The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing 9780748692934

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The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing

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The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing

Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, and Matthew Pethers

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, and Matthew Pethers, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9292 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9293 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9294 1 (epub)

The right of Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, and Matthew Pethers to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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CONTENTS

Prologue: Networks of Nineteenth-Century Letter-Writing Elizabeth Hewitt Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, and Matthew Pethers Part I: Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts 1. From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens, and the Materiality of Letter-Writing Graham Thompson 2. The Business of Letter-Writing Michael Zakim 3. Name and Address: Letters and Mass Mailing in Nineteenth-Century America David M. Henkin 4. Paper Evidence: Handwriting, Print, Letters, and the Law Christopher A. Hunter 5. Nineteenth-Century American Science and the Decline of Letters Robin Vandome 6. The Means and the End: Letters and the Work of History Alea Henle 7. Letters, Telegrams, News Richard R. John 8. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth-Century America Matthew Pethers 9. The Spider and the Dumpling: Threatening Letters in Nineteenth-Century America Leon Jackson

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Part II: Travel, Migration, and Dislocation 10. Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now William Merrill Decker 11. Working Away, Writing Home David M. Stewart 12. Letters from America: Themes and Methods in the Study of Irish Emigrant Correspondence Emma Moreton 13. The Usual Problems: Sickness, Distance, and Failure to Acculturate in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Letters Janet Floyd 14. Indigenous Epistolarity in the Nineteenth Century Phillip H. Round 15. Dueling Epistles: Enslaved Letter-Writers and the Discourse of (Dis)Honor Ben Schiller 16. Home and Belonging in the Letters of Sarah Hicks Williams Rebecca J. Fraser 17. ‘An Oblique Place’: Letters in the Civil War Rebecca Weir 18. Social Action in Cross-Regional Letter-Writing: Ednah Cheney’s Correspondence with Postbellum Teachers in the U.S. South Sarah R. Robbins Part III: Politics, Reform, and Intellectual Life 19. Founding Friendship: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the American Experiment in Republican Government, 1812–26 Peter S. Onuf 20. Corresponding Natures: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Letters David Greenham 21. ‘This Epistolary Medium’: Friendship and Civil Society in Margaret Fuller’s Private Letters Magdalena Nerio 22. ‘Will You live?’: Thoreau’s Philosophical Letters Michael Jonik 23. ‘Frederick Douglass, the Freeman’ and ‘Frederick Bailey, the Slave’: Private versus Public Acts and Arts of Letter-Writing in Frederick Douglass’s Pre-Civil-War Correspondence Celeste-Marie Bernier 24. Old Master Letters and Letters from the Old World: Julia Griffiths and the Uses of Correspondence in Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers Sarah Meer 25. Letters from ‘Linda Brent’: Harriet Jacobs and the Work of Emancipation Fionnghuala Sweeney 26. Abraham Lincoln: The Man through His Letters Robert Bray 27. Between Science and Aesthetics: The Letters of William James Martin Halliwell

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contents 28. ‘My Dear Dr.’: American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientific Correspondence Tina Gianquitto 29. ‘A Chain of Correspondence’: Social Activism and Civic Values in the Letters of Lydia Sigourney Elizabeth A. Petrino 30. A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Epistles Judith A. Allen 31. ‘The Stamp of Truth’: Historiographical Dissent and Its Limits in the Letters of Jared Sparks Eileen Ka-May Cheng 32. Defenses and Masks and Poses in Henry Adams’ Letters John C. Orr Part IV: Literary Culture 33. The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown: Epistolary Performance and New Paths for Scholarship Philip Barnard 34. Publishing and Public Affairs in the Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper Lance Schachterle 35. The Transatlantic Village: The Rise and Fall of the Epistolary Friendship of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Mary Russell Mitford Melissa J. Homestead 36. The Literary Professional and the Country Gentleman: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke Kevin J. Hayes 37. Melville’s Flummery Wyn Kelley 38. The Epistolary Romance and Rivalry of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne Patricia Dunlavy Valenti 39. Co-Responding with Walt Whitman Ed Folsom 40. ‘Rare Sparkles of Light’: Intimacy and Distance in Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson Linda Freedman 41. ‘Soul Friends’: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron in Correspondence Beth L. Lueck 42. Louisa May Alcott’s Family Post Box Judie Newman 43. Profanities, Indecencies, and Theologies: Mark Twain’s Letters to Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, and Henry Rogers Peter Messent 44. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Letters: ‘The Vaguely Defined Line Where Races Meet’ Maria Orban

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45. Sarah Orne Jewett’s Foreign Correspondence Mark Storey 46. ‘Too Intimate to Publish, Too Rare to Suppress’: Henry James in His Letters Michael Anesko 47. ‘Ill Correspondent’: Stephen Crane’s Trouble with Letters John Fagg

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PROLOGUE: NETWORKS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY LETTER-WRITING Elizabeth Hewitt

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lthough the eighteenth century has conventionally been designated the golden age of the letter for Europe, in the case of North America we can more accurately say that the nineteenth century is when letter-writing first truly flourished. We tend to imagine American postal bags as always having overflowed with familiar and domestic letters, but before the early nineteenth century most of the mail that moved through the nation consisted of newspapers and business communication. It was not until the Post Office Act of 1845 – and the advent of universally cheap mail – that most Americans began regularly to send familiar letters through the postal system. Before then, it was simply too expensive for the majority of them to use the post regularly for social intercourse.1 The substantial alterations to postal rates brought about by congressional legislation, however, along with increasingly affordable stationery, meant that by mid-century an expanding number of people were participating in the epistolary arts. The broadening scope of the American post typically became an occasion for rhapsodic celebrations of the democratic possibilities of national communication, as well as for risible commentary on the failings of its participants. An essayist describing his visit to the New York Post Office in 1853, for example, marveled at the ‘alarming piles’ of mail, conveying all sorts of ‘food for man’s passions,’ that were about to be dispatched across the world, before directing his particular attention to a ‘clumsy, dirty square missive’ addressed to ‘Missis Widdy O’Reilly to the Care of her bruthir Pat in the Post Offis iv Innis kill’n immadiate with care [sic passim].’2 The extended commentary on the commingling of this squalid, semi-literate letter with ‘one directed in a bold flourishing handwriting . . . to a mercantile firm,’ another in ‘a stiff, cramped lawyer-like hand,’ a third ‘which . . . bears to an aged couple at Munich the welcome news that their daughter has landed safe in the land of her adoption,’ and several ‘scented envelope[s]’ that contain the ‘last appeal of a broken heart,’ gives expression to the democratic diversity of epistolary writing in nineteenth-century America, as well as the paradoxes associated with it.3 For although letter-writing was consistently praised as a communicative mode in which anyone could participate, there were also strict rules regulating its practice that many commentators sought to enforce by emphasizing that correct spelling and neat chirography were even more important than authentic self-expression. In this respect, the conclusion of the visitor 1

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to the New York Post Office summarizes both the pluralistic allure and the atomistic anxiety invoked by the American mail: ‘What a motley collection! No two alike, apparently, in size, colour, shape, or style of superscription.’4 One token of the increasing accessibility of letter-writing in nineteenth-century America, and the related desire to manage it, is the 1861 publication of Beadle’s Dime Letter-Writer: A Perfect Guide to All Kinds of Correspondence.5 Epistolary manuals had been widely published in North America from the late seventeenth century on, but this version, which sold for only ten cents, offers compelling evidence that a much wider and less affluent constituency of Americans were now becoming letterwriters.6 Along with letter-writing manuals, meanwhile, correspondence collections became another crucial mechanism by which readers were schooled in the epistolary arts. Indeed, the American book market in the nineteenth century positively burst with an ever-growing number of volumes that published the letters of well-known politicians and writers. The first half of the century alone saw the publication of editions of correspondence from Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Margaret Fuller, to name just a handful of the Americans so honored.7 Publishers and booksellers offered even more volumes of letters by British and European authors. The influential magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, for example, published a series called The Library of Standard Letters: Comprising Selections from the Correspondence of Eminent Men and Women that included very popular titles such as The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague and The Letters of Madame de Sévigné to her Daughter and Friends (both from 1856).8 Echoing Hale’s explicit assertion that she hoped her editions would bring ‘more attention to the art of letterwriting,’ reviewers commended these volumes for making the paragons of epistolary style available to a general readership.9 ‘Everybody ought to study these letters for their style,’ Peterson’s Magazine proclaimed in 1856, before adding that ‘this cheap, yet neat edition will put them within the reach of everybody.’10 What also made letters such a significant literary form for nineteenth-century Americans – and indeed what still motivates our interest in them – was that they seemed to provide a deep and evocative expression of the practices, habits, and beliefs of both the historical age and particular identity of the persons who wrote them. As Hale put it: ‘Every age (and every society) has its peculiar tone . . . and this tone is nowhere to be seized so easily, and understood so well, as in the familiar letters of each epoch.’11 Many collections thus advertised themselves as memoirs, biographies, and histories even as they were predominantly composed of personal letters, and we often see the use of the prefix Life and Letters in book titles at this time precisely because letters were understood as the reservoir from which authentic personality could be drawn. As one celebrant of literary missives proclaimed in 1876, the appeal of the form was a consequence of the ‘natural and unstudied’ quality of their composition: ‘In other productions there is the restraint induced by the feeling that a thousand eyes are peering over the writer’s shoulder and scrutinizing every word; while letters are written when the mind is as it were in dressing-gown and slippers – free, natural, active, perfectly at home, and with all the fountains of fancy, wit, and sentiment in full play.’12 More than a century later, contemporary biographers still turn to the epistolary archive for a textual dishabille from which to document the stories of their subjects’ most intimate lives and the social worlds in which they lived.

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This attitude toward epistolary writing is a consequence of something unique about the form, which is that letters structure the very relations that they describe. A love letter, for instance, is delightful because it allows us to eavesdrop on the particulars of an intimate attachment, but it also formalizes the intimacy to which it gives expression. Love letters follow many generic conventions: they appeal to unilateral attraction; they insist on the sublime impossibility of articulating the heights of devotion; they confess to hesitancy and reticence; they speculate on the possibilities of unreciprocated ardor. These practices do not simply reflect the habits of romantic intercourse; rather the epistolary conventions engendered and reproduced by countless novels, letter-writing manuals, and epistolary collections have helped to establish the non-textual habits of erotic intimacy. When Nathaniel Hawthorne writes to his fiancée Sophia Peabody in April 1839 that he ‘pressed’ the envelope of her last letter ‘to my lips (turning my head away, so that nobody saw me) and then broke the seal,’ we should not merely assume that he kissed the paper as a substitution for his beloved.13 More remarkable is that he could describe this metonymic erotica because the letter’s unique amalgamation of presence and absence established the form as both amorous expression and prophylactic. And the love letter is not an exceptional subgenre: the nineteenth-century letter established many of the practices of courtship, friendship, business relations, familial attachment, and subject formation that became so naturalized they persisted long after the letter ceased to be a crucial technology for communication. Indeed, the very fact that we assume there might be different communicative languages for these different social systems – romance, friendship, business – may itself be a longer-term consequence of letter-writing, since epistolary handbooks relentlessly emphasized this separation in their own taxonomies. The constitutive power of the epistolary form in the nineteenth century has particular interest for scholars today, because we are witnessing remarkably similar social and intellectual transformations accompanying the new communicative technologies of the twenty-first century. These technologies are clearly shaping some entirely new social practices: if the primary mechanism by which a person communicates to others is limited to 140 characters, then this cannot help but affect the shape of human sociality. And like the nineteenth-century letter, these new media – whether it be email, instant messaging, tweeting, or blogs – are celebrated as particularly rich repositories of cultural interaction, which promise to exert a similarly liberating influence on politics, commerce, friendship, romance, knowledge, and art. Unlike the sometimes laconic practitioners of twenty-first-century digital correspondence, however, the nineteenthcentury proponents of letter-writing frequently theorized at length about the form they employed, and its unique affordances and possibilities. Indeed, it is not just the case that many of the figures discussed in this volume, from John Adams at the start of the century to Henry Adams at the end, were prolific correspondents; it is also true that they used the occasion of letter-writing itself to describe the medium’s consequences on social intercourse. In this respect, Emily Dickinson’s 1862 lyric ‘The Way I read a Letter’s this’ provides a paradigmatic example of nineteenth-century epistolary theory. Dickinson depicts reading a letter as a profoundly solitary and private act: the speaker removes herself to an isolated room to ‘Then draw my little Letter forth / And slowly pick the lock.’14 The poem thus emphasizes the confidential disclosure that was often extolled as the unique provenance of the letter. In fact, when in 1891 Thomas Wentworth Higginson

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posthumously published several of Dickinson’s letters to him, he praised them in very similar terms, insisting that ‘no other [writings] bring us quite so intimately near to the peculiar quality and aroma of her nature.’15 And it was not only the correspondence of infamous recluses that was described in this way. When, in 1833, Jared Sparks published the letters of that most public of men, Benjamin Franklin, he announced that they would allow readers to trace ‘the progress of genius, and [become] acquainted with the heart and affections’ of their author precisely because they provided entrance to ‘the genuine effusions of his mind and heart.’16 The many other collections of individual correspondents published throughout the nineteenth century consistently offered themselves to readers in these very same terms. Since the letter was theorized as the genre of authentic self-disclosure, the publication of any individual’s correspondence provided an unparalleled glimpse into psychological interiority. But Dickinson’s lyric reveals other social entailments of the epistolary form. When the speaker finally secures her privacy, even to the extent of ‘exorcis[ing]’ a mouse from the room, she initiates her own reading of the letter with the announcement, ‘Peruse how infinite I am / to no one that You – know.’17 The imperative mood indicates that even as this act of reading takes place in absolute seclusion, the speaker cannot help but imagine another also reading her private letter. Writing during a time when letters were valued (and hence reproduced) as transcriptions of an authentic self, Dickinson’s epistolary recipe tethers radical privacy to public circulation. Yet notably, the letter does not provide her imaginary third-party reader a portal to the consciousness of either the speaker or her correspondent. That is, despite Dickinson’s evident appeal to the letter as a vehicle for self-disclosure, the poem proposes that letters actually reveal highly mediated social intercourse. The letter discloses that one person has ‘infinite’ meaning to another, but it does not unveil what that meaning is, instead emphasizing the inequity between the speaker’s relationship with the ‘You’ and with her correspondent. Dickinson’s sly reconfiguration of the letter’s value indicates something crucial about the epistolary form that has become increasingly visible to twenty-first-century readers. Any individual letter is located at a communicative node – not only at a point of intersection between particular correspondents, but also within the larger system of correspondence into which these readers and writers have entered. Although almost all nineteenth-century editions of a writer’s letters reproduced only one side of a correspondence, the formal features of epistolary writing – the use of second-person address, frequent references to previous letters and other correspondents, assumptions of mutual acquaintance that often result in referential lacunae – disturb a unilateral identification with a single author. Whatever their editors told them, when readers engaged with epistolary collections, they were not only (or even primarily) orienting their perspective in terms of the psychic system of the letter-writer, but also toward the other communicative networks within which the author was necessarily imbricated. Imagine, for example, a reader sitting down with the volume of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence that Mabel Loomis Todd published in 1894 and reading this first sentence, from a letter Dickinson wrote to her friend Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican, in August 1862: ‘DEAR MR BOWLES, – Vinnie is trading with a tin peddler – buying water-pots for me to sprinkle geraniums with when you get home next winter, and she has gone to the war.’18 This entirely mundane sentence allows for a multiplicity of imaginative projections. How often did Dickinson’s sister

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Vinnie negotiate with Amherst tin peddlers? What did Vinnie exchange in order to procure the watering cans, and did Dickinson have any say in the negotiation? Did Dickinson plan on keeping the geraniums alive through the winter? Did Bowles take the reference to flowers as a generous gift or as an expression of sorrow at his absence? Why does Dickinson, whose family did not fight in the Civil War, suggest participation in the war, and how would Bowles have understood this cryptic statement? Was it a reference to an earlier letter from Dickinson, Vinnie or Bowles? These initial interpretive possibilities are, of course, partially a consequence of linguistic opacity – an opacity that Dickinson was particularly keen on registering in both her letters and poems. But there is more going on. Because the sentence is located in a letter – a document that articulates the junction between reader and writer – our own interpretation is inevitably sundered by the question of whether to identify with the epistolary author or with the recipient. Moreover, this letter is only a fragment of many other correspondences: only one of many letters that Dickinson sent Bowles; only one of many that Bowles received from others; only one of many that Dickinson sent to other people; only one of many in which Dickinson describes her sister; and so on. Thus, even as letter-writing was touted as being the exceptional form through which to access egoism in nineteenth-century America, the simple fact that letters link these egos together in a network of correspondence exceeding the individual writer reveals a very different theory of the letter. Epistolary exchange – whether it is located in manuscript papers, print volumes, conduct manuals, or even epistolary novels – offers its readers a speculative map for the myriad social attachments that cannot be contained by a letter’s binary structure. Although this networked theory of the letter was not emphasized in most published collections of correspondence in the nineteenth century, it was underscored in nineteenth-century writing about the U.S. Post Office. Largely written by those advocating for a cheaper post, these texts tend to laud the expansive networks of the mail for providing social intercourse to a people who are geographically dispersed. As the lead article in the first issue of The New Englander put it in 1843: ‘How much would the ties of kindred and friendship between the remotest portions of the country be strengthened; how would the chain of love be kept bright; how would sentiment, thought, knowledge, feeling, flash along that chain like the electric stream – if the means of communication, or rather of communion, should be thus cheapened and perfected.’19 Here, the author envisages the movement of mail using the metaphor of electromagnetism: letters contain ideas and emotions that pulse through American postal routes with the ‘vital energy’ of an electric charge.20 Other commentators, meanwhile, opt for the metaphor of a circulatory system. The mail, according to The Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review in 1856, is the ‘blood of the country, which resembles the arterial and venous circulation of the human system.’21 Both conceits have a similar goal, which is to assert the importance of the individual letter in conveying ‘the secret thoughts, feelings, and affections of a people’ from one place to another and simultaneously to reveal that these individual letters only have significance when they constitute a larger system incorporating and binding together communicants across the nation.22 These nineteenth-century discussions of the material conditions which shape how individual letters will reach their destinations (stamps, envelopes, addresses, mail sorters, carts, trains, and steamers) echo with our own contemporary interest in the form,

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which has undergone a fundamental alteration since the beginning of the twentyfirst century. As Lindsay O’Neill succinctly puts it in her recent study of transatlantic epistolary networks, ‘the field has shifted away from the relationship of the letter to the self and toward its participatory role in navigating social relationships and negotiating social power.’23 Such a perspective is certainly emphasized in this volume, where many of the essays are oriented not merely toward the writing subject, but also toward the myriad networks and communities forged through correspondence. There are undoubtedly many explanations for this changing scholarly focus, but one must include the fact that our own historical moment is witnessing the genesis of a new technology that has been largely theorized and studied as a communicative system – which is to say, there are notable similarities between the expanding communication routes of the post and telegraph in the nineteenth century and our own contemporary information and communication technologies. As many scholars have remarked over the last few years, the almost breathless enthusiasm with which nineteenth-century writers described the U.S. mail might remind us of the rhetoric with which some twenty-firstcentury cultural critics have greeted the social possibilities of the Internet.24 Consider, for example, the resonances between the nineteenth-century appeal to the ‘ties of kindred and friendship’ generated by the postal system, and Al Gore’s speculation in 1994 that the new ‘information superhighway’ would provide the opportunity for an ‘increasingly interconnected human family’ across the globe.25 Indeed, Gore himself explicitly deployed an analogy between nineteenth- and late twentieth-century communicative technologies in the speech he was giving to the International Telecommunications Union, beginning with the invocation of Clifford Pyncheon’s rapture in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) over the advent of the telegraph: ‘By means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time . . . The round globe is a vast . . . brain.’26 Pyncheon’s metaphor, which compares telegraphy to the human nervous system, echoes the language of many others at the time, who praised the post and the telegraph alike as extensive circuits capable of incorporating a heterogeneous and remote population into a unified body or ‘brain.’ Almost fifty years after the publication of Hawthorne’s novel, for example, in 1893, his son, Julian, engaged in a similar speculative fantasy in his short story, ‘June, 1993.’ The narrator of this tale sleeps for a century and wakes up to discover an entirely new world in which ‘unlimited facilities of intercommunication’ have radically changed social intercourse.27 ‘The inhabitants of this planet are rapidly approximating to the state of a homogeneous people,’ he is told. ‘They are almost as closely united as the members of a family.’28 For all the positive similarities that a current observer of communicative change like Al Gore might find in such statements, however, there are also striking divergences between the Postal Age and the Internet Age. The drive toward cultural homogeneity that Julian Hawthorne idealizes as one consequence of an expanding communications system, for instance, has been quite differently understood in our own era as a dangerous consequence of globalization. And even more pointedly, while nineteenthcentury writing about the post (and later the telegraph) was typically optimistic, the rhetoric surrounding the Internet has become increasingly dominated by fears about social declension.29 Thus while the nineteenth-century letter was praised as a repository for authentic individual expression, the twenty-first-century tweet is frequently

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condemned as a vehicle for pathological narcissism. While the nineteenth-century post was celebrated as cohering a heterogeneous citizenship into a vital national body, social media is frequently rendered as an insidious matrix that dissipates human community, violates individual privacy, and surreptitiously exploits free labor under the guise of online interactivity.30 There are, of course, numerous and substantial material and institutional variations between the U.S. Post Office of the nineteenth century and the global Internet of the twenty-first that might be responsible for this discrepancy in tone, but one explanation seems to be located in the strange totemic status accorded to the familiar letter as a vehicle for emotional attachment. When describing the older networks that transmitted epistolary texts, advocates of telegraph and Internet alike have tended to idealize the instantaneous nature of these systems, presenting them as capable of bridging time, distance, and alterity in ways that a letter cannot. Yet, as many of the chapters included in this volume reveal, nineteenth-century epistolary practitioners frequently acknowledged, and even embraced, the fact that letters could not annihilate all the gaps – temporal, spatial, ontological – that divided one person from another. Letters – private or published, handwritten, typed, delivered through post or by hand – offered and represented a proximity that was both more and less than physical presence and textual absence. Thus, perhaps one reason the familiar letter – unlike, say, the tweet or the instant message – did not engender the same kind of cultural anxiety was that it was located in this exceptional space between reticence and revelation, between private confession and public transmission. While our critical gaze may have shifted to the broad social matrices constituted by epistolary writing, we have decidedly not abandoned our sense that the familiar letter must also be read as an intimate vessel. By insisting on the formal exceptionalism of the familiar letter, I risk participating in a familiar pattern in epistolary scholarship: to see the genre as historically ubiquitous and therefore as providing an essential textual structure for human communication. But one of the substantial claims of this volume is that the letter – both as literary object and as communicative practice – must be read historically. The chapters that follow study nineteenth-century American letters so as to reveal the crucial significance of an increasingly well-established and widely practiced literary form in a landscape undergoing fundamental economic, technological, and cultural transformations. They recognize, as figures like Sarah Josepha Hale did, that there is a specific ‘art of letterwriting’ which each generation must update and learn anew, and that through their intimate gestures these letters can reveal the ‘peculiar tone’ of a society and its era. Only through rooting letters to a distinctive chronological and geographic location can we better understand the transhistorical and transnational significance of the form, and its role as both vessel and network. And only by looking back to a moment when the familiar letter was not increasingly obsolescent but increasingly ubiquitous can we gain insights into our own dramatically changing communicative practices.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

See Henkin, The Postal Age, especially 15–62. ‘Metropolitan Post Offices,’ 267, 268. Ibid. Ibid. 267.

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5. Legrand, Beadle’s Dime Letter-Writer. Later the same company, which specialized in dime novels, offered a version particularly directed at female readers, Beadle’s Dime Ladies’ Letter-Writer. 6. The colonial and early national tradition of American letter-writing manuals is extensively analyzed in Bannet, Empire of Letters. The nineteenth-century tradition remains understudied, but for a useful enumeration of key texts see Mahoney, ‘Bibliography.’ 7. See: Franklin, Private Correspondence; Washington, Writings; John Adams, Letters; Abigail Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams; Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence, and Miscellanies; Brown, The Life; Irving, Life and Letters; Sedgwick, Life and Letters; and Fuller, Memoirs. 8. See Montagu, The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Sévigné, The Letters of Madame de Sévigné. 9. Hale, ‘General Preface,’ vii. 10. ‘Review of New Books,’ 470. 11. Hale, ‘General Preface,’ v. 12. Westlake, How to Write Letters, 122. 13. Hawthorne, Letter to Sophia Peabody, 30 April 1839, in Selected Letters, 53. For more on the Hawthorne–Peabody correspondence see Patricia Valenti’s chapter in this volume. 14. Dickinson, ‘The Way I read a Letter’s this,’ in The Poems, 2: 669. 15. Higginson, ‘Emily Dickinson’s Letters,’ 453. For more on the Dickinson–Higginson correspondence see Linda Freedman’s chapter in this volume. 16. Sparks, ‘Preface,’ v, vi. 17. Dickinson, ‘The Way I read a Letter’s this,’ 2: 669. 18. Dickinson, Letter to Samuel Bowles, c. August 1862, in Letters, 1: 207. Readers familiar with Dickinson’s letters will, of course, immediately recognize the significant elision in Todd’s editing of this missive, since the original autograph manuscript and Thomas H. Johnson’s later revised edition read, ‘and Vinnie and Sue, have gone to the War’ (see Letter to Samuel Bowles, c. August 1862, in The Letters, 1: 416). Todd’s very liberal editorial practices presented significant challenges for later editors, but they were entirely typical. Indeed many nineteenth-century editors begin their volumes by insisting that they have made elisions and emendations necessary to protect the privacy of their subject. Yet even while this was a standard practice, we also see controversies over editorial bowdlerization arising as, for example, in the case of Jared Sparks’ work with George Washington’s correspondence. For more on the latter see Eileen Ka-May Cheng’s chapter in this volume. 19. ‘The Post-Office System,’ 23. 20. Ibid. 21. ‘The Post-Office as it Has Been,’ 681. 22. Ibid. 680. 23. O’Neill, The Opened Letter, 7. 24. For more on these analogies, and their limitations, see Richard R. John’s chapter in this volume. 25. Gore, ‘Inauguration,’ 1, 9. 26. Quoted in ibid. 1. 27. Hawthorne, ‘June, 1993,’ 456. 28. Ibid. 29. As David Henkin has illustrated, anxieties about the postal system in nineteenth-century America largely focused on post offices as potential sites for social contamination, rather than on letters themselves. ‘At post offices, both strangers and acquaintances were more likely than elsewhere to encounter one another as they went about their daily business,’ he remarks. ‘In essence, the post office provided an extreme instance of the crowded thoroughfare, with all of the dangers associated with the dense concentration of bodies’ (The Postal Age, 66). 30. For a fuller exploration of these anxieties see, for example, the essays collected by Michael Zimmer in ‘Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0.’

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Works Cited Adams, A. (1840), Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, 2nd edn., ed. C. F. Adams, Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown. Adams, J. (1841), Letters of John Adams, Addressed to his Wife, ed. C. F. Adams, Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown. Bannet, E. T. (2005), Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820, New York: Cambridge University Press. Beadle’s Dime Ladies’ Letter-Writer; or, How to Write; When to Write; What to Write (1868), New York: Beadle & Adams. Brown, C. B. (1815), The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, ed. W. Dunlap, Philadelphia: James P. Parke. Dickinson, E. (1894), Letters of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols., ed. M. L. Todd, Boston: Roberts Brothers. Dickinson, E. (1958), The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., ed. T. H. Johnson and T. Ward, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dickinson, E. (1998), The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Varorium Edition, 3 vols., ed. R. W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Franklin, B. (1817), The Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin, 2nd edn., ed. W. T. Franklin, London: Henry Colburn. Fuller, M. (1852), Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, ed. R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Company. Gore, A. (1994), ‘Inauguration of the First World Telecommunication Development Conference,’ International Telecommunication Union Library and Archives Service, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Hale, S. J. (1856), ‘General Preface,’ in M. R. Sévigné, The Letters of Madame de Sévigné to her Daughter and Friends, ed. S. J. Hale, New York: Mason Brothers, v–x. Hawthorne, J. (1893), ‘June, 1993,’ The Cosmopolitan, 14: 450–8. Hawthorne, N. (2002), Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. J. Myerson, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Higginson, T. W. (1891), ‘Emily Dickinson’s Letters,’ Atlantic Monthly, 68: 444–56. Irving, W. (1862), Life and Letters of Washington Irving, ed. P. Irving, London: Richard Bentley. Jefferson, T. (1829), Memoirs, Correspondence, and Miscellanies from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. T. J. Randolph, Charlottesville, VA: F. Carr & Co. Legrand, L. (1861), Beadle’s Dime Letter-Writer: A Perfect Guide to All Kinds of Correspondence, New York: Beadle & Co. Mahoney, D. M. (2007), ‘Bibliography of Nineteenth-Century Letter-Writing Manuals,’ in C. Poster and L. C. Mitchell (eds.), Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 319–26. ‘Metropolitan Post Offices: New York’ (1853), The Illustrated Magazine of Art, 1: 267–9. Montagu, M. W. (1856), The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, ed. S. J. Hale, New York: Mason Brothers. O’Neill, L. (2015), The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ‘The Post-Office as it Has Been, Is, and Should Be’ (1856), The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 35: 680–97. ‘The Post-Office System, as an Element of Modern Civilization’ (1843), The New Englander, 1: 9–27. ‘Review of New Books’ (1856), Peterson’s Magazine, 29: 470.

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Sedgwick, C. M. (1872), Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, ed. M. E. Dewey, New York: Harper & Brothers. Sévigné, M. R. (1856), The Letters of Madame de Sévigné to her Daughter and Friends, ed. S. J. Hale, New York: Mason Brothers. Sparks, J. (1833), ‘Preface,’ in J. Sparks (ed.), Familiar Letters and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Franklin, London: Jackson & Walford, v–ix. Washington, G. (1836), The Writings of George Washington, ed. J. Sparks, New York: Harper & Brothers. Westlake, J. W. (1876), How to Write Letters; a Manual of Correspondence, Philadelphia: Sower, Potts & Co. Zimmer, M. (2008), ed., ‘Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0,’ First Monday, 13: (last accessed 22 September 2015).

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INTRODUCTION: EPISTOLARY STUDIES AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITING Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, and Matthew Pethers

M

‘

y great object always was to invent a means of getting a letter secretly into the post-office.’1 So recalled Solomon Northup in his 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave. Engaged in a daily fight to survive the grueling atrocities of a life lived on a Louisiana cotton plantation, Northup struggled to secure the basic implements needed to compose a letter, let alone the privacy he required to write what he liked. ‘After various experiments I succeeded in making ink, by boiling white maple bark, and with a feather plucked from the wing of a duck, manufactured a pen,’ Northup explains, before documenting how one night in his slave-quarters, ‘by the light of the coals, lying upon my plank couch, I managed to complete a somewhat lengthy epistle. It was directed to an old acquaintance at Sandy Hill, stating my condition, and urging him to take measures to restore me to liberty.’2 Northup is soon forced to burn this letter, when the white man he has approached to mail it for him betrays him to his owner. But he refuses to lose faith in the act of letter-writing as the best chance for securing his emancipation, and later confides in a white Canadian named Bass, whose horror at the injustice of slavery results in his agreement to write an epistle on Northup’s behalf to the latter’s Northern friends, William Perry and Cephas Parker. Reproducing this letter – in which Bass implored these men to obtain the kidnapped African American’s ‘free papers’ – within the pages of Twelve Years a Slave, Northup attests that ‘to the body of [this] communication am I indebted for my liberation.’3 Given the distinctive and dramatic constraints on literacy and self-expression faced by enslaved blacks, this narrative might seem to represent the exception rather than the rule when it comes to American epistolary practices in the nineteenth century. Yet while most white Americans could access both stationery and the post office with ease by the middle of that century, they shared Northup’s conception of letter-writing as a means of liberation. The Yale Literary Magazine, for instance, was simply echoing innumerable other publications of the time when, in 1851, it declared that the post office’s ability to facilitate the ‘swift transfer of potent thought’ could be said to embody ‘the Spirit of Freedom.’4 Moreover, the majority of Americans shared Northup’s emphasis on the postal system’s peculiar fusion of secrecy and publicity, and his concern with the material dimensions of letter-writing. ‘[T]he post-office, with its educating energy, augmented by cheapness, [is] guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked in 1862, ‘so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine metre of civilization.’5 11

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Viewed from the twenty-first century, when the form of the letter is often regarded as at best mundanely familiar and at worst hopelessly archaic, such expressions of epistolary faith can appear either hyperbolic or incomprehensible. Yet in implicitly pulling away from each other, these two popular contemporary readings of the letter are in fact opening up a space wherein the past significance of the epistolary for figures like Northup and Emerson can begin to be recovered and understood. The past decade has seen a rapid growth in careful scholarly interrogations of ‘the death of the letter’ alongside more straightforwardly nostalgic mainstream laments for ‘the lost art of letter writing.’6 The combined effect of these analyses, on scholars and on the general public alike, has then been to help to defamiliarize the practices and institutions of epistolarity, to help to expose letter-writing as a distinctive historical phenomenon whose decline ought to make us regard it with fresh eyes. Crucially, the recurring point of reference in almost all of these contemporary diagnoses of the fate of epistolarity is the recent rise of new communicative technologies deemed to have supplanted the letter: email, instant messaging, and tweeting prominent among them. As Elizabeth Hewitt powerfully argues in her Prologue to this book, however, there are at least as many rhetorical and ideological continuities between nineteenth-century letters and twenty-first-century digital correspondence as there are generic and institutional discontinuities. Although analogies between the two modes of communication can only be pushed so far, she suggests, the current media landscape does not just allow us to appreciate anew a time when the letter was a radical and innovative means of social intercourse; such an historical perspective also allows us to view the present moment in a different light. In this respect, as the ‘networked’ theory of the letter outlined by Hewitt in her Prologue indicates, the socio-technological structures generated by twenty-firstcentury media have both fueled and been framed by the increasing scholarly interest in epistolarity during recent years – just as these networks have shaped the concerns of many of the other emergent disciplines, such as book history and Atlantic history, on which Epistolary Studies draws. The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and LetterWriting simultaneously represents a summation and an extension of a major subfield within Epistolary Studies as it has developed over the last two decades. In its approach to nineteenth-century American post and the postal system, it reaffirms and reconsiders the more general critical insights of the field: that the letter is a genre in its own right, with certain distinctive tropes and conventions, yet is also flexible enough to incorporate and be incorporated by other cultural forms; that letters have the potential to be deployed by a remarkably diverse body of writers for purposes ranging from the personal to the political, yet are also uniquely shaped by their readers in ways that can blur the line between privacy and publicity; that letters are expressions of individual sentiments or ideas, often intended for the eyes of only one other person, yet carry many commonly held attitudes through a complex infrastructure of mass distribution; and that while letters can be used to enforce social norms and bind families and nations together in times of turmoil, they can also be used to evade the gaze of authority and create dissident or skeptical communities of various sizes. In all these respects, rather than treating letters as spontaneous, private documents – as was the tendency for much of the twentieth century – the contributors to this book position the letter as a self-conscious artifact which circulates among both friends and strangers, moving readily between manuscript and print, and from there across

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multiple genres (autobiography, essay, travel narrative, poem, polemic, etc.) in ways that often concurrently make and break social ties. In its approach to the more specific issues that scholars of American epistolarity have dwelt on over the last twenty years, meanwhile, this volume also charts the established terrain while laying down new tracks and pointing out neglected paths. Here, the reader will find the distinctive dimensions of the letter and letter-writing as it developed in the newly formed United States being addressed, including: the impact of rapid industrialization and professionalization on the social function of letters and the material world of their composition; the effect that large-scale immigration and internal migration had on the practice of epistolarity; the role that enslaved people and Native Americans assumed or were assigned in relation to the postal system; the influence of epistolary texts and relationships on the effort to further the reformist agendas of Transcendentalism, abolitionism, or the feminist movement; and the uses mail was put to in negotiating America’s often fraught relationship with its former colonial master, Great Britain. What unites all these prominent trends within the American strand of Epistolary Studies is an understanding that, while the U.S. remained very close to previous and concurrent postal cultures in many respects, the canvas over which this culture was stretched was much larger and more dynamic. Throughout the nineteenth century, the letter was the primary form of communication for individuals separated by the nation’s extensive geography, a primacy grounded in mass literacy and the building of a vast postal network, such that America in this period became arguably the most important site for the elaboration of a modern epistolary culture. As has already been indicated, however, our arrival at this understanding of the significance of nineteenth-century American letters and letter-writing has by no means been swift. This is not to say that scholars have simply ignored letters from this period. The correspondence of numerous prominent nineteenth-century writers and politicians was collected and printed shortly after their death, albeit sometimes in expurgated form, with such memorial projects gaining fresh traction in the early twentieth century as new standards of archival research and textual editing took hold, while the 1960s saw a ground-breaking push to gather and publish the letters of marginal social groups – women, immigrants, slaves, workers – whose voices often rarely appeared in print during their lifetimes. For most of the last century, however, this growing mass of material was treated as transparently autobiographical: letters were neutral historical vessels to be mined for personal facts or contextual data. Indeed, a more theoretically sophisticated understanding of nineteenth-century epistolarity (an understanding, incidentally, that does justice to the similar theoretical sophistication of the letters’ original writers and readers) did not emerge until the 1980s. It arose, primarily, from the confluence of three frequently overlapping critical approaches: formalism, feminism, and poststructuralism. The first of these interpretive avenues into the letter developed from a dissatisfaction with the overwhelming emphasis on content prevailing in the by-then well-established body of work on epistolary novels. Janet Gurkin Altman’s Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (1982), for instance (easily the most important and influential of the correctives to this tendency), stressed the need to distinguish letters from other modes of autobiographical writing like diaries and journals in order to apprehend how ‘properties inherent in the letter itself’ shape epistolary fiction.7 Articulating a desire ‘to push a certain kind of formalist reading to its limits on a particularly intriguing “form,” ’

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Altman helped to underline the constructed conventions of letter-writing, while also diagramming a series of innovative ‘models for reading’ that pointed, among other things, to the distinctive temporal, relational, and grammatical dimensions of epistolarity.8 Expanding upon these insights, other critics like Elizabeth MacArthur and John Howland then began to explore such topics as the ambivalent nature of narrative closure in letters, and their paradoxical generation of an aura of spontaneity from within a set of closely defined rules.9 The second major development in Epistolary Studies during this period also grew out of unhappiness with the dominant methods for analyzing epistolary fiction. Setting out to complicate the typical reading of these gynocentric novels as expressions either of unfettered intimacy or severe domestic constraint, at least in part by bringing the letters of real women into play, feminist scholars such as Ruth Perry, Linda Kauffman, and Mary Favret insisted on the ambiguous relationship between privacy and publicity generated by the act of letter-writing.10 In Favret’s words, ‘the practice of correspondence produced subversive and contradictory effects. Conventional literary history tells us . . . that the epistolary tradition in fiction drew upon the familiar letter in order to define . . . the individual’s identifiable and proper place in society . . . Yet this limited notion of the genre does not account for many types of letter.’11 Tracing a ‘transition from private expression to published property’ that ‘pulled the letter out of its fiction of individualism and complicated its “feminine” identity,’ such analyses crucially helped to alert critics to women’s letters as a site for social negotiation and political empowerment.12 And finally, during the same decade, there came, this time from outside the AngloAmerican academy, another critical technique that helped to situate the letter as a richly productive arena for philosophical investigation. Reflecting on the apparently whimisical or banal practices of writing and sending love letters or postcards, poststructuralists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan were able to identify deep-rooted tensions within the Western tradition of writing and its construction of an authorial self.13 More particularly, in the distinctive way that letters mix openness with closure, distance with presence, and convention with intimacy, these scholars found a paradigm for the slipperiness of language itself. ‘To whom do letters belong?’ Derrida asks in The Post Card (1980). ‘The Postal Principle [is a] differential relay, that regularly prevents, delays, endispatches the depositing of the thesis, forbidding rest and ceaselessly causing to run . . . When I enter the post office of a great city I tremble as if in a sacred place, full of refused, promised, threatening pleasures.’14 In rendering letters newly strange and complex as textual objects, figures like Derrida thus also, inadvertently, suggested the basis for a reappreciation of the historical anxieties and ambitions that have traditionally been associated with them (note the echoes above both of Northup’s lost letter, which he watches ‘dissolve into smoke and ashes,’ and of the ‘religious sentiment’ Emerson discovered in the postal system).15 Strikingly, however, with the exception of a few feminist accounts of early national epistolary fiction and some controversial poststructuralist readings of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845), Epistolary Studies as it developed during the 1980s tended to largely ignore American subject matter.16 Indeed, for most critics at this time (and many still today) the home of the golden age of letter-writing was eighteenth-century Europe. This focus only really began to shift in the late 1990s, when a more concerted turn toward New World epistolarity emerged from Americanists working in two complementary disciplines: literary history and cultural history.

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The former approach has been particularly marked by an effort to treat the letters of canonical nineteenth-century writers with as much attention and respect as their published works have been afforded. Observing that ‘the performative, fictive, and textual dimensions of letter writing, and the artifacticity of the personally inscribed holograph, have only recently attracted serious notice,’ William Merrill Decker’s Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (1998), for instance, sought to uncover the self-reflexive artistry at play in the correspondence of Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams.17 While drawing extensively on Derridean notions of the ‘unboundedness, undecidability, and endless complication of the binary opposition of presence to absence,’ Decker’s book has been especially significant for emphasizing ‘two conditions’ of epistolarity ‘not exclusive to America but prominent in American experience’ – namely, geographical distance and mass literacy.18 The first of these factors, Decker argues, meant that ‘meditations on the time and space that divide correspondents’ achieved a profound intensity in the nineteenth-century U.S., while the second factor produced a large number of letter-writers who could ‘at once make use of and think through the structures of the genre.’19 Accordingly, in both cases, America’s epistolary culture can be seen as one teeming with sophisticated proponents of the form, whose missives help to foreground and interrogate the generic and linguistic ambivalences encoded within all letters. Drawing on some of the same literary figures as Epistolary Practices, Elizabeth Hewitt’s Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 (2004), meanwhile, extended existing theories of epistolarity in a different but equally innovative way. Taking up the familiar argument that the supposedly solitary and private act of letterreading or -writing ‘elicits a community of readers,’ Hewitt reframes it in political terms in order to write ‘a national literary history of a particular genre’ – ‘the epistolary form.’20 For American writers struggling to define and maintain a unified identity in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, Hewitt persuasively shows, letters became ‘both practice and . . . model for conceiving of social reciprocity.’21 The ideas of interpersonal connection and mediation generated by the U.S. postal system, although they could be exclusive as well as inclusive, led ‘American authors in the first half-century of nationhood’ to repeatedly turn ‘to the epistolary form as a means by which to theorise the kinds of social intercourse necessary to the articulation of a national identity and a national literature.’22 While both Decker and Hewitt flesh out their claims through close readings of the letters penned by particular literary figures, the cultural histories of nineteenth-century American epistolarity that have developed in tandem with their work take a more synthetic approach that has tended to focus on the habits and institutions of the U.S. mail. The avowed intention of Richard R. John’s important 1995 book Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, for example, ‘is not merely to locate the postal system in the social process, but to explore its role as social process.’23 Thus, although he shares Hewitt’s emphasis on the nineteenth-century American letter as a means of imagining national formation, John views this ideal from the perspective of policymakers and administrators more than from the position of individual letter-writers. Carefully tracing the structural expansion of the postal network, and the ways in which its development shaped significant public controversies touching on everything from religion to slavery, John powerfully reveals how nineteenth-century

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Americans came to believe ‘that communication could create culture’ and ‘that movement of information could spark the movement of ideas.’24 If Spreading the News often foregrounds presidents and postmasters, then David M. Henkin, in his equally significant The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2006), looks more closely at the ordinary citizens whose lives were impacted upon by the growth of the postal system. Stressing how the U.S. mail shifted, in the mid-nineteenth century, from an expensive, localized system designed to distribute political news into a cheap, national system designed to distribute personal letters, Henkin is particularly interested in the ways in which this process ‘facilitated new patterns and forms of intimacy while simultaneously promoting and institutionalizing diverse and dizzying possibilities of anonymous exchange.’25 Rather than setting out to probe the expressive content of letters, as Decker and Hewitt do, Henkin thus concentrates on the ‘material and cultural conditions of their transmission’ in order to draw attention to the broader postal ‘rites and rhythms’ that came to occupy a ‘fixed place in everyday experience.’26 ‘Describing the changes that took place during the middle of the nineteenth century as the emergence of a new postal culture does not imply that those changes took place exclusively in the realm of ideas or that the history of the post is best glimpsed through the study of works of art or symbolic representation,’ Henkin asserts. ‘The new postal culture was a cluster of new practices, attitudes, norms, discussions, and, crucially, habits – of communication, inquiry, and expectation – that grew up around a modern postal system.’27 American Epistolary Studies, accordingly, finds itself at the beginning of the twentyfirst century in a scholarly moment rich with possibilities, as numerous critics take up the challenge issued by Henkin and explore letters and letter-writing in the nineteenthcentury U.S. through a variety of institutional, ideological, epistemological, and material lenses as well as intellectual and literary ones. Indeed, to the sweeping epistolary panoramas painted by Decker, Hewitt, John, and Henkin, among others, one can add a wealth of more finely-grained book-length studies, ranging from David A. Gerber’s incisive account of the correspondence written by British immigrants to North America to Christopher Hager’s pioneering analysis of the letters of the enslaved, and from Marietta Messmer’s compelling excavation of Emily Dickinson’s epistolary corpus to Hilary Wyss’s poignant evocation of the role of letter-writing in Indian missionary schools.28 Equally, too, these monographs have been complemented by collections of essays such as Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris’s Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860 (2009), whose scope – in this case, covering transnational political correspondence, authorial self-making in letter form, periodical letters, and the challenges of editing collections of letters – richly suggests the vibrancy of the field.29 And this is not even to mention the parallel growth in studies of eighteenth-century American letters and letter-writing. Here, scholars such as Konstantin Dierks, Sarah Pearsall, Eve Tavor Bannet, and Lindsay O’Neill have unearthed the integral role of the letter in sustaining, generating and advancing personal, political, and intellectual relationships across the divide of the Atlantic.30 Charting the imperial networks of correspondence that connected – and sometimes disconnected – colonial America and English society and culture, these historians provide a rich body of evidence for the growth of an epistolary sensibility that touched everything from education and furniture to mercantile exchanges and scientific experiments, in ways that should inform any understanding of nineteenth-century epistolarity.

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This book concentrates on that nineteenth-century moment quite simply because it represents the apogee of American epistolary culture, and so reveals many of the long-standing trends and tensions within this culture in their fullest and most defined shape. Accordingly, The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing begins by considering the dramatic expansion of the postal system between the Post Office Act of 1792 and the popularization of the telegraph and the telephone at the end of the century. By 1873, the journalist Louis Bagger was already repeating a truism when he noted that the U.S. mail ‘comprises letters of all sizes, weights, shapes, colors, “cut” of envelope, and degree of cleanliness,’ from ‘the heavy, fat banker’s letter’ to ‘the dainty little lilac- or rose-tinged couvert, directed in a timid lady’s hand,’ and ‘last, but not least, letters without numbers from the kitchen regions, in thin, greasy envelopes.’31 In this respect, the 1845 and 1851 Post Office Acts, which reduced the cost of sending a letter from up to twenty-five cents per sheet, depending on distance, to a mere three cents per half-ounce of posted material, was crucial. But this effort to democratize the U.S. mail would have been futile without a material and institutional infrastructure ready to meet the epistolary demands of the American public. Thus, any description of the emergence of a modern postal culture in America must take into account improvements in the technology of papermaking and innovations in literacy education as well as the spread of transportation networks and the growth of urbanization. Driving all of these changes, one might argue, was the nation’s increasingly dynamic economy. At the start of the nineteenth century the U.S. economy was predominantly localized and agricultural, but by 1890 its manufacturing output had outstripped even that of Great Britain, a transformation that had a profound impact on American epistolary practices – not merely because of the volume of letters now devoted to business, but because of the professionalized, bureaucratic modes of organization that accompanied this shift. In this respect, as fields such as the law, science, history, and journalism began to redefine their intellectual standards and tighten their institutional procedures, letters became more functional in ways that the very people using them often consciously or unconsciously resisted. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the intimate familiarity so often associated with the epistle thus intersected with a wide-ranging discourse of postal anonymity that reflected the larger social changes the United States was undergoing. Tracing these various developments, Part I of this book – Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts – opens with two chapters that consider the technological and commercial factors influencing the nineteenth-century revolution in American epistolarity. Focusing on innovations in the manufacturing of paper and pens across the century, Graham Thompson examines how Americans conceived of and adapted to the changing material world of letter-writing; while Michael Zakim connects these innovations, as well as the pedagogical literature that accompanied them, to the increasingly regimented work practices fostered by American capitalism. As the chapter by David M. Henkin that follows suggests, the postal system itself underwent a similar process of aggregation following the 1845 Post Office Act, as the rise of mass mailing altered the dynamics of what and who could be mailed in radical and sometimes unsettling ways. Turning to other significant institutional settings for the nineteenth-century epistle, the next four chapters in this Part then discuss how letters served as modes of evidence,

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information, and knowledge exchange: recovering a sensational murder trial of the 1830s, Christopher A. Hunter looks at the increasing interrelationship of epistolarity, print, and the law during this period; Robin Vandome’s analysis of the correspondence of a leading scientist, J. Peter Lesley, reveals the tension between professional rigor and personal feeling that was pervading American intellectual life by the end of the century; Alea Henle’s investigation of the collection and preservation of letters by historical societies meditates on the gradually shifting standards of evaluation that were applied to these documents; and in his piece on the rise of the telegraph, Richard R. John argues that, contrary to much scholarly opinion, the letter in fact retained its cultural authority in the face of new media even in an arena like journalism, where the ideal of instantaneous news was much lauded. If each of these four chapters examines the letter within an official context of one kind or another, the final two entries in this Part, on the other hand, consider missives that fell outside the normative institutional and social circuits of the U.S. mail. Here, Matthew Pethers discusses the fate of dead letters, and connects their ambiguous legal status to nineteenth-century accounts of postal bureaucracy and state power; and Leon Jackson offers a ground-breaking study of the complex social function of threatening letters. Taking off from the urge toward fixity and standardization delineated in this section, the next part of The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing moves on to consider the unusually mobile individuals who used the postal system. Geographical distance is the basic enabling condition for letterwriting, of course. The very power of a letter lies in its ability to imaginatively bridge the gaps of physical separation. But in nineteenth-century America this dynamic of absence and presence was especially marked. ‘Our large floating population, and the unsettled, migratory habits of many of our people, make a greater number of . . . letters than there would be in a country inhabited by a more permanent population,’ the postal reformer Pliny Miles observed in 1855.32 In this regard, the market forces that generated new goods and institutions also moved the American people around in dramatic new ways – from village to city, from farm to factory, from east to west. The economic opportunities that men and women of the middle and working classes sought through relocation were, moreover, a major lure for immigrants too. Indeed, following the resumption of large-scale immigration into the U.S. at the end of the 1820s, millions of people from nations as diverse as Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, and China crossed the Atlantic, with a particular peak after 1880, when up to 600,000 individuals entered each year. Like native-born labor migrants, these travelers were keen to correspond with the friends and family they had left behind, even as their experience of new places alienated them from their roots in sometimes profound ways. The widespread demographic redistribution that characterized American society in the nineteenth century in effect gave rise to new epistolary practices and institutions, as individuals sought not only to maintain links with their countries or regions of origin but to insert their competing voices, histories, and languages into the changing landscape of the nation. As the frontier extended to accommodate the restlessness of the American people, so too did the postal system. By 1900, Congress had mandated hundreds of thousands of miles of post roads, and the number of post offices in the U.S. had grown from a mere seventy-five in 1790 to nearly 80,000. Building on the bilateral postal agreements with European nations that it had been entering into since the 1840s, the U.S. too had become

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part of the World Postal Union in 1874, thus reorganizing its transnational mail service on a cheaper and more accessible basis. Even as the geographical parameters of the postal system expanded, however, large numbers of Americans remained excluded from its circuits on the basis of race. Indeed, for Native Americans and African Americans, physical displacement was as much a barrier to letter-writing as a spur to it. The westward acceleration of the frontier, for example, brought with it a newly systematic determination to push Native Americans beyond white settlements – a program clearly articulated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, but also visible in innumerable violent clashes at the personal, state, and federal levels. Where Native Americans were granted access to epistolarity, the intent was often to ‘civilize’ them; a mode of cultural conversion they had to struggle with even as they successfully appropriated letters for their own purposes. In the case of African Americans, entry into the epistolary domain was perhaps all the more challenging. Although the enforced emigration of Africans to America came to an end with the banning of the slave trade in 1807, the mass movement of enslaved subjects within the nation’s borders remained an ever-present reality, and a dramatic indication of the tyrannical control whites exerted over the bodies and minds of their black workers. Despite the active suppression of black literacy, however, the survival of an extensive archive of correspondence authored by enslaved men and women testifies to the way in which they used letters to articulate radical protest, build community relations, maintain family ties, and forge new identities. Indeed, the emancipatory potential of letter-writing would come into its own during the Civil War and the Reconstruction of the South, events that in turn witnessed the relocation of millions of white Americans, who – like their black allies or enemies – inevitably turned to letters in order to deal with absence and loss. In speaking to these patterns within nineteenth-century epistolarity, Part II: Travel, Migration, and Dislocation begins by considering how the geographic expansion of the postal system during this period led to an evolution in American conceptions of the way that human relations could be conducted across space and through time. Paradoxically, William Merrill Decker shows, the letters written by Margaret Fuller, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams to their longed-for partners during cosmopolitan travels abroad evinced more intimacy than might have occurred face to face. For migrant workers, meanwhile, as David M. Stewart argues in the next chapter, whether they were farmhands, gold-prospectors, or mill girls, letters offered the opportunity to both sustain and reconstruct an identity in the face of pervasive social and economic instability. Taking a different methodological avenue into these issues of separation and absence, Emma Moreton’s case study of a particular body of Irish emigrant letters then suggests that computational modes of language analysis can productively reveal the way in which immigrants used the epistolary form to manage and articulate the ongoing experience of homesickness. Equally, Janet Floyd, in her chapter on migrants to the frontier, is concerned with diving deeper into the questions of assimilation and acculturation that have often been asked of the letters they wrote, both by considering some of the neglected tropes that structure these missives (such as discussions of illness) and by reconsidering the psychological issues at stake in them from a broader perspective. Following these initial contributions, this Part of the book then moves on to examine two groups who were routinely marginalized and demeaned – socially, psychologically, physically, and postally – during the nineteenth century. In his wide-ranging account of indigenous epistolarity, Phillip H. Round explores how Native Americans increasingly

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employed letters both to maintain their footing in slippery political territory, and to bridge divisions within self, family, and clan, often by modifying European scriptive conventions; while Ben Schiller’s typology of the letters of the enslaved pays particular attention to how these missives redeployed Southern discourses of honor in order to manipulate or shame white masters. Switching perspectives, Rebecca Fraser’s subsequent chapter looks at these masters more closely through the lens of Sarah Hicks Williams, a Northern bride on a Southern planation, whose letters reveal not only her growing emotional distance from her former home on the eve of the Civil War, but also her obliviousness to the plight of the enslaved. If Williams’ correspondence shows how letters could be used to negotiate and affirm dominant ideologies, the onset of the Civil War threw, of course, such certainties, and the communication circuits along which they traveled, into chaos. Accordingly, Rebecca Weir discusses how, even as the sectional conflict generated a huge upsurge in letter-writing, its disruptiveness reframed traditional understandings of epistolary intimacy and distance in new and vivid ways. Finally, though, in this Part, we see the letter playing an important strategic and symbolic role in the postbellum effort to reunify the nation, as Sarah R. Robbins discusses the uses to which the Northern reformer Ednah Cheney put both personal and printed letters during her drive to establish black schools in the South. Fleshing out the importance of such social and political programs in nineteenthcentury America as a whole, the third section of this book turns to a variety of figures who were closely engaged with the most potent controversies of the period, as well as to those who took on the task of theorizing and explaining the remarkable changes that the nation was undergoing. For all of these individuals, as the contributions to this section make clear, the letter was a vital organizational and philosophical instrument. It is important to recall, for example, that notwithstanding the democratization of the U.S. postal system in the 1840s, the previous function it had been assigned – to distribute political news and to give political actors privileged access to the public – remained prominent. Letters – as Congress had recognized in 1775, when it granted franking privileges to its members – were a remarkably effective means of building ideological consensus and allegiance in a scattered and sometimes defiantly local nation. What happened after the liberalization of postal charges was simply that this opportunity for community-building became available to a larger number of people. As Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in Democracy in America (1835–40), ‘no country in the world has made better use of association than the United States,’ nor ‘applied [it] to a wider range of purposes,’ and central to this proclivity was ‘the postal service – a force for creating powerful intellectual bonds.’33 As a mode of political organization, the nineteenth-century American letter operated in a variety of generic and institutional forms. Familiar letters and letters-in-print could equally be used to solicit favors and donations, to establish and manage committees, or to seek out allies and shame enemies, and each could draw on a range of rhetorical conventions, from the spiritual confession and the educational tract to the polemical essay and the travel narrative. What ultimately united all these epistolary strands, however, was the desire of the reformer or activist to expose some kind of social, sexual, or racial injustice, whether it be to a select few or the nation at large. Letters, in this respect, could be a vessel for dissenting and transgressive ideas, both because they were more open to the general public than almost any other form of writing, and because the U.S. postal system was so decentralized and uncensored by comparison with other nations. Still, not all nineteenth-century letter-writers of an

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interrogative disposition were interested in the interventionist potential of the form. For some, the association of the letter with impermanence and intimate self-reflection made it the ideal vehicle for looking inward, and for developing philosophical relationships detached from the everyday world. Nor were all nineteenth-century letter-writers of an interrogative disposition inclined to dissent in the first place. For some intellectuals, instead, the letter was a means of asserting or negotiating professional authority and developing institutional consensus. The great appeal of the letter for nineteenthcentury Americans thus lay precisely in its adaptability to different intentions. Part III: Politics, Reform, and Intellectual Life starts with Peter S. Onuf’s examination of the late-life correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – which positions their epistolary reflections on the Revolution and the partisan battles of the 1790s within the context of a rapidly shifting early nineteenth-century political landscape – before turning to three major Transcendentalist thinkers. Here, David Greenham investigates Ralph Waldo Emerson’s letters for the light they shed on the emergence of his central philosophical concerns, especially in regard to nature; Magdalena Nerio reflects on Margaret Fuller’s theorization of the feminine voice in her private letters, and connects her self-reflexively experimental use of epistolary form to the challenges she faced in establishing herself as a public intellectual; and finally, Michael Jonik argues that Henry David Thoreau’s correspondence serves a unique function in this writer’s oeuvre, not least because of the way in which he uses it to both articulate and embody his understanding of a good life. The next trio of chapters in this Part then loops back to the political sphere, and take as their subject the fight to abolish slavery. In her entry on Frederick Douglass, Celeste-Marie Bernier explores how this former slave used his letters to negotiate, often ambiguously, the transition between bondage and freedom, and between his private self and his public persona; Sarah Meer, meanwhile, considers Douglass’s epistolary strategies, as evidenced in several of the newspapers he edited during the 1850s, from the perspective of Julia Griffiths, a British reformer and journalist whose published essay-letters became part of the effort to forge antislavery relationships across the Atlantic; and lastly, Fionnghuala Sweeney analyzes the correspondence of Harriet Jacobs in order to delineate the particular challenges that enslaved women confronted when establishing a public voice, as well as the opportunities that opened up for them during the Civil War. That seismic moment in American history leads us to Abraham Lincoln – though not, as Robert Bray makes clear in his chapter on the sixteenth president, Lincoln ‘the Great Emancipator.’ Instead, Bray suggests, from early courtship letters to condolence letters written to the families of dead Union soldiers, Lincoln’s correspondence is marked by a repressed romanticism that sheds powerful light on the personal dimension of his political convictions. Public and private identities are often in tension too in the rest of Part III, which concludes with three pairs of chapters: on nineteenth-century science, feminism and historiography respectively. Martin Halliwell looks at how William James used his correspondence not only to engage with the leading thinkers of his day, but to bridge the growing divide between scientific rationalism and aesthetic experience; while Tina Gianquitto’s illuminating contribution shows how female botanists used letters to play a central, if now forgotten, role in the development of postbellum scientific networks. Next, Elizabeth A. Petrino considers the ways in which Lydia Sigourney subtly used the tendency to associate feminine epistolarity with the domestic sphere to

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extend a socially reformist agenda into the public realm; and Judith A. Allen probes how Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s prolific correspondence became an integral part of her fraught but defiant effort to be recognized as a public intellectual. To finish, Eileen Ka-May Cheng studies the effective use the influential historian Jared Sparks made of letter-writing as a means of asserting ‘objective’ scholarly standards and managing academic differences of opinion, before John C. Orr introduces Henry Adams’ fascinatingly guarded epistolary corpus, and the protean and elusive intellect that populates it. The carefully crafted authorial persona of Adams’ letters serves as an appropriate gateway to the final part of this book, which contemplates the role of the epistle within nineteenth-century American literary culture. The honorific ‘man of letters’ as it was used in the nineteenth century neatly indicates the diverse range of genres over which the most respected writers might be expected to have mastery: poetry, novel, essay, travel narrative, and short fiction, as well as history. And, it would have been assumed, such figures had the ability to write elegant and commanding familiar letters. As the masculine emphasis of the term suggests, the nineteenth-century literary world was highly gendered, with women writers often being associated with the allegedly less serious and less significant subject matter of sentimental domesticity. But although female authors struggled with constraints on their public visibility throughout the century, from the 1820s onward some were increasingly able to parlay the popularity of their works into explicit social critique and a degree of cultural capital. In any case, for men and women alike, the more fundamental challenge presented by the nineteenth-century literary scene was simply to make a living. The professionalization of the American literary marketplace was a slow, complicated and uneven process. One effective tool that aspiring authors did have at their disposal, however, was the letter. Thus, across the correspondence of many nineteenth-century writers, we see them engaging in negotiations over payment, copyright, and promotion, both at home and, increasingly, abroad. Moreover, the postal system itself was vital to the circulation of these writers’ works, especially once Congress lowered the cost of posting magazines in 1825. As useful as authors’ letters can be for gaining insights into the nineteenth-century publishing world, though, one would be well advised to read them with caution. Every letter-writer, after all, projects a selective, artful version of themselves, tailored to the particular subject they are addressing, and in the case of literary-minded epistolarians this projection can often be highly intricate and self-conscious. A correspondent like Emily Dickinson, for example, explicitly acknowledged that the true identity of any individual is elusive. ‘The folks have all gone away – they thought that they left me alone,’ she wrote to Abiah Root in January 1850, ‘they didn’t, and they couldn’t have seen if they had, who should bear me company. Three here, instead of one – wouldn’t it scare them? A curious trio, part earthly and part spiritual two of us – the other, all heaven, and no earth.’34 For some writers, then, letters were an effective means of evading definition, and of estranging or manipulating the person being addressed. For others, however, letters could serve as positive models for an ideal relationship with the reading public, thanks to their aura of intimacy, transparency, and reciprocity. One of the unintended consequences of the nineteenth century’s democratization of the mail, in fact, was that this public could now write directly to their favorite authors, an opportunity many readers (and some writers) seized with both hands. Moreover,

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American authors themselves were not necessarily averse to writing ‘fan’ letters, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, when there was still a strong tendency to look across the Atlantic for cultural validation. While the American vogue for producing epistolary fiction did not last beyond the 1810s, in short, the taste of American fiction-writers for the epistolary remained unshakeable across the century. Part IV: Literary Culture begins with two of the most significant novelists working at the start of that century. Here, Philip Barnard explores the highly performative nature of Charles Brockden Brown’s epistolary oeuvre, and connects the personae adopted therein to Brown’s distinctive theorization of the relationship between history and romance; while Lance Schachterle considers how James Fenimore Cooper used his correspondence both to negotiate a changing literary marketplace and to further his vision of the nation’s cultural and political independence. Importantly, in tracing the transatlantic controversies that Cooper became embroiled in, Schachterle’s contribution introduces a theme that many of the subsequent entries in this Part expand upon. Melissa J. Homestead’s chapter on the epistolary relationship between Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Mary Russell Mitford, for example, finds that the Anglo-American friendship carefully cultivated in their letters ironically disintegrated when they actually met in person. Returning to home soil, Kevin J. Hayes’ analysis of the correspondence between Edgar Allan Poe and his fellow poet Philip Pendleton Cooke shows how the growing tension between professional and amateur conceptions of authorship began to impact upon letter-writing itself. Picking up on the topic of epistolary performativity again, Wyn Kelley then examines the dazzlingly multiple and deliberately baffling series of rhetorical voices that Herman Melville adopted in his letters; before another epistolary tussle is revealingly unearthed in Patricia Dunlavy Valenti’s chapter on Sophia Hawthorne’s travel letters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s variously fascinated and disapproving responses to them. In shifting toward the postbellum era, the second half of this Part starts with Ed Folsom’s appropriately expansive account of Walt Whitman’s correspondence, which powerfully illustrates how the poet used the dialogic nature of the epistolary experience to theorize and enact an intimate relationship with his readers. In Linda Freedman’s chapter on Emily Dickinson’s correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, on the other hand, we see a poet using a range of epistolary personae to carefully distance, as well as engage, a treasured interlocutor. A far less conflicted relationship than that of Dickinson and Higginson emerges in Beth L. Lueck’s chapter on the letters exchanged between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron, which considers how, in contrast to the earlier fate of Sedgwick and Mitford’s friendship, a genuinely sympathetic transatlantic attachment could be forged by the later part of the century. Taking us back toward the letter-form’s public life, Judie Newman’s piece on Louisa May Alcott examines how she reflected upon her familial experiences of letter-writing, as well as upon the evolution of the postal system into a technology of mass communication, in her fiction. Friendship is also the theme, however, of Peter Messent’s contribution on Mark Twain, which ties his correspondence with three confidants to broader shifts within American masculinity and its conception of a range of professional identities. The conflicts within the rapidly changing culture of late-nineteenth-century America are also sharply evident in Maria Orban’s chapter on Charles Chesnutt, which explores how he used letters, both in reality and in fiction, to negotiate the

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social and artistic constraints that still confronted African American writers. Mark Storey’s intention in his chapter on Sarah Orne Jewett, by contrast, is to interrogate the role that letters played in establishing the public image of a major novelist. Carefully tracking the editorial decisions made when Jewett’s letters were posthumously published, Storey argues that the downplaying of her international correspondence has left us with a misleading impression of her as a purely ‘regional’ writer. Henry James’s credentials as a transatlantic writer are, of course, far more widely accepted, but as Michael Anesko’s appraisal of his correspondence suggests, the letters of ‘the Master’ reflect many of the tensions within his career, and had their own rocky route to publication. Finally John Fagg, like Anesko, carries us into the early twentieth century and the stirrings of Modernism, though his subject, by comparison with the prolific epistolarity of James, often struggles to put pen to paper. Stephen Crane’s terse and intermittent correspondence, Fagg compellingly argues, is a symptom both of changing ideals in American masculinity and of the overwhelming pressures facing a newly professionalized generation of writers. Nonetheless, as Fagg also indicates in his chapter, the letter would continue to be an important expressive tool for authors during the twentieth century (just as it would continue to be an important political, social and intellectual instrument). Indeed, as critics such as Linda Kauffman, Anne Bowers, and Sunka Simon have noted, the second half of the twentieth century even witnessed a revival of the epistolary mode in the work of American novelists as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Alice Walker, and Ana Castillo.35 Nonetheless, academic analysis of the role of the letter in twentieth-century American culture and society remains limited relative to the variety and volume of work now taking place on nineteenth-century epistolarity. Despite the generous proportions of this volume, for example, it could not find space for numerous topics on which scholars have already done important research, such as: mail censorship; the general administrative structures of the Post Office; letter-writing instruction at school level; and the formation of international postal agreements.36 Nor could it touch upon the rich epistolary oeuvres of figures such as Washington Irving, Catharine Brown, Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Susan Warner, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, José Martí, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Moreover, while this book helps to steer American Epistolary Studies in numerous innovative directions, it remains for future scholars to pick up on the insights about epistolarity that have recently been developed by critics working on other nations and time periods, whether these be regarding the significance of letters for Hispanic writers, the function of letters as plot devices, or the queer resonances of the postal system.37 Where future scholars will take the field is yet uncertain, of course. But there can be no doubt that, as well as continuing to provoke comparisons and reveal contrasts, our current communications revolution will play a part. For the establishment of online archives of nineteenth-century letters, and the development of digital mapping techniques, have already helped to stimulate broader interest in the American post.38 The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writers too is designed to encourage scholars, students, and the general public to appreciate anew an age when ‘the ability of writing letters’ found ‘an opportunity of frequent exertion and display in every department of business, in every profession and employment, and in all the endearing offices of social relations.’39

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 230. Ibid. Ibid. 276. ‘The Post Office System,’ 336, 337. Emerson, ‘Civilization,’ 11. Stanley, ‘The Death of the Letter?’, 241; Garfield, To the Letter, 1. For other examples of the former trend see Brant, ‘Devouring Time,’ and Haggis and Holmes, ‘Epistles to Emails’; for other examples of the latter trend see O’Connell, For the Love of Letters, and Hensher, The Missing Ink. Perhaps the fullest and most sophisticated comparison of epistolary and electronic communications to date is Esther Milne’s Letters, Postcards, Email. Altman, Epistolarity, 4. Ibid. i, 6. See MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives, and Howland, The Letter Form. See: Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel; Kauffman, Discourses of Desire; and Favret, Romantic Correspondence. Favret, Romantic Correspondence, 12. Ibid. 13. See: Lacan, ‘A Love Letter’; Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; and Derrida, The Post Card. Derrida, The Post Card, 179, 54, 69. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 235. Perhaps the most successful, or at least most productive, effort to produce a historically grounded poststructuralist reading of the postal system is Bernhard Siegert’s Relays. See, for example, Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 110–50, and Muller and Richardson (eds.), The Purloined Poe. Decker, Epistolary Practices, 4. Ibid. 14, 10. Ibid. 22, 12. Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 2, 3. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 2. John, Spreading the News, 24. Ibid. 1. Henkin, The Postal Age, xi. Ibid. 6, 93. Ibid. 5. See: Gerber, Authors of Their Lives; Hager, Word by Word; Messmer, A Vice for Voices; and Wyss, English Letters and Indian Literacies. See Gaul and Harris, Letters and Cultural Transformations. See: Dierks, In My Power; Pearsall, Atlantic Families; Bannet, Empire of Letters; and O’Neill, The Opened Letter. Bagger, ‘The Dead-Letter Office,’ 593. Miles, Postal Reform, 66. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 215, 444. Dickinson, Letter to Abiah Root, 29 January 1850, in Letters, 1: 86. See: Kauffman, Special Delivery; Bowers, Epistolary Responses; and Simon, Mail-Orders. See, respectively: Fuller, Morality and the Mail; Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 65–178; Schultz, ‘Letter-Writing Instruction’; and John, ‘Projecting Power Overseas.’

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37. See, respectively: Venegas, Transatlantic Correspondence; Rotunno, Postal Plots; and Thomas, Postal Pleasures. 38. There are too many online archives of nineteenth-century letters to list here, but readers will find many identified in the apparatus of the chapters that follow. The huge potential of digital mapping is suggested by ‘Geography of the Post’ and ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters.’ 39. The Young Lady’s Own Book, 113.

Works Cited Altman, J. G. (1982), Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Bagger, L. (1873), ‘The Dead-Letter Office,’ Appletons’ Journal, 10: 593–5. Bannet, E. T. (2005), Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820, New York: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. [1977] (1979), A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. R. Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. Bowers, A. (1997), Epistolary Responses: The Letter in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Criticism, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Brant, C. (2006), ‘Devouring Time Finds Paper Toughish: What’s Happened to Handwritten Letters in the Twenty-First Century?’ Auto/Biography Studies, 21: 7–19. Carpenter, D. P. (2001), The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovations in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davidson, C. N. (1986), Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, New York: Oxford University Press. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Derrida, J. [1980] (1987), The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dickinson, E. (1958), The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., ed. T. H. Johnson and T. Ward, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dierks, K. (2009), In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Emerson, R. W. [1862] (2007), ‘Civilization,’ in R. A. Bosco and D. E. Wilson (eds.), The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson – Volume VII: Society and Solitude, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 9–17. Favret, M. (1993), Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters, New York: Cambridge University Press. Fuller, W. (2003), Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Garfield, S. (2013), To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing, New York: Gotham Books. Gaul, T. S., and S. M. Harris, eds. (2009), Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ‘Geography of the Post’ (2015), Spatial History Project, Stanford University, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Gerber, D. A. (2006), Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, New York: New York University Press. Hager, C. (2013), Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haggis, J., and M. Holmes (2011), ‘Epistles to Emails,’ Life Writing, 8: 169–85.

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Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hensher, P. (2012), The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, New York: Faber & Faber. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Howland, J. (1991), The Letter Form and the French Enlightenment: The Epistolary Paradox, New York: Peter Lang. John, R. R. (1995), Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. John, R. R. (2015), ‘Projecting Power Overseas: U.S. Postal Policy and International StandardSetting at the 1863 Paris Postal Conference,’ Journal of Policy History, 27: 416–38. Kauffman, L. S. (1986), Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fiction, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kauffman, L. S. (1992), Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lacan, J. [1973] (1982), ‘A Love Letter,’ in J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, trans. J. Rose, New York: Norton, 149–61. MacArthur, E. J. (1990), Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form, Princeton: Princeton University Press. ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ (2013), Stanford University, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Messmer, M. (2001), A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Miles, P. (1855), Postal Reform: Its Urgent Necessity and Practicability, New York: Stringer & Townsend. Milne, E. (2010), Letters, Postcards, Emails: Technologies of Presence, New York: Routledge. Muller, J. P., and W. R. Richardson, eds. (1987), The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Northup, S. (1853), Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, Auburn, NY: Derby and Miller. O’Connell, J. (2013), For the Love of Letters: The Joy of Slow Communication, London: Short Books. O’Neill, L. (2015), The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pearsall, S. M. S. (2008), Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Late Eighteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press. Perry, R. (1980), Women, Letters, and the Novel, New York: AMS Press. ‘The Post Office System as an Element of Modern Civilization’ (1851), The Yale Literary Magazine, 16: 333–9. Rotunno, L. (2013), Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840–1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schultz, L. M. (2000), ‘Letter-Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Schools in the United States,’ in D. Barton and N. Hall (eds.), Letter Writing as a Social Practice, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 109–30. Siegert, B. [1993] (1999), Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. K. Repp, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Simon, S. (2002), Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Stanley, L. (2015), ‘The Death of the Letter? Epistolary Intent, Letterness and the Many Ends of Letter-Writing,’ Cultural Sociology, 9: 240–55.

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Thomas, K. (2012), Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters, New York: Oxford University Press. Tocqueville, A. [1835–40] (2004), Democracy in America, ed. O. Zunz, trans. A. Goldhammer, New York: Library of America. Venegas, J. L. (2014), Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wyss, H. (2012), English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. The Young Lady’s Own Book: A Manual of Intellectual Improvement and Moral Deportment (1832), Philadelphia: Key, Mielke & Biddle.

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1 FROM MIND TO HAND: PAPER, PENS, AND THE MATERIALITY OF LETTER-WRITING Graham Thompson

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n 26 December 1808, Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to his nine-year-old granddaughter, Cornelia Randolph, congratulating her on ‘having acquired the invaluable art of writing.’1 Now, the President told her, he could ‘converse with an absent friend, as if present.’2 The benefit to Cornelia of her new-found skill, Jefferson quickly pointed out, was of a different order, though. ‘I rejoice that you have learnt to write,’ he stated, ‘for as that is done with a goose-quill, you now know the value of a goose and of course you will assist [your sister] Ellen in taking care of the half dozen very fine grey geese which I will send.’3 Jefferson himself wrote over 20,000 letters during his lifetime. A quill, carefully used and maintained, might last for a week; so having a supply of quills close to hand was a necessity for the enthusiastic letter-writer. Jefferson met this demand in presidential style: the geese his slave, Davy, delivered to Cornelia and Ellen came from the flock he maintained to supply his own writing needs. Jefferson was not a traditionalist in his letter-writing habits, however. His geese were evidence of a man who took his writing tools seriously, but one who also quested after the perfect writing machine. Although he took pleasure in sharing with Cornelia a goose’s value he was also a great advocate of new writing equipment that would help him while ‘drudging at the writing table’ composing letters, as was his custom, from dawn to lunchtime.4 He had already piloted an early version of the polygraph to make copies of his outgoing correspondence, and by the time he wrote to Cornelia in late 1808 he was using not quills but the steel-nibbed pens made and supplied to him by Peregrine Williamson of Baltimore. Pens of this kind would ultimately make Jefferson’s geese obsolete. Advertising his ‘Celebrated Elastic Three Slit Metallic PEN’ in the New-York Evening Post in March 1809, Williamson included this endorsement from the President: ‘It is certainly superior to any metallic pen I have ever seen, and will save a great deal of trouble and time employed in mending the quill pen.’5 The pens answered his needs so perfectly, Jefferson had told Williamson, that ‘I . . . now indeed use no other kind.’6 Owning his own geese made Jefferson unusual. And his status as President meant he could take his pick of inventions and become an early adopter of new technology. But if in these ways Jefferson was atypical, in another way he was in much the same position as other early nineteenth-century American letter-writers: all found themselves on a threshold between older and newer material economies of letter-writing. Many 31

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of the tools that dominated letter-writing in Jefferson’s day would become objects of antiquarian interest by the end of the nineteenth century, as a swathe of technological developments altered the relations between letter-writers and the paper and pens through which they communicated. Writing has always been a material practice and continues to be so even in the digital age. Human bodies interact with physical tools to turn thoughts into scripts for readers. But this materiality manifests itself in different ways at different historical moments. Jonathan Goldberg, for instance, has shown how pedagogical penmanship manuals in early modern Europe, when writing was an elite practice, helped produce subjects fit for systems of power and domination, while Christina Lupton has argued that pen and paper it-narratives in the eighteenth century, when a burgeoning middle class entered the writing market, self-consciously brought the materiality of writing into view and undermined the stability of any straightforward connection or analogy between body and text.7 If this work speaks to specific historical instances in which mind, body, and text interact, however, it does so in a context where the actual materials with which writers and readers were engaging remained more or less unchanged. As Lupton points out, the eighteenth-century authors she examines were primarily fascinated with the mediation of their texts: ‘They invite readers to think about the long journey that brings a published text to hand, imagining impressions made by the printer on the page; the way pages are bound, or unbound; and the way books and papers are advertised, consumed, and, in possible futures, surfeited and recycled.’8 This self-conscious treatment of mediation certainly did not disappear in the nineteenth century. But writers now also attended more closely to the manufacture and status of the writing materials that were changing so dramatically around them, as centuries-old traditions were swept away by new products and techniques. At the century’s beginning, American letter-writers communicated on hand-made paper produced in much the same way it had been for centuries before in China, Japan, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Fibrous matter of varying kinds – linen and cotton rags, grass, tree bark – was soaked in water and mashed and beaten by hand to form a thin pulp. Papermakers would then dip a wooden-framed mesh or mold into the pulp and shake the frame to remove excess water, so that the pulp solidified to form a wet sheet. Removed and dried, the sheet was ready for coating, or sizing. Applying starch, animal glue or gelatin reduced the sheet’s absorbency and allowed a letter-writer’s ink to sit legibly on the paper’s surface. Like Cornelia Randolph, most early nineteenth-century letter-writers still applied that ink with a quill, the ubiquitous writing implement for 1,500 years in Europe after it replaced the reed favored by the Romans. Like the geese from which they were plucked, quills were often awkward implements with which to work. They were instruments one needed to dress and prepare before use. Jefferson could not simply go out, pluck a quill from a goose and return straight to his writing desk. The quill first had to sit in hot sand, which made it less brittle and more flexible; only then could one remove feathers and barbs and carefully carve a nib, which itself often needed ongoing maintenance with a pen knife. In contrast, by the end of the nineteenth century most paper was no longer made by hand, and hands rarely gripped quills. Letter-writers instead wrote on paper made by some of the most complex machines of the industrial age, capable of producing 500 feet of paper per minute.9 Ink then flowed onto this machine-made paper from mass-produced, factory-made steel-nibbed pens. The earlier dip pen Jefferson used

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and endorsed, and which replicated in more durable form the feather quill, eventually developed into the fountain pen, which had its own reservoir of ink. From the 1870s onward, letter-writers also started to make use of typewriters, while the guarantor of a letter’s privacy was no longer sealing wax but the mass-produced envelope carried by a postal service revolutionized by cheap prepaid postage stamps and the railways. The new material economy of letter-writing was, in short, the result of a ceaseless stream of technical, legal, and cultural innovation. The full impact of these technologies on the consciousness of nineteenth-century letter-writers is beyond the scope of this chapter, of course, but it is possible to register and describe the scale and nature of these changes and to take stock of the ways in which writers themselves experienced and differentiated the new materials with which they now interacted: materials – like paper – that were ostensibly similar and served the same function as always, but whose physical constitution had changed fundamentally; and materials – like steel pens – that were entirely different and whose evolution, dogged by mechanical imperfections, often made the arrival of modernity a source of frustration. The continual refinement of writing materials and the technologies generating them ensured that nineteenth-century letter-writers faced more changes than any other letter-writers before them. If not entirely comparable to the epochal late twentieth-century shift when digital superseded analog communication, then, such changes do nonetheless mark a radical break with letter-writing technologies of the eighteenth century. Paper production in nineteenth-century America, for example, followed an exponential curve. In 1810, hand-making methods produced paper with a value of $2.6 million, or 2.5 per cent of U.S. manufacturing output. But over the course of the century production increased 900-fold. By 1899 paper manufacturers were making sixty pounds of paper for every man, woman, and child in the country, or over two million tons.10 The machines that made this expansion possible were the result of technological advances in France, Britain, and the United States. The principal advantage of a machine was that it could make paper more quickly, and in longer and wider lengths; the size of hand-made paper was always limited by the papermaker’s arm span, since they needed to hold a wooden frame, and output could only proceed one sheet at a time. Nicolas Louis Robert, who worked in the office of a paper mill at Essonnes in France during the final decade of the eighteenth century, was the first to put the idea for a papermaking machine into practice. Robert’s machine never went into commercial production, though, and the baton of invention soon moved to London, where the engineer Bryan Donkin adapted and improved Robert’s machine with funding from the stationers Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier. At the same time, meanwhile, another British stationer, John Dickinson, developed an alternative machine. Patents for both followed in 1807 and 1809 respectively. These were the machines that would come to completely transform the capacity of the papermaking industry on both sides of the Atlantic.11 Thomas Gilpin installed the first machine in America, based on Dickinson’s design, in a paper mill near Philadelphia in 1817; and in 1827, Henry Barclay imported a machine built by Bryan Donkin to his mill in Saugerties, New York. Such was the take-up of papermaking machines that by 1845, out of more than 400 mills in the United States, only two still made paper by hand.12 That stationers funded and developed papermaking machines suggests they understood the potential market for paper products if only they could manufacture sufficient

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supply, and indeed they proved reliable oracles. Between 1840 and 1860, the number of letters carried by the U.S. Post Office rose from twenty-seven million to 161 million.13 The total number of items handled by the postal service in 1900 stood at over seven billion; and the number of post offices through which this material passed reached over 75,000 by the end of the century, compared to 903 in 1800.14 If writing in early modern Europe was an elite practice, and in eighteenth-century Britain and America an increasingly middle-class activity, the nineteenth century brought letter-writing to the masses. The proliferation of cheap, machine-made paper supported increasing literacy rates and long-distance communication; the same year Gilpin installed his mill, the Philadelphia-based Poulson’s Daily Advertiser was printed on the paper it produced, and paved the way for the tens of thousands of other newspapers and magazines that eventually disseminated a mass culture across the United States. New York City’s dominant publishing industry – one of the growing metropole’s most important areas of economic activity – relied on machine-made paper from all over New England; and the new cohort of clerks finding employment in law, business, retail, and government bureaucracies put to work, using paper, the reading and writing skills they hoped would secure their upward mobility. As it rolled out of mills into towns and cities and circulated across the nation on post-roads and railways, paper covered and stuffed nineteenth-century America. American letter-writers then responded to this proliferation of paper in different ways, with many drawing explicit attention to the material on which they corresponded. Sometimes they found paper an inferior substitute for face-to-face correspondence. Writing from London in 1837, for example, Thomas Carlyle told Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘I have been here since September: evidently another little “chapter” or paragraph, not altogether inert, is getting forward. But I must not speak of these things. How can I speak of them on a miserable scrap of blue paper? Looking into your kind eyes with my eyes, I could speak: not here.’15 Other letter-writers, meanwhile, mapped their emotions against the materials on which they communicated. William Dean Howells carefully selected which correspondents he wrote to on larger sheets of paper, one of whom was Henry James. ‘I hope you’ll be properly affected by the size of this sheet,’ he told James in 1873, ‘its extent is an emblem of my friendship for you, for I’m reducing the size of my notepaper generally.’16 James surely understood the connection between emotion and paper. As a young man he had written to his friend Thomas Sergeant Perry in 1864 that ‘your second letter quite put me to blush. (If you examine my paper with Willie’s microscope you will see that it reflects a faint ruby tinge.)’17 And an older James later apologized to Edmund Gosse in heightened terms for not replying to a letter more quickly. ‘I have pressed your letter to my bosom again and again,’ he wrote, ‘and if I’ve not sooner expressed to you how I’ve prized it, the reason has simply been that for the last month there has been no congruity between my nature and my manners . . . A crisis overtook me some three weeks ago from which I emerge only to hurl myself on this sheet of paper and consecrate it to you.’18 In these examples writers use the paper on which they write to dramatize a range of feelings – friendship, embarrassment, consecration. Just as a blank sheet can carry words with different messages, so the paper itself is endlessly metaphorical. But not all paper was created equal. Carlyle was notoriously pessimistic about the proliferation of paper, both in what he described as ‘THE PAPER AGE’ leading up to the French Revolution, and in his own contemporary Britain.19 In both cases,

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he argued, the mass production of paper – for currency and for books – resulted in a society without material substance. Writing to his wife in August 1852, Carlyle thus dismissed the new materials to which he had access as a letter-writer: ‘My malison too upon improved paper and inks! I declare all writing has grown disgusting to me with such an everfluctuating never-suiting apparatus as one now gets!’20 After telling Emerson, in December 1847, that he was glad to see his handwriting again, Carlyle had commended the ‘beautiful paper and print’ of the first issue of the Massachusetts Review.21 But a decade later, he was still trying to find a suitable medium on which to write letters. Writing to Frederic Chapman, he confessed that ‘this kind of paper, is to me much the pleasantest; but my experiments are not yet completed; and indeed I fled from some kinds (with a sort of terror) to my safe dim old straw-paper again! I will not fix on any at pres[en]t, lest I get bit when trying it on the great scan.’22 The care he took in finding the right paper resembles a musician trying to find the perfect instrument. Even when he found something agreeable, though, there was no eureka moment. In an 1860 letter to his regular paper supplier, Parkins & Gotto, for example, he declares: ‘So far as I can see, this Paper is about identical with the old favourite kind, – at any rate, is nearer it than we have a chance to come other wise; – and I am very glad and thankful that you have found it. You may with very great confidence order me 9/ worth of it; to begin with, and complete my experimenting upon.’23 One might reasonably suspect that for Carlyle the ‘experimenting’ never stopped. Not all nineteenth-century correspondents were as idiosyncratic as Carlyle, and it would be a mistake to assume that letter-writers in general found it necessary to remark self-consciously on the materials with which they wrote. People, inevitably, grow quickly accustomed to new media. But Carlyle’s sensitivity to different kinds of paper does hint at one of the effects of an industry producing vast quantities of paper for a huge variety of different purposes and purchasers: namely, the emergence of a consumer market where distinction and not just utility was a significant driver in the demand for and supply of paper. This development was a new stage in the history of letter-writing, one that required, as Konstantin Dierks has put it, ‘a cultural step – another kind of modernity, one more refined than practical – made only at the end of the eighteenth century.’24 In this world, Dierks writes, ‘quills were no longer just quills, ink no longer just ink, sealing wax no longer just sealing wax. It would increasingly matter where they came from and who made them.’25 This revolution in stationery was part of the new material economy that nineteenth-century letter-writers found themselves occupying, and so accordingly they were sometimes sensitive to the material they selected to communicate with particular recipients. On 8 January 1852, for instance, Herman Melville sat down in his brother Allan’s New York City home to reply to a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife Sophia. Although now lost, the tenor and contents of Sophia’s missive are evident from Melville’s response. He offers thanks for her ‘highly flattering letter’ and is gratified and ‘amazed’ that she finds satisfaction in ‘that book’ – the recently published Moby-Dick (1851) – given that ‘as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea.’26 He even flatters the wife of his now distant friend (the Hawthornes had recently moved more than 100 miles away from Melville’s home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts) by commenting that her ‘spiritualizing nature’ helps her ‘see more things than other people,’ including the ‘subordinate allegories’ of which Melville admits he himself was unaware when writing his salty tale of leviathan.27 Yet before this flattery, and before inquiring later

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in the letter about the Hawthornes’ new life in eastern Massachusetts, Melville signals the care he has taken over his reply and the character of his own response by invoking a scene that occurred in advance of him writing. ‘I have,’ he notes in the letter’s opening line, ‘hunted up the finest Bath I could find, gilt-edged and stamped, whereon to inscribe my humble acknowledgment.’28 In her hands Sophia thus found herself holding paper that Melville reserved only for the most honored recipients. Words alone are not sufficient for him to make clear the esteem in which he holds Sophia and her judgments on his critically failing novel; he means for the paper conveying his feelings to also serve this purpose. Importantly, Melville’s letter offers a glimpse into a nineteenth-century world where the material that facilitated communication could be as important as the message written and relayed upon it. Melville clearly hopes that the paper on which he writes might make up the deficit between his ‘humble’ words and the gratitude he wants to convey at this difficult moment in his writing career. The quality of the paper, as much as the words he inscribes upon the page, is meant to express the thoughts and feelings triggered by Sophia’s letter; the material of communication is meant to reinforce or even exceed the typographical message communicated. Melville’s letter testifies to a new economy of letter-writing in the nineteenth century marked by a consumer culture of material distinction. While the eighteenth century introduced and adapted aspirant middle-class communicators in America and Britain to the practicalities of letter-writing through a welter of instruction manuals whose utilitarian aim was technical mastery, the nineteenth century made letter-writers the beneficiaries of the ‘refined’ modernity Dierks identifies, where distinguishing between ‘the finest Bath’ and other kinds of paper was a measure of mindful feeling and communication at the same time as it was a matter of consumer choice. If such distinctions were increasingly widespread on both sides of the Atlantic, however, American and British paper users did not occupy quite the same consumer market until later in the nineteenth century. Nearly all paper made in America and Britain until the 1860s came from recycled linen and cotton rags, and the enormous expansion in paper production saw a corresponding increase in the demand for these materials. Rag picking was a common occupation in most large nineteenth-century cities, and rags were imported and exported in a competitive international market. In the United States, though, unlike Britain before 1855, imported rags attracted no import duties. Saddled too with relatively high taxes on paper production, which did not exist in the United States, British consumers complained they were paying too much for their paper, that it was too scarce, and that they had much less choice than their American counterparts. Harriet Martineau was one such complainer. ‘In the more thickly inhabited parts of the United States,’ she remarked in an 1854 essay in Household Words, ‘the inhabitants use three times as much paper per head as we British do – three times as many pounds weight per head even though the three millions of slaves are included, who cannot write or read.’29 And not only did they have more paper, they had better quality and more varied paper compared to Britain: Our American newspapers come to us in wrappers of brown and yellow, so tough, as never, by any accident, to arrive with the smallest rent in the edge, and bearing the ink as well as any paper whatever . . . Our letters come to us in envelopes of pale yellow, gray, or green, – perfectly serviceable, and rather

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pretty than not . . . The British manufacturers complain that we, their customers, are saucy about paper, and that we will use none but the whitest. We must have white envelopes, they say, a white surface for our washing bills, and snowy missives for the butcher and fishmonger. We, on the other hand, declare that we have never had a chance of showing a preference. Give us the option between white envelopes and tinted, at a difference of a few pence in the hundred, and see whether we do not buy the cheaper sort!30 Martineau’s damning comparison of the Old and New World was part of a larger campaign to end fiscal disincentives – the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ (which also included stamp duty and taxes on newspapers) – that many Britons believed acted as a brake on the circulation of ideas and education.31 But for Charles Dickens, in whose journal Martineau’s essay appeared, as for Melville, there was a more interesting and complex story to tell about rags and paper. Dickens and Melville are the two most famous writers to have visited paper mills during the nineteenth century, and they produced some of the most imaginative treatments of the new world of paper after encountering at first hand the industrial technologies of papermaking. Dickens visited a paper mill in Kent during 1850 with Mark Lemon, the journalist and founding editor of Punch and The Field. Together they published an account of this visit in Household Words in August of the same year, while in Our Mutual Friend (1854) Dickens would go on to make a paper mill a key location in the novel’s development of plot and theme. Melville, meanwhile, took a trip from his Pittsfield home to a mill in Dalton, Massachusetts, in January 1851. He used a paper mill as the setting for the second half of ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,’ a story published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in April 1855. While Dickens made his visit out of curiosity, Melville’s trip was entirely practical – he bought the paper on which he finished writing Moby-Dick. What fascinated and captivated both writers above all else, however, was the transformation of rags into usable paper using what Dickens described as a ‘wonderful machine,’ located in what Melville described as a ‘most wonderful factory.’32 For both Dickens and Melville, rags symbolized a connection between human bodies and paper, and both writers make a point of elaborating on this connection. On reaching the Dartford paper mill, for instance, Dickens’ journalistic account changes dimension. The narrator does not just watch the process of papermaking as a guide takes him around the mill; in a strange metamorphosis, he becomes the raw material used to make paper. ‘My conductor leads the way into another room,’ he writes, and, ‘I am to go, as the rags go, regularly and systematically through the Mill. I am to suppose myself a bale of rags. I am rags.’33 Following this startling declaration, the reader then follows the production of paper from the perspective of the rags themselves: ‘I find that I am changed to gruel – not thin oatmeal gruel, but rich, creamy, tempting, exalted gruel! . . . And now, I am ready to undergo my last astounding transformation, and be made into paper by the machine.’34 In Melville’s fictional account of his visit, too, people become rags, albeit in a slightly different way. A piece of scrap paper bearing the narrator’s name merges with the raggy pulp as it travels through the papermaking machine, and the narrator also imagines that the shirts of a group of London bachelors, with whom he spends the first part of the story, might be the shirts he watches being readied for pulping in the mill’s rag room, and out of which the paper

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is made. Watching this paper dropping off the end of the machine, Melville’s narrator imagines the purposes ‘without end’ for which its purchasers will use it.35 For both Dickens and Melville, the human connections between paper’s raw materials, its production and its later use make watching papermaking an edifying sight. The sense of positive transformation in Dickens’ account is palpable: ‘Oh what can I say of the wonderful machine, which receives me, at one end of a long room, gruel, and dismisses me at the other, paper! . . . May all the Paper that I sport with, soar as innocently upward as [a] paper kite, and be as harmless to the holder as the kite is to the boy!’36 Our Mutual Friend continues this thought process and, according to Katherine Inglis, ‘imagines material and spiritual renewal through the literal and metaphoric operation of its paper-mill.’37 Whereas for Carlyle the mass production of paper and print is trapped in a cycle where dirty rags are transformed back into the dustheaps that provide the raw materials for yet more paper and print, in Dickens’ view the paper mill stands in ‘opposition to the putrid city.’38 In the river that provides the mill’s driving force and in the dustheaps that provide its raw materials, ‘the twin symbols of the city are renewed and redeemed.’39 Melville’s depiction of papermaking is rather more disturbing than Dickens’. The women who tend the ‘inscrutable intricacy’ of the papermaking machine in ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ go to death, the narrator imagines, ‘through [the] consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life.’40 Yet despite this, Melville still exhibited an admiration for paper akin to Dickens’ following his visit to the mill. He gave gifts of the paper he purchased to his family, and in a letter to Evert Duyckinck, written a few days after the trip to Dalton, he annotated the maker’s stamp on the paper: ‘A great neighborhood for authors, you see, is Pittsfield.’41 What is more, he also imagined, in a slightly later letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, having his own paper mill built beside his house, which would provide ‘an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk’ upon which he could write ‘a thousand – a million – billion thoughts.’42 The uses ‘without end’ to which writers put paper make ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ almost a paean to paper’s possibilities.43 The letter to Sophia Hawthorne mentioned above is an early scene in the same drama. Melville’s and Dickens’ accounts of the nineteenth-century paper mill remain well known, but paper’s ubiquity also saw many other writers turn their attention to the history of this product and its place in a continuum of communication history. There were sober accounts, like R. R. Bowker’s essay for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1887, which appeared in a series about ‘Great American Industries,’ and used facts and figures to explain the chemistry of papermaking.44 And there were more evangelical accounts, like Schele de Vere’s essay for Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1868. De Vere, a professor of modern languages at the University of Virginia for over fifty years, wrote an article that carried on the themes of transformation established by Dickens and Melville, but ratcheted up by several notches the depiction of paper’s sublimity. Paper, for Vere, was not just the practical successor to the rocks, pyramids, obelisks, and tablets of the ancients, but their spiritual heir as well. Nature’s capacity to reuse materials is nowhere better exemplified, he argues, than when she ‘takes up the foul and tattered rags that are disdainfully thrown aside by the poorest among us, and changes them into pure, white tablets, on which are written the wisdom of Man and the truth of God.’45 Dirty ragpickers may live in hovels and in poverty, and yet the rags they collect ‘become precious jewels,’ such that the ragpickers themselves

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‘are humble servants in the mightiest cause.’46 After a history lesson on paper’s origins and a description of the machine-making process, Vere then concludes that paper is ‘one of the powers that rule the day; giving work to the lowest and to the highest, drying the tears of the poor by easy employment, and enabling the genius of the artist to mould the loftiest conceptions in pliant material.’47 Judgments like this suggest that even when it becomes a mass-produced everyday object, paper still retains a preternatural quality that exceeds its lowly origins. When people wrote about steel and gold-nibbed pens, on the other hand, homages in this mode were much rarer. Latecomers on the writing scene, fountain pens had many advantages over goose quills and dip pens, and they eventually made available to the masses an industrial-grade, durable writing implement with which to compose the letters filling the American postal service. But loyal advocates of the fountain pen were hampered by the Gradgrinderly nature of their praise. Thus in an essay from a five-part series on cheap modern products (of which the other four were matches, globes, eggs, and tea) originally published in Household Words and then reprinted in Harper’s, Charles Knight wrote of the steel pen: ‘We could almost fancy some analogy between the gradual and decided improvement of the steel pen – one of the new instruments of education – and the effects of education itself upon the mass of the people. An instructed nation ought to present the same gradually perfecting combination of strength with elasticity.’48 What chiefly attracted people to the new pens was their reliability, practicality, and cheapness. ‘Eureka! Eureka!’ a contributor to the Knickerbocker declared in 1855, ‘we have found it at last! A Fountain Pen, that will write for hours without once dipping in an ink-stand . . . which writes with the elasticity of a quill . . . and lastly, which is decidedly handsome.’49 This was Newell Prince’s Protean fountain pen, the first commercially successfully fountain pen in the United States and one often described in adverts as the ‘ne plus ultra’ for writers.50 Indeed, at mid-century, Prince’s Protean did surpass all other pens. When Anna Hope lost her railway trunk while traveling, she wrote in a letter to The Ohio Farmer in May 1856 that she regretted the ‘loss of her usual fountain pen more than of all else the trunk contained.’51 By the time the railroad company reunited her with her ‘precious pen,’ however, she had already moved on and found a much better replacement in the Protean.52 Comparing the old pen to a ‘faithful friend’ now abandoned, she consigned it to a desk drawer: ‘I have carefully covered it in note paper that I may not see it, and tempt it to reproach me.’53 With enough ink to last between three and ten hours, the Protean is ‘a great convenience,’ Hope suggests, to ‘tax gatherers, and all other dignitaries who now go about with a rusty pen, and a bottle of ink in their pockets.’54 Chief among the Protean’s qualities, a contributor to the New Englander and Yale Review added in the same year, was that it facilitated the best style of freeflowing writing and could match the ‘free flow of thought’ and ‘the concentration and glow’ of a writer’s mind.55 Ultimately, and again in the spirit of Gradgrind, the fountain pen is seen as ‘an economist of time, soon repaying . . . its original cost.’56 While writers readily acknowledged the benefits of the fountain pen, then, there was nothing like the same affection for the implement as there was for the transformative, spiritual nature of paper. One of the problems with fountain pens was the implicit weakness of their design. For all the praise of the Protean, the basic design of the fountain pen would be constantly modified over the second half of the nineteenth century. The Scientific American

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carried endless new designs for supposedly improved versions of it.57 And as late as July 1913, in a review of the fountain pen’s development and the relative merits of those available, W. J. Ghent complained that the American market was filled with pens that were ‘entirely worthless.’58 Most did not regularly fulfill their basic and muchadvertised ‘sure-shot’ function and make a mark the moment the nib touched paper. ‘I have never yet had a pen,’ Ghent writes, ‘and I have sampled all of them, which did not at some time refuse to work right.’59 Flooding was one of the commonest problems, but pens were also susceptible to the heavy hand of a writer who pressed too hard; to hardening ink if they were left unused for a time; and to warped reservoirs if, during cleaning, the owner used water that was too hot. Fountain pens, in short, were temperamental, and were as likely to disrupt the flow of thought from mind to paper as they were to provide a frictionless conduit. This temperamentally exacerbated another aspect of the fountain pen that made it more difficult to love. Ambrose Bierce memorably defined the quill as ‘an instrument of torture yielded by a goose and commonly wielded by an ass’ – with the rider that while the quill was now obsolete, ‘its modern equivalent, the steel pen, is wielded by the same everlasting presence.’60 But writing also continued to be physically trying in the age of the fountain pen. Letter-writers were thus much more willing to valorize paper than pens, because pens more readily marked the drudgery or pain of writing itself. Paper is all promise, and it is the thing on which one’s thoughts and ideas eventually remain in their final form once the pain of composition is hidden or forgotten. Pens, on the other hand, are much more mundane implements upon which writers must expend energy in order to move nibs across paper. As Henry James put it to Edmund Gosse in 1894, ‘my “holiday” is no holiday and I must drive the mechanic pen.’61 Moreover, in the expending of energy, pens interfere with thought and communication. In 1860, to his neighbour Sarah Morewood, Herman Melville noted apologetically but bluntly and without elaboration, of the short letter he had written: ‘Very scratchy pen.’62 And in expressing dissatisfaction with his novel Redburn (1849) to Evert Duyckinck, he used terms that suggest an evil haunting of the pen he had used to write it: ‘I hope I shall never write such a book again – Tho’ when a poor devel writes . . . perching on his pen & diving in his inkstand – like the devels about St: Anthony – what can you expect of that poor devel [sic passim].’63 Certainly, Meville never blamed ‘devels’ for interfering with the paper in which he took such delight. For letter-writers born in the middle of the nineteenth century, the effort to keep up with the latest developments in writing technology could be both difficult and liberating. Late in life, for example, Henry James found himself struggling with some new-fangled innovations. To Edith Wharton in 1908 he wrote: ‘I am trying to make use of an accursed “fountain” pen – but it’s a vain struggle; it beats me, and I recur to [a] familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.’64 But writing of any sort had long been painful to James; rheumatic lameness in his hands had already forced him to employ a secretary, to whom he often dictated his texts, including letters. Thus, from Italy, he wrote to Frances Morse in June 1897: ‘The voice of Venice, all this time, has called very loud. But it has been drowned a good deal in the click of the typewriter to which I dictate and which, some months ago, crept into my existence through the crevice of a lame hand and now occupies in it a place too big to be left vacant for long periods of hotel and railway life.’65 Judging from his letters, it appears that James had only fleeting regrets about leaving the pen behind for the typewriter.

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To Gaillard Lapsley he wrote a year later that he was ‘so stricken as to be incapable of holding a pen and to be reduced to this ugly – by which I mean this thoroughly beautiful – substitute.’66 And to Ariana Curtis he declared: [D]on’t pity me for my lame wrist, which is a combination of native imbecility and acquired rheumatism, but which is also what is called a blessing in disguise; inasmuch as it had made me renounce for ever the manual act, which I hate with all the hatred of natural inaptitude, and have renounced for ever, to devote myself in every particular to dictation. The latter does not hamper me at all: in letters quite the reverse, and in commerce with the Muse so little that I foresee the day when it will be a pure luxury.67 Forced by physical circumstance, James found dictation the most satisfactory way to ease the flow of words from mind to page. Delegating the writing process to an amanuensis, he cut out the ‘accursed “fountain” pen’ and with it the mechanical exertion of writing; and the major novels he produced after 1900 would suggest that switching to the ‘pure luxury’ of dictation was a change he made for the better. It would take another century, but the typewriter hammering out James’s thoughts through the fingers of a secretary presage the digital age of the virtual keyboard. And the fountain pen’s idiosyncrasies were resolved not by changes in its design but by the invention of the ballpoint pen, which was designed and patented even before the end of the nineteenth century. There are those in the twenty-first century who still fetishize paper, who carefully choose their pens, who prefer printed books to ebooks, and who value snail mail and the post over electronic mail. But professional, literary, personal, and romantic relationships can begin and end now as they never have before: without the exchange of a single piece of paper or drop of ink. The nineteenth century was, in retrospect, an age of transition between the manual and the digital, between centuries-old practices and objects and writing materials whose introduction only foreshadowed their own end. We can see now that the writing materials developed in the nineteenth century were a passing interlude between Jefferson’s geese and computer keys, between the papermaker’s wooden frame and the pixelated screen. But new media always carry with them the ghosts of the old, and they do so because writing still retains a material and a human quality that withstands technological change. When Frederick Douglass recounted in his 1845 autobiography how he had learned to read and write in a Baltimore shipyard, he noted that ‘my copybook was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk.’68 When he wrote to Gerrit Smith many years later, just before the launch of his first newspaper, Douglass transferred his sensitivity to the materiality of writing by hand to his demands for the look and the feel of a printed object that would match his publication’s political ambitions. ‘The paper must be clean, white and strong,’ he wrote. ‘The Ink pure, black and glossy. The matter must be arranged with taste, skill and order, and our columns must be free from typographical, grammatical, orthographical – and rhetorical errors and blunders.’69 Douglass’s journey from slave to intellectual makes him, like Jefferson, an atypical figure in the history of nineteenthcentury American letters. As for many a nineteenth-century American, however, the materials he worked with expressed desires and feelings to which words alone could not do justice.

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Notes 1. Jefferson, Letter to Cornelia Jefferson Randolph, 26 December 1808, in Founders Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 11 January 1817, in Founders Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 5. Williamson, ‘Vive La Plume,’ 3. 6. Jefferson, Letter to Peregrine Williamson, 22 March 1808, in Founders Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 7. See Goldberg, Writing Matter, and Lupton, ‘Gender and Materiality.’ 8. Lupton, Knowing Books, 5. 9. See Magee, Productivity and Performance in the Paper Industry, 158. 10. See McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 8. 11. For the definitive account of the development of the papermaking machine, see Clapperton, The Paper-making Machine. 12. See Hunter, Papermaking, 552. 13. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 3. 14. See Historical Statistics of the United States, 805. 15. Carlyle, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8 December 1837, in The Carlyle Letters Online,

(last accessed 22 September 2015). 16. Howells, Letter to Henry James, 10 March 1873, in Letters, Fictions, Lives, 78. 17. James, Letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, 25 March 1864, in Henry James Letters, 1: 49. 18. James, Letter to Edmund Gosse, 28 August 1896, in Henry James Letters, 4: 33. 19. Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1: 37. 20. Carlyle, Letter to Jane Welsh Carlyle, 6 August 1852, in The Carlyle Letters Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 21. Carlyle, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 30 December 1847, in The Carlyle Letters Online,

(last accessed 22 September 2015). 22. Carlyle, Letter to Frederic Chapman, 14 March 1859, in The Carlyle Letters Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 23. Carlyle, Letter to Parkins & Gotto, 21 April 1860, in The Carlyle Letters Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 24. Dierks, ‘Letter Writing,’ 487. 25. Ibid. 26. Melville, Letter to Sophia Hawthorne, 8 January 1852, in Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 218. 27. Ibid. 219. 28. Ibid. 218. 29. Martineau, ‘How to Get Paper,’ 242. 30. Ibid. 243. 31. For more on the ‘taxes of knowledge’ and how they were brought to an end, see Hewitt, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain. 32. Dickens and Lemon, ‘A Paper-Mill,’ 530; Melville, ‘The Paradise of Bachelors,’ 334. 33. Dickens and Lemon, ‘A Paper-Mill,’ 530.

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the materiality of letter-writing 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

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Ibid. Melville, ‘The Paradise of Bachelors,’ 333. Dickens and Lemon, ‘A Paper-Mill,’ 530, 531. Inglis, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s Laystall,’ 161. Ibid. 169. Ibid. Melville, ‘The Paradise of Bachelors,’ 334, 330. Melville, Letter to Evert Duyckinck, 12 February 1851, in Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 179. Melville, Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 17 November 1851, in Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 213. For more on this aspect of the story and the role the narrator plays in it, see Thompson, ‘The “Plain Facts” of Fine Paper.’ See Bowker, ‘Great American Industries.’ Vere, ‘A Paper on Paper,’ 393. Ibid. 403. Ibid. 404. Knight, ‘The Steel Pen,’ 680. The essay was originally published in Household Words on 7 September 1850. ‘Editor’s Table,’ 437. See, for example, ‘Prince’s Protean Fountain Pen!’ Hope, ‘Letter from Anna Hope,’ 84. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Prince’s Protean Ink,’ 317. Ibid. For some examples from the mid-nineteenth century through to the early twentieth, see: ‘Patent Fountain Pen’; ‘Weller’s Fountain Pen’; ‘Improved Fountain Pen’; ‘The “Climax” Fountain Pen’; and ‘An Ink Controlled Fountain.’ Ghent, ‘Fountain Pens,’ 196. Ibid. 198. Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 121. James, Letter to Edmund Gosse, 22 August 1894, in The Letters of Henry James, 1: 217. Melville, Letter to Sarah Morewood, 2 December 1860, in Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 357. Melville, Letter to Evert Duyckinck, 14 December 1849, in Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 149. James, Letter to Edith Wharton, 2 January 1908, in Henry James Letters, 4: 486. The ‘unimproved utensil’ is presumably a dip pen. James, Letter to Frances Morse, 7 June 1897, in The Letters of Henry James, 1: 255. James, Letter to Gaillard Lapsley, 17 June 1898, in The Letters of Henry James, 1: 285. James, Letter to Ariana Wormeley Curtis, 20 April 1897, in Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, 171. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 50. Douglass, Letter to Gerrit Smith, 4 June 1851, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, 451.

Works Cited Bierce, A. [1911] (2008), The Devil’s Dictionary, London: Bloomsbury. Bowker, R. R. (1887), ‘Great American Industries: VI – A Sheet of Paper,’ Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 75: 113–30.

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Carlyle, T. (1795–1881), The Carlyle Letters Online, Duke University Press, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Carlyle, T. (1837), The French Revolution: A History, 3 vols, London: James Fraser. Clapperton, R. H. (1967), The Paper-making Machine: Its Invention, Evolution and Development, Oxford: Pergamon Press. ‘The “Climax” Fountain Pen’ (1896), Scientific American, 75: 250. Dickens, C., and M. Lemon (1850) ‘A Paper-Mill,’ Household Words, 1: 529–31. Dierks, K. (2006), ‘Letter Writing, Stationery Supplies, and Consumer Modernity in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World,’ Early American Literature, 41: 473–94. Douglass, F. [1845] (2014), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. I. Dworkin, New York: Penguin. Douglass, F. (2009), The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series III: Correspondence, Volume 1, 1842–1852, ed. J. R. McKivigan, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ‘Editor’s Table’ (1855), The Knickerbocker, 45: 402–40. Ghent, W. J. (1913), ‘Fountain Pens: A Comparison and Criticism of the Various Makes on the Market,’ The Independent, 24 July, 195–8. Goldberg, J. (1990), Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hewitt, M. (2013), The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, 1849–1869, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (1976), Washington: U. S. Bureau of the Census. Hope, A. (1856), ‘Letter from Anna Hope,’ The Ohio Farmer, 24 May, 84. Howells, W. D., and H. James (1997), Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells, ed. M. Anesko, New York: Oxford University Press. Hunter, D. [1943] (1978), Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, New York: Dover Publications. ‘Improved Fountain Pen’ (1876), Scientific American, 35: 98. Inglis, K. (2011), ‘Thomas Carlyle’s Laystall and Charles Dickens’s Paper-Mill,’ Carlyle Studies Annual, 27: 159–76. ‘An Ink Controlled Fountain Drawing and Writing Pen’ (1905), Scientific American, 92: 267. James, H. (1920), The Letters of Henry James, 2 vols., ed. P. Lubbock, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. James, H. (1974–84), Henry James Letters, 4 vols., ed. L. Edel, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, H. (1998), Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, ed. R. M. Zorzi, London: Pushkin Press. Jefferson, T. (1743–1826), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Founders Online, The National Archive and University of Virginia Press, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Knight, C. (1850), ‘The Steel Pen: An Illustration of Cheapness,’ Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1: 677–80. Lupton, C. (2012), Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lupton, C. (2014), ‘Gender and Materiality on the Eighteenth-Century Page,’ SEL: Studies in English Literature, 54: 605–24. Magee, G. B. (1997), Productivity and Performance in the Paper Industry: Labour, Capital, and Technology in Britain and America, 1860–1914, New York: Cambridge University Press. Martineau, H. (1854), ‘How to Get Paper,’ Household Words, 10: 241–5.

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McGaw, J. (1992) Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Melville, H. [1855] (1987), ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,’ in H. Hayford, A. A. MacDougall, and G. T. Tanselle (eds.), The Writings of Herman Melville – Volume 9: Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 316–35. Melville, H. (1993), The Writings of Herman Melville – Volume 14: Correspondence, ed. L. Horth, with H. Hayford, H. Parker, and T. T. Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. ‘Patent Fountain Pen’ (1856), Scientific American, 11: 136. ‘Prince’s Protean Fountain Pen!’ (1860), The University Quarterly, 2: ii. ‘Prince’s Protean Ink Fountain Pen’ (1856), New Englander and Yale Review, 14: 317. Thompson, G. (2012), ‘The “Plain Facts” of Fine Paper in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” ’ American Literature, 84: 505–32. Vere, S. de (1868), ‘A Paper on Paper,’ Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, 11: 393–405. ‘Weller’s Fountain Pen’ (1865), Scientific American, 12: 366. Williamson, P. (1809), ‘Vive La Plume,’ New York Evening Post, 18 March, 3.

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2 THE BUSINESS OF LETTER-WRITING Michael Zakim

A

ll basic histories of the United States report that some time in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the nation’s aggregate wealth began to register dramatic gains. A growing inventory of commodities were being shipped in increasing volume, and at decreasing cost, to a growing number of continental and transatlantic destinations, turning the country itself into ‘but one extended [sales] counter from Maine to Texas,’ as Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine soon quipped.1 Interlocking divisions of globalizing labor upended local exchange networks between neighbors and transformed the republic into an integrated market of overlapping trade triangles. ‘What the French did for victory,’ Alexis de Tocqueville thus observed as well, Americans ‘do to cut costs.’2 This industrial revolution was systematically tallied in terms of the bales, tons, yards, crates, and boxes being continually moved from one place to another.3 All these quantitative aggregations, however, rested on a qualitative process of abstraction in which the goods were organized into commensurable sets of standard measurements. These then turned trade into a universal and far more anonymous project. Before anyone could produce for exchange, in other words, it was necessary to produce a system of exchange, to form the practical infrastructure that would allow goods to ‘encounter’ each other by suspending all their other attributes save for what made them mutually replaceable. Tersely inscribed enumerations, and instructions coordinating ninety-day notes at sight, issued by an assorted cadre of bankers, importers, wholesalers, and jobbers, with the six, twelve, and eighteen-month rhythms of cash crops and household needs that circulated between entrepot and hinterland, constituted such an infrastructure. They flattened out the once intuitive categories of time and space while recasting the economy itself into calculable dyads of credit and debt, and profit and loss. Liquidity, converging prices, loans at interest, insurance costs, and surplus value emerged as the recombinant divisions of a society that was itself becoming a function of capital turnover, secondary multiplier effects, subsidiary feedback processes, and, last but not least, the ‘efficiency of the markets.’4 Paper – ‘the most convenient material ever discovered,’ as Samuel Wells announced in his How to Write: A Pocket Manual of Composition and Letter-Writing (1857) – was located at the epicenter of this system.5 It was the material foundation for the mass production of indexes, surveys, tables, bills, inventories, receipts, and price-currents, among an avalanche of other facts and figures. These discarnated records constituted a realm of paperwork that amplified ‘mental labor’ no less spectacularly than steam engines had augmented humanity’s physical exertions. The resulting information was reproduced, exchanged, and spread with great facility and increasing speed by a ‘staff of subaltern 46

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officials and scribes,’ Max Weber’s archetypical agents of modern rationality who were practically assigned with administering the spirit of capitalism.6 The nineteenth century was consequently overrun with scribbling men. ‘Office, great many letters to copy,’ George Cayley scrawled into his personal diary at the height of the 1844 winter sales season, his truncated syntax testifying to business’s rival demands on one’s writing hand.7 Robert Graham, employed a few blocks away at William Aspinwall’s Manhattan counting house, regularly spent his mornings writing up duplicates of the firm’s correspondence until the mail went out at eleven-thirty. Afternoons were given over to transcribing accounts current and invoices, or to copying more letters into the correspondence book.8 Incoming mail needed to be indexed as well, with an attached note detailing ‘what was done upon any letter, and . . . where it was sent to, or put away.’9 This archive required hierarchal methods of information storage, coded by color or pigeon hole, for instance, or by brass-hinged labels that offered enough taxonomic flexibility to be re-arranged in response to the shifting conditions of trade.10 The aim was to turn the correspondence into an active file of past and ongoing business, so organized that ‘any letter of any date, may be found immediately.’11 This ability to ‘put a talk on paper, and send it to any distance’ was a totem of modern progress.12 It had reportedly flabbergasted Sequoyah, who went on to invent an alphabet for the Cherokee in their bid to join the ranks of civilized nations.13 William Alcott, America’s leading physiologist at mid-century, likewise explained in his Structure, Uses and Abuses of the Human Hand (1856) that Powhatan had originally been bereft of the practical means for exchanging his prize prisoner, John Smith. He certainly could not send Smith to Jamestown to deliver a verbal message, for obvious reasons. Nor could he dispatch an envoy, since the English would no doubt force the same to reveal Powhatan’s location. Ultimately, Smith himself proposed to pen a letter outlining the actual terms for his release. ‘The half-incredulous but wondering savage accepts of the proposition,’ Alcott recounted, and ‘at the appointed spot, on the appointed day, every thing is found. Smith, then, is set free.’14 All this must have appeared truly miraculous to the denizens of a preliterate American wilderness. But enlightened sensibilities were no less dazzled. Benjamin Franklin Foster, anointed as America’s ‘counting-house oracle’ by the Educational Times, accordingly celebrated the pen’s ability ‘to transmit to others, in places no matter how remote, every species of intelligence, with a secrecy that savors of miracle.’15 This synchronic quality of written documents, which allowed speech to inhabit a limitless number of surfaces all at once, to replace one context for another, and to travel diverse trajectories in endowing an otherwise unilinear reality with a widening array of valences, was a defining achievement of humanity’s increasing command over its world. As The Farmer’s Cabinet announced in 1863, in advertising a brand of durable metal nibs particularly well suited to office work, the pen had truly proven itself to be ‘mightier than the Sword.’16 Pen and paper were devoted to removing communications from the idiosyncratic flows of oral communication in favor of precision, unambiguity, continuity, discretion, and subordination, another inventory of modern rationality apprehended by Max Weber.17 ‘All the instants of time and all the places in space can be gathered in another time and place,’ as Bruno Latour has observed of modern science’s technical success in processing empirical information, a technique that proved equally relevant

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to doing business.18 In fact, capitalism was no less infused with modern civilization’s general bias toward abstraction, that which allowed humanity to distil the flux of events into their constituent parts and then reconfigure them into more useful patterns. Liverpool, New York, and New Orleans sat an inch apart from each other on the written page, for instance, making the broad scales of global trade a far more conventional operation. The desk thus rivaled the machine as both sign and praxis of the age of capital. Facts-on-paper could even be said to have replaced facts-onthe-ground as the determinant operative reality in an increasingly immaterial world of goods. ‘Never, perhaps, was it so true as now, that “the seller has need of a hundred eyes,” ’ a Boston dry-goods jobber observed of the new conditions for doing business.19 This was because it was no longer possible to infer the intentions of one’s trading partners by studying their countenances, or by relying on any of the other time-honored gestures long considered essential for closing a deal. ‘Face value’ acquired a new meaning while commerce became ever more dependent on a disembodied mass of pertinent facts which the merchant – or, more to the point, his clerks – strove to ‘harmonize . . . into a consistent and satisfactory whole.’20 Nothing was more essential to maximizing agents striving to give the market legible form, for only then would they be able to inscribe their own course of action on the market, and subsequently effect their maximizations. The ‘arrangement and phraseology of a Commercial Letter’ served as a linchpin in this project, B. F. Foster explained in a business manual first published in 1837, The Clerk’s Guide, or Commercial Correspondence; Comprising Letters of Business, Forms of Bills, Invoices, Account-Sales, and an Appendix Containing Advice to Young Tradesmen and Shopkeepers.21 ‘I devoted an hour or two in the morning to the writing of the first letter which I have ever dispatched,’ Edward Tailer reported of this milestone in his own young business career, a missive soon sent off to a correspondent in New Orleans: ‘[I] will anxiously expect an answer from him in return.’22 That answer would invariably open with a direct reference to the subject, date, and location of the prior communication, as well as any other exchanges pertaining to the matter at hand. Such reflexivity, in fact, informed the composition of the entire letter, which was designed to be a mirror image of its precursor, adhering to the same order of presentation, assigning each subject its own exclusive paragraph. Form would subsequently serve content as business correspondence became a cadastral chain of strong forensic qualities. ‘Hasty and ill-digested’ letters which ignored these protocols were suitably disparaged, both because they gave others a low opinion of the correspondent’s personal and professional capacities, and because they were more likely to generate misunderstanding and so increase the risks of litigation.23 Nothing should be superfluous or ambiguous in a business letter, Foster accordingly declared in the Clerk’s Guide: ‘A waste of words is a waste of time.’24 Such utility applied to all business needs, including purchases, consignments, requests for credit, remittances, collections on outstanding debts, protests of a bill, the release of goods from the custom house, reports on the state of the market, confirmations of the receipt of goods, inquiries into the status of shipments, and announcements regarding changes in the firm’s ownership structure. Nor was this template of precision, unambiguity, and reflexivity exclusively adapted to large-scale enterprise. It proved equally relevant for collecting remittance on a $3.22 debt:

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NY Mch 12/61 Dear Sir, Your letter by American Express is received + contains only $37.00. You have not sent the 50 due on the rent for the past three quarters + have made me pay the express charges + and have uncurrent money. When you send $3.22, which is the balance you owe me, I will give you a receipt for rent. I enclose two leases. Please send balance due without delay. Yours truly, Amos R. Eno25 The rest of this single-page communication was given over to an itemized table of the respective charges. And, indeed, whether devoted to moving America’s cotton crop to Europe or collecting fees on a downtown rental, business writing in the age of capital ushered in a new chapter in the history of the republic of letters. The cost of mailing a letter had traditionally been kept high in the United States, a function of republican political thought which viewed the private use of the mails as a means for subsidizing the circulation of public matter. Newspapers were the most important example of the latter, considered to be essential reading for a citizenry having to govern itself. In the 1840s and 1850s, however, a series of postal reforms radically reduced the price of mailing a letter. Distance was also eliminated in determining costs – up to a 3,000-mile radius – while a system of prepaid postage based on the novel technology of postage stamps was introduced as well.26 The latter innovation proved highly effective in ensuring delivery, since addressees would no longer need to pay in order to receive their mail. The cost of sending a letter of business instructions from New York to a Connecticut factory manufacturing brass products subsequently fell from 12.5 cents to three cents per sheet.27 Such reform was a clear expression of the growing centrality of privacy in the bourgeois republic, as David Henkin has argued in his important study of the nineteenth-century postal system.28 The fact that the vast bulk of this new cut-rate private correspondence was devoted to business mail underscores another shift in the priorities of the nation’s culture, from political speech to economic intercourse. More to the point, it suggests just how much commercial intercourse had emerged as a dominant form of political speech. A ‘bold, free, expeditious hand’ became the industrial standard for carrying out all this correspondence.29 It was the male equivalent of sewing, a traditional skill, that is, intensified by the tireless drive to accumulate, and sped up beyond recognition in producing the innumerable inscriptions by which the market economy was producing itself. ‘Business writing may be said to sway the world!’ P. R. Spencer, the country’s leading penmanship pedagogue after the Civil War, could thus declare without any hyperbole.30 ‘Easy and graceful in its proportions,’ Spencer continued, ‘it is as attractive as it is useful.’31 Indeed, it was attractive because it was useful. A competent business hand rested on a manufacturing technique whose functionalism was manifest in the standard nature of its production (all penmanship systems claimed to be derived from the same universal principles of physiology) as well as the standard nature of its product. ‘The style is so simple that it can be acquired with great ease and rapidity,’ a coalition of bankers, merchants, and bookkeepers from Providence typically testified in relation to the utility of Potter and Hammond’s System of Business Penmanship

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(1865), subsequently endorsing it for use in the city’s schools.32 As such, ‘mercantile writing’ should be compared to other forms of industrial engineering, to ready-made suits, for instance, or to the interchangeable jigs of machine parts, for it was designed as a tool for the mass production of capitalist knowledge, that which functioned as ‘the great medium through which thoughts are interchanged, [and] through which commerce speaks,’ as the Circular and Catalogue of Bryant and Stratton’s business colleges proclaimed in 1859.33 First founded in Cleveland in 1853, the Bryant and Stratton chain of colleges included nearly fifty branches by the end of the Civil War. P. R. Spencer became the first director of its Department of Penmanship, using his position to create a ‘uniform national system’ of handwriting, while other advocates of its instructional materials regularly explained that the resulting nationwide curriculum offered the most efficacious means of preparing students for employment in the nationalizing economy.34 Samuel Munson, who aspired to someday ‘tak[e] the dry goods department of a country town,’ thus commenced a full course of study at the Albany branch in 1862.35 Charles Rogers, in contrast, enrolled in a single, pro-rated penmanship class offered at Bryant and Stratton’s Manhattan college in order to improve his writing skills upon being hired as a government copyist during the Civil War.36 Seventeen-year-old Charles French, who was determined to go into a store ‘as soon as I have learned to write better than I now write,’ enrolled, like Charles Rogers, in a dedicated penmanship course, this one at Comer’s Commercial College in Boston, which boasted of having matriculated 12,000 students in the twenty-five years since opening its doors in 1840, that diploma now serving as ‘a letter of introduction to the best mercantile houses from Maine to California.’37 By the 1850s Manhattan had filled up with pedagogical entrepreneurs peddling a similar core curriculum of office techniques. One could attend day or evening classes at Jones’s Initiatory Counting Rooms, for instance, or enroll in Renville’s course of business instruction that ‘thoroughly fitted for the counting-room,’ or take advantage of Mr. Dolbear’s special half-price offer of ten dollars for a complete set of lessons in double-entry, which might not include writing instruction, but did promise to train gentlemen for mercantile employment in any commercial house in the city.38 Aspiring clerks could also matriculate at the Writing and Book-keeping Academy managed by Brown and Pond, the former a ‘master of pedagogy’ who had recently taken the highest prize in business writing at New York’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations and held regular chirographic demonstrations for the public.39 All catered to the ‘thousands and tens of thousands who get their living in one way or another by the pen,’ as B. F. Foster identified the vast pool of candidates for his own Commercial Academy, which opened on New York’s Broadway in 1837, offering separate programs of study in penmanship, book-keeping, commercial calculation, and mercantile letter-writing, each charging a tuition of fifteen dollars, excluding the cost of quills and ink.40 The new industrial economy required such extensive retooling, T. S. Arthur insisted in his Advice to Young Men in 1860. A best-selling publicist of free-market hermeneutics who tirelessly promoted the profit motive as a force for nurturing talent as well as guaranteeing its responsible use, Arthur urged his readers to invest their acquisitive faculties in acquiring knowledge ‘that could be used to advantage’ in pursuing their ambitions.41 This excluded artisanal skills, whose diminishing relevance to material reality now relegated once-proud craftsmen

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to the precarious status of journeymen mechanics. Steam engines and railroads, for example, condemned a whole generation of harness-makers trained to service horse travelers on the turnpikes to live out the rest of their lives within the confines of an obsolescent craft and its resulting web of impoverishment. In order to avoid a similarly dismal fate, the nation’s young men should acquire modern labor skills, by which Arthur meant ‘the whole theory of accounts’ as well as ‘a fair business hand.’42 Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, that paragon of self-made manhood for the industrializing age, likewise discovered that the best avenue out of his hard-scrabble life as a boot-black lay in improving his reading, writing, and arithmetic (‘as far as Interest’) in hopes of landing a situation in a store or ‘countin’ room.’43 Herman Melville’s poor handwriting had certainly kept him from landing a clerking position in the 1840s.44 Business information had a shelf life, which meant that office labor was not only dedicated to generating reams of documentation but to optimally realizing its value in real time. ‘As soon as a young man enters the counting-house, he is told that it will never answer to write so slow,’ wrote B. F. Foster, by means of emphasizing the twin desiderata of speed and volume driving all the scrivening.45 Rapid penmen could complete thirty words in sixty seconds, according to a contemporary statistic, which required the quill to travel sixteen and a half feet per minute. ‘You say you never saw such a thing,’ Foster further remarked in his Prize Essay on the Best Method of Teaching Penmanship (1834), but ‘thirty years ago nobody had ever seen a ship impelled by steam.’46 It was a suitably industrial analogy, as was S. A. Potter’s warning in another popular penmanship manual of the day about applying too much ink to the pen, for just as ‘the more dirt a contractor uses in constructing a railroad, the longer it takes to make it,’ the same calculations were true for the production of written documents.47 ‘If it be bad policy to furnish workmen with poor tools,’ Potter added, ‘it must be equally bad policy to furnish learners with bad pens.’48 James Guild, a Vermont schoolteacher, had already been asked by his pupils to teach them ‘to write a business hand,’ for which purpose he adopted a running style of his own invention in the 1820s.49 In fact, Benjamin Howard Rand had brought the ‘running hand’ to America a few years earlier in his New and Complete System of Mercantile Penmanship (1814). It was characterized by loops and an inclined script that had heretofore been considered effeminate. But now that velocity was a priority, and the pen could not be lifted from the page without sacrificing valuable time, loops became unavoidable.50 By the mid-1830s, Foster was promoting an ‘American system’ of writing adapted from the British innovator Joseph Carstairs, another great champion of speed, that strove to further save on the number of strokes as well as obviate the need to ever lift one’s pen from the page.51 With that same end in mind, P. R. Spencer recommended that y’s and g’s appearing at the end of words be terminated without a loop. A simple downward line or an easy curve to the left would result in a significant reduction in writing time. ‘Swiftly must the pen glide in these days of steam and electricity,’ Spencer proclaimed in promoting the adoption of simple forms of capital letters that would quicken their execution.52 And while protests against such systems, ‘which would sacrifice everything to rapidity,’ were to be heard from educators by the 1850s (when Foster himself retreated from his earlier Carstairsian zealotry and the Boston Mercantile Academy endorsed a ‘medium’ style that sought to strike a happy compromise), the attempts to rationalize, or industrialize, writing nonetheless continued apace.53

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P. R. Spencer incorporated a metronome into his stroke exercises and called the system, which had reportedly first been developed at Albany’s Commercial College, ‘Chirythmography’ – a neologism constructed from the Greek roots for time, hand, and writing.54 The system’s incipient Taylorism was unmistakable. The mechanized uniformity of pen strokes broke the alphabet down into a standard set of basic hand movements. Writing consequently became predicated on the formal production of interchangeable units that were entirely divorced from the meaning of the text itself. ‘It will be seen that all the letters, long and short, requiring the same number of motions, are thus executed in precisely the same time,’ Spencer explained.55 Heavy, sprawling, blurred, or uncertain strokes would be eliminated, while the chances that each pupil’s letters would be the same as the next were significantly enhanced. ‘A uniform, national system of penmanship – one adapted to the demands of business’ was being created, matching an earlier call by the North American Review to apply systematic principles and instruction to writing, and so include it in the scientific ethos of the age.56 In fact, every society has devised specific techniques of handwriting in organizing its respective patterns of governance and control. That is why ‘the history of politics is a history of paper,’ as Jacques Derrida has observed.57 Capitalism’s investment in a competent business hand was a direct expression of the industrial priorities of abstraction and standardization. Just as clerics once served deities, the merchant’s clerk now filled no less critical a role in administering the needs of modernity’s new sovereign, the profit motive.58 All this word-processing rested on a typographic regularity that anticipated the typewriter. Friederich Kittler has forcibly argued that the opposite was the case: namely, that the typewriter effected the destruction of the word, and so ushered in a modern loop of endless replication that turned the keyboard into a site of industrial alienation and robbed language of its defining content.59 But such claims assign too much agency to mechanical innovation. Like so many other machines invented in the early decades of capitalist revolution, the typewriter – which was first integrated into office work in the 1870s – enhanced a process that was already well under way, a process born of the logics of commodification rather than any specific techno-logic, and one patently manifest in the era’s intensifying applications of the hand-driven pen. ‘Write! Write!’ Benjamin Foster thus declared from his desk in a general store in Bangor, Maine in 1847. ‘Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.’60 Words and letters, that is to say, were already being reduced to discrete forms, to pure information, which was dependent, in turn, on the proper deployment of the penman’s own mechanics. All this writing spurred a flurry of technological spillovers which included singlestanding desks and double-counter desks, sitting desks featuring either nine or fifteen pigeonholes of varying depth, as well as desk chairs able to swivel and tilt. Paper weights, check cutters, penwipers (the woolen kind being preferable to silk or cotton, which tended to leave fibers on the point of the nib), pencil sharpeners, rulers, copying brushes, dampening bowls, blotting paper (less for absorbing excess ink than for protecting the page from soiled hands), waste-paper baskets, sealing wax (including small sticks coated with a combustible material that was ignited by friction, designed to be thrown away after a single use), seal presses, paper fasteners, letter clips (for holding checks while entering them into the day book), and writing pads were all standard office inventory, as were billhead and envelope cases, business cards, receiving boxes for papers and letters, calendars featuring various combinations of the day,

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week, and month, and stationery cases with trays for pins, wafers, pencils, and pens.61 A wide range of ‘square inkstands,’ ‘library inkstands,’ and ‘banker inkstands’ also came onto the market in these years: forty separate patents were issued between 1840 and 1872.62 All featured narrow necks designed to prevent evaporation, together with a shallow body that kept the upper part of one’s pen or quill from becoming covered with ink. Office inkstands were invariably corked as well, so that the ambient dust would not penetrate and end up thickening the ink. The interiors of the better brands of inkstands, meanwhile, were lined with rubber to safeguard the nib’s point during the constant and hurried act of dipping. The ink itself needed to flow freely without spreading or blotting. Steel pens generally required thinner inks that would not eat away at the metal. This created a problem, however, because thinner inks were also less durable, increasing the risk of someone illicitly altering the nominal sums listed on checks, bills of exchange, and letters of credit.63 Thaddeus Davids & Co. typically responded by marketing an ink suitable for steel pens that would nevertheless ‘be legible for future generations,’ its archival value therefore being self-evident.64 The discovery of aniline dyes in the 1850s would ultimately solve this conundrum.65 But ink makers still needed to provide a product that would neither mold nor thicken into globules (which slowed down the pace of writing), nor have to be wiped from the pen every few moments. Nor should inks emit unpleasant odors, or go bad, or be overly sensitive to changes in the weather. They sought an ink that dried quickly without harming the paper, that kept its original color rather than fading into a nondescript brown wash within a year, and that proved equally suitable for writing out correspondence and keeping the books, thus obviating the need to prepare or purchase a variety of mixtures.66 And then there was the paper, of course, whether of bond, linen, or ledger quality.67 The best account-book blue-laid paper reportedly came from England. But continental brands were preferred for letter-writing since they were glazed with farina and rosinsoap instead of gelatin, which meant that the pages were less greasy under the pen, allowing for a freer hand. In either case, abundant supplies became a matter of routine after the industry mechanized in the 1820s, achieving a startling rate of production in converting liquid pulp into a writing surface. Of course, dryers, sizers, slitters, cutters, and calendars were still necessary for finishing the process, as were new ruling technologies that facilitated the mass standardization of ledgers and copybooks, not to mention a broad selection of pre-printed circulars, custom house entries, bills of lading, bank notes, insurance policies, bills of exchange, and self-sealing envelopes, the latter (which were put on display at the Crystal Palace in New York) saving much time ‘as unnecessary folding is avoided.’68 The quality of machine-made paper, what is more, proved highly suitable to the new steel pens. But the transition to steel nibs was far less immediate than the telos of progress, or pen manufacturers themselves, would suggest. The cover illustration of the Annual Register of Comer’s Commercial College, for instance, continued to highlight a set of quills standing at the ready in their inkwells in the 1850s and 1860s. This was indicative of what most contemporaries still claimed: namely, that a hard quill with a clear barrel, kept well-mended and of sufficient age ‘to extract the water and oil which [it] naturally contains when immediately from the wing,’ remained the best tool for writing.69 ‘Quills Superseded,’ the agent for Hayden’s steel pens announced in an advertisement in the New York Tribune in 1841; but William Dunlap, for one,

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a veteran New York City playwright, testified to ongoing frustrations in adjusting to a steel pen.70 ‘It is difficult to impart to metal the elasticity of the quill,’ S. H. Browne similarly observed in his Manual of Commerce (1871).71 Meanwhile, B. F. Foster took note of the chronically cramped hands of those who wrote with sharp-pointed steel pens rather than quills.72 The quill not only offered greater flexibility, but its nib could also be cut to whatever angle best suited the type of writing one needed to perform. True, metal tips were far more durable, but a quill was easily refreshed by slicing two or three thin shavings off the sides. This could be repeated several times with one’s nibber or pen knife without having to extend the pen’s slit (which would, of course, alter the length and weight, and so upset the quill’s balance), although that was always an option as well. It also became possible after 1820 to purchase ready-made quills in a variety of grades and prices that were simply replaced once they wore out – a particularly significant advantage now that pen-mending skills were declining amongst the giant reserve army of clerical novices flocking to the nation’s counting houses. Pen manufacturers subsequently sought to duplicate the ‘soft feeling’ and ‘freedom of action’ characteristic of a fine quill while emphasizing the relative advantages of technical innovation, namely, metal’s mobility and durability – which was particularly pronounced once the problem of corrosion was solved by the invention of new types of inks.73 Pens were also produced in accordance to specialized uses. Foley’s gold nibs, which even ‘outwear the steel pen,’ were thus available in an extensive selection of sizes and styles respectively designed for bankers, merchants, bookkeepers, editorialists, and insurance agents.74 Similarly, the large No. 1 pens produced by Thomas Groom & Co. were devoted to bold, rapid writing, while the medium No. 2 and No. 3 sizes were recommended for correspondence and the finer No. 4 was marketed for fine work, or ‘ladies’ use.’75 Penmanship pedagogues, what is more, often sold their own lines of writing tools. Students at Comer’s Commercial College were accordingly instructed to purchase the full range of Comer’s pens, together with copies of his guide to penmanship.76 P. R. Spencer also marketed his own signature nibs, touting them as best suited to his popular writing method.77 By this point, metal pens had become the rule, their flexibility enhanced by such innovations as the addition of slits cut along the nib, which could then be attached to a quill holder if one preferred. The eventual success of the new metal tools was measured by the growing prevalence of the image of a clerk posing with one placed behind his ear.78 The most far-reaching technical innovation in writing tools combined nib, shaft, holder, and inkstand into a single device that came to be called a ‘fountain pen.’79 It could, impressively enough, be carried on one’s person from place to place, ever ready for use. The original concept dated back to the seventeenth century, though early versions required the use of an external funnel for loading the ink. Only now was a reliable reservoir successfully built into the mechanism. Indeed, a pen that was able to refill itself was highly suited to the through-flow dynamics of mass production and the era’s accelerating ‘economies of speed.’ Fountain pens were also promoted for the relative neatness of their operation, their success in keeping the ink from coming into contact with the fingers, and for avoiding spattering. At the same time, however, complaints were heard regarding their high price and the tendency of the pen to unexpectedly dry up, leak or clog, or fail to throw out the requisite quantity of ink in the course of writing.

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In his popular pocket manual, How to Write, Samuel Wells determined that the general public should adopt the principles of mercantile penmanship. The utility and acumen so essential to business correspondence were no less relevant to other spheres of modern life, whose mass anonymity made it so important to establish a culture of communication in which ‘ambiguity vanishes.’80 Such perspicuity was to inform written requests for favors, formal introductions, letters of recommendation, responses to advertisements, subscription orders, or applications for loans. Wells’s declaration was underscored when the American Annals of Education endorsed the introduction of B. F. Foster’s business letter prototypes into the common school curriculum. ‘The time of the pupils would be more profitably employed in transcribing these letters than in writing scraps of poetry,’ the Annals explained.81 The Massachusetts Teacher similarly embraced the pedagogical value of business writing. ‘Shall not every school-boy know how to write a Promissory Note, as to know the breadth of the Pacific Ocean?’ it asked.82 The answer was self-evident, and so lesson plans were devised for instructing a new generation of youngsters in the basics of business writing. The bourgeoisie thus formed their letters as they formed themselves, a process that continues uninterrupted to this day. Neo-liberal subjectivity, as Maurizio Lazzarato has recently argued, rests on those same values of utility and perspicacity that serve to enhance decision-making capacities, both one’s own or the company’s.83 Personality thus becomes a mirror image of market contingency and transience, turning it into an ‘enormous file’ of dulling conformity, as C. Wright Mills wrote in protest of the calamitous effects of paperwork in his 1951 polemic, White Collar.84 Mills depicted the lives of the desk-bound as having been annexed to Fordist machine logic in producing ‘the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.’85 Rows of desks and pools of Dictaphone transcribers stacked up in the vertical seriality of metropolitan skyscrapers were the spectacular expression of ‘a business system,’ ‘a government system,’ and ‘a money system’ that continued to operate through the invisible gears of bureaucratic abstractions.86 Corporate America had developed into a giant information factory, manned by a ‘salariat’ – Mills’s most trenchant neologism – administering reams of preprinted forms while becoming governed by that same ‘paper routine.’87 Nor did the celebrated rise of a ‘paperless office’ at the end of the twentieth century change these routines, even if post-Fordist models of management replaced skyscrapers with corporate campuses. Digitization’s incessant compressions, accelerations, and mechanizations have not begat any new paradigms of business correspondence. They simply format the newest version of a system of communication that has been underwriting capitalism’s permanent revolution since the very beginning, or at least since Adam Smith enthusiastically promoted a grammar in which ‘there are no words that are superfluous but all tend to express something by themselves which was not said before and in a plain manner.’88 Penmen never, in that respect, became appendages of the machine as much as they turned their own appendages into machines, learning to move ‘insensibly and without effort’ in mass-producing documents for an economy dependent on an ever-growing volume of written information.89 B. F. Foster’s sublime ‘command of hand,’ as explicated in the Prize Essay he published on the subject, was revealing of how capitalism’s divisions of labor rationalized, if not dismembered, our bodies even in the ostensibly polite, unmechanized setting of the counting room.90 ‘Went down with uncle to his office offering him the assistance of my arm,’ a young clerk wrote in 1838, providing confirmation of Emerson’s

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declaration from the year before that ‘a man in the view of political economy is a pair of hands.’91 Those hands were what distinguished men from the beasts, of course. They were ‘the instruments most suitable for an intelligent animal,’ as Galen had long before observed in his seminal survey of human anatomy.92 Paperwork, as such, constituted mankind’s signature achievement, a sign of the civilizing process. This was not, however, that ‘strong arm, in its stalwart pride sweeping, / True as a sunbeam the swift sickle guides,’ celebrated by Frances Osgood in her poem ‘Laborare est Orare’ (1850).93 The business writer’s hard-earned ‘command of hand’ represented a different kind of manmade mastery, no longer measured by its productive encounter with the material world but by its very ability to turn that world – including itself – into a tool of abstraction.

Acknowledgments Parts of this chapter first appeared in ‘Paperwork,’ Raritan: A Quarterly Review, 33.4 (Spring 2004), 34–56, and are reprinted here with permission.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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‘Commercial Colleges,’ 411. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 464. See Pred, Urban Growth, 191–2. For good general descriptions of the processes I describe here see Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing, and Cook, The Pricing of Progress. On the emergence of a market society see Polanyi, The Great Transformation. Wells, How to Write, 7. Weber, ‘Bureaucracy,’ 197. Cayley, Diary, 16 January 1844. See also Norris, Journal, 9 July 1858. See Graham, ‘Journal of Passing Events,’ 16 January 1844, 13 February 1848, 25 March 1848, 20 April 1848, 5 May 1848, 9 May 1848. ‘Maxims for Merchants,’ 485. It is worth noting that the high costs of the telegraph restricted its use to price quotes and only the most urgent orders in these years. See Yates, ‘Investing in Information,’ 134. Foster, The Clerk’s Guide, 27. ‘Invention of the Cherokee Alphabet,’ 330. See Lepore, A is for American, 65–7. Alcott, The Structure, 67. Quoted in Zakim, ‘Bookkeeping as Ideology,’ n.pag; Foster, Foster’s System, 10. Morton, ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword,’ 3. See Weber, ‘Bureaucracy,’ 214. Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition,’ 22. ‘A Dry-Goods Jobber,’ 209. Ibid. Foster, The Clerk’s Guide, iv. Tailer, Diary, 11 February 1850. Foster, The Clerk’s Guide, vii. Ibid. 25. Eno, Letter to Theodore Keppler, 12 March 1861, New-York Historical Society. See Miles, ‘History of the Post Office,’ 37–45, and ‘Practical Workings,’ 44–6. See Yates, ‘Investing in Information,’ 133.

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28. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 21–2. See also Pred, Urban Growth, 81, 93, and Habermas, Structural Transformation, 181–9. 29. Foster, Prize Essay, 58. 30. Spencer, Spencerian Key, 89. 31. Ibid. 93. 32. Potter and Hammond’s System of Business Penmanship, n.pag. 33. Circular and Catalogue, 30. 34. Spencer, Origin and History of the Art of Writing, 27. 35. Munson, Diary, 8 May 1862; see also 26 August 1862, and 9 September 1862. 36. For Rogers see Diary, 11 July 1864, 27 July 1864, 6 September 1864, 8 September 1864, and 2 December 1864. 37. French, Diary, Journal No. 1, July 30, 1851; Annual Register, 6. 38. See ‘Bookkeeping,’ New-York Daily Times, 5, and ‘Bookkeeping, Arithmetic, Writing,’ 6. 39. ‘Brown and Pond,’ 6. 40. Foster, Foster’s System, iii. 41. Arthur, Advice to Young Men, 69. 42. Ibid. 72, 79. 43. Alger, Ragged Dick, 85, 87. 44. See Augst, The Clerk’s Tale, 219. 45. Foster, Prize Essay, 50. 46. Ibid. 47. Potter, Penmanship Explained, 26. 48. Ibid. 22. 49. Guild, ‘James Guild,’ 287. 50. See Morison, American Copybooks, 24–6. 51. Foster, Writing and Writing Masters, n.pag. 52. Spencer, Spencerian Key, 93. 53. ‘The Dutonian System,’ 213; Annual Catalogue, 23. 54. See Spencer, Spencerian Key, 143–5, and Thornton, Handwriting in America, 50, 71. 55. Spencer, Spencerian Key, 143. 56. Spencer, Origin and History of Writing, 27. See ‘Wrifford’s Mercantile Penmanship.’ 57. Derrida, Paper Machine, 61. 58. See Goldberg, Writing Matter, 19, 40–3. 59. See Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 198–9, 230–1. See too Henry, The Iron Whim, 134–3. 60. Foster, Down East Diary, 12, 121. 61. This paragraph draws on: Illustrated Catalogue; Townsend, ‘Working Chairs,’ 16–35; Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 93–100, 340; Catalogue of Stationery; Maynard and Noyes, ‘Black Writing Ink’; Spring Circular; Smith, Printing and Writing, 161; ‘Orrin N. Moore’s Premium Inks,’ Smithsonian Institution; Dolbear & Bros., Smithsonian Institution. 62. This paragraph draws on: Potter, Penmanship Explained, 21; Spencer, Spencerian Key, 18; Whalley, Writing Implements, 86; Finlay, Western Writing Implements, 48. 63. See Whalley, Writing Implements, 80–2, and Foster, Prize Essay, 20–1. 64. ‘Thaddeus Davis,’ Smithsonian Institution. 65. See Finlay, Western Writing Implements, 28. 66. See: Maynard and Noyes, ‘Black Writing Ink’; ‘Everyday Actualities.’ 67. This paragraph draws on: Smith, Printing and Writing, 161; Marsh, Paper and Stationery; ‘Everyday Actualities’; Goodrich, Science and Mechanism, 176–80. 68. Sharp, ‘Adaptation of Recent Inventions,’ 827. 69. Rapp, A Complete System of Scientific Penmanship, 25. 70. ‘Quills Superseded,’ 4; and see Dunlap, Diary, 3: 829.

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58 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

michael zakim Browne, Manual, 313. Foster, Foster’s System of Penmanship, 16. See Finlay, Western Writing Implements, 5, 10, 23. History of the Invention, 7–9. Robinson, Merchants’, Students’ and Clerks’, n.pag. See, for example, Annual Register, 4, 6, 8. See Carpenter, History of American Schoolbooks, 188. See Whalley, Writing Implements, 44. See ibid. 60–7, and Finlay, Western Writing Implements, 40–3. Wells, How to Write, 48. ‘The Clerk’s Guide,’ 285. ‘Bookkeeping,’ The Massachusetts Teacher, 170. See Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor.’ Mills, White Collar, 189. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 289, xvii. Quoted in Guillory, ‘The Memo,’ 123. Foster, Prize Essay, 22. Ibid. 24. Anon., Diary, 19 June 1838; quoted in Dimock, ‘Class, Gender,’ 58. Quoted in Goldberg, Writing Matter, 85. Osgood, Poems, 44. See too Barker, Tremulous Private, 70–80.

Works Cited Alcott, W. (1856), The Structure, Uses and Abuses of the Human Hand, Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society. Alger, H., Jr., [1868] (2008), Ragged Dick, or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, ed. H. Hoeller, New York: Norton. Annual Catalogue of the Boston Mercantile Academy (1857), Boston: William White. Annual Register of Comer’s Commercial College (1865), Boston: Rand & Avery. Anon. (1834–8), Diary, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Mariam Coffin Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr, Philadelphia, Adelman Collection, Box 19. Arthur, T. S. (1860), Advice to Young Men on their Duties and Conduct in Life, Philadelphia: G. G. Evans. Augst, T. (2003), The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barker, F. (1995), The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Blumin, S. (1989), The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900, New York: Cambridge University Press. ‘Bookkeeping’ (1852), The Massachusetts Teacher, 5: 168–74. ‘Bookkeeping’ (1853), New-York Daily Times, 7 January, 5. ‘Bookkeeping, Arithmetic, Writing’ (1856), New-York Daily Times, 8 May, 6. ‘Brown and Pond’ (1854), New-York Daily Times, 7 December, 6. Browne, S. H. (1871), The Manual of Commerce, Springfield, MA: Bill, Nichols & Co. Bruegel, M. (2002), Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Carpenter, C. (1963), History of American Schoolbooks, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Catalogue of Stationery – Corlies, Macy & Co. (1874), New York: n.p. Cayley, G. J. (1844), Diary, MSS Collection, New-York Historical Society, BV Cayley. Circular and Catalogue of Bryant and Stratton’s Mercantile Colleges (1859), New York: Office of the American Merchant. ‘The Clerk’s Guide’ (1837), Annals of American Education, 7: 285–6. ‘Commercial Colleges – Their Nature and Object’ (1858), Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, 39: 410–15. Cook, E. (forthcoming), The Pricing of Progress: The Capitalization of American Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Derrida, J. (2005), Paper Machine, trans. R. Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dimock, W. C. (1994), ‘Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy,’ in W. C. Dimock and M. T. Gilmore (eds.), Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, New York: Columbia University Press, 57–104. Dolbear & Bros. (n.d.), Advertisement, Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, penmanship, box 1. ‘A Dry-Goods Jobber in 1861,’ (1861), Atlantic Monthly, 7: 200–12. Dunlap, W. [1806–34] (1930), Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839), 3 vols., ed. D. C. Barck, New York: New-York Historical Society. ‘The Dutonian System of Rapid Writing’ (1855), The Massachusetts Teacher, 8: 213–18. Eno, A. R. (1861), Letter to Theodore Keppler, 12 March, Eno Roberts Collection, New-York Historical Society. ‘Everyday Actualities – No. XVII’ (1854), Godey’s Lady’s Book, 48: 199–202. Finlay, M. (1990), Western Writing Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen, Wetheral: Plains Books. ‘For the Massachusetts Teacher: Payson and Dunton’s Revised Series of Writing Books’ (1855), The Massachusetts Teacher, 8: 332–7. Foster, B. B. [1847–53] (1975), Down East Diary, ed. C. H. Foster, Orono, ME: University of Maine Press. Foster, B. F. (1834), Prize Essay on the Best Method for Teaching Penmanship, Boston: Clapp & Broaders. Foster, B. F. (1835), Foster’s System of Penmanship: or, the Art of Rapid Writing Illustrated and Explained, Boston: Perkins, Marvin & Co. Foster, B. F. (1837), The Clerk’s Guide, or Commercial Correspondence, Philadelphia: Henry Perkins. Foster, B. F. (1854), Writing and Writing Masters, New York: Mason Brothers. French, C. E. (1851–1904), Diary, Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N-1977. Goldberg, J. (1990), Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Goodrich, C. R. (1854), Science and Mechanism: Illustrated by Examples in the New York Exhibition, New York: G. P. Putnam. Graham, R. (1844–8), ‘Journal of Passing Events,’ MSS Collection, New-York Historical Society. Guild, J. [1818–24] (1937), ‘James Guild, from Tunbridge, Vermont to London, England – The Journal of James Guild, Peddler, Tinker, Schoolmaster, Portrait Painter,’ ed. A. W. Peach, Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, 5: 249–314. Guillory, J. (2004), ‘The Memo and Modernity,’ Critical Inquiry, 31: 108–32. Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henry, D. (2005), The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of the Typewriter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.

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History of the Invention and Illustrated Process of Making Foley’s Diamond Pointed Gold Pens (1875), New York: Mayer, Merkel & Ottmann. Illustrated Catalogue of Office and Library Furniture at the American Desk Manufactory (1876), New York: n.p. ‘Invention of the Cherokee Alphabet’ (1828), The Missionary Herald, 24: 330–2. Kittler, F. A. (1999), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Latour, B. (1986), ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,’ Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, 6: 1–40. Lazzarato, M. (1996), ‘Immaterial Labor,’ in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 133–50. Lepore, J. (2002), A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States, New York: Knopf. Marsh, J. (c. 1835–52), Paper and Stationery Warehouse, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, Ephemera Ads 0007. ‘Maxims for Merchants and Business Men’ (1846), Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, 15: 482–5. Maynard and Knoyes (n.d.), ‘Black Writing Ink,’ Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, ink, box 1. Miles, P. (1857), ‘History of the Post Office,’ Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register, 7: 337–65. Mills, C. W. (1951), White Collar: The American Middle Classes, New York: Oxford University Press. Morison, S. (1951), American Copybooks: An Outline of their History from Colonial to Modern Times, Philadelphia: Fell Co. Morton, A. (1863), ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword,’ The Farmers’ Cabinet, 12 February, 3. Munson, S. L. (1861–2), Diary, MSS Collection, New-York Historical Society, BV Munson. Norris, A. L. (1858–60), Journal, Winterthur Library, Winterthur, DE, Doc. 339. ‘Orrin N. Moore’s Premium Inks’ (n.d.), Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, ink, box 1. Osgood, F. (1850), Poems, Philadelphia: Carey & Hart. ‘Payson and Dunton’s Revised Series of Writing Books’ (1855), The Massachusetts Teacher, 8: 113–17. Polanyi, K. (1944), The Great Transformation, New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Potter, S. A. (1868), Penmanship Explained; or The Principles of Writing Reduced to an Exact Science, Philadelphia: Copperthwait & Co. Potter and Hammond’s System of Business Penmanship (Pennsylvania, 1865). ‘Practical Workings of Cheap Postage’ (1850), Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, 22: 44–53. Pred, A. R. (1973), Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ‘Quills Superseded’ (1841), New York Tribune, 1 September, 4. Rapp, A. W. (1832), A Complete System of Scientific Penmanship (1865), Pennsylvania: n.p. Robinson, J. (1856), The Merchants’, Students’ and Clerks’ Manual, Boston: T. Groom & Co. Rogers, C. E. (1864–5), Diary, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library, MssCol 2609. Sharp, G. (1852), ‘The Adaptation of Recent Inventions to the Purpose of Practical Banking,’ The Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register, 6: 818–33. Smith, A. M. (1904), Printing and Writing Materials: Their Evolution, Philadelphia: A. M. Smith. Spencer, P. R. (1866), Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship, New York: Ivison, Phinney. Spencer, P.R. (1869), Origin and History of the Art of Writing, New York: Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman & Co.

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Spring Circular for 1860, Issued by A. S. Barnes & Burr (1860), New York: Barnes & Burr. Tailer, E. F. (1848–1917), Diary, MSS Collection, New-York Historical Society, BV Tailer. ‘Thaddeus Davis’ (n.d.), Advertisement, Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, ink, box 1. Thornton, T. P. (1996), Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tocqueville, A. [1835–40] (2004), Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Olivier Zunz, New York: Library of America. Townsend, G. (1987), ‘Working Chairs for Working People: A History of the Nineteenth-Century Office Chair,’ M.A. Diss., University of Delaware. Weber, M. [1922] (1948), ‘Bureaucracy,’ in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Routledge, 196–244. Wells, S. (1857a), How to Do Business: A Pocket Manual of Practical Affairs, New York: Fowler & Wells. Wells, S. (1857b), How to Write: A Pocket Manual of Composition and Letter-Writing, New York: Fowler & Wells. Whalley, J. I. (1975), Writing Implements and Accessories, Detroit: Gayle Research Company. ‘Wrifford’s Mercantile Penmanship’ (1825), The North American Review, 21: 451–3. Yates, J. (1991), ‘Investing in Information: Supply and Demand Forces in the Use of Information in American Firms, 1850–1920,’ in P. Temin (ed.), Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 117–54. Zakim, M. (2006), ‘Bookkeeping as Ideology: Capitalist Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America,’ Common-Place, Vol. 6, No. 3, (last accessed 22 September 2015).

