

Binding

1. Edward Lilikalani

Bishop Museum to Queen Dowager Kapiolani Bishop Museum Bishop Museum University of California, Berkeley Peabody Essex Museum Peabody Essex Museum Catholic University of America Hamilton College Library to Mattoon Monroe Curtis University of Hawaii, Manoa from Curtis P. Iaukea [?]b Library of Congress Library of Congress Unknown Now lost Now lost

Cloth

2. Charles Reed Bishop 3. Georgiana R. (Smith) Potts 4. John Kanui, Esq. 5. William and Sarah (White) Lee 6. Gorham Dummer Gilman 7. Catholic University of America 8. Thomas G. Thruma 9. Edward Bowditch Watson 10. Copyright Deposit 11. Copyright Deposit 12. Polynesian Society, New Zealand 13. Julius Palmer 14. N. G. Snelling a

Cloth Paper Unknown Cloth Paper Cloth Paper Unknown Cloth Paper Unknown Cloth Cloth

Donated to Hamilton College by Mattoon Monroe Curtis, who likely bought it at auction in 1935. The Hamilton library marks the book as received on May 11, 1936. On the same day, Curtis also donated Ka lira Hawaii (Honolulu: Mea paipalapala a na misionari, 1848), a set of English hymns translated into Hawaiian. Alexandra Wohnsen, Hamilton College Library, e-mail to author, January 14, 2019. See also Library of the Late Thomas G. Thrum, 14. Thrum himself likely received the book in 1917, at the time of the queen’s death, as he commissioned that year an article on the Kumulipo for his popu lar almanac. b This edition has the name and address of Edward Bowditch Watson penciled on the flyleaf. While the library accession records do not indicate how the institution acquired this copy, it is reasonable to speculate that Watson acquired the copy through his marriage to Lorna Iaukea, whose father, Colonel Curtis P. Iaukea, was an ambassador to Europe and Asia for the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Curtis Iaukea would serve as the trustee of Lili‘uokalani’s property beginning in 1909, but he served as an official of the Republic government and traveled to Washington to help lobby for annexation to the United States prior to his ser vice as the queen’s trustee. Because Lili‘uokalani inscribed many of the copies she gave as gifts but did not inscribe this copy, it is plausible to assume that Iaukea or a member of his family acquired this copy after he had reconciled with the queen in the early twentieth century. See Curtis Piehu Iaukea and Lorna Kahilipuaokalani Iaukea Watson, By Royal Command, i, 216. Also, Dore A. Minatodani, senior librarian, Hawaiian Collection, University of Hawaii at Manoa, e-mail to author, January 14, 2019.

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In several cases, copies of Creation of the World went to Kānaka who were actively engaged in the strug gle against annexation. Royalist and Kingdom-era judge Edward Lilikalani (c. 1852–1917), for instance, was the original recipient of a copy held today in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.93 Lilikalani helped to organize a petition drive to oppose annexation by the United States.94 But he did not keep this copy of the queen’s translation very long. It had been published in December 1897, and in August 1898 he inscribed his clothbound edition as a gift to Queen Dowager Kapi‘olani (1834–1899), the widow of Kalākaua.95 Such a gift hints that perhaps he was responsible for distributing copies in Honolulu, where he was actively working against annexation. He would have been a reliable choice for such an effort, as he remained loyal to the Hawaiian royal family throughout his life. When he died in 1917, the Hawaiian newspaper Ke Aloha Aina would memorialize him in an obituary, writing, in part, that “From this side of the newspaper, we join the woman who is deprived of her husband, and the whole family, in sadness” (“Ma ka aoao o keia wahaolelo, ke komo pu aku ne makou me ka wahine I hoonele ia i ke kane ole ame ka ohana no apau iloko o ke kaumaha”).96 When Lili‘uokalani wrote that her translation would be “a souvenir” to “my friends,” she almost certainly had in mind individuals such as Edward Lilikalani.97 Indeed, two other extant copies of the translation were transmitted to similarly loyal supporters, one a member of the Hui Kalai‘aina, or indigenous nationalist party, and the other a naturalized Hawaiian citizen who had married a member of the royal family.98 But some of the queen’s “friends” were quite new and had no links to the deposed government. Lili‘uokalani inscribed a paper-bound edition of the book, for instance, to “Mrs. Stacey Potts.”99 Georgiana R. (Smith) Potts (1852–1918) was the daughter of an elite Pennsylvania family, and her husband, the US Navy officer Stacy Potts (1853–1928), was assigned to command naval apprentices on a training cruise in early 1897.100 Georgiana Potts remained in Washington during her husband’s deployment, living in the family townhouse at 1604 Q Street NW, directly across from the luxurious Cairo, an apartment house.101 Lili‘uokalani moved into a tenth-floor apartment in the Cairo in February 1897. Throughout her stay in Washington, moreover, she received visitors from “patriotic or literary societies,” such as the Daughters of the American Revolution.102 This might well be how she met Georgiana Potts, a member of the DAR.103 The single remaining trace of their relationship—an inscription on the flyleaf of a book, with the misspelled name of Potts’s husband—is the only known evidence of their connection. But Potts would have been able to see the window of Lili‘uokalani’s apartment, on the southwest corner of the tenth floor, from the front door of

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her own home, and a visit would have required only a short walk across the street and a ride up the elevator.104 Regardless of how well Potts and Lili‘uokalani knew each other, however, the Hawaiian monarch regarded elite society women as key figures in her influence campaign. She noted that “I have daily received from all parts of the United States, the frequent courtesies from the families of congressional members.”105 In other words, she cultivated relationships with those in official positions by developing social connections to them, particularly through their wives. The queen’s apartment was extremely well positioned for such an influence campaign. Marie Celeste (Ayer) Fleming (1875–1950), the wife of Democratic congressman William H. Fleming (1855–1944) of Georgia, lived in the queen’s building, the Cairo.106 When Hawaiian annexation came up for a vote in the House of Representatives, William Fleming voted “No.”107 And the Flemings were not the only congressional family living in the Cairo. Laura Eliza (Hines) Lester (1839–1920) lived in the Cairo with her husband, Democratic congressman Rufus E. Lester (1837–1906) of Georgia. Rufus Lester voted against the Newlands Resolution as well. A walk of about five hundred feet down Q Street, moreover, would have brought her to the home of Florence (Shearer) Catchings (1849–1927), the wife of Mississippi congressman Thomas Catchings (1847–1927), a Democrat.108 Thomas Catchings would decline to appear when the annexation of Hawai‘i was up for a vote.109 Of course, not all of the queen’s lawmaker neighbors came to her aid when the question of annexation was brought before Congress.110 But Lili‘uokalani’s gift of the translated creation chant to Georgiana Potts—and her decision to place herself in a neighborhood full of government officials and their families—reveals how her Creation of the World functioned as a means of cementing relationships with members of Washington society.111 The book was not given merely to individuals, moreover. It was also presented to politically important institutions. To the Library of Congress, she presented a clothbound and a paperbound edition as a means of securing copyright. She had insisted to William Lee that they copyright the translation, even though it would not be sold commercially, and in December 1897 she inscribed the clothbound edition, “Presented to the Congressional Library of the United States of America by Liliuokalani of Hawaii” (Figure 10). And the Library of Congress was not the only Washington institution to receive a copy of her translation.112 She also gave a clothbound copy to Catholic University of America, and it remains in the university’s rare books collection. Any letter accompanying that gift has since been lost, and the queen’s inscription on the inside of the volume was simple: “For the Catholic University of America. Compliments of

Figure 10. Lili‘uokalani inscribed a clothbound edition of the Kumulipo translation (opposite) when she presented it to the Library of Congress in December 1897. The inscription on the flyleaf (above) reads, “Presented to the Congressional Library of the United States of America by Liliuokalani of Hawaii.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Liliuokalani of Hawaii.”113 Yet this gift emphasizes how her distribution of the Kumulipo linked her to various constituencies in the United States. In her autobiography, Lili‘uokalani stresses the equal treatment Catholics received under the kingdom’s government. Moreover, some Catholics in the United States emphatically supported her reinstatement as queen. Lili‘uokalani had been deposed by a group that she and others referred to as the “missionary party,” many of whose members descended from the original Protestant missionaries to the Hawaiian archipelago.114 For some American Catholics, the apparent transformation of Protestant missionaries into self-interested capitalists was emblematic of the spiritual corruption of the Protestant churches in the United States. “When Hawaii was opened up to the Protestant missionaries,” wrote Father Daniel E. Hudson (1849–1934) in his Indiana newspaper, Ave Maria, “they also went up and possessed the land, thereby robbing a poor ‘widow woman’ of her ancestral lands and throne.”115 In the US Senate, Catholic members split on the question of Hawaiian annexation, but many Catholics ardently supported the cause of the Hawaiian monarchy.116 And Catholic University, specifically, had been closely linked to President Cleveland, who cultivated American Catholics as an important constituency in his coalition.117 Even as Lili‘uokalani gave copies of the Kumulipo to old friends, to potential new friends, and to important institutions, she may also have given copies to old friends who had betrayed her. A copy held today in the Peabody Essex Museum, for instance, originally belonged to Gorham Dummer Gilman (1822– 1909), the “missionary party” consul to Boston.118 Lili‘uokalani regarded him as a self-interested double-dealer, noting that he had “avowed his implicit belief in all the absurd and wicked statements circulated by the missionary party against my own character and that of my people.” Gilman had first been appointed consul to Boston by the Provisional Government as a means of influencing opinion in the United States in favor of annexation. On reflection, Lili‘uokalani decided that she should not have been surprised by his behavior. When she was on a world tour in 1887, Gilman had been “very kind and attentive to me,” Lili‘uokalani wrote. But “he had a point to gain; he wanted a decoration from the king, and did not hesitate to say so.” Despite this self-interestedness, however, Lili‘uokalani had supported Gilman’s appointment as a Knight Companion of the Order of Kalākaua, and she had not expected him to betray the monarchy. Indeed, she wrote in 1898, Gilman should have been bound to her by “all the claims of gratitude” and should “rally to my assistance.”119 It is not clear whether he received his inexpensive, paperbound copy of Creation of the World directly from Lili‘uokalani or through an intermediary. The copy has been rebound,

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possibly destroying any inscription on the endpapers. But it is easy to imagine that Lili‘uokalani transmitted this copy as a reminder—of her authority, of her past favor, and of his indebtedness. At least three copies of Creation of the World went to recipients in Boston, and at least one went to a scholarly society in New Zealand.120 Most, however, circulated in Washington and Honolulu, connecting the two capitals across space and time. Transmitted to a far-flung network of officials, political allies, and institutions, the Kumulipo functioned in many ways as a kind of national almanac. And yet, unlike an almanac, it made clear that the sea, the land, and the sky were not merely instruments of national power but living, embodied beings with a genealogy and a history, with mo‘okū‘auhau and mo‘olelo.121

The Embodied Universe Lili‘uokalani’s translation of the Kumulipo, published and circulated to at least one university, to political allies, and to others, functioned as a kind of counteralmanac: a direct challenge to an instrumental, predictive description of the cosmos. Lee and Shepard published it, moreover, at a time when the predictive model printed by the United States was ascendant. In 1866 and following its successful use by the Union Navy during the Civil War, the Nautical Almanac Office had moved to Washington, DC. Under the administration of astronomer Simon Newcomb, who lived two blocks from Lili‘uokalani’s apartment in the Cairo, the almanac office had devoted itself to producing ever more precise models of celestial movement, an effort that paid dividends by enhancing the international prestige of the United States. In May  1896, astronomers of the British, German, French, and US nautical almanacs chose to adopt the mathematical constants of the American Ephemeris as their single, universal standard, regularizing calculations across nations.122 The Ephemeris was quickly becoming the arbiter of disputes about the solar system, the stars, and the universe. It was, moreover, essential to the operations of the US state. An 1880 law had mandated that in addition to those almanacs available for commercial sale, some one thousand copies would be printed for the peacetime “public ser vice” every year, with an additional five hundred copies printed for Congress.123 Predictive, mathematical astronomy—funded in the United States by the War Department—sought to know the future organization of celestial bodies more precisely as a means of projecting force, promoting commerce, and cultivating prestige. Likewise, nineteenth-century writers imagined islands, moons, and

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planets as sites of adventure and, ultimately, exploitation. From the New York Sun’s moon hoax to Edgar Allen Poe’s “Hans Phaall” to Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune, extraterrestrial landscapes abounded with volcanoes, colorfully dressed natives, and tropical weather. Both perspectives—the first professionalized and disciplined, the second speculative and referential—were united in their assumptions about the exploitability of the universe. The cosmos, whether in the pages of the American Ephemeris or in the pages of the New York Sun, was a place to be traversed, understood, mastered, and ultimately used. These perspectives, moreover, converged on Hawai‘i. When white authors imagined life on other worlds, they often imagined an extraterrestrial Polynesia. And when the US Navy dispatched ships carrying copies of the American Ephemeris into the Pacific, those ships secured the whale oil and sugar that passed through Honolulu harbor and made the Hawaiian archipelago a tempting object of American commercial desire. The Kumulipo offered a radically different perspective, but in a recognizable form. Like the American Ephemeris, Lili‘uokalani’s translation of the Kumulipo made a set of highly specific claims to supremacy on questions about the universe. But it explained the universe as an embodied set of relations rather than as a site of movement to be studied, predicted, and exploited. “The ancient Hawaiians,” Lili‘uokalani writes in her introduction, “were astronomers, and the [untranslatable] terms used [in the Kumulipo] appertained to the heavens, the stars, terrestrial science, and the gods. Curious students will notice in this chant analogies between its accounts of the creation and that given by modern science.”124 In laying claim to the discoveries of “modern science,” Lili‘uokalani connected her translation of an ancient creation chant to numerous astronomical publications, such as those printed by the US Naval Observatory and the Nautical Almanac Office. The goals articulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Ellicott, and others had been realized through such texts. Washington, no longer a city out of time, was the site of an official Meridian from which time and space could be calculated. And the official US almanac was fast becoming the world standard. Yet the Kumulipo challenged any attempt to understand the universe instrumentally: to map it, to measure it, to exploit it. Almanacs and ephemerides, in particular the American Ephemeris, sought to predict the future, what in the Hawaiian language is ka wā mahope, or the time that cannot be seen because it “comes after or behind.” Such attempts at prediction invite misapprehension. By contrast, the Kumulipo gazed over the past: ka wā mamua, or “the time in front.”125 As such, the Kumulipo delineated precisely how the universe unfolded across sixteen wā, or eras. There is no evidence that Lili‘uokalani ever dispatched a copy

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of the Kumulipo to the US Nautical Almanac Office. But her translation— presented as an account “of the creation” akin to “that given by modern science”— was nonetheless presented to her allies and to institutions not merely as an object of antiquarian curiosity but as a means of understanding the universe in relation to a living society, the Lāhui.126 Lili‘uokalani’s translation, moreover, did not merely provide readers with a transparent window onto an ancient, Hawaiian-language cosmography. It framed and shaped that cosmography for readers unfamiliar with Hawaiian culture. The parallels between Hawaiian cosmography and the discoveries of “modern”— or nineteenth-century—scientific theories would be uncanny if they were not intentional. Lili‘uokalani understood that at least some of her readers might be persuaded by moments of recognition, moments in which the discoveries of scientists and the predictions of ancient Hawaiian astronomers appeared to align. Her translation, for instance, describes the creation of the earth in a way that precisely correlates to late nineteenth-century theories of planet formation. She writes, At the time that turned the heat of the earth, At the time when the heavens turned and changed, At the time when the light of the sun was subdued To cause light to break forth, ............................ ... Then began the slime which established the earth.127 This translation describes the formation of the earth as the product of hot, spinning matter, circling around a “subdued” sun in a whirling celestial system. Throughout the nineteenth century, most astronomers subscribed to one of several versions of the “nebular hypothesis”: in essence, scientists believed that a hot, spinning cloud of matter cooled and condensed, eventually forming the sun and the eight planets.128 There were objections to this theory, both scientific and religious. But its adherents were left with a clear picture of the earth in the earliest years of its formation. It was, as one midcentury British writer explained, “a ball of matter, fluid with intense heat, spinning on its own axis, and revolving round the sun.”129 Lili‘uokalani promises in her introduction that the reader of the Kumulipo would discover in its pages “analogies,” or echoes, of “modern” scientific thinking. She was in an excellent position to deliver on that promise, having been educated extensively in astronomy as a child.130 In her translation, then, the earth is described precisely as adherents of the nebular hypothesis would describe it: a

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mass of hot, spinning matter in a spinning system. English-language readers would note the similarity. A British scholar in 1900, likely working from the edition held by the Polynesian Society in New Zealand, described the above passage as “a reasonably fair vision of the world in the ages before men inhabited the earth.”131 If Lili‘uokalani hoped English-language readers would recognize in the Kumulipo a confirmation of their own assumptions, she succeeded. The Hawaiian monarch could have translated the passages about the earth’s formation very differently, however. A more recent translation of the original text by Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui, a contemporary scholar of Hawaiian-language literature, reveals the potential ambiguity. In this translation, the earth does not turn. Time turns. Consider the difference: “When time turned, the earth became hot / When time turned, the heavens turned inside out / When time turned, the sun was darkened” (“ ‘O ke au i kahuli wela ka honua / ‘O ke au i kahuli lole ka lani / ‘O ke au kuka ‘iaka ka lā”).132 Gone from this translation are any “analogies” to the nebular hypothesis, and present is a distinctive relation to time and space. Here, the heavens do not spin but turn “inside out.” The sun is not a diminished and cooling ball of matter, preparing to spark into the fireball that will light the world. Instead, it is going dark. The Kumulipo offers a coherent account of the creation but not an account that aligns neatly with late nineteenth-century theories about planet formation. Lili‘uokalani’s translation was made at a time when the legitimacy of Hawaiian thought depended, at least in part, on its alignment with other systems of knowledge production, including that of “modern science.” Lili‘uokalani translates the words of this eighteenth-century chant in ways that align with the expectations of a nineteenthcentury audience looking for confirmation of what many already believe to be true. Her translation, in other words, would have provided moments of recognition not only for a Kanaka reader such as Edward Lilikalani but also for readers such as Georgiana Potts, students at the Catholic University of America, and scholars and statesmen visiting the Library of Congress. In short, her translation anticipated a varied audience, many of whom would be wholly unfamiliar with Hawaiian ways of knowing the universe. There is no doubt, however, that Lili‘uokalani insisted on the primacy of those Hawaiian ways of knowing. Her alignment with “modern science” was provisional. As the chant approaches its conclusion, in a branch of the twelfth wā, Lili‘uokalani offers her reader an account of the relation between Wākea (the expanse of the heavens), Papa (the foundation that is the earth), and Hoʻohōkūkalani (the daughter of Papa, “she who creates stars in the sky”). These three are the source of the Hawaiian people and the archipelago itself. As

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the chant progresses, the reader discovers that Wākea and Hoʻohōkūkalani have a child, a boy, but he is stillborn. They bury him on the eastern side of their house, and, in that place, a flowering plant grows up. They call this plant Hāloanakalaukapalili, and it is the first kalo, or taro plant. When their second son is born healthy, they name him Hāloa in honor of his older brother. This boy, Hāloa, was the first Native Hawaiian person. The story concludes with a list of what has been made sacred by the unfolding of human creation. “The Haloa that grow by the edge of the patch,” Lili‘uokalani translates, “became sacred.”133 The sacredness of the small plant is linked to the sacredness of the first Hawaiian person and all of his descendants. People and plants and earth and sky are linked through embodied, living relations that unfold across time. Lili‘uokalani likely recognized that her readers would have approached her translation of the Kumulipo with vastly different levels of understanding. The translated book was given to a member of the Hui Kalai‘aina and a Washington society woman, a Polynesian academic society and a Catholic university. But she was nonetheless insistent on the sacredness of the Hawaiian creation, of the Lāhui. Since the early decades of the nineteenth century, missionaries, capitalists, imaginative writers, and scientists from the United States had regarded Hawai‘i as a means to various ends. For officials of one missionary society, Hawai‘i represented a “frontier post of Christendom.”134 For whalers, Hawai‘i was a distant point of “safety,” a refuge far from home and “rising like a shadow above the waves.”135 For sugar planters and their advocates, Hawai‘i was a place where “fortunes might be made,” a place where the soil was “three times” as productive as that of Louisiana.136 For imaginative writers, Polynesia had been the model for life elsewhere in the solar system, a place where indolent natives “spent their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, . . . bathing, and loitering about on the summits of precipices.”137 And for scientists, Hawai‘i was a site for research—an ideal spot for the study of the earth’s gravitation, the magnetic field, and the movements of the stars overhead. Yet the Kumulipo insists on a different relation to the Hawaiian past and present. Hawai‘i, in the Kumulipo, is an interwoven fabric of relations unfolding across the deep time of the universe itself. It is a living, growing, sacred site of being.

“It Belongs to Wākea” Before leaving Washington, Lili‘uokalani filed a protest with the United States Congress, reiterating that she was the legitimate sovereign of the islands and

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protesting, in particular, the seizure not only of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i but of the Crown Lands, some one million acres that belonged to the royal family and not to the state.138 Traditionally, these lands had been leased, often for free or for one dollar per acre, to Native Hawaiian people. In the ensuing decades, the Crown Lands would become central to the struggle for Hawaiian Sovereignty. Between 1900 and 1909, Lili‘uokalani made five more trips to Washington to assert her legal control over the Crown Lands. She even sued the United States government but lost.139 Kanaka ‘Ōiwi strategies for asserting sovereignty varied in the years before and after annexation: petitions to the US Congress, formal and informal overtures to US elected officials and their families, protests, publications in the US popular press and in Hawaiian-language newspapers, and even armed resistance. Lili‘uokalani’s translation of the Kumulipo played at most a marginal role in this decades-long story. Only one hundred copies of Creation of the World were published, and it was not widely considered or discussed in the United States or in Hawai‘i. But the English translation of the Kumulipo nonetheless enshrined Hawaiian ways of knowing the universe in library collections, from the Polynesian Society of New Zealand to the Library of Congress to the Catholic University of America. And it preserved a Hawaiian account of the past that would be accessible even to those Native Hawaiians who were denied access to their own language throughout the twentieth century. Today, the Hawaiian Islands are treated as an instrument of US space power. The Global Positioning System depends on Hawai‘i. The US Navy tells the time—and thus is able to track objects on the earth—by relying on the very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) system. VLBI is essentially three radio telescopes, one of which is in Hawai‘i, that provide data on the positions of quasars, sources of radio waves that are five billion to fifteen billion light-years away. These data are combined, corrected, and used to determine the precise time to within a billionth of a second per day.140 This Hawaiian radio telescope, moreover, is one of thirteen telescopes on Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the archipelago, and plans for a fourteenth telescope are underway.141 Hawai‘i is, in this sense and others, an instrument of US space power: military, scientific, and economic. It is star territory.142 But the use of the Hawaiian Islands as a site from which to observe, map, and measure the cosmos is the product of a nineteenth-century space age, a period in which agents of the United States sought to instrumentalize the universe. Yale astronomer Chester Smith Lyman made astronomical observations in Hawai‘i as early as 1845, and US government surveyors conducted astronomical studies of the islands in 1883, 1887, 1891, and 1892.143 The decision to create a network of mountaintop observatories on sacred Hawaiian land, then, can be linked not

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merely to a twentieth-century space race but to a nineteenth-century effort to instrumentalize the Hawaiian archipelago for the extension of US power. But Creation of the World reminds its readers that there are other ways to understand the Hawaiian Islands. This unassuming book provides readers with a cosmogony, a story of not only how environmental and astronomical systems emerged over time but how they emerged through a set of interwoven relationships dating to the beginning of time itself. As one scholar of Hawaiian culture explains, the Kumulipo maps “the emergence of all elemental forms—animate and inanimate—from the smallest creatures to the stars, to humans, and beyond.” This English translation of a cosmological chant, moreover, has proved important to those who continue to assert the rights of Native Hawaiian people. Scholar-activists today cite the Kumulipo as a means of legitimating claims to sovereignty.144 Even more important, such genealogical histories enable people to articulate a noninstrumental relation to the natural world. As many Hawaiian activists note, Mauna Kea should properly be referred to as Mauna a Wākea, or the Mountain of Wākea. In protesting plans to build the fourteenth telescope on the mountain, the Hawaiian educator and activist Pualani Kanahele explained, “This is Mauna a Wākea. The mountain belongs to Wākea. It doesn’t belong to you, it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to Wākea.”145 Other scholars, activists, and Native Hawaiians agree. The mountain has long been considered a sacred “piko,” or umbilical cord, linking the earth to Wākea, the sky and male parent of the first Hawaiian person.146 Like the “Haloa that grow by the edge of the patch,” for which the first person was named, it is sacred.147 When traveling in the United States, Lili‘uokalani was deeply concerned that the proponents of annexation would “do everything in their power” to discredit her and the cause of Hawaiian independence. As a result, she deferred to William Lee on questions about how American readers would respond to her autobiography—she agreed “to acquiesce in all criticisms,” as she put it.148 But Lili‘uokalani took full responsibility for the Kumulipo: paying the printing costs, insisting that the book be copyrighted, and directing it to recipients throughout the world.149 The book extended a set of relations that began with Pō, the darkness, and continued as she inscribed copies to friends, new and old, and to institutions. In the late nineteenth century, one enthusiastic supporter of annexation described Hawai‘i as a “station of utmost importance” for astronomical inquiry and for the projection of military power.150 But in the pages of the Kumulipo, Hawai‘i was far more than that. It was, and is, a place descended from Wākea and Papa and Hoʻohōkūkalani, a place of living, ongoing relationships between human beings and the cosmos.

Epilogue The Third Space Age

At sunset, an observer standing on the rocky Martian surface could watch the sky’s transformation from a rusty shade of bright orange to a pale yellow to a cool, translucent blue. She could look out across a nearly airless plain and gaze at the dust-covered, human-made structures: the solar panels, the “propellant plant,” the “iron foundry,” and the “pizza joint.” This is the vision of one American capitalist, who promises that Mars colonization can be realized in the near future not by governments but by private corporations, wealthy investors, and settlers. He explains, “If we can get the cost of moving to Mars to be roughly equivalent to a median house price in the United States, which is around $200,000,” then this plan for moving one million settlers to the Red Planet in the coming century could be realized. These settlers would not necessarily pay their own way. Rather, they could “get sponsorship” and even potentially repay their sponsors for the cost of the journey because “Mars would have a labor shortage for a long time.” Settlement—secured by state power, but not funded by state budgets or subject to state oversight—would follow a model remarkably like that followed in western Georgia in the 1830s, or Hawai‘i in the second half of the nineteenth century. This scheme, moreover, is only one step in a long-term plan to fill the solar system with propellant plants and settler colonies, enabling humankind to send people and equipment throughout the solar system: exploring, developing, and extracting resources.1 Critics have challenged the feasibility of proposals such as this one, but a longer historical view sheds light on other, more pressing concerns. Moving one million people from Earth to Mars may seem farfetched. Attempts to grow crops in low-gravity, high-radiation environments, which would be necessary for any long-term colonization, have met more challenges than expected, for instance.2 And yet, eventually, the technological tools necessary for a massive migration of human beings will likely be available. Then, the introduction of microbes from

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thousands of people, or even millions, would contaminate the Martian surface, confusing attempts to study any indigenous microbial life and redirecting the evolutionary course of that potential life—even, possibly, killing it.3 Perhaps more horrifyingly, far-distant colonies will be subject to many of the same forces that shaped settler colonies in the nineteenth century. Just as in the past, boom and bust economic cycles will reshape colonial landscapes—enriching some investors who remain on earth while stranding the economically irrelevant in resourcepoor environments formerly devoted to the development of a single, now unnecessary commodity. The tenuousness of governance will produce boom and bust cycles in the state monopoly on violence, as well. Colonial elites may act with impunity for long periods, ruling over communities from which there is no escape and where exile means death. Then, every few years, elites from earth’s metropoles will impose fickle and changeable mandates through agents dispatched for that purpose. Colonization would export the political problems of earth-based societies—from indebtedness to labor strife—to the surface of other planets and moons, but without the ameliorating effects of the welfare state or of longstanding institutions, from courts to charities to universities to churches. And while true colonization may lay decades, even centuries, in the future, other efforts to exploit space are moving ahead in the present. The US Department of Defense is aggressively pursuing military preeminence in space. The beginning of this century saw a proliferation of scholarly works considering the role national governments should play above the atmosphere. Should space be governed by a system of international laws and norms, constraining major powers from seizing control of strategic regions or orbital paths? Or, alternatively, will such an approach merely leave those who abide by international norms vulnerable to those who do not?4 Such debates have been overtaken by events. In December 2019, the US Congress established the Space Force, a military division of the Air Force. The creation of this force was in many ways the culmination of a two-decade long process within Congress and the Department of Defense, beginning with a 2001 congressional report recommending changes to US space policy.5 In 2007, the People’s Republic of China performed an antisatellite weapon test, which prompted US observers to consider the limits of US supremacy in outer space and the vulnerability of US satellites.6 “The Global Positioning System (GPS),” a government report concluded the following year, “is the world standard for precision navigation and timing.” And yet, the report went on, systems such as GPS were threatened by “the rapid emergence of China as a space power.”7 The United States and other powers are actively planning to project force in space to protect their military assets, such as the GPS network and

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spy satellites. They also aim to protect commerce. As former Vice President Mike Pence explained in 2018, the Space Force will provide security to “America’s private pioneers” as they “cultivate the vast expanses” of space. The wealth of Pence’s “private pioneers” will be secured by a state-organized military apparatus, an apparatus without which private citizens, investors, and corporations would be unable to exploit these “vast expanses.”8 The arrangement Pence describes, in other words, is that of a nineteenth-century frontier.9 Frontier fantasies animated the first American space age, in the nineteenth century, and they continue to shape how policymakers conceive of space today. By 1898, isolated islands in the Pacific and far-off bodies in space were equally subject to mapping, to scientific analysis, and to dreams of adventure, conquest, and exploitation. Like the archipelagoes of Polynesia, the moons and planets of the solar system promised to be yet another frontier, reachable by brave men who would plunge over the edge of the horizon, seeking a fortune. In 1913, California governor Hiram W. Johnson (1866–1945) described his state as the “final frontier,” the “last station of the westward march of occidental civilization.”10 Johnson believed that the forces of expansion had run their course, culminating in a continent-spanning American empire that would go no farther.11 But Johnson was an isolationist, and he was out of touch with many of the currents of his own time. The annexation of Hawai‘i, along with other possessions seized during the Spanish-American War, had whetted the appetite for endless expansion over the horizon. Guidebooks published in the United States promised that California was not the final frontier. Instead, there “is one last frontier! The road is a chartered path over a sparkling sea, its limitless horizon broken with statuesque clouds, harried by trade winds, and its countries are islands and atolls flung like multicolored jewels beneath skies.”12 The course of empire was taking its way westward over the ocean, into Polynesia. But many imaginative writers and artists envisioned a kind of expansion that would prove limitless. Settler colonies in Polynesia might be followed by settler colonies on the moon.13 It is not surprising, then, that the so-called space race, the second American space age, was as much a time of nostalgia as of projection. “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier,” Senator John Kennedy told the assembled delegates in Los Angeles when he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in 1960. “We stand today,” he continued, “on the edge of a New Frontier.”14 Talk of frontiers was as common in 1960 as it had been a century earlier.15 Kennedy merely channeled it. A March 1957 article in Boys’ Life had described the launch of a US satellite as “man’s first exploratory step in the conquest of the final frontier.”16 And the dream of a “final frontier” would be made

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famous, of course, by a fictional television character in that era, one who embodied both the promise of Kennedy’s expansionist rhetoric and the memory of long-dead explorers plying the Pacific. In the NBC space opera Star Trek (1966– 1969), fictional explorer Captain James T. Kirk—whose impulsivity was modeled on that of James Cook—promises that the starship Enterprise will explore the “final frontier” of outer space.17 Such language would persist throughout the space race and afterward. By 1981, an air force report on the future militarization of space, subtitled “The Great Frontier,” would promise that war was as inevitable in space as it had been in Indian country, in Mexican California, and in the Pacific.18 Now, in the twenty-first century, legal scholars studying the potential for commerce and armed conflict in outer space continually and unselfconsciously refer to the region above the earth’s atmosphere as a “frontier,” even a “final” one.19 As one such theorist of space power explains, the model of US frontier expansion remains salient not only as rhetoric but as precedent. Nineteenth-century settler colonialism is the political and economic model by which some scholars and strategists plan for the future of space.20 But we do not lack for alternative ways of thinking about the universe, nor do we lack for warnings about the dire consequences of imagining the cosmos as a mere repository of resources. Lili‘uokalani regarded the universe, from the tiniest taro plant to Wākea, the sky himself, as sacred.21 For her, as for other Kānaka, human beings were merely one part of a rich tapestry of relationships, of earth and sky and ocean and plants and stars and everything else. For Cherokee newspaper editors in the 1820s and 1830s, meanwhile, speculation that other planets or star systems were the homes of living beings, even conscious beings, seemed perfectly plausible. Many Cherokee in the nineteenth century regarded the earth as inhabited by “ little people,” or Yunwi Tsunsdi, who facilitated spiritual transformations and shared secret knowledge.22 Moreover, for some, even the stars themselves were living beings who could visit the earth.23 As one article in the Cherokee Phoenix asked, “why should we think our earth the only planet . . . that is peopled?”24 Many astronomers in the twenty-first century have asked the same question.25 The Cherokee Nation deserved sovereignty and autonomy, Principal Chief John Ross and others asserted, not because it was exceptional but because it was emplaced. Its people lived on the lands of their ancestors, and they should not be forced to travel toward the setting sun.26 If, like many Cherokee thinkers, we regard the universe as a site of potential pluralism—of various forms of life or potential life—then Ross’s invocation of collective rights in the context of “the Universe” might be a useful starting point for our own thinking about space exploration.27

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That many nineteenth-century thinkers rejected efforts to treat the universe as nothing more than an instrument of human desires does not mean that they were indifferent to scientific study. Henry David Thoreau’s efforts to “shoot Polaris,” or mathematically chart the position of true north, is a case in point. The two-day process of locating true north in the nineteenth century was complex and difficult, and most commercial surveyors did not bother. But in this and other matters, Thoreau’s interests were not merely commercial—they were scientific, aesthetic, and moral. He sought, in his own words, “plain living and high thinking.”28 He did not merely want to “to add, divide, and measure” the universe.29 Rather, he wanted to chart the relation between the observable world and human consciousness. Nor was understanding this relation the purview only of philosophers and poets. The astronomer Maria Mitchell, who was very much part of a US military effort to carry out that addition, division, and measurement, also believed that instrumental science was merely one part of a much larger effort to understand humanity’s place in the cosmos. For her, the science of astronomy depended not only on predictive, mathematical calculation but on observation and speculation.30 Astronomers, she believed, must think like poets and philosophers. They must wonder, as Thoreau wondered, what it might mean to regard each planet we see in the sky not as “star territory” but as “another world,” a potential ecosystem hidden from those on earth and developing independently of human beliefs or desires.31 Today, the United States is on the cusp of a third space age—an age of “private pioneers,” weapons systems, and, potentially, settler colonies.32 The assumptions that underpin this new expansionist project date to the founding of the United States itself. And these assumptions can be traced across time. They can be found in President George W. Bush’s insistence that we travel into space “for the same reasons” as those that drove Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the “vast new territory” of Louisiana.33 They can be found in President Lyndon Johnson’s insistence that Americans “are all the descendants of those voyagers who found and settled the New World.”34 They can be found in President John Kennedy’s insistence that “those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space.”35 Bush, Johnson, Kennedy, and many others have sought a common history, a means of imbuing the national project with cosmic meaning. And they found this common history in the record of exploration and settler colonialism. They found, accurately, a nation-state founded on the dream of cosmic mastery.

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And yet, as I hope this book has demonstrated, there are other histories we might hold in common. Those living today in the United States of America are not merely “the descendants of those voyagers” who settled the New World. They are, instead, the inheritors of many histories. And these histories are told in the pages of newspapers and books and pamphlets and almanacs housed in libraries from Washington to Honolulu. There is the history of the enslaved poet George Moses Horton, who saw in astronomy not the possibility of measurement and mastery but of exuberant flight and of liberty, and who cautioned that the cosmos “never yet was half explored” by human science.36 There is the history of Elias Boudinot, who learned an astronomy that was limited to the measurement of celestial motion but nonetheless wondered about the possibility of life on other planets.37 And there is the history of Georgiana Potts, who received from her neighbor, the Ali‘i Ai Moku, an account of the creation of the universe according to the Hawaiian tradition, and whose family preserved this rare, fragile, paperbound pamphlet, which is now housed in a museum collection. America’s first, long space age was an era of expansion and exploitation, but it was not only that. In the twenty-first century, we would do well to recall how some in the nineteenth regarded the universe as wondrous, mysterious, and sacred.