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3 NAME AND ADDRESS: LETTERS AND MASS MAILING IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA David M. Henkin

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n 29 July 1835, a group of prominent white South Carolina citizens staged a nighttime raid on the city’s main post office. Styling themselves ‘lynch men,’ the intruders confiscated mail bags containing abolitionist tracts that were printed and mailed by a new antislavery society in the North and proceeded to burn the offending publications (along with effigies of leading abolitionists) before a large and supportive crowd in the streets of Charleston.1 Such a spectacular violation of the sanctity of the U.S. mail threatened a political crisis, which President Andrew Jackson contained by authorizing the Postmaster General to implement a compromise of sorts: the Post Office Department would transport antislavery publications to the South, but would then set them aside to prevent delivery and distribution. Following immediately on the heels of the first congressional Gag Rule, which effectively barred the consideration of any citizen petitions related to slavery, the Charleston post office raid and Jackson’s decision to suppress the mail formed crucial components of a powerful political response to the attempts of a new, notably radical, and otherwise marginal antislavery movement to seize the public stage. Accordingly, the abolitionist mail controversy has become a set piece in standard narratives of both the Second Party System and the escalating sectional conflict over slavery that anticipated and precipitated the Civil War. To modern readers, however, the circumstances surrounding this 1835 showdown over slavery might seem curious. The American Anti-Slavery Society, founded two years earlier in Philadelphia, adopted the perverse tactic of directing its message to Southern whites, mostly slaveholders, whose names they had drawn from city directories and newspaper listings. Unlike petitions to the House of Representatives opposing the annexation of Texas or advocating the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C., which had rocked the Capitol earlier in the year, the abolitionist tracts that burned in the streets of Charleston do not fit familiar models of political advocacy or public appeal. Instead, the use of the mail, a medium now linked in the popular imagination both to confidential exchange and to scenes of domestic reading, seems strikingly and provocatively personal. Direct-mail abolitionism, in fact, exploited several quite different features of the antebellum postal service, and presents a paradoxical instance of political communication. Individually addressed, though entirely unsolicited, abolitionist mail embodied a distinctive reform agenda of moral suasion designed to animate the private conscience of those who practiced or condoned the sin of slaveholding. At the same time, the 62

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contents of this appeal were mechanically reproduced and the scale of the campaign was vast and impersonal. During the summer of 1835, abolitionists sent over 175,000 pieces of printed mail (most of which were essentially newspapers) into slaveholding societies in the South, matching the aggregate output of the Southern periodical press.2 In that sense, as David Paul Nord has observed, the abolitionist direct mail campaign extended the Benevolent Empire project of evangelical publishing that had begun two decades earlier.3 But whereas the mass distribution of printed scripture by the American Bible Society could rely upon a far-flung network of religious sympathizers, a fledgling and geographically concentrated antislavery minority had to rely upon the postal system as a medium of mass broadcasting. In despoiling the mail, the Charleston lynch men were not simply repudiating the insult of being personally chastised by self-righteous radicals; they were targeting a potentially dangerous communications medium. As in the more violent anti-abolitionist riots that destroyed printing presses in Cincinnati in 1836 and Alton, Illinois, in 1837, slavery’s defenders in Charleston struck at the post office as a site of print publicity. The attack underscored a basic feature of postal exchange in the early republic that abolitionists understood but were hardly the first to discover: sending something in the mail could be an act of mass publication. Discussions of the history of communication in the nineteenth century conventionally identify the act of correspondence with holographic manuscript letters exchanged between individuals who already enjoy a deep personal acquaintanceship. Encouraged by nostalgia for lost epistolary arts, many twenty-first-century critics and commentators mystify this communications culture.4 Historians, for their part, often imply that handwritten letters provide privileged access to the sincere beliefs and intimate experiences of their authors, in pointed contrast to the phenomenon of publication. But of course letters and mail are not the same thing. Most historical and literary scholarship on correspondence takes as its subject the act of writing a letter, ignoring the conditions of a letter’s circulation and transmission. By allowing the letter to stand for the post, scholars of letters and correspondence have elided significant differences, both between epistolary and non-epistolary postal exchange (not all mail takes the form of a letter) and between privately conveyed and publicly posted letters (not all letters took the form of mail). The complex relationship between the history of mail and the history of letters is important to disentangling the familiar and underexamined association between epistolarity and intimacy and to reconstructing the culture of longdistance communication in nineteenth-century America. In significant ways, the unsolicited abolitionist newspapers that unsettled national slavery politics in 1835, rather than the handwritten personal letters that fill archives and manuscript collections, epitomized postal correspondence during the middle decades of that century. First, because the U.S. Post Office Department originated as a broadcast service provider, rather than an interactive network, and until the 1840s focused principally on connecting Americans through the circulation of news. Second, because even as mail metamorphosed into a medium of regular interactive exchanges among ordinary users, it retained profound links to publication and broadcasting while facilitating contacts that were replicable, centrifugal, asymmetrical, promiscuous, pseudonymous, or anonymous. Practically from its inception, the postal service in the United States operated primarily as a broadcast network.5 The Post Office Act of 1792 determined the role of the

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mail system in early national life by establishing two fee systems, one for newspapers and one for letters. Printed newspapers could travel up to 100 miles for one cent, and anywhere in the new nation for 1.5 cents. Furthermore, newspaper publishers could exchange copies of their papers free of charge. Letters, by contrast, were subject to a complex schedule of hefty postage rates, based on distance and number of sheets. This two-tiered postage model, which remained in place for more than fifty years, had the fully intended effect of emphasizing continuity and proximity within the republic for purposes of news circulation, even as it acknowledged and codified distance and difference for purposes of epistolary contact. Such a system restricted the postal exchange of letters to special occasions, wealthy correspondents, and especially merchants, for whom the financial scale of long-distance transactions and remittances might easily absorb the costs of letter postage. For most Americans, letter postage was too high to permit regular exchanges. Under this first U.S. mail regime, letters occupied an ambiguous position. Financially, they were crucial to the system, since high letter postage subsidized the cheap circulation of newspapers. But from the perspective of both the designers and the typical users of the mail, epistolary exchange was marginal to the main function of the postal network, which was to disseminate political news to a dispersed rural populace. Newspapers were the staple item of postal exchange in the early republic. By 1840, more than twenty-five million newspapers passed through the mail in the course of a single year, not counting those papers exchanged postage-free by editors. For the typical American postal user, the mail and the periodical press were intertwined institutions and the post office was principally a place to receive news transmissions. Moreover, the law that permitted newspapers to exchange free copies tended to have a homogenizing effect on news content, since small-town papers could reprint articles (or simply paragraphs) provided by their urban counterparts.6 More like television than like telephony, the postal system between 1792 and 1845 served primarily to allow a small number of message producers to reach a vast number of anonymous message consumers. While postal patrons could – and did – circulate newspapers in ingenious and idiosyncratic ways to engage in personal correspondence through the mail (much as radio operators in a later era could transmit private messages along airwaves dominated by large media outlets), such manoeuvres reflected and reinforced the point that at core, the mail was seen as a means of mass broadcasting. Beginning in 1845, however, postage reform redefined the mail as something approaching a network of interactive connectivity. Facing a threat of competition from private package delivery firms and rising demand for long-distance correspondence, Congress followed a recent British example and radically lowered letter postage. A second reduction in 1851 reinforced the change, extending the new low rate to letters weighing up to half an ounce no matter how far they traveled within the country, and creating an even lower rate for postage prepaid by the sender. Cheaper postage did not instantaneously create a nation of avid letter-writers, but it dramatically encouraged personal correspondence and marked the emergence of the postal network as the kind of communications medium that many students of the letter mistakenly imagine it to have always and essentially been: a popular and inclusive technology for maintaining personal relationships at a distance. But although mail became more interactive at mid-century, involving a wider range of message-senders and connecting friends and family, not all mailed matter was

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epistolary. In shifting the cost basis of sending a letter from the number of sheets to weight, the 1845 postage reform effectively redefined mail contents as objects, rather than handwritten texts. And American postal users responded by circulating a dazzlingly diverse array of objects. After the second reform in 1851, for example, the New York Times remarked that ‘the public mail has become a kind of package, parcel, and express line, for the conveyance of all sorts of goods and chattels . . . anything, in short, under the size and weight of cooking stoves or cotton gins.’7 Published inventories of the undelivered objects that accumulated in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, D.C. confirmed the heterogeneity and bulk of mid-century mailed matter. Most frequently, Americans sent lighter objects, especially bank notes, daguerreotype portraits, postage stamps, seed samples, and locks of hair.8 Such objects typically accompanied texts that fit classical definitions of letters, but they provide useful reminders that the mail is not simply a category of text. Many of the most widely mailed non-textual artifacts, such as photographs and hair, emphasized individual identity, personal connection, and bodily intimacy. Even paper currency could epitomize and exploit the utility of mail as a medium of private, one-to-one exchange between closely connected correspondents. Yet it is a mistake to construe that utility as essential, either to the workings of nineteenth-century postal communication or to the character of nineteenth-century letters. As is the case today, much nineteenth-century mail, perhaps even a majority of the letters that passed through the post office in certain times and places during the middle decades, consisted of unsolicited postings to strangers. In addition to printed tracts and newspapers of the sort sent by abolitionists to unsuspecting slaveholders in the 1830s, a variety of other appeals and solicitations filled U.S. post offices and mail bags during the middle decades of the nineteenth century; variously defying, complicating, and unsettling the conventional association between letter-writing and intimacy. By far the most common unsolicited correspondence came in the form of what were called circulars, a word that denoted letters or advertisements posted or distributed to numerous recipients in multiple identical copies. Circulars promoted political causes, announced social events, solicited donations, and advertised goods and services. Though circulars were in some cases timely and interesting to their recipients, more often they were regarded as a paradigmatic form of junk mail. By 1855, for instance, the Postmaster General was estimating that advertising circulars for lotteries and patent medicines alone were filling up thirty to forty bags a day at some post offices.9 Even when they were posted less indiscriminately, circulars might prove burdensome to their recipients. In 1869, the Unitarian minister Henry Bellows recalled receiving ‘heavy circulars from a committee of clergymen, who had charge of a fund of ten thousand dollars, asking us to compete for a funeral monument.’10 Annoyed that the package arrived postage due, Bellows ignored the appeal, only to receive a second installment, ‘postage still unpaid, but inflicting large manuscript letters upon us in respect to the way in which the designs were to be managed.’11 Most circulars arrived lighter (and paid for), but were not necessarily any more appreciated. Circulars formed a ubiquitous model of impersonal mail against which more intimate correspondence could be measured. When her sister accused her in 1847 of writing stereotypical and thin letters, Emily Wharton Sinkler went on the defensive. Demanding ‘to know what you mean by calling my letters circulars,’ the exiled urbanite countered: ‘If you only knew how little I have to write about you would think it

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wonderful that I get through a letter at all. You who live in a city could have no trouble in writing . . . why you ought to write pages.’12 The accusation clearly stung. Already by mid-century, many Americans (and principally those in cities) inhabited a world full of paper detritus. Posted circulars may have been addressed to individuals (unlike the posters and broadsides that littered city streets), but they participated all the same in the forms of impersonal communication associated with modern print culture.13 Circulars typically engaged in the increasingly ordinary businesses of advertising, fundraising, and propaganda. In some cases, however, they were enlisted in frauds, swindles, and schemes that took advantage of both the anonymity of the mail and the size of the postal network to reap considerable profits. Postal ruses took several forms, some quite ingenious. Around mid-century, for example, an enterprising teenaged boy sent multiple handwritten copies of a letter informing recipients that he had ‘received a package of papers for you with six shillings charges thereon – on receipt of which amount the parcel will be sent to you by such conveyance as you may direct.’14 Signing the letter with a false name, the young man netted a significant number of responses from curious lawyers wondering what business they might have in Great Britain, before he was caught by a special agent of the Post Office hired to investigate frauds.15 Another elaborate stratagem featured personal letters to country clergymen. ‘Being at leisure this afternoon,’ one such letter began, ‘I have concluded to sit down and write you, utterly unacquainted save in that sympathy which persons of like temperament involuntarily feel toward one another.’16 As the pastor read on, he would then learn of the author’s dissatisfaction with the ‘coldness and formality of our metropolitan sermons,’ and his fond recollections of having once heard the addressee speak while passing through his small town.17 Such recollections were reawakened, it turned out, by a reference to the distinguished country cleric in a ‘new publication of travels through the States,’ in which some distinguished foreign author had given him a glowing mention.18 The letter closed with an invitation to consider a move to the author’s wealthy urban parish. Only in a postscript did the true object of the scam surface: ‘P.S. – If you have not seen the notice of you, (in the book I alluded to), I will get it for you. I believe it sells at a dollar and a half, or thereabouts.’19 Less complicated fraudulent scams operated on an even bigger scale. A guide to New York published shortly after the Civil War, for instance, estimated that over 2,000 ‘swindling establishments’ operated out of the city, each one taking in between $100,000 and $500,000 during its brief business season before closing up shop and reappearing under a new name and address.20 The swindles could be quite simple. The addressee might be promised some gift in return for subscribing to a newspaper or a benevolent society, or perhaps a special recipe for producing a patent medicine would be offered free of charge (except, that is, for a postage stamp). Often, the offer would involve something illegal, such as a lottery (prohibited by law in the state of New York) or the distribution of counterfeit bank notes. The addressee would then be enlisted, with a great display of confidence, as the agent for an illegal operation, and when he eventually discovered the fraud he would be in no position to file a complaint with the police. ‘No fraud is more transparent [or] successful . . . [than] the circular swindle,’ Edward Crapsey observed in The Nether Side of New York (1872), while another sensationalist text maintained that: ‘There is scarcely a city or town in the Union to which circulars are not sent, and from which victims are not secured.’21

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While amusing illustrations of the limitless avarice, guile, and credulity of human beings, circular swindles depended for their success on several interesting features of the emerging postal network. Many of the perpetrators, for instance, used city directories, professional publications, commercial lists, newspaper advertisements, and other print artifacts which, taken together, formed a growing registry of postal addresses accessible on a national level. Abolitionists had used similar sources in mounting their direct mail campaigns during the 1830s, but by the 1860s many more names were available through such searches. The teenaged criminal mentioned earlier located his victims through the Law Register. The man who sought to flatter and fleece country clergymen presumably had access to national, printed lists of ministers. Those operations that did not discriminate on the basis of profession, meanwhile, could gather the names of ‘hundreds of thousands of persons . . . from all over the country’ by consulting a range of other texts, including, of course, the lists of uncollected letters at the post office which were published biweekly in the local newspapers.22 For his part, the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock discovered that obscenity dealers would locate potential customers by obtaining school rosters or would, like lottery managers or peddlers of postal fraud, purchase old letters and envelopes from specialized brokers ‘who make a business of collecting names.’23 Indeed, names assumed new significance within the letter-writing culture of the cheap postage era. One of the most remarkable achievements of the postal network was the assignment of an identifiable address to every person with access to a post office. Once postage was lowered and once regular habits of inquiry were institutionalized, one simply needed to know the name of a person and the name of a post office location (this was, of course, what facilitated the acquisition of postal addresses for circulars, advertisements, and junk mail). By definition, everyone had an address. Later in the century, with the spread of home mail delivery, postal addresses would become attached to discrete residential locations and defined with far greater geographical specificity. But prior to that point, names and cities provided users with broadly legible and accessible addresses. Letters consequently miscarried when senders misidentified persons or towns and when recipients moved, neglected to inquire at the post, or otherwise fell through the cracks of a system that claimed to include every potential user of the mail. Popular accounts of the dead letter phenomenon often implied that greater care in the addressing of letters would solve most of the problems, but clearly this was not the whole story. Dead letters floated in the intermediate space between names and people, and between the personal recognition marked by an individually addressed letter and the impersonality of a large, mobile, and uprooted society.24 The bags of errant mail that collected in Washington offered evidence of the inadequacy of personal names as the foundation for the postal address system. In addition to collecting missives where names were misspelled or attached to places that were themselves misidentified, the Dead Letter Office extracted letters from the contexts in which their addressees might be recognized. But at the post office, especially in smaller communities, names in postal addresses might have meaning within a context of local networks of acquaintanceship. In Cleveland in the mid-1850s, for example, a letter reportedly arrived with the following address: ‘To the big-faced Butcher, with a big wart on his nose – Cleveland, Ohio.’25 According to the account of this incident in Harper’s Monthly, the postal clerks ‘all knew the man, but they were afraid to deliver the letter!’26 Meanwhile, a letter sent to a postal patron in Dedham, Massachusetts, around

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the same time, was addressed in care of John Lee, whose common name apparently necessitated the specification, ‘the man that speaks through his nose or with the crucket [sic] foot.’27 And a subscriber to Scientific American from Knoxville complained in 1859 that the magazine was not delivered to a newcomer in that city because his name was not ‘familiar to those who assist the postmaster in his duties.’28 Alternatively, for more socially prominent postal users, the network of personal acquaintanceship and recognition could extend beyond the local post office. Thus, in 1846, at the very dawn of cheap postage, a letter arrived at the South Carolina home of Emily Wharton Sinkler, addressed rather vaguely to her friend ‘Miss Catherine O’Rourke, care of Mr. Sinkler, P.O. South Carolina.’29 The letter reached its intended destination, Emily observed, only because Charleston postmaster Alfred Huger (who had found himself in the national spotlight a decade earlier in the abolitionist mail controversy) was personally acquainted with her husband Charles Sinkler. O’Rourke’s correspondent might have been observing older protocols of respect in addressing letters. As late as 1854, for example, a republished edition of an older epistolary guide was still advising readers that ‘in directing your letter to persons who are well known, it is best not to be too particular; because it lessens the person to whom you write, to suppose him obscure, and not easily found.’30 But such advice was quaint and outdated by mid-century (if not earlier), and certainly at odds with most writing on the subject, and indeed Sinkler was right to think the incident odd and remarkable. Despite noteworthy exceptions, then, whatever minimal name recognition might be invoked at the local post office lay beyond the parameters of the national network that was on display in and around the Dead Letter Office. Not only were names severed from faces and from the networks of personal acquaintanceship, they were also especially liable to be shared among several people. In the dead letter lists and the reports from the postal morgue, it was clear that names were not, in fact, unique addresses. Even at the local level, postal practices ran into the problem of name duplication, something that unclaimed letter lists in the newspaper increasingly reflected and emphasized. Lists of letters being held at the post office were, even more than city directories, the nineteenth-century precursor to the phone book, at least to the extent that they provided the most conspicuous evidence of the commonness of particular surnames. As early as 1840, the New Orleans Picayune cited as ‘incredible’ the fact that in the most recent list ‘there were only sixteen for the Smith family, and not one addressed to John.’31 New postal users then, especially those living in large or unfamiliar communities, had to adjust to this new condition of alienation from their own names. Writing from San Francisco in 1854, Charles Allen, for instance, warned his brother in a postscript to ‘please put my middle Letter in for there is so may [sic] by my name here that they take all my letters and papers.’32 Though some of his namesakes returned Allen’s mail to the post office, he added, ‘some . . . keep them.’33 James Harris Ham suffered from similar confusion during the Gold Rush, and complained that one of his love letters had wound up in the hands of another J. H. Ham.34 An anecdote of postal life in Philadelphia published in 1866, meanwhile, told of a man who had received money intended for a namesake and innocently spent it before the discovery was made.35 And a more tragic fate almost befell the recovered fugitive slave Anthony Burns, whose letter to the lawyer Richard Dana from a Virginia jail cell was delayed by its delivery to another man named Dana.36 Equally, the possibility of namesake misdelivery entered into the list of plausible explanations and excuses for

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the failure of letters to arrive. Mary Wingate, responding to her husband’s complaints of not receiving any mail in 1851, wondered whether it was ‘possible there may be another of your name that gets your letters?’37 By mid-century, post office publications were urging those sending mail to ‘populous cities’ to include in the address ‘the trade or profession of the party, if known, as well as the number of the street,’ but such advice appears to have gone unheeded.38 In 1865 a children’s magazine, Our Young Folks, offered a more elaborate lesson in the perils of using putative knowledge of someone’s name as the basis for a postal address. In a piece entitled ‘A Business Letter,’ co-editor Gail Hamilton (aka Mary Abigail Dodge) describes a scenario in which a reader, upon hearing that the magazine’s editor is a man named Mr. Franklin Smith of Mattapoiset, sends a manuscript to that address. Imagining the destiny of such a manuscript, Hamilton notes that the voting rolls for Mattapoiset list no one named Franklin Smith, though there is a Francis Smith and a Frank Smith, among many other Smiths. The subscriber’s letter, which was submitting an ‘enigma’ (a type of riddle that was a standard feature of that publication), ‘is taken from the post-office by Mr. Frank Smith, who is an excellent man, but not given to literature, and who never heard of an enigma. He opens the letter with considerable curiosity . . . [and asks:] What’s the fellow bothering about?’39 Hamilton then imagines the wrong Mr. Smith showing the riddle to his puzzled wife, before leaving the letter in the family Bible, where it lies ‘forgotten . . . to this day.’40 What is more, another letter for Franklin Smith is mistaken at the post office by a ‘gay young clerk’ of approximately that name for a love note.41 Upon discovering his error, ‘Francis Smith’ simply burns the note.42 But another letter has the good fortune of arriving in the hands of a Smith whose children happen to be subscribers to Our Young Folks. Recognizing and solving the enigma, this Smith paterfamilias brings the riddle with him on a trip to Boston and submits it personally, but without the accompanying note, ‘so that nobody knows whose story it is, and it goes down into a nameless grave.’43 Such a resting place, Hamilton’s didactic article implies, is an ironic but just fate for a letter that sought to penetrate the pseudonymous façade of a public print culture with a direct appeal to a named postal patron. Indeed, didactic warnings were necessary because the temptation to equate a name with a serviceable postal address was great – and often justified. Americans routinely addressed mail to authors, politicians, and other famous people. The enslaved North Carolina barber James Starkey, for example, posted a letter to Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind during the height of her 1850 American tour, appealing to Lind’s muchcelebrated munificence to liberate him from slavery; while in the decade after the Civil War, Harriet Lane Levy, a young daughter of Jewish immigrants living in San Francisco, wrote a personal letter to Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) to express her admiration for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).44 Fanny Fern’s best-selling novel Ruth Hall (1855) is filled with fan mail to the title character once she becomes a successful author, though it is largely mediated through her pseudonym and her publisher; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as the work of Jill Anderson has demonstrated, was an especially popular target for autograph seekers during the early years of cheap postage.45 Between 1844 and 1865, 410 separate requests for the poet’s signature came to him through the mail, and though Longfellow, who wrote some 4,000 letters during this period, complained of the burden of his ever-growing stack of unanswered mail (‘as huge and inexhaustible as the guano on the odorous Chinchi

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Islands’), the inconvenience did not deter him from engaging prolifically in postal correspondence with people he did not know.46 Perhaps the best-known evidence of the growing practice of sending mail to famous strangers surfaced indirectly during the presidential election campaign of 1848, at an historical moment between the lowering of postal rates (1845) and the mandating of prepayment (1855), when General Zachary Taylor’s acceptance of the Whig nomination was delayed by Taylor’s refusal to pay the postage on the rising tide of unsolicited mail sent to him.47 Since Taylor had instructed the Baton Rouge postmaster to dispose of all letters that came postage due, official notice of the nomination entered a substantial bundle of mail forwarded to the Dead Letter Office. Perplexed by Taylor’s failure to reply, the chairman of the convention had to send a duplicate letter, much to the embarrassment of the party. Even beyond the emerging world of literary and political celebrity, postal users were growing accustomed to the accessibility of people they knew only by name and hometown. Evdience of the habitation to this new avenue of access appears throughout the literature of the cheap postage era. After meeting his nephew for the first time and under remarkable circumstances, for example, a character in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s novel The Hidden Hand (1859) resolves to write him a letter as soon as he gets home. Once his identity comes fortuitously to light, the estranged relative then becomes an accessible partner for regular and predictable postal exchange.48 The relationship between individual identity and postal address could work in the other direction as well. In John Rollin Ridge’s popular 1854 narrative of the life of California outlaw Joaquín Murieta, the protagonist is able to free one of his comrades from the clutches of the law by pretending to be a San José merchant named Samuel Harrington and testifying on behalf of the man in custody. To prove his identity to the court, Ridge recounts, Murieta presented ‘five or six letters addressed in different hands to “Mr. Samuel Harrington, San José,” and bearing the marks of various post offices in the State.’49 The new postal network thus introduced a system for mapping persons that was, at the same time, both anonymous and especially attached to the individual name. By the 1870s, a great proportion of the mail arriving daily in post offices was posted to parties whom the sender did not know. This development marked, in a superficial sense, a return to the first third of the century, when news and congressional communications dominated the mails. But the new system was strikingly different. Before 1845, printed documents addressed to no one in particular comprised the bulk of postal transmission, but they were the special province of newspaper editors (who enjoyed subsidized rates) and government officials (who wielded franking privileges). After the mid-century reforms, the privilege became democratized, at least to the extent that the power to communicate with multiple unknown persons was distributed to anyone who could afford printing costs (or the burden of extensive copying) and radically reduced postal rates. A wide assortment of publishers, ideologues, schemers, fundraisers, pranksters, entrepreneurs, solicitors, marriage-seekers, and others entered the fray, flooding the mails with new models of mass epistolary correspondence. This correspondence might be handwritten and personally addressed, but at the same time anonymously authored or promiscuously scattered, as in the case of the Valentine’s Day greetings (both sentimental and abusive) that proliferated explosively with the advent of cheap postage.50 Correspondence might be heartfelt and sincere, but nonetheless transactional and commercially motivated, as in the case of begging letters

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to men of wealth.51 And equally, correspondence might be addressed to celebrities, anonymous city dwellers spotted entering or exiting their homes, or anyone listed in a city directory. All of these letters simultaneously exploited and eroded popular notions of the letter as a form of personal relationship across distance; and today, they also reinforce a crucial historical point – posted letters in nineteenth-century America circulated in a medium that yoked intimate exchange to mass communication.

Acknowledgments Parts of this chapter first appeared in The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America, © 2006 by the University of Chicago (All Rights Reserved), and are reprinted here with the permission of the University of Chicago Press.

Notes 1. On the Charleston raid, see: John, Spreading the News, 257–72; Wyly-Jones, ‘The 1835 Anti-Abolition Meetings’; and Mercieca, ‘The Culture of Honor.’ 2. See John, Spreading the News, 261. 3. See Nord, ‘Benevolent Books,’ 242–3. 4. On the nostalgia for the lost art of intimate correspondence, see Henkin, ‘Reading Our E-mail.’ 5. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 21–2. 6. See John, Spreading the News, 160–1, and Kielbowicz, News in the Mail, 83–93. On the importance of the paragraph as a transplantable unit of news, see Slauter, ‘Le Paragraphe Mobile.’ 7. Quoted in Henkin, The Postal Age, 52. 8. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 52–62, 158–65. 9. See: Fuller, Morality and the Mail, 169; John, Spreading the News, 161; and Rohrbach and Newman, American Issue, 85. On circulars and junk mail in the British post immediately following the institution of penny postage, see Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy, 68–70. 10. Bellows, ‘Seven Sittings,’ 106. 11. Ibid. 12. Quoted in LeClerq, An Antebellum Plantation Household, 41. For another invidious comparison between circulars and ‘letters . . . of value,’ see Reverend Robert Mallard’s 1856 letter to his fiancée Mary Sharpe Jones, quoted in Myers, The Children of Pride, 280. 13. See Henkin, City Reading. 14. Quoted in Holbrook, Ten Years, 246. 15. See Holbrook, Ten Years, 244–54. 16. Quoted in Holbrook, Ten Years, 254. 17. Ibid. 256. 18. Ibid. 254. 19. Ibid. 255. Many more anecdotes of postal fraud appear in Comstock, Frauds Exposed. A fascinating account of the role of fraudulent letters and postmarks in the earlier and celebrated case of the prolific forger Monroe Edwards (whom Melville alludes to in his famous 1853 story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’) appears in the anonymously authored Life and Adventures of the Accomplished Forger and Swindler, 84–108, 132–5. 20. See Smith, Sunshine and Shadow, 694–705. 21. Crapsey, The Nether Side, 63; Smith, Sunshine and Shadow, 695. 22. Ibid.

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23. Comstock, Traps for the Young, 134. Comstock charged that publishers of sexually explicit material would send ‘circulars to postal clerks and others through the country, offering prizes for a list of the names of youth of both sexes under twenty-one years of age’ (ibid.). 24. Melville’s choice of the Dead Letter Office as Bartleby’s previous employment makes perfect sense in this context. Identifying an alienated urban stranger with the dead letter, Melville offered an astute reading of the culture of the post in the late antebellum period. 25. Quoted in ‘Editor’s Drawer,’ 570. 26. ‘Editor’s Drawer,’ 570. 27. Quoted in Holbrook, Ten Years, 387. 28. ‘Post Office Mismanagement,’ 21. In Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), the title character is told of a letter waiting for him at the post office addressed to his nickname, which no longer applies now that he has turned respectable. He reclaims his old outfit and dresses the part, in order to persuade the clerk that he is the intended recipient. See Alger, Ragged Dick, 116–19. 29. Sinkler, Letter to Thomas I. Wharton, 28 February 1846, in Between North and South, 57. 30. The New Universal Letter-Writer, 33. 31. ‘Incredible,’ New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 20, 1840, 2. 32. Allen, Letter to William Allen, 14 February 1854, Bancroft Library. 33. Ibid. 34. See Ham, Letter to Charlie [?], 22 January 1853, Bancroft Library. 35. See Rees, Foot-prints, 308. 36. See Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns, 288. 37. Wingate, Letter to Benjamin Wingate, 26 August 1851, Bancroft Library. 38. Bowen, United States Post-Office Guide, 71. 39. Hamilton, ‘A Business Letter,’ 369. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 370. 44. See: Starkey, Letter to Gerard Hallock, 9 September 1850, 86; and Levy, 920 O’Farrell Street, 14. 45. For further discussion of the fan letters in Fern’s novel see Williams, Reclaiming Authorship, 49–51. For Fern’s reflections on her own fan mail see ‘Tom Pax’s Conjugal Soliloquy.’ On Longfellow see Anderson, ‘ “Send Me a Nice Little Letter”.’ 46. Longfellow, Letter to Charles Sumner, 30 January 1855, in The Letters, 466. 47. The incident is described in most Taylor biographies. See, for example, Dyer, Zachary Taylor, 284–5, and Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman, 237–8. 48. See Southworth, The Hidden Hand, 59. 49. Ridge, The Lives and Adventures, 95. 50. On valentines in the mail, see Henkin, The Postal Age, 148–53. 51. Begging letters already proliferated in the antebellum era but developed into a robust popular genre later in the century. See Sandage, Born Losers, 226–52.

Works Cited Alger, H., Jr., [1868] (2008), Ragged Dick, or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, ed. H. Hoeller, New York: Norton. Allen, C., and W. Allen (1853–78), William Allen and Charles Allen Letters, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, BANC MSS 88/129c. Anderson, J. E. (2007), ‘ “Send Me a Nice Little Letter All to Myself”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Fan Mail and Antebellum Poetic Culture,’ University Library Faculty Publications, Scholar Works, Georgia State University Library, Paper 111, (last accessed 22 September 2015).

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Bauer, K. J. (1985), Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Bellows, H. W. (1869), ‘Seven Sittings with Powers the Sculptor, No. VII,’ Appleton’s Journal, 2: 106–08. Bowen, E. (1851), The United States Post Office Guide, New York: D. Appleton and Co. Comstock, A. (1880), Frauds Exposed; or, How the People are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted, New York: J. H. Brown. Comstock, A. (1884), Traps for the Young, New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Crapsey, E. (1872), The Nether Side of New York; or, The Vice, Crime and Poverty of the Great Metropolis, New York: Sheldon & Co. Dyer, B. (1946), Zachary Taylor, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ‘Editor’s Drawer’ (1855), Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 11: 565–72. Fern, F. [1856] (1986), ‘Tom Pax’s Conjugal Soliloquy,’ in J. W. Warren (ed.), ‘Ruth Hall’ and Other Writings, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 268–9. Fuller, W. (2003), Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ham, J. H. (1853), Letter to Charlie [?], 22 January, California Gold Rush Letters, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, BANC MSS C-B 547, Part I, Box 2. Hamilton, G. (1865), ‘A Business Letter,’ Our Young Folks: An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls, 1: 368–72. Henkin, D. M. (1998), City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York, New York: Columbia University Press. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henkin, D. M. (2008), ‘Reading Our E-mail,’ Common-Place, Vol. 8, No. 3, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Holbrook, J. (1855), Ten Years Among the Mail Bags: or, Notes from the Diary of a Special Agent of the Post-Office Department, Philadelphia: H. Cowperthwait & Co. John, R. R. (1998), Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kielbowicz, R. B. (1989), News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Levy, H. L. [1937] (1996), 920 O’Farrell Street: A Jewish Girlhood in Old San Francisco, Berkeley: Heyday Books. LeClerq, A. W. S. (2006), An Antebellum Plantation Household: Including the South Carolina Low Country Receipts and Remedies of Emily Wharton Sinkler, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Life and Adventures of the Accomplished Forger and Swindler, Colonel Monroe Edwards (1848), New York: H. Long and Brother. Longfellow, H. W. (1972), The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Volume 3: 1844–1856, ed. A. Hilen, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mercieca, J. R. (2007), ‘The Culture of Honor: How Slaveholders Responded to the Abolitionist Mail Crisis of 1835,’ Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 10: 51–76. Myers, R. M., ed. (1972), The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. The New Universal Letter-Writer; or, Complete Art of Polite Correspondence [1818] (1854), Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co. Nord, D. P. (2010), ‘Benevolent Books: Printing, Religion, and Reform,’ in R. A. Gross and M. Kelley (eds.), A History of the Book in America, Volume 2 – An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 221–46. ‘Post Office Mismanagement’ (1859), Scientific American, 1: 21.

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Rees, J. (1866), Foot-prints of a Letter Carrier; or, A History of the World’s Correspondence, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. Ridge, J. R. [1854] (1955), The Lives and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Rohrbach, P. T., and L. S. Newman (1984), American Issue: The U.S. Postage Stamp, 1842–1869, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Sandage, S. A. (2005), Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sinkler, E. W. (2001), Between North and South: The Letters of Emily Wharton Sinkler, 1842–1865, ed. A. W. S. LeClerq, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Slauter, W. (2012), ‘Le Paragraphe Mobile: Circulation et Transformation des Informations dans le Monde Atlantique du 18e Siècle,’ Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 67: 363–89. Smith, M. H. (1868), Sunshine and Shadow in New York, Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr & Co. Southworth, E. D. E. N. [1859] (1998), The Hidden Hand; Or, Capitola the Madcap, ed. J. Dobson, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Starkey, J. R. [1850] (1977), Letter to G. Hallock, 9 September, in J. W. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 86. Vincent, D. (1998), The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998, New York: Oxford University Press. Von Frank, A. J. (1998), The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, S. S. (2006), Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wingate, M. (1851), Letter to B. Wingate, 26 August, Benjamin Wingate Correspondence, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, BANC MSS 83/35 c. Wyly-Jones, S. (2001), ‘The 1835 Anti-Abolition Meetings in the South: A New Look at the Controversy over the Abolition Postal Campaign,’ Civil War History, 47: 289–309.

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4 PAPER EVIDENCE: HANDWRITING, PRINT, LETTERS, AND THE LAW Christopher A. Hunter

This little piece of paper had given rise to all these suspicions, and brought all this trouble. Benjamin F. Hallett, A Full Report of the Trial of Ephraim K. Avery (1833) (FRT, 94) On a windy December morning in 1832, a Tiverton, Rhode Island farmer made a gruesome discovery: a woman’s body, a rope tied around her neck, hanging from a post in his field. She was Sarah Maria Cornell, an unmarried thirty-year-old employee of a nearby textile mill. Her doctor informed the hastily convened coroner’s inquest that she was pregnant and that she had named a married Methodist minister as the father. The connection between seduction and suicide seemed clear and unambiguous; it was a tragedy familiar to any reader of American novels. For unlike the eponymous protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), early American heroines rarely found their integrity ‘rewarded’ with marriage to a reformed rake. On the contrary, ‘the dangerous Consequences of SEDUCTION’ had been a mainstay of American fiction since William Hill Brown’s epistolary tale of ‘the poison of vice,’ The Power of Sympathy (1789), the book most often granted the title of ‘the first American novel.’1 Primed by the conventionality of such plots to see Cornell’s death as the lamentable but predictable result of her sexual fall, it took the six men of the coroner’s jury less than a day to decide what had happened: ‘Sarah M. Cornell committed suicide by hanging herself upon a stake in said stackyard, and was influenced to commit the crime by the wicked conduct of a married man’ (FRT, 191). Disavowed by her congregation and without family nearby, Cornell was buried at public expense on the farm where she died. Yet before too long a short note penciled on a slip of dirty paper transformed this story from one resembling an eighteenth-century sentimental novel into something closer to the kind of cheap and violent sensationalism popularly associated with the reading habits of Jacksonian-era mill girls like Cornell.2 Its inscription read: ‘If I should be missing enquire of the Rev. Mr. Avery of Bristol he will know where I am Dec 20th S. M. Cornell.’3 This apparent hedge against a perilous future raised suspicions that Cornell might not have killed herself after all; as Avery’s counsel later noted, her little piece of paper precipitated what was to follow. But Cornell’s note was, in fact, only one part of a small archive she had collected in the weeks before her death. Locked in her trunk were three more letters that, in light of her own memorandum, seemed 75

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to implicate the father of her child in her death. Consequently, Cornell’s body was exhumed on Christmas Eve and re-examined for signs of trauma, and the initial finding of suicide was set aside on the technicality that because two of the jurors were not freeholders they were ineligible to sign the verdict.4 A new jury reclassified Cornell’s death as murder, and charges were brought against Ephraim K. Avery. Then, as now, the meaning of Cornell’s death hinges on the letters at its center. This ‘paper evidence,’ as one of Avery’s lawyers called it, was the only remaining documentation of a relationship between the victim and the accused, and it was central to both the trial and its coverage in print (RT, 49). Accordingly, then, we can use these letters to illuminate the increasing interrelationship of print and the law in the early nineteenth century. Taking the Cornell letters themselves as a starting point, this chapter begins by exploring their legal reading, by which I mean those modes of interpreting them enacted in the courtroom and circumscribed by its procedures. Nineteenth-century rules of evidence, as we shall see, operated both as a principle of selection and as a hermeneutic, determining what the jurors were allowed to see and hear and constraining how they could interpret that evidence. The letters’ official meaning – the one available at trial and endorsed by the state – was produced by the interaction of this group of letters with a set of flexible rules governing their reading in the courtroom. But the court was no longer the sole arbiter of these meanings; new printing technologies had broken the de facto judicial monopoly on interpretation by making it economically feasible to present epistolary evidence more or less directly to the public. Thus, the second half of my chapter turns to the printed responses that attempted to correct the perceived injustice caused by the law’s dedication to formal procedure. Many of the pamphlets, books, broadsides, illustrations, and newspaper reports that followed Avery’s eventual acquittal explicitly decried the interpretive constraints imposed by legal reading, but David Melvill’s A Facsimile of the Letters Produced at the Trial of the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery (1833) went one step further by reproducing both the texts and the material forms of the letters. If Melvill’s search for redress through reproduction is beset with an inescapable irony, it speaks all the more directly to the fraught intersection of the law and an increasingly massified world of print. This pamphlet of facsimiles responded to the court but it also contributed to a broader cultural shift that would in time change rules of evidence governing handwriting evidence in U.S. courts. Far from occupying isolated spheres, then, print and the law generated complexly intertwined cultures of reading in the antebellum U.S., cultures this chapter examines though the epistolary evidence at the center of the Avery case. Sometime before she died, Sarah Cornell locked three incriminating letters in her trunk. Each was written on one side of a different colored half-sheet of paper, with the first and the third having been folded identically, forming a sealable package with the superscription near the bottom of the verso. The earliest is unsigned, written on yellow paper, and postmarked from Warren, Rhode Island on 14 November 1832. It is apparently a reply, as it expresses ‘no small surprise’ at the news that provoked it.5 The writer proposes a meeting and promises, ‘I will do all you ask only keep your secrets.’6 A second letter, on red or pink paper, was dated ‘Providence Nov 1831’ and signed ‘B.H.’7 Here the writer asks Cornell, ‘when you write direct your letters to Betsey Hills Bristol and not as you have to me.’8 Like the yellow letter, it is an attempt to arrange a meeting. If Cornell is unwilling to travel, it adds, the writer will meet her in nearby Fall River. This missive concludes with the postscript ‘let me still injoin [sic] the secret – keep

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the letters in your bosom or burn them up.’9 And finally, an unsigned letter on white paper dated ‘Fall River Dec 8’ reads, in full, ‘I will be here on the 20 if pleasant at the place named at 6 o clk [sic]. If not pleasant the next Monday eve. Say nothing, &c.’10 These three letters clearly implicate the author in Cornell’s murder; they can be read as arranging the very meeting at which she was killed. And if the writer of the letters was almost certainly Cornell’s killer, so Avery’s responsibility for these letters, if it could be demonstrated, would go a long way toward proving his guilt. ‘Fixing the authorship . . . upon the defendant’ became, as the prosecutor at Avery’s trial said, ‘the great point . . . to prove a criminal intercourse between the parties’ (RT, 139). Indeed, even the minister’s staunchest supporters admitted that the letters ‘would go far to establishing his guilt.’11 The question facing the prosecution, however, was one that would continue to dog judges and courts for decades: how exactly to prove the authorship of unsigned or falsely signed letters. Within this context, the American editions of Thomas Starkie’s Practical Treatise on the Law of Evidence (1824) proved to be the most often cited authority in the Avery case, adverted to by prosecutors and defense lawyers alike.12 According to Starkie, the best way to prove the handwriting of a document was through the testimony of a witness who actually saw the party write it. Admitting that such evidence is rarely available, though, Starkie adds that the next best evidence is a witness who has, ‘by sufficient means, acquired such a knowledge of the general character of the hand-writing of the party as will enable him to swear to his belief, that the handwriting in question is the hand-writing of that person’ (PTLE, 2: 372). This general knowledge might be acquired by seeing the person write – even if only a single time – or by correspondence. But under no circumstances could a witness compare a questionable text to one known to be in an author’s hand: ‘It is also a rule that evidence by comparison of hands is not admissible. By comparison, is now, meant an actual comparison of two writings with each other, in order to ascertain whether both were written by the same person’ (PTLE, 373). American courts too had rejected this kind of analysis since at least as far back as Martin v. Taylor, an 1803 decision in which the U.S. Circuit Court affirmed that comparisons of handwriting were inadmissible as proof of authorship in criminal cases.13 The objections to such comparisons were more procedural than practical. To prove one piece of handwriting would require another, Starkie noted, ‘and so the evidence might branch out to an indefinite extent’ (PTLE, 375). Yet even so, the absurdity of this rule was apparent; for as Starkie himself goes on to admit, ‘a witness is more likely to form a correct judgment as to the identity of hand-writing, by comparing it critically and minutely with a fair and genuine specimen of the party’s hand-writing, than he would be able to make by comparing what he sees with the faint impression made by having seen the party write but once, and then, perhaps, under circumstance which did not awaken his attention’ (PTLE, 375). Indeed, facility with the comparative evaluation of script was an occupational necessity for postal workers and bank clerks, who were called on every day to determine the genuineness of signatures. This professional expertise was, on occasion, actually allowed in courts: Starkie offers the example of a postal inspector whose job was to inspect franks for forgeries testifying, as a matter of skill and judgment, on whether he believed a document was written in an assumed hand. But, crucially, the inspector was still not allowed to compare it to a document known to have been written by the suspected forger then on trial.14

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Instead of trying to use the writing on Sarah Cornell’s letters to connect them to Avery, then, prosecutors had to use their material attributes. No one saw Avery write the letters, but their status as objects provided a way to circumvent the evidentiary rules governing writing. Indeed, paper and postmarks were far more important than text for these purposes. The pink letter, for example, had been conveyed to Fall River by the engineer of the steamboat King Phillip.15 He recalled the color of the paper and recognized Avery in court, insisting that he was ‘certain he was the man’ who had handed him the letter (RT, 36). Similarly, the white letter, which the court admitted on the grounds that it tended to rebut the presumption of suicide, was also connected to Avery by means of its material properties.16 The white letter had been deposited in the Fall River post office on a day Avery was known to have been in town, and like all the anonymous letters Cornell had saved, it was written on half a sheet of paper. The letter’s other half was subsequently discovered in a store where witnesses had seen Avery on the day it was sent. When magnified, moreover, these torn edges of these pieces of paper matched exactly, and the watermark on the letter matched the rest of the ream recovered from the store.17 One witness even recalled loaning the owner of the store a wafer seal of ‘uncommon color, a purplish cast’ resembling the one still affixed to the white letter (FRT, 108). In both cases, the letters’ incidental material qualities and not their texts initially allowed the prosecution to introduce them as evidence against Avery. The Attorney General, for instance, argued that because they had been traced to the defendant’s possession, their contents should be read to the jury. Likening the white letter to a physical weapon, he demanded of the court: ‘[C]an we not show that instrument to the jury, to prove its contents, whether it was a sword cane or a loaded pistol?’ (FRT, 80). Just as a harmless crutch might conceal a deadly blade, an innocent sheet could arrange a fatal meeting. Avery’s possession of the letters was nearly as damning as outright proof of authorship. The justices of Rhode Island’s Supreme Court were as familiar with Starkie as the Attorney General, and they accepted this appeal. But the yellow letter could not be similarly traced to the accused. The prosecution thus tried to use Avery’s spelling – rather than his handwriting – to establish his authorship of the yellow letter. Avery’s fellow minister Ira Bidwell testified that he had received letters from Avery on both pink and yellow paper, and confirmed that a letter addressed to him and signed by Avery was in fact written by the defendant.18 The Attorney General, capitalizing on this testimony, then noted some orthographic peculiarities in the letter to Bidwell: Avery’s spelling of ‘having’ as ‘haveing,’ ‘sense’ as ‘sens,’ and Cornell’s name as ‘Connell’ (RT, 121). But although the yellow letter presented ‘nameing’ for ‘naming’ and identically misspelled ‘Cornell,’ the prosecution was never able to get it admitted as evidence.19 Similarities in spelling between two different letters was, in short, insufficient evidence of single authorship. No witnesses at Avery’s trial, in fact, testified that the anonymous letters were in the defendant’s hand, and not simply because no one had seen him write them. As even the prosecution and their supporters had to admit, if the three letters were indeed written by Avery, he had disguised his handwriting. Isaac Fiske, a teacher of penmanship and prosecution witness, explained that the pink letter was written in an ‘assimilated’ hand – that is, one that had been consciously disguised.20 The white letter, on the other hand, appeared to have been written in haste rather than with the conscious intention to deceive. Avery’s counsel noted that even though the prosecution’s own witness

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believed the white letter was simply written in a hurry, no one recognized the writing as Avery’s.21 Moreover, as Avery’s lawyers had already made clear, they had little faith in Fiske’s professional opinion, describing him as ‘so totally unqualified for the delicate task he assumed, that it seemed an insult to offer his testimony before any tribunal’ (RT, 135). This skepticism is hardly surprising. The prohibition against comparison left little room for handwriting identification or analysis, and without the latitude to offer such evidence in court, forensic expertise was slow to gain respectability. Writing masters, like postal workers, bank clerks, and other professionals who dealt regularly with writing, served, on occasion, as vernacular experts. But while they could identify a forgery, they could not specify its author. In Avery’s case, the prosecution itself admitted that the evidence of the defendant’s authorship was circumstantial, even as it tried to mitigate this problem. Citing Starkie in his opening statement, the prosecutor admonished the jurors that some circumstantial proofs could be stronger than unreliable direct evidence.22 But although Avery’s prosecutors tried to use such circumstantial evidence as an expedient to introduce two of the three letters, determining Avery’s authorship of them proved nigh on impossible. The prosecutors could point out Avery’s unusual spelling, yet the rules of evidence precluded them from actually comparing the signed to the anonymous letters. As Avery’s supporters averred after the trial, in another echo of Starkie: Our laws have wisely provided that no person shall be convicted of crime on similarity of hand-writing. To prove hand-writing, there must be witnesses, and witnesses who are not only acquainted with the hand-writing of a person, but who have also seen him write. The reason for this is, that it is easy for one person to counterfeit the hand-writing of another, and this is frequently done. (VRT, 50) Because the incriminating anonymous letters were manifestly not in Avery’s hand, or at least his normal hand, there was no way for Fiske, the jurors, or anyone else to legally attribute them to the minister. The law simply had no provision for assigning the authorship of unsigned texts written in a disguised hand. Prosecutors could suggest forgery, and no more. Of the three anonymous letters, then, one was not admitted at all and the other two were read to the jury only because their status as objects enabled the prosecutors to establish their legal competence. The color of a piece of paper, the cast of the wafer, the watermarks, tears, and postmarks were sufficient to locate the letters’ trajectories in the overlapping networks of formal and informal exchange characteristic of nineteenth-century American correspondence. But these qualities were not sufficient to demonstrate Avery’s authorship. The kind of forensic analysis of handwriting that might have claimed to make an objective determination of the anonymous pink and white letters’ authorship was still decades away from acceptance in Rhode Island. Such evidence was, as the prosecutors noted at Avery’s trial, then admissible in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New York.23 Indeed, Massachusetts and Connecticut had never adopted the rule against comparison.24 Nevertheless, even as Massachusetts affirmed that expert testimony about the genuineness of a signature could be taken as ‘competent,’ its justices also noted that such evidence was ‘generally very slight and often wholly immaterial.’25 The changes necessary to link Avery to the anonymous letters – namely, a widespread legal acceptance of the comparison of

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hands and the development of a corps of professional experts qualified to make such comparisons – did not occur until after the Civil War; and at that point the scientific accuracy of handwriting forensics still remained very much in doubt.26 In the case of Cornell’s own writing, different legal issues produced similar effects: in spite of her repeated attempts to document her relationship with Avery, most of Cornell’s own words went largely unheard. She had written to her sister and brotherin-law detailing her efforts to get Avery to support her financially. She even went so far as to include a transcription of the yellow letter, surmising that Avery would pressure her to return the original.27 Her family easily identified her writing, and when the letter was produced in court, the assistant postmaster of Fall River testified that the same person who had mailed it had also sent a second letter to Avery. He recognized his own hand in the postmark – a number 10 – from the black ink in which it was written. The rest of his office marked letters in red, he observed, but he found the red ink too thick.28 In contrast, Samuel Randall, the postmaster at Warren, Rhode Island, could not swear that the postage mark on the excluded yellow letter, a figure six, was his. ‘[M]y six might be imitated,’ he averred (RT, 101). Cornell’s letter was eventually admitted, but only as material evidence to establish Cornell’s correspondence with Avery. Its inflammatory and unverified content meant the jury could neither see nor hear what it contained. Of all her surviving writing, only the bandbox note was admitted, over Avery’s lawyer’s objection that ‘hand writing in pencil is different from writing with a pen’ and more susceptible to forgery (FRT, 91). Yet even then, legal reading dictated the terms of its interpretation: as the judge reminded the jury, it was admitted only ‘to rebut the assumption she committed suicide.’29 The fact of her fear mattered, but the object of it did not. Following the rules of evidence as they were understood in the early nineteenth century, the Rhode Island Supreme Court thus admitted the anonymous pink and yellow letters because they might have passed through Avery’s hands, only to leave the jurors to decide whether he had actually written them. But while Cornell’s account of the events leading up to her death was admitted, it was not available to read, and while her semi-public accusation against Avery was also admitted, once again the textual access of the jurors was officially limited. As they were going into deliberations, one juror asked if the documents produced during the trial would be given them to examine, and was explicitly told they would not. ‘[I]t [is] not usual to commit the papers to a jury, in criminal cases,’ the court stated.30 The jurors heard the text of the letters read aloud in court, then, and may have been allowed to examine them one at a time, but they were unable to see them as a body and so compare them to one another and draw their own conclusions.31 In effect, the letters that led to Avery’s arrest could not secure his conviction, and so after a brief deliberation the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Before the trial, most news reports had presumed Avery’s guilt and had confidently predicted his conviction. The Pawtuckett Chronicle had predicted that ‘heaven will heap its vengeful curses on the wretch,’ and even Avery’s own brethren in the Methodist Christian Herald thought his acquittal ‘highly improbable.’32 News of the crime had spread so quickly that when the court sought to impanel a jury, the lawyers had to interview over 100 men to find a dozen who had not already formed an opinion on the merits of the case.33 Because of this extensive coverage, Avery’s acquittal struck many as a surprising miscarriage of justice. And so, in the weeks and months that followed, competing factions further expanded media coverage of the case as they sought to control the

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narrative of the verdict. This outpouring of print can be seen as part of a steady stream of material catering to Americans’ thirst for sensationalist reading, as one instance of a literature of sexual violence that Daniel Cohen has argued was instrumental in creating a mass reading public.34 But at the same time, the conflicting reports of Avery’s trial also demonstrate how writers with more sober social, religious, and political motives employed the sensationalist forms of mass-market crime literature to their own more local ends. Avery’s Methodist supporters may have complained that the presses were ‘made to teem with pamphlets, and essays, and placards, and caricatures, and songs’ demonizing the exonerated minister (VRT, 35). Yet the New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church also produced its own propaganda, hiring the journalist Richard Hildreth to report on the trial for the Christian Herald and then publishing his report. Hildreth’s pro-Avery pamphlet, A Report of the Trial of the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery, appeared almost simultaneously in early June 1833 with the lawyer Benjamin F. Hallett’s far more critical A Full Report of the Trial of Ephraim K. Avery, and these were only the most prominent of dozens of accounts.35 Importantly, many of these broadsides, ballads, pamphlets, and portraits focused on the epistolary materials of the case. Indeed, print itself gave this ‘paper evidence’ a symbolic importance it had never had at trial. Hildreth, for example, included the pink letter, the white letter, and Cornell’s note in his pamphlet, while his chief competitor Hallett published all of these (mostly as appendices) along with the court-excluded yellow letter, which Hildreth had relegated to a footnote, and Cornell’s letter to her family, which Hildreth had omitted altogether.36 Yet print was no guarantee of a more objective understanding of these documents. Hallett’s anti-Avery bias, for instance, is visible in his very framing of these texts: he describes the yellow letter as ‘written in apparently a partially disguised hand’ and the pink letter as in a man’s hand ‘disguised to imitate a female’s’ (FRT, 191). Such observations tacitly admit that what was most material about these letters during the trial cannot be conveyed in print, and Catherine Williams’ Fall River: An Authentic Narrative (1834) makes this acknowledgment even more explicit. Williams’ account transcribes Cornell’s correspondence because ‘it is no more than fair that her letters should speak for her’ (FRAN, 112). But Williams also recognizes that printing the letters’ texts compromises the authenticity proclaimed in her title, and so she adds that as well as being ‘copied verbatim’ the reader can access them in manuscript: ‘The originals are now in the hands of the author of this book, and can be seen by anyone who has the curiosity to see them in [Cornell’s] own hand writing’ (FRAN, 114). This handwriting itself mattered, then, even though most of Williams’ contemporary audience would have been unable to go and look at it. For the purpose of reproducing an individual’s letters, in all their eccentricity, Williams suggests, metal type simply would not do. To circumvent the homogeneity of letterpress typefaces, then, some publishers turned to graphic technologies. The New York lithographer Henry Robinson, for instance, exacted symbolic revenge in a pair of lithographic cartoons published in July and August of 1833. The first, ‘A Very Bad Man,’ depicts Avery, who is surrounded by devils, in the process of suspending Cornell’s murdered body on the fence-post. Issued just over a month after the verdict, it includes details of the crime that had been widely publicized in reports of the trial: Cornell’s slippers and shawl, Avery’s walking stick, even the tinted lenses he wore to his court appearances. As to the less familiar aspects of the scene, the devils underline the disjunction between the court’s verdict in

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the case and the views of the people at large. ‘How will this be managed if it should go to a jury,’ asks one, as another replies: ‘A Jury ye young fools is nothing. What’s to be done with Public Opinion?’37 Robinson’s second cartoon, meanwhile, which again illustrates the murder, devotes most of its space to depicting Avery’s damnation. But the artist also includes Cornell’s key letter in the foreground – just barely legible, it reads: ‘If I should be missing enquire of the Rev. Mr.’38 Thus this illustration relocates the incriminating scrap of manuscript from the private space of Cornell’s bandbox to the scene of her murder, literally foregrounding it as an emblem of the court’s refusal to let the victim attest to her own victimization. That small note is, in essence, the difference between managing the jury and managing public opinion: jurors were prevented from seeing the evidence for what it was, but thanks to the press, the public was not so blinded. In the climate of shocked disbelief that followed Avery’s acquittal, Robinson’s lithographs suggest how the three anonymous letters and Cornell’s note acquired an additional symbolic weight, and came to represent both the minister’s guilt and the law’s failure. David Melvill’s A Facsimile of the Letters Produced at the Trial of the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery, published in mid-November 1833, then goes further than any other pamphlet in making the evidence of the case available to readers.39 This pamphlet is materially and generically quite unlike anything of its era. Lithography had only been a viable commercial enterprise in America since 1825, and Melvill was one of the first to use this relatively new technology to circumvent the generic appearance of letterpress printing. His slim pamphlet comprises nine leaves, stitched together and glued to brown letterpress wrappers, printed by Pendleton’s Lithography, a studio that had been established by the Pendleton brothers, William and John, in Boston eight years previously.40 Its contents reproduces the ‘paper evidence’ from Avery’s trial, including all the letters that were excluded or unread. Thus, alongside the three anonymous letters from Cornell’s trunk and her bandbox note, the reader finds the letters to her brother-in-law and Ira Bidwell and, for the purpose of comparison, two more letters of Avery’s. Although these other letters do not receive such detailed treatment, the anonymous letters’ postmarks, addresses, fold lines, and wafer locations are reprinted, and the yellow and pink ones are even printed on the appropriate color of paper. In this respect, unlike Henry Robinson’s images, which foreground their desire to rectify a perceived miscarriage of justice, the Facsimile presents itself as a neutral reproduction, purporting to offer readers the opportunity to determine for themselves whether or not Avery wrote the anonymous letters. Melvill includes no framing or context at all, no doubt presuming that his readers are already familiar with the details of the case. Instead, the pamphlet is designed for one purpose alone: to offer the evidence from the trial. Freed from the strictures of courtroom procedure, then, readers were now able to scrutinize the anonymous letters at will. But far from being the neutral record of the evidence it would seem, Melvill’s Facsimile is in fact a brilliant and concerted attempt to forensically establish Avery’s guilt. The facsimiles are specifically designed to pick up where the trial left off by permitting the pamphlet’s readers to engage in the kind of comparison of hands disallowed by the Rhode Island court. Indeed, the pamphlet provides explicit direction in handwriting comparison, highlighting ten separate elements of the anonymous letters that readers could compare to the authenticated examples of Avery’s writing. These notable features are, in the order that Melvill lists

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them: 1. ‘Connel,’ an idiosyncratic misspelling of Cornell; 2. ‘tine’ written for ‘time’ in the yellow letter; 3. the space between the terminal downstroke of one letter and the hairstroke of the next in all three letters; 4. the shape of the capital I; 5. all three letters’ total lack of punctuation; 6. the word ‘haste’; 7. the three letters’ terminal g’s, y’s and small d’s; 8. the ‘singularly formed’ c’s in the middle of words; 9. the date (‘Dec. 8’) on the white letter; and 10. the fact that Avery’s note to Bidwell is on pink paper ‘as if it came out of the same quire’ as the pink letter (though it is printed on white paper so that the incriminating ‘pink letter’ might be referred to without confusion).41 Apart from this last item, which is really a point of information rather than comparison, all the other nine observations direct the reader’s attention to the letters’ handwriting at multiple scales: letterforms, repeated words, punctuation, and spelling, as well as their folds, seals, and addresses. And the clear implication is that, even though the handwriting of some of the letters does not, at a glance, look like Avery’s, a more thorough examination reveals his distinctive characteristics. Tellingly, Melvill’s list combines a number of modes of analysis between which the rules of evidence operating in the law courts differentiated. Spelling comparisons, for example, were actually admitted at trial, and Melvill’s emphasis on whole-word comparison – ‘haste’ and the date ‘Dec. 8’ – resembles the impressionistic mode of authentication long permitted by American courts. But a witness, to be competent to testify, would have to know Avery’s writing beforehand, whereas Melvill’s readers could use the provided facsimile to familiarize themselves with Avery’s writing and then determine whether the anonymous inscriptions resembled those exemplars. This requires not so much a detailed examination of the script as an appreciation of the similarity of their overall impression. Yet most of Melvill’s suggestions do encourage readers to subject the letters to a more minute comparison, the kind that was regularly excluded from trials on evidentiary grounds. Readers could, at their leisure, scrutinize individual letterforms and even the interstices between letters for signs of Avery’s concealed authorship. Paradoxically, then, print allowed Melvill’s readers to become better fact-finders than the jurors who saw the originals. Without the artificial constraints of evidentiary laws, the pamphlet’s readers could not only see more evidence – since Cornell’s incriminating letter to her brother-in-law and the yellow letter were excluded at the trial – they could also read more closely, attending to the material and orthographic peculiarities of each missive. This intensive reading practice, Melvill believed, would lead readers of his pamphlet to the conclusion that Avery was in fact Cornell’s seducer and, ipso facto, her murderer. In spite of the minister’s best efforts to conceal himself, his writing would give him away. This conviction is significant because a belief in the singularity of someone’s penmanship was a recent development in the cultural understanding of handwriting. Although colonial Americans had never used the same range of scripts as their English counterparts (since specialized hands such as chancery and engrossing never flourished without their corresponding institutions), early Americans nonetheless employed many different styles. Seventeenth-century writers regularly used both gothic and italic hands, for example, occasionally switching between them within the same document (or even sentence).42 Although secretary hand and other gothic scripts had largely disappeared by the eighteenth century, it was still common for writers to learn multiple alphabets, including a variety of italics, round hands, and roman print. Writing masters, and later on copybooks and writing manuals, instructed aspiring young men of affairs to

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learn these forms so they could suit their writing to the occasion.43 Given this welter of scripts, then, it is unsurprising that handwriting, as a skill learned through imitation, was slow to be associated with individuality. The belief that each individual had a single idiosyncratic script was, in the 1830s, still of rather recent vintage, and – as is evident in Melvill’s pamphlet – did not yet imply a concomitant analytical procedure for demonstrating precisely whose individuality any given text put on display.44 In fact, the graphic evidence of authorship was, at best, inconclusive. The Reverends Joseph Merrill, Timothy Merritt, and Wilbur Fisk, all members of the New England Conference, believed that their fellow minister had been the victim of a ‘deep laid plot,’ a ‘conspiracy’ complete with forged documents and cadres of men surveilling his every move, and so published their own pamphlet, Vindication of the Result of the Trial (1834), in order to rebut Avery’s critics (VRT, 55–6). The preachers not only interviewed witnesses and created elaborate timelines refuting various parts of the prosecution’s case, they also responded directly to each of Melvill’s instructions for reading the facsimiles. Melvill’s second prompt, to take one example, asks the reader to examine Avery’s spelling of ‘time’ in one of his signed letters, where it is rendered t-i-n-e. It is also so spelled in one of the anonymous notes to Cornell. But the authors of the Vindication countered that, ‘if the word tine, which occurs but once in the yellow letter, is evidence that Mr. Avery wrote that letter, then the word time, which occurs twice in that letter, should be double evidence that he did not write it’ (VRT, 53). Moreover, the Vindication then continues to dismantle Melvill’s attribution letter by letter: It appears that the writer . . . is mistaken in supposing that Mr. Avery wrote tine for time in his letter . . . What he calls an n, was undoubtedly Mr. Avery’s m, where the circular stroke was designed for the third down stroke of the M. This seems evident from the fact that the same form of the m occurs six times in the same letter, and in words where he could not have mistaken the sound of the letter, as in from acknowledgment, name; and in the word from, in the letter to Mr. Bidwell, in the second and third paragraphs. This remark is confirmed by the same singularity in the n . . . in the words morning, into, standing, in, &c. (VRT, 53) The Methodists’ rebuttal thus reveals Melvill’s descriptions for the interpretations they are. Their own interpretations of the evidence are also inconclusive, of course, but if they fail fully to exonerate Avery, their demonstration of ambiguity in the case for the prosecution is nonetheless successful. Writers are not consistent, they suggest – the same author will use different spellings within a single letter – and so claims to discern the individuality of someone’s handwriting are specious. Such particular points of comparison are much less important than Melvill would have it, for it is impossible to tell whether the evident similarities between the anonymous letters and Avery’s own writing are the product of one writer imperfectly disguising his own hand, or the result of a poor forger attempting to implicate Avery. Yet in publishing such accurate facsimiles Melvill could at least be said to have won a victory over the erasure of handwriting enacted by the courts. The technological and economic hurdles to reprinting handwriting had long caused their own difficulties and opportunities for publishers. Within early nineteenth-century America’s ‘culture of reprinting,’ where texts were readily hijacked and exchanged, letterpresses were regularly reset, but woodblocks had to be borrowed or recarved at (relatively) great

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expense.45 The costs associated with carving into metal or wood also meant, however, that the publishers of periodicals and broadsides could incorporate images as a defense against piracy. A few years after Avery’s trial, for instance, Edgar Allan Poe used the woodcut signatures illustrating his ‘Autography’ series in just this way, creating a kind of de facto copyright by making images of script integral to his project.46 Writing on stone, meanwhile, overcame the technical difficulty of graphic reproduction by treating the words as images, and although it may not have been suitable for magazine production it was perfect for a pamphlet like Melvill’s. The rules of evidence meant that legal reading often emphasized the ‘paper’ in ‘paper evidence,’ but lithography offered a form of mechanical reproduction capable of returning the public’s focus to writing itself. Melvill’s Facsimile pamphlet was a departure from the heavily stylized illustrations of most true-crime reports, then, but it was not altogether unprecedented to use facsimile as a way of circumventing the rules of evidence. When the New Hampshire publishers Horatio Hill and Cyrus Barton issued a report on a libel action against them in 1831, they also used facsimile to argue their case before the public. Timothy Upham, a Collector of the Customs at Portsmouth, was running for Governor of New Hampshire, when Hill and Barton’s Patriot and State Gazette accused him of various official misdeeds, including smuggling during the war of 1812 and supporting a rival newspaper with government funds. During the suit Upham brought against them, Hill and Barton attempted to prove by providing specific invoices and letters that Upham had smuggled gin, tobacco, and other goods into Halifax in barrels ‘marked . . . corn,’ but the court disallowed the letters.47 When they issued their subsequent account of the trial, though, the publishers included lithographic facsimiles of documents they thought clinched their case. The letters were introduced in facsimile to rebut the allegation that they had been forged, and they were intended to underline the breadth of evidence against Upham. ‘Look at the general appearance of the writing: look at the figure 8 in the date of the years – it is peculiar – and yet in all the papers it is alike,’ Hill and Barton insist, before going on to suggest that the reader will find ‘a hundred other particulars’ in which Upham’s writing corresponds to the sample in question.48 These documents had, as they said, only been ‘excluded by the technicalities of the law.’49 Lithographic facsimile allowed publishers to circumvent such technicalities in part because of the widespread belief that these reproductions were adequate substitutes for their originals. Although they disagreed with Melvill’s conclusions, for example, the authors of the Vindication of the Result of the Trial admitted that his pamphlet was ‘a well executed document’ (VRT, 53). And yet, the irony I identified earlier remains: lithography, as a method of reproduction, undermines these facsimiles’ latent presumption that handwriting can unproblematically indicate its author. Melvill’s facsimiles were copies of copies of copies. First, the original manuscript letters were meticulously copied by Melvill himself. These copies were then sent from Rhode Island to Pendleton’s Lithography in Boson, where a professional lithographic writer who had almost certainly never seen the original letters copied Melvill’s copies a second time onto stone – this time in reverse. And only after this double copying process was complete was the pamphlet ready to be printed, thereby copying the image a third time and reversing it back to its original orientation. At each stage, human agents necessarily intervened to produce the printed document. Melvill’s pamphlet may be authenticated by letterpress ‘certificates’ from one of the prosecutors, two bank cashiers and

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the clerk of the Rhode Island Supreme Court attesting to the fact that Melvill’s copies ‘can scarcely be distinguished from the originals.’50 But this appeal to vernacular experts in handwriting analysis reveals the very unreliability of the process. Because lithography was not inherently reliable, the authority of the copy, like the testimony from which it had hoped to differentiate itself, still had to be anchored by a broader institutional authority. Lithographic facsimiles may have prepared the symbolic space that photography would soon come to occupy, but in the 1830s they could only mark rather than satisfy a popular need for a mechanically objective method of duplication. Melvill’s pamphlet is a bravura example of early lithography, yet its material form undermines its polemical value. However accurate they may be, the facsimile letters tacitly support the defense’s claim that Avery might have been framed. After all, if Melvill could duplicate the letters implicating the minister, why could not someone else have done so as well? The rules of evidence adopted by the Rhode Island Supreme Court may have caused public outcry, but they helped to insulate the legal system from these uncertainties. By making it possible for a dispersed group of readers to participate in debates surrounding the value of handwriting evidence, however, lithographic facsimile would eventually help to bring about the establishment of a regime of legal expertise in handwriting identification, which was among the earliest forms of forensic knowledge developed specifically for use in the courtroom. This form of expert reading did not arise out of nowhere: the later nineteenth-century handwriting experts effectively displaced the experienced but legally unreliable professionals who preceded them – figures like Starkie’s postal inspector, Isaac Fiske the penmanship teacher, and the clerks who endorsed Melvill’s pamphlet. But the printed images of letters and manuscripts that began to circulate in large numbers at about the moment of Avery’s trial contributed more to the drive to develop such forensic expertise than these aspiring authorities in the field.

Notes 1. Brown, The Power of Sympathy, 5, 28, 201. Brown’s fictionalized retelling of the suicide of his neighbor Fanny Apthorp, following an alleged affair with her brother-in-law, explicitly prefigures Cornell’s fate. Indeed, at the trial that resulted from Cornell’s death, one witness testified that Cornell had claimed she and her brother-in-law, Grindall Rawson, had ‘been as intimate as husband and wife’ (Hallett, A Full Report, 122). 2. See, for example, Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 35–7. 3. Melvill, A Facsimile, 4. This pamphlet is unpaginated, but the letters are numbered, so all citations refer to this mode of enumeration. 4. See Kasserman, Fall River Outrage, 11. 5. Melvill, A Facsimile, 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 5. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 7. 11. Merritt, Merrill and Fisk, Vindication of the Trial, 41. 12. See, for example, Hildreth, A Report of the Trial, 51, and Hallett, A Full Report, 17, 81. 13. See Starkie, A Practical Treatise, 2: 373.

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handwriting, print, letters, and the law 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

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See ibid. 2: 376. See Melvill, A Facsimile, 5. See Hildreth, A Report of the Trial, 42. See Hallett, A Full Report, 39. See Hildreth, A Report of the Trial, 118. See ibid. 122. Hallett, Avery’s Trial (Supplementary Edition), 22. See Hildreth, A Report of the Trial, 135. See Hallett, A Full Report, 17. See Hallett, Avery’s Trial (Supplementary Edition), 22. See Mnookin, ‘Scripting Expertise,’ 1774. Quoted in ibid. 1764. See ibid. 1785, 1802–3. See Melvill, A Facsimile, 4. See Hallett, A Full Report, 25, 27. Hallett, Avery’s Trial (Supplementary Edition), 36. Ibid. 38. One of the prosecutors, Dutee Pearce, read the red and white letters out (see Hildreth, A Report of the Trial, 39–40, 42). Quoted in Kasserman, Fall River Outrage, 112. See Hildreth, A Report of the Trial, 7. See Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 34–6. Although the case spawned a great many imprints, we should be careful not to exaggerate the ubiquity of these texts: Harvey Harnden, the Bristol County Sheriff and a member of the Committee of Investigation assisting the prosecution, sold around 8,000 copies of his Narrative of the Apprehension of the Rev. E. K. Avery (1833) in the space of a few months, for example, but 5,000 more remained unsold (see Hallett, A Full Report, 70–1). It is likely that a glut in the market led to the limited circulation of other accounts too. See Hildreth, A Report of the Trial, 39–40, 42, 49, 123, and Hallett, A Full Report, 84, 190–1. Robinson, ‘A Very Bad Man.’ Robinson, ‘A Minister Extraordinary.’ For more on the publication of Melvill’s pamphlet see Kasserman, Fall River Outrage, 234–5. Melvill, who was an inventor rather than a publisher, had only a very tenuous connection to the Avery case. He seems to have undertaken the facsimile project as a business enterprise rather than out of a direct personal or political connection, although he was acquainted with Job Durfee, a justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, who oversaw Ephraim Avery’s trial in that capacity. Melvill (whose name was sometimes spelt Melville) had met Durfee several years earlier, when he was in Washington promoting a gaslighting scheme for U.S. lighthouses. See Tilley, ‘David Melville.’ For more on the Pendleton brothers’ lithographic print studio, which ran between 1825 and 1836, see Tatham, ‘The Pendleton-Moore Shop.’ Melvill, A Facsimile, n.pag. (‘To the Reader’ – recto of rear wrapper). See Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write, 14–15. This division of hands persists in the sequential teaching of ‘printing’ and ‘cursive.’ See Thornton, Handwriting in America, 2–41. Thornton, who labels the view of handwriting as individualized ‘Romantic,’ notes that it corresponds to both the rise of handwriting analysis and autograph collecting (see ibid. 72–107). See McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 28–9. See ibid. 181.

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88 47. 48. 49. 50.

christopher a. hunter Hill and Barton, Libel Trial, 24. On the court’s decision to rule out this evidence see ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 3. Melvill, A Facsimile, n.pag. (‘Certificates’ – verso of rear wrapper).

Works Cited Brown, W. H. [1789] (1969), The Power of Sympathy, ed. W. S. Kable, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Cohen, D. (1993), Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860, New York: Oxford University Press. Hallett, B. F. (1833), A Full Report of the Trial of Ephraim K. Avery, 2nd edition, Boston: Offices of the Daily Commercial Gazette, and the Boston Daily Advocate. Cited parenthetically as FRT. Hallett, B. F. (1833), Avery’s Trial (Supplementary Edition), n.p. Harnden, H. (1833), Narrative of the Apprehension in Rindge, N.H. of the Rev. E. K. Avery, Providence, RI: W. Marshall, 1833. Hildreth, R. (1833), A Report of the Trial of the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery, 2nd edition, Boston: Russell, Odiorne & Co., and David H. Ela. Cited parenthetically as RT. Hill, H., and C. Barton (1831), Libel Trial: Report of the Trial, Timothy Upham vs Hill and Barton, for an Alleged Libel, Concord, NH: Hill and Barton. Kasserman, D. R. (1986), Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McGill, M. (2003), American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Melvill, D. (1833), A Facsimile of the Letters Produced at the Trial of the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery, Boston: Pendleton’s Lithography. Merritt, T., J. A. Merrill, and W. Fisk (1834), Vindication of the Result of the Trial of Ephraim K. Avery, Boston: David Ela. Cited parenthetically as VRT. Mnookin, J. (2001), ‘Scripting Expertise: The History of Handwriting Identification Evidence and the Judicial Construction of Expertise,’ Virginia Law Review, 87: 1723–1845. Mongahan, J. (2005), Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Robinson, H. (1833), ‘A Minister Extraordinary Taking Passage & Bound on a Foreign Mission to the Court of his Satanic Majesty!’ Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Robinson, H. (1833), ‘A Very Bad Man,’ Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Starkie, T. [1824] (1834), A Practical Treatise on the Law of Evidence, 5th edition, 2 vols., Philadelphia: P. H. Nicklin and T. Johnson. Cited parenthetically as PTLE. Tatham, D. (1971), ‘The Pendleton-Moore Shop: Lithographic Artists in Boston, 1825–1840,’ Old-Time New England, 62: 29–46. Thornton, T. P. (1996), Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tilley, E. M. (1927), ‘David Melville and his Early Experiments with Gas in Newport,’ Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society, 60: 1–17. Williams, C. R. (1834), Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, Boston: Lilly, Wait, & Co./Providence, RI: Brown & Co. Cited parenthetically as FRAN.

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5 NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN SCIENCE AND THE DECLINE OF LETTERS Robin Vandome

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etters were the lifeblood of American scientific inquiry from the colonial period to the early republic. ‘The network of correspondence created by the earliest American scientific figures grew out of intellectual curiosity,’ as Frank Shuffleton has noted, ‘but it was also a medium for constructing and validating individual identity in a world in which they felt isolated from like-minded people. They reached out to each other and to the European scientific world, and in the course of their epistolary exchanges they sketched out the possibilities of a community held together . . . by a shared interest in the facts of the real world.’1 During the nineteenth century, when epistolary practices and the conduct of science both altered dramatically, the relationship between science and letters remained vital, but it also became more ambiguous. This was, at least in part, the case precisely because American scientific letters in the nineteenth century carried the imprint of this prior legacy. The Enlightenment ‘republic of letters’ was predicated on the flow of knowledge through correspondence, and drew no sharp distinctions between scientific inquiry and an expansively conceived understanding of intellectual and literary life. Yet for the nineteenth-century inheritors of this ideal, the ongoing development of modern science threatened to undermine such a wide-ranging epistolary culture. Letters, even more than printed material, were the vital medium that made science possible for colonial inquirers. As Alexander Garden observed to his fellow naturalist Cadwallader Colden in 1755: ‘A familiar Letter conveys thoughts in a manner peculiar to itself . . . and what I learn from one seems to convey much more real Knowledge and information, than reading; this makes me particularly fond of a Correspondence.’2 Such scientific letters often started out in the form of a ‘miscellany,’ containing ‘a register of . . . many unrelated observations’ of natural phenomena which might then be pursued in more depth, and perhaps eventually revised and published.3 The resulting correspondences, which were often prized for their rarity, might expand to include well-placed peers, and so offered geographically-dispersed American naturalists and theorists a possible route to influence and legitimacy, both within the colonies and among established European authorities. John Bartram’s correspondence with the Englishman Peter Collinson, for example, provided an entrée to the Royal Society of London, where Bartram’s own observations of such phenomena as wasps’ nests progressed from epistolary descriptions to papers read aloud (in Bartram’s absence) at society meetings, and were finally printed in the organization’s Philosophical Transactions.4 Similarly, Benjamin Franklin’s correspondence with Collinson became a means to promote and publish his theoretical 89

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work on electricity in Europe.5 The scientific discourse of ‘natural history’ was shaped most powerfully, well into the nineteenth century, by those who ‘possessed access to erudite transatlantic correspondents and membership in polite institutions.’6 The intimate nature of the letter was conceived of as both an advantage and an obstacle in the development of scientific knowledge. Candour and friendship, as Susan Scott Parrish has shown, were explicitly promoted as valuable characteristics of scientific letters during the Enlightenment.7 Yet such private, personal exchange limited the scope for the dissemination of new and useful knowledge. Publication in print, although seen to be tainted by commercial interests rather than the supposedly pure motivation of scientific objectivity, provided a medium for transcending the enclosed space of the personal letter. As Collinson noted to Bartram in 1760: ‘Authors of the Magazine[s] are so careless, on these affairs, that I Don’t know how to trust them and yett It is with regret I cannot find a better way to communicate them to the publick [sic passim].’8 Nineteenth-century ‘men of science’ and ‘naturalists,’ as they typically styled themselves, both inherited and adapted the epistolary ideals and practices of the Enlightenment republic of letters, even as they were forced to confront larger processes of disciplinary specialization and bureaucratic professionalization that promised to radically transform their status and concerns. In this respect, the so-called ‘launching of modern American science,’ especially from 1850 to 1900, altered the epistolary conventions of scientific inquirers at the same time as the identity of the ‘scientist’ (a neologism of the 1830s which was generally resisted even into the 1890s) was beginning to replace that of the ‘man of science.’9 One means of tracing the changing intellectual and social identifications of ‘men of science’ and ‘scientists’ is, in fact, through these shifts in epistolary practice. For during the nineteenth century naturalists’ letters became less narrowly focused on descriptive reportage, and on the needs of a small coterie of aspirant naturalists to establish valuable contacts within the elite scientific institutions of Europe, and instead began to reflect science’s changing institutional contexts, and the burgeoning public and collective dimensions of scientific thought and practice. Organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (est. 1848), the largest national scientific society, fostered a sense of common intellectual and professional identity among a growing community. State surveys and federal research bureaus, as well as opportunities in private consulting, offered new career opportunities and fields of investigation, while colleges were reformed and new universities were established to bolster academic scientific instruction and research. At the same time, the scientific periodical emerged as a distinctive and authoritative forum for scientific exchange.10 Within these contexts, then, the singular importance of the personal letter as a candid exercise in intellectual reciprocity and friendship was cast into the shade by the bureaucratic demands of professional administration. Increasingly, a flatly professional epistolarity became a wearying norm for scientists, who by 1900 had taken their place among the ranks of other technical experts and professionals and were shouldering the burden of large administrative correspondences.11 These changes in epistolary practice were indicative of a general trend rather than an absolute shift, however. The privacy of letters also allowed many naturalists to express their ambivalence about, and even resistance to, the specific dynamics of nineteenth-century scientific inquiry, especially to their more intimate correspondents.

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While American science, by the end of the century, appeared to be defined above all by the rise of professionalized institutions and relationships, many exponents of science themselves privately worried about the decline in the culture of letters which had been wrought by the manner in which scientific research was now being conducted. Such ambivalences and anxieties were, accordingly, reflected in their own epistolary practice, as we can see from the example of J. Peter Lesley. Lesley now rests in obscurity, both scientific and historical, but in his own lifetime he was regarded as a leading American man of science, and his career and correspondence offers a clear view of this tension between a public veneer of confident scientific progress, and private epistolary expressions of resistance. He typifies the urge of many nineteenth-century men of science to retain the broad cultural terrain traditionally claimed by the eighteenthcentury man of letters. Lesley, like his peers, was ultimately unsuccessful in this effort, but the ambition is itself indicative of the distinct value attributed to epistolarity in scientific discourse during the nineteenth century. Lesley’s first training was theological, and as a young man in the late 1830s and 1840s he prepared for the Presbyterian ministry at Princeton Divinity School and in Europe, principally at Halle.12 Alongside his religious studies Lesley assisted as a fieldworker on the first Pennsylvania Geological Survey, beginning in 1839, and thus embarked in a piecemeal fashion upon what was to be his lifelong career. But it was only in 1852, after taking up a ministry in Massachusetts four years earlier, that Lesley abandoned his religious vocation (if not his deep piety), and instead established himself as an independent scientific expert in Philadelphia. In this guise Lesley made a precarious but ultimately substantial living as a geological consultant for mining and railroad companies from the 1850s onwards, although he combined this profession with more speculative inquiry, and active participation in scholarly organizations such as the American Philosophical Society (which he was elected to in 1856, and served as secretary and librarian for from 1859–85). Through the publication of influential studies of coal and iron, Lesley soon gained a national reputation as a skilled geologist and topographer. He was a co-founder of the elite National Academy of Sciences in 1863, and was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1884. From 1872 until 1883 Lesley also served as a professor of geology and mining at the University of Pennsylvania, and as Dean of its Towne Scientific School, and his scientific career concluded as director of the second Pennsylvania Geological Survey in the 1890s. Viewed through the lens of his published work and institutional affiliations, Lesley thus appears to have been an exemplary man of science, devoted to the patient and skillful pursuit of nature’s truths through the careful observation and evaluation of empirical facts. Yet Lesley also reflected at length on what he perceived to be the limitations of the scientific life in a rich personal correspondence preserved in his carefully archived family papers and in two posthumously published volumes of his and his wife’s letters. In editing her parents’ ‘intimate correspondence,’ Mary Lesley Ames sought to effect ‘[t]he method of portraiture by means of letters,’ rather than to canonize a major scientific figure.13 Lesley’s letters, as with his wife’s, are presented here as a window onto ‘personality,’ rather than a record of professional attainments.14 Thus Lesley’s extant letters cover an unusually broad range of matters. His scientific letters range from the dryly empirical and curtly professional to longer and more philosophical excursuses on scientific methods and theory. But if, through his epistolary practice, Lesley

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constructed an identity as a man of science who embodied specialist knowledge and technical expertise, he also presented himself as a man of genteel literacy, humanistic learning, and Christian virtues, even as these ideals were in danger of being eclipsed by the development of the professionalized scientific disciplines. ‘The conflict of ages is surely this,’ Lesley wrote to his wife’s aunt in August 1861. ‘Between a desire to hold converse with distant friends and a hatred of pen, ink and paper. The older one grows, the more intangible and incompressible are the spirits to be embodied, limited and subjected to language in a letter.’15 This ‘hatred of pen, ink and paper’ was hyperbole, particularly given the literal conflict of the Civil War that formed its context, and yet the sentiment aptly dramatizes Lesley’s vexed relationship to his own correspondence over the course of his scientific career. Lesley certainly lamented the loss of personal contact with friends and family, particularly after his relocation to Philadelphia from Massachusetts in 1852. But despite acknowledging the impossibility of reducing the full range of experience and feeling into letters, he indulged in long and sustained correspondences with his closest family members and a small circle of scientific friends throughout his career. More generally, the reliance on correspondence was a pervasive feature of bourgeois working life in America by the mid-nineteenth century. By 1854, for example, an estimated 120 million letters circulated in the United States, and nearly 97 million of those were estimated to be ‘written by merchants or professional men residing principally in the cities.’16 Correspondence was the great fuel and medium of the swelling business professions, as Lesley would find in his own consulting practice. As a freelance scientific businessman, the majority of Lesley’s paid engagements were generated through a professional correspondence in which he outlined his services, responded to specific inquiries, and arranged and settled commissions.17 But epistolary networks of exchange across long distances in relatively short periods of time were as indispensable to scientific research as they were to more commercial scientific exchanges. Recent scholarship on Charles Darwin’s correspondence, for example, has emphasized the extent to which letters were the English naturalist’s ‘primary research tool’ in his development of the theory of evolution by natural selection, as well as ‘the primary means by which he ensured his book [On the Origin of Species (1859)] was being read and reviewed.’18 Darwin’s global correspondence comprised the dispatch and receipt of over 14,000 letters, and ranged far beyond ‘men of science’ alone, although a small number of fellow naturalists, including the American Asa Gray, accounted for the majority of the total.19 As an independently wealthy naturalist – a ‘gentleman’ in the mould that eluded the likes of professionals such as Lesley – Darwin could afford the substantial outlay required to keep his own scientific letter-writing industry in operation. By 1877, in fact, he was spending a sum ‘roughly equal to his butler’s annual salary’ on postage and stationery.20 But the administration of this correspondence could also be overwhelming. As Darwin put it in an exasperated letter to Thomas Huxley in October 1872: ‘I should like a society formed so that every one might receive pleasant letters and never answer them.’21 Lesley was no Darwin, either in the scope of his correspondence or the power of his scientific thought, yet he was a typical man of science in that letter-writing was foundational to both his everyday work and his more personal intellectual interests. While businesslike exchanges constituted a large proportion of Lesley’s professional scientific correspondence, he also sought to construct and maintain a vibrant intellectual

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community through letters to his closer friends and family members. This impulse stemmed from Lesley’s formative experiences in the lively political and philosophical climate of Boston in the late 1840s, before he had decided on a scientific career. Although still informed by deep religious conviction, after studying in Europe and a summer of missionary work in 1845, Lesley had found his orthodox Presbyterianism slipping. His geological training then threw him in with some of the more liberal religious, political, and philosophical circles in and around Boston, where he lived while working on the preparation of maps and reports for the Pennsylvania Survey. While lodging in Boston he dined with Wendell Phillips and James Freeman Clarke, borrowed books from Theodore Parker, heard Ralph Waldo Emerson lecture, and swung between attachments to philosophical idealism, liberal Protestantism, abolitionist politics, and his more orthodox and conservative upbringing. Lesley’s connections to this fervent intellectual and cultural life were then affirmed through his marriage to Susan Lyman in 1849. The Lyman family’s social connections included the author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, as well as many well-known Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and antislavery figures in and around Boston. Thus, while Lesley would continue to minister to Congregational parishes around Boston from 1848–52, it had become clear that science and the other modes of intellectual inquiry swirling around it, rather than the church, would be his deepest commitment. It was with Susan Lyman that Lesley established his most intimate correspondence in both their courtship and married life. In the first flush of their engagement, Lesley exchanged letters with his fiancée musing excitedly on Emerson’s conception of love, as well as outlining, more anxiously, his renewed plans to pursue a ministry in the Congregational church in Massachusetts as a means of securing a living.22 Lesley’s later geological work, meanwhile, would itself become a decisive factor in stimulating bouts of extended correspondence between the couple, as he set off on frequent and extended periods of travel for fieldwork. At the outset of their relationship, however, Lesley worried about burdening his fiancée by recounting his thoughts and routines in extensive detail. ‘Do I afflict you . . . with essays?’ he asked in December 1848. ‘I write, as you see, just what comes first. As the day is, so is my letter.’23 Thus, in a process of self-exploration, Lesley instead tried to use his letters to experiment with a quasi-Emersonian persona, testing out the roles of poet, aphorist, and philosopher. ‘If I wished to be Emersonian,’ he wrote to Susan on 12 December 1848, I should say ‘Laws are exceptional at every point. Nature despises and masks herself on all sides, but in the end is found out and must be herself . . . Keep awake long enough, and the brazen head will speak, and declare how the land of science may be walled around with brass. The truly patient man is the philosopher.’ . . . Chaos is the true sages’ paradise, there grows his tree of knowledge and of life.24 These were not simply the letters of a young geologist, but the kaleidoscopic reflections of a person and a mind in flux, juggling his various possible callings: a twenty-nineyear-old man courting his fiancée, a maturing (and somewhat disillusioned) minister, a promising man of science, and a would-be philosopher, straining for gnomic insight and epigrammatic profundity. Similarly, in a letter to James Freeman Clarke from November 1850, Lesley flitted from one putative literary project to another, in an almost manic stream of enthusiasms. He

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had plans to write theological essays for Biblioteca Sacra, and publish ‘a sermon against the Fugitive Slave Law’ in the Liberator.25 And more: ‘I want to write a poem . . . on Fanaticism’ with an Abolitionist as its hero; and to anthologize ‘the sayings of the wisest men of the East and old’ from Confucius, Plato and Seneca to Christ.26 Lesley was clearly modeling himself as an ambitious man of letters, even as his bold closing statement suggested a sense of overreach: ‘I want to write a novel. What shall it be about?’27 Few of these plans, in fact, ever came to anything, although a few draft chapters of a novel, ‘Frank,’ about a geologist in the field, are preserved in Lesley’s papers.28 Instead, taken collectively, they point to the restless intellectual and literary imagination which complemented, and even dominated, Lesley’s youthful scientific leanings. Lesley’s literary eclecticism was by no means anomalous among scientific intellectuals during this period. As Francesca Bordogna has observed in relation to Lesley’s contemporary William James, ‘[u]ntil the 1860s there was no clear distinction between the man of letters and the man of science.’29 This conflation of scientific and literary vocations was a direct legacy of the Enlightenment ideal of the republic of letters. Yet, as we have already seen, the epistolary norms of Lesley’s eighteenth-century predecessors in this imagined republic had been altered by the mid-nineteenth century. The epistemologically privileged form of the ‘scholarly letter,’ for instance, had morphed into the public record of scientific knowledge in the form of the ‘learned article’ appearing in an authoritative print journal.30 As a result of this process, divisions between the private and the public iterations of scientific discourse were intensified. Legatees of the republic of letters ideal, such as Lesley, struggled with their inheritance. As Lorraine Daston puts it: ‘What began in the eighteenth century as a quest for impartiality in relationship to others, became in the nineteenth century a quest for objectivity even in relationship to one’s self.’31 Such claims to objectivity became essential for Lesley’s own public career as a scientific expert on the subject of geology, as he sought to establish himself as a disinterested expert. Yet Lesley simultaneously feared losing the larger imaginative, spiritual and aesthetic values central to the ecumenical republic of letters. Lesley’s experimental epistolary self-construction reflected this dilemma, and even once established as a leading American geologist his personal letters continued to form an outlet for his expansive and eclectic intellectual interests, beyond the narrow sphere of his scientific profession. Lesley embarked decisively on this public and professional scientific career in 1852, when he ended his ministerial work in Massachusetts and broke with the Pennsylvania Survey. Having accepted an offer of $1,200 a year from the Pennsylvania Railroad company to become its geological consultant, Lesley moved with his wife to Philadelphia and established a private practice trading on his scientific expertise.32 As a ‘consulting geologist,’ he engaged in contracts to pursue fieldwork and produce reports for a broad range of commercial interests. As Paul Lucier has shown in great detail, from the 1830s through the 1850s, consulting work by geologists and chemists had become a recognizable and highly specialized practice.33 But it made for a precarious profession. After the financial crisis of 1857, for example, Susan Lesley worriedly observed to her aunt Catherine Robbins that her husband ‘receives no salary, and has no private work,’ and noted that he had also suffered major losses in the sale of private stock.34 Nonetheless, by the close of the Civil War, Lesley was an established and successful private consultant. At a time when geologists averaged yearly incomes of $1,500-$2,000 through either government-funded survey work or college professorships, Lesley made up to $10,000 annually through consulting, at least in his peak years.35

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Almost immediately after embarking on this scientific career, however, Lesley’s personal letters register a sense of cultural estrangement. While mired in western Pennsylvanian fieldwork in the winter of 1852, he complained of his dull routine in response to Robbins’ literary chatter from Massachusetts about Nathaniel Hawthorne. ‘I am in such a desert as to literature,’ he proclaimed. ‘I shall die mentally of inanition at this work.’36 The repetition and drudgery of scientific research, and its supposed damage to mind and soul, became a major theme in Lesley’s personal correspondence, and it was this epistolary channel of self-expression and interaction which sustained his intellectual life. A series of letters maintained Lesley’s friendship with Lydia Maria Child, for example, wherein the pair indulged in playful mutual flattery. ‘What letters you do write!’ Child enthused in an 1858 missive to Lesley, characterizing his correspondence as an epic romantic literary achievement: ‘Brilliant as the Aurora, darting about, hither and yon, in the same eccentric fashion, now ethereal spirals dancing on cloud-edges, now warriors brandishing their gleaming spears, with tresses streaming to the breeze, in Ossianic fashion.’37 Other letters, meanwhile, offered manifestations of the Lesleys’ shared moral and political commitments by serving as comments upon and symbols of larger historical events. As committed opponents of slavery, for instance, the couple were transfixed by John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, and read Brown’s ‘sublime’ letters aloud to each other as they were published in the periodical press.38 Through an African American friend who was a supporter of the Underground Railroad, the Lesleys were even invited to meet John Brown’s wife, who asked them if they ‘would like to see [a] letter’ he had written to her on his pending execution.39 As Susan related to her aunt: ‘I read it first, and then Peter. It was a noble, manly, self-sustained letter, full of feeling, but more of high religious exaltation . . . Every letter he has written to his wife has breathed the same quiet, heavenly, disinterested spirit.’40 Lesley’s own personal struggles, although more mundane, centered on reconciling the tension between his moral, aesthetic, religious, and literary commitments (as amplified in his personal letters), and his narrower identity as a geological expert. In place of the jobbing professional specialist, Lesley envisaged a ‘gentlemanly’ ideal of the man of science, in part perhaps as a form of wish-fulfillment: for he constantly bristled at the tedium and constraints of his day-to-day scientific work. This gentlemanly ideal eventually meshed well with Lesley’s position as professor of geology in the 1870s, when he explicitly sought to mold his students into ‘thinkers, and not “scientists” . . . – gentlemen to boot – in fine, Christians.’41 But even before he gained the authority of the moralizing professor, Lesley was enthusing about the ‘gentlemanly’ attributes of the scientist and philosopher Chauncey Wright, who was a close friend of the Lyman family.42 Wright, a somewhat itinerant polymath, not coincidentally clung to the eighteenth-century notion that personal correspondence held a distinct advantage over other conventions of scientific discourse. In a long letter to Susan Lesley from March 1870, for instance, Wright offered a lengthy critical account of new theories of geological time and the origins of the solar system, and imagined ‘an evening’s talk’ on these subjects with her husband.43 Yet Wright also anticipated Lesley’s interjection, during such a talk, with possible ‘crushing objections’ to his materialistic theories.44 In a letter, he thus concluded, one’s scientific ideas were better insulated: ‘Now, I have it all my own way, and get safely through my peroration. Such is the privilege of letters – and sermons! but one has to imagine the applause.’45

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This imagined autonomy of scientific letter-writing contrasted not just with the practices of conversation in person, but also, even more starkly, with the larger demands of scientific publication and education. Wright, for example, never published the book-length philosophical–scientific treatise for which some of his friends hoped, while his forays into teaching, including a course of lectures on psychology at Harvard, were infamously ‘ineffective,’ due to both the complexity of Wright’s ideas and his ‘innate shyness and unfamiliarity with the classroom.’46 The personal and private letter was thus a powerful instrument for sustaining a distinctive form of scientific discourse in an intellectual landscape which prioritized more public forms of communication and exchange. Such letters were effusive and undisciplined in their range of references, and they were not bound by the dictates of public discussion, or the formal demands of publication and instruction. Lesley’s most revealing letters came, naturally enough, in exchanges with his most intimate correspondents: many of these were friends and family without any particular scientific expertise. But Lesley did also forge close epistolary relationships with a relatively small circle of his scientific peers, including the geologist James Dwight Dana, the New York paleontologist James Hall, and the botanist Leo Lesquereux. In such exchanges, Lesley roamed freely beyond his own field of geological expertise to broach more theoretical topics, such as biological inheritance, which had gained widespread currency through Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Responding to an 1886 letter of Lesquereux’s on the subject, for instance, Lesley affirmed his sense of the inherent value of this private correspondence, declaring that ‘you can have no idea what precious things these simply written letters of yours are to me.’47 In the final years of his working life, too, Lesley wrote long and unorthodox letters to Dana and Hall on religion, Darwinism, and his own keenly felt mortality.48 Lesley’s intellectual curiosity, often bursting forth at wild tangents and against the grain of scientific orthodoxy, found its fullest expression in such letters. This private and intimate sphere of scientific correspondence was insulated from the larger social and institutional pressures attendant upon scientific work; but ultimately, those pressures could not help but condition and limit the ways and workings of these aging naturalists. To Hall, a fellow scientific consultant who knew much of these pressures himself, Lesley observed with a note of resignation in 1892: ‘[W]e men of science are not an order isolated from the mass of mankind, but merely a small and not very important section of society, mixed in and mixed up with the struggling, self-supporting, money making world.’49 When, in 1884, Lesley had been elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, his presidential address had more openly confronted this tension between science as a private, even intimate, concern, and as a public and professional obligation. Here, Lesley compared the bygone days when ‘Science was . . . an early morning stroll with sympathetic friends, uncritical and inexpert,’ to the present world of inquiry, ‘grown so suddenly old, learned, utilitarian, and critical,’ where the discovery of scientific laws and truths necessarily relied on the ‘dead work’ of patient empirical study, ‘that tedious, costly, and fatiguing process of laying a good foundation which no eye is ever to see.’50 Though Lesley did not acknowledge it explicitly in this speech, these dynamics were exactly the ones being played out in his own correspondence. It was the man of letters in Lesley who exhorted the coming generation of scientists to ‘avoid the sacrifice of character to science,’ and decried the spiritual and philosophical impoverishment that resulted from narrow professionalization.51

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‘The tendency of training now is to subordinate the soul to that which should be merely its endowment and adornment,’ he observed, ‘to turn the thinker into a mere walking encyclopedia, text-book, or the circle of the mechanic arts; not to produce the highest type of man. What ridiculous and pitiable creations are these!’52 Such criticism was imbued with bitter experience of the realities of professional science. In the 1850s, for example, Lesley had been hired by the American Iron Association to lobby on behalf of the industry, based on his geological expertise, and he became immersed in the bureaucratic politics of science in Washington, D.C.53 In such professional circumstances, letters appeared not as liberating symbols of the unconstrained, inspired mind, but rather took their place alongside other administrative labors and responsibilities as a tiresome and distracting burden. He portrayed himself in family letters at this time as a flailing intellectual, battling amongst the hard-headed realities of industry and government: ‘Here I am to protect Iron. Poor abstraction that I am – called upon to protect the realest and hardest reality of real things!’54 Such scientific lobbying efforts were themselves administrative exercises – an induction in the maelstrom of business-oriented correspondence that prompted Lesley’s skepticism and boredom. Indeed, in his military metaphor for his own protectionist lobbying on behalf of the iron industry, Lesley figured letters as one of many paper weapons at his disposal, and he depicted himself wearily ‘erecting paper fortifications, tabulated bastions, formulistic curtains, newspaper articles for redoubts and covered ways, bomb proofs in the shape of private correspondence, and mines under the pamphlet mines of the enemy.’55 Such relentlessly bureaucratic applications of scientific expertise tarnished Lesley’s sense of his epistolary self, and so by extension, signified his anxiety about the decline in the culture of letters among men of science. ‘Oh for my love of letter-writing, back again! How I did love it once!’ he wrote to his wife in December 1865.56 Lesley’s creative literary inclinations, and even his romantic affections, had been worn down by the dull demands of empirical science, such that, ‘now, burning with loving thoughts I sit down, and before I can get “Dear Love” down – puff! – away they have gone, and some hard, cold, uninteresting facts flow out of my pen’s nib instead. So it is with thought – as with affection . . . All is cold, dry matter of fact now. Business – moneymaking has killed my imagination and hardened my heart.’57 Lesley had not entirely lost his underlying passions, he conceded, when discussing the deadening impact of his professional affairs, ‘for I find it is only a sort of volcanic crust over the burning lava.’58 Nevertheless, the impact was profound and recurrent. This self-doubting letter was in fact written during a period of escape from the destructive influence of scientific ‘business’ and ‘money-making.’ Lesley had been invited to deliver the prestigious Lowell lectures in Boston, and had chosen, as he explained to John Amory Lowell, the broad theme of: ‘The relations of modern science to the early history of man; taking the widest range, not only geological and ethnological, but mythological, architectural and ethical also.’59 Restored to the region and city which had inspired much of his youthful intellectual optimism, and projecting his own interests onto the broad canvas of the lecture series, Lesley was liberated from the routine of his professional labors. He spent long periods with Chauncey Wright, talking about ‘metaphysics in my room before the fire, until two o’clock in the morning.’60 Frantic engagement in this fertile intellectual scene, and the preparation of his talks, gradually swung Lesley’s emotional pendulum back toward wild enthusiasm. ‘What an ocean of

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life breaks on these rocks of Boston society!’ he declared to Susan. ‘It is heaven upon earth here, with nothing to do but read, and talk, and think . . . [S]uch a nice science to work in and for! such an age to be born in!’61 Yet as soon as he was back in the habit of his routine geological field trips, Lesley’s familiar laments returned: ‘I cannot satisfy my judgment that it was intended for man to live at the railroad pace which we pursue in our country, – to pile occupation upon occupation, until we lose our soul’s best life beneath the heaps.’62 Correspondence then continued to symbolize Lesley’s scientific and intellectual anxieties in the year that followed. As he sought to revise his Lowell lectures for publication as Man’s Origin and Destiny (1868), he suffered a breakdown and embarked upon a European tour in order to escape from work and recover. Yet he feared that: ‘My recovery to health . . . is to be minus the brains.’63 Upon reading dense or complex scientific papers, he confessed to Susan in February 1867, he found that ‘[a]ny connected writing troubles me afterward,’ and so letter-writing – ‘such harum-scarum pattering like this; and not too much of this’ – became his primary outlet for a time.64 Lesley’s ultimate reflection on the Lowell lectures once they were published reinforces this sense that he had become alienated from his true vocation. ‘I am extremely dissatisfied with these performances,’ he told his wife a year later. ‘They treat the subjects concerned with an appearance of profundity, but real superficiality. They are the result of years of reading and reflection; yet are after all mere outline sketches.’65 Nonetheless, Lesley went on to direct the second Pennsylvania Geological Survey between 1874 and 1894, and it was during this time that his administrative burden reached its apex. As State Geologist, Lesley was painstakingly thorough. He planned, commissioned, and edited 120 volumes of state reports, provided illustrations for many, and prepared their prefaces and indexes. Amid this editorial work, as his daughter later noted: ‘The mere matter of correspondence was a heavy burden.’66 In managing his responsibilities, Lesley thus policed an explicit division in his letters between private intimacy and professional necessity. When one geological colleague, J. J. Stevenson, was offended by an impersonal letter relating practical matters about the survey, Lesley responded: ‘My letters have been dry enough whenever I wrote on business. I have no time to make elaborate explanations of views and feelings.’67 While ‘my business letter came from my head,’ Lesley added, ‘[m]y letters of friendship come from my heart.’68 But while Lesley hoped to keep colleagues such as Stevenson among that group of scientific friends, including the likes of Dana, Hall, and Lesquereux, to whom he could write from the heart, in practice for him, and for most of his peers, the dynamics of a modern and bureaucratic science kept most correspondence briskly professional. Even at the outset of his role as survey director the familiar strains of self-reproach crept into Lesley’s letters to Susan, as he planned a brief trip to Europe to acquire technical instruments, and asked: ‘Do you perceive and lament that my letters have become mere commonplace allusions to events, things and persons?’69 Being ‘immersed in affairs,’ Lesley felt, degraded his intimate correspondence, and so by implication his inner intellectual life, to the level of the merely factual and descriptive.70 Yet his fastidious public commitment to his chosen scientific career left him unable to break his professional ties, and by the time he neared the completion of the survey’s Final Report in 1892 he had become something of a curmudgeon, bemoaning what he perceived as the spiritual loss occasioned by the rise of modern scientific practices. In a long,

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late letter to his fellow-geologist, James Dwight Dana, for instance, Lesley anticipated some of the skeptical pessimism that animated Henry Adams around the same time. ‘What we have lost in elegance we have gained in force,’ he declared. ‘But whether the force compensates the elegance remains to be seen.’71 Elegance in letter-writing was certainly, at all points in his career, strikingly important for Lesley, as he indicated in a letter to Susan from the same year. ‘Poor letterwriter I have become,’ he lamented. ‘Fossils have poisoned my style.’72 Just as there is a tension between this striking image and the claim it is conveying, so scientific letters more generally constituted a paradox for Lesley. The patient empiricism and laborious professional duties that made up the bulk of his scientific life seemed to diminish, rather than complement, the spirited and eclectic intellectual persona he constructed and clung to through his intimate, personal correspondence. By the close of the nineteenth century, the image of the learned and genteel man of letters appeared to be decidedly at odds with the novel figure of the scientist. Lesley’s scientific letters, then, provide an arresting portrait of the scientific intellectual milieu painfully exploring its own limitations. Ultimately, although Lesley’s intellectual preoccupations and affiliations were decidedly his own, his career forms a common thread with others within the larger patterns of nineteenth-century science in the United States. In that larger context, correspondences concerning science recorded a decisive, though often anguished and reluctant, abandonment of the Enlightenment republic of letters, replaced by a more determinedly bureaucratic and professional model of specialized inquiry and dissemination. Science as an intellectual endeavor, like the very letters being passed between professional scientists, became more anonymous and less intimate. Reflective correspondences between friends on scientific questions undoubtedly persisted – they even thrived, as the sheer volume and eclectic range of Lesley’s own letters show. But such correspondences now flowed at the periphery and in the background of scientific life, rather than constituting its central currents. As a result, even leading exponents of science felt that its influence had brought about a lamentable decline in the genteel culture of letters. Still, Lesley’s propensity to self-excoriating pessimism notwithstanding, his own intimate correspondence continued to aspire to build upon this ideal, and as such it occasionally offers a more optimistic note on which to conclude an assessment of scientific epistolarity at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘People say no good letters are written now,’ Susan Lesley wrote in 1893, to the daughter who would eventually publish her parents’ correspondence. ‘I can’t agree with them. I think there were never better letters written than to-day – far better than a hundred years ago.’73

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Shuffleton, ‘A Continental Poetics,’ 282. Quoted in Parrish, American Curiosity, 144. Parrish, American Curiosity, 140. See ibid. 112. See Wrightson, ‘[Those with] Great Abilities,’ 114–15. Lewis, Democracy of Facts, 7. See Parrish, American Curiosity, 136–73. Quoted in Parrish, American Curiosity, 149.

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9. This phrase derives from Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science. The emergence of the ‘scientist’ as a term of identification has been strikingly reinterpreted and clarified in Lucier, ‘The Professional and the Scientist.’ On exceptions to the pervasive expectation that scientific inquirers should be men see Baym, American Women of Letters, 10. 10. For more on these developments see Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science; Kohlstedt, Formation of the American Scientific Community; Reuben, The Making of the Modern University; and Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University. 11. Influential interpretations of this growth of professionalization include Daniels, ‘The Process of Professionalization,’ and Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism. For a critique and a corrective of this thesis see Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, and Lucier, ‘The Professional and the Scientist,’ respectively. 12. The biographical material in this paragraph is drawn from: Ames, Life and Letters; Chance, ‘Biographical Notice’; Davis, ‘Biographical Memoir’; and Lucier, Scientists & Swindlers. 13. Ames, Life and Letters, 1: vii. 14. Ibid. 15. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 1: 400. 16. Zboray, A Fictive People, 71. 17. See Lucier, Scientists & Swindlers, 116–21. 18. Browne, Charles Darwin, 2: 10, 11. 19. See ibid. 2: 11, and Moore, ‘Darwin’s Genesis and Revelations,’ 570. 20. Browne, Charles Darwin, 2: 12. 21. Quoted in Browne, Charles Darwin, 2: 389. 22. See Ames, Life and Letters, 1: 193–5. 23. Quoted in ibid. 1: 201. For other similar letters see ibid. 198–200. 24. Quoted in ibid. 1: 202. 25. Quoted in ibid. 1: 234. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. See Lesley, ‘Frank,’ J. P. Lesley Papers, American Philosophical Society, Box 11. 29. Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries, 36. 30. Daston, ‘The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters,’ 371. 31. Ibid. 383. 32. See Ames, Life and Letters, 268–9. 33. See Lucier, Scientists & Swindlers. 34. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 1: 351. 35. See Lucier, Scientists & Swindlers, 126–7. 36. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 1: 279. 37. Lydia Maria Child, Letter to J. Peter Lesley, 1 August 1858, in Lesley, J. P. Lesley Papers, American Philosophical Society, Box 6. 38. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 1: 377. 39. Ibid. 1: 378. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 2: 158. 42. Lesley praised Wright, for instance, as ‘a perfect gentleman, and a gentleman in science also, which last is the rarest of all rare phenomena’ (Letter to Benjamin Smith Lyman, 19 December 1864, in J. P. Lesley Papers, American Philosophical Society, Box 8). 43. Wright, Letter to Susan Lesley, 22 March 1870, in Evolutionary Philosophy, 178. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ryan, ‘Introduction,’ xvii, xvi. 47. Lesley, Letter to Leo Lesquerueux, 6 April 1886, in J. P. Lesley Papers, American Philosophical Society, Box 24.

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48. See, for example, Lesley, Letter to James Hall, 26 December 1890, in ibid. Box 26, and Lesley, Letter to James Dwight Dana, 10 May 1892, in ibid. 49. Lesley, Letter to James Hall, 27 January 1892, in ibid. 50. Lesley, ‘The President’s Address,’ 169, 174. 51. Ibid. 170. 52. Ibid. 171. 53. See Lucier, Scientists & Swindlers, 114. 54. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 1: 342. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 1: 505. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Lesley, Letter to John Amory Lowell, 20 May 1864, in J. P. Lesley Papers, American Philosophical Society, Box 8. 60. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 1: 511. 61. Quoted in Davis, ‘Biographical Memoir,’ 198. 62. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 1: 522. 63. Ibid. 2: 19. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 1: 509. 66. Ames, Life and Letters, 2: 139. 67. Lesley, Letter to J. J. Stevenson, 10 May 1878, in J. P. Lesley Papers, American Philosophical Society, Box 18. 68. Ibid. 69. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 2: 142. 70. Ibid. 2: 143. 71. J. P. Lesley, Letter to James Dwight Dana, 10 May 1892, in Dana, Dana Family Papers, Yale University, Box 2, Folder 76, Reel 2. 72. Quoted in Ames, Life and Letters, 2: 417. 73. Ibid. 2: 428.

Works Cited Ames, M. L. (1909), The Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, 2 vols., New York: Putnam’s. Baym, N. (2002), American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bledstein, B. (1976), The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, New York: Norton Bordogna, F. (2008), William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Browne, J. (2002), Charles Darwin, 2 vols., London: Cape. Bruce, R. V. (1987), The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876, New York: Knopf. Chance, H. M. (1906), ‘A Biographical Notice of J. Peter Lesley,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 45: i–xiv. Dana, J. D. (1805–95), Dana Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, MS 164. Daniels, G. H. (1967), ‘The Process of Professionalization in American Science: The Emergent Period, 1820–1860,’ Isis, 58: 150–66. Daston, L. (1991), ‘The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,’ Science in Context, 4: 367–86.

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Davis, W. M. (1915), ‘Biographical Memoir of Peter Lesley, 1819–1903,’ National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs, 8: 155–240. Golinski, J. (1998), Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, New York: Cambridge University Press. Jewett, A. (2012), Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War, New York: Cambridge University Press. Kohlstedt, S. G. (1976), The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science 1848–1860, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lesley, J. P. (1826–98), J. P. Lesley Papers, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, Mss.B.L56. Lesley, J. P. (1885), ‘The President’s Address,’ Science, 6: 168–77. Lewis, A. J. (2011), A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lucier, P. (2008), Scientists & Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1829–1890, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lucier, P. (2009), ‘The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America,’ Isis, 100: 699–732. Moore, J. R. (1985), ‘Darwin’s Genesis and Revelations,’ Isis, 76: 570–80. Parrish, S. S. (2006), American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Reuben, J. A. (1996), The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ryan, F. X. (2000), ‘Introduction,’ in F. X. Ryan and E. H. Madden (eds.), The Evolutionary Philosophy of Chauncey Wright – Volume 2: Letters of Chauncey Wright, Bristol: Thoemmes, v–xxi. Shuffleton, F. (2001), ‘A Continental Poetics: Scientific Publishing and Scientific Society in Eighteenth-Century America,’ in C. Mulford and D. S. Shields (eds.), Finding Colonial Americas, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 277–91. Wright, C. (2000), The Evolutionary Philosophy of Chauncey Wright – Volume 2: Letters of Chauncey Wright, ed. F. X. Ryan and E. H. Madden, Bristol: Thoemmes. Wrightson, N. (2010), ‘[Those with] Great Abilities Have Not Always the Best Information: How Franklin’s Transatlantic Book-Trade and Scientific Networks Interacted, ca. 1730–1757,’ Early American Studies 8: 94–119. Zboray, R. J. (1993), A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public, New York: Oxford University Press.

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6 THE MEANS AND THE END: LETTERS AND THE WORK OF HISTORY Alea Henle

[D]

‘

esirous that myself & family should live in peace with all men,’ John Lardner of Pennsylvania destroyed his father’s letterbook in 1816.1 The volume contained correspondence from when his father was part of the Pennsylvania colonial government, but Lardner dismissed this as mostly matters of account. Of more concern, the book included copies of letters Lardner’s English-born father had exchanged with friends and family during a period of bitterly partisan political strife over Pennsylvania’s governance in the mid-eighteenth century. His father, who was brother-in-law to Richard Penn, son of the colony’s founder, had apparently written about events ‘with a freedom, that could not warrant an exposure to the public’s eye.’2 Perhaps Lardner feared that, if made available for general review, the letterbook’s contents would inspire doubts about his family’s loyalty, given the recent war against the British. Importantly, this destruction did not take place out of the blue. The previous year, the American Philosophical Society had established a standing committee to collect historical and literary materials, likely inspired by the War of 1812 and the burning of Washington, as well as the establishment of similar historical organizations in Massachusetts. The Philadelphia-based Philosophical Society circulated a literary notice seeking historical documents and appointed members to reach out to individuals believed to have such materials, particularly relating to early Pennsylvania history.3 Indeed, someone probably contacted Lardner, given his father’s government service. Lardner was hardly the only person to wittingly destroy family papers; many a modern archive contains letter series with notable gaps, or diaries with passages cut out. Unusually, though, Lardner wrote a letter afterward which presented the destruction as warranted on two fronts: the confidential nature of the letters, and the potential for the letters’ contents to disturb his family’s reputation. His act of destruction thus reflects more clearly than in other instances the impact of collecting for historical purposes, as well as the tension inherent in making private, familial documents available in historical collections or for historical research. Furthermore, the justifications behind his destruction, and the care with which he positioned the loss of official documentation as a minor matter, effectively indicate the existence of multiple, contingent means of valuing letters. And last but not least, the destruction of this letterbook forty years after its author’s death raises pressing questions about whose letters were considered historical, when, and how. The Lardner incident, in short, demonstrates that the historical record is not only incomplete, but contingent upon the actions of multiple individuals – including donors, librarians, collectors, and archivists – and the 103

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changing valuation of objects. Personal politics, emotional connections, and events both historical and contemporary to the act of donation all influenced what materials were saved and likewise what destroyed. Letters then hold a particularly important place in this contingent relationship: as one of the most heavily relied upon primary source materials, historians have frequently been dependent upon their content. Yet precisely because they are a personal and potentially contentious medium, collections of letters were often censored, cherry-picked, or even overlooked. In working through these various issues this chapter pays particular attention to nineteenth-century collection practices and the preservation of letters as historical documents. I will begin by exploring historical societies’ participation in collecting and preserving letters, and a correspondence-based collection practice historical societies used which focused collecting attention upon desired historical information. I will then analyze how different societies and society members assigned historical value to letters, arguing that letters were particularly apt to survive for historical use if authored by wealthy, influential men of Anglo-American descent. This examination of the ways in which these letters were gathered and preserved highlights the contingent nature of collection and offers insight into the exclusion of other materials. And finally, the last section of the chapter offers a mini case study of the preservation of Massachusetts Historical Society founder Jeremy Belknap’s letters as historical materials. Essentially, this chapter focuses on historical societies because they engaged in collective collecting. In other words, their efforts to gather and preserve historical materials reflect the ideas of multiple individuals. The society collections do not represent any single conception of what should be preserved, but rather the reconciliation of multiple approaches which might differ in small or large ways. Thus any analysis of historical societies must highlight differences alongside agreement. Historical societies, in particular those active in the early to mid-nineteenth century, have received less scholarly attention than other elements in the work of historiography, despite their involvement in determining the early landscape of preservation in the United States. Historians and literary scholars have largely focused on letters’ many uses in historical writing – as material for histories, historical novels, and biographies.4 Archivists have stressed the ways in which collecting and preserving materials for historical use inevitably shapes their discoverability and which records survive.5 And much of the literature investigating the complex cause and effect of archival preservation has either focused on Europe or Asia, or on the United States from the late nineteenth century onward, from the birth of what became the modern archival profession. Over the course of the nineteenth century, individuals across America organized historical societies, and their core mission included gathering information for use in the writing of history. European examples, not least the Society of Antiquaries in London, helped inspire establishments in the United States. The first historical society, the Massachusetts Society, was founded in Boston in 1791; by 1900, countless others had come into existence organized around geographic identities (cities, counties, states), religions, ethnicities, and more.6 Many failed, and others were characterized by long periods of inactivity punctuated by brief bursts of action. Nevertheless, cumulatively they gathered and preserved materials which supported analysis of the history of America. These societies were quasi-public organizations with state charters, or, particularly in the West, state agencies created as trustworthy repositories of historical materials. In both cases, their focus included familial collections of letters and

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papers; the New-York Historical Society, the second founded in the United States, noted in 1804 that its mission included gathering and protecting materials ‘in the possession of those who, though unwilling to entrust them to a single person, yet would cheerfully confide them to a public institution.’7 The societies’ membership rolls drew primarily from the ranks of professional men of station and predominantly AngloAmerican descent. Some societies did not elect women as members into the twentieth century, save for rare exceptions; likewise, ethnic minorities and the laboring classes were largely excluded. Historical societies used letters to define and disseminate ideas of history across the nation. In particular, they did so through the use of a tried-and-true technique adapted from previous learned circles: namely, circular letters.8 Circulars were open flyers or pamphlets, sometimes bound with society constitutions and by-laws, and distributed with the expectation that recipients would pass requests along to others, distributing the letters through multiple networks of friends and acquaintances. Letters were also sent to newspapers for publication. These circulars had incredible reach, particularly given the limitations of viable communication networks early in the century. The Massachusetts Historical Society, for example, produced a circular in the 1790s which appeared in newspapers as far away as South Carolina, and it was also recirculated over the following decades and printed in a newspaper as late as 1823.9 This circular resulted in numerous letters and gifts to the society, which in turn facilitated development of the genre of local history in New England.10 Later historical society circulars often bore a resemblance to the Massachusetts society’s initial letter. Circular letters served as a ‘wish list’ of Society desiderata, disseminating their ideas of what had historical value through ever-widening circles. By nature, the letters emphasized the collection of desired information. The length and formats of the circulars varied, but most contained lists of subjects about which the society officers wanted information and types of documents and materials it wanted to collect, such as letters and newspapers. The circulars implicitly focused attention upon topics the officers considered historical, and in turn served to replicate such discriminations among the learned elite who received the letters. In other words, historical societies helped to craft the discourse of what the public would find historically significant by privileging certain materials over others in their circular letters.11 In several cases, the issuing societies devoted far more space to detailing desired information than formats; this effectively focused attention on collecting particular facts rather than early documents. For example, the New-York Historical Society disseminated a circular in 1804 which requested manuscripts and printed works, suggesting specific types of particular interest including orations and sermons, legal records, religious proceedings, and descriptions of towns, cities, educational institutions, manufacture, and commerce.12 However, a list of twenty-three queries followed this itemization of coveted publications and manuscripts. Through these queries, the Society then focused attention on the period of Dutch rule over the colony of New Amsterdam, about which relatively little was known. Other questions, meanwhile, affirmed specific interests in manufacture, commerce, and educational and religious institutions. On the whole, the Society was concerned with information and material documenting public transactions, characters, events, and places. Indeed, the New-York Historical Society’s queries were so detailed they provided a partial blueprint, and target, for Washington Irving’s satirical History of New York in 1809.13

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Early circulars emphasized political, religious, and civil history, but over the century the societies expanded their collecting activities to incorporate matters previously considered minor or trivial. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, for instance, which was established in 1824, revised its circular twenty years later to solicit ‘peculiar notion[s], custom[s], or superstition[s]’ in addition to books, records, drawings, ‘revolutionary songs, ancient ballads, letters, papers, narratives, [and] orderly books.’14 Along similar lines, a contributor to the Virginia Historical Register in 1849 encouraged the Virginia Society to rethink what it collected and protected. Under the initials ‘L. M.,’ the correspondent reminded the Society that history should include ‘not merely, or mainly, the transactions of the government of a country, but the doings, the progress, the character of its people.’15 This broader scope affected even societies focused on political and military affairs. The Southern Historical Society, for instance, was founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1869 to collect material relating to the Civil War so as to support vindication of the ‘dead heroes’ of the South, but nevertheless included ‘poetry, ballads, [and] songs’ in its 1876 circular.16 Historical societies were not the only parties to disseminate ideas of history; individuals also sent letters detailing the information and materials they required for writing histories. In fact, in at least one case, a historian employed the circular format to collect the data he desired. In 1813, the Congregational minister Timothy Alden, who had prepared library catalogues for the Massachusetts and New York Historical Societies and was also a member of the American Antiquarian Society, printed a letter soliciting information for a history of New Jersey. His circular (perhaps an early version of crowd-sourcing historical research) resembled the societies’, requesting first and foremost descriptive information on places, events, and institutions, plus brief biographies of prominent individuals. And at the end, he expressed interest in copies of publications and manuscripts, ‘gratuitously, at a fair price, or on loan.’17 The placement of this request made it subsidiary to the desired information, but also acknowledged the possibility that access to older documents would require him to expend money for purchase or to cover copying costs. Overall, historical society circular letters demonstrate a slow democratization of ideas of history. They collectively focused attention on certain elements of historical writing, particularly related to political and civil life, and likewise, the societies emphasized collection of desired information alongside, and sometimes above, preservation of letters and other documents. These priorities inevitably had an effect on what they collected. The process of preserving letters as historical materials was, in short, complex; for letters to enter historical society collections, with the implicit potential for long-term preservation, a number of conditions needed to be met. Once letters were created, any successive owner potentially valued, ignored, or destroyed them. As a general rule, though, donors to historical societies needed to be: (a) conscious they possessed materials; (b) aware that the materials might have some degree of historical value; (c) sufficiently confident that historians and historical society members also considered the items of historical value; and (d) willing to contribute the items or permit copying. Society officers and members exerted a degree of control over what entered their collections, but they did not necessarily agree on how to value letters and other materials. And inevitably, ideas of historical significance were changing over time. By the mid-nineteenth century several different modes of valuing letters as historical documents were in circulation including content, author, place, and name-and-date.

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These rationales had implications for the materials gathered. While most valuations emphasized content first and foremost, this period included early movements toward incorporation of more expansive modes of value (such as name-and-date), as part of a shift in favor of gathering primary materials above and beyond information. This transition was, of course, gradual and unequal in application. The letters of prominent men, for instance, were prized long before those of women, laborers, and racial and ethnic minorities, and likewise government documents were given precedence over the records of businesses.18 Thus, document content remained a dominant means of establishing historical value, even as other criteria were beginning to emerge. In 1815, for example, the French-born polymath Peter DuPonceau of Philadelphia wrote to the governor of New Jersey on behalf of the American Philosophical Society’s Historical Committee, expressing interest in ‘[l]etters of Official, political & literary character, written at interesting periods.’19 Even as DuPonceau mentioned other criteria, such as context (‘official’) and time (‘interesting periods’), then, his phrasing stressed content (‘political & literary’). DuPonceau was an active member of the American Philosophical Society’s Philosophical Committee at the time, and later served simultaneously as president of the APS and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and so wrote from a position of influence. In a similar vein, meanwhile, in 1821 the Essex Historical Society in Massachusetts requested ‘[o]riginal letters’ connected to a range of subjects, such as the ‘topography, antiquities, and natural, civil, and ecclesiastical history’ of the county.20 The Society, tellingly, did not specify an interest in particular authors or types of authors, or a timeframe other than the general reference to ‘history,’ thus emphasizing content. Valuations based on content often relied upon presumptive ideas of what constituted history. Society officers and members might agree in theory on the significant topics of history (political, civic, religious, military), but the practice of collecting information was a different matter. In May 1838, for instance, the Massachusetts Historical Society librarian Thaddeus Mason Harris drafted a letter which distinguished between accepted and rejected items based on content. The library had recently received a collection of personal papers, and he explained to his correspondent that the Society had decided to keep certain materials which were connected ‘to facts or events of a general & public nature’ and might be useful in writing history, while an ample number of other documents were not selected.21 These included ‘the common files of a lawyer’s office, such as Writs, Executions, depositions, letters from Clients,’ and ‘letters of a merely personal concern.’22 Such documents related to specific interactions between individuals and companies, and by implication were not considered useful for historical writing. This opinion was not universal, though, and the only items returned to the family may have been those considered most private. Twenty-five years later, another Society officer discovered the remaining rejected papers in the Society’s attic and, evidently considering their content historical, added them to the collection.23 Authorship as a mode of valuation meanwhile existed alongside the focus on content. The American Philosophical Society, for example, specified a desire in its 1815 circular to accumulate correspondence, both public and private, ‘from eminent men, and from men of knowledge and observations.’24 The authors of this circular thus assigned value to letters based on their creators. The remainder of the sentence connects the request for correspondence with ‘every thing which may be considered as interesting to this Country in an historical, Statistical, geographical or topographical

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point of view,’ but the whole circular nevertheless implies that all letters authored by some men might qualify as historical; a quintessential American example of this being George Washington.25 Indeed, author-based valuations fundamentally underscored appeals to the heirs of prominent political and military leaders for donations. The U.S. Congress approved expenditures for relatively few initiatives to collect and preserve historical materials over the nineteenth century, but in 1834 it purchased Washington’s public papers for $25,000, before acquiring his private papers for an additional $20,000 in 1849.26 Congress also approved purchases of two other presidents’ papers: a small batch of Thomas Jefferson’s books and papers in 1829, James Madison’s in 1837, and the remainder of Jefferson’s papers in 1848.27 Government officers had in fact already consulted some of these papers on numerous occasions, particularly insofar as the government’s copies of some of them had been destroyed in the War Office fire of 1800. Following European examples, meanwhile, over the course of the century the papers of many prominent individuals appeared in print, with these publications often relying first upon the author’s standing and reputation, and with content as a subsidiary concern. Historians and historical societies seeking particular information, or letters from specific individuals, routinely accepted copies from trustworthy sources (such as other historians or government clerks) in place of originals. Likewise, printed texts were suitable substitutes for manuscripts; indeed, by the nineteenth century printing already had a long history as an art used to preserve documents through the multiplication of copies. Copies were not acceptable, though, in a variant on authorbased valuation which involved prizing documents for their signatures. Autograph collecting was practiced far and wide during the course of the nineteenth century, with collecting peaks in the 1830s and 1870s, the latter with a particular connection to the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence.28 One ‘patriarch’ of nineteenthcentury autograph collecting in the United States, the Presbyterian clergyman William Buell Sprague, had gathered in excess of 75,000 autographs at his death in 1878, and as late-twentieth-century scholars have noted, his collection preserved historical items otherwise at risk of loss or destruction.29 Sprague and other autograph hunters interested in historical signatures revered original signatures regardless of a documents’ contents, however. These collectors’ practices and their treatment of documents sometimes included actions such as pruning or removing material considered objectionable either at the time or subsequently. Nevertheless, autograph-based evaluation was an acceptable means of establishing the historical value of letters. For historical societies, autograph-based appraisals involved esteeming letters as non-substitutable artifacts, in contrast with other valuation methods wherein copies were acceptable. In June 1784, the early historical editor Ebenezer Hazard advised fellow historian Jeremy Belknap to give a copy of the first volume of his History of New-Hampshire (1784) to George Washington, so as to obtain ‘a letter from him in his own handwriting, which will be worth preserving.’30 Under such a view, the resultant letter’s value lay in the originality of the writing, facilitating a tangible connection between owner or beholder and Washington. It was not just leading statesmen who attracted such attention, though. Within the historical realm, many elected officials and other notables were frequently the focus of historical society autograph collecting. The Rhode Island Historical Society, for instance, appointed a committee in 1836 ‘to procure so far as practicable’ the signatures of all the state’s governors, and in a similar

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vein, the Connecticut Historical Society in the 1840s expressed a particular interest in the autographs of ‘gentlemen of distinction’ such as state and federal office-holders.31 Frequently, historians and societies valued letters using multiple means simultaneously. One exchange between a historian and a state record office offers a good example. In 1826, the historian and editor Jared Sparks was visiting state record offices in search of material for a documentary edition of Revolution-era diplomatic correspondence. He was also collecting ‘autographs of the revolutionary heroes and statesmen’ against the possibility of publishing a complete collection of facsimile autographs.32 For the first purpose, he paid clerks to make copies, but for the latter he needed originals. North Carolina Secretary of State William Hill allowed Sparks to take a number of these originals, including ‘autographs of distinguished men’ from the Revolution era such as Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Jay, and Henry Laurens.33 The copies made by the clerks were ‘deposited in the files’ in place of the originals.34 An official in charge of the Maryland state archives, meanwhile, made a similar offer, conditional on approval by the Governor and Council.35 State officials, in this respect, were more focused upon continuity of authentic information within their archival files rather than possessing originals. Indeed, government record-making practices often involved the creation and circulation of multiple instances of documents; thus, copies could satisfy their archival purposes. Another means of valuation, particularly prevalent among state and local historical societies, involved privileging letters based on connections to specific places. Thus, in 1850, the Alabama Historical Society solicited the ‘correspondence . . . of any remarkable persons, male or female, residing in or passing through the State; or in any way connected with its history.’36 In this construction, physical presence in Alabama (either temporary or permanent) was as or more important than a connection with the state’s history. Other historical societies organized around geographic identities did not emphasize physical presence in and of itself to the extent that Alabama did; but, as with the Schoharie County Historical Society later in the century, most focused on gathering materials related to their particular city, county, state, or region. Nonetheless, the Schoharie Society, which was based in New York, did specify an interest in letters by ‘early settlers,’ thereby implicitly prioritizing a chronologically specific physical presence in the area.37 Finally, as an unusual letter from 1847 demonstrates, valuations based on the inclusion of name-and-date had the potential to encompass far more diverse materials than content, author, or place. In that year, Rhode Island Historical Society member Edwin M. Stone donated 225 documents to the Society, mostly made up of letters which he had saved from being burnt out of ‘a conviction that not a scrap bearing a name & date, should be destroyed.’38 Under this rationale, the critical elements for preservation were the ability to connect any given document with a specific person and time; content, author, or place were of little to no matter. Indeed, the items Stone saved bear this out, as some documented the abduction and sale of slaves. Many historical society officers favored ending slavery, but the societies also included ardent defenders of slavery among their members and potential donors. Amidst the increasingly urgent and fraught political debates of the mid-nineteenth century, historical societies thus tended to focus on past practices rather than present conflicts. Analysis of historical society records for the first half of the nineteenth century suggests that few donated manuscripts were specifically described as documenting slavery and enslaved peoples.39

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What materials the societies did accession were generally in print form rather than manuscript, such as pamphlets issued by abolition and colonization societies. Stone’s donation, justified on the basis of name-and-date, was an exception. While name-and-date was Stone’s primary mode of valuation, he nevertheless used other modes (content, author, autograph) to distinguish between the 225 items he handed over. In describing a body of 177 letters, broken down into five lots, for example, he noted authors and, for the most part, subjects. Over seventy letters related to social customs and/or maritime history. Other letters ‘contain historical incidents of some interest’ or ‘semi-official opinions on legal topics.’40 One lot of fifty-eight ‘brief’ letters, dating from Albert Gallatin’s term as Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Stone considered ‘chiefly valuable for their autographs, & for the dates of decisions to which they refer,’ and in a related vein, he noted a letter in another lot which contained a valuable Jefferson autograph.41 Thus Stone divided his finds into documents worth preserving as artifacts due to signatures and time of writing, on the one hand, and items with valuable historical content, on the other. In summary, people selecting material to preserve in historical society collections or publications used a variety of valuation modes including content, author, place, autograph, and name-and-date. These were not exclusive; value based on content might co-exist with an interest in autographs or names. But content was perhaps the most prevalent mode, and the most open to interpretation; for value based on content varied depending upon any given individual’s ideas of history, which might change and conflict with those of others both contemporaneously and over time. In order to see more clearly the ways in which the how and when of inclusion in historical society collections operated, then, I would like to conclude with a mini case study of the preservation over the nineteenth century of Jeremy Belknap’s letters and papers. It is easy to assert that letters grow in value with time and age, but the question of how this works in practice has been too little considered. Most of the individual and family collections documenting the colonial period and the early United States now in the possession of historical societies did not enter their collections until well after the mid-nineteenth century. The inclusion of an individual’s letters in the historical record for the majority of the nineteenth century was an exception rather than the rule. This held true even for men of station, wealth, and British ancestry. Women, individuals from the lower and middling classes, and those not of Euro-American descent faced further bars, of course. The papers of the founders of early historical societies – most professional men of station – too were often overlooked by the very societies they helped establish. Looking at the processes through which the papers of Belknap, a white man of middling status and a historical society founder, came to be included in publicly accessible collections, thus highlights the obstacles to inclusion for less privileged individuals’ papers. Born in Boston in 1744, Belknap was ordained in 1767 by the noted historian Rev. Thomas Prince, whom he would go on to emulate. He ministered to the First Church in Dover, New Hampshire, for nearly two decades – years which were characterized by strife, ostensibly over his pay, but also due to his promulgation of orthodox Calvinist policies to an increasingly resistant congregation. While living in Dover, he researched and wrote a three-volume History of New-Hampshire (1784–92), and became increasingly concerned about documentary losses. Thus he raised the possibility of establishing ‘a public repository’ for historical manuscripts in the introduction to his first

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volume, and a few years later, after accepting a call to a Boston church, he joined with other like-minded individuals to form the first historical society in the nation.42 Belknap was the Massachusetts Historical Society’s first corresponding secretary, and his labors until his death in 1798 contributed greatly to the Society’s success.43 Belknap’s awareness of his own papers’ historical value is not known. He simply left disposition of all his letters to his heirs, and it was not until sixty years after his death that his daughter expressed a belief that he would have eventually donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society all materials in his possession connected to the history of America.44 Belknap likely assigned historical value to the documentary materials he had collected, but may not have assigned such to his own letters. He was not a prominent public figure in comparison to the Revolutionary War heroes he heralded, and whose achievements shaped the ideas of history he promulgated through the Massachusetts Society. This likely affected his colleagues’, as well as his own, sense of his papers’ uses as material for history. For although the Society mourned Belknap’s loss, there is no indication that the members sought to include his papers in their collections. Rather, the members voted to present his widow with the Society’s Collections as volumes were published and to purchase a portrait of him, if they could raise enough money by subscription.45 The minutes for the meetings after his death contain no reference to his papers or to his collection of historical books, pamphlets, and manuscripts. Nor did his widow offer the members an opportunity to review and select these items, as Dorothy Quincy Hancock had after the death of Revolutionary patriot and Massachusetts governor John Hancock only a few years earlier.46 Belknap’s papers remained in his family’s hands for more than a half century after his death. They ‘carefully preserved’ them and may have considered publishing some at the time, but no publication appeared.47 By the late 1840s, however, increasing numbers of biographies, often composed primarily of excerpts from the subject’s writings, as well as documentary collections of individual writings, were appearing in print.48 Belknap’s posthumous reputation, particularly as ‘The Historian of New Hampshire,’ had led to his name being used for a county there, and ‘to designate several private corporations.’49 Nevertheless, with the deaths of so many of his contemporaries, his fame was in question, for ‘[t]he results of some of his labors have been claimed for others, and some of his actions have been erroneously represented.’50 To counter this, his granddaughter Jane Belknap Marcou thus composed a memoir, featuring extensive excerpts from his letters and writings, which was published in 1847. At mid-century, though, despite this memoir, the Massachusetts Historical Society and Belknap’s surviving offspring valued Belknap the collector of historical documents and information over Belknap the creator of letters and diaries. The transfer of Belknap’s papers to the Society emphasized the broader context of American history rather than Belknap’s own life and work. In 1858, eleven years after Marcou’s memoir appeared in print, Belknap’s only surviving child, Elizabeth, gave the majority of what now constitutes the Jeremy Belknap Papers to the Society. Importantly, in her letter of donation, she described the gift as made up of print and manuscript materials ‘relating to American history,’ and the member who announced the gift at the Society’s March 1858 meeting evidently emphasized the phrase, which the recording secretary included as a quote in the minutes.51 This description not only emphasized Belknap as collector but stressed the materials’ worth as based on their content and

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connection to American history. Indeed, Elizabeth’s letter added that she gave her authorization for the Society to present any books or pamphlets that ‘do not relate to American history’ to the Boston Public Library.52 By 1877, the Society had come to value Belknap’s letters as historical on at least three additional bases: content (i.e. Belknap’s historical labor in addition to the historical materials he had collected), temporality (i.e. their age), and the ties between creator and recipient (i.e. Belknap’s personal connection to the Society). Close exposure to the papers had led to this different view. Society member Charles Deane examined the collection on its arrival at the Society, and 40 per cent of his lengthy report on the contents of the donation detailed ‘the large amount of manuscripts connected with Dr. Belknap personally, – that is, either written by him or addressed to him.’53 He valued these for their documentation of Belknap’s life and work, which included establishment of the Society. Among the other items, Deane highlighted roughly 250 letters from Belknap’s friend and fellow historian Ebenezer Hazard. Belknap’s papers included few copies of letters he had authored, though, and Deane considered obtaining Belknap’s half of this correspondence ‘desirable.’54 His suggestion was shortly translated into action. With Elizabeth Belknap’s permission and assistance, the Society had successfully acquired the letters by 1861, and sixteen years later, the Society published the Belknap–Hazard correspondence. Deane, writing for the publication committee, acknowledged that the letters included ‘private and personal affairs’ as well as detailing historical labors.55 Nevertheless, he justified printing because the correspondence as a whole offered ‘a picture of the time.’56 Of equal import too was the fact that ‘every thing relating to him who was the principal founder of this Society must be regarded with interest by its members for all time.’57 Time or age was a vital element in the attribution of historical value in at least two respects. Firstly, historical society officers often construed the past in relation to their own birth and childhood. Belknap, for example, was part of the past for Deane, who was born in 1813, fifteen years after his predecessor’s death. And secondly, the passage of time removed constraints with respect to including materials in the historical record. Indeed, Deane noted as much when presenting the Belknap-Hazard correspondence in 1877, commenting that ‘[t]he freedom with which this correspondence was conducted on both sides . . . would have operated as an obstacle to its publication at a much earlier period, but time disposes of all such questions.’58 With the death of Belknap and Hazard’s contemporaries, in other words, the letters could be made available as curious and interesting reservoirs of historical material, rather than potential sources of scandal and libel. Belknap’s letters, then, were valued as artifacts of his life by the end of the nineteenth century. The Belknap–Hazard correspondence appeared across two volumes in the 1870s and was reprinted in 1882 with an additional appendix. During the 1880s, moreover, the Society received further Belknap documents from Jane Belknap Marcou; and other donations were added over the succeeding decades.59 To celebrate the Society’s centennial, it printed additional letters from the Belknap papers in the 1890 volume of its Collections, although it lamented that many of Belknap’s letters had disappeared or been lost over the years. The letters included in this volume, it was observed, were ‘not . . . written for any eye but that of the person to whom it was sent, or of some intimate friend.’60 Yet they offered insight into the ‘social, political, and literary life’ of the time, and ‘their entire freedom from reserve gives them a special value.’61

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Overall, the story of Belknap’s letters allows us to trace the first stages of a shift away from a history centered around heroes and national founders to a broader definition of what figures warranted having their papers preserved as part of the historical record. When Belknap gathered materials, he focused on colonial and revolutionary notables such as George Washington. By a century after Belknap’s death, his own papers had become part of the documentation of life in Revolutionary America. It is important, of course, not to overstate the pace of this change, which was incremental. An educated minister of Anglo-American descent, and a founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Belknap was a member of the elite by most standards. The broadening of nineteenth-century ideas of history and historical figures was thus narrow by modern standards, excluding most women, laborers, and ethnic and racial minorities. But the stages through which Belknap’s letters became part of the collections of the Society he helped found are nonetheless important. The critical time periods in their journey included not merely the disposition of his papers immediately after his death, but the maturation of individuals born in the following years. In the anecdote which began this chapter, a letterbook survived its creator by forty years, but was destroyed at a point where the creator’s son recognized its potential use in history. While some materials’ historical value was and is immediately apparent, then, a generation or more passed before the Lardner letterbook’s historical value prompted acts of donation and destruction despite its creator’s comparatively elite status. The layered construction of the historical record as I have explored it here, and not least the different methods used to value any given item, points to the contingent nature of that record. Given this contingency, it is worth incorporating a greater consideration of sources and their histories within the usual lenses of historical analysis, as a means to more directly address these presences, absences, and silences. In the case of this chapter, many of its primary sources, both print and manuscript, were located in historical society institutional records and archives. Lardner’s letter advising the American Philosophical Society of the destruction of his father’s letterbook became part of the Society’s collection of business correspondence. Edwin Stone’s letter of donation likewise became part of the Rhode Island Historical Society letterbooks. Moreover, the societies often referred to their own records as their pasts grew and became the subject of historical attention. The Massachusetts Historical Society’s published Proceedings thus drew on earlier letters, occasionally reprinting them either as part of meeting minutes or in footnotes and references. Historical society records, meanwhile, also affirm the vulnerable nature of the historical record. The early nineteenth-century historian and author John Farmer was a prime force behind the creation of the New Hampshire Historical Society in 1823, and consequently many of his letters addressed Society business. When Farmer died in 1838, at the age of fortynine, his heirs and friends no doubt valued these letters as relics of his life. But ninety years later, appreciation of their historical value facilitated the Society’s acquisition of two collections including approximately 500 letters which contain as much or more information about the Society’s first decades than any other surviving institutional records.62 Records might survive by chance, but their incorporation and availability for historical research and analysis depend upon recognition of their historical value by any measure.

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Acknowledgments The author would like to acknowledge the financial and research assistance provided by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Library Company of Philadelphia, New England Fellowship Consortium, Massachusetts Historical Society, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Thanks are also due to Jennifer Black, Noelia Saenz, and Sarah Fried-Gintis for comments on an earlier draft, and to Naomi Lederer for research assistance.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Lardner, Letter to John Vaughan, 24 May 1816, American Philosophical Society Archives. Ibid. See Tilghman, ‘Literary Notice,’ ix, and Historical and Literary Committee, ‘Minutes.’ For key examples of the scholarship on letters in historical and biographical writing see: Bannet, ‘Letters on the Use of Letters’; Casper, Constructing American Lives, especially 116–18, 169–71, 204–8, 305–10; Cheng, Plain and Noble Garb, especially 104–52. Important examples of the scholarship on archives and preservation include: Bastian, ‘Reading Colonial Records’; Cook, ‘Remembering the Future’ and ‘The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country’; Holmes, ‘Passive Keepers or Active Shapers’; Kaplan, ‘We Are What We Collect’; Moore, Restoring Order; Panitch, ‘Liberty, Equality, Posterity?’; and Trouillot, Silencing the Past, especially 26–7, 52–3. See Sweet, Antiquaries, 89–91, and Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society, 25–6, 40–4. New-York Historical Society, Constitution and Bye-Laws, 9. For a list of known historical society circulars printed in America between 1791 and 1850, see Henle, ‘Preserving the Past,’ Appendix 3, with the proviso that at least one circular, issued by the Louisiana Historical Society in the 1840s, was inadvertently omitted from the list. See Belknap, ‘Circular Letter,’ and ‘Miscellany.’ See Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society, 27, Hall and Taylor, ‘Reassessing the Local History,’ xxiv–xxx, and Russo, Keepers of the Past. See Henle, ‘Preserving the Past,’ 82–94. See New-York Historical Society, Constitution and Bye-Laws, 8–15. See Bowden, ‘Knickerbocker’s History,’ 163. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, ‘The Society’s Circular,’ 109, 110. ‘Hints to the Historical Society,’ 210. Jones, Official Circular, 2, 4. Alden, Circular Letter, n.pag. See Henle, ‘Preserving the Past,’ 5, 104–6. DuPonceau, Letter to Mahlon Dickerson, 17 November 1815, American Philosophical Society Archives. Essex Historical Society, Essex Historical Society, Incorporated, 7. Quoted in ‘January Meeting,’ 222. Ibid. The individual who later added the rejected materials to the collection was identified in the Society’s second volume of Proceedings only via an anonymous footnote, but was likely either Charles Deane or Charles C. Smith, the volume’s editors. See ‘Monthly Meeting, May, 1836,’ 45. Tilghman, ‘Report,’ xii. Ibid. See Eaton, ‘The George Washington Papers.’ See Sifton, ‘Provenance and Publication History,’ and Stagg, ‘Introduction.’ See Patterson, Autographs.

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29. See Mulder and Stouffer, ‘William Buell Sprague.’ 30. Hazard, Letter to Jeremy Belknap, 16 June 1784, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 356. 31. Rhode Island Historical Society Trustees, ‘Trustee Records,’ 105; Poinsett, Letter to Charles Hosmer, 29 March 1841, Connecticut Historical Society. See also Hosmer, Letter to J. C. Smith, 7 June 1843, Connecticut Historical Society. 32. Sparks, ‘Journal,’ 8 May 1826. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 25 May 1826. 36. Alabama Historical Society, Constitution, 10. 37. Schoharie County Historical Society, Constitution, 16. 38. Stone, Letter to T. C. Hartshorn, 28 July 1847, Rhode Island Historical Society Archives. 39. This appraisal of historical society accessions related to slavery is based on my review of accession or donation records in institutional archives or published accounts for the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society’s historical committee, the Pilgrim Society, and the historical societies of Connecticut, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia. 40. Stone, Letter to T. C. Hartshorn, 28 July 1847, Rhode Island Historical Society Archives. 41. Ibid. 42. Belknap, History, iii. 43. See Tucker, Clio’s Consort, especially 3–40, 62–102. 44. See ‘March Meeting, 1858,’ 285. 45. See ‘Quarterly Meeting, October, 1798,’ 120, and ‘Quarterly Meeting, January, 1799,’ 124. 46. See ‘Adjourned Meeting, June, 1794,’ 69. 47. Marcou, The Life of Jeremy Belknap, 1. For the suggestion that an immediate posthumous publication of some of Belknap’s papers had been planned see ‘March Meeting,’ 294. 48. See Casper, Constructing American Lives, and Carter, ‘The United States.’ 49. Marcou, The Life of Jeremy Belknap, 1. 50. Ibid. 51. ‘March Meeting, 1858,’ 285. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 311. 54. Ibid. 295. 55. Deane, ‘Prefatory Note,’ vi. 56. Ibid. vii. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. vi. 59. See Massachusetts Historical Society, ‘Belknap Papers.’ 60. Smith, ‘Preface,’ xiv–xv. 61. Ibid. 62. See New Hampshire Historical Society, Guide to the John Farmer Papers.

Works Cited ‘Adjourned Meeting, June, 1794’ (1791–1835), Proceedings of the Historical Society of Massachusetts, 1: 67–73. Alabama Historical Society (1850), Constitution of the Alabama Historical Society; Organized at Tuskaloosa, July 8th, 1850, Tuskaloosa, AL: M. D. J. Slade. Alden, T. (1811), Circular Letter, Respectfully Addressed to Every Gentleman of Science, Newark, NJ: n.p.

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Bannet, E. T. (2009), ‘Letters on the Use of Letters in Narratives: Catharine Macauley, Susannah Rowson, and the Warren–Adams Correspondence,’ in T. S. Gaul and S. M. Harris (eds.), Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 35–55. Bastian, J. A. (2006), ‘Reading Colonial Records through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation,’ Archival Science, 6: 267–84. Belknap, J. (1784), The History of New-Hampshire: Volume I, Philadelphia: Robert Aitken. Belknap, J. (1794), ‘Circular Letter of the Massachusetts Historical Society,’ South-Carolina State-Gazette, 29 October, 2. Bowden, M. W. (1975), ‘Knickerbocker’s History and the “Enlightened” Men of New York City,’ American Literature, 47: 159–72. Carter, C. E. (1938), ‘The United States and Documentary Historical Publication,’ The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 25: 3–24. Casper, S. (1999), Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Cheng, E. K. (2008), The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism & Imperialism in American Historical Writing, 1784–1860, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Cook, T. (2006), ‘Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of Archives in Constructing Social Memory,’ in F. X. Blouin, Jr., and W. G. Rosenberg (eds.), Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 169–181. Cook, T. (2011), ‘The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,’ The American Archivist, 74: 600–63. Deane, C. (1877), ‘Prefatory Note,’ Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th Series, 2: v–xii. DuPonceau, P. (1815), Letter to Mahlon Dickerson, 17 November, Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society Letterbooks, American Philosophical Society Archives, Philadelphia, Volume 1, Record Group VIII.5. Eaton, D. S. (1964), ‘The George Washington Papers: Provenance and Publication History,’ George Washington Papers, American Memory, Library of Congress, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Essex Historical Society (1821), Essex Historical Society, Incorporated June 11, 1821, Salem, MA: n.p. Hall, D., and A. Taylor (1989), ‘Reassessing the Local History of New England,’ in New England: A Bibliography of Its History, Volume 7, ed. Roger Parks, Hanover: University Press of New England, xxiv–xxx. Hazard, E. [1784] (1877), Letter to J. Belknap, 16 June, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th Series, 4: 356–7. Henle, A. (2012), ‘Preserving the Past, Making History: Historical Societies in the Early Republic,’ Ph.D. Diss., University of Connecticut. ‘Hints to the Historical Society’ (1849), Virginia Historical Register and Literary Advertiser, 2: 210. Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society (1815–16), ‘Minutes,’ American Philosophical Society Archives, Philadelphia, Volume 1, Record Group VIII.4. Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1850), ‘The Society’s Circular,’ Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 4: 105–12. Holmes, D. (2006), ‘Passive Keepers or Active Shapers: A Comparative Case Study of Four Archival Practitioners at the End of the Nineteenth Century,’ Archival Science, 6: 285–98. Hosmer, C. (1843), Letter to J. C. Smith, 7 June, Connecticut Historical Society Records, Hartford, CT. ‘January Meeting, 1897’ (1896–97), Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Series, 11: 221–3.

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Jones, J. W. (1876), Official Circular, Richmond, VA: Southern Historical Society. Kaplan, E. (2000), ‘We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity,’ The American Archivist, 63: 126–51. Lardner, J. (1816), Letter to J. Vaughan, 24 May, American Philosophical Society Archives, Philadelphia, Record Group IIb. ‘March Meeting, 1858’ (1855–8), Proceedings of the Historical Society of Massachusetts, 3: 283–333. Marcou, J. B. (1847), The Life of Jeremy Belknap, D.D., The Historian of New Hampshire, With Selections From his Correspondence and Other Writings, New York: Harper & Brothers. Massachusetts Historical Society (1991), ‘Belknap Papers, 1637–1891, Guide to the Collection,’ Massachusetts Historical Society Library, Boston, Massachusetts, (last accessed 22 September 2015). ‘Miscellany’ (1823), Nantucket Inquirer, 22 April, 2. ‘Monthly Meeting, May, 1836,’ (1835–6), Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2: 41–6. Moore, L. J. (2008), Restoring Order: The École des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820–1870, Duluth, MN: Litwin Books. Mulder, J. M., and I. Stouffer (1986), ‘William Buell Sprague: Patriarch of American Collectors,’ American Presbyterians, 64: 1–17. New Hampshire Historical Society (2014), Guide to the John Farmer Papers, Special Collections, Tuck Library, Concord, New Hampshire, (last accessed 22 September 2015). New-York Historical Society (1805), The Constitution and Bye-Laws of the New-York Historical Society: Instituted in the City of New-York the 10th Day of December, 1804, New York: T. & J. Swords. Panitch, J. M. (1996), ‘Liberty, Equality, Posterity?: Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French Revolution,’ The American Archivist, 59: 30–47. Patterson, J. E. (1973), Autographs: A Collector’s Guide, New York: Crown Publishers. Poinsett, J. R. (1841), Letter to C. Hosmer, 29 March, Connecticut Historical Society Records, Hartford, CT. ‘Quarterly Meeting, October, 1798’ (1791–1835), Proceedings of the Historical Society of Massachusetts, 1: 120. ‘Quarterly Meeting, January, 1799’ (1791–1835), Proceedings of the Historical Society of Massachusetts, 1: 121–4. Rhode Island Historical Society Trustees (1822–48), ‘Trustee Records,’ Rhode Island Historical Society Archives, Providence, Rhode Island, Volume 25. Russo, D. J. (1988), Keepers of the Past: Local Historical Writing in the United States, 1820s–1930s, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Schoharie County Historical Society (1889), Constitution and By-laws of the Schoharie County Historical Society, Schoharie, N.Y., Schoharie, NY: The Republican Office. Sifton, P. G. (1976), ‘Provenance and Publication History: Introduction to the Index to the Thomas Jefferson Papers Microfilm Collection,’ Thomas Jefferson Papers, American Memory, Library of Congress, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Smith, C. C. (1890), ‘Preface,’ Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th Series, 4: xiv–xv. Sparks, J. (1826), ‘Journal of Three Southern Tours Made for Historical Researches,’ Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Sparks 123. Stagg, J. C. A. (2010), ‘Introduction,’ The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition, University of Virginia Press, (last accessed 22 September 2015).

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Stone, E. M. (1847), Letter to T. C. Hartshorn, 28 July, ‘Correspondence and Reports, 1845–1852,’ Rhode Island Historical Society Archives, Providence, Rhode Island, Volume 62 (aka IV). Sweet, R. (2004), Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, New York: Hambledon and London. Tilghman, W. (1818), ‘Report of the Historical and Literary Committee to the American Philosophical Society,’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1: xi–xv. Tilghman, W. (1819), ‘Literary Notice,’ Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, 1: viii–x. Trouillot, M-R. (1995), Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press. Tucker, L. L. (1990), Clio’s Consort: Jeremy Belknap and the Founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society. Tucker, L. L. (1996), The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791–1991, Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society.

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7 LETTERS, TELEGRAMS, NEWS Richard R. John

he Electro Magnetic Telegraph – A Great Revolution Approaching.’1 So ran the headline of a glowing editorial that James Gordon Bennett featured in the New York Herald in May 1845. Though the country’s first telegraph link – a fortymile line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore – had been open to the public on a fee-for-service basis for only a month, and while New York City had yet to be linked with the nation’s capital, it seemed self-evident to Bennett that the new medium was destined to have ‘the most extraordinary effects.’2 Prominent among them would be the rapid obsolescence of the handwritten letter. Now that the public had an alternative to the post office, Bennett predicted, the ‘present system of epistolary correspondence’ would be ‘entirely revolutionized’ and the ‘mail system’ entirely ‘broken up.’3 Who in the future would bother to pen a handwritten letter that might take days to arrive, now that it had become possible to communicate immediately over the wires? Bennett’s prognosis was characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century pronouncements concerning the relationship between the telegraph and the communications media that predated it. Commentator after commentator predicted that the new medium would render letter-writing superfluous and usher in a new era of instantaneous communications that would have far-reaching consequences for politics, commerce, and culture. Once the telegraph network had been filled out, gushed Maine journalist and onetime Congressman Francis O. J. Smith in the same month, only newspapers and the other ‘heavier, grosser matters of correspondence’ would continue to go in the mail.4 Henceforth, every interest – political, social, commercial, and industrial – would find in the new medium a ‘sine qua non’ as ‘indispensable to success as the morning napkin is to comfort and cleanliness.’5 The ‘truth’ is, Bennett pronounced in July 1845, ‘the telegraph will supersede the present system of communicating intelligence by mail.’6 And for the press, he elaborated, the consequences of this shift would be especially dramatic. Once it became possible for journalists to obtain up-to-date information instantaneously from any location to which telegraph wires had been strung, the multitude of newspapers that aspired to be mere ‘vehicles of intelligence’ would be ‘destroyed.’7 Bennett and Smith were, of course, wrong about the allegedly imminent obsolescence of the handwritten letter. In fact, at virtually the same moment that they were predicting that the telegraph would supersede the mail, Congress enacted the landmark Post Office Act of 1845, which, by radically lowering the basic letter-postage rate, prompted a major uptick in postal correspondence that would usher in a golden age of epistolarity in the United States. Notwithstanding this boom in letter-writing, however, the ruminations of telegraph enthusiasts like Bennett and Smith were at least in one sense perceptive. For they underscored the symbiosis that existed in nineteenth-century

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America between two literary genres that are often treated in isolation: the handwritten letter and the telegraphic dispatch, or what would soon become known as the telegram. The nature of this symbiosis is the central theme of this chapter, which surveys the relationship between the letter and the telegram in order to gain a better understanding of the character and significance of an oft-overlooked dimension of the nineteenth-century informational environment. It is perhaps unsurprising that in recent decades the telegraph has been often compared, either explicitly or implicitly, with more recent communications media – not only email, but also radio, television, and text messaging. All of these media rely on electricity, and the telegraph was the first electrically mediated communications medium. Expansive claims about the consequences of the telegraph abound. It has been, for example, credited with the streamlining of journalistic prose, the proliferation of organic metaphors for the human body, and the popularization of novel kinds of spirituality.8 Few have made the analogy between past and present quite so baldly as the journalist who, in 1998, labeled the telegraph the ‘Victorian Internet.’9 Such analogies persist, and, with them, a panoply of misleading assumptions. The Internet has become since the 1990s a mass service that is broadly accessible to the entire population. The telegraph, on the other hand, remained throughout the nineteenth century a specialty service for an exclusive clientele. The capacity of telegraph wires was limited, costs were high, and network providers ordinarily charged by the word. The typical telegram consisted of fewer than ten words and, to economize on bandwidth, was often sent in code. Moreover, no telegram was truly private. Every message was sent over a public wire, and the vast majority presupposed the engagement of at least two highly skilled operators to code and decode the message, as well as one of the thousands of messenger boys telegraph companies employed to ensure that messages were promptly delivered by hunting down their recipients.10 Not until 1910, with the much-ballyhooed rollout of an inexpensive ‘night letter,’ would the country’s leading network provider, Western Union, reconfigure the telegraph as a social medium for ordinary people.11 This was true even though telegraph critics had been urging lawmakers to establish a cheap and accessible ‘postal telegraph’ since the mid-nineteenth century.12 The British public had enjoyed the benefits of cheap telegraphy since 1870, but before the second decade of the twentieth century, most Americans regarded the receipt of a telegram as a harbinger of urgent, and typically bad, news – rather than, as has become common with email today, a ubiquitous feature of everyday life. In this respect, forecasters like Bennett and Smith had it backwards. For in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the letter, and not the telegram, that became the primary medium for long-distance communications. The Post Office Act of 1845 did far more than the telegraph to hasten the emergence of ‘modern communications’ in the United States: by drastically lowering the basic letter rate, it established the institutional preconditions for an unprecedented explosion in correspondence that would touch virtually every segment of the population.13 It is not the telegraph, in short, but the mail, that deserves to be remembered as the true Victorian Internet. Nonetheless, it is understandable that cultural commentators like Bennett and Smith were so mistaken. When they wrote about the respective merits of the telegraph and the mail, they were, after all, by no means impartial observers. Bennett, like many newspaper editors, quite plausibly feared that the telegraph would disrupt his business model. As with most newspapers of the period, the Herald obtained much of

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its copy though a federally subsidized newspaper exchange service that was operated by the U.S. Post Office Department. The service was free, the organization politically accountable, and the information abundant – in fact, there was no limit to the number of other newspapers that an editor could receive through the mail.14 The commercialization of the telegraph threatened these institutional arrangements. Since the new medium was faster – a key consideration for newspaper editors – it rendered the exchange service superfluous, raising for Bennett the unsettling prospect that a privately owned and operated network would henceforth become the primary source of the time-specific fillips of information on commerce and public life that were commonly called news. Henceforth, Bennett warned, newspapers would be at the mercy of corporate ‘monopolies’ that they lacked the means to control. To forestall this disturbing eventuality, Bennett repeatedly urged Congress – albeit unsuccessfully – to buy out Samuel Morse’s patent rights and graft the telegraph onto the Post Office Department. The Post Office was, at least in theory, self-supporting, he argued, and it obtained all but a tiny fraction of its revenue from the postage on letter mail. In Bennett’s view, if letters were doomed, then Congress would have no choice but to act.15 Francis O. J. Smith had, if anything, an even more obvious reason to hype the new medium. As a silent partner in Morse’s venture, Smith owned a one-quarter stake in Morse’s patent rights. If the government bought Morse out, Smith was guaranteed a financial windfall that would save him the trouble of figuring out how to make money from a venture that remained, in 1845, highly speculative.16 The extent to which both Bennett and Smith misread the future is made plain by the subsequent history of the telegraph and the mail. Despite the determined publicity campaign launched by industry critics to lobby for a ‘postal telegraph,’ the letter and the telegram had surprisingly little in common. Indeed, in hindsight, it is not obvious why a telegram should be characterized as a letter at all. In an age in which the carefully crafted letter was widely regarded as a mark of refinement, the vast majority of telegrams were short, artless, and banal. And unlike letters, they were written not in the hand of the author, but in that of the telegraph operator, a major drawback during a period when handwriting was widely regarded as an index of character. The primary advantage that the telegram had over the letter was the superior speed of its delivery. Yet for many if not most mid-nineteenth-century letter-writers, the significance of this advantage was relatively modest, since the Post Office Department was rapidly taking advantage of the railroad, the steamboat, and other transportation improvements to convey at low cost millions of letters at speeds that were fast enough for all but a tiny percentage of users.17 The telegraph was so expensive, observed one commentator in 1856, that its use was necessarily restricted to the ‘wealthier classes.’18 The mail, by contrast – being ‘cheap, uniform, and certain’ – was ‘emphatically’ the ‘institution of the middling and poorer classes of the community.’19 Not surprisingly, the new medium would remain confined to merchants, journalists, and other wealthy insiders for decades to come. In the 1880s, for example, a mere 5 per cent of the revenue obtained by Western Union came from social correspondence. Fewer than 2 per cent of the American people, in the estimation of company president Norvin Green, would ever have the occasion to send a telegram at all.20 The limitations of the telegraph as a social medium were not confined to its high cost. Although the champions of cheap telegraphy lauded the new medium as transparent, in fact, every telegram bore unmistakable signs of a human intermediary. Unlike

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a posted letter, which provided its recipient with the tactile pleasure of handling an object that had been signed and sealed by someone known to them, and that had been touched by no one else during its transmission, the telegram was, as one critic observed in 1856, ‘incapable’ of conveying the ‘private feelings and sentiments’ of one friend to another.21 Letters, another commentator elaborated in 1884, had for their recipients a multitude of attributes that telegrams lacked. These included the physical pleasure of possessing a three-dimensional object whose penmanship constituted an unmistakable proof of the sender’s presence. Telegrams, by contrast, were coldly informal, and often presented ‘names wrongly spelled,’ making them ‘about as well adapted for chirography’ as a ‘buckwheat pancake.’22 There were ‘thousands of businesses of private enterprise,’ Norvin Green declared six years later, in which the ‘people at large’ were more interested, and in which, therefore, lawmakers had more cause to intervene if they wished to ‘lighten the burdens of the people.’23 If the cost of sending a telegram were no greater than the cost of sending a letter, Green predicted, it was still unlikely that more than 10 per cent of Americans would make the switch.24 In the main, Green was correct: even after Western Union introduced its cheap and convenient ‘night letter’ two decades later, the primary medium for long-distance social communication in the United States remained the posted letter, not the telegram.25 It is one thing to highlight the limitations of the telegram as a genre of correspondence, but quite another to ignore the high hopes with which the new medium would come to be invested. Among the topics that contemporaries found most intriguing was the likely relationship between the cost of sending a telegram and the evolution of the English language. The New York lawyer Conrad Swackhamer can fairly be said to have initiated this line of speculation with a remarkable essay entitled ‘Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature,’ which he published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1848.26 The subject of his essay, Swackhamer posited, was novel: most of the speculation about the new medium up to that point had focused on high-stakes contests over patent rights, contracts, and rights of way. Swackhamer, on the other hand, instead of reiterating these familiar concerns, tackled a ‘comparatively unimportant branch’ of the topic – namely, the cultural consequences of the new medium.27 The telegraph, Swackhamer argued, had the potential to facilitate the ‘perfection’ of literature by encouraging ‘FACILITY and CLEARNESS’ of expression.28 Should telegraph users wish to emulate the ‘florid verbosity’ of the essayist Samuel Johnson or the ‘polished sentences’ of the journalist Joseph Addison, they would pay a premium for their literary pretensions.29 Notwithstanding its high cost, the crafting of ‘telegraphic dispatches’ had become indispensable for certain kinds of transactions, Swackhamer averred; yet as costs mounted, even the most fulsome users could be expected to economize by adopting a ‘more nervous and rhetorically perfect style.’30 Writing, in this respect, would come to more closely resemble thought, and as it did, the more ‘perfectly’ would language ‘perform its office,’ since: ‘Every useless ornament, every added grace which is not the very extreme of simplicity, is but a troublesome encumbrance.’31 The ‘telegraphic style,’ Swackhamer concluded, was ‘terse, condensed, expressive, sparing of expletives and utterly ignorant of synonyms.’32 Its influence, he predicted, would not be confined to the relatively small percentage of Americans for whom the new medium had become a necessity. In addition, it would be felt in every newspaper in the country that broadcast telegraphic news. That is, it would be

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through the press that the influence of the ‘telegraphic style’ would be most widely felt, a process that was even more certain to render obsolete the stylistic flourishes of a Johnson or an Addison. Of the canonical English writers, Swackhamer suggested, only Shakespeare – who wrote with a ‘Yankee directness’ that revealed his ‘prophetical vision of the future public taste’ – provided a trustworthy template for the writers of the future.33 All of the other literary giants of the past would soon be forgotten, for ‘all that is great and memorable in the past grows dim in the distance,’ while before us lie the ‘isles of engines, where the human race are to live by machinery, and flash from point to point in polar magnetic chariots.’34 Swackhamer’s thinly veiled contempt for the English literary canon illustrates the extent to which ruminations on the telegraph often had more to do with aesthetic preferences than with the actual attributes of this new medium. Much the same might be said of later commentators. Ernest Hemingway, for example, famously attributed his spare writing style to the lessons he had learned as a foreign correspondent. ‘Cablese,’ as Hemingway termed it, helped form him as a writer.35 Even so, the ‘chastening of American prose style’ that Edmund Wilson traced to the second half of the nineteenth century would almost certainly have occurred had the telegraph never been invented.36 To be sure, writers such as Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman did frequently use telegraphic metaphors in their prose.37 Yet none of these writers actually composed many telegrams, a circumstance that implies – by Swackhamer’s own logic – that the new medium had, at best, an indirect influence on their literary style. ‘The uncertain and muted effects of the telegraph upon literary style,’ as the telegraph historian David Hochfelder has observed, ‘suggest that a technology’s effects upon cultural production depend on the scope and intensity of its use. In the telegraph’s case, the medium was only part of the message.’38 The framing of generalizations about the stylistic features of letters and telegrams is constrained by a startling asymmetry. Carefully edited volumes of letters abound, yet comparable published collections of telegrams are virtually non-existent. This is presumably because nineteenth-century Americans lovingly saved the letters that they received, and editors have followed their lead. Countless posted letters are meticulously preserved in archives, where they have long been a major resource for scholars; archival collections of telegrams, in contrast, while hardly unknown, are relatively rare.39 Lacking such resources, cultural historians have instead often generalized about the new medium on the basis of fictional telegrams, such as those dispatched by Ralph Touchett’s mother in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in which Henry James explains her mastery of the ‘art of condensation’ by referring to the fact that she ‘chiefly communicates . . . by means of telegrams.’40 With the exception of highly specialized groups such as female telegraph operators, the usage patterns of telegraph users have only rarely been studied in detail.41 One exception is President Abraham Lincoln. As the commander in chief of the Union army during the Civil War, Lincoln sent almost a thousand telegrams that have been preserved in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.42 Given his office and the seriousness of the situation with which he was confronted, Lincoln was unconstrained by the issues of cost and access that dogged most American users of the telegraph. It is therefore all the more suggestive of his understanding of the medium that his telegrams were rarely more than a few sentences long, and were sometimes composed but not sent, in the conviction that they might fail to convey his precise meaning.43

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The telegram, as the leading scholar of this subject has concluded, sat on the ‘lowest rung’ of Lincoln’s ‘communications ladder,’ below the handwritten letter and the face-to-face conversation.44 For Lincoln, the primary value of the new medium lay not in the fact that it permitted him to reach out to his officers in the field, but rather in the information that he obtained from it about the progress of the war.45 One realm in which telegrams did eventually come to rival letters was diplomacy. With the completion of a transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, the U.S. State Department found it possible for the first time to communicate more or less in real time with other governments and its own diplomats in the field. Even here, price remained a constraint. The first encoded transatlantic message sent by Secretary of State William Seward cost the State Department $19,540, an enormous sum for which Seward was roundly criticized, and which was long remembered, along with his support for the annexation of Alaska, as one of ‘Seward’s follies.’46 The high cost of cabling significantly limited the utility of this new medium. Yet even if used sparingly, the very fact of its existence had the effect of centralizing American diplomacy by limiting the discretion of foreign ministers. No longer could diplomats posted to distant countries plead ignorance of their superior’s intentions. This technical improvement could sometimes prove counterproductive, though. In a diplomatic crisis, for instance, rapid-fire telegraphic exchanges often only increased tensions, complicating the task of keeping the peace. In looking back on his tenure as Britain’s ambassador to Washington during the American Civil War, Lord Richard Lyons reflected that had an Atlantic cable linked the United States and Great Britain during these years, diplomatic protocols would have collapsed and the two countries would almost certainly have come to blows.47 Subsequent events bore out Lyons’ concern. Thus the easy exchange of diplomats’ telegrams between the United States and Venezuela would be a key factor in the exacerbation of hostilities between those two countries in the 1890s. Instead of making communications more transparent, the telegram, as one historian of nineteenth-century international relations has put it, ‘undercut customary diplomacy’ and ‘cast an ominous cloud over the geopolitical environment.’48 The advantages of the telegram as a means of communication were especially evident in the business world. The primary advantage of the telegraph over the mail was its speed, and time-specific information was the soul of commerce. Not surprisingly, merchants were early adopters of the new medium. Even so, a great deal of business communication continued to take place by letter.49 Even at Western Union, senior executives maintained massive letterbooks in which clerks recorded their outgoing correspondence.50 Business users preferred the mail not only because it was cheaper, more familiar, and more flexible, but also because it was widely perceived to be more secure. To be sure, many nineteenth-century business users sent telegrams in code, enhancing their confidentiality. Yet the new medium was emphatically not foolproof: codes could be broken, telegraph operators could make mistakes, and telegrams could be subpoenaed. The possibility that supposedly secret telegrams might become public knowledge was a recurrent concern. Long after a telegram had been received, the telegraph company that had sent it retained a transcript to provide evidence in court cases. Western Union, for example, retained copies of every outgoing telegram for at least two years after it had been sent. It is thus not surprising that even virtuosic telegraph users such as Jay Gould – a wily financier who displayed great ingenuity in using the telegraph to plant deceptive newspaper stories to advance his business interests – wrote out a

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multitude of letters in his own distinctive hand, which his associates dubbed ‘blue jays’ on account of the color of their ink.51 Here, too, telegrams were, in the end, less important as a medium for outgoing communication than as a tool for monitoring timesensitive developments in the wider world. The single most important arena in which the letter and the telegram vied for dominance in nineteenth-century America was journalism, a realm in which the high-speed transmission of time-specific information had long been a priority. It was here that the relationship between the letter and the telegram was the most complicated, and where the influence of the telegraph on letter-writing was most widely discussed. The letter had, of course, been an important journalistic genre since at least the end of the seventeenth century. Both European and American newspapers routinely printed (and reprinted) individual paragraphs, as well as longer pieces, that had been sent to them by distant informants, who were commonly known as ‘letter-writers.’ In fact, newspapers themselves were often regarded as quasi-public epistles, a perception reflected in the frequent use of the term ‘News-Letter’ in their mastheads and prospectuses.52 In the United States, these practices were carried over into the early decades of the nineteenth century, when newspaper editors routinely ran items that consisted, in their entirety, of letters containing information on events in distant localities that had been sent to their office by trusted individuals living in the city or town from which they reported. Typically, the letter-writer was not identified by name. ‘We have copied to-day’ a letter on commerce in Boston ‘from an intelligent person,’ declared the editor of the Washington-based National Intelligencer in 1815: ‘Articles of this description . . . should receive a cordial welcome, as tending to instruct the various sections of the country in each other’s resources and capacity for improvement, as well as to elicit, by temperate discussion, the best lights on the all-important topics connected with internal improvement.’53 This practice was so common that letter-writing contributors who were presumed to have specialized knowledge about particular topics had been known since the eighteenth century as ‘correspondents,’ a term that remains current in the journalistic profession today.54 The letter remained a distinct journalistic genre even after the telegraph changed its relationship to the reporting of current events. Once editors became accustomed to receiving a steady diet of time-specific information over the wires, they stopped relying on letter-writing correspondents for the most up-to-date news. The telegraph, as media critic James W. Carey has explained, ‘eliminated’ any need for the composition by out-of-town correspondents of lengthy letters that ‘announced events, described them in detail, and analyzed their substance.’55 Carey exaggerated when he contended that the resulting newspaper prose was ‘lean and unadorned’: in fact, telegrams were often rewritten in-house to make news stories more prolix.56 Yet he was right to highlight the emergence, following the commercialization of the telegraph, of the ‘stringer,’ a new kind of pay-as-you-go, out-of town journalist (named after the ‘string’ of column inches that they submitted to their newspapers every month to settle their accounts). Stringers ‘supplied the bare facts’ via telegraph to a distant colleague, who transformed these facts into copy.57 The resulting bifurcation of story and storyteller, in Carey’s view, had a pervasive effect on journalistic prose. As he puts it, in an oft-cited passage: The wire services demanded language stripped of the local, the regional and the colloquial. They demanded something closer to a ‘scientific’ language, one of strict denotation where the connotative features of utterance were under

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control . . . If a story was to be understood in the same way from Maine to California, language had to be flattened out and standardized. The telegraph, therefore, led to the disappearance of forms of speech and styles of journalism and storytelling – the tall story, the hoax, much humor, irony, and satire – that depended on a more traditional use of language.58 Although Carey overstates the influence of the telegraph on journalistic prose, his hypothesis can nonetheless be supported by evidence gleaned from the press. Telegrams ‘require an epigrammatic brevity and conciseness which is fatal to the elegant dignity of the old school of writing,’ remarked a San Francisco journalist in an article that was reprinted in the New York Times in 1869: ‘The gentlemen who make up reports for the newspapers of a continent by the glare of a hundred gaslights in the fourth-story office of the New-York Associated Press have no opportunity for rhetorical flourish or literary ornamentation.’59 In fact, the publication of narratively complex letters in newspapers did not cease; rather, journalistic letter-writing assumed a different form. Henceforth, the out-oftown letters that newspaper editors ran typically consisted of a discursive commentary from an identifiable, though often pseudonymous, reporter who reflected on ongoing issues that readers were assumed to already know something about from other sources. The Civil War marked the coming of age for a remarkable generation of talented journalists who composed highly distinctive letters of this kind, mostly under pen names: among them ‘Gath’ (George Alfred Townsend), ‘Striker’ (Uriah Hunt Painter), and, of course, ‘Mark Twain’ (Samuel L. Clemens) – a journalist-turned-novelist whose literary style had been decisively shaped by the letter-writing conventions of the midnineteenth-century newspaper press.60 The influence of the telegraph on the American newspaper is, in short, easily overplayed. The secondary or ‘deck’ headline, for example, an innovation sometimes assumed to have followed the commercialization of the telegraph, actually antedated the new medium, while its close cousin, the inverted pyramid lead, would not become common even at metropolitan papers until several decades after telegrams had become a newsroom staple.61 Moreover, the journalist who rewrote the information obtained via telegraph from a far-away reporter could just as easily alter as accept the presentation of ‘bare facts’ contained in the reporter’s dispatch. It was, in fact, customary for telegraphically transmitted news items to be rewritten in-house, which helps explain why they were just as likely to be referred to as ‘wires’ or ‘news feeds,’ than as discrete ‘dispatches’ or ‘telegrams.’ To align the contents of these communications with the journalistic norms of the publication that they would appear in, the editors of the larger metropolitan newspapers became accustomed by century’s end to employing an in-house ‘rewrite man’ to provide context and incidental detail.62 The rewrite man at the New York Herald, for example, was celebrated for larding the notoriously terse, and extremely expensive, Atlantic cable dispatches with ‘magniloquent verbosity’ in order to conceal the original text’s parsimony and impress upon readers the ‘reckless outlay’ that Bennett had made to bring them the news.63 The persistence of the out-of-town letter owed something to the oft-lamented unreliability of telegraphic news. The ‘ruling faults’ of telegraphic reporting, reflected the New Orleans Times-Picayune, in 1850, was its haste: ‘The reporter seizes upon rumors and hurries them off, or wishes to communicate conjectures or opinions which have an

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authentic air to him, and seem to have an important bearing on the current events before him.’64 Subjective opinions were hard to detect and rumors transmitted by telegraph were often transmogrified into ‘bare fact.’ If an editor received a telegraphic dispatch, the Times-Picayune elaborated, he was inclined to treat the information it contained as representing ‘fixed facts’ or ‘positive assertions,’ when in reality it might be a mere ‘speculation’ written to suit the ‘local views’ of its author.65 Sometimes dispatches found their way into print not because of their news value, but simply because they had been expensive to procure. ‘These mistakes are costly to the press,’ explained the Times-Picayune, ‘they disturb and harass the public mind, and make the telegraph nearly useless as a reliable source of public intelligence, and at times a positive injury.’66 ‘[M]uch news sent by telegraph now-a-days,’ concluded one Cleveland journalist three years later, in summarizing what had by this time become a widely held view, is ‘pretty extensively mixed up . . . It is a compound of rumors, contradictions, and qualifications.’67 The shortcomings of telegraphic news prompted journalists to reconsider the merits of the posted letter. So long as editors received their news reports in the mail, reflected a contributor to the Alexandria Gazette in 1851, it had been hard to ‘manufacture news’: ‘Men who wished to mislead the public knew that their letters would be accompanied by other letters, and perhaps by individuals who would give the lie to startling announcements.’68 Now that the press had come to rely on the telegraph, however, everything had changed, for many unattributable items found their way into print, making it well-nigh impossible to evaluate the accuracy of the information they contained. ‘[T]he man who gives publication to a false report,’ the contributor concluded, ‘should not be allowed to shield himself under the words “telegraphic dispatches.” ’69 The superiority of the letter over the telegram as a medium for news reporting remained a subject for comment half a century later. A hundred years ago, reminisced journalist and future New York Times editor Rollo Ogden in 1900, it had been customary for the European correspondents who provided American editors with foreign news to take for granted that their readers in the United States knew little about the wider world. In order to fill them in, they wrote the ‘most delightful letters,’ that were a ‘very feast for curiosity,’ since they were ‘packed with information’ about international affairs.70 Ever since the telegraph had spanned the Atlantic, however, this custom had fallen into abeyance, as the ‘copious telegrams’ that had increasingly found their way into print had lured newspaper readers into ‘neglecting’ the ‘true sources’ of knowledge.71 As a result, Ogden continued, the coverage of foreign news in major U.S. newspapers provided the ‘mass of readers’ with less ‘real instruction to the mind’ than they could have obtained in the ‘slower but surer’ days before the telegraph ‘opened the line of least resistance along the Atlantic ooze’: ‘The jump to news-carrying by lightning instead of by letters has not only taken away the fresh mind of the observer, and put matter of fact in place of piquancy. It has thrown everything out of perspective.’72 While the shortcomings as a news source of the telegram as compared to the posted letter prompted a good deal of journalistic hand-wringing, one should be cautious about overemphasizing the differences between the two media. As paradoxical as it might at first appear, the economics of journalism-by-telegraph encouraged prolixity. As a consequence, as a contributor to the Writer opined in 1887, there was ‘practically no difference’ between a ‘special dispatch’ that a journalist sent 1,500 miles by telegraph and a local news report that the journalist gave to an editor in person.73 For stringers, the business was especially precarious: they received a fee for every item of news they

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reported on that found its way into print (the going rate for first-time journalists in the 1890s was between $5 and $8 a column), giving them a financial incentive to bulk up their dispatches.74 In fact, the ‘faking’ of a news report by embellishing its details in order to make it seem more appealing to a distant editor (who, in many instances, had no independent way to determine its accuracy) had become so endemic by the late nineteenth century that its pros and cons were a frequent topic for discussion.75 Sending an editor the optimal amount of news involved a delicate balancing act. If the stringer sent what his editor regarded as an excessive amount of information, the newspaper might refuse to accept his telegram, saddling the stringer with the bill.76 Moreover, although stringers customarily sent in their news reports by telegraph, even they would sometimes fall back on the mail. ‘Quaint and curious things,’ the journalist J. S. Ritenour advised his peers in 1890, should almost always go by post: if, for example, you have a news item on a boiler explosion at a ‘manufactory’ at which a half dozen men have been killed, you should not telegraph it in hastily.77 For only the ‘great papers,’ such as the metropolitan dailies in New York City, can afford to ‘be reckless in the matter of telegraphic expenses’ – and even they are not as prodigal as the rookie correspondent might assume.78 If the explosion occurred in the morning or forenoon, Ritenour concluded, send the report in by mail (‘This saves telegraph tolls’), and if the accident occurred late in the day, query the editor as to how much copy he wants, since ‘correspondents who observe care in the quantity and quality of their telegraphic news are always better appreciated and better paid than those who are reckless in these respects.’79 For other journalists, and especially for those based outside the United States, letter-writing remained a matter of necessity rather than choice. In some instances, the limited facilities of the telegraph network in certain remote parts of the world obliged journalists to use the mail to report on events that were considered to be of great significance. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., racked up huge cable bills during the many years he ran the New York Herald from an office in Paris, and spared no expense to enable his star reporter, Henry Morton Stanley, to locate the whereabouts of African explorer David Livingstone. Yet Stanley’s account of his encounter with Livingstone would not find its way into print for several weeks after the two men had met. The telegraph had yet to be extended to East Africa, leaving Stanley with no choice but to carry his story with him to Aden (now Yemen), from where the news of his discovery could finally be cabled to the United States. Less urgent stories, including the voluminous reporting that Stanley undertook in Africa during the period he was on his quest for Livingstone, were written up in letter-form and sent to the Herald in the mail.80 The limited facilities of the global telegraph network can only partially explain why New York World reporter Nellie Bly failed to provide a detailed account of her celebrated round-the-world trip of 1888–9 until after she had returned to the United States. Far more important was the World’s editorial strategy. Though the Pacific had yet to be spanned by telegraph, Bly’s route though Europe and South Asia was well served by cable. Nonetheless, Bly provided her editors with remarkably little copy while she was in transit. Her account of the crossing of the Atlantic, for example, which took the form of a letter that she sent to the World in the mail, would not appear in print until she had arrived in Ceylon over a month later. With the exception of a small number of posted letters, and a series of perfunctory cables confirming her whereabouts, she effectively stayed silent until she had returned to the United States.81

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Cost may have been a factor: yet had Bly’s editors wished Bly to provide the World with a day-by-day account via cable, they certainly had the resources to foot the bill. Instead, by keeping a celebrity reporter out of the spotlight, the World’s editors cannily heightened the suspense that surrounded her return. Even in an age of rapid, globespanning communications, it could sometimes pay to keep readers waiting. To keep up the suspense, the World ran frequent stories about Bly’s likely whereabouts, and even sponsored a game that offered prizes for those who guessed the precise date on which she would return, to which 100,000 readers replied.82 Constraints of a different kind limited news coverage of the period’s military conflicts. The distinguished war correspondent George W. Smalley, for one, did not trust the telegraph with his first-hand account of the Battle of Antietam, fearful that key details would be censored or stolen. Instead, he hopped two trains, wrote up his report by oil lamp on the night he returned to New York City, and carried it in person the next morning to the Tribune.83 Smalley followed a similar procedure during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, when, for analogous reasons, he sent by mail what journalism historian John Maxwell Hamilton has aptly termed ‘discursive letter-style reports.’84 Once again, cost was not a determining factor – the Tribune readily paid out $125,000 in cable fees during this conflict; rather, the nub of the matter was Smalley’s determination to retain control over his reporting.85 ‘The mere fact never contents the public. It wants the full story,’ Smalley later recounted, in looking back on this phase of his journalistic career. ‘There was never much chance of sending the full story by wire from the battlefield or from any town hard by; nor, indeed, from any capital; even from a neutral capital. Only when once in London was a correspondent master of the situation.’86 Smalley was right to be cautious. To monitor the use of the telegraph by the press, the federal government had established a censorship bureau during both the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. In each conflict, government censors prohibited the transmission of anonymous telegrams and blocked the circulation of any new reports that might reveal troop movements or dampen civilian morale.87 The publication of false information, such as the mistaken news report that President Lincoln had ordered the enlistment of 400,000 additional soldiers – a report that, it would later be revealed, had been concocted to shape the commodity markets – could lead to the temporary shutdown of the offending newspaper.88 Favorable military outcomes, on the other hand, such as the victory of the U.S. Navy over the Spanish fleet in Manila during the Spanish-American War, could prompt censors to work closely with journalists to get the story out as fast as possible.89 Press management, of course, long predated the telegraph. Patriots and loyalists alike had recruited for-hire ‘letter-writers’ to stir up political feeling by intentionally planting bogus stories in prominent newspapers during the American War of Independence, while British government officials had subsidized favorable news accounts of military triumphs since at least the War of the Spanish Succession.90 True, telegraphic news was faster, and, at least in theory, more ubiquitous than the pre-telegraphic communications media of the eighteenth century. Yet, as should be clear by now, it would be a mistake to conflate timeliness with the telegraph, or to assume that the telegraph had a technologically determined influence on the journalistic craft. One implication of this brief survey of the relationship between the letter and the telegram in nineteenth-century America is to encourage literary historians to expand

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their definition of letter-writing to embrace the composition, transmission, and revision of telegrams. Such an expanded definition makes sense for several reasons. Most basically, it reflects the commonsensical assumption of nineteenth-century Americans that letters and telegrams had certain features in common. The first telegrams, it is worth recalling, were modeled on letters – in fact, for a time, in a direct postal carryover, they were even dubbed ‘telegraphic dispatches’ – while the reporters who used the new medium to transmit news stories assumed the venerable title of ‘correspondent.’ The ‘postal telegraph’ movement that originated in the 1840s and gained a substantial following in the 1870s and 1880s explicitly linked the two media in the popular imagination. For most Americans, of course, the posted letter would remain far more familiar than the telegram, yet the two media remained part of the same informational environment. Journalists often confronted a real choice between telegraphing (or cabling) in a story, or sending it in by mail. And, finally, and despite the unfortunate propensity of present-day commentators to make facile analogies between the telegraph and the Internet that are at best anachronistic, and at worst flat wrong, the popularization since the 1990s of email, text messaging, and other kinds of electrically mediated asynchronous communication should at the very least encourage us to ponder how the commercialization of the telegraph drew on and was sometimes shaped by conventions that had originated with the mail. The relationship between the letter and the telegram is far more nuanced, and far less predictable, than has often been supposed. The ability to transmit information faster than a horse could gallop changed some things, but not others. In order to understand fully the informational environment of nineteenth-century America, it is important to remember that new media did not necessarily supersede old media, that the oracular pronouncements of self-interested promoters should not be conflated with a fair-minded account of the course of events, and that cultural norms and institutional structures could often be just as consequential as technological imperatives and market incentives as agents of change.