Notes

Introduction 1. Ingalsbe, “Space Superiority Remains Vital.” 2. Counterspace Operations: Air Force Doctrine Document 2-2.1, G-1. 3. Joint Publication 3-14: Space Operations, II-9; Meghann Myers, “The Space Force is Officially the Sixth Military Branch. Here’s What That Means,” Air Force Times, December 20, 2019. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-military/2019/12/21/the-space-force-is-officially-the -sixth-military-branch-heres-what-that-means/. 4. Musk, “Making Humans a Multi-Planet Species”; Davenport, The Space Barons. 5. MacDonald, The Long Space Age, 207–17. 6. “Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Space Priorities: Houston, TX,” August 23, 2018. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president-pence -administrations-space-policy-priorities-houston-tx/. Accessed February 19, 2019. 7. Jason Daly, “The U.S. Military Has Been in Space from the Beginning,” Smithsonian. https:// www . smithsonianmag . com /smart -news /us -military - has - been - space - beginning -180969403/. Accessed February 12, 2019. 8. Journal of the Continental Congress, 1777, 8: 464. 9. Footner, USS Constellation, passim; Carothers, Fractional Money, 49. 10. See, for instance, Oberg, Space Power Theory, 47–48. Oberg identifies six uses of space power: (1) achieving diplomatic, civil, or military advantage; (2) econom ically rewarding other global actors; (3) dissuading other global actors from taking a par ticu lar, unwanted action; (4) achieving immunity from the aggressive actions of other nation-states; (5) projecting national influence; and (6) resisting attacks by other global actors. Many theories of space power, I suggest, can be reduced to the three broad categories outlined in Chapter 4 of the present volume: force projection, commerce, and scientific prestige. See also Klein, Space Warfare, 3–4, and JohnsonFreese, Space Warfare in the Twenty-First Century, 57, 105. 11. Burges, A Short Account of the Solar System. See Chapter 1. 12. The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1855, 1. See Chapter 4. 13. Quoted in Chaffin, Pathfinder, 33; see also Chapter 3. 14. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 408, 406. 15. Dean, “Henry  D. Thoreau and Horace Greeley Exchange Letters on the ‘Spontaneous Generation of Plants,’ ” 635. I’m grateful to Sean Ash Gordon, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for pointing this out to me. 16. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 408, 406. 17. Chura, Thoreau as Land Surveyor, 17, 73, 98–100.

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18. Chura, Thoreau as Land Surveyor, 116–118; Charles Davies, Elements of Surveying with the Summary Tables (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1830). 19. On Native American land claims, see Chura, Thoreau as Land Surveyor, 136. On Brown’s sham survey, see Chura, 87, 141–142. 20. Tso-le-oh-woh, “What an Indian Thought When He Saw the Comet,” Cherokee Advocate, September 28, 1853. 21. “Astronomy,” Cherokee Phoenix, June 18, 1828, 3. See also “Immensity of the Universe,” Cherokee Phoenix November  24, 1832, 4, which was published by the second editor of the Phoenix. 22. “Probable Collision of the Earth and Planet,” Freedom’s Journal, January 31, 1829, 342. 23. Lili‘uokalani, Creation of the World, passim. See also Chapter 5. 24. For more on the NAVSTAR system, see Air Force Systems Command, Staff Film Report 273. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v = SFj80G634ww. Accessed December 17, 2018. 25. “Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Space Priorities: Houston, TX,” August 23, 2018. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president -pence-administrations-space-policy-priorities-houston-tx/. Accessed February 19, 2019. 26. For more on how GPS relies on radio telescopes, see “U.S. Naval Observatory Command History,” U.S. Navy, Fleet Forces Command History. www.public.navy.mil/fltfor/cnmoc/Pages /HistoryPage _usno.aspx. Accessed January 20, 2018. 27. For more on the importance of printing, paper making, and bookbinding, see Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 1–32, and Stein, When Novels Were Books, 1–20. 28. See Bruyns and Dunn, Sextants at Greenwich, 27; see also Charles Henry Davis, “Art. XXXI.—Davis’s Report on the Nautical Almanac,” American Journal of Arts and Sciences (November 1852): 317–36, quotation on 322. 29. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 226–30. 30. Aubin, Bigg, and Sibum, The Heavens on Earth, 2. 31. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 348, 350. 32. See, for instance, Horigan, List of Publications Issued by the United States Naval Observatory, passim. 33. Andrew Ellicott to Thomas Jefferson, April 13, 1801, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 33, 580–582; Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Ellicott, February 24, 1802, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 36, 629. 34. See New England Farmer’s Almanac (Boston: Thomas G. Fessenden, 1828). For a discussion of this, see Gross, “Reading for an Extensive Republic,” in The History of the Book in America: Volume II, 522. 35. Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 47, 81, 84, 136. 36. Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 258. 37. Dick, “History of the American Nautical Almanac Office,” passim. See also Chapter 4. 38. Lili‘uokalani, Creation of the World, passim. Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship,” 4. 39. For “counter science,” see Foucault, The Order of Things, 379; for “nomad science,” “minor science,” and “State science,” see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 362; for “fugitive science,” see Rusert, Fugitive Science, 4–5. 40. Rusert, Fugitive Science, especially 149–180. 41. Parrish, American Curiosity, passim. 42. Latour, Science in Action, 21–62. 43. Altschuler, The Medical Imagination, 7–8.

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44. Rusert, Fugitive Science, 4–5. 45. Hickman, Black Prometheus, 207. On cosmology and world thinking, see also Sugden, Emergent Worlds. 46. Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling. Schuller builds significantly on the work of Sharon M. Harris. See Harris, Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832–1919. See also Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America. 47. “Transcript of Presidential Meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House,” November 21, 1962. https://history.nasa .gov/JFK-Webbconv/pages/transcript.pdf. Accessed February 21, 2019. 48. “Transcript of Presidential Meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House,” November  21, 1962. https://history.nasa .gov/JFK-Webbconv/pages/transcript.pdf. Accessed February 21, 2019. 49. Ewing, The Lost World of James Smithson, 302. 50. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 28, 163. 51. G. L. Tupman Private Journal, 1875. Tupman Archive, University of Cambridge. Journal entry for May 24–27, 1875 (The Life & Adventures of Station B), Album 2 (Transit 2), Tupman Archive, University of Cambridge, 17–18; King, History of the Telescope, 257–58; Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 163. 52. Andrew Ellicott to Thomas Jefferson, 13 April 1801, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 33, 580–82; Bedini, Jefferson Stone, 8–12. 53. Elias and Smith, Navy’s Needs in Space, 132. 54. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 408. 55. Bache’s comment might be apocryphal and was reported in Joseph Henry, “Biographical Memoire of Alexander Dallas Bache,” in Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Science 1 (1877):181–212. Quotation on 195. 56. Davis, “The Coast Survey of the United States,” 65–82. Quotation on 68. 57. Quoted in Davis, Life of Charles Henry Davis, 168. 58. Johnson-Freese, Space Warfare in the Twenty-First Century, 165–88, and MacDonald, The Long Space Age, 215. MacDonald seeks a “synthesis” between state action and commercial investment in space. 59. Klein, Space Warfare, 8; Lambeth, Mastering the Ultimate High Ground, 122. 60. “Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Space Priorities: Houston, TX,” August 23, 2018. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president -pence-administrations-space-policy-priorities-houston-tx/. Accessed February 19, 2019.

Chapter 1 1. Buckingham, Personal Memoirs, 20. See also Pretzer, “‘Of the Paper Cap and Inky Apron,’ ” 162. 2. Tanselle, “Some Statistics on American Printing, 1764–1783,” 329. 3. The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, Published by Order of the Commissioners of Longitude (London: W. Richardson and S. Clark, 1766). 4. Ferraz-Mello, Morando, and Arlot, Dynamics, Ephemerides and Astrometry, 335. For an extant example of the almanac, see Connaissance des Temps (Paris: Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1682). 5. Andrew Ellicott to Thomas Jefferson, April 13, 1801, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 33, 580–82.

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6. Adams subsidized the printing of astronomical information. See Bartholomew Burges to John Adams, May 29, 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents /Adams/99-02-02-0962. Navy administrator Francis Hopkinson described the new nation in astronomical terms. See, for instance, Francis Hopkinson to Thomas Jefferson, January 4, 1784, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6, 443–447. Connecticut congressman Timothy Pitkin led a congressional investigation into the use of the national meridian in US map production. See “Establishment of a First Meridian for the United States,” December 15, 1809, American State Papers, House of Representatives, 11th Cong., 2nd Sess., Miscellaneous 2: 53. 7. Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 158–59. 8. Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting a Supplemental Report of William Lambert, Explanatory of his Astronomical Calculations, with a View to Establish the Longitude of the Capitol (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1824), 7. 9. Burges, A Short Account of the Solar System. 10. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden, rev. A. H. Clough (Boston: Little, Brown, 1885); William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 2. 11. Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, 58–60. 12. “Boston, December 10, 1788,” Essex Journal, January 7, 1789: 1; “A Short Account of the Solar System,” Massachusetts Spy, February 19, 1789: 4; “This Day is Published,” Boston Gazette, January 5, 1789: 3. 13. Kansas, Star Maps, 319; Beech, Wayward Comet, 50–51; Fielding, American Engravers, 206. 14. Bartholomew Burges to John Adams, May 29, 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-0962. 15. Fichter, So Great a Proffit, 206. 16. Burges, A series of Indostan letters. 17. Burges, A Short Account of the Solar System. 18. Nevil Maskelyne, Advertisement of the Expected Return of the Comet of 1532 and 1661 in the Year 1788 (London: J. Nichols, 1786), 3. 19. Hasegawa and Nakano, “Orbit of periodic comet 153P/Ikeya-Zhang,” 883–88. 20. Bartholomew Burges to John Adams, June 19, 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-0994. 21. Arendt, On Revolution, 20–22. 22. Journal of the Continental Congress, 1777, 8: 464. 23. Paine, Common Sense, 27. 24. Francis Hopkinson to Thomas Jefferson, January 4, 1784, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6, 443–47. 25. Kingston and Corry, The Life of General George Washington, 147; Elliot, An Oration, Pronounced at Brattleboro Vt., 18. 26. [Alexander Hamilton], Federalist No. 9, The Federalist Papers, 43. 27. Footner, USS Constellation; First United States Coins. 28. Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, 214. 29. Quoted in John, Spreading the News, 30. 30. John, “Expanding the Realm of Communications,” in The History of the Book in America: Volume II, 212–13, 215; Tanselle, “Some Statistics on American Printing, 1764–1783,” 329. 31. The importance of print to the national project was one reason that early copyright law protected an author’s exclusive rights for only fourteen years. US officials hoped that the print circulation of scientific discoveries would benefit the entire nation. See McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 10, 45–46, 68.

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32. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11. 33. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3–5, 88. For a discussion of this in the context of US print culture, see Loughran, Republic in Print, 65. 34. In 1786, for instance, there were so few clocks in the city of Salem, Massachusetts, that city officials chimed the start of school each weekday. See Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers, 18. For more on the mass production of clocks in the United States, see Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932, 51–57. For an 1809 congressional study of map accuracy, see “Establishment of a First Meridian for the United States,” December 15, 1809, American State Papers, House of Representatives, 11th Cong., 2nd Sess., Miscellaneous 2: 53. 35. [Nathan Daboll], The New-England Almanack, or, Lady’s and gentleman’s diary, for the year of our Lord Christ 1789 . . . By Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq (Providence: John Carter, 1788), 23–25. 36. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 226–30. 37. Bruyns and Dunn, Sextants at Greenwich, 27. 38. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 16–17; Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers, 37; Richardson, Longitude and Empire, 37–38. 39. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1–9, 167–90. The foundational account of “print culture” is that of Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 3–42. For a discussion of this, see Hazard, “ Thing,” 792–800. 40. For the limitations on mail ser vice and newspaper distribution, see Loughran, Republic in Print, 7–11. Castronovo, Propaganda 1776, 117–50. See also Pottroff, “Circulation,” 621–27. 41. Andrew Ellicott to Thomas Jefferson, April 13, 1801, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 33, 580–82. 42. Bedini, The Jefferson Stone, 23. 43. Mathews, Andrew Ellicott, 212–15; Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 105. 44. Andrew Ellicott to George Washington, November 26, 1792, The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, Vol. 11, 443. 45. Andrew Ellicott, The New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia almanac and ephemeris, for the year of our Lord 1793 (Baltimore: Samuel and John Adams, 1792). 46. Abigail Smith Adams to Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, April 4, 1808, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-1661. See also Abigail Smith Adams to John Quincy Adams, December  30, 1812, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-2218. 47. Bickerstaff’s New-England almanack, for the year of our Lord, 1787 (Printed for Ebenezer Battelle and William Green, Boston, 1786), 11. This edition is held in the Library Company of Philadelphia. 48. A. [Charles Brockden Brown], “On Almanacks,” 85–88. 49. See New England Farmer’s Almanac (Boston: Thomas G. Fessenden, 1828). For a discussion of this, see Gross, “Reading for an Extensive Republic,” in The History of the Book in America: Volume II, 522. 50. The study was conducted by Charles W. Koontz. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 235. See also Rev. James Madison to James Madison, May 5, 1789, The Papers of James Madison, Vol. 12, 130–31. 51. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 174. 52. Homestead and Hansen, “Susanna Rowson’s Transatlantic Career,” 619–54, especially 627. 53. The copy owned by Benjamin Rush is held at the Library Company of Philadelphia. See Benjamin Banneker, Benjamin Banneker”s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia al-

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manack and ephemeris, for the year of our Lord, 1792 (Baltimore: William Goddard and James Angell, 1791). 54. In his essay, Brown describes the practice of hanging almanacs by packthread on a nail. See A. [Charles Brockden Brown], “On Almanacks,” 85. 55. Rusert, Fugitive Science, 33, 41. 56. Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 2nd Sess., 103. 57. The line was established between February and March 1791. See Bedini, Jefferson Stone, 137. 58. For a discussion of this poem, see Rusert, Fugitive Science, 39. 59. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 25–27. 60. Benjamin Banneker descended from grandparents from Wessex County, England, from the Kingdom of Jolof in present-day Senegal, and from “Guinea,” which at the time encompassed the coastal area between the present-day nations of Ghana and Nigeria. See Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 7, 22–23, 38, 40, 43–44. 61. Hickman, Black Prometheus, 177, and Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 56–61. 62. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 83–84, 107. 63. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 117, 124. 64. For a discussion of the change from a landmark-based system of navigation to a grid-based system, see Richardson, Longitude and Empire, especially 35. 65. Alexandria Gazette, April 21, 1791. 66. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 128, 331; Alexandria Gazette, April 21, 1791. 67. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 162. 68. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 232. 69. Quoted in Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 165. 70. Quoted in Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 166. 71. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 164. 72. “Portsmouth, Oct 20,” New-Hampshire Gazette [Portsmouth], October 20, 1791, 3; “Benjamin Banneker,” Federal Gazette [Philadelphia], November 26, 1791, 2; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” Inde pendent Gazetteer [Philadelphia], November 26, 1791, 2; “Mr. Dixon,” Baltimore Evening Post, October 13, 1792, 1; “Maryland, Baltimore County, near Ellicott’s Lower Mills,” Baltimore Evening Post, October  13, 1792, 1; “To Mr.  Benjamin Banneker. Philadelphia, Aug.  30, 1791,” Federal Gazette [Philadelphia], October 16, 1792, 3; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser [Philadelphia], October 18, 1792, 2; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” Independent Gazetteer [Philadelphia,], October  20, 1792, 1; “To Mr.  Benjamin Banneker,” NewJersey Journal [Elizabethtown], October 24, 1792, 1; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” Massachusetts Spy, November 1, 1792, 1; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” Providence Gazette, November 3, 1792, 1; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” American Mercury [Hartford, CT], November 5, 1792, 2; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” Connecticut Gazette [New London], November 8, 1792, 2; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” Herald of the United States [Providence, RI], November  10, 1792, 274; “To Mr. Benjamin Banneker,” Newport Mercury [Newport, RI], November 19, 1792, 3; “Letter from the famous self-taught Astronomer, Benjamin Banneker,” Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine (October 1792): 222; James McHenry, “Letter from James McHenry,” American Museum, or, Universal Magazine 12, no. 3 (September 1792): 185; James McHenry, “Account of Benjamin Banneker, a free Negro,” Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine (November 1791): 300; James McHenry, “Account of a Negro Astronomer,” New York Magazine, or Literary Repository 2, no. 10 (October 1791): 557. 73. Smith, The Pretentions of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency Examined, 10. 74. Band, Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika, 408–10.

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75. Quoted in Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 127. 76. Smith, The Pretentions of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency Examined, 10. See also Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 295. 77. See, for instance, Bickerstaff’s Boston almanack, for the year of our Lord 1785 (Boston: John W. Folsom [1784]). Printer John W. Folsom likely cribbed calculations from Nehemiah Strong, Eben Warner Judd, and Nathan Daboll in compiling this almanac, which he then issued under the popu lar Bickerstaff name. See Charles Evans’s American Bibliography, 18875. Also see the note in the North American Imprints Project entry. 78. James Pemberton to William Goddard, September 9, 1791, reprinted in Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 174–76. Benjamin Banneker, Benjamin Banneker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanack . . . for . . . 1792 (Baltimore: Goddard and Angell [1791]), 19–21. 79. [James Hervey], “Reflections on the Unbounded and Astonishing Scenes of Creation,” The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (January 1753): 1–4; James Hervey, “Contemplations on the Starry Heavens,” Meditations and Contemplations (Gainsborough: Henry Mozley, 1814), 221–97; Benjamin Banneker [James Hervey], “The Planetary and Terrestrial Worlds, Comparatively Considered,” Benjamin Banneker’s Almanac Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, for the Year of our Lord, 1792 (Baltimore: Goddard and Angell [1791]), 19–20, quotation on 19. 80. The Alexandria Gazette, April 21, 1791, reprinted in Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 331. 81. Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes; Szendy, Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials; Paine, The Age of Reason, 709. 82. Benjamin Banneker [James Hervey], “The Planetary and Terrestrial Worlds, Comparatively Considered,” Benjamin Banneker’s Almanac Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, for the Year of our Lord, 1792 (Baltimore: Goddard and Angell [1791]), 20. 83. Sagan, Pale Blue Dot. 84. Burges, A Short Account of the Solar System, 15, 17. 85. Benjamin Banneker, Banneker’s New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac . . . for . . . 1795 (Baltimore: S. and J. Adams [1794]), 22. This also appears in Banneker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac, for . . . 1795 (Wilmington, DE: S. and J. Adams [1794]), 23. This almanac appears in Charles Evans, Bibliography, 26612, and a copy is held at the New York Historical Society. 86. Hickman, Black Prometheus, 177, and Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 180. 87. Andrew Ellicott, The New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia almanac and ephemeris, for the year of our Lord 1793 (Baltimore: Samuel and John Adams [1792]), and Andrew Ellicott to George Washington, 26 November 1792, The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, Vol. 11, 443. 88. Buckingham, Personal Memoirs, 20. 89. I have been unable to determine Keen’s identity. He might have been the Baltimore Methodist who married Catharine Barry in 1807 but who does not appear in census records. Alternatively, he might have been related to Delaware enslaver Thomas Kean, Esq., who appears in the 1800 census. See Thomas Keen and Catharine Barry, August 4, 1807, citing marriage, First Methodist Episcopal Church, Baltimore, MD, FHL microfilm 13,697. Maryland, Church Records, 1668–1995, FamilySearch. familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F4J3-Q3X. Accessed February 24, 2016. Thomas Kean, Esq., Christiana Hundred, New Castle, Delaware, United States; citing p. 163, NARA microfilm publication M32, roll 4, FHL microfilm 6,413, National Archives, Washington, DC. 90. For a discussion of the image, see Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 290.

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91. One reader, for instance, corrected the rate of exchange between US money and French Crowns and commented on a method for ridding the home of a caterpillar infestation. Benjamin Banneker, Benjamin Banneker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanac, for . . . 1795 (Philadelphia: Gibbons [1794]), 28, 31. This copy appears in Charles Evans, Bibliography, 26611, and is held at the American Antiquarian Society. 92. Benjamin Banneker, Banneker’s Virginia and North Carolina Almanack . . . for . . . 1797 (Petersburg, VA: Prentis & Murray [1796]), 19. This almanac appears in Charles Evans, Bibliography, 47711, and is held by the American Antiquarian Society. 93. US Census, 1810, John Parham, Sussex, Virginia; citing p. 177, NARA microfilm publication M252, roll 71, FHL microfilm 181,431, National Archives, Washington, DC. 94. William Parham was elected from Sussex County in 1811, 1812, and 1813. See “A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787-1825,” Tufts University and the American Antiquarian Society, http://elections . lib.tufts .edu/. Accessed December 4, 2016. See also Leonard, General Assembly of Virginia. 95. In Sussex County in 1810, there were 177 free white people and 320 black people, of whom 287 were enslaved. See US Census, 1810, Sussex, Virginia; citing pp. 177–78, NARA microfilm publication M252, roll 71, FHL microfilm 181,431, National Archives, Washington, DC. 96. Journal of the Continental Congress, 1777, 8: 464; Paine, Common Sense, 27; Francis Hopkinson to Thomas Jefferson, January 4, 1784, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6, 443–47; Kingston and Corry, The Life of General George Washington, 147; Elliot, An Oration, Pronounced at Brattleboro Vt., 18; [Hamilton], Federalist No. 9, The Federalist Papers, 43. 97. Bedini, The Jefferson Stone, 139–41; Andrew Ellicott, compiler, and Thackara Vallance, engraver, “The City of Washington,” Philadelphia, 1792, Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Division. 98. Bedini, The Jefferson Stone, 12. 99. Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Ellicott, December 18, 1800, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 32, 321, and Bedini, The Jefferson Stone, 8. 100. Thomas Jefferson to Robert Patterson, March 22, 1802, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 37, 107–9. See also Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Ellicott, February 24, 1802, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 36, 629. 101. John Nathan Hutchins [Andrew Beers], Stoddard’s diary or, The Columbia almanac, for the year of our Lord 1801: Calculated for latitude 42 degrees north, and for a meridian 3 degrees east of the city of Washington, the capital of these United States (Hudson, NY: Ashbel Stoddard [1800]), and Andrew Beers, Hutchins improved: being an almanac and ephemeris . . . for the year of our Lord 1801 (New York: Power and Southwick[?], sold by Evert Duyckinck [1800]). For an account of nearly identical calculations, see the North American Imprints note for Stoddard’s diary. 102. Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Ellicott, December 18, 1800, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 32, 1 June 1800-16 February 1801, 321. 103. Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 102–3. 104. Shields, “The Learned World,” 254–55. 105. Thomas Jefferson to Joel Barlow, October 8, 1809, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Vol. 1, 588–90. 106. Thomas Jefferson to Robert Patterson, March 22, 1802, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 37, 107–9. See also Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Ellicott, February 24, 1802, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 36, 629. 107. John Nathan Hutchins [Andrew Beers], Stoddard’s diary or, The Columbia almanac, for the year of our Lord 1801: Calculated for latitude 42 degrees north, and for a meridian 3 degrees

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east of the city of Washington, the capital of these United States (Hudson, NY: Ashbel Stoddard [1800]), and Andrew Beers, Hutchins improved: being an almanac and ephemeris . . . for the year of our Lord 1801 (New York: Power and Southwick[?], sold by Evert Duyckinck [1800]). For an account of nearly identical calculations, see the North American Imprints note for Stoddard’s diary. 108. A. [Charles Brockden Brown], “On Almanacks,” The Monthly Magazine and the American Review I, no. 2 (1799): 85–88, quotation on 86. 109. Thomas Jefferson to Joel Barlow, October 8, 1809, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Vol. 1, 588–90. 110. Abigail Smith Adams to Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, April 4, 1808, Founders Online, from the National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-1661. 111. Andrew Ellicott, The New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia almanac and ephemeris, for the year of our Lord 1793 (Baltimore: Samuel and John Adams [1792]) 112. Francis Hopkinson to Thomas Jefferson, January 4, 1784 Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6, 443–47. 113. Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting a Supplemental Report of William Lambert, Explanatory of his Astronomical Calculations, with a View to Establish the Longitude of the Capitol (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1824), 7.

Chapter 2 1. “Norfolk, Aug. 15,” Daily National Intelligencer [Washington, DC], August 19, 1831, 3. 2. See Simkin and Fiske, Krakatau 1883, 275, 417. 3. “Domestic. From the Masonic Mirror,” Middlesex Gazette [Middletown, CT], October 19, 1825: 2; “Phenomenon,” Spectator [New York], October 14, 1825, 2. 4. “Shishaldin Reported Activity: Shishaldin 1824,” Alaska Volcano Observatory, www.avo .alaska .edu/volcanoes/activity.php. Accessed September 22, 2017. 5. Allmendinger, Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County, 22, 228, 312, n. 55; Gray, Confessions of Nat Turner, 9–11. 6. Gray, Confessions of Nat Turner, 10. 7. Gray, Confessions of Nat Turner, 11. 8. In calling Turner’s astronomy “vernacular,” I am building on Britt Rusert’s use of the term. See Rusert, Fugitive Science, 29. 9. “Friends of the Maria Mitchell Memorial Association,” 36. 10. Hickman, Black Prometheus, 184–85. 11. “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp,” Frederick Douglass Paper, January 27, 1854, 4. See also Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 44. 12. Harriet Powers, Pictorial Quilt, cotton plain weave, pieced, appliqued, embroidered, and quilted, 1895–1898, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 13. Tymstra, The Chinchaga Firestorm, 57; Hicks, This I Accomplish, 62–63. 14. An enslaved ceramics craftsman in South Carolina, David Drake, or “Dave the Potter” (c. 1800–1874), etched short poems into the wet clay of his pots. In 1858, he wrote a cryptic couplet about Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the “bear” constellations that both point to the North Star: “the sun moon and—stars; = / in the west are a plenty of—bears (July 29, 1858).” See Chaney, “The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter,” 616. The poem is dated to late July, when the Big Dipper, the portion of the Big Bear constellation that pointed to true north, would have indeed been found in the western sky over South Carolina. “I Made

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This Jar,” National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox: The Making of African American Identity: Vol. I, 1500–1865, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org /pds/maai/identity/text5/drakeverses .pdf. Accessed September 25, 2017. 15. Correspondents from New York were ubiquitous in the newspaper, but many also wrote from the south. See, for instance, Samuel Cornish, “A Thought for the Patriot and Philanthropist,” The Rights of All, May 29, 1829, 6. For news of comets, see “Probable Collision of the Earth and Planet,” Freedom’s Journal, January 31, 1829, 342; on meteors, see George Moses Horton, “Lines. On the Evening and the Morning,” Freedom’s Journal, August 15, 1828, 166; on earthquakes and kinetic energy, see “The Causes of Earthquakes,” The Rights of All, June 12, 1829, 12; on thunderstorms, see “Thunder Storm,” The Rights of All, June 12, 1829, 12; on the operations of history, see “People of Color,” Freedom’s Journal, April 27, 1827, 25. 16. OED Online, s.v. “cosmology,” www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/view/Entry/42251 ?redirectedFrom= Cosmology. Accessed December 2014. 17. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 51. Bacon offers this estimate based on known circulation figures for The Rights of All and concludes—plausibly, I think—that Freedom’s Journal had a significantly higher circulation. 18. The Editors [Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm], “To Our Patrons,” Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827, 1. Historians have debated the newspaper’s multiple other objectives. See Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 29, 38. 19. Loughran, Republic in Print, 2–3, 316. 20. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 201, 252. 21. Power-Green, Against Wind and Tide, 47–49. 22. The last New York issue I have been able to locate was printed October 9, 1829, only a short time after the publication of David Walker’s Appeal. For a discussion of the paper’s circulation, see Fraser, “Distributed Agency,” 116 and 138, n. 23. For a southerner’s account of the Belleville edition of the newspaper, see “The Ninth and Tenth Numbers of a Newspaper,” Recorder [Wilmington, NC], September 2, 1831, 3. 23. “Probable Collision of the Earth and Planet,” Freedom’s Journal, January 31, 1829, 342. 24. Palmer, Perilous Planet Earth, 55. 25. Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 314. 26. See Dodsley, The Preceptor, 1, 381. 27. Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race, 59–61. 28. Parker, “Justice and the Conscience,” in The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, Vol. 2, 48. 29. Martin Luther King Jr., “Our God Is Marching On,” King Papers Project, ed. Clayborne Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, mlk -kpp01.stanford.edu. Accessed June 12, 2014. 30. The Editors [Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm], “To Our Patrons,” Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827, 1. 31. Samuel Cornish, “Reform Indeed,” The Rights of All, August 7, 1829, 26. 32. See Taylor, “Reconsidering the ‘Forced’ Exodus of 1829,” 283–85. 33. Andrews, The History of the New-York African Free Schools, 54. 34. Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, 13. 35. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks, 5–6. 36. Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch, 62–63. 37. Bartholomew Burges to John Adams, 29 May 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, Washington, DC, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-0962. 38. “A Colored Navigator,” The Colored American, October 27, 1838.

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39. A. [Charles Brockden Brown], “On Almanacks,” 86. 40. Andrews, The History of the New-York African Free Schools, 75, 97. 41. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 128, and Andrews, The History of the New-York African Free Schools, 69–70. 42. [Samuel Cornish], “Literary Department,” The Rights of All, May 29, 1829, 5. 43. Rusert, Fugitive Science, 11–14. 44. See “Siamese Brothers,” The Rights of All, September 18, 1829; “The Causes of Earthquakes,” The Rights of All, June 12, 1829, 12; “Babylon,” The Rights of All, October 9, 1829. 45. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix. 46. Nixon, Slow Violence, 14. 47. Dick, Sidereal Heavens, 288. 48. Harding, Emerson’s Library, 230. 49. See “Thunder Storm,” The Rights of All, June 12, 1829, 12. 50. Dick, The Christian Philosopher, 71–72. 51. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, especially 52–58; Foster, “Genealogies of Our Concerns,” 377– 78; Yingling, “No One Who Reads the History of Hayti Can Doubt,” 314–48, 19; Helwig, “Black and White Print,” 117–35; Philip Edmondson, “ ‘To Plead Our Own Cause,’ ” 121–54. 52. Baltimore distribution agent Hezekiah Grice was an ice dealer, and he helped to establish the National Convention Movement. See Jalata, “Revisiting the Black Strug gle,” 92, and Matthews, Richard Allen, 134–35. Seth Hinshaw was a Quaker postmaster for New Salem, North Carolina. See Table of Post Offices in the United States, 158. 53. Powell, “Sheridan, Louis,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 5: 332–33. 54. Gatewood, “ ‘To Be Truly Free,’ ” 332. 55. “The Freedom’s Journal,” Freedom’s Journal, January 11, 1828, 168, and “The Conclusion of Our Article,” Recorder [Wilmington, NC], September 10, 1830, 3. For a discussion of how I arrived at these figures, see Fraser, “Emancipatory Cosmology,” 278–79. 56. “The Conclusion of Our Article,” Recorder [Wilmington, NC], September 10, 1830, 3. 57. Gamber, The Boarding House in Nineteenth-Century America, 58. 58. “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp,” Frederick Douglass Paper, January 27, 1854, 4. See also Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 44. 59. Saad, Social History of Timbuktu, 80. 60. Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space, 19. Martin Brückner notes, moreover, that geography’s material practices shaped the “construction of the American subject” in the early republic. See Brückner, The Geographic Revolution, 6. Consider, also, Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature, 5. 61. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 178. 62. V., “Walker’s Appeal. No. 2,” Liberator, May 14, 1831, 1. 63. See V., “Walker’s Appeal No. 1,” Liberator, April 30, 1831, 1. V. identifies himself as “a free white man, without personal interest in the question of slavery” and indicates that he received his copy of Walker’s Appeal from Garrison. The writer later suggests that he might “walk arm in arm with [a black man of irreproachable character and intelligence] through Washington-street tomorrow, from Market-street to Roxbury line.” I take this to mean that V. was, at the time of his writing, a Boston resident. 64. Baltimore and Washington were sites of distribution from the first issue of Freedom’s Journal. Fredericksburg, Virginia, was added with the August 3, 1827, issue. Alexandria, in the District of Columbia, was added with the August 24, 1827 issue. On January 11, 1828, Freedom’s Journal added three locations in North Carolina to the distribution list: New Bern, Elizabethtown, and

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New Salem. Richmond, Virginia, was added with the February 29, 1828, issue. New Orleans was added on July 4, 1828 65. Clinkscales, On the Old Plantation, 46, and Hinks, “To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren,” 155. 66. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 51. 67. “The Ninth and Tenth Numbers of a Newspaper,” Recorder [Wilmington, NC], September 2, 1831, 3. See also Hinks, “To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren,” 143. For more on Hooper, see Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs, 11. 68. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 266–67. 69. For North Carolina, see “Domestic Slave Trade,” Freedom’s Journal, October 17, 1828, 284–85. For Virginia, see “For the Freedom’s Journal. Wilkinsville, (VA.),” Freedom’s Journal, July 13, 1827, 2. For Maryland, see “Missing,” Freedom’s Journal, August 15, 1828, 166. For Maryland, see “Scipio C. Augustus,” Freedom’s Journal, August 15, 1828, 166. 70. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 69. 71. Beamish, “Boston,” in Cities of Light, 10. 72. Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina, 2–3. 73. Horton was also influenced by Methodist hymns, by the writing of William Cullen Bryant, and by the Bible. See Sherman, ed., The Black Bard of North Carolina, 36–37. 74. Horton, “Lines. On the Evening and the Morning,” Freedom’s Journal, August  15, 1828: 166. 75. Horton, “Gratitude,” Freedom’s Journal, September 5, 1828: 190. 76. Sherman, ed. Black Bard of North Carolina, 29. 77. Horton, The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, 81. 78. Horton, The Hope of Liberty, 3. 79. “George M. Horton,” Freedom’s Journal, August 29, 1828: 179. 80. Horton, Poetical Works, xiii–xv. 81. Horton, Poetical Works, xvi. 82. Morse, Geography Made Easy, 9. 83. Horton, Poetical Works, 80. 84. Horton, Poetical Works, 81–82. 85. Horton, Poetical Works, vi. 86. Whitman, Drum-Taps, 34. 87. “Rise” appears eighteen times. “Away” appears twenty-one times. 88. Booth, Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama, 58–59. 89. Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, February 18, 1784, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6, 541–43. 90. Horton, “Slavery,” Freedom’s Journal, July 18, 1828, 135. 91. Horton, “Lines. On the Evening and the Morning,” Freedom’s Journal, August  15, 1828, 166. 92. Horton, “On the Poetic Muse,” Freedom’s Journal, August 29, 1828, 181. 93. Horton, “For the Freedom’s Journal. Gratitude,” Freedom’s Journal, September  5, 1828, 190. 94. Angelou, And Still I Rise, Part 3. 95. “George M. Horton” [John Russwurm], Freedom’s Journal, September 12, 1828, 194. 96. “George M. Horton” [John Russwurm], Freedom’s Journal, October 3, 1828, 218. 97. “Our Literature,” Frederick Douglass Paper, September 23, 1853. 98. “George M. Horton” [John Russwurm], Freedom’s Journal, September 12, 1828, 194.

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99. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 51. 100. Greenberg, ed., Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, vii. 101. “Summary,” Western Luminary, September 14, 1831, 3. See also “Insurrection in Virginia,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, September 1831, 65–66, and “Domestic Intelligence,” Christian Recorder, October 1, 1831, 159. 102. Gray, “Introduction,” Confessions of Nat Turner, passim. 103. “Miscellany, the Confessions of Nat Turner,” Essex Gazette [Haverhill, MA], January 7, 1832, 4; Gray, Confessions of Nat Turner, 45. 104. Ambler, The Life and Diary of John Floyd, 89–90. 105. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 55. 106. “Miscellany, the Confessions of Nat Turner,” Essex Gazette [Haverhill, MA], January 7, 1832, 4 107. Ewing, Practical Astronomy, v. This book was available at West Point as of 1822. See Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Military Academy, 19. 108. Hope, A Scientific Way of War, xciii. 109. “Report of the Board of Visitors to the General Examination of Cadets of the United States Military Academy,” 310–11. 110. Dew, Review of the Debate, 82, 114, 6. 111. Gray, Confessions of Nat Turner, 45. 112. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 268. 113. Acts of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina at the Session of 1830–1831, 11. 114. Acts of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina at the Session of 1830–1831, 17. 115. William Lloyd Garrison, “To the Public,” The Liberator, January 1, 1831, 1. 116. William Lloyd Garrison to Joseph Gales and William W. Seaton, Boston, September 23, 1831, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 131. 117. Garrison did have black readers, however. In 1834, 75 percent of the Liberator’s subscribers were black. See Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 268. 118. Fraser, “Emancipatory Cosmology,” 283, n. 6; Rusert, Fugitive Science, 33–64. 119. Rusert, Fugitive Science, 164. 120. Robinson, Black Marxism, 314. 121. Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting a Supplemental Report of William Lambert, Explanatory of his Astronomical Calculations, with a View to Establish the Longitude of the Capitol (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1824), 7. 122. “Report of the Board of Visitors to the General Examination of Cadets of the United States Military Academy,” 310–11. 123. Andrews, The History of the New-York African Free Schools, 75, 97. 124. Burges, Short Account of the Solar System, 15–17. 125. Frederick Douglass, “Slavery, the Slumbering Volcano,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 3, 1849; Melville, “Benito Cereno,” 163.