Acknowledgments For advice and suggestions, I would like to thank John Maxwell Hamilton, Thomas C. Jepsen, Nancy R. John, Brooke Kroeger, David Paul Nord, Matthew Pethers, and Andie Tucher. For research assistance, I am grateful to Lilly Cutrano and Jeffrey Nichols.

Notes 1. Bennett, ‘The Electro Magnetic Telegraph,’ 2. This article was unsigned, but we can assume Bennett was its author, since he had a long-standing interest in the telegraph, and customarily wrote the Herald’s feature editorials. 2. Ibid. 2. 3. Ibid. 4. Smith, ‘The Post-Office Department,’ 151. 5. Ibid. 6. Bennett, ‘The Magnetic Telegraph,’ 2. 7. Ibid. 8. See Carey, Communication as Culture, 201–30; Otis, Networking; Sconce, Haunted Media. 9. See Standage, The Victorian Internet. For a similar postal-telegraphic back formation (‘before telecommunications’), see Decker, Epistolary Practices.

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letters, telegrams, news 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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See Downey, Telegraph Messenger Boys. See John, Network Nation, 349–50. See ibid. 24–64, 114–99. See, for example, John, Spreading the News, especially 112–68, and Henkin, The Postal Age. See also the annotated collection of primary source documents compiled in John, ed. The American Postal Network, 1792–1914, especially volume 3. See Kielbowicz, ‘Regulating Timeliness,’ 9–12. See John, Network Nation, 54–5. See ibid. 34–43. See Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 79. New York Postal Reform Committee, Proceedings, 15. Ibid. See Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 77. Post, Letter to Congress, 25 March 1856, National Archives, 34A-G14.6. ‘Popularizing the Telegraph,’ 84. Norvin Green, Letter to Henry H. Bingham, 11 December 1890, in Western Union Telegraph Company, Presidential Letterbooks, Smithsonian Institution, Box 204B, Folder 1. See ibid. See Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 80. For the attribution to Swackhamer, see Nunberg, ‘All Thumbs,’ n.pag. Swackhamer, ‘Influence of the Telegraph,’ 411. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 412. Ibid. 413. Ibid. Quoted in Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 73. In fact, Hemingway probably learned more about concision as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star (see ibid. 98). Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 635. See: McCormack, ‘Domesticating Delphi’; Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism, 111–76; and Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 173–87. Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 100. See McCormack, ‘Domesticating Delphi,’ 599. James, The Portrait of a Lady, 26. See also McCormack, ‘Domesticating Delphi,’ 577. See Jepsen, My Sisters Telegraphic, 118–40, and Otis, Networking, 120–46. For a generous digitized sample of these telegrams, see Lincoln, ‘The Lincoln Telegrams Project.’ For a detailed survey of Lincoln’s use of the telegraph by one of his own telegraphers see Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office. See Wheeler, Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails, 181–2. See ibid. 182. See ibid. 181. See Weber, ‘Seward’s Other Folly.’ See Nickles, Under the Wire, 72–5. Britton, Cables, Crises, and the Press, xiii. See Yates, Control through Communication, 21–64. This generalization is based on a page-by-page inspection of Western Union Telegraph Company, Presidential Letterbooks and Writings, Smithsonian Institution. See John, Network Nation, 158–9, and Richardson, William E. Chandler, 163. For more on these connections, see: Pettegree, The Invention of the News, 182–207; Randall, ‘Epistolary Rhetoric’; and Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity.

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132 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

richard r. john ‘Washington,’ 1. See Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 29–62. Carey, ‘The Dark Continent,’ 160. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 161. ‘American Journalism,’ 5. See Summers, Press Gang, and Caron, Mark Twain. See Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 103, and Mindich, Just the Facts, 64–98. See Nord, ‘Accuracy or Fair Play?’ 240–1. Clarke, My Life, 125. I am grateful to Andie Tucher for the citation to Clarke’s memoir. ‘Telegraph for the Press,’ 2. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Arrival of the Asia,’ 2. ‘Telegraphic Rumors, &c.,’ 2. Ibid. Ogden, ‘The Press and Foreign News,’ 392. Ibid. 393. Ibid. 393, 391. Hills, ‘Advice to Newspaper Correspondents,’ 29. See Hills ‘Queries’ (1896), 9, and Fedler, Lessons from the Past, 67–9. See Tucher, ‘The True, the False,’ 94. See Hills, ‘Queries’ (1888), 118. Ritenour, ‘Sending Despatches,’ 222. Ibid. Ibid. 223. See Hamilton, Journalism’s Roving Eye, 76–88. For transcriptions of Stanley’s posted dispatches, see Stanley, Stanley’s Dispatches. See Ruddick, ‘Nellie Bly,’ 9, and Kroeger, Nellie Bly, 154. See Kroeger, Nellie Bly, 150. See Hamilton, Journalism’s Roving Eye, 60. Ibid. 61. See ibid. Smalley, Anglo-American Memories, 232. See Lubow, The Reporter Who Would Be King, 166, and Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 90. See Blondheim, ‘ “Public Sentiment is Everything.” ’ See Kielbowicz, ‘Regulating Timeliness,’ 51. See: Slauter, ‘The Paragraph as Information Technology,’ 258–70; Castronovo, Propaganda 1776, 117–50; and Black, Debating Foreign Policy, 25–44.

Works Cited ‘American Journalism’ (1869), New York Times, 11 July, 5. ‘Arrival of the Asia – Further from Turkey’ (1853), Cleveland Plain Dealer, 20 October, 2. Barnhurst, K. G., and J. Nerone (2001), The Form of News: A History, New York: Guildford Press. Bates, D. H. [1907] (1995), Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corp During the Civil War, ed. J. A. Rawley, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

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Bennett, J. G. (1845), ‘The Electro Magnetic Telegraph – A Great Revolution Approaching,’ New York Herald, 12 May, 2. Bennett, J. G. (1845), ‘The Magnetic Telegraph,’ New York Herald, 9 July, 2. Black, J. (2011), Debating Foreign Policy in Eighteenth-Century England, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Blondheim, M. (2002), ‘ “Public Sentiment Is Everything”: The Union’s Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864,’ Journal of American History, 89: 869–921. Britton, J. A. (2013), Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the New International Information System in the Americas, 1866–1903, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Carey, J. W. [1986] (1997), ‘The Dark Continent of American Journalism,’ in E. S. Munson and C. A. Warren (eds.), James Carey: A Critical Reader, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 144–88. Carey, J. W. (1989), Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, Boston: Unwin Hyman. Caron, J. E. (2008), Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Castronovo, R. (2014), Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks and Revolutionary Communications in Early America, New York: Oxford University Press. Clarke, J. I. C. (1925), My Life and Memories, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Dicken-Garcia, H. (1989), Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Downey, G. J. (2002), Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850–1950, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fedler, F. (2000), Lessons from the Past: Journalists’ Lives and Work, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Gilmore, P. (2009), Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hamilton, J. M. (2009), Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Henkin, D. M. (2008), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hills, W. H. (1887), ‘Advice to Newspaper Correspondents,’ Writer, 1: 29–30. Hills, W. H. (1888), ‘Queries,’ Writer, 2: 118–21. Hills, W. H. (1896), ‘Queries,’ Writer, 11: 9. Hochfelder, D. (2012), The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. James, H. [1881] (2009), The Portrait of a Lady, ed. R. Luckhurst, New York: Oxford University Press. Jepsen, T. C. (2000), My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846–1950, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. John, R. R. (1995), Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. John, R. R. (2010), Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. John, R. R., ed. (2012), The American Postal Network, 1792–1914, 4 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto.

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Kielbowicz, R. B. (2015), ‘Regulating Timeliness: Technologies, Law, and the News, 1840–1970,’ Journalism and Communication Monographs, 17: 5–83. Kroeger, B. (1994), Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist, New York: Random House. Lincoln, A. (1864–5), ‘The Lincoln Telegrams Project,’ (last accessed 22 September 2015). Lubow, A. (1992), The Reporter Who Would Be King: A Biography of Richard Harding Davis, New York: Scribner’s. McCormack, J. H. (2003), ‘Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,’ American Quarterly, 55: 569–601. Mindich, D. (1998), Just the Facts: How ‘Objectivity’ Came to Define American Journalism, New York: New York University Press. New York Postal Reform Committee (1856), Proceedings of a Public Meeting and Address of the New York Postal Reform Committee, New York: Baker & Godwin. Nickles, D. P. (2003), Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nord, D. P. (2008), ‘Accuracy or Fair Play? Complaining about the Newspaper in Early TwentiethCentury New York,’ in P. Goldstein and J. L. Machor (eds.), New Directions in American Reception Study, New York: Oxford University Press, 233–54. Nunberg, G. (2008), ‘All Thumbs,’ University of California at Berkeley School of Information, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Ogden, R. (1900), ‘The Press and Foreign News,’ Atlantic Monthly, 86: 390–3. Otis, L. (2001), Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pettegree, A. (2014), The Invention of the News: How the World Came to Know about Itself, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ‘Popularizing the Telegraph’ (1884), Journal of the Telegraph, 17. Post, J. W. (1856), Letter to Congress, 25 March, Records of the Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads: 1808–1946, Chapter 16: Records of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee and its Predecessors, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, National Archives, Washington, Record Group 233, 34A-G14.6. Randall, D. (2008), ‘Epistolary Rhetoric, the Newspaper, and the Public Sphere,’ Past and Present, 198: 3–32. Richardson, L. B. (1940), William E. Chandler: Republican, New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Ritenour, J. S. (1890), ‘Sending Despatches to Newspapers,’ Writer, 6: 222–4. Ruddick, N. (1999), ‘Nellie Bly, Jules Verne, and the World on the Threshold of the American Age,’ Canadian Review of American Studies, 29: 1–12. Schneider, G. (2005), The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Sconce, J. (2000), Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Slauter, W. (2012), ‘The Paragraph as Information Technology: How News Traveled in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,’ Annales HSS, 67: 253–78. Smalley, G. (1911), Anglo-American Memories, New York: Duckworth & Co. Smith, F. O. J. (1845), ‘The Post-Office Department: Considered with Reference to its Condition, Policy, Prospects, and Remedies,’ Merchant’s Magazine, 12: 140–52. Standage, T. (1998), The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers, New York: Walker & Co. Stanley, H. M. (1970), Stanley’s Dispatches to the ‘New York Herald’, 1871–1872, 1874–1877, ed. N. R. Bennett, Boston: Boston University Press. Summers, M. W. (1994), Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1863–1878, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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Swackhamer, C. (1848), ‘Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature,’ United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 22: 409–13. ‘Telegraph for the Press’ (1850), New Orleans Times-Picayune, 7 June, 2. ‘Telegraphic Rumors, &c.,’ (1851), Alexandria Gazette, 30 August, 2. Tucher, A. (2013), ‘The True, the False, and the “Not Exactly Lying”: Making Fakes and Telling Stories in the Age of the Real Thing,’ in M. Canada (ed.), Literature and Journalism: Inspirations, Intersections, and Inventions from Ben Franklin to Stephen Colbert, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 91–118. ‘Washington,’ National Intelligencer, 18 April 1815, 1. Weber, R. E. (2013), ‘Seward’s Other Folly: America’s First Encrypted Cable,’ in Masked Dispatches: Cryptograms and Cryptology in American History, 1775–1900, 3rd edn., Washington: National Security Agency, 2013, 104–33. Western Union Telegraph Company (1865–1911), Presidential Letterbooks, Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, Series 4. Wheeler, T. (2006), Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War, New York: Harper Collins. Wilson, E. [1962] (1994), Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, New York: Norton. Yates, J. (1989), Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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8 DEAD LETTERS AND THE SECRET LIFE OF THE STATE IN NINETEENTHCENTURY AMERICA Matthew Pethers

A

lthough Benjamin Franklin, who was appointed Postmaster General in 1753, inaugurated a procedure for advertising unclaimed letters in the press, it was not until seventy years later that a division of the post office was officially established to handle those letters left undelivered by this practice. Pushed through Congress under the generalship of John McLean, who had been specifically appointed to address the financial and structural inefficiencies of the early nineteenth-century post office, the Postal Act of 1825 mandated that, after publishing their lists of uncollected letters at regular intervals for three months, local postmasters should ‘send such of the said letters as then remain on hand, as dead letters, to the general post office, where the same shall be opened and inspected.’1 Once instituted, the Washington-based Dead Letter Office then quickly became a source of fascination for the reading public, to the point where accounts of its internal procedures were almost as frequent a presence in the press as dead letter lists. By 1848, for example, an essayist in the Boston Recorder was already feeling obliged to note that because ‘the Dead Letter Office has so often been described by visitors to Washington, . . . you will, I suspect, thank me to be brief.’2 These caveats notwithstanding, though, newspaper and magazine writers returned with increasing frequency to this subject as the century wore on, and at least one explanation for their unabated interest lies precisely in the fact that the DLO allowed the public to witness the federal government at work. At a time when the reach of the state was relatively limited, the post office was, significantly, the wing of the U.S. government most visible to its citizens – no other branch at Washington, as Wayne Fuller has remarked, ‘touched the lives of so many Americans so often, so intimately, and so favorably.’3 In this respect, then, we can see the extensive nineteenth-century press coverage of postal matters as indicative of that new ‘field of communication between the state and its constituencies’ which Oz Frankel has labeled ‘print statism.’4 For, although stories such as that appearing in the Boston Recorder were both more informal and more concise than the government-sponsored inquiry reports and social surveys that Frankel discusses, they similarly ‘facilitated the representation of the centralized, modern state to its publics, and in turn, the representation of the nation by (and to) the government itself.’5 Indeed, stories about the DLO in particular spoke explicitly to the strengths and limitations of this evolving dialogue. Such was the importance the government attached to the rapidly expanding postal network that the position of Postmaster 136

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General was elevated to cabinet status in 1829, ranked only behind the treasury secretary and the secretary of state. One of the consequences of this privileging of the post office, and the political suturing that it was deemed to perform, however, was that the potential failure of the mail system then took on pressing ideological implications. For if, as Elizabeth Hewitt has recently argued, ‘letters constitute a crucial site by which democratic theory passes into social practice’ in nineteenth-century America, it becomes the case that ‘the possibility of dead, purloined and/or miscarried letters serves to underscore the ways in which national ties may not be so easily secured.’6 Thus the Flag of Our Union was not alone in insisting that ‘no division of any department under the Federal government is engaged in more important and responsible duties, bearing directly upon the interests of the public at large, than the dead-letter branch of the General Post Office.’7 In order to fully understand this bearing of the postal system on the new relationship between citizen and state, and its ties to nineteenth-century America’s changing socio-economic structure, we should begin by unpicking the three key terms in the denomination of the ‘dead letter office.’ The office, for instance, is an important site in the modernization of eighteenth-century labor and market relations. As the increasing complexity and interrelatedness of the economy intersected with a growing separation of work from home in the 1830s, specialized office quarters began to replace the minimally-staffed mercantile house as a means of organizing large regional and national concerns.8 The postal system, noticeably, was at the forefront of such developments. The post office not only employed more people than any other institution in the antebellum U.S., it boasted the biggest and most intricate bureaucratic structure of the period. The DLO, which was often referred to as ‘one of the most complicated pieces of machinery in this “Ship of state,” ’ therefore attracted particular attention to its elaborate procedures.9 ‘Each dead letter that was returned to the writer had to go through seventeen distinct separate processes,’ the ex-DLO clerk Pliny Miles recalled in 1862, and in many cases journalists expanded upon these different stages at great length.10 Even more fascinating for nineteenth-century observers of the DLO was the sheer mass of material it had to deal with. In 1894, for example, the Maine Farmer recorded that ‘the number of pieces of dead mail matter received . . . during the [previous] fiscal year . . . was 7,131,927’; a more than sevenfold increase from the 1830s, when regular federal collation of these sums began.11 Faced with such huge figures, which were the subject of annual rumination in the press, it is hardly surprising that ‘by midcentury,’ in the words of Richard R. John, ‘a rhetoric of the bureaucratic sublime – with its curious mingling of . . . wonder and dread – had firmly established itself as a dominant motif in popular discussions of the postal system.’12 Evidently, commentators on the DLO were led to fear that the administrative magnitude of the post office’s task could overwhelm the individual significance of the private letter. ‘As one looks at this complicated human machinery,’ Edward Crapsey wrote of the dead letter operation in 1878, ‘his wonder grows, not that any letter ever goes astray, but that any one ever reaches its proper destination. He is almost inclined to laugh at the simple credulity of the people who drop letters . . . confident that they are each and all to go to the proper place.’13 Yet at the same time, Crapsey’s article also points to the potential reassurance that American letter-writers could find in the impersonal mechanics of the DLO. For the very exactness of the totals enrolled in a publication like the Maine Farmer

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indicates the sense of responsibility the state felt toward its citizens. In previous centuries ‘governments . . . did not consider it any part of their business to provide the public with a full account of their stewardship in any matter,’ Crapsey adds, before declaring that ‘figures are always eloquent; but in no case are they more eloquent than in the statistical records of the Post-office Department,’ which show ‘its strides in intellectual power and activity.’14 A similar tension between anonymity and particularity meanwhile marks out the precise object which the DLO was designed to handle – the ‘letter.’ As numerous epistolary theorists have pointed out, ‘the very letter that would seem to promise a radical secrecy, at the very moment of [posting], becomes a public act that elicits a community of readers.’15 Implicit in the letter form is a relinquishment of control on the writer’s part which can lead to their message going astray. Where a dead letter diverges from this familiar critical insight, however, is in the specifically juridical negotiation between privacy and publicity which it generates. While the typical nineteenth-century office was concerned with producing and responding to correspondence, thus leaving it vulnerable to epistolary misreading, the DLO ideally adopted an arbitrational role in which the content of the letter was irrelevant. ‘Some jocose individuals think that the [dead-letter] clerks . . . are so full of all kinds of secrets, gathered in their position, that they could write curious and startling books if they were so disposed,’ the Providence Evening Press remarked in 1860. ‘But the letters are never read in the dead-letter office, and the clerks are as ignorant of the sentiments which they contain as the man on the outside of the marble wall.’16 Rather than treating letters as repositories of intimate knowledge the DLO clerks were often said to ‘open them mechanically,’ thereby indicating an affinity between them and the faceless bureaucracy of which they were part.17 Notwithstanding occasional complaints about how ‘the heart’s sweetest emotions . . . are ignored by these unsentimental [clerks] and then consigned to the flames,’ the tone of such descriptions is generally positive, expressing at best a wry bemusement that the clerks can resist the ordinary citizen’s interest in other people’s mail.18 More critical comment instead appeared in the press when the DLO was perceived to have failed in its duty to protect postal privacy. Thus, in 1855, a major controversy erupted when it was revealed that the sale of undeliverable letters to local paper mills was ‘liable to abuse, by allowing a morbid or mischievious curiosity to indulge itself in a re-examination, before grinding the mass into new paper.’19 Although the Postmaster General himself investigated these claims and found no evidence of wrongdoing, the practice of recycling dead letters was halted until later in the century (when the introduction of shredding machines allowed the DLO to destroy missives in advance) and the post office returned to burning its undeliverable letters in a huge bonfire on the Mall once a quarter. Above all, what this incident suggests is that even when the DLO successfully turned a blind eye to the messages in a letter its medium could reintroduce a blurring of the public/private divide. For as Jacques Derrida has argued, paper is not simply ‘an inert surface laid out beneath some markings,’ it has ‘a symbolic history of projections and interpretations, a history tangled up with the history of the human body and hominization’ in which, like writing, it too sits ‘between the political or cultural life of citizens and their innermost secrets.’20 In the case of the DLO, the solution to the resistant, signifying quality of paper’s materiality was to remove it from the communications circuit altogether through incineration. Indeed, the need to physically obliterate already defunct messages points

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to the strange resonance of the first term in the title of the DLO – the image of letters as ‘dead.’ Part of the public fascination with the DLO undoubtedly stemmed from this conflation of letters and death, which was the subject of endless jokes, puns, and metaphors. Rehearsing a familiar set-piece in which a letter-writer mistakenly takes the return of their missive from the DLO to indicate the demise of its intended recipient, the New York Observer humorously remarked that: ‘At the Dead Letter Department letters are continually received from people who are not too ignorant to write, yet who seem to entertain the extraordinary notion that the . . . head of the department is in actual communication with Death himself.’21 Despite the playful tone of pieces such as this, however, there was a more serious and more concrete connection between ‘the King of Terrors and the routine business of the dead letter branch.’22 This was, in part, because of the way in which the epistolary culture of the nineteenth century consistently figured the personal letter as a form of surrogate speech which could simulate the physical presence of the writer. All letters move uneasily between proximity and distance, but those in the DLO lay closer to the fears of irrevocable absence invoked by the latter end of this spectrum. What is more, there is a very real sense in which the postal system’s central role as a conduit for economic and emotional sustenance meant that its breakdown could have devastating consequences. ‘For the want of any one of these letters,’ the Independent observed of the DLO, ‘some child may have died of starvation or some woman of despair. The last hope quenched, the last opportunity of virtue or of life closed – that is what a dead letter may mean.’23 As statements like this imply, nineteenth-century Americans believed that the failure of the state to ensure communicative reciprocity could lead to the terminal alienation of individual citizens. In fact, when we bear in mind their repeated claim that the post office ‘may be termed the great heart of the community, forcing the blood of commercial and social intercourse through all the veins and arteries of the body politic,’ it becomes evident that they sometimes conceived of dead letters as a threat to the very vitality of the nation itself.24 For if the postal system is the place where ‘the social body becomes a living whole,’ then cessation of flow will result in the expiration of democracy.25 Importantly, these kinds of analogies suggest a fundamental antithesis between death and democracy. But as Russ Castronovo has pointed out, ‘citizenship in the nineteenthcentury United States at once stands in opposition to and depends on death for definition and substance . . . The U.S. democratic state loves its citizens as passive subjects, unresponsive to political issues, unmoved by social stimuli, and unaroused by enduring injustices . . . [It] incites a necrophilic desire to put democratic unpredictability and spontaneity to death’ (NC, 1, 4, 6). The bearing of this tendency toward ‘political necrophilia’ on the ideological work of the post office is then clear in its relation to African American letter-writers (NC, 4). Even if we set aside the widespread illiteracy which served as a practical barrier to black epistolarity, it is apparent that the ‘social death’ inflicted on African Americans through arbitrary renaming and relocation routinely served to position them outside the postal system and its ‘veins and arteries of the body politic.’26 Yet it is not simply marginal social groups who are implicated in the quiescent mechanisms of ‘political necrophilia,’ since – as Castronovo observes – ‘citizens themselves frequently cultivate a demeanour and subjectivity that releases them from the contingencies and insistent needs of embodied existence . . . Death, as an abstract final category, attracts citizens because it abnegates the constant struggle to secure freedom’ (NC, 4, 38). Given the pervasive influence of religion on nineteenth-century understandings of death it is

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unsurprising that Christian thinkers latched onto the DLO as a ready source for theological metaphors. Popular ministers such as Henry Ward Beecher and Philips Brooks, for example, can be found making extended reference to concepts like the ‘dead prayer office,’ where ‘thousands of [selfishly] worded petitions’ to God end up ‘buried . . . forever.’27 But rather more pertinent to the democratic deficiencies of the DLO are the connections which unordained writers regularly drew between the workings of that ‘letter Golgotha’ and the world to come.28 ‘The afterlife emancipates souls from [the] passionate debates, everyday engagements, and earthly affairs that animate the political field,’ Castronovo argues, and ‘it is precisely such privatization and disengagement that stamps citizenship in the United States of the nineteenth century’ (NC, 4). In this respect, one striking passage from an 1861 issue of The Knickerbocker can stand in for the many others which also articulated this dynamic: Measurably – shall we all come, like sealed letters, to the great and final Dead-Letter Office, there to be opened and examined, (for there all seals and all hearts will be opened), and those of us who are found to contain anything valuable, will be carefully recorded in a book, and sent, perhaps, upon a new and more certain mail-route . . . while those of us who are found to contain nothing valuable, are stuffed promiscuously in bags . . . and ‘by law,’ consigned to the flames which burn forever.29 Crucially, what is revealing about this analogy is the way in which it exhaustively translates the resurrectional potential of the DLO away from an earthly plane. At least on the surface, it is the job of the DLO to breathe new life into dying messages, thereby allowing them to re-enter the vigorous reciprocity of the postal system, but as this passage effectively indicates, beneath that intention there lurks a countervailing urge toward the transcendence of mortal structures. Accordingly, the DLO has much in common with the broader trend toward ‘institutionalism’ which Christopher Castiglia has identified as a characteristic feature of antebellum America. ‘Distinct from the material practices of particular institutions, the discourse of institutionalism asserted its power to carry current social interests unhindered into the future,’ Castiglia explains. ‘Orienting citizens from present negotiations to a perpetually receding horizon of futurity, institutionalism . . . imagined citizens, partisan and potentially passionate, as the subjective and therefore threatening others of the “political” ’ (IS, 5). Like any bureaucratic entity, in short, the DLO was inclined to treat its users as types, whose individual demands and desires had to be subordinated so that the organization itself could function and endure. The tension engendered in the DLO by the contrast between this impassive functionalism and the subjectivity of those it serves becomes clear if we attend to the discourses surrounding ‘interiority,’ a concept which Castiglia sees developing alongside and in opposition to ‘institutionalism.’ ‘The interiorization of the social in the antebellum United States did not produce disciplined subject positions in the image of state ideology,’ he argues, ‘but generated . . . models of association and social interaction beyond the interests of the state – in ways that belied the coherence of national or market interests’ (IS, 4). In the case of the DLO, this counterinstitutional orientation is particularly apparent in the fascination which the public had with the fate of romantic letters. Nineteenth-century epistolarians, as I have already suggested, persistently figured letters as contiguous with the writer’s inner

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self. Even though women letter-writers were in a minority before the postal reforms of the 1840s, for example, there was already a strong rhetorical link between eroticism and epistolarity, which stemmed from the sentimental novels and conduct books of the eighteenth century. When casting an eye on the DLO, commentators were thus naturally inclined to wonder ‘what untold tales of love and . . . sympathy and sentiment, that vortex for human thought might reveal.’30 Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century a popular subgenre of short magazine stories devoted to the amatory complications of dead letters had emerged. Boasting titles like ‘A Dead Letter Romance’ (1877) or ‘Romance of a Postage Stamp’ (1878), these fictions form part of a wider shift away from the early nineteenth-century epistolary novel’s emphasis on letter-as-content toward the kind of ‘postal plots’ which, as Kate Thomas has argued, ‘found excitement in the distance, separation, delays, and precipitous deliveries that could skew the trajectory of a communication.’31 The DLO itself, in other words, becomes an important narrative obstacle to the happiness of the protagonists in these stories. Admittedly, not all of these tales manage to articulate an anti-instutitionalist position. One notable corpus of dead letter romances revolves around a protagonist who persists in sending letters to a loved one over the course of several decades, despite always having them returned by the DLO. As generations of postal workers are ‘born and buried,’ while ‘still the queer letters came, and were called for,’ these figures are typically incorporated into the institutional folklore of the DLO, and are only reunited with their lost partner ‘in the world beyond [the] stars.’32 But the far more prevalent strand of dead letter romance in which the divided couple successfully arrive at an earthly reconciliation does tend to express a sense of ‘interiority’ at odds with the bloodless mechanism of the DLO. In ‘A Secret Postal Service’ (1889), for instance, the heroine eventually learns that, despite having her missives to her missing husband repeatedly ‘returned from the dead letter office,’ he has been sustained through dangerous illness by a dream in which he was able to exercise the ‘conjugal right’ of reading ‘his wife’s letters.’33 Brought back from the brink of literal death by the tender solicitude of his wife, and physically reinstalled in their comfortable home, the husband appropriately concludes that it is ‘very evident there is a law of Correspondence not included in nor subject to the regulations of the Post Office Department.’34 Here then, the private feelings of the individual are successfully realized in a terrestrial, domestic space beyond the reach of the state. Unlike the many post-Civil War stories of reunited lovers which serve as metaphor for national reconciliation, these kinds of dead letter romances imagine a model of personal exchange detached from external management; one which is reached by asserting the potential for letters to overcome the routinizing pull of the DLO through the very emotions invested in them. Indeed, for numerous commentators the appeal of a visit to the DLO lay less in witnessing its complex operations at first hand and more in the opportunity it afforded for insights into this intimate self-expression. ‘We must confess, that after wading through the dead-letter masses for an hour or two . . . we gradually became more fastidious,’ Francis Copcutt noted of his tour in 1860. ‘The large-hand letters were business, business, business, to such a wearying extent, and . . . men [so] little inclined to really put themselves into letters, that the feminine epistles took precedence . . . and the result proved, what is so often said and sung, that this sort of literature is peculiarly the field of our fair friends.’35 In reality, though, the DLO was dedicated precisely to those

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business interests which Copcutt dismisses. As its original congressional mandate to ‘preserve carefully all money, loan office certificates . . . and other valuable papers’ suggests, the DLO primarily acted to safeguard commercial exchange – it had no remit or obligation to return personal letters, only the objects enclosed with them.36 In fact, despite the periodical objection of those who felt that ‘a valuable letter . . . may have no money in it, for it may contain information equivalent to hundreds of five dollar letters,’ the economic function of the DLO simply increased as the decades wore on.37 Before the middle of the nineteenth century, sending cash through the mail was prohibitively expensive (because each dollar bill was counted as a separate sheet for the purpose of assessing postage), which meant that commercial exchanges via letter were largely the province of wealthy merchants. But the Postal Act of 1845, by shifting the cost of dispatch from sheets to weight, opened the gates for a flood of paper currency from everyday correspondents to join the credit instruments and bank drafts being mailed by businessmen. By 1865, for example, the DLO was recovering enclosures totalling close to $245,000 from over 40,000 letters a year, one quarter of which contained sums of less than a dollar.38 Given the preponderance of such tiny enclosures, it is understandable that some observers detected a mismatch between the elaborate machinery of the DLO and the result of its endeavors. ‘The joke becomes evident when it is known that the money in the letter amounted to only a one-cent postage stamp and a copper cent . . . and the postmaster had to go through as much red tape as if the letter had contained $1,000,’ The Outlook remarked of one returned enclosure in 1894.39 What this criticism overlooks, however, is the crucial role which generous access to postal services played in binding ordinary citizens into an emergent market economy. Echoing the widespread belief that ‘frequency and rapidity of intercourse are . . . the surest means of extending and increasing commerce,’ the DLO’s attention to the fate of the smallest sum not only aided the informal flow of money around the nation, it encouraged a broader trust in the post office as a vessel for financial transaction.40 This trust is made particularly clear if we recall, as The Knickerbocker did in 1861, that it was dead-letter clerks ‘who alone, in all this country . . . are allowed, “by law,” to break the sacred seal of letters addressed to others.’41 Excluded from the harsh legal penalties that the congressional Postal Act of 1792 leveled against anyone – including postal workers – who interfered with a letter, the DLO effectively occupied what Giorgio Agamben has called a ‘state of exception’: a ‘zone of anomie . . . neither external nor internal to the juridical order . . . in which all legal determinations – and above all the very distinction between public and private – are deactivated’ (SE, 23). Occasionally the press would run stories, both factual and fictional, about dead letter clerks who violated their obligation not to misuse this privilege. ‘The Crossing-Sweeper in Office,’ for example, which ran for ten installments in The Spirit of the Times between 1849 and 1851, was predicated on the eponymous character using his new employment as ‘Secretary and Examiner at the Dead Letter Office’ to access a ‘raft [of] epistles which I will pick and choose for publication.’42 But a more typical characterization of the DLO clerk at mid-century is suggested by the most famous employee of that office, Herman Melville’s disconcertingly taciturn Bartleby. Strikingly, Melville’s short story, which first appeared in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853, concludes with the revelation that Bartleby ‘had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington’ (BS, 45). This rare scrap of information

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about Bartleby’s past life is taken by his most recent employer, the Lawyer who narrates the story, to explain Bartleby’s strange withdrawal from his duties and eventual self-starvation: Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? . . . Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring: the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave . . . On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! (BS, 45) For the Lawyer at least, the peculiar demands of working at the DLO offer a persuasive rationale for Bartleby’s behavior. Yet in acknowledging that he ‘cannot now tell . . . how true’ the report of Bartleby’s employment at the DLO is, the Lawyer also introduces a fissure of doubt into his reading of Bartleby’s behavior; an interpretive gap which later readers of the story have been quick to alight upon (BS, 45). Focusing closely on the Lawyer’s self-centeredness, Melville scholars from the early twentieth century onward have tended to see the biographical postscript to the story as an unconvincingly simplistic resolution which is typical of its narrator’s complacency and evasiveness. As Dan McCall has pointed out, ‘nobody seems to take seriously the Dead Letter Office as an explanation for what went wrong with Bartleby; most critics tell us that the rumor is a boomerang, and it flies right back to the Lawyer, showing us what is wrong with him.’43 Melville’s contemporaries too would have detected something awry in the Lawyer’s final claims, for the DLO’s status as one of the few departments in the post office protected from the spoils system renders Bartleby’s sudden dismissal from it following ‘a change in the administration’ unlikely (BS, 45).44 Yet by being more closely attuned to the dead-letter discourses which were proliferating during the 1850s, these contemporary readers may also have been able to detect a grain of truth in the postscript which more recent critics have missed. Unlike later commentators, for example, an 1856 reviewer of the tale in the Boston Daily Evening Traveller was happy to concede that Bartleby’s ‘extraordinary silence’ has its roots in ‘his former life in the Dead Letter Office at Washington.’45 What this reader apprehended, I would argue, is how closely Bartleby’s behavior in the Lawyer’s offices accords with the reticence typically ascribed to DLO clerks in the mid-nineteenth century. In this respect, the Lawyer is certainly an unreliable narrator, but not in the way that has conventionally been thought. For he is wrong about how DLO clerks respond to the letters they encounter, rather than about Bartleby’s possible employment there. An 1846 article about the DLO in Littel’s Living Age, for instance, reported that the rings found there ‘passed through the practical hands of . . . cold, grey-haired clerks, who never stopped to read the tender effusion that cost so much racking of the heart-strings – and the delicate pledge of affection [was] tossed into an iron chest,’ while in 1859 the Knickerbocker declared that ‘the work of the Dead Letter Office is done by machinery; fleshless hands unfold the written sheets; automatic eyes ascertain the direction and contents; iron attendants . . . perform the incremation of those letters which cannot be returned to the writers; for if it were not so, would not all the secrets of our neighbors be blazoned to the world?’46 Crucially, when viewed against such accounts of the perplexingly emotionless way in which DLO clerks carried out their jobs, the ‘silently [and] mechanically’ functioning Bartleby, about whom

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there is said to be nothing ‘ordinarily human,’ begins to seem less sui generis (BS, 20). As the above descriptions suggest, DLO clerks were not rendered helplessly despondent by the misdirected letters they handled, in the way that the Lawyer would have it, but became immune to the empathetic claims of social interaction. Bartleby’s passivity is that of the trained bureaucrat rather than the existential nihilist, and his incommunicativeness is a matter of professional pride rather than paralytic melancholy. It is no coincidence that Bartleby’s initial rejection of the Lawyer’s wishes comes when he is asked to read aloud copies of letters with his fellow workers; or that he soon refuses to copy these letters himself. In contrast to the Crossing-Sweeper in Office’s violation of epistolary privacy, Bartleby tries – inexorably – to maintain the aphasic principles of the DLO. The central problem which Bartleby faces, from this perspective, is that he is trying to maintain these standards in the wrong place. By far the most common reading of Melville’s story sees Bartleby as ‘a victim of and protest against the numbing world of capitalistic profit and alienated labor,’ but while he is certainly a downtrodden worker, this is not because he stands outside the system but because he cannot enforce his professional values within it.47 This frustrated commitment to duty becomes clear if we consider one of the bitterest ironies of the tale – the choice of a law office as Bartleby’s new place of work. Given the way in which the DLO functions, as I have already suggested, as a ‘space devoid of law’ akin to Agamben’s definition of the state of exception, it is small wonder that Bartleby does not fit in with his fellow scriveners on Wall Street (SE, 50). For as an embodiment of the DLO’s extrinsic relationship to the covenants of correspondence and commerce, he represents an inevitable affront to the Lawyer’s ‘snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds’ (BS, 14). In his typically obtuse fashion the Lawyer attempts to make sense of Bartleby’s actions within a juridical framework. ‘What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?’ he demands when his dismissed employee refuses to vacate the building, but these questions are simply greeted with silence (BS, 35). Misreading Bartleby as someone who occupies the same social space as the rest of us, the Lawyer, like so many visitors to the DLO, is stumped by the impenetrable passivity of this clerk. In this respect, even when Bartleby does deign to respond to the Lawyer’s requests it is with an insistent statement of demurral – ‘I would prefer not to’ – that closely conforms to the logic of exceptionality (BS, 20). This catchphrase, according to Agamben himself, encapsulates the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’ in the way that it ‘resists every possibility of deciding between potentiality and the potentiality not to.’48 Bartleby’s intention is not ‘to abolish the old Law and inaugurate a new mandate,’ he argues, but to hold fast to a ‘zone of indistinction between yes and no’ which is ‘turned both toward life and toward death; [which] signifies both the ring and the finger intended for it . . . both what was and what could not be.’49 This avenue into Melville’s story gives the DLO a fitting explanatory prominence, and best accounts for Bartleby’s tragic fate. Seen through this lens a critic like Branka Arsić, although right to describe Bartleby’s move ‘from the DLO . . . to the space of the law’ as ‘an impossible leap,’ errs when characterizing the DLO as ‘a kind of erasing machine’ which ‘negates life absolutely’ (PC, 127, 126). What such readings miss, despite taking the postscript to the story seriously, is the way in which the DLO as a site of exception ‘hovers so decidely between affirmation and negation, acceptance

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and rejection, giving and taking.’50 Counter to a scholarly tendency toward Gothic representations of the DLO that ironically echo those of the Lawyer, it is in his former job where Bartleby might imagine ‘happily marrying . . . life and death’ – only once he leaves his state of exception must he confront the fact that ‘death is not married to life’ (PC, 127, 126). Indeed, as he passes from potentiality to actuality, Bartleby’s adherence to the mute impartiality of the DLO quickly becomes pathological. His sudden refusal to ‘carry . . . letters to the post-office,’ which can be read as a desperate effort to reroute them to the DLO, eventually spirals into a blank repudiation of food and water (BS, 32). By the end of the story the Lawyer’s equation of ‘dead letters’ and ‘dead men,’ notwithstanding the mistake he makes in locating its generation in the DLO, is borne out. Unable to resist the impositions of the law, Bartleby seems to accept the inescapable triumph of death, but in doing so he perhaps hopes to mimic the sometimes inscrutable surface of those missives he once handled. If Melville’s tale emphasizes the potentially doleful fate of those individuals no longer employed in the DLO, then other writers portrayed such a career change more positively. Caroline Orne’s widely reprinted ‘The Clerk of the Dead Letter Office’ (1857), for example, depicts the resignation of its eponymous protagonist as ‘wonderfully rejuvenating,’ since it allows him to start a new life with the fiancée he thought he had lost (CD, 336). Unlike the coldly impassive Bartleby, Orne’s Roland Floyd is evidently moved by the ‘sad history’ of the rings and letters he must deal with; in a manner akin to the Lawyer’s claims about the DLO, ‘his employment in the Dead Letter Office seemed to make him still more despondent, for he had learned by it how many hearts are made sick by hope deferred’ (CD, 334, 335). In both stories, though, the state of exception which allows these clerks to access other people’s mail does not extend beyond the boundaries of the DLO. The very point of ‘The Clerk of the Dead Letter Office’ is that Floyd exists in a state of suspended animation in the DLO which is only overcome when he rejects its dreamy mingling of ‘scenes of the past’ with ‘those of the present’ for a world outside his ‘little bare-walled room’; and Orne is also careful to condemn the aunt who has burnt Floyd’s letters to his fiancée, and so kept them apart, for destroying private correspondence in a fashion that is only legitimate within his former berth (CD, 338, 333). As these two otherwise very different stories suggest, the long-standing provision against both postal workers and members of the public interfering with the mail, which had been strengthened in 1836 with an Act mandating a penalty of $500 and imprisonment for six months, persisted into the middle of the century. In the wake of the Civil War, however, and the new-found reach and confidence that the federal government gained from it, the DLO’s state of exception was appropriated and diluted in two directions. On one hand, it became a model for anti-obscenity and anti-lottery campaigners seeking greater moral regulation of the mail, and on the other hand, it became demystified through efforts to make the inner workings of the post office more transparent.51 In regard to the latter development, for example, following a decision to preserve and display undeliverable photographs of Union soldiers during the early 1860s, this collection was incorporated into a formally-established exhibition space within the DLO, which grew rapidly during the 1870s before eventually moving to larger premises.52 ‘One of the rooms of the Postoffice Department building has recently been transformed into a museum for the exhibition of curiosities that have accumulated in the dead letter office,’ the Scientific American reported in 1883.

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‘The articles exhibited number several thousands, and embrace everything imaginable, from a postage stamp of the Confederate states to snakes and horned toads.’53 Significantly, this ‘heterogeneous collection, ranging in kind from skulls to confectionery, and in value from one cent to one thousand dollars’ echoes the chaotic accumulativeness that readers would have been familiar with from antebellum catalogues of the strange materials that washed up in the DLO.54 Indeed, it proved difficult to avoid a lingering connection, evident in the very language of the quotation above, between the DLO and the seventeenth-century ‘cabinet of curiosities,’ with all its uncircumscribing and encyclopedic tendencies. Despite the potential for the DLO’s ‘buried treasures’ to ‘remain as records, not always of human civilization, but of human foolishness,’ however, it was clearly the intention of the exhibitors to align their display with the more modern concept of the museum, which implied judicious selection and rational ordering.55 ‘No one would have supposed it to be any branch of the postal service!’ the Youth’s Companion noted of a visit in 1887. ‘Its walls were lined with glass cases, containing the most remarkable conglomeration of articles, all of which are classed . . . and it certainly looked like a museum on a small-scale.’56 In this respect then, we can see the DLO’s exposition of its contents as part of that wider late-nineteenth-century trend toward the creation of museums and world’s fairs that Tony Bennett has dubbed ‘the exhibitionary complex.’ Unlike the domain of the law, Bennett argues, which shifted from the gallows to the prison during the nineteenth century, ‘the institutions comprising “the exhibitionary complex,” by contrast, were involved in the transfer of objects and bodies from the enclosed and private domains in which they had previously been displayed . . . into progressively more open and public arenas where, through the representations to which they were subjected, they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power . . . throughout society.’57 To this extent at least the objects on show in the DLO differed from the pre-war listings of curiosities, for they asserted the federal government’s ability to control and comprehend the heterogeneous residue of the postal system. Whereas the dead-letter catalogues of the antebellum press invoked, as David Henkin has suggested, fears of social anarchy, the DLO museum offered the reassurance that America’s democratic centrifugalism could be contained.58 Moreover, by placing this heterogeneous body of objects where it could be physically seen, the DLO museum also offered the American public the reassurance of direct access to other people’s lives at a time when this could seem in short supply. As Elizabeth Duquette has noted in a powerful reading of Metta Fuller Victor’s 1866 detective novel The Dead Letter, postbellum socio-political discourses were dominated by the idea that ‘that the indeterminacy of individual behavior [could] be regularized by considering people statistically at the level of the mass,’ an attitude that easily bled into an already highly bureaucratized rhetoric surrounding dead letters.59 What the DLO museum provided, however – even (or especially) through its most trivial items – was a glimpse of the particular. As one DLO clerk remarked in 1884: ‘It is characteristic of human nature to stand with mere vague wonderment before any question or occurrence that appears distant and impersonal. But anything that touches intimately social and domestic relations arouses at once an acute interest . . . This may account for the eager delight . . . always displayed by the DeadLetter Office pilgrims.’60 It would be easy to read the metaphor of the ‘pilgrimage’ here as indicating that the DLO museum performs a kind of sacerdotal function, but the role it plays is actually

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more revelatory than mystificatory. The ‘exhibitionary complex’ did not seek to ‘map the social body in order to know the populace by rendering it visible to power,’ Bennet writes. ‘Instead, through the provision of object lessons in power – the power to command and arrange things and bodies for public display – [it] sought to allow the people . . . to know rather than be known, to become the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge.’61 Thus, in the case of the DLO museum, as well as allowing the public to see into each other’s letters, this spectacle allowed the public to observe the inner workings of their government – a potentially comforting prospect during a period when the previously remote American state was expanding its influence. In fact, despite regular claims in the antebellum press that ‘entrée to the Dead-Letter Office, like kissing, goes by favor, and it has cost us much trouble and many refusals,’ this branch of the state had always been relatively accessible.62 Noting the trend for eyewitness accounts of the DLO, the Albany Register, for example, reported in 1852 that: No day passes without some . . . visits, and during times of great public excitement, when Washington is filled with strangers, the influx of ‘curiosity hunters’ is so great as to almost paralyse the working of this section. At the inauguration of General Taylor, more than one hundred visitors a day, for several days were received and entertained . . . and a like-tide of wonder-seeking humanity ebbed and flowed during the sittings of the recent political Conventions at Baltimore.63 What happened after the Civil War, however, was that these tours became more obviously structured. Placed in a dedicated exhibition space, and ordered along rational lines, the secrets of the DLO were rendered newly approachable for the masses. Accordingly, then, the DLO museum can be situated as further evidence of that ‘gradual but fundamental transformation of the relationship between postal space and public space’ that David Henkin has identified as occurring during the Gilded Age.64 On one hand, the introduction of new services such as free home delivery was bringing the post office more intimately into the lives of ordinary citizens; and on the other hand, the introduction of new employment regulations such as the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 was letting more ordinary citizens become part of the post office. But the most pertinent innovation of the late nineteenth century in regard to the DLO museum is the massive programme of post office construction which took place during this time, for in the grand, purpose-specific architecture of these buildings the democratic ambition of the museum finds its analog. Moreover, through its spectacularization of civic space the DLO museum is also connected to the celebrated halls and edifices of the late-nineteenth-century World’s Fair. Indeed, given the unabated interest that the public had showed in the DLO since the 1840s it is little wonder that its newly established museum was effectively transplanted to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, nor that it proved to be a major attraction. ‘There are certain displays . . . of which the visitor never seems to tire,’ W. R. Maxfield reported from the White City: He gives but a glance to the post-office in actual operation, because that is a thing he can see any day, either at the cross-roads village or in the great city, but he cannot see the dead-letter office every day, or even a small portion thereof. This accounts for the great, good-natured crowd that constantly presses about the cases in which the numerous trophies of the dead-letter office are displayed.65

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Like its equivalent in Washington, the DLO museum at Chicago was startlingly heterogeneous – ‘containing almost every mailable article from horned toads received alive to a love letter written on a board’ – but what becomes clearer in discussions of the latter is the way in which this diversity feeds into conceptions of national identity.66 Probably the most remarked upon item in the DLO exhibit at Chicago was a memorandum book from Benjamin Franklin’s tenure as Postmaster General that included his earliest recordings of dead letters. In ‘tak[ing] one back to a period that antedates not only the mail car, but even . . . postage stamps,’ the Daily Inter Ocean characteristically observed, Franklin’s ledger was ‘illustrative of [our] progress in carrying the mail . . . The Postoffice Department, has provided for the benefit of those interested, not only a complete exponent of the methods of the present, but by models and relics, the history of the past.’67 Notwithstanding the crude patriotism that imbued many press accounts of the Exposition, visitors to the DLO section were genuinely entitled to feel proud. The DLO, and the postal system of which it was so vital a part, had been transformed in just over a century from a small-scale operation into the hub of the nation’s economic, moral, and emotional life. Even more than revealing ‘at a glance the enormous difference between the postal service of the present and . . . the early days of the country’s history,’ however, Franklin’s ledger is a fitting epitome of the DLO for the way in which it brings together bureaucratic enterprise, autographic fetishization, archival preservation, and mundane curiosity in one potent vessel.68 As with the DLO museum itself, the ledger allows us to see how nineteenth-century writers and thinkers came to generate what Lauren Berlant has called a ‘counterpolitics of the silly object,’ which ‘reads the waste materials of everyday communication in the national public sphere as pivotal documents in the construction, experience, and rhetoric of quotidian citizenship in the United States.’69

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Ingersoll, An Abridgement, 548. ‘The Dead Letter Office,’ Boston Recorder, 59. Fuller, The American Mail, 84. Frankel, States of Inquiry, 2. Ibid. Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 6, 13. ‘Dead-Letter Office,’ Flag of Our Union, 583. See Chandler, The Visible Hand. ‘Down Among the Dead Letters,’ 517. Miles, ‘Advantages,’ 446. ‘Misdirected Letters,’ 6. John, Spreading the News, 11. Crapsey, ‘Marvels in Postal Service,’ 5. Ibid. 4. Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 2. ‘Washington Sketches,’ 2. ‘Local Intelligence,’ 3. ‘Odd Things in the Mail,’ 3. ‘The Dead-Letter Office,’ The Knickerbocker, 181. See also ‘The Paper Mill Story.’ Derrida, Paper Machine, 42, 43, 57.

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dead letters and the secret life of the state 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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‘A Dead Letter Office,’ New York Observer and Chronicle, 93. Ibid. ‘Postal Common Sense,’ 4. ‘Washington Sketches,’ 2. ‘The Post-Office as it Has Been,’ 681. For a detailed discussion of those social groups, such as African Americans, who were at the margins of the postal system’s ‘imagined community’ see John, Spreading the News, 112–68. ‘Badges Seen Everywhere,’ 2. See also Beecher, ‘Lecture-Room Talk,’ 356. Copcutt, ‘A Day,’ 184. ‘The Dead-Letter Office,’ The Knickerbocker, 182. ‘The Dead Letter Office,’ Boston Evening Transcript, 3. Thomas, Postal Pleasures, 2. ‘A Dead Letter Romance,’ 4. ‘A Secret Postal Service,’ 62, 766. Ibid. 766. Copcutt, ‘A Day,’ 199. Ford, Journals, 9: 817. ‘Dead Letters,’ Maine Farmer, 2. See ‘Abstract of the Report,’ 60. ‘All the Same,’ 116. Quoted in Fuller, The American Mail, 190. ‘The Dead-Letter Office,’ The Knickerbocker, 182. ‘The Crossing-Sweeper in Office,’ 457. McCall, The Silence of Bartleby, 129. Although it gives more weight to the change-of-administration explanation than I would, John’s ‘The Lost World of Bartleby’ is nonetheless an invaluable exploration of this aspect of the story. ‘Review of “Bartleby”,’ 473. ‘The Dead Letter Office,’ Littell’s Living Age, 23; ‘Padlocks Disregarded,’ 255. Barnett, ‘Bartleby as Alienated Worker,’ 385. This reading has recently been reinvigorated thanks to the appropriation of Melville’s story by the Occupy movement. See, for example, Edelman, ‘Occupy Wall Street.’ Agamben, Homo Sacer, 48. Agamben, Potentialities, 270, 255, 270. Ibid. 256. I do not have space here to elaborate on this first development, but do so in a further essay on the legal discourses surrounding the DLO, currently in preparation. Although it neglects the structural significance of the DLO, Fuller’s Morality and the Mail offers a detailed account of these postbellum campaigns. For more on these photographs, and the development of the DLO museum, see Cushing, The Story of Our Post Office, 271–5. ‘Curiosities,’ 296. McCollin, ‘The “Blind Reader”,’ 10. ‘How to Send Things,’ 523. Underwood, ‘The Dead Letter Office,’ 587. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 60. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 163–4. Duquette, ‘The Office,’ 42. Collins, ‘The Dead-Letter Office,’ 460. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 63.

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150 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

matthew pethers Copcutt, ‘A Day,’ 182. ‘Dead Letters – By a Resurrectionist,’ 2. Henkin, The Postal Age, 82. Maxfield, ‘World’s Fair,’ 250. Garrett, ‘World’s Fair Suggestions,’ 731. ‘Postoffice Exhibit,’ 2. ‘Curiosities,’ 296. Berlant, Queen of America, 12.

Works Cited ‘Abstract of the Report of the Postmaster General’ (1866), The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 54: 57–61. Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (1999), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2008), State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cited parenthetically as SE. ‘All the Same in the Dead Letter Office’ (1894), Outlook, 21 July, 116. Arsić, B. (2007), Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cited parenthetically as PC. ‘Badges Seen Everywhere’ (1893), Boston Evening Herald, 6 July, 2. Barnett, L. K. (1974), ‘Bartleby as Alienated Worker,’ Studies in Short Fiction, 11: 379–85. Beecher, H. W. (1870), ‘Lecture-Room Talk,’ Christian Union, 4 June, 356. Bennett, T. (1995), The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge. Berlant, L. (1997), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Castiglia, C. (2008), Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cited parenthetically as IS. Castronovo, R. (2001), Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cited parenthetically as NC. Chandler, A. (1977), The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copcutt, F. (1860), ‘A Day in the Dead-Letter Office,’ The Knickerbocker, 55: 179–204. Crapsey, E. (1878), ‘Marvels in Postal Service,’ The Independent, 31 January, 4–5. ‘The Crossing-Sweeper in Office – No. I’ (1849), Spirit of the Times, 19: 457. ‘Curiosities of the Dead Letter Office’ (1883), Scientific American, 48: 296. Cushing, M. (1893), The Story of Our Post Office: The Greatest Government Department in All its Phases, Boston: A. M. Thayer. ‘The Dead Letter Office’ (1846), Littell’s Living Age, 9: 23–4. ‘The Dead Letter Office’ (1848), Boston Recorder, 14 April, 59. ‘The Dead Letter Office’ (1852), Boston Evening Transcript, 31 May, 3. ‘A Dead Letter Office’ (1868), New York Observer and Chronicle, 19 March, 93. ‘A Dead Letter Romance’ (1877), Maine Farmer, 27 January, 4. ‘Dead Letters’ (1857), Maine Farmer, 29 October, 2. ‘Dead Letters – By a Resurrectionist’ (1852), Albany Register, 23 September, 2. ‘The Dead-Letter Office’ (1861), The Knickerbocker, 58: 180–4. ‘Dead-Letter Office’ (1869), Flag of Our Union, 11 September, 583.

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Derrida, J. (2005), Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Edelman, L. (2013), ‘Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities,’ History of the Present, 3: 99–118. Ford, W. C., et al., eds. (1904–37), Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 34 vols., Washington: Library of Congress. Frankel, O. (2006), States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in NineteenthCentury Britain and the United States, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fuller, W. (1972), The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fuller, W. (2003), Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Garrett, M. R. (1893), ‘World’s Fair Suggestions,’ Friends’ Review, 46: 731–2. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. ‘How to Send Things by Mail’ (1884), Harper’s Bazaar, 17: 523. Ingersoll, E. (1825), An Abridgement of the Acts of Congress Now in Force, Excepting Those of Local and Private Application, Philadelphia: Tower & Hogan. John, R. R. (1995), Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. John, R. R. (1997), ‘The Lost World of Bartleby, the Ex-Officeholder,’ New England Quarterly, 70: 631–41. Maxfield, W. R. (1893), ‘World’s Fair for the Stay-at-Homes,’ Zion’s Herald, 9 August, 250. McCall, D. (1989), The Silence of Bartleby, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McCollin, A. G. (1893), ‘The “Blind Reader” at Washington,’ Ladies’ Home Journal, 10: 9–10. Melville, H. [1853] (1987), ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,’ in H. Hayford, A. A. MacDougall, G. T. Tanselle (eds.), The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University and the Newberry Library, 13–45. Cited parenthetically as BS. Miles, P. (1862), ‘Advantage of Uniform Postage,’ The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 46: 443–8. ‘Misdirected Letters’ (1894), Maine Farmer, 26 April, 6. Orne, C. (1857), ‘The Clerk of the Dead Letter Office,’ Lady’s Home Magazine, 9: 333–7. Cited parenthetically as CD. ‘Padlocks Disregarded’ (1859), The Knickerbocker, 53: 254–66. ‘The Paper Mill Story’ (1855), The Pittsfield Sun, 14 June, 2. ‘Postal Common Sense’ (1869), The Independent, 11 November, 4. ‘The Post-Office as it Has Been, Is, and Should Be’ (1856), The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 35: 680–97. ‘Postoffice Exhibit’ (1893), Daily Inter Ocean, 11 June, 2. ‘Review of “Bartleby,” Boston Evening Traveller, 3 June 1856 (1995), in B. Higgins and H. Parker (eds.), Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, New York: Cambridge University Press, 473. ‘A Secret Postal Service’ (1889), Arthur’s Home Magazine, 59: 760–6. Thomas, K. (2012), Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters, New York: Oxford University Press. Underwood, G. H. (1887), ‘The Dead Letter Office,’ Youth’s Companion, 60: 587–8. ‘Washington Sketches – No. 4’ (1860), Providence Evening Press, 23 July, 2.

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9 THE SPIDER AND THE DUMPLING: THREATENING LETTERS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA Leon Jackson

F

rom almost the moment he was elected to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln was deluged with mail. Years later, his various secretaries would estimate that between 250 and 500 letters arrived daily at the White House. These included official correspondence, letters from family and friends, begging letters, letters of advice, requests for appointments, loans, and favors, and those offering a variety of gifts. But there were also, as Lincoln’s secretary, William O. Stoddard, recalled, a ‘large number of threatening letters.’1 Indeed, Stoddard estimated that the White House received on average ‘one per diem’ throughout Lincoln’s presidency.2 ‘Mr. Abe Lincoln,’ reads one, sent in 1861: [I]f you don’t Resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you you god or mighty god dam sundde of a bith go to hell and buss my Ass suck my prick and call my Bolics your uncle Dick god dam a fool and goddam Abe Lincoln who would like you goddam you excuse me for using such hard words with you but you need it you are nothing but a goddam black Nigger.3 [sic passim] Most of these letters were kept from Lincoln’s knowledge, but he still read scores of them and professed to care about none. ‘Assured that no man who will write anonymous and threatening letters is worthy of being feared,’ reported a journalist in 1860, ‘he tosses all such aside, as he says, to illustrate at some future day, the comical side of his Administration.’4 If Lincoln was unwilling to engage with threatening letters, then modern scholars have scarcely been more eager. Despite an ongoing renaissance in the study of American letters and letter-writing, of which this volume is both a summary and extension, there has been not a single study dedicated to threatening letters in the United States. There are at least two reasons for this: one practical, the other procedural. In the first place, threatening letters are a highly dispersed genre; rather than being gathered in one specific type of archive, instances of and references to them are scattered in newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, local histories, court records, governors’ and presidents’ letter books, and private letter collections. They can, in short, be hard to find. While scholars may make passing reference to the incidental examples that have come to 152

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their attention in the context of their own research projects, it is only with the advent of online archival catalogues and large-scale digitization projects that it has become practical to study the threatening letter as both a phenomenon and a genre. In this light, it turns out that there are hundreds of them, and they are revealed as a significant feature of the nineteenth-century epistolary landscape. But a second reason for their neglect is that even when these letters can be recovered in volume, they present an interpretive challenge, for they do not fit readily into the developing historiography of Anglo-American epistolary practice. Threatening letters are neither ‘polite’ nor ‘familiar’; they do not grow out of, or constitute, middle-class values; they do not follow the conventions of letter-writing manuals; written anonymously, or pseudonymously, they do not invite epistolary reciprocity; and they are as often thrown through windows or slipped under doors, as sent through the postal system. Threatening letters, then, require the development of new frames of reference and interpretation that speak to the particularity of the genre and its deployment. Yet the effort of recovering and accounting for these letters is demonstrably worthwhile for a number of reasons. In the first instance, they offer an almost unique repertoire of voices from the margins, showcasing those who put pen to paper out of only the most pressing need or dire conviction. Secondly, they present a stark example of the nineteenth-century belief in the power of the written word to shape behavior, a belief predicated on a vision of writing that stands in contrast to the more refined notion of cultural work scholars usually adhere to. And finally, they enable one to bring together a number of cultural practices, political positions, and social constituencies that are rarely considered under one umbrella. Threatening letters were written by the Ku Klux Klan but also by African Americans and abolitionists; they were sent by women as well as men; by the powerful as well as the poor. They are never less than rich and fascinating documents. Thus, in this necessarily brief chapter, I intend to offer an initial theorization of both threats and threatening letters; survey the range of uses to which they were put; explore their role in shaping contested racial relations; and chart some of the major continuities and transformations in this genre through the nineteenth century. A preliminary strategy for generating interpretive traction might simply entail defining what we mean in referring to the ‘threat’ in a threatening letter, and asking what difference it makes whether it is made through a letter rather than some other medium. While ‘threat’ and its cognates have a number of colloquial meanings, a robust body of philosophical literature on the topic defines it as a demand for behavior contrary to the wishes of its target, which brings pressure to bear upon that person by indicating that the consequences inflicted as a result of non-compliance will be more painful than the consequences of compliance.5 Threats can, more generally, be located on what legal scholar Joel Feinberg has called a ‘spectrum of force’ – an explanatory model that runs ‘from compulsion proper, at one extreme, through compulsive pressure, coercion proper, and coercive pressure, to manipulation, persuasion, enticement, and simple requests at the other extreme.’6 Compulsion, Feinberg explains, offers its subjects no choices; requests leave their subjects with ultimate discretion; but coercive pressure – the element most often seen in threatening letters – seeks to issue offers that, as the saying goes, one cannot refuse (at least in theory) because the penalties of noncompliance are so daunting.7 Who would risk the proverbial spider in the dumpling? If we have failed to recognize the significance of coercive pressure in nineteenth-century American cultural history, then this is surely a result of our decades-long obsession

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with the moral suasion and other manipulative rhetorical strategies situated at one end of Feinberg’s spectrum, and with the Foucauldian notions of power that exceed agency located at the other. Appeal and compulsion were surely important in the nineteenth century, but ‘[t]hreatening,’ as one antebellum magazine argued, also had ‘an important place in good government,’ and it demands serious scholarly attention now, if we are to understand fully the modalities of power at play in nineteenth-century communicative culture.8 A skilled and enthusiastic participant in the rough and tumble world of frontier politics, Lincoln experienced more than his fair share of threats – facing down angry mobs, getting into wrestling matches, and at one point becoming embroiled in a duel. Yet in all of these cases, the threats Lincoln encountered were issued directly and in person. Push often came to shove, but a shove could be countered with a shove back. The very essence of the threatening letter, by contrast, resides in its reciprocal asymmetricality. A letter can intimidate, but one cannot fight a letter, and if the letter is not signed, one cannot even seek out and fight, or perhaps reason, with its author either. The threatening letter communicates its message yet admits no dialogue or negotiation. As such, its use of anonymity differs from that vaunted by the champions of what we now call the public sphere, with its appeal to reason and its capacity for debate.9 Hidden from their victims, the writers of these letters nonetheless vaunted their own panoptic powers. ‘I have got my eye on you every day,’ wrote one.10 ‘I am watching you with a hawk’s eye and a despairing murderers heart,’ intoned another.11 Several other forms of intimidation followed from the unidirectional and mediated nature of the letter. In confronting an actual aggressor, one could assess the credibility of the threat they offered based upon visual as well as verbal appraisal; anonymity and pseudonymity afforded no such certainty. Letters were signed ‘TWELVE OF US’ or ‘Thirty Truckmen’; they claimed the backing of ‘sixty or seventy’ fellow travelers, or ‘300 yankee youths between 18 & 20.’12 Moreover, writers sometimes signed their letters with corporate identities known to induce terror: Ku Klux Klan, Molly Maguire, Black Hand. Not knowing how credible a threat a letter constituted induced radical uncertainty. And then, of course, there were the rhetorical qualities of the letter. Recipients were verbally browbeaten, addressed as ‘you damn’d Buggur,’ or ‘the damdest fool that God put life into.’13 ‘[Y]ou are nothing but a damned whore. You are fucked every night by sporting men,’ jeered the author of one letter, before warning that ‘if you don’t back up it will be the worse for you.’14 Heightened, hyperbolic language also came into play, as when one recipient of a letter from the Klan was told: ‘Punishment awaits you, and such horrors as no man ever underwent and lived.’15 And the dramatic mode of address extended too to visual traits adorning the texts. Letters were illustrated with death’s heads, coffins, guns, knives, skeletons, and gallows; they were written in blood, punctured with bullet holes, cut into the shape of effigies; and they were accompanied by nooses, coffins, hickory switches, and – in some cases – a severed human ear.16 The temporal dimensions of the epistolary threat also set it apart from its embodied equivalent, inasmuch as the timing and nature of the reprisal threatened were less than self-evident. While the demands made sometimes stipulated strict deadlines – ‘by the 10th Oct 1808’ or ‘Ere another moon wanes’ – the punishment threatened was often couched in deliberately vague terms, the better to induce dread.17 ‘[W]e will have your Life if it is 20 years after,’ one victim was told.18 Others, in an especially unnerving scenario, were threatened with poisoning. Once a threatening letter was sent, the impression given was of a chain of events set into motion, the outcomes of which were

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as inevitable as they were inscrutable. Even the material aspects of the threatening letter, finally, distinguish it from the interpersonal threat; slipped under a door, thrown through a window, or even delivered or retrieved through the postal service, a threatening letter violated the sanctity of the home in the way that an enemy could not. It crossed spatial and spiritual thresholds that were becoming increasingly more valued and, in principle, inviolate, over the course of the nineteenth century. When displayed to public view, by contrast, as some threatening letters were, they exposed the vulnerability of the victim to the community at large, in ways that recalled the traditional ‘posting’ of cowards in an honor culture. Upon finding a letter from the Ku Klux Klan ‘pinned to [my] gate with a knife [and] stating that I had been doomed,’ for example, the Republican judge, Albion Tourgée, knew that the entire neighborhood would have seen it.19 While Lincoln claimed not to care about such threats, meanwhile, his wife, according to Elizabeth Keckley, was ‘sorely troubled,’ and ‘seemed to read impending danger in every rustling leaf, in every whisper of the wind.’20 This heightened, coercive anxiety was, of course, precisely the effect for which the writers of threatening letters strove, and it was one for which the letter’s temporal, reciprocal, rhetorical, material, and identifiable dimensions were uniquely well suited. To the extent that they have been discussed at all, such threatening letters have been characterized as one of the ‘weapons of the weak,’ to invoke the anthropologist James C. Scott’s useful term.21 That is, they rely precisely on the rhetorical invocation of power in the face of its actual and practical absence. Or at least, so we have been told. The only essay ever written on threatening letters, E. P. Thompson’s seminal 1975 study ‘The Crime of Anonymity,’ makes just such a claim, arguing that the threatening letter is ‘a characteristic form of social protest in any society which has crossed a certain threshold of literacy, in which forms of collective organized defense are weak, and in which individuals who can be identified as the organizers of protest are liable to immediate victimization.’22 Threatening letters, in other words, permitted common folk to articulate their grievances safely and clearly. A note thrown through a window or slipped under a door enabled commoners to demand restitution by threatening retribution. The frequency of poor spelling, weak grammar, and absence of formal modes of address in such messages suggests that they were indeed written by those who had little other recourse to the world of letters and letter-writing; they were produced under conditions of desperation or deprivation. Yet while Thompson was doubtless right in seeing the threatening letter as a tool of the poor in pressing their claims upon the rich, and of the marginal in pushing back against the majority, the evidence suggests something rather more complex. Threatening letters were not only a weapon of the weak, but could also serve as a tool of the powerful against the weak, and also as a means for peers to coerce, and settle scores with, one another. Four of such alternative uses, in particular, loom large: the commission of crimes of extortion, the practice of social crime, the enforcement of communal norms, and engagement in political activism. In the first instance, then, threatening letters were sometimes deployed simply in order to carry out acts of criminal extortion with no demonstrable element of social protest. In 1812, for example, a ‘very respectable lady’ of New York City received a letter demanding that she deposit $400 under a pile of bricks on Broadway or risk being killed ‘by fire or poison.’23 In 1830, meanwhile, Joseph J. Knapp, who was considerably less respectable (he had conspired to murder a wealthy sea captain in Salem) received a letter ‘requesting a loan of three hundred and fifty dollars,’ and threatening to expose his criminal activities if not paid.24 And in 1849, the wealthy William Astor

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received letters demanding $50,000 on pain of death.25 The writers of these three letters were lone wolves or worked in pairs, but threatening letters were just as often the product of extensive criminal operations. The same year Astor received his letter in New York, one newspaper was describing ‘an organized gang of fiendish depredators,’ using letters threatening arson to extort money from multiple home owners around Boston, while a cross-dressing male prostitute arrested in 1862 for blackmailing clients was found in possession of a valise containing ‘in all about one thousand letters.’26 By the end of the century, a plethora of gangs across America were extorting money from Italian immigrants by sending them intimidating letters signed with a black hand, and while the most recent scholarship on the topic suggests that black hand letters were less centrally coordinated than had been supposed, it is clear that many people pursued criminal careers through extended and extensive epistolary extortion.27 Yet while many of these letters indicate a remorseless criminal opportunism, several generations of Marxist social historians have reminded us that at least some instances of ostensibly anti-social crime can be better understood as examples of what they call ‘social crime,’ in which the perpetrators seek not to exploit others but to protest or survive under conditions of unfair duress.28 The practices that fall under the rubric of social crime – poaching, squatting, filching, smuggling, and bootlegging, to name but a few – were often understood by their practitioners as customary in nature and as reflecting a moral, rather than a profit-driven, economy; and they were often defended or abetted by recourse to threatening letter. A spate of such letters were posted in Maine in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, for example, when wealthy absentee landowners sought the assistance of surveyors and sheriffs to evict squatters from backcountry land plots. The church deacon and storekeeper John Neal tried to explain to the squatters that in refusing to pay rent they were violating the nation’s laws; an argument, that, of course, makes no room for the notion of ‘social crime.’29 But for his pains, he and his team of surveyors was fired upon; he was intimidated by groups of locals; his barn was burned to the ground; and ‘notices written in blood’ were posted up threatening his home and his life should the survey continue.30 While there were financial advantages to the protest and its outcome, this was more selfevidently a case of social protest than of deviance. Similar letters, meanwhile, driven by similar motives, were sent during New York’s 1839–45 Anti-Rent War, when landowners tried to serve process on, or evict, indebted tenants. The local sheriff, Michael Artcher, received such a note, signed only by ‘A Tenant,’ warning him that ‘if you come out in your official capacity, you come against a great strength, and I would not pledge for your safe return.’31 Even more troubling was the Anti-Rent letter sent to G. H. Edgerton, commanding him ‘NOT. TO. MEDDLE. PLOT. NOR. PLAN. WITH. THE. LANLORDS. OR. THEIR. AGENTS,’ and predicting that if ‘TAR. AN. FEATHR WANT. MAKE. YOU. STOP. YOUR. ROBEERIES. A. TOUCH. OF. THE. HAK. OR. A DOSE. OF. PISTLS. PILLS. WILL. CURE. YOU. OF. YOUR. DISORDER. [sic passim].’32 During the Civil War, too, the wives of Confederate soldiers, impoverished by war-time rations, inundated Southern governors with threatening letters based very clearly around a traditional moral economy. ‘[T]he time has come that we the common people has top hav bread or blood,’ said one, ‘and we are bound boath men and women to hav it or die in the attempt [sic passim].’33 Not all letters demanding customary rights grew out of land-use, or food-based, debates, however; they were just as likely to appear during protests over exploitative labor conditions in workshops, mines, factories, and even battlefields. When weavers

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at Alexander Knox’s workshop felt they were being underpaid, they threw a letter, signed by ‘The Black Cat,’ through his window.34 ‘Either Quit the Busness Or else pay the price,’ it ran in part, ‘you ought to for if you dont you will be fixed [sic passim].’35 In the 1840s, likewise, labor disputes between miners and mine owners in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania led to the dispatch of threatening letters under the name of Molly Maguire, a practice that continued through the 1880s. ‘Mr. John Taylor,’ ran one Molly Maguire letter from 1874, ‘Please leave Glen Carbon or if you dont you will suffer; by order of the BSG. We will give you one week to go but if you are alive on next Saturday you will die: Remember and leave.’36 And in the middle of the Civil War, African American soldiers in the Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts regiments, infuriated by the fact that they received lower pay than their white fellow soldiers, eventually resorted (just as we have already seen their enemies’ wives doing) to anonymous threatening letters, left for their commanders to read and ponder.37 Threatening letters of this kind, driven by privation and framing demands in terms of customary and inalienable rights, most closely correspond to the eighteenth-century English texts studied by E. P. Thompson. But they were not the only sort of letters in play. The use of threatening letters to influence personal relations in the workplace or business policy shaded imperceptibly, for some, into attempts to enforce communal norms more generally. Rural communities in both England and America had long turned to extra-legal sanctions combining physical pain with public shaming to chastise those who threatened social cohesion, using whippings, rail-ridings, duckings, tar-and-featherings, skimmingtons, and charivaris, to enforce compliance or ensure exile.38 While these were often meted out spontaneously, or at least with no warning, in late-nineteenth-century America, threatening letters were often sent out as an initial reprimand. They were used in this fashion by the Ku Klux Klan from the 1860s onward, for instance, but this practice was especially associated with vigilante groups known as White Caps, who focused on instances of domestic abuse and sexual impropriety. While the White Caps originated in Indiana in the 1870s, vigilantes operating under this name spread, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Midwest to points as far removed as New Mexico and Ontario.39 Typically, White Cappers would leave notes attached to bundles of hickory switches or nooses on the doors of their victims. Thus, in 1874, a letter to Conrad Heuser of Indiana warned him that ‘if you don’t treat your family better . . . you are Liable of the 49 [lashes] according to the penelties of Committy Laws we got a letter that you have Heretofore Mistreated your family without any Reasons [sic passim].’40 The way in which the White Caps used threatening letters to enforce social, and especially communal, norms differed from the ways in which criminals, and even social protesters, used them, inasmuch as the former’s letters were invariably posted publicly. To wake up to a hickory switch and a threatening note on one’s doorstep was to be already shamed before one’s community, without the need for a direct confrontation. Yet as various scholars have argued, the experience of shame can be both disintegrative, inasmuch as it situates the subject beyond the pale of the community, or reintegrative, inasmuch as it seeks to draw the subject back into conformity with and readmission to the community’s norms.41 While some threatening letters, as we shall see below, sought to wholly remove the recipient from any given community, then, it is clear that the letters of the White Caps held out the potential of reassimilation. Turning to my fourth and final category of under-examined uses for threatening letters, meanwhile, it is also clear that they could be deployed in an effort to sway

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decision-making by policymakers at the state and national level, especially by those who felt ill-served by their elected officials. There were two traditional ways for commoners to address political grievances outside of the realm of electoral politics and party activism, both of which prospered from the revolutionary era through to the second half of the nineteenth century: the petition, a highly deferential form of popular political intervention, and mob action, a far less polite practice.42 At least one threatening letter to a Supreme Court judge from 1815 indicates a debt to both traditions. Beginning as the ‘humble petition of the distress[e]d of St. John’s,’ who want to ‘most humbly’ express their concern about some recent legislation, before modulating to threats of livestock slaughter ‘and all other disorderly Vice that can be comprehended by the Art of Man,’ it finally ends with a curious quid pro quo that is half threat, half offer: ‘Mercy wee [sic] will take, and Mercy we will give.’43 Increasingly, though, the disaffected chose to use letters to threaten, rather than implore or negotiate, with their leaders. Indeed, Lincoln was far from the only president to receive menacing notes. Many, for example, were sent to Thomas Jefferson in the wake of his unpopular Embargo Act of 1807. ‘Mr. President. Take of [sic] your Embargo & restore us to freedom,’ ran one, ‘or 300 Yankees Youths between 18 & 20. & 150 of City Washington are resolved on your destruction. Look to it.’44 And another declared: ‘President Jefferson I have agreed to pay four of my friends $400 to shoot you if you dont take off the embargo . . . which I shall pay them, if I have to work on my hands & nees [sic] for it.’45 Nor were presidents alone singled out; such threats were also sent to congressmen, governors, mayors, assemblymen and many others holding lesser elected positions. Yet it is not simply the case that these letters were swinging closer to mob actions than petitions. For while populist attempts to intervene in the political process have typically been subsumed under the broader historical rubric of mob activity, with its intimations of spontaneous riot, it is important to remember that threatening letters function in a distinct manner, not least in introducing the rhetorical aura of choice. Whatever the case, however, of the many ways in which threatening letters were deployed in nineteenth-century America, none looms so large as the use of them against people of color and the white activists who championed their fight for social justice. The black shopkeeper Isiah Emory received one telling him to close his New York store or face dire consequences.46 Amos Beman, a young black man who was receiving informal tutoring at Wesleyan University in the 1830s, was sent one too, telling him to halt his studies or ‘we will resort to forcible means to put a stop to it.’47 And during the Civil War the Missouri slave Easter Davis found one tacked to her master’s door accusing her of informing for nearby Union troops and telling her to ‘skedaddle like hell’ if she did not wish to ‘pull a rope.’48 Most African Americans, though, were not afforded the luxury of a threatening letter before violence befell them. Rather, these messages were reserved, in general, for whites. They were sent in great number, for instance, to abolitionists from the 1820s onward. William Lloyd Garrison, who received scores of them, took receipt of one that declared, ‘if you persist in publishing your infamous Liberator one month longer, assassination awaits you. Think not that you can avoid the blow; as poison will accomplish what the dagger may fail of effecting.’49 Equally, when the editor Cassius Marcellus Clay launched an antislavery newspaper in 1845, he promptly received a letter warning him that ‘[t]he hemp is ready for your neck’; and the reformer Samuel May reported getting many ‘threatening letters from the South, surcharged with imprecations of vengeance, and telling me to persist in speaking and writing against slavery at the peril of my head.’50

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It would be easy to dismiss such letters, as the abolitionists often did, as nothing more than ‘a cheap method for bullying blackguards to vent their malignant spleen,’ but it would also be a mistake to do so.51 For while threatening messages directed to abolitionists were doubtless intended to harass, intimidate, and cow them in fairly direct ways, they were also predicated on a larger, if less evident, vision of society and social change. That vision understood society as an organic whole, hierarchical in nature and vulnerable to threats: from unhappy slaves, from ambitious free men and women of color, and from external agitators. Those who verbally assaulted the abolitionists and their friends understood their mission to consist in: firstly, isolating abolitionists from their networks of support; and secondly, removing them, either literally or symbolically, from society. Unlike the White Caps, theirs was not a reintegrative mission. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, who made it a point of policy to send copies of the Liberator to people in the South, received a letter calling him a ‘SON OF A BITCH,’ and telling him ‘if you ever send such papers here again, we will come and give you a good Lynching . . . So you had better keep them at home.’52 Yet it is not clear that abolitionists were any more ‘at home’ in the North than the South, given the resistance that was so often offered to them there too. Home, the abolitionists found, was often defined as a place where strangers were not welcome: hence, the number of nineteenth-century letters warning people to physically leave a given location. Thus, when the African American abolitionist William Wells Brown sought to deliver some antislavery lectures in Vermont, his host there received a letter insisting that if Brown would not ‘leave the town within twenty-four hours,’ he would be ‘carried out.’53 Abigail Gibbons, serving as a Union nurse in Maryland during the Civil War, received a letter telling her ‘you are not needed at this place and you had better leave double quick . . . you old nigger lover,’ while one Klan note from the 1860s demanding the removal of a teacher at a black school simply began: ‘Villain away!!’54 In each case, the goal was the literal displacement of a perceived threat. In 1834, while on a lecturing tour in America, the English abolitionist George Thompson received a letter informing him ‘that there is a plot in agitation to immerce you in a vat of Indelable Ink and I recommend to you to take your departure from this part of the country as soon as possable or it wil be shurely carried into operation and that to before you see the light of another son [sic passim].’55 This threatening letter, like so many others sent to abolitionists, demanded physical removal, but in this case rather than threatening physical death as a penalty for non-compliance, it promised what has often been called ‘social death’: a state of extreme abjection and loss of standing.56 To be immersed in indelible ink, that is, was to be permanently marked as ‘colored’ and, therefore, to be rendered persona non grata. This missive, surely, was intended to induce disintegrative shame. For the immersion threatened was really only a slight variation on the more common form of ritual humiliation and punishment meted out to communal offenders through the act of tarring and feathering. A medieval English practice that migrated to America in the eighteenth century, tarring and feathering had become a mainstay following the struggle between rebellious colonists and loyalist officials during the revolutionary era, when many of the latter suffered this punishment for supporting the mother country rather than the rights of the colonies. But it also flourished – rhetorically at least – during the build-up to the Civil War. Many of the letters the abolitionists received, for example, threatened them with this punishment should they not cease their activism or leave town. Thus, a flier was distributed about Boston in 1835 offering $100 to ‘the individual who shall first lay

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violent hands’ on Thompson, ‘so that he may be brought to the tar kettle before dark,’ while William Lloyd Garrison was told that anyone associated with the Liberator was ‘to be supplied with a plentiful coat of Tar & feathers,’ and warned that should there be ‘any father movements relating to Abolitionists meetyns there is a still company of some Hundrds who are ready, and the tar & Feathers will be handy [sic passim].’57 Threatening letters, moreover, were also sent to politicians in order to punish them for holding antislavery policies and to steer them away from such positions. This, surely, would account for the flood of abusive mail sent to Lincoln, so much of which touched on the issue of slavery. He was, however, far from the only recipient. John Quincy Adams, who stubbornly defied the Gag Rule forbidding antislavery petitions to be read in Congress, received a constant stream of invective from the South. ‘This is to inform you,’ ran one letter, ‘that your villanous course in Congress has been watched by the whole South, and unless you very soon change your course death will be your portion.’58 Another contained a sketch of Adams, with the word ‘abolition’ above it and ‘mene tekel upharsin [the writing is on the wall]’ inscribed in the margin; it had had a bullet fired through it.59 Likewise, in October 1864, Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson, was assailed in a barely legible screed reminding him that ‘evry dog has his day . . . and that day cannot ever come untill you are tared & fethered & burnt . . . [and] we are preparind a knise-coat of feathers for that orcation [sic passim].’60 Speaking in 1868, shortly after having received a similar note, the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens claimed to have ‘received more than a barrel of threatening letters in his time,’ and in that he was probably not alone.61 It is worth noting, however, that the stream of menacing letters sent to the abolitionists had almost no effect on them. As many historians have pointed out, antislavery activists – and especially immediatist abolitionists like Garrison, who were deeply influenced by evangelical thought – positively throve on persecution, since it reinforced their perception that they were doing righteous battle against Sin. So far from feeling isolated or outcast, they simply felt more secure within their own social sphere.62 Indeed, many of them were willing to publish the letters they received, in journals such as The Liberator; often with mocking commentary appended, thereby robbing the letters of their insidious capacity to induce private terror.63 The abolitionists were far more comfortable issuing their jeremiads through the overt medium of the press than the covert method of the private letter, to the extent that when Governor John Wise of Virginia was deluged with threatening letters from the North in the weeks leading up to the execution of John Brown, no one was more appalled than Brown himself.64 And what of African Americans themselves? Only two black-authored threatening letters have surfaced, both of apocryphal origin, and neither relating specifically to slavery.65 While African Americans may have routinely deployed the weapons of the weak under slavery – foot-dragging, thieving, poisoning, arson – as well as sometimes erupting into violent rebellion, the conditional leverage of written threats suited their needs no better than it did the abolitionists. What one takes away from an examination of the hundreds of threatening letters scattered through the nineteenth-century archive is a sense of the incredible confidence their authors felt in the power of threats and especially the power of handwritten and privately communicated threats. What is equally apparent too is that the distinctions we can draw between crime and social crime, or between community punishment and political engagement, tend to blur at the edges when we view them through the lens of these letters. The example of threatening letters as deployed in the struggle over racial politics makes that abundantly clear. What I have not yet made clear, though, is any

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sense of how, if it all, threatening letters changed over the course of the century. In this respect, the threatening letter, it is worth pointing out, was neither an American genre, nor a nineteenth-century one. Menacing messages appeared in England as early as the fourteenth century, when aristocrats and peasants deployed them for purposes both criminal and political.66 Their ‘golden age,’ moreover, was in the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth, both in Britain and, significantly, in America, where they were crucial tools in the long struggle for the colonies’ political independence.67 Much of what I have described here, in other words, might just as readily have been illustrated with materials from other countries and earlier centuries. But nonetheless, the nineteenth century did witness two signal innovations in the use of threatening letters – one toward its beginning and the other toward its end – each of which warrants scrutiny. The first of these was the large-scale migration of threatening letters concerned with moral and social infractions from the world of manuscript to the pages of newspapers. Typically framed as letters to the editor, and deploying as well as addressing pseudonymous personae, they threatened exposure and humiliation, or sometimes prosecution. Their use of scarcely-veiled identities and locations, however, often made their targets more or less self-evident to local readers. ‘Mr. Sarcastic,’ one 1822 example opens: Permit us through the medium of your highly useful paper . . . to state that a certain Miller who attends a Grist-Mill near the Woollen Factory in this town is in the constant practice of taking exorbitant tolls. This is not the only Virtue this Pious ornament of society possesses; he now and then takes it into his head to turn his wife and family out of doors. Should these malpractices be continued, his name shall certainly be made public. Wack ’em & Co. N. B. We must offer a Query. If the above can be considered WHITE actions, what will constitute BLACK ones? W. & Co.68 Importantly, such letters function in a manner similar to the handwritten White Cap letters of the late nineteenth century described earlier. The printing of threatening letters was certainly more closely tied to growing urbanization and the anonymity it afforded, but it also sought, through the use of widely read publications, to recreate the forms of localized moral surveillance and accountability that dominated smaller towns and villages, and that marked out the White Cap phenomenon.69 The public nature of letters by writers like ‘Wack ’em & Co.,’ and the often transparent identity of the individuals being lashed, specifically recalls those handwritten threatening letters that were posted publicly rather than delivered directly, and some of their coercive force too doubtless emerges from the essentially public nature of the threats being levied. This was not, strictly speaking, a nineteenth-century phenomenon – letters of this kind had appeared occasionally as early as the 1720s, primarily in larger urban centers such as Boston.70 But beginning in the 1820s, they became a dominant feature in many newspapers. Two of the more popular, if short-lived, of the early publications to foreground these letters, the Boston Castigator and the City Fire-Fly, even advertised the existence of a ‘Communication Box’ placed in the local marketplace, where such missives ‘may be deposited.’71 For all that these letters seem to reflect, or at least be couched in, the language of moral and social reform, some appeared to be more personal and more malicious in nature, while a few had more than a whiff of blackmail about them. And by the 1840s, a flourishing genre of ‘flash’ newspapers had appeared in the urban print market that charged for the insertion of such letters, many of which

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were frankly extortionate. Here the letters spread across many pages, including locales far from the point of publication.72 Because these letters were mediated by the editor and his newspaper, however, it also undermined somewhat the asymmetrical reciprocity of the traditional threatening letter, enabling the victim of such an epistle to write back in either indignation or negotiation. When the City Fire-Fly published a letter demanding a Boston woman mend her immoral ways, for example, a defender leapt to her aid. ‘Mr. Flash,’ he wrote: Please inform ‘Old Comical’ that he is KNOWN, – and that his rascally insinuations, with regard to a young lady in Middle-street are as false as the rottenhearted villain who is the author of them. Let him beware, or he will receive a more severe castigation than the pen can bestow. A friend to injured innocence.73 Doubtless some of these letters were the work of the editors themselves, written simply in order to drum up a salacious interest in the alleged misdeeds of others (the editor of the City Fire-Fly even admitted as much at one point), yet many seem to be legitimate and suggest that the printed medium of the newspaper was displacing scribality as the dominant mode of epistolary coercion, at least in regard to the leveraging of threats that could be identified as being on the right side of the law.74 The use of newspapers to negotiate or respond to threats meanwhile also plays a prominent role in the second nineteenth-century innovation in the threatening letter, which was the dramatic rise in the postbellum era of epistolary-mediated ransom kidnapping. While children had been abducted in the hundreds or possibly thousands through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were never specifically held hostage for a ransom. One of the first, most dramatic, and certainly best documented instances of this new crime was the 1874 abduction of a four-year-old child named Charley Ross from the streets of an affluent neighborhood in Philadelphia.75 Mere days after his disappearance, the child’s father, Christian Ross, received the first of what would amount to twenty-three postmarked letters, all unsigned, demanding that he pay the immense sum of $20,000 to have his child released.76 Lengthy, querulous, and seemingly deliberately misspelled to throw off identification, the kidnappers’ letters demanded that Christian indicate his assent to their terms by placing specifically worded advertisements in various Pennsylvania newspapers. When he varied the wording in an early ad to indicate that he might not be able to raise the full ransom, the letters ceased for a while; only when he had the precise words printed in a subsequent advertisement did the letters with additional instructions begin again. Although tightly scripted and bereft of room for negotiation, this was as close to ‘correspondence’ as the threatening letter scenario ever came. It was also the closest Christian ever came to finding his son, for negotiations broke down, and some time later the kidnappers were mortally wounded in the commission of an entirely unrelated crime, one of them admitting to the abduction as he bled to death. Charley was never seen again. The abduction of Charley led, before the end of the century, to several copycat cases, in each of which the kidnappers’ letters – and there were always letters – referenced the Ross abduction as a point of additional coercive leverage.77 In both the case of the flash editors’ printing of threatening letters, and the insistence of the kidnappers of Charley Ross that his father communicate through the classified columns of the daily press, we see a convergence of the manuscript composition of threatening letter and newsprint. This convergence would then reach its grisly culmination in 1878, following

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the abduction of Alexander T. Stewart. Stewart was a fabulously wealthy retail store owner who, in 1878, was already two years dead and was entombed in his family’s mausoleum. His body was stolen for ransom, however, shocking a nation that was still reeling from the spate of living abductions. Unprecedented as a crime, it also led to a wholly new form of threatening letter: one composed entirely of cut-out-and-pasted newsprint words. True, this letter was almost certainly a hoax – one of scores sent to investigators by ghouls and opportunists – but it was also a complete novelty. Scrapbooking newsprint had been a serious avocation for most of the century, both among editors and hobbyists, but it had never been used to compose an anonymous – let alone a threatening – letter.78 The compositors at the New York Times, impressed by the use to which their paper had been put, even sought to replicate the letter’s eclectic typography in reprinting the note.79 A typographic cause célèbre, the cut-and-pasted warning message would be canonized in fiction when it appeared, just a few years later, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1901–2). By this time, the remediation of script by print was complete, and there would be no further innovations in the form of the threatening letter until the era of electronic mail, which takes us far past the chronological parameters of this chapter. Indeed, a piece of this nature – one of the first to survey this immense and largely subterranean phenomenon – can unfortunately do little more than sketch the outlines of the genre, define a few of its salient traits, and discuss a handful of significant transitions in the form. A lengthier intervention might have provided more substantial and variegated case studies; discussed the growing importance of handwriting analysis in the identification of threatening letter-writers; explored the development of both state and federal laws proscribing the writing and sending of such texts; considered the significance of European traditions of threatening letter-writing and their migration to America through such groups as the Molly Maguires from Ireland and the Black Hand gangs from Italy; discussed the use of coercive pressure in the context of legitimate threatening letters, including dunning notices and diplomatic communiqués; and placed the practice of threatening letters within the broader contexts of epistolarity in America. Nonetheless, one hopes that this chapter serves as an invitation to further study of the threatening letter that will, itself, be hard to refuse.

Notes 1. Holzer, ‘Introduction,’ xxxiii. 2. Ibid. 3. G. A. Frick, Letter to Abraham Lincoln, 14 February 1861, in Holzer, Dear Mr. Lincoln, 341. To put a spider in one’s dumpling was to do another an injury, and sometimes, more specifically, to threaten poisoning. See Payne, ‘A Word-List,’ 361. 4. ‘An Hour with Mr. Lincoln,’ 5. 5. See, for example: Gunderson, ‘Threats and Coercion’; Luckenbill, ‘Compliance Under Threat of Severe Punishment’; Altman, ‘Divorcing Threats and Offers.’ 6. Feinberg, Harm to Self, 189. 7. See ibid. 189–95. 8. Newcomb, ‘Threatening and Punishment,’ 1,448. 9. For a seminal account of the rational-critical function of anonymity in North America see Warner, Letters of the Republic. 10. Ku Klux Klan, Letter to Davie Jeems, c. 1868, n.pag. 11. Quoted in Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, 2: 164.

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12. ‘The Reign of Prejudice,’ 175; quoted in Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 103; North, History of Augusta, 358; quoted in Jackson, History of the American People, 173. 13. Anonymous, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 4 October 1807, in Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Founders Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015); Anonymous, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 25 August 1808, in ibid. (last accessed 22 September 2015). 14. Quoted in Buckley, ‘The Case Against Ned Buntline,’ 266. 15. Quoted in Wade, Fiery Cross, 64. 16. In separate incidents, both Harriet Beecher Stowe and the abolitionist Lewis Tappan received the severed ear of a slave in the mail. See Frick, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, 5. 17. Anonymous, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 19 September 1808, in Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Founders Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015); quoted in Wade, Fiery Cross, 48. 18. Anonymous, Letter to Matthias B. Tallmadge, 19 July 1809, n.pag. 19. Quoted in Elliott, Color-Blind Justice, 157. 20. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 54. 21. Scott, Weapons of the Week, passim. 22. Thompson, ‘The Crime of Anonymity,’ 255. 23. ‘Daring Villainy,’ 3. 24. Palmer, Explanation, 122. 25. ‘Curious Case of Attempted Extortion,’ 2. 26. ‘Correspondence of the Republic,’ 3. 27. See Pitkin and Cordasco, The Black Hand; and for a significant updating, Lombardo, The Black Hand. 28. For a helpful summary, see Lea, ‘Social Crime Revisited.’ 29. See Taylor, Liberty Men, 192–24, 223–4. 30. Ibid. 193. 31. Quoted in McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era, 18. 32. Quoted in Summerhill, Harvest of Dissent, 60. 33. Quoted in McCurry, ‘Women Numerous and Armed,’ 37. 34. Quoted in Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 169. 35. Ibid. 36. Quoted in Murphy, Argument of Franklin B. Gowen, 109. 37. See Yacovone, ‘The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment,’ 43, 45. 38. See, for example, Thompson, Customs in Common, 467–538, and Palmer, ‘Discordant Music.’ 39. On the spread of White Capping, see Cummings, ‘Community, Violence, and the Nature of Change,’ and Palmer, ‘Discordant Music,’ 39–49. 40. Quoted in Noble, ‘White Caps,’ 71. 41. See, for example, Braithwaite, Crime, Shame, and Reintegration. 42. On the significance of petitioning, see Bogin, ‘Petitioning and the New Moral Economy,’ and Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship. On the legitimacy of mob action, which was always a more fraught ideological practice, see Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, and Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy. 43. Quoted in Pedley, History of Newfoundland, 293. 44. Filo Liburtus, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 17 January 1809, in Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Founders Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 45. Anonymous, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 19 September 1808, in ibid. (last accessed 22 September 2015). 46. See Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 166. 47. ‘The Reign of Prejudice,’ 175.

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48. Quoted in Whites, ‘You Can’t Change History,’ 223. 49. ‘Short Metre,’ 171. 50. Quoted in Richardson, Cassius Marcellus Clay, 46; quoted in Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Fifth Annual Report, v. 51. ‘Threats and Personal Danger,’ 129. 52. ‘Polite Letters from the South,’ 25. 53. Quoted in Johnston, Looking Back from the Sunset Land, 268. 54. Quoted in McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, 171; quoted in Wade, Fiery Cross, 48. 55. Quoted in Stone, ‘George Thompson,’ 120. 56. For a seminal account of social death see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 38–76. 57. Quoted in Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 104; ‘Two Epistles,’ 147; ‘Boston: Saturday, November 21, 1835,’ 187. For the case of an actual tarring and feathering of an abolitionist, see ‘The Lynching of Mr. Phillips,’ 105. 58. ‘Continued from No. 13,’ 209. 59. Ibid. 60. ‘Jeff Davis,’ Letter to Andrew Johnson, 24 October 1864, in Johnson, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, 7: 246. 61. Thropp, ‘An Interview,’ 4. 62. On abolitionist solidarity in the face of persecution see Friedman, Gregarious Saints. 63. It is worth stressing that the abolitionists, more than probably any other social group in antebellum America, fully understood the affordances and drawbacks of postal culture, which they had exploited to brilliant, if controversial, effect in their various mailing campaigns of the 1830s. On these postal campaigns see John, Spreading the News, 257–80. 64. See McGinty, John Brown’s Trial, 241–2. 65. See Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 116, and ‘A Race War Imminent,’ 6. 66. See Stones, ‘The Folvilles,’ 134, and Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 201–2. 67. On the threatening letter in eighteenth-century England see Thompson, ‘The Crime of Anonymity.’ I am currently completing a history of the threatening letter in the anglophone Atlantic World of the long eighteenth century that will cover the North American example in detail for the first time. 68. ‘Fair Dealings,’ 3. 69. For more on this rural model, see Hansen, ‘The Power of Talk.’ 70. See Clark, The Public Prints, 136. 71. ‘A Communication Box,’ 3; ‘City Fire-Fly,’ 1. 72. See Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press, 23. 73. ‘For the Fire-Fly,’ 3. 74. See ‘Editor’s Misery,’ 2. 75. My overview of the Ross case draws on Fass, Kidnapped, 21–56. 76. The kidnappers’ letters are reproduced lithographically in Ross, The Father’s Story of Charley Ross. 77. See Alix, Ransom Kidnapping in America, 10–22. 78. The prehistory of this cutting-and-pasting is discussed by Garvey in Writing with Scissors, but her work makes no reference to its use in anonymous letters. 79. See ‘A. T. Stewart’s Body Found,’ 2. As the New York Times would note over a century later, the actual practice of cutting and pasting threatening notes has always been more common in fiction than in fact (see Lidz, ‘We’re Holding Your Plot Device,’ 12).

Works Cited Alix, E. K. (1978), Ransom Kidnapping in America, 1874–1974: The Creation of a Capital Crime, London: Ferrer & Simons. Altman, S. (1996), ‘Divorcing Threats and Offers,’ Law and Philosophy, 15: 209–26.

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Anonymous (1809), Letter to Matthias B. Tallmadge, 19 July, Matthias B. Tallmadge Papers, NewYork Historical Society, New York City, MS 612, Box 1, Folder 4, (last accessed 22 September 2015). ‘A. T. Stewart’s Body Found’ (1878), New York Times, 15 November, 1–2. Bogin, R. (1988), ‘Petitioning and the New Moral Economy of Post-Revolutionary America,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 45: 391–425. ‘Boston: Saturday, November 21, 1835’ (1835), The Liberator, 21 November, 187. Braithwaite, J. (1989), Crime, Shame, and Reintegration, New York: Cambridge University Press. Buckley, P. G. (1998), ‘The Case Against Ned Buntline: The “Words, Signs, and Gestures” of Popular Authorship,’ Prospects, 13: 249–72. ‘City Fire-Fly’ (1822), The City Fire-Fly, 23 November, 1. Clark, C. E. (1994), The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740, New York: Oxford University Press. Cohen, P. C., T. J. Gilfoyle, and H. L. Horowitz (2008), The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, Chicago: Chicago University Press. ‘A Communication Box’ (1822), Boston Castigator, 21 August, 3. ‘Continued from No. 13’ (1842), Congressional Globe, 12 February, 209. ‘Correspondence of the Republic’ (1849), The Republic, 4 July, 3. Cummings, W. J. (1988), ‘Community, Violence, and the Nature of Change: Whitecapping in Sevier County, Tennessee, During the 1890s,’ MA Thesis, University of Tennessee. ‘Curious Case of Attempted Extortion’ (1849), New-York Tribune, 15 March, 2. ‘Daring Villainy’ (1812), American Watchman and Delaware Republican, 15 February, 3. Dunphy, T., and T. J. Cummins, eds. (1882), Remarkable Trials of all Countries, 2 vols., New York: S. S. Peloubet. ‘Editor’s Misery’ (1822), City Fire-Fly, 16 November, 2. Elliott, M. (2006), Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality, from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson, New York: Oxford University Press. ‘Fair Dealings’ (1822), Boston Castigator, 11 December, 3. Fass, P. S. (1997), Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America, New York: Oxford University Press. Feinberg, J. (1986), Harm to Self, New York: Oxford University Press. ‘For the Fire-Fly’ (1822), City Fire-Fly, 26 October, 3. Frick, J. W. (2012), ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ on the American Stage and Screen, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedman, L. J. (1982), Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870, New York: Cambridge University Press. Garvey, E. G. (2013), Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, New York: Oxford University Press. Gilje, P. A. (1987), The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Gunderson, M. (1979), ‘Threats and Coercion,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 9: 247–59. Hansen, K. V. (1993), ‘The Power of Talk in Antebellum New England,’ Agricultural History, 67: 43–64. Harris, L. M. (2003), In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holzer, H., ed. (1993), Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Holzer, H. (1998), ‘Introduction,’ in H. Holzer (ed.), The Lincoln Mailbag: America Writes to the President, 1861–1865, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, xxvii–xxxvi. ‘An Hour with Mr. Lincoln’ (1860), New-York Daily Tribune, 20 November, 5. Jefferson, T. (1743–1826), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Founders Online, The National Archive and University of Virginia Press, (last accessed 22 September 2015).

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John, R. R. (1995), Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnson, A. (1967–99), The Papers of Andrew Johnson, 16 vols., ed. L. P. Graf and R. W. Haskins, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Johnson, P. (1997), A History of the American People, New York: Harper Collins. Johnston, N. R. (1898), Looking Back from the Sunset Land, or, People Worth Knowing, Oakland, CA: n.p. Justice, S. (1994), Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381, Berkeley: University of California Press. Keckley, E. [1868] (2005), Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, ed. W. L. Andrews, New York: Penguin. Ku Klux Klan (c. 1868), Letter to Davie Jeems, n.d., Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York City, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Lea, J. (1999), ‘Social Crime Revisited,’ Theoretical Criminology, 3: 307–25. Lidz, F. (2011), ‘We’re Holding Your Plot Device. If You Want It Back, Send Us . . .,’ New York Times, July 3, 12. Lombardo, R. M. (2010), The Black Hand: Terror by Letter in Chicago, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Luckenbill, D. F. (1982), ‘Compliance under Threat of Severe Punishment,’ Social Forces, 60: 811–25. ‘The Lynching of Mr. Phillips’ (1855), The Liberator, 6 July, 105. Maier, P. (1972), From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776, New York: Vintage. Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1837), Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Boston: Isaac Knapp. McCurdy, C. W. (2001), The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839–1865, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. McCurry, S. (2013), ‘Women Numerous and Armed: The Confederate Food Riots in Historical Perspective,’ OAH Magazine of History, 27: 35–9. McGinty, B. (2009), John Brown’s Trial, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McPherson, J. M. (2014), The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Merrill, W. M. (1963), Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Murphy, D. F. (1875), Argument of Franklin B. Gowen, Esq. Before the Joint Committee of the Legislature of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: Helfenstein, Lewis, & Greene. Newcomb, H. (1842), ‘Threatening and Punishment,’ Weekly Messenger, 31 August, 1448. Noble, M. (1973), ‘The White Caps of Harrison and Crawford County, Indiana: A Study of the Violent Enforcement of Morality,’ Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan. North, J. W. (1870), The History of Augusta from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Augusta, ME: Clapp and North. Palmer, B. D. (1978), ‘Discordant Music: Charivaris and Whitecapping in Nineteenth-Century North America,’ Labour/Le Travailleur, 3: 5–62. Palmer, J. C. R., Jr. (1831), Explanation; or Eighteen Hundred and Thirty, Boston: S. N. Dickinson. Patterson, O. (1982), Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Payne, L. W. (1909), ‘A Word-List from East Alabama,’ Bulletin of the University of Texas, 123: 1–391. Pedley, C. (1863), The History of Newfoundland, from the Earliest Times to the Year 1860, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green.

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Pitkin, T. M., and F. Cordasco (1977), The Black Hand: A Chapter in Ethnic Crime, Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams. ‘Polite Letters from the South’ (1839), The Liberator, 15 February, 25. ‘A Race War Imminent’ (1886), Columbus Enquirer-Sun, 9 November, 6. ‘The Reign of Prejudice’ (1833), The Abolitionist, 1: 175. Richardson, E. H. (1976), Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Ross, C. K. (1878), The Father’s Story of Charley Ross, Philadelphia: John E. Potter & Co. Scott, J. C. (1985), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ‘Short Metre’ (1831), The Liberator, 22 October, 171. Stone, Z. E. (1883), ‘George Thompson in Lowell,’ Contributions of the Old Residents’ Historical Association, Lowell, Mass., 2: 112–32. Stones, E. L. G. (1957), ‘The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville, Leicestershire, and their Associates in Crime, 1326–1347,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7: 117–36. Summerhill, T. (2005), Harvest of Dissent: Agrarianism in Nineteenth-Century New York, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Taylor, A. (1990), Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Thompson, E. P. (1975), ‘The Crime of Anonymity,’ in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, J. G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and C. Winslow (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in EighteenthCentury England, New York: Pantheon, 255–324. Thompson, E. P. (1993), Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, New York: New Press. ‘Threats and Personal Danger’ (1832), Genius of Universal Emancipation, 2: 129. Thropp, M. E. (1868), ‘An Interview with Thaddeus Stevens,’ Daily Alta California, 13 July, 4. ‘Two Epistles’ (1835), The Liberator, 12 September, 147. Wade, W. C. (1987), The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America, New York: Oxford University Press. Warner, M. (1990), The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whites, L. (2004), ‘You Can’t Change History by Moving a Rock: Gender, Race, and the Cultural Politics of Confederate Memorialization,’ in A. Fahs and J. Waugh (eds.), The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 213–36. Wilentz, S. (1986), Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing’ (1862), Sunday Mercury, 22 June, 7. Yacovone, D. (2001), ‘The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, the Pay Crisis, and the “Lincoln Despotism,” ’ in M. H. Blatt, T. J. Brown, and D. Yacovone (eds.), Hope & Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 35–51. Zaeske, S. (2003), Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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10 LONGING IN LONG-DISTANCE LETTERS: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND NOW William Merrill Decker

F

rom pre-modern times forward, the letter has offered practitioners the means to cultivate intimate relations across space and to affirm a continuing distant presence under conditions of mutual absence. Such absent presence (or present absence) has figured historically as the genre’s core theme, reminding correspondents of their status as mortal beings at risk of sudden reciprocal loss. Not surprisingly, individuals exchanging across continents and oceans were particularly prone to developing this theme. But beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, innovations in transport and communications technologies along with the West’s bureaucratic commitment to postal efficiencies at home and abroad greatly mitigated the isolation described by pre-modern correspondents.1 In the travel letters of Margaret Fuller, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams, for example, one notes a burgeoning confidence in the epistolary inscription’s power to extend the self’s presence across space and through time, even as the age-old pain of isolation associated with the letter-writer’s existential status continues to be expressed. In view of the nineteenthcentury technological developments that support such confidence, and in view of our current naturalization to the electronic mediation of the interpersonal bond, this chapter examines evolutions in long-distance human relationships when correspondence over vast geographic space becomes routine. As nineteenth-century correspondents became ever more modern and mobile, how did they sustain rapport across the spatiotemporal divide? Did they long for each other with antique intensity? Or, in their proficient adjustment to geographic dispersion, did absence begin to disappear amid gradations of virtual presence? Then and now, to what extent does the correspondent’s loneliness in time and space still haunt and inform the epistolary act? Before engaging such questions, however, it is worth underscoring that our discussion takes place on the far side of thresholds none of the writers discussed in this chapter foresaw, much less crossed. To exchange language as efficiently with people on other continents as with someone sitting across the hall calls into question the meaning of ‘distance’ and alerts us not only to the attenuated requirement of bodily presence in twenty-first-century human relationships but also to the diminished presumption that such presence is the sine qua non of interpersonal rapport. As the lavishly invoked object of longing, the addressee’s live physicality exists as the tropological center of much pre-electronic correspondence. This is not to suggest that nineteenth-century correspondents naïvely confused ‘bodily’ with ‘full’ presence or conceived face-to-face conversation as unmediated communication, however prolifically the dream of immersion in another’s being may flourish on the letter sheet. Nor is it to suggest that this 171

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dream is lost to contemporary correspondents. Still, the distant body’s inaccessibility has been dramatically mitigated in the modern era. For those able to afford transport, one mitigation comes in the form of a rail or air boarding pass: even when such options are not exercised, to know that there exist means rapidly to traverse space renders even hemispheric distance much less forbidding than formerly. Moreover, when separation of parties is unavoidable, the power of technology to deliver text, image, and voice goes far to relieve the isolation described in pre-electronic letters. The synchronicity of instant messaging and mobile phone text-and-imaging all but eliminates the temporal lag associated with the letter exchange. Although email preserves the asynchronous rhythms of epistolary conversation, and thus the anxiety of not knowing why one’s message is not answered, in general the lag is shorter and email remains only one of several ways to reach the partner in the exchange. Neither Fuller nor Twain nor Adams possessed a crystal ball in which the Internet appeared. But that is not to say that they were not each fully capable of imagining synchronous disembodied contact with the epistolary partners for whom they longed over an oceanic or a continental distance. As prolific authors who wrote for what they visualized as national and international audiences, their horizons were shaped by the expansive reach of print capitalism; their mobility as habitual and ambitious travelers complemented their presence by virtue of the printed page.2 Active at a time when great technological developments were afoot, all three delineate a desire that plays a motivating role in the genealogy of contemporary telecommunications – a longing for instant immersive contact to which contemporary digital technology exists as the partial fulfillment.3 In Amherst, Massachusetts on 25 September 1845, Emily Dickinson begins a letter to Abiah Root in nearby Springfield with the following lines: ‘I long to see you, dear Abiah, and speak with you face to face; but so long as a bodily interview is denied us, we must make letters answer, though it is hard for friends to be separated.’4 As a characterization of epistolary occasions that predate electronic modalities of virtual presence, this passage penned by a sheltered fifteen-year-old might serve as a definition of ‘long distance,’ reminding us that geography as objectively measured remains distance as subjectively experienced. The word ‘long’ here is a spatiotemporal term, as Dickinson affirms that time must pass before (if ever) they meet again. ‘Bodily’ enthrones the material person as the prime medium of communication; ‘interview,’ used in the nineteenth century interchangeably with ‘conversation,’ emphasizes the non-verbal visual exchange accompanying face-to-face interlocution. Dickinson’s remedy to the problem of separation is to write ‘a long, long letter,’ as though to fill up the space between herself and her correspondent.5 In her extreme abhorrence of geographical distance, she frames the predicament of the nineteenth-century letter-writer, a predicament shared with those for whom space existed as invitation. Twenty years Dickinson’s senior, and similarly the child of an upper-middle-class New England home, Margaret Fuller traveled ambitiously and (finances permitting) at will. Like Dickinson, she was the daughter of an attorney elected to the U.S. Congress; for both, the father’s Washington residence occasioned a childhood visit south. Whereas Dickinson’s excursion would be the one venture outside her native Massachusetts, Fuller’s counted as the first of many travels. By her early twenties Dickinson had consigned herself to the fastness of her Amherst home; at the same age Fuller chafed in her confinement to greater Boston and dreamed of embarking on a Grand

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Tour for the purpose of gathering materials for a biography of Goethe. Europe would have to wait until her mid-thirties, but in the meantime she moved with ease among Boston, Providence, and New York, and in 1843 traveled to Illinois and Wisconsin to experience first-hand the landscapes of the upper Midwest and to document conditions of recently displaced Native American communities. A dozen letters survive from the three-month adventure that formed the basis of Summer on the Lakes (1843) and although she confesses to moments of homesickness – ‘what can be so forlorn in its forlorn parts as this travelling?’ she laments to Emerson in August – at no point in these letters does the distance between herself and her addressee figure as perilous or forbidding (LMF, 3: 143). Aware of the time it must take her missives to reach their destinations and mindful of the possibility that anything posted is liable to miscarry, she never registers a doubt that most of her letters will arrive in good order or that she will reunite with family and friends. Having kept up a vibrant correspondence with James Freeman Clarke during his six-year residence in Louisville, Kentucky, she had no reason to think overland mail would not go through.6 For Fuller, it would take more than geography to disrupt a relationship. Not until 1845 does distance for Fuller become affectively distressing and tropologically dynamic – become, in a word, long. These developments occur when she herself is a comparatively fixed point and her exchange partner, James Nathan, is the traveling party. Relations with Nathan, the German–Jewish businessman with whom Fuller fell in love just after publication of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), would prove unsustainable for many reasons, chief among them Nathan’s decision to return to Europe (mistress in tow) and his inability to reciprocate the volume and intensity of Fuller’s epistolary attentions.7 Little remains of Nathan’s side of the correspondence, but Fuller’s letters characterize the distance between them as much more than objective space that bodies (people or letters) might traverse as opportunity avails. In her strained relations with Emerson, Fuller had learned of interpersonal spaces that could not be crossed, but there had never been a fatal lapse in the exchange by which they negotiated boundaries. As a friend, Emerson would prove highly reliable if reliably disappointing.8 Fuller’s letters to Nathan, on the other hand, reflect the dilemma of being attached to a person who lacks Emerson’s frank responsiveness and whose obscure movements and irregular pen thwart Fuller’s efforts to discern his itinerary. As well, her letters exhibit the tendency of desperate longing to idealize its absent object, flawed as that object is known to be. ‘Lost too soon, too long; where art thou, where wander thy steps and where thy mind this day?’ Fuller begins a letter of April 1846, conveying, beneath uncertainty as to his geographic location, fear that Nathan has set himself at an impenetrable remove (LMF, 4: 204). ‘I have felt,’ she goes on to confess, ‘these last four days, a desire for you that amounted almost to anguish’ (LMF, 4: 204). To the degree that she suspects Nathan’s absence may be permanent, representations of space in her letters are fraught with anguish and compensatory metaphysics. She imagines distance as permeable by means of telepathy and angelic intervention. ‘Do you bless me when you receive this and bend your mind to have me feel it,’ she closes one letter, and concludes another: ‘When you receive this breathe a prayer that I may be sustained and aided by the Angels, for just now I need aid’ (LMF, 4: 180, 191). The uncharacteristically abject tone, the request for prayer and telepathic replies that arrive immaterially and instantaneously, not only demonstrate Fuller’s despair of her correspondent but also her impatience with a medium that formerly met the needs of friendship.

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Alongside her routine confidence that what she posts will arrive, Fuller had never lost sight of the fallibility of the letter in its slow, accident-prone, material exchange – an awareness that dates from childhood, when she suspects at one point that her congressman father’s letters may have been lost in shipwreck.9 Her concern with the tendency of letters to miscarry deepens as she becomes increasingly a partner in transatlantic correspondences (hence the plea for telepathy), but so too does her tendency to fetishize the artifact that succeeds in arriving from afar. Several months into her troubled correspondence with Nathan, Fuller registers the power of the letter as the absent beloved’s extension, his physical and spiritual metonym: ‘I thought when you went letters would be nothing after the fulness of living intercourse, but already I begin to want them very much and be disconsolate to think I can receive none for near a month yet’ (LMF, 4: 116). In his absence letters have become everything and serve as the basis on which she idealizes the relationship as it enters what she recognizes as its posthumous phase: ‘We have been much to one another, and, should we never meet again in bodily presence, precious realities must ensue to both of us from the past meeting’ (LMF, 4: 122). The one medium of those ‘precious realities’ is the letter sheet: ‘with pleasure inexpressible I have at last received your letters. At last!’ (LMF, 4: 133). In the full flush of his letters’ arrival she imagines a unity that exists despite – if not indeed by virtue of – transoceanic bodily separation. ‘All day it was sweet, yet toward nightfall it grew oppressively sad. I longed to be summoned by your voice,’ Fuller writes three days after receiving the packet, uncertain, or so her shifting verb tenses suggest, as to Nathan’s temporal position in her life: ‘Your thoughts are growing in my mind, the influence of your stronger organization has at times almost transfused mine, and has effected some permanent changes there, there have been moments when our minds were blended in one’ (LMF, 4: 141). Yet what she characterizes as this immersion-in-separation betrays strain, and the elegiac past tense (‘were blended’) confirms a separation that, in the months ahead, will become absolute. In August 1846, Fuller began her four-year residence in Europe as a New York Tribune foreign correspondent. Accompanied by her friends Marcus and Rebecca Spring, she conducted a six-month reconnaissance of England, Scotland, and France, meeting with such luminaries as Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Joseph Mazzini, George Sand, Adam Mickiewicz, and Félicité-Robert de Lamennais, before proceeding to Rome, where she bade farewell to the Springs and began a new life as an expatriate, partisan of Italian independence, war correspondent, field hospital organizer, mother, and wife. Her life would transform so rapidly as to render the idea that she might return to her previous roles in New York and Boston unthinkable. Given, in this period, her frequent isolation even from members of her European circle (including her husband, Giovanni Ossoli, whose service to the republican cause necessitated frequent absence), relationship with them via letter sheet sometimes became as common for her as relationship by face-to-face contact. But letter-sheet was the only option when communicating with American family and friends from whom her complex European experience – not only the ‘scandal’ of motherhood and marriage which she concealed as long as she could, but her involvement in revolution – had left her estranged. To her old and formerly intimate friend, Caroline Sturgis, she writes as follows in January 1848, in the early days of pregnancy: When I arrived in Rome, I was at first intoxicated to be here. The weather was beautiful, and many circumstances combined to place me in a kind of passive, childlike well-being. That is all over now, and, with this year, I enter upon a

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sphere of my destiny so difficult, that I, at present, see no way out, except through the gate of death. It is useless to write of it; you are at a distance and cannot help me; – whether accident or angel will, I have no intimation. (LMF, 5: 43) In declaring ‘[i]t is useless to write of it,’ Fuller underscores the difference in communicability distance makes. Whether or not it would even be possible for her to find phrasing adequate to express her life’s true difficulties, she is so far removed from her correspondent that she feels powerless to make the attempt. Fuller faces that same burden when she writes to William H. Channing on 23 November 1848, two months after the birth of her son: I do not write you of myself because there is too much to tell. There are things I long for you to know but in the right way, all the scene grouped and colored as I could give it if we passed two or three days together. Let me say when we shall pass two or three days together. Is that too much for me to count on in life? (LMF, 5: 155). Despite her longing to reunite with friends and communicate some portion of the ‘too much to tell,’ she is more darkly confident of ‘if’ than of ‘when.’ Inadequate as the letter sheet has become in conveying the substance of her life, Fuller has become perilously dependent on overseas mail for both financial and emotional support, and her epistolary writing reflects the economic and material dimension of the exchange as well as its role in sustaining a fragile rapport with loved ones. A tone of desperation recurs in the face of insecure and expensive postal communications and, beyond that, the highly tenuous banking arrangements by which she is paid in Italy for work performed in the New York Tribune’s employ. ‘This is the only letter I have from any member of my family for near four months,’ she writes to her brother Richard, an important member of her home support community, in August 1848: ‘I do not know what will become of me, if I do not, in the course of Sept[embe]r receive the money either from you or [the Tribune] . . . It makes me heart-sick to think how long I have waited and of the uncertainty of correspondence at this distance’ (LMF, 5: 103). Money and mortality merge thematically in this and other letters in which effusions of need and longing are themselves constrained by the economics of the letter sheet: ‘Goodbye, my dear Richard, much shall I have to say, if ever we meet again, but three sheets of paper (and I pay eighty cents to get one to you) come to an end in a moment’ (LMF, 5: 104). In her penury and isolation, incoming letters, along with whatever specie and encouragement they contain, constitute a lifeline. But they constitute as well what she imagines as the one probable link to her transatlantic contacts so long as she remains alive. Her more than geographical separation is a constant theme in the letters she wrote during the two years before her attempt to bring her family ‘home’ to New York City ended in shipwreck and death. Yet no clairvoyance was strictly required for her to write Emerson on 10 June 1849, a year before her ship sailed, the following portentous lines: Should I never return, – and sometimes I despair of doing so, it seems so far off, so difficult, I am caught in such a net of ties here . . . I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself; the degree of profit to which, amid great difficulties, I have put the time, at least in the way of observation. Meanwhile, love me all you can: let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp. (LMF, 5: 240)

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The shifting verb tenses in this passage compel attention: the conditional framing of her probable death and the hypothesis of a completed life as it enters the past tense of a self-authored obituary, followed by the present-tense imperative ‘love me,’ the injunction to extend welcoming hands which it may or may not be in her power to grasp. A year later, about to embark, she reciprocates the Springs’ expressed desire to see her, aware that such longing must be qualified by questions regarding her status as mother and wife: ‘I long too to embrace my loved friends at home. Since my face was turned towards them I long much’ (LMF, 6: 87). But dread of the ocean, and fear of what she properly imagines as the estranged position to which scandal has brought her in the lives of those for whom she longs, unite in the general tone of foreboding that these last letters dispatched from Europe convey. In keeping with the anxious negotiation of family ties that we see in Fuller’s correspondence, Twain’s earliest extant letter, written from New York City on 24 August 1853, and addressed to Jane Lampton Clemens in Hannibal, Missouri, begins: ‘My Dear Mother: you will doubtless be a little surprised, and somewhat angry when you receive this, and find me so far from home’ (MTL1, 3). As though taking a page from the early life of Benjamin Franklin, Twain had left his sister’s home in St. Louis at the age of seventeen and traveled east to New York City, and thereafter to Philadelphia, finding temporary work as a printer in both cities. Unlike Franklin, though, who lacked both the means and the inclination to communicate with his family in Boston, Twain wrote copiously to his relations in the Mississippi Valley, and the letter of 24 August, along with others to follow, would be shared with his brother Orion, a printer and editor, before subsequently appearing in Hannibal and Muscatine newspapers. In the years ahead, Twain would post letters from Nevada, California, Hawaii, Europe, and the Levant. Some of this correspondence was expressly personal while some was produced under contract with West and East Coast newspapers. His first two major publications, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), document his extensive travel and draw upon his ceaseless activity as a roving journalist. Travel, observation of life in distant lands, and authorship are bound inextricably in the career of ‘Mark Twain,’ the stage Westerner Samuel Clemens fabricated as he privately assimilated to the genteel culture of the East Coast. While Twain’s early letters home occasionally cite symptoms of traveler’s fatigue, they express little homesickness or longing for familiar faces. Nor do they agonize over the inevitable letters – outgoing and incoming – lost in transit over the distances separating correspondents. ‘I don’t prepay postage. Letters are too uncertain,’ he writes to his mother from Constantinople in September 1867, concluding a letter in which he has prepared an inventory of dispatches to the Alta California, the newspaper in which much of Innocents Abroad first appeared (MTL2, 89). While concerned that some letters may have miscarried, he operates, as do many of his contemporaries, on the principle that a sufficiently prolific production of letters assures that some will arrive at their destinations. In the correspondence predating his courtship of and marriage to Olivia Langdon, geographical distance and separation from intimates do not figure as grievous issues. Instead, his letters depict a traveler for whom it has become second nature to traverse spaces and sustain absences under uncomfortable, unsanitary, and perilous conditions. Beginning, however, with the intense attachment he formed with Olivia, the sister of a fellow tourist aboard the USS Quaker City, distance and absence emerge as motifs to which he would devote obsessive and inventive attention.

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Twain’s letters to Olivia not only reflect the mileage separating one from another as he built his reputation as an itinerant lecturer, but also the distance dividing a man of frontier origins from a woman ten years his junior, whose personality reflects a distinctly sheltered, privileged, church-going, provincial, upper-middle-class Eastern culture. His courtship letters exhibit the consciousness of someone who, in the first blush of national celebrity founded on the persona of a Western raconteur given to wry, rustic, vernacular humor, must refine his manners and mend his skepticism to make himself acceptable to the pious Olivia. In volume and intensity, these letters showcase an idiom and set of themes that do not figure in his previous correspondence. Two days after extracting a conditional consent from Livy’s parents to marry their daughter, for example, Twain writes from New York City a letter that engages in an incantatory repetition of her name and that expresses an obsessive concern with her health, sleep, nutrition, moods, and general vitality: I slept well – & when I woke my first thought was of you, of course, & I was so sorry I was not going to see you at breakfast. I hope & believe you slept well, also, for you were restful & at peace, darling, when I saw you last. You needed rest, & you still need it, for you have been so harassed, & so persecuted with conflicting thoughts of late – I could see it, dear, though I tried so hard to think my anxiety might be misleading my eyes. Do put all perplexing reflections, all doubts & fears, far from you for a little while, Livy, for I dread, dread, dread to hear you are sick. (LMT2, 289) This is one of many love letters of the period marked by a frantic effusiveness, as though the flood of words addressed in absentia might succeed in conjuring her outof-body presence. ‘Good-bye, Livy,’ Clemens closes this letter. ‘All this time I have felt just as if you were here with me, almost – & part of the time as if I could see you standing by me. But you are vanished!’ (LMT2, 291). Before and after their marriage, Clemens had many opportunities to write in this vein, given his increasing success as author and public personality and his need for an income derived from lecture tours, an activity he wished to curtail but that financial exigencies necessitated. Easy and familiar as these letters may be, touched by a clownish and doting humor, they are haunted by an awareness of the irreducible distances that persist even between two people who love each other intensely – a recognition that they are always two and never one. At times this acknowledgment of existential separation comes across in Twain’s characterization of Livy as angelic and otherworldly, a trope in keeping with the period’s patriarchal conception of the wife as ‘angel in the house,’ but that in Twain’s usage evinces his concern over the state of Livy’s chronically fragile health. On receiving from her a porcelaintype portrait while on tour in Cleveland, Twain expatiates in language that combines euphoria over such virtual presence with nagging anxiety over her mortality: ‘Oh, Livy darling, I could just worship that picture, it is so beautiful . . . There is that deep spiritual look . . . that far away look that I have noted before when I wondered in my secret heart if you were not communing with the inhabitants of another sphere’ (MTL3, 61). In his not-so-secret heart Twain worries (and will continue to worry until her death in 1904) that she is not long for this world. The letter closes with the good-night ritual typical of dispatches to Livy, the writing of which generally occupied the hour before he went to bed: ‘I kiss the beautiful picture, & send another winging its way down the night wind to seek you out & set you wondering in your dreams who touched your lips’ (MTL3, 65).

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To be immersed in the beloved object despite physical separation is a recurrent theme in letters of friendship and love. In Twain’s letters such immersion can take comic and ingenious form. Responding to what must have been Livy’s characterization of how he is always with her even when he is away, Twain writes as follows on 2 March 1869: ‘Bless you I am glad to be in your apple sauce – or even in your soup, Livy – for it is a sign that I am in your thoughts, & therefore in your heart, the daintiest mansion that ever I inhabited, my darling. And I pray that its doors may never be closed against me until one or the other of us shall go forth forever from among the living’ (MTL3, 131). This passage is remarkable for the speed with which metonym follows metonym – food (applesauce, soup), thoughts, heart (as seat of affection) – until we arrive at Livy figured as the mansion in which the author wishes to dwell and endeavors to be worthy of doing so pro tempore. Twain proceeds quickly from lighthearted banter concerning his presence in Livy’s dishes to a concession that he fears banishment from her affections to the somber acknowledgment that death must eventually finalize separation. Again and again, geographical distance and the epistolary genre provide Twain the means of such a recognition, even as he affirms his unfailing devotion and the couple’s inseparable bond. This strain achieves striking articulation in a letter dated 14 December 1873. By this time the couple had been married two and a half years. In addition to enduring Twain’s meteoric success and the absences his career entailed, they have had two children, lost their first-born, Langdon, and are now expecting a third. A travel-weary Twain pens his letter following a busy autumn during which Livy has accompanied him to England. There, in addition to lecturing, Twain has been supervising the printing of The Gilded Age (1873) and attending to copyright claims. When production of the book encounters delay, Livy insists on returning to Hartford. Escorting her on the return voyage, Clemens hardly spends a week in the U.S. before re-crossing the Atlantic to monitor developments of the book in press. Absent now as the holidays approach, he writes to Livy with an affection equal to that of his courtship letters, but also with a seasoned awareness of their twoness and the distances that intervene between the couple wherever they may be. It is commonplace, as I have already suggested, for people to speak on letter sheet with an intimacy impossible in face-to-face conversation; we have seen this in the letters Fuller pens to James Nathan, and we will see it again in the letters Henry Adams writes to Elizabeth Cameron. But in the effusions Twain inscribes to Livy during his 1874 Christmas absence in Great Britain he both affirms and illuminates that paradox: My own little darling, my peerless wife, I am simply mad to see you. You don’t know how I love you – you never will. Because you do all the gushing yourself, when we are together, & so there is no use in two of us doing it – & one gusher usually silences another – but an ocean is between us, now, & I have to gush . . . You must forgive me for not talking all I feel when I am at home, honey. I do feel it, even if I don’t talk it. Will you remember that? Will you remember it & not feel harshly when I do not utter it? (MTL5, 518) One needs few biographical details to infer a context: the couple has had problems finding time to be together and there have been asymmetries in their intimate discourse when they do. For Twain, this has led to a fatalistic acceptance that Livy, at least, will never sound the depths of a devotion that, for all his effusiveness, he can never quite state (‘You don’t know . . . you never will’). The mood of this dispatch dominates

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those that follow in the month that remains before he heads home: ‘Never mind the “gushing;” with one like me, that is nothing; I am not demonstrative, except at intervals – but I always love you – always admire you – am always your champion,’ he writes on 29 December, and two days later he frames this resolution: ‘Thirteen more days in England, & then I sail! If I only do get home safe, & find my darling . . . well, I shall be a grateful soul. And if ever I do have another longing to leave home, even for a week, please dissipate it with a club. Sometimes I get so homesick I don’t know what to do’ (MTL5: 536, 543). This trip would not mark the end of his travels. But even so, his resolution, however eagerly he may have broken it, speaks eloquently of the anguish of separation that no exchange of letter sheet can reduce. Born into a political family that had distinguished itself for three generations in the U.S. diplomatic service, Henry Adams was no more intimidated by geographic distance than were Fuller and Twain. From childhood he dispatched a steady stream of letters with never a fear that oceans and continents could seriously disrupt the epistolary exchange. In the first chapter of The Education of Henry Adams (1918), he cites railroad, steamship, and telegraph as the three technologies that by 1844 had decisively separated the eighteenth-century republic from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial empire the U.S. rapidly became. While conceding his retrograde attachment to Enlightenment ideals and exhibiting a Walpolian commitment to the epistolary documentation of daily life, at no point did he fail to engage technologies that would carry him to the ends of the earth and report what he found when he got there.10 His first sustained exercise in distant correspondence occurred between 1858 and 1860, during a post-baccalaureate sojourn in Europe, soon to be followed by an extended residence in London (from 1861 to 1868) as private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s appointee to the Court of St. James. In these initial overseas adventures, Adams developed the habit of composing long diary letters addressed to family members; afterward, when he returned to the U.S. and entered into his career as journalist and scholar, close friends also figured among diary-letter recipients. Evident as they are of Adams’ strong bonds, few expressions of intense longing occur in these or any other letters in the years leading up to Adams’ marriage to Marian (Clover) Hooper, and the correspondence that survives between Henry and Clover is meager – since they were seldom apart – and restrained in tone. Longing and distance become themes in Adams’ letters only after Clover’s 1885 suicide and then only after Adams has fallen in love with Elizabeth Cameron, the wife of Senator Donald Cameron, a woman twenty-two years his junior. In August 1890, partly to remove himself from Cameron’s orbit, Adams boarded a steamship in San Francisco and set off on a fourteen-month circumnavigation of the world with extended stays in Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, Fiji, Indonesia, Australia, and Sri Lanka. Toward the end of his travels he would pass through the Suez Canal to France and England and then finally re-cross the Atlantic, in November 1891, back to his home in Washington, D.C. In leaving the U.S. for an indefinite period, Adams meant to vacate scenes he had shared with Clover, but he was also imposing distance between himself and Cameron, to whom he bore what he guiltily regarded as an emotionally adulterous relationship. Given the necessity to be mutually absent, however, Adams and Cameron soon became parties to a correspondence that was intimate and addictive. Combining his discipline as a diarist with his formidable powers of observation, Adams produced during his fifteen-month sojourn one of the late nineteenth century’s most detailed Polynesian travelogues. The interest of this writing consists as

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much in Adams’ documentation of colonized cultures as in the intensity with which Adams and Cameron negotiate their relationship. Both themes join in melancholic mood as he writes from an internalized tristes tropiques. This literary performance derives in part from the material conditions under which they corresponded. On average, Adams was able to post and receive letters only once a month. His determination to write to Cameron every day thus took the form of serial entries, each recapitulating the day’s activities, collected in a single epistle that he would post in the monthly outbound mail. The entries record everything from details of ocean travel to ethnological observations of his Polynesian hosts, from geological and climatic data to anecdotes concerning encounters with islanders and with fellow Westerners, such as Robert Louis Stevenson. He provides a running commentary on his physical and mental health and devotes paragraphs to natural history. As such, much of the writing might pass for a travel narrative. But Adams nevertheless interweaves into the day’s narration sentences personally directed to his addressee. The arrival of Cameron’s letters with their fund of news constitutes a recurring storyline. As he occasionally reminds her, the diary letters are for her eyes only, and certain passages in particular are written in strict confidence. Tropologically, this writing inscribes a consciousness of time-bound existence and the intimation of a ‘next world’ beyond temporal experience. Repeatedly, Adams situates himself at a point of euphoric no return. ‘The weather is divine beyond imagination,’ he writes during his sojourn in Tahiti, ‘the scenery, a sort of Paradise for lost souls, the beauty of archangels fallen’ (LHA, 3: 426). ‘Taïti is lovely,’ he reaffirms a month later, ‘the climate is perfect; we have made a sort of home here; and I never shall meet another spot so suitable to die in’ (LHA, 3: 459). In such passages he fantasizes an easeful transition to an afterlife. The letters celebrate the plenitude of what to a European-American is an exotic, end-of-world beauty, and the companionship of the American painter John La Farge – who instructs Adams in the art of watercolor – contributes to the chromatic dimension of his verbal renderings. Nevertheless, sorrow ever underlies his euphoria and despite moments of rapt impressionism the writing is always a testimony to loss. As diary, Adams’ entries concede the finitude of time; as travelogue, they acknowledge his absence from scenes disrupted by the suicide of his wife; as letter, they confirm the absence of his correspondent, an object of forbidden desire. We may form some idea of that absence and desire from Adams’ description of what it is like for him to receive Cameron’s monthly dispatch: Your letter . . . arrived here yesterday afternoon. Long as it is, I think I know it by heart already . . . I know no new combination of love and angel to offer you, and am reduced to sheer bêtise, which, at a seven thousand mile dilution, is exasperatingly stupid; but you can at least to some degree imagine what sort of emotion I might be likely to feel at having you take me by the hand and carry me on with your daily life till I feel as though I had been with you all the month. (LHA, 3: 423) A compelling feature of Adams’ diary letters is this sustained relationship with the diary letters of his correspondent: a confidential sharing, a twinning of subjectivities made possible by the 7,000-mile separation, a parallelism of lives that affords vivid sensation but that offers neither a satisfactory relationship nor absolves the correspondent of guilt over assuming an illicit if virtual intimacy. Still, an unsatisfactory

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relationship is nevertheless a relationship, the supposed surrogate for what cannot exist, supported and constituted by an ongoing generation of text – accounts of Polynesian adventure, expressions of loneliness, and updates concerning Adams’ circuitous ‘return.’ Given the epistolary dimension of this diary, Adams constantly entertains the sensation of being in two places simultaneously; and he recurrently articulates this sensation by referring to pen, paper, and the scenes of reading and writing as the conjuration of Cameron’s disembodied presence. ‘Do you want my impressions?’ he asks in a typical invocation. ‘I don’t believe you do, but it is noon; the day is scorching; we have just breakfasted; I am lying on my bed, trying to keep cool, out of the glare; and why should I not talk to you, even if you go to sleep as I should do in your place’ (LHA, 3: 543). Elsewhere he writes: ‘The truth is that I find pleasure in talking to you, and I go on doing it, even when I think you asleep’ (LHA, 3: 379). Across oceans and time zones, Adams thus preserves the trope of intimate conversation. Given the uncertainties of his relationship with Cameron – for by virtue of this writing it has entered a new phase and neither party knows where it may lead – the sensation of leading two lives is not sustainable. At the end of a month of entries with their lush description and accounts of varied adventure, Adams concludes as follows: ‘I seal and send this long diary, all about myself when I want to write only about you . . . As the winter approaches I seem to think more and more about you . . . and long more to see you. The contrast between my actual life and my thoughts is fantastic. The double life is almost like one’s idea of the next world’ (LHA, 3: 299). The phrase ‘next world’ alludes to the question of ultimate destination. From the moment of departure this matter had been a troubled one. Considering the risks of travel in tropic zones for a European-American over fifty, Adams knows that death is always a possibility, but he has also to consider the likelihood that he will not die, in which case his relationship with Cameron must attain a new status: a status that would be determined by their reunion in Paris on his return arc. The reunion did not go well: although Cameron showered affection on her old friend and spent much time with him during his two-week stay, at no point did they meet privately – her daughter or some mutual friend was always present. Nothing like the confidentiality of their diary letters was achieved in this much-anticipated moment. The trouble was that Adams in person was far from dead. Reflecting on the awkwardness of their reunion after he had left France for England, he observes what must have been clear to Cameron – ‘no matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask, I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify, and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have’ (LHA, 3: 557). Such, ordinarily, is the formula of rupture. The disappointment of the Adams–Cameron reunion did not, however, end the relationship. Rather, it clarified the epistolary terms of their intimacy, and until he died in 1918 the exchange of diary letters would persist. Adams maintained numerous correspondences in the course of a long life, several in diary letter format, yet in no other correspondence does he write letters as continuous diary entries. On both sides, over great distances, the exchange generated ongoing incremental records of daily life, private diaries enabled by a sustained epistolary friendship. Voluminous intimate correspondences have existed for centuries, but one may question whether an epistolary friendship such as this could have arisen a half-century before it did, for its peculiar density in part derives from its enabling technologies as well as from the expectations and fantasies those technologies foster. The nineteenth century increasingly dismantled

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the oceanic and continental barriers that formerly confined human intimacy to circumscribed zones: steamship lines, rail networks, and efficient federal postal systems made the swift and copious exchange of letters a feature of everyday life. Even for those who preferred the hand-inscribed medium, the telegraph and the telephone allowed one to imagine instantaneous communication (a phenomenon associated formerly with visions, hallucinations, and prayer) as a model of human contact.11 As one reads the diary letters of Adams and Cameron, one is struck by how often they write as though their presence to one another in absentia were mediated by something like the Internet – as though their epistolary language contained the fantasy from which the Internet would be invented. The letter that arrives from one’s distant and intimate other, that brings with it representations of a life in real time, a promise of life beyond one’s fixed spatiotemporal point: this is the dream of the Adams–Cameron diary letters, such a dream as our technology realizes in accordance with longings for emotional and metaphysical satisfaction similar to their own. In the twenty-first century, one has to make special efforts to opt out of a global telecommunications network that propagates one’s digital omnipresence. Experience of another’s qualified absence differs from that of previous generations inasmuch as one can establish synchronous contact irrespective of geographic distance. Prior to the Internet’s advent – and its everywhere-and-nowhere ‘third place’ – separation from those lost to visual and auditory affirmation was comparatively absolute.12 Today, by contrast, one can be closer than ever to one’s distant partner while remaining farther than ever apart. To appreciate our predecessors’ unappeased longings requires an informed and active imagination. Still, proximities per se (offline or online) are misleading. As the letters of Fuller, Twain, and Adams demonstrate, interpersonal presence has never been a matter of physical contiguity: contiguity has served as the trope of mutual presence and non-contiguity as that of mutual absence, whereas the reality has been more elusive. Contemporary epistolary longings may not be so different from those of our predecessors, in that we desire that which we cannot have or can only possess through a prosthetics of having. True, epistolary activity has become radically disembodied, the exchange of the DNA-saturated letter-sheet supplanted by the back-and-forth of electronic text, but correspondents desiring evidence of live physicality can generally move from email or SMS to synchronous visual and auditory rapport. Technologies of contiguity may do little more than elevate what have always been impossible expectations, but perhaps we are ever more satisfied with the prosthesis.13 What does one expect of the epistolary partner, and to what extent is contact-at-a-distance the true source of satisfaction? Answers to such questions may not have changed much between the nineteenth century and now.14

Notes 1. For further discussion of the isolation experienced by correspondents prior to the advent of telecommunications, the concept of ‘absent-presence,’ and the deathly resonances of letterwriting see Decker, Epistolary Practices, 1–103. 2. The term ‘print capitalism’ derives from Anderson, Imagined Communities, especially 39–48, which links modern polity to the emergence of national and international readerships. 3. Such fulfillment necessitates radical change. As Hayles suggests in How We Became Posthuman, especially 25–49, the pattern/randomness of electronic telecommunications supplants the presence/absence of print technology. See also Poletti and Rak, Identity Technologies.

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4. Dickinson, Letter to Abiah Root, 25 September 1845, in The Letters, 19. Dickinson’s reiteration of ‘long’ in this quotation makes us aware that the verb itself is intensely epistolary, expressive of the impossible desire to change shape, to elongate in defiance of spatiotemporal confinement to achieve contiguity with the absent other. 5. Dickinson, Letter to Abiah Root, 8 September 1846, in The Letters, 14. 6. For more on this epistolary relationship see Packer, ‘Dangerous Acquaintances.’ 7. On Fuller’s relationship to Nathan, see Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, 249–63, and Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller, 292–303. 8. See Decker, Epistolary Practices, 124–6, and Constantinesco, ‘Discordant Correspondence.’ 9. See Fuller, Letter to Timothy Fuller, 29 January 1821, in The Letters, 1: 111. 10. For more on the Walpolian dimension of Adams’ letter-writing see Decker, Epistolary Practices, 226, 265. 11. Think, for example, of the preternatural exchange in Brontë, Jane Eyre, 447. 12. The term ‘third place’ is derived from Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, passim. 13. Palet’s ‘The Future of Sex,’ for example, explores the technology of virtual sex. Such might seem the realization of the desire latent in erotic correspondence of the nineteenth century, but only if one overlooks the intrinsic satisfactions of deferred verbalized desire. 14. This does not, of course, mean that structural change is not now taking hold. ‘As media change,’ Hayles suggests in Electronic Literature, ‘so do bodies and brains; new media conditions foster new kinds of autogenic adaptations’ (118).

Works Cited Adams, H. (1982–8), The Letters of Henry Adams, 6 vols., ed. J. C. Levenson, E. Samuels, C. Vandersee, and V. H. Winner, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cited parenthetically as LHA. Anderson, B. [1983] (2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York: Verso. Brontë, C. [1847] (1998), Jane Eyre, ed. M. Smith, New York: Oxford University Press. Constantinesco, T. (2008), ‘Discordant Correspondence in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Friendship”,’ The New England Quarterly, 81: 218–51. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Dickinson, E. (1997), The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. H. Johnson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fuller, M. (1983–95), The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 6 vols., ed. R. Hudspeth, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cited parenthetically as LMF. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2008), Electronic Literature, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Marshall, M. (2013), Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Matteson, J. (2012), The Lives of Margaret Fuller, New York: Norton. Oldenburg, R. (1989). The Great Good Place: Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, New York: Paragon. Packer, B. (2000), ‘Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke,’ English Literary History, 67: 801–18. Palet, L. S. (2014), ‘The Future of Sex Tech Looks Awesome/Terrifying,’ Ozy.Com, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Poletti, A., and J. Rak, eds. (2014), Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Twain, M. (1988), Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1: 1853–1866, ed. E. M. Branch, M. B. Frank, and K. M. Sanderson, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cited parenthetically as MTL1. Twain, M. (1990), Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2: 1867–1868, ed. H. E. Smith and R. Bucci, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cited parenthetically as MTL2. Twain, M. (1992), Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 3: 1869, ed. V. Fischer and M. B. Frank, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cited parenthetically as MTL3. Twain, M. (1997), Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5: 1872–1873, ed. L. Salamo and H. E. Smith, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cited parenthetically as MTL5.

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11 WORKING AWAY, WRITING HOME David M. Stewart

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orking increasingly meant traveling in nineteenth-century America. Driven by a growing population and the consolidating effects of capitalist production, millions departed homes in the rural northeast to pursue opportunities in the region’s rapidly expanding cities and towns. Others went west, where the flat, fertile plains of Ohio and beyond promised livelihoods no longer possible in coastal states where agricultural land was in increasingly short supply. For some, relocation was permanent; for others, it was not, either because employment markets were unstable or because jobs elsewhere were only meant to resolve short-term cash-flow problems. In recent years, literary and cultural historians have examined how Americans resolved the disciplinary challenges posed by a large, mobile population that was young, included women, and was no longer constrained by financial dependence on the family or regulation by church, trade, or community. The erosion of traditional social controls and the decline of status-bearing occupations, it is argued, generated a wide range of efforts to adjust to new conditions, from behavioral codes and fashion to common school education, popular reform, and print culture. Correspondence is oddly absent from our understanding of how Americans responded to the problems of population mobility – oddly, because letters were the obvious means used to counter the effects of distance on traditional surveillance culture. Even the recent spate of work on nineteenth-century letter-writing understates its use for this purpose, despite interest not only in how the postal service bridged the vast spaces that separated Americans, but how it helped negotiate the conflict inherent in U.S. democracy between personal liberty and social order.1 However, two recent studies of employment migrants suggest ways to understand how Americans used correspondence to address gaps produced by working away. In one, Thomas Augst treats letter-writing as one of several ways middle-class families instilled moral ‘character’ in their sons, who left home seeking careers in the nation’s burgeoning commercial centers.2 Citing theorists of sentimental literature, Augst credits letter-writing not with projecting domestic rule beyond the home, but with internalizing self-rule by joining the discipline of writing with emotional debts to those left behind.3 In the other, David Gerber has less direct interest in filial duty or employment. But his account is broader than Augst’s, and so useful in treating letter-writing in its larger nineteenth-century context. He describes correspondence as the means whereby European immigrants to the U.S. managed a ‘radical rupture of the self’ caused by separation from home and homeland.4 Gerber is particularly compelling in his willingness to ‘understand the narrative of the individual in relationship to his or her correspondents over time, and let that narrative guide the analysis,’ locating his case studies in biographical contexts that 185

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have little in common but the extraordinary range of circumstances they were written to address.5 By embracing diversity in immigrant letters and treating them in speculative textual terms, Gerber suggests how to read the correspondence not only of young men in business, but of the great variety of Americans who worked away, wrote home, and did so for reasons very hard to generalize. In what follows, I too examine individual cases of such writing. To the extent that schemas are required, I take Gerber to be largely correct that correspondence helped sustain identity against a break with the main fixtures upon which it relied: home and family. But I complicate his account in two ways. First, I argue that employment migrants were troubled not only by geographical separation, but by a labor market that in a short space of time voided key markers of traditional identity-formation, especially around class and gender. In writing, correspondents negotiated new markers and continuities, often across distances that served as a buffer between economic reality and the expectations of those at home. Second, I complicate Gerber’s view of identity, not so much theoretically, but insofar as he treats correspondence as ‘intertextual,’ meaning it arose from ‘discursive practices . . . that lead such texts as personal letters, sermons, and newspaper editorials to settle into similar patterns.’6 Missing from this list is precisely the discursive context Augst identifies as the engine of character: sentimental literature. Among the critics Augst cites, Richard Brodhead argues that as a response to population mobility, sentimental fiction leveraged emotional debts fostered in the home for the stated purpose of ‘sparing the rod,’ a disciplinary device the effectiveness of which declines greatly with distance.7 Mother love, Brodhead contends, supplied the rhetorical force for countless innocent, self-sacrificing (motherly) victims like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva. Feminine but, like Uncle Tom, not always female, such characters elicited compliance in readers through vulnerabilities cultivated in childrearing, as disobedience was treated as a betrayal of this love. In addition to novelists, authority figures such as teachers, clergy, and wives (in their role as moral guardians) evolved performative styles that assumed the rhetorical force of parental injury.8 As Augst puts it, this ‘disciplinary intimacy’ developed across various spheres through ‘a new emotional and social investment in the practice of literacy.’9 But correspondence played a particular role, he argues: ‘Letters intensified emotional ties among distant family members by making the affective obligations of the middle-class family transparent in the practice of literary discipline.’10 Following federal legislation in 1845 and 1851 that reduced the cost of personal mail and prompted Americans to embrace mass letter-writing, correspondents enjoyed what one ‘cheap postage’ advocate called the ‘social and moral and intellectual advantages’ of letters, which ‘would keep alive affections and friendship which now die out in distance; it would, in short, be a new bond of union, binding the people together in knowledge, and sympathy, and love.’11 Others were not so sure that ‘love’ was as benign a force as it was made out. ‘Instead of the government perishing for the want of contact with the people,’ one critic wrote, ‘this one branch is found to have mingled itself so intimately with the interests and enjoyments of the people, as to be a source of danger and a cause of alarm for the security of our liberties.’12 As Elizabeth Hewitt argues, love’s epistolary ‘binding’ took material forms. The salutation ‘dear,’ for example, asserted an emotional claim on the reader that made ‘reciprocity all but ineluctable.’13 The same is true for the debt incurred by receiving a letter, which had to be answered or risk injuring the sender.

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Character aside, salutatory endearments and the debts incurred by receiving letters projected family authority directly beyond the home. Offense expressed due to short, poorly written, or late letters often provided a formal context for injuries of content (such as pleas or warnings) that improved the chances of compliance. Such power was a double-edged sword, however, as senders and receivers were equally vulnerable. To elicit sympathy, one must be injured; and because injury was used coercively, it formed the basis not just for reciprocity, but resentment, albeit sublimated and marked by guilt. If writing home sustained identity, as Gerber says, it did so with ambivalence. Not all the examples considered here are letters between parents and children. They do, though, involve rhetorical enactments of parental injury. The correspondence of James Bell and Augusta Elliott of Norton Hill, New York, also bears the ambivalence just identified, which cuts both ways as each strains to fulfill expectations represented by the other. Augusta teaches school and they plan to marry; but James lacks suitable employment, and in 1854 he leaves to find it, first in Maine, then Illinois, where he settles for farm labor. He is twenty when he leaves, and over the next nine years, until 1863, when he dies of wounds received fighting with the 8th Illinois Cavalry, he visits Augusta only once. During his absence they write letters, 276 of which survive. Initially, these are mutually defensive. Insecurity appears in jealousy and erotic horseplay, at times violent. ‘[I]f you don’t tell me “I will cut your head off”,’ James writes on one occasion (JABP, 8 April 1855). On another, Augusta threatens to ‘tickle your neck, pull your nose, bite your ear, untie your neck’chief, blow in your face, steal your handkerchief, pull your hair (a little), kiss you with a pin in my mouth, and daub ink in your face’ (JABP, 19 May 1858). Such teasing was often meant to relieve James’s dejection about their circumstances. ‘I do not know but that it was presumption in me to love you,’ he writes in one instance. ‘You was so kind and good. And when I think how unworthy I am of your regard I almost wish I never saw you . . . I am not good enough for you Gusta’ (JABP, 20 April 1856). A year later, he infers marriage using a device that turns up often in their letters: ‘How would you like to take a school where there was but one scholar. I know of a school of that description that you can get’ (JABP, 19 April 1857). But his ‘school Marm’ she never becomes (JABP, 19 April 1857). While supportive, Augusta is frustrated by his failure to find employment suitable for them to marry. Years pass and bickering persists, often provoked by hints that she has had enough. The teacher–student analogy suggests a relationship of mutual dependence. As James’s teacher, Augusta assumes the power of selfless commitment, with a maternal cast heightened each time he fails her. This he does first by being absent, especially during several months when, unknown to her, he relocates to Illinois. She is furious. ‘Dear Sir, I feel that I have been neglected, cooly neglected,’ she writes, withholding a more intimate greeting, before characterizing his fault in terms of epistolary betrayal: ‘I’ve been to the post-office until I’ve worn out all my shoes, inquiring for letters. At last I was ashamed to inquire any longer’ (JABP, 19 December 1855). He too is ashamed, but to no practical end. Indeed, stunts like the Illinois move, which took him within visiting distance of Norton Hill, suggest that James was avoiding her, even while he still needed her moral direction. ‘As I look back over the past,’ he writes four years later, ‘how much I find to regret. I suppose the best way is . . . do better in the future. Well darling, it shall be my object in life, to live worthy of you, and gain a home in Heaven’ (JABP, 31 October 1860).

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With the outbreak of the Civil War, James enlists. One letter a month becomes one a week. His are passionately patriotic: ‘my heart burns with indignation, my blood leaps with quickened pulsations, and I feel that I could strike for my country with a willing heart; and a ready hand’ (JABP, 23 April 1861). Hers contain the added conviction that it is his duty to make things right. ‘Any man who would not respond to the call of his country,’ she recounts saying to neighbors, ‘I did not consider worthy to be called my husband’ (JABP, 21 May 1861). He admires her zeal, but his cools after seeing action. Learning that his brother wishes to enlist, he writes that ‘he never shall with my consent. I can tell him things that will take the fever out of him double quick’ (JABP, n.d. 1861). But for James war resolves ‘the old subject’ of work and marriage, his service vindicating a decade of waiting, while turning separation into shared sacrifice (JABP, 28 October 1856). A week after the slaughter at Fredericksburg, he writes about her letters that ‘I feal [sic] better for reading them . . . in you I have always found a sympathy and encouragement to do my duty as a soldier’ (JABP, 22 December 1862). ‘James I am thankful,’ she writes in response to such sentiments. ‘You ask if I ever thought what an influence I had over you. I did not know really as I had. If I have, tho my example has’ent [sic] been what it should be, it is truly consoling’ (JABP, n.d. 1861). He too is consoled. In the Washington hospital where she has traveled to nurse him, Augusta records his final words: ‘You will love me always wont [sic] you Gusta? . . . O I’m so so thankful . . . Gusta forgive all my sins. I left it all to your judgment’ (JABP, n.d. 1863). James and Augusta were redeemed by his military service. But before his death, a more modest sacrifice shows how writing facilitated this redemption by producing a sense of conjoined righteousness. Significantly, the event occurred not in battle, but in the domestic space James shared with other soldiers. On 26 October 1861, he writes: ‘The boys in our tent have adopted a resolution that there shall be no more card playing’ (JABP, 26 October 1861). While hardly surprising at a time when such activities were widely condemned, their pledge anticipates this very concern in a letter from Augusta dated one day before: ‘It is a source of grief to me that you are surrounded by sin and wickedness. My prayers are for you and my thoughts constantly upon you. Why it seems to me the very bad part of camp life, this swearing, drinking and playing card business’ (JABP, 25 October 1861). Augusta’s warning was redundant; he surely knew her views already. But, more importantly, it reiterated the same ‘sympathy and encouragement’ that obliged him to ‘do my duty as a soldier.’ In another letter, written the day before he joined the Fredericksburg assault, James hints at the basis of her authority: a ‘binding’ he can no more deny than he can deny himself. Reflecting solemnly on their relationship over the years, he recalls proposing to her, which he did as they peered into an article of domestic furniture now synonymous with identity formation: ‘Many times I see you, almost feel your presence, as you stood by my side before the mirror and since that little word yes, important, and eventful to us both’ (JABP, 10 December 1862). It is hard not to be cynical reading the letters of James and Augusta, even when we know that long separations (and engagements) were not uncommon and that James was joined by 620,000 others who died for the cause, many bearing tokens of affection from those to whom they would have to answer if they did not. Certainly their correspondence reveals the pain mutually inflicted through a gendered division of disciplinary labor that replaced proximity-based controls with emotional ones. The sense pervades their letters that escaping this pain would require some form of Pyrrhic sacrifice, which the war provided.

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Yet not to be dismissed is the chance of domestic conciliation under these conditions, or the role played by letter-writing in achieving it. Both occurred in the life of William Swain of Youngstown, New York, who in April 1849 left home to prospect for gold on the Feather River in northern California.14 Like James, and like most who headed west with the 27-year-old Swain, he failed in his quest, which was to return with ‘a pocket full of rocks’ (CSFP, 20 April 1849). But unlike James, and unlike thousands who perished from accident and disease on the overland trail, Swain survived, arriving home in February 1851, ill and penniless, but otherwise able to resume life where he left off. Swain was also not compelled to go, at least not because he needed work. A certified teacher and co-owner of the family farm, he was already married, and his wife, Sabrina, pleaded with him not to go. Yet in returning, no one appears to have blamed him. Welcomed back by family and community, Swain subsequently enjoyed a long life as a farmer, father, and husband, dying in 1904 at age eighty-three. His California stories entertained generations of Swain children, and at their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Sabrina, wearing a black crimson dress he bought for her on the journey home, proposed a toast: ‘To my 49er.’15 Yet whatever love she bore her forty-niner, Sabrina paid the same price as Augusta. Her first letter to William after his departure for California begins, ‘I want very much to describe my feelings as near as I can, but in doing so I hope not to crucify yours’ (CSFP, 15 April 1849). Whatever his feelings, hers stem from being left to care for an infant child, elderly mother-in-law, and William’s bachelor brother, who was now forced to work the farm alone. And while not intending to ‘crucify’ her husband, Sabrina’s letters present William with a chronicle of pain borne on his account. This includes bitterness – ‘people tell me that I am a fool for letting you go away and that no man that thought anything of his family would do so’ (CSFP, 22 April 1849); exhaustion – ‘not only my back is bad, but I have a pain in my chest and left side, palpitation of the heart, and dyspepsia’ (CSFP, 26 July 1849); isolation – ‘when I contemplate my loneliness and your absence I am ready to exclaim: “Would to God you had never left me” ’ (CSFP, 19 September 1849); insecurity – ‘I often dream of you, but cannot have any satisfaction, for you treat me with distain [sic]’ (CSFP, 19 September 1849); and sexual mistrust – ‘I think of various temptations you are surrounded with and how many men of good morals . . . have been led into all kinds of vice’ (CSFP, 9 June 1850). A general fear arises for William’s safety as reports of trail life make their way back. ‘All are very anxious to hear from you,’ his brother George writes in August 1849, ‘the same mail that brought [your] letter brought news of four persons dying of cholera’ (CSFP, 20 August 1849). And the farther west William travels, the less reliable the mail service is. ‘We have not received even as much as a line from you since you left Fort Laramie and I can assure you the time seems very long,’ Sabrina writes in December 1849 (CSFP, 7 December 1849). ‘May you be happy. We are not,’ George seethes after two more months pass without word. ‘What the dickens is the reason you don’t write, Boy?’ (CSFP, 9 February 1850). George’s use of the diminutive indicates something inferred throughout: that William was inclined to willfulness. His early letters also suggest he is, indeed, having a good time. ‘I have not enjoyed life for many years as I have the last week,’ he writes shortly after leaving (CSFP, 25 April 1849). As head of the family since their father’s death a decade before, George was the steadier of the two brothers. His letters are encouraging, but advise prudence throughout. ‘Look the ground over calmly,’ he advises William,

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‘and if you think there is a fair prospect of getting through with life and health, go ahead’ (CSFP, 19 April 1849). When William lands ill at New York (he took the sea route home), George meets him and arranges medical treatment. Both grew up reading Walter Scott and William Wordsworth; both too relished news about the West and the discovery of gold. But where George bowed to the duties of home and family, for William romantic enthusiasm prevailed. Still, William was not a ‘Boy,’ and his enthusiasm included more considered reasons for going west. ‘If health and success crown my exertions,’ he writes in the same letter that expresses his enjoyment on the trail, ‘my family with myself will equally share the benefit’ (CSFP, 25 April 1849). Such hopes were not unreasonable. Many attested to the fortune that awaited anyone with the courage to go after it. The 90,000 (mainly male) travelers who arrived in California in 1849 included a wide range of Americans, from farmers and tradesmen to shopkeepers and propertied professionals. Most joined partnerships and joint-stock companies with boards of directors, articles of association, elections, committees, and bylaws. William’s company had fifty-eight members, including lawyers, physicians, and clergymen. And angry as he was at his brother’s silence, George planned to join him if conditions in California were as good as they hoped. William was also not insensitive to the plight of his family. In his early letters, he tries to calm Sabrina through the explanatory power of gender, suggesting that she was being overly emotional (‘I hope that you will govern your feelings by reason’), and citing their respective spheres of responsibility: ‘I am in the post that duty calls me to fill . . . care of our child will devolve onto you’ (CSFP, 11 April 1849, 5 May 1849). She asks that he too share his feelings (‘I hope you will not keep anything back’), but he declines, adopting a cheerful tone punctuated by moments of sublimity meant less to deny Sabrina’s feelings than to transcend them: ‘The grandeur of these boundless plains . . . forcibly remind you of the almighty source of creation and evoke the thought that you yourself are but a speck in the midst of the grand scene’ (CSFP, 24 August 1849, 20 May 1849). William is more open with his brother, telling him in May 1849 that ‘many times when I think of our family I can hardly restrain my feelings,’ and in his diary, where three days later he writes that ‘I have received three letters from home, but my feelings were too deeply affected to allow me to read them . . . [I] fear that Sabrina may not enjoy herself while I am absent’ (CSFP, 6 May 1849, 9 May 1849). But it is before his mother that William abases himself most strikingly in what might be described as a declaration of general contrition. ‘Memories of my childhood and of the tender and watchful care you exercised over me in my youth have been overlooked in the care of business,’ he writes in mid-May 1849. ‘I acknowledge that I have failed to hold your advice and counsel in proper estimation, which I deeply regret’ (CSFP, 13 May 1849). As the source of moral leverage quintessentially identified with ‘disciplinary intimacy,’ William’s injured mother elicits an admission of guilt all but categorical. William’s conscience was not the only thing disturbing his good times. Based on reports in local newspapers, George calls life on the trail ‘a kind of golgotha,’ as companies like William’s began to encounter unforeseen obstacles such as deserts, mountains, and mounting losses of men and animals (CSFP, 26 July 1849). And worse was to come, as California turned out to be not at all what they hoped. Up to now, gold mining had represented escape from the plodding mysteries of middle-class success. ‘No capital was required to obtain this gold,’ California governor Richard Mason

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wrote in 1848, ‘as the laboring man wants nothing but his pick and shovel.’16 But life in the mining camps was no better than on the trail, and success was as elusive as ever. Not that it mattered by this point. Even before California, William wrote warning others to stay home. And among the first letters he received when he got there was one from Sabrina telling him that their daughter was talking, and that her first words included two she had evidently picked up from the adults: ‘poor Papa’ (CSFP, 9 October 1849). In a letter dated 15 April 1850, and addressed jointly to his wife and mother, William modifies his objectives in apparent recognition of their arbitrative power, saying that if he returned ‘without one cent, I should ever be glad that I have taken the trip to California. It has learnt me to have confidence in myself, has disciplined my impetuous disposition and has learnt me to think and act for myself and to look upon men and things in a true light’ (CSFP, 15 April 1850). If writing home allowed William to justify leaving as a necessity to provide for the family, it also allowed him to return by showing that what he obtained instead was of equal, if not greater value. And he was right, apparently. On returning, William settled down and, with George, embarked upon a new project, purchasing land to enlarge their farm, which eventually would make them leading peach growers in the region. Writing home was more than a character-building exercise, just as California was more than a way to prove his manhood. Connubially, letters were a site for what Karen Lystra calls ‘testing’: working through emotional crises to build trust.17 More broadly, writing home was how William, his family, and their community developed resources to enable middle-class men to risk the ‘golgotha’ of the marketplace and either fail and not be cast out, or succeed but remain subject to the family’s power ‘to crucify.’ Likening William’s experience to Christian sacrifice completed his Adamic march into the wilderness with a redemption economically less transcendent (‘without one cent’) than practical. If writing home helped the Swains negotiate an entrepreneurial manhood at once free from and subject to the regime of family affection, it operated differently in another mid-century mass migration. Decades before gold was found in California, Americans began to depart rural New England, the villages and small farms of Vermont and New Hampshire in particular. Notable about this exodus was that it included women who, beginning in the 1820s, were drawn by the promise of textile jobs – first in Lowell, Massachusetts, where mill owners hired them as a cheaper alternative to men, and then more widely as the Lowell model caught on. At least as significant as the rush west was for men at mid-century, the entry of thousands of respectable, literate young women into the wage economy had far-reaching effects on American social life. It also produced an epistolary archive just as remarkable, if more spotty, as girls came and went from the mills with some regularity, suspending their correspondence when they visited home, or marrying and vanishing altogether from the historical record. Like the Swain correspondence, letters between mill girls and their families are surprising for the gap they reveal between reality and myth. Factory owners were largely truthful in assuring parents that their daughters would be protected from sexual danger. But efforts were also made to secure less palpable aspects of their virtue. Magazines such as the Lowell Offering (1840–5) featured stories of girls whose desire in entering the mills was to benefit their families. Yet letters written by such girls show a more complicated mixture of self-interest, parental deference, and guilt, as their place in the rural home was less idyllic than popularly represented. If having a daughter in the mills bore

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any family advantage, Thomas Dublin argues, it was mainly negative: one less mouth to feed, and a reduced obligation to provide a dowry.18 Vermont native Sally Rice knew what it was to be caught between family duty and marginal significance to the household economy. Writing to her parents in 1839 from Union, New York, where she worked as a domestic, Sally was blunt about returning: Not but that I have a good Father & Mother but . . . I cannot bare the thoughts of going there to live . . . I shall need all I have got and as for mayyring and settling in that wilderness I wont . . . I am now most 19 years old I must of course have something of my own before many more years have passed . . . where is that something coming from if I go home and earn nothing . . . I have lived amonst desent people so long that I don’t want to go home [sic passim]. (LSR, n.d. 1839) Hoping to escape the ‘profane Sabbath breaking set’ of rural Vermont, Sally plans to marry and ‘raise my boys,’ an ambition that suggests she is well aware of her lesser value as a female child (LSR, n.d. 1839). She ends with a demand that leaves little doubt what life will be like if she returns (‘I want you should write me an answer directly and let me know my fate’) (LSR, n.d. 1839). Sally got her way, and eight years later she married James Alger, a railroad engineer from Worcester (LSR, n.d. 1839). Whether she ‘learnt . . . confidence,’ as William did, is unclear from her surviving letters, although, like him, experience seems to have tempered her ‘impetuous disposition.’ Her later letters are less confrontational, perhaps because working life turns out to be, like California, not what she hopes. In 1845, determined to earn more, Sally disregards her father’s advice and takes a mill job, only to find it too difficult. ‘You surely cannot blame me for leaving the factory so long as I realized that it was killing me,’ she pleads (LSR, 14 September 1845). She also talks of herself being a ‘backslider’ at church (LSR, 23 February 1845). To the extent that she expresses remorse, Sally does so not, like William, to her mother, but to her father. This also occurs in the letters of other female workers. If fifteen-year-old Mary Paul is more respectful in writing home, she too expresses a strong desire to seek work elsewhere. ‘I want you to consent to let me go to Lowell if you can,’ she writes to her father, Bela Paul, from Woodstock, Vermont, where she has traveled to earn her keep after her mother’s death three years earlier: We all think if I could go with some steady girl that I might do well. I want you to think of it and make up your mind. Mercy Jane Griffith is going to start in four or five weeks. Aunt Miller and Aunt Sarah think it would be a good chance for me to go if you would consent which I want you to do if possible. I want to see you and talk with you about it. (MPL, 13 September 1845) Mary’s mix of firmness and affection continues after she moves to Lowell, where she works for four years before taking a series of jobs in other locations, from coat-making in Brattleboro, Vermont, to membership of a Fourierist commune in Monmouth, New Jersey. Mary wants money, and, like Sally, she knows this means leaving. ‘If I thought I could make a decent living . . . I would come back,’ she writes, ‘but I have tried to my satisfaction and must work where I can get more pay’ (MPL, 18 December 1853). Necessity is offset by regret, in particular as Bela is unwell. She also appeals for his counsel and consent each time she considers a new idea. Concerning the New Jersey

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project, she asks, ‘let me know what you think of my plans. If you have any real objection as if you would rather I would not go so far away, let me know and I will cheerfully give up this idea of going. I hope sometime to be able to do something for you sometime. And sometimes I feel ashamed that I have not before this’ (MPL, 27 November 1853). While it is not clear whether Mary would have changed her mind had Bela objected, her feelings seem sincere, especially when addressing topics that suggest Bela’s limited success as a provider. When he expresses his hope to someday ‘have a home for us all,’ she replies: ‘It grieves me to think that in your old age you must live away from your children with none to care for your comfort but strangers and if I live long enough it shall not always be so’ (MPL, 18 December 1853). Bela Paul supplied the same emotionalized moral compass that guided James Bell and William Swain. However, the direction Mary received from her ‘poor Papa’ was often practical, which neither Bell nor Swain sought, nor got, from the women with whom they corresponded. Mary had no mother, and asking her father for advice clearly reflected gender and age expectations rather than her lack of capacity. Like mill women across New England, Mary repeatedly proved that she could make her own decisions, and do so without Sally-like belligerence. Yet capable as she was, Mary was a public woman at a time when she was meant to be private. So, regardless of whether she needed or took it, she welcomed not just her father’s emotional affirmation, but his instruction. Working women were vulnerable publicly in ways James and William were not, in other words. To see how this vulnerability played out in writing home, my final two examples involve that more palpable virtue Americans were keen to preserve: female chastity. Delia Page was nineteen in 1860, and had been working at the Amoskeag Company for a year, when the news that she was ‘desperately in love’ prompted her guardian, Luther Trussell, to inquire about her activities in Manchester, New Hampshire, where the mill was located (TFP, 29 August 1860). Her beau, it turned out, was another worker who, according to Luther’s source, Benjamin Piper, had ‘a wife & one child in Lowell. He has been trusteed twice by his wife [for child support], is also a man that drinks hard and also running after women’ (TFP, 4 September 1860). Two weeks later, Piper’s wife provided more details: not only was Delia carrying on a very public affair with a married man, but to escape rules that prohibited his visits, she had moved out of the company boarding house into a private residence. When asked ‘what Father Trussell would say,’ she responded that ‘it was nothing to him. She was of age’ (TFP, 20 September 1860). Delia eventually ended her involvement with this ‘very unprincipled Man’, but not before a fight, the embarrassment of which the family seems to have appreciated, having discarded the letters that bore her side of the story, including a vigorous defense of the affair and the man (TFP, 4 September 1860). The struggle to save Delia from ruin reflects the wider difficulty for nineteenthcentury parents of exerting control over the courtship and marriage of their children. For Luther, this was exacerbated by circumstances. Leaving aside the question of her age, Delia was not his legal charge, but had only boarded at the Trussell home after her mother’s death when she was small. She also did not depend on him for material support. In addition to her earnings from the mill, a small inheritance made Delia, as Luther noted, ‘independent from the avails of your own labour’ (TFP, 11 November 1859). So as the extent of the problem became clear, it was necessary to proceed carefully, a task that fell largely to him. Luther wrote every week, and more often at the

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height of the crisis. As a correspondent Luther was meticulous – or so he tells Delia in a postscript added to a letter sent by her sister, in which he refers to himself in the third person: ‘father’s letter will be dry, it takes him so long to write it, he writes a line then thinks a long time then writes another’ (TFP, 15 July 1860). All begin with endearments that assert an emotional claim on the recipient, in addition to the one generated by receiving long letters painstakingly written. And Luther doesn’t wait for trouble before putting this claim to work. Soon after Delia leaves for Manchester, he writes: ‘Be a good girl. Try to excel in everything you do. Take care of your health, save your earnings. And remember always that you are a Steward and must give an account of your Stewardship’ (TFP, 5 December 1859). Eventually, Sunday school homilies give way to more aggressive tactics: challenging her rationalizations, rhetorical disinterestedness, advice on comportment, and a powerful mix of familial coercion and selfobjectification: ‘You must take care of my little factory girl. Don’t let her expose her health if you do she will be sick and loose [sic] all she has earned. Don’t let her do any thing any time that she would be ashamed to have her father know’ (TFP, 7 September 1860). Luther was no fool, and he knew Delia wasn’t either. So when firmness was required, he held nothing back: ‘Now I want you to screw your patience to a sticking point & and moderate your love to summer temperature and read carefully that you may get my meaning’ (TFP, 11 September 1860). Whatever one thinks of his methods, Luther gave Delia good advice for living in a company town in 1860 at an age when being desperately in love was ‘dangerous . . . especially for Ladies’ (TFP, 31 August 1860). Stubborn as she was, Delia finally left her man, although just what she learned from this and to what end is obscured by the absence of her letters and sketchy information about her later life. She and her eventual husband, Charles Thompson, married in 1866 and traveled to California, settling in Tomales, a small town north of San Francisco, where he pursued various business interests.19 But the 1870 census identifies only Charles living there with a young woman named Wilhelmina, and two children, one born that year, the other in 1868. The same census locates Delia in another town some distance away, while her sister’s diary places her back home between 1872 and 1874. When Charles died in 1893, there is no record Delia was in California – or anywhere – suggesting that they divorced and she remarried, changing her name once again. If he succeeded in ending Delia’s relationship with a married man, then, Luther may not have been as effective in providing the practical socialization William Swain received in writing home, or that Bela Paul gave his daughter, who, while hardly less restless than Delia, finally settled down. If fragmentary records make it difficult to reflect on the results of Luther’s effort, Gerber’s ‘intertextual’ approach helps by situating his correspondence with Delia in the wider ‘discursive practices’ of the time. The cases treated so far have exhibited ‘patterns’ clearly sentimental in both the local rhetoric and the national, biblical, and domestic narratives that correspondents used to sustain themselves in the face of migratory disruption. Delia was also subject to such rhetoric, and sentimentalism provided her life with generic logic. Yet by exercising her freedom not just occupationally, but sexually, Delia inverted the coercive emotionalism of this logic, and in a decidedly threatening way. In his letters, Luther drew on textual resources that emphasized victimization over the redemptive transformation produced earlier. These resources ranged from novels like Charlotte Temple (1791) and The Coquette (1797), both reputedly based on true stories of women ‘desperately in love’ and

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ruined by ‘unprincipled men,’ to anti-seduction tracts that appeared in periodicals like those Delia sent home from Manchester – periodicals that Luther thought she should study more carefully. ‘I am afraid you did not have time to read them yourself,’ he suggests in December 1859. ‘After you have read the papers send them to us. We shall not value them the less because they have contributed to your improvement’ (TFP, 5 December 1859). Where her reading ended, his letters began. Delia was not the only working woman tempted by the flesh. Nor was she the only one who wrote home about it. Sex played a conspicuous role in the work experience of Ada Shepard, with her letters providing a further gloss on the effects of Luther’s epistolary efforts to domesticate Delia. The daughter of a Massachusetts baker, 22-year-old Ada cared for the children of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne during their trip to Europe in the late 1850s, while corresponding with Clay Badger, a teacher at Antioch College.20 She took the job because she and Clay wished to marry and, like James Bell, Clay lacked adequate income. If this posed a challenge to his manhood, a more serious one came in a series of letters in which Ada described an attempt to seduce her by an Italian physician named Franco. She couldn’t avoid Franco, who was retained to treat one of the Hawthorne children; nor could she tell her employers, for fear of being sent home. Describing her would-be lover’s initial declaration, she writes of ‘that terrible passion in his eyes and his whole manner, of which I have read in books, but of which I never had a conception before, he poured forth such a storm of consuming and raging passion . . . that I felt sick and dizzy’ (LCB, 8 December 1858). Like Luther, Ada reveals the sentimental context in which she and Clay write, albeit with more Gothic hysteria typical of ‘books’ that advised on such matters. The world Ada navigated was characterized as replete with sexual peril hidden behind the blandishments of romantic love, which Franco professed to her every day for four months. Why letter-writing under these conditions may have failed women who sought more than a narrowly constrained public life is suggested in a letter from March 1859, approximately the time Franco ended his campaign. In it Ada admits, with an air of intense self-reproach, that notwithstanding ‘utmost abhorrence,’ she derived ‘pleasure’ from his attentions (LCB, 26 March 1859). This took many forms, which she describes in great detail: personal magnetism (‘the doctor brought a kind of soothing influence’), kisses (‘I had not power to withdraw my hand’), arousal (‘strange and new sensations that sometimes came over me when he was there’), and ‘the thought that my presence had so much power over this man’ (LCB, 26 March 1859). Such ‘evil tendencies’ didn’t stop with Franco (LCB, 26 March 1859). As if intent on taking Sabrina Swain’s advice to ‘not keep anything back,’ Ada confesses to such encounters with other men. While she assures Clay of ‘not a moment’s unfaithfulness . . . I should wish to kill myself at this moment if I believed that were possible,’ Franco was not the first taken with her, nor perhaps the last (LCB, 26 March 1859). Nevertheless, shortly after her return from Europe, Ada and Clay married. To do his duty as her foster father, Luther cast Delia as Charlotte Temple, telling her ‘nothing but disgrace poverty misery and death can be expected’ from her behavior (TFP, 7 September 1860). For her part, Ada dangled cuckoldry before her fiancé like a noose, hoping the damage would be transformed by her abjection and his openness in return: ‘Tell me just how much this letter pains you, dear Clay!’ (LCB, 26 March 1859). But this time it is Clay’s letters that are missing, probably removed by him sometime after Ada committed suicide in 1873. She was thirty-eight, a mother of four,

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the founder of a school for girls, and one of the first women elected to the Boston School Committee. Given their absence, we are unable to link the letters Clay purged from the family papers to whatever breakdown led to his wife’s death. But inasmuch as working women inverted the generic emotional logic of writing home, it heightened the vulnerability of both correspondents. Whatever Clay felt reading her March 1859 letter, and whatever he wrote in reply, it is reasonable to assume that Ada and Clay, as much as Delia and Luther, regarded her social reintegration less confidently than William and Sabrina Swain did his.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

See John, Spreading the News; Henkin, The Postal Age; and Hewitt, Correspondence. Augst, The Clerk’s Tale, 5. Ibid. 1–9. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives, 3. Ibid. 227. Ibid. 46. See Brodhead, ‘Sparing the Rod.’ On shame and the self in sentimental literature, see Stewart, Reading and Disorder, 120–37. Augst, The Clerk’s Tale, 72. Ibid. 76. ‘Review of Cheap Postage,’ 90. ‘Our Post-Office,’ 393. Hewitt, Correspondence, 6. For a detailed discussion of Swain’s prospecting venture, see Holliday, The World Rushed In, which also generously transcribes much of his correspondence. Quoted in Holliday, The World Rushed In, 449. Ibid. 40. See Lystra, Searching the Heart, 157–91. See Dublin, Farm to Factory, p.19. See ‘Death of Charles T. Thompson,’ 3. For more biographical information on Ada Shepard see Abele, ‘Ada Shepard.’

Works Cited Abele, S. (2013), ‘Ada Shepard and Her Pocket Sketchbooks, Florence 1858,’ Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 39: 1–34. Augst, T. (2003), The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bell, J., and A. Elliot (1854–63), Correspondence, James Alvin Bell Papers, Manuscripts Department, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Cited parenthetically as JABP. Brodhead, R. (1988), ‘Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,’ Representations, 21: 67–96. ‘Death of Charles T. Thompson’ (1893), Sausalito News, 22 December, 3. Dublin, T., ed. (1993), Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830–1860, New York: Columbia University Press. Gerber, D. (2006), Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, New York: New York University Press. Henkin, D. (2008), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Holliday, J. S. (1981), The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience, New York: Simon & Schuster. John, R. R. (1995), Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lystra, K. (1989), Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press. ‘Our Post-Office’ (1848), The New Englander, 6: 393. Page, D., and L. Trussell (1859–61), Correspondence, Trussell Family Papers, Tracy Memorial Library, New London, NH. Cited parenthetically as TFP. Paul, M. (1845–62), Mary Paul Letters, Paul Family Papers, Vermont Historical Society, Barre, VT. Cited parenthetically as MPL. ‘Review of Cheap Postage by Joshua Leavitt’ (1848), The Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 2: 82–104. Rice, S. (1838–45), Letters of Sarah H. Rice, Hazelton Rice Papers, Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier, VT. (last accessed 22 September 2015). Cited parenthetically as LSR. Shepard, A. (1856–9), Letters to Clay Badger, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Norman Holmes Pearson Collection, Yale University. Cited parenthetically as LCB. Stewart, D. M. (2011), Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Swain, W. (1849–50), Correspondence, Swain Family Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Cited parenthetically as CSFP.

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12 LETTERS FROM AMERICA: THEMES AND METHODS IN THE STUDY OF IRISH EMIGRANT CORRESPONDENCE Emma Moreton

O

ver the past few decades there has been a growing interest in the nineteenthcentury letter and how this type of material might inform our understanding of American social history during a period of increasingly intense immigration. Important studies of English, Scottish, Irish, German, Swedish, and Norwegian emigrants, among others, have demonstrated the value of using personal letters to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of both the complex social processes of migration and the conditions and daily lives of the emigrants themselves.1 And they have also enriched our understanding of how the form of the letter itself, for emigrants more than any other group in nineteenth-century America, ‘functioned primarily to [reinforce and] reconfigure personal relationships made vulnerable by distance.’2 The sourcing, preservation, and documentation of emigrant letter collections is now gathering pace, with the Internet providing a significant new forum for the dissemination of long-hidden archives.3 Whilst the value of emigrant letters as socio-historical artifacts is now generally accepted, however, finding the best means to exploit such resources is still somewhat problematic. Methodological issues to do with representativeness and sample size are an ongoing concern for anyone working with ego-documents, and the task of ‘[d]ecoding texts with inadequate paragraphing and punctuation, ungrammatical constructions [and] highly irregular spelling’ – all traits typical of many emigrant letters – poses various challenges with regards to content analysis.4 Additionally, and perhaps most relevantly for the concerns of this chapter, there is the difficulty of what Ken Plummer has called ‘dross rate’ – the fact that: ‘Letters are not generally focused enough to be of analytic interest – they contain far too much material that strays from the researcher’s concern.’5 The editorial practices of various scholars working on and with emigrant letters would appear to support Plummer’s view. Referring to previous studies which have looked at emigrant letters from America, including those of pioneering figures like Theodore Blegen and Alan Conway, as well as more recent accounts, David Fitzpatrick, in his 1994 book Oceans of Consolation, observed that: ‘The authors of this otherwise exemplary work [have] shared the widespread impatience of editors with material deemed “tedious for the non-specialist,” including “ritualized pious reflections” and “endless lists of persons to whom the letter-writer wishes to send his or her best regards.” ’6 Consequently, what has been viewed as ‘uninteresting’ or ‘irrelevant’ material within these letters has, quite often, simply been omitted. Fitzpatrick’s approach in Oceans of Consolation, an account of nineteenth-century Irish migration 198

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to Australia, on the other hand, was to publish his sources in full (fourteen sequences of letters between 1843 and 1906, of which fifty-five were sent to Australia and fifty-six to Ireland) and to comprehensively analyze those sources for their themes. The present chapter then follows Fitzpatrick’s lead by considering, as Liz Stanley has also argued, ‘the features of letters’ others perceive ‘as problems’ to be ‘the very things’ that are ‘interesting and deserving sustained attention as analytical problematics.’7 The everyday, the typical, and the mundane – what the emigrant wrote about over the course of weeks, years, and decades – I want to argue, provides the fullest insight into how letters in the nineteenth century embodied, defined, and modified human relationships. In order to carry out this analysis I will begin by identifying the key topics within a specific collection of letters by a female Irish emigrant named Julia Lough (pronounced Locke), who emigrated to America in 1884. I will then explore how computational methods can be used to look, in more detail, at the language of one of those topics (‘Homesickness and Separation’), before finally examining how a sense of distance and separation between author and recipient is textually performed in Julia’s letters. Significantly, the letters I treat here are drawn from a much larger body of Irish emigrant correspondence that has been collected by Kerby A. Miller and is housed at the University of Missouri. Miller himself has explored this wider corpus in several pioneering works on Irish emigration, and his archive of over 5,000 letters has also been referred to by scholars including David Emmons, Greg Koos, Susannah Bruce, and myself.8 But the Lough family correspondence, which is a small but significant part of Miller’s collection, has attracted less attention. In the early 1950s, a few of the Lough letters were initially donated by Canice and Eilish O’Mahony of Dundalk, County Louth, to Arnold Schrier, then a graduate student at Northwestern University, who subsequently employed them, alongside other epistolary documents, in his 1958 book Ireland and the Irish Emigration, 1850–1900. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the rest of the Lough letters were then donated to Miller by the O’Mahonys and by Edward Dunne and Kate Tynan of Portlaoise, County Laois. Both Miller and Schrier, who thereafter collaborated in researching Irish migration to America, made photocopies and transcriptions of these letters, and Miller returned the original manuscripts to their donors. It is of this new material that Miller himself has offered the most detailed analysis to date, in his 2008 study Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration, where he uses the Lough letters as part of a wider argument that ‘Irish emigration was based on family – not individual – decisions: [on] choices by Irish parents as to which of their children to send or allow to go abroad first; and choices by Irish Americans as to which of their siblings, cousins, or other relatives to encourage and assist to emigrate and join them.’9 Indeed, this familial dynamic is clearly evident in the migration story of Julia Lough.10 The five Lough sisters – Elizabeth, Alice, Annie, Julia, and Mary – came from a Roman Catholic family in Meelick, in what was then called Queen’s County (now County Laois), Ireland. Mary – who was the youngest – apart, all of them emigrated to America between 1870 and 1884. Elizabeth Lough emigrated some time in 1870 to Winsted, Litchfield County, Connecticut, where she worked mainly as a seamstress, as well as marrying and having five children. Alice Lough also emigrated around 1870. She too lived in Winsted, between 1870 and 1880, before then moving to Hampden County, Massachusetts in 1881 with her husband and several of their eventually seven children. Annie Lough was the third sister to emigrate, in 1878, and she lived in Winsted all her

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life, where she appears to have worked as a servant for a while. Although married, she bore no children. And finally, our central subject here, Julia Lough, came over in September 1884 at the age of thirteen. After arriving, Julia lived with her sister Elizabeth and her brother-in-law Dan Walsh in Winsted between 1884 and 1894. In approximately 1895 she moved to Litchfield County, Connecticut, where she remained until at least 1927, the point when her letters stop. Julia was somewhat of a success story, working as a seamstress to begin with and then from the age of nineteen as an apprentice dressmaker, before becoming a professional dressmaker and opening up her own shop on Main Street, where she employed several members of staff. She also, at the age of twenty-five, married a well-respected, Irish-born railroad engineer, Thomas McCarthy, with whom she had six children (although only one, Elise, is named in her letters). Of the ninety-nine letters in the Lough family collection, thirty-five are in Julia’s hand, and the bulk of these letters (thirty-three in total) date from 1884 to 1895. Two later surviving letters were sent from Julia to her sister Mary between 1919 and 1927.11 Julia’s primary correspondents, at least on this evidence, were her mother (who is addressed in twenty-three of the thirty-five missives) and Mary (who is addressed in twelve), both of whom were still residing in Ireland. The former correspondence seems to have ceased around 1893, for in June 1894, Julia tells Mary: ‘I always spend the evening crying when I get a letter from you I can scarsely make up my mind yet to have Dear Mother gone you do not know how different a feeling it is to be away and try to realize what happened I have thought of Mother very much all through May [sic passim]’ (JLC, 4 June 1894). The twenty-four-year gap between a letter Julia sent to Mary in August 1895 and one she sent to her in March of 1919 or 1920, meanwhile, might be explained by the fact that, in addition to managing her business, these were Julia’s prime childbearing years. This is not to say that Julia did not write any letters home during this period. A reference in the 1919/20 message to a ‘Christmas letter [being] received,’ for example, suggests that the sisters did maintain some level of contact during this period, perhaps corresponding at important times of the year such as Christmas, New Year, St Patrick’s Day, or Easter (JLC, 17 March 1919/20). Yet at the same time this letter also gestures to a lack of regular contact and to a sense of estrangement as having developed between the siblings, as when Julia observes that: ‘We have been very well all Winter Thank God. hoping this will find You and all your family well I dont know them. You dont inform me any thing about them [sic passim]’ (JLC, 17 March 1919/20). Certainly, the tone here is rather different from those earlier in the collection. The first letter we have from Julia, dated ‘Saturday night / September / 27–84,’ was sent from Queenstown (now Cobh) on the coast of County Cork, Ireland, just before Julia embarked on her journey to America, and its very moving content gives the reader a powerful sense of what Julia was experiencing when she sat down that evening to write (JLC, 27 September 1884). ‘My Dearest Mother,’ it begins, ‘but it cannot be helped now it wont [sic] be for long Dear Mother I would die if I thought I never would see you again you can be sure’ (JLC, 27 September 1884). The next letter in the sequence, though it does not contain an address line or date, then seems to come just as Julia is about to set sail for America (either from Ireland or England, depending on the passage she took) and once again emphasizes the drama of departure: ‘I am all right so far and I hope I will sleep tonight only we and another young man at [our lodgings with]

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O. Sullivan tonight I have been at the office and we are to be out at half past seven in the morning and sail [sic passim]’ (JLC, n.d. 1884). Since concentrating on such obviously emotional passages potentially does a disservice to the full range and complexity of material in emigrant letters, I have developed specific modes of discursive analysis in an effort to broaden our comprehension of such material. In the case of Julia Lough’s letters, following the assembly of digital transcriptions based on Kerby Miller’s archive, which retained the original spellings, grammar, punctuation, and line breaks, my first task was to identify the key topics within Julia’s correspondence through a close reading of each letter. Deciding on these topic categories was challenging in itself; more challenging still was identifying where topics began and where they ended. Indeed, the issue of topic identification is something that text-linguistics scholars have been grappling with for many years.12 According to Teun Van Dijk, for example, ‘for a sequence to have a topic, each sentence (or its underlying propositions) must “satisfy” this topic directly or indirectly’ and, therefore, a change of topic can be identified ‘if one of the sentences of a discourse no longer “belongs to” a given topic and if the sentence is the first member of a sequence with a different topic.’13 Yet as already indicated, such a method of analysis (which relies, to a large extent, on there being sentence boundaries within a text) is problematic when working with many emigrant letter collections. Julia’s letters, for example, contain neither sentences nor paragraphs – like other emigrant letters, they move, as Bruce Elliott has put it, ‘from topic to topic rarely spending time with any one matter, so that coherence is at the mercy of thematic diversity.’14 In order to rectify this problem, David Fitzpatrick altered the formatting of the letters he included in Oceans of Consolation so as to ‘render [them] intelligible at first reading.’15 Sentence breaks were introduced, ‘causing changes to capitalisation and punctuation,’ and ‘each letter [was] split into paragraphs according to topic, so laying bare at least one reading of the sequential logic of that letter.’16 My approach, however, has been to not alter the formatting of Julia’s correspondence; for arguably, there is structure and logic in her letters. She certainly appears to organize her writing semantically. The rare full stops that are evident in her letters tend to indicate a change in topic, for instance (rather than the end of a sentence). Additionally, Julia uses vocatives – such as ‘Dear Mother’ in the June 1894 letter quoted above – to indicate a shift in the direction of the discourse; and statements about the weather as well as references to the possibility of a reunion (as in, ‘I hope you and I will spend some happy time together yet’) can both indicate a topic change (JLC, 25 March 1894). And finally, religious references, particularly to prayers and blessing, are often used to signal the close of a particular section. My approach, in short, has been to look for sequences within the discourse that appear to be lexically related, whilst at the same time taking into consideration the structure and logic that already exists in Julia’s letters. Through this analysis, twentyfour broad categories then emerged – surprisingly few, perhaps, given the range of possible subjects that might be covered by someone who is experiencing the dramatic changes that migration brings. But we can take this narrow range as both a reflection of the formulaic nature of nineteenth-century correspondence, and indicative of the limited educational background of the author.17 Tabulated in condensed form, the topics (with attendant examples) are these:

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Any descriptions of daily routines such as cooking, sewing, and general household chores.

Any references to death – typically of a family member, friend or personal acquaintance – and/or mourning. Usually, such sections of a letter will be heavily loaded with religious references. Any mention of learning. Typically this topic only comes up when Julia is talking about her nieces and nephews.

Daily Life

Deaths

These are often long sections, providing information, passing comment, or asking questions about family members and/or family friends. It is common for there to be several secondary topics embedded within these sections. Any mention of letters which are about to be written as well as letters which the author hopes to receive. Often, the author will give instructions on what the recipient should write. A formulaic greeting can be found in most of Julia’s letters. Variations on this greeting might include references to health or weather.

Family and Friends

Greetings

Future Letters

Any references to items that have been sent with a letter (a photograph or a newspaper clipping, for instance, or larger items such as a parcel or a trunk).

Enclosures

Education

Definition

Topic and Tag

Table 12.1

‘When you write again I want to hear an account of Maggie and all particulars about home and yourself’ (JLC, c. 1889/94) ‘I am very happy to hear from you and to hear you are in the enjoyment of good health as this leaves one and all friends at present Thank God’ (JLC, 2 December 1889)

‘I was perfectly surprised to hear of Mike Fitzgerald’s death how suddint. let me know did he have the priest or did he think he was going to die’ (JLC, 25 January 1891) ‘above all things keep they to school regular and as long as you can. There is nothing like a good education. No matter where they roam it is every thing now’ (JLC, c. 1889/94) ‘You gave me a happy Surprise to See you drop out of the letter and I very promptly kissed you and was So glad to See you. You look well I think’ (JLC, 17 March 1919/20) ‘I am very glad he has indoor work for all winter does any of his friends ever come see him give my love to him and Mary’ (JLC, December 1893)

Example [sic passim] ‘I have been so busy getting the Sewing done before house cleaning dresses night-gowns bloomers corsetcovers slip I thought I would get this done before dinner. I have leg lamb, spenach onions prune pie graham muffens, Coffee Elsie always drinks milk’ (JLC, 17 March 1919/20)

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Any references to good health or more likely, ill health, with regards to the author, recipient, or any other persons mentioned within the content of the letter. Any references to feelings of homesickness or separation. The word ‘homesick’ itself is never used in the Lough letters, but the author might refer to dreams of home, feelings of loneliness or sadness, and a longing to see family members back home in Ireland. References to distance are common in this context, as are references to the passing of time and seasons. Any instances in which the author attempts to define or align themselves in some way.

Health and Illness

Any reporting of local, national, or international news (as opposed to family news).

News Event

Migration

Any reference to these specific countries. Although the words ‘Ireland’ and ‘America’ are rarely used in the Lough letters, ‘here’ and ‘there’ are often used when making comparisons between home and the New World, as are the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘you.’ This is often a secondary topic, such as when discussing health, work, or religion. Any mention of emigration, whether it is the issue generally or the specific migration of family and friends.

Ireland and America

Identity

Homesickness and Separation

Definition

Topic and Tag

‘I was very much surprised to hear of Jim Deevy coming to this country. I hope he will like it did he ever say anything about coming to see us . . . I think there ought to be a good time in Ireland soon when you say every one is coming here’ (JLC, 11 May pre-1892) ‘I suppose you must have heard of the hard times is all over the country and all the shops and factories shut down We have read about some in New York Starving it seems to be a scarsety of money and all the banks have nearly all failed or closed I hope there will be some change for the better soon’ (JLC, 3 September 1893)

‘it is not because I did not get chances to get married I am single but the right one did not come yet’ (JLC, 3 September 1893) ‘I think you two ought to be very comfortable there and us here working hard’ (JLC, 9 March 1890)

Example [sic passim] ‘if I did not take care of my self I would be often home sick it is very easy to get cold and rheumatism here and perhaps be laid up six months with it’ (JLC, c. 1889–90) ‘I was heart broken the other night I dreamed you was dead and I could not See you and you never left any message for me so I woke up crying and I was so frightened till I realized it was only a dream’ (JLC, 25 January 1891)

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Sign Off

Salutation

Reunion

Remittance

Religion

Previous Letters

Recollections

Topic and Tag

Example [sic passim] Any mention of previous correspondence, sent or received. ‘she wrote last week and sent you the Paper’ (JLC, 9 March 1890) ‘you used always be so good to me wasent I bold but There is often some overlap and ambiguity between the I did not have common sense then have you got that topic of ‘Recollections’ and ‘Homesickness and Separation.’ little trunk yet we used to try hard to get a look in I Generally speaking, ‘Recollections’ is used when the author remembers specific events, routines, places or people from the remember’ (JLC, c. 1889–94) past. ‘This is a Holy day here Assension Day. Thos. went Any mention of religious routines or practices (such as mass and communion), religious institutions or people, or religious to half past five mas and I went to seven and received Holy Communion we have many devotions here three discourse (this being often used to console when a death evenings a week I have not missed any so far’ (JLC, 24 occurs within the family). May 1893/94) Any references to money being sent (or not sent) from ‘Dear Mother I am sending you one pound for your America to Ireland. own especial use I am sure you want some new flannels or some thing for yourself’ (JLC, December 1890) ‘I hope I Shall meet you once more in life and have a Any instances where the author mentions the possibility happy time again’ (JLC, 25 January 1891) that one day the family will be back together. This could be a physical reunion in Ireland or a ‘heavenly reunion’ after death. Any formulaic opening to a letter – typically consisting of ‘My Dearest Mother’ (JLC, 11 May pre-1892) a possessive pronoun followed by the recipient’s name or identifier. Any rhetorical or structural feature marking the end of ‘With my best love to My Dear Mother Maggie the letter. There is a sign off in most of Julia’s letters, and and you Dear Mary Wishing you all Mary Happy sometimes two – one in the body and one in the margins. Christmas from your very Affectionate Sister Julia all sends their best love to ye hoping soon to hear from you good bye’ (JLC, 20 December 1884)

Definition

Table 12.1 (Continued)

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Writing Process

Work

Transportation

Weather and Seasons

Topic and Tag

Example [sic passim] Any mode of conveyance, either within Ireland or America. ‘we are to be out at half past seven in the morning and sail’ (JLC, n.d. 1884) Any mention of weather or the seasons. Weather seems to be ‘The snow is about gone I hope we do not get any more. I am always glad to See beautiful Spring’ (JLC, an important structural feature of Julia’s letters, helping to organize the discourse and to introduce or trigger other topics 21 March 1893) (especially around health and homesickness). Any mention of places of work, types of labor, or work ‘I will Soon have a trade and be more independent I routines. work home evenings and get all the sewing I can do but when I comence to get pay I will not take in sewing evenings as it is hard to work all the time’ (JLC, 18 January 1891) ‘I think you are growing smarter all the time to write This category includes any references to the process of letter-writing. These might include evaluative comments and such an nice letter’ (JLC, December 1890) statements relating to the handwriting style, neatness, and spelling of the author’s or recipient’s writing, or instances where the author describes where they are and what they are doing at the time of writing.

Definition

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As should be clear from this outline, although there was inevitably some overlap between topics (such as ‘Homesickness and Separation,’ ‘Recollections,’ and ‘Reunion’), there were also noticeable enough differences between these topics to justify them being categorized on their own. Having identified these topic categories, the next stage was to annotate each letter accordingly. In this respect, the tags identified in angled brackets in the left-hand columns above were used to mark where a topic begins and where it ends. Thus for the topic ‘News Event’ (used to describe any reference to local, national, or international incidents), the opening tag was used to show where the topic started and the same closing tag with a forward slash – – was used to show where the topic ended. As in the following passage from an 1893 letter: I suppose you must have heard of the hard times is all over the country and all the shops and factories shut down We have read about some in New York Starving it seems to be a scarsety of money and all the banks have nearly all failed or closed I hope there will be some change for the better soon (JLC, 3 September 1893) In cases where the discourse could be interpreted in more than one way, two or more tags were used. This meant that a section could be said to be ‘about’ a number of topics, or it could be said to be ‘about’ just one topic. In regard to the passage above, for instance, where the text is annotated with the tags for a ‘News Event,’ an alternative, or additional, interpretation might be the topic ‘Ireland and America.’ In this case the annotation would be as follows (where ‘News Event’ is the primary topic and ‘Ireland and America’ is the secondary topic): I suppose you must have heard of the hard times . . . I hope there will be some change for the better soon

Having annotated all thirty-five letters in this way, it was then possible to extract all references to a particular topic – such as those dealing with the focus of this chapter, ‘Homesickness and Separation’ – and once they were extracted, it became possible to analyze these discursive sequences using computational methods to notice lexical and grammatical patterns. Accordingly, Table 12.2 lists the key topics of Julia Lough’s letters in order of the number of times they occur, thereby providing us with an overview of what Julia writes about, and how often. What is perhaps striking about this data is how rarely topics like ‘Migration’ and ‘Transportation’ seem to crop up, even though these themes are precisely the ones on which most readers of emigrant letters have focused. Instead, the far greater focus of Julia’s letters, at least, is on the more subtle refraction of physical dislocation evident in the national comparisons identified under ‘Ireland and America.’ Other topics, meanwhile, feature heavily because they provide a recurring structure to the letters themselves, helping to organize and situate the flow of information, as with ‘Salutation,’ ‘Greeting’ and ‘Sign Off,’ all of which score in the mid-thirties. Salutations and formulaic greetings can, in fact, be found in all of Julia’s letters (and a sign off can be found in all but two). Additionally, the topics ‘Previous Letters’ and ‘Future Letters’ also occur across all of the thirty-five letters; understandably so, no doubt, when we take into consideration the time, distance, and uncertainty involved in transatlantic

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Table 12.2 Topic Ireland and America Family and Friends Previous Letters Religion Future Letters Greeting Salutation Sign Off Weather and Seasons Recollections Homesickness and Separation Health and Illness Work Enclosures Remittance News Event Reunion Deaths Daily Life Writing Process Identity Education Migration Transportation

Occurrences 66 58 49 48 41 35 35 33 31 31 28 24 23 17 16 10 10 9 8 8 6 2 1 1

communication. One conclusion we might draw from this table, then, is that emigrant letters were both self-reflexive and self-conscious in relation to the epistolary medium in which they partook. This data, however, does not indicate the spread of topics across the letters as a whole. It is possible, after all, that a topic may be mentioned several times in the same letter, or it may not be mentioned at all. Counting the number of times a topic occurs thus offers only one way in to Julia’s letters. Counting the number of words attributed to each occurrence of a particular topic, on the other hand, arguably provides a more accurate reflection of the content of a letter, or of a letter collection. Indeed, Table 12.3 looks rather different. Here, ‘Sign Off’ and ‘Salutation,’ as one might expect given the usual brevity of these epistolary features, move down the scale from positions 7 and 8 to positions 22 and 13 respectively. Notably, however, ‘Previous Letters’ remains in the top four places (along with ‘Family and Friends,’ ‘Ireland and America,’ and ‘Religion’), thereby reaffirming the importance of the rituals and demands of letter-writing itself for Julia. Moreover, ‘Enclosures’ moves markedly up the scale – from fourteenth position to tenth – along with ‘Recollections,’ ‘Work,’ ‘Homesickness and Separation,’ and ‘Deaths’ (which rise five places, eight places, three places and seven places respectively). Although they do

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Words

Family and Friends

4,255

Ireland and America

2,269

Religion

1,854

Previous Letters

1,186

Recollections

978

Work

885

Weather and Seasons

774

Homesickness and Separation

737

Greeting

714

Enclosures

699

Deaths

691

Future Letters

642

Sign Off

637

Health and Illness

563

Remittance

539

News Event

476

Daily Life

320

Writing Process

265

Identity

234

Reunion

213

Migration

136

Salutation

99

Transportation

60

Education

53

not appear as frequently as some other topics, then, these topics, when they do occur, are given prominence in Julia’s letters. Given the particular prominence of the theme of ‘Homesickness and Separation’ in scholarship on emigrant letters, we might take its rise up the rankings in this second table as simply confirming what we already know, but crucially, the extraction of these discursive units also allows us to understand them in much greater detail. In this respect, all occurrences of ‘Homesickness and Separation’ having been extracted, computational tools (in this case the text corpus management and analysis system Sketch Engine) were used to observe distinct patterns in Julia’s language.18 Using the ‘Word List’ option in Sketch Engine, all the Parts of Speech (POS) tags – such as ‘Preposition + Personal Pronoun’ – from the Julia Lough collection with an n-gram value of two (i.e. consisting of two words) and which occurred ten or more times, were extracted. The following table gives the ten most frequent of these POS 2-grams for the topic of ‘Homesickness and Separation’:

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Table 12.4 Examples (with Number of Individual Occurrences in Parentheses)

POS

Frequency

Personal Pronoun + Verb (Present Tense)

28

I hope (5) / I wish (4) / I get (2) / I think (2) / you do (2) / you know (2) / I assure (1) / I do (1) / I go (1) / I keep (1) / I read (1) / I value (1) / I want (1) / it seem (1) / it wont (1) / we do (1) / you see (1)

Preposition + Personal Pronoun

26

for me (3) / from you (3) / of you (3) / since I (2) / so I (2) / so you (2) / till I (2) / with you (2) / between us (1) / for you (1) / if I (1) / near her (1) / near I (1) / to me (1) / to you (1)

Determiner + Singular Noun 22

the world (2) / the year (2) / a crumb (1) / a dream (1) / a feeling (1) / a letter (1) / a picture (1) / a year (1) / another baby (1) / another year (1) / any message (1) / every night (1) / every thing (1) / the evening (1) / the fall (1) / the heart (1) / the letter (1) / the office (1) / the sea (1) / the time (1)

Personal Pronoun + Modal

21

you will (5) / I would (3) / I will (3) / I could (3) / I can (2) / you can (2) / it can (1) / you could (1) / you may (1)

Verb (Present Tense) + Personal Pronoun

15

hope you (5) / wish you (3) / know I (2) / assure you (1) / get it (1) / think I (1) / want you (1) / wish I (1)

Modal + Verb (Base Form)

14

can give (1) / can hope (1) / can see (1) / could help (1) / could make (1) / could see (1) / will give (1) / will live (1) / will send (1) / will spend (1) / will write (1) / would die (1) / would enjoy (1) / would give (1)

Personal Pronoun + Verb (Past Tense)

13

I heard (2) / I thought (2) / I did (1) / I dreamed (1) / I felt (1) / I looked (1) / I made (1) / I realized (1) / I woke (1) / it seemed (1) / you gave (1)

Singular Noun + Preposition 13

time of (2) / bye for (1) / deal of (1) / home at (1) / letter from (1) / message for (1) / night since (1) / office till (1) / piece so (1) / time as (1) / year although (1) / year with (1)

Adjective + Singular Noun

13

long time (2) / beautiful spring (1) / fast today (1) / first doesnt (1) / good cry (1) / good deal (1) / grand everything (1) / little piece (1) / merry xmas (1) / next year (1) / other night (1) / other time (1)

Determiner + Adjective

13

a good (2) / a long (2) / a great (1) / a happy (1) / a little (1) / a merry (1) / all past (1) / any other (1) / the first (1) / the last (1) / the other (1)

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Looking at this table closely, some interesting patterns then begin to emerge. The n-grams ranked first and fifth, for example, contain several verbs which have the ability to project (‘hope,’ ‘wish,’ ‘know,’ ‘think’). Projection structures, in linguistic terms, consist of two main components: the projecting clause (‘I hope’) and the projected clause (‘you will write’). In these structures the primary projecting clause sets up the secondary projected clause as a representation of the content either of what is thought, or of what is said (‘I hope you will write’).19 Projection structures, to put it another way, have the ability to project the author’s expectations, desires, or beliefs onto the recipient. But, as Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen have pointed out, there is also a distinction to be made between the projection of propositions and the projection of proposals, for ‘propositions, which are exchanges of information’ – typically statements or questions – ‘are projected mentally by processes of cognition – thinking, knowing, understanding, wondering, etc.,’ whereas ‘proposals, which are exchanges of goods-&-services’ – typically offers or commands – ‘are projected mentally by processes of desire.’20 In other words, whereas propositions are projected using cognitive verbs such as ‘know’ or ‘think,’ proposals are projected using verbs of desire, such as ‘hope’ or ‘wish.’ Moreover, whereas propositions prospect some kind of verbal response from the recipient (in response to the statement ‘I think you are growing smarter all the time,’ for instance, the recipient may choose to agree or disagree), proposals prospect a non-verbal response (thus, in response to the indirect command ‘I hope you will write,’ the recipient may choose to act – by writing back – or not).21 These response-expecting projection structures anticipate reactions and seek to elicit certain responses from the recipient, thus contributing with particular importance to the interactive nature of letters and helping to strengthen the relationships those letters so often seek to embody. Crucially, a closer look at the projection structures that appear in Julia’s letters within the topic ‘Homesickness and Separation’ shows a relatively high frequency of the verbs ‘hope’ and ‘wish.’ More specifically, for Julia, projection structures containing the verb ‘hope’ are typically coupled with an expression of loneliness (as when she writes, ‘I hope you will have a very happy xmas Dear Mother I do always be lonesome and have a good cry the last three xmas’), or a statement which seeks to reassure the recipient that they are very much in her thoughts (as when she writes, ‘I am thinking of you and I will not forget you next year with Gods help. I hope you will write to me after Christmas’) (JLC, 2 December 1899, December 1890; emphasis added). Using these structures, Julia essentially does two things: she implicitly instructs her mother or sister to undertake a particular emotional or material response, whilst also reassuring them that they are an ongoing part of her mental life. In contrast to the projection structures containing the verb ‘hope,’ which prospect actions that are more or less feasible (Julia’s mother and sister are required to enjoy Christmas or write a letter), those which contain the verb ‘wish’ on the other hand typically express a desire for something which both the author and recipient know to be impossible, or at least, very unlikely – that is, for Julia and her mother and sister to be physically reunited. Thus Julia variously imagines herself back in Ireland, or her mother and sister to be present in America: ‘I wish I was near her so I could make all those things for her’; ‘I wish you was near so I could help you’; ‘Oh how I wish you was near . . . we do have every thing good’ (JLC, July 1893, c. December 1899, 24 May 1893/94; emphasis added). Here the repetition of the word ‘near’ across so many different letters expresses an encoded distance that textually ‘performs’ a desire for closeness and shared experience.

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Interestingly, these kinds of projection structures often contain modal verbs (as in, ‘I hope you will spend a very happy xmas Mother Dear’), but it is the modals that do not belong to these structures that are most often used to construct hypothetical worlds that function to create a sense of closeness and immediacy between author and recipient (JLC, n.d. December 1890; emphasis added). Looking at occurrences of the modal ‘would,’ for example, in writing ‘Dear Mother I would die if I thought I never would see you again you can be sure’ Julia imagines a world in which she and her mother will meet again, and in writing ‘I would give the world to be with you tonight but do not fret I would not like to say good bye for long,’ she imagines a world in which her return to Ireland is possible (n.d. 1884; emphasis added). Equally, the modal verb ‘will’ – typically used to reassure Julia’s mother that she is going to be permanently missed and remembered – seems to function in a similar way. Thus, when she writes ‘Dear Mother I want you to be very happy this xmas and . . . I will be with you all for home is where the heart is’ or ‘I am sure you will be just as well pleased when you know I am thinking of you and I will not forget you next year with Gods help,’ rather than speaking in the present tense, Julia conspicuously shifts her attention to the future (JLC, December 1893, December 1890; emphasis added). This deictic shifting between worlds, as realized through references to person (I/you), time (past/future), distance (near/far), and location (here/there), both performs and reinforces homesickness and separation whilst at the same time creating what David Fitzpatrick has called ‘common moments of imaginable communion.’22 Or as Julia herself succinctly puts it: ‘I am thinking of you although the sea rools [sic] between us’ (JLC, December 1890). Finally, a closer look at the n-grams derived from the last three POS identifiers in the table above confirms the importance of the temporal markers (‘xmas,’ ‘tonight,’ ‘next year’) evident in the passages just quoted to Julia’s discursive world. The following are examples of ‘Singular Nouns and Prepositions’ (SNP), ‘Adjectives and Singular Nouns’ (ASN), and ‘Determiners and Adjectives’ (DA), in context (with emphasis added passim): SNP: ‘the fall is the nicest time of the year here but it always makes me lonesome’ (JLC, 18 October 1891) SNP: ‘I think this is the nicest time of the year although lonesome’ (JLC, 10 October 1893) ASN: ‘you know I am thinking of you and I will not forget you next year with Gods help’ (JLC, December 1890) ASN: ‘I am always glad to See [sic] beautiful Spring, how I would enjoy being home and see how grand everything looks there’ (JLC, 21 March 1893) DA: ‘I assure you I did not cry so much in a long time as when I read your letter’ (JLC, 10 August 1890) DA: ‘Christmas is all past and gone I thought very much of you’ (JLC, 11 May c. 1892) What is striking here is how the three lexical sets are united by the recurrence and interrelation of three particular topics: ‘Homesickness and Separation,’ ‘Recollections,’ and ‘Weather and Seasons.’ Once again, the key phrases that Sketch Engine has extracted from the letters serve a bridging function, joining people, periods, and places into imagined wholes. But in this instance we can see more clearly how changes in the season or climate seem to have triggered feelings of distance and longing in Julia. It is not always the case that the n-grams point to reflections on the relationship

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between past and present, though, as the equal frequency of ‘Personal Pronouns and Verbs (Past Tense)’ in the table above might indicate. Importantly, a closer look at these past-tense verbs in context not only reveals that they tend to be verbs of perception or cognition, but that they are perception/cognition verbs which suggest a lack of clarity. Thus, in one letter Julia states that ‘It seemed so long since I heard from home I was getting uneasy,’ while in another she writes, ‘I dreamed you was dead and I could not See [sic] you and you never left any message for me so I woke up crying and I was so frightened till I realized it was only a dream’ (JLC, 10 August 1890, 25 January 1891; emphasis added). Within these discursive structures, then, there is an overwhelming sense of vagueness and uncertainty – a lack of knowledge about Ireland, friends, and family – that suggests that the imaginative bridging of physical distance was not always so easily achieved for Julia. Ultimately, the methodologies outlined above allow us to see how Julia’s relationships were changed, maintained, constructed, and performed through language. With particular regard to the topic of ‘Homesickness and Separation,’ projection structures are used to anticipate responses and reactions, assigning the recipient of a letter a role to play in the unfolding discourse, modal verbs are used to help to construct possible worlds in which the author and recipient might once again be reunited, social deixis textually construct a sense of distance and separation between participants, and finally lexis relating to loneliness and sadness, as well as cognition and perception verbs expressing vagueness, all contribute to what might be described as a lexicogrammar of emigrant epistolarity. Inevitably, the focus of this chapter is narrow, examining just one collection of correspondence – thirty-five letters by one Irish emigrant to America – from the much larger archive of 5,000 emigrant letters held by Kerby Miller. But through repeating the process described here, using letters by authors from a range of socio-historical, economic, and cultural backgrounds, a more comprehensive lexicogrammar of my key topics may begin to emerge, providing a fuller picture of the language and functions of emigrant correspondence whilst also potentially paving the way for semi-automated methods of topic identification for emigrant letter collections in the future. Equally, of course, this further research may show that the linguistic features and themes identified here need to be expanded or refined as other, more typical ones emerge. And nor should we forget that the discourses and topics that do not emerge may be as telling as the ones that do. Certainly, from reading Julia’s letters, one gets the feeling that her emigration operated as a great source of guilt and regret. In a letter to her sister from 1893, for example, she declares, ‘See what a different life yours and mine has been I am sure you are happy in having such a good husband and Now your own children and having Mother there always but then I think you were always the best to Mother and it is only fair you Should receive the reward [sic passim]’ (JLC, 21 March 1893). Yet, by all accounts, Julia’s life in America was very successful and prosperous; she had independence, a career, a business, and a family. It may simply be the case that Julia feels socially constrained by nineteenth-century attitudes about Irish emigration and the emigrant experience here, and that she does not want to offend her sister by emphasizing the positive possibilities of the New World. It is striking, though, that as well as rarely mentioning her own work and family in her letters, Julia at no point states that she is happy in America. In this respect, what is not talked about in emigrant letters may be just as interesting, and as revealing, as what is talked about.

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Notes 1. See, for example: Erickson, Invisible Immigrants; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer, News from the Land of Freedom; Gerber, Authors of Their Lives; Barton, Letters from the Promised Land; and Zempel, In Their Own Words. 2. Elliott, Gerber, and Sinke, ‘Introduction,’ 17. 3. See, for example: ‘Digitizing Immigrant Letters’; ‘Digitizing Experiences of Migration’; ‘The Irish Emigration Database.’ 4. Elliott, Gerber, and Sinke, ‘Introduction,’ 4. 5. Plummer, Documents of Life, 55. 6. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 21. The quotations here are taken from Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer, News from the Land of Freedom, 46. For these seminal works referred to by Fitzpatrick, see: Blegen, Land of Their Choice, and Conway, The Welsh in America. 7. Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium,’ 202. 8. For Miller’s key works, see: Emigrants and Exiles; Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan; and Ireland and Irish America. For the other works mentioned here, see: Emmons, The Butte Irish; Koos, ‘The Irish Hedge Schoolmaster’; Bruce, The Harp and the Eagle; and Moreton, ‘Profiling the Female Emigrant.’ 9. Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 307. 10. I am indebted to personal communications with Kerby Miller for the information that follows. See too Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 316. 11. Some of the letters are not dated, but their content allows them to be placed within an approximate timeframe. 12. See, for example: Beaugrande, Text Production; Van Dijk, Text and Context; and Hoey, Patterns of Lexis and Textual Interaction. 13. Van Dijk, Text and Context, 138. 14. Elliott, Gerber, and Sinke, ‘Introduction,’ 4. 15. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 26. 16. Ibid. 17. A topic-comparison between lower-rank and higher-rank letter-writers might be an interesting future study in this respect. For more on epistolary conventions in emigrant letter-writing and their relation to social background see Dossena, ‘ “As this leaves me.” ’ 18. See ‘Sketch Engine.’ For a detailed account of this system’s features and their potential uses see Kilgarriff and Kosem, ‘Corpus Tools for Lexicographers.’ 19. See Halliday and Matthiessen, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 377. 20. Ibid. 461. 21. For a much fuller analysis of the use of projection structures in emigrant correspondence see Moreton, ‘ “I hope you will write.” ’ 22. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 494.

Works Cited Barton, H. A. (1990), Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in America, 1840–1914, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blegen, T. C., ed. (1955), Land of Their Choice: The Immigrants Write Home, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Conway, A., ed. (1961), The Welsh in America: Letters from the Immigrants, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Beaugrande, R. (1984), Text Production: Toward a Science of Composition, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Bruce, S. U. (2006), The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865, New York: New York University Press.

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‘Digitizing Experiences of Migration: The Development of Interconnected Letter Collections’ (2013–present), Arts and Humanities Research Council, Coventry University, (last accessed 22 September 2015). ‘Digitizing Immigrant Letters’ (2010), Immigration History Research Centre, University of Minnesota, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Dossena, M. (2007), ‘ “As this leaves me at present”: Formulaic Usage, Politeness and Social Proximity in 19th Century Scottish Emigrants’ Letters,’ in S. Elspas, N. Langer, J. Scharloth, and W. Vandenbussche (eds.), Germanic Language Histories From Below (1700–2000), Berlin: De Gruyter, 13–29. Elliott, B. S., D. A. Gerber, and S. Sinke (2006), ‘Introduction,’ in B. S. Elliott, D. A. Gerber, and S. Sinke (eds.), Letters Across Borders: Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1–25. Emmons, D. M. (1990), The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Erickson, C. (1972), Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Centrury America, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Fitzpatrick, D. (1994), Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia, Cork: Cork University Press. Gerber, D. A. (2006), Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, New York: New York University Press. Halliday, M. A. K., and C. M. I. M. Matthiessen (2004), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, London: Arnold. Hoey, M. (1991), Patterns of Lexis in Text, New York: Oxford Univerity Press. Hoey, M. (2001), Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge. ‘The Irish Emigration Database’ (2012–present), Mellon Centre for Migration Studies, Ulster American Folk Park Museum, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Kamphoefner, W. D., W. Helbich, and U. Sommer, eds. (1988), News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kilgarriff, A., and I. Kosem (2012), ‘Corpus Tools for Lexicographers,’ in S. Granger and M. Paquot (eds.), Electronic Lexicography, New York: Oxford University Press, 31–56. Koos, G. (2001), ‘The Irish Hedge Schoolmaster in the American Backcountry,’ New Hibernia Review, 5: 9–26. Levinson, S. C. (1983), Pragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lough, J. (1884–1927), Correspondence, Lough Family Letters: 1876–1927, Courtesy of Kerby Miller, University of Missouri. Cited parenthetically as JLC. Miller, K. A. (1985), Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, K. A. (2008), Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration, Dublin: Field Day. Miller, K. A., D. N. Doyle, and P. Kelleher (1995), ‘For Love and Liberty: Irish Women, Migration and Domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815–1920,’ in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 54–61. Miller, K. A., A. Schrier, B. D. Boling, and D. N. Doyle, eds. (2003), Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815, New York: Oxford University Press. Moreton, E. (2012), ‘Profiling the Female Emigrant: A Method of Linguistic Inquiry for Examining Correspondence Collections,’ Gender & History, 24: 617–46. Moreton, E. (2015), ‘ “I hope you will write”: The Function of Projection Structures in a Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Irish Emigrant Correspondence,’ Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 16: in press.

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Plummer, K. (2001), Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism, London: SAGE Publications. Schrier, A. (1958), Ireland and the Irish Emigration, 1850–1900, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ‘Sketch Engine’ (2003–present), Lexical Computing Ltd., (last accessed 22 September 2015). Stanley, L. (2004), ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences,’ Auto/ Biography Studies, 12: 201–35. Van Dijk, T. A. (1977), Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse, London: Routledge. Zamper, S., ed. (1991), In Their Own Words: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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13 THE USUAL PROBLEMS: SICKNESS, DISTANCE, AND FAILURE TO ACCULTURATE IN MID-NINETEENTHCENTURY EMIGRANT LETTERS Janet Floyd

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ome of the content that appears routinely in letters written home by AngloAmerican emigrants to the western territories and states of the U.S. in the middle of the nineteenth century deals with common issues: the ‘usual problems’ of sickness, ‘loss of citizenship and home’ and adapting to ‘the type of lifestyle’ required there.1 Discussion of the malarial fevers that plagued newly arrived settlers is ever-present in these letters, as (predictably) are references to the vast distance between writer and addressee, alongside dour commentaries on unwelcome aspects of the region and its inhabitants. This kind of unsurprising material has been of most interest to historians investigating the popular experience of the West or to cultural historians of settler responses to life on what used to be called the frontier. For scholars of emigrant letters, quite different priorities obtain. Theirs is an inquiry that mines letters for evidence of the social and psychological implications of mass emigration for the individual: the patterns of disruption, unhappiness, or even trauma that may be found in letters to those back at home. Questions around assimilation, adaptation, and acculturation to the new setting – the progress toward a successful outcome of emigration – lie at the heart of the matter here. With these differences in mind, I want to turn this discussion on its head and look again at three letters’ treatment of these ‘usual issues.’ My aim is to suggest a wider range of questions that we might put to the emigrant letter: firstly, by assessing the ways in which narratives other than a progress from alienation toward accommodation may structure letters, in this case narratives of sickness; secondly, by considering the complex forms in which the acknowledgment of distance may appear; and, finally, by thinking again about failure and success in acculturation to a new setting as a focus in reading emigrant letters. As Marjory Harper has succinctly put it: ‘Migrant letters are a minefield.’2 Not only are their numbers massive, but their survival and preservation has been largely random. Replies to emigrant correspondence are rarely available, and the emigrant experiences committed to paper were themselves highly variable. The three letters I have chosen here are thus very different from one another and no claims can be made for their representativeness. What they each in their different ways suggest, however, is what can be gained from thinking further about their epistolary representation of experience. 216

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Letters written by Anglo-American emigrants moving westwards have generally been understood as constituting a particular and separate genre of epistolary writing. These are, extraordinarily, letters written by ‘obscure people’ – available in great numbers and clearly occupying a quite different category, and having a quite different kind of interest, to the more evidently artful missives of educated writers or historically significant actors.3 They respond to a precise circumstance – emigration in pursuit of greater prosperity to the western states and territories of the U.S. – that has long been the subject of shared understandings and exhaustive analysis by popular and academic historians and writers. Whatever else historians of the American West have disagreed about, the psychological implications of this experience have been a matter of some consensus. Or, to put it another way, there are no pressing, broader historical debates to distract the scholar of emigrant letters from the consideration of their epistolarity. Nor is there much argument in the field about what the emigrant letter home was for – namely, to express the threat to psychological well-being of dislocation and to try to lay it to rest, whilst at the same time weighing that threat against expectations for future satisfaction and prosperity. Charlotte Erickson, whose magisterial 1972 book Invisible Immigrants inaugurated the current field, while following the practice of historians of emigration to the western states of America in seeing these letters as ‘micro-histories,’ also took the view that such letters were the work of ‘unassimilated’ emigrants struggling to adapt to new circumstances. Indeed, she argued that no emigrant would bother to write letters home unless he or she was dissatisfied or unhappy. These, then, were authentic and quite transparent texts, whose function it was to dispel the writer’s sense of alienation through several standard tactics: arranging the immigration of others, getting ‘financial help,’ and maintaining ties.4 Much more recently, David Gerber has found the same essentially unmediated quality in these letters, a ‘purity and authenticity of emotions,’ as well as a comparable desire on the part of the letter-writers to mend a troubling sense of rupture.5 He too organizes the content of these letters into three strands: the regulative (organizing and maintaining relationships), the expressive, and the descriptive (‘news’). All, he argues, are mobilized to achieve a sense of continuity in relationships in the face of extremes of separation. These scholarly arguments follow in a long popular tradition of understanding the content of emigrant letters. Letters seemed, from the start of westward migration in the U.S., to operate as signifiers of the painful implications of emigration. The Oakland Museum, for example, owns an undated daguerreotype, ‘Four Miners Reading a Letter,’ in which three comrades surround a young man gazing pensively at the sheets he clutches in his hand.6 The longing of the forty-niners for letters was a trope of most mid-nineteenth-century representations of their experience. Thus Alonzo Delano’s popular Gold Rush drama, Live Woman in the Mines (1857), included a set piece showing miners desperate for letters and then made distraught with homesickness by reading them: Enter Miners, hastily, as if running from their work. Half a dozen voices at once. Miners. Any letters for me? Have I got a letter? Mary. Wheugh! Wheugh! One at a time – one at a time – can’t look for all at once! Old Swamp. Form a line boys – form a line; give the gal a chance.

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1st Miner. I’ll give five dollars for a letter! 2nd Miner. I’ll give ten – only give me a letter . . . Pike. Here old fellow. Why – why Old Swamp, you’re cryin – bad news from home! Old Swamp. (Struggling with emotion.) N-no; all’s well, thank God.7 Equally, the sadness engendered by reading and responding to letters received from emigrants was also a popular subject, as in such genre paintings such as James Collinson’s ‘Answering the Emigrant’s Letter’ (1850), in which children collaborate on a letter under the rueful gaze of their parents. Admittedly, images of emigrants actually writing letters, mournfully or otherwise, are less common. For all that this period saw a massive increase of letter-writing in general (an increase intimately linked with those systems of communication and transportation that also made all kinds of migration cheaper, easier, and quicker), actually sending letters was still a considerably more effortful matter than receiving them.8 For some, illiterate or semi-literate, it demanded assistance. For many writing was a new practice. Bruce Elliott, David Gerber, and Suzanne Sinke have commented, for example, on how emigrant writers ‘often struggle on from topic to topic . . . so that coherence is at the mercy of thematic diversity.’9 So perhaps the depiction of emigrants writing letters has never seemed as pleasantly poignant to imagine as the receiving of them. Mournful import aside, however, the scholarship of emigrant letters has paid increasing attention to the particular rhetorical tactics of emigrant letters, not only in their use of the conventions (and platitudes) of letter-writing, but also the way in which they operate within discourses of emigration.10 Stephen Fender, in particular, has argued that emigrant letters were imbricated in a dominant discourse of emigration that organized the experience as a rite of passage, taking the emigrant from the trauma of separation through a testing ‘liminal phase’ to eventual accommodation and ‘an actual reformation’ of the self.11 Fender reminds us of the cultural work performed by these letters. The claims of success or the justifications for setbacks that form such a common part of emigrant letters were always part of the broader cultural argument about emigration, as indeed were the letters themselves. In England, for instance, letters from ‘poor persons’ as well as from the privileged who had emigrated were commonly printed in newspapers and collected in volumes to aid others considering emigration to the ‘western states.’ Emigrant letters on both sides of the Atlantic were, and remain, some of the most culturally visible letters of the nineteenth century: printed and reprinted by regional presses, assiduously quoted in histories both popular and esoteric, and imitated in novels and movies. In considering what else there is to say about a category of letters so studied, treasured, and imitated, however, we can begin by turning to that rare thing (indeed it is perhaps unique): a particular emigrant letter discussed across and beyond the field of study of Anglo-American emigrant letter-writing. This particular letter is a missive by the Englishwoman Rebecca Butterworth, written from Outland Grove, Arkansas in 1846. This single letter (no previous or subsequent letters or responses are extant), a philippic of miserable complaint, has prompted interest and vexation by turns. Erickson argues that Butterworth should never have emigrated from Rochdale, Lancashire at all. She is a failure.12 Fender agrees and notes that the letter wanders outside the dominant discourse he has described.13 It seems to me significant, though, that Butterworth’s letter focuses on illness, and I want to use it to reflect on the accounts of sickness that were so common

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in emigrant letters. From here, I move to a letter by Hiram Lewis Hurlbut, written in 1851 from Sacramento to his home in Grand Isle, Vermont. In this case I am interested in exploring the complex meaning and expression of distance in such letters. And finally, I turn to a letter by Sarah Stebbins, who migrated from Deerfield, Massachusetts to Illinois in the late 1830s; a letter that combines questions of success and failure, excitement about the future and a sense of alienation, in ways that are not necessarily acknowledged in a field that largely looks for processes of assimilation. Rebecca Butterworth’s well-known letter, written from the short-lived settlement of Outland Grove in Arkansas on 5 July 1846, is a letter of passionate grievance written to her father and, since its reprinting in Invisible Immigrants, it has been singularly discussed as a hyper-negative response to a disastrous experience of emigration. This letter of five substantial paragraphs to her ‘very dear and tender father’ in Rochdale, Lancashire covers four pages of notepaper.14 Peter Stallybrass, who has judged brevity to be characteristic of most letters of the period, would no doubt consider this to be exceptionally lengthy, and indeed it certainly appears so to the reader of emigrant letters.15 Moreover, the letter also stands out as dominated not so much by the assessment of economic success or failure on the one hand, or homesickness and alienation on the other – though Butterworth tackles both much later in the letter – but rather by the description of illness. She launches almost immediately into an exhaustive account of giving birth to a child whilst in the grip of a fever, and does not spare her reader: On Sunday the 14th June labour came on. I had a many came to see me expecting it almost the last time. I was insensible at times. We did not know I had labour and John and Sarah would have been alone with me on Sunday night but Thos and his wife got very uneasy about me at 9 o’clock and concluded to come and sit up that night, knowing John and Sarah were weared down which I know I attach to a kind Providence. I suppose I had a few dread hours still not knowing I was in labour beside having been so prostrated a whole week with fever.16 Moving on from a lengthy exposition of the timing, treatment, and outcome of these events (the baby has died soon after his birth and been buried with ‘Polly and Rebecca,’ two other children born to her in Outland Grove), and from the aftermath of her illness, Butterworth then sets out the deteriorating circumstances in which she and her husband John are living: John is not satisfied here. What little corn we had the cattle [h]as jumped the fence and eaten it so that it will not make even cattle feed. We are dammed up in corner. We have not bread to last above a week and no meat, very little coffee, about ½ lb of sugar. John can milk one cow which makes us a little butter but the other won’t let him.17 In the concluding paragraphs, Butterworth makes a range of suggestions as to how she and her husband can get home to Rochdale, what they can sell to raise funds, and what different routes might cost. She makes the single proviso that she ‘will feel a pang, that is leaving the homes of our 3 little ones but I cannot see their faces.’18 Clearly, though, she is asking to be rescued by a gift of money from her father. Across thirty-five years of scholarship, Butterworth’s letter has been read in just one way; that is, as existing outside the conventions of response associated with emigrant letters. Erickson, for example, deals with the whole family as representative of ‘an urban family who tried to settle on a frontier farm . . . An illustration of the want of preparation

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of this family . . . was their complete reliance on doctors in sickness. No one in [the] family had even a rudimentary knowledge of midwifery.’19 Erickson’s argument is that Butterworth was unlikely to adapt to settlement in Arkansas because as a middle-class, urban daughter of a ‘land surveyor’ or ‘estate agent,’ she was not prepared to engage with her surroundings, as well as being what Erickson surmises as ‘temperamentally unprepared.’20 Fender, discussing the response to emigration as being formed by a discourse that anticipated a process of trauma, dissatisfaction, accommodation, and recovery, argues that accounts of failure are ‘fragmentary, hesitant, few in number,’ and that Butterworth must be considered an extreme case, standing ‘outside’ both the desired or general experience of emigration, and consequently unable to organize her experience narratively or rhetorically.21 Similarly, meanwhile, Gerber argues that Butterworth’s ‘intense narrative of sickness, death and impoverishment’ is an exception on the grounds that ‘whatever their situation, few were willing to declare a surrender and return.’22 In arguing that Butterworth’s experience was one of ‘completely capitulating in the face of the failure of their American dream’ (that is, the result of a mismatch between a fantasy of prosperity and the actual circumstances of life in Arkansas), Gerber echoes both Erickson’s association of Butterworth with misguided ‘agrarian dreams’ and Fender’s sense that her fantasies of a ‘land of plenty’ have been ‘shattered.’23 The way in which Butterworth’s misery has been represented as the predictable outcome of emigration (‘failure’ and ‘capitulation’) for someone ‘unsuited’ on grounds of class and background therefore needs reconsideration if her letter is to be read afresh. There seems no clear reason to assume that, as a woman from a town, or the daughter of a man of some skills and knowledge, she was any less likely to be prepared for Outland Grove, a settlement that did not survive, than any other emigrant. Growing up in a city at the center of a group of mill towns highly responsive to the international vagaries of the cotton trade, Rebecca Butterworth knew a Rochdale of boom and bust at the heart of industrial capitalism, its workforce famously stroppy, its activism well established (it was, for example, a center of abolitionism in England).24 William Barton, Butterworth’s father, was a major activist in the city, a self-made man from Liverpool, a campaigner on behalf of poor people, a visitor of the poor, and a radical non-conformist.25 We know nothing about Rebecca Barton’s life before her marriage to a shoemaker, John Butterworth, but it seems unlikely to have been either pampered, or disengaged from economic struggle. In moving to the American South, Rebecca Butterworth was relocating from an industrial center to the resource-providing periphery formed by the cotton trade, a classic move for those who were economically vulnerable in the age of European colonization. She was also making a popular move. Arkansas in the 1840s had a fastgrowing cotton economy (fired by Southern cotton farmers migrating westwards), accompanied by a broader 333 per cent increase in agricultural economy in the same decade. This was the Southern cotton industry pushing westwards, accompanied by migrant farmers. Donald McNeilly, for instance, has described how many thousands of farmers ‘of the middling sort . . . poured into Southern and Eastern Arkansas to build self-sufficient farms’ during this period.26 During the 1840s, the numbers of these farmers grew from 6,000 to over 14,000. By the time Butterworth got to Arkansas in about 1843, then, although there was apparently ‘a disparate jumble of well-born, ambitious and otherwise talented pioneers’ flowing in, there was also a script for migrant families to follow.27 There were, for example, locally published instructional books for households new to the area.28

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Butterworth was unhappy in Outland Grove on a number of fronts, but there seems no special reason to draw her letter into an argument about barriers to accommodation. It is more useful, perhaps, to refer to the work of those scholars of nineteenthcentury migration who emphasize: firstly, that emigrants were not moving from places that were experiencing stable conditions to more unstable ones, but from places as much in flux as their destinations; and secondly, that emigrant experience was extraordinarily variable and volatile.29 Butterworth, though she situates herself, in the address she gives, as in ‘The Back Woods of America,’ was competing alongside hundreds of others of the middling sort like herself. Indeed, she had access to a range of supports. She did not move with her husband and children alone, but with a slew of her husband’s relatives, the rest of whom subsequently abandoned Outland Grove and went on to settle permanently elsewhere in Arkansas.30 The only circumstance that marks an obvious divide between Rebecca Butterworth and the other parts of her family living nearby in Arkansas was that she lost four children within a year: five-year-old Mary Ann, who had been born in Rochdale in 1841; Polly and Rebecca, who died aged four and two; and William, whose death at birth is recorded in the letter under discussion. In approaching this letter with its emphasis on illness in mind, I want to suggest that Butterworth is not departing from a narrow repertoire of rhetorical norms, but drawing on a different set of discursive tactics for representing her situation as an emigrant. Viewed from one angle, this is a familiar type of emigrant missive, in that the writer asks for money. Equally, though, it is common for emigrant letters to discuss health. What, then, do these letters do when they raise illness? Butterworth’s choice of her illness as her primary focus (rather than economic insecurity) may constitute a strategy, I would argue, for distracting her reader from the failure of her husband and herself to progress in their farming while John’s siblings apparently prospered. Equally, she may have been using the description of her bodily suffering as ‘the only way she [could] speak’ as a woman, as Carolyn Steedman has suggested of feminine epistolarity, and in order to assert a decisive presence in the family fortunes.31 In any case, it is first and foremost illness that represents Butterworth’s predicament in Arkansas. This is not merely an idiosyncracy on her part. Conevery Valenčius, for example, in a study of health in Arkansas and Missouri during this period, describes how important the experience of illness was to the understanding of new areas. It wasn’t just that malarial fevers were ‘debilitating and disorientating,’ or that ‘fail[ure] to stem chronic illness’ was a common driver for people during this period to move on.32 Illness was an experience that defined many people’s response to the region. This is surely unsurprising. It is a truism, after all, that a ‘stable sense of self over time is a condition of one’s identity and survival’: we want to think of ourselves as ‘agents persisting over time.’33 But illness militates against both that stable self-identity and that expectation of physical reliability, ‘bombard[ing]’ you, as Neil Vickers writes, with ‘sensations from within that are not anchored in meaning.’34 The project of emigration was fundamentally understood as a test of individual grit, hard work, and hope of prosperity for the future. Illness, however, could erase all such agency. It suspends time, both past and future. As Vickers puts it: ‘All the information you have is locked into the present moment.’35 Accordingly, Rebecca Butterworth does not argue that her illness has promoted greater faith, gratitude, or spiritual progress. Rather, she reiterates that she was in a state of oblivion: ‘I cannot tell you what kind of medicine . . . I was insensible at times . . .We did not know I had labour . . . They say I forced myself out of bed and from sister and run round the bed to a pallet on the floor.’36 Moreover, she

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also returns a number of times to her sense, during her illness, that the future has been suspended. She begins her letter: MY VERY DEAR AND TENDER FATHER I have been long in answering your and my dear sisters letters. The reason is I was taken sick a month since today. I commenced with bilious intermittent fever which nobody thought I would get over . . . Thomas . . . did not expect me getting over it . . . if premature labour came on it would be certain death . . . I had a many came to see me expecting it almost the last time . . . Both Docter Howard and Thos said I may be very thankfull I am spared myself, for if I had lived to come to my time the child was so large I could not of borne it . . . If it aint for him through the providence of god I expect I would have been in my grave now [sic passim].37 My point here is that Butterworth, in drawing on illness as a subject, was exploring and communicating her experience of emigration in a distinct form. These are not ‘fugitive counter-currents’ against the norms of emigrant expression, as Fender would have it.38 Butterworth simply presents a different self, not homesick but endangered physically and psychologically, and she offers a different sense of time, not as a continuum stretching between failure and success, but as dominated by a climax in her illness. If Butterworth’s emigrant letter has been most often read (and misread) in the context of frontier farming, another important body of emigrant letters is constituted of those written home from the very different setting of Gold Rush California in its heyday. Letters from miners in the Far West have, in fact, traditionally belonged to a separate category in Western scholarship. They bear the same badge of authenticity as other emigrant letters, but there is no expectation that the forty-niners and their successors will use the same discursive patterns as farming ‘pioneers.’ Where letters from the latter are, as I have suggested, routinely categorized and summarized, letters from the miners tend to be characterized as simply expressed, and ‘plotless.’39 As Eric Richards has noted, until very recently, scholars have been attracted to specificity of emigrant experience: they have tended to ‘contain’ the emigrant letter ‘within certain boundaries’ of nation and region, particular trajectories, nationalities, and occupations.40 Yet all these Anglo-American letter-writers, forty-niners and farmers alike, were moving far from home, all were precipitated into an unfamiliar life, and all were driven by hopes of greater prosperity. Furthermore, many forty-niners eventually swapped mining for other economic activities, and many pioneers dumped farming and made for the towns. Here, then, I want to examine an issue that is routinely acknowledged, if not necessarily addressed, across the whole range of emigrant letters: namely, the distance between emigrant writer and addressee. Recent scholarship has drawn our attention to a shift in the conditions of American postal exchange at the middle of the century. David Henkin, for instance, argues that the arrival of cheap postage ‘enabl[ed] correspondents back home to imagine themselves close to their displaced ones,’ while William Merrill Decker describes the emergence of exchanges of ‘sincere and confidential disclosures’ that are ‘disengaged . . . from public performance.’41 And recent, more general, work on epistolarity has emphasized too the ‘communication circulaire’ on which correspondence rests.42 But, of course, emigrant writers found communication through letter-writing a

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less reliable business, proffering the opportunity for news and confidences, while frustrating the correspondent in his or her desire for intimate exchange. The following letter from California, written in May 1850, draws to our attention the distance that nullifies communication, not the closeness to which the nineteenth-century letter was devoted: ‘Dear Sally and little children I this night take the opportunity of writing to you to let you know that I am well at present and hope that when these few lines comes to hand they may find you all enjoying the same.’43 Writing this, the emigrant husband is well aware that his news of his experiences will be out of date by the time Sally receives it. But having committed it to paper anyway, and paused, he receives a letter from her and responds: I received your letter last night . . . which gave me great pleasure and satisfaction to hear that you was all alive and that your health was somewhat better than it has been for sum time past but that poor little [?] and John was unwell but I hope they will bewell again vary soon. I started a letter to you the 13 of November but you hav not received it that was since your note to me I hope you have got it before this time. I have nothing of great importance to write to you at present for I have not made but vary little money.44 [sic passim] Here, the pauses in communication attendant on distance are almost silencing the writer. Only life-changing news – the discovery of a stash of gold, presumably – could maintain its power and interest notwithstanding the time lag between writing and receiving a letter. All else is either uncertain (‘I hope you have got it before this time’) or scrambled (‘I started a letter to you . . . but you hav not received it’). Decker has argued that ‘the death that is the space between correspondents – a geographic space but also the space of signifier and the mirage of consensual meanings – haunts letterwriters,’ and the difficulty of closing the distance between correspondents surely has a particular valency for emigrant writers in the mid-nineteenth century, some of whom imagined never seeing again the people they had left behind.45 Hiram Lewis Hurlbut’s 1851 letter from Sacramento acknowledges his distance from his family in near silence. Addressing a pictorial letter sheet, one side illustrated, one side blank, to his wife of about twenty years, ‘Miss E. A. Hurlbut Grand Isle Vermont,’ but actually writing to his sons Hiram and Homer, he scrawls over a series of illustrations of one ‘John Smith’ traveling west a message to one son with instructions to another: To Hiron B. Hurlbut Homer Hurlbut Mind your Mother Keep this clean til you See me H. L Hurlbut46 Perhaps Hiram could not be bothered to write more. One contemporary wag commented that buying pictorial letter sheets was ‘the method much resorted to by Californians as it helps to fill out the sheet and thereby save[s] the trouble of writing long letters which by many is considered a great task.’47 Perhaps he chose to keep his distance; thus bearing out Stephen Fender’s argument that emigration to the ‘golden west’ represented a masculine ‘need for space.’48 Or perhaps, alone, thrown back on himself, he was unable to overcome a sense of social isolation sufficiently to write. Michel De

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Certeau has described the blank sheet of the letter as ‘a space of one’s own’ on which to write, but it may be that loneliness and a sense of distance stripped ‘a space of one’s own’ of attraction.49 Conversely, rather than giving way to a sense of the yawning distance from his family, Hurlbut may have used the letter, as Henkin has suggested that many forty-niners did, to assert his authority over the limitations of distance.50 In writing only that his sons are to be obedient to their mother, and to maintain the condition of the letter, Hurlbut is seemingly engaged in this kind of assertion of discipline despite distance. These boys, he judges, need to be reminded of the mistakes they are likely to make in his absence. Whatever the case, Hurlbut chose a form of letter that had much to offer in his situation, residing at a distance of something around 3,000 miles from home. The mass-produced pictorial letter sheets sold to miners in their hundreds and thousands for ten or fifteen cents apiece, and so were an especially popular option through the early 1850s on account of their cheapness (since postal charges were still assessed according to numbers of sheets).51 In a population of emigrants with varying levels of literacy and little experience of writing at any length, and without the presence of large numbers of emigrant women, to whom the responsibility of writing home was often passed, these letter sheets were useful indeed. Moreover, the sheets also offered a range of images encoding the writer’s distance from home: images of folks at home missing their emigrant relatives or going about familiar domestic routines; pictures of racy Californian adventures with banditti and the like; and scenery and views. Hurlbut, for his part, chose a popular type: the miner’s experience set out as a series of images. On his chosen letter sheet, eight images, sketched roughly, are framed by an opening image entitled ‘Mr. John Smith takes final leave of Mrs. John Smith’ (a sad scene of a couple already parted and waving handkerchiefs at one another from a distance) and, at the end, one entitled ‘John Smith arrives safe home with his pile’ (a surprisingly poignant scene of the couple almost reunited, stretching their stick-like arms out to one another).52 The references to distance could hardly be more direct, and Hurlbut was not unusual in suggesting that placing this sheet on the wall at home would remind his family of what might at any time be happening to him. Writing home from California in April 1855, for example, L. D. Smith told his brother: ‘William get a frame and put this picture in and hang it where you can look at it and just considder [sic] it is me out on a prospecting tour this is a good comparison.’53 Smith’s letter sheet then depicts the unfolding experience of ‘A prospecting party’ in four comic images: ‘Starting’; ‘Not even the colour’ (a scene of hopeless failure); ‘The end of the Mule’; and, ignominiously, ‘Returning.’54 Hurlbut, on the other hand, chose a sheet picturing a jumble of disparate experiences, mining for gold, certainly, but also casual work and gambling, as well as continual movement: John Smith, being short of cash, turns porter to the Elephant House. John Smith has struck a Lead. John Smith having made a pile leaves for Sacramento on a ‘bust.’ John Smith bets his pile on the Jack. John Smith dead broke. John Smith resolves to reform. Fortune favors John Smith & he invests his dust in a ‘Ranch.’55 In choosing this letter sheet, Hurlbut offered his correspondents a number of unconnected trajectories of experience, all experienced by Mr. John Smith alone. He leaves

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his readers to decide what relation they bear to his own experience, if any. Perhaps he intended it to manage expectations. Certainly, it opens up the distance between his experience (and what he can or wishes to tell of it) and the world back at home, and leaves his family to make of it what they may. The problems caused by distance, and the near-complete separation that distance produced, were routinely and variously acknowledged in emigrant letters. Those acknowledgments are a constant reminder of the letter’s limitations, and the breaks in communication and silences it enforces. This sense of absence is also present in the letter Sara Stebbins, an emigrant in her twenties, wrote from Richfield, Illinois to her mother-in-law at home in Deerfield, Massachusetts in January 1839. Sara, the second wife of Lansford Stebbins, the mother of three children and the stepmother of Lansford’s son by his first marriage, composed this long letter over two days, and it takes the form of a single long paragraph, carefully penned (it looks as if she has drawn lines on the paper) on two sheets. It covers three sides and those parts of the fourth that would not be obscured in its folding for postage. Transcribing Sara’s letter for publication in 1965, Donald Carmony gave it the title ‘Frontier Life: Loneliness and Hope,’ and commented upon the apparent contradictions within it. As Carmony puts it, Stebbins ‘pours out her heart’ here.56 Indeed, this is a letter that refers to loneliness three times within the first few lines: Feeling rather lonely I address a few lines to you hopeing it will not meet with as much neglect as those I have written to the girls. If they know how much pleasure it gives us to heare from home I think they would write us oftner. Could they once imagin how lonely we are in this wooden world with nothing new or interesting but the same thing day after day I know they would write. Our Sundays are so long and lonsom . . . how lonely we are.57 [sic passim] References to loneliness are, moreover, supplemented with mentions of homesickness and specific addresses to her children, ‘the girls’ (her husband’s unmarried aunts, perhaps, or her sisters-in-law) and other family members. ‘All I can do is to walk about and think of Friends and home,’ she notes at one point.58 At the same time, though, and this explains the tension identified in Carmony’s title, the letter is full of information about prospects for wealth creation, plans for ‘independence’ and that achievement of ‘ease’ to which every emigrant aspired. Stebbins, for example, encourages others in the family to join a group that already included two of Lansford’s brothers and the family of ‘Uncle Clesson.’ Indeed, the extended Stebbins family had started migrating to Michigan and Ohio as well as Illinois some years before, and more were expected.59 For all that Sara and Lansford, along with Lansford’s brothers Dennis and William, were trying to settle in an area where wealth had yet to be created on any substantial scale, there were still many advantages to having this range of experience and support available. For as Carolyn Billingsley has argued, large, well-networked families were critically important in establishing a hold on social capital and economic security in antebellum America.60 What we seem to have here, then, is a letter that we would conventionally think of as reflecting the experience of a transitional phase within the progression from disorientation toward adaptation and assimilation. Stebbins misses those members of her circle who are back in Massachusetts, but she is expecting her hopes for a comfortable farming life to be fulfilled. She lives with an extended family and looks forward to welcoming others, including two of her four school-age children who are still at home. And yet this letter is still full of dissatisfaction with Richfield and Illinois, and the shifting terms

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in which this discontent is couched do not indicate progression or accommodation as much as an encounter with a space of economic opportunity in a cultural setting where assimilation would be difficult. In this respect, the model of occupying a colony proves useful in the sense that it enables her to delineate the difference between her family and other settlers. Other settlers are, simply, savages: they ‘cannot be called civilised beings.’61 ‘I wish some Eastern men with families would come in here for we knead [sic] them as much as they do missionaris [sic] in India,’ she adds.62 The Stebbins family had arrived at a point when the local population was dominated by subsistence farmers migrating from the South with very different aims to these migrating New Englanders. Moreover, Illinois had only been surveyed in 1835 and no major players imposed themselves on the scene until 1841, two years after this letter was written, when the first large land purchase was made. No township was established until 1845.63 The family had launched itself onto what Eric Richards has called ‘a sea of laisser-faire,’ in which they were invisible and anonymous.64 In a situation where the family was struggling to make its way, it is difficult to see what Stebbins might have accommodated herself to. She certainly goes to some pains to evoke an extremely volatile setting. She makes references to the various impacts of ague, not only in terms of Lansford’s struggles with the fever, but also in terms of the transformation of her own body: ‘I have shook enough to shake one to pieces if ther [sic] was shu[ch] [sic] a thing but I believe my bones have become more compact.’65 Conversely, those enjoying good health in Illinois have been transformed into creatures like cattle or pigs – ‘the children act lik [sic] fat cattle let loose to run,’ while ‘William and Dennis is pork fat.’66 And in thinking about how to interpret the bodily experiences they are having, Stebbins once again turns to a colonial model, and looks back at the example of America’s seventeenth-century settlements for an example of a mix of starvation and prosperity: ‘Look at the old colinis [sic] say old Plimmoth.’67 The scholarly reading of emigrant letters has long addressed itself to the same broad questions about emigration that preoccupied figures like Stebbins, and others, who were arguing about its economic efficacy and psychic fallout in the mid-nineteenth century. Questions of success and failure, suitability and unpreparedness, dominated those discussions as, it seems to me, they continue to do. The problem of how to deal with the new situation and how to communicate that predicament underpins every emigrant letter, of course. But perhaps these writers were not as tightly scripted or as blinkered in their conception of what they were experiencing as we have become accustomed to assuming.

Notes 1. Reynolds, Frauenstein Letters, 103. I have elected to use ‘emigrant’ to describe both those who moved westwards within the U.S. and those who traveled across the Atlantic to the western states. Not wholly satisfactory, it nonetheless has the virtue of emphasizing the places that these travelers left behind, which seems appropriate in a discussion of letters home. 2. Harper, ‘Review of Letters across Borders,’ 211. 3. The term ‘obscure’ is used by Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 4. She also uses the term ‘ordinary working people’ (1). Distinctions between these and more sophisticated writers are considered in Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 485, and ‘Irish Emigrants and the Arts of Letter Writing.’ 4. See Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 5–6. 5. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives, 44.

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6. See Unknown Maker, ‘Four Miners.’ 7. Delano, A Live Woman, 28–9. 8. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 122–5, on the expense and unreliability of the postal service. Emigrants’ struggles with writing are discussed in Fitzpatrick, ‘Irish Emigrants and the Art of Letter Writing,’ and Markelis, ‘Every Person Like a Letter.’ 9. Elliott, Gerber, and Sinke, ‘Introduction,’ 3. 10. On the use of letter-writing conventions in emigrant letters, see Decker, Epistolary Practices, 95, 100–1, and Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 20–2. 11. Fender, Sea Changes, 132, 159. 12. See Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 51–2, 175–8. 13. See Fender, Sea Changes, 211–12. 14. Quoted in Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 175. 15. See Stallybrass, ‘What is a Letter?’ 16. Quoted in Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 176. 17. Ibid. 177. 18. Ibid. 19. Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 19, 51. 20. Ibid. 68, 175. 21. Fender, Sea Changes, 205. 22. Gerber, Authors of their Lives, 187. 23. Ibid.; Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 51; Fender, Sea Changes, 212. 24. For a useful discussion of Rochdale during the period of Butterworth’s childhood see Ratner, Cooperation, Community and Cooperatives, 59–108. 25. See Evans, ‘William Whittle Barton.’ 26. McNeilly, The Old South Frontier, 42. 27. Ibid. 7. 28. See Carrigan, ‘Nineteenth-Century Rural Self-Sufficiency.’ 29. See, for example, Richards, Britannia’s Children, 8, 133. 30. The movements of Butterworth’s family in Arkansas (for only she and her husband returned to Rochdale), can be gleaned from Mason, ‘Family History Records.’ 31. Steedman, ‘A Woman Writing a Letter,’ 123. 32. Valenčius, Health of the Country, 24. 33. Vickers, ‘Narrative Identity and Illness,’ 1,070. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Quoted in Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 176. 37. Ibid. 175. 38. Fender, Sea Changes, 206. 39. For comments on the epistolary style of forty-niners, see Kowalewski, Gold Rush, xxiii, and Fender, Plotting the Golden West, 86–7. 40. Richards, ‘Limits of the Australian Emigrant Letter,’ 59–60. 41. Henkin, The Postal Age, 131; Decker, Epistolary Practices, 12. 42. Goodman, The Republic of Letters, 140. 43. Swearingen, Letter to Sally Swearingen, 3 May 1850, California Lettersheet Collection. 44. Ibid. 45. Decker, Epistolary Practices, 15. 46. Hurlbut, Letter to E. A. Hurlbut, n.d., California Lettersheet Collection. 47. Quoted in Baird, California’s Pictorial Letter Sheets, 26. 48. Fender, Plotting the Golden West, 97. 49. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 134. 50. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 125–6. 51. See Baird, California’s Pictorial Letter Sheets, 16.

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52. For details of this sheet’s provenance see Baird, California’s Pictorial Letter Sheets, 121–2, and Peters, California on Stone, 178–9. 53. Smith, Letter to ‘Dear Friends,’ 24 April 1855, California Lettersheet Collection. 54. Ibid. 55. Hurlbut, Letter to E. A. Hurlbut, n.d., California Lettersheet Collection. 56. Carmony, ‘Frontier Life,’ 53. 57. Stebbins, Letter to Lois Stebbins, 6 January 1839, Stebbins Collection. 58. Ibid. 59. For details of the family movements to various parts of Illinois in the early nineteenth century see Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Libary, Guide to the Stebbins Family Papers. 60. See Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, 43. 61. Stebbins, Letter to Lois Stebbins, 6 January 1839, Stebbins Collection. 62. Ibid. 63. For a discussion of Illinois’s population during this period see Jensen, Illinois: A History, 5–7. 64. Richards, Britannia’s Children, 12. 65. Stebbins, Letter to Lois Stebbins, 6 January 1839, Stebbins Collection. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid.

Works Cited Baird, J. A., Jr. (1967), California’s Pictorial Letter Sheets, 1849–69, San Francisco: David Magee. Billingsley, C. E. (2004), Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Frontiers and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Carmony, D. (1965), ‘Frontier Life: Loneliness and Hope,’ Indiana Magazine of History, 61: 53–7. Carrigan, J. A. (1962), ‘Nineteenth-Century Rural Self-Sufficiency: A Planter’s and Housewife’s “Do-It-Yourself” Encyclopaedia,’ Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 21: 161–9. De Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Delano, A. (1857), A Live Woman in the Mines! New York: Samuel French. Elliott, B. S., D. A. Gerber, and S. Sinke (2006), ‘Introduction,’ in B. S. Elliott, D. A. Gerber, and S. Sinke (eds.), Letters across Borders: Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–25. Erickson, C. (1971), Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Evans, J. (2008), ‘William Whittle Barton,’ Terry Mason’s Family History Site, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Fender, S. (1981), Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail, New York: Cambridge University Press. Fender, S. (1992), Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature, New York: Cambridge University Press. Fitzpatrick, D. (1994), Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fitzpatrick, D. (2006), ‘Irish Emigrants and the Art of Letter Writing,’ in B. S. Elliott, D. A. Gerber, and S. Sinke (eds.), Letters across Borders: Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 97–106. Gerber, D. A. (2006), Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, New York: New York University Press. Goodman, D. (1994), The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Harper, M. (2009), ‘Review of Letters across Borders: Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, ed. by Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber, and Suzanne Sinke,’ English Historical Review, 506: 211–12. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hurlbut, H. L. (1851), Letter to E. A. Hurlbut, n.d., California Lettersheet Collection, Kemble Special Collection 9, California Historical Society, San Francisco, MS Vault 32, Box 1, Folder 31, (last accessed 22 September 2015) Jensen, R. J. (1978), Illinois: A Bicentennial History, New York: Norton. Kowalewski, M. (1998), Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration, Berkeley: Heyday Books. Markelis, D. (2006), ‘ “Every Person Like a Letter”: The Importance of Correspondence in Lithuanian Immigrant Life,’ in B. S. Elliott, D. A. Gerber, and S. Sinke (eds.), Letters across Borders: Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 107–23. Mason, T. (2014), ‘Family History Records,’ RootsWeb, (last accessed 22 September 2015). McNeilly, D. P. (2000), The Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society, 1819–61, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Peters, H. T. (1939), California on Stone, New York: Doubleday. Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library (2001), Guide to the Stebbins Family Papers, Memorial Hall, Deerfield, MA, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Ratner, C. (2013), Cooperation, Community and Co-ops in a Global Era, New York: Springer. Reynolds, K. M. (2009), The Frauenstein Letters: Aspects of Nineteenth Century Emigration from the Duchy of Nassau to Australia, Bern: Peter Lang. Richards, E. (2004), Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales Since 1600, London: Hambledon and London. Richards, E. (2006), ‘The Limits of the Australian Emigrant Letter,’ in B. S. Elliott, D. A. Gerber, and S. Sinke (eds.), Letters across Borders: Epistolary Practices of International Migrants, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 56–74. Smith, L. D. (1855), Letter to ‘Dear Friends,’ 24 April, California Lettersheet Collection, Kemble Special Collection 9, California Historical Society, San Francisco, MS Vault 166, Box 2, Folder 10. Stallybrass, P. (2012), ‘What is a Letter?’ Paper Delivered at ‘Writing Materials: Women of Letters from Enlightenment to Modernity,’ 30 November 2012, King’s College London and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Stebbins, S. (1839), Letter to L. Stebbins, 6 January, Stebbins Collection, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library, Memorial Hall, Deerfield, MA, Box 3, Folder 8. Steedman, C. (1999), ‘A Woman Writing a Letter,’ in R. Earle (ed.), Letters and Letter-writers, 1600–1945, Aldershot: Ashgate, 111–33. Swearingen, S. (1850), Letter to S. Swearingen, 3 May, California Lettersheet Collection, Kemble Special Collection 9, California Historical Society, San Francisco, MS Vault 15, Box (Miscellaneous/ Oversize). Unknown Maker (n.d.), ‘Four Miners Reading a Letter,’ Collection of M. R. Isenburg, Oakland Museum of California, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Valenčius, C. B. (2002), The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, New York: Basic Books. Vickers, N. (2012), ‘Narrative Identity and Illness,’ Journal of Evaluation of Clinical Practice, 18: 1070–1.

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14 INDIGENOUS EPISTOLARITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Phillip H. Round

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uring the nineteenth century Native Americans increasingly turned to epistolary correspondence as a means of bridging the ever-expanding geographic and social divide between themselves, their families, their clan members, their tribal communities, and their spiritual practices. A Lakota man named Kills Enemy Alone (aka Išna Toka Kte) is typical of this generation of American Indians who took up the pen to close such distances with a letter. Born around 1854, he had been raised to understand a man’s ‘job’ as embedded in an intricate web of kinship relations, buffalo hunting, warfare, sacred duties, and clan and medicine society obligations. Like many Native men in the 1880s, however, he found the buffalo virtually extinct, many religious practices outlawed, and his kin and clan scattered across the Plains. Whereas his life before the reservations had been carefully organized around the tiyospaye, the tightly knit kinship groups that formed the core of the Lakota Nation’s social networks, it now lacked direction, buffeted about by the whims of Indian agents and military officers.1 Thus, he turned to wage labor to make ends meet. Some men of his generation became teamsters, hauling freight for non-Indian businesses, but Kills Enemy Alone joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1889 – just as his more famous Lakota kinsmen, Sitting Bull and Black Elk, had done – and traveled to Europe as a performer. When he became homesick, he used missionary books written in Lakota to learn how to write an alphabetic form of his Native language. Then he wrote a letter home. Postmarked ‘Neuilly, Paris, France,’ it begins: ‘Wamniyomni cigala ito toka lo anpetu kin . . . [Little Whirlwind, brother-in-law, I will tell you something. . .]’2 Native letters like the one Kills Enemy Alone sent from Paris to South Dakota have much in common with those written by Europeans. In addition to their utility in communicating over long distances, letters embody many subtler material practices. The epistolary genre is deeply invested in distance, absence, privacy, and publicity. Its very existence suggests, at the bare minimum, a conversation, and thus it is a dialogic form that often seeks to embody the voice of the absent sender. Moreover, the genre as a whole has been described as a ‘cultural institution’ by José Luis Venega for the way that, in the early modern period, it quickly became embedded in the development of state bureaucracies, the public sphere, and the privatization of personal space.3 Letters, in short, perform social roles, by demonstrating their writers’ literacy and status; yet are also like fiction, in that they are texts that signify through narrative point of view, image, and metaphor. Significantly, as the nineteenth century unfolded, American epistolarity took shape within the new nation’s burgeoning ‘postal age,’ a blend of topography, bureaucracy, 230

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and imagined intimacy that David Henkin argues established ‘the modern posted letter as its own distinctive historical practice.’4 In posted letters, as Henkin puts it, ‘an already powerful state institution’ oversaw an emerging epistolary ‘network of popular exchange and sociability’ in which ‘ordinary Americans began participating in a regular network of long-distance communication, engaging in relationships with people they did not see.’5 It was at precisely this historical moment too that Native Americans across the Unites States were also being forcibly joined together in an abstract ‘community’ by federal Indian policy. Like the Postal Service, the Office of Indian Affairs maintained a complex epistolary network for the long-distance management of a dispersed population. Thus, throughout the Office of Indian Affairs’ archives, letters to and from Native correspondents and government officials outline the contours of the new forms of written sociability Native Americans were sharing with their EuroAmerican counterparts. But indigenous peoples’ letters also exhibit unique characteristics, specific to Native Americans’ distinctive legal and social standing within the United States. The epistolary genre’s formal elements, for example, and especially its salutations and valedictions, performed different social functions in many Native communities than they did in bourgeois Euro-American society. Whereas nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals and schoolroom practice prepared Euro-Americans to open and close their missives with socially decorous, yet largely conventional phrases (‘My Dear Sir’; ‘your Humble Servant,’ etc.), even a brief survey of indigenous letters from the period shows marked differences. An 1863 letter from an imprisoned Dakota man, Augustin Fresneir, to his white pastor, Stephen Riggs, opens with this salutation: ‘Tamakoce Mitakuye [My Relative His Country].’6 Significantly, the prisoner’s greeting here does not include a conventional honorific reference to the minister’s social position, but rather a familial phrase that denotes both respect and commonality within Dakota society. In a slightly different way, meanwhile, a Lakota correspondent begins his 1889 letter to the local reservation overseer: ‘Major Levy, my friend. I come to ask for a pass to go to Rosebud Agency. I don’t want to run off but I want a pass, and I will tell you why.’7 In this case, the writer underscores his social marginality within Euro-American society at large. Yet, like the previous writer, he also frames his request as born of friendship, rather than submission. Similarly, when departing from the epistolary exchange, other Native writers literalize the physical conventions of greeting and departure that had become standard in negotiations between whites and Indians. In letter after letter, many a Native correspondent enunciates a phrase similar to this one from Old Man Iron to Stephen Riggs in 1864: ‘One of my relatives, I shake your hand through Jesus.’8 In addition to their modification of the conventional generic features of letter-writing, Indian Epistles also traveled specifically indigenous social networks, bearing traces of the communication circuits through which they flowed – post offices, postal officials, and railways to be sure, but also rivers and streams, trails, villages, and friends of a friend who happened to be passing along the way. In the voluminous archives of the Office of Indian Affairs, all regions and tribes are represented by letters, and the distances such letters traveled, and the circuitous routes they forged, map out the new social and geographical connections that were emerging for Native nations during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in addition to their geographic trajectories, such dispatches offer a unique perspective on how indigenous social cohorts were formed and maintained.

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And finally, Native American letters are distinctive in exhibiting what the Cherokee scholar Christopher Teuton has called the ‘textual continuum’ of oral and written practices within tribal communities.9 Letters were often dictated, and even if written privately, performed in public, thus affirming their fundamentally oral and inter-subjective nature. A 1900 letter from Lakota elder Blue Horse to the Western painter Eldridge Ayer Burbank exemplifies this continuum at work. Blue Horse dictated, in Lakota, a message to Burbank via his friend Ista Tanka. The latter, in turn, composed a letter in English based on this recitation. Its salutation is a performance that then emphasizes the cross-cultural nature of the correspondence (‘This morning I am glad to shake hands with you through the white man’s way’), and in the lines that follow, Blue Horse exhibits great wit and keen reasoning as he assures Burbank that he is adopting the epistolary style of the white man as ‘his way,’ not his ‘burden.’10 Reminiscing with Burbank as an old friend (they had met many years before when Burbank was painting portraits of Indian leaders), Blue Horse tells a short history of his life, reminding Burbank how often he had protected white men during the Plains Wars. And now that ‘the shadows of mature years have furrowed’ his face, Blue Horse adds, he has written to have one last conversation with Burbank before ‘looking for peace in the spirit land.’11 His death, he insists, will match the expectations of Lakota faith, not of Burbank’s Christianity: ‘You may ask me for explanations, and the absurdity of our faith, and in reply my friend, I would say “How” let’s wait my friend, and see who gets there first.’12 Then finally, the letter enacts a ritual act of Lakota spirituality as Blue Horse declares, ‘I shall raise my pipe above my head and say Great Spirit be good to my friend,’ before repeating the phrase to all of the four directions.13 In closing, Blue Horse himself inscribes his signature as a name glyph in blue colored pencil – a Plains pony facing left on the page – and crucially, signatures like this, and hundreds of others like them (both glyphic and alphabetic) affirm personal and communal identities quite apart from those recognized by the colonial power structure that Burbank represents. As the Ojibwa/Dakota critic Scott Lyons has suggested, such unique textual elements expose Native ‘scenes of writing’ that stage the inter-cultural, collaborative work that letters performed as critical social spaces for individual selffashioning and community revitalization.14 These letters are, in Lyons’ words, a space ‘where indigenous ethnic groups began transforming themselves into actual nations.’15 To all intents and purposes, Native letter-writing was firmly ensconced in colonial systems across the Americas by the middle of the eighteenth century.16 In British North America, for instance, Indian education in literacy increasingly emphasized alphabetic literacy in English and, as would be the case later, letters were at the forefront of these inter-cultural exchanges. Thus the missionary Eleazar Wheelock, who was stationed in Lebanon, Connecticut, demanded epistolary discipline from the native students who studied at Moor’s Charity School from its founding in 1754 to his death in 1779. Here Oneida, Mohegan, Stockbridge, Narragansett, Mohawk, Montauk, and Delaware students from as far away as Quebec, Long Island, and villages along the Susquehanna all learned to write letters to prove their adoption of the Protestant faith. By century’s end, more than 150 Native men and women had attended Wheelock’s school, with many going on to serve as missionaries to nations in Canada and the trans-Appalachian West. Letters exchanged between Wheelock and his Indian students then epitomize the shifting power dynamics at work in eighteenth-century indigenous epistolarity. During the 1750s, for example, Wheelock printed many of his students’ missives in an effort to raise money for his mission, while in the case of one convert, David Fowler,

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Laura Murray has demonstrated that the Indian Epistle actually served as a means for managing the balancing act Native writers had to perform between ‘complex emotion or negotiation and formulaic obedience.’17 It is also from within the genre of the Indian Epistle that we get some of our earliest examples of Native women’s writing. The few letters we have from Native women, as Hilary Wyss argues, show they ‘resisted public demonstrations of [their] literacy,’ because such material practices merely reinforced their separate and unequal treatment.18 Thus Sarah Simon, a member of the Narragansett nation who studied at Eleazar Wheelock’s school, often rebelled against school discipline and English colonialism with a studied epistolary silence. In this way, early Native letters soon became instrumental in transforming traditional social and economic practices, playing an important role in producing new polities at places like Natick, Massachusetts and Brothertown, New York. As European land-grabbing reached intolerable levels, astute Native community members seized upon letters as a means for wresting control of their individual lives and community well-being from the colonial state apparatus. It was from within this context that the Mohegan convert and Wheelock student Samson Occom then became the first Native writer to publish books in the British Atlantic world, at the same time as employing letters to establish himself as a religious and secular leader who could guide an inter-tribal Indian community to form a new village in Oneida country.19 Pressured by European colonialism to re-examine long-held understandings of social order and their sovereign right to homelands, Native people like Occom went about reconstituting what it meant to be ‘Indian’ within the new alphabetically literate world order in which they found themselves. As Occom’s generation aged, its members then tutored younger Native students in the epistolary practices they had mastered. In 1773, for example, Joseph Johnson, a Mohegan convert to whom Occom served as a mentor, penned a letter on behalf of the inter-tribal community in Farmington, Connecticut that exemplifies how indigenous epistolarity was coming to facilitate social and personal transformations for a new generation. This letter is directed to ‘all Indians’ in the region, and lists the Native bands of ‘Mohegan, Nihantuck, Pequtt, Stonington, Narragansett, and Montauk’ as the inter-tribal social cohort it hopes to constitute as a political entity through its epistolary address.20 And similarly, its signatures confirm the Farmington people’s adoption of a communal identity apart from the colonial power structure. Thus, Joseph Johnson and the Farmington leaders’ embrace of the epistolary petition and its community-affirming modes of assent reflect Scott Lyons’ observation that Native signatures do not represent acquiescence to assimilation or the European ‘ “civilizing” project so much as an embrace of “modernity.” ’21 Down through the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, such Indian Epistles then continued to help Native peoples constitute new kinds of communities, playing critical roles in forging military alliances and negotiating terms for peace.22 By 1830, however, these disparate epistolary performances were beginning to crystalize into a national, inter-tribal public relations campaign against the Jackson administration’s infamous Indian Removal Act. Centered at first in Georgia’s Cherokee Nation, this letter-writing crusade eventually extended to tribal communities across the states east of the Mississippi. In response to the first national policy of forcibly uprooting peoples from their homelands, correspondents from around the country – both Native and non-Native – thus waged a decade-long scribal battle over the plan. Indeed, the fact that the Cherokee were among the Native nations to hold out longest against removal is in part a testament

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to their early decision to harness print literacy to the service of their emerging sense of national identity. Although the newspaper they founded, the Cherokee Phoenix, was short-lived (running only from 1828 to 1834), it nonetheless marked the start of a process by which the five southeastern tribes (the Cherokee, Muskogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole) engaged in an extended epistolary conversation within the dominant public sphere. The newspaper’s editor, Elias Boudinot, hailed from a prestigious Cherokee lineage, and had been educated at the missionary school in Cornwall, Connecticut. There he met his future wife, Harriett Gold, and learned early on to ply the epistolary genres as a means of crossing the otherwise unsurpassable divide between himself as an Indian and his beloved, who was white.23 Published in October 1827, Boudinot’s Prospectus for the Phoenix set out the paper’s strikingly epistolary goals. The Phoenix, he stated, would be a compendium of letters detailing the ‘laws and public documents of the Nation [and] . . . the manners and customs of the Cherokees,’ as well as a scrapbook of ‘[m]iscellaneous articles calculated to promote Literature, Civilization and Religion among the Cherokee.’24 And when the Phoenix finally saw print, Boudinot himself addressed his subscribers in a series of letters as ‘the Public,’ positing therein an expansive epistolary network comprised of ‘our home readers’ (Natives) and ‘our distant readers’ (whites).25 Letters written in the Sequoyah syllabary, which Boudinot translated for his English-speaking readers, meanwhile became among the paper’s most popular elements. In the early numbers of the Phoenix, these Cherokee letters most often appear as local color, and Boudinot inserts them primarily ‘[f]or the amusement of our English readers,’ since: ‘They will convey to the reader [a] pretty good idea of Cherokee composition.’26 Moreover, he also uses them, as did many editors of missionary publications, to elicit ‘sentiment’ or ‘sympathy’ from this distant white readership. One Cherokee correspondent, for example, offers a letter ‘to prove to your white readers, that, instead of the poorer class of our people being in servile chains and oppression . . . they are in possession of religious and political freedom and rural happiness.’27 But as the possibility of Indian removal became a reality, letters to the paper begin to shift back to the diplomatic style of earlier Indian Epistles. Letters to the editor from ‘our home readers,’ sometimes in the Sequoyah syllabary, gave Cherokees a chance to ‘sign on’ to the public sphere the Phoenix had constructed by allowing their signatures and pseudonyms to stand as markers of self-fashioning. Glass, a Cherokee whose signature and valediction to one printed letter epitomizes the emerging importance of print ‘visibility’ for tribal members just entering the public sphere, accordingly concludes his letter: ‘I The Glass write this. I am well.’28 Equally, other writers cloak their public identities in classically derived pseudonyms reminiscent of the American Revolution’s pamphlet wars. Letters from ‘Scipio’ and ‘A Friend’ join thus one signed by ‘A Cherokee’ to assert what the Phoenix came to signify to its Cherokee print public sphere – namely, the idea that: ‘In a liberal government every person has a right to his sentiments.’29 In its brief lifespan, then, the Cherokee Phoenix evolved into a ‘tribunal’ where, as Boudinot put it, the Cherokee’s ‘injured rights may be defended and protected.’30 In the process, republication of the court battles over the Removal Act were reprinted alongside humbler, Cherokee-language letters that reported on the mindset and feelings of traditionalists within the nation. Glass’s letter, written from the Arkansas Territory in late 1828, is typical of this ‘home’ readership’s vernacular-language epistolarity. Although he later addresses his implied readers/listeners as ‘my friends,’ Glass’s initial salutation is

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totally unlike those of other, English-language correspondents: ‘In August and the beginning of September I write.’31 And similarly, throughout his recitation of land dispossession and tribal council politics, Glass repeats a refrain – ‘I relate this to you’ – which is an English-language rendering of what linguists call an ‘evidential.’32 That is, Glass has used Cherokee morphemes in his original text that indicate whether the information he reports in his letter is direct or indirect knowledge. And finally, he also exploits the letter-form’s invocation of absence by emphasizing several times that he is speaking from Arkansas, where he and a band of other traditionalists have voluntarily relocated. In a phrase that would resonate with many Cherokee readers anticipating forced removal west, Glass offers this concluding valediction: ‘Now my friends, Farewell. Be thankful that all is well here in Arkansas. This is all Send me in turn some information, that I may hear what is done among you.’33 Although it is a common turn of phrase in English, we might read Glass’s use of ‘hear’ as an echo of the more performative and aural nature of Indian Epistles in general. At the very least, it shows that the letter was becoming a very necessary tool in keeping Native communities together. Indeed, after the 1830s, letters by Native Americans, like those Boudinot printed in the Phoenix, began to enter the broader national public sphere as printed texts. The published versions of these letters, known as ‘memorials,’ then developed into a legally recognized genre in U.S. statute law, defined as ‘a statement of facts in the form of a petition to the government (often reprinted in the Congressional Record).’34 This genre became perhaps the single most important printed form of Native sovereignty in the realm of Euro-American public opinion. But although they enjoyed legal standing, many of these missives positioned themselves as personal correspondence, detailing an individual’s grievances and often reciting his or her biography. One well-known example will suffice to demonstrate how the Indian Epistle evolved into the Indian memorial. First widely published in 1846, the Memorial of John Ross and Others is particularly revealing because we have access to the social practices that informed its production. In an 1836 letter to a friend, which was itself published, Ross reports how a delegation of Native Americans attempted to meet with President Andrew Jackson, and were denied. Failing that, they tried to speak with the Secretary for Indian Affairs. Again, they were rebuffed. Unsuccessful in all their efforts at oral confrontation, Ross concludes, the Cherokee delegates ‘then memorialized the Senate.’35 Thus, the letter within this letter becomes a meta-textual figure for the genre’s role as material practice. As a communicative inscription that ‘stands in’ for an absent speaker, the letter format was particularly attractive to Native Americans like Ross because they were quite literally rendered ‘absent’ from the conversations that involved them. Unable to be ‘seen’ by president or secretary, they appear instead in epistolary form, and the Letter from John Ross, once published, then becomes a communal epistle, with the American public and its legislators its implied readers/listeners. Ross’s other letter, the Memorial of John Ross, is, meanwhile, one of the most important of its kind written in the immediate post-Removal period, not least for the way that it presents the Cherokee Nation’s case by questioning the discursive validity of the government’s methods of treaty negotiation. What is perhaps most interesting as regards the history of Native letter-writing in America, however, is just how much the Memorial exploits epistolary conventions to undercut the government’s authority. The first convention it adopts, namely the implied absence that demands letter-writing itself, is something everyone in the Removal controversy exploited as part of an ironizing of

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governmental ‘oversight.’ Boudinot, for instance, had sharply observed that: ‘The present administration must be Lynx-eyed if they can see from Washington “public interest” suffering in these woods.’36 But while every letter that deals with Removal takes advantage of this ‘distant’ readership to some degree, Ross also uses it to question how well the government knows the signatories of what he considers to be spurious treaties. ‘It may be remarked that the signature or mark of Indians is easily obtained to papers of any description by persons of influence or authority,’ he observes, ‘without the individual having any real knowledge of the contents or object of the paper he is signing.’37 Therefore a signature is not a signature in Cherokee country unless (as was the case with the letter from Glass) ‘it is accompanied by satisfactory evidence that its contents were fully and satisfactorily explained to them, that their signature was a voluntary act.’38 It would seem here that the Cherokee memorialists, while adhering to many print conventions, still have a faith in their own basic linguistic and cultural structures, and the ability of these to sensitively parse hearsay from fact. By the early 1860s, however, yet another style of Indian letters would emerge as a potent space for expressing vernacular-language sovereignty and kinship relations over the harsh distances, geographic and cultural, of the newly established Indian Territory. Most notable among the Native American communities who began to adapt written forms of their languages to this purpose are the Dakota. As a result of their military actions against settlers and soldiers in Minnesota, several hundred Dakota men and women were imprisoned in the Civil War army outpost of Fort McClellan, in Davenport, Iowa, in 1863. Reflecting on the terrible deprivations they suffered, and the mass hangings that preceded their incarceration on the banks of the Mississippi, these prisoners – formerly illiterate in alphabetic writing – then wrote hundreds of letters in their native language asking for clemency. Importantly, the written form of the Dakota language the prisoners used owed its development to the Presbyterian missionaries who lived among them, perhaps most notably Stephen Riggs and his wife Mary. As Protestants, the Riggs and their colleagues believed that true conversion could only be accomplished if the Dakota could read the Bible in their own language. Thus, as Stephen reported in his autobiography: ‘The labor of writing the language was undertaken as a means to a greater end.’39 But although several hundred copies of Dakota-language Bible chapters and tracts were soon produced, Christianity and literacy did not immediately sweep through the Dakota Nation. Instead, things only began to change in the 1850s, when disputes over treaties made between certain Dakota groups and the Americans caused many community members to see both literacy and Christianity in a new light. And when war broke out between disgruntled bands of Dakota and white settlers in 1862, the ability to write took on an even more urgent valence. Thus, even among those supposedly ‘incorrigible’ traditionalists imprisoned at Fort McClellan, the mission Dakota writing system served as a potent mode of national expression. In what would become a pattern among the Siouan speakers who used the Riggses’ orthography down through the nineteenth century, the prisoners increasingly turned to writing to negotiate their place in a changed political landscape. As a missionary, Riggs inevitably saw the uptick in requests for literacy education among the imprisoned Dakota as evidence that they had realized ‘[t]he power of the white man had prevailed; and the religion of the Great Spirit, or the white man’s God, was to be supreme.’40 But while Riggs envisaged the triumph of the Christian God over heathenism as a ‘revolution in letters,’ the Dakota prisoners and their families appear

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to have experienced literacy as a far more nuanced, more Dakota-centered thing.41 Indeed, John Peacock (aka Spirit Lake Dakota), in his 2014 introduction to the first collected edition of the prisoner letters, has suggested that it would be wise to ‘think of [them] not merely as historic documents but as sacred texts.’42 Part of this sacredness lies in the way the letter-writers use formal Dakota rhetorical structures to transform the letters into acts of kinship. When Peacock, a contemporary descendant of one of the letter-writers, tried to render a letter into perfect English, he discovered that he had ‘deleted twelve instances of “it is so,” the rhetorical flourish with which a Dakota man traditionally ends declarative sentences.’43 What appeared in English to be the stumbling repetitions of barely literate writers, Peacock realized, were ‘repeated invocation[s] of kinship . . . [K]inship is the very topic of the letter, of every paragraph, of each sentence. The rest of every sentence, of the body of every paragraph, then addresses what is predicated on kinship – exchange between kin.’44 When read as a group, then, the correspondence of the Dakota prisoners suggests that their mode of vernacular writing was particularly well-suited to the task of redeploying the reciprocities of traditional Dakota life that were being eroded by U.S. colonialism. An 1864 letter by Robert Hopkins is typical in this respect: Well, my friend, I will write a short letter . . . I really want one of you to come visit . . . I also want you to bring two black song books, then song book you bring change for six, and then a man, they call him Thunder Iron, he wants a song book and a new Bible, he wants one, so then Makes Crows gave me one of them. So this is what they said, and so I write this letter because I didn’t see the song books. Bring as many as you can, my friend. Well, that is all I have to say. Your wife and son, I shake their hands. Also bring one of the brown Dakota alphabet books. I am Robert Hopkins – it is so.45 Here, Hopkins’ salutation locates his addressee, Stephen Riggs, in a circle of friendly sociability, as does his careful list of book requests from several other prisoners. His ‘handshake’ at the letter’s end is a similar gesture, while his signature, containing the Dakota male speaker’s declarative sentence marker, ‘it is so,’ affirms the writer’s personhood and reliability. Many of the letters by Hopkins’ brethren meanwhile seek other kinds of help, such as explaining to Riggs (‘my relative’) that the prisoners ‘want to see our relatives, and we need you to help talk for us, that’s the purpose of our letter.’46 Still others are used as a method of bonding among the prisoners themselves. Several letters contain testaments of faith and sobriety (‘now the Bible is made known to me, as long as I live, I will not drink alcohol’) whose veracity is attested to by a number of Dakota signatories.47 Outside of prison, in their own villages, these men would have been members of several different and important social groups (translated as ‘societies’ in most ethnographic literature). Behind prison walls, however, they needed to re-group, make new societies to fit new circumstances and develop new rites to affirm their membership in them. At least one letter also suggests that some Dakota had taken to epistolarity in order to begin to write their own alphabetic histories as a counterbalance to the American invaders’ constant invocation of literacy and fact as guarantees of their right to conquest: ‘Although our actions have all taken place, they’re all written down. There can be no lies about what we did, because it’s all written down.’48

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By the time they were released in 1868, the Fort McClellan prisoners found themselves in a world where very little of their traditional Minnesota homelands remained. All of their surviving relations and others deemed unfit by the government to remain in Minnesota – some 1,000 people in all – were forcibly removed to the Dakota Territory near Crow Creek (not far from present-day Pierre, South Dakota), where many died from hunger. The lesson they had learned in Fort McClellan was not lost, however. For the Lakota, when faced with a colonial expansion similar to that affecting their Dakota kinsman to the east, drew directly from the Dakota’s literacy experiences in the 1860s. During the Plains Wars of 1852 to 1877, the Lakota of the Northern Plains had tried to buy time for adjustment to the violent encroachment of white settlers by signing treaties (in 1852 and 1868) that they believed would guarantee them large reaches of their original homelands in the Black Hills of South Dakota. But despite Ulysses S. Grant’s promises to implement more humane and less corrupt Indian agencies, following his election as President in 1869, the government increasingly began to relocate ‘removed’ and ‘hostile’ Sioux communities to reservations even further off the beaten path of American emigrant wagon trains, arable land subject to the homestead act, and those natural resources deemed of no use to the Indians. Within this context, where Grant’s new band-based agencies were parceled out to various Christian denominations, the missionizing project initially did not make much progress. Benedictine brothers attempted to engage with Lakota people through the Standing Rock, Spotted Tail, and Red Cloud Agencies, for example, but were unable to set up a permanent mission until the late 1870s. Only at Cheyenne River in South Dakota did Thomas L. Riggs, the son of Stephen, successfully establish a mission and school in 1872. Although the evidence is circumstantial, there is good reason to believe that the key to this success at Cheyenne River had much to do with the Riggses’ orthography and its appeal to many Siouan speakers in trying political circumstances.49 Alphabetic literacy was certainly central to the government’s efforts to enforce its bureaucratic structures in Indian Country. Not only were the missionaries’ Bibles and religious liturgies introduced in alphabetic vernacular forms, but so too were treaties, ration cards, petitions, and land surveys. Accordingly then, vernacular Lakota diction expanded to include a new phrase, ‘mnisapa wicasa [ink man],’ for those who touched the pen to paper or printed words in books.50 Throughout his public life during the reservation period, too, the Lakota leader Red Cloud employed a white amanuensis in William J. Godfrey, a personal friend of the Secretary of the Interior.51 As a geographically divided and marginalized nation, in short, the Lakota found alphabetic epistolarity in the 1880s to be a potent technology of social formation for tribal members of many different political allegiances, fostering new ways of constituting personhood and community. This is the context within which Kills Enemy Alone wrote from Paris in 1889 to his relations in South Dakota. The alphabet he used was largely the same one employed by the Dakota prisoners, and he was likely aided in learning it by publications such as the vernacular Lakota weekly called Iapi Oaye: The Word Carrier, which Stephen Riggs had initiated in 1871.52 It is, though, the 1880s experiences of Nicholas Black Elk, the Lakota holy man who later became famous as the narrator of Joseph Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (1938), that perhaps best epitomize the significance of letters to the reorganization of Lakota society. Black Elk was born in 1863 and, at the mere age of

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nine, was blessed with a powerful vision from the sacred Thunder Beings ‘that foreshadowed the special powers he would use later in his life to cure illness and aid them in war.’53 But because of his youth and the uncertain state of affairs in his homeland (his family retreated to Canada after Crazy Horse’s death in 1877), Black Elk kept his vision secret until 1881. By 1886, moreover, he had grown so disillusioned with his community’s lack of spiritual progress in the face of the challenges presented by the reservation system that he decided to join Buffalo Bill’s West Show. At the age of twenty-three, Black Elk thus found himself abroad, and while touring Europe with the Show he was (thanks to a clause in his contract) baptized as Christian and given religious instruction from the Riggs translation of the Bible into Dakota. Having learned to write in alphabetic Lakota, Black Elk then made his first epistolary effort in a letter to his people back home that was published in the Iapi Oaye in 1888. In it, he told his fellow Lakota that when he first saw a copy of Iapi Oaye in France, he had ‘rejoiced greatly.’54 His happiness, he explained, derived from the fact that the paper allowed ‘Lakotas . . . to translate English’ into their mother tongue.55 Two things stand out here. The first is that by 1888, Black Elk was using the Riggs orthography and Christian theology right alongside the traditional medicine ways of a Lakota holy man. The second is that he thought of vernacular writing in a very different way from the missionaries who promoted it. Iapi is a Lakota word that means ‘language.’ Oaye is a noun form of the verb aya, to carry. Thus, the missionaries translated the phrase in the subtitle of their newspaper as Word Carrier. The ‘word’ in question – no doubt the ‘logos’ of St. John – is to be carried to the Indians as a mode of Protestant witnessing. Yet Black Elk’s reading is different. He thinks of the ‘word’ as the Lakota language itself and the ‘carrying’ as the physical act of transporting the words of the northern Plains to Paris. It appears to suggest to him the materiality of Lakota talk and its resurrection in the pages of a newspaper read far from the homeland. When Black Elk returned to the Lakota homeland from Paris in 1887, his medicine powers were restored to him. But the reservation system had largely outlawed the practice of his faith. Only when a sacred form of singing and dancing arrived to the Lakota from a Paiute prophet named Wovoka in Nevada did Black Elk begin to think that there was still a way to believe in the Great Spirit’s presence on the plains and the return of that power through the rebirth of the buffalo herds. Even though oral narratives originally spread word of Wovoka’s visions, writing came to play an important role in the growth and continuation of the Ghost Dance, especially after the U.S. army’s bloody attempt to suppress it at the massacre of Wounded Knee in December 1890. Indeed, as the anthropologist James Mooney discovered on a visit to the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Oklahoma in 1892, the words of Wovoka remained very much alive in that community in the form of a letter stored in a ‘beaded pouch’ that was held with great reverence. After sharing a prayer with the Arapaho leader, Left Hand, Mooney was shown the letter. It was, he recalls, a ‘statement of the doctrine delivered by Wovoka to the Cheyenne and Arapaho delegates . . . on the occasion of their last visit to Nevada, in August, 1891.’56 Long after Wounded Knee, then, Native peoples of the plains were still avidly seeking Wovoka’s advice. The letter, Mooney noted, had been ‘written down on the spot . . . by one of the Arapaho delegates, Casper Edson, who had attended the government Indian school at Carlisle.’57 Now the missive was an integral ritual object in the Arapaho believers’ lives.

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Even more interesting is Left Hand’s explanation for why he showed Mooney the letter. He wanted the ethnographer to deliver it into the hands of the Indian Commissioner in Washington, D.C. When read within the context of the development of the Indian Epistle down through the nineteenth century, this request makes perfect sense. First, because the letter embodied a gesture of good will. Left Hand wished to share the good news of the prophet with whites. And second, because in much the same way that letters operated for the Dakota prisoners of war, Left Hand’s letter was a ‘fact.’ It showed white readers that there was nothing to fear in the Ghost Dance, and perhaps that English-language literacy (the long-sought sign of civility the colonizers demanded) could go hand in hand with non-Christian, indigenous forms of spirituality and moral rectitude. Indeed, what Mooney did not know, and Left Hand likely did, was that this letter was just one of hundreds that Native Americans wrote during this period in order to keep Wovoka’s vision alive and the now-nationwide community of believers in touch with each other. Virtually none of these have survived, but we do have one valuable trace of this epistolary corpus in the so-called ‘Messiah Letters,’ a cache of twenty-one letters written to Wovoka (by twelve different men and one woman) between 1908 and 1911. These were recovered in 1920, by the ethnographer and local historian Grace Dangberg, from Carrie Willis Wilson, a Nevadan woman who had served as Wovoka’s amanuensis during the period he was working (under the name of Jack Wilson) on her family’s farm. The twenty letters come from all over Indian Country, both in the U.S. and Canada, and in essence reflect the maturation of the Indian Epistle over the course of the nineteenth century. Generic elements often associated with epistolarity’s role in forging ‘modern’ forms of selfhood and sociability among Euro-Americans appear in this correspondence refracted and revitalized in distinctly Native idioms. In much the same way that manuscripts circulated in early modern England to form ‘coteries’ – communities of readers whose shared experience of the written word knit them together as a social unit – these letters to the Paiute prophet describe a wide-ranging network of believers. Their tribal communities and occupations, as well as their places of residence, are various: Fast Horse was a policeman in Montana; Bear Comes Out was a Lakota family man living a traditional life in Porcupine, South Dakota; F. W. Antelope had been a student at Chilocco Indian School in north-central Oaklahoma; and William Gay was a mixed-blood man who had taken up the faith at the Pine Ridge Reservation. As was the case in the Dakota prisoner letters and those of Joseph Johnson, these missives contain salutations and valedictions that are inflected by the special new social bonds forged between the correspondents. ‘Mr. Jack Wilson, Dear father,’ most letters begin.58 ‘I shake hands with you this time,’ Bear Comes Out writes.59 And William Gay simply signs off with: ‘Your truly [sic] son.’60 Not only are these framing devices familial and reverential, they are also communal, underscoring an element of epistolarity that made letters attractive to all sorts of social groups in nineteenth-century America. This element of the Messiah Letters perhaps comes through most eloquently in one anonymous correspondent’s comment to Wovoka that ‘I cannot Trust no other man so this is reason I always . . . write.’61 Some had their sons or daughters write for them, either because they could not do so themselves, or because – as for this nameless Arapaho – the distance to a Post Office was long and such letters were best entrusted to family: ‘I always have my own son to

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write letters for me but he has been out working about Two weeks he has just come home and he write [sic] this letter for me again . . . My Post Office from my plow is about a quarter of a mile.’62 Thus when his Arapaho neighbours Sherman Sage and The Gun offered to help this man post his letters to the prophet, he was overjoyed, adding that: ‘Both of them they like me very well I know.’63 The Indian Epistle’s power was not limited to Wovoka and his correspondents, of course. By the end of the nineteenth century, many nations had developed an alphabetic syllabary for their dialect and had begun exchanging letters between the now far-flung members of their community. Whether trying to cope with the pressures of relocation and dislocation or trying to escape from the U.S. government’s constant meddling in their affairs, groups such as the Meskwaki and the Kickapoo picked up writing systems and employed letters to keep in touch with their kin elsewhere. And in time, the Indian Epistle would even become a literary device, as pioneered by figures like the lateneteenth-century Creek writer Alex Posey, whose fictional letters to Indian newspapers and use of satiric dialects helped to open the way for twentieth-century Native fiction writers and poets to further build on an indigenous letter-writing tradition that has now stretched over three centuries.64

Notes 1. Tiyospaye signifies both the concept of ‘home’ (ti, a shortened form of tipi), and group or gathering (ospaye). So much of the Lakota language is based in what are known as ‘relative terms’ that this level of social organization may be one of the most important in the linguistic and textual dimensions of this society that was undergoing transformation within the context of American colonialism. 2. Kills Enemy Alone, Letter to Little Whirlwind, 1889, Nebraska State Historical Society. This letter was looted from a dead Lakota’s body after the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, and only resurfaced in the 1960s. 3. Venegas, Transatlantic Correspondence, x. Venegas’s work is based on the pioneering research to be found in Altman, Epistolarity, and Dierks, In My Power. 4. Henkin, The Postal Age, 6. 5. Ibid. 42, 2. 6. Augustin Fresneir, Letter to Stephen Riggs, 20 March 1864, in Canku and Simon, Dakota Prisoner of War Letters, 31. 7. Yellow Elk to S. T. Leary, 7 November 1889, Records of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. 8. Old Iron Man, Letter to Stephen Riggs, 1864, in Canku and Simon, Dakota Prisoner of War Letters, 105. 9. Teuton, Deep Waters, xix. 10. Blue Horse, Letter to Eldridge Ayer Burbank, 1900, Newberry Library, 1. 11. Ibid. 3. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Lyons, X-Marks, 123. 15. Ibid. 16. For a survey of the role letters played in the early modern colonial administration of the Americas see Round, ‘Neither Here nor There.’ 17. Murray, ‘ “Pray, Sir,” ’ 21. 18. Wyss, English Letters, 103. 19. See Brooks, ‘ “This Indian World.” ’

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242 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

phillip h. round Johnson, ‘To the Indians,’ 204. Lyons, X-Marks, 9. For a range of examples see Calloway, American Revolution. For a full discussion of Boudinot’s epistolary courtship see Gaul, ‘Introduction.’ Boudinot, ‘Selections,’ 90. Ibid. 91, 109. Quoted in Round, Removable Type, 136. Ibid. The Glass, ‘Letter from Arkansas,’ 2. Quoted in Round, Removable Type, 138. Boudinot, ‘Selections,’ 118. The Glass, ‘Letter from Arkansas,’ 2. Ibid. Ibid. Quoted in Round, Removable Type, 140. Ross, Letter from John Ross, 15. Quoted in Round, Removable Type, 137. Ross, Memorial, 12. Ibid. Riggs, Mary and I, 59. Ibid. 222. Ibid. Peacock, ‘Introducing the Dakota Letters,’ xix. Ibid. xxvi. Ibid. Robert Hopkins, Letter to Stephen Riggs, 20 August 1864, in Canku and Simon, Dakota Prisoner of War Letters, 56. Mr. Uses a Cane, Letter to Stephen Riggs, 2 June 1865, in ibid. 169. Hands to Ruin, Letter to Stephen Riggs, 1864, in ibid. 98. Mr. Uses a Cane, Letter to Stephen Riggs, 2 June 1865, in ibid. 168. See Riggs, Mary and I, 491. Ostler, Plains Sioux, 173. Ibid. 237. For more on Iapi Oaye, and its impact on Lakota literacy, see Kersterrer, ‘Spin Doctors.’ When Stephen Riggs died in 1883, his son Alfred became sole editor and publisher, splitting the vernacular Iapi Oaye into two separate newspapers (one Lakota and one in English) in 1884. DeMallie, ‘Nicholas Black Elk,’ 3. Quoted in DeMallie, ‘Nicholas Black Elk,’ 9. Ibid. Mooney, Ghost Dance, 75. Ibid. Fast Horse, Letter to Jack Wilson, 12 February 1909, in Dangberg, ed. ‘Letters to Jack Wilson,’ 291. Bear Comes Out, Letter to Jack Wilson, 31 January 1910, in ibid. William Gay, Letter to Jack Wilson, 9 October 1910, in ibid. 292. Anonymous, Letter to Jack Wilson, 31 March 1910, in ibid. 295. Ibid. 294. Ibid. 295. See Littlefield, Alex Posey.

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Works Cited Altman, J. G. (1982), Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Blue Horse (1900), Letter to A. E. Burbank, Digital Collections for the Classroom, Newberry Library, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Boudinot, E. [1827] (1983), ‘Selections from the Cherokee Phoenix,’ in T. Purdue (ed.), Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 85–154. Brooks, J. (2006), ‘ “This Indian World”: An Introduction to the Writings of Samson Occom,’ in J. Brooks (ed.), The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, New York: Oxford University Press, 3–43. Calloway, C. (1995), The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, New York: Cambridge University Press. Canku, C., and M. Simon, eds. (2014), The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters, Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Dangberg, G., ed. (1938), ‘Letters to Jack Wilson, the Paiute Prophet, Written between 1908 and 1911,’ Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 164: 279–96. DeMallie, R. (1984), ‘Nicholas Black Elk and John G. Neihardt: An Introduction,’ in R. DeMallie (ed.), The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1–74. Dierks, K. (2009), In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gaul. T. S. (2005), ‘Introduction,’ in T. S. Gaul (ed.), To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823–1839, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1–76. The Glass (1828), ‘Letter from Arkansas,’ Cherokee Phoenix, 29 October, 2. Henkin, D. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, J. [1773] (1998), ‘To the Indians Concerning Oneida Lands,’ in L. J. Murray (ed.), To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 203–5. Kerstetter, T. (1997), ‘Spin Doctors at Santee: Missionaries and the Dakota-Language Reporting of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee,’ Western Historical Quarterly, 28: 45–67. Kills Enemy Alone (1889), Letter to Little Whirlwind, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, NE, RG4946: Kills Enemy Alone. Littlefield, D. F. (1992), Alex Posey: Creek Poet, Journalist, and Humorist, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lyons, S. (2012), X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mooney, J. [1896] (1991), The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Murray, L. J. (1996), ‘ “Pray Sir, Consider a Little”: Rituals of Subordination and Strategies of Resistance in the Letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock,’ in H. Jaskoski (ed.), Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays, New York: Cambridge University Press, 15–41. Ostler, J. (2004), The Plains Sioux and U. S. Colonialism from Louis and Clark to Wounded Knee, New York: Cambridge University Press. Peacock, J. (2014), ‘Introducing the Dakota Letters,’ in C. Canku and M. Simon (eds.), The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters, Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, xix–xxviii.

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Riggs, S. (1880), Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux, Boston: Congregational SundaySchool and Publishing Society. Ross, J. (1836), Letter from John Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, to a Gentleman in Philadelphia, Philadelphia: n.p. Ross, J. (1846), Memorial of John Ross and Others, Representatives of the Cherokee Nation of Indians, Washington: Ritchie & Heiss. Round, P. H. (2005), ‘Neither Here Nor There: Transatlantic Epistolarity in Early America,’ in S. Castillo and I. Schweitzer (eds.), A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, Oxford: Blackwell, 426–45. Round, P. H. (2010), Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Teuton, C. (2010), Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature, Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Venegas, J. L. (2014), Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wyss, H. E. (2012), English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Yellow Elk (1889), Letter to S. T. Leary, 7 November, Records of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Federal Archives and Records Center, Kansas City, MO, Record Group 75, 75.19.85.

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15 DUELING EPISTLES: ENSLAVED LETTER-WRITERS AND THE DISCOURSE OF (DIS)HONOR Ben Schiller

I

n 1845, in what has become one of the most famous epistolary exchanges between a formerly enslaved African American and a former slaveowner, Frederick Douglass used the letters page of William Garrison’s Liberator to respond to an item of correspondence that had originally been published in the Delaware Republican under the headline ‘To The Public: Falsehood Refuted.’1 Penned by one A. C. C. Thompson, this letter set out to discredit Douglass’s recently released Narrative of the Life as ‘a ridiculous publication, which bears the glaring impress of falsehood on every page.’2 Thompson’s tactics included both ad hominem attacks on the ‘recreant slave by the name of Frederick Bailey’ (based upon a refusal to acknowledge the author’s refashioning of himself as the free man Frederick Douglass), and the ostensible provision of ‘a true representation of the character of those gentlemen, who have been censured in such an uncharitable manner, as murderers, hypocrites, and everything else that is vile.’3 Thus, Colonel Edward Lloyd, accused by Douglass of complicity in at least two slaves’ murders, was – according to Thompson – ‘a kind and charitable man, and in every respect an honorable and worthy citizen.’4 Captain Thomas Auld, who in Douglass’s account is renowned for his ‘meanness’ and his habit of letting his slaves go hungry, is similarly described as ‘a respectable merchant . . . and an honorable and worthy member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and only notable for his integrity and irreproachable Christian character.’5 And Edward Covey, reviled by Douglass as a renowned ‘nigger-breaker’ and slave breeder, is actually ‘a plain, honest farmer, and a tried and faithful member of the Methodist Episcopal Church’ in Thompson’s view – ‘a good Christian’ and ‘a hard working man.’6 Importantly, Thompson’s defense of such men’s honor necessarily heaped dishonor on their detractors, at the same time as positioning ex-slaves like Douglass as almost beneath contempt, condemned by both their race and background to the category of unreliable witness. Indeed, as John Sekora has suggested with regard to antebellum debates over the authenticity of slave narratives, in Thompson’s account Frederick Bailey is but ‘a proximate cause and marginal participant in a public dispute between white groups. He may not possess his own narrative.’7 Thus we find Thompson offering up his own memory of Bailey/Douglass as ‘an unlearned, and rather an ordinary negro’ as incontrovertible evidence that ‘the Narrative was not written by the professed author but from statements of this runaway slave.’8 The blame for the whole 245

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calumny, Thompson concludes, needs to be laid at the door of ‘some evil designed person or persons [who] have composed this catalogue of lies to excite the indignation of the public opinion against the slaveholders of the South.’9 From a Southern, proslavery perspective, in short, Thompson’s authority and the substance of his critique depend on the contrast between his own status as a man of honor and the status of the former Frederick Bailey and his sponsors as dishonorable liars. While such calculated dishonesty was to be expected of a black runaway, moreover, for a white gentleman it was an unforgivable breach of etiquette. Yet, in his riposte to this attack on the credibility of his autobiography, Douglass deftly transformed Thompson’s letter from a refutation of falsehood into proof of veracity. Writing in early 1846 from Scotland, where he was on a speaking tour, he thanked Thompson for providing the validation that only a Southern gentleman could have offered: ‘I give you the fullest credit for the deed, saying nothing of the motive . . . To show you how highly I value your testimony, I will inform you that I am now publishing a second edition of my narrative in this country, having already disposed of the first. I will insert your article along with my reply as appendix to the edition now in progress.’10 To a certain extent, Douglass’s recognition of the evidentiary value of Thompson’s letter, and his decision to append their correspondence to subsequent editions of his Narrative, lends itself to being read within a broader tradition of epistolary authorizations for African American writing. Similar inclusions can be found across the canon of slave narratives and range from letters between black autobiographers and slaveowners as here, to testimony from supposedly unimpeachable (usually white) character witnesses, to court documents and bills of sale.11 In many cases these texts were likely inserted not at the behest of the author of the narrative but by a white editor, publisher, or amanuensis, and were intended to reassure a white readership blinded by what Robert Stepto calls the nineteenth-century’s ‘cultural myopia’ over the authenticity of black testimony.12 In the case of Douglass’s adoption of Thompson’s letter, however, there is more at stake than mere authentication, for as Fionnghuala Sweeney has argued, ‘by casting Thompson as an honorable Southern gentleman respectfully saving Douglass’s “embarrassment,” Douglass parodies Thompson’s class and racial position.’13 Moreover, the fact that their epistolary exchange of blows was conducted in a public forum renders this tactic doubly significant in that, as Kenneth Greenberg makes clear, Southern men of honor ‘were concerned, to a degree we would consider unusual, with the surface of things – with the world of appearances.’14 Like other, similar epistolary exchanges that are to be found among the authorizing texts included within antebellum slave narratives, therefore, this contest testifies to ‘the place where slavery and honor intersect.’15 This intersection was, indeed, a critical aspect of a proslavery ideology that was structured in terms of a series of Manichean dyads which both began and ended with the opposition of black and white. Where masters were powerful, slaves were necessarily powerless; where whiteness equated to rationality and intelligence, blackness signified foolishness and ignorance; where white women of the master class were considered chaste, female slaves were imagined concupiscent; where slaveowners were men of honor, their bondspeople were possessed of none. Accordingly, as Greenberg suggests, ‘one of the most important distinctions involved the issue of lying. The words of the master had to be accorded respect because they were the words of a man of honor. The words of a slave could never become objects of honor.’16 The rhetorical power of Douglass’s parodic renegotiation of the meaning and content of Thompson’s letter, then, lay in its simultaneous appropriation and inversion of this value system. Thompson himself is rendered

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a slavish fool who, as Douglass puts it, ‘will be but poorly thanked by those characters you have felt it your duty to defend. I am almost certain they will regard you as running before you were sent, and as having spoken when you should have been silent.’17 And similarly, the men whose honor Thompson had presumed to vindicate are recast as dishonorable brutes through an extension of his own logic. ‘I am not to determine what charitable, feeling men can do,’ Douglass replied, ‘but, to show what Maryland slaveholders actually do, their charitable feelings to be determined by their deeds, and not their deeds by their charitable feelings. The cowskin makes as deep a gash when wielded by a professed saint, as it does when wielded by an open sinner.’18 Bearing in mind Fionnghuala Sweeney’s suggestion that Douglass’s Narrative ‘might reasonably have been considered to represent the black voice in the South, even if the life it described was not typical of black Southern experience,’ his epistolary duel with Thompson stands as a compelling example of the ways in which the rhetorical terrain of honor and dishonor, which Southern slaveholders presumed to possess and control, was in fact ground upon which they could be engaged, and sometimes even bested, by their supposed inferiors.19 Indeed, such discursive encounters were not simply confined to letters exchanged between ex-slaves and former masters. They are also apparent within letters written by those still undergoing enslavement, and in this respect it is worth repeating John Sekora’s proposition that ‘the inescapable presence of such [linguistic] negotiations – in all of their forms – makes slavery very much a literary matter. Slavery and the language of slavery are virtually coextensive.’20 While Sekora, though, is interested in the ways in which ‘entitlement of a Hegelian sort’ led masters to try to control the very language of the enslaved so as to ‘exact slave complicity in their own subjugation,’ this chapter is more concerned with how bondspeople themselves utilized language in their efforts to exploit slaveowners’ desire for validation.21 Acting out of self-interest, and often in self-defense, enslaved letter-writers used the paternalistic discourse of honor and dishonor to entreat, persuade, cajole, or beguile their masters. Thus, although their negotiations were conducted in the hope of achieving wholly different outcomes to the literary coup de grace Douglass delivered to Thompson by republishing his letter as an authorizing text, their tactics involved comparable literary techniques of appropriation, inversion, and reinvention. Of the nearly 500 letters written by enslaved men and women that survive across assorted modern archives, the vast majority were written by individuals who were the trusted informants of their enslavers. Some were drivers or held other positions of authority, and corresponded with their owners in order to report on issues of plantation management or the behavior and conduct of slave communities. As I have argued elsewhere, it is useful to consider many of these correspondents as ‘trusties,’ or perhaps, as Michael Tadman has termed them, ‘key slaves’; which is to say that they represent the select few whom masters chose to afford ‘special privileges, including considerable protection of family ties.’22 This practice, as Tadman observes, allowed slaveowners to construct themselves in benevolent terms whilst treating ‘the coarse mass of slaves with indifference.’23 Relatedly, meanwhile, in terms of numbers, second only to the letters of such trusties are those written by hirelings or quasi-free self-hirers, some of whom might be considered ‘key slaves’ themselves. Like the missives written by the latter group, their letters also provided owners with reports on both their own conduct and that of their overseers. Taken as a whole, then, the correspondence that masters received from these trusties and hirelings can be persuasively read as testifying to the elaboration of a system of epistolary surveillance.24 But such a correspondence

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also implied a degree of confidence, and while masters may have simultaneously relied on other, overlapping disciplinary structures to ensure the honesty of their enslaved correspondents, incorporating them into a network of epistolary exchange created, in theory at least, the possibility of transactions between master and slave that were defined in honorable terms. Categorizing enslaved correspondence not by who wrote it but by what was written, on the other hand, reveals another, equally important type of letter within the extant corpus, namely those that were written at the point of forced migration via sale, hire, or slaveholder relocation. Many of these were also written by key slaves who had either fallen from favor and were endeavoring to save themselves from the market, or else were writing on behalf of others whose sale or hire they sought to prevent, or at least to shape in some way.25 Whatever their status, however, this was an era when local, regional, and interstate slave trading and hiring made forced migration and the separation of families and neighborhoods the rule rather than the exception for African Americans.26 Written in the context of such fundamental existential threats, the intriguing thing about these exodus letters is what they reveal of the kinds of bargains that the enslaved attempted to strike with those that owned and hired, or bought and sold them, and the rhetorical tactics they deployed in these negotiations. Such letters not only offer practical reasons as to why what their authors desire would also be of benefit to potential or actual owners, but proffer ideologically astute defenses of black needs by framing their requests in a vocabulary of sentiment and honor that firmly situates these within the discourse of paternalism. Indeed, this last tactic may have been of particular utility when slaves were attempting to manipulate and manage owners who were directly engaged in the commerce of slavery, either via their interactions with slave-traders or because a substantial part of their business was slave-hiring. If, as Jonathan Martin has proposed, such market transactions tended to remind slaveholders that mastery was primarily a commercial activity that had little to do with honor and sentimentality or mutual obligation and domesticity, then when their slaves provided them with evidence to the contrary, or presented them with opportunities to perform their paternalism, they were surely deploying important ideological bargaining chips.27 Finally, the prevalence of enforced migration and the destruction this wrought on enslaved communities also helps to delineate a third major group of correspondence masters received from slaves. These were letters written in the hope of maintaining or re-establishing contact with those from whom bondspeople had been parted, and what is interesting about this correspondence are the tactics that writers needed to use in their attempts to ensure that their messages reached their intended recipients. As both David Henkin and Christopher Hager have shown, slaves who hoped to make use of the postal service had to overcome many obstacles, not least of which was the likelihood that their mail might be intercepted by unsympathetic whites, and so the primary means by which they were able to use letters to convey messages to distant loved ones was through the intercession of masters as amanuenses, as readers, and as posters or recipients.28 Their letters therefore often read as a kind of epistolary ventriloquism, in which black writers are attempting to frame their messages in ways that would allow them to be spoken through white mouths.29 As Philip Troutman has observed, this avenue of epistolary exchange required a degree of ‘geopolitical literacy’ and involved the inclusion of ‘certain slaveholders in the larger sentimental community’ of slavery’s diaspora, but as we shall see, it also depended on persuading these slaveowners that interaction with the black community was an honorable thing to do.30

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Indeed, taking all three of these strands of correspondence together reveals how at least some enslaved correspondents deployed the discourse of honor and dishonor as part of their efforts to manipulate owners in ways that are suggestive of a larger set of cultural practices. Without doubt the enslaved had to be very cautious as to how they utilized the epistolary medium in which their owners involved them, and careful as to how they presented themselves and their arguments, but they nonetheless did attempt to use letters to effect negotiations over treatment and employment, and sales and hirings, as well as to re-establish communication with absent loved ones. Their letters had to operate on multiple levels, but by proffering material benefits and appropriating the discourse of (dis)honor, some enslaved correspondents found the means to turn an epistolary culture within which their position was determined by masters into a conceptual space from which they could attempt to manipulate and challenge the men and women who sought to govern them. Although the slave letters that survive are exceptional in the very fact of their continued existence, the circumstances of those who wrote them were far from exceptional, and so this correspondence gives us access to the ways in which many African Americans chose to present both themselves and their masters given the narrow parameters within which they had to operate. In this sense, such correspondents stand as vocal representatives of those whose day-to-day negotiations with those that held power over them went unrecorded. That they had to enter into such bargaining by presenting their masters with something they wanted renders such exchanges particularly tragic, for all that such slaves had to trade on was their utility, their deference, and their ability to make slavery conscionable by assuring their owners that they were indeed the honorable men they liked to imagine themselves to be. But we should also keep in mind that by taking this route, unfree letter-writers sought to make slavery bearable for themselves, and thus negotiated a domain where they could potentially be something other than the objectified, commodified bodies their masters wished them to be. In May 1837, for example, Thomas W. Harriss, a North Carolinian tobacco planter, received a letter from Billy Branch, a quasi-free blacksmith who lived independently and hired his own time. The occasion for writing was that Branch’s house and workshop had been burnt to the ground, a disaster that he makes clear was not his fault but surmised ‘to be by the fire falling from the pipe of a woman that lived in the house with me when she went to get her breakfast.’31 As Branch goes on to assert, while he was of course attempting to bear this great misfortune ‘with Christian fortitude,’ if his master were able to help him it would surely be the act of a noble and honorable man: you have known me from my youth until the present time. my labours has been for the welfare of you and yours ever since I was able to work. you profess to be a Christian and be it far from me to doubt that you practice it and the scripture saith faith hope and charity are the three greatest things in a christian and the greatest of these is Charity and I humbly pray that your unbounded wealth will afford and your unbounded generosity will please bestow and I shall ever pray for the prosperity of you and yours so long as life shall last Your Old and humble servant Billy Branch, Blacksmith [sic passim]32 In seeking to engage Harriss’s sympathy and thereby his aid, Branch cannily highlights the sentimental bonds that are supposed to bind master to slave and that are intrinsic to his master’s presumed self-image as a Christian gentleman. As such, his letter

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effectively challenges Harriss to act honorably and charitably. Whether this strategy worked or not we cannot say, given the lack of any surviving reply, but the fact that Harriss chose to keep Branch’s letter suggests that it may have done, or at the very least that he was not offended by the light in which it presented him. Branch’s particular predicament was unique, as were many of the circumstances that provoked individual enslaved men and women to write to their enslavers, but nevertheless their tactics were often very similar. Between 1847 and 1854, for instance, the Virginian slaveowner Rice C. Ballard received at least three letters from different enslaved women: Lucile Tucker, Delia, and Virginia Boyd.33 Ballard was both a speculator in slaves and a substantial planter, who had used the profits and opportunities afforded by his association with the pre-eminent slave-trading firm Franklin and Armfield to purchase land and human capital, eventually accumulating a stake in the ownership of nearly 1,000 bondspeople distributed across multiple plantations in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, many of them held in partnership with Judge Samuel S. Boyd.34 Ballard is also notable as one of the period’s more brazen ‘one-eyed men,’ a phallic euphemism employed by Isaac Franklin in his correspondence with Ballard, where the pair openly joked about raping enslaved women and speculated on the value that potential buyers might attach to the complexion, parentage, age, and beauty of such ‘fancy maids.’35 Yet, if this body of letters reveals a coarse, brutal, unfeeling, and exploitative rapist, Sharony Green has suggested an alternative, if inevitably speculative, reading of at least some of his sexual relationships with enslaved women, casting them in terms of ‘affection,’ rather than simple predation, although this emotion was not necessarily or even likely to have been reciprocated by the objects of his lust.36 Ballard’s known predilections hardly prove that he had had physical relationships with Tucker, Delia, and Boyd. While it is plausible to imagine that he might have done so with Tucker, Delia’s letter suggests nothing of the kind, and in the case of Boyd, it was Ballard’s business partner Samuel Boyd, rather than Ballard himself, who made her the object of his sexual appetites. But it is nonetheless important to attend to the existing accounts of Ballard’s character because they provide context for the appeals all three women made to his sense of duty. In this respect, we might also note the tone of the correspondence Ballard received from Avenia White, an African American woman Ballard emancipated in 1838 along with her son, Preston (who could well have been Ballard’s child), and another woman, Susan Johnson, and her three children.37 Ballard made special provisions for White and Johnson when he freed them in Cincinnati, giving them funds to establish themselves and later sending a further $150 in response to various entreaties by White herself and others acting on her behalf. Between September 1838 and February 1840, White wrote him at least five letters, each of which attempted to appeal to his sense of honor and duty, particularly through the invocation of Johnson’s offspring as well as Preston. In her final missive, for instance, White reproachfully notes that ‘if you have forgotten me, I hope you have not forgotten the children’ (a turn of phrase that lends weight to the suspicion of Ballard’s paternity).38 Extracting Ballard’s assistance was no easy task, however. Her first three letters went unanswered, and her appeals only really gained traction once they were transferred from the relative privacy of Avenia’s letters (which were likely dictated to Frances Bruster, another free black woman, who owned the boarding house in which the women and children resided) to a more public sphere, in which the audience for Ballard’s refusal to do his duty was not simply a coterie of black women, but also one Calvin Fletcher, a white merchant and city councilman

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from whom, as White reported, she had been forced to borrow money.39 Since Ballard appears to have been unmoved by White’s plight until Fletcher became involved, it seems that potential shaming before his white peers rather than personal sympathy motivated the $150 he sent in the care of Fletcher. Indeed, it is notable that the councilman, not White, acknowledged receipt of Ballard’s gift.40 If Ballard’s motives with regard to these women and their children may well have been complicated by sex and paternity, then it is nonetheless the case that White’s strategic deployment of the discourse of (dis)honor was at least marginally successful. Ballard could evidently be appealed to in these terms, or at least goaded into action if threatened with exposure over failing to act as a true Southern gentleman. If such an interpretation appears at odds with the ways in which Ballard and his fellow slave-traders imagined themselves as ‘one-eyed men,’ we can perhaps resolve this contradiction by considering that while these men might have been quite open with one other about their, and their customers’, propensity for ungentlemanly conduct, this did not mean that Ballard was ready to be so honest in front of strangers. It is therefore instructive to note how the letter Ballard received from Virginia Boyd, written some fourteen years later and under very different circumstances, is nonetheless comparable to those of Avenia White, not only for its deployment of the discourse of (dis)honor, but also for the fact that it threatens a public shaming if her demands are not met. As Boyd puts it: ‘I have my letters writen & folded put into envelopes & get it directed by those that dont know the contents of it for I shall not seek ever to let any thing be exposed, unless I am forced from bad treatment [sic passim].’41 Like White, Boyd had also found herself the object of a master’s lusts and/or affections, though in her case the rapist was not Ballard but his business partner, Samuel Boyd.42 Having already borne him one child and now pregnant with a second, Boyd found herself cast out, transported to a slave-trader’s yard in Houston, where she discovered that Ballard had also given explicit instructions that her eldest daughter (from a different, unknown father) be sold separately. Edward Baptist has suggested that the change in her fortunes was likely due to a combination of the displeasure of Boyd’s wife, Catherine, and the fact that her pregnancy was too obvious a sign of his infidelity, but whatever Boyd and Ballard’s reasons for selling her, Virginia and her small family now faced an existential crisis.43 Like White, then, she had little option other than to turn to her former master for assistance. She therefore wrote to Ballard in an attempt to engage his help in making Boyd change his mind, and although she ultimately did not succeed, her tactics are nonetheless notable for the way in which she exploited both the language of sentiment and the discourse of honor in order to try to shame and cajole her white interlocutor into helping. Alongside the threat of exposure noted above, for instance, she also appealed to Ballard’s ostensible gentility and potential empathy, using – like White – invocations of (either metaphorical or literal) paternity, and implying that failure in what she perceived to be his duty would render him no more respectable than her immediate abuser: [Y]ou wrote for them to sell me in thirty days, do you think that after all that has transpired between me and the old Man (I don’t call names) that its treating me well to send me off among strangers in my situation to be sold without even my having an opportunity of choosing for my self; its hard indeed and what is still harder – for the father of my children to sell his own offspring yes his own flesh and blood[.] My god is it possible that any free born American would

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brand his character with such stigma as that, but I hope before this he will relent & see his error for I still beleave that he is possest of more honer than that[.] I no too that you have influence and can assist me in some measure from out of this dilema and if you will god will be sure to reward you[.] you have a family of children and no how to empathise with others in distress[.] all I require or ask [is] for an agent to be afforded hear to see to me [and ti]me to Earn the money, honestly to buy my [children. If] I have to work my finger ends off. [sic passim]44 For all their rhetorical bite, however, Boyd’s threats and pleas fell on deaf ears. In August, Ballard received a letter from C. M. Rutherford, the agent who had placed Virginia with the Texan slave-trader from whose slave pens she wrote her missive, confirming that she and her younger child had been sold for $1,100 and asking for instruction on the sale of the remaining daughter.45 Still, despite this defeat, it remains profitable to compare Boyd’s literary tactics with the more successful ones of Frederick Douglass, in that both writers appropriate and invert the values of honor and honesty that would normally belong to enslavers and apply them instead to the enslaved. In her letter, Boyd situates her rapist and his business partner as the arbiters of Southern mores, but by decrying Boyd’s dishonorable behavior she simultaneously constructs herself not as only a woman who has been wronged but also as one who was ‘possest [sic] of more honer [sic]’ than her abuser.46 That her tactics failed to persuade Ballard to recant only reveals the contingent nature of such tactics, for while Avenia White’s deployment of a white intercessor, Calvin Fletcher, had perhaps made the threat of unmasking too real for Ballard to discount, in Boyd’s case there was no impartial third party to witness his and his partner’s dishonor. However desperate Boyd would have been when she set pen to paper, the likelihood of this outcome must have been obvious to her, which suggests the possibility of a slightly less instrumentalist interpretation of her manipulation of the discourse of (dis)honor than my analysis to date necessarily allows. To appropriate the terms of a different argument about master/slave relations for a moment, if we consider the ideology of paternalism as the ‘fragile bridge across the intolerable contradictions inherent in a society based on racism, slavery, and class exploitation,’ is it not plausible to argue that when the enslaved deployed the language of honor and dishonor, of mutual responsibilities and duties, that they were in fact invoking a worldview that they at least partially endorsed?47 To posit this question is not to suggest complicity in or acceptance of bondage, nor that the enslaved saw their enslavers as their enslavers liked to imagine themselves, but rather that African American appropriation of the discourse of (dis) honor implied an acceptance of its basic tenets, even if its application was reversed. With this in mind, then, we can consider one last letter, which is a striking example of the form in that it applies the discourse of (dis)honor to both black and white, enslaved and enslaver. It was written by a South Carolinian woman named Lavinia, who lived and worked on a low-country sea-island cotton plantation, to her mistress, Phoebe Sarah Lawton, sometime in July 1849. Like Billy Branch, Lavinia spoke of Christian values; like Virginia Boyd, she was concerned with sexual probity and with the treatment of her children; like Frederick Douglass, she judged the enslavers’ morality by their deeds, and not vice versa. And like all such correspondents, she sought to persuade, entreaty, and cajole professed paternalists into action by holding them to the standards they themselves projected. ‘I am tormented,’ her letter begins:

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My conscience is bruised, my feelings are vex. It seems wrong that my daughter’s husband should be given to a base woman, more worse than Mary Magdalene. Do you think it right in the sight of God? What God put together for mankind to broke asunder? If she was a virtuous woman I would not care, but she is one of the vilest of the vile. See how she treated Mrs. Lawton’s Peggy, last year and the year before in taking her husband Peter by using her arts to bewitch him and after having 2 children left him and now gone to taken Aggy’s husband from her. I view her as a devil . . . Before 2 years she will desert him and take up with somebody else. Like the womman what met our saviour at the well who had 5 husbands. Dere Missis can’t you take pity . . . and use your influence in stopping this wretched business? . . . My God is this religion? . . . Oh Mas Elliot can you allow this? This krewel thing dun in your yard! . . . View this matter as you would if they were your children. Have they not souls as well as white people? Do not allow such adultery . . . What does the Bible say? That a man shall not put away his wife for the cause of fornication. And if he put her away not to take another. He is breaking Aggy’s heart. She did not leave him but he left her. The audacious proud villain! he thinks more of himself than he thinks of him. He goes about bragging how much money he mades and that turns the black wretches crazy . . . He is prouder than his master . . . This accounts for the cold state the church is in because there is so much devils in it. Where is your conscience? Pray over it, Massa and you, if you can allow it. Excuse bad writing by firelight. Your Servant, Lavinia [sic passim]48 This letter stands alongside Virginia Boyd’s as among the most revealing pieces of extant enslaved correspondence. Like Boyd, Lavinia also found herself facing a blank piece of paper, pen in hand, struggling to express her anxiety over her child’s future. In this case, the central dynamic is not rape, it is infidelity, and the transgressors are not just the enslavers, they are the enslaved. But beyond the anger directed at her son-in-law’s inconstancy, Lavinia’s choicest words are for the white men and women whose intervention in the social, sexual, and marital lives of the enslaved community have facilitated the whole sorry affair. With the same clear sense of intent that informs Boyd’s letter to Ballard, Lavinia marshals every argument that an enslaved person could gather in order to rebuke her owners, variously reminding Phoebe Lawton of the meaning of justice, of her Christian duty, and of the fact that enslaved African Americans are no mere chattels but human beings to whom enslavers owe a duty of care. In this respect, Lavinia’s letter ironically reflects the advice that slaveholders gave to one another, as summed up by one Georgia planter in 1851: ‘The master should remember that whilst . . . his slaves [are] . . . property, and as such, owe him proper respect and service . . . they are also persons and have a claim on his regard and protection.’49 Comparing this statement to Lavinia’s suggestion that her mistress should ‘view this matter as you would if they were your children’ and her reminder that the enslaved ‘have . . . souls as well as white people’ reveals her intimate knowledge of how figures like Lawton liked to imagine themselves and the ideals to which they subscribed. Moreover, while Lavinia’s letter clearly shows that she was well aware of the hypocrisy inherent in

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such paternalistic pretensions, knowing this did not prevent her, and others like her, from challenging their masters to hold true to the duties their moral code prescribed. Nor did this knowledge prevent her and her fellow African Americans from appropriating the discourse of (dis)honor and applying it to their own friends and families. As Frederick Douglass concluded in an 1847 letter to William Lloyd Garrison: ‘My “impertinence and sauciness” have ever consisted in presuming to be, and behaving as a man – in paying no more deference to a white man, than to a black man of equal moral and intellectual worth – in bowing to no skin-deep superiority, but rendering honor only where honor is due.’50

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

See Thompson, ‘Letter.’ Ibid. 88. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 89. Douglass, Narrative, 39; Thompson, ‘Letter,’ 90. Douglass, Narrative, 42; Thompson, ‘Letter,’ 90. Sekora, ‘Black Message/White Envelope,’ 486. Thompson, ‘Letter,’ 88. Ibid. 89. Douglass, ‘Reply to A. C. C. Thompson’s Letter, Liberator, 27 February 1846,’ in Narrative, 92. For various examples of this kind of use of authenticating documents see: Ball and Fisher, Slavery, 1; Bibb, Narrative, iv–v, vii; Brown, Narrative, vii–viii; Jacobs, Incidents, 258–60; and Northup, Twelve Years, 299–336. Stepto, From Behind the Veil, 7. Sweeney, Frederick Douglass, 65. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, 3. Ibid. vii. For other, similar examples see: Bibb, Narrative, 175–8; Brown, Narrative, vii–viii, 71; and Jacobs, Incidents, 198–6, 258–60. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, 11. Douglass, ‘Reply to A. C. C. Thompson’s Letter, Liberator, 27 February 1846,’ in Narrative, 93. Ibid. 94. Sweeney, Frederick Douglass, 60. Sekora, ‘Black Message/White Envelope,’ 485. Ibid. Schiller, ‘Selling Themselves,’ 4; Tadman, ‘Interregional Slave Trade,’ 132. Ibid. 132. For a full discussion of the concept of the ‘key slave’ and their role in maintaining both plantation discipline and masters’ delusions of benevolence see Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, xix–xxxvii. See Schiller, ‘Learning Their Letters,’ 15. Walter Johnson uses the concept of slaves ‘shaping the sale’ to emphasize that they themselves were active agents within slave markets, as they sought ways to influence the decisions of potential buyers and sellers in order to protect themselves and their loved ones from enforced separations, bad masters, or forced migration. See Soul by Soul, 176–87. See ibid. 7–9, and Deyle, Carry Me Back, 19–21. See Martin, Divided Mastery, 19–20. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 25, and Hager, Word by Word, 62. See Schiller, ‘U.S. Slavery’s Diaspora,’ 208–9.