Chapter 3 1. Caddle, Georgia Land Surveying, 276–77, n. 21. The account originally appears in the Cherokee Phoenix, May 26, 1832, 2. 2. Caddle, Georgia Land Surveying, 273, 277, 404. Even compass and chain measurements— the type of survey undertaken for most commercial purposes—depends on measurements of the

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earth’s magnetic field and on fixed monuments left behind in more sophisticated, astronomical surveys. 3. To-Cha Lee, Chu-Li-Oa, and Charles Hicks, “Cherokee Indians. To the Editors of the National Intelligencer,” Weekly Register [Baltimore, MD], April 10, 1813, 97. 4. Herman Daggett to Jedidiah Morse, Cornwall, Connecticut, March 12, 1821, in Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War, 272. 5. “Immensity of the Universe,” Cherokee Phoenix, November 24, 1832, 4; “Influence of the Moon,” Cherokee Phoenix, September 28, 1833, 4. 6. Bass, Cherokee Messenger, 191, 194. 7. [Dionysius Lardner], “Surface of the Earth,” Cherokee Advocate, October 29, 1846, 4. 8. Womack, Red on Red, 7. 9. The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, Published by Order of the Commissioners of Longitude (London: W. Richardson and S. Clark, 1766); Sylvio Ferraz-Mello, B. Morando, J.-E. Arlot, Dynamics, Ephemerides and Astrometry of the Solar System, 335; Connaissance des Temps (Paris: Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1682). 10. Waff, “Almanacs, Astronomical,” 6. 11. “Free Church of Scotland,” Baptist Memorial and Monthly Record 4, no. 5 (May 1845): 153. 12. Gaul, “Introduction,” in Cherokee Sister, 15. See also Rufus Anderson, Memoir of Catharine Brown, 115. 13. Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War, 272, 278. 14. “Arkansas Cherokees. Extract from a Letter to Mr. Hitchcock, Dated Dec. 17, 1831,” Missionary Herald 33, no. 4 (April 1831): 119–20. 15. Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), 258. 16. Gaul, “Introduction,” Cherokee Sister, 7. 17. Round, Removable Type, 130. 18. Perdue, Cherokee Women, 135–36. 19. Star, History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folklore, 49. 20. Round, Removable Type, 130. 21. Purdue, Cherokee Editor, 67. 22. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation, 147, n. 29. 23. “Letters Written During a Journey Through North America,” Christian Observer (February 1823): 90. 24. Gaul, Cherokee Sister, 14. 25. Thirteenth Annual Report of the ABCFM, 151. 26. Woodbridge, A System of Universal Geography, 4–11, and Rudiments of Geography, 16– 21, 45–46. 27. Asa Hitchcock, “Arkansas Cherokees. Extract of a Letter from Mr. A. Hitchcock, Dated Dec. 17, 1831,” Missionary Herald 28, no. 4 (April 1832): 119–20. 28. Gaul, Cherokee Sister, 15. 29. Quoted in Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 147. 30. Young Beaver, “For the Cherokee Phoenix: A Revery,” Cherokee Phoenix, July  9, 1828, 2. 31. Martin, The Land Looks After Us, 71–72, and Gaul, Cherokee Sister, 22. 32. “Astronomy,” Cherokee Phoenix, June 18, 1828, 3. 33. Cherokee Phoenix, August 27, 1828, 3. 34. “Astronomy,” Cherokee Phoenix, August 27, 1828, 4.

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35. “Comets,” Cherokee Phoenix, December 3, 1828, 3; “Probable Collision of the Earth and a Comet,” Cherokee Phoenix, March 25, 1829, 4; “Comets for the Year 1832,” Cherokee Phoenix, March 24, 1832, 4; “Something Curious,” Cherokee Phoenix, August 4, 1832, 2. 36. “Celestial Phenomena,” Cherokee Phoenix, May 5, 1832, 2. 37. “Influence of the Moon,” Cherokee Phoenix, September 28, 1833, 4. 38. Olive Branch, “Indians in Indiana,” Cherokee Phoenix, March 24, 1830, 4. 39. “Immensity of the Universe,” Cherokee Phoenix, November 24, 1832, 4. 40. “Natural Law,” Cherokee Phoenix, May 3, 1831, 1–2. 41. Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War, 272, 278. As a student, Boudinot relied on Introduction to Ancient and Modern Geography by J. A. Cummings (1772–1820), a book that positively linked the student’s understanding of the earth as a body in space to the student’s ability to survey and draw maps of contested territory; e-mail to the author from Jamie E. O. Cantoni, executive director of the Cornwall (Connecticut) Historical Society, January 30, 2018. A copy of the same edition used by Boudinot remains in the Cornwall Historical Society collection. See Cummings, Introduction to Ancient and Modern Geography, 248–50. 42. John Ross, Annual Message, New Echota, CN, October 13, 1828, in Ross, The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 141. 43. Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 47, 81, 84, 136. 44. “Immensity of the Universe,” Cherokee Phoenix, November 24, 1832, 4. 45. Elias Boudinot (unsigned), “To the Public,” Cherokee Phoenix, February 21, 1828, 3. 46. I consider it likely that Boudinot and Russwurm received the article from one of two Massachusetts publications. See “Probable Collision of the Earth and a Comet,” Cherokee Phoenix, March 25, 1829, 4; “Probable Collision of the Earth and a Comet,” Bower of Taste, March 7, 1829, 152; and “Probable Collision of the Earth and a Comet,” New Bedford Mercury, February 13, 1829, 1. 47. The Phoenix reports that this article was reprinted from the London almanac Time’s Telescope, although in fact it is a reprinting of a bowdlerized version that had appeared in a two-penny weekly periodical called the Mirror, a forerunner to the London Review. For a comparison, see “The Comets of the Year 1832,” Cherokee Phoenix, March 24, 1832, 4; “On the probability of a concussion of a comet with the Earth,” Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, 19, no. 532 (February 4, 1832): 71–73; Time’s Telescope for 1832 (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1832), 30, 141, 157, 158. 48. Round, Removable Type, 135. The agent list typically appeared on the first page of the newspaper. See, for instance, “Agents for the Cherokee Phoenix,” Cherokee Phoenix, January 6, 1830: 1. 49. Emerson wrote to President Martin van Buren that Boston antiremoval activists such as himself “have read [the Cherokee] newspapers.” See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Letter to Martin van Buren, President of the United States,” in Emerson: Political Writings, 49–52. For Rafinesque, see “Communications. Cherokee Language. Answer to Professor Rafinesque’s Questions,” Cherokee Phoenix, August 6, 1828, 2; “Cherokee Language. Answer to Professor Rafinesque’s Questions. [Continued],” Cherokee Phoenix, August 20, 1828, 2; “Cherokee Language. Answer to Professor Rafinesque’s Questions. [Concluded],” Cherokee Phoenix, September 3, 1828, 2. In the third installment, Boudinot refers to back issues of the newspaper, which “I presume [Rafinesque] has received,” indicating that the Turkish American polymath was a subscriber. 50. “New Echota,” Cherokee Phoenix, June 24, 1829, 2. See also “In the last number,” Cherokee Phoenix, August 12, 1829, 2. 51. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation, 147, n. 29.

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52. See, in particu lar, Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, and Szendy, Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials, passim. 53. Dick, The Christian Philosopher, 376–80. 54. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, Vol. III, 22–23. 55. Gaul, Catharine Brown, 17; Arlene B. Hirschfelder, ed., Native Heritage: Personal Accounts by American Indians, 1790 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 157. 56. Mooney, Myths of the Cherokees, 257–58. 57. See “Immensity of the Universe,” Cherokee Phoenix, November 24, 1832, 4, and “Immensity of the Universe,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 5 (August 1832), 89. 58. See, for instance, “Immensity of the Universe,” Alexandria [Virginia] Gazette, November 24, 1832, 3; “Immensity of the Universe,” Trumpet and Universalist Magazine 88, no. 22 (November 24, 1832): 88; “Immensity of the Universe,” Gloucester [Massachusetts] Telegraph, June 29, 1833, 1; “Immensity of the Universe,” Citizen [Carlisle, PA] 1, no. 7 (April 17, 1832): 56. 59. “Astronomy,” Cherokee Phoenix, June 18, 1828, 3. 60. “On the works of creation,” Cherokee Phoenix, May 19, 1832, 3. 61. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 17. 62. John Ross, Annual Message, New Echota, CN, October 13, 1828, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 141. 63. Marshal, “Communications. For the Cherokee Phoenix,” Cherokee Phoenix, March 27, 1828, 2. 64. Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 253. 65. “To Mr. Elias Boudinot,” Cherokee Phoenix, April 15, 1829, 2. 66. See John Ross to David Irwin, Mineral Springs near Wms’, Cherokee Nation, August 17, 1835, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 351. See also John Ross to John F. Schermerhorn and Benjamin F. Currey, Mineral Spring, CN, August 22, 1835, and Benjamin F. Currey to John Ross, Cherokee Agency, September 9, 1835, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 352–53. Additionally, see A.  J. Langguth, Driven West, 224, and Kenneth  L. Valliere, “Benjamin Currety, Tennesean among the Cherokees,” 239. 67. Vermont astronomer James Dean conducted eclipse observations in 1811 with commercially available spyglasses, which magnified between eleven and thirteen times. See James Dean, “Observations on the Eclipse of Sept. 17, 1811,” 250. 68. “Planetary Phenomena of Jupiter from 1600greg through 2100 (UT), Astrodienst AG 23-July-2009, 08:35,” https://www.astro.com/swisseph/jupiter1600.pdf. Accessed October 17, 2018. 69. The Cherokee Almanac provides advice on “resolving” a nebula in this way. See Cherokee Almanac 1858 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1857[?]), 33. For an account of developments in the theories of nebulas and galaxies during the 1850s, see Nasim, Observing by Hand, 33. 70. Cherokee Almanac 1858 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1857[?]), 6. 71. Cherokee Almanac for the year of our Lord 1842 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1841[?]), 20. 72. “Morning and Evening Stars,” Cherokee Almanac 1858 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1857[?]), 4. 73. Walter S. Adair to John Ross and Delegation, Milledgeville, GA, January 8, 1836, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 382–83. Ross would estimate that 12,608 people traveled the land route out of Eastern Cherokee Nation in 1838, although by this time thousands had already emigrated. See John Ross to Winfield Scott, Cherokee Agency East, November 7, 1838, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 689. For a discussion of the death toll estimates, see Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 328. 74. John Ross to the Senate and House of Representatives, Red Clay Council Ground, Cherokee Nation, September 28, 1836, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 459.

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75. Bass, Cherokee Messenger, 176, and Samuel Austin Worcester to Samuel Chandler, New Bedford, NH, July 7, 1835, in George H. Shirk, “Some letters from Samuel A. Worcester at Park Hill,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 26 (Winter 1948): 470. 76. Bass, Cherokee Messenger, 185, 192. 77. Bass, Cherokee Messenger, 192. 78. See, for instance, “To Regulate a Clock,” Cherokee Almanac for the year of our Lord 1842 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1841[?]), 2. 79. “Leap Year,” Cherokee Almanac 1860 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1859), 6. 80. Hargrett, Oklahoma Imprints, 1835–1890, 8. 81. Hargrett, Oklahoma Imprints, 1835–1890, 18. See also Catherine Falzone, “Davy Crockett Almanacs,” From the Stacks: New York Historical Society Museum and Library, http:// blog .nyhistory.org /davy-crockett-almanacs/. Accessed October 17, 2018. 82. Hargrett, Oklahoma Imprints, 1835–1890, 40. 83. Cherokee Almanac 1858 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1857[?]), 15. 84. Purdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 92. 85. Bowen, Eastern Cherokee by Blood, 1906–1910: Applications 1–3000 (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2005), 4–5. 86. Laura Hemming, Wisconsin Historical Society, e-mail to the author, April 5, 2016. The 1836 edition of the Cherokee Almanac was stamped “received” by the Wisconsin Historical Society in 1882. The society itself was founded in 1846, a decade after the original purchase of the pamphlet. It remains possible that William Jenks, of Boston, originally possessed this pamphlet. The two other Cherokee Almanac editions owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society were sold by the Boston Athenaeum, which likely received them through a contact at the ABCFM. 87. Bass, Cherokee Messenger, 213. 88. Bass, Cherokee Messenger, 194. 89. The pamphlet’s extremely detailed explanation of the leap year is a case in point. See “More about Leap Year,” Cherokee Almanac 1860 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1859), 33. 90. “Influence of the Moon,” Cherokee Almanac 1851 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1850), 12. 91. Thirteenth Annual Report of the ABCFM, 151. 92. Thanks to Hartwell Francis, of Western Carolina University, for this translation. Hartwell Francis, e-mail to the author, March 10, 2016. See also Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, Part I, 257. 93. “Comets,” Cherokee Almanac 1859 (Park Hill: Mission Press, 1858[?]), 6. 94. “The Comet Has Come,” Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat [Little Rock], October 2, 1858, 2. 95. Grierson, Valley of Shadows, 53. 96. Cottam and Orchistron, Eclipses, Transits, and Comets of the Nineteenth Century, 261. 97. Burges, A Short Account of the Solar System, 15, 17. 98. Smith, Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy, 22, 26. 99. Whitman, Drum-Taps, 34. 100. Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 218. 101. This name also appears as Tsoo-le-oh-wah. The contemporary spelling would likely be Tso-le-o-wo (ᏦᎴᎣᏬ) or Tso-le-o-wah (ᏦᎴᎣᏩ). See Tso-le-oh-wah, “A Red Man’s Thoughts,” Cherokee Advocate, May 25, 1853. 102. Holland, Cherokee Newspapers, 1828–1906, 139–78. 103. Tsoo-le-oh-wah, “A Red Man’s Thoughts,” Cherokee Advocate, May 25, 1853. 104. Smith, Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy, 39. 105. Burges, A Short Account of the Solar System, 15–18.

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106. Tso-le-oh-woh, “What an Indian Thought When He Saw the Comet,” Cherokee Advocate, September 28, 1853. 107. Tso-le-oh-woh, “What an Indian Thought When He Saw the Comet,” Cherokee Advocate, September 28, 1853. 108. Grierson, Valley of Shadows, 53. 109. Tso-le-oh-woh, “What an Indian Thought When He Saw the Comet,” Cherokee Advocate, September 28, 1853. 110. Chaffin, Pathfinder, 33. 111. Caddle, Georgia Land Surveying, 273–74. For an account of missing boundary markers, see Jerran Burris White, “The Missionary Work of Samuel A. Worcester Among the Cherokee,” MA thesis, North Texas State University (August 1970), 72, and Western Weekly Review, October 12, 1832. 112. Birthday Story of Private John G. Burnett, Captain Abraham McClellan’s Company, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry, Cherokee Indian Removal, 1838–1839. Floyd Glenn Lounsbury Papers, Mss. Ms. Coll. 95, American Philosophical Society. 113. Quoted in Chaffin, Pathfinder, 33. 114. Isserman, Exploring North America, 111. 115. Frémont, The Exploring Commission, 4. 116. Yeats, McCallie, and King, Geological Survey of Georgia, Bulletin No. 4-A, 275. 117. Frémont, The Exploring Commission, 4, 59, 111. 118. Consider, for instance, the Cherokee poet John Rollin Ridge, who makes a similar claim in Ridge, Poems, 30–34. 119. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 408, 406. 120. “From the Savannah Mercury,” Cherokee Phoenix, July 8, 1829, 2. 121. Olive Branch, “Indians in Indiana,” Cherokee Phoenix, March 24, 1830, 4. 122. Dionysius Lardner, “Surface of the Earth,” Cherokee Advocate, October 29, 1846, 4. 123. To-Cha Lee, Chu-Li-Oa, and Charles Hicks, “Cherokee Indians. To the Editors of the National Intelligencer,” Weekly Register [Baltimore, MD], April 10, 1813, 97. 124. See, for instance, “Natural Law,” Cherokee Phoenix, May 3, 1831, 1–2. 125. Ross, Annual Message, New Echota, CN, October 13, 1828, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 141. 126. “An Act to Provide for Surveying the Coasts of the United States. Act of Feb. 10, 1807, Sess. II, ch. 8, 2 Stat. 413–14. 127. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 27, 56, 132.

Chapter 4 1. These calculations were for the year 1866. Maria Mitchell to Professor Joseph Winlock, September 26, 1864, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 2. Commander B. S. Moeller, USN, to Professor Joseph Winlock, October 12, 1864, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 3. Commander B. S. Moeller, USN, to Professor Joseph Winlock, October 15, 1864, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC.

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4. George Blunt to Professor Joseph Winlock, October 20, 1864, Letters Received, 1864– 1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 5. Commander B. S. Moeller, USN, to Professor Joseph Winlock, November 7, 1864, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 6. Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting a Supplemental Report of William Lambert, Explanatory of his Astronomical Calculations, with a View to Establish the Longitude of the Capitol (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1824), 7. 7. Cooper, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, Second Edition, 325. 8. In an address to graduates of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Charles Henry Davis informed the cadets that “We [older officers] congratulate ourselves that the period of darkness, in which it was thought that [scientific] refinement and cultivation were incompatible with the professional duties of a sea-officer, has utterly passed away.” Davis, Life of Charles Henry Davis, 96. 9. “Art. V. The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1867. Published by the Authority of the Secretary of the Navy. Bureau of Navigation, Washington. 1865,” North American Review 208 (July 1865): 134–46, quotations on 146 and 141. 10. Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finance. Senate. 32d Cong., 2nd Sess. H. Doc. 23: 27. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org /title/194 Accessed November 4, 2018. 11. Charles Henry Davis, “Art. XXXI.—Davis’s Report on the Nautical Almanac,” American Journal of Arts and Sciences (November 1852): 317–36, quotation on 322. 12. See Dick, “The American Transit of Venus Expeditions of 1874 and 1882,” 100, 104, 105. Eight separate expeditions were organized by the US Naval Observatory to observe the Transit of Venus alone. These expeditions were dispatched to Vladivostok, Nagasaki, Peking, Kerguelen, Tasmania, and Bluff Harbor and the Chatham Islands in New Zealand. (An expedition to the Crozet Islands was unable to land in bad weather, and that team was redirected to a second site in Tasmania.) For the Chile expedition, see Gilliss, The U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere, passim. For the expedition to Sumatra, see Heber D. Curtis, “The U.S. Naval Observatory’s Eclipse Expedition to Sumatra,” in Publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 13, no. 81 (1901): 205–16. 13. See, for instance, Schubert, Tables of Melpomene and Almanac Catalogue of Zodiacal Stars, passim. 14. Horigan, List of Publications Issued by the United States Naval Observatory, passim. 15. The Lick Observatory in California (1876), for instance, cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the New Horizons mission to Pluto (2006–2016). The Lick Observatory cost roughly $700,000 to build. As a percentage of US gross domestic product, this would represent a $1.5 billion investment in 2015 dollars. By an alternative measurement, the Lick would have cost $188 million in 2015 dollars. New Horizons cost roughly $670 million. See MacDonald, The Long Space Age, 15–16. 16. See, for instance, Oberg, Space Power Theory, 47–48. Oberg identifies six uses of space power: 1. achieving diplomatic, civil, or military advantage; 2. economically rewarding other global actors; 3. dissuading other global actors from taking a particu lar, unwanted action; 4. achieving immunity from the aggressive actions of other nation-states; 5. projecting national influence; and 6. resisting attacks by other global actors. Many theories of space power, I suggest, can be reduced to the three broad categories outlined in this chapter: force projection, commerce, and scientific prestige. See also Klein, Space Warfare, 3–4. 17. Luskey, “Special Marts,” 360.