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30. Troutman, ‘Correspondences,’ 213. 31. Branch, Letter to Thomas Harriss, 10 May 1837, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. 32. Ibid. 33. Ballard may well have received other letters penned by slaves, but only these three survive in the extensive archive of his correspondence preserved at the University of North Carolina (see: Lucile Tucker, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 25 June 1847, in Ballard, Rice C. Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Box 7, Folder 113; Virginia Boyd, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 6 May 1853, in ibid. Box 12, Folder 191; Delia, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 20 October 1854, in ibid. Box 14, Folder 217). Of the three surviving slaveauthored items, the letter from Tucker is certainly written in such a way as to suggest that it forms a part of a larger correspondence. Since limitations of space preclude an examination of all three in this chapter, my analysis focuses on the Boyd letter, but it is worth noting that each correspondent wrote in terms that stretched, or at least played upon, the language of deference and subordination that one might expect of such missives. For a fuller discussion of Delia’s letter see Schiller, ‘Learning Their Letters,’ 6–7; Tucker’s letter is discussed in Green, ‘Mr. Ballard,’ 31–2. 34. See Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 124–5, and Baptist, ‘Cuffy,’ 1,627. 35. Quoted in Baptist, ‘Cuffy,’ 1,619. 36. Green, ‘Mr. Ballard,’ 33. 37. See ibid. 17, 24–5. 38. Avenia White, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 2 February 1840, in Ballard, Rice C. Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Box 2, Folder 31. 39. See Avenia White, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 30 December 1838, in ibid. Box 2, Folder 25. As Green observes, the penmanship of Avenia’s letter is the same as that of a letter he received from Bruster, suggesting that she served as Avenia’s amanuensis (see ‘Mr. Ballard,’ 27). 40. See Calvin Fletcher, Letter to Rice C. Ballad, 28 January 1839, in Ballard, Rice C. Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Box 2, Folder 26. 41. Virginia Boyd, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 6 May 1853, in ibid. Box 12, Folder 191. 42. In her analysis of the connections between rape, race, gender, and slavery, Sadiya Hartman asks the following question: ‘If the legal existence of the crime of rape depends upon evaluating the mens rea and actus rea of the perpetrator, and, more importantly, the consent or non-consent of the victim, then how does one grapple with issues of consent and will, when the negation or restricted recognition of these terms determine the meaning of enslavement?’ (‘Seduction and the Ruses of Power,’ 539). This question, as well as Hartman’s answer to it, which turns on the complex interaction of seduction, power, agency, and violence, seems to me to obviate further discussion of whether or not it is appropriate to apply the term ‘rape’ to sex between enslaved people and their enslavers. The relationship of enslaved to enslaver negates the possibility of real consent, even in cases where the enslaved appear to have traded sex as a strategy for survival, and as such, we should surely typify all such relationships as coercive and therefore as rape. See also Block, ‘Lines of Color.’ 43. See Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 361–3. 44. Virginia Boyd, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 6 May 1853, in Ballard, Rice C. Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Box 12, Folder 191. 45. See C. M. Rutherford, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 8 August 1853, in ibid. Box 12, Folder 196. 46. Virginia Boyd, Letter to Rice C. Ballard, 6 May 1853, in ibid. Box 12, Folder 191. 47. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 5. 48. Lavinia, Letter to to Phoebe Sarah Lawton, July 1849, Papers of the Willingham and Lawton Families, University of South Carolina. 49. Bass, ‘Essay,’ 12. 50. Douglass, Letter to William Lloyd Garrison, 7 June 1847, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, 215.

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Works Cited Ball, C., and I. Fisher (1837), Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, New York: John S. Taylor. Ballard, R. C. (1822–88), Rice C. Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, #4850. Baptist, E. E. (2001), ‘ “Cuffy,” “Fancy Maids,” and “One-Eyed Men”: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,’ The American Historical Review, 106: 1619–50. Baptist, E. E. (2014), The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, New York: Basic Books. Bass, N. [1851] (1980), ‘Essay on the Treatment and Management of Slaves,’ in J. O. Breeden (ed.), Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 11–16. Bibb, H. [1849] (2001), The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave, ed. C. J. Heglar, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Block, S. (1999), ‘Lines of Color, Sex, and Service: Comparative Sexual Coercion in Early America,’ in M. E. Hodes (ed.), Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, New York: New York University Press, 141–63. Branch, B. (1837), Letter to Thomas Harriss, 10 May, Thomas Whitmel Harriss Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC, Box 1. Brown, W. W. (1849), Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave: Written by Himself, London: Charles Gilpin. Deyle, S. (2005), Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life, New York: Oxford University Press. Douglass, F. [1845] (1997), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. W. L. Andrews and W. S. McFeely, New York: Norton. Douglass, F. (2009), The Frederick Douglass Papers – Series Three: Correspondence – Volume 1, 1842–1852, ed. J. McKivigan, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Genovese, E. D. (1974), Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, New York: Pantheon Books. Green, S. (2011), ‘ “Mr Ballard, I Am Compelled to Write Again”: Beyond Bedrooms and Brothels, a Fancy Girl Speaks,’ Black Women, Gender and Families, 5: 17–40. Greenberg, K. S. (1996), Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hager, C. (2013), Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartman, S. (1996), ‘Seduction and the Ruses of Power,’ Callaloo, 19: 537–60. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, H. (1861), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Boston: Published for the Author. Johnson, W. (1999), Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lavinia (1849), Letter to Phoebe Sarah Lawton, July, Papers of the Willingham and Lawton Families, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. Martin, J. D. (2004), Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Northup, S. (1853), Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, Auburn, NY: Derby and Miller.

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Scarborough, W. K. (2003), Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-NineteenthCentury South, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Schiller, B. (2008), ‘Learning Their Letters: Critical Literacy, Epistolary Culture and Slavery in the Antebellum South,’ Southern Quarterly, 45: 11–29. Schiller, B. (2009), ‘Selling Themselves: Slavery, Survival, and the African American Diaspora,’ 49th Parallel, 23: (last accessed 22 September 2015). Schiller, B. (2011), ‘U.S. Slavery’s Diaspora: Black Atlantic History at the Crossroads of “Race,” Enslavement, and Colonisation,’ Slavery and Abolition, 32: 199–212. Sekora, J. (1987), ‘Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,’ Callaloo, 32: 482–515. Stepto, R. B. (1991), From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sweeney, F. (2007), Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Tadman, M. (1996), Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tadman, M. (2004), ‘The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and Myth-Making of the U.S. South,’ in W. Johnson (ed.), The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 117–42. Thompson, A. C. C. [1845] (1997), ‘Letter to the Delaware Republican,’ in F. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. W. L. Andrews and W. S. McFeely, New York: Norton, 88–91. Troutman, P. (2006), ‘Correspondences in Black and White: Sentiment and the Market Revolution,’ in E. E. Baptist and S. M. H. Camp (eds.), New Studies in the History of American Slavery, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 211–42.

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16 HOME AND BELONGING IN THE LETTERS OF SARAH HICKS WILLIAMS Rebecca J. Fraser

O

n 9 September 1853, Ben Williams, a physician and slaveholder from North Carolina, and Sarah Hicks, born and raised in a middle-class household in New Hartford, New York, exchanged their wedding vows. Sarah would no doubt have felt the unease experienced by any newly married woman as to what awaited her as a wife, but in her case this was coupled with apprehension about her impending relocation to her new husband’s family home, Clifton Grove – a plantation largely farming cotton and producing turpentine, located in Greene County, North Carolina. It was, for Sarah at her point of departure, an unknown place. She knew that her life would be different there, moving as she was from the comforts of her childhood home and the privileges of girlhood to becoming a wife, and presumably a mother, with all the obligations of care and responsibility that this entailed.1 Yet this was something more than merely leaving her much beloved family home, for Sarah would make a journey of over 650 miles to surroundings, peoples, and customs that were alien to her. Most especially worrying to this new bride was the role she would be expected to fulfill as plantation mistress to the thirty-seven enslaved people her husband held at Clifton Grove, part of the Williams family’s larger slaveholding capital, which had numbered over 300 in 1845 and had undoubtedly increased by the time of her marriage to Ben. Like so many Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of home proved an elusive concept for Sarah on her move to the South. The increasing movement of people, whether through forced or voluntary migration, from the eastern seaboard into the frontier lands of the West during the antebellum period heightened anxieties regarding the gendered and racial order of these newly settled lands, and helped to generate idealized definitions of ‘home’ that were bound up with discourses of middleclass refinement and gentility.2 Sarah’s concept of home and belonging was tied to such ideals, while also being governed by a profoundly racialized perspective common to both the middle classes of the North and the slaveholding elite of the South. While Sarah struggled to reconcile her decision to move so far away from her family to a place where she felt ‘a stranger in a strange land,’ her awareness of others who were also bereft of a sense of home and belonging did not extend to the lives of the enslaved, whose familial bonds were increasingly desecrated by the demands of the internal slave trade in this era.3 While she fretted about her own inability to develop a sense of belonging in the antebellum Southern world, primarily because of the institution of racial slavery and its literal coloring of social relations and cultural currencies, Sarah never spared a thought for the domestic lives of the enslaved men and women with 258

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whom she shared her new home – enslaved men and women who, by the 1850s, were all too familiar with scenes of departure and heartbreak as a result of seeing members of their own families and those of others sold off and separated. Indeed, in this particular decade, the interregional trade in enslaved men, women, and children was at its height and states throughout the upper South, extending as far south as Georgia and as far west as Missouri, were primary exporters in this lucrative market.4 Yet Sarah, fully complicit with the racial discourses of the era that cast enslaved people as emotionally inept and devoid of sentiment, lacked any sense of empathy for the African American men and women who lived and labored at Clifton Grove, and for whom familial separation was a regular occurrence. Sarah’s myopia, which prevented her from an empathetic – if not sympathetic – response to the enslaved men, women, and children whom her husband’s family traded on a regular basis, powerfully communicates the ways in which ideas of home and belonging were heavily underpinned by implicit racial distinctions in antebellum America. Moreover, her letters offer an interesting case study of how regional ideals influenced these conceptions of domesticity, and how an individual’s geographical relocation could shape their understanding of these concepts in new and profound ways. Above all, though, it is the subject matter and intent of the letter-form itself that can tell us much about how someone like Sarah apprehended where her home was and where she belonged. As Stephen Stowe has argued in a subtle consideration of the family letters of Southern planters, during the nineteenth century, ‘epistolary rhetoric drew attention to the distance between family members even as it mediated geographical (and it was hoped) emotional distance between them. Distance, yearning and time passing were constant themes of the antebellum letter-writer, with the first perhaps most prominent in Southern correspondence.’5 Stowe’s analysis of the meaning of epistolarity for the slaveholding classes is then particularly apt when considering the letters of Sarah Hicks Williams, because what they reveal is the slow but sure way in which she fashioned herself into the wife of a Southern planter. Although her initial letters back to New Hartford were frequent and full of recollections of friends and family not forgotten, as time wore on and she became acculturated into white Southern life the distance between the former ‘Sarah Hicks’ and the present ‘Sarah Williams’ was written into her letters as a manifestation of what Stowe calls the ‘breach between desired closeness and actual separation.’6 Sarah’s journey to North Carolina in 1853 was not the first time she had left home. Between 1844 and 1845, for example, she had attended the Albany Academy for Girls in New York’s state capital. This time away from her family, though, was only ever a short-term arrangement, which allowed Sarah to indulge in the novelties of an academy education safe in the knowledge that she would always return to New Hartford and her parents’ home. Indeed, Sarah could find constant reminders of New Hartford in Albany, even when she longed to ‘leave this Old “Dutch City” and sit in my accustomed seat at home.’7 Her childhood friend, Libby (Elizabeth) Sanger, had also enrolled in the Academy for the same year, and they boarded together at a residence in Pearl Street. These two young women undoubtedly shared their longings for the familiarity of home, but they also relished the new opportunities and distractions offered by the busyness of school life. Both Sarah and Libby were delighted with their experience of the Academy, particularly its ethos of self-improvement through learning, which Sarah echoed to her parents by noting that ‘study we must, to be anything

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in this school.’8 They were also evidently thrilled with the social esteem that could be acquired through academic achievement. Thus, early in December 1844, Libby had one of her compositions read in the chapel, with Sarah remarking that it ‘was the best one that had been read . . . this year quite an honour I can assure you to have it said by the composition teacher too.’9 And Sarah too had been proving her academic talents, having been elected as one of the editors of the school’s newspaper, The Planetarium, for the month of March 1845. ‘It is rather pleasing to think that you are popular enough to be elected out of a department of ninety young ladies,’ she observed of her own moment in the spotlight.10 Indeed, she confided to her parents that she thought Libby and herself were favorites among the girls at the Academy, although she assured them that they must not think that she was bragging, a most unbecoming trait for a young lady of her status.11 The whirl of Albany’s wider social circle also meant that Sarah and Libby had little time to dwell on their longing for New Hartford and their feelings of homesickness. Thanksgiving at the Academy was spent very ‘pleasantly’ for the two girls, for as Sarah recollected: ‘[We] went to church in the morning, had an excellent dinner and in the evening Miss McDonald made a little party for us, invited several ladies and gentlemen from the city, among them was Miss Loveridge, our composition teacher, and Professor Watson, our teacher in mathematics – we had a most delightful evening.’12 And events like this were far from a one-off. Sarah wrote in the same letter, for example, only a month after having arrived in Albany, that they ‘already have quite a pleasant circle in the city.’13 This is clearly evidenced by the numerous invitations extended to the two young ladies courtesy of prominent ladies and gentlemen residing in the City, with Sarah noting in one typical aside that: On Friday evening Lib and I were invited to Mr. Gainwood’s where we met some ladies and gentlemen from the city. This was the first and only evening we have been in the street after dark, and then we had company. Emily Weed called on us last week, apologized for not calling sooner. Mr. McElroy called on us again last Wednesday evening, and invited us to go to a concert at Mr. Kennedy’s church but we could not accept, as we had an engagement. We returned Sarah Brunson’s call on Saturday. Judge Brunson came into the room to see us. I must say Pa that I was very pleasantly disappointed with him, he was very sociable and seemed to take quite an interest in us, and said we must come very often to see them.14 Other visits, meanwhile, saw Libby and herself attending exhibitions at the State Capitol, accepting invitations to take tea with prominent ladies, and attending events at the United Dutch Reform Church in Albany, the closest venue in terms of religious ideals and forms of worship to the First Presbyterian congregation of which her mother was a devout member in New Hartford. However, despite the warm welcome she received from those in the city and the happiness she found at the Academy through academic excellence and social popularity, the idea of ‘belonging’ in Albany never occurred to Sarah. Her home was in New Hartford – where her parents lived and where she had two sisters to whom she was closely tied, even as they eventually moved away to form their own families. This was never far from Sarah’s mind as she navigated the demands of Academy life and city living. She often wrote to her parents with much excitement at the prospect of returning to New Hartford, as, for example, in her declaration that: ‘When I think that (if I live) in two short months I shall see Old New Hartford again I can hardly contain myself.’15

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And she often took care to count down the length of time remaining until her stay at the Academy would be over. Thus she writes on 30 March 1845 that: ‘Lib and I have been reckoning how long it will be before we go home . . . 3 weeks from next Friday morning we shall start for good old New Hartford . . . I cannot realize that I am to see you soon again.’16 Safely ensconced in the familiar social and racial customs of her home state, Sarah was wholly aware that her residence in Albany was only ever going to be a temporary phase in her young, white, middle-class life. By contrast, however, her relocation to North Carolina was permanent. No longer would she be going ‘home’ to New Hartford to spend long, idle summers or to enjoy the festivities of the Christmas period, when her father would leave ‘his foot-print in the ashes, to make us think SantaClaus had indeed been down the chimney leaving us gifts.’17 In the immediate aftermath of her marriage, as Sarah began to seriously contemplate the distance of North Carolina from New Hartford, and the terms of her separation and all it represented, her letters to her parents began to anxiously communicate a sense of impending loss. She implored her parents, for example, to meet with her and Ben along the couple’s honeymoon route back to North Carolina, suggesting a rendezvous at the Brooklyn residence of one of her two sisters. As she told them on 24 September 1853, shaken by the thought of replacing one home for another, particularly one so far away and so unfamiliar: ‘[We] shall reach New York probably Wednesday or Thursday I wish you would both meet us there I would so love to see you once more before I go to my far distant home . . . I need not tell you that Ben does all he can to make me happy, & I am so, but I know too much of the world to expect of it perfect bliss, that remains for a better world & purified human nature.’18 Her initial letters back to New Hartford from North Carolina were then frequent, an attempt perhaps to allay her fears that she might be being ignored, or even worse, forgotten by those she had left behind. In these epistles she positions herself as central to the social circles she had inhabited in New Hartford, assuming, or rather hoping that her absence would be sorely felt. She often writes of childhood friends, for example, with whom she shared girlhood chatter and secrets, recalling that their coming to see her off on the day of departure ‘waving their handkerchiefs . . . did make me cry [I] couldn’t help it.’19 It was not just the familiar social circles and shared experiences of New Hartford that she would miss, though. These friendship groups and family ties had certainly provided her with status and respectability in the town of New Hartford, but it was also something more than her established standing that she feared parting from. It was her sense of a regional identity. For as she reminded her parents: ‘Perhaps you think I left home without sorrow, I can tell you I did not, my heart yearns over my home and its associations, & it will take a long time for another home to seem as dear, there is not a hill or valley or wood in old New Hartford which is not dear to me, & the people I love dearly.’20 Importantly, one of those people she claimed to ‘love dearly’ was Mary, her eldest sister, who had relocated to Ohio following her marriage to an ardent abolitionist, James Brown, in 1844. James had high hopes that Sarah too might adopt his political and moral stance toward slavery. Indeed, after her college days at Albany, she had spent several long summers at the Brown household in Bloomfield, where the controversial abolitionist Congressman Joshua Giddings was a regular guest. While Sarah often teased James about his antislavery tendencies, joking that as a result of the ‘long lecture[s] on abolition’ that he sent to her she was sure he was ‘doing his best to make me an abolitionist,’ the relationship between the two was full of fond attachment,

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equally expressed on both sides.21 Writing to Sarah’s parents in March 1845, for example, James voiced the hope that his sister-in-law knew how important her letters were to those in Bloomfield. He also felt confident that their letters, and particularly his, could help to ease Sarah’s feelings of loneliness in Albany. ‘It is a source of much pleasure to me that she believes that I feel towards her as a brother & that she reciprocates a sincere emotion,’ he noted in March 1845.22 Sarah’s subsequent attendance at a Liberty Party Convention in Painesville no doubt signaled to the Browns that she was beginning to form at least a mild aversion to Southern slavery. As she excitedly explained to her parents in a letter written from Bloomfield: Judge [Lester] King was here and spoke, as also a Mr. [George] Bradburn from Massachusetts, formerly a Whig member of the legislature in that State . . . Mr. King and Mr. Bradburn invited Cousin Ann and myself to go with them, so we accepted the invitation, and made a visit of four days at Mr. Harris’. While in Painesville we received much attention from Mr. King and Mr. Bradburn and also received an invitation from Colonel Slater – an uncle of Henry L. Slater – to visit . . . but it was not convenient for us to go.23 Yet by September 1853 her eight-year courtship with Benjamin Williams had ended in marriage, and all the Browns’ hopes of an addition to their abolitionist network were dashed. Sarah’s misgivings about her fiancé’s slaveholding status, which, as she confessed, she couldn’t ‘make . . . seem right,’ were resolved by the thought that ‘perhaps there,’ in North Carolina, ‘may be my sphere of usefulness’ – especially if she could prove herself to be a more benign and understanding mistress than Avy Williams, Ben’s widowed mother, with whom he had shared Clifton Grove since the 1830s.24 But tellingly, Sarah avoided the Browns prior to her departure, leaving her sister to complain to their mother and father that: ‘It seems to me she might have come had she chosen to do so.’25 Without even a written farewell to Mary and James, who were not invited to the nuptials, Sarah thus bid adieu to the world she had known and set off to the region where she would spend the rest of her life. The letters Sarah sent from Clifton Grove to her parents in New Hartford over the first few months of her residency in North Carolina were filled with comments on the peculiarities of Southern living – the food, the customs, and mostly, the preponderance of enslaved people. A pervading sense of loneliness and heartsickness haunts her letters: hanging questions regarding Mary and James; frequent declarations regarding her husband’s wealth and his love for her; insistence that her aging parents (who were both in their sixties) should make the particularly arduous journey to Clifton Grove, which was located along a seven-mile stretch of plank road and bounded for twenty miles or so by thick forests of pine. There were no kind letters from Bloomfield to make her loneliness less lonely and the unfamiliarity easier to bear. There were also fewer letters from her other sister, Lucinda, the busyness of her life in Brooklyn meaning Sarah might wait months rather than weeks to hear from her. Geographically remote from one another, Sarah and her parents attempted to sustain their relationship through the letters they wrote, all the time sensing the ideological distance growing between them as a result of the political differences between the Hicks and the Williams families. Characteristically, Sarah reminded her parents in her first letters from Clifton Grove how well she had done for herself in marrying a man of Ben’s wealth and standing. As she confided on 10 October 1853: ‘Between you & I, my husband is better off than

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I ever dreamt of. I am glad I didn’t know it before we were married, he owns 2000 acres of land in this vicinity but you must bear in mind that land here is not nearly as valuable as with you.’26 Clifton Grove itself consisted of 1,400 acres of pine land, and this was the primary investment on the plantation, totaling a healthy return of at least $4,200 per annum. Sandy Run, another of her husband’s holdings, about seven miles from Clifton Grove, contained another seventy-three acres of land. This was farmed for turpentine, a staple product exported from North Carolina to the internal markets of the United States. Like Clifton Grove, of course, Sandy Run was worked by enslaved laborers. Noting the stark differences in the ways that wealth was marked in the antebellum South as compared to the North, Sarah remarked in another letter, twelve days later, how: ‘Ambition is satisfied here by numbering its thousands of dollars, acres & hundreds of negroes – houses, furniture, dress are nothing. For instance the Doctor’s Brother, a very wealthy man, lives in a large wood house without lathing or plastering. To be sure, he has a handsome sofa, sideboards & chairs in his parlor, which contrast strangely with the unfinished state of the house.’27 It was this lack of interest in the material evidences of wealth as Sarah understood them that so concerned her. Contrasted with the ways in which the Northern middle classes of the era demonstrated their prosperity – through the grandeur of their houses, the décor and soft furnishings of their interiors, the carefully manicured gardens adjoining their refined dwellings, and their dress, manner, and behavior – the wealthy planters in the antebellum South communicated their fortune in a language that other Southerners would understand but many Northerners failed to. One might have expected that racial slavery was what would affront Sarah’s sensibilities the most on her move from New Hartford to North Carolina. But while to begin with it was perhaps strange to her, the condition of forced labor – the reality of a master and slave dynamic – really did not seem to concern her on moral grounds. What did bother her was the ease with which black people – as slaves – inhabited the daily lives of white Southerners. Previous to her marriage, Sarah’s servants had been white, and had maintained a degree of detachment from the Hicks family circle, as all good servants, in Sarah’s eyes, should. Yet here in the South, from Sarah’s perspective, there were levels of familiarity, even intimacy, shared between white slaveholders and their black slaves that left her feeling awkward and most uncomfortable. Her primary discomfort was with the lack of obsequiousness she expected from those employed to serve. This, coupled with her inexperience with black people, left her uncertain of how to behave in the presence of slaves, particularly given the ease with which many other white Southerners interacted with their workers. She was unsure, for example, of how to deal with the black ‘waiting girl’ who, seeming ‘perfect[ly] at home,’ came into her room while she was on honeymoon to ‘look at me.’28 In effect, she was uncomfortable with the way in which enslaved people occupied a room – the parlour, the kitchen, the bedroom – minus the formalities expected of Northern servants. She was also taken aback by what she perceived as the impudence of the demands of the enslaved at Clifton Grove. ‘One of the field hands asked me to fix a dress for her the other day, another wanted to know if Massa Ben and I wouldn’t ride over to Snow Hill & get her a new dress,’ she complained.29 Although such responsibilities were readily expected of a plantation mistress in the South, Sarah was evidently bewildered at such requests, having had a Northern middle-class upbringing where servants would never make such demands.

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Removed from the ‘long lectures on abolition’ that James had written her, and the strong antislavery sentiment in the Bloomfield household, however, Sarah eventually became accustomed to the familiarities between slaveholding families and their enslaved labor force, and gradually painted a picture of Southern slavery that was much more benign, at least under her husband’s management. Following her arrival in early October 1853 and after spending a few weeks getting accustomed to the role of plantation mistress, for example, she wrote her parents that she had ‘seen enough to convince me that the ill treatment of the slave is exaggerated at the North, but have not seen enough to make me like the institution.’30 A month later, she reported that ‘the servants are treated better in most respects than I expected.’31 By June 1854, nine months after her arrival at Clifton Grove, Sarah had become wholly at ease with the presence of enslaved people in her daily routine, so much so that she began to discuss them in her letters with a degree of indifference, as part of the plantation mechanics, reporting that ‘several of the servants . . . have been down with Dysentery, but all are better now with the exception of “old Frank” (the old negro who came down here to be taken care of).’32 By this point Sarah was beginning to participate in proslavery thinking, understanding that enslaved labor provided an important economic resource for the Williams family, and eased her own responsibilities as mistress of the household. It troubled Sarah when the enslaved laborers were sick, not out of any maternal concerns for the individual or their families but because it burdened the plantation mistress with work, both in caring for them and assigning others to take over their duties. This shift in Sarah’s thinking, as she slowly confirmed her belief in the racial order of the slaveholding South, was evident in several of the missives that she sent during 1854. In the same letter narrating Frank’s illness, for instance, Sarah commented rather dryly that ‘people may talk of the freedom from care of a Southern life, but to me it seems full of care.’33 Yet the ‘care’ she is referring to here succeeded in dehumanizing enslaved peoples and made a fictive racial order of black inferiority and white supremacy normalized and natural. Having come to locate enslaved men and women as part of the plantation system – as human cogs in a well-oiled operation – by mid-1854, suggests how far Sarah’s views had shifted toward a proslavery stance in such a short space of time. Although she also talked about returning to settle in the North only a year or so after her relocation to Clifton Grove, her reluctance to sell the ‘servants’ (as she continued to call them) was a decisive factor in preventing this move. While she insisted that her hesitancy lay in her feelings of responsibility toward them – stressing ‘I know that they are kindly cared for now, and they might easily fall into worse hands’ – it is apparent that Sarah had begun to adopt the Southern slaveholding ideology of paternalism as a defense against the charges that abolitionists might make of slavery being an unjust, cruel, and barbaric system.34 In the same 1854 letter these lines come from, Sarah lamented the ‘smouldering fires of animosity’ reopened between North and South over the question of slavery (fires ignited by the debates over the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the issue of popular sovereignty, whereby new states could decide for themselves whether they should be slave or free).35 Yet she also questioned the abolitionists’ case against slavery and slaveholders, opining that: I wish the Abolitionists of the North could see these things as I see them. If they knew what they were about they would act differently, as they are doing, they are tightening the bonds of the slave, and putting further off his emancipation. I do not doubt the sincerity of many of them, but more of this when I see you.36

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By January 1856, Sarah had begun to openly question Northern views on Southern slavery, filtered through questions regarding Mary’s sincerity toward Ben. ‘I think she is much mistaken,’ she wrote of her sister, ‘& judges the Dr much too harshly when she hints that he may not like me to correspond with her.’37 Following this thinly disguised attack on the Browns’ antislavery views, she added that ‘I think my coming South has changed some of my friends more than it has me.’38 Yet of course it was really Sarah’s own changing viewpoint that so divided her from her New Hartford kin and left her feeling divorced from her Northern friends and family. As she moved further toward a proslavery perspective and away from the middleclass moral reform perspective and attendant charitable principles she had been raised with, and which up to the time of her marriage she had acted upon, certain members of her Northern family inevitably found her to be very different. Although Mary had tried hard to reconcile herself to Sarah’s choice of husband, maintaining contact through the occasional letter, in the face of her own well-established antislavery sentiments she could never accept her sister’s warm embrace of racial slavery. Certainly other Northern women had married slaveholders and relocated to the South, either on a permanent or temporary basis, and in the process became accustomed to the region and to the role that they assumed as plantation mistress. Others assimilated less easily, however. If Sarah had been more like the English actress and author Frances Kemble, for example, in her attitude toward Southern slavery then Mary would no doubt have forgiven the bad decision she had made in her choice of husband and welcomed her home with open arms. Kemble had married the slaveholder Pierce Butler in 1834 and spent the winter of 1838–9 on her husband’s plantations on the Sea Islands of Georgia. She kept a diary of her time there, recording the brutalities of racial slavery that she witnessed on a daily basis, and subsequently published it at the height of the Civil War, following a very bitter divorce from Butler in 1849, under the title Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839 (1863).39 When Sarah had written that the plantation could be her ‘sphere of usefulness’ Mary had no doubt hoped that her sister planned to encourage Ben to move toward emancipating his enslaved labor force, rather than expecting that she would come to claim they were ‘kindly cared for’ under his control. As it was Mary and James increasingly withdrew from social relations with Sarah as the 1850s progressed and the sectional crisis reached its climax. This increasing withdrawal on the part of her elder sister was evident to Sarah even as she remained hopeful that things might turn out for the best. Writing in November of 1855, she reported that one of the Williamses’ enslaved domestics, Lizzie, had given birth to a little boy. With no small degree of irony Sarah suggested that ‘Lizzie is going to call it Brown, after her husband, but I am going to write to James that I call it after him.’40 Although Sarah had no real intention of doing this, her comment was loaded with an acute understanding of the extent of the power of plantation mistresses to control the lives of the enslaved men, women, and children that labored for them. This was manifest in the daily routines of the plantation whereby enslaved peoples were denied their status as parent, spouse, lover, sibling, aunt, or uncle, and categorized through their labor (as field hand, cooper, domestic) and their monetary value. Immediately following this sentence regarding Lizzie and her new baby boy, Sarah’s tone changes, as if bringing up the Browns reminded her of the loneliness she often felt at Clifton Grove, and the ways in which her family relations with those in the North had undergone such seismic shifts. Proceeding to recount how both Ben and herself had recently traveled north, she explained that ‘we stayed in Philadelphia hoping to see [James], but were

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disappointed[.] I wanted to see him & Mary very much, but it was perhaps for the best that we did not meet.’41 By the summer of 1857, Sarah and Ben had relocated to Burnt Fort, Georgia, a site on the Satilla River near the Okefenokee Swamp. Ben was keen to capitalize on his turpentine interests and the area had become the focus of a large sawmill operation in recent years. Sarah initially confronted their new situation with gloom and despondency. Although they were now ‘keeping house’ independently, rather than sharing with Ben’s mother as they had at Clifton Grove, Sarah faced the prospect of actual physical isolation in the secluded swamps of the Satilla. The ideal of ‘home,’ with its connotations of familiarity and contentedness, once again began to seem a remote concept. With her husband often away on business trips back to North Carolina and further south, Sarah was left suffering from want of counsel and support as she managed a large household of enslaved African Americans and cared for her two children, Sarah Virginia, born in July 1854, and Henry Clay, who was only a year old.42 Writing to her parents in January of 1858 from Burnt Fort, she ended her letter with a note of despair and melancholy: ‘Somehow I don’t feel like writing, I feel too much worried – Every other moment something is wanted & I’m too confused for anything.’43 Within the year Sarah had seemingly become better accustomed to the change of circumstance and her new living arrangements. Apparently much more contented with her new location in the swamplands of Georgia, she explained to her parents in November 1858 that: ‘On the whole I have enjoyed myself much better without a lady-friend than I expected, perhaps the great secret lies in being constantly employed.’44 Yet this change in mood is belied by the journey to New Hartford she and the two children had undertaken sometime during the course of 1858. Although she admitted that it was not something she would attempt again until the children were much older, the reason she gave for the journey was simple: ‘The fact is I had got thoroughly homesick, I have been and returned.’45 The move further south had evidently unnerved Sarah again, leaving her wholly alone and bereft of the guidance, support, and society she might have claimed in North Carolina, particularly from Ben’s sister Martha, and Martha’s daughter Harriet, both of whom had been raised as ‘Southern daughters’ (with all the racial and gendered connotations that this implied) and both of whom had married particularly wealthy slaveholders. Grieving for what she had left behind in North Carolina revived in Sarah the feelings of longing and loneliness she had first experienced on her move to Clifton Grove. The simple assertion that she made the difficult trip to New Hartford with the children in tow because of homesickness speaks directly to the fact that she still regarded her parents’ home as where she felt most comfortable. Although she still persisted in regarding New Hartford as ‘home,’ however, her relocation to Georgia heralded a new beginning for Sarah in many ways. Away from the shared living arrangements of Clifton Grove, and with no need any longer to check herself against her mother-in-law, she rapidly became accustomed to the sole authority invested in her as plantation mistress. She also began to more openly discuss slavery and the Williams family’s ownership of black bodies in terms of investment and profitability. In one letter written from Burnt Fort, for example, she details the purchase of three enslaved people: a female slave, Anarchy, the wife of an enslaved man they already owned, whom she intended to use as part of her domestic staff in the household; a distiller called Lewis; and ‘a yellow boy about thirteen years old, I forgot what he cost, somewhere about a thousand I suppose.’45 Without a moment’s thought for the lives and loves these enslaved peoples might have been detached from, and the

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heartaches this would cause, Sarah finishes this account of her husband’s recent purchases by indicating that just as ‘the Dr believes in negroes & pine land’ so does she.46 Her view of what these additions to the workforce might mean for their future income simply disregards or fails to consider the ties to home (either African or American) of the enslaved people Ben had bought while on his trip. Sarah’s racialized understanding of the concept of ‘home’ is starkly demonstrated here as she congratulates her husband on his wise stewardship of their plantation without any recognition of the forcible sundering of black families that this involved.47 While Sarah could have extended an empathetic compassion given her own experiences of longing for home, the racial ideologies that she now held to were such that she could only view African Americans as serving the economic productivity of the Williamses’ businesses, rather than as sentient individuals with lives outside of the condition of being treated as property. The Williams family’s further move in December 1860 to a newly constructed house, ‘Sunnyside,’ in Ware County, Georgia, where they remained for just under fifteen years, then saw Sarah finally able to claim a settled sense of belonging in the South that she had been edging toward ever since her arrival in September 1853. As she wrote to her parents once newly established at Sunnyside, ‘we intend to have a pleasant home – the house is unassuming, but plenty nice enough, & we hope to make the grounds around pleasant.’48 By the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, meanwhile, she was writing to her parents with her thoughts on the impending conflict in a way that demonstrated her regional alliance to the newly formed Confederacy: ‘I tell you now that Lincoln has played the aggressor, he’ll have to leave every inch of Southern soil, I need not tell you there is excitement, it is more than that, it is determination, it is the spirit of 76, the will to conquer or die.’49 From this point on Sarah became a real emblem of ‘Confederate Womanhood,’ extolling virtues of female patriotism and sacrifice to the Southern cause. Of course, being a Northerner perhaps made her determination to prove her loyalty to the Confederacy even more pronounced, but by this stage Sarah could lay legitimate claim to being a committed Southerner, as the wife of a slaveholder and mother to his children.50 Other Northerners in the Confederacy or those with Unionist connections did not escape accusations of treason, and the conflict caused insurmountable tensions and hostilities in the domestic lives of some white Southern families.51 Such a fate did not befall the Williams family, however. Indeed, following the Civil War, Sarah followed the path trod by many Confederates and her former detachment toward those who had labored for her during slavery turned into contempt. She confided to her parents in 1867, for example, that given the rapid turnover of hired help she had experienced since the end of the War she believed freedpeople to be an ‘ungrateful race . . . drive[ing] me to be tight and “stingy” with them.’52 Sarah’s concept of home and belonging, as we have seen, was implicitly racialized across her life, but became more openly so as she moved south and increasingly saw black people only in the way that they functioned for the white slaveholding classes. This letter, at the near-close of the archival collection of her surviving epistles, is good evidence of quite how far she had moved from the middle-class Northern sensibilities of the family she left behind. Now effectively a stranger to New Hartford, Sarah lived out the remaining part of her life in Georgia, moving in 1872 to Waycross, Waresborough. It was here that Ben regained the privileged status he had once enjoyed as a slaveholder, being one of the four founders of this burgeoning railroad town. Sarah, for her part, devoted the rest of her life to her family and the Church. Her search for a sense of belonging in the antebellum South had been a long and troubled

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journey, one where she had shed ties that had once been dear and sacrificed much of what she had once valued. But through her letters she was able to measure this loss, at first using them to try and close the physical, emotional, and ideological distance between herself and the North, and then using them to assert those same distances. This period of transition in her life, lasting the best part of a decade, was one where she, like many nineteenth-century Americans, faced the complex and difficult realities of readjustment in order to eventually call a new region home.

Acknowledgments Parts of this chapter first appeared in Gender, Race, and Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and are reprinted here with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

Notes 1. See Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 30 March 1845, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 2, 1838–45. 2. The impact of these migrations on antebellum conceptions of home and belonging is discussed: in relation to the South in Baptist, Creating an Old South, and Cashin, A Family Venture; in relation to middle-class women in Kaplan, ‘Manifest Domesticity,’ and Jeffrey, Frontier Women; in relation to African Americans in West, Families of Freedom, Wolf, Almost Free, and Troutman, ‘Correspondences in Black and White’; and in relation to Native Americans in Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers. 3. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 22 October 1853, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 4, 1852–3. 4. See: Tadman, Speculators and Slaves; Johnson, Soul by Soul; and Deyle, Carry Me Back. 5. Stowe, ‘Rhetoric of Authority,’ 920. 6. Ibid. 7. Sarah Hicks, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 30 March 1845. 8. Sarah Hicks, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 1 December 1844, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 2, 1838–45. 9. Sarah Hicks, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 15 December 1844, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 2, 1838–45. 10. Sarah Hicks, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 23 February 1845, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 2, 1838–45. 11. See Sarah Hicks, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 15 December 1844. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Sarah Hicks, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 23 February 1845. 16. Sarah Hicks, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 30 March 1845. 17. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 5 January 1865, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 6, 1856–68. 18. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 24 Sept 1853, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 4, 1852–3. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Sarah Hicks, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 8 March 1845, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 2, 1838–45. 22. James Brown, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 9 March 1845, Williams Family Archive.

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23. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 4 April 1847, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 3, 1846–51. 24. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 7 March 1853, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 4, 1852–3. For more on the power which slaveholding could offer to widows like Avy Williams see Wood, Masterful Women. 25. Mary Brown, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 20 September 1853, Williams Family Archive. 26. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 10 October 1853, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 4, 1852–3. 27. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 22 October 1853. 28. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 10 October 1853. 29. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 22 October 1853. 30. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 10 October 1853. 31. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 7 November 1853, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 4, 1852–3. 32. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 14 June 1854, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 5, 1854–5. 33. Ibid. 34. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 2 October 1854, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 5, 1854–5. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 3 January 1856, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 6, 1856–68. 38. Ibid. 39. For more on Kemble’s exposure and response to slavery see Clinton, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, 113–36. For a response similar to that of Sarah Hicks Williams see King, A Northern Woman in the Plantation South. 40. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 9 November 1855, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 5, 1854–5. 41. Ibid. 42. In addition to Sarah Virginia (or Lilly as she was known in infancy) and Henry Clay, Benjamin and Sarah went on to have six other children (Sarah was pregnant every other year from 1854 to 1867) including Harriet, Samuel (Joseph Samuel), Martha, Benjamin Hicks, William Pitt, and an unnamed infant who was stillborn. 43. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 16 January 1858, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 6, 1856–68. 44. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 23 November 1858, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 6, 1858–68. 45. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 16 January 1858. 46. Ibid. 47. For more on the familial dislocations caused by slavery, and the range of white responses to it, see Williams, Help Me to Find My People. 48. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 3 December 1860, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 6, 1856–68. 49. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 28 April 1861, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 6, 1856–68. 50. For fuller discussion of the ideal of Confederate Womanhood see: McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; Faust, Mothers of Invention; and Faust, ‘Altars of Sacrifice.’ 51. See Taylor, Divided Families. 52. Sarah Hicks Williams, Letter to Samuel and Sarah Parmelee Hicks, 27 August 1867, Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Folio 6, 1856–68.

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Works Cited Baptist, E. E. (2002), Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Bowes, J. P. (2007), Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippian West, New York: Cambridge University Press. Brown, J. (1845), Letter to S. and S. P. Hicks, 9 March, Williams Family Archive, Courtesy of Kathy Wright Fowler. Brown, M. (1853), Letter to S. and S. P. Hicks, 20 September, Williams Family Archive, Courtesy of Kathy Wright Fowler. Cashin, J. E. (1994), A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Clinton, C. (2000), Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, New York: Simon & Schuster. Deyle, S. (2005), Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life, New York: Oxford University Press. Faust, D. G. (1990), ‘Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narrative of War,’ Journal of American History, 76: 1,200–28. Faust, D. G. (2004), Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. King, W., ed. (1997), A Northern Woman in the Plantation South: Letters of Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox, 1856–1876, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Jeffrey, J. R. (1979), Frontier Women: Civilizing the West, 1840–1880, New York: Hill and Wang. Johnson, W. (2001), Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, A. (1998), ‘Manifest Domesticity,’ American Literature, 70: 581–606. McCurry, S. (2010), Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stowe, S. M. (1987), ‘The Rhetoric of Authority: The Making of Social Values in Planter Family Correspondence,’ Journal of American History, 73: 916–33. Tadman, M. (1989), Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Taylor, A. M. (2005), The Divided Family in Civil War America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Troutman, P. (2006), ‘Correspondences in Black and White: Sentiment and the Slave Market Revolution,’ in E. E. Baptist and S. M. H. Camp (eds.), New Studies in the History of American Slavery, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 211–42. West, E. (2012), Families of Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Williams, H. A. (2012), Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, S. H. (1838–68), Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wolf, E. S. (2012), Almost Free: A Story About Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Wood, K. E. (2004), Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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17 ‘AN OBLIQUE PLACE’: LETTERS IN THE CIVIL WAR Rebecca Weir

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n June 1862, Harper’s Illustrated Weekly published Winslow Homer’s engraving ‘News from the War.’1 The scenes that made up the double-page illustration presented a vision of powerful interconnectedness. Here, information travels by post, messenger, and special train, in the form of personal letters, newspapers, and military dispatches; these communications link people across the (dis)United States, in combat zones and at ‘home.’ Most of Homer’s bustling scenes show U.S. military personnel: unusually tall soldiers line up in front of ‘Our Special Artist’ (Homer himself); shipboard sailors pose after the arrival of a pile of mail bags; a military messenger ready to mount his horse pauses, envelope in hand; more soldiers tumble in their rush to get hold of newspapers from New York; convalescent soldiers stand on a street in the Confederate capital Richmond.2 At the still eye of Homer’s storm of communication, however, a grief-stricken woman sits in her parlour – a newly opened letter is crumpled in the hand that hangs by her side. The scene is captioned ‘Wounded’ and, as Alice Fahs has noted, it draws on the wartime trope that every bullet made two marks (one on the soldier and one on their family).3 But in this instance, the letter also forms a metaphorical link between the body of the woman and that of the soldier whose photograph rests in her workbasket. Although symbolic dark shading and a heavy border separate this scene from the rest of the composition, domestic space is not cut off from the manifold epistolary spaces of the war. The creeper that curls inside the parlour’s high closed window, for instance, is suggestive of the Union’s extensive communications network. Nowhere, it seems, is beyond the reach of the mail – or the recording eye of Harper’s as it too moves through the postal system. Homer’s patriotic vision of a (re)United States realized through the movement and consumption of ‘news of the war, be it of victory or defeat,’ enfolds a drama of epistolary access, intimacy, and isolation.4 Letters were indeed everywhere on the eve of the secession crisis that turned into four years of devastating conflict between the Union and the new rebel nation of the Confederacy. According to David Henkin, ‘most Americans’ had come to participate in postal communication and develop new expectations of epistolary contact at a distance by 1861, as a result of the coincidence of reduced postage rates, an expanding postal network, rising literacy, and increasing internal migration.5 In the latter respect, Henkin traces some of the common epistolary concerns and practices of the Civil War back to the earlier moment of the Gold Rush, but he also suggests that the war of 1861–5, which caused families to separate en masse, marked the high point of the ‘postal age’ and had the greatest ‘impact on popular understandings of the post.’6 271

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The mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men across the North and the South gave rise to the ‘phenomenon of mass military correspondence,’ as soldiers and their kin turned to letters to maintain important relationships.7 Epistolary intimacy became ‘a means of continuous connection’ to ‘home communities,’ with up to 180,000 letters a day being sent and received over the course of the struggle.8 While Henkin stresses an inclusive national postal culture, however, some groups in Civil War America were better placed than others to keep in touch via letter. Confederate families had to balance their desire for news of loved ones with the prohibitive expense of stamps and the scarcity of paper, as well as the manifold inadequacies of the new polity’s mail service. As Drew Gilpin Faust has noted, ‘for rich and poor alike, the inefficiencies and expense of the Confederate mail service worked as a significant impediment to maintaining emotional bonds . . . Despite its high cost, mail delivery was far from reliable, and southerners reported instances where service was interrupted for months at a time.’9 As the war dragged on, Confederate soldiers and civilians thus reduced their ‘postal age’ expectations of regular timely contact to hope of some contact. In November 1864, Alexander Spence of the First Arkansas Regiment resorted to playing the law of averages by promising his family that he would write ‘every chance & all of you must do the same.’10 And in April 1864, William L. Nugent’s wife Nellie crossly notified him by letter that he would not hear from her again until she received a letter from him. William desperately tried to explain that he had written to her ‘repeatedly’ and could ‘only hope you have received some of my letters.’11 ‘If you have not,’ he added, ‘I shall have to endure the mortifying reflection that however much I may endeavor to communicate with you, I can never again hear from you, no matter how frequent your opportunities for writing may be.’12 He had just enough hope, he asserted, to sit down to write her yet another letter. Marginal or neoliteracy meanwhile comprised an obstacle to epistolary contact for other groups, though by no means an insurmountable one. Those without the skills to write a letter could dictate to scribes and listen to replies read aloud. A relatively small number of African American soldiers were able to read or write when they joined the Union army, and most of those had been freemen before the war.13 Enslaved African Americans were routinely denied access to literacy, of course. Yet Christopher Hager estimates that, despite prohibitive legal codes and manifold deprivations, ‘at least 200,000 and possibly almost half a million people achieved literacy while they were enslaved’ and as such ‘scholarly attention to slaves’ letters has been incommensurate with the role writing played in many enslaved people’s lives.’14 Long before President Lincoln acknowledged the war for the Union was a war against slavery, then, enslaved people seized wartime opportunities to secure their freedom and new literacy skills. Schools established by regimental personnel and Northern missionary societies had military and religious priorities, but the skills attendees acquired doubtless helped them to maintain vital bonds of kinship at a distance.15 As Spotswood Rice, a formerly enslaved soldier from border-state Missouri, wrote from a hospital bed in St. Louis to his still-enslaved daughters on 3 September 1864: ‘I take my pen in hand to rite you A few lines to let you know that I have not forgot you and that I want to see you as bad as ever [sic passim].’16 This, and another surviving letter by Rice, addressed to the owner of his children, remind us that while the extraordinary circumstances of the war might not have fundamentally changed the relation of African Americans to the postal system, any number of black correspondents experienced those circumstances as propitious and worked out altered senses of self in their letters. For them, as for the

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white Southern women studied by Drew Gilpin Faust, letters came to serve as ‘vehicles of self-transformation’ in the context of the wider destabilization of social norms.17 The letter from Rice to his daughters was inscribed in two hands, with Rice’s pen giving way to another after the first fourteen lines; a switch that suggests both the bodily effort that writing required of this soldier, who was hospitalized with chronic rheumatism, and the letter’s importance. It simply could not wait. After reassuring his children of his love, Rice urged them to be ‘contented,’ as he would soon join an expedition of black and white soldiers ‘up the rivore to Glasgow and above there thats to be jeneraled by a jeneral that will give me both of you [sic passim],’ in spite of their mistress Kittey Diggs.18 ‘Dont [sic] be uneasy my children I expect to have you,’ he reiterated.19 Moreover, as the letter continues, Rice goes on to directly challenge Diggs. As he relates what he will tell her, he articulates a shift in his view of the world: ‘Your Miss Kaitty said that I tried to steal you But I’ll let her know that god never intended for man to steal his own flesh and blood. If I had no cofidence in God I could have confidence in her But as it is If I ever had any Confidence in her I have none now and never expect to have [sic passim].’20 Rice’s faith in God is, in short, now incompatible with a faith in white Southern authority. Sure of his righteousness, and the military force backing it up, Rice expresses his sense of self-empowerment with defiant words for the girls’ mistress. Using a series of commanding imperatives, he informs his daughters that: ‘I want her to remember if she meets me with ten thousand soldiers she [will] meet her enemy . . . You tell her from me that She is the frist Christian that I ever hard say that aman could Steal his own child especially out of human bondage[.] You can tell her that She can hold to you as long as she can [sic passim].’21 Strikingly, Rice’s warning letter to Diggs herself, also dated 3 September 1864, is patterned with similar phrases (‘now I want you to understand,’ ‘I want you to remembor [sic],’ ‘I want you to understand,’ ‘I want you now to’).22 And as this letter progresses, Rice explicitly identifies himself with a newly-acquired ‘powrer and autherity [sic passim],’ at once divine and political.23 The latter prerogative, for instance, is figured at the close of the letter in Rice’s triumphant affirmation of the Union as constituting his greatest advantage over Diggs: ‘I have no fears about geting mary out of your hands this whole Government gives chear to me and you cannot help your self [sic passim].’24 Given Rice’s stirring faith in the federal government, it thus seems doubly ironic that his letters survive only because they were intercepted by Kittey’s brother F. W. Diggs, a postmaster, who included them as evidence in a letter complaining to General William Rosecrans, Union commander of the Department of the Missouri, about the affront of being ‘insulted by such a black scoundrel.’25 Even soldiers who faced less instinctive prejudice and who were relatively better-placed to keep up regular postal contact with folks at home were exposed to the problem of lost or confiscated letters, however. The routine acts of epistolary orientation we find in most nineteenth-century letters were greatly intensified by the uncertain conditions of the Civil War: typical statements of when the author wrote last, or the date of the most recent letter they have received, are weighted with extra significance. ‘Your letter dated July 16th came all right but the one you speak of haveing [sic] sent previous, I have never received,’ George Washington Whitman informed his mother in a letter from Camp Lincoln, Newport, dated 21 July 1862. ‘I did not a word from home from the 14th of June until the other day when I got your letter of the 16 of July I felt quite downhearted every time a mail arived and brought me no letter I wish some of you would write oftener just to let me know how you are all geting along [sic passim].’26 William Bradbury, who served with the 129th

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Illinois Infantry, meanwhile struggled to put the letters written to him by his wife back into sequence. ‘I received your letter of March 26th yesterday, [after] only 5 days,’ he wrote to Mary Bradbury on 1 April 1864. ‘Today I got a letter from you of March 2nd . . . I did not receive any other letter from you addressed to me at Knoxville, except the one of March 2 . . . I have not received the gold pens yet . . . I burnt your last letter by mistake and don’t remember exactly all you wrote about.’27 In respect to such exchanges, Winslow Homer’s ‘News from the War’ glosses over the realities of broken or disrupted lines of epistolary communication. Instead, Homer presents a vision of a nation of (white, Northern) readers united by news even as they experience the isolation of grief. Newspapers in general and Harper’s Weekly in particular provide the most immediate bind; contemporary readers who encountered the illustration in Harper’s would have seen that the soldiers in the picture reach for the same paper that they had open before them. The illustration’s insistence on the connective capacity of war news thus seems to anticipate Benedict Anderson’s famous argument for print-based nationalism, which privileges the newspaper and novel as analogous forms that have historically ‘provided the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation.’28 Each required that readers imagine the simultaneous action and fundamental relatedness of large numbers of strangers. Homer wasn’t the only one to see the newspaper – and the more widespread hunger for war news – as a binding agent, though. As early as September 1861, a writer for Boston’s Atlantic Monthly marveled that a vast network of railroads, post roads, and telegraph wires enabled ‘perpetual intercommunication’ between the Union army and the home front, and kept Northern society in a state of feverish excitement.29 Life’s necessities could be stripped down to ‘bread and the newspaper,’ the Atlantic affirmed, ‘whatever else we do without.’30 Nor did the early excitement of ‘war fever’ wear off quickly.31 In June 1862, another Atlantic contributor regretted that ‘the gifts and intelligence of eighteen million people’ were ‘distraught, and at the mercy of every bulletin.’32 As literary critics and historians have increasingly acknowledged, the war coincided with the rise of mass media.33 Recent work on literary responses to experiences of war at a distance and its implications has tended to overlook the familiar form of the letter, however. Homer, on the other hand, recognized letters and newspapers as relaying information within the same communicative environment. He is interested in the letter’s arrival as the occasion for a personal drama which impresses on the viewer the significance of each soldier among the many. His composition therefore suggests what many critics have missed: printed news was one of the factors that shaped experiences of epistolary contact during the war, and vice versa. Indeed, newspapers are a common feature of Civil War-era correspondence. Soldiers frequently suggested that civilians with access to on-the-spot reportage were better informed about battlefield events and the progress of campaigns than they themselves were. In a letter written at Kelley’s Ford, Virginia, for instance, James Miller complained to a sister in rural Pennsylvania that ‘you will get the particulars of the fight of yesterday in the New York papers sooner than we shall here within ten miles of the action and in fact we are the most anksious [sic] mortals you ever saw to get the papers that give the accounts of battels [sic] in which we have participated for in the smoke of a battle field all that we see or know is confined to our own regiment.’34 For Miller, the papers offered an all-but-omniscient perspective denied to the mere ‘mortals’ caught in the fog of war. George Washington Whitman similarly supposed

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that his mother Louisa would ‘get a great deal better account of the fight, than I can give you (in the papers),’ but anticipated that she would want to ‘hear my account of it so here it is.’35 Yet later that year George also wondered: ‘Where in thunder does all the troops go, that the papers say are leaving New York, and the other Citys every day. Why dont they send em, out to the front, and let us old veterans come home, and see our Mammies [sic passim].’36 The authority of the all-seeing newspaper was thus sometimes questionable as well as compelling. Sergeant Charles Bowen, of the 12th United States Infantry Regiment, for one, challenged politically-motivated claims ‘in the papers that “the [Union] army is in the best of spirits.” ’37 In a letter written after the crushing defeat at Fredericksburg, he told friends and family, ‘All I have to say is the man who writes such nonsense had better not let himself be known down here or he would be in a dangerous place.’38 Since their letters were largely uncensored (unlike those of later soldiers), military personnel could use them to talk back to press representations of the war’s progress, even as printed war news helped anxious civilians track their soldier correspondents and negotiate epistolary silences.39 Certainly, the frequent delay and miscarriage of letters to and from combat zones turned locating loved ones into a struggle for many civilians. Epistolary silence was a particularly frightening component of epistolary exchange during the war.40 For contemporaries with access to newsprint, papers therefore potentially held clues which would help them to divine the unreported circumstances of individual fathers, sons, husbands, brothers. George Washington Whitman, for example, readily anticipated that his family would look for news of his regiment and corps in the press. ‘I have not had a chance to send you a letter for some days,’ he wrote to his mother in Brooklyn, ‘but I suppose you have seen by the papers that we have crossed into V[irgini]a again.’41 The wartime correspondence of George’s brother, the poet Walt, then reveals how the Whitman family did just that. ‘I wrote to George yesterday,’ Walt told his mother in a June 1863 letter from Washington, where he was dividing his time between caring for hospitalized soldiers and copy-work for the government. ‘It looks from some accounts as though the 9th Army corps might be going down into East Tennessee, (Cumberland Gap or perhaps bound for Knoxville).’42 The interweaving of newspapers and letters may have helped Walt maintain epistolary contact more directly too: having seen ‘a letter in a Cincinnati paper’ which reported that George’s brigadier-general ‘was appointed provost marshal at Lexington,’ he decided to write to his brother care of ‘ “Lexington or elsewhere, Kentucky.” ’43 Such glancing details acquired special significance in the aftermath of battles, as correspondents waited for word of loved ones. Death, as recent historians of epistolarity have pointed out, always lurks in the silence between letters – the bodily absence of the correspondent to whom letters are addressed constantly trembles on the verge of permanent inaccessibility – but the war that introduced Americans to death on a hitherto unimaginable scale rendered this risk newly present.44 Although the prevailing rhetoric of patriotic sacrifice dictated that the death and suffering of individual soldiers mattered greatly, the lack of a military system adequate to the task of gathering information about the fate of thousands of men caught in the chaos of vast battlefields meant that bad news traveled in unpredictable ways – by letter, by telegraph, by word of mouth, by newsprint, or not at all. The work of the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army, established by Union nurse Clara Barton soon after the war’s end and in operation until 1868, testifies to the number

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of soldiers who disappeared without leaving a trace of ink, racking their families with uncertainty and desperation for news.45 Soldiers were often described as ‘going to war,’ and ‘war news’ filled the papers, but ‘war’ is not somewhere one can direct a letter. Emily Dickinson, whom William Merrill Decker has identified as ‘arguably the greatest theoretician of letter writing to be met with in American . . . literature,’ clearly knew this.46 By the 1860s, she may have rarely traveled from her Amherst home but she regularly presented herself to friends and family in the form of letters. After a missive to her friends Dr. and Mrs. Holland went unanswered, for instance, she gave them this nudge: ‘I write to you. I receive no letter. I say “they dignify my trust.” I do not disbelieve. I go again. Cardinals wouldn’t do it. Cockneys wouldn’t do it, but I can’t stop to strut, in a world where bells toll.’47 Flashy red birds or cocky cockneys might be too proud ‘to inquire again,’ but Dickinson claims that she is not, even if the ‘little peacock in me . . . quite dies away.’48 Life is too uncertain to risk a break in communications, Dickinson asserts through the traces of a strut that mark her opening sentences. Her ‘I’ is insistent, staccato: I am here, don’t ignore me. Indeed, after reaffirming her epistolary presence, she seeks to re-establish postal intimacy. In the second half of the letter to the Hollands, what she ‘can’t stop’ is her overflowing of emotion, whether or not she receives empathy or letters in return. ‘My business is to love,’ she declares, and by her final paragraph, the proud peacock has been ousted by a reclusive songbird who echoes Dickinson’s earlier line with the plaintive claim that ‘My business is to sing,’ even if this proves an ‘unnoticed hymn.’49 Such a shift is underpinned by Dickinson’s keen awareness that physical absence and non-existence looked very much alike from a distance, without the evidence of a letter to tell them apart. The world ‘where bells toll’ is very much the mortal world of war. Dickinson’s letter to the Hollands was penned in the summer of 1862, and it seems likely that she is invoking a world where civilians regularly heard tidings of unseen deaths on the battlefield. Certainly, like so many of her contemporaries, Dickinson was an avid war-reader who gathered news from the Springfield Republican and the Amherst Record, as well as Harper’s, Scribner’s, and the Atlantic Monthly.50 Indeed, her correspondence shows that she used newsprint to supplement epistolary contact during the war era. In August 1862, she told her good friend, the newspaper editor Samuel Bowles, then abroad in Europe, that: ‘I’ve learned to read the Steamer place – in Newspapers – now. It’s ’most like shaking hands, with you – or more like your ringing at the door, when Sue says you will call.’51 Dickinson also retreats from her initial comparison as she writes, however. The letter before her offers an implicit contrast with the ‘Steamer place’ in newspapers like Bowles’s own Springfield Republican. The sheet that Bowles will hold, unlike the latter, carries the trace of her own hand. Dickinson’s revised simile at the end of this sentence interposes the indifferent medium of the doorbell between them. But in Dickinson’s simile too, advance notice from Sue, her close friend and sister-in-law, allows her to hear the bell’s ring as Bowles’s ring. Personal knowledge imbues abstract printed information with personal significance (the ‘Steamer place’ allows Dickinson to feel nearer to her friend), but familiar letters already carry such a charge, conveyed by the material text. ‘Sue gave me the paper, to write on,’ Dickinson explains, so should he tire as he writes back he can ‘play it is Her,’ since the paper contains Sue’s lingering presence.52 As we have already seen, war readers did not always or primarily seek to experience the special space of the battlefield at a distance, via the press. They wanted to learn

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what was happening or had happened to particular soldier correspondents of whom they had lost track. This activity, for instance, informs Dickinson’s correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a renowned reformer and man of letters who took command of a regiment of freedmen during the war. Dickinson initiated their personal correspondence after reading Higginson’s own (publicly addressed) ‘Letter to a Young Contributor’ in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1862. ‘A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,’ she would write to Higginson after the war’s end.53 But her characterization of the letter as a record of thoughts which will outlast the mortal body does not mean that she ignored the ways in which letters were tied to bodies. Without an address, for example, how would a letter reach someone by post? Such addresses are so familiar as to be almost invisible to literary critics, who prefer to mine the rich contents of letter-texts, but markings on envelopes – addresses, postmarks, decorations like those on patriotic Civil War envelopes – were a crucial part of nineteenth-century postal communication. To be sure, letters were and are routinely forwarded to recipients elsewhere, but when a letter-writer pens an address, they place a person. If a person’s whereabouts are unknown or unimaginable, on the other hand, that act of placement becomes problematic, as Dickinson and other Civil War letter-writers discovered. In this respect, Dickinson’s oft-quoted remark, ‘War feels to me an oblique place’ is rooted as much in the mundane difficulty of sending a letter to a correspondent whose whereabouts one no longer knows, as it is in her more general alertness to the revealing indirection or ‘slant.’54 Higginson did not tell Dickinson about his appointment to the colonelcy of the First South Carolina Volunteers, who were initially based at Camp Saxton near Beaufort, on the Sea Island of Port Royal, and so she wrote to him: Dear Friend, I did not deem that Planetary forces annulled – but suffered an Exchange of Territory, or World – I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable . . . Should there be other Summers, would you perhaps come? I found you gone, by accident, as I find Systems are, or Seasons of the year, and obtain no cause – but suppose it a treason of Progress – that dissolves as it goes . . . I trust you may pass the limit of War, and though not reared to prayer – when service is had in Church, for Our Arms, I include yourself – I, too, have an ‘Island’ – whose ‘Rose and Magnolia’ are in the Egg, and it’s ‘Black Berry’ but a spicy prospective, yet as you say, ‘fascination’ is absolute of Clime . . . But I fear I detain you – Should you, before this reaches you, experience immortality, who will inform me of the Exchange? Could you, with honor, avoid Death, I entreat you – Sir –55 In the first half of this letter, Higginson is simply ‘gone’ – who knows where. His removal from known addresses creates radical uncertainty about the possibility of future epistolary contact. Dickinson had not yet met her ‘Dear Friend’ in person, but her opening line suggests that her perception of the universe has nonetheless altered. The ‘planetary forces’ invoked here suggest invisible natural phenomena subject to the laws of science, like the laws of gravity, which dictate the relation and movement of bodies in the solar system, which have now been thrown out of sync. Dickinson

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thus questions Higginson’s loyalty in abstract terms, a mode befitting a correspondent whose actions (leaving home without giving her notice or a new address) have rendered his continued existence as both a correspondent and a ‘Friend’ a matter of probability. Dickinson implies that she did not believe that friendship could be ‘annulled’ like a marriage but now, as a result of Higginson’s actions, she begins to wonder – even as she affirms her continued belief in friendship as a constant force unaffected by changes in bodily circumstance. Her friend’s improbability is bound up with his having gone to ‘War’ – an ‘oblique place,’ at least for the correspondent who must send a letter indirectly, to addresses where she knows her recipient is not. Higginson might of course die in this curious place. Dickinson’s invitation to ‘come’ and visit Amherst reaches out to bring her absent friend back to her, in the form of a reply and in person. But this conditional invitation is laced with equal parts anxiety and humor: the assertion of Higginson’s improbability and mortality is balanced against the genteel social business of arranging a meeting. War’s obliquity, here, is heightened rather than mitigated by war news. The latter half of Dickinson’s letter reveals that she has a good idea that Higginson is in command of an African American regiment on one of South Carolina’s Sea Islands. She does not claim to know precisely where he is, though; the exotic ‘Island’ of unhatched ‘Rose and Magnolia’ and ‘Black Berry’ that she imagines is her own, a creation conspicuously pieced together from quotations and associations, prompted by thoughts of Higginson and his soldiers yet separate from his reality. It may be the case that Dickinson had read about Higginson’s whereabouts in the Springfield Republican early on in 1863. In the New Year’s Day issue, for instance, she could have discovered ‘Higginson’s Black Brigade,’ a short article containing a reprinted letter from the New-York Tribune, which located Higginson as commander of a regiment of over 700 men ‘now encamped below Beaufort, S. C., at Smith’s plantation.’56 And the issue of 6 February carried ‘Col. Higginson’s Estimate of Black Soldiers,’ which reprinted a ‘letter from Col. T. W. Higginson of Worcester, commander of the negro regiment at Port Royal, to Gov Andrew . . . in which the colonel gives a glowing account of the soldierly qualities of his black volunteers.’57 Appearing in newsprint, these letters were addressed to everyone. Yet as Dickinson’s response to Higginson’s public ‘Letter to a Young Contributor’ shows, she, like other war readers, could take print personally – that is, as the basis for more personal epistolary contact. Higginson’s hopes for his soldiers, explicitly identified as freed slaves in the Springfield Republican of 6 February 1863, inform Dickinson’s reference to the ‘Black Berry’ – a ‘spicy prospective’ that promises well for the future. Yet if Dickinson ‘exaggerates the dehumanizing tendencies of racist rhetoric’ through such images, she does so not to make a wider political point, but to help her create common ground with her interlocutor (‘I, too, have an “Island” ’).58 The Atlantic Monthly, it is worth noting, had published Higginson’s ‘The Procession of the Flowers’ in December 1862, an essay that begins by discussing the ‘blossoming shrub[s]’ of Cuba.59 By focusing on her own exotic island’s flora, Dickinson seeks to reaffirm shared (intellectual) ‘Territory’ with her correspondent. Indeed, she develops the letter as a vehicle which permits the meeting of minds when she quotes directly from Higginson’s article in the line ‘as you say, “fascination” is absolute of Clime.’ Implying an ongoing conversation, Dickinson absorbs his printed words into their personal communication, and shares her own thinking on the limited nature of mortal perception – the point where his article left off. The shift of address that follows in her

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missive – ‘But I fear I detain you’ – is not merely an apology for taking up his time; it signposts a moment of imagined epistolary communion, an ‘I’ holding a ‘you’ within the circle of the letter’s address for as long as reading lasts. Dickinson herself finally breaks off as she realizes bodily separation anew. What if Higginson dies in the temporal gap between the moment of the letter’s writing and its arrival at its physical destination, she asks? Without anyone to send word, how will she know if he is no more? The mind-bending phrase ‘experience immortality’ avoids the word ‘die’ with a mock-formality. She addressees a ‘you’ whom she assumes to be living, but allows for the possibility that her letter might ‘reach’ its addressee when the recipient is no longer a ‘you’ to be addressed in expectation of a reply. The ‘Exchange’ emphasized right at the start of the letter ostensibly refers to swapped states – mortality for immortality – yet it also foregrounds postal exchange as the context for her concerns. Dickinson is anxious to locate Higginson as an unseen correspondent who has disappeared into the postal system, a state markedly less certain than either life or death. Dickinson’s concerns about letter-writing under the conditions of war echo subtly through her verse, but the years between 1861 and 1865 also saw a more explicit cluster of poems featuring war reading and its attendant anxieties.60 These poems, many of which appeared in newspapers, typically see bad news arrive at home in the form of a letter or a casualty list. Here, the in-between state privileged by Dickinson gives way to grief, which leads speakers in turn to reflect upon both the suffering and sacrifice of women at a distance from the battlefield, and the relation between individual families and the imagined many of the nation. Thus, in Theodore Tilton’s ‘The Captain’s Wife,’ which was first collected in Lyrics of Loyalty (1864), the form of the letter is identified with tortured love from the first. A soldier hand-delivers a sealed envelope to the home of his commander, who he ‘loved . . . as my life,’ but cannot bear to see it opened.61 Given to the captain’s sister, the letter’s contents are relayed to his wife, Blanche, indirectly. ‘I could not shield her from the stroke, yet tried to ease the blow,’ the sister remarks: ‘I did not read it as it stood, – but tempered so the phrases / As not at first to hint the worst, – held back the fatal word, / And half retold his gallant charge, his shout, his comrades’ praises.’62 The speaker’s retrospective address involves the poem’s readers themselves in revelation of the letter’s news. The letter, in this respect, is a device which dramatizes the import of a single soldier’s death, but Blanche’s reaction also prompts the reader to consider the trial of many ‘other women’s hearts.’63 ‘O Christ! when other heroes die, moan other wives the same?’ the captain’s sister asks.64 The implicit answer is, of course, yes. Blanche is identified as the representative of white Northern womanhood through her name, and Tilton accordingly enlists her ordinary/extraordinary suffering in the service of an antislavery argument with national scope. ‘O Lord! give Freedom first, then Peace!’ the poem concludes.65 Blanche’s experience is evidently traumatic (the news contained in the letter renders her ‘like a statue carved in stone,’ her sister-in-law observes).66 But for correspondents awaiting information about a loved one, the absence of a letter could be even more disorientating. In this context, then, newspaper lists of casualties – error-riddled and incomplete as they often were – offered at least the possibility of knowledge. Indeed, newspaper casualty lists held a special fascination for Tilton’s contemporaries, in part perhaps because they uneasily stood in for the more personal address

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contained in a letter. George Washington Whitman’s family saw his misspelled name on such a list after the battle of Fredericksburg in mid-December 1862; Walt rushed south to find his brother in camp with a healed gash in his cheek, safe and well.67 Writing to his other brother, Jeff, a few weeks later, George apologized for causing ‘so much uneasyness’ among his family: ‘I was in hopes that you would not hear of our Regts being in the fight untill you got my letter. How my name came to be in the papers I cant see, as I was very careful not to report myself in the list of wounded in my company [sic passim].’68 Crucially, George recognized that his family were negotiating an unpredictable flow of written information in the form of both letters and newspaper reportage as they attempted to keep track of him. They were not seeking to know war at a distance – they were looking for a specific person – but sometimes the press was their best hope for an insight into George’s whereabouts. For such readers, the catalogues of the dead and wounded could often be glanced at and forgotten, as a writer for the New York Times remarked in a review of an exhibition of Matthew Brady’s battlefield photographs: ‘We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type.’69 The effect of this textual ‘jumble’ is nothing like as visceral as that of the maimed and broken bodies on display in Brady’s photographs, nor is it as intimate as the first-hand explanation of events contained in George’s letter. Indeed, the Whitman family’s Civil War correspondence offers a fuller picture of the activity we might call ‘epistolary war reading,’ an activity which disturbs the traditional assumption that the home front was divided from the battle front by the kinds of indirect or secondhand knowledge contained in newspapers and other printed texts. Ironically, as Tamara Plakins Thornton has observed: ‘It was print that endowed handwriting with its own, new set of symbolic possibilities: script emerged as a medium of the self in contradistinction to print, a medium defined as characteristically impersonal and dissociated from the writer.’70 It follows, then, that the new attention to mass printed media that occurred during the Civil War had significant implications for American readers’ experience of script. Like a signature, handwriting denoted a particular bodily presence; indeed, it falls into that category of signs that Charles Peirce would, in 1885, call ‘indexes’ – signs not arbitrarily but directly connected in some way to what they signify.71 In the case of script, this connection is real and physical: marks on paper are the traces of the movements of an individual writer’s hand. They are also evidence that a loved one’s hand is still able to write. Hence Walt Whitman’s relief on receipt of a letter from his brother George after the battle of Spotsylvania took place in mid-May 1864. ‘I was so glad to get a letter . . . from George dated June 1st,’ he told his mother, ‘it was so good to see his handwriting once more.’72 Famously, Whitman spent much of the war in Washington, D.C., as a self-appointed visitor to the soldiers’ hospitals.73 In addition to the letters he regularly exchanged with his family in Brooklyn, he often wrote for the wounded men whom he visited. As he explained in one of his newspaper letters to the New York Times, he did ‘a good deal’ of work composing all kinds of letters by the bedsides of men too sick or otherwise unable to write for themselves: ‘Some are poor writers, some cannot get paper and envelopes; many have an aversion to writing because they dread to worry the folks at home – the facts about them are so sad to tell. I always encourage the men to write, and promptly write for them.’74

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In this, Walt Whitman was not unusual; many other visitors and nurses acted as scribes for hospitalized soldiers.75 Good penmanship, as taught in antebellum Common Schools, marshaled the quirks and tremors of an individual hand into perfectly regular sweeps, curves, and verticals; but the conditions of Civil War camps, transports and battlefields were not conducive to such exacting standards of chirography. Soldiers’ script represented individual writers in particular environments and physical states. The tremor of a tired, cold, or strained body registered on paper, like a seismograph. Quakes and judders are, for instance, readily visible in the soldier signatures that Union chaplain William Oland Bourne collected in New York’s Central Park hospital, many of them from men who were learning to write with their left hands after amputations.76 Indeed, in May 1866, Bourne organized a ‘Grand Exhibition of LeftHand Penmanship by Soldiers and Sailors,’ which the popular author Fanny Fern wished that ‘every boy and girl in the land’ might be taken to so as ‘to see the power of the mind over the body.’77 It was not only the grievously injured whose handwriting was transformed by the effects of war, however. After a day on fatigue duty in September 1861, Alexander Campbell asked his wife to ‘excuse me to night for this scribling. I worked too hard with the pike and showvel and my hand shaking and another thing I have to hurry [sic passim].’78 Later, below decks on a river transport, he again apologized, this time for a letter disfigured with his sweat and grease from his rations.79 Confederate soldier Dick Simpson similarly explained to his aunt in July 1861 that he was ‘now far out in the woods sitting on the ground writing with a pencil about long enough to ketch [sic] with two fingers and on a little piece of plank about as large as my paper, so you must excuse this scrawl.’80 And Henry Matrau, who was a member of the Iron Brigade, also took care to address the worries that his evident struggle to write might have provoked back home. ‘Excuse this miserable scrawl for it is written on my knee by the side of an awful smoky fire & out of doors to[o],’ he told his parents in February 1865. ‘The weather is so cold I have to stop every five minutes to warm my fingers.’81 The ultimate shock, though, as Walt Whitman appreciated, was the appearance of an entirely alien hand in the place of a familiar script. In Whitman’s poem ‘Come Up from the Fields Father’ (1865), the arrival of a hand-written letter from a wounded soldier to his family causes dismay. They gather to read, only to find a horrifying discrepancy between the letter’s explicit message and the meaning of the material text: Open the envelope quickly; O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d, O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul! All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only, Sentences broken – gun-shot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital, At present low, but will soon be better.82 Far more viscerally and extensively than Theodore Tilton in ‘The Captain’s Wife,’ Whitman conveys the disorientation of epistolary bad news. The mother-figure who calls for the opening of the envelope half-reads, half-sees the lines that Whitman quotes through her eyes. Using italics and the demonstrative ‘this,’ he seeks to conjure the script behind the printed pages of the book wherein the poem first appeared. Instead of the pleasure of a familiar touch from a distance, of the kind Whitman felt

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from his brother’s penmanship in 1864, the mother in his poem experiences her son’s handwriting as alien and ominous. The ‘strange hand’ ruptures the indexical relation between script and body, leaving her to wonder where ‘our Pete’ really is.83 The latter’s signature marks the letter as his own but his mother cannot reconcile this sign with her intimation that her ‘only son is dead.’84 The letter brings Pete close whilst simultaneously reasserting his distance: there is a Not-Pete inherently woven into the texture of the text, even as he appears to speak directly to them on their prosperous Ohio farm. The mother’s experience of the letter-writer as a shifting subject (Pete/Not-Pete) is effectively mirrored in the different subject positions which the speaker adopts throughout the poem. He both speaks as one of the family (in the voices of mother and daughter) and observes their crisis from a knowing distance, revealing to the reader that ‘while they stand at home at the door he is dead already.’85 The shock of a stranger’s touch transforms the mother’s reading. Words lose their shape and unfix themselves from definite meanings; she must catch the animated flashes of black that ‘swim’ like slippery fish in the water of her eyes. And through this process of disorientation she is able to recognize how the ‘broken’ form of the letter’s opening mirrors the form of her soldier son’s broken body more truthfully than the carefully composed sentences in a strange hand. Whitman locates authenticity in her version of the letter’s script and her interpretation of the letter’s meaning. Pete’s ‘little sisters’ are ‘speechless and dismay’d’ by her reaction and point to the explicit sense of the sentences.86 ‘See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better,’ they insist.87 They do not know enough to interrogate its materiality. But the mother-figure does more than this. In the poem’s final stanza, her grief-stricken longing ‘[t]o follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son’ turns her into something of a cipher – her ‘thin form presently drest in black’ aligns her with the inky ‘flashes’ of words that contained the last traces of her son.88 Her attempt to ‘escape and withdraw’ from life involves pursuing Pete into script; the page of the letter being reconfigured as the oblique place where she lost him.89 For her, as for so many others during the Civil War, there is little hope to be found in Emily Dickinson’s assertion that a letter ‘feels . . . like immortality.’

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

See Homer, ‘News from the War.’ Ibid. 376. Ibid. See Fahs, The Imagined Civil War, 138. ‘News from the War,’ 378. Henkin, The Postal Age, 146. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid. Faust, Mothers of Invention, 116. Alexander Spence, Letter to ‘Father and Mother,’ 5 November 1864, in Getting Used to Being Shot At, 110. Nugent, Letter to Eleanor Nugent, 20 April 1864, in My Dear Nellie, 168. Ibid. See Wilson, Campfires of Freedom, 83–5. Hager, Word by Word, 46, 62. See Wilson, Campfires of Freedom, 82–108.

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‘an oblique place’: letters in the civil war 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

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Spotswood Rice, Letter to ‘My Children,’ 3 September 1864, in Berlin, Freedom, 689. Faust, Mothers of Invention, 163. Spotswood Rice, Letter to ‘My Children,’ 3 September 1864, in Berlin, Freedom, 689. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Spotswood Rice, Letter to Kittey Diggs, 3 September 1864, in ibid. 690. Ibid. Ibid. F. W. Diggs, Letter to General Rosecrans, 10 September 1864, in Berlin, Freedom, 691. George Washington Whitman, Letter to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, 21 July 1862, in Civil War Letters, 58, 59. Bradbury, Letter to Mary Bradbury, 1 April 1864, in While Father Is Away, 148, 149. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25. ‘Bread and the Newspaper,’ 348. Ibid. 346. Ibid. ‘War and Literature,’ 680. See, for example: Fahs, The Imagined Civil War; Blondheim, News over the Wires; Harris, Blue and Gray in Black and White; and Samuels, Facing America. Miller, Letter to Jane Miller Cramer, 2 August 1863, in Bound to be a Soldier, 98. George Washington Whitman, Letter to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, 16 March 1862, in Civil War Letters, 45. George Washington Whitman, Letter to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, 20 October 1862, in ibid. 71. Bowen, Letter to ‘Friends at Home,’ 27 December 1862, in Dear Friends, 205. Ibid. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 141. See ibid. 142. George Washington Whitman, Letter to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, 10 November 1862, in Civil War Letters, 73. Walt Whitman, Letter to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, 9 June 1863, in The Correspondence, 1: 107. Walt Whitman, Letter to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, 15 April 1863, in ibid. 1: 88. See, for example, Decker, Epistolary Practices. See Pryor, Clara Barton, 134–48, and Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 212–13. Decker, Epistolary Practices, 142. Dickinson, Letter to Dr. and Mrs. J. G. Holland, Summer 1862, in The Letters, 1: 413. Ibid. Ibid. See Richards, ‘ “How News Must Feel,” ’ 163. Dickinson, Letter to Samuel Bowles, August 1862, in The Letters, 1: 416. Ibid. Dickinson, Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, June 1869, in ibid, 1: 460. Dickinson, Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, c. February 1863, in ibid, 1: 423; Dickinson, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant,’ in Selected Poems, 431. Dickinson, Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, February 1863, in The Letters, 1: 423. ‘Higginson’s Black Brigade,’ 2. ‘Col. Higginson’s Estimate,’ 2. Richards, ‘ “How News Must Feel,” ’ 170. Higginson, ‘The Procession of the Flowers,’ 649.

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284 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

rebecca weir See Richards, ‘ “How News Must Feel,” ’ and Barrett, To Fight Aloud. Tilton, ‘The Captain’s Wife,’ 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 127. See Folsom and Price, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, 79. George Washington Whitman, Letter to Thomas Jefferson Whitman, 8 January 1863, in Civil War Letters, 78. Quoted in Nudelman, John Brown’s Body, 107. Thornton, Handwriting in America, xiii. See Peirce, ‘On the Algebra of Logic.’ Walt Whitman, Letter to Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, 10 June 1864, in The Correspondence, 1: 232. See, for example, Folsom and Price, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, 76–98. Whitman, ‘Visits Among Army Hospitals,’ 1. See, for example, Alcott, Hospital Sketches, 37–9, 52–5. See Clarke, War Stories, 144–74. Quoted in ibid. 144. Alexander Campbell, Letter to Jane Campbell, 13 September 1861, in ‘Him on the One Side’, 44. See Alexander Campbell, Letter to Jane Campbell, 5 August 1862, in ibid. 111–12. Dick Simpson, Letter to Caroline Virginia Taliaferro Miller, 4 July 1861, in ‘Far, Far from Home’, 22. Henry Matrau, Letter to Joseph and Amanda Matrau, 13 February 1865, in Letters Home, 109. Whitman, ‘Come Up From the Fields Father,’ in Complete Poetry, 437. Ibid. Ibid. 438. Ibid. Ibid. 437. Ibid. Ibid. 438. Ibid.

Works Cited Alcott, L. M. [1863] (1960), Hospital Sketches, ed. B. Z. Jones, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Anderson, B. [1983] (2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Barrett, F. (2012), To Fight Aloud is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Berlin, I., ed. (1982), Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 – Series II: The Black Military Experience, New York: Cambridge University Press. Blondheim, M. (1994), News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844 to 1897, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowen, C. T. (2001), Dear Friends at Home: The Civil War Letters and Diaries of Sergeant Charles T. Bowen, Twelfth United States Infantry, 1861–1864, ed. E. K. Cassedy, Baltimore: Butternut & Blue.

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Bradbury, W. H. (2003), While Father Is Away: The Civil War Letters of William H. Bradbury, ed. J. C. Bohrnstedt, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. ‘Bread and the Newspaper’ (1861), Atlantic Monthly, 8: 346–52. Campbell, A., and J. Campbell (1999), ‘Him on the One Side and Me on the Other’: The Civil War Letters of Alexander Campbell, 79th New York Infantry Regiment, and James Campbell, 1st South Carolina Battalion, ed. T. A. Johnson, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Clarke, F. M. (2011), War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘Col. Higginson’s Estimate of Black Soldiers’ (1863), Springfield Republican, 6 February, 2. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Dickinson, E. (1958), The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., ed. T. H. Johnson and T. Ward, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dickinson, E. (2010), Selected Poems and Commentaries, ed. H. Vendler, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fahs, A. (2001), The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Faust, D. G. (1996), Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the Civil War, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Faust, D. G. (2008), This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, New York: Knopf. Folsom, E., and K. M. Price (2005), Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hager, C. (2013), Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harris, B. (1999), Blue and Gray in Black and White: Newspapers in the Civil War, Washington: Brassey’s. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Higginson, T. W. (1862), ‘The Procession of the Flowers,’ Atlantic Monthly, 10: 649–57. ‘Higginson’s Black Brigade’ (1863), Springfield Republican, 1 January, 2. Homer, W. (1862), ‘News from the War,’ Harper’s Illustrated Weekly, 6: 376–7, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Matrau, H. (1993), Letters Home: Henry Matrau of the Iron Brigade, ed. M. Reid-Green, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Miller, J. T. (2001), Bound to be a Soldier: The Letters of Private James T. Miller, 111th Pennsylvania Infantry, 1861–1864, ed. J. Mannis and G. R. Wilson, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ‘News from the War’ (1862), Harper’s Illustrated Weekly, 6: 378. Nudelman, F. (2004), John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Nugent, W. E. (1977), My Dear Nellie: The Civil War Letters of William L. Nugent to Eleanor Smith Nugent, ed. W. M. Cash and L. S. Howorth, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Peirce, C. S. [1885] (1993), ‘On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation,’ in C. J. W. Kloesel (ed.), Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition – Volume 5: 1884–1886, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 162–90. Pryor, E. B. (1987), Clara Barton: Professional Angel, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Richards, E. (2008), ‘ “How News Must Feel When Travelling”: Dickinson and Civil War Media,’ in M. N. Smith and M. Loeffelholz (eds.), A Companion to Emily Dickinson, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 157–79.

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Samuels, S. (2004), Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press. Simpson, D., and T. Simpson (1994), ‘Far, Far from Home’: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, 3rd South Carolina Volunteers, ed. G. R. Everson and E. W. Simpson, Jr., New York: Oxford University Press. Spence, A., and T. Spence (2002), Getting Used to Being Shot At: The Spence Family Civil War Letters, ed. M. K. Christ, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Thornton, T. P. (1996), Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tilton, T. (1864), ‘The Captain’s Wife,’ in F. Moore (ed.), Lyrics of Loyalty, New York: George P. Putnam, 126–8. ‘War and Literature’ (1862), Atlantic Monthly, 9: 674–84. Whitman, G. W. (1975), Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman, ed. J. M. Loving, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whitman, W. (1864), ‘Visits Among Army Hospitals,’ New York Times, 11 December, 1–2. Whitman, W. (1961–1977), The Correspondence, 6 vols., ed. E. H. Miller, New York: New York University Press. Whitman, W. (1981), Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. J. Kaplan, New York: Library of America. Wilson, K. P. (2002), Campfires of Freedom: The Camp Life of Black Soldiers During the Civil War, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

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18 SOCIAL ACTION IN CROSS-REGIONAL LETTER-WRITING: EDNAH CHENEY’S CORRESPONDENCE WITH POSTBELLUM TEACHERS IN THE U.S. SOUTH Sarah R. Robbins

n the decade after the U.S. Civil War, the work of Reconstruction took on a number of interrelated forms, as Union troops stationed in the South, supported by social reformers from throughout the North, sought to establish a new order of race relations in the former Confederacy while also facilitating the uplift of former slaves and their children. Central to this effort was the teaching corps of ‘Yankee schoolmarms’ memorably extolled in publications like Charles Chesnutt’s ‘The March of Progress’ (1901) and W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903).1 Less familiar to us today are the forms of women’s writing that chronicled and promoted this crucial enterprise as it happened, including the many letters traveling between New England support bases and transplanted white women schoolteachers. One vital example of this under-explored archive is recoverable in the papers of the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society (NEFAS), a Boston-based organization that provided financial backing, professional development training, and pragmatic political guidance for its network of teachers.2 The NEFAS originally launched its work for Southern blacks in the midst of the Civil War and persisted in its educational agenda until the end of Reconstruction. Collaborating with similar groups in other Northern urban centers, the NEFAS helped lobby Congress and the President to create the Freedmen’s Bureau, then, after the war, worked closely with Bureau representatives across the South to establish schools for freedmen and their children. In its first years, the organization’s minutes boasted impressively long lists of officers (with over a dozen vice presidents from among New England’s leading abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Edward Hale). Through task-focused committees – such as one managing teachers, one tracking finances, and one securing basic supplies like books and clothing – the society was, within several months of its founding, supporting over eighty teachers in an array of Southern locations. By December 1865, the teachers’ committee reported that ‘the whole number of teachers in the field sent out by our society was reported to be 140. The number of scholars, perhaps 10,000.’3 In the minutes for 15 January 1866, meanwhile, the organization officially affirmed this ongoing goal: ‘The object of this society shall be the industrial, social, intellectual, moral and religious improvement of persons released from slavery and of other needy persons in the Southern States.’4

I

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The dominant voice in the extensive epistolary record of the NEFAS is Mrs. Ednah Dow Cheney. Though now better known as a biographer of Louisa May Alcott, Cheney also deserves attention for the rhetorical prowess of her NEFAS-associated correspondence, which, in its own day, provided significant agency to a range of women writers. These examples of Cheney’s work as a writer, reader, and editor of epistolary texts have been preserved in several formats: copies of handwritten letters addressed to her and other members of the teachers’ support committee (which she chaired); a ‘Daily Record’ volume with detailed summaries of the letters she sent to teachers in the South; minutes of the teachers’ committee; financial records of donations from various New England towns that were sponsoring individual teachers; and copies of the Freedmen’s Record, the organization’s official publication, which she ran. In drawing from the rich NEFAS archive, we can see the vital role that Cheney’s letters played as a means of mentoring and management for the teachers themselves. And equally importantly, such an analysis underscores Cheney’s rhetorically astute re-purposing of her ongoing exchanges with NEFAS teachers, which she repositioned for a larger audience in the Freedmen’s Record – the NEFAS house journal which, under her editorship, drew political and financial support to the organization’s crossregional educational campaign.5 In the memoir she published in 1902, near the end of her life, Cheney looked back on her engagement with the NEFAS as personally pivotal. ‘I count it the most interesting and fruitful work of my life,’ she noted.6 Offering up particular praise for her long-standing companion in this enterprise, Lucretia Crocker, and for the teachers themselves, Cheney asked that the group so often dubbed ‘Yankee schoolmarms’ be afforded ‘remembrance as true martyrs to the cause, for they did faithful and exhausting service with very slight rewards, except in the consciousness of the good they accomplished.’7 The same could be said of Cheney herself. Though she did not directly take on the labor of running a school in the South, she repeatedly traveled there (along with her friend Crocker) to observe and chronicle the work taking place. And more significantly, in terms of her epistolary output, she put in countless hours back in Boston as the primary manager of the NEFAS Teachers’ Committee – a task which, at its core, entailed letter-writing, letter-reading, and letter-editing. In surveying the record of Cheney’s efforts to support the education of freedmen through epistolary modes, we can thus track one social activist’s strategic adaptation of this gendered discursive form, so frequently associated with private literacy, in order to do very public cultural and political work. Importantly, much of the existing scholarship on American women’s letter-writing in the nineteenth century has emphasized its role in the formation of personal subjectivity and in private, familial practices of literacy, particularly in regard to the need to reach across spatial separations caused by individual and group migration, often to the West. Linking women’s epistolary activities with genres such as diaries and journals, this view of their letter-writing aligns with those stereotyped versions of nineteenthcentury American women’s writing that would cast Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) as a sentimental domestic narrative devoid of political critique, Emily Dickinson’s poetry as the secretive product of a recluse, or Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diary as a window into the private experiences of the Civil War rather than a publicly significant account of its course. More recently, though, scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s letter-writing have begun to complicate our views of this genre,

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especially by pointing to the ways in which ‘private’ writing (even when circulating only within a relatively small audience) took on very public features. Though her work on the Beecher sisters’ participation in a tradition of ‘parlor literature’ certainly acknowledges that family’s unusually public profile, for example, Joan Hedrick’s account of these familial texts extending outward from middle-class domestic spaces applies well beyond such circles as that of Harriet Beecher Stowe.8 Thus, while few families in nineteenth-century America could anticipate a ready audience when choosing to publish their personal correspondence, as the Beechers repeatedly did, Hedrick’s explication of the ways in which that family’s production and consumption of personal writing participated in a broader social agenda provides an important reminder that American middle-class women’s letter-writing was a highly public task, which frequently anticipated a readership beyond the nuclear family.9 In that vein, too, Deidre Mahoney has focused on how lessons in the proper decorum for letter-writing were assertively inculcated in nineteenth-century advice manuals, thereby underlining the generally accepted point that even missives positioned within a family were expected to have a public dimension.10 And finally, on a broader plane, Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris have stressed the need to recognize the fact that letters from previous eras, when read today, provide more than a straightforward reflection of the past’s cultural values; rather, the careful study of letter-writing reveals how it can make purposeful social interventions on its own terms.11 Within this scholarly context then, even though it is grounded in the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, we can draw on Konstantin Dierks’s argument for the ‘radical potential of letter writing’ in order to understand the epistolary activities of Ednah Cheney and others involved in the NEFAS’s educational agenda.12 For such political activists, Dierks observes, letters ‘were meant to create a new future. Letters did not reveal – they made history.’13 Part of what gave the correspondence of Cheney and other NEFAS members its ‘radical potential,’ of course, was its ability to move, in the postbellum years, across the North–South boundaries that had divided the nation during the war itself. And here, the work of David M. Henkin on the postal system, like that of Dierks, has emphasized the contribution that maturing communication networks made to letter-writing’s capacity for reaching across spatial divides in a timely manner.14 Building too on Henkin’s previous study, of how print culture in an increasingly urban U.S. environment promoted democratic social engagement during the nineteenth century, this chapter intends to show how ‘private’ handwritten texts like letters – especially when sent cross-regionally through the auspices of the post-war postal system – could (and did) actively participate in print culture’s political ambitions.15 More specifically, I will argue that the turning of transplanted New England women’s handwritten epistolary accounts of their teaching into print stories, situated within a larger rhetorical context of an ‘officially’ sanctioned publication, had a politically significant impact on these teachers’ own situations, on the broader agenda of the NEFAS, and on Ednah Cheney’s role of enabling these ongoing epistolary transformations. Accordingly, this chapter’s examination of NEFAS correspondence culture documents the interactive relationship between ‘private’ correspondence and the public presentation of letters for educational purposes, a strategy that provided this group of New England women with a gendered avenue to postbellum social activism, long before suffrage was achieved. Well trained by their parents, their formal schooling,

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and extra-curricular texts like gendered advice manuals, the middle-class women teaching the freedmen had at their disposal a whole array of literacy tools for telling their story in compelling ways to a readership beyond the original addressees of their ‘personal’ letters. Along these lines, although the NEFAS itself was a self-consciously non-denominational (and even an avowedly secular) enterprise, its members were well aware of how publications circulating under the auspices of various religious organizations earlier in the century had developed highly sophisticated strategies for using women’s personal writing for public causes. Biographies of saintly mission women, stories for mission magazines, and talks by mission women returned home on furlough all drew on a shared arsenal of gendered rhetorical techniques.16 Women linked to the NEFAS endeavors used letter-writing, then, under Cheney’s astute leadership, to cross borders between private and public literacies, thereby acquiring an efficacious political voice. Although this letter-based civic engagement would reach the limit of its impact without fully achieving all its goals, we should nonetheless recognize both the originally empowering dimensions of this shared discursive practice and the lessons to be learned from its eventual termination. Significantly, teaching in a Reconstruction-era schoolhouse was exhausting. Class sizes were often huge, and evening sessions for adults typically supplemented the daytime offerings for younger learners. Local Southern whites were less than welcoming, in many cases, so that social interaction beyond that with students and fellow teachers was limited, exacerbating the sense of isolation associated with being far from home. Meanwhile, if letter-writing provided one method for maintaining connections with the North – familial and otherwise – it also represented another drain on the teachers’ time. The Virginia-based Philena Carkin, for instance, observed in one letter that Cheney printed in the Freedmen’s Record: ‘As the time draws near when the present session of the school must be broken up, we find ourselves so completely woven in to the work of teaching, that it is very hard to become sufficiently disentangled to write letters, or even to attend to such little details as affect our health and comfort.’17 For those affiliated with the NEFAS, salaries were paid by sponsorship, which might be achieved by collecting funds in a teacher’s home village, but which could also come from fundraising among supporters whom the teacher had never met. Even in the initial years of its operations, when enthusiasm for educating blacks ran at its highest, money was a major concern for the NEFAS leaders headquartered in Boston. A number of unsigned articles in the Freedmen’s Record – some written in an epistolary format, and some referencing field-workers’ letters as sources of information – acknowledged the challenge of fundraising.18 After all, many more requests for teachers were coming from Southern communities than the Society was able to fulfill. Since Cheney edited the publication, she is most likely the author of these unsigned stories; but, in any case, they generate an important context for reading her commentaries in the Society’s ‘Daily Record’ on the letters being received from various teachers, as well as for tracking the choices she made in selecting which of their reports to print in the Record. In January 1868, for instance, the Freedmen’s Record offered up an article entitled ‘Five Hundred Dollars for an Adopted Teacher,’ an explanation of its rationale for soliciting that amount as the baseline for enabling one educator’s annual service in the South.19 Acknowledging that it would be difficult for a small New England village

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to raise such a sum, this feature story explained that the Society welcomed any funds and would make up the difference to achieve a sponsorship. Addressing would-be donors as one anticipated audience for the publication, this article also clarified why the NEFAS, not the donor communities, needed to handle the selecting of individual teachers. Furthermore, in presenting a full accounting of all NEFAS expenses for teachers in the previous year, the periodical used a tactic of transparency to encourage supporters’ confidence. Written in a businesslike yet friendly voice, the piece blended in comfortably, in its tone, with the remainder of the stories printed in that issue, many of which were compiled to a large extent from letters by the teachers themselves. Indeed, the main public tool for keeping funds flowing into the Society’s coffers and out to teacher salaries was the letter-writing of the educators stationed in the South.20 The printed versions of the accounts sent to Cheney’s committee highlight the writers’ marked rhetorical sophistication in adapting the letter genre to the organization’s needs, while also encouraging us, in retrospect, to afford Cheney herself credit for a careful brand of epistolary editorship in selecting, arranging, and introducing these texts to maximum effect. In this regard, Cheney astutely cultivated a stance that was neither aligned with nor in direct contrast to the ‘sisterly editorial voice’ that Patricia Okker has ascribed to female magazine editors like Sarah Hale.21 Cheney, in other words, managed an epistolary transformation process which, besides bequeathing originally private letters a public status, also garnered for those texts a new level of rhetorical power. That transformation occurred in part as an example of what Sari Edelstein has recently described as nineteenth-century women writers’ ‘dialogue with journalistic modes,’ through which, as she points out, otherwise disenfranchised women could acquire ‘a point of entry’ into political debates and public discourse.22 Supplementing recent research that has highlighted the role of female editors like Hale, Lydia Maria Child, and Margaret Fuller in nineteenth-century print culture, Edelstein calls on scholars to pay attention to the discursive traces of their ‘ongoing dialogue with the press.’23 Her study may examine women’s fiction within this framework, yet her emphasis on how the Civil War produced a Northern ‘reading public hungry for eyewitness news and on-the-ground details’ certainly has significance for understanding the audience for the Freedmen’s Record in the years shortly thereafter.24 Similarly, her proposal that women novelists of this era were negotiating between journalism and fiction in order to blend a feminized personal narrative with the emerging techniques of reportage has a corresponding context in the hybrid texts that Cheney created for the Freedmen’s Record by weaving her own reportage and analysis around teachers’ personal letters, themselves crafted to tell engaging stories about their work. Ultimately, though, in appropriating the form of the newspaper itself, Cheney and the women letter-writers whose work she sponsored took a different route than the fiction-writers Edelstein explores. For while Edelstein sees women novelists of the period as claiming a special role for fictive discourse by incorporating traits of the journalistic in order to enter public discourse ‘somewhere between [Nancy] Fraser’s utopic “subaltern counterpublic” and [Lauren] Berlant’s toothless “mass cultural intimate public”,’ Cheney and her colleagues transmuted the private genre of the letter into a public avenue to social agency.25 Moreover, they did so, as evidenced through their periodical archive, by creating a hybrid rhetorical space constructed out of the strategic synthesis of multiple conventions.

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The transplanted white New England women leading so many postbellum lessons for Southern blacks took on the task for a variety of reasons, from the admirable to the questionable.26 Whatever their impetus for joining, though, some of these women brought special writing talents to their posting.27 Digging into the archive of letters associated with the NEFAS’s educational project, we find that, although every school-teaching team was clearly required to send detailed accounts of their progress to the organization’s Boston headquarters, a few of the correspondents emerged as particularly skilled reporters. Cheney then cultivated these talented letter-writers, frequently featuring their stories in the Freedmen’s Record. One of her favored authors, for example, was Anna Gardner, who, in later years, would go on to publish a book of poetry and prose in which she drew on her experience as a teacher in the South.28 Gardner’s letters often appeared in the Freedmen’s Record in their entirety, with little to no editorial introduction, as Cheney clearly felt they aptly chronicled the experience of the Society’s teachers in a way that would appeal to Northern stakeholders, while also serving as a model for other teacher-writers, an important second audience for the periodical. A letter printed in the April 1867 issue of the Record, and dated a month earlier, exemplifies Gardner’s ability to transport an anticipated reader to the Southern setting. Here, Gardner encourages continued support for her school through a blend of celebrating her students’ achievements and emphasizing their ongoing needs: Charlottesville, Va., March 1867. We are still favored to have our schools progressing finely. Month after month the scholars make such a steady improvement as to astonish the white people who incidentally discover it. Only a few days ago, a white merchant was puzzling over some calculations in his business without coming to a satisfactory result, when one of my scholars said to him, ‘I think I can do that sir,’ immediately helping him out of his difficulty. This was a boy about thirteen years of age, who did not know one figure from another when the school opened in this place in November, 1865. There is in this community a sight so strange, so novel, that I doubt whether the white people here (could they but ‘conquer their prejudice’ so far as to witness it) would find what would appear to them a greater anomaly than that, should they search to the ends of the earth. I allude to the two schools in our midst, composed of about sixty scholars each, presided over in a dignified manner by two colored persons, a man and a woman, late graduates of the Normal School in the place. Only two years ago, these colored teachers, who now assert by their bearing and attainments the dignity of human nature, were known as hopeless, ignorant slaves. Strong as is the instinct of curiosity, prejudice among the white inhabitants here (as probably in all small, inland, Southern towns) is much stronger. That the white people, who will not attend a school examination to which they are publicly invited, are not indifferent to what is going forward among their former chattels personal, is evident on every hand by the questions with which they continually ply the colored people. Respectfully submitted, Anna Gardner.29

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As this letter suggests, the characters appearing in Gardner’s narratives often included dedicated, high-achieving students, local whites surprised by the intellectual progress of their former slaves, and, implicitly, herself and her colleagues as agents of change. A letter from Gardner written in the fall of that same year, meanwhile, echoes those themes while also emphasizing her efforts to train future teachers from among local students: My Dear Mrs. Cheney, – Our schools are all well filled, and prospering finely. I have one great cause of discouragement. Some of my best scholars, and those I have worked hardest with, for want of pecuniary means, have been forced to leave school. This I regret very much, not only on their own account, but on mine, as I am ambitious that the school should not fall below its standard as a Normal School . . . As we cannot admit into our schools half of those who would like to attend, we take great pains to scatter the seeds of instruction, disseminated in school, by encouraging each scholar to teach parents and brothers and sisters at home. I often enquire, ‘How far has your mother got along?’ and receive the reply, ‘She can spell “right smart” in the Primer.’ Little Bella Gibbons went several months in succession, when school was out at night, to the University, to teach a servant there, who has now gone to the North . . . They are strongly impressed with the idea that it will not do to be unable to read and write in Yankee land. Bella is about eleven years of age, but very small for that. You can see her in the photograph, standing by me; and then, if you please, look over my shoulder, and you will see a dear little girl, with a bare neck, who is the one who gave me the reply above, when I questioned her as to teaching her mother . . . Cordially yours, Anna Gardner.30 Cheney, moreover, used another dispatch from Gardner from the end of January 1868 to model for other teachers how they should be adjusting their leadership to the shifting political landscape of shrinking donor support from the North. Again, Cheney printed the whole. This time, Gardner reported that Charlottesville’s freed peoples were ‘cheerfully’ embracing the need to contribute to their local school’s cost; that a local Virginia branch of the New England Freedmen’s Union Commission had been established; and that eighty dollars had already been raised.31 Indicating her own skill as a savvy reader of the Freedmen’s Record, Gardner referenced a previous issue’s content, where ‘My Dear Mrs. Cheney’ had given ‘something of an estimate of the pecuniary aid furnished by the freedmen themselves in support of the schools under the auspices of your society.’32 Having ‘noticed’ that account, Gardner explained, she had been ‘reminded’ that she should provide ‘a more definite report’ of donor cultivation in the particular local site she was serving.33 In embracing the message that her role as teacher also entailed being a fundraiser, Gardner thus reinforced Cheney’s leadership by responding to one public act of correspondence with an only ostensibly private letter demonstrating equally astute awareness of the NEFAS’s donor-dependent institutional context. While letters from teachers like Gardner formed the heart of each issue of the Freedmen’s Record, Cheney also incorporated epistles and news from well-known leaders and organizations whose presence in the publication enhanced the periodical’s

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ethos. Some of these supplements offered up Cheney’s own overt political analysis, as in a November 1868 story on the recent ‘Action of the National Commission’ with which the NEFAS was loosely affiliated and a February 1869 piece entitled ‘Change in the Freedmen’s Bureau.’34 And a related strategy involved printed communications from and about commendable black leaders, such as William and Ellen Craft. Harriet Tubman, for instance, was dubbed praiseworthy for leading so many fellow slaves to freedom but also for having been an early teacher ‘commissioned by the New England Freedman’s Aid Society,’ thereby associating her with the current teachers whose epistles were appearing alongside a story about her.35 Similarly, letters from supporters (and especially donors) validated the enterprise of uplifting the freedmen and the role the transplanted Yankee teachers were playing in that effort. One striking illustration of this practice – positioning teachers’ current letters from the South within a larger and more long-standing political enterprise of social transformation – drew on the ‘niche’ celebrity of Harriet Jacobs for members of the NEFAS audience. Jacobs, like Tubman, had served as a teacher in a post-war Southern school. By printing correspondence from her in the Freedmen’s Record, Cheney claimed enhanced authority for the organization while simultaneously demonstrating the efficacy of giving private letters public voice. In that vein, Cheney’s introduction of Jacobs’ communiqué is particularly telling: ‘The following letter from Mrs. Jacobs is a private one, as she is no longer a teacher in our employ; but so many friends will be glad to hear of her, that we make some extracts for the “Record”.’36 Jacobs’ letter then affiliated itself with those of transplanted Northern white teachers on a number of fronts. She described the continued abuse of former slaves by white ‘contract masters’ who had supposedly hired them to work for pay but who continually cheated the poor workers ‘out of their crops of cotton,’ and on the flip side she pointed to some of ‘the once-wealthy planters’ who had become so land-poor that they were choosing to ‘let their plantations to freedmen in preference to poor whites,’ who were presumably less reliable as tenants.37 In detailing the challenges of the post-war economy for her people while also extolling the hope that ‘Negro suffrage’ could be achieved through ‘the blessings of freedom,’ Jacobs’ letter underscored for Cheney’s other readers – whether potential supporters in the North or teachers working in the South – the complex realities of postbellum politics.38 Using the mixture of personal narrative and reportorial commentary that Edelstein identifies as a frequent feature in nineteenth-century women’s literacy practices, Jacobs, like Anna Gardner, helped Cheney to establish the broader strategies for public intervention through letter-writing that the Freedmen’s Record employed. And as the manager of this process, Cheney closely shepherded this epistolary transformation, moving what had been a private letter into a public space of political action. During its relatively short publication span, the Freedmen’s Record provided an efficient means of reaching its mixed audience of possible donors, political supporters, and NEFAS teachers themselves. Judging by the recurring patterns in the letters penned by women writing from widely scattered locations, Cheney, as editor, favored certain narrative lines as the most important to emphasize. While the many handwritten artifacts still on hand in the Society’s bulging folders of correspondence confirm that these repeating periodical storylines accurately mirror the full range of letters being submitted, the potential rhetorical impact of these themes becomes even more

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obvious once presented as part of the official record of NEFAS in the Freedmen’s Record. Cheney’s purposeful editorial decision-making emerges across individual issues through the strategic arrangement of pages’ overall content, the compelling sequencing of stories, and the representative range of locales from which teachers’ letters are culled. As suggested above in regard to Anna Gardner’s epistles, one frequent trait of the letters Cheney selected to print was their ability to report on the authors’ personal experiences of teaching in vivid language designed to carry Northern readers into Southern classrooms. Indeed, sometimes key elements in these letters’ descriptions conspicuously recalled pedagogical practices familiar to New Englanders from their own common schools, such as the annual Exhibition, as evidenced in a spring 1868 letter from Philena Carkin: We are now making preparations for an Exhibition, the proceeds of which are to be put into the fund we are trying to collect for the purpose of purchasing a piece of land, to erect the new school house upon. The labor of preparing for such entertainments is pleasing it is true, but none the less labor. Still, in all our former efforts of this kind we have been amply repaid, in the satisfaction of seeing our scholars do better even than we dared to hope for. Mrs. Gibbons had a very pleasant little entertainment in her school-room Friday evening, to which the children and parents were invited. Several pieces were very prettily spoken, and nearly all present united in singing such tunes as they are familiar with here. I think that entertainments of this kind, combining instruction with amusement, are necessary in a place like this, where the young are surrounded by so many vicious influences.39 Closely related to such teachers’ accounts of success in their schools, meanwhile, were letters either recounting the progress of particular students or presenting first-person demonstrations by pupils themselves. In a June 1868 contribution to the Record, for instance, a brief epistle from Anna Gardner introduced a letter-within-a-letter from her student, John West, whom she described as excelling in mathematics. West’s own epistolary contribution declared: ‘When Miss Gardner came here, two years ago, I scarcely knew the letters of the alphabet; and now I have been through one written arithmetic and as far as partial payments in another.’40 Explicitly thanking one of the NEFAS’s regular donors, West concluded enthusiastically: ‘Your kindness proves that we have friends in Massachusetts.’41 Similarly, in a piece entitled ‘Letter from a Pupil’ submitted by both Gardner and Carkin for the next month’s issue, a student named Mary Conyers described a recent exhibition at their school in glowing terms.42 Earlier that same year, meanwhile, a longer letter from Gardner’s protégé Bella Gibbons addressed one specific supporter by name: Dear Mrs. Cowing, I cannot tell you how very thankful I am to the dear friends of the North who have done so much for our education. I used to go into the house to play with the little girl I belonged to, and she would show me the books with pictures in them, but I was dare [sic] to touch one. Then I thought it a great blessing to be white. I do not think so now, for I can go to school every day, and have a kind and dear teacher who does all she can to make us learn as fast as possible.43

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Bella then went on to offer up a ‘thousand thanks’ to Mrs. Cowing for having sent a ‘beautiful book’ and promised to ‘write you a long letter about it’ after it had been read.44 By constructing the donor herself as one of her teachers, Bella (likely guided by her NEFAS on-site role models) contributed to the organization’s ongoing work of turning gendered letter-writing into fundraising. Over time, in fact, the Society was able to describe students attaining enough knowledge to become assistant teachers themselves. Thus, in the March 1868 issue of the Record an enthusiastic letter from Jane Hosmer complemented one from her former student William Lucas, by then serving as a teacher himself in Gordonville, Virginia.45 Indeed, letters like these played an increasingly important part in the Society’s discourse, as its supporters suffered more and more from what might be called ‘cause fatigue,’ and fundraising thereby became more challenging. Although core activists like Cheney and her friends Lucretia Crocker and Hannah Stevenson remained stalwart, the energy of others originally devoted to the cause waned, both among the leadership in Boston and in the smaller towns that had generated much funding. Cheney’s memoir would later describe the convenings of the Teachers’ Committee that she so faithfully chaired as ‘weekly meetings at the Studio Building,’ always ‘full of the warmest interest, and wit, and pathos’ and matched only by an ‘equally abundant’ passion ‘in the stories of our teachers.’46 But the minutes of the committee paint a different picture of ebbing commitment within the larger network. Between the first meetings of the committee in the 1860s and its disbanding in 1876, a persistent decline in participation was documented across the minutes’ record of attendance, and concerns about reductions in donations intensified. Meanwhile, in the pages of the Freedmen’s Record, letters to supporters attempted to make the case for continued donations, even as federal involvement in the Southern states’ governance weakened, and a parallel set of open letters to teachers in the field aimed to prepare them for the inevitable reduction in positions that inexorably wiped out all but a few schools (eventually, in fact, all but one, in Columbus, Georgia). A number of these letters were signed by Cheney herself, as she marshaled all the rhetorical energy she could to navigate this complex interplay between seeking more resources from one constituency while lowering expectations within another. One sign of this balancing effort in action appears in the front-page letter to readers for the January 1867 number, where Cheney declares ‘how immense is the work that has been accomplished, and yet it looms up before us grander in its proportions, and more beneficent in its results than ever before.’47 Looking back over the organization’s accomplishments to date, Cheney’s rallying cry to supporters reminded them of the visionary nature of the enterprise: ‘In the readiest possible place the children were gathered together, and the magical spelling book put into their hands to convince them that the tree of knowledge was no longer forbidden to them, but they were invited to come and eat of its life-giving fruit.’48 Now, she suggested, progress could indeed be celebrated, as the freedman ‘is no longer a timid fugitive from slavery. He is declared a citizen of the United States, and he recognizes, as we do, that the future welfare of the country rests heavily on his shoulders. Meantime so clearly is it seen that “as we stand by him so will it be well for us,” that every sect, from Catholics to Friends, is proposing to work for him in the interest of its own denomination.’49 Moving forward, her letter then argued, the Society could draw strength from its identity as ‘a federal Union

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of all the leading unsectarian societies in aid of the freemen,’ a group dedicated to education but free of proselytizing goals associated with religious organizations doing similar pedagogical work.50 Hence, she asserted, the organization ‘includes men and women of various creeds,’ all committed to the enterprise, and ready to exert a ‘moral influence,’ though not a theological one.51 Moreover, she added, the Commission was especially deserving of backing, since it aimed ‘to make the freedman self-supporting and self-reliant,’ a goal that included expecting them to absorb at least some of the cost of their schooling as soon as possible.52 In that context, then, she reminded her readers, their organization was striving to build ‘a supply of native teachers,’ and ‘we are working directly towards the Normal School’ as a predominant model, with the NEFAS seeking to nurture potential future teachers from the South for the South.53 Finally, in closing this extended plea to the organization’s network for continued donations, Cheney envisioned a time when their leadership would no longer be required, even as she simultaneously asserted that such a moment had not yet arrived: ‘When we have a State Board of Education in every Southern State, caring for blacks and whites alike, then we can r[etire] from our labors; then we will sound [a] jubilee song, and, giving an hour to rejoicing, will count this work accomplished, and turn our forces to other duties; but until then, this is the imperative work, which should have our best energies, our most fervent prayers, and our largest contributions.’54 Correspondingly, for a Freedmen’s Record issue in June of the same year, Cheney crafted a parallel letter directed to the teachers currently employed, similarly alerting them that the priorities and strategies of the schools still operating needed to shift toward preparing local Southern teachers – ‘white and black’ – to take over the work.55 In thanking these dedicated teachers for their service, however, she also warned them, more bluntly, that: All the societies have experienced difficulties in raising funds. Many persons think the time has come for the South to support its own schools; others suppose that the Freedmen’s Bureau . . . will do all that is necessary; and many are worn out by the claims continually made upon them . . . [I]t is evident to us at the office that we cannot continue the work on the same scale as heretofore, unless some means are opened to us. We have struggled with poverty throughout the year; and, although we shall honorably fulfill all engagements that we have entered into, it will probably be accomplished only by great personal sacrifice on the part of the long-tried friends of the cause.56 Indeed, the Freedmen’s Record itself was hardly immune to budget woes. Apparently Cheney and her colleagues felt they could not justify continuing to publish the periodical on a monthly basis while imposing so many budget cuts on their schools. Thus, by December 1868, the publication’s front page announced that it would no longer be a monthly. While one rationale asserted that the mainstream press was now providing more coverage of topics relevant to the organization’s work than in the past, another cause openly acknowledged was to save funds.57 Here, then, as in her earlier letters simultaneously pressing donors for continued support while also warning teachers of the ongoing decline in NEFAS capacity to fund classrooms, Cheney used epistolary rhetoric to address a mixed audience with pragmatic sensitivity. Positioning herself and the publication in a mediating position

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between supporters in the North and teachers in the South, Cheney cultivated a voice both reassuringly personal and insistently managerial. Accordingly, in her letter-writing, as with her editing and her associated management of the Society’s teachers’ committee, Cheney repeatedly demonstrated how epistolarity and social activism could be productively intertwined. In recovering her thoughtful navigation of this purposeful literacy practice, therefore, we also gain a reminder of how purportedly private genres can cross the fluid boundaries of discourse to do efficacious public work.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Tyler Branson for assistance with the preparation of citations and to Molly Leverenz and Courtney Eason for help with transcriptions of letters from the teachers to Cheney. Quotations from the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society Records appear courtesy of The Massachusetts Historical Society.

Notes 1. Du Bois was himself a rural schoolteacher, as he recounts in the poignant fourth chapter of The Souls of Black Folk. Earlier in the same book, Du Bois praises the women who established schools during Reconstruction as part of what he calls ‘the crusade of the New England school-ma’am,’ observing that: ‘[T]hey came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did their work well’ (22). In ‘The March of Progress,’ Chesnutt confronts the complex issues Southern black communities faced once local students were sufficiently prepared to teach – even as the dedicated white women who had given years of service were still on the scene. He begins with the hopeful opening lines: ‘The colored people of Patesville had at length gained the object they had for a long time been seeking – the appointment of a committee of themselves to manage the colored schools of the town’ (770). But he then goes on to explore the ethical repercussions the townspeople face when one of the applicants for the sole teaching position is the school’s ‘former teacher, Miss Henrietta Noble,’ an orphaned New England spinster of modest means who ‘had taught the colored children of Patesville for fifteen years’ (ibid.). 2. Because the archival collection from which many of my sources are drawn uses the name ‘New England Freedmen’s Aid Society’ for the organization, I adopt that designation, abbreviating where necessary to NEFAS. However, the name used by the group in its second stage of activity, from 1866 onward, was the New England Branch of the Freedmen’s Union Commission. 3. New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, ‘Minutes,’ 28 December 1865, Massachusetts Historical Society. The minutes book is one of several leather-bound volumes in the NEFAS archive. The Massachusetts Historical Society’s collection incorporates these main sources: one volume of meeting minutes from 1862–74; four volumes of ‘Daily Records’ from 1865–6, 1868–9, and 1871–4; three volumes of Teacher’s Committee records from 1864–76; and one volume listing the teachers with salaries, supporting societies, and numbers of pupils served. Quotations from this volume, as well as from other pieces in the organization’s archive (including the Freedmen’s Record) are from the same collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society. 4. New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, ‘Minutes,’ 15 January 1866, Massachusetts Historical Society. 5. Beginning with its first volume in 1865, this publication called itself the Freedmen’s Journal, but in 1867 the name changed to the Freedmen’s Record, for which single copies were advertised at ten cents each. I adopt the latter name for consistency throughout. 6. Cheney, Reminiscences, 97.

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7. Ibid. 98. An important cultural trend enabling the NEFAS and other organizations such as the American Missionary Association to place women teachers in the South during Reconstruction was the ongoing feminization of common school-level teaching in the U.S. As Nancy Hoffman has shown, a gradual shift away from male dominance of the teaching profession took place across these decades: ‘At the beginning of the nineteenth century . . . one in ten teachers was a woman; by 1920 . . . out of the greatly expanded force of 657,000 public school teachers, 86% were women, and almost all elementary school teachers were women’ (Women’s ‘True’ Profession, xv). 8. See Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 76–88. 9. The Beechers’ frequent use of their own family letters for publication – as in Stowe’s Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854) – demonstrates the widespread recognition of their social prominence during their lifetimes. 10. See Mahoney, ‘ “More Than an Accomplishment.” ’ 11. As Gaul and Harris observe, letters have too often been ‘lumped into a catch-all category with diaries and journals,’ receiving ‘little distinct analysis as a unique genre’ (‘Introduction,’ 3). They ask, instead, that scholarship address letters from previous eras in American history ‘on their own terms – not merely as a source of information nor only as a plot or structural device within fiction’ (ibid.). 12. Dierks, In My Power, xiii. 13. Ibid. 14. See Henkin, The Postal Age. 15. See Henkin, City Reading. I am indebted to Quigley’s insightful review of Henkin’s work in ‘Epistolary America.’ 16. For further discussion of this see Robbins, ‘Woman’s Work for Woman,’ and Robbins and Pullen, Nellie Arnott’s Writings on Angola. 17. Carkin, ‘Charlottesville, Va.,’ 96. 18. See, for example, ‘Unadopted Teachers.’ 19. See ‘Five Hundred Dollars for an Adopted Teacher.’ 20. See Bergman and Bernardi, ‘Introduction,’ 8–9. 21. Okker, Our Sister Editors, 23. 22. Edelstein, Between the Novel and the News, 2. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 4. 25. Ibid. 7. 26. See Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, and Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction. 27. This was also true, albeit to a lesser extent, of African American educators. See, for example, Charlotte Forten’s two-part account of ‘Life on the Sea Islands,’ published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864, which details her teaching of ‘contrabands’ at Port Royal in the closing days of the war. See too, in this context, Peterson, ‘Doers of the Word’, 176–95. 28. See Gardner, Harvest Gleanings. For an early historical treatment of Gardner’s work in Virginia, one of several NEFAS postings she held, see Vance, ‘Freedmen’s Schools.’ 29. Gardner, ‘Charlottesville, Va., March 1867,’ 60–1. 30. Gardner, ‘Charlottesville, Nov. 30, 1867,’ 8–9. 31. Gardner, ‘Charlottesville, Jan. 26, 1868,’ 37. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. See Cheney, ‘Action of the National Commission,’ and ‘Change in Freedmen’s Bureau.’ 35. ‘Moses,’ 142. 36. Cheney, ‘A Word from Harriet Jacobs,’ 115. 37. Jacobs, ‘A Word from Harriet Jacobs,’ 115. 38. Ibid. 116.

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300 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

sarah r. robbins Carkin, ‘Charlottesville, Va.,’ 96. West, ‘Letter,’ 98. Ibid. See Conyers, ‘Letter from a Pupil.’ Gibbons, ‘Letters from Pupils,’ 41. Ibid. 42. See Hosmer, ‘Gordonville, Va.,’ and Lucas, ‘Gordonville, Va.’ Cheney, Reminiscences, 85. Cheney, ‘Our Third Volume,’ 1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, 1, 2. Ibid. 2. Ibid. Ibid. Cheney, ‘To the Teachers,’ 100. Ibid. 101. See Cheney, ‘[Untitled Announcement],’ 185.

Works Cited Bergman, J., and D. Bernardi (2005), ‘Introduction: Benevolence Literature by American Women,’ in J. Bergman and D. Bernardi (eds.), Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1–22. Carkin, P. (1868), ‘Charlottesville, Va., May 17, 1868,’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 96. Cheney, E. D. (1867), ‘Our Third Volume,’ Freedmen’s Record, 3: 1–2. Cheney, E. D. (1867), ‘To the Teachers,’ Freedmen’s Record, 3: 100–2. Cheney, E. D. (1867), ‘A Word from Harriet Jacobs,’ Freedmen’s Record, 3: 115. Cheney, E.D. (1868), ‘Action of the National Commission,’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 169–70. Cheney, E.D. (1868), ‘[Untitled Announcement],’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 185. Cheney, E. D. (1869), ‘Change in Freedmen’s Bureau,’ Freedmen’s Record, 5: 1–2. Cheney, E. D. (1902), Reminiscences, Boston: Lee & Shepard. Chesnutt, C. W. [1901] (2002), ‘The March of Progress,’ in W. Sollors (ed.), Stories, Novels, and Essays, New York: Library of America, 770–80. Conyers, M. A. (1868), ‘Letter from a Pupil,’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 111. Dierks, K. (2009), In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. [1903] (1996), The Souls of Black Folk, ed. D. M. Gibson, New York: Penguin. Edelstein, S. (2014), Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. ‘Five Hundred Dollars for an Adopted Teacher’ (1868), Freedmen’s Record, 4: 6–8. Forten, C. (1864), ‘Life on the Sea Islands, Part I,’ Atlantic Monthly, 13: 587–96. Forten, C. (1864), ‘Life on the Sea Islands, Part II,’ Atlantic Monthly, 13: 666–76. Gardner, A. (1867), ‘Charlottesville, Va., March 1867,’ Freedmen’s Record, 3: 60–1. Gardner, A. (1868), ‘Charlottesville, Jan. 26, 1868,’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 37. Gardner, A. (1868), ‘Charlottesville, Nov. 30, 1867,’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 8–9. Gardner, A. (1881), Harvest Gleanings in Prose and Verse, New York: Falls & Wells. Gaul, T. S., and S. M. Harris (2009), ‘Introduction,’ in T. S. Gaul and S. M. Harris (eds.), Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1–14.

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Gibbons, B. (1868), ‘Letters from Pupils,’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 41–2. Hedrick, J. D. (1994), Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, New York: Oxford University Press. Henkin, D. M. (1998), City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York, New York: Columbia University Press. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hoffman, N. (2003), Woman’s ‘True’ Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Hosmer, J. (1868), ‘Gordonville, Va., Feb 11, 1868,’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 34–6. Jacobs, H. (1867), ‘A Word from Harriet Jacobs,’ Freedmen’s Record, 3: 115–16. Jones, J. (2004), Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Lucas, W. P. (1868), ‘Gordonville, VA., Feb 3, 1868,’ Freedman’s Record, 4: 34–6. Mahoney, D. (2003), ‘ “More than an Accomplishment”: Advice on Letter Writing for NineteenthCentury American Women,’ Huntington Library Quarterly, 66: 411–23. Morris, R. C. (2010), Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘Moses’ (1868), Freedmen’s Record, 4: 142–6. New England Freedmen’s Aid Society (1862–78), ‘Minutes,’ New England Freedmen’s Aid Society Records, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts, Mixed Material, Ms. N-101. Okker, P. (1995), Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Peterson, C. (1998), ‘Doers of the Word’: African-American Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880), New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Quigley, D. (2008), ‘Epistolary America,’ Reviews in American History, 36: 54–9. Robbins, S. R. (2006), ‘Woman’s Work for Woman: Gendered Print Culture in American Mission Movement Narratives,’ in W. Wiegand and J. Danky (eds.), Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 251–80. Robbins, S. R., and A. E. Pullen (2011), Nellie Arnott’s Writings on Angola, 1905–1913: Missionary Narratives Linking Africa and America, Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. ‘Unadopted Teachers’ (1867), Freedmen’s Record, 3: 53–4. Vance, J. C. (1953), ‘Freedmen’s Schools in Albemarle County during Reconstruction,’ The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 61: 430–8. West, J. (1868), ‘Letter,’ Freedmen’s Record, 4: 98.

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19 FOUNDING FRIENDSHIP: JOHN ADAMS, THOMAS JEFFERSON, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT IN REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT, 1812–26 Peter S. Onuf

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ohn Adams of Massachusetts, the second president of the United States, and his successor, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, both died on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. Adams was the ‘Atlas of Independence’ whose indefatigable efforts on countless congressional committees prepared the way for Jefferson’s eloquent Declaration, approved by the Continental Congress on 4 July 1776, and signed by delegates from the various states over the next months.1 For their countrymen, the great patriots’ nearly simultaneous death – Jefferson died at noon, Adams a few hours later – was a reminder and reaffirmation of a shared national identity.2 In the years since 1812, when Adams and Jefferson had resumed a friendship that had long been interrupted, and apparently broken beyond repair, by the vicious party conflicts of the 1790s, the two former presidents had drawn closer to each other through their extraordinarily rich and varied correspondence. Though they never saw each other again after Adams escaped the new capital city of Washington, D.C., in March 1801 (just in time to avoid Jefferson’s inauguration), in these later years the presence of each in the other’s life was increasingly palpable. The quickening pace of the mails brought their distant homes closer, as did the rising tide of visitors – family members, friends, and acquaintances – in both directions. In 1819 Adams began referring to his home at Quincy as ‘Montezillo Alias the little Hill’ in a playful reference to Monticello, Jefferson’s ‘little mountain’ (AJL, 547).3 Monticello and Montezillo seemed to be in some sort of ‘evil Communication,’ Adams joked, as Jefferson overcame physical complaints that Adams now suffered: ‘I wish you could Convey to me by some subterranean Canal or Air-Balloon as clear Eyes, and as steady hands as yours’ (AJL, 539). The two old men suffered the same symptoms and seemed to breathe the same air. The ‘black cloud’ of the Missouri Compromise, for example, threatened to unleash a terrifying storm that would devastate the country that was their common home, destroying everything they had achieved and lived for (AJL, 571). Indeed, preserving the Union was the great desideratum for the two aging patriots as they reaffirmed their fundamental attachment to each other. In their last years, Adams and Jefferson looked back to the new nation’s beginnings, when they had devoted themselves to the cause of independence. The Declaration, Jefferson wrote in the midst of the Missouri 305

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crisis, was ‘the fundamental act of union of these States,’ and his friendship with Adams was the living embodiment of that union.4 Adams understood that Jefferson’s opposition to congressional restrictions on Missouri’s entry into the Union did not alter his lifelong conviction that slavery was radically unjust and ultimately incompatible with republicanism. But he also understood that any precipitous assault on the institution – whether from the interference of the free states, acting through Congress, or from within, as slaves rose up in rebellion – would subvert the very foundations of social order and family life in the slave South. Jefferson pointed an angry finger at restrictionists with their humanitarian pretensions, while Adams imagined himself in his friend’s agonizing position and shared his terror. Jefferson was far from being a dispassionate observer of the deepening crisis.5 In a remarkable letter to Adams from January 1821, for example, he expressed his angry feelings about Northern efforts to determine the future of slavery in Missouri. ‘If Congress has a power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of the states, within the states, it will be but another exercise of that power to declare that all shall be free,’ both in Virginia and throughout the Union, Jefferson insisted, before asking: ‘Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?’ (AJL, 570). Yet even as Jefferson conjured up the specter of a bloody servile insurrection, he expected a sympathetic response from his old friend in Massachusetts. Adams was clearly not being held responsible for the machinations of congressional ‘restrictionists,’ whose ostentatious solicitude for slaves, Jefferson was convinced, betrayed their real intention to reduce the southern and western states to the condition of subject provinces. Indeed, although ordinarily eager to argue about any and every topic that came up in their wide-ranging correspondence, Adams responded empathetically, identifying with his old friend. The uncertain future of the peculiar institution had been ‘hanging’ over the country ‘for half a Century,’ Adams wrote back on 3 February 1821: I might properly say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air . . . I have been so terrified with this Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object I must leave it to you, I will vote for forceing [sic] no measure against your judgements, what we are to see God knows and I leave it to him, and his agents in posterity. (AJL, 571) Evoking those ‘former times’ when the two young revolutionaries had led the struggle for their country’s independence, Adams thus reached across the widening sectional divide and reaffirmed their personal union. The slavery issue threatened to destroy the country, but it could never threaten their friendship. In earlier exchanges, the skeptical Adams had often questioned Jefferson’s sunny faith in the progress of Enlightenment. But now he joined his friend in looking to the future when God, acting through his ‘agents in posterity’ would finally bring an end to this great ‘evil’ (AJL, 570). Here was a sympathetic echo of Jefferson’s abiding – if now shaken – faith in the wisdom and virtue of the rising generation. ‘[T]he earth belongs in usufruct [or trust] to the living,’ he had written to James Madison in 1789.6 Looking back, Adams and Jefferson now agreed that they had been worthy stewards, passing on the great legacy of freedom and self-government to future generations. But as they confronted their mortality, they also discovered and articulated a shared faith that put their nation-making efforts in cosmic perspective. Reports on their failing powers evoked the

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evanescence of human life, prompting questions about time, history, and what Adams called the ‘design’ apparent in ‘the revelation of nature i.e. nature’s God’ (AJL, 373). Adams’ reference to the Declaration of Independence here was certainly intentional. He had served with Jefferson on the committee that drafted the Declaration’s appeal to ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God,’ thus justifying Congress’s renunciation of King George III’s merely earthly authority.7 And if ‘nature’s God’ presided over the nation’s founding, he also presided over the theological and philosophical discussions that dominated their late-life correspondence. Importantly, the old patriots looked beyond the bitter partisan divisions of the 1790s, but they did not overlook the differences that had divided them. To the contrary, they renewed their friendship by exploring the philosophical disagreements that had once fueled partisan rancor. ‘You and I, ought not to die,’ Adams wrote on 15 July 1813, ‘before We have explained ourselves to each other’ (AJL, 358). He had ‘loved and esteemed’ Jefferson ‘for Eight and thirty years,’ from their first meeting at the Continental Congress in 1775 to the present moment, Adams declared a month earlier; but the two men had never really understood each other (AJL, 327). Some of the ideas the Virginian had attributed to him in recently published private correspondence, for example, were ‘totally incongruous to every principle of my mind and every Sentiment of my heart,’ and Adams went on to repeat this complaint in a subsequent letter (AJL, 326). Though a confessedly compulsive writer, he had ‘been So unfortunate as never to be able to make myself understood’ (AJL, 351). But this misunderstanding did not jeopardize their friendship. Both protested – in the face of considerable contradictory evidence – that their affection for each other had persisted throughout their protracted estrangement. Jefferson was famously averse to conflict and therefore reluctant to see ‘the passions of that day rekindled in this’ (AJL, 332). To protect their friendship he laid down ground rules that would enable a civil and affectionate exchange of views. Jefferson, for instance, asserted that he and Adams had never descended to the level of their partisan followers. ‘Neither decency nor inclination permitted us to become the advocates of ourselves,’ he assured his friend, ‘or to take part personally in the violent contests which followed’ (AJL, 336). Mere pawns in partisan warfare between Federalist administrations and Republican oppositionists, ‘we suffered ourselves, as you so well expressed it, to be the passive subjects of public discussion’ (AJL, 336). Partisan foes may have traded in scandalous lies and distortions, kindling ferocious passions. But ‘you and I cannot differ,’ the Virginian concluded (switching to the present tense), ‘because truth is our mutual guide’ (AJL, 332). This was to say that the two friends could only differ in their views, not on fundamental principles: ‘If any opinions you may express should be different from mine, I shall receive them with the liberality and indulgence which I ask for my own, and still cherish with warmth the sentiments of affectionate respect of which I can with so much truth tender you the assurance’ (AJL, 332). Adams did not need Jefferson’s permission to express different opinions, of course, but he did so with the ‘affectionate respect’ and friendly ‘sentiments’ the Virginian enjoined. Indeed, the letters the former presidents exchanged for the rest of their lives were suffused with warm feeling. The renewal of their friendship enabled them to explore once controversial questions of politics and philosophy dispassionately, and to recognize their more profound and fundamental agreement on the transcendent value and enduring legacy of America’s republican revolution.

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On the political level, the fact that Adams and Jefferson renewed a once robust friendship and correspondence that the party battles of the 1790s had badly damaged and ceased altogether from 1804 to 1812 was an inspiration to American nationalists – and to the aging patriots themselves.9 The conflicts over foreign policy and political economy that had led to a second ‘War of Independence’ against Britain in 1812 and, more recently and ominously, the deeply divisive controversy over the future of slavery in the new state of Missouri led many anxious Americans to fear that their epochal experiment in republican self-government might fail. The alliance between Virginia and Massachusetts had been the key to the American Revolution’s success; if that friendship now failed, the Union would collapse and the Revolutionaries’ great sacrifices would be wasted. As Jefferson put it in a famous letter to John Holmes in the midst of the Missouri crisis, the ‘scission’ of the Union would constitute an ‘act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.’10 The Missouri crisis revealed a ‘line of division’ between North and South – and therefore between Massachusetts and Virginia – that would ‘never be obliterated,’ Jefferson warned, once the ‘moral and political’ questions raised by the westward expansion of slavery were brought to the fore ‘and held up to the angry passions of men.’11 Through these successive crises of the Union, however, the former presidents repaired and sustained their personal union. As they explained themselves to each other, they took the long view, harking back to the new nation’s beginnings in 1776 while looking forward to – and beyond – their own deaths. The perspective they gained on partisan conflict in the 1790s led them to contemplate the meaning of American independence for their countrymen and for the world. Their understanding of historical change in turn prompted an engagement with more fundamental philosophical and spiritual questions. In 1791, when Jefferson’s followers charged Adams with being an ‘aristocrat’ because of the views expressed in his Defence of the Constitutions (1787–8), Adams told Jefferson that it was ‘high time that you and I should come to an explanation with each other,’ a declaration that signaled the imminent demise of their friendship (AJL, 249). It was something like a challenge in an affair of honor that could only be satisfied by Jefferson’s acknowledging that he had betrayed his old friend in endorsing criticism of the book.12 Jefferson could not apologize then, nor could he do so in an exchange with Abigail Adams in 1804, when she expressed a wish ‘to have seen a different course pursued by you’ (AJL, 274). After all, any suggestion that his affection for the Adamses had ever faltered called his own honor into question. By 1812, though, as the partisanship of the 1790s had receded further into the past and the United States teetered on the brink of another war with Britain, American patriots recognized the need to overcome their differences and revive the Spirit of ’76. The logic of reconciliation became increasingly compelling for Adams and Jefferson. Wounded feelings and offended honor counted for little when the nation’s survival hung in the balance. As their numbers dwindled, the surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence recognized their centrally important symbolic role in sustaining Americans’ patriotic commitments. Fellow signer Benjamin Rush thus seized the moment to reconcile Adams and Jefferson, and his two estranged friends eagerly embraced the opportunity to account for themselves. In this context, ‘explanation’ no longer meant estrangement. Their renewed correspondence instead enabled the two old patriots to put their disagreements – and themselves – into historical and philosophical perspective.13

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Returning to one of the key points of their dispute in 1791, Jefferson first raised the question of ‘aristocracy’ in June 1813, thus opening the way for a series of their richest and most sustained explanations. Charges that Adams and his fellow Federalists were ‘aristocrats’ and ‘monocrats’ who sought to suppress the people’s power and reverse the Revolution’s outcome had been central to partisan divisions in the 1790s. If this Republican propaganda had opportunistically pandered to populist paranoia, as Adams charged at the time, it also reflected a fundamental and deepening ideological cleavage throughout the Western world in the ‘Age of Democratic Revolution.’ For to Adams and Jefferson, as well as to their contemporaries, the great struggle between defenders of old regime ‘aristocracy’ and progressive exponents of ‘democracy’ explained revolutionary upheavals and counter-revolutionary reaction in America, France, and every other country during the late eighteenth century.14 The survival of the United States and the success of its experiment in democratic government, moreover, remained radically uncertain in 1813, as the new nation was yet again sucked into the vortex of European warfare. Jefferson did not mean to throw down the ideological gauntlet to Adams when he raised the question of aristocracy – the most significant source, Adams thought, of their earlier misunderstanding. Assuming an Olympian detachment, Jefferson instead suggested that ‘men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak’ (AJL, 335). Throughout history, the ‘people’ and the ‘aristocracy’ struggled for domination, and patriots could legitimately disagree about which represented the greater threat to the common weal at any given moment. ‘The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time,’ Jefferson concluded. ‘In fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history’ (AJL, 335). Jefferson thus made generous concessions to his combative friend by reframing – and defusing – the aristocracy question. Party divisions were not only an irrepressible, ‘natural’ fact of political life, he suggested, but might even play a useful role in sustaining free society. Jefferson could make this claim because ‘parties,’ he now argued – in striking contrast to the tenor of Republican rhetoric of the 1790s – did not represent irreconcilably distinct and hostile ‘parts’ or classes in society. Parties were instead defined by the ‘opinions’ their followers shared about the source of threats to the community as a whole – a community that included their partisan opponents. According to this logic, Adams feared the unbridled power of the people, but his determination to design a regime that would curb democratic excesses did not make him an ‘aristocrat.’ And by the same token, Jefferson (who was, by all conventional criteria, much more of an aristocrat than his friend) could be a democratic advocate of the people’s rights and interests. ‘You and I differ; but we differ as rational friends,’ he assured Adams in October 1813, ‘using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors’ (AJL, 388). In other words, Jefferson might be wrong (although he never actually conceded that he was), but it did not matter because he and Adams were, in any case, ‘rational friends.’ Friendship and patriotism, in this sense, constituted fundamental attachments, while differences of opinion among partisans were contingent and dynamic, always subject to change. Extricating themselves from the party battles of the 1790s, the two old friends thus launched into a wide-ranging exchange on human nature through the ages. For his part, Adams insisted on 13 July 1813 that the ‘idea’ of aristocracy was woven by

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‘God Almighty’ into the very ‘Constitution of human nature’ itself (AJL, 355). The aristocratic impulse to dominate took many forms. ‘The five Pillars of Aristocracy are Beauty Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues,’ he wrote, and ‘any one of the three first, can at any time over bear any one or both of the two last’ (AJL, 342). Adams thought that aristocracy was ‘natural,’ but argued that it must be contained and controlled: this was precisely why he saw constitutional design as crucial to the Revolution’s success.15 In response, Jefferson distinguished ‘natural aristocracy’ from the corrupt and ‘artificial aristocracy’ that the Revolution had presumably destroyed (AJL, 388). ‘Virtue & talents,’ the final two and most vulnerable ‘pillars’ in Adams’ construction, remained standing when the others were toppled. For Jefferson a ‘natural aristocracy’ that included himself, Adams, and other worthy patriots was ‘the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society’ (AJL, 388). Adams’ efforts to segregate and so control ‘aristocrats’ in a ‘separate chamber of legislation’ were fundamentally misguided, for ‘to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil’ (AJL, 388). The old patriots gleefully challenged each other’s fundamental premises, simultaneously articulating philosophical differences and neutralizing the poisonous sting of partisan polemics. Whatever they said was not meant, and could not be taken, personally. Ambiguity about key terms helped. They did not agree on what they meant by ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ and, therefore, on what the distinction between the two might be. The identity of actual ‘aristocrats’ remained unclear. In Adams’ extreme formulation, anyone who influenced anyone else’s vote was an aristocrat, whether he exercised that influence ‘by his Birth Fortune, Figure, Eloquence, Science learning, Craft Cunning, or even his Character for good fellowship and a bon vivant’ (AJL, 398). But if everyone was (potentially) an aristocrat, then no one was. Aristocratic influence was dynamic and circumstantial, not a fixed and defining characteristic of any particular individual or class. And if aristocrats could not be identified, how could they be ostracized and controlled – in a ‘separate chamber’ of the legislature, or anywhere else? Jefferson confronted the same problem. During his political career he certainly knew who his aristocratic enemies were and he struggled mightily to destroy them. But in retrospect the bright lines blurred to the point of invisibility. Were all Jefferson’s political followers true friends and patriots? Had American independence really changed everything, with virtuous and talented ‘natural aristocrats’ now selflessly exercising authority on behalf of grateful citizens? Adams and Jefferson relished the opportunity to explain themselves to each other. They were free to articulate the most extreme views, even to the point of self-contradiction, without jeopardizing their renewed friendship. The give and take of their conversation enabled the two patriots to stake out a common ground for their shared faith; if their arguments often floated at high levels of abstraction, they also hit home in personally meaningful ways. For Jefferson, who had always professed his undying attachment for his fellow patriot, the restoration of their friendship was a kind of vindication. In contrast, Adams responded rapturously to the resurrection of a relationship he and his wife Abigail had considered dead. Writing more often and at much greater length, he exulted in the sympathetic attention of a worthy friend.16 Adams did not belabor the details of his constitutional design. He was more interested in basic questions of political psychology, focusing obsessively on the tension

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between the republican principle of equality and the universal impulse toward domination – and therefore inequality – that his historical research and personal experience so amply confirmed. Without constitutional restraints, he had affirmed as far back as 1787, republican governments would instantly self-destruct.17 Aristocratic impulses came to the fore precisely when candidates sought to influence, or corrupt, their fellow citizens in order to gain their suffrage. The reigning ideal in a republic was that the people exercised their sovereign will and thus secured their liberties when they elected fellow citizens to govern them. But Adams was skeptical. The scramble for office, he warned, would give rise to insidious new aristocracies that were difficult to recognize and impossible to control. ‘Mankind have not yet discovered any remedy against irresistible Corruption in Elections to Offices of great Power and Profit,’ he darkly concluded on 15 November 1813, ‘but making them hereditary’ (AJL, 401). Jefferson did not condemn Adams’ extraordinary statement. He knew that his friend was no aristocrat, and the ‘terrorism of a former day,’ when the two old patriots had endured party warfare, offered some justification for Adams’ diagnosis of the democratic pathologies that threatened the new nation’s survival (AJL, 346). Moreover, Adams assured Jefferson that he hoped to exclude ‘legal hereditary distinctions from the U.S. as long as possible,’ although this would depend on the implementation of appropriately republican remedies (AJL, 401). They continued to disagree on those remedies, with Adams seeking to contain aristocratic impulses through the mechanisms of mixed and balanced government and Jefferson looking to federalism to expand popular participation in government while limiting its excesses.18 But these were disagreements between friends who understood that no remedies were possible – and that the experiment in republican self-government that they had launched in 1776 would certainly fail – if the federal union itself could not be sustained. In the 1790s, the Adams–Jefferson friendship had been a near casualty of partisan conflict; now, as the new nation embarked on another war for independence, their enduring friendship testified to their shared commitment to a union that transcended the differences between ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’ or Northerners and Southerners. If the renewed relationship between Jefferson and Adams had a broad political significance at a perilous moment in the history of the Union, it was also personally gratifying. Adams could blame partisan enemies for the wounds inflicted by partisan combat, but he recognized his failings as a democratic politician. Though he had the ‘virtue & talents’ of one of Jefferson’s natural aristocrats, Adams knew he lacked the beauty, wealth, and charming manner that made his friend such a successful and popular figure. Jefferson courted the people while Adams seemed perversely proud of his ‘immense unpopularity’ (AJL, 535). By advocating constitutional limitations on popular power and precociously condemning the French Revolution, Adams had made himself a lightning rod for partisan enemies. While still president he also succeeded in alienating the High Federalist followers of Alexander Hamilton in his own region; and by subsequently supporting his Republican successors’ efforts to secure the Union, including the ill-fated 1807–9 Embargo on foreign trade, ‘I have Sacrificed my Popularity in New England’ (AJL, 295). For Adams, patriotism was defined in opposition to popularity. Jefferson might celebrate the ‘mighty wave of public opinion’ that swept him into office, but Adams was acutely conscious of the people’s self-destructive power to subvert republican government and tear the Union apart.19 Elections for him were moments of danger, when

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deluded partisans lost their minds, not – as Jefferson liked to think – moments of civic renewal. Yet as he extricated himself from partisan and sectional loyalties and renewed his friendship with the ever-popular Jefferson, the unpopular Adams reaffirmed his more fundamental attachment to his country’s independence and union. The warm and affectionate tone that suffused their correspondence belied Adams’ proud prickliness. Adams could be himself, fearlessly espousing the opinions that made him so unpopular, while still reinforcing their friendship. Here was a model and inspiration for patriots across the continent. ‘Never mind it, my dear Sir,’ Adams told Jefferson on 15 July 1813, ‘if I write four Letters to your one: your one is worth more than my four’ (AJL, 357). Adams, in short, cherished Jefferson’s letters because they reaffirmed shared patriotic commitments while enabling the free expression of conflicting opinions that had once driven them – and their followers – apart. The imbalance in the numbers of letters sent north and south that I have already noted reflects Adams’ grateful enthusiasm for a renewed correspondence that vindicated his patriotic identity. But the balance became more equal in later years, despite the fact that Jefferson struggled to keep up with his correspondence and complained about the painful burden it entailed. Adams never found it painful to write, even when family members had to serve as amanuenses. The compulsion to put pen to paper that got him into so much trouble earlier in his career – and that later came back to haunt him when intemperate letters, some hostile to Jefferson, appeared in print – now enabled the garrulous and proudly unpopular Adams to overcome his alienation and isolation by corresponding with a widening circle of friends. Overall, Jefferson continued to write more letters to more correspondents than Adams did in his last years. But his ‘popularity’ became increasingly burdensome as supplicants besieged him for favors and pilgrims to Monticello sought to bask in the Sage’s presence. Jefferson showed how important their friendship was to him after some of Adams’ private letters were published in Boston in 1823.20 ‘Be assured, my dear Sir,’ he wrote on 12 October, ‘that I am incapable of recieving [sic] the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for near half a century’ (AJL, 600). Incapable of reading Jefferson’s letter himself at his advanced age, Adams had one of the young women in his household read it aloud: ‘When it was done, it was followed by an universal exclamation, The best letter that ever was written, and round it went through the whole table – How generous! how noble! how magnanimous!’ (AJL, 601). The family setting of this vignette is significant. The friendship between the two old patriots had originally flourished in Paris between 1784 and 1785, when they were both serving as diplomats and Jefferson had been warmly welcomed into the Adams family circle. When they reconciled, Jefferson regained his old standing in the household. But the old roles were now reversed. The ‘magnanimous’ Jefferson had always claimed that private and public domains were distinct and that political differences did not – or should not – affect friendship. Abigail Adams had dismissed such claims with contempt in her 1804 letters to Jefferson by insisting on the personal pain the partisan combat of the 1790s had inflicted on her family. But by 1823 the two friends had long since gained philosophical perspective on old quarrels, simultaneously vindicating Jefferson’s professions of undying friendship and satisfying Adams’ earlier demand that: ‘You and I, ought not to die before We have explained ourselves to each other.’

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In essence, Jefferson was the friend Adams had desperately sought throughout his life, and their friendship enabled him to contemplate his death with equanimity. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that Adams was the needier correspondent and that their relationship was therefore asymmetrical. Jefferson also longed to be understood. Adams’ idiosyncratic constitutional ideas exposed him to partisan ridicule and abuse and the resulting wounds augured a bitter and embattled retirement. But the thinskinned Jefferson nursed equivalent grievances about the scathing assaults of partisan and clerical foes on his religious faith. Privacy took on a more profound meaning for him as he retreated into his study at Monticello and defended the sanctity of conscience. Declaring that he was a ‘sect by myself,’ Jefferson immersed himself in the theological works collected in his library as well as in Bible study.21 What he found there was nobody’s business. Bemoaning unauthorized publications of his private correspondence on 27 June 1813, Jefferson insisted, ‘judge me by my acts,’ not on distorted conceptions of his beliefs (AJL, 336). Importantly, the two men both suffered unwelcome invasions of their privacy on controversial subjects they freely discussed in their letters, but the world’s misunderstandings accentuated the value of the understanding they reached with each other. Jefferson’s late-life spiritual quest, in particular, isolated him from a world that was all too eager to probe his beliefs and claim him as one of their own – or denounce him as infidel or atheist.22 Yet Jefferson did not hesitate to elaborate his ideas about religion, philosophy, and ethics to his sympathetic and trusted friend. In their simultaneous exchanges on aristocracy the old patriots had explored and explained their differences; when they turned to theology, they discovered more profound agreement on fundamental issues. Most of the founders, including Jefferson and Adams, were practicing Christians with strong – though often concealed – deistic tendencies.23 Jefferson’s sense of isolation reflected the small number of like-minded anti-Trinitarians, or Unitarians, in rural Virginia; Adams was much more in accord with his neighbors in eastern Massachusetts, where Unitarianism grew rapidly during his retirement and gained control of many established congregations. Jefferson hoped that this enlightened, democratic Christianity would eventually spread southward. But in the meantime he worshiped with more conventional Christians in Charlottesville and kept his own counsel. Shared theological views blurred ideological differences between the old friends. Both celebrated the ‘intelligence in the design and constant preservation’ of the Creator’s marvelously lawful system (AJL, 468).24 Jefferson certainly had no doubt in God’s existence. ‘It is impossible for the human mind not to percieve [sic] and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it’s [sic] composition,’ he wrote on 11 April 1823 (AJL, 592). Indeed, in an uncertain world, the ‘necessity of a superintending power’ was the one certainty (AJL, 592). But Christians who claimed to know the mind of God beyond the design revealed in Creation were guilty of ‘Presumption and Impiety,’ Adams added (AJL, 376). Humbly acknowledging the limits of his understanding, he wrote on 15 September 1813 that he could not ‘understand and feel’ beyond his own ‘little infinitessimal Circle’: ‘The Duties of a Son, a Brother, a Father, a Neighbour, a Citizen, I can See and feel, but I trust the Ruler with his Skies’ (AJL, 376). To claim to know more – by some miraculous dispensation – was to defy and degrade the lawful order of ‘nature’s God.’ Pretensions to divine authority constituted the ultimate source of the artificial, man-made aristocracy that both patriots despised.

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The teachings of Jesus, the two men felt, offered ethical guidance for good republicans, affirming natural sociable impulses that were nurtured in the bosom of the family and expressed in relations with neighbors, fellow citizens, and mankind generally. The laws of ‘nature’s God’ were inscribed in men’s hearts. Knowledge of them did not require the mediation of a priestly caste and initiation into its otherworldly mysteries. While Adams thus directed his gaze downward, to what could be seen and known by man in his own ‘infinitessimal Circle,’ in the same modest spirit Jefferson asserted his ‘habitual anodyne’ to metaphysical anxiety: ‘I feel, therefore I exist’ (AJL, 567). Yet he also saw the need to liberate mankind from the ‘heresy of immaterialism,’ which he traced back to Plato and his ideal forms (AJL, 568). And so, unlike Adams, who stated that ‘the question between spirit and matter appears to me nugatory because we have neither evidence nor idea of either,’ Jefferson would not settle comfortably on these ‘pillows of Ignorance’ (AJL, 563). Platonic mystifications were responsible for man’s alienation from himself, and from God, Jefferson argued. All the unnatural forms of hierarchy and despotic rule that had afflicted mankind through history were authorized by the ‘masked atheism’ of Platonic idealism (AJL, 568). ‘To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings,’ he insisted on 15 August 1820, ‘to say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul’ (AJL, 568). Jefferson was a resolute materialist because of his faith in ‘nature’s God.’ A properly reformed, ‘primitive’ Christianity, in his view, would restore God the Creator to His rightful place as Creator and man to his in the order of creation. Thus in his ‘Bible’ – a radically edited, cut-and-paste version of the New Testament composed between 1804 and 1820 – Jefferson sought to reconnect God and man by gleaning the authentic teachings of Jesus from the corrupted and conflicting accounts in the Gospels.25 What remained was ‘the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man’ (AJL, 384). Jefferson repeatedly blamed Plato for the corruption of Christianity and everything else he loathed in Western civilization; and Plato’s ultimate disciple, in his view, was John Calvin, with his nonsensical doctrine of original sin – the very epitome of man’s self-alienation. As the descendant of Puritan Calvinists, Adams could only shrug his shoulders: for him, the spirit of liberty and congregational self-government had flourished in New England, despite (or perhaps because of) the great reformer’s doctrines. Adams was also disgusted by Plato, suspecting that the Republic (c. 380 bc) was a ‘bitter Satyre [sic] on all Republican Government’ (AJL, 437). But if Platonic idealism constituted a threat for Adams, it was more fully embodied in the pernicious influence of system-building philosophers like Rousseau and that despicable rabble-rouser Thomas Paine. The credulous masses were all too easily seduced by ‘Paradox, Riddle, Mystery, Invention, discovery, Mystery, Wonder, Temerity,’ Adams concluded on 16 July 1814. ‘Plato and his Disciples, from the fourth Century Christians, to Rousseau and Tom. [sic] Paine, have been fully Sensible of this Weakness in Mankind’ (AJL, 438). Talking about theology thus brought the two men back to their argument about aristocracy: in this case Jefferson focused on the mystifiers, ‘priests’ who preached the people into submission to earthly authorities, while Adams focused on the mystified. Yet if they took different routes, they were both headed in the same direction, toward home and a final reckoning with their brief time on earth.

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For his part, Jefferson’s belief in the unity of Creation and the conservation of matter offered him a comforting vision of some sort of afterlife or immortality. His conception of generational sovereignty, with the stewardship of the earth passing from one ‘living’ generation to the next, translated his philosophical materialism into familiar, homely terms. Sexual impulses, such as the desire for ‘coition,’ he remarked on 28 October 1813, ‘have not been given by god to man for the sake of pleasure, but for the procreation of the race. For as it were incongruous for a mortal born to partake of divine life, the immortality of the race being taken away, god fulfilled the purpose by making the generations uninterrupted and continuous’ (AJL, 387). Both men were, of course, intensely conscious of the regard of future generations, and enacted this concern by saving their letters and papers and by correcting the historical record.26 Indeed, they particularly cherished the letters they exchanged, congratulating each other on their generous and edifying sentiments and even toying with the idea that particular letters might be published before they died. Publication, they imagined, would enable grateful readers to remember and honor their patriotic sacrifices. It was a kind of immortality. For sentimental materialists of the early nineteenth century, meanwhile, the immortality promised in heaven was no cold, bloodlessly idealist abstraction, but something like a family reunion instead. ‘Our next meeting,’ Jefferson wrote to Abigail Adams in 1817, ‘must then be . . . in a country, for us, not now very distant’ (AJL, 503). Mrs. Adams herself would depart this world a year and a half later, joining Jefferson’s daughter Maria and her own daughter Nabby ‘in the country to which they have flown’ (AJL, 503). Her husband, who was left behind, had little interest in Jefferson’s philosophical speculations, but shared his faith in a home-like afterlife. ‘I believe in God and in his Wisdom and Benevolence,’ he told his friend in December 1818, ‘and I cannot conceive that Such a Being could make Such a Species as the human merely to live and die on this Earth’ (AJL, 530). Extrapolating the moral sense from the individual to God may have required a great leap of faith, but doing so relieved Adams of sleepless nights pondering philosophical conundrums. ‘If I did not believe [in] a future State I Should believe in no God,’ he added (AJL, 530).27 The fundamental principle of enlightened Christianity, both men agreed, was ‘the Love of God’ (AJL, 380).28 To believe in God was to trust in the power of the love that animated his Creation. Jefferson and Adams effectively became present to each other in their letters, but those letters also reminded them that they would never see each other again on earth and must therefore await transportation to another ‘country’ after death. The loss of loved ones was a constant, bittersweet reminder to the long-lived patriots that the joys of family life were fleeting and evanescent, even as a rising generation of grandchildren gave them hope for a future they would not share. Lengthening silences between letters attested eloquently to their declining powers. Eagerly asking after each other’s health, they feared becoming increasingly dependent. ‘I am sometimes afraid that my “Machine” will not “Surcease motion” Soon enough,’ Adams wrote on 16 July 1814; for he dreaded nothing ‘So much as “dying at top” and expiring like [Jonathan] Swift “a driveller and a Show” ’ (AJL, 434). With another decade to live, meanwhile, Jefferson announced that ‘I am ripe for leaving all, this year, this day, this hour’ (AJL, 484). Though ‘I enjoy good health,’ he reflected, and ‘I am happy in what

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is around me,’ the time had come for a graceful departure, for ‘when we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another’ (AJL, 434). Contemplating the prospect of death, the old men became more acutely conscious of their disease and injury-prone bodies. Their horizons contracted as they relied increasingly on the care of family members and were confined to their homes. Yet memories of their patriotic labors in 1776 still loomed large. Adams, for example, looked back ‘with rapture to those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers’ (AJL, 610). The old patriots also noted the passing of fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence, and assessed its historical significance. Indeed, even if the apparent failure of the French Revolution seemed to vindicate Adams’ skepticism, both men could agree on the American Revolution’s success and its world impact. Adams was ‘a Believer,’ after all, ‘in the probable improvability and Improvement, the Ameliorability and Amelioration in human Affaires [sic]’ (AJL, 435). And Jefferson, for all his vaunted optimism, did not expect the imminent arrival of the republican millennium. ‘Rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over’ before the benighted nations of Europe gain their freedom, Jefferson acknowledged in September 1823. ‘Yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation. for what inheritance, so valuable, can man leave to his posterity?’ (AJL, 596). Adams, meanwhile, struck a similarly somber but hopeful note. ‘It is melancholy to contemplate the cruel wars, dessolutions of Countries, and ocians of blood which must occure before rational principles, and rational systems of Government can prevail and be established [sic passim],’ he replied; but that day would finally, surely come (AJL, 598). In the ‘Era of Good Feeling’ that succeeded the near-destruction of the Union during the controversy over the future of slavery in Missouri, Jefferson and Adams were reassured that the legacy of liberty was secure in America. They could also look forward to the ultimate enlightenment and liberation of the nations of the world. ‘You and I shall look down from another world on these glorious achievements to man, which will add to the joys even of heaven,’ Jefferson wrote on 4 September 1823 (AJL, 596). Rational principles would ultimately prevail, Adams agreed, as God’s plan for his Creation unfolded. He could contemplate his death, he observed in his penultimate letter to Jefferson, ‘without terror or dismay,’ confident that ‘I shall ever be under the same constitution and administration of Government in the Universe and I am not afraid to trust and confide in it’ (AJL, 613). Adams the constitutionalist thus rested his faith in the great Law Giver. In contrast, Jefferson’s last letter to Adams, written on 25 March 1826, and hand-delivered by the former’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, evoked the thrill of Revolution and the glowing prospects of the rising generation. ‘It was the lot of our early years to witness nothing but the dull monotony of Colonial subservience, and of our riper ones to breast the labors and perils of working out of it,’ Jefferson observes, but now it is the turn of ‘young people’ like his grandson ‘to recount to those around him what he has heard and learnt,’ for his lot is ‘the Halcyon calms succeeding the storm which our Argosy had so stoutly weathered’ (AJL, 613). At the end of their days, the two patriots thus joined in celebrating the new nation’s exceptional achievement and its providential destiny. Each was desperate to survive to the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. Yet both were weary of life and ready to die, confident that they would meet again in ‘another country.’

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Notes 1. C. F. Adams and J. Q. Adams, The Life of John Adams, 1: 321. 2. See Burstein’s evocative study, America’s Jubilee, especially 255–86. 3. All citations of correspondence between Adams and Jefferson are to Lester Cappon’s edition of The Adams–Jefferson Letters, but these letters can also be viewed digitally as part of the Adams Papers and the Jefferson Papers, which are available at Founders Online, along with the two men’s correspondence with scores of other individuals. 4. Jefferson, ‘Minutes of the Board of Visitors,’ in Writings, 479. 5. For further discussion of Jefferson’s response to Missouri see Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 109–17, 128–9. 6. Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 6 September 1789, in Writings, 959. 7. Jefferson, ‘A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America,’ in Writings, 19. 8. Jefferson had made a similar appeal to his Federalist foes in his ‘First Inaugural Address’ on 4 March 1801, emphasizing shared principles and discounting ‘difference of opinion’ (Writings, 493). 9. See Burstein, America’s Jubilee, 255–86. 10. Jefferson, Letter to John Holmes, 22 April 1820, in Writings, 1,435. 11. Jefferson, Letter to General James Breckenridge, 15 February 1821, in Writings, 1,452; Jefferson, Letter to John Holmes, 22 April 1820, in ibid. 1,434. 12. See Freeman’s Affairs of Honor (especially xiii–xxiv), the most insightful study of early national political culture. 13. On Adams in retirement see Ellis, Passionate Sage, 174–233, and Freeman, Affairs of Honor, 105–58. On Jefferson’s retirement years see Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets, and Gordon-Reed and Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs. 14. See Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, and Mattes, Citizens. 15. On Adams’ political psychology see Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, and Ryerson’s magisterial study, John Adams’s Republic. 16. In the first two years of their correspondence (1812–13), the ratio of Adams’ letters to Jefferson’s was 37:10; from 1 January 1820 to their deaths in 1826, it was 27:16. 17. ‘Elections to offices which are great objects of Ambition, I look at with terror,’ he had written to Jefferson 6 December 1787 (Adams–Jefferson Letters, 214). 18. See Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 109–46. 19. Jefferson, Letter to Joseph Priestley, 21 March 1801, in Writings, 1,086. See, for example, Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 14 June 1813, in Adams–Jefferson Letters, 329–30. 20. For more on this incident see Burstein, America’s Jubilee, 255–7. 21. Quoted in Stewart, Nature’s God, 25. 22. See Onuf, The Mind of Jefferson, 139–68. 23. See Stewart, Nature’s God. 24. See also Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 14 September 1813, in Adams–Jefferson Letters, 372–4. 25. See Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible. 26. See Freeman, Affairs of Honor, 262–8, and Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson. 27. See also Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 3 May 1816, in Adams–Jefferson Letters, 469–71. 28. See also Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 12 October 1813, in Adams–Jefferson Letters, 383–6.

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Works Cited Adams, C. F., and J. Q. Adams (1871), The Life of John Adams, 2 vols., rev. edn., Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Adams, J. (1735–1826), The Adams Papers, Founders Online, The National Archive and University of Virginia Press, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Adams, J., and T. Jefferson [1959] (1988), The Adams–Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abgail and John Adams, ed. L. Cappon, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Cited parenthetically as AJL. Burstein, A. (2001), America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence, New York: Knopf. Burstein, A. (2005), Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, New York: Basic Books. Cogliano, F. D. (2006), Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ellis, J. E. (1993), Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, New York: Norton. Freeman, J. (2001), Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gordon-Reed, A., and P. S. Onuf (forthcoming), Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson, New York: Norton. Jefferson, T. (1743–1826), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Founders Online, The National Archive and University of Virginia Press, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Jefferson T. [1804–20] (2011), The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English, Washington: Smithsonian Books. Jefferson, T. (1984), Writings, ed. M. D. Peterson, New York: Library of America. Mattes, A. (2015), Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Context of the Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood, 1775–1840, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Onuf, P. S. (2000), Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Onuf, P. S. (2007), The Mind of Jefferson, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Palmer, R. R. (1959–64), The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ryerson, R. A. (forthcoming), John Adams’s Republic, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stewart, M. (2014), Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, New York: Norton. Thompson, C. B. (1998), John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

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20 CORRESPONDING NATURES: RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S LETTERS David Greenham

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alph Waldo Emerson’s collected letters span the nineteenth century, from 1807, when he was barely four years old, to 1881, when he was seventy-eight. They have a variety of aims and intentions. Some letters, especially those to Thomas Carlyle, are to do with the book trade, as Emerson tries to secure copyright for Carlyle’s writings in America and ensure his friend gets some kind of income from his work. Many other letters deal with the details of editing the New England journal The Dial. Lots concern family and financial matters, which often overlapped because of Emerson’s close business relationship with his elder brother William. But here I will focus primarily on the letters Emerson wrote between 1816 and 1842, which chart his growing intellectual maturity and the emergence of his central philosophical and literary concerns: self-reliance, the adequate response of the individual to nature, and the composition of poetry. These letters, because of their often intimate complexion, also reveal unexpected aspects of Emerson’s character: whimsical, passionate, vulnerable and, on occasion, lyrical; but also loyal, critical, didactic, and enthusiastic for the improvement of other individuals, wherever he found them and however the rest of the world viewed them. In 1816, in a letter to his younger brother Edward, the thirteen-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson contrasted his faults as a letter-writer with his aspirations for the form: This letter as almost all mine contains little else than nonsense; I hope no more will be like it in that respect. Mother says that our letters should be improving to both, that we ought to write what strikes us in our reading particularly thereby improving each with the reading of the other. (LRWE, 1: 21) ‘During my stay at home I have read,’ he begins the next sentence and this is followed by a list of books that he has dutifully made his way through, including works by Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and, yet more ‘improvingly,’ Samuel Whelpeley’s Historical Compend (1806) – ‘a brief survey of the history of every nation on earth’ (LRWE, 1: 21). On the same theme too, he again writes to Edward a year later: ‘I expect from [your letters] a fund of ideas enough to overstock my brain for a great while – but stop – in real earnest I wish to hear very much from you . . . for the improvement of both yourself and me’ (LRWE, 1: 45). Thus the express purpose of his correspondence is a classic New England one, in his case imbibed explicitly from the maternal line, of ‘improvement’; not only of the self but also of the addressee.

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Emerson’s youthful letters develop this Puritan flavour, and often with a certain amount of grudging juvenile humor. Thus he mocks the New England line in thriftiness, even while realizing it, by ensuring that his ‘purpose [in writing] is fulfilled by seeing my letter touch the bottom’ (LRWE, 1: 47). There was, in fact, a need for such thriftiness. Emerson’s father, a Boston minister, had died when Waldo – as the family called him – was eight, leaving his mother to raise four boys, three of whom required college education (the fifth, Bulkeley, never developed mentally, and a sister died in infancy). Each of the brothers would take it in turns to help run a small school to send the others to Harvard, and Emerson’s mother kept a boarding house (in the letter just cited, for example, he notes that ‘Mother has no boarders’ and that ‘there is enough misfortune to sink my letter, though of paper, anywhere’) (LRWE, 1: 47). As such, an improvement of circumstances was much the order of the day, and throughout Emerson’s life his most important letters are those which aim at just such an ‘improvement’ of the self or of his correspondent. One area in which Emerson certainly found himself much in need of improvement, and which would become perhaps the most crucial element of his future fame, was his feelings toward nature. Emerson’s first comments on the effects of ‘nature,’ for example, in an 1822 letter to his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, hardly foreshadow what was to come. Recounting a June walking tour of the New England countryside that he took with his brother William, he writes: I cannot tell, but it seemed to me that Cambridge would be a better place to study than the woodlands. I thought I understood a little of that intoxication, which you have spoken of; but it was a soft animal luxury, the combined result of the beauty which fed the eye; the exhilarating Paradise air, which fanned & dilated the sense; the novel melody, which warbled from the trees. Its first charm passed away rapidly with a longer acquaintance, but not once, during our stay, was I in any mood to take my pen, ‘and rattle out the battles of my thoughts,’ as Ben Jonson saith well. (LRWE, 1: 115) The aunt to whom this letter is addressed was amongst the most important influences on Emerson’s intellectual and spiritual life. Mary Moody Emerson was an idiosyncratic autodidact who had absorbed in almost equal measures the strict piety of her Calvinist ancestors and the Romantic effusions of her European contemporaries.1 She took a keen interest in the intellectual and spiritual growth of all her nephews, and her correspondence with Emerson is always of the improving kind.2 For Mary ‘nature’ was second only to the Bible as the place to find oneself in the company of God, and she would have it that her ‘young favourite wd wander wild among the flowers & briars of nature – would scale the “tempel [sic] where the Genius of the Universe resides” ’ (SLMME, 160). This, then, is the rising path to the ‘intoxication’ of nature which Emerson speaks of in his letter, and which he expects, but fails to find, in experience. For the young Emerson nature is too relaxing to be an intoxicant: it opposes efforts of body and mind and leaves him in ‘soft animal luxury.’ And though it was, contrariwise, ‘exhilarating,’ its picturesqueness soon passes and the ‘Paradise air’ brings no inspiration for his writing. It is the urban college environment of Cambridge, Massachusetts that will provide the educative influence for Emerson, not the open woodlands of his country walks.

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Nevertheless, Emerson knew he ought to get something out of nature and his aunt was his model. Her significance is confirmed almost exactly a year later, in June of 1823, in a letter to a regular early correspondent, John Boynton Hill: I am seeking to put myself on a footing of old acquaintance with Nature, as a poet should, – but the fair divinity is somewhat shy of my advances, & I confess I cannot find myself quite as perfectly at home in the rock & in the wood, as my ancient, & I may say, infant aspirations led me to expect. My aunt, (of whom I think you have heard before & who is alone among women,) has spent a great part of her life in the country, is an idolater of Nature, & counts but a small number who merit the privilege of living among the mountains. The coarse thrifty cit [sic] profanes the grove by his presence – & she was anxious that her nephew might hold high & reverential notions regarding it as the temple where God & the Mind are to be studied & adored & where the fiery soul can begin a premature communication with other worlds. When I took my book therefore to the woods – I found Nature not half poetical, not half visionary enough . . . In short I found that I had only transported in the new place my entire personal identity, & was grievously disappointed. (LRWE, 1: 133) Again, this is a telling passage. Emerson begins by locating a primal desire for oneness with nature – it is an ‘ancient’ and ‘infant’ aspiration, and he also acknowledges Aunt Mary as his model. But, as before, Nature, capitalized here and thus personified, flees from Emerson’s ‘advances’ and he is not ‘perfectly at home.’ He sees himself as a ‘cit’ – that is, a city-dweller interloping in the countryside. Thus the pages of his book – which we can take to be one to write in, rather than read from – remain blank; and instead of finding an understanding of Mind and God that will enable poetry and lead to a communion with something transcendent (though that is not a word Emerson will yet use), he finds only his urban self, brought entire into this new space that remains one of disappointment. Nature only reminds him of himself through his difference from it, his alienation. Indeed, as the letter goes on it circles around this disenchantment. Firstly ‘there is an excellence in Nature which familiarity never blunts the sense of – a serene superiority to man & his art in the thought of which man dwindles to pigmy proportions’ (LRWE, 1: 133). And secondly, ‘parti-coloured Nature makes a man love his eyes’ (LRWE, 1: 134). In the first instance, Nature dwarfs man and renders him insignificant; a feeling that would always be intolerable for Emerson. The second instance records the grounds of a re-crescive selflove; a force that Emerson will always find welling up and which gives all his works their optimistic tenor. It is in finding a balance between his experience of the vastness of nature and the sustaining value of self-love that at least one of Emerson’s most lasting achievements will be won. One reason, then, for Emerson’s early disappointment with nature is because of the way it disturbs his developing sense of the significance of individuality. In a letter of August 1827, again to his aunt Mary, Emerson announces this theme on its own terms, aside from his thoughts on the natural world: ‘I said to myself, that if men would avoid that general language & general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting’ (LRWE, 1: 207). He wrote these lines in response to a sermon he heard earlier that day, a sermon ‘all of clay,’ as he put it (LRWE, 1: 207). It is worth noting that Emerson had, at this point, almost

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completed his first year as an approbated minister in the Unitarian church and was in the process of trying to find his own voice amidst the clamor of a tradition: what he called ‘the plagiarisms of the common stock’ (LRWE, 1: 207). In this same letter to his aunt, for instance, he goes on to sound his keynote: ‘Every man is a new creation; can do something best; has some intellectual modes & forms or a character the general result of all, such as no other agent in the universe has’ (LRWE, 1: 207). This is the kind of optimism for which Emerson is rightly famous, but it does not yet have the full cosmic charge of its mature expression. The individual still needs to be related to that whole of which he is a unique ‘created’ part. For the Emerson of 1827, in another letter to his aunt from December of that year, this is articulated through a relationship with God. Here man is an animal that contains ‘in his soul an image of the Being by whom the Universe subsists’ and, ultimately, ‘God shall be all in all’ (LRWE, 7: 169). A ‘lawless imagination’ and a ‘restless soul,’ he notes, will not leave him ‘incessantly in the unfathomable abyss’ (LRWE, 7: 168).3 For Emerson the preacher this was a more or less satisfying holding position, however these articles of faith departed him over the next few years. At least one blow to this faith was the death of his first, beloved wife Ellen Tucker Emerson from tuberculosis in February of 1831, after just over one year of marriage. Of her death, in a letter to Mary, Emerson writes: ‘My angel has gone to heaven this morning & I am alone and strangely happy. Her lungs will no longer be torn nor her head scalded by her blood nor her whole life suffer from the warfare between the force & delicacy of her soul and the weakness of her frame’ (LRWE, 1: 318). Still, Emerson’s grief, however tempered by relief at the cessation of Ellen’s pain, was very real and he felt his loneliness, even as this isolation, along with his own ill health, yielded time for significant study. He began to read Goethe and the French interpreter of German thought Victor Cousin, both of whom further challenged the received traditions of New England, giving him new ways to think about an individual’s place in nature. Goethe in particular, as he notes in another important letter to Mary, ‘leads a child of Nature up from the period of “Apprenticeship” to that of “Self production” & leaves him . . . assured on the way to infinite perfection’ (LRWE, 1: 354). The idea that nature is something to learn from, something nurturing of individuality rather than something that eclipses it, is a crucial insight that would help Emerson to begin to resolve his own issues with nature. In that same letter, moreover, Emerson also reasserts his right to reject tradition: The farthing candle was not made for nothing – the last leaf must open & grow after the fashion of its own lobes and veins & not after that of the oak or the rose, and I can only do my own work well by abjuring the opinions & customs of all others & adhering strictly to the divine plan a few dim inches of whose outline I faintly discern in my breast. (LRWE, 1: 354) Here, at least two significant things happen. Firstly, Emerson is able to articulate the relationship between his own growth and that of natural objects: each is an individual and thus the whole is only made up of individuals doing what they naturally do within a divine plan. And secondly, he is able to express this notion through metaphor, a talent that will become perhaps his major gift to American literature when it advances, as it does, to the rich and ambiguous resources of symbolism. To be an individual, then, albeit only a ‘farthing candle,’ becomes central, and the leaf (after Goethe) becomes

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a working symbol.4 As such, the act of belonging to anything that restricts individual growth is to be eschewed, and Emerson resigns from the church in December of 1832 and sets sail for Europe at least in part to search for his own individuality and find appropriate models for it. From Rome, in the spring of 1833, Emerson writes that ‘[t]he wise man – the true friend – the finished character – we seek everywhere & only find in fragments,’ lamenting his disappointment in finding partiality in all those he meets when, as always, he expects with relentless optimism to discover the man whom he can only ‘describe’ and whom he calls ‘a Teacher’ (LRWE, 1: 375, 376). But he is also worried about retaining his own individuality in the face of those he meets, however partial they may be; a concern which he figures in the image of himself as ‘a poor asteroid in the great system subject to disturbances in my orbit not only from all the planets but from all their moons’ (LRWE, 1: 375). This will become, in ‘The American Scholar’ (1837) a few years later, one of Emerson’s most famous lines, albeit reframed to reject texts rather than individuals: ‘I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system’ (CW, 1: 56). On his Grand Tour, though, it is people whose gravity perturbs his own orbit, attracting him with hope and then repelling him with disappointment. One such individual whom Emerson did meet in Europe, and whose books would have a much greater impact on the eventual path of his orbit than his physical presence, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though no surviving letter recalls his visit to Coleridge in August 1833, the importance of the Englishman’s work is captured in two slightly later missives.5 The first of these is to Emerson’s younger brother, Edward, and was written in December 1833, shortly after the former’s return to New England. The reference here is slightly oblique, as it is to an extended review by Frederic Henry Hedge of Coleridge’s major prose works, in which Hedge outlines Coleridge’s ‘first’ philosophy and demonstrates its connections to the German Idealist tradition of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Gottlieb Fichte. This essay, which had just appeared in the Christian Examiner, is described by Emerson as ‘a living leaping Logos’ (LRWE, 1: 402). The second reference, meanwhile, also from a letter to Edward, in May 1834, is more important and merits quoting at some length: Philosophy affirms that the outward world is only phenomenal & the whole concern of dinners of tailors of gigs of balls whereof men take such account is a quite relative & temporary one – an intricate dream – the exhalation of the present state of the Soul – wherein the Understanding works incessantly as if it were real but the eternal Reason when now & then he is allowed to speak declares it is an accident a smoke and nowise related to his permanent attributes. Now that I have used the words, let me ask you do you draw the distinction of Milton Coleridge and the Germans between Reason & Understanding. I think it a philosophy itself. [sic] & like all truth very practical . . . Reason is the highest faculty of the soul – what we mean often by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision. The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary. (LRWE, 1: 412) Significantly, much ink has been spilled on Emerson’s utilization of Coleridge’s distinction between an intuitive Reason, which gives direct access to eternal truth, and

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the mechanical Understanding, which defers to custom and shapes truths accordingly.6 Suffice to say here that Emerson would certainly have found this difference drawn at length in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825), which he had been recently re-perusing; while James Marsh, in his introduction to the 1829 American edition of the book, makes the connection to Milton explicit.7 Despite the association with the German thinkers, especially Immanuel Kant, made by Coleridge himself, on the other hand, his determination in Aids to Reflection was to give priority to the English spiritual tradition, especially the seventeenth-century divine Robert Leighton.8 What really matters for Emerson, though, is that after his spiritual wanderings and doubts, the power of unmediated perception and insight here given to Reason allows him to reject traditions that disagree with his own intuitions (thus confirming what he had written to his aunt the previous year); and also directly reconnects his soul to what is permanent. Consequently, the myriad phenomena of nature which had attracted and disappointed him in the late 1820s can be reinterpreted as the substance of his own vision. Yet it should also be recalled that this letter to his brother does not merely lay out the grounds of a philosophy of Transcendentalism that Emerson would make every effort to hold to, but that it was written to Edward when he was convalescing in Puerto Rico from the tuberculosis that would kill him less than five months later. It is, then, in its epistolary context, a letter of consolation, asking his brother to dwell on the insignificance of the worldly or phenomenal life that is giving him so much pain and recognize something deeper and more permanent. It is a preacher’s soothing epistle as much as it is a brother’s philosophical dispatch. Emerson notes, for example, just before embarking on his outline of Reason and Understanding, that he has ‘reconciled himself to [his] insignificance’ while ‘Hope’ remains his greatest ‘virtue’ (LRWE, 1: 412). Indeed, Emerson was more than once to see his own life in terms of this philosophical dualism. Toward the end of the year in which Edward died, Emerson began courting his second wife, Lydia Jackson, and his proposal letter from January 1835 begins as follows: ‘I obey my highest impulses in declaring to you the deep and tender respect with which you have inspired me. I am rejoiced in my Reason as well as in my Understanding by finding an earnest and noble mind whose presence quickens in mine all that is good and shames and repels from me my own weakness’ (LRWE, 7: 232). Though he writes to Lydia just a week later that he ‘is not a metaphysical lover,’ he is no doubt content to reconcile the more spiritual ends of his Reason, and the earthly pleasures of his Understanding, marked as it is by the senses (the ‘attractions by which our good foster mother Nature draws us together’) (LRWE, 1: 434). But he also seeks – and this becomes increasingly important if the whole thing is not to turn into mere Romantic narcissism – a loss of self in his love: ‘I find a sort of grandeur in the modulated expressions of a love in which the individuals, & what might seem even reasonable personal expectations, are steadily postponed to a regard for truth & the universal love’ (LRWE, 1: 434). So there is, as ever, something of a tension between the attractions of the senses, which create a connection between individuals, and the reaching after a more sustaining association at the expense of individuality and, indeed, of sensuality, which Reason abrogates. It will not come as a surprise, then, that, as we shall see later, Emerson’s relationship with Lydia becomes at times a strained one. What is at stake in his marriage is analogous to what is at stake in his relationship with nature: the same high expectations; the same efforts to balance self

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and other; the same all but inevitable setbacks. That is why Emerson is able to use equivalent metaphysical figures for both. It is in these years leading up to the publication of his first great work Nature, in 1836, that Emerson begins to feel ‘at home’ in nature explicitly through a loss of the self which is at the same time a powerful assertion of presence. In Nature he records this famous epiphany: ‘Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me’ (CW, 1: 10). Yet ten years before, he had failed to identify with his aunt’s ‘intoxication’ in the ‘Paradise air.’ Then the pleasures of nature had ‘passed rapidly away’ and were merely aesthetic, animal, and sensual: all he could find in nature was ‘his entire personal identity.’ Now the ‘blithe’ air bathes his head and lifts him up to the infinite; and the phenomenal self that holds him to earth, his ‘mean egotism,’ vanishes. And though he is still very much present in this latter vision (the passage contains one ‘my,’ one ‘me,’ and three ‘I’s), the experience is crucially no longer individual except in the sense that he is one with the One, the Universal Being. This is what an individual comes to be for Emerson, namely a person who is wholly obedient to the larger will of the universe, now conceived of as benevolent ‘nature.’ Emerson’s epiphanic individuality is here exemplary. He has, by escaping the ‘mean’ customs of the everyday self, passed into that formerly coveted ‘other world’ of his aunt Mary, and become ‘perfectly at home in the rock & in the wood’; while finding in the ‘transparent eyeball,’ an image of simultaneous absence and presence, just the right symbol to render that experience. Once Emerson had determined that at least one of his roles would be to define and defend individuality, he began to take a public stand in works such as Nature, ‘The American Scholar,’ ‘The Divinity School Address’ (1838), and ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841). And at the same time he would use his correspondence to promote and encourage any such individuality that he found, or that found him. This occurred locally, through his constant defense of the eccentricities of the educationalist Amos Bronson Alcott, whom even Emerson called ‘a tedious archangel,’ or the poet Jones Very, who considered himself, at times, to be the second coming.9 It happened professionally, in the many letters to Margaret Fuller regarding their literary organ The Dial, or to Thomas Carlyle regarding the American publication of his works, beginning with Sartor Resartus (1833–4), which was published in full in Boston before it was available as a single volume in Britain.10 Emerson’s conception of individuality was also pursued more privately, in, for example, his intimate letters to the ardent and able Caroline Sturgis.11 It erupted more famously when Walt Whitman published Emerson’s letter of congratulation on the achievement of Leaves of Grass (1855) – ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career’ – in the New York Tribune in 1856 (LRWE, 8: 446).12 In any case, wherever Emerson thought he detected the notes of a unique character he would use his pen to encourage and enable; notwithstanding the fact that each individual disappointed him in the end.13 Alcott makes a particularly interesting case study in Emerson’s efforts to support the idiosyncratic individuals of his time. In the mid-1830s Alcott ran a school in Boston with Elizabeth Peabody (whose sister Sophia later married Nathaniel Hawthorne) on what would then have been considered original lines. The focus was on interaction rather than rote learning and Alcott was genuinely interested in all

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that his young pupils, both boys and girls, had to say. In 1836 he published a book, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, that was a record of certain aspects of his teaching experience along with accounts of his method. Conversations was widely criticized in the press (where it was noticed) and so, in the spring of 1837, Emerson used his pen to offer a defense. To the editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser he wrote that: ‘Mr. Alcott’s plan & practice are so novel, that he encounters constant opposition & has very few friends, I believe, in the city, except his immediate patrons. [He is] a man of singular intellectual power & born to teach men, if not to teach children’ (LRWE, 2: 61). Emerson’s support for Alcott is predicated on Alcott’s novelty, the opposition he faces, his lack of local support; all of which would suggest that he is kicking against the traditions that Emerson abhors. Alcott is also ‘singular’ and a ‘born’ teacher, even if the last clause undoes much of the good work of the previous lines’ efforts to elicit sympathy – especially if Alcott’s aspiration was to be a schoolteacher. The trouble was that – as much as Emerson admired Alcott as an experimenter who would unsettle those who read him – he never really did like Alcott’s writing. Indeed, a year earlier Emerson had written to Alcott offering editorial advice on another of Alcott’s books (probably the unpublished Psyche), which he again praised for being ‘original, and vital in all its parts,’ and containing ‘many beautiful & some splendid passages’ (LRWE, 2: 4). But it was also a manuscript with many ‘defects’: it ‘grapples with an Idea which it does not subdue’; is ‘too much a book of one idea’; is ‘sometimes pedantic’ with ‘many verbal inaccuracies’ and is written in an ‘antiquated form’ (LRWE, 2: 4–5). His recommendation, which he puts as tactfully as he can, is ‘condensation’; that is, the omission of a good part of it (LRWE, 2: 5). A book which has only one idea, and that an idea that it is unable to subdue, is a problematic book. Later, in June of 1838, Emerson would look at the manuscript again, and one of the opening comments of his letter to Alcott on this occasion is: ‘If the book were mine I would on no account print it; and the book being yours, I do not know but it behoves you to print it in defiance of the critics’ (LRWE, 1: 138). The rest of the letter then rehearses and amplifies the comments from two years earlier, but, importantly, finishes by withdrawing from the field: ‘I frankly tell you that I doubt entirely my jurisdiction in the matter’ (LRWE, 1: 141). After which Emerson also, characteristically, offers to help Alcott to publish if he so wishes. What Emerson is interested in is not the book itself but the fact of its difference; not whether Alcott is successful, but whether he is original. It is, then, his individuality which brings Emerson out to battle on his behalf – and to be watchful about battling against him. As he had written to Fuller in 1837, shortly after Alcott had been staying with his family: ‘Mr. Alcott – for I must resume that novel topic – is the great man & Miss Fuller has not yet seen him. His book does him no justice and I do not like to see it . . . But he has more of the godlike than any man I have seen and his presence rebukes & threaten & raises. He is a teacher’ (LRWE, 1: 76). Note here that Alcott is not a great man, but the great man. He occupies the space that Emerson holds open for the fully realized individual: he ‘rebukes,’ ‘threatens,’ and ‘raises’; and as such, Emerson defends him as the ‘teacher’ that he had looked for in Europe, and failed to find – the figure who best represents individuality, and also best represents what Emerson looked for, and hoped to provide, in his idea of correspondence. Another correspondent who answered to Emerson’s ideal was Caroline Sturgis. When Emerson first encountered Sturgis in March 1837, he wrote in his journal that

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she lacked the ‘self-distrust’ that plagues so many people of his acquaintance, that ‘fear to launch away into the deep which they might freely and safely do.’14 As Kathleen Lawrence notes, self-trust was an early Emersonian attempt to name what he would later more famously call ‘self-reliance,’ and thus he immediately identifies Sturgis here as a representative of the individual.15 Though they exchanged a few cordial letters in the interim, with Sturgis asking Emerson for copies of lectures she had attended, they did not entertain a full-blown correspondence until a few years later.16 Yet even Emerson’s early letters to Sturgis have an atypical air of unguarded lyricism and suggestiveness. An example from December 1839 begins as follows, and without salutation: And so Caroline has no question to ask me but ‘where is my St Augustine?’ I hoped out of the midsummer silence of those island woods, a torrent of questions would flow at last, or, better still, melodious lessons of a higher right that heal whilst they accuse us. Why should she be the spoiled child of of [sic] every Muse & spiritual Potentate, if not to sway & mend us when she leaves the Oaks? – but I please myself with the belief that the syllables will yet come to me which the spirits said to you, & when it is my good fortune to meet you in that thought destroying air of the town, I shall, by virtue of the words, again see leaves twinkle & hear the murmur of my woods (LRWE, 7: 363). The presence of sibilance and consonance in his prose is extremely unusual for Emerson, whose letters, as we have seen, tend to censure, to stiffness, to metaphysics, or to whimsy, but rarely to lyricism. It is as though Emerson wants to recreate the satisfying feel of a conversation but recently paused, and is hiding his disappointment that Sturgis may not quite being playing that game, asking only after a book rather than disclosing something deeper. The woman he describes, rather like his aunt Mary, seems to have direct access to the ‘Muse’ and the ‘spiritual Potentates’ that dwell amongst the leaves of nature. Emerson desires to share her access, through intuition, to reason itself. Thus he writes to Sturgis in her ‘island woods’ (probably Naushon, off the southern Massachusetts coast), asking for what he claims to have found in Alcott: ‘lessons of a higher right that heal whilst they accuse us.’ That is, he wants to be tested and challenged, and to grow fuller thereby. Emerson received Sturgis’s ‘syllables’ later that summer in a series of poems she asked him to consider for publication in The Dial. Of these he writes to her: ‘I love their courage, their perception, their rude strength, their magnanimity, their religion. It is not the poetry of parlours but of belief & plain dealing’ (LRWE, 7: 396). The poems’ virtues, then, are not in their finish, or their relationship to a particular accepted poetic tradition, but in their ability to represent her independence. As he continues: ‘Its rhythm and melody are very imperfect but it has sincerity, and I read it with the respect which character constrains. It does not seem to say “What fine verses we are!” but rather “who wrote us sets no value on us; it was as easy as breathing; these are not made flowers but plants; not a cup of water but a spring” ’ (LRWE, 7: 396). These comments clearly prefigure the broadly Romantic counter-tradition of poetic form that Emerson will most fully articulate in his 1844 essay ‘The Poet,’ where he states that: ‘It is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, – a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own’ (CW, 3: 6). In at least two ways, then, this letter to Sturgis foreshadows some of Emerson’s most famous ideas: the requirement for sincere content to create its own form; and the consequent organic naturalness of the verses themselves.

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In the summer of 1840, though, their correspondence becomes more complex. Over the previous few years Emerson’s relationship to his second wife, Lydia, as recorded in his letters to her, appears to show some strain. In 1838, for example, Lydia (whom Emerson addresses as Lidian in his letters) goes to stay with her family in Plymouth. Emerson first writes to her on the 16th February, including little comments from their infant son Waldo: ‘ “Mamma gor” interrupts Waldo who is conveying my handkerchief from chair to chair. “Mamma gor,” for, Mamma all gone!’ (LRWE, 2: 110). And similarly, on the 17th: ‘Waldo begins to be more pathetical & energetical in “Der mamma” & looks at doors, & greets me with unusual goodwill as if I could carry him to Mamma’ (LRWE, 2: 112). The next day’s letter, meanwhile, keeps it light, but with a chiding edge: ‘Not a word from the mute Lidian yet and this is my fourth letter. Who is a naughty girl?’ (LRWE, 2: 113). The next couple of letters are newsy, but also contain more of Waldo’s endeavors and baby talk, as if to emphasize her absence. But on the 27th he writes tersely: ‘I am weary of living alone & hope you have ere this overcome some of your implacable aversion to Concord & will consent to return to yours affectionately, R. W. E.’ (LRWE, 2: 118). From the outset of their relationship the choice to set up home in Concord rather than Plymouth had been a problem. Emerson had insisted on the former. Not only did he have family roots there, but he also saw it as an ideal place to gather together artists and thinkers, as it indeed proved to be. Lydia, though, would often spend time in Plymouth, and this seed of dissension between them was never weeded out, becoming part of what gradually drew them apart. As Kathleen Lawrence puts it, ‘[a]lthough Emerson maintained his affection and respect for Lidian, she is his “Asia,” as distant and forbidding as that remote continent’; and as Robert Richardson confirms, ‘it was not too much to say that in the early 1840s Emerson was living emotionally, though not physically, in what would now be called an open marriage.’17 It was into this context that the young Caroline Sturgis was thrown. Emerson required an emotional outlet, but was not able or willing to release himself from the proprieties of marriage. As such, and despite his epistolary fervor, Emerson was determined to keep the relationship Platonic: You & I should only be friends on imperial terms. We are both too proud to be fond & too true to feign[.] But I dare not engage my peace so far as to make you necessary to me as I can easily see any establishment of habitual intercourse would do, when the first news I may hear is that you have found in some heaven foreign to me your mate, & my beautiful castle is exploded to shivers . . . But that which set me on such writing was the talk with Margaret F[uller] last Friday who taxed me on both your parts with a certain inhospitality of soul inasmuch as you were both willing to be my friends in the full & sacred sense & I remained apart critical, & after many interviews still a stranger. I count & weigh, but do not love. – I heard the charge, I own, with great humility & sadness. I confess to the fact of cold & imperfect intercourse, but to the impeachment of my will. [sic] and not to the deficiency of my affection. If I count and weigh, I love also. (LRWE, 2: 325) Here Emerson’s exuberance is restrained, his syntax convoluted, and the lyricism quieted to enable something like clarity to emerge, though his punctuation lapses more than usual. Just what kind of friendship in ‘the full & sacred sense’ between a married

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man and a younger woman is appropriate is obviously at stake. Fuller and Sturgis have pushed for something warmer, though there is no reason to believe this to be sexual, and they chide Emerson for his icy distance. Emerson reflects and accepts the charge to the extent that it is part of a willed distance, but also claims to love in addition to acknowledging the accusation of mechanical acts of counting and weighing. His ‘love,’ then, is necessarily aloof yet commanding – ‘imperial,’ as he puts it. But even so, they can have no hold on each other, as Sturgis could easily be lost to one who could hold her and Emerson’s ‘beautiful castle’ would be exploded. It would appear that Sturgis took Emerson at his word and they recommenced their relationship on new and safer terms. He calls her, in his next letter, ‘dear sister’ and ‘dear child’ and claims now, quite differently from the letter of just a few days earlier, that ‘you shall not give me so great a joy as by the finding for yourself a love which shall make mine show cold and feeble,’ before adding that his love ‘certainly is not cold and feeble’ (LRWE, 2: 326–7). Indeed, this was borne out by a subsequent missive, which is written on this new footing, yet maintains the tone of the sublimated love letter: ‘Let us often send each other greetings, my dear sister, from bark to bark, whilst the Blessed Spirit suffers us as now to sail in convoy separated by only a narrow strip of sea – if it only be an All-hail that Love & Faith exist’ (LRWE, 7: 439). The turning of love toward faith here strips it of its sexual potential. But Emerson, still negotiating these boundaries, begins a letter in June of 1841 with ‘[y]ou are my summer harp, and in these amber days let me hear the notes,’ before continuing provocatively, ‘I am glad if you were contented for an hour at Concord, O insatiate maiden’ (LRWE, 7: 457). Still, such mock-erotic language should not deflect us from what really draws Emerson to Sturgis: the fact that together ‘they have never declined a jot from the truth’ and can live ‘on divine terms,’ and that she is someone to whom he can write almost unguardedly, intuition to intuition, with the protection of the impossibility of their having a deeper relationship (as they are ‘brother’ and ‘sister’) giving license to his words (LRWE, 7: 457, 439). It is also to Caroline Sturgis that Emerson sends his most touching and ultimately troubling letter, just a few days after the death from scarlatina of his five-year-old son, Waldo, in January 1842: ‘Alas! I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve; that this fact takes not more deep hold than other facts, is as dreamlike as they; a lambent flame that will not burn playing on the surface of my river. Must every experience – those that promised to be dearest & most penetrative, – only kiss my cheek like the wind & pass away?’ (LRWE, 7: 485). In this desperate letter Waldo’s death is slotting into a tragic, but philosophically coherent, pattern. Pain is only improving if it can be turned to some purpose; not toward the self, but toward the general. Grief’s lack of purchase is metaphysically true for Emerson, but only of worth as an example of Reason’s demanding conditions. When his brother Edward was ill in Puerto Rico he accounted for the thinness of the phenomenal life of the Understanding by calling it a ‘dream’; and here too Waldo’s death is ‘dreamlike.’ In a letter to his aunt Mary, written at the same time, he notes: ‘I can say nothing to you. My darling & the world’s wonderful child, for never in my own or another family have I seen anything comparable, has fled out of my arms like a dream. He adorned the world for me like a morning star, and every particular of my daily life. I slept in his neighbourhood & woke to remember him’ (LRWE, 3: 7). Again then, Waldo is figured as a dream, but this time it is his life that flees, not his death. Both aspects of Waldo’s existence, life and death, were, as Emerson represents

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them in this most difficult of times, merely phenomenal: a flame that does not burn, an experience which fails to penetrate, a loving kiss that passes away. Even though, as Emerson describes it here, every ‘particular’ of his ‘daily life’ was shaped by Waldo, he was, in Transcendentalist terms, never there. Or, rather, that aspect of him that lived and died left behind only an impression; for what falls away at death, and what expresses itself as life, is the part that Emerson wants to reduce to nothing. What Emerson loved in Waldo, and what sustains his cosmic optimism, was his ability to symbolize Universal Being. The letter to Sturgis goes on: ‘Calm & wise calmly & wisely happy the beautiful Creative Power looked out from him & spoke of anything but Chaos & interruption, signified strength & unity & gladdening, all-uniting life’ (LRWE, 7: 485). Waldo, in short, represented that individuality which, for Emerson, is the expression of the whole in each particular. A month after Waldo’s death Emerson explains this to Sturgis once more: ‘He as much as any, perhaps he more than any of my company of friends (all of whom you know) gave a licence to my habitual fancy of magnifying each particular in my modest round of experiences to stand for a general & mundane fact’ (LRWE, 7: 491). To some this may suggest the very coldness that Sturgis and Fuller had held Emerson to account for two years earlier; but there is no absence of love or pain in Emerson’s response to the death of his son. Rather there is the move that marks all his work, including his correspondence, from the experience of individual things and events to the transcendent vision of the whole.

Notes 1. See Cole, Mary Moody Emerson. 2. For a more detailed account of the importance of Emerson’s correspondence with his aunt see Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism, 3–23, 66–9. 3. Here, as elsewhere, I have expanded Emerson’s use of obsolete spellings such as ‘ye’ and ‘yt’ to ‘the’ and ‘that.’ 4. See Cromphout, Emerson’s Modernity, 67–72. 5. Instead this visit is recounted in his 1856 book English Traits. See Emerson, Collected Works, 5: 5–7. 6. For an account of this discussion see Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism, 35–9, 41–7, and passim. 7. See Marsh, ‘Preliminary Essay,’ lix. 8. See Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 153. 9. Emerson, Emerson in his Journals, 249. On Emerson’s relationship with and epistolary defenses of Alcott and Very see Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 98–120, and Richardson, Emerson, 301–6, respectively. 10. See Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 52–82, and Constantinesco, ‘Portraits à la Lettre.’ 11. See Lawrence, ‘ “The Dry-lighted Soul” Ignites.’ Even here, though, Emerson’s letters to Sturgis were sometimes shared among other members of his circle. See Decker, Epistolary Practices, 258. 12. See Montiero, ‘Fire and Smoke.’ 13. For a discussion of how Emerson used his correspondence to both foster friends and keep them at bay see Constantinesco, ‘Discordant Correspondence.’ 14. Emerson, Selected Journals, 506. 15. See Lawrence, ‘ “The Dry-lighted Soul” Ignites,’ 43. 16. See, for example, Emerson, Letters, 7: 299–300. 17. Lawrence, ‘ “The Dry-lighted Soul” Ignites,’ 55; Richardson, Emerson, 429.

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Works Cited Cole, P. (1998), Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism, New York: Oxford University Press. Coleridge, S. T. [1825] (2006), Aids to Reflection, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Constantinesco, T. (2007), ‘Portraits à la Lettre: La Correspondance d’Emerson et de Carlyle,’ Revue d’Études Américaines, 2: 16–31. Constantinesco, T. (2008), ‘Discordant Correspondence in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Friendship”,’ The New England Quarterly, 81: 218–51. Cromphout, G. V. (1990), Emerson’s Modernity and the Example of Goethe, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Emerson, M. M. (1993), The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, ed. N. C. Simmons, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Cited parenthetically as SLMME. Emerson, R. W. (1939–95), The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. R. L. Rusk and E. W. Tilton, New York: Columbia University Press. Cited parenthetically as LRWE. Emerson, R. W. (1971–2013), The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. A. R. Ferguson, D. E. Wilson, R. Bosco et al., Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Cited parenthetically as CW. Emerson, R. W. (1992), Emerson in his Journals, ed. J. Porte, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Emerson, R. W. (2010), Selected Journals, 1820–1842, ed. L. Rosenwald, New York: Library of America. Greenham, D. (2012), Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism, London: Palgrave. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, K. (2005), ‘ “The Dry-lighted Soul” Ignites: Emerson and His Soul-Mate Caroline Sturgis as Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts,’ Harvard Library Bulletin, 16: 37–67. Marsh, J. [1829] (2006), ‘Preliminary Remarks,’ in S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, xxiii–lxxvi. Montiero, G. (1985), ‘Fire and Smoke: Emerson’s Letters to Whitman,’ Modern Language Studies, 15: 3–8. Richardson, R. D., Jr. (1997), Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sacks, K. (2003), Understanding Emerson: ‘The American Scholar’ and his Struggle for SelfReliance, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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21 ‘THIS EPISTOLARY MEDIUM’: FRIENDSHIP AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN MARGARET FULLER’S PRIVATE LETTERS Magdalena Nerio

To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Friendship’ (1841)1 Margaret Fuller is one of the most colorful and passionate letter-writers of the early nineteenth century – a bright light disseminating cultural pleasures and the virtues of reform before a rapt New England coterie and a diffuse transatlantic readership. An extension of her famous Boston ‘Conversations’ (a series of classes for women which she ran between 1839 and 1844), Fuller’s private letters promote an erudite civil discourse punctuated and enriched by impassioned, critical ruminations on life and art; on life as it is lived in the passing moment and on the corresponding formal properties of the art of epistolarity – indeterminacy, immediacy, and the vigor of the letterwriter herself.2 Confronting and challenging the conventions of mere commonplace nineteenth-century letter-writing, Fuller’s correspondence self-consciously reflects on matters of form, resisting polite exchanges and empty platitudes in favor of bold and unflinching appraisals of self and world. In the act of cultivating and fine-tuning the prophetic voice that would become the hallmark of her New York and European journalism, the private letters facilitate Fuller’s entry into public life as an exceptionally exacting critic of nineteenth-century American institutions and morals. Most assuredly, it was in her capacity as a private correspondent that Fuller initially began to align her pen with the stance that would cement and define her literary reputation: the voice of feminine moral outrage. The course of laying claim to a feminine, public voice never did run smooth, however, and Fuller’s confessional letters highlight how vulnerable she remained throughout her writing life to anguished attacks of paralysis and self-doubt. Eschewing the formal overtures of politesse – talk of the weather, New England gossip, inquiries as to the health of the addressee and her family – Fuller claimed that she loathed the banal and routine act of composing letters quickly and under pressure, out of the sheer necessity of relaying news. She insisted that she could do very little with the 332

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medium in this vein, declaring to Caroline Sturgis in 1839 that ‘I do not like to do . . . hurried things,’ and that her best self would be reserved for the intimately conducted ‘personal interview.’3 Importantly, this frustration, however seemingly disingenuous, alerts us to a common feature of Fuller’s private correspondence as a whole: the tension between the form of the letter and the voice of the woman writer, the former continually checking the passionate impulses of the latter through the exertion of social pressure. Thus Fuller protested disdainfully to the Germanist scholar and Unitarian minister Frederic Henry Hedge in January 1840 that ‘I have little taste . . . for this epistolary medium. It does not refresh like conversation, it does not stimulate, like good serious study or writing.’4 Thus, in the company of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the educational reformer Bronson Alcott (who would employ Fuller at the Temple School in Boston, though he could not pay her wages), Fuller privileged the inspired, unfettered qualities of conversation as a pedagogical tool.5 Above all, she prized the democratic virtues of ‘impassioned earnestness’ and ‘eloquence’ associated with extemporaneous public speaking, or ‘that power of forcing the vital currents of thousands of human hearts into one current by the constraining power of that most delicate instrument the voice.’6 Her self-deprecating protestations notwithstanding, she did in fact regard letterwriting as an extension of the learned and lively conversation that endeared her to Emerson, Alcott, and the reform-minded Bostonian women who attended her classes on culture and society. Delighting in the convivial atmosphere of the Conversations, Fuller found her Boston classes not only ‘very pleasant’ but also an unanticipated intellectual pleasure, for ‘[t]here I have real society, which I have not looked for out of the pale of intimacy. We have time, patience, mutual reverence and fearlessness eno’ to get at one another’s thoughts.’7 It is this same dynamic we can then see at work in Fuller’s intimate correspondence: the bold attempt to search, and, in so doing, lay claim to another mind. Seizing on the experimental and pliable features of the letter form as a textual space for rigorous, uncensored instruction, Fuller’s private letters everywhere display the voice of the discerning critic and teacher, urging friends and loved ones to become their best selves – to read and write their way toward a keen sense of energizing and ennobling civic duty that is suggested in moments of intense private study and mediation. Her most interesting letters are thus enriched by the confessional fervor of what Samuel Richardson called writing ‘to the moment,’ as she speaks candidly to friends inclined to reserve judgment in order to sympathize and encourage.8 Significantly, it is in the pages of her private letters that Fuller lays bare her ‘dreams and hopes as to the education of women,’ the cause for which she is perhaps best remembered and duly revered.9 Though not all members of what Fuller dubbed the ‘Martineau class’ (after the English abolitionist and writer Harriet Martineau), American women desirous of educational refinement would preoccupy Fuller throughout her career as an educator and writer, as she grew more and more convinced of the need for a class of reformers to infuse American women’s learning with a decided civic consciousness.10 Novel in conception and design, Fuller’s famous Conversations set about addressing the questions ‘what were we born to do? How shall we do it? which so few ever propose to themselves ’till their best years are gone by.’11 In form and content, Fuller’s letters seek to address these same fundamental questions, highlighting the keen sense of public duty that could be nurtured in its early stages by a devoted circle of friends, pupils, and other loyal correspondents.

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Because the young Fuller especially is wont to stress her discomfort with the limitations of epistolarity, a hasty perusal of her private letters may lead us to fall back on the standard clichés about Fuller the woman: a brilliant conversationalist and educator but a colloquial and clumsy writer best remembered for the content (or activist message) of her polemic rather than its innovative form. This reading certainly has a long tradition behind it. After all, it was none other than Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his biographer son Julian, who gave rise to this enduring and misleading myth. In publicizing and endorsing his father’s characterization of Fuller as a monstrous perversion of her sex, lacking ‘the charm of womanhood,’ Julian’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1885) and its enthusiasts even went so far as to second the elder Hawthorne’s notion that ‘Providence’ had been ‘kind in putting her and her clownish husband on board that fated ship’ that wrecked off the coast of Fire Island in July 1850, causing her untimely death.12 Concurring with Nathaniel’s notion that Fuller was a tedious ‘humbug’ who went to great lengths to refine away her ‘coarse’ exterior, the American press had by the later decades of the nineteenth century grown to accept and widely disseminate Hawthorne’s stinging dismissal of Fuller’s writing talent as equally strained and paltry.13 Thus Fuller was accorded by Victorian journalists ‘a gift to talk, not to write,’ for ‘in all that she has written there is not a line that will live.’14 These sweeping pronouncements, which negate the reverence Transcendentalist circles accorded the art of conversation, effectively conflate the extemporaneous quality of the bulk of Fuller’s prose with haste and formlessness.15 Countering the enduring critical tendency to mythologize and caricature Fuller for good or ill, however, a fresh engagement with her letters situates Fuller the woman writer squarely in the New England literary context in which she moved, and offers a sustained perspective on her extensive, private preoccupation with literary form – in particular, her interest in the more flexible and nuanced features of the prophetic speaking voice as a key to fostering critical dialogue on social reform issues. Contextualized appropriately, the private correspondence adds an important layer of complexity to Fuller’s enduring literary achievement, showcasing her talent for argument, her intimate knowledge of the contours and guises of love, and her vivid impressions of the fabric of our emotional lives – impressions that remain to this day more universal than Victorian. What is more, Fuller’s letters throb with the animated pulse of reformist and literary activity in Boston, Providence, and New York in the 1840s, reminding us how this formidable woman defied the stereotype of the Victorian spinster-recluse à la Elizabeth Barrett Browning or the Brontës. Indeed, Fuller’s letters give us intimate access to the Victorian woman of letters as activist, editor, and translator at her most alive in the world, for it is in these pages that she assumes a number of key and life-altering roles: the devoted daughter; the strict and solicitous older sister; the severe editor cutting the young Thoreau to shreds; even the spurned lover. Moreover, the roles Fuller was forced to assume have much to tell us about the strictures and decided advantages of middle-class women’s lives in early-nineteenthcentury America. And equally, if we should decide to approach her letters primarily as historical curiosities, we would find many colorful anecdotes to enhance our understanding of everyday life among nineteenth-century New England’s intellectual class. Resisting the tendency among Transcendentalist scholars and biographers to privilege Fuller’s life at the expense of her literary achievement, in short, this chapter points to Fuller’s private correspondence as further evidence of the complexity of her literary experiments with the voice of nineteenth-century woman in civil society.

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Fuller’s chief correspondents of the 1830s and 40s include Ralph Waldo Emerson (‘Dearest Waldo’); the well-to-do author of children’s books Caroline Tappan (née Sturgis); the Harvard-educated Unitarian minister, and editor of The Western Messenger, James Freeman Clarke; and the socialist and Anglophile William Henry Channing, another product of the Harvard Divinity School.16 These friends served primarily as sounding boards for Fuller’s regrettably stifled literary ambitions, especially the monumental, unpublished Life of Goethe she dreamed of writing and around which she structured her voluminous reading into the life and works of the legendary German whom she introduced to Emerson. Writing to Clarke in August 1832 she professed to feeling ‘enchanted’ with the incomparable Goethe, a poet who ‘comprehends every feeling I ever had.’17 Reading Goethe, she added, was an exhilarating, even terrifying experience. While immersed in his complex oeuvre, she felt herself coming dangerously close to losing her ‘personal identity,’ so completely did she see her own private ruminations and theories echoed in the famous pages of ‘the great sage.’18 As every passionate reader and aspiring writer will understand, Fuller’s intense admiration for Goethe’s universality – as expressed particularly in his lyric poetry – also proved the occasion for humble reflections on her own talent. Describing her self-imposed immersion in German belles lettres in the same letter to Clarke, Fuller claimed to ‘preserve in reading the great sage some part of every day, hoping the time will come when I shall not feel so overwhelmed and leave off this habit of wishing to grasp the whole and be content to learn a little every-day as becomes so mere a pupil.’19 Here as elsewhere in the correspondence, then, Fuller’s eagerness to record her rigorous and independently designed program of study reflects her view of self-cultivation as the only appropriate use of one’s leisure and, even more importantly, a vital preparatory tool in the making of any public intellectual worthy of the name. While her reading of Goethe and her long, passionate letters to friends about him invigorated her intellectual program and inspired her teaching, however, her family life distressed and tormented her. Above all, as the private letters show, Margaret’s concern for the Fuller family, and anxieties with regard to access to money in the aftermath of her father’s death in 1835, distracted and paralyzed her – burdening a lively mind with the sorts of quotidian, familial concerns that were part and parcel of entering Woman’s Estate in early-nineteenth-century New England. With regret, she confessed her private pain in a letter to her mother on 18 November 1837, acknowledging that: ‘It is no longer in my power to write or study much. I cannot bear it and do not attempt it. Heaven . . . had no will that I should do any-thing great or beautiful. Yet I do not despair, daily I do a little and leave the result to a higher power.’20 Tasked with tutoring and mothering her younger siblings, she developed an anxious concern for them – a concern which, as Fuller indicated in a letter to her brother Arthur in December 1837, took its toll on her delicate state of health. She thus urged Arthur to prove himself worthy of her love and sacrifice through continual exertion in his studies, and by cultivating the virtues of ‘earnestness and forethought.’21 Fuller was also capable of remaining strong when confronted with her mother’s passivity and the miserliness of her uncle Abraham Fuller (the sole executor of her father’s estate): a distressing family dynamic that forced Margaret to intervene stridently on her mother’s behalf, urging the latter to remain steadfast in her duty as ‘guardian of the [younger] children,’ despite Abraham’s relentless ‘vulgar insults’ and repeated threats to cut off all financial support for the children’s education.22 As the

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impassioned defender of her timid mother and younger siblings, the private letters show us Fuller at her most formidable and argumentatively sound. As she told her mother on 5 September 1837: I cannot like you think that feelings of kindness, however narrow the mind of the writer, could induce [Abraham Fuller] to taunt you or . . . say things which he knows to be false. Do not suffer yourself to be puzzled or scared by such stuff. No Judge in the world will ever interfere with your management of the minor children unless we who are of age request it, as you are well aware we never shall.23 Despite her role as pillar of the family, however, a nagging sense of failure – a bitter resignation to the idea that she had been doomed by providential design to assume the role of the underachiever, a woman whose presence carried more force than the record of her achievements – is a recurring feature of Fuller’s correspondence. A moving and bittersweet narrative, Fuller’s letters record a talented young woman’s precarious trajectory: the movement from childhood joie de vivre – which in Fuller’s case expressed itself in terms of literary and epistolary precociousness, as her exacting father’s prodigy – to a resigned, adult acceptance of the pressures and perils of New England family life. Spread too thin among family members, pupils and friends, Fuller declared regretfully in March 1839 that ‘I can hardly be a real friend to any one . . . The claims upon me are now too many. I am always sacrificing myself . . . yet I can do very little for any one person.’24 By construing intellectual accomplishment as a relentless moral obligation, Fuller could seldom let a day go by without finding herself lacking, setting a high – perhaps impossible – bar for self-improvement. She might look forward to a lessening of her anxiety provided she could reasonably lay claim to having performed ‘some great or glorious deed or to have just finished some beautiful work the Apollo Belvedere for instance or Shakespeare’s Tempest and to pause this day and feel creation and one’s self a worthy part thereof.’25 But never content with the extent of her accomplishments, she felt acutely ‘sensible of the defects in my education,’ deeming herself ‘ignorant’ and ‘superficial.’26 Significantly, these perceived and exaggerated defects in her educational history were duly read by Fuller in characterological terms as pointed, morally-charged opportunities for expansive self-reinvention – a self-fashioning achieved through active reading, writing, reflection, and confessional correspondence. As Amanda Anderson explains, the Victorians’ tendency to fall back on characterological constructions and justifications of their world and, in due course, their most cherished undertakings, constitutes an earnest attempt to refashion in ethical terms the ‘disenchantments of modernity.’27 A woman of her time, Fuller’s frantic appeals to friends similarly invested in self-cultivation reflect the distinctively Victorian tendency to imbue intellectual undertakings with a high moral seriousness akin to the cultural aspirations favored by modern-day liberals. Indeed, as Daniel Malachuk has shown, we may trace the aims of ‘a perfectionist liberalism committed to the universal realization of objective moral goods’ directly back to Victorian advocates of exposure to culture as one route to human perfection.28 For her part, Fuller would return to the wonderfully adaptable letter form throughout her writing life, using an intimate mode of address to tug at the heartstrings of a mass, transatlantic readership in her work as the European correspondent for Horace

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Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Commenting on Anglo-American institutional reforms of the 1840s as well as in the context of the Italian Revolution of 1848 and the events immediately preceding it, Fuller insisted, throughout her dispatches to the Tribune, that the success of these democratic experiments depended above all else on the efforts of an elite mentor class, ‘a large corps of enlightened minds, well prepared to be the instructors, the elder brothers and guardians of the lower people . . . whose hearts burn to fulfill that noble office.’29 Thus the reverence for Goethe’s universality obsessively expressed in Fuller’s private letters – with an almost girlish enthusiasm – reminds us that the particular program of democratic self-culture discovered by the young woman reader and correspondent made fine distinctions among cultural forms, tempering her otherwise inclusive vision with a keen appreciation for what Matthew Arnold termed ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world.’30 In privileging the value of critical discernment as a key component of her democratic thought experiment, Fuller insisted on the political power that inheres in keen perception, in remaining meticulously attentive to the intricacies of the political, the social, and the moral as they impinge on our everyday lives. And what is more, the act of responding sensitively to art and literature, Fuller’s correspondence everywhere implies, is essential to the flourishing of a robust public sphere, for it is this responsiveness to beauty which molds political actors aware of difference, comfortable with choice and with a plurality of competing perspectives. The formal trappings of Fuller’s correspondence then elegantly capture the dilemma of the woman writer in search of a public voice. By forcing the letter-writer to speak concisely on matters of concern to her circle of select confidants – to make personal enthusiasms and inclinations palatable to a particular readership – the letter seems to exact a high price: the subordination of the authentic self to a highly cultivated and mannered epistolary persona. At the same time, though, a letter’s preoccupation with the social and with the moral intricacies of lived experience enables the rigorous and nuanced critique of manners, of cultural forms, and of the aesthetic aspirations of individuals that would become the stock-in-trade of Victorian critiques of the systemic. In the case of Fuller’s letters, the anxieties and the mundane tribulations of the woman writer are strictly tempered, forced to meet the demands of friendship halfway. In so doing, however, Fuller’s private letters probe, and provide illuminating perspective on, the usefulness of finely cultivated friendships in civic life. Fuller’s correspondence, accordingly, effects a literary sphere for true intimacy and the confessional, outpouring, spontaneous writing – writing ‘to the moment’ – it necessitates. Intimating her acute understanding of letter-writing as the medium best suited to investigating and testing the bonds of friendship, Fuller confessed to Caroline Sturgis in February 1839 that ‘I do not . . . respond to your letter in words, I do with my heart.’31 Dispensing with empty sentimental overtures, Fuller the correspondent assumes the role of educator, pupil and ideal-intimate, forcing friends and associates to engage with her on subjects as intricate and varied as religion, politics, philosophy, and literature, among other topics. Constructing herself as a singular friend and, as a result, a singular writer of letters, she maintained that ‘all of freedom that has fallen to my lot, is that of thought and unrestrained intercourse with my friends.’32 With these words, Fuller thus reimagines the strictures imposed on woman’s sphere, not in terms of constraint, but rather as a space for fresh engagement with the voice of the conscientious confidant; and, in so doing, she accords a public relevance to the dictates of private, moral scruple.

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These private reflections, Fuller’s correspondence intimates, mold private subjectivities, preparing friends to assume a public voice and a corresponding public function. She thus reminded Frederic Henry Hedge, on the apposite date of 4 July, that he might best serve his country by writing, thereby forcing his ‘opinions into collision with those generally received.’33 Continuing the logic of public service as moral duty, moreover, she declared: Nobody can be more sensible than myself that the pen is a much less agreeable instrument for communication than the voice, but all our wishes will not bring back the dear talking times of Greece and Rome. And believe me, you cannot live, you cannot be content without acting on other minds ‘it’s no [sic] possible.’34 Though sensible of the failures of the nineteenth-century public sphere to recreate the ancient civic virtues of an animated public discourse, print and letter-writing therefore remained for Fuller a necessary, compensatory gesture: an imperfect but useful means by which to shock and, in the best of outcomes, inspire ‘other minds.’ Though she felt duty bound in the act of composing them hurriedly, for example, Fuller’s private letters continue the conversation begun in public, reformist circles, creating a sphere for intimacy and dialogue among friends on a variety of interdependent aesthetic and activist subjects. With her characteristic lack of reserve, and her tendency to painful disclosures of self-doubt, depression, and anxiety, Fuller demanded no less than the hearts and minds of her correspondents. She did not mince words or spare feelings, forcing Emerson to point in October 1840 to a fundamental ‘difference in our constitution. We use a different rhetoric . . . It is as if we had been born & bred in different nations . . . I hear the words sometimes but remain a stranger to your state of mind.’35 Emerson’s bewilderment hints at the candor and warmth with which Fuller’s letters remain suffused – a candor which shied away from pleasantries and false reassurances in favor of critical, even uncomfortable, self-examination and the implied or direct insistence that her friends follow suit. As Emerson was no doubt aware, Fuller carefully selected her intimate circle as a refuge from the dismaying majority of ‘apparently ossified human beings’ whom she did not care to know, let alone strike up a correspondence with.36 Viewing her erudite coterie as incontrovertible evidence of her discernment, Fuller corresponded with the finest minds in Boston – most of whom she emphatically urged to adopt ever more rigorous programs of intellectual refinement. In assuming the role of a visionary connoisseur of hearts, Fuller’s epistolary persona speaks truth plainly and with a remarkably unpretentious grace. Impassioned, though always sincere (indeed, too sincere for Emerson’s liking), Fuller counseled her loved ones to ‘trust the prophecy of one who has as good a title as any Sybil to utter oracles to other hearts.’37 It is sympathetic discernment that enables Fuller to speak authoritatively – to counsel her nearest and dearest, presuming that they may trust in her superior wisdom as a feminine prophet of self-culture. Disseminating an epistolary rhetoric of connected hearts relaying truth spontaneously, Fuller’s letters effect a morally authoritative immediacy. A significant feature of Fuller’s correspondence as a whole, for example, is the urgency with which she instructs friends to write and study. Labeling herself the clumsy and inept ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme,’ Fuller urged James Freeman Clarke to complete her vision for ‘a Life of Goethe in 2 vols octo accompanied by criticism

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on his works – The vision swims often before mine own eyes, but I know that too many of them are swimming there of the kind and would gladly see this one realized by a friend – If I do it – there shall be less eloquence perhaps but more insight than a [Germaine] De Stael.’38 Always pointedly self-effacing with an eye toward spurring her friends to action, Fuller effectively fashions herself elsewhere into her own kind of De Stael for ‘dear New England.’39 Reflecting on her literary talents in April 1840, for instance, she has this to say to William Henry Channing: ‘Since I have had leisure to look at myself I find that, far from being a great original genius, I have not yet learned to think to any depth, and that the utmost I have done in life has been to form my character to a certain consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth.’40 The cultivation of refined taste is no inconsiderable feat, however, and it retains important implications for the theory of self-culture consistently evoked in Fuller’s correspondence. Acquiring discernment – becoming choosy in the selection of one’s friends, for example – is the essential first step in developing the kind of critical acumen with which to distinguish among the aesthetically pleasing and the aesthetically coarse and, in turn, among the politically sound and the politically precarious. Fuller’s role, then, as the sensitive reader, editor, and critic par excellence lends itself to her larger political critique of nineteenth-century America, particularly her innate aversion to ‘petty intellectualities, cant, and bloodless theory.’41 As her private letters reveal, Fuller felt it was her duty to transmit culture, with the understanding that it might do wonders for the beneficiaries of her explicit and carefully considered recommendations. Her gift of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) and Goethe’s Egmont (1788) to her problematic brother-in-law, William Ellery Channing, is one case in point. Acknowledging receipt of her gift prompted this frank admission from William: ‘I do not read now. I am chiefly engaged with doing nothing. I own to a large penchant for this species of occupation. It is a pleasant thing to do nothing.’42 Chiefly remembered for his erstwhile role as Thoreau’s walking companion, William is at least made to acknowledge and defend his laziness here, even if Margaret’s efforts to rouse him to take up some useful occupation ultimately proved ineffectual. ‘Goethe’s works,’ William adds, are ‘too heavy a task for an idle man . . . to search for his beauties, or hang over his in-fathomable sagacities [sic], like a fish-hawk over a shoal of mackerel.’43 But it is precisely this continual and intellectually taxing search for ‘beauties,’ whether ‘in-fathomable’ or profound, that Fuller demanded from herself and her talented friends, admirers, and pupils. Indeed, she found more eager and energetic recipients of her treasures outside the bosom of her immediate family in the likes of other noteworthy literary ladies such as Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lydia Maria Child, and Jane Carlyle. In their effusive and heartfelt letters to Margaret, her fellow bluestockings commended her exquisite literary taste, breadth of knowledge and, in her fellow reformer Child’s words, a prose style ‘full of touches of beauty . . . [and] original piquant sayings,’ which give the impression of a remarkable ‘stream’ of thought at once ‘abundant and beautiful.’44 Significantly, Fuller’s self-conscious engagement with the demands of her learned friends and fellow reformers informs the formal, stylistic features of her published prose, especially where she turns explicit attention to Victorian social reform questions from the vantage point of feminine moral outrage. In texts such as Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) and the New-York Tribune reports (1846–50), scenes

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of reading proliferate alongside sketches of sensitively imagined, highly engaged participant-readers – readers reminiscent of a James Freeman Clarke or a Caroline Sturgis. Woman thus evokes the figure of ‘a recluse of high powers’ immersed in serious contemplation of Héloïse’s love letters to her tutor Abelard.45 Delighting in the solitude that makes his study possible, the imagined recluse goes so far as to declare that Héloïse had surpassed her tutor ‘in soul and genius,’ just as he ‘curses the fate that cast his lot in another age from hers.’46 This sketch of the merry recluse is important for two reasons. First, because Fuller invests the solitary, passive pursuits of the scholar with an infectious energy and agency; and second, because the paradigm of masculine subjectivity suggested by the intellectually serious recluse makes a revisionist commentary on nineteenth-century gender relations, replacing a sexually-charged paternalism (Abelard) with the sensitive reader’s finely cultivated responses. Capable of immense powers of sympathetic identification with the medieval woman writer, the Victorian recluse ‘would have been to her a friend, such as Abelard never could. And this woman he could have loved and reverenced.’47 Here, as elsewhere in Woman and as throughout the private letters, paradigms for reading and responding sensitively to art suggest important paradigms for a real-world political engagement predicated on the virtues of sympathy and a refined aesthetic sensibility. Letters to Emerson in particular discuss their ambitious vision for their periodical venture The Dial, their rigorous editorial and critical standards for American literary culture, and their immersion in contemporary Anglo-American reformist writing, New England preaching and teaching, and eighteenth-century German literature, as well as their reverence for British Romanticism. Fuller’s critical appraisal of Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1840), for example, is a revealing index of her Romantic aesthetic philosophy: I do not look at Shelley’s journals &c for me, but for him[.] He inspires tenderness. I do not care whether I knew the thought before or not. I am interested to know what he thought . . . [T]he Defence of Poetry seems to me excellent[.] It seems to me not ‘stiff’ but dignified, and no otherwise ‘academical’ than as showing a high degree of culture. If there are many statements as good I do not know them.48 Here, as elsewhere in Fuller’s letters, the idea of reading sensitively suggests the universalizing, democratic charge of such an activity for The Dial’s editors, its readership, and, by implication, pluralistic, modern societies in general. In a world of competing values, in other words, the cultivation of ‘a high degree of culture’ hinges importantly on the right kind of critical recognition and discernment, with its capacity to facilitate what Shelley called ‘the moral improvement of man.’49 Such critical acumen and aesthetic responsiveness cannot depend exclusively on the value judgments of ‘academical’ snobs, and, Fuller’s words imply, must capture the full spectrum of human political emotion. Emerson’s priggish discomfort about ‘the difference in our constitution’ notwithstanding, Fuller’s letters reflect a sustained attempt to engage with an imagined ideal intimate immune to shock, unfazed by conventionally proscribed topics of conversation. Such a confidant not only would make an ideal friend but, even more importantly, encapsulated many of the essential characteristics of the ideal Prophet–Reformer envisioned by a number of leading Transcendentalists. As one anonymous handwritten

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fragment among Fuller’s papers pertaining to The Dial indicates, the imminent arrival of ‘a new Prophet’ was anticipated eagerly by this particular group of intellectuals and reformers, as they clamored variously – either in the pages of The Dial itself or in their letters and public orations – for a ‘new and more perfect religion,’ a philosophy attuned to the peculiarities of what they aptly labeled a ‘transition period.’50 Within this context, the art of epistolarity gave Fuller free rein to nurture and sustain a number of important friendships, all the while allowing her reformist vision of prophetic speaking as a woman’s particular public duty to flourish. And equally, Fuller’s most intimate and impetuous love letters constitute an extension (rather than an overt contradiction) of the passionate intensity that likewise fueled her intellectual pursuits. Ever the romantic, the self-described ‘lady of enthusiasm and taste’ cultivated a number of affairs of the heart that began innocently enough with the exchange of letters discussing art, literature, New England intellectual culture, and, by the 1840s, the vibrant New York literary and cultural scene.51 As the letters show, Fuller’s unshaken faith in the intelligence of the emotions undergirds her headstrong pursuit of a number of seemingly inappropriate love objects who did not seem to reciprocate the intensity of her regard, especially the married Emerson and the desultory philanderer James Nathan, a German businessman and adventurer she met around the time of publishing Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Nevertheless, Fuller’s correspondence makes explicit the energy and sustaining creativity of a woman in love, reminding us of the wonderful coherence of her romantic philosophy: to give all in art as in love. The most significant literary correspondence of her life, Fuller’s letters to Emerson took the form of the adoring pupil addressing her mentor, and, in tandem with this obsequious mode of address, she eagerly assumed the role of the passionate woman declaring her affection unapologetically. Constructing herself as the ideal recipient of his messages, Fuller exaggerated her claims to perfect kinship with the aims of Emerson’s 1838 Human Culture Lecture Series, protesting too much that the ‘being lives not who would have received from your lectures as much as I should.’52 Laying claim to a ‘divine’ self-cultivation and romantic sensibility, Fuller expressed her enthusiasm for Emerson’s intellectual gifts with a proprietary fondness: I hate every-thing that is reasonable just now, ‘wise limitations’ and all. I have behaved much too well for some time past; it has spoiled my peace. What grieves me too is to find or fear my theory a cheat – I cannot serve two masters, and I fear all the hope of being a worldling and a literary existence also must be resigned – Isolation is necessary to me as to others. Yet I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties’ as the technical phrase is except to myself. – But why do I write thus to you who like nothing but what is good i e [sic] cheerfulness and fortitude? It is partly because yours is an image of my oratory.53 Importantly, Fuller’s complaint captures the central conflict explored in her letters – self versus society – and points to the reconciliation seized on by the New England literary culture she embraced: the emphasis on a robust, essentially oral literary expression as exemplified by Emerson’s lectures. Her intense identification with Emerson’s vision points to the intellectual fusion between the two that, as Fuller’s subsequent letters reveal, flowered into the most compelling and long-lasting passion of her adult life. What she found in her relationship with Emerson could be nothing less than ‘true love,’ an unshakable bond nourished by intellectual communion, capable of reflecting

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back the best or ‘the true self, that particular emanation from God which was made to correspond with that which we are, to teach it, to learn from it, to torture it, to enchant it, to deepen . . . to satisfy our wants.’54 Fuller’s 1845 romance with James Nathan, meanwhile, underscores the beauty of her innate sympathy, and makes clear the intense passion she was capable of feeling and inspiring: the kind of love that obliterates self-regard. Though she had fallen deeply in love before, with the banker Samuel Ward in the late 1830s, he had not returned her affection, choosing instead to marry her close friend Anna Barker.55 Desirous mainly of pursuing Fuller to further his own literary ambitions, Nathan nevertheless set out to court her vigorously, initiating a tempestuous relationship when the two met in New York at one of Ann Lynch’s famous literary soirées.56 The relationship preoccupied Margaret for four months, while she was still writing furiously as the chief literary correspondent for the New-York Tribune.57 As her frequent escort to concerts and art museums, Nathan enabled Fuller to fully experience the cultural capital New York had become by the mid-1840s. It was an ecstatic moment in her life that inspired over fifty love letters to Nathan, and at long last the opportunity for life to imitate her passionate philosophy. Eschewing regret or the wistful longing for more tranquil feelings, Fuller declared in a moving letter to Nathan on 22 February 1845: I think it is a great sin even to dream of wishing for less thought, less feeling than one has. Let us be steadfast in prizing these precious gifts under all circumstances. The violet cannot wish to be again imprisoned in the sod, because she may be trampled on by some rude foot . . . our lives are sad, but it will not always be so. Heaven is bound to find for every noble and natural feeling its response and its home at last.58 The sin, in Fuller’s philosophy, lies in loving too little, and, given the internal struggle that ensues, in stubbornly refusing the natural fulfillment and expansive reinvention that love makes wonderfully possible. In this instance, her religious rhetoric is pointedly revisionist and overwhelmingly maternal, replacing guilt and trepidation with a gentler theory of duty. In the end Nathan would devastate Margaret once she made the painful discovery that he had been living with another woman while actively pursuing their relationship. Although there is little doubt that the woman was Nathan’s mistress, he persisted in referring to her as an ‘English maiden,’ a woman he had brought with him to New York from London in an effort to remove her from a life of sin and rehabilitate her.59 True to her philosophy, though, Fuller refused to chastise him once he had revealed all, reminding him instead of the sheer impossibility for ‘the heart of woman’ to ‘refuse its sympathy . . . in behalf of [another,] injured woman.’60 Was Fuller deliberately blind and foolish where Nathan was concerned? Does there remain a glaring contradiction between her romantic impulsivity and her erstwhile intellectual seriousness? Perhaps. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the elegant coherence of love’s knowledge as it impressed itself on Fuller’s mind. In her choice of passionate kindness over cool rationality, we see over and over again in Fuller’s letters how this philosophy sustained Fuller in love, and in the public roles she eagerly assumed. As she confessed in an April 1845 letter to Nathan, it is unmistakably a kind of ‘foolish tenderness’ that women feel toward the ‘men that really confide in them,’ which ‘makes us feel like mothers,’ and, as a result, lends a woman in love a certain nobility, energy, and

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agency.61 Knowing her heart to be wonderfully expansive and open, she was also wise enough to trust it, emboldened by a terrifying mixture of ‘beautiful feelings’ and an ‘anxiety to do something’ born of ‘the most genial confidence.’62 Nonetheless, while epistolarity – and especially the epistolary novel familiar to readers of Richardson – has frequently been associated with love, privacy, domesticity, and the lives and reading tastes of women, Fuller’s correspondence of the 1830s and 40s reminds us that this assumption also needs challenging. Moving away from a focus on the intimate, the private, and the domestic spheres, Fuller’s letters repeatedly seek to confront the proper role of the woman of letters in public – a public she envisioned in ever-widening transatlantic terms as a textual space for formidable reform. Aligning her vision for her Transcendentalist organ The Dial with her reformist ideal of sympathetic public dialogue no longer enslaved to the ‘European mind,’ she notably declared in a letter to William Henry Channing that the periodical must remain ‘a perfectly free organ,’ thus permitting the unfettered ‘expression of individual thought and character.’63 As an unprecedented kind of democratic experiment in letters, The Dial and its contributors represented for Fuller a neutral space for thoughtful reflection enhanced by ‘a fair calm tone’ and ‘a recognition of universal principles.’64 Furthermore, Fuller maintained that the ‘periodical will not aim at leading public opinion, but at stimulating each man to think for himself, to think more deeply and more nobly by letting them see how some minds are kept alive by a wise self-trust.’65 This notion of fostering a print public sphere composed of discerning and critical minds mattered enormously in terms of Fuller’s vision for The Dial and the cultivated readership she wished to attract to its pages. It is a vision practiced too by Fuller in her private letters, and one with significant political implications, suggesting as it does a role for the cultivated (woman) reader, writer, and thinker as a morally authoritative interlocutor in private life. In her distinctive capacity as counselor and nonconformist, Fuller, as the voice of the nineteenthcentury woman of letters, managed throughout her correspondence to collaborate fruitfully with the notable women and men of her day, at all times fostering sympathy ‘in fearless sincerity.’66

Notes 1. Emerson, ‘Friendship,’ 351. 2. For pertinent historical details concerning Fuller’s famous lecture series, see Capper, ‘Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer,’ and Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 112–53. 3. Fuller, Letter to Caroline Sturgis, 7 February 1839, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 46, 47. 4. Fuller, Letter to Frederic Henry Hedge, 1 January 1840, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 113. 5. As Kelley explains, Alcott’s controversial pedagogy enraged many Bostonians, leaving him destitute and unable to pay Fuller (see Learning to Stand and Speak, 147). 6. Fuller, Letter to James Freeman Clarke, 1 February 1835, in “My Heart is a Large Kingdom”, 33, 34. 7. Fuller, Letter to Sarah Helen Whitman, 21 January 1840, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 118. 8. Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, 5: 86. 9. Fuller, Letter to William Henry Channing, 9 December 1838, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 354.

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10. Ibid. Famous for her intellectual rigor and candor, Martineau published several books, including the travelogue Society in America (1837) and the didactic How to Observe Manners and Morals (1838), which are considered pioneering works of modern-day sociology. For a discussion of Fuller’s sometimes fraught friendship with Martineau see Von Frank, ‘Margaret Fuller and Antislavery.’ 11. Quoted in Capper, ‘Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer,’ 513. 12. Hawthorne, ‘Journal Comments,’ 177. These lines are quoted in ‘New Books: Nathaniel Hawthorne,’ 6. 13. Hawthorne, ‘Journal Comments,’ 177. 14. ‘Margaret Fuller in a New Light,’ 2. 15. In their capacity as innovative educators Fuller and Alcott gravitated toward intense dialogue with their students, and the New England Transcendentalists more widely privileged and experimented with oral forms of literary expression that served a public, educational function. See Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 77–81. 16. Fuller, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8 March 1842, in “My Heart is a Large Kingdom”, 149. 17. Fuller, Letter to James Freeman Clarke, 7 August 1832, in “My Heart is a Large Kingdom”, 15. 18. Ibid. 16. 19. Ibid. 20. Fuller, Letter to Margarett Crane Fuller, 18 November 1837, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 316. 21. Fuller, Letter to Arthur B. Fuller, 31 December 1837, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 320. 22. Fuller, Letter to Margarett Crane Fuller, 5 September 1837, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 301. 23. Ibid. 24. Fuller, Letter to Caroline Sturgis, 4 March 1839, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 60. 25. Fuller, Letter to James Freeman Clarke, 1 July 1833, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 186. 26. Fuller, Letter to James Freeman Clarke, 25 October 1833, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 196. 27. Anderson, ‘Trollope’s Modernity,’ 516. 28. Malachuk, Perfection, 7. 29. Fuller, “These Sad But Glorious Days”, 157. 30. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 190. 31. Fuller, Letter to Caroline Sturgis, 7 February 1839, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 47. 32. Fuller, Letter to Frederic Henry Hedge, 4 July 1833, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 188. 33. Ibid. 189. 34. Ibid. 35. Emerson, Letter to Margaret Fuller, 24 October 1840, in The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 237. 36. Fuller, Letter to James Freeman Clarke, 26 November 1833, in “My Heart is a Large Kingdom”, 27. 37. Ibid. 38. Fuller, Letter to James Freeman Clarke, 28 April 1835, in “My Heart is a Large Kingdom”, 40. 39. Fuller, Letter to William Henry Channing, 19 April 1840, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 131. 40. Ibid. 41. Fuller, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 17 August 1843, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 3: 143.

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margaret fuller’s private letters 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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Channing, Letter to Margaret Fuller, 26 February 1842, Houghton Library. Ibid. Child, Letter to Margaret Fuller, 3 March 1844, Houghton Library. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 26. Ibid. Ibid. Fuller, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 31 May 1840, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 136. Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry,’ 681. ‘Fragment About The Dial,’ Houghton Library. Fuller, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 11 April 1837, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 268. Fuller, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1 March 1838, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1: 327. Ibid. Fuller, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, October 1841, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 234, 235. See Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller, 131. See Capper, Margaret Fuller, 2: 220. See Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller, 290–4. Fuller to James Nathan, February 22, 1845, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 4: 50. Quoted in Capper, Margaret Fuller, 2: 223. Fuller, Letter to James Nathan, 6 April 1845, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 4: 68. Fuller, Letter to James Nathan, 14 April 1845, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 4: 74. Ibid. Fuller, Letter to William Henry Channing, 22 March 1840, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 2: 126. Ibid. Ibid. Fuller, Letter to George T. Davis, 23 January 1830, in “My Heart is a Large Kingdom”, 11.

Works Cited Anderson, A. (2007), ‘Trollope’s Modernity,’ English Literary History, 74: 509–34. Arnold, M. [1869] (1993), ‘Preface to Culture and Anarchy,’ in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. S. Collini, New York: Cambridge University Press, 188–211. Buell, L. (1973), Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Capper, C. (1987), ‘Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston,’ American Quarterly, 39: 509–28. Capper, C. (1992–2007), Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, 2 vols., New York: Oxford University Press. Channing, W. E. (1842), Letter to M. Fuller, 26 February, Margaret Fuller Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1086, Volume 9, 82. Child, L. M. (1844), Letter to M. Fuller, 3 March, Margaret Fuller Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1086, Volume 16, 63. Emerson, R. W. [1841] (1983), ‘Friendship,’ in R. W. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte, New York Library of America, 341–54. Emerson, R. W. (1997), The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. J. Myerson, New York: Columbia University Press.

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‘Fragment About The Dial’ (n.d.), Margaret Fuller Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1086, Volume 15, 141. Fuller, M. [1845] (1998), Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. L. J. Reynolds, New York: Norton. Fuller, M. (1983–94), The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 6 vols., ed. R. N. Hudspeth, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fuller, M. (1991), “These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches From Europe, 1846–1850, ed. L. J. Reynolds and S. B. Smith, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fuller, M. (2001), “My Heart Is a Large Kingdom”: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. R. N. Hudspeth, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hawthorne, N. [1858] (2008), ‘Journal Comments on Fuller,’ in J. Myerson (ed.), Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 175–8. Kelley, M. (2006), Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Malachuk, D. S. (2005), Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Margaret Fuller in a New Light’ (1884), The American Register, 20 December, 2. Matteson, J. (2012), The Lives of Margaret Fuller, New York: Norton. ‘New Books: Nathaniel Hawthorne’ (1884), The Boston Evening Transcript, 28 November, 6. Richardson, S. [1753] (1932), The History of Sir Charles Grandison: In a Series of Letters, 6 vols., Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press. Shelley, P. B. [1840] (2003), ‘A Defence of Poetry,’ in Z. Leader and M. O’Neill (eds.), The Major Works, New York: Oxford University Press, 674–701. Von Frank, A. J. (2013), ‘Margaret Fuller and Antislavery: “A Cause Identical”,’ in B. Bailey, K. P. Viens and C. E. Wright (eds.), Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 128–47.

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22 ‘WILL YOU LIVE?’: THOREAU’S PHILOSOPHICAL LETTERS Michael Jonik

Thank you for writing so often. By doing so you give me a glimpse of yourself in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without feeling we’re instantly together. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (c. 65)1

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life – I wrote this some years ago – that were worth the postage. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) (W, 94) In one of his earliest extant letters, from August 1836, Henry David Thoreau quotes to his friend Charles Wyatt Rice a saying from Charles Lamb’s ‘Distant Correspondents’ (1822) concerning letter-writing: ‘Epistolary matter,’ says Lamb, ‘usually comprises three topics, news, sentiment and puns.’ Now as to news I don’t know the coin – the newspapers take care of that. Puns I abhor and more especially deliberate ones. Sentiment alone is immortal, the rest are short-lived – evanescent. Now this is neither matter-of-fact, nor pungent, nor yet sentimental – it is neither one thing nor the other, but a kind of hodge-podge, put together in much the same style that mince pies are fabled to have been made, i.e. by opening the oven door, and from the further end of the room, casting in the various ingredients – a little lard here, a little flour there – now a round of beef, and then a cargo of spices – helter skelter. (CHDT, 9)2 If Thoreau often critiques newspapers for contributing to the idle chatter of a society distracted by commerce and foreign wars at the expense of poetry, philosophy, and ‘liv[ing] deliberately,’ his work is nonetheless frequently concerned with current events such as the Mexican American War, abolition, or emergent technologies like the locomotive (W, 90). Similarly, readers of Thoreau will know that despite his professed abhorrence of puns, he is not above making ‘pungent’ ones, like the owls who hoot ‘how der do’ in Walden, or more subtly the etymological pun on ‘saunterer’ as one both headed à la Sainte Terre and sans terre at the outset of ‘Walking’ (1862) (W, 272).3 Yet, as epistolary matter, it is sentiment for Thoreau 347

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that is ‘immortal,’ which outlives the ephemerality of the news or the momentary pertinence of a pun as it is communicated in the context of a particular exchange between correspondents. Here he deviates from Lamb, who holds that sentiment is a ‘dish’ that needs ‘to be served up hot; or sent off in water-plates, that your friend may have it almost as warm as yourself. If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all cold meats.’4 Sentiment for Thoreau instead outlasts the evanescence of hot and cold emotions, even if it is ‘not yet sentimental.’ This is in spite of the fact that letters themselves are an evanescent and heterogeneous mode of writing, one which, temporally and formally, tends to be a ‘kind of hodge-podge’ or ‘mince pie’ of content. Letters can be as various as our daily doings; and, in being free from the strictures of other forms of narrative prose, are frequently momentary and topical, fragmentary or provisional. They can be intended merely to provoke a response from a particular addressee in a particular situation. Yet, despite their link to the present and quotidian, to the personal and the particular, every letter remains nonetheless ‘open’ in the sense that it is readable by anyone, and is addressed to any future that awaits it, even after the deaths of both writer and recipient. Sentiment, to be immortal, thus must be simultaneously linked to the personal and to the present as it is freed from the past. Although the letter quoted above is an early one, already Thoreau adumbrates the complex relationship of sentiment to epistolary temporality that marks his corpus of letters. As he does so, he evokes the broader philosophical problem of ‘everydayness’ that fundamentally motivates his thought. Like Emerson, who insists on recalibrating poetry and philosophy to ‘the near, the low, the common’ wherein one might find ‘the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking,’ Thoreau devotes himself in countless ways to anatomizing the near and the ordinary, and to distilling from them an enduring ethics of everyday living.5 This is evident across the span of Thoreau’s writings: in his early A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), which uses the ‘structure’ of the week to assemble meditations on, among other topics, nature, temporality, the ‘drama’ of friendship as it is ‘enacted daily,’ and the transience of our quotidian toil; in the experiment of Walden, in which he endeavors to ‘front only the essential facts of life’ and to uncover new perceptual worlds right before his eyes; and, perhaps most expansively, in his journals, where he transcribes diurnal and seasonal phenomena with both imaginative vigor and remarkable scientific precision (AWCM, 264; W, 90). In the context of these other modes of writing the everyday, his letters, then, form an important archive in Thoreau’s oeuvre, albeit one that has received comparatively little scholarly attention.6 Far from taking a subsidiary role, his letters (almost all of which were unpublished in his lifetime) both work in concert with his published writings and journals, and constitute a unique genre of Thoreau’s writing. As such, they invite the type of scrutiny with which his published writings have long been read, and which his journals have more recently begun to experience through the innovative work of Sharon Cameron, Daniel Peck, Kristen Case, and François Specq, among others.7 Thoreau’s letters extend his intimate investigations of the diurnal and proximal, but, given their form, they animate them through a series of dialogic positionings. They offer some of Thoreau’s most compelling philosophical writing about the ‘harvest of daily life,’ yet, at the same time, deal with the ‘business’ of life in all its mundane variety (W, 217). We meet, for example, a young Thoreau at pains to enter both the antebellum literary marketplace (often relying on Horace Greely as his enthusiastic benefactor) and the lyceum circuit. Thus, in an 1848 letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne, he is invited to

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deliver a lecture at the Salem Lyceum; his presentation, ‘Student Life in New England, Its Economy,’ later evolving into the first chapter of Walden.8 In an 1849 exchange with Louis Agassiz, meanwhile, Thoreau plays facilitator, noting that ‘one of the directors of the Bangor (M[ain]e.) Lyceum has asked me to ascertain simply – and I think this is a good way of doing business – whether you will read two or three lectures before the institution’ (CHDT, 243). To which Agassiz replied, rather in the vein of Thoreau himself: ‘It would give me great pleasure to engage for the lectures . . . but my only business is my intercourse with nature’ (CHDT, 244). As his sense of self-identity as a writer and lecturer grows more assured, though, Thoreau confidently declares to the president of Harvard, Jared Sparks, in a September 1849 letter requesting library borrowing privileges: ‘I have chosen letters for my profession’ (CHDT, 249). Indeed, in a somewhat different, but also telling letter from three years later, he even sends his autograph to a young autograph collector, quipping: ‘This is the way I write when I have a poor pen and still poorer ink’ (CHDT, 287). By the time of his death in 1862, Thoreau had corresponded with many of the preeminent American intellectuals of his age: not only Emerson, Hawthorne, Agassiz, and Greely, but also Margaret Fuller, James Russell Lowell, William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry James Sr., and Charles Sumner, among others. If the amount of natural historical detail which floods his other writings is palpably less present in his letters, he nonetheless does occasionally use it to communicate with his similarly scientifically-minded peers. In early 1847, for example, he writes to James Elliot Cabot about collecting natural specimens for Agassiz, and to Horatio R. Storer, a student of Agassiz and Asa Gray, about birds’ nests and eggs.9 He at other points describes a Canadian lynx to the Boston Society of Natural History, discusses flowers and birds with Daniel Ricketson, and advises the enthusiastic B. B. Wiley that ‘you cannot surely identify a plant from scientific description until after long practice’ (CHDT, 478).10 His letters thus document revealing intersubjective moments of an antebellum literary, scientific, and political culture in formation. Equally, in a December 1856 missive to Harrison Gray Otis Blake (who would prove one of his dearest contacts), Thoreau, himself the author of posthumously published essays on ‘Love’ and ‘Chastity and Sensuality’ (both 1894), describes an emerging literary talent whom he had recently met in New York: That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition [of Leaves of Grass] (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time . . . There are two or three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say the least; simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants. But even on this side he has spoken more truth than any American or modern that I know. I have found his poem exhilarating, encouraging . . . He is a great fellow. (CHDT, 444) If Thoreau would often develop his literary opinions in his letters, moreover, others would furnish him with theirs. In an 1861 letter from his English correspondent Thomas Cholmondeley, he receives this assessment of two recent publications: ‘Darwin’s origin of species may be fanciful but it is a move in the right direction. Emerson’s Conduct of Life has done me good; but it will not go down in England for a generation or so’ (CHDT, 613).

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Elsewhere, we encounter a strikingly homely Thoreau, one inconsistent with the caricature of him as an ascetic and a hermit. His letters to Emerson, for instance, in which one might expect refined articulations of their philosophical convergences and differences, are instead often preoccupied with domestic reportage – descriptions of Emerson’s children while he was away in Europe and Thoreau was staying in his house, the activities of their Concord milieu, editorial exchanges concerning The Dial, or business and legal dealings.11 These are letters concerning the vicissitudes of love and life, if not of hot and cold sentiment. Thoreau confides to Emerson of a ‘tragic correspondence’ in which he declined a proposition for marriage from Sophia Foord, an unanticipated ‘foe’ to whom, as he says, ‘I sent back as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice’ (CHDT, 191). And in another intimate letter from several years earlier, Thoreau writes to Emerson’s wife, Lidian, from Staten Island, where he had briefly gone to serve as a tutor to her brother-in-law’s children: Your voice seems not a voice, but comes as much from the blue heavens, as from the paper . . . Such a voice is for no particular time nor person, and it makes him who may hear it stand for all that is lofty and true in humanity. The thought of you will constantly elevate my life; it will be something always above the horizon to behold, as when I look up at the evening star. (CHDT, 119) Still other letters register the grief that Thoreau felt at the loss of loved ones, such as his brother John and his father, Emerson’s five-year-old son Waldo, or the tragically drowned Margaret Fuller.12 Concerning the latter, in a 25 July 1850 letter to Emerson, Thoreau offers in harrowing detail what he had learned concerning her last moments: ‘At floodtide about 3½ o’clock when the ship broke up entirely – they came out of the forecastle & Margaret sat with her back to the foremast with her hands over her knees – her husband & child already drowned – a great wave came & washed her off. The Steward? [sic] had just before taken her child and started for shore; both were drowned’ (CHDT, 262). In his final letter exchanges with friends and admirers, as dictated to his sister Sophia as he lay on his death bed, Thoreau meanwhile records his thoughts on his own approaching end. Thus, to Myron Benton, in late March 1862, he observes: ‘I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing’ (CHDT, 641). While Thoreau’s letters to and from the Emersons and other intimates might constitute an archive of epistolary sentiment unto themselves, however, it is in exchanges with lesser-known friends, especially Blake and Ricketson, that he most perspicuously meditates on sentiment itself, as well as what might be thought of as the necessary condition or mode of sentiment, namely sincerity. What is more, Thoreau here theorizes sincere sentiment as part of his broader practices of everyday living and ethically relating to others. As such, these letters form a series of philosophical dialogues clearly informed by Thoreau’s interest in the Stoic tradition, in which themes related to sincerity, such as friendship, alterity, health, life practices, and death, are often intensely discussed.13 Indeed, he reactivates many of the concerns of classical moral-epistle writers and philosophers such as Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, as well as later practitioners of the form such as Montaigne and, of course, Emerson. What sentiment relies on in the Stoic tradition from which Thoreau draws is the capacity to speak plainly and freely, to reveal oneself openly and without self-censorship.

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If sentiment will outlive news and puns – if it is to be immortal – it must be couched in a sincere and truthful discourse. Sincere speaking then emerges as a precondition for ‘true’ friendship: in true friendship we can say anything without hesitation or fear of reprisal. Seneca, in one of his famous letters to Lucilius, thus writes: ‘Think for a long time whether or not you should admit a given person to your friendship. But when you have decided to do so, welcome him heart and soul, and speak as unreservedly with him as you would with yourself . . . Why should I keep anything back when I am with a friend? Why shouldn’t I imagine I’m alone when I am in his company?’14 Or, as Montaigne puts it in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ (c. 1580): ‘The secret I have sworn to reveal to no other man, I can impart without perjury to the one who is not another man: he is myself.’15 Similarly, Emerson echoes both Seneca and Montaigne in his 1841 essay ‘Friendship,’ in which he defines the friend as ‘a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought.’16 Friendship, in this sense, is a manner of speaking: we speak in such a way as if the friend were not there or as though the friend were none other than ourselves.17 But at the same time that Emerson privileges sincerity, he develops a model of friendship in which any friendship that does not draw us toward moral perfection must be abandoned: ‘It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other . . . Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining.’18 Similarly, in Thoreau’s own mediations on friendship in A Week and elsewhere, friendship both relies on sincerity, and uses sincerity as a vehicle for elevating one’s self – the ‘importance of Friendship in the education of men’ is that: ‘It will make men honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man’ (AWCM, 217). Ideal friendship exercises our virtues, and demands us to grow and to better ourselves: ‘For a companion, I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius’ (AWCM, 279).19 Such ideal friendships, if they are possible at all, are evanescent and elusive, Thoreau admits elsewhere.20 But still, at the same time that he is formulating these meditations in his writings, he is also putting them into practice in his letters in the form of advice, exhortations, self-reflection, and an often excoriating societal critique. In an 1843 reply to Richard Fuller, Margaret Fuller’s brother, for example, Thoreau asks: ‘How much sincere life [we must live] before we can even utter one sincere word. What I was learning in college was chiefly, I think, to express myself, and I see now, that as the old orator prescribed, 1st, action; 2d, action; 3d, action; my teachers should have prescribed to me, 1st, sincerity; 2d, sincerity; 3d, sincerity . . . I mean sincerity in our dealings with ourselves mainly; any other is comparatively easy’ (CHDT, 94).21 In the first exchange of his remarkable correspondence with H. G. O. Blake, meanwhile, he criticizes those who live alienated from what he takes to be such a sincere life: Why not see, – use our eyes? Do men know nothing? I know many men who, in common things, are not to be deceived; who trust no moonshine; who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it; who are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their

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lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. If they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for? Do they know what bread is? or what it is for? Do they know what life is? . . . I have sworn no oath. I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live . . . Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something . . . When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God, – none of the servants. In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know – that you are alone in the world. Thus I write at random. I need to see you, and I trust I shall, to correct my mistakes. Perhaps you have some oracles for me. (CHDT, 215) The litany of questions which Thoreau puts to Blake about work and society here, resolves into a series of rough-hewn imperatives – at once a creed and an anti-creed – in which there is distilled much of Thoreau’s developing Weltanschauung concerning life, the self and society, religion, and morality. Indeed, in countless letters, we find Thoreau sketching out such a philosophy of life or, to adopt Foucault’s terminology, an ethics of the care of the self.22 Although, unfortunately, the letters from Blake to Thoreau are (except for one fragment) no longer extant, it is clear that he was a cherished interlocutor for Thoreau, and one who indeed provided him with ‘oracles.’23 ‘Your words,’ he told Blake in 1853, ‘make me think of a man of my acquaintance whom I occasionally meet, on whom you too appear to have met, one Myself, as he is called. Yet why not call him Your-self?’ (CHDT, 299). In this vein, Thoreau then often seeks his frank opinion: ‘I am glad to know that you find what I have said on Friendship worthy of attention. I wish I could have the benefit of your criticism; it would be a rare help to me. Will you not communicate it?’ (CHDT, 258). That such criticisms would be a ‘rare help’ to Thoreau points to the fact that he conceives of friendship as a means of self-cultivation, and letters as a privileged means for revealing what is best in both the friend and ourselves.24 In letters, we are always addressing the absent friend yet at once refining ourselves in ways that exceed the relationship to that friend. As Thoreau put it to Blake: ‘I am preaching, mind you, to bare walls, that is to myself; and if you have chanced to come in and occupy a pew – do not think that my remarks are directed at you particularly, and so slam the seat in disgust’ (CHDT, 260). Letters, although directed ‘outward,’ at once allow our sincerity to be directed inwards. Foucault, in his analysis of the Stoic tradition, thus takes correspondence to be an exercise in ‘self-writing’ that ‘constitutes a certain way of manifesting oneself to oneself and to others’: To write is thus to ‘show oneself,’ to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence. And by this it should be understood that the letter is both a gaze that one focuses on the addressee (through the missive he receives, he feels looked at) and a way of offering oneself to his gaze by what one tells him about oneself.25 Indeed, Thoreau was keenly aware of this dynamic of mutual self-examination and provocation. ‘I need to see you . . . to correct my mistakes,’ he writes in the letter I have

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quoted above, while on 27 February 1853 he diagrams to Blake the complex interplay of his and his friend’s gazes as a series of ‘successive reflecting surfaces’: I am much indebted to you because you look so steadily at the better side, or rather the true centre of me (for our true centre may, and perhaps oftenest does, lie entirely aside from us, and we are in fact eccentric), and, as I have elsewhere said, ‘give me an opportunity to live.’ You speak as if the image or idea which I see were reflected from me to you; and I see it again reflected from you to me, because we stand at the right angle to one another; and so it goes, zig-zag, to what successive reflecting surfaces, before it is all dissipated or absorbed by the more unreflecting, or differently reflecting, – who knows? (CHDT, 298)26 The dialogue of friends here is figured not as a mirror of self and other, but as a perpetual de-centering (or ‘ec-centering’) of reflected images and ideas. It is pushed ever forward into unknown spaces as their ‘selves’ (or self-reflections) become destabilized, if not dissipated or absorbed. Friendship thus becomes an unpayable debt, one that is perpetually deferred. ‘I have not forgotten I’m your debtor,’ Thoreau writes to Blake on 20 November 1849. ‘When I read over your letters . . . I feel that I am unworthy to have received or to have answered them, though they are addressed, as I would have them to the ideal of me. It behoves me, if I would reply, to speak out of the rarest part of myself’ (CHDT, 250). This is a debt which Thoreau and Blake would seek to repay each other until the end of Thoreau’s life, and even after it. They took Seneca’s advice to consider long and hard who would be admitted into each other’s friendship, and respected what Emerson calls the naturlangsamkeit of friendship – its ‘natural slowness.’27 ‘Methinks I will write to you,’ Thoreau told Blake in September 1855. ‘Methinks you will be glad to hear. We will stand on solid foundations to one another . . . We were built slowly, and have come to our bearing’ (CHDT, 384).28 Tellingly, Blake (who would inherit Thoreau’s manuscripts at his death and edit his journals into seasonal mediations, but repeatedly decline to edit his correspondence) later remarked that long after Thoreau died, he would often return to his letters, and hear in them his friend’s voice, still renewing and provocative.29 Thoreau’s epistolary experiments in sincerity were not always without their social risks. Thoreau’s frankness might seem brusque or off-putting. He asks Blake in March 1856, for example: ‘Are you not tough and earnest to be talked at, praised, or blamed? Must you go out of the room because you are the subject of conversation? Where will you go to, pray? Shall we look into the “Letter-writer” to see what compliments are admissible?’ (CHDT, 420). With Daniel Ricketson, too, whom Thoreau celebrates as ‘singularly frank and plain-spoken’ (and who would become one of his most loyal friends and disciples), the virtue of sincerity also lent itself to silences, complaints, or perceptions of offence (CHDT, 383). In an autumn 1860 exchange, Ricketson wonders at Thoreau’s lapse in corresponding: Friend Thoreau – Am I to infer from your silence that you decline any farther correspondence or intercourse with me? Or is it that having nothing in particular to communicate you deem silence the wiser course? Yet, between friends, to observe a certain degree of consideration is well, and as wrote you last, and that some nine or ten months ago, inviting you to visit me, I have often felt disappointed and hurt by your almost sepulchral silence towards me. (CHDT, 593)

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Thoreau’s forthright reply, written a few weeks later, then urges Ricketson to rethink this silence in a way that does much to reveal how he understands both letter-writing and his philosophical disposition as a correspondent: But what do you mean by that prose? Why will you waste so many regards on me, and not know what to think of my silence? Infer from it what you might from the silence of a dense pine wood. It is its natural condition, except when the winds blow, and the jays scream, & the chickadee winds up his clock. My silence is just as inhuman as that, and no more. You know that I never promised to correspond with you, & so, when I do, I do more than promised . . . Some are accustomed to write many letters, others very few. I am one of the last. At any rate, we are pretty sure, if we write at all, to send those thoughts which we cherish, to that one, who, we believe, will most religiously attend them. This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction. I do not feel addressed by this letter of yours. It suggests only misunderstanding. Intercourse may be good, but of what use are complaints & apologies? Any complaint I have to make is too serious to be uttered, for the evil cannot be mended. Turn over a new leaf. (CHDT, 599) Despite the ‘deliberate’ pun on turning ‘a new leaf’ (which appears at the end of a page in the original letter), intercourse, Thoreau insists to Ricketson, must be of cherished thoughts and not mere platitudes and regards, complaints or apologies. He consequently ‘does not feel addressed’ insofar as Ricketson dwells on false sentiments and misunderstanding.30 Rather, for Thoreau true sentiment will be tempered by silence, a natural silence indistinguishable from the silence of the ‘dense pine wood’ or the silence of that which cannot be uttered. Such silence is in sharp contrast to the increasingly intense buzz of communication in nineteenth-century life, wherein Thoreau sees people being imposed upon to make available all their thoughts and doings. Ordinary conversation, as he writes in ‘Life without Principle’ (1863), is ‘hollow and ineffectual’ and does damage to our self-sincerity: When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip . . . In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.31 Likewise, newspapers, another of Thoreau’s favorite targets of critique in his letters, despite their tie to the everyday, seem to distance us from that which is nearest to us. They not only prevent our basic ‘contentment . . . in life,’ they remove us from our native region wherein we might experience the true wealth of our days (CHDT, 259). Instead of news of foreign wars or economic crises, Thoreau insists in his letters that he is seeking the ‘inevitable news, be it sad or cheering’ (CHDT, 251). He is after a ‘new perception of the truth’ (CHDT, 259). Thus he entreats Blake in November 1849: ‘Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers’ (CHDT, 251). If silence and solitude might cost us our outward lives, we stand to gain a renewed understanding of the infinitude of our inward selves: ‘It is either the [New-York] Tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private extacy [sic] still higher up’ (CHDT, 424).32

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In each of these instances, we find Thoreau refining – and sharing – his ethical thinking; his letters become an enchiridion or instruction manual for everyday living for both himself and his correspondents. They are often clearly meant to serve a pedagogical purpose: to ‘teach men in detail how to live a simpler life,’ or to ‘make use of the ground [he] has cleared, to live more worthily and more profitably’ (CHDT, 384). Indeed, in one of the very last letters he receives from Daniel Ricketson the latter explicitly celebrates him as a teacher: ‘Truly you have not lived in vain – your works, and above all your brave and truthful life, will become a precious treasure to those whose happiness it has been to have known you, and who will continue to uphold though with feebler hands the fresh and instructive philosophy you have taught them’ (CHDT, 649). Yet the questions Thoreau puts to his interlocutors are always turned back onto himself as well. A decade before Emerson formulated the question of the times in ‘Fate’ (1860) as ‘How shall I live?’, Thoreau puts to Blake the question ‘Will you live? or will you be embalmed? Will you live, though it be astride of a sunbeam; or will you repose safely in the catacombs for a thousand years?’ (CHDT, 257).33 Nevertheless, it is not long before he pauses to self-reflect: ‘I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is. I shall be sorry to remember that I was there, but noticed nothing remarkable’ (CHDT, 257). He thus tirelessly prompts his readers to consider or reconsider their lives, to weigh their significance, at the same time that he is reconsidering and weighing his own. Not just to give accounts of our days, but to account for them. As he puts it of his reason for going into the woods in Walden, we must be determined, when the time comes to die, not to ‘discover that [we] had not lived’ (W, 90). Thus Thoreau invokes the Stoic meletē thanatou, or ‘death exercise,’ in which, as Foucault explains, one is offered ‘the possibility of looking back, in advance as it were, on one’s life. By thinking of oneself as about to die, one can judge each action that one is performing in terms of its own value.’34 Indeed, the specific Stoic philosophers whom Foucault goes on to mention offer a series of sentiments that clearly resonate in Thoreau’s letters: The death exercise as it is evoked in certain letters of Seneca consists in living the long span of life as if it were as short as day, and in living each day as if one’s entire life depended on it . . . It is the type of exercise that Marcus Aurelius was thinking of when he wrote that ‘moral perfection requires that one spend each day as if it were the last.’ He would even have it that every action he performed be done ‘as if it were his last.’ . . . Death, said Epictetus, takes hold of the laborer in the midst of his labor, the sailor in the midst of his sailing: ‘And you, in the midst of what occupation do you want to be taken?’ And Seneca envisaged the moment of death as one in which an individual would be able to become a sort of judge of himself and assess the moral progress he will have made, up to his final day. In Letter 26, he wrote: ‘I shall leave it to Death to determine what progress I have made . . . I am making ready for the day when I am to pass judgment on myself – whether I am merely declaiming brave sentiments or whether I really feel them.’35 Bearing these arguments in mind, we can then see more clearly how Thoreau’s own letters, as punctuated self-investigations of his everyday life, allow him to time and again take stock of his endeavors and to urge others to take stock of theirs as well. We think ahead to the moment of our death, he agrees, so that we might reflect back on the

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life we are living and ask ourselves, ‘have I lived’? Our diurnal toil may be transient, we may meet with mundane frustrations and fleeting glories, but what endures is the quality of our efforts, and the perseverance with which we undertake them. If we fail, Thoreau tells Blake, ‘[m]ake your failure tragical by the earnestness and steadfastness of your endeavor, and then it will not differ from success’ (CHDT, 313). There is of course more to say regarding how philosophy informs Thoreau’s letters, especially concerning Stoicism’s imperative to bring together logic, ethics, and physics (aka nature) or the question of how other traditions like Epicureanism, German Idealism, classical Indian philosophy, or Confucianism might also inflect Thoreau’s epistolary engagements. But it is enough here to say that Pierre Hadot’s remarks regarding Thoreau’s Stoicism in Walden are true of his letters as well: ‘Also Stoic in Thoreau, are both this joyous acceptance . . . of nature and the universe, in all their aspects, whether they are graceful, terrifying, or hideous, and the idea that each reality has its usefulness when one considers it from the perspective of totality.’36 In this respect, Thoreau’s Stoic attitude toward the relationship of nature to ethics is borne out, at least in part, in his letters written in response to the deaths of those close to him. To Emerson’s sister-inlaw Lucy Brown, for instance, a few weeks following the deaths of both Thoreau’s brother John and Emerson’s son Waldo in January 1842, Thoreau writes: Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river, which [John] frequented, as pleasantly as ever . . . The memory of some past events is more persuasive than the experience of present ones . . . As for Waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. Do not the flowers die every autumn? He had not even taken root here. I was not startled to hear that he was dead; – it seemed the most natural event that could happen. (CHDT, 63) Similarly, in order to console Waldo’s father, Thoreau writes shortly after, in his first extant letter to Emerson: ‘Dead trees – sere leaves – dried grass and herbs – are not these a good part of our life?’ (CHDT, 64). And following the untimely death of Margaret Fuller and her husband the Marquis of Ossoli, he offers these philosophical reflections to H. G. O. Blake: ‘I have in my pocket the button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis . . . on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light, – an actual button, – and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less than my faintest dream’ (CHDT, 265). Although Thoreau might appear insensitive to these tragedies by relating the loss of a son to a mist or dried grasses, or by admitting that the Marquis’s life ‘is less substantial to me . . . than my faintest dream,’ we must understand these sentiments less as a trivializing of death than as a rethinking of death as integral to the natural totality. Death, even the death of a son, is not a possible event, but always already actualized in life and necessary to life. This leads not to a posture of self-strength, but to an acceptance of our radical vulnerability and impermanency.37 If, as Emerson would later claim in relation to his son’s death, ‘[g]rief too will make us idealists,’ Thoreau here likewise describes how such ‘actual events’ are still ‘far less real’ to him than his own thoughts and dreams.38 But at the same time, he limns the ecstacy of a mind drawn out by grief, an ecstasy of ambiguity through which grief shows life to be intense yet ephemeral, impersonal yet deeply inter-relational. ‘Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives,’ he tells Blake, ‘all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here’ (CHDT, 265).

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As such, these events cast him back on himself, as in the meletē thanatou: ‘I say to myself, Do a little more of that work which you have confessed to be good. You are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with yourself, without reason. Have you not a thinking faculty of inestimable value?’ (CHDT, 265). Not long after Thoreau’s own death in 1862, Emerson published an edition of his friend’s letters, which appeared under the title Letters to Various Persons (1865). This collection – which Emerson styled as a ‘perfect piece of Stoicism’ – perhaps inevitably highlighted the philosophically-oriented letters to Blake and Ricketson.39 It did so, however, by obscuring some of the correspondents’ names (preferring instead the anonymity that the volume’s title indicates) and, to the dismay of Thoreau’s sister, excising some of the more tender passages written to his intimate friends. Later nineteenth-century editions of the correspondence, on the other hand, such as Franklin B. Sanborn’s Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894), re-included the more personal letters and the names and, according to Robert Hudspeth, ‘offered evidence to complicate the Stoic persona that Emerson had presented in 1865.’40 My own goal has been, not unlike Emerson, to present a Thoreau who understands letter-writing as informed by Stoic practices in sincerity and self-elevation, and thus to present a strong case for treating his letters as a potent philosophical form, but this does not necessarily entail a Thoreau divorced from the other forms of everyday living which populate his letters, or devoid of unguarded sentiments of vulnerability or affection. One need only read the letters of Seneca to Lucilius to see the echoes of Stoic love, tenderness, and frailty in Thoreau’s correspondence. What is clear, moreover, is that, across his letters, in both those devoted to ‘business’ and those broaching more philosophical topics, we find Thoreau working out the problem of life as he is living it. Indeed, the letters themselves frequently betray such differentiations.41 Rather, as a ‘hodge-podge’ form, his letters allow us to think about the two types of content together, as well as to reconsider his letters as part of a larger project that includes his essays, books, and unpublished journals. At certain points, Thoreau would follow Agassiz’s cue and devote himself more exclusively to the ‘business of doing intercourse with nature’ – as such, there are telling gaps in the archive of his letters in the early 1850s, where his journals are brimming with detail instead. And, as with his journals, there is the sense that we are witnessing a Thoreau in formation, essaying ideas, and hungry for his friends’ assurances and corrections. At the same time, too, there is an abiding sense of the insufficiency of letters as a form of communication. Epistolary sentiment carries with it what is unsaid or uncommunicable, debts to another that cannot be repaid, and due reverence to that which must remain unutterable. As Thoreau eloquently puts this in A Week: ‘To our finest communications we only lend a silent ear. Our finest relations are not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive depth of silence never to be revealed’ (AWCM, 278). Or, as Walden would have it: ‘Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening’ (W, 217). Nonetheless, what is communicated in Thoreau’s letters reveals a man thoroughly devoted to meditating on the question of life and on his relationships, and endeavoring to confront the world deliberately and express himself sincerely. His aim is always, as he remarked to Blake in 1859, to ‘keep up the fires of thought’ (CHDT, 558). To live joyously and without regret. To live one world at a time, day to day, instant to instant. To travel to the Celestial City, with no need of a letter of introduction.

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Notes 1. Seneca, Letter XL, in Letters from a Stoic, 82. 2. As Lamb himself further explains regarding puns: ‘In the latter, I include all non-serious subjects; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated after my fashion, nonseriously . . . A pun is reflected from a friend’s face as from a mirror’ (‘Distant Correspondents,’ 206, 211). 3. Thoreau, ‘Walking,’ 185. 4. Lamb, ‘Distant Correspondents,’ 209. 5. Emerson, ‘The American Scholar,’ in Essays and Lectures, 68, 69. 6. The re-editing of the whole of Thoreau’s available correspondence is ongoing, with his letters up until 1848 having recently been republished by Princeton University Press in an edition by Robert N. Hudspeth, and a further two volumes forthcoming (see Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau – The Correspondence, Volume 1). These editions will help us to begin to better appreciate the position of Thoreau’s letters in his oeuvre, but since the Princeton series is currently incomplete I have chosen, for the sake of consistency, to quote here from the 1958 scholarly edition of the letters edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode. Those interested in the various different editions of Thoreau’s correspondence that have appeared since the late nineteenth century can find digital reproductions of many of these – including the Harding and Bode volume – on the website of The Walden Woods Project (see Thoreau, ‘Correspondence’). 7. See: Cameron, Writing Nature; Peck, Thoreau’s Morning Work; Case, ‘Thoreau’s Radical Empiricism’; and Specq, ‘Poetics of Thoreau’s Journal.’ 8. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to Henry David Thoreau, 21 October 1848, in Thoreau, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 230–1. 9. See Thoreau, Letter to Horatio R. Storer, 15 February 1847, in ibid. 175–6, and Thoreau, Letter to James Elliot Cabot, 8 May 1847, in ibid. 179–80. 10. See respectively: Thoreau, Letter to Samuel Kneeland, 13 October 1860, in ibid. 591–2; Thoreau, Letter to Daniel Ricketson, 12 October 1855, in ibid. 388–90, and Daniel Ricketson, Letter to Henry David Thoreau, 14 October 1859, in ibid. 560–1; and Thoreau, Letter to B. B. Wiley, 26 April 1857, 477–8. 11. See, for example, Emerson’s letters to Thoreau on 2 December 1847 and 11 March 1850, in ibid. 194–5 and 256. 12. See, for example, Thoreau, Letter to Lucy Brown, 2 March 1842, in ibid. 62–3. 13. In this respect, Thoreau’s letters arguably belong among the great tradition of philosophical correspondences, such as those between Spinoza and Oldenburg or Leibniz and Clarke and, in his own century, Emerson and Carlyle or William James and Henri Bergson. 14. Seneca, Letter III, in Letters from a Stoic, 35. 15. Montaigne, ‘Of Friendship,’ 172. 16. Emerson, ‘Friendship,’ in Essays and Lectures, 347. 17. Emerson elsewhere celebrated Montaigne as ‘the frankest and honestest of all writers,’ for the way in which he keeps ‘his gates open, and his house without defence’ (‘Montaigne; or the Skeptic,’ in ibid. 698). Emerson would also later eulogize Thoreau as ‘sincerity itself’ and as a ‘truth-speaker’ (‘Thoreau,’ 410). 18. Emerson, ‘Friendship,’ in Essays and Lectures, 354. 19. This is not without its risks. As Thoreau writes later, tellingly invoking the language of epistolary exchange: ‘Ah, my dear Strangers and Enemies, I would not forget you. I can well afford to welcome you. Let me subscribe myself Yours ever and truly, – your much obliged servant. We have nothing to fear from our foes; God keeps a standing army for that service; but we have no ally against our Friends, those ruthless Vandals’ (A Week, 287). 20. See Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature, 20–4.

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21. See also Thoreau, Letter to Lucy Brown, 21 July 1841, in The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 44–5. 22. See Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,’ in Essential Works, 281–302. 23. This was true in a way that far exceeded Thoreau’s affection for Emerson, who had disappointed him by unaccountably withholding his criticism of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers until after it had been published, despite Thoreau’s entreaties for him to share it. See Johnson, ‘Historical Introduction,’ 477–9. 24. In this context, we might reconsider the sentiment addressed to Lidian Emerson I have already quoted – ‘The thought of you will constantly elevate my life’ – as less that of an impossible romantic love, as it has sometimes been read, and rather of Stoic friendship. 25. Foucault, ‘Self Writing,’ in Essential Works, 216. 26. In the postscript to the same letter, Thoreau renders this metaphor in terms of echoes: ‘P.S. It is so long since I have seen you, that as you will perceive, I have to speak as it were in vacuum, as if I were sounding hollowly for an echo’ (Letter to H. G. O. Blake, 27 February 1853, in The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 252). 27. Emerson, ‘Friendship,’ in Essays and Lectures, 346. 28. By the end of Thoreau’s life their relationship had sped up a little. Thoreau, for example, asked Blake, in a letter dated 3 May 1861, to accompany him to Minnesota on a sojourn in order to attempt to restore his health, writing: ‘Pray let me know if such a statement offers any temptations to you. I write in great haste for the mail, and must omit all the moral’ (The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 615). 29. Blake’s epistolary sentiment for his deceased friend long endured. He found himself ‘still warmed and instructed by [Thoreau’s letters], with more force occasionally than ever before; so that in a sense they are still in the mail, have not altogether reached me yet, and will not probably before I die’ (quoted in Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 328). 30. Ricketson seems to have taken such arguments with a pinch of salt, judging from a comment in his journal on an earlier Thoreau letter, from October 1854, that Thoreau is ‘evidently well-meant though overcautious’ (Thoreau, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 342). 31. Thoreau, ‘Life without Principle,’ 169. 32. Thoreau would often contrast his work to Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. On 10 April 1861, for instance, not long after the start of the Civil War, Thoreau writes to the antislavery activist Parker Pillsbury: ‘I also read the New[-]York Tribune, but then I am reading Herodotus & Strabo, & Blodget’s Climatology, and Six Years in the Deserts of North America, as hard as I can to counterbalance it’ (Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 611). 33. Emerson, ‘Fate,’ in Essays and Lectures, 943. 34. Foucault, ‘The Hermeneutic of the Subject,’ in Essential Works, 105. 35. Ibid. 36. Hadot, ‘There are Nowadays Professors,’ 232. 37. See Rossi, ‘ “In Dreams Awake”,’ 113–16. 38. Emerson, ‘Experience,’ in Essays and Lectures, 473. 39. Quoted in Hudspeth, ‘General Introduction,’ 413. This accords with Emerson’s posthumous portrait of Thoreau as a ‘hermit and stoic’ but ‘fond of sympathy’ (‘Thoreau,’ 397). On the intentions of Emerson’s edition of Thoreau’s letters see Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 189–91. Hudspeth’s ‘General Introduction’ valuably limns Thoreau’s relation to Stoicism, but risks conflating philosophical Stoicism with the more common meaning of ‘stoic’ (see 408–37). 40. Hudspeth, ‘General Introduction,’ 425.

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41. See, for example, Thoreau’s 30 December 1837 letter to Orestes Brownson, in which he at once requests assistance in finding employment, offers several philosophical and ethical thoughts, and reflects nostalgically on the time he spent teaching in Canton, Massachusetts, and living with the Brownsons, before ending with an apology for this ‘cold business letter’ (Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 20). Likewise, see his 6 October 1838 letter to his sister Helen concerning Locke and Common Sense Philosophy, which belies the claim that it is written in ‘the style pedagogical’ (ibid. 29).

Works Cited Bennett, J. (1994), Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and The Wild, London: Sage Publications. Cameron, S. (1985), Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal, New York: Oxford University Press. Case, K. (2013), ‘Thoreau’s Radical Empiricism: The Kalendar, Pragmatism, and Science,’ in F. Specq, L. D. Walls, and M. Granger (eds.), Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 187–99. Emerson, R. W. [1862] (1982), ‘Thoreau,’ in L. Ziff (ed.), Selected Essays, New York: Penguin, 393–414. Emerson, R. W. (1983), Essays and Lectures, ed. J. Porte, New York: Library of America. Foucault, M. (1997), Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 – Volume 1 – Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: The New Press. Hadot, J. P. (2005), ‘There Are Nowadays Professors of Philosophy, But Not Philosophers,’ trans. A. Simmons and M. Marshall, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19: 229–37. Hudspeth, R. N. (2013), ‘General Introduction,’ in H. D. Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau – The Correspondence, Volume 1: 1834–1848, ed. R. N. Hudspeth, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 402–37. Johnson, L. C. (1980), ‘Historical Introduction,’ in H. D. Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau – A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. C. F. Hovde, W. Howarth, and E. H. Witherell, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 433–500. Lamb, C. [1822] (1828), ‘Distant Correspondents,’ in Elia: Essays which have Appeared Under that Signature in the London Magazine, 2nd ser., Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 205–13. Montaigne, M. de (2003), ‘Of Friendship,’ in The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journals, Letters, trans. D. M. Frame, London: Everyman’s Library, 164–76. Peck, H. D. (1990), Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,’ the Journal, and ‘Walden’, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Richardson, R. D., Jr. (1986), Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rossi, W. J. (2009), ‘ “In Dreams Awake”: Loss, Transcendental Friendship, and Elegy,’ in J. T. Lysaker and W. J. Rossi (eds.), Emerson & Thoreau: Figures of Friendship, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 107–26. Seneca [c. 65] (1969), Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell, New York: Penguin. Specq, F. (2013), ‘Poetics of Thoreau’s Journal and Postmodern Aesthetics,’ in F. Specq, L. D. Walls, and M. Granger (eds.), Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 219–33. Thoreau, H.D. [1849] (1980), The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau – A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. C. F. Hovde, W. Howarth, and E. H. Witherell, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cited parenthetically as AWCM. Thoreau, H.D. [1854] (1971), Walden; or, Life in the Woods, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cited parenthetically as W. Thoreau, H. D. [1862] (2007), ‘Walking,’ in J. J. Moldenhauer (ed.), The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau – Excursions, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 185–222.

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Thoreau, H. D. [1863] (2004), ‘Life Without Principle,’ in W. Glick (ed.), The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau – The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 155–80. Thoreau, H. D. (1958), The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. W. Harding and C. Bode, New York: New York University Press. Cited parenthetically as CHDT. Thoreau, H. D. (2013), The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau – The Correspondence, Volume 1: 1834–1848, ed. R. N. Hudspeth, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thoreau, H. D. (2015), ‘Correspondence,’ The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: The Digital Collection, The Walden Woods Project, (last accessed 22 September 2015).

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23 ‘FREDERICK DOUGLASS, THE FREEMAN’ AND ‘FREDERICK BAILEY, THE SLAVE’: PRIVATE VERSUS PUBLIC ACTS AND ARTS OF LETTER-WRITING IN FREDERICK DOUGLASS’S PRE-CIVIL-WAR CORRESPONDENCE Celeste-Marie Bernier

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s the quintessential enslaved man turned self-emancipated liberator of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass, né Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, has generated a vast body of scholarship. Social and literary historians alike have cut to the heart of the signifying practices and experimental devices adopted by Douglass the antislavery radical and reformer, the autobiographer, the orator, the philosopher, the novelist and, in the last few years, the photographic subject and visual theorist. Far less a subject of concern, however, have been the many other Douglasses that continue to remain understudied: Douglass the naturalist, the poet, the historian, the diarist, the travel writer, the art critic and, most importantly for this chapter, Douglass the letter-writer. Writing in July 1846, some eight years after he gained his freedom, to a personal correspondent identified solely as ‘My dear Mary,’ Douglass jubilantly confided from Edinburgh, Scotland, ‘I have just bought a beautiful and some what costly manifold letter-writer. It enables me to write two letters at one time so that I may always retain a copy of what I write. I am just now trying my hand and thus far I feel quite encouraged.’1 Recognizing the pressures as well as the possibilities presented by his increasing renown as a public figure within a transatlantic no less than a U.S. national domain, he admitted of the rationale undergirding his purchase: ‘I find I must be careful what I write lest I set down something which upon mature reflection I may regret.’2 For Douglass, access to the latest epistolary technologies represented more than keeping a record. Here was the opportunity not only to create and maintain a personal archive, but to retain control over his means of self-representation through an ongoing process of self-reflection, self-revision, and even self-correction. At stake for Douglass here was the premium he placed on stage-managing his public image and private reputation. Writing in the same letter to ‘Mary’ a few lines later, he bore candid witness to his correspondence as a site of ‘inner’ as well as ‘outer’ struggle by urging that ‘[i]f it were allowable and in good taste, I would try to tell you how much I feel indebted to yourself . . . for the many pleasant moments I spent in your society during my late visit to Belfast,’ only to immediately concede, ‘I was not 362

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as happy as I expected to be.’3 ‘I confess my spirit was marred,’ he concluded, by ‘the malignant slanders’ of the proslavery Presbyterian minister Thomas Smyth: ‘I ought not to have permitted this to disturb me, but one cannot always command their feelings.’4 Echoing this powerful blend of psychological revelation, self-reflexive literary expression, political controversy, and personal fallibility, the act and art of letterwriting across Douglass’s career, and more especially during his antebellum years, reveals the potency of epistolarity as a double- if not multi-edged sword. On one hand, in the decades between his first surviving letters, which were composed in 1842, and his correspondence written on the eve of the Civil War, it is clear that letter-writing became the epitome of political and imaginative liberation for Douglass. Here was a means through which he could: assert his pre-eminence within national and international reformist circles; articulate his philosophical understanding of pro- and antislavery ideologies; vouchsafe his status as an intellectual rather than as a physical embodiment of slavery’s ills; showcase his authoritative control over language and his artistic capabilities; test out core motifs and tropes that were to become a staple of his published writings; exercise his influence as a newspaper and magazine editor; further his pioneering work as an Underground Railroad activist; and, finally, maintain an array of personal and professional relationships which ran the gamut from free, fugitive, and enslaved African Americans to white politicians, reformers, and literary celebrities. On the other hand, however, and in stark contrast to the fixity of the speeches he delivered in the public arena and which were stenographically reported in countless periodicals, letter-writing also occupied a liminal space, especially for the newly self-emancipated Douglass, between his burgeoning and not yet stable public image and his private identity. Accordingly, letter-writing was a slippery tool for Douglass, one capable of both revealing and concealing the ambiguities and tensions within his competing constructions of a representative and even archetypal persona and an individual and necessarily more fallible selfhood. Writing a letter to William Lloyd Garrison from Scotland in January 1846, which was intended for public dissemination within the pages of The Liberator, Douglass responded to the insinuation of a virulent white detractor, A. C. C. Thompson, that he was not the author of the recently published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), by showcasing his conflicted sense of self. Wrong-footing his addressee, Douglass opened his riposte by seemingly endorsing Thompson’s disbelief. ‘[I]f any one had told me, seven years ago, I should ever be able to write such [a book], I should have doubted as strongly as [some] now do,’ he told Garrison (FDPC1, 84). But he then quickly betrayed his rhetorical sleight of hand by effecting a categorical reversal: ‘You must not judge me now by what I then was – a change of circumstances has made a surprising change in me. Frederick Douglass, the freeman, is a very different person from Frederick Bailey, the slave. I feel myself almost a new man – freedom has given me a new life’ (FDPC1, 84). Douglass’s gestures toward a clear-cut division between new and old identities notwithstanding, what this letter, and many others from the same period, reveal is a self in a state of transition and transformation, one that stands in marked contrast to the well-choreographed and well-rehearsed public persona that was to dominate Douglass’s postbellum correspondence. Giving the lie to white abolitionist myths regarding the ‘before and after’ experience of enslaved men and women who had been freed, the existential conflicts presented by enslavement and emancipation manifested themselves for Douglass as relative rather than absolute states of existence. Indeed, these conflicts

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essentially define his antebellum correspondence, as he repeatedly exposes, sometimes consciously and often unwittingly, the co-existence – in psychological if no longer in legal terms – of his dual personae: ‘Douglass, the freeman’ and ‘Bailey, the slave.’ At the same time emotionally secure and uncertain, politically resolute and adaptive, and physically indefatigable and broken down, Douglass betrays a host of identities in his correspondence – the fugitive slave, the family man, the celebrity, the radical, the reformer, and the writer, among others – that were in collision and conflict. As is the case for recent readers of Douglass’s published writings, so contemporary audiences for his correspondence too must adopt a scholarly approach based on reading against the grain in order to begin to extrapolate the complex interpretive possibilities presented by his multifaceted literary practices. In this regard, we are fortunate that the correspondence of nineteenth-century African Americans, both enslaved and free, has recently become the subject of several ground-breaking studies that help to open up such interpretive vistas. Conclusively laying to rest John Blassingame’s 1977 lament that one ‘form of slave testimony rarely subjected to systematic analysis is the letter written to or by blacks,’ historians such as Christopher Hager and Ben Schiller have reoriented our understanding of a rich archive of African American letters that has been emerging since the 1990s.5 Taking on another of Blassingame’s observations, that although ‘many slaves wrote letters which have been preserved . . . only a few scholars have tried to find them,’ researchers have unearthed a wide range of African American epistles over the last few decades and made them available in various published editions.6 Yet they have typically presented such letters as instances of unmediated self-expression. Addressing the importance of a body of ‘fascinating correspondence . . . that reveals the daily life and inner thoughts of bondsmen’ in his seminal 1974 anthology Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves, Robert Starobin suggests that these texts offer relatively direct access to lives lived in enslavement when compared with the better-known form of the slave narrative, which was usually ‘written many years after successful escapes’ and so lacked the ‘original content and spirit’ of the ‘slaves’ stories.’7 But he also warns against treating such letters as historically reliable artifacts by drawing attention to the fact that: ‘Slaves were conscious of the need to deceive for purposes of survival, not only when they communicated with each other, but also – and especially – when they addressed their masters. Thus the letters have to be read with extreme care, for they are loaded with subtleties of meaning, irony, double entendres, and outright put-ons.’8 Those who followed in Starobin’s wake have not always been so cautious, however. As Hager neatly puts it: ‘Scholars have mined slaves’ letters for what they reveal about the conditions of southern slavery, but the letters’ composition remains largely unconsidered as an experience unto itself, an often practical, sometimes creative act not only of resistance but also of reflection and inner transformation.’9 This fluid interpretive framework, in which black-authored letters no longer function as self-evident bodies of proof but as literary works in their own right, certainly has direct applicability to Douglass’s correspondence, which as I have already suggested is characterized by artful epistolary strategies. Indeed, as a correspondent writing almost exclusively as ‘Frederick Douglass, the freeman’ rather than as ‘Frederick Bailey, the slave,’ his epistolary archive cannot, in any case, be categorized according to the genre of enslaved letter-writing. The only letters Douglass is known to have written as an enslaved man were ‘passes’ for himself and others during an attempted ‘Run-Away Plot’ – which he and his co-conspirators ended up ‘flinging . . . into the fire’ for their

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own salvation – while extensive searches have confirmed that no more than a handful of missives survive from the period between his escape in 1838 and the purchase of his freedom by white British abolitionists in 1846.10 The closest Douglass’s extant body of writing comes to the classic ‘slave letter’ is in the repeated letters he wrote to his ‘Old Master,’ Thomas Auld, among which was a particularly hard-hitting missive – recently singled out by Bob Blaisdell as ‘a literary and historical masterpiece’ – that Douglass published in his newspaper, The North Star, on the tenth anniversary of his escape.11 Bearing witness not only to the physical violations but to the psychological abuses enacted against enslaved men, women, and children, Douglass’s September 1848 letter to Auld emphasizes the extent to which enforced mental and cultural ‘ignorance’ eradicated the ‘sweet enjoyments’ of ‘writing or receiving letters’ for African Americans and led to an emotional scarring that took precedence over ‘all the stripes you have laid on my back, or theirs’ (FDPC1, 314). For Douglass, it was not only an individual’s right to his or her own body – with regard to love, labor, or mobility – that divided a state of enslavement from a state of emancipation, it was the right to acts of self-expression – pre-eminent among them the ability to communicate with ‘absent friends and relatives’ across an extended epistolary network (FDPC1, 314). A few years later, Douglass again interpreted the right to participate in epistolary exchange as a litmus test of an individual’s moral and civil liberties. Writing in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), of the ability ‘to go and come, to be here and there’ experienced by the ‘people of the north, and free people generally,’ he also emphasized the textual means by which such mobility represented the antithesis of enslaved journeys of no return.12 While in the case of ‘free people’ there is ‘correspondence, and there is, at least, the hope of reunion, because reunion is possible,’ he observed, for ‘the slave, all these mitigating circumstances are wanting. There is no improvement in his condition probable, – no correspondence possible, – no reunion attainable. His going out into the world, is like a living man going into the tomb, who, with open eyes, sees himself buried out of sight and hearing of wife, children and friends of kindred tie.’13 Characteristically, while Douglass repeatedly condemns the abuses enacted against enslaved bodies, he reserves his most hard-hitting language for denouncing white educational barriers that restricted black lives to an intellectual and cultural void. Among the most important of many rites of passage for ‘Douglass, the freeman’ was his determination to engage in the acts and arts of letterwriting denied to ‘Bailey, the slave.’ The vigor with which Douglass executed this determination is clearly indicated by the large number of letters he left behind. His surviving epistolary archive up to 1846 may be comparatively less extensive, but unlike for many nineteenth-century African Americans the challenge presented by his remaining corpus is not one of absence, but one of excess. Significantly extending the pioneering collections of Douglass’s letters edited by Philip Foner and Norma Brown in the 1970s, the Frederick Douglass Papers team, led by John McKivigan, has recently published the first of four volumes of Douglass’s correspondence (with the second due soon).14 Meticulously recording the difficulties this team have encountered, McKivigan ascribes some of the ongoing problems with establishing the full extent of Douglass’s surviving correspondence to the fact that ‘many of the letters are in private hands, and others are scattered through hundreds of manuscript collections in the United States, Canada, and Europe.’15 Further issues confront researchers with a particular interest in the letters Douglass composed in the first half of his life, on the grounds

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that ‘nearly all the antebellum and wartime correspondence to Douglass was destroyed in an 1872 fire at his house in Rochester.’16 These problems and absences notwithstanding, however, the amount of extant material is staggering: McKivigan confirms that the Douglass Papers team have so far ‘obtained reproductions of over 5,000 letters by and to Douglass.’17 If the breadth of Douglass’s correspondence is ‘unmatched by any other African American of his generation,’ so too is its complexity.18 As McKivigan emphasizes, for example, those interested in Douglass’s epistolary engagements must take due note of the fact that he ‘himself made the first concerted effort to publish his own correspondence’ – ‘[e]ach of his autobiographies reproduces letters to and from Douglass in part or in their entirety,’ while he ‘also printed important letters written by himself or to him in the various newspapers he published.’19 But far from being transparent historical records, these public epistolary documents are deeply influenced by Douglass’s strategies of self-creation. ‘In accordance with the editorial standards of his era,’ McKivigan adds, ‘when publishing his own letters Douglass excised portions of a purely personal nature. No letters between Douglass and members of his family made their way into his own publications.’20 Any later reader or editor of Douglass’s correspondence must first reckon with the way it has already been shaped, often in invisible ways, by the political and cultural motivations undergirding his letter-writing and letter-printing practices. ‘In answer to the suggestion as to the desirableness of an authentic publication of his lectures and speeches, he said it was his hope at some time to arrange them for publication, along with a collection of his letters,’ an early biographer, James Gregory, reported during Douglass’s lifetime. ‘He wished something to be left as a memorial of his work, humble though it was. It might, in some way, help to weaken the force of the criticism someone has made that, “If the negro were sunk in the depth of the sea, all that the negro has done and the negro himself would be forgotten within twenty years.” ’21 Part interpersonal exchange, part archive, part diary, and part literary narrative, Douglass’s body of letters had a radically revisionist moral and social use value, in their capacity to defy the dehumanizing realities of African American lives lived within a white racist imaginary. ‘I am unfit for public speaking’ (FDPC1, 2). So Douglass concedes in one of his earliest surviving letters, written from Lynn, Massachusetts to William Lloyd Garrison on 8 November 1842 and subsequently published in The Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Having been ‘seized with a violent pain in my breast, which continued till morning, and with occasional raising of blood,’ Douglass was especially galled that he had been unable to meet his commitment to lecture because, ‘[t]hose that can but whisper freedom, should be doing even that’ (FDPC1, 2). Substituting his increasingly renowned oratory with the far less tried and tested arena of public letter-writing, he sought instead to translate his recent speeches protesting against the Northern imprisonment of the fugitive slave George Latimer into written prose. Showcasing his use of Latimer’s plight to indict Northern complicity in slavery as a national rather than regional sin, Douglass here relies on dramatic inversions similar to those already found in his public addresses: ‘Henceforth we need not portray to the imagination of northern people, the flying slave making his way through thick and dark woods of the South, with white fanged blood-hounds yelping on his blood-stained track; but refer to the streets of Boston’ (FDPC1, 3). But in warring against the morally deadening limits of dispassionate reportage, Douglass also adopts self-consciously literary

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tactics through which he seeks to heighten and direct his readers’ empathy. As he urges Garrison at one point, ‘let us take a walk to the prison in which George Latimer is confined, inquire for the turn-key; let him open the large iron-barred door that lead you to the inner prison . . . Hark! listen! Hear the groans and cries of George Latimer, mingling with which may be heard the cry – my wife, my child – and all is still again’ (FDPC1, 4). Working not to provide a factual summary but to emotively inhabit Latimer’s perspective, Douglass uses first-person narration in this letter to deliberately ventriloquize his subject’s suffering. ‘I am to be murdered, though not in the ordinary way,’ he writes in the voice of Latimer. ‘No; I am to be killed by inches. I know not how; perhaps by cat-hauling until my back is torn all to pieces, my flesh it be cut with the rugged lash, and I faint’ (FDPC1, 4). Refusing to flinch from taboo topics related to the abuse and mutilation of black bodies as sites of white torture, Douglass establishes his authority to speak for Latimer as born of autobiographical experience: ‘I can sympathise with George Latimer, having myself been cast into a miserable jail, on suspicion of my intending to do what he is said to have done, viz. appropriating my own body to my use’ (FDPC1, 5). ‘My heart is full, and had I my voice, I should be doing all that I am capable of, for Latimer’s redemption,’ he then concludes. ‘I can’t write to much advantage, having never had a day’s schooling in my life, nor have I ever ventured to give publicity to any of my scribbling before; nor would I now, but for my peculiar circumstances’ (FDPC1, 5). Importantly, Douglass’s decision to finish his powerful narrative with such a self-deprecating critique of his literary prowess was to become a repeated feature not only of his public correspondence but of his published writings in general. Both here and elsewhere he sought to encourage his audiences toward a realization not so much of his failures as an author, as to the failures of even the most eloquent language to do justice to the realities of black enslavement. Writing this first of many letters intended for publication in the antislavery press – which he justified solely on the grounds of personal necessity while nevertheless displaying considerable artistic freedom – Douglass effectively pioneered a set of literary techniques and devices that were to become a staple of his protest aesthetic. This 1842 letter bears witness to Douglass’s use of the epistolary form as a testing ground for the form and content of his speeches and his later autobiographical works. Douglass’s missive on behalf of Latimer can be taken as a signal of the beginning of a public letter-writing practice designed to vindicate his antislavery activism. But at the same time as shoring up his personal and political relationships, his extant correspondence also betrays the social and cultural tensions rife within a transatlantic abolitionist network. Writing a public letter from Chester County, Pennsylvania, to the white reformer James Miller McKim in September 1844, Douglass customarily began with a repeated series of disclaimers. Characteristically informing his addressee (and his wider readership) that he was ‘quite unaccustomed to write anything for the public eye, and in many instances quite unwilling to do so,’ he begged leave to submit ‘a very hasty, and of course very imperfect, sketch of the Anti-slavery meetings recently held’ (FDPC1, 28). ‘Those that came gave very good attention, though I am satisfied that most came from no higher motive than to gratify an idle curiosity,’ he summarized, before adding, ‘I am glad, however, they came, from whatever motive; I am willing to be regarded as a curiosity, if I may thereby aid on the high and holy cause of the slave’s emancipation’ (FDPC1, 28). At the heart of this letter is one of Douglass’s first written

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recognitions of the problematic public perception of the archetypal ex-enslaved person, who is treated as part of a theatrical spectacle that is vulnerable not only to white proslavery vilification but white abolitionist commodification. Writing over a decade later, in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass was no longer ‘willing’ to be treated as a body of evidence. He concluded his statement that white audiences attending his speeches ‘came, no doubt, from curiosity to hear what a negro could say in his own cause’ by taking offence at the fact that, ‘I was generally introduced as a “chattel” – a “thing” – a piece of southern “property” – the chairman assuring the audience that it could speak.’22 Staging his growing resistance in epistolary no less than autobiographical terms, his increasingly multi-layered and multifocal letter-writing practices confirm his self-reflexive cultivation of the image of someone more than able to ‘speak just the word that seemed to me the word to be spoken by me.’23 Across both his public and private correspondence, Douglass engaged in acts of literary experimentation to ensure that he not only projected but also owned his personal voice. In working to control his public position as a transatlantic cause célèlebre through his correspondence, Douglass wrote Garrison a public letter from Dublin in September 1845 in which he narrated an incident involving ‘a real American, democratic, Christian mob’ that had sought to prevent him lecturing on slavery during the voyage from the United States to Britain (FDPC1, 50). According to Douglass’s detailed account, the ‘clamor went on longer after I ceased speaking, and was only silenced by the captain, who told the mobocrats if they did not cease their clamor, he would have them put in irons’ (FDPC1, 50). In denouncing the actions of his proslavery auditors in this letter, Douglass shed rare light on the rationale undergirding his practice of deliberately withholding personal information, a practice which he understood as a prerequisite to antislavery activism. ‘There are a number of things about which I should like to write, aside from those immediately connected with our cause; but of this I must deny myself, – at least under present circumstances,’ he explained, convinced that, ‘[s]entimental letterwriting must give way, when its claims are urged against facts necessary to the advancement of our cause’ (FDPC1, 47). If collectively examined, the political and aesthetic tensions on display within Douglass’s antebellum letters testify to the difficulties he confronted not just over the freedom to express himself, but how to construct and negotiate between his private and public identities. A few months later, Douglass again wrote to Garrison, this time from Scotland, in order to endorse a further categorical distinction between his private and public senses of self. ‘I have given up the field of public letter-writing to [our] friend [James N.] Buffum, who will tell you how we are getting on,’ Douglass told Garrison, ‘but I cannot refrain from sending you a line as a mere private correspondent’ (FDPC1, 108). In a bold departure from his published writings, in which he artfully crafted a public persona by vouchsafing his archetypally heroic status, Douglass’s decision to write as a ‘private correspondent’ tellingly resulted in his revelation of a vulnerable interiority. ‘He says he can put his hand on the Bible, and, with a clear conscience, swear he never struck me,’ he observes of Thomas Auld, before candidly laying bare another version of the white master’s sanitized story. ‘He has certainly forgotten when a lamp was lost from the carriage, without my knowledge, that he came to the stable with the cart-whip, and with its heavy lash beat me over the head and shoulders, to make me tell how it was lost . . . and that he beat me until he wearied himself’ (FDPC1, 109). Offering up an autobiographical vignette that is nowhere else to be

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found in his surviving archive, Douglass concludes by testifying to his intellectual authority over Auld: ‘My memory, in such matters, is better than his’ (FDPC1, 109). But the overall effect of this narrative is to complicate his famous subjugation of the white overseer Edward Covey in the Narrative of the Life, an episode that Douglass configures as one which ‘revived within me a sense of my own manhood.’24 For in the letter to Garrison, Douglass seeks to memorialize the history of his enslaved body as a site not of invincibility but of victimhood. The role of this letter in the shaping of Douglass’s selfhood is further rendered intriguing by the fact that it was actually ultimately intended for publication – subsequently appearing in the pages of The Liberator. Douglass sought to maximize his moral suasionist persona by combining the intimate tone of the ‘private correspondent’ with the denunciatory invective of the public figure, a mixture he would increasingly deploy as he fought both to do justice to the physical and psychological traumas endured by ‘Frederick Bailey, the slave,’ and to dramatize the political victories of ‘Frederick Douglass, the freeman.’ Concluding by informing Garrison that, ‘I did not tell many things which I might have told,’ Douglass sheds rare light in this letter not only on his common epistolary practices but on his formal and thematic strategies as an orator, autobiographer, essayist, and historian more generally (FDPC1, 109). Constituting declarations of artistry as well as authority, Douglass here betrays a lifelong determination to produce multifaceted bodies of work characterized not by self-evident acts of didactic explication but by self-reflexive gestures of narrative withholding, literary fragmentation, and textual ellipsis. Damning evidence of the personal, political, and financial constraints placed on Douglass by white U.S. abolitionists remains a theme of his letters, and is especially to the fore in his correspondence with the Bostonian reformer Maria Weston Chapman during the 1840s. As early as 10 September 1843, while he was engaged as an antislavery lecturer in Cambridge, Indianapolis, Douglass wrote Chapman a letter in which he protested against the American Antislavery Society’s tight hold on his purse strings. ‘I have received a few lines from my wife asking for means to carry on household affair[s],’ he poignantly observed, before confirming his lack of financial autonomy by admitting, ‘I have none to send hir [sic]’ (FDPC1, 13). ‘Will you please see that she is provided with $25 or $30,’ the letter concludes (FDPC1, 13). Even more revealingly, a few years later, in March 1846, he wrote Chapman another letter – this time from Kilmarnock, Scotland – in which he confided, ‘I have felt somewhat greaved [sic] to see by a letter from you to Mr. R. D. Webb of Dublin that you betray a want of confidence in me as a man, and an abolitionist’ (FDPC1, 99). Bitterly opposed to the fact that ‘you were pointing out to Mr. Webb the necessity of his keeping watch over myself and freind [sic] Mr. Buffum,’ he issued an ultimatum: ‘If you wish to drive me from the Anti-slavery society, put me under overseer ship and the work is done’ (FDPC1, 99). Dramatically to the fore within this protest is one of white abolitionism’s most troubling contradictions: the extent to which the racist rhetoric, as well as the white supremacist ideology, of plantation slavery influenced antislavery politics and repeatedly defined black–white relations in the free states. Nothing could be further from Douglass’s chafing against his treatment by Chapman, however, than the unassuming manner he displayed in his correspondence with the white reformer, statesman, and benefactor Gerrit Smith. Scarcely five years after his epistolary rebukes to the American Antislavery Society, he wrote Smith a letter

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from Rochester, New York, in which he took heart from Smith’s positive endorsement of his recent speeches (‘I am greatly pleased by your good opinion of these lectures’) while also giving evidence of their egalitarian friendship by candidly sharing his authorial insecurities: ‘I sometimes fear that being delivered by a fugitive slave – who has never had a day[’]s school constitutes the only merit they possess’ (FDPC1, 439). ‘I am seriously intending if I can command the money to publish them in Book form,’ he then further confided, an enterprise in support of which he gratefully acknowledged ‘your generous offer of 25 dollars for that purpose, [which] was timely and very thankfully received’ (FDPC1, 439). Offering up further confirmation within his correspondence of his conviction that the route to literary accomplishments was a sure-fire way to dismantle racial prejudice, Douglass also shared his hope that, ‘[t]he fact that negroes are turning Book makers may possibly serve to remove the popular impression that they are fit only for Boot blackers’ (FDPC1, 439). Writing another letter to Smith from Rochester over a year later, on 13 February 1852, Douglass signaled the importance he attached not only to the style and content of his correspondence but to the means of its practical execution by explicitly drawing attention to his handwriting. ‘You quite encourage me about my chirography,’ he informed Smith, especially since ‘[m]y hand is a picked up one – gathered from different sources and therefore lacks consistency’ (FDPC1, 517). For Douglass, the act of fine composition was indelibly intertwined with freedom itself, as indicated by the well-known passage in the Narrative of the Life where he reflects on learning to write by copying letters of the alphabet onto ‘board fence, brick wall, and pavement.’25 As shown by the letter to Smith, he retained a lifelong commitment to improving his penmanship, so that ‘I could write a hand very similar to that of [my] Master.’26 Still, despite the personally revealing tone of Douglass’s correspondence with Smith, it is ultimately only in rare epistolary exchanges that readers obtain a no-holds-barred insight into the struggle of ‘Frederick Bailey, the slave’ to become ‘Frederick Douglass, the freeman.’ A revealing case in point is a letter Douglass wrote on 16 May 1846 to Ruth Cox, a fugitive slave from Maryland who was living with his family under the adopted name of Harriet Bailey. ‘A few loving words to my own Dear Sister Harriet. You will observe that I commence to write very plain,’ Douglass begins – gently acknowledging the literacy barriers affecting the correspondence between formerly enslaved blacks, before continuing ‘I don’t know how I shall hold out – at any rate I think you will be able to read it. I’ll try to make it so that you can without much trouble’ (FDPC1, 124). Breaking radical new ground, the words that follow could not be further from Douglass’s invariably stage-managed narration of an empowered selfhood in his oratory and published writings. ‘Harriet I got real low spirits a few days – ago – quite down at the mouth,’ he confesses. ‘I felt worse than “get out.” My under lip hung like that of a motherless colt[.] I looked so ugly that I hated to see myself in a glass. There was no living for me. I was snappish. I would have kicked my grand “dada”! I was in a terrible mood – “dats a fac! old missus – is you got any ting for poor nigger to eat!!!” ’ (FDPC1, 124). Deliberately writing with ‘a little of the plantation manner of speech’ that he virulently rejected when urged on him by white abolitionists and that he otherwise excised from his writings, Douglass here offers unprecedented confirmation of the extent to which his identities as ‘Frederick Douglass, the freeman’ and ‘Frederick Bailey, the slave’ remained entangled rather than distinct.27 In this letter, written exclusively for a

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single, private, black addressee, he offers an emotional outburst nowhere else to be found in his correspondence, not only admitting to psychological trauma and suicidal tendencies (‘It is a terrible feeling and I advise every body to keep clear of it who can . . . There was no living for me’), but to an unequivocal sense of self-hatred (‘I feel very foolish when I come out of my fits of insanity’) that is entirely missing from the self-mythologizing speeches, essays, and books that characterize his lifelong bodies of work (FDPC1, 125). Writing to Cox, a correspondent he identified as a family member, and one who had also suffered a history of enslavement, Douglass reverts to a ‘plantation’ idiom as a powerful lens through which he is able to begin to locate his unresolved and seemingly un-choreographed experiences of familial loss and mental depression. His use of minstrel-show rhetoric testifies to the emotional cost of the ‘Horrible feeling[s]’ being generated by the repressed memory of an enslaved past that continues to resurface within his emancipated present (FDPC1, 124). Betraying an emotional indebtedness to another individual that is entirely at odds with his more typical appearance as the archetypal self-made man across his speeches and writings, Douglass is at pains to emphasize to Cox that, ‘could I have seen you then . . . soon I would have been releived [sic] . . . You would have been so kind to me. You would not have looked cross at me’ (FDPC1, 124). In a powerful confirmation of the ‘wickedness’ of slaveholders who kept enslaved men and women ‘in utter ignorance’ by denying them the ‘sweet enjoyments of writing or receiving letters,’ Douglass also pleads with Cox to serve as an emotional conduit to his illiterate wife, Anna Murray Douglass. ‘Read the enclosed letter which I send to my Dear Anna over and over again till she can fully understand its contents,’ he instructs Cox in the final lines of his note to her (FDPC1, 125). In a staggering loss to his epistolary archive, Douglass’s ‘enclosed letter’ to Anna – along with others he may have written or dictated to his wife – has not survived. Yet this absence is perhaps appropriate given the struggle with silence and secrecy evident in Douglass’s correspondence with Cox. Scarcely less than a year later, on 31 January 1847, Douglass confirmed that his experience of depression was no isolated incident by writing to Cox again, with a no less upsetting confession. ‘There are many things I should like to write about – but I am not in a state of mind to write,’ he confided, before declaring: ‘I am miserable – unhappy – and it seems I must so live and Die. I wish to mercy I could see you and talk with [you]. I could soon relieve my mind – but I am too far a way – and writing seems only to make matters worse. It is absolutely too bad that I should be so harassed in my feelings’ (FDPC1, 200). Revealing a self vulnerable to perpetual cycles of emotional angst that extended far beyond immediate exposure to the terrors of enslavement, such letters make it possible for scholars to begin to extrapolate the enduring stranglehold ‘Frederick Bailey, the slave’ exerted over the mental landscape of ‘Frederick Douglass, the freeman.’ In recognizing the limitations of language in the face of psychological suffering, Douglass’s declarations of unhappiness to Cox provide an alternative framework within which to revisit his jubilant public statement in the September 1848 letter to Thomas Auld that ‘freedom has given me new life. I fancy you would scarcely know me’ (FDPC1, 85). As close analysis of the emotionally conflicted Douglass on offer within his private correspondence reveals, it is not only the case that Auld would scarcely recognize Douglass, but that the latter ‘scarcely knew’ himself. Giving the lie to his earlier conviction that letter-writing functioned as a powerful substitute for

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the spoken word, Douglass’s admission to Cox that ‘writing seems only to make matters worse’ betrays a realization he nowhere elsewhere conceded: that words, language, and literary expression all failed when it came to extrapolating the enormity of ‘unhappy’ feelings by which ‘I must so live and Die.’ ‘I have no words to describe to you the deep agony of soul which I experienced,’ Douglass declares in his public letter to Auld, even as he seems to overturn this claim through his powerfully eloquent recollection of ‘the chain, the gag, the bloody whip, the death-like gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman’ (FDPC1, 310, 311). A key issue within Douglass’s correspondence as a whole and his oeuvre more generally is the ability of language to capture the physical and psychological realities of enslavement; a concern he shared with many other African American writers of the nineteenth century. Interrogating the extent to which textual representation could do justice to their emotional, corporeal, and existential experiences, he and other enslaved and emancipated letter-writers, both celebrated and unknown, cultivated a multitude of experimental strategies – characterized by narrative withholding and indirection and ellipses as well as metaphor, symbolism, and allegory – as they asserted their externally and internally contested right to literacy. Even a brief analysis of the now-considerable archive of enslaved correspondence testifies to the perceived failure of written expression to begin to come to grips with a range of experiences that remained formally off-limits. Writing to her unnamed mother in April 1838, for instance, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, an enslaved woman who would much later become Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress and confidant, lamented, ‘I must now close, although I could fill ten pages with my griefs and misfortunes; no tongue could express them as I feel.’28 Similarly, decades later, on 7 October 1852, the former fugitive turned celebrated author Henry Bibb wrote a public letter to his old master, Albert G. Sibley, in which he freely conceded, ‘my illustrations are inadequate to describe the injustice, and my abhorrence of slave holding.’29 No feted national exemplar like Douglass, Keckley, or Bibb, but rather an obscure enslaved man residing in Georgia, Abream Scriven meanwhile composed a letter on 19 September 1858 in which he too addressed an experience which could not be captured by the conventions of epistolary prose: ‘My Dear Wife, I take the pleasure of writing you these few [lines] with much regret to inform you that I am Sold . . . My Dear wif [sic] for you and my Children my pen cannot Express the griffe [sic] I feel to be parted from you all.’30 Adopting equally self-conscious rhetoric in the face of the difficulties the epistolary mode presented for African American subjects writing themselves into existence, Douglass navigated the challenge of doing justice to the life of ‘Frederick Bailey, the slave’ by borrowing from numerous genres – including the political tract, the spiritual confession, and the literary autobiography – while also resorting to formal experiments encompassing everything from signifying to artful dramatization. Exemplifying Ben Schiller’s observation that enslaved black correspondents relied on ‘ambiguous discourse and equivocal slippages of meaning to trouble and complicate the “public transcript” of a given text and turn it into a marginal, but not necessarily hidden, “transcript of resistance,” ’ Douglass marshaled an array of techniques designed to both straddle and trouble the divide between his private and his political personae.31 Refusing to be defeated by the imposition of a social, cultural, and existential death in which ‘no correspondence’ was permitted to ‘the slave,’ both ‘Frederick Bailey’ and ‘Frederick Douglass’ endorsed the right to letter-writing as a means of joining

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the world of the oppressed to the world of the free. Nowhere is this ambition more in evidence than in Douglass’s determination to use the epistolary form as a way of reopening the lines of communication between enslaved and free familial networks and of working toward their physical reunion. ‘It will give me great pleasure to Serve you and your friend in bringing Mother and son together – So far as I am able’ (FDPC2, 143). So Douglass wrote to Susan Inches Lesley on 6 September 1856, before confiding: ‘It is . . . exceedingly difficult to find Colored people from the South. They change their names – and conceale [sic] their origin for obvious reasons . . . [B]ut I have Several acuaintances [sic] in different parts of the Country, from North Carolina, of whom I will gladly make enquiries – and Should any trace of him reach me, I will gladly inform you of the fact’ (FDPC2, 143). As Douglass makes clear in this letter his efforts to reunite separated African Americans were driven by his own experience of loss. ‘I have been looking for a friend of mine from Slavery this 18 years – and in measure know how to Sympathise, with your poor friend – in Search of her Son,’ he tells Lesley (FDPC2, 143). Writing from his home in New York to James Hall a few years later, Douglass further testifies to this sense of dislocation and absence: ‘The curtain dropt between me and Maryland nearly twenty one years ago. Since [t]hen I have been separated from all the dear ones of my youth as if by the shadow of death’ (FDPC2, 185). But there were also chinks of light amidst the gloom of familial severance. Reporting from Rochester on 4 January 1865, toward the end of the Civil War, Douglass was heartened to inform Julia Griffiths of a recent breakthrough regarding his family that had taken place during a lecturing tour in Baltimore. ‘Among the most interesting incidents was meeting my dear sister Eliza, whom I had not seen for nearly thirty years, and with whom, under the slave laws, I could not correspond, and did not know but that she was dead,’ he declared (FDPC2, 296). While Douglass had no choice but to acknowledge in this letter that the ‘facts concerning other members of our family’ given to him by his sister were ‘most[ly] . . . painful, for they have been sold and scattered throughout the rebellious slave States,’ his relatively neglected activities as an Underground Railroad conductor nonetheless point to his continuing commitment to aiding others in the journey from enslavement to freedom (FDPC2, 296). Writing to Amy Post in one of the limited but revealing body of letters that touches on this aspect of his career, Douglass made the following heartfelt plea: ‘Please shelter this sister from the house of bondage until five o’clock – this afternoon – she will then be sent onto the land of freedom.’32 Yet more revealingly, in the independent spirit of another fugitive he aided, a man named William Osborne, ‘Frederick Douglass, the freeman’ saw the ghost of ‘Frederick Bailey, the slave.’ Writing to Maria G. Porter on 13 October 1857, he informed her that Osborne ‘[c]ame to us last night from slavery. He looks fully able to take care of himself, but being destitute, he needs for the present, a little assistance to get him to Canada – $2.50 will be quite suffecient [sic]’ (FDPC2, 157). Having survived many physical and psychological trials during his own lifetime, Douglass neither for the first nor the last time here choreographs for others the imbrication of epistolary guidance and emancipatory care that was so crucial to his individual experience of liberation. In this respect, we can see once more the wider significance of letter-writing in Douglass’s project of textual self-making. ‘By applying methods of literary analysis to documents that previously have been regarded as a regrettably small data set, rather than as a genre of intellectual creation,’ Christopher Hager argues in regard to African American letters, we can

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‘broaden literary studies (to manuscripts in addition to printed works, marginally literate writers in addition to the well-educated) and inspire new modes of interpreting historical sources’; and it is this approach that promises to further illuminate Douglass’s long-neglected epistolary oeuvre.33 Douglass not only produced celebrated autobiographies, speeches, and essays in which he expanded the conventions of a range of literary genres, he also left behind a vast and multi-layered body of letters through which he cut to the heart of a lifelong struggle to do justice to the corporeal, imaginative, and emotional realities of both ‘Douglass, the freeman’ and ‘Bailey, the slave.’

Acknowledgments I would like to express my profound gratitude to John McKivigan for generously granting access to the so-far unpublished second volume of Douglass’s Correspondence in the Frederick Douglass Papers series.

Notes 1. Douglass, Letter to ‘Dear Mary,’ 30 July 1846, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, Box 3, Reel 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. For a full account of Smyth’s campaign against Douglass during the Irish visit of 1845 see Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway, 118–21. 5. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, lxii. See Hager, Word by Word, and Schiller, ‘Self and Other in Black and White.’ 6. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 3. See, for example: Miller, ed. Dear Master; Redkey, ed. A Grand Army; and Griffin, ed. Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends. 7. Starobin, Blacks in Bondage, 50, 48. 8. Ibid. xx. 9. Hager, Word by Word, 54. 10. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies, 319. 11. Blaisdell, ‘Introduction,’ xii. For more on the genre of the ‘Old Master’ letter and Douglass’s relation to it see Sarah Meer’s chapter in this volume. 12. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies, 238. 13. Ibid. 14. See Douglass, The Life and Writings, and A Black Diplomat in Haiti. For an important later collection that foregrounds Douglass’s familial correspondence networks see Cooper, ed. Dear Father. 15. McKivigan, ‘Introduction to Series Three,’ xxv. 16. Ibid. xxii. 17. Ibid. xxvii. As McKivigan observes, it was ‘[o]nly during his early career’ that ‘surviving letters written by Douglass outnumber those written to him,’ a statistic that explains the scope as well as the periodization of this chapter, in which I solely come to grips with the antebellum letters he authored (p. xxviii). 18. Ibid. xxvii. 19. Ibid. xxiv. 20. Ibid. 21. Gregory, Frederick Douglass, 210. 22. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies, 366. 23. Ibid. 367.

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Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in Autobiographies, 65. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies, 367. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 42. Bibb, ‘Letter to My Old Master,’ in The Life and Adventures, 239. Quoted in Decker, Epistolary Practices, 87. Schiller, ‘Learning Their Letters,’ 15. Quoted in Bial, The Underground Railroad, 38. Hager, Word by Word, 4.

Works Cited Bial, R. (1995), The Underground Railroad, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Bibb, H. [1849] (2001), The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave, ed. C. J. Heglar, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Blaisdell, B. (2013), ‘Introduction,’ in C. G. Woodson (ed.), The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters during the Crisis 1800–1860, New York: Dover, i–xv. Blassingame, J., ed. (1977), Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Chaffin, T. (2014), Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Cooper, M., ed. (1990), Dear Father: A Collection of Letters to Frederick Douglass from His Children 1859–1984, Philadelphia: Fulmore Press. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Douglass, F. (1818–95), Correspondence, Frederick Douglass Papers, The Library of Congress, Washington, MSS11879. Douglass, F. (1975), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. P. S. Foner, 5 vols., New York: International Publishers. Douglass, F. (1977), A Black Diplomat in Haiti: The Diplomatic Correspondence of U.S. Minister Frederick Douglass from Haiti, 1889–1891, ed. N. Brown, 2 vols., New York: Documentary Publications. Douglass, F. (1994), Autobiographies, ed. H. L. Gates, Jr., New York: Library of America. Douglass, F. (2009), The Frederick Douglass Papers – Series Three: Correspondence – Volume 1, 1842–1852, ed. J. McKivigan, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cited parenthetically as FDPC1. Douglass, F. (2016), The Frederick Douglass Papers – Series Three: Correspondence – Volume 2, 1845–1865, ed. J. McKivigan, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cited parenthetically as FDPC2. Gregory, J. (1893), Frederick Douglass the Orator, Springfield, MA: Wiley & Co. Griffin, F. J., ed. (1999), Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854–1868, New York: Knopf. Hager, C. (2013), Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keckley, E. H. (1868), Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, New York: G. W. Carleton & Co. McKivigan, J. (2009), ‘Introduction to Series Three,’ in F. Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers Series Three: Correspondence – Volume 1, 1842–1852, ed. J. McKivigan, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, xxi–xxx.

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Miller, R. M., ed. (1990), Dear Master: Letters of a Slave Family, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Redkey, E. S., ed. (1992), A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Schiller, B. (2008), ‘Learning Their Letters: Critical Literacy, Epistolary Culture, and Slavery in the Antebellum South,’ Southern Quarterly, 45: 11–29. Schiller, B. (2008), ‘Self and Other in Black and White: Slaves’ Letters and the Epistolary Cultures of American Slavery, c. 1815–1865,’ Ph.D. Diss., University of Edinburgh. Starobin, R., ed. (1988), Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publications.

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24 OLD MASTER LETTERS AND LETTERS FROM THE OLD WORLD: JULIA GRIFFITHS AND THE USES OF CORRESPONDENCE IN FREDERICK DOUGLASS’S NEWSPAPERS Sarah Meer

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ong before literary critics discovered ‘interpretive communities,’ abolitionist print culture was demonstrating them.1 It has become a truism to suggest that periodicals ‘imagine communities,’ to adapt Benedict Anderson’s phrase, and many historians have emphasized their communal aspect: Jeffrey Groves talks of their ‘communities of print’ and their creation of ‘a sense of belonging,’ while Susan Belasco Smith and Kenneth Price focus on the ‘social text.’2 Antislavery newspapers too, as several historians have recently argued, projected communities based on common ideals and networks of friendship.3 Accordingly, antislavery editors not only cultivated readers, they invited specific readings and counted on particular interpretations, demarcating community in terms of textual response. Stanley Fish speaks of ‘ “ways of reading” that are extensions of community perspectives,’ but in their use of letters, antislavery newspapers reversed the process, eliciting readings that united and defined their readerships.4 Redeploying the written culture of slavery was a favorite method of highlighting its cruelty. Texts used for this purpose included advertisements and ephemera, but it is letters which best demonstrate the shared ‘way of reading,’ or ‘community perspective’ upon which the tactic was based. Printing letters to and from former slaveowners offered an experience of reading in sympathy, of belonging to an interpretive community distinguished by opposition to slave-masters’ assumptions. These ‘open letters’ sometimes made a private correspondence public, and sometimes were public by design but borrowed their style and modes of address from the private exchanges of friends. They demonstrated that a letter’s significance could depend on its reception: not just who read it, but in what circumstances, and in what company. Antislavery newspapers encouraged skeptical reading of letters from former masters, readings against the grain, but other letters were presented quite differently. From 1855 onwards, for example, one regular column in the various newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass took the form of an open letter from a British supporter, Julia Griffiths. These Letters from the Old World (1855–63) served a purpose almost diametrically opposed to the letters to and from former masters. Whereas the ‘Old Master Letters’ were published 377

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to reject ties (those the writers claimed over their former slaves) Griffiths’ Letters were written to forge and cement antislavery friendships across the Atlantic. While the former were offered for skeptical reading, the latter signaled sincerity, professing minds in sympathy, rather than at odds. These Letters also record the self-consciously international projection of the newspapers Douglass edited between 1847 and 1863. Benedict Anderson famously implicated the newspaper in the development of the nation state, of course, but The North Star (1847–51), Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851–60), and Douglass’ Monthly (1859–63) cast their nets more widely. All three papers were produced in Rochester, New York, but boasted subscribers in many Northern U.S. cities, in Canada, and also in Britain and Ireland.5 Part of the debate over American slavery was conducted as a hostile correspondence. Mail received by the New York office of the American Anti-Slavery Society included a kind of terrorism: Theodore Weld, for instance, recorded a letter sent to Lewis Tappan from Alabama ‘containing a negro’s ear cut off close to the head.’6 In turn, as John Nerone observes, the American Anti-Slavery Society sent mass mailings to post offices in the South not so much to reach slaveowners as because the response – public burnings, gag laws – swayed public opinion in the North.7 Letters were the medium and sometimes the message in the struggle over slavery, in this case both evidence of violence and a threat of more. On 30 March 1860, Lewis Douglass, editing Frederick Douglass’ Paper while his father was in Great Britain, printed two letters, the first of the hostile variety, and the second a message of antislavery sympathy. The first was printed under the heading ‘A Voice from the South.’ It had been sent from Tennessee to Jermain Loguen, a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Syracuse, New York. Loguen had escaped from slavery in 1834, changing his name from ‘Logue,’ the name of his first owner and father, David.8 The letter’s author, Sarah Logue, was the widow of another former owner, David’s brother Manasseh. The Logues were a feckless tribe who could have been invented by Faulkner; they owned a distillery and were partial to drinking and brawling. They had acquired Jermain’s mother, Cherry, when she was 7; she was their first slave, probably sold cheap because she had been free and kidnapped in Ohio. It was more than twenty-five years since Jermain had left, but the Logues were still hoping to recoup his loss. Sarah Logue’s letter is an astonishing combination of domestic newsiness, business, petulance, and menace, and its movement from familial update to threat to sarcasm is at first disturbing and then increasingly bathetic. Logue puts on display the assumptions, ironies, and evasions of a slaveowning society, she both treats Loguen as a moral being and insists on his price as chattel: MAURY COUNTY, STATE OF TENNESSEE, Feb’y 20th, 1860. TO JARM: – I now take my pen to write you a few lines, to let you know how we all are. I am a cripple, but I am still able to get about. The rest of the family are all well. Cherry is as well as common. I write you these lines to let you know the situation that we are in, – partly in consequence of your running away and stealing Old Rock, our fine mare. Though we got the mare back, she was never worth much after you took her; and, as I now stand in need of some funds, I have determined to sell you; and have had an offer for you, but did not see fit to take it. If you will send me one thousand dollars and pay for the

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old mare, I will give up all claim I have to you. Write to me as soon as you get these lines, and let me know if you will accept my proposition. In consequence of your running away, we had to sell Abe and Ann and twelve acres of land; and I want you to send me the money that I may be able to redeem the land that you was the cause of our selling, and on receipt of the above named sum of money, I will send you your bill of sale. If you do not comply with my request, I will sell you to someone else; and you may rest assured that the time is not far distant when things will be changed with you. Write to me as soon as you get these lines. Direct your letter to Bigbyville, Maury Country, Tennessee. You had better comply with my request. I understand that you are a preacher. As the Southern people are so bad, you had better come and preach to your old acquaintances. I would like to know if you read your Bible? If so, can you tell what will become of the thief if he does not repent? And if the blind lead the blind, what will the consequence be? I deem it unnecessary to say much more at present. A word to the wise is sufficient. You know where the liar has his part. You know that we reared you as we reared our own children; that you was never abused, and that shortly before you ran away, when your master asked you if you would like to be sold, you said you would not leave him to go with anybody.9 Thus Sarah blames him for causing the sale of her land and two of his fellow slaves, overlooks his paternity in order to claim that ‘we reared you as we reared our own children,’ and hints that she will sell him to someone who will pursue him at Syracuse. Her letter reveals her prejudices, her educational shortcomings, and the sheer virulence of her emotions, including jealousy: after her threats, she cannot resist a bit of sneering at Jermain’s status as a preacher, continuing compulsively some way after, ‘I deem it unnecessary to say much more at present.’ As Loguen knew, Sarah Logue’s letter could work brilliantly as an abolitionist document in itself. Lewis Douglass too recognized that this letter was almost as pathetic as it was appalling, and reinforced this by introducing it in Frederick Douglass’ Paper as almost a comic offering. Lewis was careful to underline the contrast between the stridently patronizing address ‘TO JARM’ and the dignity of the man readers of the paper knew as ‘the Rev. J. W. Loguen of Syracuse.’10 Douglass’s introduction to the letter includes jocular references to the popular song ‘Way Down in Tennessee,’ and his slang – such as ‘hard up’ and ‘hush money’ – combine to disarm Sarah Logue’s threats with irreverence.11 There is even a hint of sexist condescension in his amusement at her ‘womanly’ harping on about domestic woes and the disappointing mare: The following letter was received a day or two since by the Rev. J. W. Loguen of Syracuse, from his mistress ‘way down in Tennessee.[’] The old lady is evidently ‘hard up,’ financially, and attempts to frighten her former servant into the payment of $1,000 as ‘hush money.’ We imagine she sent to the wrong man, as Mr. Loguen needs no ‘bill of sale,’ to secure himself from capture in that section of the State. Besides his own stalwart arm he has hosts of friends who would make that region too hot to hold the man-hunters who would venture on such an errand as the old lady hints at in her somewhat singular epistle. – Her lamentations about the old mare are decidedly funny, (we may add womanly,) and all the misfortunes of the family are traced directly to the escape of ‘Jarm.’12

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As unintentionally revealing as Sarah Logue’s letter is, its framing by Lewis is partly what enables us to read it as comical and ridiculous. Readers of Frederick Douglass’ Paper can be assumed to share an abhorrence of slavery, and therefore of Logue’s demands, while Lewis’s reassurances about Central New York (‘too hot to hold the man-hunters’), Loguen’s ‘hosts of friends,’ and his own ‘stalwart arm’ allay any anxieties the letter might arouse. Indeed, to be among the readers of the paper, in which Loguen’s activities were regularly reported, was in a sense to be among the hosts of friends. Douglass’ Paper, in other words, encourages its subscribers to read Sarah Logue’s letter in ways that she did not anticipate, and endows her words with ironies and meanings that were not visible to her at all. This kind of textual redeployment had been a staple in abolitionist publications for decades: Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is (1839), for example, collected items from Southern newspapers which testified to beatings, mutilations, shootings of fugitives, and other atrocities. The book, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, insisted on the authenticity and significance of this kind of documentation: ‘That [slaveholders] should utter falsehoods, for the sake of proclaiming their own infamy, is not probable.’13 Weld makes particularly pointed use of newspaper advertisements for fugitive slaves, which casually indicated histories of brutality – ‘much marked with irons,’ ‘had on a large neck iron with a huge pair of horns and a large bar or band of iron on his left leg,’ and so on.14 William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator (1831–65), too, used ironic reprinting: in a regular column called the ‘Refuge of Oppression’ it reproduced proslavery texts to indict the culture of slavery. In such cases, of course, the irony lay in the eyes of the beholder, since the authors of such documents did not intend them for abolitionist arguments, nor were they interpreted as such by most of their original readers. The irony, in other words, was generated in the context of the antislavery periodical. It was produced in the text itself, by editorial introductions, or even simpler reframings like a new title. It was also a product of the perceived community of the periodicals, which enabled a reading within a shared field of sympathy. Perhaps references to mutilated and enslaved bodies horrified a few readers of a Southern paper, but in The Liberator horror was the very point. Paradoxically, though, for The Liberator’s readers, their shared repulsion was also a validation of their sense of community. Letters from and to former masters were a particularly useful kind of document for ironic reprinting, and almost formed a genre in themselves. One of the most wellknown examples is Frederick Douglass’s ‘Letter to My Old Master, Thomas Auld,’ which was printed in The North Star on 8 September 1848.15 The letter has perturbed Douglass’s biographers since; as Dickson Preston argued, it ‘made superb antislavery propaganda but was unfair to the man at whom it was aimed.’16 Its most inaccurate assertion was that Auld had ‘turned out’ Douglass’s grandmother ‘like an old horse to die in the woods’ – a doubly undeserved claim, since although Auld did not own Betsy Bailey, he was housing her at the time. Douglass published a correction in The North Star in 1849, but he also reproduced the letter without amendment in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). His actions make most sense when understood within the genre of ironic reprinting: the letters were less to Thomas Auld than they were intended for abolitionist reading. In the ‘Letter,’ Douglass told Auld, ‘I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery,’ and as its reprinting in My Bondage makes clear, what was important in that ‘use’ was

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what the letter could teach the wider circle of readers, rather than any particular communication to its ostensible addressee.17 But Old Master Letters were often most effective when they could be used to demonstrate the intellectual and sympathetic distance between the writers and their former slaves. In Henry Bibb’s 1849 narrative, he published an exchange of letters with his former master William Gatewood which pointed up the disparity in their respective states of literacy. A Gatewood letter from 9 February 1844 shows his shaky command of spelling and punctuation: I received a small book which you sent to me that I peroseed [sic] and found it was sent by H. Bibb I am a stranger in Detroit and know no man there without it is Walton H. Bibb if this be the man please write to me and tell me all about that place and the people I will tell you the news here as well as I can.18 In his first sentence alone, Bibb’s reply of 23 March demonstrates his much greater ease in the world of letters, but he also rejects the terms of familiarity on which Gatewood presumes. While Gatewood seems friendly, in his offer of an exchange of news, Bibb is formal and snubbing, insisting that their shared history is painful: ‘Dear Sir: – I am happy to inform you that you are not mistaken in the man whom you sold as property and received pay for as such.’19 Bibb also included a whole series of letters from former acquaintances in Kentucky, despite the fact that many were antagonistic or accused him of theft, because, he argued, ‘in the endorsement and confirmation which they have given to my story . . . they have done me and the anti-slavery cause good service.’20 Publishing such correspondences staged an implied culture clash between the slaveowning and the antislavery mindsets. They allowed readers to appreciate the gap between the slaveowners’ senses of themselves and their effects upon unsympathetic readers. To experience the full effect of a letter like Sarah Logue’s was to perceive two different responses at once, the one intended in its creation and the other in the publication. Letters like Bibb’s and Douglass’s, on the other hand, were written with a knowing awareness of their antislavery readership even when, like Douglass’s, they were formally addressed to an old master. Perhaps the most artful example of Old Master Letters replicates the reception gap, or staged culture clash, produced by printing a letter like Sarah Logue’s. Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 ‘Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master’ was dictated to Valentine Winters, published in the Cincinnati Commercial, and then widely reprinted, including in the New York Tribune and Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book. In desperate straits just after the Civil War, Anderson’s former master had written asking him to return to work on the farm. Like Sarah Logue, Colonel P. H. Anderson seemed to assume that the former slave shared an interest in, even a responsibility for, the fortunes of his former master, while questions of slavery and freedom were mere incidentals. Jourdan Anderson’s reply at first appears to respond to this sense of familiarity, and then reveals troubling details of their former relations that both condemn the Colonel and explain why the breach between them is irremediable. He begins with the deference that his former master is clearly counting on: ‘Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdan, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again.’21 But he soon shifts into ambivalence: ‘I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house.’22 And he then moves on to open irony

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(‘In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine’), before ending with a satirical bite which has been compared to Mark Twain: ‘Say Howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.’23 Jermain Loguen had rejected his connection with the Logues by changing his name, and offering Sarah Logue’s letter for publication was a way of repudiating the familiarity she assumed with ‘Jarm.’ In a similar way Jourdan Anderson refused the ties that the Colonel presumed still bound them. Loguen, Bibb, and Anderson insisted on their distance from former masters and used formality to do so, either in their own responses or in the framing of republished letters. Publishing letters reinforced this distance; it was an aggressive act. Frederick Douglass made this clear in his letter to Thomas Auld. In the etiquette of correspondence, Douglass was, as he said, taking a ‘great liberty . . . in addressing you in this open and public manner.’24 The conventional phrase for impoliteness, ‘taking a liberty,’ was nicely judged irony, but as Douglass admitted, he was opening himself up ‘to no inconsiderable amount of censure’ for placing Auld in the public eye without consulting him, an act of ‘reckless disregard of the rights and proprieties of private life.’25 Old Master Letters must have gained an additional charge from the impudence of the act of reprinting, itself an infringement of courtesy or decorum. Their openness was confrontational, their effects dependent on friction, misunderstanding, and conflicts of interest. But this was not the only way in which antislavery newspapers used letters. Correspondence was a form which could demonstrate sympathy and likemindedness, as well as dramatize difference; it could bridge cultural differences as well as illustrate them. Not surprisingly, letters designed to reinforce ties substituted familiarity for formality in their tone, and affection for aggression in their stance. The second letter printed in Frederick Douglass’ Paper on 30 March 1860, for instance, also had a connection to Jermain Loguen. Loguen himself often appeared in the paper: it reviewed his autobiography warmly and advertised it for months. But Loguen’s most regular appearances were connected with his work as a full-time paid agent of the Syracuse Fugitive Aid Society during the 1850s. Loguen and his wife Caroline sheltered, fed and clothed fugitives, either sending them on to Canada or finding them jobs and homes in the environs of Syracuse. The Weekly Anglo-African called Loguen the ‘Underground Railroad King’; by some estimates the Loguens helped 1,500 people in these ways.26 Syracuse was a center of antislavery feeling, known as the most abolitionist city in the country, and sometimes dubbed the ‘Canada of the United States.’ At the heart of this was the Loguens’ home, openly advertised as a stop on the Railroad in both the local and the antislavery press. Loguen’s appeals for donations thus regularly appeared in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, whose readers were an important source of resources. The steady stream of Loguen’s letters of acknowledgment in Frederick Douglass’ Paper clearly indicates as much. Letter after letter, for example, thanks Julia Griffiths, whose fundraising played a major role in enabling Loguen’s work with fugitives. Moreover, from 1855 to 1863, Griffiths was also the most regular correspondent for Douglass’s paper. The daughter of a stationer and printer in Kent, England, Julia Griffiths met Douglass on his 1845–7 trip to Britain, and in 1849 traveled to the United States with her sister Eliza. There they worked as assistants in the Rochester office of Douglass’s North Star.