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18. Kendall, Maria Mitchell, 66. 19. Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, 57. 20. Kendall, Maria Mitchell, 66–67. 21. Kendall, Maria Mitchell, 69. 22. For a published version of this passage, see Albers, Maria Mitchell, 81. For the erasure, see Kendall, Maria Mitchell, 69. 23. Varon, Disunion!, 152–53. 24. Albers, ed. Maria Mitchell, 81. 25. Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, 154–55. 26. Maria Mitchell to Commander Charles Henry Davis, October 16, 1860, Letters Received, 1859–1860, Box 3, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 27. Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, 70. 28. Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, 69. For a summary of salaries, see Table 5. Mitchell’s salary of $500 per year for the calculations of the planet Venus was less than that of Ernst Schubert, for instance, whose calculations of the asteroid Iris paid $800 per year. M. B. Foote, the other woman astronomer employed by the almanac office, was also paid $500 for her calculations. As of 1856, the only other woman employee, E. C. Bache, was a copyist. Both Foote and Bache were married to astronomers. 29. Charles Henry Davis to Captain Duncan S. Ingraham (USN), November 22, 1856, Letters Sent, 1852–1856, Box 1, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 30. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 119, and “Art. V. The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1867. Published by the Authority of the Secretary of the Navy. Bureau of Navigation, Washington. 1865,” North American Review 208 (July 1865): 134–46, quotation on 146. 31. Senate Journal, 32nd Cong., 1st Sess., May 25, 1852, 432. 32. “Art. V. The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1867. Published by the Authority of the Secretary of the Navy. Bureau of Navigation, Washington. 1865,” North American Review 208 (July 1865): 134–46. 33. Ernst Schubert to Joseph Winlock, February 28, 1865, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 34. Joseph Winlock to Ernst Schubert, April 12, 1865, Letters sent, 1864–1866, Box 2, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 35. Charles Henry Davis to Ernst Schubert, November 1, 1856, Letters Sent 1852–1856, Box 1, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 36. Quoted in Hogan, Of the Human Heart, 204–5. 37. Quoted in Hogan, Of the Human Heart, 222. 38. “Art. V. The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1867. Published by the Authority of the Secretary of the Navy. Bureau of Navigation, Washington. 1865,” North American Review 208 (July 1865): 134–46, quotations on 146 and 141. 39. W. Ferrel to Joseph Winlock, April 30, 1865, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Box 4, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 40. Goodfellow, “Ferrel’s Work on the Coast Survey,” 341. 41. See Reardon, With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other, 1–16. Reardon points out that Jomini’s theories were a matter of debate and revision but emphasizes that his work was nonetheless central to US military thinking.

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42. Jomini defines “logistics” thus: “Logistics is the art of well ordering the functioning of an army, of well combining the order of the troops in columns, the times of their departure, their route, the means of communication necessary to assure their arrival at a point named” [La logistique est l’art de bien ordonner les marches d’une armée, de bien combiner l’ordre des troupes dans les colonnes, les [temps] de leur départ, leur itinéraire, les moyens de communications nécessaires pour assurer leur arrivée à point nommé]. See Jomini, Tableau Analytique, 74. 43. Jomini, Summary of the Art of War, 61. 44. Weaver II, A Legacy in Brick and Stone, passim. 45. Hope, A Scientific Way of War, 126. 46. Quoted in Chaffin, Pathfinder, 33. 47. As Robert Lawrence Gunn observes, indigenous languages were part of this natural landscape. See Gunn, Ethnology and Empire, 4. 48. Charles Henry Davis, “Art. XXXI.—Davis’s Report on the Nautical Almanac,” American Journal of Arts and Sciences (November 1852): 317–36, quotation on 322. 49. “Art. V. The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1867. Published by the Authority of the Secretary of the Navy. Bureau of Navigation, Washington. 1865,” North American Review 208 (July 1865): 134–46, quotations on 146 and 141. 50. Roberts, Now for the Contest, xiv. 51. Roberts, Now for the Contest, xiv; Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 77. 52. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals, 39. 53. Quoted in Harrison, One Hundred GOP Years, xii. 54. B. S. Moeller to Joseph Winlock, October 12, 1864, and B. S. Moeller to Joseph Winlock, October 21, 1864, in Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 55. Rush and Woods, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, Series I, Vol. 2, 272–73, 274, 331. 56. Harbord, Glossary of Navigation, 136. 57. Air Force Systems Command (AFSC), Staff Film Report 273, https://www.youtube.com /watch? v = SFj80G634ww. Accessed December 17, 2018. 58. B. A. G. [Benjamin Apthorp Gould] to Charles Henry Davis, June 25, 1854, in Letters Received, 1849–1853, Box 1, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 59. This effort was organized by the Smithsonian Institution. Joseph Henry to Nautical Almanac Office, April 4, 1854. Letters Received, 1849–1853, Box 1, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. The shipment was sent May 8. 60. Withers, Zero Degrees, 141. 61. Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers. 62. Davis, “Art. XXXI.,” 335. 63. In practice, this meant that the Ephemeris contained two parts: a navigator’s section, calculated for the Greenwich Meridian, and an astronomer’s section, calculated for Washington. Dick, “History of the American Nautical Almanac Office,” 13. 64. See, for instance, the advertising insert in the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1865. Bureau of Navigation, Washington, DC, 1863. 65. D. Eggert and Son to Joseph Winlock, March 21, 1865, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Box 4, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 66. Dick, “A History of the American Nautical Almanac Office,” 15.

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67. In October 1864, for instance, Blunt ordered one thousand almanacs for 1865, one thousand almanacs for 1866, twenty-five“large almanacs” for 1865, and any available “large” editions for 1866. See George Blunt to Joseph Winlock, October 20, 1864, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 68. Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 57. 69. Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 46. 70. Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 59, 46. 71. Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 142–43. 72. Charles Henry Davis, “Art. XXXI.—Davis’s Report on the Nautical Almanac,” American Journal of Arts and Sciences (November 1852): 317–36. 73. Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 56. 74. Quoted in Davis, Life of Charles Henry Davis, 86–87. 75. In his preface to the first edition of the Ephemeris, Davis singled out for special attention his office’s relationship to Harvard University and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he noted the previous innovations of American mathematicians such as Nathaniel Bowditch. The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1855, 1. 76. His thinking was in line with contemporary theories of space power, which link such power to the ability to dominate in future environments. See Klein, Space Warfare, 36. 77. Quoted in Davis, Life of Charles Henry Davis, 168. 78. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 3–31. 79. Most were undergoing repairs and refits. See Stewart, Official records of the Union and Confederate Navies, Series I, Vol. 16, 28; B. S. Moeller to Joseph Winlock, October 12, 1864, Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 80. Lieutenant Commander James Shirk, Philadelphia Navy Yard, to Professor Joseph Winlock, February 18, 1865, in Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 81. See Letters Received, 1864–1865, Records of the US Naval Observatory, Record Group 78.4, National Archives, Washington, DC. 82. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11. 83. It more accurately predicted the beginning and ending times of the event from two separate locations. See Dick, “A History of the American Nautical Almanac Office,” 14. 84. Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 289, n. 1369; Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 52; Thoreau, Henry D. Thoreau Journal, Volume 2: 1842–1848, 45. 85. Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers, 117, and Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions, 69–105. 86. Davis, “Art. XXXI.,” 324. 87. Baum and Sheehan, In Search of the Planet Vulcan, 1–15. 88. Newcomb, “Results and Discussion of Observation on Transits of Mercury,” 474–77. See also, “Notes,” The Nation (February 15, 1883): 147–50. 89. Einstein, “The Generalized Principle of Relativity,” 137, 163. 90. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11. 91. Mitchell, “The Astronomical Science of Milton as Shown in ‘Paradise Lost,’ ” 318. 92. Whitman, Drum-Taps, 34. 93. Dugdale, “Whitman’s Knowledge of Astronomy,” 126. 94. Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 218.

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95. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 41; Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 279. 96. Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 252. 97. Mitchell, Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals, 167. 98. Walt Whitman, “Mocking all the textbooks,” in the Walt Whitman Archive, nyp.00024. https://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/transcriptions/nyp.00024.html. Accessed December 17, 2018. The quoted portion here does not appear on the extant manuscript but was quoted in full in Richard Maurice Bucke’s Notes and Fragments (1899). 99. Quoted in Dugdale, “Whitman’s Knowledge of Astronomy,” 126. 100. Charlie Rose interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 60 Minutes, March 22, 2015. https:// www.cbsnews.com/news/neil-degrasse-tyson-astrophysicist-charlie-rose-60-minutes/. Accessed December 18, 2018. 101. Horigan, List of Publications Issued by the United States Naval Observatory, passim. 102. “Twenty-third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science,” Athenaeum 1350 (September 10, 1853): 1064–70. Quotation on 1067. 103. Withers, Zero Degrees, 141. 104. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11. 105. Charles Henry Davis, “Art. XXXI.—Davis’s Report on the Nautical Almanac,” American Journal of Arts and Sciences (November 1852): 317–36, quotation on 322.

Chapter 5 1. [Locke], “Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made, By Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c.,” New York Sun, August 31, 1835. 2. See A Narrative of Five Youth from the Sandwich Islands, 1–44. 3. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, Vol. III, 22–23. 4. A publisher later printed the New York Sun account of Richard Adams Locke (1800–1871) as a book. See [Locke], The Moon Hoax. 5. Galluzzo, Altre scoverte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herchel. 6. Waring, Early American Stencils on Walls and Furniture, 20, n. 2. The thirty-inch swatch of paper originally came from the Silas Paddock House on India Street (formerly Pearl Street). It was a gift of Edward H. Wing, who died in 1911. The original donation record for the wallpaper appears to have been lost, but it was given to the Nantucket Historical Association in 1911 or at some time prior. Michael  R. Harrison, Obed Macy Director of Research and Collections, Nantucket Historical Society, e-mail to author, February 14, 2019. 7. Thurston, Life and Times of Mrs. Lucy G. Thurston, iii, 10. 8. During their three-month stay in Hawai‘i, the Dolphin crew would encounter some twenty US commercial vessels, mostly whale ships. The men of these ships would become “riotous and insubordinate” in Honolulu, and the commander of the Dolphin spent three months seizing commercial sailors and ordering them flogged. Davis, The Life of Charles Henry Davis, 40. 9. A Narrative of Five Youth from the Sandwich Islands, 1–6. 10. Charles Henry Davis, “Art. XXXI.—Davis’s Report on the Nautical Almanac,” American Journal of Arts and Sciences (November 1852): 317–36, quotation on 322. 11. Waldrop, “Mauna Kea (I): Halfway to Space,” 1010–13. 12. Dennis Overbye, “Under Hawaii’s Starriest Skies, a Fight Over Sacred Ground,” New York Times, October 3, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/science/hawaii-thirty-meter -telescope-mauna-kea .html.

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13. The British hoped that by observing the transit of Venus across the sun from multiple locations on Earth, and by coordinating these observations precisely, they would be able to establish solar parallax—or the distance between Earth and the star around which it orbits. In this way, they would be able to determine not merely the relative distances between celestial bodies but the absolute distances between them. For digitized journals of the expedition and a brief introduction, see Rebekah Higgitt, “Transit of Venus,” in Cambridge Digital Library, University of Cambridge, https://cudl . lib.cam. ac.uk /collections/tov/1. Accessed November 28, 2018. For a longer treatment of the expedition, see Ratcliff, The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain, passim. The US Congress was equally serious about its commitment to establishing solar parallax, appropriating $177,000 for eight separate expeditions organized by the US Naval Observatory. See Dick, “The American Transit of Venus Expeditions of 1874 and 1882,” 100, 104, and 105. For the US Coast Survey expeditions, see The Report of the Hawaiian Commission: Appointed in Pursuance of the Joint Resolution to Provide for Annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States, 122–23. 14. George Lyon Tupman, October 3, 1874, Honolulu Station journal (RGO 59/70), Cambridge University Library, 16. https://cudl . lib.cam. ac.uk /view/MS -RGO -00059-00070/22. Accessed January 8, 2018. 15. Kalākaua to Captain R. S. Floyd, November 22, 1880, Bishop Museum. 16. A government report explained, “The Observatory is a great convenience to us in regulating the local time, which is furnished by [the Hawaiian office of the Surveyor-General] for the benefit of the public.” Alexander, “Report of the Surveyor- General, Honolulu, H.I., March 21, 1888,” 8–9. The observatory structure cost $318 and the transit instrument was provided for free by the US Coast Survey. 17. In years following the coup, Hawai‘i would become the site of additional observatories. See Todd, “A Mid-Pacific College,” 285–86. 18. Melville, White-Jacket, 346; Mahan, Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 187; Meiser, Power and Restraint, 38. 19. See Kyselka, An Ocean in Mind, 7–10; Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It, 1–23 and 25–77. 20. Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to the Hawaiian Tradition. 21. Thurston, “The Sandwich Islands,” 265. 22. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 187, and Klein, Space Warfare, ix, 119–20. 23. As General J. M. Schofield explained to Congress in 1875, “as a depot from which to fit out hostile expeditions against this coast and our commerce on the Pacific Ocean, [the Hawaiian Islands] would afford the means of incalculable injury to the United States.” Quoted in Thurston, “The Sandwich Islands,” 268. 24. Richardson, Longitude and Empire, 32. 25. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 71. 26. Kanaka ‘Ōiwi refers to people who have a genealogical relationship to Hawai‘i. Kanaka Maoli, often used as a synonym, refers to “real” or “true” Native Hawaiians. Kanaka refers to a Native Hawaiian person or, generically, to the Native Hawaiian people. Kānaka is the countable plural form of this word. For more on this, see Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship,” 25, n. 1. 27. Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It, 13–15, 21; Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 89. As Hutchins points out, etak—or islands referenced by navigators—did not need to be actual places to be useful to navigation, and many indigenous Pacific Ocean navigators apparently relied on both real and hypothetical islands in charting a path over the ocean.

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28. King Kalakua’s Tour Round the World, passim. For an account of a Hawaiian educated in the United States, see A Narrative of five youth from the Sandwich Islands, passim. For more on the labor of Hawaiian sailors, see Rosenthal, Beyond Hawai‘ i, 77. 29. The predictable temperatures from week to week, for instance, made it an ideal site from which to conduct research on the earth’s magnetic field, which the United States sponsored after the islands were annexed in 1898. Hazard, Results of Observations Made at the Coast and Geodetic Survey Magnetic Observatory Near Honolulu, Hawaii, 1902–1904, 9. See also The Report of the Hawaiian Commission: Appointed in Pursuance of the Joint Resolution to Provide for Annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States, 122–23. 30. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Vol. 1, 102. 31. Schmitt, Robert C. Historical Statistics of Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1977. 32. Rosenthal, Beyond Hawai‘ i, 170–73. 33. McGregor, Na Kua’aina: Living Hawaiian Culture, 100. 34. US Census Bureau, Population Division (September 13, 2002), “Table 26. Hawaii—Race and Hispanic Origin, 1900–1990.” 35. For a discussion of the debates about precontact population, see Love, Race over Empire, 84–85. 36. Andrade, Unconquerable Rebel, 118. 37. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 122. 38. Andrade, Unconquerable Rebel, 50. For more on the voting restrictions in the postcoup Republic of Hawai‘i, see 143. For the 6,500 petitioners, see Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 231. 39. Citizen’s Committee of Safety to John L. Stevens, Honolulu, January 16, 1893, in The Executive Documents of the House of Representatives, 1894–1895, 1056. 40. “Protest of the Queen, Jan. 17, 1893,” in Nott and Hopkins, eds., Cases Decided in the Court of Claims of the United States, at the Term of 1909–1910, 435. 41. “The New Era!” The Hawaiian Gazette, January 24, 1893: 1. 42. Andrade, Unconquerable Rebel, 153–64. 43. Andrade, Unconquerable Rebel, 162. 44. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 180. 45. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 180. 46. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 183–84, 207. 47. Emma ‘A‘ima Nāwahī edited the newspaper. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 192. 48. See Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 192, 197. See also Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen and An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition. 49. Schamel and Schamel, “The 1897 Petition Against the Annexation of Hawaii,” 402–8. 50. Meiser, Power and Restraint, 38. 51. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 32. One US military leader, General J. M. Schofield, explained to Congress in 1875 that ceding control of the Hawaiian Islands to another major power “would afford [that rival] the means of incalculable injury to the United States.” Quoted in Thurston, “The Sandwich Islands,” 268. 52. Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 197–227. 53. Thirty-Second Annual Report of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, 26. 54. Poe, Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, with a Memoir by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Volume III, 124.

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55. Poe, “Hans Phaall—A Tale,” 566. 56. Solomon, Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination, 2. 57. Ho‘omanawanui, Voices of Fire, xxix, 4. Ho‘omanawanui draws her definition of mo‘olelo kālai‘āina from Moses Manu, “He Moolelo Kaao Hawaii no ke Kaua Nui Weliweli ma waena o Pele-Keahialoa me Waka-Keakaikawai: He mau kupua Wahine Ka‘eae‘a,” May 13, 1899, 4. For more on the Lāhui as a political idea, see Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 2–3. 58. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 17. 59. See Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 155. 60. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 2–3. 61. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 22. 62. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 22. 63. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” who also faces the past, the Hawaiian does not see catastrophe: Benjamin, “ Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257–58. 64. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 22. 65. Queen Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition, 3. 66. Beckwith, The Kumulipo, 1–2; Tregar, “The Creation Song of Hawaii,” 38–46. 67. Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition. 68. Shane MacDonald, Catholic University of America Archives, e-mail to author, January 23, 2019. 69. Meaghan Wright, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, e-mail to author, January 22, 2019. 70. Thigpen, Island Queens and Mission Wives, 66. 71. “Note and Comment,” Spring field Republican, July 16, 1897, 6. 72. “Liliuokalani an Author: Ex-Queen is at Work on Two Books,” St. Louis Republic, July 15, 1897, 5. 73. Jno. A. Palmer to Lee and Shepard, Publishers, December 16, 1885, in Lee and Shepard business records [manuscript], 1860s–1906. American Antiquarian Society. 74. A. G. Waite, “The Lee and Shepard Collection,” May 14, 1949, in Lee and Shepard business records [manuscript], 1860s–1906. American Antiquarian Society. 75. Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 316. 76. Women readers in the northeast were a key audience for Lili‘uokalani’s autobiography. Lee placed at least thirty-four separate classified advertisements in Woman’s Journal, a Boston women’s rights periodical first published in 1870. The advertisements describe the queen’s autobiography as “undoubtedly the most important contribution to the History of the Hawaiian Revolution, and the cause leading up to it, which has been presented to the American people.” They appear between April 1898 and May 1899. See Woman’s Journal 29, no. 17 (April 23, 1898): 131; Woman’s Journal 30, no. 20 (May 20, 1899): 155. The book sold for two dollars, bound in cloth. 77. Forbes, ed., Hawaiian National Bibliography, Volume IV, 4835. 78. “Mrs. Dominis Here,” Baltimore Evening Star, January 23, 1897. 79. “Her Great, Good Friend,” Morning Times [Washington, DC], January 26, 1897, 5. 80. William Lee for Lee and Shepard to Queen Lili‘uokalani, September 16, 1897, Hawai‘i State Archives [M-93-3-21]; William Lee to Queen Lili‘uokalani, December 18, 1897, Hawai‘i State Archives [M-93-3-21]. “Cousin Sara [Sara Lee] to Queen Lili‘uokalani, December 18, 1897, Hawai‘i State Archives [M-93-3-21]. See also Forbes, ed. Hawaiian National Bibliography, Volume IV, 4835. 81. Forbes, ed. Hawaiian National Bibliography, Volume IV, 4835. 82. Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 351.