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After a year, Eliza married Douglass’s printer John Dick, and moved to Canada, but Julia Griffiths remained and proved an invaluable manager and fundraiser. Douglass testified that within a year of arrival she had doubled the paper’s circulation, paid off its debts, and helped to lift the mortgage on his house.27 Griffiths was also secretary to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and edited their two anthologies of abolitionist poetry and prose, the Autographs for Freedom (1853–4). She thus oversaw the first publication of Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave (1853), as well as helping to organize the occasion on which Douglass gave his now most well-known speech, on the meaning of the Fourth of July to the slave. Griffiths returned to Britain in 1855, but continued to be active in antislavery work in New York: she raised subscribers for the newspaper, and funds for the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and the Underground Railroad. She set up ladies’ antislavery societies all over Britain and Ireland: twenty committees in five years, many in South Yorkshire and the Midlands, but also in Liverpool, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Dublin.28 From these associations Griffiths solicited direct monetary donations, as well as goods and articles for fundraising bazaars. Loguen, for instance, acknowledged contributions, often of relatively small sums, forwarded by Griffiths in Frederick Douglass’ Paper and then Douglass’ Monthly. Thus in the latter we find the following: ACKNOWLEDGMENT. SYRACUSE, Dec. 30, 1858. DEAR DOUGLASS: – I wish to acknowledge through your paper the receipt of £5, which I have received from the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Huddersfield, Eng., and also £1 12s 3d from the Barnsley Ladies’ A. S. Society. In behalf of the travelers on the great New York Central Underground Railroad, I would thank these trans-Atlantic friends for their kind remembrance of our suffering people in this the land of our birth. These donations were sent to us through the kindness of that true friend to her enslaved sisters, Miss Julia Griffiths.– . . . Truly yours for the right. J. W. LOGUEN, Agent.29 Loguen’s acknowledgments, in this way, insisted on the thread that stretched from the fugitives through Douglass, then Griffiths, to the ladies of Barnsley and Huddersfield. All were engaged in the same struggle ‘for the right.’ After Griffiths returned to Britain in 1855, letters also became her own connection to Frederick Douglass’ Paper: she wrote to Douglass himself, to his printers, and to Douglass’s friends and subscribers, oiling the wheels of circulation and production.30 This correspondence behind the scenes was mirrored by a series of open letters to Douglass, written between 1855 and 1863. Douglass had a recurring feature called ‘Our Correspondence,’ featuring regular contributors from all over the U.S. and sometimes further afield. In 1855, letters from Griffiths also began to appear, under the heading Letters from the Old World. Envisaged as a series, they were titled and numbered from the start, and Griffiths eventually contributed eighty-seven of these Letters in total. Griffiths described her travels and fundraising efforts, reported on the health of antislavery individuals and societies in Britain, and commented on antislavery questions raised in Douglass’s papers and elsewhere. Because she maintained a separate, private correspondence with Douglass, it is clear that Griffiths specifically produced these letters for publication: they were open letters by design.31 Chatty and familiar in style, the column, though directed to Douglass, often addressed other readers, both

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individually and generally, on both sides of the Atlantic. In turn, some of those readers, often regular correspondents for the paper themselves, congratulated Douglass on Griffiths’ letters.32 Whereas printing Old Master Letters exploited their intimacy by making private letters public, Griffiths’ Old World Letters adopted the intimacy of a private correspondence for a public one. Most importantly, the letters projected a community of the likeminded, readers who shared sympathies and interests, and were envisaged as ‘trans-Atlantic friends.’ Susan Belasco Smith and Kenneth Price have usefully asked if a periodical ‘is a single text or is it the sum total of the many texts that appear in competing columns and pages?’33 Similarly, one might read each of Griffiths’ columns as a single text, in the context of the whole issue in which it appears, or as part of the entire eight-year run of Letters. For the first year after her return to Britain, Griffiths’ letters lend themselves to reading as a sequence. They offer themselves as travelogue and are often similar in tone, itinerary, and observation to contemporary American books about European travels by prominent antislavery figures, such as William Wells Brown’s Three Years in Europe (1852) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854).34 Griffiths positions herself uniquely, though, as an Englishwoman writing in an American mode, for a paper based in Rochester which is then circulated transatlantically. Moreover, Griffiths may also be drawing on a British influence in these touristic columns. She was acquainted, for example, with William and Mary Howitt, the reform-minded former Quakers who contributed prolifically to periodicals and annuals in the 1830s.35 Some of the Howitts’ enthusiasms – memorializing the wildlife and customs of the British countryside, apostrophizing Romantic poets – are close to those of Griffiths. William’s Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847) is reputed to have invigorated the popularity of literary tourism, and at times during the first year of her column, and occasionally afterwards, Griffiths sounds rather like him, as for example in her twenty-second ‘Letter’ (which appeared on 4 July 1856), an extraordinarily long piece in which she recounts a Walter Scott-themed pilgrimage to Abbotsford, Melrose Abbey, and Dryburgh. She is more like Mary Howitt, meanwhile, in her description of a Dundee Christmas in her February 1858 ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LI.,’ comparing the different ways that the festival is observed in England, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Unlike the Howitts, however, Griffiths keeps her accounts of British matters subordinate to her interest in American affairs. In one column in 1861, Griffiths moves rapidly from an extended account of Shakespeare country to discussing General Frémont’s Proclamation.36 Some of Griffiths’ letters situate their observations within larger international debates, intervening in discussions in other periodicals and other places. Thus a column from 1859 investigates a local institution near Griffiths in Yorkshire to contribute to a live debate amongst African American writers: the role emigration should play in the destiny of the race. The piece combines investigative journalism with reference to a wider discussion that takes in British and American views of the slavery question alongside exploration and settlement projects in Africa. Griffiths had paid a long visit to Meltham Cotton Mills near Huddersfield, sometimes called the ‘model mills of Yorkshire.’37 The Brook family, who owned several cotton and silk mills, had built for their workers at Meltham a dining hall, a lecture room, a church, and a school house; there were also plans for a musical band, fire company, cottages, and a park. Reform-minded readers of Douglass’ Monthly might have been interested anyway, but

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they also understood the international economy that directly linked the ‘nice, healthylooking well-dressed girls’ that Griffiths saw in Huddersfield with slave labor in the Americas.38 Griffiths’ examination of Meltham engages with the campaign for Free Produce and touches on a number of recent publications: an article on the slave trade by Harriet Martineau in the Edinburgh Review, David Livingstone’s reports from expeditions in East and Central Africa, and a pamphlet by the Philadelphia Quaker Benjamin Coates, Cotton Cultivation in Africa (1858). She thus links Meltham Mills to some major antislavery issues – the complicity of British manufacturers and consumers, cotton cultivation in Africa, and African American emigration. Griffiths reports the manufacturers’ skepticism about the possibility of truly free cotton (Brooks shows her different kinds of cotton – Egyptian, Sea Island, New Orleans), and how the inferior Egyptian cotton is spun with superior American kinds. She appreciates the difference between blends, and learns their prices. Her report on this tour is vivid and direct – she writes in the present tense, and repeatedly introduces a description with ‘here,’ as if the reader were beside her examining the different kinds of cotton on a table: But here is a finer, softer, whiter, and more silky cotton before me; whence comes it? – From the seaboard slave States. It is the famous ‘Sea Island Cotton.’ Thousands of poor slaves have toiled away under burning suns, to produce this clean, white, cotton, and scores have died martyrs to it! . . . It grows near the sea, on the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, in marshy land, often inundated with water, and in an atmosphere so unhealthy that white people cannot live more than half the year there! So a Charleston merchant recently told one of my friends. – What is the average life of the slaves there, I did not learn! Now, if what Dr. Livingston[e] says be true, and he has found a spot in Africa favourable to the growth of this valuable cotton, I trust that some of our princely merchants and manufacturers will unite and form a company that shall supply capital, and employ agents to sow and cultivate Sea Island Cotton amid the marshes of Africa.39 This passage thus ultimately links American antislavery irony with British imperial optimism; it rather surprisingly goes on to assure readers that Brooks’ Thread, despite that slavery-tainted Sea Island cotton, is a quality product. The column touches, in this respect, on a controversial debate amongst abolitionists, about the role emigrationist and colonizationist schemes should play in challenging American slavery. Griffiths mostly shared Douglass’s skepticism about the good of such projects, in opposition to the various positions championed by Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnett, Benjamin Coates, and others.40 The Philadelphia abolitionist William Whipper replied in the following issue of the paper, however, that ‘cotton growing in Africa is a practical anti-slavery work’ that would help counter race prejudice everywhere.41 Whipper’s response is interesting, then, because it points out a curious contradiction between Griffiths’ thinking and the extraordinary span of her antislavery efforts. Whipper argues that an antislavery vision that confines itself to the United States runs counter to the many ways in which Griffiths herself transcends national barriers. Is she not, he asked, ‘now busily engaged in bottling up the humanity of the British nation, and sending it here in the shape of pounds, shillings and pence, for the purpose of spreading the live coals of freedom on the American heart, and assisting the flying and toil

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worn fugitive to find a shelter, home and protection from American task-masters on British soil?’42 British pounds are here rescuing Americans from slavery; moreover, that money is helping some of them to take refuge in Canada. Despite his curious and disturbing imagery, Whipper seems to be much more aware than Griffiths is of the international breadth of her own enterprise. Whipper might even be said to be reading Griffiths against the grain, just as Douglass’s readers were encouraged to interrogatively read Sarah Logue. Alternatively, to return to Smith and Price’s query, there is also a case for reading some of Griffiths’ letters in situ, as part of the issue that contains them. The long letter from Griffiths in Frederick Douglass’ Paper of 30 March 1860 demonstrates very clearly how her missives were designed to forge connections and promote a sense of common enterprise and empathy that stretched across the Atlantic.43 That same issue contained Sarah Logue’s letter ‘To Jarm,’ but while the latter was published to exploit the dissonance between its sense of propriety and that of Douglass’s readers, Griffiths’ ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXX’ worked hard to bind and celebrate a community across national and linguistic divides. ‘No. LXX’ contained an account of a fundraising bazaar held by the Halifax Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on 29 February 1860. The exhaustive detail with which Griffiths describes this occasion might seem parochial now, but as Griffiths’ report makes clear, the bazaar was not just a local affair: it was raising money for antislavery activities in Rochester, and it was also a clearinghouse for goods sent by well-wishers from afar. The Halifax ladies had solicited wares from sister associations in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Germany; American readers of Frederick Douglass’ Paper had sent their handiwork too. As Griffiths recognized, acknowledging the work that went into fundraising helped to ensure that it continued; her column was, indeed, unusual in recognizing women’s antislavery activity with such appreciation. Griffiths is careful to name individuals who have played a large part, cities which have sent significant offerings, and to describe items sent (wax flowers, skeleton leaves, work in Berlin wool, muslin and leather, dolls, toy rabbits, and bogwood castle carvings). Griffiths even mentions missing items which have sold well in the past. ‘There was a lack on the Irish stall,’ she notes, ‘of the ever attractive horse hair ornaments, usually sent us from Clogher County.’44 Griffiths has also ensured that the flow is not all out of Europe by including a paragraph of thanks to American readers: As regards your own contributions, my friends, I would say that your neat and tasteful assortment of children’s aprons and pinafores – the finely wrought muslin caps – but especially the hair work – and the collections of dried autumnal leaves, called forth much admiration, and proved very saleable.45 Griffiths’ ‘little account of proceedings to my friends on the other side of the Atlantic’ tellingly uses the conventionally affectionate gestures of intimate correspondence: ‘I wish that some among you could have looked in upon the picturesque scene that presented itself at midday on Wednesday.’46 And there are also comparative references designed specifically to resonate in Rochester. ‘Differing in construction from your own beautiful Corinthian Hall, the Mechanics’ Hall is entered from the opposite end,’ she reflects at one point.47 If further proof were needed that this antislavery bazaar in Yorkshire was not marginal or provincial, Douglass himself was present. He had traveled to Britain in November 1859, and spent December and January with Griffths.48 As a result,

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Griffiths is in a position to inform the readers of his paper how his tour is going: ‘thus far, our friend, Mr. Douglass’s British antislavery campaign has proved highly successful . . . His Scotch tour was a brilliant one – his reception everywhere enthusiastic, and his welcome an universally warm one.’49 Griffiths’ assurances of friendship construct a community around support for Douglass, opposition to slavery, and rescuing the fugitives who knock on Jermain Loguen’s doors. Her readers are assumed to be as much in sympathy as Sarah Logue shows herself to be without it. At the same time, the 30 March issue illustrates one of the inconveniences of nineteenth-century correspondence – its slowness – and the curious effect it could have on chronology in a periodical that made a feature of letters. Griffiths’ heartening account of the Halifax bazaar and Douglass’s progress in Britain was written on 9 March and published nearly three weeks later. It would have crossed with the devastating news from Rochester, which appeared in the newspaper on 16 March, that Douglass’s tenyear-old daughter, Annie, had died three days earlier.50 Despite the fact that he still feared being implicated in the furore over John Brown’s raid, Douglass cut short his visit to Britain and started for home when he heard, and the cheery note struck in Griffiths’ letter must have struck readers as poignantly out of date after the news in the previous issue. Many of these features are common in the whole run of Griffiths’ Letters. As with the comparison of halls in Halifax and Rochester, she often draws on her knowledge of both countries to help her readers visualize something. In an account of a microscope exhibition, for instance, Griffiths compares some minute writing, viewed through a lens, to both British and American coins, remarking that ‘it appeared to occupy a [circle] about the size of a crown piece; but in reality the little piece of glass on which the characters were traced, was not the twentieth part of the size of your five cent pieces.’51 Just as she was careful to solicit American contributions to the Halifax bazaar, and to thank those contributors as fully as the British ones, Griffiths sometimes sends messages to British readers via Douglass’s paper, messages that would take at least a month, crossing the Atlantic twice, while an ordinary letter would take a day. The sense of solidarity thus engendered is at least as important as the sentiment expressed. The object of her address seems to shift, sometimes between sentences in a single letter, moving between Douglass, American readers, and British ones. Reporting on the Louvre, for example, she begins a paragraph to Douglass (‘I have found it impossible, dear friend, to resume my scribble earlier’) only to shift in the next sentence to her more general American readers: ‘On rereading what I wrote concerning the Louvre, I find I have . . . assumed that all my friends across the Atlantic know the history of this magnificent palace.’52 This fluidity in the column’s sense of its readership blurs the difference between writing a personal letter and a public newspaper column, endowing her communications with a personal warmth and solicitude. The effects of postal delay, which account for the strange sense of parallel chronologies seen in the 30 March issue, would become even more acute during the Civil War, when the speed and seriousness of events made timeliness seem both more important and more out of reach. Clare Pettitt, for instance, has identified a similar ‘transatlantic time-lag’ in the wartime correspondence of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton.53 In Griffiths’ case, it makes her look out of sympathy with Douglass, most starkly in Douglass’ Monthly in October 1862, when Douglass’s editorial brims with emotion after Lincoln’s announcement of his intention to make the Emancipation Proclamation at the end of the year. Indeed, there is a peculiarly anticlimactic effect when the reader

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moves on to ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXXXIII,’ which had been written in July 1862. Here Griffiths describes an inconsequential holiday, and seems horribly behindhand, noting that ‘we continue to watch anxiously for American news,’ and wondering why Lincoln still has not emancipated.54 Douglass’s editorial, meanwhile, is jubilant. ‘We shout for joy that we have lived to record this righteous decree,’ he begins, and his very next item thanks ‘readers and friends in Great Britain and Ireland’ for their part in the struggle.55 It is Julia’s letter in that issue which unwittingly demonstrates how far away those friends and readers are, but the apparent disjunction also throws into relief the mechanics of this sympathetic correspondence. There is a stark difference in mood between Douglass’s editorial and Griffiths’ ‘Letter,’ but both writers are thinking of ‘trans-Atlantic friends,’ and of Emancipation. The coincidence of these two items in one issue dramatizes Griffiths’ physical distance from antislavery work in Rochester, but also underlines her emotional ties to it. However widely members of this interpretive community were dispersed, however long this momentous news was delayed, readers understood how their ‘trans-Atlantic friends’ would receive it.

Notes 1. The term originates with Fish, Is There a Text; see especially 1–117. 2. See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Groves, ‘Periodicals and Serial Publication,’ 230, 224; Smith and Price, ‘Introduction,’ 3. 3. See Hutton, Early Black Press; Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere; Nerone, ‘Newspapers and the Public Sphere.’ 4. Fish, Is There a Text, 16. 5. See B. Anderson, 31–6, 61–3. 6. Weld, American Slavery, 83. 7. Nerone, ‘Newspapers and the Public Sphere,’ 236. 8. For more on Loguen’s life see Hunter, Set the Captives Free. 9. L. Douglass, ‘Voice from the South,’ 2. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Weld, American Slavery, iii. 14. Ibid. 73. 15. See F. Douglass, ‘Letter to My Old Master,’ 345–53. 16. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 166. 17. F. Douglass, ‘Letter to My Old Master,’ 353. 18. Bibb, Life, 175. 19. Ibid. 177. 20. Ibid. 196. 21. J. Anderson, ‘Letter from a Freedman,’ 265. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 267. For the Twain comparison see Breed and Italie, ‘How Did Ex-Slave’s Letter.’ 24. F. Douglass, ‘Letter to My Old Master,’ 345. 25. Ibid. 26. Quoted in Sernett, North Star Country, 162. See ibid. 166–80, and Hunter, Set the Captives Free, 151–76. 27. See F. Douglass, Life and Times, 289, and more generally Douglas, ‘A Cherished Friendship.’ 28. Midgley documents fifteen between 1856 and 1857 alone. See Women Against Slavery, 207. 29. Loguen, ‘Acknowledgment,’ 22.

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30. I have examined these connections in more detail in Meer, ‘Public and Personal Letters,’ especially 255–6. 31. See ibid. 257. 32. See, for example, Nubia, ‘From Our San Francisco,’ and Loguen, ‘Letter.’ 33. Smith and Price, ‘Introduction,’ 9. 34. See Meer, ‘Public and Personal Letters,’ 257–62. 35. See, for example, Griffiths, ‘Letters from the Old World, No. II,’ 2, and McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 140. 36. See Griffiths, ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXXVII.’ 37. Griffiths, ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXII,’ 24. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. On this debate see: Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality; Lapsansky-Warner and Bacon, Back to Africa; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 122–47. 41. Whipper, ‘Letter,’ 41. 42. Ibid. 43. Not unrelated to this point is the fact that this letter also appeared in Douglass’ Monthly of April 1860, 248–9. 44. Griffiths, ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXX,’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 3. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 2. 47. Ibid. 3. 48. See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 202–3. 49. Griffiths, ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXX,’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 3. 50. See L. Douglass, ‘Death of Little Annie,’ 1, and McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 207. 51. Griffiths, ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXIII,’ 38. 52. Griffiths, ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXV,’ 90. 53. See Pettitt, ‘Timelag.’ 54. Griffiths, ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXXXIII,’ 727. 55. F. Douglass, ‘Editorial,’ 721, 722.

Works Cited Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Anderson, J. (1865), ‘Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master,’ in L. M. Child (ed.), The Freedmen’s Book, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 265–7. Bibb, H. [1849] (2001), Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written By Himself, ed. C. H. Heglar, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Blight, D. W. (1989), Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Breed, A. G., and H. Italie (2012), ‘How Did Ex-Slave’s Letter to Master Come to Be?’ boston. com, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Douglas, J. (2012), ‘A Cherished Friendship: Julia Griffiths Crofts and Frederick Douglass,’ Slavery and Abolition, 33: 265–74. Douglass, F. [1848] (2014), ‘Letter to My Old Master, Thomas Auld,’ in D. W. Blight (ed.), My Bondage and My Freedom, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 345–53. Douglass, F. (1862), ‘Editorial,’ Douglass’ Monthly, October, 721–2. Douglass, F. (1881), Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Hartford, CT: Park. Douglass, L. (1860), ‘Death of Little Annie Douglass,’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 16 March, 1.

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Douglass, L. (1860), ‘A Voice From the South,’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 30 March, 2. Fanuzzi, R. (2003), Abolition’s Public Sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fish, S. (1980), Is There a Text in This Class?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Griffiths, J. (1855), ‘Letters from the Old World, No. II,’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 17 August, 2. Griffiths, J. (1859), ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXII,’ Douglass’ Monthly, February, 24. Griffiths, J. (1859), ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXIII,’ Douglass’ Monthly, March, 38. Griffiths, J. (1859), ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXV,’ Douglass’ Monthly, June, 90. Griffiths, J. (1860), ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXX,’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 30 March, 2–3. Griffiths, J. (1860), ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXX,’ Douglass’ Monthly, April, 248–9. Griffiths, J. (1861), ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXXVII,’ Douglass’ Monthly, November, 549–51. Griffiths, J. (1862), ‘Letters from the Old World, No. LXXXIII,’ Douglass’ Monthly, October, 726–7. Groves, J., ‘Periodicals and Serial Publication: Introduction’ (2007), in S. E. Casper, J. D. Groves, S. W. Nissenbaum, and M. Winship (eds.), A History of the Book in America – Volume 3: The Industrial Book 1840–1880, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 224–30. Hunter, C. (1993), To Set the Captives Free: Reverend Jeremiah Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York, 1835–1872, New York: Garland. Hutton, F. (1993), The Early Black Press in America, 1827 to 1860, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Lapsansky-Warner, E. J., and M. H. Bacon (2005), Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1840–1880, University Park: Penn State University Press. Loguen, J. (1854), ‘Letter from J. W. Loguen,’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 14 April, 3. Loguen, J. (1859), ‘Acknowledgment,’ Douglass’ Monthly, February, 22. McFeely, W. S. (1991), Frederick Douglass, New York: Norton. Meer, S. (2012), ‘Public and Personal Letters: Julia Griffiths and Frederick Douglass’ Paper,’ Slavery and Abolition, 33: 261–74. Midgley, C. (1992), Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1860, London: Routledge. Miller, F. J. (1975), The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nerone, J., ‘Newspapers and the Public Sphere,’ in S. E. Casper, J. D. Groves, S. W. Nissenbaum, and M. Winship (eds.), A History of the Book in America – Volume 3: The Industrial Book 1840–1880, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 230–48. Nubia (1855), ‘From Our San Francisco Correspondent,’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 26 October, 3. Pettitt, C. (2012), ‘Timelag and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Transatlantic Imagination,’ Victorian Studies, 54: 599–623. Preston, D. J. (1980), Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sernett, Milton (2002), North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Smith, S. B., and K. M. Price (1995), ‘Introduction: Periodical Literature in Social and Historical Context,’ in K. M. Price and S. B. Smith (eds.), Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 3–16. Weld, T. D. [1839] (1968), American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, New York: Arno. Whipper, W. M. (1859), ‘Letter from W. M. Whipper to Miss Griffiths,’ Douglass’ Monthly, March, 41.

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25 LETTERS FROM ‘LINDA BRENT’: HARRIET JACOBS AND THE WORK OF EMANCIPATION Fionnghuala Sweeney

How divinely beautiful was her sympathy, her tenderness . . . There are hundreds, who if they had the opportunity, today would rise up and call her blessed . . . The alabaster box of precious ointment which Mary broke and poured out upon the head of Jesus, as an expression of her love, she was constantly breaking and pouring out, in his name, upon the poor, the suffering, the destitute. Francis J. Grimké, ‘Eulogy of Harriet Jacobs’ (1897)1 Despite the significance of her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs’ public profile as an activist and campaigner never came close to rivaling that of other African American writers and political crusaders of the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods. Yet traces of the impact of Jacobs’ social activism and grassroots humanitarian interventions are detectable in Francis J. Grimké’s postmortem veneration. His assessment of Jacobs’ legacy not only notes the absent testimony of many others gone, but clarifies the importance of voice and witness in calling history into being. As an act of memorialization, the eulogy also, however, repoliticizes the exceptional historical and literary position Jacobs occupies as the author of Incidents, one of the most powerful pieces of antislavery literature to emerge from the struggle for emancipation. So frank were the book’s disclosures of the sexual and reproductive dilemmas confronting enslaved women that Jacobs adopted the pen name ‘Linda Brent’ and used this fictive narrator to shield herself from the risk of public censure. By providing one of the period’s few glimpses into the coercive politics of slave motherhood, the story of ‘Linda Brent’ counters the universalizing claims of male-authored slave narratives to be representative of black challenges to white mastery. Jacobs’ emphasis on the specifically gendered experience of slavery, with its violent overlaying of reproductive and productive roles, not only points to the bodily specifics of women’s subjection, though. More radically, it sketches the ways in which sexual relationships could be used to subvert white mastery, to generate what Jenny Sharpe identifies as an experience ‘akin to freedom,’ a model of fugitive-emancipatory sexuality for women in slavery.2 Jacobs’ writing therefore provides a direct link between sexual agency and political subjectivity because it posits ‘Linda Brent’ as a willful subject exercising discretion in 391

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matters of sexual intimacy, the reproductive consequences of which materialize in new generations as living evidence of maternal sovereignty. Accordingly, much critical attention has been paid to the book’s remarkable emphasis on black women’s experiences and the window it opens onto the private, sexual, and familial intimacies of survival and resistance. In Gabrielle Foreman’s words, Jacobs – and other black female writers – ‘work to steal away African American agency by recovering black female motive, will, and active desire, as well as by recuperating an economically, legally visible, and racially inflected motherhood.’3 This much is indisputable. But Incidents’ creation of a fictional literary persona represented as orchestrating this subversion of the paternal and patriarchal had in its historical moment a further consequence: it served to obscure from public view the woman whose embodied experience took form in its pages. In many ways, as a result of the currency afforded ‘Linda,’ as she continued to be familiarly, and sympathetically, known in abolitionist circles, Jacobs was not just protected from middle-class white censure: as an historical agent she remained concealed behind the mask of domesticity and service that was the necessary mark of her respectability in freedom. The protective enclosure of the domestic domain therefore allowed ‘Linda’ to exist, to mainstream white and black abolitionists alike, as a cipher for the quandaries posed by patriarchy, as well as for the realities of abuse or victimization that attended slavery’s failed attempts to reduce the subject to a silenced instance of ‘bare life.’4 In effect, it mitigated against the decoding that would have established a literal correspondence between Linda Brent’s written and Harriet Jacobs’ lived experience, and in so doing potentially required an alarming public confrontation between the ‘motive, will and active desire’ of these two women. Notwithstanding, however, the de-sentimentalizing effects that Jacobs’ presence as a public persona might have had on nineteenth-century understandings of domestic womanhood, had she been willing or permitted to occupy the kind of platform inhabited by self-emancipated men, her work sits at one end of a longer continuum of black women’s writing that plots a course from the shame of sexual slavery to a celebratory recovery of sexual desire. As Laurie Kaiser has suggested, Jacobs helped to pioneer a progressive tradition of literary emancipation emphasizing the body as the locus of pleasure and of freedom.5 In this respect, not only does Incidents use its autobiographical form to write sexual and reproductive experience into black history, employing pseudonymity as a form of public disclosure, but Jacobs herself is also, as Jean Fagan Yellin stresses, ‘the only woman known to leave papers testifying to her life in slavery.’6 The existence of these papers, which include hundreds of letters, has been key to the extraordinary work undertaken by Yellin in ascertaining not just the traditionally contested truth of the story ‘Linda’ tells, but in establishing Jacobs rather than, as had previously been presumed, Lydia Maria Child as the author of Incidents. Jacobs’ own letters, and the traces of her to be found in the correspondence of others, which occasionally surfaced in the press and more rarely still in institutional or governmental records, therefore afford the prospect of a rare insight into the ways in which a female African American social subject negotiated the terrains of kinship, work, activism, and creativity. Moreover, the letters also offer the opportunity to distinguish the mature Jacobs from the fictive ‘Linda’; to unpack a political subjectivity in unbroken existence and continuous play across the boundary of slavery, not only as a matter of historical truth or creative attribution, but as part of a necessarily continuous process of self-emancipation. And finally too, they allow us to explore the ways

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in which the private persona took shape in written language, providing a window onto the thorny ground where the overlapping power structures of the familial, the domestic, and the political were mediated, in ways different in kind though sometimes touching on related negotiations in the public domain, including those involving literary publication, circulation, and reception. As Celeste-Marie Bernier has recently argued, the African American literary tradition’s ‘cultivation of multiple political and historical personae by men and women . . . attests to the extent to which they deliberately . . . refus[ed] to follow any singular journey from slavery to freedom.’7 In this respect, other major African American women of Jacobs’ generation, such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, who were likewise, in Bernier’s words, ‘marginalized in comparison with the overwhelming emphasis upon Black male heroic figures,’ often worked and communicated as antislavery and emancipatory activists in ways other than through the written word.8 While Tubman’s relationship to reading and writing was largely incidental, for example, reflecting the position of the majority of those born into slavery for whom the option of literacy was withheld, Truth deliberately rejected the written word, emphasizing instead the power of orality, memory, and eloquence as political tools in the long struggle for emancipation. Importantly, both Truth’s and Tubman’s activism challenged the subalternizing assumptions that attend non-scriptedness in Western culture, but in doing so it eschewed the political potential of epistolarity, in particular the opportunity letterwriting presented for advocacy based on establishing enabling forms of sentimental identification between readers and writers. Consequently, we must understand Jacobs’ letters ‘in the context of a fluid and malleable female heroic continuum’ made up of ‘shifting historical and political identities,’ wherein the radical female leaders of the antislavery and women’s movements deployed speeches, the visual and creative arts, and public performances as a rule rather than an exception.9 Precisely because of their eschewal of literary forms of self-authorship, both Tubman and Truth generated a body of archival material and a visible presence that inscribed itself in unorthodox ways into the historical record.10 At first glance, on the other hand, Jacobs’ archive appears in many ways a more conventional one, since it is based on private correspondence, published works, and the other auto/biographical fragments of writing that typically hold sway as the stuff of history in general and literary history in particular. Both her archive and her legacy result from what ostensibly seems to be a traditionally configured life in freedom, one inscribed within rather than exceeding contemporary gender roles, including those lionizing the condition of motherhood and its behavioral bulwarks, which linked female nature to maternal nurture. Additionally, Jacobs’ limited presence on public platforms and the dearth of visual images of her person (only one photographic portrait, from 1894, is known to survive) produce the impression of a less discernibly radical, because less rhetorically forceful, contribution to the achievement of universal emancipation at the end of the Civil War.11 Her work, despite the recovery of an epistolary archive as well as proof of her authorship of Incidents, remains largely ‘invisibilized,’ emphasizing once again the significance of the public domain in producing models of black sovereignty easily translatable into durable records of political agency. And this neglect also points once more to the masculinized nature of that nineteenth-century black public sphere, not just as an arena in which men dominated, but as a space in which the value attributable to voices and acts of emancipation was calibrated according to gender.

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From the earliest examples of her surviving correspondence with her activist brother, John Jacobs, through the poignant search for news of her lost son, Joseph, whom she assumed had died in Australia, in her later years, it is clear that for Harriet letter-writing within the family circle provided a means of maintaining networks of kin and relations of intimacy across the often great distances that were the result of selfemancipatory acts and post-emancipatory experiences of diaspora. In many ways, this branch of Jacobs’ epistolary activity has a clarity of purpose that derives from its role in asserting and sustaining the bonds of kinship whose integrity slavery placed under continued threat. Although inevitably inflected by the emotional charge attending the familial relationships in question, this correspondence is arguably less complicated by the wider questions of power, authority, and resistance that attend her letters to close (white) female friends. If, however, as Andrea Powell Wolfe has noted, Jacobs uses a form of ‘doublevoicedness’ throughout Incidents, speaking not just to a white female readership but sending ‘a message to northern blacks that they must prepare to fight for their rights as human beings,’ then in her non-autobiographical writing too Jacobs can be seen as negotiating with the sometimes competing claims of black and white political agendas.12 As in her work as ‘Linda,’ where the disclosures around the sexually coercive realities for enslaved women can obscure the extent of Jacobs’ uncompromising resistance to slavery’s racial patriarchy, the ordinariness of her correspondence and its frequent focus on the material everyday clouds the significance of activities carried out in the contraband spaces between slavery and freedom, which were intended to facilitate the emergence of full citizenship from social death. In this respect, the extent of Jacobs’ achievement is testified to yet also belied by the amount of her correspondence that has survived, which is large relative to other African American women but remarkably small compared to what she must have originally penned. As a result, many of the details of her biography emerge in the writing of others – that of her friend and fellow abolitionist Julia Wilbur, and her daughter Louisa in particular. While many of the governing facts of Jacobs’ life may be established, therefore, glimpses of her interior world are limited and partial. However, there is strong evidence in her letters of her active participation in the antislavery networks in place before and during the Civil War, as well as her tireless work among refugee communities in the areas of health, welfare, and education. These activities were interventions into the process of social, legal, and subjective transformation set in train by the spatial and legal destabilizations of the war – in particular the Emancipation Proclamation, which overturned the political landscape of the national capital by freeing thousands of enslaved individuals and opening up the possibility of progressive integration to free society. Despite the significance of her autobiographical writing, which charts a life lived in slavery, fugitivity, and eventual emancipation, then, Jacobs’ letters show that her life was characterized by a kind of activist service that placed her primarily in a feminine private domain, but that also allowed movement across the boundaries of public and private space as it was being constructed as a social habitat for once-enslaved African Americans on the cusp of freedom. Indeed, the realities of Jacobs’ own fugitivity, in the years she spent incarcerated in her grandmother’s attic, and subsequently in the years before her Northern friends arranged for her manumission, meant that Jacobs was well prepared for her encounter with the monumental crisis of the Civil War, and the opportunities attending the arrival of thousands of ‘contraband’ people and

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later refugees in and around Washington, D.C. These human ‘contrabands’ provided embodied examples, as had earlier self-emancipating fugitives like Jacobs herself, of the recuperative capacity of individuals and communities consigned to the social death of slavery but resistant to the implied category of bare life that attended it. During this period, rather than seeking to make larger arguments about freedom, Jacobs’ letters attend to the material imperatives of survival for the thousands of refugees for whom arrival could, without adequate help, result in turmoil or tragedy rather than in the promise of new communities. In an apparent understanding that the force majeure of the war allowed some of the conventional formalities of letter-writing to be put aside, Jacobs’ own hand is characteristically used in advocacy of one kind or another, requesting that clothing, money or hospital supplies be sent to support the work of settlement, or seeking to ameliorate conditions for the worst affected. These letters provide access to a form of agency operating strategically on the intersection of the public and the private, between citizenship and exclusion, in ways that mirror, while also initiating profound challenges to the ambiguities and ambivalences of the multiple ‘states of exception’ set up to moderate the radical instabilities around citizenship that loss of territorial integrity and the fact of war persistently provoke.13 In the spring of 1862, Jacobs considered traveling to the liberated Sea Islands in South Carolina in order to take part in the Port Royal experiment, which involved former slaves taking over land abandoned by plantation owners. But ultimately she decided instead to concentrate her efforts in Washington, D.C., and traveled from her home in New York to the national capital to assist the refugees from the South who were flooding in as a result of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Alongside a team of other women working on the ground, and in conjunction with a wider network of women abolitionists, Jacobs was involved in an early attempt to reconstruct the architecture of the domestic realm for freed African Americans by epistolary means. In June 1862, for instance, she attended the tenth annual meeting of the Progressive Friends at Longwood, Pennsylvania, where she met William Lloyd Garrison, who prevailed upon her to write a piece about Washington’s refugees for The Liberator.14 The resulting article, ‘Life Among the Contrabands,’ completed in August of that year, took the form of an extended letter addressed to Garrison, in which Jacobs reworked her earlier fictive narrator, ‘Linda’ (whose celebrity had in the past provided her with some muted traction within abolitionist circles), into an epistolary persona exerting unequivocal narrative authority over the scenes she witnessed. Although further south than she had been in many years, close to the battlefield’s frontline and the border with the confederacy, a place she described as ‘strongly secesh [sic],’ Jacobs’ letter displays not a trace of fear, but describes with confidence and empathy the human emergency that displacement had created, as well as the new hope of reconstructed lives and communities it held out.15 Moreover, ‘Life Among the Contrabands’ also details the ways in which she and her colleagues circulated through the public–private spaces of boarding houses, requisitioned buildings, and hospitals, assisting those who, although no longer enslaved, were nonetheless bereft of the sovereignty that Union victory and constitutional change would eventually provide. At a time when neither subterfuge nor apology was any longer required, Jacobs retained her earlier literary identity in this epistle, but transformed its iterative voice, practically overnight, from the confessional tenor of a slave girl to the commanding tones of the emancipatory female activist, projecting a newly confident public persona invulnerable to public censure and refusing any attempt at commodification.

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It was a position that marked the beginning of a sustained engagement with community-building from which she never looked back. That Jacobs was aware of the utopian promise of jubilee and was working directly in pursuit of the conditions that would help make this possible is evident not only in her published epistolary texts but in her private correspondence, in which her fictive persona is similarly transformed. In a letter to Lydia Maria Child from March 1864, for example, co-written with her daughter, Louisa Jacobs, and signed as such, Harriet framed the historical significance of the war within religious rather than military rhetoric. ‘A Power mightier than man is guiding this revolution,’ she declared, ‘and though justice moves slowly, it will come at last.’16 In the same letter, meanwhile, she describes going ‘to the wharf last Tuesday, to welcome the emigrants returned from Hayti,’ an incident that involved the repatriation of some 407 persons who were part of a failed colonization venture in the Caribbean, to which Abraham Lincoln had provided support.17 Not only did Jacobs’ appeal to a higher power cast the Civil War as an instance of divine intervention in human history, indicative of a form of providence that sanctified the deaths on the battlefield as a form of blood sacrifice, then, but it classified the arrival of ‘contrabands’ and other refugees and returned migrants as indicative evidence of the eventual arrival of a more secular salvation in the form of legal emancipation and universal freedom. Providing a rare glimpse into a world of black female radicalism intersecting with the unstable territories of contraband settlement, this letter, in conjunction with others of the period, suggests that despite the conventionally ‘feminine’ or ‘maternal’ roles occupied by Jacobs in offering succor and nurture to displaced persons, which might have appeared unthreateningly apolitical, her presence in and around the capital was a means by which to manipulate the state of exception imposed by the war to freedom’s ends, as well as to facilitate the ways in which movement and resettlement recalibrated slavery’s geographies of repression. In this period, as during her prior enslavement and subsequent Southern fugitivity, Jacobs actively marshaled, while also placing pressure on, the maternal roles she chose to occupy, moving between performative personas and adopting an epistolary voice appropriate to their provisional articulation. In Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, where she tended to the material and medical needs of the wounded and displaced of both cities, including Union soldiers, Jacobs acquired a degree of fame and related social power whose force draws little overt comment in her own writing, and appears only obliquely in the evidence of others. But the effects of her interventions on the emerging landscape of freedom were powerful nonetheless. Working with Louisa, for instance, she founded the ‘Jacobs (Linda) School’ in Alexandria, where she also used her increasing political abilities to challenge the harsh regime of the Alexandria refugee camp in repeated brushes with its superintendent, the Reverend Albert Gladwin. Gladwin’s exploitative practices, in conjunction with attempts to impose a punishing rule of containment and surveillance, showed a tendency to replicate the hierarchies of power more typical of locales further south, which Jacobs could not tolerate. ‘I do think [Gladwin] has been a slave driver, for he takes to it so naturally,’ Jacobs’ fellow relief worker Julia Wilbur observes in a letter from February 1863. ‘He has said to me several times “Oh! Miss Wilbur, if you had been on the plantation so much as I have & knew these people as well as I do, you w[oul]d find there is no other way of getting along with them.” . . . [H]e treated a poor old woman so yesterday that Mrs. Jacobs had to speak, her feelings were very much hurt.’18

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In particular, Jacobs’ insistence on the need for appropriate lodging in order to allow her to carry out her work with refugees effectively compelled her toward an increasingly open confrontation with Gladwin that eventually included a personal letter to General John Slough, the military governor of Alexandria. Jacobs’ challenge to Gladwin’s authority over the allocation of living space and the designation of usage to particular buildings resulted in the Superintendent being chastised by Slough, with Julia Wilbur reporting that Gladwin was even ‘threatened . . . with the Slave Pen,’ a response which apparently left Jacobs in a state of ‘high glee.’19 This kind of successful intervention, one of several related instances, provides evidence of the esteem in which Jacobs was held as a result of her camp service, but also of the influence of her advocacy even in situations in which, as an African American woman, her word was not underwritten by institutional or official power. It also confirms, moreover, the ways in which the war to preserve the Union produced destabilizations in institutionalized power, including in the official organizational roles assumed by men in conditioning contrabands and refugees for their entry into freedom. That Jacobs herself was keen to record the significance of the verbal battles she conducted with white men is evident in her epistolary re-narration of her encounters with Gladwin. These offered a means by which she could establish her authority as the primary guardian of ‘the welfare of my people’ and what she called ‘our mission here.’20 Writing to her former co-worker Hannah Stevenson following Stevenson’s return to Boston, for instance, Jacobs recounted her success in challenging Gladwin’s attempts to appropriate the building containing the women’s home she had established. In her discussions with the Governor of Washington, D.C., Jacobs told Stevenson, she responded to the accusation that she ‘had written all over the country and slandered’ Gladwin by admitting without apology that she had ‘written and spoke freely of him.’21 Jacobs’ epistolary exploitation of these destabilizations as opportunities to exert political traction thus demonstrates that the Mater Misericordiae of the emerging urban territories of black settlement was, despite the sentimental associations of the role in domestic and religious imaginary, and the degree to which the war had made the marginalized voice of the Linda of the antebellum years defunct, able to pack a persuasive punch when the occasion demanded. The presence of Jacobs’ letters within the peculiarly public, peculiarly private domain of the refugee camp, whose contraband inhabitants occupied, as she had done in her fugitive years, a position of curtailed political subjectivity that nonetheless carried a cargo of revolutionary potential, suggest how intent she was on optimizing the conditions that would make citizenship in freedom a realistic eventuality. In so doing she marshaled the apparatus of military power that war brought into proximity, but that would otherwise have remained beyond ordinary reach. Recognizing that emancipation was not a singular event but a process through which full sovereignty might eventually be achieved, her letters emphasized the creation, through forms of spatial designation, of a social infrastructure that included housing, education, healthcare, and economic independence. The success of these developmental initiatives clarified the shortcomings, even at its best, of the previous status quo, which Confederate victory would reinstate, but it also exemplified the latent promise of what W. E. B. Du Bois would later describe as ‘Black Reconstruction.’22 The degree to which Jacobs was able to engage in epistolary advocacy with powerful white men during wartime, and use letters to confide in her friends about it,

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crucially testifies to the ways in which she transformed the abusive epistolary relationships described in Incidents, where, as Elizabeth Hewitt has noted, ‘letters . . . just as much as bodies, perpetuate sexual violence.’23 Jealously obsessed with the idea that she might ‘exchange letters with another man,’ Linda Brent’s predatory master, Dr. Flint, regularly ‘contrive[s] to thrust a note into her hand’ as part of his efforts to seduce her.24 Thus the intimate nature of the letter-form in Incidents serves to expose the unequal position of African Americans within the to-and-fro of correspondence, and more particularly their vulnerability to exploitation. Indeed, even when, later on in the book, Linda uses a series of faked letters to successfully escape from Flint, their status as ‘a trick’ points toward a more general sense of epistolarity’s untrustworthiness.25 It is all the more striking then that Jacobs’ Civil War activism was marked by the emergence of a powerful epistolary voice, which countermands the earlier ‘tyranny . . . of letters’ that Hewitt identifies at the heart of Brent’s relationship with literacy.26 By the mid-1860s, in effect, Jacobs had managed to develop a de-privatized mode of letter-writing that reframed her relationship with her implied readers not only because it asserted a rhetorical capacity that was communitarian rather than individualized, but also because it assumed the role of historical explanation and encryption. The latter emphasis, and Jacobs’ increasing reputation in the environs of Washington, D.C., are both reflected in her personal appearances before the public during the Civil War, the most renowned of which occurred on British West India Emancipation Day in 1864, when she addressed a gathering honoring the L’Ouverture Division of the Ninth Army, and the physicians and nursing staff at the Coloured L’Ouverture Hospital in Alexandria. As Lewis Perry has noted, this short speech ‘allows us to hear her public voice at a great revolutionary moment in the civil war’ and ‘illuminates issues concerning emancipation, citizenship, historical memory, and women’s public responsibilities at a crucial moment of change.’27 Here, Jacobs’ rhetoric transforms the bloodied landscape of the war into a legacy of sovereign recognition through her memorial remapping of this landscape into a future where the African American dead are nobly interred, at sites that posterity will designate ‘sacred shrine[s]’ to freedom’s cause.28 The organizing metaphor of this speech is significant because it involves the characterization of the war’s landscape as a text of which Jacobs is not only the visionary author but an active reader, in ways that, prior to her fugitivity and emancipation, she was unable or unwilling to manage. The emergence of this public voice therefore links Brent’s previous articulation of her position as a narrator privy to an exceptional understanding of slavery with Jacobs’ prophetic invocation of knowledge concerning future black freedom and citizenship. Such rhetorical forays as the Alexandria speech may be relatively rare in Jacobs’ lexicon, but they are crucial in the way that they mark the reintroduction of her voice as a mode of articulated dissent reliant on authority over her body in ways that the written word does not always allow. Whereas Flint forces Linda to read his letters aloud as part of his campaign of sexual coercion, Jacobs’ emergence into the public domain finds her authorizing her own words for an African American audience (a community rather than a single intimate), with whom she chooses to establish not the sentimental correspondence debased in Incidents, but an activist relationship to those doing battle for a future in freedom. If Jacobs’ Emancipation Day speech sweeps across history in order to arrange black heroism and posterity in complementary alignment on the American soil of the future, her contemporary letters are in the main more presentist and practical, more focused on putting interpersonal relationships to work in the service of a moment

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she was sure would ‘come at last.’ Yet her letters of the Civil War period nonetheless provide evidence of a utopian impulse closely related to the speech’s emphasis on the need to ‘struggle . . . for the freedom of your race and the defense of your country.’29 Indeed, from the very moment of her arrival in Washington, Jacobs began repositioning the act of letter-writing as a mode of community-building and activist labor. ‘Dear Mrs Gay,’ she wrote to the white Quaker activist Elizabeth Neall Gay in early October 1862, ‘collect all you can . . . & when it is most needed I can let [you] know.’30 Tellingly, the use of imperatives across the color line in this, and other contemporaneous letters, complements the fractured urgency of the style that emerges in this phase of Jacobs’ epistolary activism as she sought to respond to the pressing immediacy of the needs of the ‘poor contrabands’ lately marooned in the capital. This letter is one of several that characterize the pragmatic nature of Jacobs’ humanitarian engagement, including the ways in which her letters co-opted existing women’s antislavery networks in the service of the new imperatives of wartime. But equally it provides evidence of the emergence of new socio-political hierarchies by illustrating the authority Jacobs was able to wield across the intersubjective relationships at the heart of the epistolary form. The development of this epistolary authority is, significantly, reliant on a redemptive embrace of the ambivalent nature of letter-writing as portrayed in Incidents. Jacobs’ assertion of her public voice during the war can, as has already been suggested, be read as a reversal of the one-way exchange of letters that lies at the heart of Dr. Flint’s sexual domination of Linda. If letter-writing in Incidents can be distinguished, as Elizabeth Hewitt has suggested, from the celebratory ways in which it is typically portrayed in male-authored slave narratives because it is associated ‘not with freedom, but with subjugation,’ the same is not true for Jacobs’ war-work.31 But equally, Jacobs’ writings of the mid-1860s also offer a new angle on the deceptive dimension that letters take on in Incidents. In this respect, as the fugitive letters that Linda Brent gets smuggled north and then mailed back to Flint in order to hide her whereabouts might suggest, correspondence can prove an important tool of resistance by generating an illusion of distance that serves to open up a space of relative freedom. Linda is in fact concealed very close to Flint’s home, in her grandmother’s attic, but her faith that the fake letters ‘will do good in the end’ is borne out by the sense of physical absence they convey, which eventually allows Linda to evade Flint’s surveillance and genuinely escape north.32 There is certainly some truth to Daneen Wardrop’s argument that Linda’s increasing confidence in her ability to manipulate Flint through letters forged in her own hand sees her entry ‘into a white patriarchal system of signification specific to the institution of slavery,’ wherein African Americans must ‘write in the in-between spaces of white culture.’33 But despite this, and despite Flint’s attempts to deceive the Brent family by reading aloud false ‘substitute . . . letter[s]’ supposedly from Linda, for Jacobs, the illusionist behind the double veil of Brent the fictive narrator and Brent the epistolary trickster, the letters encoded into her literary narrative offer repeated evidence of her performative resistance to white patriarchal authority, and the scripts it pens.34 For the fictive Brent, too, who tellingly observes Flint’s epistolary deceit from her hiding place in the attic, the scripting and circulation of letters performs as an index of her mastery of words and burgeoning literary freedom prior to her eventual escape. This self-reflexive use of the letter as an experimental model of narrative form, which

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allows private truth to be embedded in public fiction, adds a further layer of representative complexity to the performative articulation of the African American literary self in the antebellum period. That system of signification to which Wardrop refers, then (born of the textual constraints of enslavement) was jettisoned as part of Jacobs’ program to transform herself from fugitive slave to retiring author, and from retiring author to vocal prophet of the historical legacy that would attend the buried remains of black heroism during the Civil War. Her later letters, in this sense, are not tasked with resisting coercive intimacy or uncovering the manipulations of the master class; instead they are rehabilitated as sites of expressive, interpretive, and organizational authority, as talismans of radical social reform based on national inclusion and the possibility of citizenship. As such they form part of Jacobs’ wider creation of cartographies of activism in which the letter is established as a site of political radicalism and autobiographical reimagining. Jacobs’ letters of the mid-1860s, for the most part, make for less explicitly confrontational reading than Incidents. They are far more concerned with the testimonial and evidentiary character of women’s experience, and with keeping Northern abolitionist networks informed of the progress of emancipation as it was taking form in the contraband camps behind Union lines. But like other African American activists of the period, including Frederick Douglass, who positioned violent resistance to slavery as a form of moral revolution in the tradition of the American War of Independence, Jacobs often viewed internal migration and return from an African American nativist position – one resistant to both enslavement and deterritorialization, and representative of a fundamental reimagining of the republic as a space of citizenship. Jacobs knew first-hand, from her antebellum correspondence about Incidents with Lydia Maria Child and Amy Post, how instrumental white women were in securing the publication of African American narratives; just as she knew from her encounters with Harriet Beecher Stowe, who not only tried to include part of Jacobs’ story in her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) without permission, but also initially refused to engage in correspondence with Jacobs at all, how these whites could also act as restrictive cultural gatekeepers.35 Jacobs’ later correspondence, however, often redraws the parameters of inclusion in the national imaginary in ways that grant black women greater cultural agency and that resonate beyond the traditionally deferential relationship between black and white reformers. Emphatic throughout her life on the political personhood of enslaved women, a position that reflected the theoretical (if not always the practical) commitments of some in the abolitionist movement, Jacobs drew on parallel but otherwise unacknowledged instances of women’s involvement in earlier revolutionary activity that underscored the significance of their labor in providing the material conditions for social change during the war. Unlike Frederick Douglass, Jacobs had no direct links to the black or abolitionist press, but her more expansive letters to women friends were often passed on and read aloud in Northern fora where the appetite for news from the front lines was large, and then found their way into print in official reports of the business of religious support committees. In a letter from Alexandria in April 1864, for example, later quoted in the minutes of a New York Committee on the Condition and Wants of the Colored Refugees, Jacobs discussed an ‘old woman who is attracting much attention here,’ after testifying to her involvement in the War of Independence.36 In Incidents, Jacobs had used the fictitious ‘Linda Brent’ to provide access to a world

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of embodied experience previously beyond the pale of mainstream narrative. In this fragmentary testimony of one of the few living witnesses to the expectations of revolutionary republicanism’s responsibility to deliver universal freedom, on the other hand, Jacobs combines feminist activism with the act of literacy in order to position herself as a conduit for black women’s historical agency. ‘She retains her memory remarkably, and talks sensibly,’ Jacobs observes: She has none of the plantation-negro idiom . . . She takes great pride in telling how she spun cloth for the soldiers’ clothes during the Revolutionary War, hoping when the war was over she would receive her freedom . . . [N]ever dreaming that the day of deliverance was so far in the future. After the breaking out of the present war her master . . . left her and two other old women to die. She said . . . ‘I thought I should be left to starve, but the Lord had prepared this place, and I knew nothing about it.’37 Moving from third-person narration to direct quotation, this borrowed letter performs, through its inclusion of a partial and almost lost account of black women’s history (Jacobs’ original missive is in fact no longer extant), an instance of empathetic listening and retelling.38 It opens a space within the liminal territories of the emerging freedom for black women’s voices, channeled into the public domain in unconventional ways that retain its speakerliness intact, and therefore allowing previously excluded narratives, including women’s participation in the original struggle for political freedom that brought the state into being, to take written form. This form of contrabanded epistolary narration, translated from the intimate speakerly into the potentially public and historicizing domain of letters, echoes aspects of Jacobs’ earlier autobiographical act in Incidents, which presents life in slavery as publicly meaningful and therefore subject to, and the subject of, literary disclosure. Her April 1864 letter not only provides access to the everyday material hinterlands of black women’s history as part of the structure of earlier revolutionary heroism, it represents the Civil War as a potential harbinger of a revolutionary future, rather than as a fight against territorial dissolution. In this sense, it represents the earlier struggle as an unfinished project of liberty and justice, of which black freedom was the primary signifier. Jacobs’ activities in Washington, D.C., and Alexandria during the Civil War involved her in work that attempted to deal with the human catastrophe that the mass displacement, lack of infrastructure, and general neglect of the period produced. But this turmoil was also marked by the creation of a newly politicized epistolary persona, which, although acknowledging the continuity with experiences that had led her through multiple forms of fugitivity into freedom, was nonetheless characterized by its capacity for contemporary action, and its emphasis on emancipation as an ongoing political project directed at erasing slavery’s residual legacies. Inevitably, literacy – a relatively rare commodity for African Americans, and one not without its ambivalences – abetted in the configuration of Jacobs’ activist associations and the related forms of labor in which she engaged. Neither involved in the physical fighting, as was Sojourner Truth, nor operating behind enemy lines as did Harriet Tubman, Jacobs contributed to the war effort in a way that sought to ameliorate immediate suffering, and provide the means by which a free black social and economic infrastructure might take form. Jacobs’ letters thus offer a means of exploring the domestic cartographies within which many black women operated during the Civil

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War years. The agenda of familial and social incorporation that lay at the heart of Jacobs’ grassroots activism – organizing basic lodging, clothing, nursing care, and education for contrabands and other refugees – meant that she came to be understood in Marian terms as a maternal benefactor, a status overwriting but never actually erasing the Magdalen figure at the heart of her earlier literary endeavor. Aligned with Christian models of both embodied sanctity and Marian devotion, Jacobs’ correspondence often took the form of empathetic action rather than outcry. But if, as Stephanie Li has suggested, ‘[t]he figure of the slave master becomes a cruel substitute for the mother,’ in the work of ‘Linda Brent,’ Harriet Jacobs’ later writing, and her correspondence in particular, marshal the maternal persona in acts of will calculated to produce communitarian structures and historical narratives in which freedom might finally gain full and dramatic expression.39

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Grimké, ‘Eulogy of Harriet Jacobs,’ in Jacobs, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2: 828. Sharpe, ‘Something Akin to Freedom,’ 31. Foreman, ‘Who’s Your Mama?,’ 134. The relevance of this concept, which is derived from Giorgo Agamben’s Homo Sacer, to slavery is explored in Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 184–92. Kaiser, ‘The Black Madonna,’ 97. Yellin, ‘Introduction,’ xxix. Bernier, Characters of Blood, 19. Ibid. 202. Ibid. 203. See also Jones, ‘African American Women’s Nineteenth Century Public (Vocal) and Private (Text) Voice.’ Though both did collaborate with biographers to produce their life histories. See Truth and Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, and Bradford, Scenes from the Life of Harriet Tubman. This 1894 photograph is reproduced, unattributed, as the frontispiece to Jacobs, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. Wolfe, ‘Double-Voicedness in Incidents,’ 518. See Agamben, State of Exception, especially 19–20. See Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life, 158–9. Jacobs, ‘Life Among the Contrabands,’ in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2: 401. Jacobs and Louisa Matilda Jacobs, Letter to Lydia Maria Child, 26 March 1864, in ibid. 2: 561. Ibid. See Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life, 179. Julia Wilbur, Letter to Anna M. C. Barnes, 27 February 1863, in Jacobs, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2: 453. For more on Jacobs’ relationships with Wilbur and Gladwin see Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life, 164–74. Julia Wilbur, ‘Diary of Julia Wilbur, 21 November, 1863,’ in Jacobs, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2: 532. Harriet Jacobs, Letter to Hannah Stevenson, 10 March 1864, in ibid. 2: 551. Ibid. 552. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, passim. Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 125. Jacobs, Incidents, 51. Ibid. 167. Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 125.

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27. Perry, ‘Harriet Jacobs,’ 596. 28. Jacobs, ‘Flag Presentation at L’Ouverture Hospital, Alexandria, VA,’ in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2: 578. 29. Ibid. 30. Jacobs, Letter to Elizabeth Neall Gay, 9 October 1862, in ibid. 2: 422. 31. Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 125. 32. Jacobs, Incidents, 167. 33. Wardrop, ‘I Stuck the Gimlet,’ 210, 214. 34. Jacobs, Incidents, 165. 35. See Jacobs, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 1: 247–88. 36. Jacobs, ‘Letters from Harriet Jacobs, April 9, 1864, and updated, and Letter from Louisa Matilda Jacobs, May 14, 1864,’ in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2: 565. 37. Ibid. 2: 566. 38. For a full discussion of the ways in which African American narrative characteristically positions itself as an oral narrative structured around the related activities of tellers and listeners, see Robert Stepto’s seminal From Behind the Veil. 39. Li, ‘Motherhood as Resistance,’ 18.

Works Cited Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2008), State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baucom, I. (2005), Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernier, C. (2012), Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Bradford, S. H. (1869), Scenes from the Life of Harriet Tubman, Auburn, NY: W. J. Moses. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935), Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Foreman, P. G. (2012), ‘Who’s Your Mama?: “White” Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom,’ in M. O. Wallace and S. M. Smith (eds.), Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 132–66. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Jacobs, H. [1861] (1987), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. J. F. Yellin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jacobs, H. (2008), The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2 vols., ed. J. F. Yellin, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Jones, P. (2012), ‘African American Women’s Nineteenth Century Public (Vocal) and Private (Text) Voice,’ Journal of the African Literature Association, 6: 153–67. Kaiser, L. (1995), ‘The Black Madonna: Notions of True Womanhood from Jacobs to Hurston,’ South Atlantic Review, 60: 97–109. Li, S. (2006), ‘Motherhood as Resistance in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,’ Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 23: 14–29. Perry, L. (2008), ‘Harriet Jacobs and the “Dear Old Flag,” ’ African American Review, 42: 595–605. Sharpe, J. (1996), ‘ “Something Akin to Freedom”: The Case of Mary Prince,’ differences, 8: 31–56.

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Stepto, R. B. (1979), From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Truth, S., and O. Gilbert (1850), Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828, Boston: J. B. Yerrington & Son. Wardrop, D. (2007), ‘ “I Stuck the Gimlet in and Waited for Evening”: Writing and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 49: 209–28. Wolfe, A. P. (2008), ‘Double-Voicedness in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: “Loud Talking” to a Northern Black Readership,’ ATQ, 22: 517–25. Yellin, J. F. (2004), Harriet Jacobs: A Life, New York: Basic Civitas Books. Yellin, J. F. (2008), ‘Introduction,’ in H. Jacobs, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers – Volume 1, ed. J. F. Yellin, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, xxix–xxxvii.

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26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE MAN THROUGH HIS LETTERS Robert Bray

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he extant letters of Abraham Lincoln number nearly 4,000 – an imposing number to review in a single chapter, it would seem.1 But the great majority of these were written during his presidential administrations in the Civil War period of 1861–5. As might be expected, most – perhaps nine of every ten – of these letters are brief executive or military directives, sometimes consisting of only a sentence or a single word (‘Impossible’) and a signature (or not, as in the case of telegrams) (CWAL, 8: 427). The one-in-ten is, of course, likely to be of immeasurable importance to American historians and Lincoln biographers. Yet while necessary for the chronicling of the times, and much used in political and military histories of the Civil War era, such letters nonetheless reveal little or nothing of Lincoln’s personality or his literary yearnings and so can be passed over quietly in a survey of his epistolary voice and temperament. Leaving what, exactly? Of the personal Lincoln, not very much. There is, for instance, not a single love letter from the hand of Abraham to his wife of more than twenty years, Mary Todd Lincoln, and precious few letters to her of any stripe during their lengthy absences from each other’s company over the years. Nor, with the exception of two ham-fisted courtship letters to Mary S. Owens (from 13 December 1836 and 16 August 1837), did Lincoln open his heart to any other woman with whom he is thought to have been romantically involved. He did let one woman see inside him, but as a friend, not a lover, and only once. This was Mrs. Orville H. Browning (Eliza), in whom Lincoln confided his lingering resentment over Owens having rejected him as husband material. And even here the lack of congruence between this letter and Lincoln’s reputation as a ‘nice guy’ generates interpretive difficulties. Male– male friendship for Lincoln, meanwhile, mostly meant practical familiarity rather than blood-brotherhood. Even with his most powerful political allies in Illinois, David Davis and Jesse Fell, and with his long-time law partner, William H. Herndon, Lincoln kept himself to himself. With one man alone did he develop an intimate friendship: Joshua Fry Speed, a Kentuckian whom Lincoln knew in Springfield from the late 1830s on, became Lincoln’s confidant on matters of love and marriage, each in turn encouraging the other to take the plunge into matrimony. Almost alone, his series of letters to Speed in the early months of 1842 offer us a rare glimpse into Lincoln’s repressed romanticism, an important fragment from the otherwise missing picture of his consistently problematic relationships with women.

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Ironically, the most agonized letter Lincoln ever wrote he did not send, while the most famous letter he signed and sent he did not write. The first of these came about in July 1863, when the Union Army of the Potomac, commanded by Major General George G. Meade, soundly defeated Robert E. Lee’s Confederates at the epochal Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln was elated, believing that the Civil War might soon be brought to an end, if only Meade would follow up his victory by hotly pursuing Lee’s ‘hideously, cruelly damaged’ army back across the Potomac River into Virginia, where it might finally be brought to surrender.2 But this Meade did not do, instead allowing Lee to withdraw what remained of his Army of Northern Virginia to safety, almost unmolested by the Union. Lincoln, though as ever forbearing, was devastated by what he took to be a failure of Union generalship, and even his usually extraordinary selfcontrol gave way to his feelings. As the Union General-in-Chief, Henry Wager Halleck, wrote in a telegram to Meade on 14 July 1863: ‘I need hardly say to you that the escape of Lee’s Army without another battle has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President.’3 This was inevitably a severe wound to Meade’s amour-propre, and, not two hours after receiving Halleck’s message, he shot back one of his own, asking to be relieved of command immediately. It was at this point that Lincoln, still on the same day, wrote to Meade. Of course, he began, he was aware of the Army of the Potomac’s signal victory; of course he heartily congratulated Meade on it (once again); and of course he regretted the pain that Halleck’s report of his ‘great dissatisfaction’ had caused. ‘But,’ the president continued, ‘I was in such deep distress myself that I could not restrain some expression of it. I had been oppressed nearly ever since the battles of Gettysburg, by what appeared to be evidences that [you] were not seeking a collision with the enemy, but were trying to get him across the river without another battle’ (CWAL, 6: 327). Through the retrospective lens of history, we can judge that Lincoln was exactly right here: Lee and his army did escape, and Meade, or at least his subordinate commanders, believed that, having ‘drive[n] the invaders from our soil,’ the Army of the Potomac had done its full duty (CWAL, 6: 318). But for Lincoln, this was intolerable. Like Pennsylvania, Virginia was part of the Union, even if the latter state happened to be in rebellion. So the notion that Meade’s army had expelled Lee from ‘our soil’ was a kind of political heresy to Lincoln. ‘Will the generals never get that idea out of their heads?’ he exclaimed to his secretary John Hay. ‘The whole country is our soil.’4 And it was precisely this sense of frustration that led to the spillover of emotion in Lincoln’s letter of 14 July to Meade. ‘Again, my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape,’ Lincoln concluded. ‘He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely . . . Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it’ (CWAL, 6: 328). Yet this letter, as well as speaking to Lincoln’s genuine depth of feeling, also speaks to the need he felt to balance such visceral anger against the responsibilities of his position. On a personal level, Lincoln could have, with some righteousness, sent this letter of reprimand to his commanding general in the field; as the president, however, he forbore. On its envelope we instead find Lincoln’s endorsement: ‘To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed’ (CWAL, 6: 328). Shifting from the private end of the spectrum to the public, meanwhile, we have Lincoln’s famous ‘Bixby Letter,’ which appeared in Northern newspapers to great acclaim almost as soon as it was sent. Dispatched on 21 November 1864, at the behest

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of the governor of Massachusetts, John A. Andrew, this letter addresses a widow named Lydia Bixby, who claimed that she had lost her five boys in the war. ‘Dear Madam,’ it reads: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have gloriously died on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom. Yours, very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln. (CWAL, 8: 116) Over the years this missive has assumed a proud place among Lincoln’s canonical writings. As Michael Burlingame has noted, no less a Lincoln biographer than Carl Sandburg declared that the letter formed a ‘piece of the American Bible,’ and many other Lincolnists have agreed.5 But two crucial problems need to be taken into account here. First, Lincoln only signed the letter – it was in all probability composed by his secretary John Hay (a judgment by Burlingame that is now generally accepted).6 And, second, the content of the letter hardly represents the transcendently great prose that it has often been taken for. Burlingame, for instance, notes that the verb ‘beguile’ in the second paragraph, which Hay had an ‘inordinate fondness’ for, does not sound like the voice of Lincoln – and, indeed, its only occurrence in all of the latter’s writings is in the Bixby letter.7 Moreover, phrases like ‘died gloriously on the field of battle’ and ‘altar of Freedom’ are untypically grandiose, if not pompous, whether in or out of the context of Lincoln’s letters. Although he may well have died a theist of some sort (most likely, in line with his naturalistic determinism, a strict Calvinist), there is no good reason to believe that Lincoln, who began his adult life as an atheist, either ‘prayed’ to the ‘Heavenly Father’ to ‘assuage’ Lydia Bixby’s grief – or anyone else’s, including his own. To see the differences in tenor and rhetoric between the Bixby letter and Lincoln’s other letters, it is only necessary to compare the former with two condolences that he actually both wrote and signed: one to the parents of Elmer Ellsworth from 25 May 1861, and one to Fanny McCullough from 23 December 1862. Elmer Ellsworth, who had worked in the Lincoln–Herndon law office during the year before the war started, was among the earliest Union casualties, having been fatally shot after taking down the Confederate flag and raising the Stars and Stripes over the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. When news of the young colonel’s killing reached the White House, Lincoln – who admired him as he would a son – burst into tears and later, at the funeral, was heard to lament over the corpse: ‘My boy! My boy! Was it necessary that this sacrifice should be made!’8 The most substantive paragraph of Lincoln’s letter to Ellsworth’s parents then reads: In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own. So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall.

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In size, in years, and in youthful appearance, a boy only, his power to command men, was surpassingly great. This power, combined with a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew. And yet he was singularly modest and deferential in social intercourse. My acquaintance with him began less than two years ago; yet through the latter half of the intervening period, it was as intimate as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit. To me, he appeared to have no indulgences or pastimes; and I never heard him utter a profane, or an intemperate word. What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. The honours he labored for so laudably, and, in the end, so gallantly gave his life, he meant for them, no less than for himself. (CWAL, 4: 385) So sincere is this, as heartfelt and noble as the fallen soldier who is the letter’s subject, that the Bixby letter seems flaccid in its conventionality by comparison. Granted, Lincoln knew and cared for young Ellsworth, and this accounts for much. But there is something else in the words too: a sense of plain conviction that is closer to Lincoln’s default style. Similarly, Lincoln’s December 1862 letter to Fanny McCullough, the daughter of a Union colonel who had recently died fighting in Mississippi, conveys his sympathy with a simple beauty: It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before. (CWAL, 6: 16) As with the Ellsworth condolence, this letter emerges from a personal acquaintance with its subject, and Lincoln’s prose is equally informed by an avuncular use of the first person. Yet it is more than merely familiar. It is exalted by an energy of feeling that pushes past cliché (the old saw that ‘sorrow comes to us all,’ for instance, is given new authority when Lincoln stresses its peculiar impact on the young) and reaches a modest but firm assertion that Fanny, like the writer himself, can and will heal in time. In this sense, Lincoln makes full use of the reciprocal nature of epistolary rhetoric, with his decidedly not rhetorical question (‘Is not this so?’) inviting Fanny to let her healing begin then and there. In fact, almost from the moment he mastered the alphabet, Lincoln had a measure of literary ambition. Mostly covert, and halting rather than vaulting, this first took the form of writing letters for illiterate neighbors in Indiana, then of prose compositions both narrative and analytic, and, in his late twenties, emerged as poetry, which, along with political stump-speaking, was the mode most agreeable to his penchant for

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performing in language. Though never a novel-reader, he read all the dramatic works he could find in places like New Salem and Springfield, Illinois, and he found in a half-dozen or so of Shakespeare’s plays that synthesis of poetry and drama that would innervate his later political speeches. With his near-eidetic memory, he could extemporize at will, and in public he often told jokes that were fables in upland Southern dialect, his sources being joke books and stories from newspapers that featured what has come to be known among folklorists as ‘old southwestern humor.’ These various literary experimentations and interests are the ones that then surface in the tonal qualities and reference points to be found Lincoln’s letters. In 1844, for example, six years after he anonymously published a melancholy ballad entitled ‘The Suicide’s Soliloquy’ in the Sangamo Journal, Lincoln was on a canvassing trip for the Whig Party and revisited the area of southwestern Indiana where he had lived between the ages of seventeen and twenty.9 What he saw in the little town of Gentryville evidently moved him to a profound and apparently protracted nostalgia, for when he returned to Springfield he began to sketch the poem that eventually became ‘My Child-Hood Home I See Again’ (1846). The model for this sentimental reflection on ‘loved ones lost,’ Lincoln indicated in a February 1846 letter to his fellow attorney Andrew Johnston, of Quincy, Illinois, was the lugubrious ‘Mortality’ (1825), written by the Scottish poet William Knox (CWAL, 1: 367). ‘Feeling a little poetic this evening, I have concluded to redeem my promise . . . by sending you the piece you expressed a wish to have,’ Lincoln told Johnston of this piece, before adding: ‘I wish I could think of something else to say; but I believe I can not’ (CWAL, 1: 366). Thus he left Knox’s poem, which is entirely given over to fatalistic melancholy about the shortness and bitterness of life, to speak for him. As Lincoln’s law partner and future biographer, William Henry Herndon, recorded, Lincoln did not ‘love to read generally,’ but when he found something that stirred him he ‘love[d] to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind.’10 Those relatively few texts that he took to heart, Herndon added, were immediately ‘assimilated to his being,’ after which he could discuss them in detail and recite them from memory.11 ‘Mortality’ was one such text, and one in particular that seemed to sustain Lincoln when he felt lowest. We may confidently assume, therefore, that, in finally acting upon Johnston’s request, Lincoln simply sat down and wrote out the fifty-six lines of the poem without copying it. Indeed, Lincoln did not then know, and may never have known, that William Knox was the author of ‘Mortality.’ When Johnston asked in a subsequent letter (now lost) who had written the poem, Lincoln could only reveal that he had ‘met it in a straggling form in a newspaper,’ before adding that: ‘Beyond all question I am not the author. I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is’ (CWAL, 1: 378).12 Nonetheless, Lincoln had already positioned himself as a potential rival to Knox by concluding his February 1846 letter to Johnston with this question: ‘By the way, how would you like to see a piece of poetry of my own making? I have a piece that is almost done, but I find a deal of trouble to finish it’ (CWAL, 1: 367). Thus it was that in April 1846, Lincoln enclosed the manuscript of the first ten stanzas of ‘My Child-Hood Home.’13 Recalling the genesis of the poem, Lincoln wrote that he had been out stumping for Henry Clay when, either by political itinerary or sentiment, he had made his way ‘into the neighborhood in which I was raised, where my mother and sister are buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years’ (CWAL, 1: 378).

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It was, he continued, a homeground ‘as unpoetical as any spot of the earth,’ yet it evoked in him the keenest nostalgia, a series of ‘feelings in me which were certainly poetry’ (CWAL, 1: 378). The resulting poem, long in gestation, had turned out to be romantic in a quite Wordsworthian sense. With its emphasis on ‘Memory! thou midway world / ’Twixt earth and paradise, / Where things decayed and loved ones lost / In dreamy shadows rise,’ it echoes ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’ that Wordsworth saw taking on the form of poetry through its ‘recollection in tranquility’ (CWAL, 1: 378).14 Unsurprisingly, then, ‘My Child-Hood Home’ – and the letter accompanying it – has often been seen as a key to Lincoln’s locked personality.15 But reading the poem as strictly autobiographical is to make the common mistake of identifying the writer with their poetic voice. Treating ‘My Child-Hood Home’ in this reductive way, biographers actually sell Lincoln short as a poet. True, he lacked confidence in his writing gifts, and he must have known that poetry could be, at best, his avocation. But even if we judge ‘My Child-Hood Home’ the work of a poetaster, in light of the almost transcendently powerful rhetoric Lincoln would reveal to the world in his later speeches and writings, it must be acknowledged an important part of his literary maturation. Lincoln described what he had written to Johnston as ‘cantos,’ perhaps thinking of his beloved Lord Byron’s longer works, and noted that he was sending ‘the first only’ (CWAL, 1: 378). But no doubt encouraged by Johnston’s reception of the poem, on 6 September 1846 he then dispatched the second section of the piece’s ‘four little divisions’ (only three of which were ever written, or are extant) (CWAL, 1: 378). This one took as its theme another of Lincoln’s psychological preoccupations – madness. ‘The subject . . . is an insane man,’ he explained. ‘His name is Matthew Gentry. He is three years older than I, and when we were boys we went to school together. He was rather a bright lad and the son of the rich man of our very poor neighborhood. At the age of nineteen he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity’ (CWAL, 1: 384). Lincoln’s prose précis of the poem, however, scarcely hints at the horror of madness as represented in the verses. What stands out for the reader is Lincoln’s voice’s morbid need to participate vicariously in his comrade’s fate: ‘And when at length, tho’ drear and long, / Time soothed thy fiercer woes, / How plaintively thy mournful song / Upon the still night rose. // I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed, / Far distant, sweet, and lone – / The funeral dirge, it ever seemed / Of reason dead and gone’ (CWAL, 1: 385). Yet, the poem concludes, ‘this is past . . . / Thy piercing shrieks, and soothing strains / Are like forever mute’ (CWAL, 1: 386). Instead, it is the speaker himself, the boy-child in Nature – who, unconsciously fathering the man, ‘stole away, / All stealthily and still, / Ere yet the rising God of day / Hath streaked the Eastern hill’ – that realizes the lesson much later through memory (and poetizing) (CWAL, 1: 386). Again there are echoes of Wordsworth, and more specifically works like ‘The Idiot Boy’ (1798), here. But again we need to ask what Lincoln is trying to say through this ostensibly autobiographical documentation of the ‘impressions . . . made upon me’ by ‘my old home’ (CWAL, 1: 384). As the victim of an inexplicable and irredeemably fatal fall from reason to madness, Matthew Gentry can be seen as an embodiment of Lincoln’s own worst nightmares. Yet, filtered and harmonized in verse, this anxiety transcends the merely personal and reaches toward a broader conviction that ‘Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her.’16 That Lincoln was not versifying just for himself we can surmise from the fact that the two ‘cantos’ of ‘My Child-Hood Home’ sent to Johnston were presented in the

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Quincy Whig in May 1847 at the latter’s behest (under the title ‘The Return’). ‘To say the least, I am not at all displeased with your proposal to publish the poetry, or doggerel, or whatever else it may be called,’ Lincoln told Johnston on 25 February 1847. ‘Whether the prefatory remarks in my letter shall be published with the verses, I leave entirely to your discretion’ (CWAL, 1: 392). His only stipulation, in fact, was that the poem appear anonymously, since ‘I have not sufficient hope of the verses attracting any favorable notice to tempt me to risk being ridiculed for having written them’ (CWAL, 1: 392). The typically tender sensibility of an unsure author, perhaps, but more likely a result of political prudence. As the newly elected Whig Congressman from the Sangamon District of Illinois, Lincoln probably preferred beginning his term in Washington without literary distractions. Indeed, time and context show us that ‘My Child-Hood Home’ is not ‘doggerel.’ By antebellum literary standards the poem could have held its own in any number of anthologies of American literature. While evidently not of the first rank – as the work of the already famous Longfellow, the soon-to-arrive Whitman, and the still-teenage Dickinson would be – Lincoln’s poem shows drama, imagery, and music enough to endure, even had he not become the sixteenth president of the United States. Ironically, in fact, romantic emotion was much harder for Lincoln to express in his personal life than in his poetic ventures. From an epistolary standpoint, the muchdiscussed question of whether Lincoln and the twenty-year-old Anne Rutledge fell in love in New Salem, Illinois, circa 1833, and of whether Lincoln was emotionally devastated after her untimely death in August 1835, is, strictly speaking, irrelevant. For not a scrap of paper exists in either’s hand concerning the other. Instead, the first documented ‘romance’ of Lincoln’s life is the altogether stranger pursuit of one Mary S. Owens, which occurred in the autumn of 1836 and continued off and on through most of 1837 before ‘winking out’ (as Lincoln said of a general store in New Salem that he had half-owned).17 Here there are three extant letters: two from Lincoln to Owens (dated 13 December 1836 and 16 August 1837), and one longer piece – from April 1838 – written to Eliza Browning, the wife of a political friend. It is from this third missive that we can gather most of what we know of Lincoln’s at best halfhearted courtship of Owens. If, that is, it is reliable. For it is dated to the first of the month (April Fool’s Day), and could well have been intended as a joke – on Lincoln himself certainly, but with plenty of satire aimed at Owens too. In this respect, though the dates and circumstances of their meeting and courtship are probably accurate, the letter is largely cast in the form of a post-breakup burlesque of Owens, and so we must question Lincoln’s wider portrait of a beloved who rejected his suit. Lincoln writes to Browning that he had first seen Owens sometime around 1833, when she had come over from Kentucky to visit her sister, Mrs. Bennett Abell. At this point, he confesses in a rather unromantic fashion, he ‘thought her agreeable, and saw no objection to plodding life through hand in hand with her’ (CWAL, 1: 117). Then, ‘in the autumn of 1836,’ there was to be a return visit to the Kentucky branch of the family (CWAL, 1: 117). Mrs. Abell ‘proposed,’ Lincoln recalled, that she would bring Mary back with her, ‘upon condition that I would engage to become her brotherin-law with all convenient dispatch’ (CWAL, 1: 117). Whether in jest or earnest, Lincoln agreed; and thus began a year and a half of mutually miserable courtship. By 1836, Lincoln was serving in the Illinois House of Representatives, the state capital then being in Vandalia. It was a stale, flat, and unprofitable time, both politically and

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personally. Indeed, as the year wound down, Lincoln had fallen into one of his deep depressions. So, all in all, it was not the best time to write a love letter. Still, Lincoln tried, even if he ended up penning something very like its antithesis. Saluting his prospective wife on 13 December simply as ‘Mary,’ he opened with, ‘I have been sick ever since my arrival here. It is but little difference, however, as I have verry [sic] little even yet to write’ (CWAL, 1: 54). Then, after complaining that she had not answered his previous message to her (‘the longer I can avoid the mortification of looking in the Post Office for your letter and not finding it, the better’), and briefly noting the latest political news, he closes his short missive in frank despair: You recollect I mentioned in the outset of this letter that I had been unwell. That is the fact, though I believe I am about well now; but that, with other things I can not account for, have conspired and have gotten my spirits so low, that I feel I would rather been [sic] any place in the world than here. I really can not endure the thought of staying here ten weeks. Write back as soon as you get this, and if possible say something that will please me, for really I have not [been] pleased since I left you. This letter is so dry and [stupid] that I am ashamed to send it, but with my pres[ent] feelings I can not do any better. (CWAL, 1: 54) By his sign-off, then, Lincoln is barely coherent, in either thought or grammar. The three ‘can nots’ and ‘have nots’ within a single paragraph are especially telling: this is a man steeped in negative feelings asking a woman he feels something for to help him emotionally, yet without giving her any good reason to do so. As Lincoln slowly climbed out of the dark crater of his depression, he seems to have continued to profess an interest in Owens. But he remained chary of marrying her. His only other known letter to Owens, from August of the following year, for example, might be read as the clumsy attempt of a suitor to get out of a marriage promise without actually breaking it (his sense of honor no doubt niggling him, as it would during his later courtship of Mary Todd). Lincoln hems and haws here, takes one step forward and two back, and finally shuffles his way through to a half-wishful, half-regretful ‘farewell’ (CWAL, 1: 94). Addressing Owens this time under the salutation ‘Friend Mary,’ Lincoln insists: You must know that I cannot see you, or think of you, with entire indifference . . . I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women. I want, at this particular time, more than anything else, to do right with you, and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it would, to let you alone, I would do it. And for the purpose of making this matter as plain as possible, I now say, that you can now drop the subject, dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without calling forth one accusing murmer [sic] from me. (CWAL, 1: 94) All of this is a passive-aggressive effort to invert the usual conventions of epistolarity, which are designed to elicit a response from one’s interlocutor. ‘If it suits you best to not answer this . . . a long life and a merry one attend you. But if you conclude to write back, speak as plainly as I do,’ Lincoln finishes, with a barely concealed longing for the former avenue to be the one Owens takes (CWAL, 1: 94). Lincoln is really asking Owens not to accept him, and in the end that is what happened. She, no doubt wisely, ended their relationship through the ultimate medium of silence.

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In the aftermath, however, Lincoln may have either regretted or resented his rejection. How else to explain the astonishing letter, written nearly a year later, to Eliza Browning? On its surface, this missive is one of the harshest things Lincoln ever wrote. It is downright cruel. But, as with the August 1837 letter to Owens herself, we need to pay attention to the conflicted feelings doing battle in it. And, as I have already suggested, there is the possibility too that it is not so much an epistle as a burlesque comic sketch – a genre Lincoln knew, loved, and practiced though his own oral storytelling – with its narrator as a subject of the slapstick. Since the letter follows the model of the comic yarn, a clear sense of the structure and impact of it can only come through when it is read whole. Given the constraints of space, however, the following extract will have to suffice. After giving Mrs. Browning the context for their courtship, Lincoln recalls his 1836 meeting with Owens, fresh up from Kentucky and, ostensibly, come to Springfield to marry him: I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff; I knew she was called an ‘old maid,’ and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the appelation; but now, when I beheld her, I could not for the life of me avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting in to wrinkles, but from want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head, that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and revealed her present bulk in less than thirty-five or forty years; and, in short, I was not at all pleased with her. (CWAL, 1: 118) In reality, this caricature was no more like Mary Owens than it was like Lincoln’s mother – whose invocation here comically reduces the narrator himself to ‘the size of infancy.’ Indeed, she is, as Lincoln implies a little earlier, like no woman outside of ‘my immagination [sic]’ (CWAL, 1: 118). Moreover, Lincoln concludes by clearly signaling that he is the one who ‘made a fool of myself’ (CWAL, 1: 119). ‘After I had delayed the matter as long as I thought I could in honor do . . . I concluded I might as well bring [the relationship] to a consummation without further delay,’ he tells Mrs. Browning, ‘and so I mustered my resolution, and made the proposal to her direct; but, shocking to relate, she answered, No . . . I was mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different ways’ (CWAL, 1: 119). From at least one critical perspective, however, Lincoln’s misogynistic portrayal of Owens is very definitely a sign of personal turmoil rather than comic effect. For there has been a recent trend – much to the consternation of Lincoln scholars and the surprise of the large and always-eager audience for Lincolniana – to claim that the sixteenth president was homosexual.18 This trend gained much of its impetus from a 2005 book entitled The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, in which the clinical psychologist C. A. Tripp drew on the friendship between Lincoln and Joshua Fry Speed, and in particular the time they spent together in Springfield, Illinois between 1837 and 1842, to conclude that Lincoln had ‘an intense and ongoing homosexual relationship with Speed. Admittedly it was not recognized as such by anyone at the time, including the principals . . . Yet what people did recognize at the time . . . is that Lincoln’s relationship with Speed was by any measure unique – the “closest” as well as the “most intimate” relationship of his life.’19 In effect, Tripp is arguing, although Lincoln’s contemporaries did not have the twentieth-century vocabulary necessary to define ‘homosexuality’

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they saw in his ties to Speed the romantic and sexual affiliations we now understand by the term. Small wonder, then, that the Lincoln priesthood took Tripp roughly to task. He was criticized for over-reading his sources as well as cherry-picking them; for ignoring evidence of Lincoln’s well-documented heterosexual behavior; and, when he did mention it, for treating Lincoln’s heterosexuality (including the four sons born to him and Mary Todd Lincoln during the first decade of their marriage) as only a necessary social mask. The most measured and convincing rebuttal to Tripp, however, came from Michael Burlingame, who contributed an afterword to The Intimate World itself. Burlingame, then in the final stages of composition of his monumental two-volume biography of Lincoln, took the time and trouble to consider Tripp’s book with care. Having already published a ‘psychobiography’ of Lincoln, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, a decade before, Burlingame was more sensitive than most to his guild’s reluctance to accept such approaches. So in his comments, entitled ‘A Respectful Dissent,’ Burlingame trod generously through Tripp’s narrative and argument, while at the same time taking a clear-eyed look at the evidence Tripp presented. ‘Since it is virtually impossible to prove a negative, Dr. Tripp’s thesis cannot be rejected outright,’ he concluded. ‘But given the paucity of hard evidence . . . and given the abundance of evidence indicating that Lincoln was drawn romantically to some women, it is possible but highly unlikely that Abraham Lincoln was “predominantly homosexual.” ’20 Even if the theory of the ‘gay Lincoln’ needs to be treated with skepticism, then, it nonetheless raises important questions about historical interpretation, and the role of Lincoln and Speed’s correspondence within accounts of the former’s life. Indeed, almost every Lincoln biographer would agree with Tripp that Lincoln’s letters to Speed are extraordinary, both in themselves and in the larger field of his correspondence, which is otherwise largely devoid of the reflective and personal sides of the man. Moreover, the letters Lincoln wrote to Speed are doubly tantalizing in that they represent only one half of a conversation: Speed’s replies to Lincoln are missing from the documentary record. This, of course, encourages us to read (and perhaps over-read) between the lines of Lincoln’s extant letters in order to try to infer what Speed had written that so prompted Lincoln’s heartfelt responses. These extant letters consist of seven missives written between early January 1842 and 4 July 1842. During this period, Speed had left Springfield and was living back in Kentucky, at his family home, where he found himself at the beginning of a courtship with a local girl, Fanny Henning. They were soon engaged, but Speed was getting cold feet. And Lincoln too was undergoing romantic trials. Having broken off his engagement to Mary Todd (sometime late in 1840, or very early 1841), he eventually reconciled with her, and they were married on 4 November 1842. Throughout the stormy period in between, however, Speed acted as Lincoln’s confidant, both supporting and upbraiding his friend. It was Speed, for example, who insisted that Lincoln see Mary face-to-face in 1840 in order to withdraw from the engagement, rather than send a letter to her, as Lincoln at first intended to do, thereby replicating his actions with Mary Owens.21 Once Speed’s doubts about Fanny Henning set in, then, the ‘polarity’ of the friendship, as Douglas Wilson has so aptly called it, began to reverse, and the two men found themselves in the same boat.22 What Lincoln had to offer his friend in the way of advice was the bitter experience of a courtship gone bad and the self-realization that he did not love Mary Todd sufficiently to marry her, even as Lincoln wanted to convince Speed of the opposite: that the Kentuckian did love his fiancée deeply enough for a marriage to work.

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Taken together, all seven letters from Lincoln to Speed form an astonishing record of the former’s intimate reflections on two crucial questions: Did Speed truly love Fanny? And, if so, why was he so anxious about taking the plunge? In his very first letter, for example, actually written while Speed was still in Springfield, but posted to Kentucky rather than given to him, Lincoln sets forth his fears that Speed’s ‘naturally . . . nervous temperament,’ along with the bad weather inevitably to be endured during his journey, would lead him into depression and possibly neurasthenia (CWAL, 1: 265). An even more pressing cause for Lincoln’s concern, meanwhile, seems to come a few lines later when he notes ‘the rapid and near approach of that crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate’ (CWAL, 1: 265). The portrayal of Speed’s imminent marriage as something that will render him ‘agonized and distressed’ may well just represent a conventional male fear of commitment (CWAL, 1: 265). Yet there also seems to be something deeper at work here. There is ‘a painful difference between you and the mass of the world,’ Lincoln tells Speed as he worries about his friend’s ‘nervous debility,’ an affliction of the spirit burdening only sensitive souls, of whom Lincoln himself is evidently another (CWAL, 1: 266). Speed had, of course, recently witnessed the debacle of his friend’s premature proposal to Mary Todd and helped nurse him through his own bad bout of depression. Now, Lincoln promised, he would repay the favor by staying as close to his friend as slow mails and great distance allowed. ‘I know what the painful point with you is, at all times when you are unhappy. It is an apprehension that you do not love her as you should,’ Lincoln explains. ‘What nonsense! . . . I shall be so anxious about you, that I want you to write me every mail’ (CWAL, 1: 266). This determination on Lincoln’s part to ‘bring [you] home to your feelings’ through regular communication evidently prompted Speed to respond with at least two letters in early January 1842, to which Lincoln replied in turn with one on 3 February (CWAL, 1: 266). In its opening paragraph, Lincoln again addresses their friendship and the continuing difficulties of Speed’s courtship (especially as complicated by Fanny Henning’s ill-health), but also tackles something critical and intemperate Speed had apparently said. ‘You well know that I do not feel my own sorrows much more keenly than I do yours,’ he notes defensively: [Y]et I assure you I was not much hurt by what you wrote me of your excessively bad feeling at the time you wrote. Not that I am less capable of sympathizing with you now than ever; not that I am less your friend than ever, but because I hope and believe, that your present anxiety and distress about . . . her life, must and will forever banish those horid [sic] doubts, which I know you sometimes felt, as to the truth of your affection for her. If they can be once and forever removed . . . surely, nothing can come in their stead, to fill their immeasurable measure of misery. (CWAL, 1: 267) Lincoln’s emphasis on love as an inoculation against pain in the last sentence is especially effective. He seems to be telling Speed that he needs to accept and declare his deep affection for Fanny – which to Lincoln is obvious in his friend’s heart – in case she really is in danger of losing her life. ‘Why Speed, if you did not love her, although you might not wish her death, you would most calmly be resigned to it,’ he adds (CWAL, 1: 268). Which may seem rather cold on Lincoln’s part; but he is probably thinking of his own

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case. ‘You know the Hell I have suffered on that point, and how tender I am upon it,’ he concludes. ‘[Yet] I have been quite clear of the hypo since you left’ (CWAL, 1: 268). That is, Lincoln’s own severe depressions of the preceding two years have subsided, thanks to his honest reckoning with his feelings. Since Lincoln was prompting Speed to marry Fanny rather than reject her (as he had Mary), their cases remained slightly different. Anticipating Speed’s marriage to Fanny following her return to health, Lincoln wrote on 13 February, two days before the planned wedding, that ‘my desire to befriend you is everlasting . . . [it] will never cease, while I know how to do any thing,’ even as he acknowledged that ‘you will always hereafter, be on ground that I have never occupied, and consequently, if advice were needed, I might advise wrong’ (CWAL, 1: 269). Rather than lingering on the demands of married life itself, to which he had confessed himself a stranger, Lincoln thus returned to the theme of Speed’s ‘nervous temperament,’ offering this guidance as from one hypochondriac to another: ‘[S]hould excessive pleasure still be accompanied with a painful counterpart at times, still let me urge you, as I have ever done, to remember in the dep[t]h and even the agony of despondency, that verry [sic] shortly you are to feel well again . . . I incline to think it probable, that your nerves will fail you occasionally for a while; but once you get them fairly graded now, that trouble is over’ (CWAL, 1: 269). There is, of course, something deeply empathetic in Lincoln’s diagnosis of Speed’s recurring depression. It is fair to conclude that Lincoln and Speed had been sharing intimate details about their emotional health for years, and that a good part of these conversations had been about love, women, and sexuality as well. Now, though, Lincoln, without exactly bidding adieu to his best friend, reveals his awareness of their henceforth changed relationship. After predicting Speed’s permanent recovery, he closes with the postscript, ‘I have been quite a man ever since you left,’ as if in acknowledgment of an altered dynamic (CWAL, 1: 270). With Speed now permanently in Kentucky and Lincoln in Springfield, it is no surprise that their emotional intimacy came to an end, even once Lincoln himself ascended to married status. Yet the friendship also cooled in another important respect. Speed had inherited slaves from his father, and it is fair to say that he gradually became ‘soft’ on the question of ending the peculiar institution. This would undoubtedly have disappointed Lincoln, notwithstanding the fact that his own public and political principles were not abolitionist but anti-expansionist. One of the later and most often quoted of his letters to Speed, for example, dates to 24 August 1855, at the height of the crisis over Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas–Nebraska Act. Speed was for its passage, and the free spread of slavery into the territories; Lincoln was adamantly against (as his widely-reprinted ‘Peoria Speech’ of 1854 had shown the world). Speed had apparently told Lincoln ‘that sooner than [he] would yield [his] legal right to the slave . . . [he] would see the Union dissolved’ (CWAL, 2: 320). This, of course, was not at all what the soon-to-be-Republican Lincoln was advocating. ‘I am not aware that any one is bidding you to yield that right; very certainly I am not,’ he insisted. ‘I . . . acknowledge your rights and my obligations, under the constitution, in regard to your slaves’ (CWAL, 2: 320). And yet: ‘I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils’ (CWAL, 2: 320). ‘I bite my lip and keep quiet,’ Lincoln swiftly added, careful not to baldly call out his oldest and most cherished friend on the matter (CWAL, 2: 320). But Lincoln was unmistakably reminding Speed that while he

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viewed his slaves as chattels, Lincoln viewed them as human beings. On this question of his ‘judgment and feelings’ there could be no agreement to disagree (CWAL, 2: 320). Few friendships could have survived being so at odds both morally and politically. Lincoln would offer Speed government appointments more than once during the Civil War, and to that extent the old trust prevailed. Lincoln’s close to his August 1855 letter, however, sounds like a broader farewell: ‘My kindest regards to Mrs. Speed. On [slavery,] the leading subject of this letter, I have more of her sympathy than of yours. And yet let [me] say I am Your friend’ (CWAL, 2: 323).

Notes 1. This is the author’s approximate number, based on a census of letters in Lincoln, The Collected Works. 2. Guelzo, Gettysburg, 441. 3. Quoted in Guelzo, Gettysburg, 448. 4. Quoted in ibid. 447. 5. See Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2: 737. 6. See Burlingame, ‘The Bixby Letter.’ 7. Ibid. 180. It is also worth noting, in a further irony of history, that later investigation revealed that Mrs. Bixby had had only two sons killed in the Union Army, though she tried to claim compensation for three others: one of whom had run off to the Confederate Army, along with, perhaps, a second, while the third had been honorably discharged. Worst of all, ‘Mrs. Bixby was born in Virginia, sympathized with the Confederacy, and disliked Lincoln so strongly that she apparently destroyed the letter in anger’ (Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2: 737). 8. Quoted in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2: 177. 9. For further discussion of how the Sangamo Journal piece reflects Lincoln’s temperament see Miller, Lincoln’s Melancholy, 39–42. 10. Quoted in Bray, Reading with Lincoln, ix. 11. Ibid. x. 12. Building a biography of Lincoln from his letters is made much more difficult because almost all personal letters to Lincoln have not survived. This problem of interpretation will become clearer in the discussion of his friendship with Joshua Speed below. 13. Moreover, in this letter Lincoln also thanked Johnston for a newspaper clipping of a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ (1845) called ‘The Pole-Cat,’ which had appeared in the Quincy Whig on 18 March 1846. Despite its foolishness, Lincoln liked it, as he liked much of the burlesquing dialect humor of the antebellum American southwest. ‘I have never seen Poe’s “Raven”; and I very well know that a parody is almost entirely dependent for its interest upon the reader’s acquaintance with the original,’ Lincoln wrote. ‘Still there is enough in the polecat, self-considered, to afford one several hearty laughs. I think four or five of the last stanzas are decidedly funny’ (Letter to Andrew Johnston, 18 April 1846, in Collected Works, 1: 377). One wonders whether Johnston’s mention of Poe whetted Lincoln’s literary appetite, for at some point, probably in the last two years of the 1840s, Lincoln read ‘The Raven’ and thereafter could recite the poem from memory (see Bray, Reading with Lincoln, 138–9). 14. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads,’ in The Major Works, 598. 15. See, for example, Wilson, Lincoln before Washington, 139–43, and Burlingame, The Inner World, 107–10. According to Burlingame, the root of Lincoln’s lifelong struggle with depression lay in his mother’s death in Indiana in 1818: ‘The subsequent events in Lincoln’s life that plunged him into stygian gloom had such power because they reawakened memories of the painful losses he suffered as a youth’ (107).

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418 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

robert bray Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,’ in The Major Works, 134. Quoted in Tarbell, In the Footsteps of the Lincolns, 195. For a useful overview of this trend see Steers, Lincoln Legends, 125–49. Tripp, The Intimate World, 126. Burlingame, ‘A Respectful Dissent,’ 238. See Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 1: 182. Wilson, Lincoln before Washington, 122.

Works Cited Bray, R. (2010), Reading with Lincoln, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Burlingame, M. (1994), The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Burlingame, M. (2000), ‘The Authorship of the Bixby Letter,’ in J. Hay, At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings, ed. M. Burlingame, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 169–84. Burlingame, M. (2005), ‘A Respectful Dissent,’ in C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Free Press, 225–45. Burlingame, M. (2013), Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Guelzo, A. C. (2013), Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, New York: Knopf. Lincoln, A. (1953), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols., ed. R. P. Basler, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cited parenthetically as CWAL. Shenk, J. W. (2005), Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Steers, E. J. (2007), Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with our Greatest President, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Tarbell, I. (1924), In the Footsteps of the Lincolns, New York: Harper & Brothers. Tripp, C. A. (2005), The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Free Press. Wilson, D. L. (1997), Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on the Illinois Years, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wordsworth, W. (2008), The Major Works, ed. S. Gill, New York: Oxford University Press.

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27 BETWEEN SCIENCE AND AESTHETICS: THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES Martin Halliwell

W

illiam James’s life was full of in-betweens. As a young man he aspired to be an artist but was pushed reluctantly into medicine by his father, and he often felt torn between competing interests during his student years at Harvard University in the 1860s and then throughout his professional life. Initially appointed as an instructor in physiology and anatomy at Harvard in 1873, James eventually found that his interests coalesced around the emerging discipline of psychology. This focus gave rise to his definitive late-nineteenth-century study, The Principles of Psychology (1890), a book that took many years to write and a great deal of perspiration. In the remaining twenty years of his life, though, his correspondence and published writings roamed freely between psychology, philosophy, religion, spiritualism, literature, and education, engaging widely with both Victorian and modern thinkers on each side of the Atlantic. Ninety years after the historic publication of The Principles of Psychology, the French philosopher Michel Foucault conceptualized the idea of the ‘experience book’ to describe texts in which knowing and doing are inseparable, a category he contrasts with the ‘demonstration book’ in which truth and knowledge are treated with more epistemological certainty.1 Foucault’s distinction foreshadowed the post-foundational turn in philosophy in the 1980s when there was a resurgence of interest in James’s pragmatism, and especially the manner in which he sidestepped often intractable epistemological concerns in favor of a philosophy of action. But it is also a useful distinction for thinking about James as a writer, particularly as ‘experience’ was a persistent focus of his personal and professional life, and one that enabled him to explore in his letters and published writings those ‘in-betweens’ that came to define the early-twentieth-century modernist worldview as it intensified in Europe and the United States during the years preceding James’s death in 1910. The notion of his work as an experience book does not mean that he remained a reluctant scientist or always in flight from empirical orthodoxies, but rather that he practiced philosophy in a manner that challenged the boundaries of nineteenth-century thought. In order to interrogate this concept of the experience book in relation to James’s thought, one can begin by considering how his correspondence offers insights into his development as a thinker. His corpus of letters, which spans 1856 to 1910 (and around a third of which are collected in twelve volumes published by the University of Virginia Press), provides a wealth of primary evidence for understanding his ideas, including a substantial amount of correspondence prior to his first major publication in 1890.2 The earliest editions of his letters, especially Ralph Barton Perry’s two-volume The Thought 419

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and Character of William James (1935), effectively demonstrate how James’s development was refracted through his relationships with his father and his younger brother Henry, and this has become a common theme of more recent biographical studies.3 As the eldest child William struggled with his father; sometimes unfairly, given that Henry James Sr. desired a rounded education for his five children and tried to stimulate William and Henry Jr.’s cultural interests by traveling in Europe. In 1884 William honored his father with a commemorative volume, The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, but he was resentful that he was pushed toward anatomy and medicine when he had just discovered a passion for painting. William’s relationship with his brother also had its peculiar tensions, despite their mutual admiration: we learn from their letters that the brothers suffered from a range of medical complaints and it was rare for them to be well at the same time.4 There are fewer letters of note between William and his third brother Wilky, who died prematurely of kidney complaints in 1883, perhaps linked to the wounds that he sustained as a young Union soldier in the Civil War. Instead, the letters reveal more about his feelings toward his fourth brother Robertson, about whom William was particularly critical because of his excessive drinking, and his younger sister Alice, whose private writings (including not only letters but a diary written with the encouragement of William and Henry) offer insights into her own declining health and contemporary medical treatments.5 William’s correspondence with Alice and with his wife, Alice Howe Gibbens, reveals another triangular relationship that contrasts with the Henry James Sr., William and Henry triad. Just as his early relationships with these men helped him to anchor key ideas, so his bond with the two Alices allowed him to test out ideas in practice via his sister’s terminal illness and his wife’s interest in spiritualism and mediums. As this might suggest, William’s letters cut between family life and his scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic interests, particularly the concept of ‘pluralism,’ which is evident in nascent form in his early letters before coming to fruition in his final volume A Pluralistic Universe (1909). This book derived from the Hibbert Lectures that James delivered at Oxford University in spring 1908, wherein he mapped out a philosophical mode that holds various positions in relation to one another, rather than seeking to resolve those positions into monism or dualism. Despite it being his last publication, A Pluralistic Universe was not the culmination of James’s thought, even though the concept of pluralism brought together the diverse strands of his work and clarified in philosophical terms what he meant by ‘varieties’ in his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience. Above all, linking together the three dimensions of James’s correspondence – his intellectual development, his family relations, and his pluralistic philosophy – was his lifelong fascination with the concept of experience. This was a bridging category between science and art for him, but was more often expressed as a feeling or sensibility than as a philosophical concept, particularly because James worried that concepts tend to obscure or simplify reality. In this way his writings evoke a late-eighteenth-century German Romantic sensibility in avoiding categorical distinctions between scientific and aesthetic modes of inquiry. We see this most frequently on the level of style and imagery, but there is a strong likelihood that this would have been foregrounded at the level of content had he lived longer. Although his health was deteriorating rapidly in 1909, he intended to return to his early interest in painting and sculpture by working on a book on aesthetics. As Barbara Loerzer has emphasized, James pictured his body of thought

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as ‘an arch built on one side’ which he believed needed completing by aesthetic means.6 In particular, Loerzer argues, James’s French interests helped to shape this sensibility, reflecting his pronouncement as an eighteen-year-old ‘that “Art” is my vocation,’ after being inspired by the training he undertook at William Morris Hunt’s Studio in Newport, Rhode Island during 1860–1, where he was exposed to the Barbizon School of painting.7 And, as I will discuss later, this sensibility also reflects synergies between James’s theories of experience and those of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, which grew out of their mutual dissatisfaction with dominant metaphysical models. Little of James’s projected work on aesthetics exists (except for two notebooks and a couple of undated papers amongst the William James Papers at Harvard University), but it is instructive to see how his letters complement his published work in identifying experience as an in-between category that links his scientific and aesthetic preoccupations.8 Sometimes, for example, he makes bold statements in his letters about the relationship between personal experience and professional life, such as a message to his friend Tom Ward in December 1876: ‘Every man ought to have outside of his work a chance to cultivate the ideal. I ought to be able to read biographies, histories, etc., a couple of hours every evening, for I think a professor, in addition to his fach [subject], should be a ganzer Mensch [whole human] but I can read nothing.’9 But elsewhere, scraps of correspondence emerge in his published texts in unexpected ways and in a manner that implicates James, the ‘ganzer Mensch,’ in the processes he is describing. As has been well documented, James’s early intellectual interests were stimulated by his family’s three-year sojourn in Europe between 1855 and 1858. Henry and he had an eclectic education, including private tutoring in Switzerland, England, and France; William attended the Collège de Boulogne in winter 1857–8, before a return to Europe in October 1859 saw him take anatomy classes at the Geneva Academy. This allowed for a deep engagement with European ideas, languages, and cultures, but also instilled in him a dislike of formal education, which played out when the family moved to Newport for a year between 1858 and 1859, and during his time at Harvard. We see this best expressed in a September 1861 letter to his family from Cambridge. Describing his laboratory work, William gleefully declares, ‘I can be as independent as I please, and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of everyone.’10 Aware of his own proclivities, he also acknowledges ‘that the “native hue of resolution” has never been of very great shade in me hitherto,’ but he concludes with a sense of resolve: ‘I am sure that that feeling is a right one, and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do, I think I shall turn out all right.’11 This resolve was probably intended for his father, but displays a presence of mind, an unorthodox spirit, and a dislike of routine which he was still maintaining three decades later, in claiming to his French friend Charles Renouvier that Harvard ‘inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business . . . so that during term time one can do no continuous reading at all [and] when vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing.’12 This 1896 disclosure to Renouvier, and the assertion that his workload has reduced ‘my own energy [to] a small teacup-full,’ displays James’s characteristic attitude both toward university life and the periodic bouts of illness that often undermined his sense of purpose.13 In his introduction to the first volume of the University of Virginia edition of James’s correspondence, which collects William’s and Henry’s early letters, Gerald Myers astutely links the brothers’ various ailments to their interest in ‘evanescent’ elements that were often expressed in ‘pictorial language.’14 Visceral and aesthetic experiences were often in

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tension for the brothers, but played out via their interest in sense impressions and the act of composition. Such self-reflexivity is evident, for instance, in an early letter from William to Henry, dated 7 September 1861. Writing from a ‘Drear & Chill Abode’ in Cambridge, whilst studying at Harvard University’s Lawrence Scientific School, the nineteen-year-old William was clearly missing his family home in Newport.15 These ‘gushes of feeling’ for home are in contrast to his sense of being ‘unsettled’ in his Cambridge room.16 Although he cannot pinpoint the precise features of the room that preclude homeliness, he describes ‘an argand gas burner with a neat green shade over it merrily singing beside me’ and ‘a round table in the middle of the room with a red and black cloth upon it.’17 These favorable colors are in contrast to the ‘curtainless and bleak’ windows, with ‘shades of linen,’ a ‘horsehair covered sofa’ and a ‘vast’ and ‘naked’ mantelpiece.18 Such is his discomfort with the room and irritation with the street noise below that he admits he has rented another room to sleep in. His mood quickly lifts when he moves to alternative accommodation the following week (for twice the price), writing to the family to say that his new bedroom is ‘perfectly delicious, with a charming aspect,’ largely because it captures the sun for much of the day.19 But the earlier letter to Henry is dominated by interior description; William does not relay much about his classes and concludes that ‘there was not much . . . worth seeing’ on his visits to an engraving exhibition at Harvard and the Boston Atheneum Gallery, except for ‘some curious big things of [Washington] Allston, & the casts.’20 Although he would not have been averse to Allston’s romanticized landscape painting, it is not in formal art where we see William’s aesthetic interests emerging, but in his evocative description of the room, conjured with a painterly eye and imbued with the heightened emotion of a homesick young man. William sometimes includes pencil sketches in his letters to Henry, such as a small sketch of what the two of them would look like in his bed in Cambridge ahead of Henry’s planned visit of November 1861, and a diagram of a laboratory in a letter of May 1865, which had been established in Rio de Janeiro by the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz. Howard Feinstein has persuasively analyzed a number of these early pencil sketches in which the tensions in James’s thought and life can be discerned, but it is also worth dwelling on the visual dimensions of the letters that complement them, such as those written during James’s year-long scientific expedition to Brazil as an assistant volunteer to Agassiz during a break from his medical degree at Harvard.21 The letters and diary entries that record the Brazil trip, which include sketches of flora and of other members of the expedition, are in direct contrast to the interior description of his 1861 letters from Cambridge. In a Brazilian letter from May 1865, for example, William expresses his discomfort with the tropical heat (he had contracted a case of smallpox that had a long-term effect on his eyesight) and describes how busy he has been, so much so that he had no time to ‘write or read, not even a moment to study portuguese.’22 Many descriptions of the Brazilian landscape, meanwhile, reveal a Romantic sensibility: On Sunday 4 of us ascended a mountain called the Corcovado, near here. The finest view I ever saw – the mountain having a narrow summit, from wh. three sides went sheer down. The sea and mountains and clouds, & forests, together, made a scene wh. can be neither imagined nor described, so I think I shall not attempt to say anything about it. The affluence of nature here is wonderful. The ease with wh. vegetation invades every thing . . . and weds

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what is artificial to what is natural, makes everything very beautiful & very different from the colorless state of things at home. The color of the vegetation is peculiarly vivid.23 Alongside the unfavorable contrast to ‘colorless’ New England, the springtime foliage on Mount Corcovado, to the west of Rio de Janeiro, blends with other natural elements. The sublime scene is beyond words but offers a harmonious impression, transforming the common moss (which ‘grows on every wall a few years old’) into something rare and exotic – much as Henry David Thoreau (a member of Henry James Sr.’s circle, along with the ‘divine’ Ralph Waldo Emerson) did for wild berries in his natural histories of Concord.24 Despite the sublimity this is not a static scene of contemplation, for William concludes by moving on to describe the prospect of a tough geological excursion into ‘uninhabited’ country to the north of Rio.25 Importantly, this exciting new landscape helped James to shake off his malaise and compensated, to a degree, for his waning respect for Agassiz. In 1861 he had described Agassiz’s projects as being ‘of the greatest scientific import,’ but early in the Brazil trip he decided that the Swiss naturalist was ‘self-seeking & . . . illiberal to others’ and realized that he entertained outdated theories about natural order and race that sat uncomfortably with evolutionary theory.26 In particular, he found Agassiz’s emphasis on detailed classification stifling, even though it revealed the variety of natural phenomena that James was to explore in more phenomenological terms thirty years later. The most exuberant descriptions of the trip reflect James’s passion for walking in nature, by which he thought he could access reality more directly than in a state of contemplation, and this passion continued through his life, feeding into works such as his late essay ‘The Energies of Men’ (1907), which links a philosophy of pragmatism to heroic muscularity, perhaps in an effort to compensate for moments when his bodily energy was depleted. This is illustrated in his exclamation to Tom Ward in December 1876: ‘How I envy you your fund of energy. I have a little spoonful ready for each day and when that’s out as it usually is by 10 o’clock A.M. I’m good for nothing.’27 Nonetheless, his passion for physical exertion eventually led him to buy and renovate a mountain house in Chocorua, New Hampshire in the shadow of the White Mountains, where he took long summer vacations from Harvard, and James frequently associates walking with health in his letters. He recommends ‘wood tramps’ to Henry in a 1885 missive, for instance, observing that his walks ‘renew ones youth more than anything I know,’ and ten years later writes that ‘muscular exercise’ sets him up ‘wonderfully’ for the day and gives him the opportunity to relish the ‘aromatic elements’ and ‘poetic sentiments’ of a New England summer (the fresh air was even more appealing than usual because William was suffering from a bout of pubic lice at the time and had to soak in ‘crude petroleum’).28 Walking, in this context, becomes an element of his working practice in Brazil and gives him a sense of purpose, even if he is sometimes at a loss to describe the natural world, as he was when he remarked to Henry that: ‘No words, but only savage inarticulate cries can express the gorgeous loveliness of the walk I have been taking.’29 Like Charles Darwin, James was interested in the biodiversity of natural forms and drew upon an aesthetic lexicon to describe the flora, describing at various points the ‘bewildering profusion & confusion of the vegetation’ and ‘the wonderful, inextricable, impenetrable forest.’30 Losing himself in the sublime landscape was, in part, an

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attempt to escape the more taxing and routine aspects of the trip and to compensate for a lack of intellectual stimulation, but it is clear that aesthetics rather than geology and botany capture his imagination here. Crucially, this sensibility was honed by his reading of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–25) on the boat trip to Brazil, which documents Humboldt’s exploration to the Americas between 1799 and 1804 and which had already been a major influence on Darwin’s Beagle expedition. James’s own extremes of emotion and excitement about the exotic terrain echo the German explorer’s account. Moreover, as well as describing fauna, flora, and tropical terrain, Humboldt captures his encounters with natives such as the bamboo-dwelling mixed-race ‘zambos’ of northern Colombia, and aspects of primitivism edge into James’s account too. ‘Down in the valley I see 3 or four of the thatched mud hovels of negroes, embosomed in their vivid patches of banana trees,’ he told his brother, while to his father he asserted that ‘these indians are particularly exasperating by their laziness & stolidity.’31 But he was also more tolerant of racial mixing than Agassiz’s scientific racism permitted, and he reflects critically on his own inability to communicate with natives in ‘this placid Acardia’ despite his competency in Portuguese.32 In this respect, although James never entirely lost this edge of primitivism, he became more self-aware of it, most obviously in his 1899 essay ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,’ which describes what he takes to be strange Appalachian agricultural practices, until a passing traveler helps him to respect the story of ‘duty, struggle and success’ that underpins this different way of life.33 The Brazilian trip is instructive in revealing James’s competing interests, but his letters home also detail his strong feelings toward his family. In December 1865, for example, he ends a letter to his mother by asking her to tell Henry ‘that I long to see him & hear him & read him as one seasick longs for land,’ and also remarks that ‘I never knew what [father] was to me’ before embarking on the trip.34 Indeed, there is a great deal of affection in all of the correspondence between William and Henry, but also deeper tensions that reveal fraternal rivalry, perhaps because Henry found his literary voice much earlier than William, having completed ten novels before The Principles of Psychology was published in September 1890. William read and commented on much of Henry’s literary output, including a barbed exchange in February 1885 when he accused Henry of satirizing the Boston educator and Transcendentalist Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in his novel The Bostonians (1886). Henry’s reply expressed vehement denial and a sense that he would be extremely sorry, ‘in fact deadly sick, or fatally ill,’ if he had unintentionally caricatured Peabody (a correspondent of their father’s) as the old reformer Miss Birdseye, claiming instead that she had ‘evolved entirely from my moral consciousness.’35 Henry’s protests that William has been ‘harsh & unfair’ in his assessment showed him to be clearly upset, prompting William to placate his brother six weeks later: ‘Day before yest. came to me about the poor Miss Birdseye episode, concerning which I trust your troubled soul is already at rest.’36 But while this slightly patronizing phrasing is typical of his response to his younger brother, it also reveals a similarity in their often violent reactions to daily incidents. William’s later description of this kind of ‘troubled soul’ as having a ‘morbid-minded’ sensibility could be applied to himself as well as his brother; such individuals, as James puts it in The Varieties of Religious Experience, might suffer afflictions but they are better prepared for exploring the margins of experience than the ‘healthy-minded’ (a term he critically associates with the New England mind-cure movement).37

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This notion of the ‘sick soul’ anatomized in Varieties manifested itself most clearly in the brothers’ concern for their sister Alice, a subject that was to preoccupy their exchanges prior to her premature death in March 1892. The mood of these letters is often colored by Alice’s state of health, of which Henry was more aware, given that she lived in England from 1889. Her health fluctuated a great deal during her first year in Leamington, Warwickshire, but then settled into a pattern of debilitation when she moved to Kensington in West London, leading Henry to describe her condition as presenting ‘no essentially new feature – only a pretty steady & I fear pretty painful development of the old.’38 Alice’s diary, though, is full of mood shifts. She swings in one entry, for instance, from applauding William’s 1890 essay ‘The Hidden Self’ to exuberantly describing her bodily mortification to meekly accepting her physical limitations and the small ‘centimeter of observation’ by which she sees the world.39 The ‘poverty’ of Alice’s ‘outside experience,’ as she described it in an 1891 letter to William, was in stark contrast to the enlarged sphere of activity that her brother advocated.40 He was often sympathetic to her condition, but was curmudgeonly at times and could play the role of the stern patriarch. This is particularly apparent in a letter from 6 July 1891, written from the repose of William’s summer retreat in Chocorua soon after they had discovered that Alice had breast cancer. Here William expresses his relief at the discovery of ‘this more tangible and immediately-menacing source of woe’ and contrasts it favorably to the ‘vague nervousness’ or neurasthenia that plagued them both.41 Implying that Alice ‘never cared for life,’ William then unfeelingly contrasts his ‘strong and varied impressions and activities’ with her ‘long unchanging hours in bed’ and ‘slow-paced monotony.’42 He finishes more tenderly, advising her to ‘look for the little good in each day as if life were to last a hundred years,’ but also, well-meaningly but rather recklessly, suggests she takes ‘all the morphia (or other forms of opium if that disagrees) you want, and don’t be afraid of becoming an opium-drunkard.’43 If William sometimes used Alice’s ailing condition to test out his ideas on health and selfhood, then his wife helped him to widen his experiential range via her longstanding interest in psychic activity and mediums. Stimulated by her family’s Swedenborgian belief-system (which was shared by Henry James Sr.), Alice Howe Gibbens became fascinated by spiritualism, and it also captured William’s attention following their engagement in 1878. It prompted him to set up a psychophysics laboratory in the mid-1880s, informed his correspondence with the British psychic researcher Frederick Myers, and fed into his Lowell Lectures of 1896 on the subjects of hypnotism, multiple personality, and demoniacal possession. Apart from a burst of courtship letters and some travel correspondence (including one letter in which William describes his and Alice’s ‘peculiar kind of tie’), their messages largely focus on home-life, the birth of their five children, the holiday home in Chocorua, their medical ailments, and the death of their infant son Herman in 1885.44 Their relationship was sometimes uncomfortable, particularly when William’s sister was alive, and their correspondence could shift awkwardly between morbid topics (Alice’s bouts of depression and her interest in séances following Herman’s death), a mutual concern for the spiritual realm (what Alice later called ‘the undiscovered country’), and their periodically difficult emotional life (often expressed in an evocative literary style).45 This development of a writing style that bridged personal and professional life was far from unique in the late nineteenth century (as is evident in the letters of fellow Bostonian Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example), and it is sometimes difficult to separate affectionate letters to James’s wife and family from the subjects of his correspondence

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with professional acquaintances.46 Domesticity is sometimes a comfort to him, but at other times is stiflingly parochial. His interest in spiritualism and the margins of experience suggest that, although he did not have a theory of psychic repression himself, he was often looking into the corners of domestic life that were repressed within Victorian bourgeois life. And home could sometimes seem remote and strange to him, as it often did from the vantage point of Europe or late in the Brazilian trip when he wonders if his mother will be able to understand him on his return from eight months in a tropical climate. ‘You have no idea, my dearest Mother,’ he observed then, ‘how strange that home life seems to be from the depths of this world buried as it is in mere vegetation and physical needs & enjoyments.’47 The ‘old existence seems to me like a dream,’ he adds in this letter, as if his experience has made strange all that was once familiar.48 There is an Emersonian strain to this notion of a transformative experience, but it also establishes a marker for his philosophical interest in expanding the range of what could be said to be empirically observable by putting himself into the role of the experimenter. We see this on a more professional level in his correspondence with two of the most renowned European and American philosophers of the fin de siècle, Henri Bergson and John Dewey, the first of whom he shared a temperament with and the second a method. Whilst the majority of these letters were exchanged during the first decade of the twentieth century, their subject matter reflects ideas that James had been developing since the 1880s. Bergson initiated the correspondence with James by sending him an inscribed copy of Matière et Mémorie in 1896, but they did not start exchanging letters until six years later, when James returned the favor by sending a copy of Varieties, admitting that he had only just begun to understand Bergson’s book; after initially thinking its ‘ideas so new and vast,’ he confessed, he now thought it was a work of ‘exquisite genius.’49 The pair then corresponded regularly from 1902 onwards, and met in 1905 in Paris, leading James to refer to the ‘Beautiful Bergson’ in his diary.50 Three years later he wrote with the hope that a ‘socially and intellectually endosmotic relationship’ would develop between them and by 1909, when Bergson sent a letter expressing his appreciation for James’s emphasis on a ‘consoling emotion drawn from the heart of reality,’ they had independently reached similar conclusions about experience.51 They were equally eclectic in their mixing of discourses and Bergson noted broader resonances between pragmatism and the new French philosophy, but he worried that a pragmatic theory of action might be an invasion of la durée that exists beyond the subjective comprehension of time.52 For while James had identified phases of movement and rest within the ‘stream of thought’ (the title of the most famous chapter of Principles), Bergson argued that consciousness is always in flux without breaks.53 The fullest realization of James’s appraisal of Bergson, meanwhile, occurs in the sixth lecture of A Pluralistic Universe, but for him too their letters allowed them to express differences of opinion on truth and the unconscious, as well as the similarities that led them to accept that philosophical concepts and ‘intellectual knowledge’ are practically necessary but tend to obscure ‘raw unverbalized life.’54 Whereas James and Bergson had similar sensibilities, the letters between James and Dewey reveal a difference of temperament that divided the Harvard circle of pragmatists from what was to become the more technical variation of pragmatism housed at the University of Chicago, where Dewey was tenured from 1894. James had first read Dewey enthusiastically in the mid-1880s, but he also found the reading experience disappointing, in all likelihood because James was much more of a prose stylist than his

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counterpart. Nonetheless, this did not prevent him from praising Dewey’s mid-1890s lectures and his 1906 essay on ‘The Experimental Theory of Knowledge’ in letters to their author. In return, Dewey was quick to acknowledge James’s accomplishments: on the publication of Principles, he applauded James’s ‘stimulus to mental freedom’ and thanked him for offering a method that was absent in most empirical treatises of the time.55 In a March 1903 letter, though, Dewey reasserted a metaphysical (or what he called a logical) dimension that James had been seeking to sidestep, arguing that a ‘conception of process’ helps to unite ‘the truths of pluralism and monism, and also of necessity and spontaneity.’56 He suggests here that facts and ideas are corresponding aspects of ‘the active process itself’ that transcends ‘any objectified form.’57 James agreed with this correspondence theory of truth, but he fused it with a philosophy of coherence in which certain things adhere more closely than others. And so, when in their exchange Dewey criticizes Charles Peirce for ‘protesting against’ metaphysics, he implies that James is similarly blind to the inevitability of metaphysics (in the Jamesian conception of the will, for example), even as he notes their concurrence on monism and the ethical drift of pragmatism.58 At heart, then, despite their mutual interest in experience, Dewey thought that James lacked rigor and that his style of writing unhelpfully confused philosophical categories.59 On his part, meanwhile, James’s exchanges with Dewey illustrate the older man’s desire to foreground experience above technical considerations. He credited Dewey with offering philosophical perspectives that were ‘clear and open’ and with identifying ‘the center for everyone,’ but he was also wary of logic-chopping and ‘vicious intellectualism,’ as he called it in A Pluralistic Universe.60 These exchanges with Bergson and Dewey, then, return us to the personal and professional intersections in James’s letters, and to the Foucauldian notion of an ‘experience book’ in which the thinker is embedded in experiential flux. For despite James’s mastery of medical and anatomical vocabulary, the two volumes of The Principles of Psychology often explain psychological activity via figurative language. And this, in turn, shaped James’s interest in spiritualism and his philosophy of radical empiricism, by which he meant that it is important to treat some ineffable phenomena empirically in order to do justice to the full range of experience. The publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1901 epitomizes this notion of an experience book. This is in large part because the text includes lengthy quotations from first-hand sources and also, significantly, because James sneaks in a disguised account of an emotional breakdown he underwent in autumn 1872. Just two years after the publication of Varieties, James wrote a letter to his translator Frank Abauzit to admit that this document was his ‘own case – acute neurasthenic attack with phobia. I naturally disguised the provenance! So you may translate freely.’61 The letter describing this episode as it appears in Varieties, ‘for permission to print which I have to thank the sufferer,’ includes an account of an epileptic ‘with greenish skin, [and] entirely idiotic’ whom the writer had seen in an asylum; a wretched individual pictured in a way that renders him ‘absolutely non-human.’62 Mixing figurative language and a pathological description of epilepsy that is reminiscent of the German psychologist Carl Carus’s 1846 book Psyche, the prostrate figure is portrayed as a ‘sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy’ enclosed by the cell-like asylum room.63 When the correspondent then exclaims (in italics) ‘that shape am I, I felt potentially’ he simultaneously identifies with the figure and recoils from the image of an entombed body because it prohibits potentiality.64 The passage can be read as a form of epistolary

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self-therapy on James’s behalf, in which he discovers a language to describe this overwhelming experience, but it also offers a critique of classificatory systems. Another example of James as the experiencer, meanwhile, occurs in an essay he published in the last year of his life, ‘A Suggestion about Mysticism.’ This essay draws most directly upon a diary entry of 14 February 1906, written during a visit to Stanford University, but the account shares many stylistic qualities with his letters. Here he follows up on his discussion of mystical experiences in Varieties by describing the ‘intense spreading of the margin of the field,’ which he links to a dream sequence he experienced in San Francisco.65 The dreams produce a ‘bewildering’ state that he likens to ‘the sinking, giddying anxiety that one may have when, in the woods, one discovers that one is really “lost”.’66 Whereas he recoils from the confinement of the epileptic in the Varieties passage, here bewilderment stems from a disintegrating self. This episode disturbs him profoundly, but he manages to move beyond the confusion to feel a new sympathy for individuals ‘passing into dementia’ or experiencing ‘invasions of secondary personality.’67 The figurative account of his dream sequence is followed by a more distinctly philosophical and scientific register as he realizes that ‘the threshold between the rational and the morbid state had . . . been temporality lowered.’68 This gives him insight into ontological issues that a technical perspective would prohibit, and provides another example of James’s tendency to move between different subject positions and modes of description within a single text. The fact that he was drawn to narrative description can be attributed in large part to the influence of his father and his brother Henry, but also to his own love of literature, even if in later life this did not move beyond reading autobiographies, as he admitted in a 1907 letter.69 Indeed, James’s correspondence is notable for his exchanges with authors as varied as Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton. We can best appreciate this strand of James’s letter-writing, however, by looking at his contrasting correspondence with two of the most significant writers of his day: William Dean Howells and Henry Adams. For these letters not only illustrate James’s engagement with two important late-nineteenth-century writers, both of whom were born around the same time as him; they also stem from the final decade of his life, and so are helpful in thinking about the social, intellectual, and cultural transitions between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.70 James could sometimes be curt in these exchanges, as in a 9 February 1908 letter to Adams in which he responds to a private copy of The Education of Henry Adams (1907) that he had been sent the previous December (the book would only be widely circulated in 1918, after Adams’ death). James declared that he found parts of the text ‘obscure,’ especially the diplomatic history sections, but other sections were ‘excellent, superlatively so,’ particularly the account of Adams’ boyhood in Boston and his education in London during the rise of Darwinism.71 Perhaps implicitly reflecting on his own youthful aspirations, he was drawn to the hybridity of Adams’ text. ‘There is a hodgepodge of world-fact, private fact, philosophy, irony . . . which gives a unique cachet to the thing, and gives a very pleasant gesammteindruck of H. A.’s self,’ he observed, the German emphasis here indicating James’s own capacious philosophical approach to life (and recalling his earlier conception of the ganzer Mensch).72 But James also took issue with Adams’ notion of history ‘as the determination of a curve by points’ based on the second law of thermodynamics, mainly because it implied that the future can be predicted rationally, rather than giving rise to ‘genuine novelties.’73 This is an

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unnuanced reading of Adams’ theory of history, yet it underlines James’s view that his fellow Bostonian was too rationalistic and tended to overlook data that could not be easily incorporated into a pattern. James concludes the letter by hoping that the pair will meet before they die, but it is noticeable, and surprising, that he does not seize on their shared ambivalence to modernity, or on the image of the dynamo that Adams saw at the Paris World Exposition of 1900 and envisioned as an ‘abysmal fracture’ in the flow of history.74 Realizing that Adams was upset, James tried to reassure him the following week by praising The Education and claiming that it had become the ‘pride’ of his library, alongside Goethe’s Faust (1808–32).75 And when Adams expressed the view two years later that The Education was ‘rotten’ and should be burnt, James offered further reassurance.76 Nonetheless, a letter from William to his wife, following a meeting with Adams in Paris in May 1910, shows how much his opinion had affected Adams, and displays both his wit and tendency to score points. Describing to Alice how he had found Adams ‘identifically unchanged and “undegraded” . . . after so many years of loss of solar energy,’ he conspicuously uses imagery that draws from his disagreement with Adams about the nature of time, which James envisaged in an Emersonian vein as an open-ended circle.77 Whereas James was skeptical in his letters to Adams, he did not offer any such criticisms of William Dean Howells, who was five years his senior. Howells’ work was certainly more realistic than the German Romantic literature that interested James as a young man, but it shared a combination of social realism and psychological investigation with the early fiction of his brother Henry and with George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), James’s favorite novel in his mature years. Writing to Howells in May 1910, he is confident that his correspondent’s novels would ‘grow in importance year by year and stand as the great chronicle of the manners and morals of people as they really were during the 50 years we have lived through’ – a comment that reiterates a previous remark when he had claimed that Howells’ ‘place is secure in the history of [his] native land.’78 But in any case, this letter to Howells is not really of a literary nature; it is rather a message of condolence following Mrs Howells’ ‘taking off.’79 Indeed, it reveals James’s capacity to feel deeply, as he imagines ‘how lost you, with your tender & loyal heart, must feel to be left in this strange-growing world, after so many years of unbroken companionship.’80 This letter of condolence, then, is marked by James’s own feelings of mortality, not least in those passages where he acknowledges that Howells’ literary legacy is based on the fact that he ‘used his opportunity to the full, and made the world happier and better while he wrote there.’81 Such a conclusion might seem odd given James’s morbid proclivities, but this account of Howells’ sunny disposition reveals that he could often be nostalgic for a world that was rapidly changing – just as his brother Henry was in the 1907 travelogue The American Scene, his account of returning home after many years in Europe. Two decades before William wrote to Howells, Henry himself had acknowledged his respect for their mutual friend in an exchange with his brother, but Henry was also critical of Howells’ disregard for ‘form, style & composition.’82 In contrast, William was less than enthusiastic about Henry’s late, modernist novel The Golden Bowl (1904), commenting that its ‘method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference . . . goes agin the grain of all my own impulse in writing.’83 Instead of Henry’s ‘twilight’ and ‘mustiness,’ William championed Howells’

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‘vigorous production,’ and rather grandiosely (or self-mockingly) linked Henry’s The Tragic Muse, Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, and his own The Principles of Psychology, all of which were published in 1890, as marking ‘the great epochal year in American literature.’84 Perhaps Howells’ fiction, both then and later, offered William a welcome escape from his morbidity, even though relief would be harder to maintain as his health deteriorated. On 10 August 1910, for example, Alice wrote to Howells from Lamb House in Sussex, where William and she were staying with Henry in the hope that another European trip would aid her husband’s recovery. Alice observes that William has recently experienced an ‘acute’ cardiac attack and that he is trying to summon energy for the arduous transatlantic journey to their home in Chocorua (where he was to die a fortnight later).85 At the bottom of this letter William adds a brief note in which he simply wishes Howells ‘as good a season as the unreality of life’s vicissitude permits.’86 This wonderfully loaded phrase reflects, one last time, James’s sense of being between worlds. Written from Europe and facing his final return to New England, the scribbled postscript expresses James’s very modern notion of experience whilst retaining his affection for one of the most respected postbellum American writers.

Notes 1. Foucault, ‘Interview,’ 246. 2. The twelve volumes of The Correspondence of William James, edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley and published by the University of Virginia Press, contain around 3,000 of an estimated 9,200 letters still extant. Numerous unpublished letters, notebooks, sketches, lecture notes, diaries, and memorabilia are held in the William James Papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 3. See the first volume of James, The Thought and Character, in particular. 4. As Tóibín notes of their correspondence: ‘Illness within the James family was like money in some families, or worldly success or religious devotion in others. It was discussed in hushed and reverent tones, and those who did not benefit from it won no brownie points. William and Henry . . . knew how far to go with it, how to refer to it enough but not too much; they understood how much to invent and how much to make of what was real’ (‘A Man with My Trouble,’ 16). 5. See Alice James, The Death and Letters, for a representative sampling of her correspondence. 6. James, Some Problems of Philosophy, 5. See Loerzer, ‘William James.’ 7. James, Letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, 15 August 1860, in The Correspondence, 4: 33. Hunt was a devotee of the French Barbizon School. 8. See James, Aesthetics, Houghton Library, 4392 and 4393. 9. James, Letter to Tom Ward, 30 December 1876, in The Correspondence, 4: 552. 10. James, Letter to the James Family, 16 September 1861, in The Correspondence, 4: 43. 11. Ibid. 12. James, Letter to Charles Renouvier, 4 August 1896, in The Correspondence, 8: 179. 13. Ibid. 14. Myers, ‘Introduction,’ xxix. 15. James, Letter to Henry James, 7 September 1861, in The Correspondence, 1: 1. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. James, Letter to the James Family, 16 September 1861, in The Correspondence, 4: 42.

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20. James, Letter to Henry James, 7 September 1861, in The Correspondence, 1: 2. 21. See Feinstein, Becoming William James, 124–35. 22. James, Letter to Henry James, 3 May 1865, in The Correspondence, 1: 7. Nonetheless, later in the trip he exclaimed to his mother that he could speak Portuguese ‘like a book’ to go with the French and German he had learnt as a teenager (Letter to Mary Robertson Walsh James, 9 December 1865, in The Correspondence, 4: 131). 23. James, Letter to Henry James, 3 May 1865, in The Correspondence, 1: 7. 24. Ibid.; James, Letter to Henry James, 3 May 1903, in The Correspondence, 3: 234. 25. James, Letter to Henry James, 3 May 1865, in The Correspondence, 1: 8. 26. Ibid. 27. James, Letter to Tom Ward, 30 December 1876, in The Correspondence, 4: 552. 28. James, Letter to Henry James, 17 September 1885, in The Correspondence, 2: 29; James, Letter to Henry James, 7 July 1895, in The Correspondence, 2: 370. 29. James, Letter to Henry James, 15 July 1865, in The Correspondence, 1: 9. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 10; James, Letter to Henry James, Sr., 12 September 1865, in The Correspondence, 4: 123. For a broader sample of James’s views on race during this period see Brazil through the Eyes of William James, especially 23, 47. 32. James, Letter to Mary Robertson Walsh James, 9 December 1865, in The Correspondence, 4: 132. 33. James, ‘On a Certain Blindness,’ 134. 34. James, Letter to Mary Robertson Walsh James, 9 December 1865, in The Correspondence, 4: 132. 35. Henry James, Letter to William James, 14 February 1885, in W. James, The Correspondence, 2: 7. William’s initial letter to Henry on the subject of Miss Birdseye is lost. 36. Ibid.; James, Letter to Henry James, 1 April 1885, in The Correspondence, 2: 11. 37. See James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 71–138. 38. Henry James, Letter to William James, 31 July 1891, in W. James, The Correspondence, 2: 181. 39. Alice James, The Diary, 88. 40. Alice James, Letter to William James, 30 July 1891, in The Death and Letters, 194. 41. James, Letter to Alice James, 6 July 1891, in The Correspondence, 7: 177. 42. Ibid. 178. For a fuller discussion of the relation between William and Alice see Halliwell, ‘Morbid and Positive Thinking.’ 43. James, Letter to Alice James, 6 July 1891, in The Correspondence, 7: 178. 44. James, Letter to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 24 December 1879, in The Correspondence, 5: 68. For the troubled courtship correspondence between William and Alice see Richardson, William James, 172–6. 45. Quoted in Gunter, Alice in Jamesland, 92. 46. For more on the dialogic elements of Holmes’s writing see Gibian, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation. 47. James, Letter to Mary Robertson Walsh James, 9 December 1865, in The Correspondence, 4: 132. 48. Ibid. 49. James, Letter to Henri Bergson, 14 December 1902, in The Correspondence, 10: 167. 50. James, Diary, 28 May 1905, Houghton Library, http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45436 725?n=105&printThumbnails=no (last accessed 22 September 2015). 51. James, Letter to Henri Bergson, 28 July 1908, in The Correspondence, 11: 62; Bergson, Letter to William James, 30 September 1909, in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, 364. 52. See Bergson, Letter to William James, 6 January 1903, in Mélanges, 579. The pair exchanged a number of interesting letters in early 1903.

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432 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

martin halliwell James, The Principles of Psychology, 1: 219. James, A Pluralistic Universe, 112, 121. John Dewey, Letter to William James, 10 May 1891, in James, The Correspondence, 7: 163. John Dewey, Letter to William James, 27 March 1903, in James, The Correspondence, 10: 220. Ibid. Ibid. For a fuller comparison of James and Dewey with reference to their letters see Weber, ‘James, Dewey, and Democracy.’ James, Letter to John Dewey, 4 August 1908, in The Correspondence, 12: 73; James, A Pluralistic Universe, 32. For a detailed analysis of the development of a popular style in James’s writing see Stob, William James and the Art of Popular Statement. James, Letter to Frank Abauzit, 1 June 1904, excerpted in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 508. See also James, The Correspondence, 10: 620. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 134. Ibid. Ibid. James, ‘A Suggestion about Mysticism,’ 163. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See James, Letter to Henry Adams, 7 December 1907, in The Correspondence, 11: 490. In this context it is worth noting that James had been admitted to the Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1905, to join Howells and Adams. James, Letter to Henry Adams, 9 February 1908, in The Correspondence, 11: 537. Ibid. Ibid. Adams, The Education, 381. James, Letter to Henry Adams, 15 February 1908, in The Correspondence, 11: 542. Faust had been a touchstone for James as a young man, but this reference was not without irony given that he praised Goethe’s poetry but by his late twenties thought that Faust lacked a ‘consistent philosophy’ (Letter to the James Family, 24 July 1867, in The Correspondence, 4: 186). Henry Adams, Letter to William James, 17 February 1909, in James, The Correspondence, 11: 634. James, Letter to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 17 June 1910, in The Correspondence, 12: 556. James had recently commemorated Emerson in a centenary address (see ‘Emerson,’ 316). James, Letter to William Dean Howells, 16 May 1910, in The Correspondence, 12: 552; James, Letter to William Dean Howells, 4 March 1896, Houghton Library, n.pag. James, Letter to William Dean Howells, 16 May 1910, in The Correspondence, 12: 552. Ibid. Ibid. Henry James, Letter to William James, 16 May 1890, in W. James, The Correspondence, 2: 135. James, Letter to Henry James, 22 October 1905, in The Correspondence, 3: 301. James, Letter to William Dean Howells, 16 May 1910, in The Correspondence, 12: 552; William James, Letter to Henry James, 22 August 1890, in The Correspondence, 2: 146. Alice Howe Gibbens James, Letter to William Dean Howells, 10 August 1910, Houghton Library, n.pag. James, Letter to William Dean Howells, 10 August 1910, in The Correspondence, 12: 574.

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Works Cited Adams, H. [1907] (2000), The Education of Henry Adams, New York: Mariner. Bergson, H. (1972), Mélanges, ed. A. Robinet, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bergson, H. (2002), Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. K. A. Pearson and J. Mullarkey, London: Continuum. Feinstein, H. M. (1984), Becoming William James, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. [1980] (2000), ‘Interview with Michel Foucault,’ in J. D. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 – Volume 3: Power, New York: The New Press, 239–97. Gibian, P. (2001), Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. Gunter, S. E. (2009), Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Halliwell, M. (1999), Romantic Science and the Experience of the Self: Transatlantic Crosscurrents from William James to Oliver Sacks, Aldershot: Ashgate. Halliwell, M. (2014), ‘Morbid and Positive Thinking: William James, Psychology, and Illness,’ in M. Halliwell and J. Rasmussen (eds.), William James and the Transatlantic Conversation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 109–13. James, A. [1934] (1964), The Diary of Alice James, ed. L. Edel, London: Penguin. James, A. (1981), The Death and Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence, ed. R. B. Yeazell, Berkeley: University of California Press. James, A. H. G. (1910), Letter to William Dean Howells, 10 August 1910, A.MS., William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1092.9 (1022). James, W. [1890] (1981), The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols., ed. F. H. Burkhardt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, W. (1896), Letter to W. D. Howells, 4 March, A.MS., William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1092.9 (1023). James, W. [1899] (1983), ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,’ in F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers, and I. K. Skrupskelis (eds.), Talks to Teachers on Psychology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 132–49. James, W. [1902] (1985), The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. F. Bowers and I. K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. James, W. (1905), Diary, A.MS., William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Ms Am1092.9 (4553), (last accessed 22 September 2015). James, W. [1905] (1988), ‘Emerson,’ in F. H. Burkhardt (ed.), Manuscript Essays and Notes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 315–22. James, W. [1909] (1977), A Pluralistic Universe, ed. F. Bowers and I. K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, W. [1910] (1978), ‘A Suggestion about Mysticism,’ in F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers, and I. K. Skrupskelis (eds.), Essays in Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 156–65. James, W. [1911] (1979), Some Problems of Philosophy, ed. F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers, and I. K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, W. (1935), The Thought and Character of William James: As Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, 2 vols., ed. R. B. Perry, Boston: Little, Brown & Co. James, W. (1992–2004), The Correspondence of William James, 12 vols., ed. I. K. Skrupskelis and E. M. Berkeley, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. James, W. (2006), Brazil through the Eyes of William James, ed. M. H. P. T. Machado, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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James, W. (n.d.), Aesthetics, A.MS., William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1092.9 (4392), (last accessed 22 September 2015). James, W. (n.d.), Aesthetics, A.MS., William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1092.9 (4393), (last accessed 22 September 2015). Loerzer, B. (2014), ‘William James, the French Tradition, and the Incomplete Transposition of the Spiritual into the Aesthetic,’ in M. Halliwell and J. Rasmussen (eds.), William James and the Transatlantic Conversation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 65–79. Myers, G. E. (1992), ‘Introduction,’ in W. James, The Correspondence of William James – Volume 1: William and Henry, 1861–1884, ed. I. K. Skrupskelis and E. M. Berkeley, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, xvii-l. Richardson, R. D. (2006), William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Stob, P. (2013), William James and the Art of Popular Statement, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Tóibín, C. (2008), ‘A Man with My Trouble: The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872,’ London Review of Books, 30: 15–18. Weber, E. T. (2009), ‘James, Dewey, and Democracy,’ William James Studies, 4: 90–110.

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28 ‘MY DEAR DR.’: AMERICAN WOMEN AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENTIFIC CORRESPONDENCE Tina Gianquitto

D

‘

r. Gray says, “You must write and tell about the dog!” ’ exclaimed Jane Gray, wife of the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, in an 1870 letter to Charles Darwin.1 Gray apparently had a dog that she supposed, by his actions, to have been ‘suckled by a cat.’2 Darwin, who had no doubt heard about this curiosity from his friend Asa, had asked Jane to pass along any information she might possess about her peculiar dog and its feline behavior, and she was obliging. Her ‘stupid little doggie,’ she informed Darwin, ‘still keeps up the trick of washing his face with his paws & will sit as demurely as any old tabby, licking one paw & rubbing his face, & then changing to the other.’3 Indeed, Darwin’s correspondence shows that from early on in his career, he turned to the women in his circle – personal friends and family members, as well as amateur and professional women scientists in England and America – to perform experiments that contributed directly to his research. The account of Jane’s curious dog, for instance, appears in the second edition of The Descent of Man (1874) as a ‘confirmatory account’ of imitative behaviors in animals.4 Crucially, what this brief anecdote offers is an example of a larger, under-studied phenomenon: the role that women played in scientific correspondence networks throughout the nineteenth century. Scientific study during this era was a remarkably open endeavor and public enthusiasm for and participation in scientific investigation was widespread, with letters serving as an indispensable tool in these activities. As Susan Scott Parrish has put it, scientific letters ‘were part of a network of epistemic, cultural, and biological exchange’ that was foundational to the development of American intellectual life.5 By the time Jane Gray was writing, such exchanges had long been seen as essential to the pursuit of scientific discovery. Naturalists, for example, typically relied upon correspondents to provide specimens from contacts in far-flung outposts to fill in information about the world’s flora and fauna. Perhaps more importantly, however, the communal nature of such transnational information networks created a sense of civic engagement and shared responsibility for the explication of natural phenomena. Many of the important large-scale comparative research projects of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s theory of evolution among them, were only made possible through the assistance of global correspondents, who supplied specimens – ‘the raw materials of the natural science economy’ – as well as essential local details about those specimens (habitat, climate, geographical 435

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distribution, etc.).6 But the private/public nature of scientific correspondence also reveals that these letters performed personal and social functions as well as scientific ones, bridging distances between individuals and enabling the intimate negotiation of popular ideas and debates. As Martin Rudwick has observed, nineteenth-century scientific colleagues engaged in ‘continual and lively discussions’ of both emotional and theoretical matters in letters, and peppered discussions of the ‘implications of current research’ with earnest details of health and family.7 Women participated in these scientific correspondence networks in significant numbers, especially from the mid to latter part of the nineteenth century, and they generally followed many of the same practices as their male counterparts in constructing and maintaining these networks. Archival correspondence files of scientists around the U.S. accordingly contain troves of letters written by nineteenth-century women seeking to participate in the scientific discussions that dominated American public life. These archives provide a textured snapshot of the world of women’s scientific engagement and offer rich and largely untapped veins of inquiry for anyone interested in examining the world of women in science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But what is perhaps most extraordinary about the bulk of female scientific correspondence is that it is in many ways not extraordinary at all. The extant correspondence of female naturalists – from amateur enthusiasts to academic professionals – shows them engaged, like their male counterparts, in a diversity of scientific pursuits encompassing the hard and life sciences, and thus engaged in a corresponding variety of scientific networks. Many of these female correspondents were, indeed, educated during the mid-century era, when ‘proportionally more girls than boys studied science’ and ‘a greater percentage of girls’ higher schools offered [scientific studies] than did comparable institutions for boys.’8 Between 1840 and 1880, as Kim Tolley has noted, a national ‘culture of science’ that was premised upon ‘informal networks and personal friendships’ arose, which was seen as ‘welcoming to women.’9 Moreover, as Tolley also points out, a growth of courses in natural history for girls coincided ‘with a period in which employment opportunities for women increased in such related fields as botany, horticulture, entomology, science illustration, museum work, and natural history teaching.’10 The surprisingly robust presence of women correspondents in the archives of key male scientific figures of the nineteenth century demonstrates that, to some extent, what mattered to participants in scientific exchange networks was ‘words and experiences being merely themselves, . . . a facticity unrelieved by meaning.’11 The value of a correspondence, in this respect, hinged largely on the quality of the observations proffered or the specimens exchanged, not necessarily on considerations of such things as gender or economic status. Key individuals and institutions, such as John Torrey, Asa Gray, Joseph Hooker, the Smithsonian Institute, and Kew Gardens (among many others), ‘served as great clearinghouses, linking amateur and professional botanists together in a national network for the exchange of specimens, information, and materials.’12 Professionals helped correspondents identify, label, and arrange specimens in their collections, and in return, amateurs and other collectors were valued as ‘the legs, hands, and eyes of individuals and institutions.’13 Whether offering preserved plant or insect specimens, detailed reports on the after-effects of earthquakes, or accurate weather observations, the ‘cooperative observer system’ of scientific networks yielded valuable information, and women, if they had something worthwhile to contribute, were welcomed into the system as warmly as their male counterparts.14

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Like those counterparts, women displayed many different motivations for establishing a correspondence on scientific matters. It is thus helpful to keep in mind Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven’s observation that ‘the very materiality of the letter, its imbrication in multiple cultural practices, its potentially nomadic trajectory, makes it a form resistant to the construction of grand narratives.’15 A majority of letter-writers were true amateurs, leisure-time botanizers seeking to engage experts as a way to increase their knowledge of science; these correspondents generally wrote once or twice, usually letters asking for an identification of an unknown specimen, for an autograph, or perhaps for a reprint of an otherwise inaccessible publication. Others wrote many letters over the course of years and discussed a wide range of topics. At the opposite end of the spectrum were those women engaged in the scientific knowledge trade as a professional enterprise. These included: professional naturalists sharing experimental observations; herbarium curators writing to each other and to male colleagues; and commercial collectors writing both to customers and to each other. These letters show a careful negotiation of both gendered and professional terrains, and in some cases contain intimate details, such as the mention of a ‘late financial depression,’ ‘an invalid husband,’ and the death of a son ‘on whom we depended,’ which suggest contexts of domestic and economic hardship, and which make visible the reasons why many women were drawn into scientific endeavor as a paying pursuit.16 The majority of letters, though, are from those who fell somewhere in between these two poles – teachers requesting information for students, for instance, or scientific club secretaries sharing local discoveries. Elizabeth Keeney accurately defines this group as ‘not fully amateur or professional, distinguished by a proficiency with . . . local [scientific matters] and by contact with others with whom they shared specimens and observations.’17 A correspondent such as Mrs. A. E. Bush, a teacher at a normal school in San Jose, California, falls into this category. Bush was in the process of reconstructing her school’s herbarium – ‘all gone with a flash’ when fire destroyed her school building – when she wrote to East Coast botanists requesting identification of plant specimens in 1880.18 And even though she notes with regret that she must request the return of these specimens, she offers others to repay the favor: ‘Do you wish living roots of our common ferns?’19 The broad interest shown in participating in scientific conversations by both women and men in varied economic and geographic circumstances relates both generally and specifically to the nature of scientific discourse in mid- to late-nineteenthcentury America. Scientific concerns permeated American cultural life, and several nodes of engagement with ‘science’ were open to women of the time. The major periodicals of the time, for instance, offered detailed discussions on everything from protozoa to arctic glaciers and invited readers to participate in the major scientific debates of the century. They also promoted the notion that the project of scientific knowledgegathering was democratic and universally accessible: many popular scientific journal articles throughout the nineteenth century ‘encouraged their readers to participate in the scientific enterprise,’ stressing the egalitarian principle that all men – and indeed women – ‘possessed the same capacity for understanding nature’ as their professionalized counterparts.20 A scientifically-inclined individual, male or female, could become engaged in one of any number of popular collecting exercises by responding to the calls for specimen exchange that routinely appeared in popular magazines and journals, such as Science, the Torrey Bulletin, and the Botanical Gazette.21 And newspapers too

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participated in these early ‘citizen science’ initiatives – helping to generate ‘distributed communities’ of ‘non-professional participants’ engaged in ‘organized data-collection projects,’ often ‘in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions.’22 The Pacific Rural Press, for instance, published a ‘Naturalists’ Directory’ comprised of California collectors ‘willing to correspond and exchange material with others in the same line of study.’23 For both men and women in nineteenth-century America, participation in these exchanges was a form of profound civic engagement. Calls for broad public participation in scientific networks worked, as Deborah Coen notes in her study of seismological knowledge, both to ‘inculcate scientific habits’ and to generate ‘a sense of national unity.’24 Individuals also connected with each other through various scientific information networks besides those formulated in periodicals and directories: as a result of participation in local scientific societies, engagement with national institutions like the Smithsonian or the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or personal introductions made by friends and colleagues.25 But in all these cases too, letters were the linchpin. With the expansion of the American postal network from the 1840s onward, amateurs could more easily write to experts, who in turn felt a duty to encourage the expansion of scientific knowledge, thereby forming a series of ‘overlapping correspondence networks’ that produced both an ‘unusually comprehensive’ and ‘decentralized natural science community.’26 Letter-writing offered members of the scientifically active public a way into the conversation. But as well as providing the opportunity for encouragement in and validation of scientific pursuits, for those writing from locations distant to the centers of scientific commerce, correspondence served to ameliorate the intellectual isolation that often accompanied such physical isolation. As Jim Endersby has observed, ‘perhaps the commonest reason to join a collecting network was a desire for a likeminded companion; the importance of loneliness and the resultant need for friendship are essential to understanding how . . . connections were established and maintained.’27 Endersby may be writing primarily about male botanists operating within the world of British colonial outposts, but as is evident from the letters of female scientific correspondents in nineteenth-century America, the impetus of isolation is key for them too. For some, this impetus came in the form of geographical isolation, especially among those women writing from the frontier spaces of the U.S., many of whom explain in their letters that they took to botanical study to stave off the boredom of rural life after relocating from eastern cities. For others, intellectual isolation arose from having few around who shared their scientific interests. The epistolary pursuit of such interests enabled these women to expand their parameters beyond the home, to bond with others over a shared love of the natural world, and to create networks that encouraged and sustained all parties through long years. The way in which women botanists sought a ‘sympathetic’ audience for their ideas about science can help to explain other, more personal dimensions of the letters in their correspondence networks. To write a letter – enclosing found and prepared specimens, detailing the narrative of discovery, relating personal anecdotes of health and family – to post it, and to reply to letters received, was to forge a bond across space and time, and to participate in a communal enterprise that transcended ‘a facticity unrelieved by meaning.’ As Elizabeth Hewitt observes in her study of nineteenth-century American correspondence, the sympathetic dimension of epistolary exchange is deeply encoded in the formal elements of a letter, in the salutation and subscription of ‘My dear friend’

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or ‘Yours truly,’ which serve to call attention to the ‘social union’ established between letter-writer and letter recipient.28 Indeed these conventional modes of address, as Hewitt points out, both assert intimacy and demand reciprocity, giving the reader of a letter ‘almost no space to resist.’29 Scaled up to the broadest level, these epistolary affiliations could then be regarded as the stuff out of which national unity was made. Arguing for the mail system as a ‘new bond of union, binding the people together in knowledge, sympathy, and love,’ advocates for postal reform believed that the alignment of individual and nation would be facilitated by ever-cheaper postage rates.30 Significantly, scientific correspondence was envisaged as a key part of this process. ‘The more numerously letters . . . of scientific enterprise, pass between the east and the west, between the north and the south – just so much the more do we strengthen the ties that make us one people,’ a Select Committee on Postage argued in 1841.31 Indeed, large-scale projects such as Asa Gray’s Synoptical Flora of North America (1878) were fundamentally national in nature, offering the promise of a comprehensive and systematic catalogue of the country’s plant life. Such projects not only relied on an unofficial network of citizen scientists dedicated to exploring the new territories of the nation, but also on an expanded and efficient postal system capable of conveying their discoveries. Crucially, too, these correspondents not only sent words, they sent things. Legislative changes in the postal system throughout the nineteenth century, including the shift to a uniform pricing system based on weight, increasingly made sending material artifacts economically viable for a wider public. Accordingly, scientific societies, such as the Torrey Botanical Club, kept members informed of important changes in postal rates, posting notices such as the following (from 1874) in regular bulletins: ‘Botanical specimens may be sent in the mails as “cuttings”; postage one cent for each two ounces or fraction thereof; packages limited to four pounds, wrapped so as to admit examination and unaccompanied by any writing in addition to the address.’32 Enclosures in letters – botanical, entomological, or other kinds of specimens, of course, but also agricultural specimens and seeds, specimen lists, books and copies of articles, and especially personal items such as signed photographs – were vital elements of scientific letter networks and enabled correspondents to ‘negotiate the vast distances that frequently defined a postal relationship.’33 Emigrants to distant parts of the nation, for instance, sent native plants, along with written descriptions of their geographic locales, to friends and family back home. Not only did these plants, like the daguerrotypes that also traversed the postal system, serve as a kind of stand-in for ‘visual access’ to remote areas of the country, they perhaps also sought to invoke transplanted loved ones through the presence of a transplanted flower.34 Indeed, references to plants and photographs often overlapped in women’s scientific correspondence. Thus Benjamin D. Walsh, an economic entomologist who had relocated to Illinois, in pleading with the New Jersey-based Mary Treat for a daguerreotype in 1869 declared: ‘I want you for my Entomological album.’35 When Treat failed to enclose an image in her next letter, Walsh then playfully insisted: ‘So, my dear Madam, you threaten that I shall not get an Ichneumon [wasp specimen] from you till I write to you! Well now, suppose I threaten in return that I won’t write to you till you send me your photograph?’36 Emily O. Pelton, who had moved from Massachusetts to California, similarly wrote to George Davenport, a Boston store owner, botanical writer, conservationist, and fellow fern collector in the mid-1870s: ‘I would indeed send you my picture had I one, and will send one for your album when I get some taken, but I hope you

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will not wait for mine, for I should like to place your face before me – would prefer to have the real to the representative one . . . I feel quite well acquainted with you, but of course can only think of you in a dim sort of way, surrounded by heaps of ferns, and loving all nature best of all.’37 In the midst of another letter, about the identification of collected fern specimens, Pelton metaphorically reaches out to give the plants to Davenport: ‘My “Photo” you will find enclosed among the ferns and could it speak would give you friendly greeting with a warm grasp of the hand.’38 Words, specimens, and photographs combine here to ‘encourage the fantasy of instantaneous transportation’ that was central to long-distance communication among a highly mobile population.39 The warmth and familiarity expressed in Pelton’s gift of her photograph to Davenport, as much as the humor expressed in Walsh’s letter to Treat, exposes the foundation of ‘emotional encouragement’ that, as Daniel Goldstein notes in his study of the correspondence networks of the Smithsonian Institution, undergirded the exchanges of ‘men and women who engaged in science in remote areas of the country.’40 Many of the letters between enthusiasts, collectors, and Harvard professionals, for instance, illuminate these bonds of both knowledge and sympathy, frequently mixing requests for identifications or specimens with consolations about illness, fatigue, and overwork. Indeed, as Jim Endersby has argued in regard to the letters written between Charles Darwin and his closest friend, Joseph Hooker, for many naturalists, sympathy itself was seen as a ‘scientific skill,’ one ‘necessary to fully understand the living world.’41 And equally, for educators of the period, sympathy was often both the starting and end point of nature study. They believed, in the words of Robin Schulze, that ‘once students had come to love nature, they would wish to know nature.’42 Sympathy for nature, in short, was intimately bound up with the sympathy over the joys and sorrows of life that are so much a part of conventional epistolary exchanges. Emily Pelton, for instance, wrote to George Davenport in May 1880, ‘[y]ou speak of your health not being good in February. How is it now? I can see that you are depressed. Don’t let worldly cares and troubles dim the brightness of life,’ before linking her concerns to popular ideas of the curative dimension of nature study in encouraging Davenport to ‘each day visit some shady nook in fancy if unable to go in reality.’43 Similarly, Francis Meyers of Syracuse, New York, also addressed Davenport on his poor health in a letter from February 1881, saying, ‘we . . . wish very much that you were not obliged to work so hard.’44 Davenport had offered Meyers much the same support the year before, both consoling her over and encouraging her in her botanical labors. ‘Your letter betrayed so much weariness that I wanted to answer it at the time I received it, but could not,’ he wrote then. ‘I can understand how you may at times get discouraged as I think I understand your peculiar temperament, but you must not overtax yourself in your work for reaction is always depressing in its influence.’45 Details of health problems and familial concerns – long illnesses, slow recoveries, births, and deaths – are frequently shared in scientific letters of the nineteenth century. Such information often introduced explanations for delays in responding to letters or fulfilling requests. When the commercial collector Rebecca Austin queried Katherine Brandegee, curator of the herbarium of the California Academy of Sciences, about the receipt of a package of specimens in May 1897 – for which, significantly, she had yet to be paid – she framed her anxiety as concern for Brandegee’s health. ‘Dear Friend,’ she opens the letter, ‘I sent you a package of specimens some time ago, and should have

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heard from you ere this. I hope you are not sick.’46 In an earlier letter, responding to Brandegee’s complaint that she had been unable to sleep, Austin had written, ‘I can fully sympathize with you, as I have been a great sufferer at different times in my life from the same cause.’47 But in the May 1897 missive Austin is deploying the rhetoric of sympathy in a more ambiguous way, politely providing Brandegee with a convenient excuse for her delinquent payments, while making a claim on those payments nonetheless. Reiterating her concern over Brandegee’s health at the end of the 1897 letter, Austin also presses her correspondent for a quick response: ‘Hoping to hear from you soon & that you are well. I remain / Your sincere friend.’48 Correspondents, especially those in the tight-knit commercial collecting community of the frontier West, also used their missives to create networks of professional support and encouragement for their colleagues, discussing in their letters such matters as the costs of collecting supplies, new revenue sources, or the reputations of current and potential customers. In some cases, correspondents who had grown close offered each other direct material support, as when Austin told her friend John Gill Lemmon, an ailing Civil War veteran, in 1879: [R]emember that I am always your friend and will endeavor to help you in all that I can, so whenever you may need any plants that you think I can get for you, ask for them, but do not say any more to me about paying money for them, for this makes me feel that you think I am selfish, and work only for money. We are in this world to help each other, and you have helped me in many ways, so let me return your kindness whenever I can, and say nothing about it.49 In other instances, a letter-writer might encourage a customer’s continued support of a friend’s collecting activities by providing information about that person’s struggles. The Californian collector Mary Pulsifer Ames, for instance, advocated for Lemmon to George Woolson, a prominent Eastern horticulturist and commercial nursery proprietor: ‘The wretched state of his health wholly unfits him we think, for any occupation except botanizing which keeps him a great deal in the open air and proves a healthful and diverting recreation for his mind. He was one of the victims of our late civil war.’50 Written consolations and concerns often stand in for physical demonstrations of sympathy in such letters, as correspondents both offer sympathy to and identify with their colleagues. As Elizabeth Barnes has noted of the role of sympathy in nineteenthcentury American literature, ‘one’s apprehension of another’s experience is understood to be achieved through the mediating influence of one’s own emotions. As one subject views another, she must imagine how the other feels; this can only be accomplished by projecting onto the other person what would be one’s own feelings in that particular situation.’51 Such is the sentiment expressed by Elizabeth B. Davenport of Brattleboro, Vermont, who commiserates with her unrelated namesake George Davenport about his well-known eye troubles. ‘My sympathy is very fully with you,’ she tells him: Some eight years since I got poisoned by mushroom spores – a peculiar case. Had glycerin on my face + spores adhered, + then somewhat absorbed into circulation . . . Produced chronic inflammation of the bi-facial nerve. My left eye was astigmatic, but [my] good right eye would do any amount of work + never felt it. Now the iris is covered with minuscule scars, each causing a

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separate astigmatism, so that it is impossible to get a clear definite outline of anything. I never looked through microscope again till last year, and now I see much that is not there. If I use my eyes overmuch, or get overtired I suffer excruciating pain . . . So you see how I am handicapped.52 Embedded in this testimonial, of course, is the fact that Elizabeth ruined her health pursuing scientific interests, a complaint echoed by many other women writers in their letters. Letters thus serve to articulate not only the act of scientific research, of specimen collection and subsequent study, but also the physical trials often attendant upon that study. Mary Treat, an accomplished naturalist and popular nature writer, fills her correspondence, for instance, with accounts of streams forded and treks through woods and marshes in pursuit of rare specimens, of long hours spent at the microscope, and of suffering chills and fevers as a result of her exertions.53 In this respect, while female collectors supplied considerable relevant scientific context for the data sent in letters, they also wrote entertaining narratives of discovery that affirmed both their intrepid characters and their dedication to the scientific cause. Scientific information was thus often embedded in tales of adventure and adversity, even if the adventure was only made up of heading off a beaten path and the adversity consisted largely in tangling with briars that ‘clutched,’ ‘tripped,’ ‘and ‘seemed determined to do all in their power to prevent [the writer] . . . finding the hidden treasure.’54 Almeta Hodge Barrett wrote to Asa Gray, for example, to describe an expedition to Mount Hood, where she collected plants at 3,000 feet above sea level and ‘five hundred feet above snow line.’55 Ascending and descending steep slopes and ‘high ridges’ in pursuit of specimens, in order to reach one particular plant she was ‘obliged to climb a steep bank just where the snow had melted, leaving a yawning fissure a foot or eighteen in width. Slipping, I only saved myself by springing over the chasm just as I saw I must go.’56 Even though Barrett concluded her letter by revealing that she was ‘sorry to find’ the procured specimen was ‘nothing new,’ Gray nevertheless rewarded her courageous collecting by naming a local Hood River plant after her (Penstemon barrettiae).57 Importantly, epistolary accounts of the lengths that female scientific enthusiasts would go to in pursuit of their research likely harkens back to the themes of geographical and intellectual isolation mentioned earlier. Mary Treat, for instance, had separated from her husband years before and had no one to witness the dedicated hours she spent at her microscope. Indeed, although numerous scientists rewarded Treat for her discoveries by naming species after her, one gets the sense, reading letters such as those that she wrote to her mentor Asa Gray, that she also seeks recognition for the physical toll that such scientific accomplishments took on her. Still, scientific correspondents not only appealed for emotional sympathy, they also displayed intellectual sympathy, and epistolary exchange offered an occasion for letterwriters to work though complex arguments, to discuss their thoughts on scientific developments, and most importantly, to participate in ongoing scientific debates and controversies. In a letter to Charles Darwin from December 1872, for instance, Mary Treat tells the naturalist, writing from Vineland, New Jersey: ‘Your theory is steadily gaining ground among the masses and thinking people of this country . . . It is boldly advocated from an Orthodox pulpit in this place, and from the Unitarian pulpit we have had a series of discourses teaching the people your theory. Nothing brings out a crowd on Sunday, like the announcement that Darwinism is to be the theme.’58 But if

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‘the world moves’ at the sound of Darwin’s name, Treat does not simply want to watch it doing so.59 ‘Command me in whatever way you may wish observations made,’ she adds, ‘on birds, insects or plants and I shall only be too glad to render assistance as far as my power.’60 In fact, Treat was one of the very few scientific women that Darwin did ‘command’ to perform specific experiments, in a remarkable correspondence that spanned several years and included at least sixteen extant letters – the most he wrote to any female correspondent who was not part of his immediate circle of friends and family. Strikingly, even though Darwin could be, according to Janet Browne, ‘deeply exploitative’ of those in his information network, he nonetheless offered Treat valuable career advice.61 ‘If I were in your place I should be afraid to publish,’ the evercautious naturalist wrote of one of her findings, ‘unless I had tried the experiment many times, under the most rigorous precautions; for I am convinced that no botanist wd believe the statement unless all precautions taken were described in detail.’62 While in general women’s participation in nineteenth-century American science followed the broad arc of their male counterparts, however, specific gender concerns nevertheless can be seen in their letters. Alice Eastwood, one of the most prominent botanists of the late nineteenth century, was known throughout the botanical world as an ambitious and courageous collector. Often traveling alone into the remotest areas of the West, and riding vast distances in the process, she regularly carried a pistol and had modified her clothing for the field, devising an ingenious system of buttons to turn skirts into waist pants suitable for hiking. Nevertheless, Eastwood wrote to Katherine Brandegee for advice in the face of a particular ‘quandary’ she encountered during the planning of a long-awaited expedition to Mineral King, California.63 ‘I wrote to Visalia to inquire about the stage and have learned that the stage no longer runs there,’ Eastwood recounted. ‘At Three Rivers, the only place to stay is at the house of an old widower with grown up and small children. I stayed there in the spring. He made love to me and though I snubbed him, he even wrote to me after I returned asking if he might come to see me. I did not reply; but I can’t go there again and I’m afraid that I’ll have to give it up. What a nuisance sex is!’64 As lightheartedly as it is handled, this episode nevertheless registers the real constraints placed upon women’s scientific pursuits by conventional gender relations. Indeed, Eastwood explicitly places this incident in the broader context of women’s rights by prefacing the story with news of the departure from California of her friend, the British suffragist and education reformer Mary McRoberts, at the behest of her husband. As Eastwood put it, ‘the cause of women suffers a great loss here when she leaves.’65 Eastwood likely knew she was writing to a sympathetic audience. Brandegee, who was also friends with McRoberts, was clearly attuned to gender concerns in her own position. She initially took a degree in medicine, for example, after her first husband, Hugh Curran – a reputed alcoholic whom she had divorced – died, saddling her with his debts, but then turned to botany to support herself when she found it difficult to establish a practice as a female doctor.66 This vocational struggle for professional authority clearly continued despite her later success: she once opened a note to a colleague at the Gray Herbarium by saying, ‘[y]our letter to the Curator of the Herbarium of the California Academy of Sciences [addressed] Dear Sir has much amused me,’ before reminding him that ‘after having been’ in charge ‘for eight years’ she is still ‘Dear Madam.’67 Accordingly, the California Academy of Sciences strongly encouraged the scientific and frontier spirit of Western women, adopting a formal resolution

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in its first year of existence inviting the ‘cooperation’ of scientific women ‘in every department of natural history.’68 Brandegee, who by 1889 was one half of a botanical power couple with her second husband, Townshend Stith, used her position as curator to advance her own ideas about botanical classification: her letters to East Coast botanists whom she admired, such as Asa Gray and Sereno Watson, regularly offered tart commentaries on the efforts of some of their colleagues (‘that distracted gang’) to classify Western plants.69 Even with respected colleagues like Gray, however, gender considerations tended to flare up, as in one exchange from 1884. Apparently, Gray had written to propose naming a species after Brandegee (then Curran, née Layne), for which she thanked him, somewhat half-heartedly, in a ‘nearly forgotten’ postscript.70 ‘My own name is Layne,’ she told Gray there, ‘and I would prefer to have so called any plant which you may kindly call for me.’71 Gray was evidently puzzled by this assertion, since Brandegee began a subsequent letter by stating that ‘I . . . will try to explain myself in respect to names’: In the first place, I do not greatly care for [named species], and if a genus is to be named for me, I would prefer it to be after my death, (with a copy on asbestos mailed to my residence). In the next place your [chosen] plant is altogether too unsightly. And I hereby wish it distinctly understood that no plant which is of an ill smell, covered with prickles or of which the fruit stands on its head – is to be christened after me – I should not like such an erroneous opinion of my appearance and habits to become current. I[n] regard to specific names, your argument that one must either be married or single, hardly covers the ground . . . ‘Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad’ and who knows but I might to-morrow take it into my head to marry a man named Smith. What would you do with a species named for me – Smithiae? Therefore, please evolve a generic name for your homely weed out of your inner consciousness and if out of your kindly feeling you sometime wish to name species for me, call them Layne.72 Brandegee’s writing here is both acerbic and witty, but she is deploying humor to make a serious point about power and powerlessness. Having already been divorced, she is clearly aware both of the contingencies of marriage and, by contrast, the lasting nature of scientific nomenclature. She is also clearly aware of the well-established use of botanical nomenclature as a tool of ridicule by scientific rivals. It is thus significant that Brandegee requests that should Gray insist on naming anything after her, he do so under her maiden name. As Nancy Walker has noted in a study of American women’s humor, the woman who uses comedy to point out the absurdities in oppressive social systems is ‘at odds with the publicly espoused values’ of their culture – in this case, both woman’s subordination to the marriage system and her expected acquiescence to scientific authority.73 Thus even as Brandegee ‘break[s] out of [a] passive, subordinate position,’ she risks ‘alienating’ those upon whom she might be dependent, such as Asa Gray.74 The subject of her satire, namely her feminine appearance, highlights her awareness that it simultaneously marks the source of both her marriageability and her exclusion from the scientific arena. In many ways, Katherine Brandegee and Alice Eastwood are exceptional in the world of nineteenth-century scientific letters. Both occupied important positions that

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required voluminous correspondence with scientists around the country, and as a result their epistolary records have been more comprehensively preserved in archives than is typical for female botanists of this period. Their letters offer the most complete examples of the kinds of botanical exchanges that women engaged in during the latter part of the century, even if a good proportion of their correspondence has also been lost. The majority of extant scientific letters by other women from the nineteenth century does not cover so many categories. Instead, these letters, many of which exist only in the archives of notable male scientists or male-led institutions, need to be read according to the terms that Susan Scott Parrish establishes in her powerful reading of the scientific archive: they are examples of both the ‘simultaneous losses’ of the historical record, serving as instances of what has not been widely collected, as well as that which has been unintentionally preserved, the ‘accidental stowaway inside the historical vehicle’ of their male colleagues’ papers.75 The fact that we find a great many stowaways in these papers indicates that women participated fully in the scientific communities of the nineteenth century, engaging in different types of scientific conversations and largely following the conventions of their male colleagues in establishing and maintaining scientific networks. Yet these surviving letters make the efforts of scientific women visible only because ‘no originary collector or latter-day archivist particularly took note of it, or bothered to exclude it.’76 What we have generally lost is the sense that male and female scientific correspondents were engaged primarily in conversation with each other. But contrary to what one might expect, it is the letters of often obscure female correspondents that have been preserved in the files of important scientific figures, while the replies of those prestigious scientists, in all but a few notable cases, no longer exist. Most epistolary exchanges between botanical correspondents of different genders are no longer exchanges at all, as in many cases the archive only records a one-way conversation. We can only see women replying to unknown questions or comments, and we are left reconstructing a silence. Thus the richness of scientific epistolary relationships during the nineteenth century, of the kind we see in the collected volumes of Charles Darwin’s correspondence, for instance, are largely ‘inaccessible’ in the American archival record because such gaps have rendered them ‘lost and/or forgotten.’77 The contours of just what is missing can be seen in those few places where both sides of the conversation exist, where we witness professionals and amateurs of both sexes querying each other about the mundane and the intimate in the midst of matters of science – with curiosity, humor, and above all sympathy. It is through these moments that we can affirm Daniel Goldstein’s conclusion that ‘however great or small their expertise,’ nineteenthcentury American women and their male scientific ‘correspondents shared a sense that they were united in working toward a common goal.’78

Notes 1. Jane Gray, Letter to Charles Darwin, 14 February 1870, in Darwin, Darwin Correspondence Project, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Darwin, Descent of Man, 73. 5. Parrish, ‘Rummaging,’ 296. 6. Goldstein, ‘Outposts of Science,’ 531.