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83. Catalog of Title Entries of Books and Other Articles, Volume 14: Jan. 2–April 2, First Quarter 1898. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898. https://archive.org /details /catalogoftitlee189814libr/page/n5. Accessed February 12, 2018. 84. Catalog of Title Entries of Books and Other Articles, No. 336, Dec. 6–11, 1898. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897. https://archive.org /details/catalogoftitleen18973libr /page/n1121. Accessed February 12, 2019. 85. For instance, Woman’s Journal 29, no. 17 (April 23, 1898): 131. 86. Bott, “ ‘I Know What Is Due to Me’: Self-Fashion and Legitimization in Queen Liliuokalani’s Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen,” 143. 87. Lili‘uokalani to William Lee, Ebbitt House, Washington, DC, October 18, 1897. Fred Bennett Collection of the Book Club of California. 88. Tregar, “The Creation Song of Hawaii,” 38–46. 89. Queen Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition, 3. 90. Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition, 1. It was received May 16, 1898. “Transactions and Proceedings,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 7, no. 2 (June, 1898): 118. 91. These men were Julius Palmer and N. G. Snelling. Lili‘uokalani to William Lee, Ebbitt House, Washington, DC, October 28, 1897. Fred Bennett Collection of the Book Club of California. 92. In one instance, the original recipient can only be guessed at. The University of Hawai‘i at Manoa holds a copy of An Account of the Creation of the World According to the Hawaiian Tradition that has the name and address of Edward Bowditch Watson penciled on the flyleaf. While the library accession records do not indicate how the institution acquired this copy, it is reasonable to speculate that Watson acquired the copy through his marriage to Lorna Iaukea (1885–1972), whose father, Colonel Curtis P. Iaukea (1855–1940), was an ambassador to Europe and Asia for the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Curtis Iaukea would serve as the trustee of Lili‘uokalani’s property beginning in 1909. But he previously served as an official of the Republic government and traveled to Washington to help lobby for annexation to the United States. Because Lili‘uokalani inscribed many of the copies she gave as gifts, and she did not inscribe this copy, it seems plausible to assume that Iaukea or a member of his family acquired this copy after he had reconciled with the queen in the early twentieth century, although this cannot be known with certainty. Dore A. Minatodani, senior librarian, Hawaiian Collection, University of Hawaii at Manoa, e-mail to author, January  14, 2019. Curtis Piehu Iaukea and Lorna Kahilipuaokalani Iaukea Watson, By Royal Command, i, 216. 93. Forbes, Hawaiian National Bibliography, Vol. IV, 4835. 94. In fact, he was accused by one annexationist leader of having forged names on a petition because he had signed in his own hand for those Kānaka who could not sign their names in English. See Coffman, Nation Within, 186. 95. Forbes, Hawaiian National Bibliography, Vol. IV, 4835. 96. “Haalele mai i keia ola ana o Edward K. Lilikalani,” Ke Aloha Aina, November 16, 1917, 4. For a translation of this, see nupepa, https://nupepa-hawaii.com/2017/11/17/death-of-edward -kamakau-lilikalani-1917/#more-41723. Accessed January 22, 2019. A more literal translation would read, “From the side of this spokesman [the Aloha Aina newspaper], we join the woman who is left without a husband and all of the family, in sadness.” 97. Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition, 3.

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98. A copy held today in a California library bears the inscription “John Kanui, esq.,” likely the John Kanui who served as a leading member of the Hui Kalai‘aina, or indigenous nationalist party. Kanui also helped to organize the petition against the planter oligarchy, and in 1893 he met with a representative of the US government in Honolulu to insist that the Kanaka ‘Ōiwi did not support the provisional government that had overthrown the monarchy. “No. 29, Interview with the Hui Kalaiaina,” 1653–54; Dean Smith, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, e-mail to author, January 14, 2019. Charles Reed Bishop (1822–1915), the husband of Hawaiian ali‘i Bernice Pauahi Bishop (1831–1884) and a naturalized Hawaiian citizen, also received a clothbound copy, inscribed “From Liliuokalani of Hawaii.” Forbes, Hawaiian National Bibliography, Vol. 4, 4835. In her autobiography, Lili‘uokalani would describe Charles Bishop—a supporter of the royal family—as exemplifying “exalted piety” and demonstrating a “love for all that is good, honorable, and pure.” Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 333. 99. See Forbes, Hawaiian National Bibliography, Vol. 4, 4835. This disbound copy is held in the Bishop Museum. 100. Hamersly, Records of Living Officers in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 321. In 1898, he would be assigned as chief engineer on the USS Detroit, sent to the Caribbean during the SpanishAmerican War. See “Opposing Squadrons: Fighting Ships in the Fleets of Admiral Sampson, Commodore Schley, and the Spanish Admiral,” New York Tribune, May 20, 1898: 2. 101. Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia for 1898, 783. 102. Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 340, 347, 349. 103. Lineage Book of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Volume 24, 123. Potts’ DAR registry number was 23348. 104. Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 340. 105. Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 350. 106. Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia for 1898, 1080. 107. Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States 55, no. 2, 637. 108. They lived at 1722 Q Street NW. See Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia for 1898, 1080. 109. Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States 55, no. 2, 637. 110. Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia for 1898, 1079–81. Senator John L. Wilson (1850–1912; R-Washington) lived in the Cairo with his wife, Emma (Ingersoll) Wilson (1830–1912), as did Congressman James S. Sherman (1855–1912; R-New York) and his wife, Carrie (Babcock) Sherman (1856–1931). Republican congressmen Israel Fischer (1858–1940), Warren Hooker (1856– 1920), and George Southwick (1863–1912), all of New York, lived in the Cairo, as well. All five— Wilson, Sherman, Fischer, Hooker, and Southwick—voted in favor of the Newlands Resolution. Mississippi senator Edward C. Walthall (1831–1898) and his wife, Mary (Leckie) Walthall (1833– 1898), also lived in the Cairo, but Edward Walthall died in Washington before the Newlands vote. See Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia for 1898, 1079. See also “Walthall, Edward Cary (1831–1898),” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov /scripts/biodisplay.pl?index =W000111. Accessed February 12, 2019. For votes on the Newlands Resolution, see Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States 55, no. 2, 637, and “The Hawaiian Question,” Cyclopedic Review of Current History 8, no. 2 (1898): 317–28. 111. “It is not designed for general circulation,” she wrote of the book, “but for my friends.” Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 351. 112. She asked Lee to copyright the book in October. See Lili‘uokalani to William Lee, Ebbitt House, Washington, DC, October  28, 1897. Fred Bennett Collection of the Book Club of California.

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113. Shane MacDonald, Catholic University of Amer ica Archives, e-mail to author, January  23, 2019. The book was not accessioned until 1909, but many of the books received in the 1890s were accessioned at that time. Shane MacDonald, Catholic University of America Archives, e-mail to author, January 28, 2019. 114. Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 112, 37. 115. Quoted in Wetzel, “A Church Divided,” 358. See also Ave Maria, July 2, 1898, 23. 116. Senators Stephen Mallory II (1848–1907; D-Florida) and Samuel D. McEnry (1837–1910; D-Louisiana) voted against annexation. Senators Thomas H. Carter (1854–1911; R-Montana) and Edward Murphy, Jr. (1834–1911; D-New York), voted for it. See “The Hawaiian Question,” Cyclopedic Review of Current History 8, no. 2 (1898): 317–28. 117. Byerly, The Great Commission, 96. 118. Meaghan Wright, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, e-mail to author, January 22, 2019. 119. Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 332–34. 120. The Boston recipients were William and Sara Lee, Julius Palmer, and N. G. Snelling. See Lili‘uokalani to William Lee, Ebbitt House, Washington, DC, October 28, 1897. Fred Bennett Collection of the Book Club of California. The New Zealand recipient was the Polynesian Society. It was received May 16, 1898. “Transactions and Proceedings,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 7, no. 2 (June 1898): 118. See Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition, 1. 121. Ho‘omanawanui, Voices of Fire, xxix, 4. Ho‘omanawanui draws her definition of mo‘olelo kālai‘āina from Moses Manu, “He Moolelo Kaao Hawaii no ke Kaua Nui Weliweli ma waena o Pele-Keahialoa me Waka-Keakaikawai: He mau kupua Wahine Ka‘eae‘a,” May 13, 1899, 4. For more on the Lāhui as a political idea, see Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 2–3. 122. Dick, “History of the Nautical Almanac Office,” 21, 27. Simon Newcomb lived at 1620 P Street NW. See Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia for 1898, 735. 123. American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1884, ii. 124. Or, she added, “Sacred Scripture.” See Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to the Hawaiian Tradition, 3. 125. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 22. 126. Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to the Hawaiian Tradition, 3. 127. Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to the Hawaiian Tradition, 7. 128. Woolfson, “The Solar System: Its Origin and Evolution,” 1–3. 129. The quotation is from Charles Goodwin (1817–1878), “On the Mosaic Cosmogony.” See Cosslett, ed., Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century, 116. 130. For more on the use of Olney’s Geography in Hawaiian education, see Cooke and Cooke, Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children’s School, 162, 171, 218. Lili‘uokalani described herself as “studious” during the period of her schooling. See Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘ i’s Story by Hawai‘ i’s Queen, 10. She may also have been exposed to Hawaiian-language astronomy books. See Clark, O ke Aohoku [Astronomy], passim. Some two thousand copies of this translation of astronomical science into Hawaiian were likely printed. See Forbes, Hawaiian National Bibliography, 1071. 131. Tregear, “The Creation Song of Hawaii,” 39. 132. Ho‘omanawanui, Voices of Fire, 4–5. 133. Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to the Hawaiian Tradition, 69. See also Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship,” 4–5.

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134. Thirty-Second Annual Report of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, 26. 135. Olmsted, Incidents of a Whaling Voyage, 187. 136. Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago, 77. 137. [Richard Adams Locke], “Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made, By Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c.,” New York Sun, August 31, 1835. 138. Letter from Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii, to U.S. House of Representatives protesting U.S. assertion of ownership of Hawaii, December 19, 1898, HR 55A-H28.3, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington, DC. 139. Van Dyke, Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘ i, 117, 229, 231–34. See Hawaii et al. v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs et al., No. 07-1372, 129 S. Ct. 1436 (2009), 556 U.S. 163, Supreme Court of the United States. 140. “U.S. Naval Observatory Command History,” U.S. Navy, Fleet Forces Command History, www.public.navy.mil/fltfor/cnmoc/Pages/HistoryPage_usno.aspx. Accessed January 20, 2018. 141. Dennis Overbye, “Under Hawaii’s Starriest Skies, a Fight Over Sacred Ground,” New York Times, October 3, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/science/hawaii-thirty-meter -telescope-mauna-kea .html. 142. For a history of these telescopes, see Zirke, An Acre of Glass, 93–94. 143. The Report of the Hawaiian Commission: Appointed in Pursuance of the Joint Resolution to Provide for Annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States, 122, 123. 144. Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship,” 4. 145. “Mauna Kea: From Wakea - Ancestor of the First People of This Land,” http://alohaquest .com/scripts/mauna _ kea .htm. Accessed February 14, 2019. 146. Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship,” 4. 147. Lili‘uokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to the Hawaiian Tradition, 69. See also Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship,” 4–5. 148. Lili‘uokalani to William Lee, Ebbitt House, Washington, DC, October 18, 1897. Fred Bennett Collection of the Book Club of California. 149. She asked Lee to copyright the book in a letter. Lili‘uokalani to William Lee, Ebbitt House, Washington, DC, October 28, 1897. Fred Bennett Collection of the Book Club of California. 150. The Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1875 (Honolulu: Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 1875), 28. For more on his support of annexation, see The Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1898 (Honolulu: Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 1898), 70, 157.

Epilogue 1. Elon Musk, “Making Humans a Multi-Planet Species,” 50. 2. Amy Held, “China Tried to Grow Cotton on the Moon, but it Didn’t Work,” NPR. January  17, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/17/686169520/plant-china-mooned-over-dies-couldnt -cotton-to-lunar-environment. Accessed February 12, 2019. 3. Jyoti Madhusoodanan, “Microbial Stowaways to Mars Identified,” Nature, May 19, 2014. https://www.nature.com/news/microbial-stowaways-to-mars-identified-1.15249. Accessed February 12, 2019. 4. Johnson-Freese, Space Warfare in the Twenty-First Century, 165–88, and MacDonald, The Long Space Age, 215. MacDonald seeks a “synthesis” between state action and commercial investment in space. Klein, Space Warfare, 8; Lambeth, Mastering the Ultimate High Ground, 122.

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5. That report considered the creation of a “Space Corps,” although it ultimately recommended other approaches to consolidating US space power. See Donald H. Rumsfeld et al., “Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization,” US Department of Defense, January 11, 2001. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext /u2/a404328.pdf. 6. Michael R. Gordon and David S. Cloud, “U.S. Knew of China’s Missile Test, but Kept Silent,” New York Times, April 23, 2007. https://www.nytimes .com/2007/04/23/washington /23satellite . html ? _ r = 1&adxnnl = 1&oref = slogin&ref = asia&pagewanted = print&adxnnlx =1177412634-gIokCeqAhuEUTz6obSrvpQ. Accessed January 20, 2020. 7. A. Thomas Young et al., “Leadership, Management, and Organization for National Security Space” (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analysis, July 2008), 2. 8. “Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Space Priorities: Houston, TX,” August 23, 2018. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president-pence -administrations-space-policy-priorities-houston-tx/. Accessed February 19, 2019. 9. The Space Force is frequently analogized to the US Marine Corps, which in the nineteenth century was frequently used to protect US commercial interests. Recall that Marines from the USS Boston landed in Honolulu in January 1893 to “protect life and property.” Citizen’s Committee of Safety to John L. Stevens, Honolulu, January 16, 1893, in The Executive Documents of the House of Representatives, 1894-1895, 1056. 10. Johnson, “First Biennial Message of Governor Hiram W. Johnson,” 6. 11. Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 197–227. 12. Walker and Spiess, Hawaii and the South Seas, 3. 13. Galluzzo, Altre scoverte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herchel; Waring, Early American Stencils on Walls and Furniture, 20, n. 2. 14. John F. Kennedy, “Acceptance of Democratic Nomination for President” [TNC:191-E5], July 15, 1960, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn /about-jfk /historic-speeches/acceptance-of-democratic-nomination-for-president. Accessed January 20, 2018. 15. “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” the twenty- by thirty-foot mural behind the western staircase of the US House of Representatives, was painted in 1861 by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. See “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (mural study, U.S. Capitol) by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze.” Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery. 16. Jim Winchester, “Zero for the Mouse,” Boys’ Life (March 1957): 12. 17. Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek, first draft, March 11, 1964, 3–5, https://web.archive.org/web /20060924140423/http://www.ex-astris-scientia .org /misc/40_ years/trek _ pitch.pdf. Accessed January 22, 2019. 18. Viotti, Military Space Doctrine: The Great Frontier, 10. 19. Ramey, “Armed Conflict on the Final Frontier: The Law of War in Space,” 1–157; Bromberg, “Public Space Travel 2005: A Legal Odyssey into the Current Regulatory Environment for United States Space Adventurers Pioneering the Final Frontier,” 639–71; Maogoto and Freeland, “The Final Frontier: The Laws of Armed Conflict and Space Warfare,” 165–95. 20. Moltz, The Politics of Space Security, 14–15. 21. Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship,” 4–5; Lili‘uokalani, Creation of the World, 69. 22. Gaul, ed., Catharine Brown, 17; Arlene B. Hirschfelder, ed. Native Heritage: Personal Accounts by American Indians, 1790 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 157. 23. Mooney, Myths of the Cherokees, 257–58. 24. “On the works of creation,” Cherokee Phoenix, May 19, 1832, 3.

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25. Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, “Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain ’Oumuamua’s Peculiar Accelaration?” Astrophysical Journal Letters, November 8, 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1810 .11490. Accessed February 12, 2019. 26. “To Mr. Elias Boudinot,” Cherokee Phoenix, April 15, 1829, 2. 27. John Ross, Annual Message, New Echota, CN, October 13, 1828, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, Vol. I, 141. 28. Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 113, 116. 29. Whitman, Drum-Taps, 34. 30. Mitchell, “The Astronomical Science of Milton as Shown in ‘Paradise Lost,’ ” 318. 31. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 408, 406. 32. “Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Space Priorities: Houston, TX,” August 23, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president -pence-administrations-space-policy-priorities-houston-tx/. Accessed February 19, 2019. 33. Bush, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 57. 34. Johnson, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 533. 35. John F. Kennedy, “Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort,” September 12, 1962, Digital Identifier USG-15-29-2, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, https://www.jfklibrary .org /learn /about-jfk /historic-speeches/address -at-rice-university-on-the-nations -space-effort. Accessed January 20, 2020. 36. Horton, Poetical Works, 81–82. 37. Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War, 272, 278; “Astronomy,” Cherokee Phoenix, June 18, 1828, 3.

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Index

Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition, 8, 135, 138–47, 150–59. See also Kumulipo Adair, Justice Walter, 92, 182 n. 73. See also Red Wat Adams, Abigail, 26, 46 Adams, President John, 3, 16, 17, 19, 21, 25, 26, 60, 130 Adams, President John Quincy, 10 Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson, 16 African Dorcas Association, 61 Agassiz, Louis, 114 Alexander, Rev. Archibald, 80 Ali‘i ai Moku, 5, 141–42, 165. See also Lili‘uokalani Almanacs, 7, 15, 14–47; Connaissance des Temps, 16; Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, 16. See also American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 80, 82, 84–86 American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, 3, 8, 11, 106–31, 135, 153–54 Andrews, Charles C., 60 Andrews, Robert, 18 Angell, James, 35–36 Angelou, Maya, 71 Ave Maria (periodical), 152 Bache, Alexander Dallas, 11–12, 112, 121–22 Baldwin, Christopher C., 27, 28 Balloons, hot air, 38, 70 Banneker, Benjamin, 17–18, 28–46, 84 Barlow, Joel, 45 Bayonet Constitution, 137 Beers, Andrew, 18, 43 Bell, Philip, 75 Bickerstaff, Isaac, 18, 26, 34 Bishop, Charles Reed, 147, 194 n. 98

Blue Origin, 6 Blunt, George, 106–7, 121 Boudinot, Elias, 5, 82–87, 91, 96, 165. See also Gallegina Uwati Boutelle, Charles, 123 Bowditch, Nathaniel, 125 Brown, Catharine, 82. See also Kā tỳ Brown, Charles Brockden 26–28, 46, 67; Edgar Huntly, 67 Brown, John, 4 Buckingham, Joseph, 14–16, 26, 38 Burges, Bartholomew, 19–29, 37, 41, 46, 56, 60, 76, 99 Burnett, John G., 102 Bush, President George W., 164 Caesar, Julius, 17 Cairo (apartment house), 148–49, 153 Candy, John Walker, 80, 96. See also Daguwada Catchings, Florence (Shearer), 149 Catchings, Congressman Thomas, 149 Catholic University of America, 143, 147, 149, 152, 156–58 Celestial Mechanics, 125 Cherokee Advocate, 79, 98, 104 Cherokee Almanac, 80, 81, 91–103 Cherokee Nation, 3–4, 7, 78–79, 81–103, 116, 163 Cherokee Phoenix, 79, 81, 86–98, 104, 163 Choctaw Almanac, 94 Christian Philosopher, 62 Civil War, United States, 8, 11–12, 68, 106–31, 153 Clark, William, 44, 164 Clausewitz, Carl von, 115 Cleveland, President Grover, 139–40, 144–45, 152 Clinkscales, John George, 66

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Coast Survey, United States, 11–12, 105, 112, 121–23, 134 Colonization of space, 1, 3, 86, 103, 160–61 Comets 3, 17, 19–28, 37, 52, 56–58, 67–70, 76, 81, 87, 96–99, 101, 105, 109, 130; Encke’s Comet, 56, 58, 87; Donati’s Comet, 96, 99; Klinkerfues, 99; Maria Mitchell’s Comet, 109 Conant, Marshall, 95 Condorcet, Marquis de, 32 Cook, Captain James, 24, 133, 163 Cooper, Thomas, 107 Cornish, Samuel, 5, 7, 52–56, 58–59, 61–64, 69, 76, 79 Corps of Discovery, 44 Cramer, Zadock, 44 Cromwell, Oliver, 27–28 Curtis, Mattoon Monroe, 147 Daboll, Nathan, 18, 34 Daguwada, 96. See also John Walker Candy Dave the Potter, 175 n. 14 Davis, Charles Henry, 11, 107–29, 133 Delany, Martin, 76 Depot of Charts and Instruments, 10, 105 Dew, Thomas R., 75 Dick, Thomas, 62–67, 88 Dominis, John Owen, 143 Donati, Giovanni Battista, 96, 99 Downes, John, 112 Drum–Taps, 98, 127 Dunthorne, Richard, 60 Du Pont, Admiral Samuel F., 123 Einstein, Albert, 126 Ellicott, Andrew, 7, 16–18, 24, 25, 28–31, 33, 36, 38, 43–46, 118, 154 Ellicott, George, 31 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 62, 88, 90, 128 Extraterrestrial life, 5, 35–38, 39, 62, 87–89, 132, 140, 154, 163, 165 Father Abraham, 18. See also Abraham Hutchins Ferguson, James, 31, 84 Ferrel, William, 114, 119–20 Fisher, John, 39 Flag of the United States, 2, 21, 144 Fleming, Marie Celeste (Ayer), 149 Fleming, Congressman William H., 149 Floyd, Governor John, 73

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 36 Force, Abigail Ware, 27 Franklin, Benjamin, 15, 34 Freedom’s Journal, 7, 52–77, 79, 87, 109 Frémont, John C., 3, 101–4, 116 Frontier, 1, 12, 116, 139–40, 157; final frontier, 162–63 Frost, Rev. Amariah, 26 Gallegina Uwati, 5, 82–87, 91, 96, 165. See also Elias Boudinot Garrison, William Lloyd, 65, 75, 110 Genius of Universal Emancipation, 56 Gilman, Gorham Dummer, 147, 152 Gilmer, Governor George, 101 Global Positioning System, 2, 5, 11, 118, 119, 130, 158 Goddard, William, 33–36 Gould, Benjamin Apthorp, 119–20 Gray, Thomas R., 72–73 Greenleaf, Benjamin, 95 Grice, Hezekiah, 55, 177 n. 52 Grierson, Francis, 97, 100 Hale, Senator John P., 113 Hamilton, Alexander, 21 Harrison, President Benjamin, 139 Hassler, Ferdinand, 121 Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, 144–45, 159 Hervey, James, 35–36 Hicks, Elijah, 87, 90 Hitchcock, Asa, 84–85 Hooper, Archibald, 66–67 Hopkinson, Francis, 21, 170 n. 6 Horton, George Moses, 67–72, 165 Hudson, Father Daniel E., 152 Humboldt, Alexander von, 44, 98, 127–29 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 88, 90 Hutchins, Abraham, 18 Hutchins, John Nathan, 43–45 Iaukea, Colonel Curtis P., 147, 193 n. 92 Iaukea, Lorna, 147, 193 n. 92 Jenks, Rev. William, 94–95 Jenks, William (Cherokee youths), 94–95 Jefferson, President Thomas, 16, 24, 29, 32–34, 41, 43–46, 154 Jetsons, 5 Johnson, President Lyndon, 164

i n d ex Johnson, Governor Hiram, 162 Jomini, Antoine-Henri, 115–16 Judd, Eben Warner, 18, 34 Jupiter, 91–98, 118, 120, 125 Kalākaua, King, 134, 142, 146, 148, 152 Kapi‘olani, Queen Dowager, 148 Kā tỳ, 82. See also Catharine Brown Kant, Immanuel, 36 Kanui, John, 147, 194 n. 98 Kendall, Ezra Otis, 112–13 Kennedy, President John F., 10, 162–64 King Jr., Martin Luther, 58 Kingdom of Hawai‘i (1810–1893), 4, 5, 8, 134, 137, 141, 158 Kirk, Captain James T., 163 Kosmos, 127–28 Kumulipo, 8, 135–59 Lāhui, 135, 138, 140–146, 155, 157 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 125 Lawrence, Daniel, 33 Leadbetter, Charles, 31 Lee and Shepard (publisher), 135, 144–46, 153 Lee, Robert E., 114 Lee, Sara (White), 143, 144, 147 Lee, William, 143–49, 159 Lester, Laura Eliza (Hines), 149 Lester, Congressman Rufus E., 149 Lewis, Meriwether, 24, 44, 164 Liberator, 65, 75 Lilikalani, Judge Edward, 147–48, 156 Lili‘uokalani, Queen, 5, 134–68 Louisiana Purchase, 25, 44 Lowell, James Russell, 49 Lundy, Benjamin, 56 Lyman, Chester Smith, 134, 158 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 136 Mars, 1, 4, 6, 92, 97, 118, 160 Martineau, Harriet, 88, 132 Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal Nevil, 21, 60 Maury, Matthew, 122 Mayer, Tobias, 31 Mercury, 86, 98, 125, 126 Mexican-American War, 1, 101 Milne-Home, David, 56, 57, 67, 71, 72 Mitchell, Maria, 3, 49, 50, 106–29, 164 Mitchell, William, 49 Monroe, President James, 46

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Moon, 4, 6, 10, 23, 30, 53, 57, 59, 67, 68, 71–72, 86, 88, 95–97, 104, 118, 125, 132–40, 154, 161–62 Moon Hoax, 88, 132–33, 140, 154 Mooney, James, 82–83, 88 Morse, Jedidiah, 69, 74, 82 NASA, 1, 10, 108 Naval Observatory, United States, 10, 108, 112, 122, 124, 129, 154 Navy, United States, 3, 6, 8, 11, 16, 21, 46, 106–8, 111–14, 116–17, 122–23, 140, 148, 154, 158 Newcomb, Simon, 112, 126, 153 Newlands Resolution, 139, 149 New-York African Free School, 59–61, 69, 76 New York Sun, 88, 132, 140, 154 Nowlein, Sam, 138 Observatories, 6, 10, 81, 109, 123, 131, 158; Lick Observatory, 134; Mauna Kea Observatory Complex 134, 158–59; Pulkovo Observatory, 120 Oliver Optic, 144 Paine, Thomas, 21–22 Palmer, Julius, 144, 147 Parham, John, 41–42 Parker, Theodore, 58 Peirce, Benjamin, 111–21 Pemberton, James, 33–34 Pence, Vice President Mike, 162 Pickering, John, 88, 90 Pierpont, John Henry, 49 Pitkin, Congressman Timothy, 16, 49 Plutarch, 17 Poe, Edgar Allan, 140, 154 Polynesian Society, New Zealand, 146–47, 156–58 Port Royal Sound, 106, 122–23 Post Office Act of 1792, 22 Potts, Georgiana R. (Smith), 147–49, 156, 165 Potts, Stacy, 148 Powers, Harriet, 49, 51–52 Rafinesque, Constantine Samuel, 88 Red Wat, 92. See also Justice Walter Adair Ridge, John, 85, 87, 90 Ridge, John Rollin, 184 n. 118 Rights of All, 7, 52–66, 71–87 Rittenhouse, David, 31

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Ross, Principal Chief John, 86, 89, 91, 163 Rush, Benjamin, 22, 29 Russwurm, John, 5, 7, 52–53, 56–57, 59, 63–64, 68, 71, 75 Saturn, 92, 98, 118, 125 Schubert, Ernst, 112–15, 119–21 Sequoyah, 83–84, 88, 90, 96 Shakespeare, William, 17 Shelton, Gen. William, 1 Shepard, Charles A.B., 144 Sheridan, Louis, 55, 64 Smith, Congressman William Loughton, 33 Space Force, United States, 1, 161–62 Space Power, 2–5, 11–12, 107–8, 118, 122, 129, 131, 136, 139, 158, 161, 163 SpaceX, 6 Spanish-American War, 139, 162 Speckled Snake, 104 Star Trek, 6, 163 Stephenson, Matthew Fleming, 102 Strong, Nehemiah, 18, 34 Struve, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von, 120, 130 Swift, H. K., 109 Swift, Prudence, 109 Third System, 115–16 Thoreau, Henry David, 3–4, 103–4, 125, 164

Thrum, Thomas G., 147 Timbuktu, 65 Trail of Tears, 79, 81 Treaty of New Echota, 92 Trump, President Donald J., 12 Tso-le-oh-woh, 4, 98–104 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 139 Turner, Nat, 48–52, 72–77 Venus, 4, 35, 39, 91–92, 98, 103, 106, 111, 118 Walker, David, 55, 71 Washington, George, 2 Watie, Stand, 91 Watson, Edward Bowditch, 147, 193 n. 92 West, Benjamin, 18, 30, 34 West Point, 4, 74, 76, 116 Whitman, Walt, 70, 98, 127–29 Wilcox, Robert, 138 Winlock, Joseph, 113–14 Woodbridge, William Channing, 84 Worcester, Anne Orr, 93 Worcester, Rev. Samuel, 93–99, 103–4 Young Beaver, 85–87 Zach, Baron Franz Xaver von, 89

Acknowledgments

This book had modest beginnings, and it would not exist but for the aid of institutions, mentors, colleagues, friends, and family. The first glimmers of Star Territory appeared during an independent study with my dissertation director Sharon M. Harris, who enabled me to become the scholar I am today. I have aimed in my research to match her fidelity to the archive, her commitment to understanding the past as a place where human beings found and created meaning from their lives. I will be forever grateful for her mentorship and guidance. I am also deeply indebted to Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, who provided feedback on numerous chapter revisions as the project developed, and who modeled through her own writing a theoretical sophistication to which I still aspire and a commitment to justice that I can only hope to emulate. Finally, I owe a tremendous debt to Anna Mae Duane, whose extraordinary research on the history of the New-York African Free School redirected the course of my own research. Her feedback reshaped this book’s methodology, and her generosity of spirit continues to guide how I approach the work of teaching and scholarship. Throughout the writing process, I was sustained by the friendship of Joseph Darda, whose scholarship I continue to read and admire. Our talks at the Nathan Hale bar are some of my fondest memories from graduate school. I feared my friendship with Nathaniel Windon would be cut short when he left the University of Connecticut for Penn State, but I’m pleased to reflect that it has deepened in the time since then, and this book has benefitted from our talks about history, literature, and the nineteenth century. I am enormously grateful to the institutions that have provided support for Star Territory. The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute provided me with a Draper Fellowship. The American Antiquarian Society provided me with two month-long research fellowships, which were foundational to the development of this project. North Dakota State University, where I began my academic career as an assistant professor, provided me with a Dean’s Challenge Grant, which enabled me to conduct research at the National Archives in

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Washington, DC. The Center for Humanities and Information at the Pennsylvania State University provided me with a year-long fellowship, during which I completed the final draft of this book. And the University of Manchester provided me with leave from teaching through the Presidential Fellowship scheme, which enabled me to complete revisions faster than I other wise would have. I extend my thanks to each of these institutions. I am also deeply grateful to the numerous program directors, deans, and department chairs who supported my research: Michael Patrick Lynch and Brendan Kane at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute; Kent Sandstrom, Christina Weber, Gary Totten, and Elizabeth Birmingham at North Dakota State University; Paul Erickson, Nan Wolverton, and Kimberly Toney at the American Antiquarian Society; Eric Hayot, John Russell, and Pamela VanHaitsma at the Center for Humanities and Information; and Alessandro Schiesaro, Peter Knight, and Hal Gladfelder at the University of Manchester. Thank you all. Throughout my research, I relied on the goodwill and generosity of archivists and librarians who answered questions and located sources, often after I sent e-mails to them from out of the blue. Molly O’Hagan Hardy, then at the American Antiquarian Society, provided invaluable guidance in researching eighteenth-century almanacs. Elizabeth Pope and Ashley Cataldo, also of the AAS, provided guidance about Hawaiian books and Boston publishers, respectively. Dore A. Minatodani, of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, answered numerous questions about Hawaiian sources. I would also like to thank Jamie E. O. Cantoni of the Cornwall, Connecticut, Historical Society; Jascin Finger of the Maria Mitchell Association; Michael  R. Harrison of the Nantucket Historical Association; Laura Hemming of the Wisconsin Historical Society; Michael North of the Library of Congress; Krystal Kakimoto of the Bishop Museum; Andrew  D. Levitz of the US Office of Naval Intelligence; Shane MacDonald of Catholic University of America; Alexandra Wohnsen of the Hamilton College Library; and Meaghan Wright of the Peabody Essex Museum. Without their generosity, I would have been unable to answer many of the archival questions explored in these pages. I am particularly indebted to Hartwell Francis, of Western Carolina University, for his assistance in answering many of my questions about Cherokee-language sources. The First-Book Institute at the Pennsylvania State University provided a forum in which I thought deeply about the aims and methods of this book, and for that opportunity I am extraordinarily grateful. I am indebted to Sean X.

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Goudie, the institute director, for enabling me to participate and for his continued support as a mentor, colleague, and friend. I am also thankful to Hester Blum, who provided feedback on my original book proposal, which was much in need of revision. Hsia-Ting Chang not only helped to organize the event but asked thoughtful questions that clarified the goals of my book project. I am also grateful for the feedback and friendship I received from my institute colleagues: Kelly Bezio, Brianna Burke, Danielle Christmas, Kya Mangrum, Matthew Schilleman, and Lindsay Thomas. While at the institute, I was glad to have a chance to spend time again with Joseph Darda, my old friend from graduate school, whose feedback was as astute as ever. Finally, I am grateful to Priscilla Wald, whose comments during the institute helped me to take this project apart and put it back together again. And in the years since my participation, she has generously offered feedback and professional advice. I am deeply grateful for her help in bringing this book to completion. Portions of Chapter 2 were published as “Emancipatory Cosmology: Freedom’s Journal, The Rights of All, and the Revolutionary Movements of Black Print Culture” in American Quarterly 68, no. 2 (June 2016), and I am grateful to that journal and its publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, for the permission to republish these materials here. I am also grateful to the editor, Mari Yoshihara, for her guidance on that article, and to the two anonymous reviewers, one of whom I have learned in the years since its publication was Britt Rusert, an extraordinary scholar whose writing I have long admired. I am enormously grateful to my editor, Jerome Singerman, not only for advocating for this book’s publication but for making it more nuanced and cogent than it other wise would have been. My thanks also go out to the staff and editorial board at the University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers. Following the book’s completion, these reviewers revealed themselves, and I am pleased to thank Maurice Lee and Laura Dassow Walls for feedback that helped me to take my writing in new and more productive directions. I have had a number of extraordinary writing mentors and colleagues throughout my career as a student, a journalist, and a scholar. I was extremely lucky to have studied with Joseph Monninger, Roy Andrews, and Paul Mroczka at Plymouth State University. My writing is sharper for having been edited at the Eagle-Tribune newspaper by the late Jo-Anne X. MacKenzie, an extraordinary and fearless journalist of the kind so desperately needed in a free society. At the University of Connecticut, my scholarship benefited from the guidance

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of Martha Cutter, Tom Deans, Wayne Franklin, Bob Hasenfratz, Margo Machida, Glen MacLeod, Charles Mahoney, Thomas Recchio, Shawn Salvant, Gregory Semenza, Fiona Somerset, Kathleen Tonry, Chris Vials, and Sarah Winter. At North Dakota State University, I was blessed to receive the guidance and mentorship of Bruce Maylath, the first chair of a hiring committee to actually hire me. And I appreciated the kindness and generosity of my colleagues at NDSU: Lisa Arnold, Anne Blankenship, Kevin Brooks, Sean Burt, Alison Graham-Bertolini, Alex Hsu, Donald Johnson, Daniel Kenzie, Julia Kowalski, Andrew Mara, Miriam Mara, Mary McCall, the late Amy Rupiper Taggart, Kelly Sassi, Verena Theile, Emily Wicktor, and Heath Wing. Adam Goldwyn and Anastassiya Andrianova made North Dakota feel as wry and ironic as home, which I appreciated every day I was there. I am also grateful to my students, several of whom have gone into academia despite my warnings. In particular, Rio Bergh, Rowshan Chowdhury, Shaibal Dev Roy, and Samantha Maza developed research projects that overlapped with my research for this book, and they have gone on to pursue doctoral degrees in American literary studies. I look forward to reading their published scholarship in the coming years. To Jeff Chase, my oldest friend, I can only offer a thank you from the bottom of my heart. I live an ocean away from where we grew up, and it’s an extraordinary thing to have a friend who understands not only who I am but who I was. Thank you to Brandon Heath, whose friendship over the years has shaped me in more ways than I can count. I can only aspire to match your creativity and insight in my own writing. Rachel Elin Nolan shaped this book’s development over many years, and I am full of gratitude for the humane, impassioned, and thoughtful way she approaches questions of scholarship and life. For this and many other reasons, Rachel, I will be forever in your debt. My aunt, the late Mima Weissmann, was the first person to take me to see a university campus, and I remember hoping then that I could spend the rest of my life in such places. I only wish that I could give her this book as a token of my gratitude. I am thankful for the care and guidance throughout my life from Marcelle Finn, Bill Freeman, Marianna Freeman, and the late Norma Fraser, as well as Elaine Lawrence and Gerry Lawrence, Donna Freeman, Leslie Freeman, and Robin Hale. Thank you to Dwight Fraser and Diane Carlson, who modeled for me an intellectualism that is wide-ranging and eclectic. Thank you to Michael Lynch and Olivia Burrious Lynch, Thomas Lynch, and David Fraser and Ash-

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ley Fraser. Each of you has supported me at times of crisis in my life, and for that I will always be grateful. And thank you to my niece and nephews Mia Lynch, Benjamin Lynch, Simon Fraser, Austin Fraser, and Carson Fraser. who remind me that great things are yet to come. Finally, this book is dedicated to my parents, Geoffrey Lee Fraser and Carol Freeman Fraser, without whom none of this would be possible.