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446 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

tina gianquitto Rudwick, ‘Charles Darwin in London,’ 195. Tolley, Science Education, 1. Ibid. Ibid. 9. Parrish, ‘Rummaging,’ 289. Keeney, Botanizers, 23. Ibid. Coen, Earthquake Observers, 240. Archival materials at institutions like the Harvard University Herbarium also demonstrate the number of type specimens produced by women collectors, as well as the number of ‘new’ species discovered and named for women collectors. Gilroy and Verhoeven, ‘Introduction,’ 20. Mrs. Richard F. Bingham, Letter to Sereno Watson, 30 May, 1881, Sereno Watson Papers, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. Bingham was a noted collector of marine algae; she had at least five new species named after her. Keeney, Botanizers, 23. Mrs. A. E. Bush, Letter to George Davenport, 11 February 1880, in Davenport, George Edward Davenport Papers, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. Ibid. According to the Harvard Herbarium database, Bush sent a total of eighteen specimens to the herbarium over a three-year period, including several species that are now threatened or believed to be extinct. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, 296. See also Shuttleworth and Cantor, ‘Introduction,’ 2–4. See, for example, Bessey, ‘Botanical Notes,’ 472. Dickinson and Bonney, ‘Introduction,’ 4. ‘Naturalist’s Directory,’ 49. Coen, Earthquake Observers, 272. See Keeney, Botanizers, 30–7. Goldstein, ‘Yours for Science,’ 576. Endersby, Imperial Nature, 100. Hewitt, Correspondence, 2. Ibid. 6. Quoted in ibid. 7. Ibid. Marshall, ‘Botanical Specimens by Mail,’ 14. Henkin, The Postal Age, 60. Ibid. 127. Walsh, Letter to Mary Treat, 26 September 1869, Vineland Historical Society. Walsh, Letter to Mary Treat, 15 October 1869, Vineland Historical Society. Emily O. Pelton, Letter to George Davenport, 6 August c. 1876, in Davenport, George Edward Davenport Papers, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. Emily O. Pelton, Letter to George Davenport, 15 March 1877, in ibid. Henkin, The Postal Age, 60. Goldstein, ‘Yours for Science,’ 589. Endersby, ‘Sympathetic Science,’ 300. Schulze, Degenerate Muse, 60. Emily O. Pelton, Letter to George Davenport, 30 May 1880, in Davenport, George Edward Davenport Papers, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. Francis Meyers, Letter to George Davenport, 4 February 1881, in ibid. Davenport, Letter to Francis Meyers, 17 October 1880, ibid. Rebecca Austin, Letter to Katherine Brandegee, 11 May 1897, in Brandegee, Townshend Stith and Katherine Layne Brandegee Papers, University and Jepson Herbaria Archives.

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47. Rebecca Austin, Letter to Katherine Brandegee, 10 December 1896, in ibid. 48. Rebecca Austin, Letter to Katherine Brandegee, 11 May 1897, in ibid. 49. Rebecca Austin, Letter to John Gill Lemmon, 24 November 1881, in Lemmon, John and Sara (Plummer) Lemmon Papers, University and Jepson Herbaria Archives. 50. Ames, Letter to George Woolson, 23 September 1873, Thurber-Woolson Botanical Collection, University of Massachusetts. 51. Barnes, States of Sympathy, 5. 52. Elizabeth B. Davenport, Letter to George Davenport, 5 October 1904, in Davenport, George Edward Davenport Papers, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. 53. Treat details some of her excursions and illnesses in a series of letters to Charles Sprague Sargent dated 11, 16, 17 April, and 10 May, 1877 (see Correspondence, Archives of the Gray Herbarium). 54. Mary Collins Reynolds, Letter to Asa Gray, December 1884, in Gray, Papers of Asa Gray, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. 55. Mrs. P. G. (Almeta Hodge) Barrett, Letter to Asa Gray, 12 July n.d., in ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. See Lodewick, ‘Almeta Barrett,’ 23. 58. Mary Treat, Letter to Charles Darwin, 13 December 1872, in Darwin, Darwin Correspondence Project, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Browne, Charles Darwin, 7. 62. Darwin, Letter to Mary Treat, 12 August 1873, Darwin Correspondence Project, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 63. Alice Eastwood, Letter to Katherine Brandegee, 13 September 1894, in Brandegee, Townshend Stith and Katherine Layne Brandegee Papers, University and Jepson Herbaria Archives. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. See Creese, Ladies in the Laboratory, 23. 67. Katherine Brandegee, Letter to Unknown Recipient, 14 May 1891, Historic Letter Collection, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. 68. Quoted in ‘Our History,’ n.pag. The California Academy of Sciences was also the first natural history museum to hire a female curator of Ichthyology, Rosa Smith Eigenmann. 69. Katherine Brandegee, Letter to Asa Gray, 15 December 1893, in Gray, Papers of Asa Gray, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. 70. Katherine Brandegee, Letter to Asa Gray, 27 August 1884, in ibid. We must infer the content of Gray’s missive since his original letter and later reply to Brandegee were lost when the Academy collections were destroyed following the earthquake and fire that hit San Francisco in 1906. 71. Katherine Brandegee, Letter to Asa Gray, 27 August 1884, in Gray, Papers of Asa Gray, Archives of the Gray Herbarium. 72. Katherine Brandegee, Letter to Asa Gray, 5 November 1884, in ibid. The quotation comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘The Masque of Pandora’ (1875), which opens with an image of dead flowers. 73. Walker, A Very Serious Thing, 9. 74. Ibid. Still, Gray must have had some sense of humor and awareness, since he obliged Brandegee by creating the genus Layneae. 75. Parrish, ‘Rummaging,’ 291. 76. Ibid. 77. Littlefield, ‘A Response,’ 278. 78. Goldstein, ‘Yours for Science,’ 593.

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Works Cited Ames, M. E. P. (1873), Letter to G. Woolson, 23 September, Thurber-Woolson Botanical Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts. Barnes, E. (1997), States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel, New York: Columbia University Press. Bessey, C. E. (1907), ‘Botanical Notes,’ Science, 25: 472–3. Bingham, R. F. (1881), Letter to Sereno Watson, 30 May, Sereno Watson Papers, Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Brandegee, K. (1891), Letter to Unknown Recipient, 14 May, Historic Letter Collection, Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Brandegee, K. (1871–1926), Townshend Stith and Katherine Layne Brandegee Papers, University and Jepson Herbaria Archives, University of California, Berkeley. Browne, J. (2003), Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coen, D. (2013), The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Creese, M. (1980), Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800–1900, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Darwin, C. (1809–82), Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Darwin, C. (1874), The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn., London: John Murray. Davenport, G. (1833–1907), George Edward Davenport Papers, Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University. Dickinson, J. L., and R. Bonney (2012), ‘Introduction: Why Citizen Science?’ in J. L. Dickinson and R. Bonney (eds.), Citizen Science: Public Participation in Environmental Research, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1–14. Endersby, J. (2009), ‘Sympathetic Science: Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, and the Passions of the Victorian Naturalists,’ Victorian Studies, 51: 299–320. Endersby, J. (2010), Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practice of Victorian Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilroy, A., and W. M. Verhoeven (2000), ‘Introduction,’ in A. Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (eds.), Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1–28. Goldstein, D. (1994), ‘ “Yours for Science”: The Smithsonian Institution’s Correspondents and the Shape of Scientific Community in Nineteenth-Century America,’ Isis, 85: 573–99. Goldstein, D. (2008), ‘Outposts of Science: The Knowledge Trade and the Expansion of Scientific Community in Post-Civil War America,’ Isis, 99: 519–46. Gray, A. (1810–88), Asa Gray Papers, Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Keeney, E. (1992), The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lemmon, J. G. (1863–1911), John and Sara (Plummer) Lemmon Papers, University and Jepson Herbaria Archives, University of California, Berkeley. Lightman, B. (2007), Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Littlefield, M. (2010), ‘A Response to Susan Scott Parrish,’ Early American Literature, 45: 275–9.

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Lodewick, R. (2001), ‘Alma Barrett: A Woman Botanist in Oregon,’ Bulletin of the American Penstemon Society, 60: 22–6. Marshall, J. W. (1874), ‘Botanical Specimens by Mail,’ Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 5: 14. ‘Naturalist’s Directory’ (1882), Pacific Rural Press, 23: 49. ‘Our History’ (2015), The California Academy of Sciences, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Parrish, S. S. (2010), ‘Rummaging/In and Out of Holds,’ American Literary History, 22: 289–301. Rudwick, M. J. S. (1982), ‘Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science,’ Isis, 73: 186–206. Schulze, R. G. (2013), Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene, New York: Oxford University Press. Shuttleworth, S., and G. Cantor (2004), ‘Introduction,’ in G. Cantor and S. Shuttleworth (eds.), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1–15. Tolley, K. (2003), Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective, New York: Routledge. Treat, M. (1830–1923), Correspondence, Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University. Walker, N. (1988), A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Walsh, B. D. (1869), Letters to M. Treat, 26 September and 15 October, Vineland Historical Society, Vineland, New Jersey.

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29 ‘A CHAIN OF CORRESPONDENCE’: SOCIAL ACTIVISM AND CIVIC VALUES IN THE LETTERS OF LYDIA SIGOURNEY Elizabeth A. Petrino

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s its title would suggest, in her posthumously published memoir Letters of Life (1866), Lydia Huntley Sigourney recounts her experience as a working writer through an epistolary framework – a formal choice designed to elicit an intimate connection with her readers at a time when authors were often expected to respond to individual letters from their fans. In this respect, her self-deprecating humor and satirical asides in this book take us behind her public image. An oft-quoted comment in Letters of Life demonstrates the ironic distance she felt from her high-profile status as a writer: ‘If there is any kitchen in Parnassus, my Muse has surely officiated there as a woman of all work, and an aproned waiter’ (LL, 376). Rather than viewing Sigourney as a hack writer, however, in the way that some critics have implied she saw herself, I believe her tendency to describe writing letters and poetry as an everyday activity, on a par with domestic activities, suggests a desire to unite the public and private spheres – and to extend the values of home into the political and social world.1 In Letters of Life, for instance, where she estimates that her ‘epistolary intercourse . . . exceeds a yearly exchange of two thousand letters,’ Sigourney observes that the potentially ‘burdensome’ nature of this correspondence is alleviated by ‘the hope of disseminating through this quiet vehicle, some cheering thought or hallowed principle’ (LL, 377). Indeed, as suggested by a ‘Memoranda’ from the period 1860–1, Sigourney kept careful track of her correspondence. Here, neatly recorded by Sigourney in columns, and arranged by month and year, is the number of pages and lines she had written, of garments sewed or mended, of calls made, and letters received and written.2 Recalling Benjamin Franklin’s famous act in the Autobiography (1771–90) of recording his faults as part of ‘the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,’ Sigourney’s impulse toward an industrious accounting of both her domestic and literary activities has similar origins in eighteenth-century rationalism and its emphasis on the public good.3 Like a nineteenth-century Emily Post or Ann Landers, Sigourney wrote sentimental poems and pseudo-confidential, advice-filled essays for young people and children. But her correspondence reveals that she also tried to inculcate republican virtues in her readers, and saw letters as aesthetic devices to incite social change. In this regard, Paula Bennett’s theoretical distinction between ‘equality feminists’ and ‘difference feminists’ provides a useful framework for understanding Sigourney’s epistolary perspective.4 Nineteenth-century ‘equality feminists,’ Bennet argues, among whom we should count Julia Ward Howe and Frances Wright, stressed the discourse of natural 450

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rights issuing from the liberal political views of John Locke and Thomas Paine. Based on these beliefs, these feminists advocated for women’s suffrage and equal treatment under the law. On the other hand, ‘difference feminists,’ as their name implies, invoked Scottish Enlightenment thinkers to endorse women’s participation in political reform without requiring their departure from the ‘separate sphere’ of domesticity. Indeed, these women – such as the politically conservative Angelina and Charlotte Grimké and the more progressive and radical Sarah Louise Forten – believed they were required as a result of their divinely sanctioned roles as wives and mothers to educate the next generation in order to achieve social change. Sigourney herself would seem to fit into the latter mould, as when she declares in Letters to Young Ladies (1833) that: ‘It is in the domestick sphere, in her own native province, that woman is inevitably a teacher. There she modifies by her example, her dependents, her companions, every dweller under her own roof’ (LYL3, 11). Advocating women’s political involvement on the basis of their duty toward ‘dependents’ and ‘companions,’ however, led to an ideology of femininity that granted power only through these sanctioned roles and thus offered limited political access. Accordingly, then, on many occasions Sigourney also employed letters to advocate social change in more direct ways. Letters, I will argue in this chapter, frequently afforded Sigourney a medium for public exchange and allowed her to express national and social concerns. Early on in her career, for example, her letters on behalf of Native Americans and the deaf underscore her willingness to use political persuasion on both the private and public level to advocate for the political rights and education of marginalized groups. In paying close attention to several of Sigourney’s major essay collections, meanwhile, it becomes clear that although she imitated the homely epistolary style of the conduct book, a form that had begun in the Renaissance and evolved through the eighteenth century, she did so – once again – with a distinctly political edge. In this respect, Letters to Young Ladies, like Letters to Mothers (1838) and Letters to My Pupils (1851), generates an impression of intimacy with the reader, while also providing a blueprint for women’s education and elocutionary training. It is this central role that the writing and receiving of letters played in generating Sigourney’s own literary celebrity that, finally, we see addressed in Letters of Life, where she balances her epistolary sense of readerly intimacy with a more hard-headed sense of authorial professionalism. For Sigourney, in short, letter-writing advanced women’s intellectual development and propelled debate about important political issues. But at the same time, the controversial nature of these issues forced her, from the very beginning of her career, to confront the tensions within her own home and marriage in ways that led to the development of a professional identity that was seemingly aligned with woman’s domestic role. In Connecticut, where Sigourney was born and thereafter lived, women were often shunned for speaking publicly, and even conversation and letter-writing, which were seen by some as acceptable methods of political persuasion for women, could come under suspicion. In 1837, for example, just two years after a concerted mailing campaign by abolitionists sparked resentment in the North as well as the South, the efforts of Charlotte and Angelina Grimké to lecture publicly on slavery led the General Association of Massachusetts Churches to issue a pastoral letter which was read at all religious assemblies in the state. ‘We appreciate the unostentatious prayers and efforts of woman in advancing the cause of religion at home and abroad,’ the letter stated. ‘But when she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, our care

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and protection of her seem unnecessary; we put ourselves in self-defence against her; she yields the power which God has given her for her protection, and her character becomes unnatural.’5 Crucially, the chilling effect such missives could have on female public discourse was already something Sigourney had experienced at first hand. For despite the early encouragement he gave his wife’s writing, which included helping her to develop the footnotes for her 1822 narrative poem, Traits of the Aborigines, Charles Sigourney felt similarly, and regularly dismissed her literary efforts (Lydia would only turn to writing as a means of earning income in 1834, after his hardware business failed). Consequently, Sigourney published Traits anonymously, and composed her two subsequent books, A Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since (1824) and Poems (1827), during her husband’s absences from home for work. Nonetheless, in cultivating relationships with editors, relentlessly promoting her work, and sending out numerous contributions to journals and newspapers, Sigourney was engaged in a level of activity she could not long keep secret from Charles. It was this open pursuit of literary fame, as Gary Kelly has suggested, that created a crisis in their marriage and led to Sigourney’s decision to request a separation in the winter of 1827.6 In response, Charles wrote an ‘Appeal,’ very different in tone to the ‘affectionate letters’ Kelly describes him sending earlier in their relationship, where he laid out a list of grievances against his wife.7 Claiming that during their early courtship he had felt ‘admiration [for] the power of your mind,’ and that he later approved of the publication of Traits, Charles also asserted here that: [Although] I endeavored, by every means in my power, not merely to uphold your character, but to extend your reputation . . . I could not reconcile [your writing] with my ideas of the delicate propriety which should ever mark the female character . . . I have thought that the ambition for literary distinction seems now to be occupying nearly all your thoughts, & threatens to destroy your conjugal character: – that this apparently unconquerable passion of displaying yourself is the secret principle which of late influences your conduct, & may be traced in very much which you do: – that it begets a lust of praise which, like the appetite of the cormorant, is not to be satisfied: – that it leads you to prefer the flatteries of the parasites, who hang upon you, to the good opinion, & plain but steady esteem of your husband.8 Charles then continues in this vein for five more pages, in two separate drafts, with multiple beginnings and cross-outs. Thus, although much less public than the General Association’s pastoral letter, this missive has a similar purpose in its offering of a formal response to Lydia’s request for separation, and its outlining of a set of parameters under which she could express her views: avoid public adulation and flattery; live a suitably domestic life; endeavor to respect your husband’s role; and accept your place within the home. Nonetheless, although Charles could not imagine how his wife might have had the audacity to become a famous author, his response – at least – still offered her an opportunity to maintain a public self along the lines he prescribed. As a result of the ‘Appeal,’ Kelly argues, Lydia shifted her focus to ‘more acceptably “feminine” kinds of writing’ in a way that managed to placate her husband’s anxieties: ‘She posed as a part-time author, telling editors, publishers, and other correspondents that her literary

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activity was carried out in spare moments from domestic duties. Picking up the theme of her husband’s [letter], she made the domestic role of women and its conventionally accepted extensions into the public sphere a central theme of her writing.’9 Accordingly, we could see Sigourney making a decisive choice in favor of ‘difference feminism’ rather than ‘equality feminism’ even at this very early stage of her career, as she endeavors to emphasize the conventional female role of wife and mother as the impetus for her writing. Yet Kelly’s analysis of her turn to the typically ‘feminine’ subjects of ‘education, moral reform, and female conduct,’ perhaps understates the degree of continuity between her initial work on history and Indian affairs and her later writing, and the extent to which she came to conceive of letters as an alternative means of effecting social change and endorsing political stances.10 Composed of 4,000 blank verse lines and five cantos, Traits of the Aborigines had carefully detailed the legal injustices perpetrated against the Native Americans, narrated their tragic fates at the hands of white settlers, and pointed to the contradictions embedded in popular representations of the ‘Red Man.’11 And this sense of outrage did not simply disappear, for even from her isolated vantage point in Hartford, Connecticut, Sigourney continued to follow with discomfort the appropriation of Indian lands through the end of the decade. For her, the horrific tales of Indian abuse she heard reflected an unignorable failure of the republican ideals around which she was still shaping her life and professional work. One key example of the way in which Sigourney used letters to make political appeals thus comes with her 1831 publication of an epistolary petition in the Cherokee Phoenix (a native-language newspaper based in Oaklahoma), to accompany her poem ‘The Cherokee Mother.’12 This ‘Letter to the Delegation of the State of Connecticut,’ originally written in 1829, was explicitly designed to raise awareness of the plight of Native Americans in light of Andrew Jackson’s attempted removal of Cherokees to the West. Indeed, Sigourney no doubt decided to make her views known because of the Supreme Court’s declaration in the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) that Indian tribes constituted ‘domestic dependent nations’ rather than foreign states that could judicially pursue an actionable cause.13 Upholding John Locke’s claim that autonomy was synonymous with the possession and cultivation of goods and land, the federal government effectively legitimized its claims to Indian territory through this decision, but in pointing to the narrow nature of American property laws Sigourney’s ‘Letter to the Delegation’ encouraged Native Americans (and, more implicitly, women) to recognize that their rights as citizens had been abrogated.14 Some years later, in an 1836 letter responding to a request from the minister William Buell Sprague for an autograph, Sigourney suggested that the ‘Letter’ was originally meant to be presented as a petition to Congress, but this ‘was eventually overruled, as too bold & too political, & the papers which had been drawn up, not being used, were thrown into a repository of useless things, from whence, you will perhaps think it no compliment, that I should thus rescue them for your service.’15 According to Tricia Lootens, then, this later letter’s ‘laconic expression’ and admission of ‘abandoned political aims’ can ‘serve as an emblem of Sigourney’s own development from an ambitious, if self-divided, national political prophet into a determinedly cheerful – and apolitical – model of self-reliance.’16 But while Lootens sees Sigourney’s movement from republican virtue to Victorian womanhood as representing a ‘decline, [and] a privatization of redemption,’ one might ask why Sigourney

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would have chosen to publish the petition at all if she was so concerned with political quietism.17 Indeed, a close reading of the ‘Letter to the Delegation’ itself shows her to be aware of an audience that might extend beyond the Cherokee to others, as the very form of the open letter converts her private sentiment into a public statement, by offering an ‘expression of sympathy which prevails not only in this part, but in many other sections of the country.’18 In defending women’s involvement in national political affairs, Sigourney certainly goes on to carefully base her argument for Indian rights around deeply held beliefs about home life and women’s roles. ‘Anxiety for the fate of that portion of our aborigines who are in danger of dismission from their native territory, has painfully oppressed our minds,’ she tells the readers of the Phoenix, ‘nor will it be deemed unnatural that the cause of the helpless should excite commiseration in a sex whom nature has taught both the need and the value of protection, who, accustomed to associate every hope that cheers, every charity that sweetens life with the idea of home, involuntarily sympathize with those who may be exiled from its sanctuary.’19 But while she consigns the primary role in aiding the Cherokee to men here, the metaphorical alliance she posits between Native Americans and white women as equally oppressed groups has a sharper edge. Like other female activists of her generation, Sigourney self-consciously employs the language of high sentimentality in the face of its potential critics because she understands the irresistible power that arguments embedded in ‘nature’ can have. ‘It will probably be alleged that we have viewed this subject solely through the medium of feeling,’ she notes at one point. ‘This was our intention.’20 Offering further affective evidence against Native American removal, Sigourney then concludes by once again emphasizing the similarity between whites and Indians. Since the Cherokee had exchanged ‘savage habits for the plough-share and the pruning-hook, for the school, the press, the temple of the living God,’ she observes, ‘we should sincerely lament to see them leaving their peaceful villages for a distant wilderness, mournfully forsaking, their household hearths, and their fathers’ sepulchres for an alien’s wandering, and a stranger’s grave.’21 While consistent with the popular theory that Native Americans could be ‘civilized’ through working the land, Sigourney’s argument in this section also resonates with the empathy women like herself no doubt felt for those excluded from education, publishing, and the church. Though that is not to say that all of her contemporaries got the message. Writing a letter to Sigourney in July 1836, for example, the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth condescendingly praised the American’s achievements on behalf of the Indians, who she claimed should send her ‘moccasins’ – ‘and they would I am sure if all you have said of them, in strains eloquent as their own, could reach their ears or by some worthy [be] interpreted or be put into their feeling souls.’22 Caught in a culture that elevated Native Americans as childlike innocents and the bearers of an immemorial past at the same time as subverting their legal rights, Sigourney publicly employed letters as a means to object to their genocide, but might well have questioned the efficacy of these sympathetic appeals in the face of the insensitivity of some of her respondents. It is little wonder, then, that in her later work Sigourney placed such an emphasis on instilling moral values in individuals from a young age, and that she reformulated her understanding of epistolarity in order to further this agenda. Crucially, Sigourney’s experience of teaching in her hometown of Norwich from 1811 to 1814, and in Hartford

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from 1814 to 1819, offered her a formative basis for understanding the value of letterwriting and other forms of non-verbal communication in educating children. During this period her pedagogical innovations had included using letter-writing as a means to encourage her students to express themselves and refine their writing. As she subsequently reflected in Letters of Life: A disposition to express their own thoughts with ease and elegance, both in writing or orally, being the natural fruit of such studies, was encouraged. Yet, having discovered that the stern requisition of stated compositions from novices often daunted those who might have little to say, and checked the impulse of those who had none, I made no demand for elaborate moral essays. As the epistolary style is always valuable to our sex, and, by its endless variety of subject, allures those who would shrink at the formidable idea of ‘composition,’ and its attendant criticism, I permitted them, at stated times, to express their thoughts in a letter addressed to myself. They strenuously insisted on a response, and I found this furnished me with opportunities of suggesting or enforcing subjects of consequence to us both, more fully than I could do in conversation. (LL, 215) Letters, for most early-nineteenth-century educators, were ‘valuable’ to women because their domestic duties might call upon them to write. But as the above passage suggests, for Sigourney they functioned more importantly to inculcate critical habits of mind, improve self-expression, and generate a sense of community. Indeed, such emphases are notable in the first half of Letters to My Pupils, where Sigourney addresses her readers on topics of political and moral import such as ‘Patriotism,’ ‘Social Intercourse,’ and ‘Fitly-Spoken Words,’ in a way surely reminiscent of her earlier missives on ‘subjects of consequence’ (LMP, 38, 32, 44). And the second half of the book, too, underlines the ongoing power of letters to forge affective connections between women through a section containing biographies of Sigourney’s pupils who died young, wherein their letters and literary ‘effusions’ are liberally quoted (LMP, 69). Although her students might learn to write letters for practical ends, then, these letters also forged bonds between students and teacher that aided Sigourney’s larger objectives of inculcating intellectual growth and Christian charity. Perhaps because her own formal education had ended at the age of thirteen, while she was ‘in the full tide of improvement,’ Sigourney valued access to ‘a wider range of history and literature, than any school to which I could have access allowed,’ and so proposed the same rigorous education for her students (LMP, 156). Although most nineteenth-century women were trained in the decorative arts, including sewing, embroidery, and music, she was determined that ‘the ornamental branches should be omitted, and the time of [the] children devoted to a thorough and somewhat extensive course of study’ (LMP, 179). The success of this approach, in Sigourney’s view, was evinced not only by the letters her pupils wrote when at school, but those they sent her later in life. In building on the habits of charitable exchange instilled by their early education, for example, the letters from former students accompanying donations were particular proof for Sigourney that the circuit between sentimental benevolence and writing could continue well into adulthood. Thus Letters to My Pupils includes missives from Sigourney’s graduates in locales ranging from Thailand to Kentucky, which testify to her vast influence on their subsequent lives.23 And equally, Sigourney emphasizes the annual picnic to commemorate the founding of the school, which had taken place every 1 August since 1815, where these

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letters were recited alongside a yearly report of charitable activity that included support for educating orphans in Myanmar and the sending of books to missionaries in Liberia and to Native American tribes. Through this public epistolary activity, as Sigourney puts it, the collective identity of the school was renewed and cemented: ‘By degrees our band became widely separated . . . [But] there were letters from absent ones to be read, for a chain of correspondence bound the outposts to the centre’ (LMP, 201). Perhaps the most striking example of how Sigourney employed letters as a means to educate her pupils in a sense of cultural sensitivity and respect toward others appears in her interactions with the precocious deaf child Alice Cogswell, however. Sigourney’s connection with Alice began in 1814, after she had set up her second school in the home of Daniel Wadsworth and his mother in Hartford, where the eight-year-old was one of fifteen students, along with her sisters Mary and Elizabeth, handpicked by Wadsworth. And over the next few years Alice began her journey toward becoming the first prelingually deaf person to be taught to read and write in America. Thus, although some critics have questioned Alice’s role in Sigourney’s school, portraying her as a ‘mascot’ who begged for instruction and only wished to be treated like hearing children, it was clearly a beneficial relationship.24 As Letters to My Pupils reveals, for example, Sigourney not only used letters to instruct her students in a variety of issues pertaining to slavery and Indian removal but to build a community of shared moral responsibility toward the deaf. By encouraging the hearing children to invent visual signs for different objects during their epistolary exchanges, Sigourney recalls, she got them to assist in Alice’s education, such that they came to exult ‘in [her] every acquisition or commendation, as though it were their own’ (LMP, 251).25 An even more telling instance of such collaborative instruction, meanwhile, appears in a round-robin letter that Sigourney’s pupils composed in 1817 to send to Alice during a brief illness. Four classmates wrote portions of the letter, and, while short, their entries express their concern for her health and wish that she might return soon. Several entries suggest the students’ sympathy and express their belief that Alice deserves to receive the same admiration as others: thus two students wish that Alice might be present for the election of the next ‘Monitress,’ a position that rotated weekly and that entitled the successful nominee to wear a ‘pretty crown,’ while another student speculates about who might be elected, concluding that ‘I hope the Best one will [win], who do you think is best? You must send your vote if you do not come.’26 Sigourney’s own final entry – ‘You see how we all love you. – I hope you will be always good, and then God will love you’ – then underscores her democratic view that all students should be treated with respect, as well as her characteristic moral evangelizing.27 Overall, this round-robin letter both encourages a sense of shared responsibility for Alice among her fellow students and offers another example of Sigourney’s epistolary efforts to bind ‘the outposts to the centre.’ If Alice Cogswell taught Sigourney an important lesson in non-verbal language, meanwhile, the deaf and blind Julia Brace prompted Sigourney to interrogate the limits of human understanding and employ letters as a more public means of social advocacy. I have argued elsewhere that Sigourney’s interest in the elevation of emotion and non-verbal cues, which was also fundamental to sentimental discourse, originated in her teaching of Alice and continued in her poetry about Julia Brace and the deaf, dumb, and blind Laura Bridgman, where she explored how these cues might – or might not – succeed in affecting her readers.28 But as an exponent of sentimental benevolence, Sigourney also widened the opportunities for the deaf

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through letters written on their behalf. On 1 January 1828, for instance, Sigourney penned a letter to the Board of Directors of the Hartford Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (later the American School of the Deaf), on behalf of the Ladies’ Visiting Committee, for which she served as secretary. The letter’s aim was to secure financial stability for Brace, who might have been forced to leave without any means of external support. According to Sigourney, Brace deserved to have her small income, which was based wholly on public donations, deposited into a savings account in order to accrue interest that would support her throughout her life. While Brace had accumulated roughly $300 from well-wishers, Sigourney noted, her ‘expenses for clothing, during this period of 2 and an half years, have been so strictly regulated by economy, and so diminished by her skill and diligence in mending, as to amount only to $20.55 cents.’29 As well as rewarding her thriftiness, moreover, the investment of this money would ensure other future returns. Brace depended for the contributions she received on ‘the bounty of [the Asylum’s] numerous visitants, to which in her former obscure situation she could have no access,’ Sigourney stressed.30 Remaining in the Asylum would thus ensure her continued exposure to those ‘whose curiosity has been excited by witnessing the mysterious process of her needle-work, or whose sympathy, [has been] awakened by the contented deportment of that sufferer, who must never look upon the face of heaven, or hold communion with man.’31 Beyond the particulars of Brace’s case, in fact, Sigourney clearly felt that writing on behalf of this deaf and blind girl would afford her an opportunity to make a case for those who lacked a public presence. ‘Nature has given her no voice to lift up on her own behalf, no ear to warn her against meditated wrong,’ Sigourney remarks at one point in the letter, ‘she cannot even enforce her own cause by the glance of the imploring eye, or the silent eloquence of gesture, like the other interesting inmates of this noble Institution.’32 In building her case, then, Sigourney eloquently places herself in the position of advocating for the speechless, at the same time as consciously underscoring Brace’s unusual and uncertain dependence on benefactors like herself. ‘Had her birth been in some metropolis of Europe, where wealth & leisure combine to enhance the value of all objects of curiosity or mystery,’ Sigourney adds, Brace might have gained international renown and been the subject of philosophical study for her achievements in learning.33 Citing the celebrity of James Mitchell, the deaf-blind son of a Scottish minister who had sensationally recovered his sight after an operation in 1813, Sigourney here implicitly contrasts the lack of attention that deaf and blind young women receive in America with this young man’s personal history. But once again, as with the ‘Letter to the Delegation,’ an emphasis on feminine humility and marginality disguises an assertion of sentimental authority. ‘Gentlemen, we perhaps owe you an apology, for thus forcing on your attention, facts and arguments which were as obvious to your minds as to our own,’ Sigourney concludes: Yet in the greater freedom of intercourse and inquiry which our sex has allowed us with regard to the poor deaf, dumb & blind girl, our opportunities have occurred of becoming more minutely acquainted with the circumstances of her helplessness, her merits, and her necessities . . . For your past liberality, suffer us to render thanks in her name, to whom Nature has denied all power of expressing gratitude. Yet will it not the less strongly come up as a memorial before Heaven in that day when the deeds of men are made manifest.34

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Speaking in the ‘name’ of one who cannot speak for herself, Sigourney both hints at the more general silencing of American women and, in the very act of writing the letter, breaks that silence. Moreover, in playing upon the early-nineteenth-century use of the term ‘memorial’ to describe an open letter to Congress, she brings the Protestant evangelicalism informing her appeal back down to earth, in order to prefigure the politically engaged advocacy for the disenfranchised found in her later ‘Letter to the Delegation.’ The actions of the Asylum directors today, she implies, will send a message for God to read when the ‘deeds of men’ are unsealed in the afterlife. Equally double-edged was Sigourney’s conception of the epistolary as it appeared in conduct books. From the Renaissance on, these books had tended to enjoin women to be ‘chaste, silent, and obedient.’35 But in the early nineteenth century American and British women writers began to appropriate the genre to develop theories of communication for women that allowed them more freedom within the circumscribed limits of the domestic sphere. Conduct books, for these writers, offered an opportunity to train women in the rhetorical arts and perform a critical function in advocating for social change. Whereas earlier manuals encouraged parents to give limited education to girls and preached submission as a virtue, then, figures like Sigourney, as Jane Donawerth has noted, wrote conduct books that ‘theorized women’s cultural roles in writing and speaking and taught women conversational skills and letter writing.’36 The latter lessons were particularly crucial because they were models for a broader sense of female community and exchange. Literacy, Sarah Robbins has remarked, was – in texts like Sigourney’s Letters to Mothers – ‘not an array of decontextualized decoding skills but rather an integrated cluster of collaborative activities whose outcomes could be noted in both individual and social terms.’37 Thus part of Sigourney’s project in her first conduct book, Letters to Young Ladies, was not only to provide a guide for young ladies in how to attain the social graces, but to develop arguments for – and manifest the intellectual and political benefits of – rhetorical education for women. Here Sigourney maintains, to some degree, that letters and conversation allow young women, who are ensconced at home, to become the best partners for their husbands, only implicitly acknowledging that these women’s ultimate goal might be persuading the men within their households to take positions on political topics, without subjecting themselves to public censure. At other points, however, Sigourney more openly counters the criticisms frequently leveled against women’s education and encourages women to converse on important topics, including ‘the social feelings and [their] relative duties’ (LYL1, 83). The latter emphasis, for example, comes in the fifth letter of the book, entitled ‘Conversation,’ where Sigourney explores the value of feminine discourse as a method for both rhetorical persuasion and entertainment. In instructing women in how to speak for the second purpose, she stresses several techniques to maintain the interest of your interlocutor: be lively, emote, avoid interrupting others, and listen carefully. Female methods of elocution, in this regard, particularly depend on the free indulgence of emotion: ‘Conversation, to be interesting, should be sustained with animation. Warmth of heart must put in motion the wheels of intellect. The finest sentiments lose their force, if uttered with lassitude and indifference’ (LYL1, 83). But while one can imagine this advice appearing in any rhetorical manual of the period, Sigourney also goes on to claim that engaging delivery alone does not make one’s speech appropriate. ‘[I]n studying to render conversation agreeable,’ she adds, ‘let us not forget that it should have an higher object than merely the art of pleasing’ (LYL1, 88).

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Sigourney therefore moves quickly beyond instructing women in how to speak to an argument about why they should speak – an argument that clearly revolves around the more rational and logical processes of thinking which many in the nineteenth century still believed women were incapable of. Education is important for women not only so that they might become fit companions, Sigourney insists, but so that they can assume their role in civil society. Regarding the perception that female speech is largely devoted to gossip, for example, she addresses her imagined correspondent thus: You are doubtless aware that our sex have been accused of a tendency to remark with severity upon the foibles of character. It has been gravely asserted that we were prone to evil-speaking. Is it so? Let us candidly canvass the point. We may have temptations to this vice, peculiar to ourselves. We have more leisure for conversation than men. Our range of subjects is more limited. The multifarious pursuits of business and politics, or the labors of scientific and professional studies, engross their thoughts, and necessarily lead them to more elevated and expansive channels. Women, acting in a narrower sphere, examine with extreme ardor, whatever falls under their observation, or enters into competition with them. (LYL1, 90) Crucially, a series of counter-arguments to the accusation of female frivolousness are embedded in this passage. Firstly, Sigourney rejects the idea that women are incapable of higher learning because they are naturally deficient by underscoring the social constraints of their existence in a ‘narrower sphere.’ Secondly, she successfully imitates the features of public speech, mimicking the vocal patterns of political debates – including interjections, rhetorical questions, and calls to ‘canvass the point’ – in order to suggest that women can become skilled orators too. Thirdly, she advocates women’s access to a larger range of subjects than those to which they are currently confined as morally advantageous. And finally, she capitalizes on the heightened emotion often ascribed to women by asserting that their ‘extreme ardor,’ in this case, allows them to see more deeply into ‘the foibles of character’ than men. While Sigourney does not dismiss – and does not refute – the perception that women are more sentimental than men, then, she does reproach businessmen, politicians, scientists, and other professionals for not directing women away from self-love toward the greater good. Accordingly, instead of giving themselves over to their ‘narrower sphere,’ Sigourney advises young women to study elocution and adopt careful literary habits. ‘Reading aloud, with propriety and grace,’ she insists, ‘is an accomplishment, worthy the acquisition of females’ (LYL1, 55). Moreover, Sigourney also maintains that women need to have fine handwriting skills and letter-writing abilities, for ‘rendering her treasures available to the good of others’ is one of the duties incumbent upon a woman (LYL1, 74). It is not surprising, then, that in the third edition of Letters to Young Ladies, Sigourney would specifically refer to her fellow conduct-book writer, Eliza Farrar, who in The Young Lady’s Friend (1836) had declared of the ‘art of letter-writing’ that: ‘The more rational and elevated the topics are, on which you write, the less will you care for your letters being seen, or for paragraphs being read out of them.’38 Letter-writing, for both Sigourney and Farrar, proved to be a method that would allow women to convey their ideas to a wide audience. ‘Elegant chirography, and a clear epistolary style, are accomplishments which every educated female should possess,’ Sigourney argues, whereas ‘fashionable penmanship,’ especially when it obscures legibility, can prevent women from being understood (LYL3, 115). Indeed, for Sigourney ‘orthographical

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and grammatical correctness’ in a letter is a sign of moral integrity (LYL3, 115). ‘You are aware that . . . handwriting is considered one of the talismans of character,’ she asserts at one point. ‘Whether this test may be depended on or not, the fact that letters travel farther than the sound of the voice, or the sight of the countenance can follow, renders it desirable that they should convey no incorrect or unfavourable impression’ (LYL3, 116). Thus, while Sigourney observes that ‘[o]ur sex have been complimented as the possessors of a natural taste for epistolary composition,’ she also claims a more significant function for letters than the mere expression of intimate feeling when she invokes Cicero, who ‘proved himself to be no less a master of [written] excellences, than of his more sublime art of eloquence, when he said: “Whatever may be the subject of my letters, they still speak the language of conversation” ’ (LYL3, 116). As this classical reference point might suggest, Sigourney holds female letter-writers to the highest standard: they should not only avoid a fluffy, ornate style in favor of reasoned argument, they should also seek to convey noble principles to a republican audience who were open to persuasion. Certainly, Sigourney’s own epistolary exchanges with the American public are a notable theme in Letters of Life, where she takes us behind the scenes to reveal how letterwriting and the authorial construction it enabled were essential to her development as a writer. Like the eponymous author in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854), who complains of the ‘letters of love, friendship, and business, I am constantly receiving from strangers,’ Sigourney received and fulfilled countless requests for poems and tributes from her public.39 If, as Lawrence Levine has argued, texts that came to be regarded as ‘demanding even for educated readers in the twentieth century’ were understood as ‘accessible to [a] broad and far less well educated public a century earlier,’ then Sigourney and Fern’s depiction of the intrusive and comical letters they got from their fans underlines how this sense of a direct and immediate connection with writers perhaps played out even more intensely for self-consciously populist authors like them.40 The celebrity culture that began to emerge in America in the mid-nineteenth century depended in good part on the semblance of reciprocity, and in this regard letters helped to sustain the illusion that writers and readers were, as David Haven Blake has put it, ‘intimate stranger[s].’41 ‘Although more commonly associated with individualism,’ Blake notes in regard to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s fame, ‘celebrity is . . . a collaborative form of identity, one that resides with fans as much as it does unique personalities.’42 Crucially, Sigourney herself was not immune to the attractions of this imagined communion – as both a literary celebrity and a fan, she cultivated relationships with the important literati of her day. Thus in November 1836 she sent a letter to William Wordsworth, requesting a poem, and in February 1856 she sent Longfellow a congratulatory missive containing some verse of her own for his forty-seventh birthday.43 In an antebellum literary culture that valued personal ties while increasingly depending on an automated print world, letters could (as Sigourney put it via Cicero) ‘still speak the language of conversation.’ Consequently, even though Sigourney’s advice that handwriting should be universally legible signifies a belief in the value of epistolary standardization, for her, as for her own readers, possessing a letter allowed one to imagine the particular physical presence of its writer. No doubt Sigourney’s fans often requested that she supply handwritten poems or copy out poems in her own hand for this very reason, as one sign of their intimacy with her.44 Those eager readers who wrote to Sigourney ‘wanted a famous poet to bless and articulate the most meaningful moments in their private lives,’ Blake observes.45 But these letters also had a public valence, for Sigourney’s professional correspondence

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equally suggests the impact such exchanges had in solidifying her career. Editors, of course, often wrote soliciting articles for their magazines. ‘Before I ceased to keep a regular catalogue, they had amounted to more than two thousand [requests],’ Sigourney recalls in Letters of Life. ‘Promptitude was the life-blood of these contributions. Hungering presses must be fed, and not wait’ (LL, 366). Just as these exchanges furthered her literary reputation, though, so too the same volume of letters she received from her fans helped to generate an ongoing demand for her work. Indeed, much of this fan mail contained specific inquiries for poems or occasional pieces. Quoting the British writer Felicia Hemans, Sigourney tellingly calls herself a victim of ‘album persecution’ in Letters of Life, in reference to the flood of blank books that were often sent to authors with the request for handwritten work (LL, 368). ‘I undertook at one time to keep a statement of the solicitations that showered upon me,’ she then adds, before offering numerous examples: Requested to write dedication poems for three nicely-bound albums, brought by strangers . . . To read critically, in one day, a manuscript of two hundred and sixty closely-written pages, and write a commendatory notice of it for some popular periodical . . . To prepare the memoir of a colored preacher, of whose character and existence I was ignorant . . . To punctuate a manuscript volume of three hundred pages, the author having always had a dislike to the business of punctuation, finding that it brings on a ‘pain in the back of the neck.’ . . . To be umpire of a baby-show in the city of New York. (LL, 369–74) Suffice to say, Sigourney’s attempt to catalogue these missives ‘was not long continued’ (LL, 369). Yet if there is a tongue-in-cheek exposure of her readers’ foibles at work here, we should not forget that she famously also saw herself at the end of her career as an ‘aproned waiter’ who uncomplainingly served the needs of an anonymous and voracious public and its literary institutions. Thus, notwithstanding her devastating caricature of her readers for their requests – as well as of herself for attempting to respond to them – Sigourney equally emphasizes a self-conscious understanding of how her success within the publishing world depended in large part on the fervent loyalties she cultivated. According to Paula Bennett, nineteenth-century American sentimentalists, Sigourney included, often employed ‘ironic humor’ and its ‘deflationary tactics’ to both indicate their awareness of the limited options they had as writers and distance themselves from this recognition.46 There is no such irony, however, in Sigourney’s statement that ‘I consoled myself . . . the multitude of these solicitations bespoke an increasing taste for poetry among the people’ (LL, 368). Why, after all, would Sigourney include these letters if not to demonstrate her positive role in the literary marketplace and her perceived authority as a writer? Indeed, for her, celebrity was but the means to the end of achieving a higher social and moral good. ‘Fame, as a ruling motive, has not stimulated me to literary effort,’ she concludes. ‘It has ever seemed to have too flimsy a wing for sustained and satisfactory flight . . . Still the only adequate payment are the hope and belief that, by enforcing some salutary precept, or prompting some hallowed practice, good may have been done to our race’ (LL, 378). Sigourney clearly understood that within the antebellum publishing world relationships between editors, audiences, and authors were forged through epistolary connections,

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a ‘chain of correspondence,’ linking one writer and one reader at a time. For readers today, Sigourney’s achievement may lie in her astute manipulation of ‘difference feminism,’ and its emphasis on the domestic forum as one where women could carry out social activism and express civic values while guaranteeing their respectability. But those contemporary readers who showered Sigourney with solicitations evidently saw her as a much more publicly prominent and professionally influential figure. As such, Sigourney’s letters not only offered her a socially sanctioned medium to privately persuade men to act on behalf of the oppressed, they allowed her a space to express her own views about national, political, and literary affairs in the confidence that she would be more widely heard.

Notes 1. Her early biographer Gordon Haight, for instance, takes this comment as evidence that Sigourney ‘was not altogether deceived about the quality of her work,’ and suggests of the ‘Memoranda’ I discuss below that in listing the number of ‘calls paid, visits received, volumes read, garments made, and stockings knit, and in the same column the pages of prose and lines of poetry written during the year . . . she saw no incongruity in classifying them together’ (Mrs. Sigourney, 46, 45). 2. See Sigourney, ‘Memoranda,’ Lydia Huntley Sigourney Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Box 1, Folder 35. 3. Franklin, Autobiography, 75. 4. See Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere, 41–2. 5. General Association of Massachusetts Churches, ‘Pastoral Letter,’ 305. For more on the context within which this letter was sent see Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 11–36. 6. See Kelly, ‘Introduction,’ 22. 7. Ibid. 8. Charles Sigourney, Letter to Lydia Sigourney, October 1827, in Sigourney, Lydia Huntley Sigourney Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Box 2, Folder 6. 9. Kelly, ‘Introduction,’ 23. In stark contrast to her husband’s letter vehemently denouncing her for giving up her wifely duties, we have Sigourney’s own cheerful and seemingly contented portrayal of herself during these years in Letters of Life. Completely silent on the subject of domestic tension, she contends instead that her literary work complemented her domestic activities – she notes, for example, that she found ‘knitting congenial to the contemplation and treatment of the slight themes that were desired, and, while completing fifteen or sometimes twenty pairs of stockings yearly for our large family, or for the poor, stopped the needles to arrest the wings of a flying thought or a flowing stanza’ (Letters of Life, 366). 10. Kelly, ‘Introduction,’ 23. 11. Sigourney, Traits of the Aborigines, 98. 12. See Sigourney, ‘Letter to the Delegation,’ 3. 13. Quoted in Cheyfitz, ‘Savage Law,’ 110. Sigourney’s particular support of the Cherokee might also be explained by their association with the written word: the Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah had created a syllabary in 1821, allowing them to develop a high level of literacy, with a written constitution following in 1827. 14. See Cheyfitz, ‘Savage Law,’ 112. 15. Sigourney, Letter to Rev. Dr. William Buell Sprague, 13 July 1836, Lydia Huntley Sigourney Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Box 1, Folder 5. 16. Lootens, ‘Hemans and Her American Heirs,’ 250. 17. Ibid. 18. Sigourney, ‘Letter to the Delegation,’ 3. 19. Ibid.

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20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Maria Edgeworth, Letter to Lydia Sigourney, 15 July 1836, in Sigourney, Lydia Huntley Sigourney Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Box 1, Folder 5. 23. See Sigourney, Letters to My Pupils, 190–4. 24. Lane, When the Mind Hears, 156; see also 179. For a corrective to such views of Sigourney’s relationship with Cogswell, see Sayers and Gates, ‘Lydia Huntley Sigourney.’ 25. For Sigourney’s full account of Cogswell in Letters to My Pupils see 249–62. 26. Pupils of Lydia Sigourney, Letter to Alice Cogswell, 1817, in Cogswell, Alice Cogswell Papers, American School for the Deaf Archives. 27. Ibid. 28. See Petrino, ‘ “Language of the Eye.” ’ 29. Sigourney, Letter to the Directors of the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, 1 January 1828, Lydia Huntley Sigourney Papers, American School for the Deaf Archives. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Donawerth, ‘Introduction,’ xxiii. 36. Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric, 42. 37. Robbins, Managing Literacy, Mothering America, 61. 38. Farrar, The Young Lady’s Friend, 280, 281. 39. Fern, Ruth Hall, 183. 40. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 4. 41. Blake, ‘When Readers Become Fans,’ 101. This term is drawn from the title of Schickel’s Intimate Strangers. 42. Blake, ‘When Readers Become Fans,’ 101. 43. See Green, ‘William Wordsworth and Lydia Huntley Sigourney,’ and Haight, ‘Longfellow and Mrs. Sigourney.’ 44. See Blake, ‘When Readers Become Fans,’ 108. 45. Ibid. 109. 46. Bennett, ‘Laughing All the Way to the Bank,’ 11.

Works Cited Bennett, P. B. (2002), ‘Laughing All the Way to the Bank: Female Sentimentalists in the Marketplace, 1825–1850,’ Studies in American Humor, 3: 11–25. Bennett, P. B. (2003), Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blake, D. H. (2012), ‘When Readers Become Fans: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry as a Fan Activity,’ American Studies, 52: 99–122. Cheyfitz, E. (1993), ‘Savage Law: The Plot Against American Indians in Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh and The Pioneers,’ in A. Kaplan and D. Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 109–28. Cogswell, A. (1805–30), Alice Cogswell Papers, American School for the Deaf Archives, American School for the Deaf, West Hartford, CT. Donawerth, J. (2002), ‘Introduction,’ in J. Donawerth (ed.), Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900: An Anthology, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, xiii–xlii. Donawerth, J. (2012), Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Farrar, E. (1836), The Young Lady’s Friend, Boston: American Stationers’ Company.

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Fern, F. [1854] (1986), Ruth Hall and Other Writings, ed. J. Warren, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Franklin, B. [1771–90] (1958), Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. R. B. Nye, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ginzberg, L. D. (1992), Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Green, D. B. (1964), ‘William Wordsworth and Lydia Huntley Sigourney,’ New England Quarterly, 37: 527–31. Haight, G. S. (1930), ‘Longfellow and Mrs. Sigourney,’ New England Quarterly, 3: 532–37. Haight, G. S. (1930), Mrs. Sigourney, The Sweet Singer of Hartford, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. General Association of Massachusetts Churches [1837] (1974), ‘Pastoral Letter of the General Association of Massachusetts (Orthodox) to the Churches under their Care,’ in A. Rossi (ed.), The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, New York: Bantam Books, 305–6. Kelly, G. (2008), ‘Introduction,’ in G. Kelly (ed.), L. Sigourney, Selected Poetry and Prose, Toronto: Broadview Press, 11–56. Lane, H. (1984), When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf, New York: Vintage. Levine, L. W. (1988), Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lootens, T. (1999), ‘Hemans and Her American Heirs: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry and National Identity,’ in I. Armstrong and V. Blain (eds.), Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, London: University of London Press, 243–60. Petrino, E. (2013), ‘ “Language of the Eye”: Communication and Sentimental Benevolence in Lydia Sigourney’s Poems and Essays about the Deaf,’ in P. B. Bennett and M. DeJong (eds.), Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 69–88. Robbins, S. R. (2004), Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Sayers, E. E., and D. Gates (2008), ‘Lydia Huntley Sigourney and the Beginnings of Deaf Education in Hartford: It Takes a Village,’ Sign Language Studies, 8: 369–411. Schickel, R. (1985), Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc. Sigourney, L. H. (1791–1865), Lydia Huntley Sigourney Papers, American School for the Deaf Archives, American School for the Deaf, West Hartford, CT. Sigourney, L. H. (1791–1865), Lydia Huntley Sigourney Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT, Ms Sigol1865. Sigourney, L. H. (1822), Traits of the Aborigines of America: A Poem, Cambridge, MA: Hilliard & Metcalf. Sigourney, L. H. (1831), ‘Letter to the Delegation of the State of Connecticut, From an Association of Ladies,’ Cherokee Phoenix, 12 March, 3. Sigourney, L. H. (1833), Letters to Young Ladies, 1st edn., Hartford, CT: P. Canfield. Cited parenthetically as LYL1. Sigourney, L. H. (1837), Letters to Young Ladies, 3rd edn., New York: Harper Brothers. Cited parenthetically as LYL3. Sigourney, L. H. (1851), Letters to My Pupils: With Narrative and Biographical Sketches, New York: Robert Carter & Brothers. Cited parenthetically as LMP. Sigourney, L. H. (1868), Letters of Life, New York: D. Appleton and Company. Cited parenthetically as LL.

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30 A FIGHTING PLATFORM: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S EPISTLES Judith A. Allen

I have been given unusual powers of expression and I truly hope that my life will count for much good to the world – as Darwin’s did and Galileo and many other blessed souls who have given high place to serve the world . . . But when it comes to the woman of me, my fitness and desirability for marriage, all this counts against me. By virtue of what I have of greatness I am the less desirable wife. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 22 May 18981 Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote fierce letters. When it came to what has been called the ‘epistolary pact’ – ‘the call for a response from a specific reader within the correspondent’s world’ – she was, arguably, a master.2 No wonder. Though her frequent itinerancy meant she ultimately destroyed most of the letters she received, even those of an intimate nature, that same roving life contributed to the fact that she wrote hundreds of letters each year.3 The letter excerpted in the epigraph to this chapter, for example, addressed to the man who would become her second husband, from 1900 until his death in 1934, is just one of the missives – typically twenty to thirty pages long – that she sent to him on an almost daily basis during their courtship. In 1894, divorce had ended Gilman’s decade-long marriage to her first husband, the artist Charles Walter Stetson, from whom she had been estranged since 1888, thus allowing her to try to ‘prove’ – as she told Houghton Gilman – that contrary to Stetson’s beliefs, ‘a woman can love and work too.’4 Indeed, by July 1899, when she wrote these words to her fiancé, she was already lecturing, writing, and editing for a living. The comparison drawn between herself and Darwin and Galileo in the earlier letter should have left Houghton in no doubt: if they married, she would jettison nineteenth-century gender norms and embrace the task of ‘serv[ing] the world.’ Through her letters, and increasingly so after her divorce, Gilman maintained a complex network of associations, both personal and professional. Such epistolary web-spinning was, of course, undertaken by many public intellectuals traveling and working as Gilman did, some her ancestors, some her contemporaries. Gilman’s correspondence, however, raises forcibly the gender specifics historically inherent in the identifier ‘public intellectual.’ For there was no breezy adoption of this position for women of any race, class, ethnicity, age, or sexual identity during the nineteenth century. Indeed, tensions derived from the dynamics of gender pervaded Gilman’s life, notwithstanding her relative privileges. These included the application of different 465

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critical standards to her work and the proscription of certain public pronouncements she wanted to make. As the social reformer Daniel Kiefer advised Gilman’s lecture agent William B. Feakins when one of her talks was suddenly cancelled: ‘Very few among our comfortable and well-to-do people are favourable to suffrage, and the character of the school at which Mrs. Gilman was to talk, is [merely] representative of . . . [an] unthinking and stupid intolerance of everything that makes for right thinking.’5 At the height of Gilman’s career, in the early twentieth century, the press may have helped to grant her a great deal of authority – the New York Times, for example, mentioned her approximately every eleven days, in unusually detailed accounts of her feminist and reform activities.6 But, inevitably, her growing influence as the face and voice of feminism also elicited increasingly strong reactions, including hostile, unsolicited letters. Thus in one typical, anonymously-written missive sent from Mayfield, Georgia in 1909, Gilman was told: ‘You are simply a blatant howling fool advocate of what you think is women’s rights . . . We do not want . . . vixenish and whorish suffragettes to rule over us, we shall not and will not have them . . . It is a shame for a woman to speak (even) in public.’7 Here, then, as elsewhere in Gilman’s career, ‘Main Street’ mores and customs collide with her inferred transgression of gender and sexual norms. As a wife and mother on the road for days and even weeks at a time, and a handsome, unsupervised woman far from home and living independently in lodgings, Gilman generally connoted all kinds of moral risks. Her male peers on the lecture circuit and in the ranks of the public intellectual faced no such criticisms. Meanwhile, editors, happy to have her famous name on their contents pages, nonetheless tried to control the actual content of her work. Sometimes altered versions of essays appeared without her permission, or else simple theft placed her writing in places she never expected, both with and without her name attached. Fierce arguments and difficult epistolary exchanges resulted. Indeed, under these circumstances, correspondence became a vital tool for Gilman, or even an intellectual venue within its own right – a kind of fighting platform. Through her letters, for example, Gilman sometimes explored new theories or made the case for positions to be ventured. Her assertive, at times sarcastic missives probed arguments, refuted misogyny, and criticized laws, policies, and beliefs. In particular, as a feminist theorist, she held that the asymmetrical ‘sexual contracts’ of marriage and prostitution epitomized ‘the woman question’ ailing industrial societies.8 Women’s oppression, Gilman argued, was historically contingent. It generated species retardation through women’s economic dependence within androcentric cultures. Modern industrial sexual relations accordingly impaired both individual and social motherhood, inhibiting female solidarity, suppressing female labor, and enshrining warfare, intemperance, and prostitution, in ways that restricted women’s erotic options and institutionalized sex divisions and inequalities.9 It was such concerns, articulated at their greatest length in Women and Economics (1898) and The Man-Made World (1911), that also infused Gilman’s correspondence. Material factors, however, often tempered Gilman’s free expression in the epistolary realm, just as they tempered her public statements. Unlike her revered feminist counterpart, Olive Schreiner, for example, who lived on an annuity from a wealthy older brother supplemented by royalties from her hugely popular Story of an African Farm (1883), Gilman still needed to earn her living. She survived from lecture tour to lecture tour, augmented by payments for periodical articles, and often enough, after 1887, loans from friends that kept the lights on.10 As Gilman’s career unfolded, then, so too did her

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obligations to various relatives and friends. Even once remarried, debts from her protracted nursing of her terminally ill mother during the early 1890s confined her firmly to the task of generating income. For George’s wages as a patents attorney were strikingly modest; the more so with his generous co-support of her needy relatives and friends. As late as the winter of 1930, they were being forced to seek cheaper accommodation as a result of their string of dependents.11 Managing all of these sometimes tense relationships and investments was a heavy part of Gilman’s epistolary load and often required great diplomacy. When gender-related issues imperiled her public intellectual career, meanwhile, direct solutions could be equally elusive. On the lecture circuit, for instance, audiences could palpably object to women speakers, and some of Gilman’s letters reveal her understandably emotional reaction to these rejections. In short, neither her public nor private positions were ever secure – her qualifications remained subject to interrogation, her methods remained debated, and her platforms remained unstable. Such insecurity and uncertainty then inevitably inflected her correspondence as she negotiated these matters, sometimes leading her to regard her letters as ‘like morning prayers,’ at other times leading her to pen ‘most melancholy letters, or cross unreasonable letters, or mean quarrelsome letters, or no letters at all.’12 This multiplicity of epistolary personas is evident in Gilman’s correspondence from its very beginning. Some of her earliest juvenilia, for example, includes letters telling her friends of her desire to do ‘good to the world’ in the manner of her wider family. Indeed, as a scion of the famous Beecher clan of writers, reformers, preachers, abolitionists, and suffragists, Gilman succeeded early on in dispensing with much of the domestic labor typically assigned to women.13 This permitted her, initially, to indulge her imaginative life, and slightly later on, to begin to conceive of herself as ‘a strong-minded woman.’14 But the sometimes pugilistic tone of her letters from this period also suggests how she was struggling to have her transgression of gender norms grasped or accepted, even by close friends and family members. ‘My dream world was no secret . . . [and] my mother called on me to give it up,’ Gilman later recalled. ‘Night after night to shut the door on happiness, and hold it shut.’15 Moreover, as Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has noted, even once Gilman reached maturity, ‘her mother continued to open her letters, advise her on how to answer them, and tell her which invitations she could accept and which she must refuse.’16 Gilman’s self-determination faced challenges from the very beginning, then, and these in turn took root in her epistolary self-conceptions. Nonetheless, her ongoing rejection of the constraints of feminine domesticity ultimately ensured her portions of uninterrupted time to herself. On long train rides, and in cafes, tea rooms, waiting rooms, guest houses, hotels, reception rooms, and parlors, Gilman wrote letters (as well as numerous reviews, articles, and book chapters), thus turning her epistolary practices into public and semi-public displays.17 She wrote these missives rapidly and effectively, responding flexibly to the venue, and, evidently, to the addressee. Thus, in April 1897, she begins a note to Houghton: Here is a testimonial of esteem as ’twere – delicately adapted to the circumstances. I flatter myself ’tis not a bad product for a railroad train . . . I can write letters in the cars . . . and as I am in the cars a good deal and have absolutely no other correspondent of a purely spontaneous, natural variety, you are likely to come in for lots of gablett [sic]. [My daughter] Kate’s letters must be adapted to her – bless her! You wouldn’t believe how hard I work at her letters.18

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Indeed, without this adaptability, the vast Gilman oeuvre, which consists of over 2,000 published items (most of them non-fiction), would have been impossible.19 But her epistolary craft has often been set apart from her other literary practices and concerns, notwithstanding the fact that as a mode of writing, letters accounted for a considerable amount of time and effort across her whole career. Most commonly, scholars have assigned her correspondence to the realm of intimate self-expression and used it as a primary source for biographical analysis. As her recent biographer Cynthia Davis has remarked, for example: ‘Page after page of introspective letters . . . provide unprecedented access into who [Gilman] was and what she wanted, making the writing of her life a tantalizing project for those interested – as I am – in the various ways a self can be fashioned.’20 Yet Gilman’s propensity for writing so many letters (sometimes as many as fifty during a single weekend away), her talent for addressing her correspondents in so many different ways, and her interest in penning content germane to matters far from her own experience, should perhaps give us greater pause when claiming that her mail offers access to her inner life and desires. In order to understand Gilman’s epistolary endeavors, and their place within the broader patterns and emphases of her life’s work, we must first move away from some of the more familiar strains in her correspondence. These strains are fully evident in the two most important printed editions of Gilman’s letters from recent years: the Gilman biographer Mary Hill’s 1995 selection of the 1897–1900 courtship letters Charlotte sent to her future husband George; and a chronologically broader compendium of 360 letters put together and annotated by Denise Knight and Jennifer Tuttle in 2009. Arranged across eight thematic chapters that cover Gilman’s whole life, Knight and Tuttle’s Selected Letters aims ‘not to duplicate’ the romantic material contained in Hill’s A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but arguably it reiterates the same trend in Gilman scholarship.21 For, like Hill or Davis, Knight and Tuttle view Gilman primarily through the lens of her personal, intimate and familial relationships, with the correspondence serving as the key pivot for ‘a fuller picture of Gilman’ – one ‘emphasizing her uniqueness and subjectivity.’22 Thus the Selected Letters features most fully correspondence relating to Gilman’s teenage girlfriend Martha Luther, her first husband Charles Walter Stetson, her daughter Grace, and her lifelong friend and stepmother to her daughter Grace Channing Stetson, as well as including various letters to Houghton Gilman omitted by Hill. Moreover, it also mirrors the predominantly literary emphasis in Gilman scholarship, wherein the great and noteworthy Gilman is the young Gilman – the depressed wife who, famously, endured the ‘rest cure’ in 1887 before leaving her unhappy marriage and heading to California where she wrote thirteen of American literature’s finest pages: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892). Reissued to great acclaim by The Feminist Press in 1973, this short story made Gilman little short of heroic within the Women’s Studies movement of the mid-1970s to 1980s and has deeply shaped her subsequent reception.23 Hence, despite the attention of some historians and sociologists to Gilman’s non-fiction treatises of the Progressive era, it has been the fiction of the younger Gilman, and her personal relationships, that has underpinned the tsunami of feminist-inflected scholarly commentaries on her work published since the 1990s.24 Indeed, even as Gilman scholarship has opened itself up to new and newly critical emphases on race, religion, and sexuality, the field of reference within her oeuvre has remained much the same.25

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Given that she was an intellectual who called herself a social philosopher, however, the profile of Gilman as primarily a young fiction writer seriously distorts the historical record. In her lifetime, in fact, Gilman’s fame came only with Women and Economics, when she was nearly forty, and with the five non-fiction treatises that followed – Concerning Children (1900), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Human Work (1904), The Man-Made World, and His Religion and Hers (1923) – the last published when she was sixty-three. Most of her career entailed writing and campaigning on female suffrage, pacifism, marriage and divorce, prostitution, ‘masculism,’ childcare, maternity leave, urban design, kitchenless houses, dress reform, birth control, and euthanasia, rather than producing imaginative works. Indeed, more than three quarters of her lectures, publications, and other professional activities date from the period after 1898, when Women and Economics first appeared. A fuller understanding of Gilman’s epistolary endeavors, then, requires expanding our attention to less well-trodden aspects of her career – two of which I intend to explore in the remainder of this chapter. The first of these new avenues is represented by Gilman’s letters to or about public figures. Addressees here include leading sociologists like Lester Frank Ward and Edward Alsworth Ross, literary lions like Charles Lummis and Theodore Dreiser, and reform celebrities like Jane Adams, Susan B. Anthony, and H. G. Wells, as well as her abolitionist and suffragist relations, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Henry Ward Beecher. Such letters are important because they can help us to establish Gilman’s wider cultural influence, and because they offer insights into the relationships between feminists, and women’s movement activists, within the broader contours of Gilded Age and Progressive-era reformism. The second trajectory into her later career is represented by her professional correspondence, which constitutes the largest proportion of Gilman’s epistolary exchanges from the 1890s on. Here, her correspondents include innumerable newspaper editors, publishers, intellectuals, reformers, activists, and worldwide readers and critics, making for a body of letters that richly documents Gilman’s decades as a public intellectual who was lecturing, editing, and writing for a living. As has already been noted, Gilman’s attempts to both support herself and contribute to the well-being of numerous dependent relatives and friends often lent her personal letters a considerable emphasis on money and material matters. But it is in her professional correspondence that these issues appear at their sharpest, as she makes contracts and tries to secure the fees negotiated for her work. A ‘representative’ analysis of Gilman’s correspondence (as far as such a thing is possible) must, in short, match its contemporary volume, and select chronologically from those letters that clustered around her most absorbing adult activities. Thus we might see more clearly both dimensions of Gilman’s quest to ‘love and work too.’ Gilman, crucially, was an autodidact. Her family sent her much less intellectually promising brother, Thomas Adie Perkins, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the simple reason that he was male, a move subsidized by the senior Beecher clan. He flunked out, thus commencing the successive failures that would prompt him to seek his sister’s financial support throughout his adult life. But the teenage Gilman was left to send coolly poignant letters to her absent father asking for readings and callings she might pursue.27 Equally too, in the late 1870s, she had to enlist various New England friends and contacts who had been awarded the sex dividend of education to take her to lectures on college campuses and recommend books. This guidance initially led to

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Spencer, Darwin, Mill, and other theorists ruminating upon race, evolution, kinship, patriarchy, eugenics, ethnicity, and sex differences and their origins. And then, as her unhappy experiences of marriage and motherhood led her into depression, she began to compensate for them by drawing on familial knowledge and networks relating to abolitionism, urban reform, and suffragism. Her increasing absorption in the ‘woman question,’ for example, inspired many diary entries, letters, and visits to friends and newspaper editors at this point, much to the chagrin of her first husband.28 It was precisely her lack of formal training, however, that lent Gilman’s later correspondence with other public figures an often fraught edge. Her early poetry and short stories allowed her to establish a correspondence with various male notables, but her place in their worldview often remained that of someone who commented upon the ‘woman question’ via clever verse or fiction. Few of them regarded her as an intellectual peer, even if holding her to be, as Edward Alsworth Ross did, ‘the most brilliant woman I have known’ (she was also, he tellingly added, ‘the most beautiful woman . . . I have ever laid eyes on’).29 Without the proper disciplinary credentials, women could not rate as either academic contenders or colleagues. Thus while Gilman may have been a founding member of the American Sociological Association, and often presented herself in her letters as ‘a social philosopher,’ her lack of qualifications and research publications worked against her.30 Consequently, she often wrote to her male peers in a deferential or self-deprecating style. In November 1900, for example, she told Frank Lester Ward: ‘My principal authority is you . . . [since] I have read a number of works on sociological lines . . . – without definitely remembering them. You know my head has been weak for fifteen years or so. Could you, who know the field, and who have read my book give me a little list of reliable authorities [to] bear out my position?’31 Ward, in fact, seems to have prompted this kind of response in many of his female correspondents, and in Gilman’s case he persisted (much to her annoyance) in ignoring her non-fiction theoretical work, even as she flattered him as to the importance of his theoretical contributions to the ‘woman question.’32 Nonetheless, as the foremost academic critic of women’s subjection during the Progressive era, who had theorized an ancient history of gynaecocracy overthrown by androcracy, Ward naturally interested Gilman, who had begun to explore similar ideas in the widely acclaimed Women and Economics. Some nineteen years older than Gilman, the authoritative Ward approximated a father figure who could help to legitimate her aspirations to theorize and challenge women’s oppression, and so she readily confided her history to him and confessed the insecurities of her position as an autodidact. Gilman continued to minimize her own work in her correspondence with Ward, referring to the fact that ‘I’ve been writing a scrap of a thing on “Man as a Factor in Social Evolution” and another on “The Persistence of Primitive Tendencies in the Domestic Relation” ’ (probably early drafts of The Home) in January 1901, and describing Concerning Children in January 1907 as ‘comparatively slight and uneven, a book of essays.’33 Yet she also occasionally manifested resentment, as with her response to Ward’s success with Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (1903). ‘I was a little grieved in reading your statement that no one had taken up your theory – for I had stoutly defended it in my book Women and Economics,’ Gilman observed upon its appearance. ‘But perhaps you didn’t consider that book of sufficient importance to mention . . . evidently I overrated your interest.’34 Thereafter, Ward offered some published caveats, but his private references to the field still conspicuously excluded Gilman’s bestseller.35

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Though Gilman was regularly sent copies of his articles and reviews, Ward did not treat her as a fellow contributor to sociological theory. The problem, perhaps, was that they shared too much common ground for Ward’s comfort. Prior to contemporary sex-differentiation, they both maintained, woman had been the ‘advanced, industrial animal . . . unique in the animal kingdom.’36 The belief that the present patriarchal order was natural and God-given thus needed close scrutiny and destabilization. Moreover, on the subject of men as sex-selectors, Gilman and Ward’s views converged too, as they did on the character of male desire. Under the regime of modern civilization, females had raised men from their prior status as dependent parasites, both argued, while by contrast men had reduced women to unequal and needy partners. Females sought to make males more like themselves, to their cost, while males sought to make women less like themselves, to their benefit. Significantly, though, Gilman’s difficulties with Ward’s pre-eminence and her struggle with him as an authority figure deepened around a disagreement in their mutual work – namely over how to theorize the decline of a gynaecocentric culture. Responding to the call for feedback on Pure Sociology that Ward had especially issued to feminists and female reformers, Gilman initially praised its 126-page chapter on sexual relations, in which Ward set forth his position on this question. ‘I think it is the most important contribution to the “woman question” ever made (not excepting my own beloved theory) – and therein of measureless importance to the world,’ Gilman wrote to him in January 1904, while also applauding in print his view of woman as the ‘race type’ from which men originally only provided reproductive variance as an enlarged parasite.37 More fundamentally, though, Gilman disagreed with Ward’s premising of the origins of male dominance on the theory that rape and sexual violence had been unleashed by primitive man’s discovery of his own paternity. In this respect, despite their convergence on sex selection, Gilman resisted Ward’s paternity hypothesis, advancing instead an economic and maternity-centered version of his story. Indeed, in resisting the causal status Ward attributed to the discovery of paternity, Gilman rejected man-centered accounts of sex-selection altogether. Instead, in both fictional works such as Herland (1915) and sociological studies such as His Religion and Hers, Gilman emphasized the ability of gynaecocentric cultures to overcome sexual violence, and argued that it was ‘absurd’ to believe that ancient sexual patterns could have been ‘instantaneously changed and inverted by one man – or one generation of men.’38 Gilman’s emergent critique of Ward’s periodization and causality on the question of a violent androcentric overthrow of gynaecocentric culture first took shape, however, in a series of letters written to him between 1907 and 1909, declaring his explanations of women’s oppression to be inconclusive. ‘Assume a matriarchal settlement under exceptionally good conditions,’ she urged him in November 1908: Assume an excess of females . . . Having now good conditions and surplus females, the male becomes increasingly valuable. The dominant females, already the industrial power and used to tribal communism, now [agree] . . . to maintain one male to each small group of females. If this were done, the male being now supported by the group of females and held in high esteem, is in a position to develop naturally, the excessive indulgence, cruelty, pride, etc. which would so lead to the more injurious effects of unchecked masculine rule. This hypothesis seems to me simple and genetic – requires no telic process, no determined action.39

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Moreover, Gilman suggested, ‘matriarchal polygamy’ should be retitled as ‘voluntary polygyny’ – a system initiated by women, and so with very different sexuo-political implications.40 ‘Good conditions – excess females; excess females – male at premium,’ she then concluded, in a cheery shorthand of her theory. ‘Male at premium – females establish polygyny. Polygyny – over-development of maleness. Predominant maleness – androcracy. Androcracy – the world as we have it . . . “How’s that?” ’41 Unfortunately, no letter survives revealing any written response from Ward to this hypothesis, but at the very least the skepticism expressed by Gilman here casts doubt on any claim that she was an uncritical Wardian, and suggests how she could use letters to her male peers to assert her views as well as to flatter. Indeed, such assertiveness is a prominent feature in many of her other letters relating to her work. ‘The least I get out of lecturing is travel, entertainment and experience. That’s something surely,’ Gilman told Charles Lummis in September 1896, but if her letters are any guide she got much more than this out of her speaking tours.42 Certainly, she left Houghton Gilman in no doubt of her priorities. ‘I wish you could have heard me last Sunday night,’ she observed in June 1897. ‘I never spoke better in my life. A full church. A big platform all to myself. And it came! It just poured in a great swelling river and all these people sat and took it in . . . I forget everyone in the audience when I speak.’43 Indeed, her love of lecturing even gave her pause in contemplating remarriage. Though she finally consented to becoming Houghton’s wife, their wedding, in the spring of 1900, was on the road – in Detroit, not New York, because she had speaking engagements there. Moreover, her consent also hinged upon a clear statement of wifely duties she would and would not fulfill, in order to permit the fullest scope for her ‘greatness.’ As well as cajoling Houghton into understanding the pleasure she took in oratorical intellectualism, Gilman entreated a corollary diminution of domestic conjugal demands: ‘Cheerfully I will run around the rest of my life – a tentless Arab – living in a pair of handbags and a sleeping car – cheerfully will I forgo the comforts of home . . . [rather] than to suffer again as I have suffered for years and years.’44 Renegotiating conventional gender roles was not always so easy on the lecture circuit itself, however. To judge from the audiences who applauded Gilman across the nation, women were her main constituency.45 Yet, if women were the natural target for Gilman’s hallmark critique of female economic dependency it was, ironically, largely the money of men which supported her in speaking out to them. At daytime engagements, for example, audience members were usually wives using their husbands’ funds to subscribe for the lectures, while in the evening men might actually accompany their wives. Gilman’s letters, in fact, reveal how preoccupied she was with male audience members’ attitudes toward her. When she won over these listeners – like a ‘big old man’ in St. Louis who declared he ‘now was in favor of woman on the rostrum – though he never had been before’ – she bragged unapologetically, newly optimistic about the prospects for change.46 Conversely, though, male disapproval deeply grieved her. Reflecting on a lecture she had given in the South, for instance, she told Houghton: ‘Last night was the women one. I had a good house and well, expected much, but I did not please the men of the place – for which I am truly sorry . . . The women liked it . . . But I wanted the men to get a better feeling toward the women’s movement – and I feel as if I had not succeeded at all – rather the other way.’47 Such letters reveal Gilman’s emotional vulnerability and sometimes fragile confidence. But they also highlight the

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gender transgression involved in constructing a role for female public intellectuals. Gilman asserted herself as an advanced thinker presuming to educate her fellow women, and these women were largely willing to accept that persona. For men, on the other hand, Gilman’s intellectual mastery was a harder sell. The traveling involved in establishing a lecturing career meanwhile imposed other gender challenges. Women journeying and lodging and eating alone were still an unexpected, unwelcome, and improper sight at the end of the nineteenth century and could face threatening attentions. Despite her embrace of dress reform, for example, Gilman frequently stood out in public as an attractive, not to say beautiful, woman and hence was subject to unsolicited scrutiny and approaches. Indeed, Judith Walkowitz has persuasively argued that ‘street harassment emerged as a “social problem” and “social issue” ’ in the late nineteenth century precisely because that was a moment ‘when some women were empowered to articulate it publicly as a violation of their bodily integrity.’48 The age of the mandatory chaperone might have been waning in 1890s America, especially as more and more women entered the workplace, but there were still potent matters of manners and propriety constraining women attempting to traverse streets, use transportation facilities, and enter urban spaces. If he wished, Gilman’s male peer on the lecture circuit could pocket a generous fee before economizing with a cheap seat in a crowded train carriage and a serviceable single room at a convenient railway hotel. Then he could repair to the bar of a rather better hotel to meet his local hosts or lecture agent, walk or take a cab to the venue, depart after the formalities wherever he liked, taking the next day’s mid-morning train home, perhaps after a pleasant late breakfast, again care of a better hotel. But almost none of these options were available to Gilman. As Gilman’s letters make clear, at some destinations, a female contact was necessary, to act either as a traveling companion, a secretary/receptionist, or a knowledgeable local able to ensure accommodations in a safe area, and often as all three. This inevitably made touring expensive for female lecturers, but there was nothing hoteliers and boarding house owners found more suspicious than an unaccompanied woman. At the age of thirty, for example, Gilman’s idol, the venerable feminist author Olive Schreiner, was evicted from her lodgings by a landlady deeming it improper for her to be receiving gentlemen friends like the social reformer Havelock Ellis.49 If a lady had visitors, she needed a same-sex companion and a separate parlor. Nor were such constraints reduced when between lodgings. Spending so much time on trains as she did, Gilman regularly denounced Progressive-era railroad companies in her letters. In letters to friends and newspaper editors alike she targeted their monopolies, the captive status of passengers, their poor service, their lack of concern for traveler safety, and their dearth of waiting rooms, cafes, and bathrooms. In one strand of correspondence that is both stinging and hilarious, Gilman – who often played solitaire while waiting for the next train – even protests at suddenly being banned from doing so on account of the railroad company’s new anti-gambling policies. Happily, her protest fell into the hands of a company superintendent married to an avowed Gilmanite, who wrote back promising that she would not be troubled again.50 But negotiating the rules imposed upon her by the men who controlled the logistics of her lecture tours was not always so straightforward. In 1914, for example, at the height of the resurgent women’s suffrage campaign, her lecture manager, William B. Feakins, wrote to say that if she insisted on referring to suffrage in her speaking

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engagements, she risked everything: the profits, the audiences, and the goodwill of the menfolk paying the subscriptions of their lady wives.51 Eventually, Gilman wearied of such interference in her mission, which meant that she undertook handling the publicity, local arrangements, and finances of her lecture tours through friendship and organization networks of her own. This process could be both onerous and amateurish, generating a sometimes irritated correspondence illuminating the complex logistical aspects of life as a public intellectual – the marketing, promotion, and delivery to congenial audiences of one’s ideas.52 Little wonder that after a ten-day Western lecture tour, Gilman would return home to rest. When back in New York City or later Norwich, Connecticut, however, Gilman’s letters also document the attempts of editors to direct, censor, manipulate, and even rewrite her words. After Women and Economics became a bestseller, journals and magazines regularly asked to publish Gilman’s work, with her famous family acting as a further draw. Yet her correspondence reveals a constant process of negotiation, not to say downright haggling, over the content of these pieces. ‘I do not think this is up to your scratch. The article is bright as all your things are, but it is a discussion – is it not – of a commonplace truth,’ the editor of The Independent tells Gilman in one of his typical missives, while an editor at Success Magazine characteristically asks: ‘Could you compress the series into, say, four instead of six articles, without injuring the presentation of the whole subject?’53 Sometimes these editors worked closely with Gilman in an effort to construct pieces along certain lines, but these usually steered clear of her more controversial views. Long, unvarnished versions of her theoretical arguments, rooted in reform Darwinist assumptions, were difficult for publishers to imagine on their monthly contents pages without significant revision. Such circumstances thus made Gilman a somewhat prickly contributor, demanding professional and equal treatment at all times, while certainly not receiving it. In short, much epistolary tension attended the publication process. A good case in point is Gilman’s correspondence with Arthur Vance, editor of the Pictorial Review. ‘It seems to me your article is too statistical and too pathological,’ Vance declared of one early piece on divorce that Gilman submitted in 1909. ‘My idea was something along this line . . .’54 Upon which ensuing advice Gilman acted. By March 1919, however, Gilman felt confident enough to tell Vance that if she had a contract, or some kind of commitment to his publishing her, she might be more willing to consider his perspectives. ‘I have done several pieces of work on suggestions of yours,’ she noted, ‘only to have them returned.’55 In effect, she added in another letter from two months later, Vance was trying to turn her into something she was not and had no desire to be: a species of modern investigative journalist. Instead she insisted she was a social philosopher; and one, moreover, who had ‘important ideas sometimes, lots of ’em. And . . . a sort of style of my own.’56 Still, even when Gilman triumphed in the matter of content, further struggles lay ahead, especially around the rate of pay she received for her journalism and essays. In a world of highly personal and financially diverse relations with editors, differential rates were pervasive and difficult to combat. Thus when Hamilton Holt told Gilman, ‘I admit that you are worth three and four cents a word, but even two cents is rather high for a weekly paper like The Independent,’ it would have been hard for her to tell whether this was really company policy or merely sexual discrimination.57 Even when editors offered her clear rates of pay, meanwhile, Gilman’s correspondence documents the long struggles she had to secure

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payment, and the bitter disputes that arose when only half the contracted sum was forthcoming several months after an article’s publication.58 She invariably received neither explanation nor much by way of apologies, just a casual expression of friendly neglect.59 A reliable income from journalism was, in short, difficult to come by. Moreover, cultural institutions and arbiters other than magazines and their editors could be equally heavy-handed and slapdash. In 1913, for instance, Gilman generously donated a poem opposing child labor to the National Committee on Child Labor. She was therefore surprised when a letter containing an edited version of her original poem, minus lines connecting increased legal protection for children with women’s enfranchisement, arrived in the post. While, ‘of course, we in the office are much in sympathy with the Suffrage cause,’ the committee secretary explained, they had judged the connection extraneous to their mission, and so had ‘taken the liberty of making a few changes.’60 To which Gilman offered a witty, direct, and uncompromising response scrawled at the bottom of the page: ‘Do not take a gift horse to the orthodontist. I am distinctly unwilling that my work be altered, however superior their contributions may be. Since my poem proved unsuitable, kindly return.’61 Similarly too, Gilman intervened vigorously elsewhere when correspondents misrepresented her intellectual contributions. In 1930, for example, the psychologist and cultural critic Samuel D. Schmalhausen, writing to request a chapter for a book of essays he was planning, described Gilman as ‘the first sociologist in America to discuss adequately women’s parasitic psychology (under our social system, following the illuminating work of Olive Schreiner).’62 Admiration for Schreiner no doubt tempered Gilman’s response but it was nonetheless blunt: ‘My “Women and Economics” was published in 1898; Olive Schreiner’s “Woman and Labor” after the Boer War. She was one of the greatest women of the age, far greater than I in literary power, but unless you refer to the suggestions in “The Story of An African Farm” and the far reaching vision of her “Dreams,” my work on the economic dependence of women and its results antecedes hers.’63 Gilman was eventually persuaded to contribute to Schmalhausen’s book, Woman’s Coming of Age (1931), producing – in fact – her last piece of published non-fiction for it. Yet as I have already suggested, our view of that non-fiction oeuvre changes if we consider Gilman’s correspondence, or at least significant portions of it, to merit analysis as an extension of that work. Letters, in this sense, accompanied and facilitated the activities that she privileged as the nature of female animals – to work, to hunt, to improve, to provide for others in the present and the future. Indeed, her letters document in intricate detail the challenges and subtleties of the sociological labor she undertook. If she had to use those letters to fight for recognition, it was because her position as a female public intellectual was precarious. Moreover, that precariousness extended to the literal spaces she had to negotiate in order to pursue her career, which were both constrained and controversial as a result of her gender. While, unquestionably, she made a name for herself on the lecture circuit, this by no means provided her with professional respect. And similarly, though she made a discernible impact on public opinion through her writing and was well-covered in the press, newspaper and magazine editors thought nothing of censoring her work or defaulting on the agreed payments for it. As a result, she often had to use her gift with correspondence to protest, shame, or correct. Beyond Gilman’s own experience, finally, her correspondence tells a further story. Her modest exchanges with New England friends and family members in the 1880s

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greatly expanded in the heady days of her Californian radicalism in the 1890s, as she reached out to Fabian, suffragist, and ex-abolitionist contacts, and grew even more voluminous after the success of Women and Economics swept her forcibly into the disparate amalgam of movements that for a time would constitute the Progressivism of the fin de siècle. The letterheads populating her remaining correspondence of the early twentieth century themselves document that moment’s ill-assorted aggregate force, reason alone for Gilman’s sometimes euphoric optimism as to the prospects for human transformation. What this increasingly vast correspondence tells us, then, is how central letters were to her self-conception as a social philosopher rather than a fiction writer or poet. Indeed, as Gilman herself put it in the autobiography she wrote at the end of her life: ‘I have never made any pretense of being literary . . . In sheer bulk of material I have written much more than the twenty-five volumes I hope to see on my shelf someday . . . Sometimes I would have to copy it, or change a little, but usually it was written and sent – like a letter.’64

Notes 1. Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 22 May 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Collection 177, Folder 51. 2. Altman, Epistolarity, 89. See also Stanley, Salter, and Dampier, ‘The Epistolary Pact.’ 3. See Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 95–106. For an instance of Gilman’s own rationalization of the need for her mail to be destroyed see Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 25 May 1897, in A Journey from Within, 52. 4. Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 26 July 1899, in ibid. 274. 5. Daniel Kiefer, Letter to William B. Feakins, 8 June 1914, in Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Collection 177, Folder 139. 6. See Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 206. 7. Quoted in ibid. 210. 8. See Allen, ‘Reconfiguring Vice.’ For a broader account of these arguments see Pateman, The Sexual Contract. 9. See especially Gilman, Women and Economics, and The Man-Made World. For more on these fundamental arguments see Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 82–9. 10. See Allen, ‘Progressive Portraits.’ 11. See Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 293. 12. Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 22 April 1898, in A Journey from Within, 124; Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 26 June 1897, in ibid. 67. See Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 381–2, and ‘ “Letters Are Like Morning Prayers.” ’ 13. For more on the female members of the Beecher family and their activities see White, The Beecher Sisters. 14. Gilman, Letter to Martha Luther, 29 July 1881, in The Selected Letters, 13. See Horowitz, Wild Unrest, 7–32. 15. Gilman, The Living, 23. 16. Horowitz, Wild Unrest, 10. 17. See Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 208. 18. Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 25 April 1897, in A Journey from Within, 44. 19. For a measure of Gilman’s output see Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 366. 20. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, xxi. 21. Knight and Tuttle, ‘Introduction,’ xxv. 22. Ibid. xxii. 23. See, for example: Hedges, ‘Afterword’; Berkin, ‘Private Woman, Public Woman’; Veeder, ‘Who Is Jane?’; and Winkler, Victorian Daughters, 31–9.

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24. See, for example: Lane, To Herland and Beyond; Karpinski (ed.), Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Golden (ed.), The Captive Imagination; Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and Horowitz, Wild Unrest. 25. See, for example: Fessenden, ‘Race, Religion, and the New Woman’; Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis, 63–91; Hausman, ‘Sex Before Gender’; Newman, White Women’s Rights, 132–57; Gilbert and Gubar, ‘ “Fecundate! Discriminate!” ’; and Weinbaum, ‘Writing Feminist Genealogy.’ 26. Rather than Gilman’s personal life shaping her professional life, it was more often the reverse. When an agent absconded with the profits from a lecture tour in 1897, for example, her efforts at redress led her to the office of an attorney cousin, George Houghton Gilman. Thus began their journey toward another contract altogether – their marriage (see Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 64). 27. See, for example, Frederic Beecher Perkins, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 15 October 1878, in Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Collection 177, Folder 26. 28. See Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 32–42. 29. Ross, Seventy Years of It, 60. 30. Gilman, Letter to Mr. L. L. Bernard, 26 September 1927, in The Selected Letters, 261. 31. Gilman, Letter to Lester Frank Ward, 28 November 1900, in Ward, Lester Frank Ward Papers, John Hays Brown Library, Ms. 90.23/28/8. 32. Ward’s biographer, Clifford H. Scott, observes that female correspondents constitute over half of his voluminous correspondence – a fairly remarkable feat given Ward’s long stints in all-male environments, as a civil service paleobotantist from 1865–1903 and then a sociology professor at Brown University from 1907–13 (see Lester Frank Ward, 40). For more on Ward and Gilman’s relationship see Allen, ‘ “The Overthrow.” ’ 33. Gilman, Letter to Lester Frank Ward, 15 January 1901, in Ward, Lester Frank Ward Papers, John Hays Brown Library, Ms. 90.23/28/8; Gilman, Letter to Lester Frank Ward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Collection 177, Folder 124. 34. Gilman, Letter to Lester Frank Ward, 30 June 1903, in Ward, Lester Frank Ward Papers, John Hays Brown Library, Ms. 90.23/28/8. 35. See, for example, Ward, Letter to Joanna Odenwald Unger, 27 October 1903, Lester Frank Ward Papers, John Hays Brown Library, Ms. 90.23/30/1. 36. Gilman, ‘Apropos,’ 122. 37. Gilman, Letter to Lester Frank Ward, 20 January 1904, in Ward, Lester Frank Ward Papers, John Hays Brown Library, Ms. 90.23/28/8. For Gilman’s published approbation see ‘Apropos.’ 38. Gilman, His Religion and Hers, 204; and see Gilman, Herland, 55. 39. Gilman, Letter to Lester Frank Ward, 6 November 1908, in Ward, Lester Frank Ward Papers, John Hays Brown Library, Ms. 90.23/33/9. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Gilman, Letter to Charles Lummis, 14 September 1896, in The Selected Letters, 246. 43. Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 5 June 1897, in A Journey from Within, 64. 44. Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 7 June 1897, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Collection 177, Folder 42. 45. See, for example, Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 22 May 1898, ibid. Collection 177, Folder 51. 46. Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 18 June 1899, in A Journey from Within, 225. 47. Gilman, Letter to George Houghton Gilman, 20 May 1898, in ibid. 142. 48. Walkowitz, ‘Going Public,’ 2. 49. See Schreiner, Letter to Havelock Ellis, 29 October 1885, in The Letters, 85. 50. See Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 283.

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51. Daniel Keafer, Letter to William B. Feakins, in Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Collection 177, Folder 139. 52. For a full account of the business dimensions of Gilman’s work see Allen, ‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Feminism, and Progressivism,’ 433–7. 53. Hamilton Holt, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 19 November 1908, in Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Collection 177, Folder 128; Margaret Connolly, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 7 October 1902, in ibid. Collection 177, Folder 133. 54. Arthur Vance, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 20 May 1909, in ibid. Collection 177, Folder 132. 55. Gilman, Letter to Arthur Vance, 19 March 1919, in ibid. 56. Gilman, Letter to Arthur Vance, 9 May 1919, in ibid. 57. Hamilton Holt, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 12 October 1906, in ibid. Collection 177, Folder 128. 58. See, for example, Hamilton Holt, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 14 November 1907, in ibid. 59. See, for instance, Albion W. Small, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 20 March 1908, in ibid. Collection 177, Folder 126. 60. Josephine J. Eschenbrenner, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 29 October 1913, in ibid. Collection 177, Folder 141. 61. Ibid. 62. Samuel D. Schmalhausen, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 19 June 1930, in ibid. Collection 177, Folder 122. 63. Gilman, Letter to Samuel D. Schmalhausen, 23 June 1930, in ibid. Gilman nonetheless contributed to Schmalhausen’s Woman’s Coming of Age (1931), and in a final tribute to Schreiner, entitled her chapter ‘Parasitism and Civilized Vice,’ even though parasitism was not a central category of her own way of characterizing women’s dilemma. 64. Gilman, The Living, 284.

Works Cited Allen, J. A. (1999), ‘Reconfiguring Vice: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Prostitution and Feminist Theory,’ in J. Rudd and V. Gough (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 173–99. Allen, J. A. (2003), ‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Feminism, and Progressivism,’ in M. J. Hogan (ed.), Imperialism and Reform in the Progressive Era, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 427–69. Allen, J. A. (2004), ‘ “The Overthrow” of Gynaecocentric Culture: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Lester Frank Ward,’ in C. J. Davis and D. D. Knight (eds.), Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 59–86. Allen, J. A. (2009), The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, History, Progressivism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Allen, J. A. (forthcoming), ‘Progressive Portraits: Literature in the Feminisms of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner,’ in R. Goodman (ed.), Feminist Writing and the Emergence of Feminist Theory, New York: Cambridge University Press. Altman, J. G. (1982), Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Berkin, C. (1979), ‘Private Woman, Public Woman: The Contradictions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,’ in C. Berkin and M. B. Norton (eds.), Women in America: A History, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 150–73. Davis, C. J. (2010), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Living, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fessenden, T. (1995), ‘Race, Religion, and the New Woman in America: The Case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,’ Furman Studies, 37: 15–25.

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Gilbert, S. M., and S. Gubar (1999), ‘ “Fecundate! Discriminate!”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity,’ in J. Rudd and V. Gough (eds.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 200–16. Gilman, C. P. (1860–1935), Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, 177: Mf-1. Gilman, C. P. (1898), Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, Boston: Small Maynard. Gilman, C. P. (1904), ‘Apropos of Prof. Ward’s Theory,’ Woman’s Journal, 35: 122. Gilman, C. P. (1911), The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture, New York: Charlton Company. Gilman, C. P. [1915] (1979), Herland, ed. A. J. Lane, New York: Pantheon. Gilman, C. P. [1923] (2003), His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of our Fathers and the Work of our Mothers, ed. M. S. Kimmel, Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Gilman, C. P. (1931), ‘Parasitism and Civilized Vice,’ in S. D. Schmalhausen (ed.), Woman’s Coming of Age, New York: Liveright, 110–26. Gilman, C. P. [1935] (1990), The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gilman, C. P. (1995), A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900, ed. M. A. Hill, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Gilman, C. P. (2009), The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. D. D. Knight and J. S. Tuttle, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Golden, C. J., ed. (1992), The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, New York: Feminist Press. Hausman, B. L. (1998), ‘Sex Before Gender: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Evolutionary Paradigm of Utopia,’ Feminist Studies, 24: 488–509. Hedges, E. (1973), ‘Afterword,’ in C. P. Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, ed. E. Hedges, New York: The Feminist Press, 37–63. Hill, M. A. (1980), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hill, M. A. (2000), ‘ “Letters are Like Morning Prayers”: The Private Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,’ in C. J. Golden and J. S. Zangrando (eds.), The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 47–52. Horowitz, H. L. (2012), Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, New York: Oxford University Press. Karpinski, J. B, ed. (1992), Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, New York: G. K. Hall & Co. Kessler, C. F. (1995), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress toward Utopia, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Knight, D. D., and J. S. Tuttle (2009), ‘Introduction,’ in C. P. Gilman, The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. D. D. Knight and J. S. Tuttle, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, xv–xxv. Lane, A. J. (1991), To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, New York: Meridien. Newman, L. (1999), White Women’s Rights, New York: Oxford University Press. Pateman, C. (1988), The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Peyser, T. (1998), Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ross, E. A. [1936] (1977), Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography of Edward Alsworth Ross, New York: Arno. Schreiner, O. (1925), The Letters of Olive Schreiner, 1876–1920, ed. S. C. CronwrightSchreiner, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Scott, C. H. (1976), Lester Frank Ward, Boston: Twayne.

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Stanley, L., A. Salter, and H. Dampier (2012), ‘The Epistolary Pact, Letterness, and the Schreiner Epistolarium,’ Auto/Biography Studies, 27: 262–93. Veeder, W. (1988), ‘Who Is Jane? The Intricate Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,’ Arizona Quarterly, 44: 43–61. Walkowitz, J. R. (1998), ‘Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London,’ Representations, 62: 1–30. Ward, L. F. (1841–1913), Lester Frank Ward Papers, John Hays Brown Library, Brown University, Ms. 90.23. Weinbaum, A. E. (2001), ‘Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Maternalist Feminism,’ Feminist Studies, 27: 271–30. White, Barbara (2003), The Beecher Sisters, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Winkler, B. S. (1980), Victorian Daughters: The Lives and Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Women’s Studies Program.

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31 ‘THE STAMP OF TRUTH’: HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DISSENT AND ITS LIMITS IN THE LETTERS OF JARED SPARKS Eileen Ka-May Cheng

U

ndeservedly neglected by modern scholars in favor of his better-known nineteenth-century contemporaries George Bancroft and William Prescott, the American historian Jared Sparks is now known to later historians primarily for his questionable practices as editor of George Washington’s writings. To protect Washington’s reputation, for example, Sparks bowdlerized his letters, changing Washington’s use of colloquial or slang phrases; and for such reasons Sparks has come to embody for modern scholars the slipshod methods and uncritical chauvinism often believed to characterize antebellum historical writing.1 It is ironic, then, that Sparks’ own letters help to reaffirm his significance during his lifetime. For while Sparks never published a grand narrative history like those of Bancroft and Prescott, his biographical works and collections of historical documents established him as one of the pre-eminent historians of the mid-nineteenth century. Hence he corresponded with virtually all the leading American historians in this period, making him a linchpin in the informal scholarly network that connected these writers to one another. Sparks, in effect, exerted as much of an influence on American historical writing in his time through his letters as he did through his published works.2 More specifically, Sparks used his letters to impress on other historians his commitment to impartial truth and scholarship, revealing him to be a more careful and scrupulous historian than his reputation allows. Not only did his letters impart a regard for the value of primary sources and citation – two of the hallmarks of modern professional scholarship – they also challenged the widespread idealization of the colonial and revolutionary periods in the mid-nineteenth century by acknowledging the costs of nationhood for Native Americans and the loyalists of the American Revolution. What Sparks exemplified, then, about American historical writing in his time was its complexity and sophistication, not its backwardness, as he sought to balance a commitment to truth with both his desire for popular appeal and his nationalist purposes. While sharing and reinforcing his commitment to these imperatives, Sparks’ correspondents at the same time communicated their differences with him over how to put them into practice. Sparks’ correspondence thus provided a private forum that allowed, and even encouraged, the expression of dissent by American historians – both from each other and from the uncritical chauvinism of their contemporaries. But only 481

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up to a point. For, in the end, as they inscribed Sparks’ nationalist perspective onto his understanding of truth, these personal exchanges served to validate that perspective as objective reality and thereby embed it all the more deeply in the public consciousness. Originating from a humble background, Sparks first gained entrance into Boston’s literary circles as editor of the North American Review from 1817 to 1818. Having served for several years as a Unitarian minister, Sparks then abandoned the ministry in 1823 to devote himself full-time to literary and historical pursuits, resuming the editorship of the Review later the same year. During his tenure at the Review, he turned it into a leading literary organ for the Boston Brahmin elite and established his own standing within that world as a trusted cultural arbiter. Sparks’ subsequent work as a historian further solidified his status as a denizen of the New England intellectual elite. Sparks made his mark as a historian with the publication of a collection of late-eighteenthcentury documents, The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, in 1829–30, and his even more successful and highly regarded edition of the writings of George Washington in 1834–7.3 Although his cultural achievements provided him with an entrée into politics, Sparks, like many of his fellow Boston Brahmins, nonetheless eschewed the political arena, looking to culture instead as his primary medium for wielding public influence.4 Yet while sharply critical of Jacksonian democracy, like most of his fellow Brahmins, Sparks shared wholeheartedly in the fervent nationalism that Andrew Jackson embodied. Thus, firmly maintaining a faith in the nation’s exceptionalist mission to embody and uphold republican ideals for the rest of the world, Sparks declared in an 1841 letter to William Prescott: ‘Let us cherish our institutions. The New World has a new destiny to fulfil. The old governments of Europe rest like an incubus on the vital energies of struggling humanity.’5 Such ardent nationalism did not necessarily preclude a genuine commitment to scholarship and truth, however. Letters not only served as a medium for Sparks to express and define his commitment to this ideal; through his correspondence, Sparks also formed a scholarly community with other historians that was crucial to the development and dissemination of his understanding of what constituted historical truth. Through their letters, Sparks and his colleagues exchanged information and advice, providing each other with both encouragement and criticism. While it is clear from these exchanges that Sparks’ correspondents looked to him as a source of guidance and authority on historical matters, Sparks also derived edification and profit from his interlocutors. Sparks, for example, underlines this sense of mutual exchange, and the mixture of support and friendly disagreement that characterized this community, when he writes to George Bancroft in January 1835 describing his own biography of Benedict Arnold and asking for Bancroft’s opinion of it. ‘Arnold is written with some care, and mostly from original materials,’ Sparks states. ‘I studied historical accuracy, and it may be quoted with perfect confidence. Remember this when you get to that point. Let me know what you think of it.’6 But even as he then goes on to express his pleasure at the progress of Bancroft’s history, Sparks at the same time twits Bancroft on the Jacksonian politics that set him apart from the rest of his Brahmin circle, asking to be included as a subscriber to Bancroft’s newspaper with the proviso that ‘I shall certainly find much that is good to read, though you must not think to convert me to your politics.’7 Sparks’ and Bancroft’s scholarly community essentially centered on New England, reflecting Sparks’ own background and the dominance of this region over American

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historical writing during this period.8 In addition to Bancroft, for example, Sparks’ correspondence with influential historical writers included such northeastern luminaries as William Prescott, John Gorham Palfrey, George Edward Ellis, and Edward Everett. Yet at the same time the practice of letter-writing inevitably allowed these Brahmins to extend the boundaries of their circle to include historians from other regions of the country, as well as from across the Atlantic. Among Sparks’ many other correspondents were the Southern historians William Trescot, William Stevens, and Charles Campbell, and on the European side, the French historian François Guizot as well as the English historians Lord Mahon and William Smyth, to name but a few. As nationalistic as he was, then, Sparks also helps us to see the cosmopolitan character of his scholarly network and the way the correspondence between its members bridged both national and intellectual differences. This is particularly evident in his private correspondence with Lord Mahon – the very man who, in 1851, laid the basis for Sparks’ reputation as a bowdlerizer. Mahon’s sharp public attack on Sparks’ editorial practices resulted in an extended controversy that spiraled to include not only many of Sparks’ fellow historians but also leading newspapers and periodicals like Harper’s and the Evening Post.9 What most incensed Sparks were Mahon’s charges that he had ‘ “tampered with the truth of history” ’ in allowing his patriotic and sectional prejudices to censor his selection of Washington’s writings.10 Taking strong exception to what he believed was the implication that he had consciously falsified and distorted through his omissions, Sparks indignantly proclaimed in a pamphlet rebutting Mahon’s accusations that ‘you insinuate, nay, you almost declare, that I have “systematically” left out facts and opinions, with the express design of perverting the testimony of history.’11 As he vehemently refuted such charges, Sparks went on to question Mahon’s own integrity, demanding: ‘Are you sure, my Lord, that you are perfectly candid in speaking thus? . . . To tamper with truth of any kind is, in my apprehension, a highly criminal act. It implies a defect, not of judgment, but of principle.’12 While in these public exchanges Sparks could only interpret Mahon’s criticism of him as an aspersion on his probity, making it impossible for him to accept Mahon’s position as a legitimate interpretive difference, Sparks proved, however, more accepting of such dissent in his private exchanges with his adversary. Hoping to smooth over the passions that had been generated by the controversy, Mahon affirmed his vision of a transatlantic community of letters that would bridge and transcend such conflicts – and revealed the importance of letters themselves in maintaining that community – in an 1853 missive asking George Ticknor to serve as an intermediary between himself and Sparks. As Mahon explained to Ticknor: ‘While I adhere to my own opinions, + understand him as unreservedly to adhere to his, respecting Editorship, I do not feel that difference as at all irreconcilable with my general sentiments towards him, as a fellow laborer in the field of Literature, of esteem + regard.’13 For his part, Sparks then responded favorably to this overture, even commending the latest volume of Mahon’s History of England (1836–53) for ‘sustaining the high merit of historical composition for which the previous parts of the work have been so justly valued,’ despite his disagreement with Mahon’s account of Washington’s decision to execute the British officer Major André as a spy.14 Addressing Mahon privately, in an 1854 letter, Sparks amicably expresses his dissent from Mahon’s views, and happily recognizes the inevitability of such disagreement. ‘But who has ever read a history and agreed with all

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the opinions of the writer, drawn out as they are by the vast number and variety of topics that come before him?’ Sparks notes. ‘What more can be reasonably expected or hoped, than that the writer will not suffer himself to be led astray by preconceptions, prejudices, favorite theories, or hasty conclusions?’15 As Sparks more specifically admits here, his difference of opinion with Mahon over André is the product of his nationalist perspective, for ‘[i]n the case of André, I suppose no American will be convinced by your argument, or consent that there was a want of justice or humanity in the course pursued by Washington.’16 Yet Sparks sees no conflict between his nationalistic outlook and his desire to maintain a transatlantic bond of exchange and friendship with Mahon, concluding his letter by reassuring Mahon of his belief that their ‘literary skirmishes’ over his editing of Washington’s papers would not ‘interfere with personal respect and esteem, or mar the relations of social intercourse.’17 With this sentiment, Sparks both expresses a far more forgiving attitude toward the controversy with Mahon than he did in his public responses, and suggests how epistolary communication could provide a medium for tempering such conflicts. Yet Sparks and his colleagues would only go so far in expanding the boundaries of their scholarly circle. Inclusion and exclusion went hand in hand with one another, as letters simultaneously provided those excluded from Sparks’ elite circle of historians with a point of entry into that network and reaffirmed their marginal status. Joel Tyler Headley, for instance, whose highly popular military histories made him a somewhat suspect figure in elite literary circles because of what was deemed his concern with sales at the expense of scholarship, at once breached and reinforced the boundary between popular and scholarly history through his correspondence with Sparks.18 Headley wrote to Sparks in December 1846 asking for information about Washington for a collective biography of Washington and his generals he was writing, on the basis that ‘[y]our researches having been so thorough you can tell me what is to be relied on as fact and the various traditions.’19 Headley thus deferred to Sparks’ scholarly authority and acknowledged his superior claims to truth, even as he claimed equality as a colleague engaged in the same endeavor, by expressing his agreement with Sparks’ portrayal of Washington as a ‘man of strong passions’ and asking for examples ‘of the strong not to say rough xpressions [sic] he sometimes used especially in battle.’20 Sparks, meanwhile, responded in kind, expressing his own approbation for Headley’s work, laced with a certain deprecation, in a later letter thanking Headley for sending him a copy of Washington and His Generals (1847). Declaring himself ‘much pleased with your graphic sketches of characters and events,’ Sparks, as he did with Mahon, amicably acknowledged that he did not always agree with Headley’s views.21 Notwithstanding these differences, which Sparks regarded as inevitable, he concluded that Headley had ‘caught the spirit of the times, and wrought it deeply into your pages. Many readers will be attracted to these volumes, who would hesitate at the threshold of a more formal history.’22 But here, even as Sparks expresses a sense of collegial disagreement with Headley and praises his history for its liveliness and popular appeal, he ultimately denies Headley recognition as a scholarly equal. When he distinguishes Headley’s work from ‘more formal history,’ Sparks makes explicit what he had implied in using the term ‘sketches’ to speak of Headley’s book – that he did not consider it a work of serious scholarship like his own. Still, the line Sparks drew between popular history and its ‘more formal’ counterparts did not mean that he was opposed to making history accessible to the larger

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public. On the contrary, writing at a time when history was seen as a form of both literature and philosophy, whose purpose was to instill moral lessons in its readers through a vivid and engaging narrative, Sparks firmly expressed his commitment to balancing scholarly integrity with popular appeal in other letters.23 Indeed, Sparks reveals how important letters themselves were as a vehicle for his endeavor to reconcile these imperatives in his correspondence with the contributors to the Library of American Biography, a twenty-five-volume project he edited between 1834 and 1847. Believing that a general narrative of American history would be too dry for general readers, Sparks hoped that this work would engage their interest in the nation’s past by presenting it through a series of short biographies of important figures ranging from John Smith to Benedict Arnold. And indeed, the first series of biographies, published between 1834 and 1838, was successful enough for Sparks to continue it with another series which began appearing six years later. In addition to winning a popular audience, the Library achieved critical acclaim as an important contribution to the study of American history. It is indicative of Sparks’ desire to put the work on a sound scholarly footing, for example, that the contributors to the series came predominantly from the New England intellectual elite to which he belonged, and included many of the leading historical writers of the time, ranging from William Prescott to John Gorham Palfrey.24 Wishing to imbue these contributors with his own ambition to balance popular appeal and scholarly accuracy, Sparks repeatedly wrote to them with instructions on how to bring together these demands. As Sparks put it to Charles Upham, his vision of the work was that it should have ‘a popular aspect, + at the same time that the lives should be written with care + accuracy,’ a directive which required that documents be ‘patiently examined, and a spirited narrative drawn from them.’25 Hence Sparks emphasized to Upham and his other contributors the importance of basing their accounts on primary sources, which he considered the only sure foundation for truth, but also warned against including too many quotations from them for fear of losing the reader’s interest. ‘Extracts should be few, short, + apposite,’ Sparks explained to Upham. ‘Brief + pointed notes will often be valuable, + frequent references to original authorities, but not to recent compilations, which seldom contain anything new, and for the most part are much given to dullness and blunders. Notes of this sort will be a proof of research, + a guide to further inquiry, which many readers will prize + none will dislike.’26 Crucially, in his prescriptions for the value of primary sources, or ‘original authorities,’ over ‘compilations,’ and the importance of citations, Sparks revealed his commitment to the critical methods of scholarship associated with the German historian Leopold von Ranke’s influential ideals of objectivity. Rather than seeing these methods as inimical to popular appeal, Sparks believed that footnotes would enable his contributors to reconcile scholarly accuracy with readability by providing proof that they had based their accounts on research in primary sources, without the need for extensive quotations from these texts. While Upham agreed with Sparks about the importance of primary sources as a basis for truth, he differed from Sparks over how to put this precept into practice. Using his letters to Sparks to explain why he had departed from his editor’s instructions by including so many documentary extracts in his Life of Sir Henry Vane (1835), Upham argued that: ‘In writing the life of a man who was himself an author, I am quite sure that it is best to make him speak for himself as far as may be.’27 Only in this way, Upham believed, could the historian ‘present living pictures’

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of his subject, ‘showing them to the reader as painted, at the time, by the original himself,’ thereby allowing the reader to be ‘transported to the age in which he lived.’28 For Upham, then, by enabling him to fulfill the Romantic historian’s goal of bringing the past to life for the reader, such extracts would add to the dramatic interest of his narrative – not take away from it, as Sparks feared.29 Ultimately, Sparks himself was not inexorably opposed to Upham’s claim that these quotations enhanced his claims to truth by giving ‘the stamp of authenticity to a memoir.’30 Writing to Sparks in January 1835, Upham observed that he was ‘much relieved’ that ‘you recognize the force of the reasons that actuated me,’ a declaration of gratification at Sparks’ acceptance of his rationale that once again suggests how the correspondence between the historians in Sparks’ circle enabled them to express and resolve their differences with one another.31 The differences that Sparks and his colleagues expressed to one another in their correspondence were not always so cordially resolved, though. Nor was Sparks always so accepting of departures from his own standards of critical scholarship. A shared desire to balance this ideal with popular appeal was itself sometimes a source of conflict, creating a sense of rivalry among Sparks and his colleagues for readers. Sparks, for example, reveals this sense of rivalry – and demonstrates how the correspondence between these historians at once channeled and fueled the conflicts it created – when he writes to William Prescott in February 1841 of his fears that the overlap in subject matter between his and Bancroft’s intended histories of the Revolution would undercut the demand for his own book. Citing Sparks’ greater commitment to research in primary documents, Prescott tried to reassure him that he and Bancroft were too different in their approaches for their histories to pose a threat to one another.32 Sparks himself came to the same conclusion, agreeing with Prescott that the superficiality of Bancroft’s scholarship obviated any danger that his work would rival his own. As Sparks confessed: I had been misinformed as to Bancroft’s plan. I understood it to be a new and formidable work on the American Revolution. If it is only a continuation of his historical sketches, the interference can be of no importance. His way of skimming over things, like Camilla touching the tops of the waving corn, or the man in his seven league boots stepping only on the summits of the highest hills, has little in it to claim the dignity of history, or to satisfy readers who would study the motives of actors, and the progress and connection of events.33 Although Bancroft was as firmly committed to critical methods of scholarship as Prescott and Sparks, then, Sparks clearly did not share his understanding of how to apply those methods.34 Sparks’ characterization of Bancroft’s work as ‘sketches’ – the same term that he had used to categorize Headley’s history – suggests that he regarded Bancroft’s work little more highly than Headley’s form of popular history, evincing a scorn at odds with the friendly respect he elsewhere expressed for Bancroft’s opinion as a fellow historian. Thus if the correspondence of these historians with one another helped to forge personal bonds between them and foster a sense of collegiality that transcended their differences, this exchange illustrates how its private character could also free them to engage in personal backbiting that revealed the limits to both their collegiality and their tolerance of disagreement. The same commitment to truth that made Sparks so disparaging of Bancroft’s work also contributed to his appreciation for opposing viewpoints in American history. Only by acknowledging the perspectives of contestants on both sides of a conflict, he believed, could the historian achieve impartiality, which for Sparks was synonymous

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with truth. Hence, he repeatedly urged the need to examine British as well as American documentary sources in his research on the Revolution. ‘Let the testimony of both sides be brought together, and impartial results be deduced from the whole,’ Sparks adjured Robert Southey in 1828. ‘This would seem the only method of imparting to the history of that period the stamp of truth, and of doing justice to all the parties concerned.’35As much as he celebrated Washington and other revolutionary worthies in his biographical works, then, Sparks proved remarkably willing in his letters to acknowledge the colonists’ shortcomings and the wrongfulness of their treatment of Native Americans. Thus, in an 1844 letter giving George Edward Ellis suggestions for how to approach his biography of John Mason for the Library of American Biography, Sparks recommended that Ellis provide some discussion of the Pequot War, citing it as an example of how Native Americans have been wrongly vilified by historians. If for Sparks, the Pequots on the one hand had cause ‘for what were called their murders,’ the colonists on the other hand were completely unjustified in their ruthlessness against the Pequots.36 As he explained to Ellis, ‘I doubt whether the early writers did justice to the Pequots + other Indians. If they could have told their own story, they would probably have shown a provocation.’37 Condemning the colonists’ ‘butcheries’ in no uncertain terms, Sparks added that, ‘I do not believe that the extermination of the Pequots can be defended upon any principles of civilized policy, much less of humanity or justice.’38 Although a fervent exponent of the exceptionalist belief in America’s providential destiny, Sparks did not use this belief to justify white American brutality toward Native Americans, as so many of his contemporaries did. Maintaining that to cover up such atrocities would be a dereliction of the historian’s obligation to truth, he concluded instead that: ‘We may have a just pride in the virtues of our ancestors, but truth does not require us to varnish over their defects; nor is there any necessity to defend their frensies [sic] and abominations.’39 Sparks was even more concerned, meanwhile, with what he believed was the unjust treatment of the loyalists at the hands of American historians, and his letters both articulated and furthered his active engagement in revising patriotic myths about the Revolution. In addition to preparing an edition of the loyalist George Chalmers’ Introduction to the Revolt of the American Colonies (eventually published in 1845), Sparks had already begun, in his letters, to advance a more sympathetic view of the loyalists by the 1830s, putting him at the forefront of a larger reassessment of them that would only come to fruition some time later.40 Thus, in an 1833 letter to the novelist Catharine Sedgwick responding to her queries about the history of New York during the Revolution, Sparks urged the need for more attention to the treatment of the loyalists. Expressing his sympathy for what he believed many loyalists had unduly suffered on account of their principles, while still in the end upholding the necessity of their proscription, Sparks acknowledged to Sedgwick that: The tories were harshly treated; more so in my opinion, than their personal deserts required. They were mostly sincere in their opinions, + risked every thing in support of them. But it was a time in which no compromise could be made with an opinion, honest or not. The public cause demanded that such opinions should not be professed, + severities apparently cruel were the necessary consequence. I have more charity for the Tories than most people; + would treat their names tenderly, where there is no wicked act, or malicious design connected with them.41

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Sedgwick, notably, went on to feature the loyalists prominently in her historical novel The Linwoods (1835), and portrayed them sympathetically in much the same terms as Sparks, thus suggesting the potential influence of his letter on her work. But Sparks had an even more decisive influence on the more widespread reappraisal of the loyalists that took hold a decade later, with the publication of works such as George Atkinson Ward’s Journals and Letters of the Late Samuel Curwen (1842), Henry Van Schaack’s Life of Peter Van Schaack (1842), and Lorenzo Sabine’s The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown (1847). Challenging the neglect and vilification of the loyalists in traditional patriotic accounts of the War of Independence, these three books, in their different ways, each sought to acknowledge and understand opposition to the Revolution. They were all widely reviewed and frequently cited by other historical writers of the time, demonstrating their recognition as the serious forms of scholarship prized by Sparks. Indeed, not coincidentally, all three of these historians had written to Sparks during their research, asking for his aid and advice. Responding encouragingly to each of them, Sparks also provided more tangible assistance to these fellow historians by helping to disseminate and publicize their writings, actively using his letters as a tool in achieving this goal. Sparks’ positive response to the draft Henry Van Schaack showed him of the memoir of his father, for example, prompted Van Schaack to repeatedly importune Sparks for help in promoting the work. Sharing Sparks’ desire for popular appeal, Van Schaack asked in April 1842 if he would recommend his book to booksellers and help to get it written up in the North American Review.42 Concerned that his publisher was not doing enough to promote his book, Van Schaack then added a month later that, ‘I am, from experience, satisfied, that there is only one way that I can get it into the hands of individuals, and that is by personal appeals + letters.’43 If Sparks could write to leading literary figures in the Boston area and tell them about the book, Van Schaack declared, ‘I have no doubt it would lead to sales in most if not all cases, + the book being thus put in circulation in a few leading families would get into the hands of others, be made the subject of conversation, & I shall then have no fear for the result.’44 Sparks accordingly obliged, using his connections within Boston’s intellectual elite to bring attention to The Life of Peter Van Schaack. After asking John Gorham Palfrey to ‘Get from Mr. [Francis] Bowen a review,’ which ‘may be easily done, + will be interesting,’ he sent a copy to George Bancroft with the injunction, ‘I sent you a copy of Van Schaack’s book, first, because it is a good book; secondly, because it is in your line; and, thirdly, because I want you to write a word in its favor for the Morning Post . . . This work is a useful one. Pray write a notice of it, as brief as you please, suited to call attention to it; – & say in the notice that the book may be found at Little & Brown’s.’45 Yet if Sparks used his letters to help bring popular attention to Van Schaack’s work, this shared concern with attracting readers could at the same time limit how far he was willing to go in redeeming the loyalists, as he implied in his advice to George Atkinson Ward in July 1842. Even more unabashed in his deference to Sparks’ opinion than Van Schaack was, Ward sent Sparks a draft of his memoir of his great grand-uncle Samuel Curwen asking whether it merited publication, and telling Sparks that his decision to go ahead was contingent on Sparks’ approval. While assuring Ward that he considered his memoir worthy of printing, Sparks nonetheless advised Ward to change or eliminate his preface to the work. ‘There are some things . . . which I would alter,’ Sparks

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explained. ‘A defence of the Tories will not accord with the public opinion of the present day. I am not sure but the whole may as well be omitted. You see I am frank, because you request it. But in such matters every man must judge for himself.’46 Telling Sparks that all of his suggestions would be ‘strictly observed,’ Ward did not specify the changes he would make to his memoir in the reply he wrote three days later, but in the final version of the book he confined his professed desire ‘for a proper vindication’ of the loyalists to a broad declaration of his hopes of redeeming them from ‘whatever obloquy has been unjustly cast upon their names.’47 Moreover, he was also careful to qualify this statement of intent with the disclaimer that he presented his work, ‘without endorsing principles at variance with the spirit of the age,’ suggesting that he had heeded Sparks’ specific warnings about the dangers of championing the loyalists too vociferously.48 Indeed, Ward’s correspondence with Sparks itself served as a means of pre-empting public criticism and legitimizing the historical value of his work, as Ward cites Sparks’ ‘favorable opinion’ of it and thanks him for his ‘encouraging letters’ in the published preface, thereby converting Sparks’ private commendation into an instrument of public promotion.49 Thus Sparks’ epistolary advice helped promote Ward’s reassessment of the loyalists while at the same time limiting its extent. Sparks continued to play this dual role in his favorable response, in a much later letter, to the revised 1845 edition of Ward’s memoir of Curwen. Here Sparks makes both the extent and limits of his willingness to question patriotic myths about the Revolution even clearer in the course of affirming the value of Ward’s reassessment of the loyalists as a contribution to the cause of truth. As the losers in the Revolution, Sparks asserted, the loyalists, like Native Americans, had not been able to tell their own story, resulting in an account skewed in favor of the victors. Recognizing how much the recording of history was a function of perspective, Sparks declared to Ward that: In all wars particularly in civil wars, there are outrages on both sides, and the conquering party tells its story in its own way, concealing or excusing its own faults, and exaggerating those of its opponents. Witness the accounts which the Romans have given of the Carthaginians, and the manner in which our writers have described the Indian wars. If Hannibal or Sassacus had written histories, we should now see important portions of history under a different aspect.50 For Sparks, then, by presenting the viewpoint of the loyalists, works like Ward’s provided a valuable corrective to this bias that would contribute to a fuller understanding of historical truth. Yet, as Sparks also made plain, his willingness to entertain the loyalist perspective did not mean that he questioned the legitimacy of the Revolution. On the contrary, precisely because of his faith in the overall rightness of the Revolution, he believed that Americans could afford to acknowledge some of its faults without tarnishing its reputation, for, as he noted, ‘no cause, that is, no good cause will suffer by knowing the whole truth.’51 Sparks thus saw no conflict between his interest in the loyalists and his nationalist desire to vindicate the Revolution. Sparks revealed how his commitment to truth and his nationalist purposes converged perhaps most fully in his exchanges with Lorenzo Sabine, though. As was the case with Ward, Sparks’ interest in and approval of Sabine’s work played an important role in encouraging his fellow historian in this endeavor, and his advice to Sabine simultaneously enhanced the claims of The American Loyalists to truth and scholarship and the force of its patriotic message. Although Sabine had made a place for himself among

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Boston’s intellectual elite through his contributions to the North American Review, his modest social standing as a merchant and his residence in Maine put him on the outer margins of that circle, giving added weight to Sparks’ approbation for his work. Indeed, he expressed an unalloyed pleasure at Sparks’ praise, declaring in December 1845, for example, that he could ‘[not] help smiling, my dear sir, at what the master spirit of our historical & biographical literature, says of my scanty stock of knowledge of the Loyalists.’52 Originating as his work did in his personal encounters with the descendants of loyalists, Sabine took a distinctly empathetic and biographical approach to his subject. Describing himself to Sparks as ‘revolution-mad from a boy,’ Sabine admitted that before he came to Maine, he had never even considered ‘that there was more than one side to the Revolution.’53 But with the realization of his close proximity to the descendants of the loyalists across the border in Canada, he had decided ‘to learn every thing that was to be known of these our unhappy countrymen,’ with the result that he was able ‘to complete several hundred brief biographical notices,’ based on both his interviews with loyalist descendants and his research in books and documentary sources on the Revolution.54 Moved by the stories he had been told of individual loyalist sufferings, Sabine at the same time made clear that his personal sympathy for the loyalists did not take away from his fervent attachment to the Revolution, when he declared to Sparks of his finished book: ‘You will find it, I think, Whig to the very back-bone, though mild and merciful to the poor Tories.’55 Thus Sparks did not need to tell Sabine to tone down his defense of the loyalists, as he had with Ward, for Sabine shared Sparks’ adamant belief in the legitimacy of the Revolution. To the contrary, Sparks’ emendations to Sabine’s work sought to give it a more historical character and strengthen its claims to scholarship. But in doing so, Sparks actually enhanced the power of its nationalist message. Recommending that Sabine include ‘a long Introduction, of an historical character,’ Sparks also pushed Sabine to place his material in a larger context and to ground his discussion of that context more firmly in truth through additional primary sources, such as those pertaining to loyalist claims for confiscated property.56 Further, Sparks insisted: ‘It will add to the historical value, if you will give references to your authorities.’57 But here, even as Sparks reveals his commitment to impartial scholarship in his injunctions to citation and his recommendations for more research in primary sources, the content of his recommendations demonstrates the limits of his sympathy for the loyalists and reveals how his desire to give Sabine’s work a more historical cast actually furthers a nationalist purpose. For in his assertion that the ‘British government were very liberal to the Loyalists,’ who ‘presented enormous claims, each one estimating his loss according to his fancy,’ Sparks effectively mitigates Sabine’s sympathy for the sufferings of his subjects.58 And by pointing to how the loyalists ‘received a great deal more than the states ever realized from the sale of their lands,’ Sparks indirectly exonerates Americans from criticism over the injustice of their confiscation policy.59 Sabine himself then echoed some of these viewpoints in the lengthy essay he subsequently wrote to preface his biographical dictionary, claiming in his response to Sparks’ letter that: ‘The historical view you mention, I have had in mind since you first suggested it.’60 This introductory essay mixes the influence of Sparks’ emphasis with Sabine’s own distinctive standpoint, as Sabine challenges the prevailing view of the Revolution as a unified movement in favor of abstract political principle by chronicling the nature and extent of loyalist opposition in each state, and by interpreting it

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as an economic struggle to free labor from British commercial restraints. Yet in making this argument, he in the end affirms all the more decidedly Sparks’ belief in the necessity and justifiability of the Revolution, declaring at one point that: ‘For a higher or holier purpose than this, men have never expended their money, or poured out their life-blood in battle!’61 Sparks’ role in proposing the idea of the preface only made his approval of it all the more significant for Sabine. Telling Sparks he was undeterred by the prospect of public attacks on his work, he underscored the value he placed on Sparks’ favorable opinion when he wrote in March 1847 that, ‘I am anxious that you of all my friends, shall think the historical essay which precedes the biographical notices, accurate, just, and conceived in good taste.’62 Indeed, Sparks’ approval provided more than just a source of personal affirmation for Sabine, as his prediction that he would be unfazed by critical reviews proved unfounded. Complaining bitterly to Sparks in March 1848 about what he believed were unjustified aspersions on his patriotism, he remarked sarcastically of the denunciations of him as a ‘Tory’ that: ‘By this reasoning, you are a Traitor, because you have produced a life of Benedict Arnold . . . and a Tory like myself, because you have admitted into your [Library of American Biography], a life of Count Rumford.’63 Suggesting how he viewed private letters as both a refuge that provided a buffer from the unpleasantness of public strife and a vehicle for venting his frustration with it, Sabine then apologized to Sparks for his diatribe: ‘It relieves me to tell you as occasions occur, of my progress, and of the obstacles to my progress, in the historical line.’64 Moreover, in asking Sparks for his permission to quote a letter from him praising the biographical dictionary, Sabine, like Ward, hoped to convert Sparks’ private approval for his work into an instrument of public sanction. Sabine assured Sparks that he would not print his letter without his permission, out of his strong conviction that ‘private letters should be sacred.’65 In response, Sparks urged Sabine not to take the criticisms of his work and the accusations of Toryism seriously, and reassured him that ‘the book will ever be regarded by all competent judges, as furnishing valuable materials for history, collected with fidelity, and patient research, exhibiting internal evidence of high authority and meriting the confidence of all who are seriously employed in seeking for truth.’66 Echoing Leopold von Ranke’s definition of truth as a ‘strict presentation of the facts,’ Sparks declared to Sabine that a ‘history is a collection of facts,’ and maintained that The American Loyalists contained no more errors than any other comparable work.67 As much as Sparks recognized how the judgment of history was a function of perspective in his arguments for reassessing Native Americans and loyalists, then, he only went so far in that recognition. In basing truth on the aggregation of facts and making it a matter of accuracy or error, Sparks ultimately defined truth in Rankean terms as an objective entity to be discovered by the historian.68 In praising Sabine’s biographical dictionary on this basis, not only did Sparks legitimize Sabine’s nationalist viewpoint as grounded in truth; he denied that Sabine’s work contained a viewpoint at all by making it appear to be simply the emanation of fact, thereby turning the nationalist perspective they shared into a reflection of objective reality and invalidating any challenges to it as a misrepresentation of truth, rather than a legitimate difference of opinion. Sparks’ correspondence with his fellow historians thus served to at once express and contain historiographical dissent, to simultaneously include and exclude, and to offer both a private refuge from public contention and an instrument of public influence. Even as his letters allowed Sparks to mediate and transcend his interpretive and

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methodological differences with other historians, they at the same time revealed the limits to his acceptance of conflict. If his openness to disagreement was premised on a recognition of the subjective character of historical analysis, Sparks could only go so far down that line, as he simultaneously affirmed a staunch belief in an objective truth independent of the viewer. And if, in his letters, Sparks revealed his willingness to question patriotic myths vilifying Native Americans and loyalists, he also ultimately reinforced exceptionalist assumptions about the nation’s transcendent destiny in doing so. While the medium of letter-writing provided Sparks with an important vehicle for instilling his commitment to impartial truth and scholarship, then, it at the same time demonstrated how that commitment went hand in hand with his nationalist purposes.

Notes 1. See Sparks, The Writings of George Washington. These criticisms began to gain ground at the end of the nineteenth century (see, for example, Adams, The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2: 265–78, 479–506). For subsequent accounts of how Sparks’ editorial practices embody the supposed backwardness of antebellum American historical writing, see: Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians, 100–13; Wish, The American Historian, 48–55; and Cappon, ‘American Historical Editors,’ and ‘Jared Sparks: The Preparation of an Editor.’ 2. On Sparks’ influence as a historian, see Casper, Constructing American Lives, 135–53, and Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth, 30–51. 3. For more biographical background on Sparks, see Adams, The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks. 4. On how the New England elites looked to culture as a medium for public influence, see: Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism, 86–91; Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy, 88–100; Field, ‘The Birth of Secular High Culture,’ 578–95, and The Crisis of the Standing Order, 85–110; and Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 174–204. 5. Jared Sparks, Letter to William Prescott, 9 March 1841, in Prescott, Correspondence, 213. 6. Jared Sparks, Letter to George Bancroft, 20 January 1835, in Bancroft, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 7. Ibid. 8. On this dominance, see Callcott, History in the United States, 61, and Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism, 118–47. 9. On this controversy, see Adams, The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2: 479–506, and Casper, Constructing American Lives, 192–5. 10. Sparks, A Reply to the Strictures, 6. 11. Sparks, Letter to Lord Mahon, 42. 12. Ibid, 43. 13. Lord Mahon, Letter to George Ticknor, January 1853, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. On the peaceful conclusion to this controversy, see Adams, The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2: 504–6. 14. Sparks, Letter to Lord Mahon, 21 October 1854, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147j. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. On the view of Headley as a popular historian, and the relationship between popular and scholarly history in this period more broadly, see Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth, 46–8.

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19. Joel Tyler Headley, Letter to Jared Sparks, 30 December 1846, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. 20. Ibid. For similarities to Elizabeth Ellet’s ambivalent relationship with Sparks see Casper, Constructing American Lives, 163. 21. Sparks, Letter to Joel Tyler Headley, 14 July 1847, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147h. 22. Ibid. 23. For more on Sparks’ desire to balance popularity with his belief in the importance of documents as a basis for truth, see Casper, Constructing American Lives, 136–42. 24. For more on purposes and approach in the Library of American Biography, see ibid. 141–9. 25. Sparks, Letter to Charles Upham, 27 November 1832, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147f. 26. Ibid. 27. Charles Upham, Letter to Jared Sparks, 15 December 1834, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. 28. Ibid. 29. For more on Upham’s understanding of how primary documents would further his Romantic understanding of truth, see Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth, 136–7. On the broader nineteenth-century view of history as a form of Romantic art, see Levin, History as Romantic Art. 30. Charles Upham, Letter to Jared Sparks, December 1834, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. 31. Charles Upham, Letter to Jared Sparks, 13 January 1835, in ibid. 32. See Prescott, Letter to Jared Sparks, 1 February 1841, in Correspondence, 203–4. 33. Jared Sparks, Letter to William Prescott, 9 March 1841, in Prescott, Correspondence, 212. 34. On Bancroft’s commitment to these critical methods, see: Nye, George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel, 94–8; Handlin, George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat, 65–6, 126–7, 341–2; and Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth, 143–52. 35. Sparks, Letter to Robert Southey, 2 June 1828, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147d. 36. Jared Sparks, Letter to George Edward Ellis, 25 April 1844, in George Edward Ellis Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. For more on how many of the contributors to the Library of American Biography likewise challenged the vilification of Native Americans, see Casper, Constructing American Lives, 146. 37. Jared Sparks, Letter to George Edward Ellis, 25 April 1844, in George Edward Ellis Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. Nonetheless, Sparks would only go so far in his sympathy for Native Americans. As much as he lamented the injustices they had suffered at the hands of white Americans, he in the end still affirmed the inevitability of their extermination and in this way reconciled their destruction with his nationalist faith in America’s exceptionalist mission. It was precisely for this reason that he believed it was so important to record their history accurately, since soon that was all that would be left of them. See, for example, Sparks, Letter to Henry Whiting, 11 May 1831, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147e. 40. For more on this trend in mid-nineteenth-century historical writing, see Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth, 212–36, and Tamarkin, Anglophilia, 149–65. 41. Sparks, Letter to Catharine Sedgwick, 28 October 1833, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147f. 42. See Henry Van Schaack, Letter to Jared Sparks, 15 April 1842, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153.

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43. Henry Van Schaack, Letter to Jared Sparks, 18 May 1842, in ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Jared Sparks, Letter to John Gorham Palfrey, 16 May 1842, in Palfrey Family Papers, Houghton Library; Jared Sparks, Letter to George Bancroft, 24 May 1842, in Bancroft, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 46. Sparks, Letter to George Atkinson Ward, 4 July 1842, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147g. 47. George Atkinson Ward, Letter to Jared Sparks, 7 July 1842, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153; Ward, ‘Preface,’ iii. 48. Ibid. iv. 49. Ibid. 50. Sparks, Letter to George Atkinson Ward, 20 May 1845, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147h. 51. Ibid. 52. Lorenzo Sabine, Letter to Jared Sparks, 31 December 1845, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. For more on Sparks’ influence on Sabine, see Casper, Constructing American Lives, 152. 53. Lorenzo Sabine, Letter to Jared Sparks, 31 December 1845, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. 54. Ibid. 55. Lorenzo Sabine, Letter to Jared Sparks, 20 March 1847, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. 56. Jared Sparks, Letter to Lorenzo Sabine, 10 August 1846, in Lorenzo Sabine Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Lorenzo Sabine, Letter to Jared Sparks, 21 August 1846, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. 61. Sabine, The American Loyalists, 2. 62. Lorenzo Sabine, Letter to Jared Sparks, 20 March 1847, in Sparks, Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 153. 63. Lorenzo Sabine, Letter to Jared Sparks, 11 March 1848, in ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Sparks, Letter to Lorenzo Sabine, 28 July 1848, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147h. 67. Quoted in Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth, 79; Sparks, Letter to Lorenzo Sabine, 28 July 1848, in Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, Houghton Library, MS Sparks 147h. 68. For this definition of the Rankean ideal of objectivity, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 1–2, and Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History, 2–7.

Works Cited Adams, H. B. (1893), The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co. Bancroft, G. (1816–90), George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA, Ms. N-1795. Bassett, J. S. (1917), The Middle Group of American Historians, New York: Macmillan Company. Callcott, G. (1970), History in the United States, 1800–1860: Its Practice and Purpose, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Cappon, L. (1973), ‘American Historical Editors Before Jared Sparks,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 30: 375–98. Cappon, L. (1978), ‘Jared Sparks: The Preparation of an Editor,’ Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 90: 3–21. Casper, S. E. (1999), Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Cheng, E. K. (2008), The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784–1860, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Ellis, G. E. (1814–94), George Edward Ellis Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts, Ms. N-1172. Field, P. (1997), ‘The Birth of Secular High Culture: The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review and Its Critics,’ Journal of the Early Republic, 17: 575–609. Field, P. (1998), The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Foletta, M. (2001), Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Handlin, G. (1984), George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat, New York: Harper & Row. Howe, D. W. (1998), The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Krieger, L. (1977), Ranke: The Meaning of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levin, D. (1959), History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Novick, P. (1988), That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, New York: Cambridge University Press. Nye, R. (1944), George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Prescott, W. H. (1925), The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, ed. R. Wolcott, Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co. Sabine, L. (1803–77), Lorenzo Sabine Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, M 1978-057. Sabine, L. (1847), The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in the War of the Revolution, Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown. Sheidley, H. (1998), Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America, 1815–1836, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Sparks, J. (1789–1866), Jared Sparks Collection of American Manuscripts, 1560–1843, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Sparks 1–48, 50–163. Sparks, J. (1834), The Writings of George Washington; Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, Selected and Published from the Original Manuscripts, Boston: American Stationers’ Co. Sparks, J. (1842), Letter to John Gorham Palfrey, 16 May, Palfrey Family Papers, 1713–1915, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1704: Part I (862). Sparks, J. (1852), Letter to Lord Mahon, Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. Sparks, J. (1852), A Reply to the Strictures of Lord Mahon and Others: On the Mode of Editing the Writings of Washington, Cambridge: J. Bartlett. Tamarkin, E. (2008), Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ward, G. A. (1842), ‘Preface,’ in S. Curwen, Journal and Letters of the Late Samuel Curwen, ed. G. A. Ward, New York and Boston: C. S. Francis & Co. and J. H. Francis, iii–iv. Wish, H. (1960), The American Historian: A Social-Intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past, New York: Oxford University Press.

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32 DEFENSES AND MASKS AND POSES IN HENRY ADAMS’ LETTERS John C. Orr

I

n 1850 a young Henry Adams wrote his name – H. B. Adams – in the front cover of a copy of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son (1774).1 He also included the date, allowing us to identify him as twelve years old at the time. When he actually read the book is less clear, but all the evidence is that he read it as a young man, rendering one passage that he underlined quite telling. There are few sections that contain any sign that he engaged with the book, but within Letter CXXIX in Volume I he underlined a couple of sentences stressing the importance of remaining silent in public, an admonition that ends ‘one cannot keep one’s own private affairs too secret.’2 That mantra would recur throughout Adams’ own letters from his later years as he routinely remarked that ‘sense to me means silence’ (LHA, 5: 170). Ten years after receiving the Chesterfield volume, Adams was beginning to work as his father’s private secretary, first while the elder Adams served in Congress and then following his father’s appointment as American consul to the Court of St. James. From Washington, D.C., on 9 December 1860, Henry wrote to his older brother, Charles, about an idea he was formulating. ‘I propose to write you this winter a series of private letters to show how things look,’ he began, before noting: I fairly confess that I want to have a record of this winter on file, and though I have no ambition nor hope to become a Horace Walpole, I still would like to think that a century or two hence when everything else about us is forgotten, my letters might still be read and quoted as a memorial of manners and habits at the time of the great secession of 1860. At the same time you will be glad to hear all the gossip and to me it will supply the place of a Journal. (LHA, 1: 204)3 Interestingly, his motivation here is less to capture the heady political debates leading up to the American Civil War than to represent the culture surrounding those debates, an indication that he was already considering that his future lay in the semiotics of culture rather than in the political arena. I begin with these two moments from the young man’s life because they strike me as emblematic of the tension that informs Adams’ entire biography: an intense desire to protect his privacy and in some ways disappear, contrasted with a fierce ambition to be a public intellectual whose works will be remembered for centuries to come. That inherent complication manifests itself in much of his writing, both in his private letters and in his published volumes, and indeed the liminal nature of the letter as a private statement made in what is ultimately a public forum perfectly encapsulates the

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aesthetics of the man. The Henry Adams who emerges from his vast correspondence was a multifaceted individual, a towering intellectual whose dedication to and experimentation with the possibilities of linguistic expression mirrored his desire to be both present and absent at the same time. Just as many of his literary works seek to deflect attention from their author, he likewise restricts access to himself in the more personal medium of the letter, while still affecting the conceit that the letter functions as a longdistance personal chat. In a few instances, though, the occasion for a letter causes these self-imposed barriers to weaken, even if they do not entirely crumble. The most important thing that must be kept in mind when broaching any aspect of Adams’ life and work is the intense public attention his family engendered. Henry was of the fourth generation of the Adams family dynasty that originated with John Adams, and Henry’s grandfather, John Quincy Adams, the second and sixth Presidents of the United States respectively. Henry himself shunned politics for a scholarly and literary life, though his associates included such turn-of-the-century political luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Hay. His true fascination was with historical process and the transformation of societies over the course of time, a topic he initially explored in his monumental 1890 work The History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, before turning to medieval France in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), and finally his own life in The Education of Henry Adams (1907). Yet many of his works experimented with what William Merrill Decker has called ‘textual dispersions of ego’; via a process of simultaneously appearing in some public form and deflecting attention from himself as the author.4 His first novel Democracy (1880), a satire of American politics, was published anonymously, while his second novel Esther (1884) was released under the female pseudonym ‘Frances Snow Compton.’ His privately published Memoirs of Arii Taimai (1901), more commonly known as Tahiti, went one step further and was written in the voice of an old chiefess of Tahiti’s Teva clan. As he put it to John Hay in 1882, after asserting that he wanted neither ‘notoriety nor neglect,’ his ‘ideal of authorship would be to have a famous double with another name, to wear what honors I could win’ (LHA, 2: 463). Lastly, his metafictional autobiography, The Education, privately published in 1907 before its posthumous publication in 1918, was written in the third person, a ploy that allowed him to claim that the ‘object of the study is the garment, not the figure [beneath].’5 Thus, when he sent Henry James a copy of The Education in 1908, he urged the novelist ‘to take your own life in the same way, in order to prevent biographers from taking it in theirs’ (LHA, 6: 136). Adams was propelled by a desire to tell his own life story, itself an act of willful public self-exposure, yet a part of the motivation to do so was effectively a desire to commit suicide, the ultimate act of self-imposed public disappearance. As Carolyn Porter phrases it, his narrative approach represented a ‘complex mixture of hubris and self-effacement.’6 Crucially, that same mixture can be found in his correspondence. The Adams clan had a history of blurring the lines between the public and private realm through each generation’s publications of their ancestors’ letters and private papers. In a letter of 1900 intended to forestall one such publication, Adams noted to his younger brother Brooks that thanks ‘entirely to our family-habit of writing, we exist in the public mind only as a typical expression of disagreeable qualities. Our dogmatism is certainly odious, but it was not extravagant till we made it a record’

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(LHA, 5: 100). Earl Harbert has argued cogently, in this respect, for an Adams heritage that was ‘imposed upon’ Henry, whose life’s work can be read as his attempt ‘to discover and set down in his own unique way all that it meant to be an Adams.’7 One radical option was to drop out and renounce the family name and its heritage, a ploy that Henry considered while in his twenties. In a letter to Charles from November 1867, for instance, he wrote: John [their oldest brother] is a political genius; let him follow the family bent. You are a lawyer, and with a few years patience will be the richest and most respectable of us all. I claim my right to part company with you both. I never will make a speech, never run for office, never belong to a party. I am going to plunge under the stream. For years you will hear nothing of any publication of mine – perhaps never, who knows. I do not mean to tie myself to anything, but I do mean to make it impossible for myself to follow the family go-cart . . . I shall probably remain under water a long time. If you see me come up, it will be with an oyster and a pearl inside. If not, why – so! (LHA, 1: 557) The spatial metaphor here, of sinking beneath the surface of the water, perfectly captures Henry’s desire: he is not leaving the stream, but is disappearing within it in order to create the pearl. He is imagining for himself the invisible artistic action that his later life and work attest to. An important part of Adams’ ploy to avoid detection was to employ various personae, and his letters, like so many of his published works, stand as a demonstration of that tactic. Depending upon whom among his major correspondents he was communicating with, the topics being discussed, the tone of the letter, and the style of writing at times varied significantly. His first major correspondent was his slightly older brother Charles, who served in the Union army during the Civil War, while Henry was in London serving their father. Understandably, these letters act at times as what Joanne Jacobson has called ‘an arena of conflict’ between the two siblings.8 While in London in the 1860s, Adams met Charles Milness Gaskell, and their close personal and epistolary relationship lasted until Adams’ death. Letters to Gaskell often treat literary and artistic matters, and they also contain some of the darkest of Adams’ pessimistic meditations. John Hay’s friendship with Adams dated from the late 1870s; the letters written to him are among the most playful and witty in his epistolary oeuvre, and naturally politics is a constant topic. Elizabeth Cameron, the much younger second wife of a Pennsylvania senator, became a member of Adams’ social circle in the early 1880s and his primary correspondent – as well as object of his affections – after Marian (Clover) Adams, Henry’s wife, committed suicide in 1885. Letters to Cameron move seamlessly from social to political gossip, and at times contain elliptical statements of his ardor. And finally, Adams began a stimulating intellectual relationship with his younger brother Brooks around the year 1893, filling letters to him with economic data and prognostications while largely avoiding humor or gossip. It is wise not to overstate Adams’ conscious manipulation of his persona in any of these correspondences, but that he did attempt to exert some control over the external recognition and understanding of himself is evident from a remark to his niece, Mabel Hooper La Farge, in 1911 that ‘[I] will not have my defences and masks and poses betrayed and broken down. They are set up to prevent my betraying myself, and the only effect of attacking them is to make me brutally defensive’ (LHA, 6: 434). That

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same split between a public persona and the individual shielded by it also appeared in his poem ‘Buddha and Brahma’ (1915), where Adams makes a distinction between the life choices of the Buddha and a Rajah who parted ways with him. While the Buddha withdraws from the world in order to unite his ‘soul with the great soul from which it started,’ the Rajah chooses a separate path in order to remain active in the world.9 The consequence, however, was that ‘we, who cannot fly the world, must seek / To live two separate lives; one, in the world / Which we must ever seem to treat as real; / The other in ourselves, behind a veil / Not to be raised without disturbing both.’10 The other behind the veil here no doubt corresponds to the self that Adams’ poses and masks were designed to protect from betrayal throughout his letters. Another complication in accessing Adams’ identity through his correspondence is the fact that the sheer volume of his extant letters is staggering, stretching far beyond the major interlocutors identified above. Approximately 4,500 missives were gathered by the editors of the now-standard six-volume Harvard University Press edition of The Letters of Henry Adams, though in an ‘Editorial Note’ to Volume 4 they observe that they had to omit 245 letters from the first three volumes, while from the concluding three volumes they were forced to omit – by dint of the already bulging nature of the project – 1,525 letters.11 In addition, a small packet of letters from Adams to one of his regular correspondents has only recently came to light, years after publication of this definitive collection.12 Adams also clearly wrote to individuals who did not save his letters or who, like the artist John La Farge, Adams’ traveling companion on trips to Japan and the South Seas, did save them only for them to be later lost. ‘I give you full authority to burn or otherwise destroy any trace of me that may be found among La Farge’s accumulations of travel,’ Adams responded to a request from the artist’s business manager in 1911, shortly after La Farge’s death, and so no letters to La Farge exist (LHA, 6: 75). On other occasions too, Adams encouraged correspondents to destroy his letters. One such plea was made to Elizabeth Cameron in 1891 when he complained that his letters ‘are so disagreeable, egotistic and yawpy that I quiver at the thought of their existence, and entreat you, in mere kindness to me, to burn them’ (LHA, 3: 567). She did not, though, and by the end of his life, he noted that she ‘must have tons which you can select to print together with your own,’ before encouraging her at least to name a literary executor in order to organize his letters and those of other members of their social circle, ‘as much because it would occupy and amuse you for years, as to immortalise you or us’ (LHA, 6: 703). By this time, of course, Adams was a very adept letter-writer, but that had not always been the case. Adams’ first letters date from when he was attempting to study law in Germany at the end of the 1850s, before abandoning that endeavor and setting off on what was essentially his Grand Tour. He gained the discipline necessary to carry on regular and multiple correspondences, however, over the course of the subsequent decades and especially while employed in London as his father’s private secretary, since a part of his job there was the handling of correspondence. The very neat hand he developed was, in this respect, a necessity for his work copying official state documents. When, in 1896, he responded to Charles’s request for information regarding these years to aid the older brother in the biography he was writing of their father, Henry responded: ‘You have of course all of the letter-books which I kept in London, with the index of letters received’ (LHA, 4: 377). The necessary care over correspondence that he took in that official role, then, provided him an initial lesson in the functions and limitations of the letter.

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One of the first and most obvious functions of any letter is to communicate a state of being, and that kind of quotidian element is a constant presence in Adams’ correspondence. He often begins a letter with a statement about the weather at the time of writing. ‘Here the day was springlike till afternoon when the wind turned north, and blew violently,’ he wrote to Elizabeth Cameron in 1893. ‘This morning my veracious thermometer registers 25°’ (LHA, 4: 87). And in an era predating modern medicine, the slightest alteration in one’s health and the health of others was understandably a concern. After reporting on John Hay’s children while traveling with his family, for example, Adams concluded: ‘This, then, is our health-report, a dull and futile matter except to those that are conscious of having bodies and ailments, but not without interest to such’ (LHA, 4: 536). His long diary letters from the South Pacific likewise, and understandably, demonstrated an effort to describe the scene in front of him, whether that be the people and cultures he encountered or the natural world that was confronting him. ‘Naked to the waist, their rich skins glistened with cocoanut oil. Around their heads and necks they wore garlands of green leaves in strips, like seaweeds, and these too glistened with oil, as though the girls had come out of the sea,’ he wrote in the former vein, describing the dancers in a presentation of the siva on Samoa; while in the latter vein he wrote from Tahiti that: ‘The light never remains the same for an hour at a time. Even the colors shift incessantly. A coral reef which at ten o’clock is green with the intense lustre that only glass can represent, is deep purple at noon, blue at two o’clock, and may be brown or grey or violet or rose or orange or red before dark’ (LHA, 3: 290, 414). Equally, for the international correspondent, a running knowledge of steamer schedules made an epistolary relationship feasible, and more than a few letters close with a variation on a comment from 1908 about the need to ‘post this letter tonight’ in order for it ‘to sail’ the next day (LHA, 6: 165). As much as Adams’ letters are at times glimpses into the labyrinths of his mind, then, the physical world surrounding him is rarely absent from his communications. In a draft of an unsent letter that was to accompany a late essay, ‘The Rule of Phase Applied to History’ (1909), Adams remarked on what the intended rhetorical approach of The Education had been: it was, he observed, ‘meant as a letter; garrulous, intimate, confidential, as is permitted in order to serve a social purpose, but would sound a false note for the public ear’ (LHA, 6: 205). The letter as he theorizes it here is, in other words, essentially a chat between friends, a meeting site for two private individuals removed from the gaze of public scrutiny. Indeed, on several occasions across the sixty years of his correspondence, Adams spoke of a letter as if it were a physical manifestation of the other person in the conversational pairing. As readers of letters in a printed or (increasingly) digital form, we must remind ourselves of their actual physicality – the recognition of familiar handwriting, the whiff of faint odors, the process of opening and removing the letter from the envelope – and how these factors could render a letter a kind of metonym for its writer. As William Merrill Decker has pointed out, during the nineteenth century (as well as before and since) ‘the inscribed letter often communicates in ways that depend absolutely on the conceit of the sender’s embodiment in the artifact sent.’13 In a letter to Charles Milnes Gaskell in 1871, for example, that Adams had started but not completed, he picked the conversation up the following morning: ‘Ho! a letter from you. You walk into my door, or rather through it, arm and arm with Mrs. Sturgis, and naturally I lay myself out for no end of gossip’ (LHA, 2: 104). And to Elizabeth Cameron in 1889, as his infatuation

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was nearing its apex, he wrote from Canada: ‘My only surviving notion of happiness is the sense that some one, to whom one is attached, is sitting in the next room. In the Russell House at Ottawa such a sensation is not within the bounds of sanity; but a letter is a sort of substitute for it’ (LHA, 3: 196). Here, then, as well as witnessing the kind of indirect declaration of affection that Adams often employed with Cameron, we see how the act of writing the letter itself has created the presence of the recipient. As the distance between them increased, Adams became bolder in his declarations of love for Cameron, as did the embodiment of the person by the letter. From Tahiti, for instance, to which he fled in part to avoid the complications his growing love would cause, he gushed that he knew ‘no new combination of love and angel to offer you,’ before returning to the metonymic physicality of the letter itself, when he related that ‘you can at least to some degree imagine what sort of emotion I might be likely to feel at having you take me by the hand and carry me on with your daily life till I feel as though I had been with you all the month’ (LHA, 3: 423). And even when a letter was not an overt metonym for the other in their correspondence, the trace of that function casts an intriguing light on his statement to Cameron a few weeks later: ‘I shall take the letter to bed with me to read again when the dawn wakes me’ (LHA, 3: 449). Adams also sought out other methods to express his affections for Cameron that depended upon a kind of displacement.14 Thus, in 1888, he sent a letter to Martha Cameron, Elizabeth’s two-year-old daughter, that began: ‘I love you very much, and think of you a great deal, and want you all the time’ (LHA, 3: 137). He knew that he was pushing the boundaries of accepted conduct, and he acknowledged as much in a letter a few days later to Elizabeth herself, closing on: ‘Give Martha my tenderest love. Propriety forbids me to send as much to her mamma, so I remain only conventionally hers’ (LHA, 3: 142). Here Adams is employing a favorite rhetorical strategy that appears in much of his writing: praeteritio or paralipsis, whereby he indirectly distances himself from the statement he has made – the rhetorical equivalent of retreating behind a persona. Similarly, while translating medieval French ballads and chansons for Mont- Saint-Michel and Chartres, Adams rarely mentioned the process of writing the book to any of his correspondents, so the one chanson that he sent to Cameron is particularly revealing. It was his translation of ‘Chanson of Thibaud’ (c. 1230), a plea from a desperate lover to the woman who has not reciprocated his affections. The concluding couplet from each stanza reads, ‘Grace! lady; give me comfort to possess / A hope, one day’ (LHA, 5: 160). Although his stated request for sending the poem was to ‘tell me if it hitches anywhere,’ it seems more likely that he was primarily interested in the message of the poem rather than the faults of his translation (LHA, 5: 160). But epistolary indirection and restraint were not reserved solely for Elizabeth Cameron. Adams comprehended the limitations of the letter, and chief among his concerns was the need to maintain discretion when writing. Given that letters were at times clearly passed around among friends and family, Adams learned to maintain a respectful reserve in writing. One of his earliest letters to Charles, for example, while studying in Berlin, responded to the apparent admonition by his brother to be discreet in his letters. ‘Your remark about care in writing what the Gov. [their father] is to see, surprised me much more than your criticisms,’ Henry noted, ‘possessing as I do a mens conscia recti’ (LHA, 1: 18). Despite his clear conscience, however, he obviously took the lesson to heart. As an older man, it was he who gave advice to a younger sibling, this time to Brooks. In response to a new book Brooks had published, Adams contended, ‘I have,

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at awful cost, learned to hold my tongue, except in letters, and am getting nervous even about them,’ and returning to the same theme a few months later, he noted that: ‘Sense to me means silence; but all the more that one is silent to others, one needs to talk with oneself. That is my reason for writing letters. They are really to myself’ (LHA, 5: 100, 170). In this sense, then, Adams may very well have seen the letter as a site for working out his thoughts, but it clearly was not a journal, and he never forgot that a letter – if sent – entered into a public domain. This need for discretion was exacerbated not only by his family’s fame but by his associations with some of the cream of the social world, the people whose movements in public were incessantly tracked by the society pages in newspapers. Maintaining one’s standing in that world demanded very rigid rules of decorum – rules that Adams adhered to religiously – and that process necessarily affected not only the content but the very function of his letters. One important formality, for instance, involved providing and expecting letters of introduction. Thus, in 1883, he reported to John Hay that Elizabeth Cameron and her husband Donald were sailing to England before commenting, ‘I would like to give her letters, but cannot saddle my friends with Don’ (LHA, 2: 497). Instead, he wrote privately to his friends encouraging them to meet Mrs. Cameron. Likewise, one of the most curious of his surviving letters was occasioned by an apparent appeal to Adams from a disgraced member of their circle asking for help in being reinstated to good social standing. Adams railed against the impertinence of the man in a letter to Elizabeth Cameron, expressing much more hostility than he ever manifested regarding a political event, blustering that: ‘If a man is under ban, and tries to break the ban by forcing himself on one’s privacy, that man is hors la loi. The decision is final. Argument or discussion ceases’ (LHA, 5: 718). Here again, the breach of his privacy heightened his anger at the outlaw. Indeed, he was so outraged that he wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, a longtime acquaintance and then president of the United States, asking him to intervene with the man – who had once held a diplomatic post – in order to prevent a public scandal. Rarely did Adams so openly express any emotion. Nonetheless, Adams was a wicked social gossip and was as comfortable in the company of women as of men, so his letters to Elizabeth Cameron and other female associates often mention aspects of social scandals, although they studiously avoid discussing the actual event directly. He traded in this gossip, even though he was reluctant to be a regular fixture in society, preferring instead to host more intimate dinners at his home. To explain how he came upon a story, he often employed a trope of being Noah on the ark, relying on the birds sent out for information, a trope manifested in his case in the labors of his nieces who stayed with him in Washington, D.C., for extended periods of time. ‘The girls go out like doves for gossip,’ he informed Cameron in 1902, while sharing some juicy information with her (LHA, 5: 351). Yet, when they returned with stories, propriety limited the amount of detail that he would devolve in a letter. Thus, while providing Cameron with the outline of a scandal that was causing him to be ‘in deadly terror lest the whole awful story should get out,’ he concluded the discussion by noting, ‘I’ve no doubt that we shall know privately the whole story, and in that case we can tell it to you in Paris a month hence rather than write it’ (LHA, 4: 702). In another instance, after a meeting with a mutual friend, Adams described the acquaintance’s story as ‘a weird tale of Muscovy which I had better not write’ (LHA, 5: 232). And a letter to Cameron from 1905, after relating whom among their social set he

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had encountered in Paris, playfully concluded: ‘If you ever dare whisper one word of my letters, I’ll kill you’ (LHA, 5: 671). Significantly, then, while a letter may have the potential to mimic the personal conversation, its permanence as an artifact, the very aspect that made it the only viable mode of communication across vast distances, also makes it potentially dangerous for both writer and recipient. Indeed, the stakes were particularly high for someone like Adams. He was no mere member of an American upper class, and although he occasionally associated with them, he generally disdained the nouveau riche. Instead, he was an Adams, the offspring of presidents, and that heritage provided him a lifelong sense of belonging to an aristocracy. When studying in Berlin in 1860, for instance, he wrote to his mother lamenting the failure of Europeans to grasp his unique status as both ordinary citizen and heir apparent. ‘They’re not great enough,’ he declared, ‘to understand and appreciate the state of society in which the equals of their princes are only private persons, and they cannot conceive how a person whose ancestors have held in succession every position of dignity and power which their nation could give, can consider himself as their equal’ (LHA, 1: 77). As William Merrill Decker has noted, Adams’ relationship with the English lawyer and politician Charles Milnes Gaskell in particular ‘fostered the arrogance Adams assumed’ with others; likewise in his letters to Gaskell himself, ‘mandarin posture constitutes fellowship as Adams seeks to emulate the mannered aloofness of Gaskell’s class.’15 This identification never diminished, as is clear when Adams wrote to Gaskell in 1910, ‘our class is as defunct as the dodo’ (LHA, 6: 355). In truth, all of Adams’ associates were of a similar social standing. ‘You are a snob, you know,’ he wrote to Cameron in 1901, ‘and so am I, for that matter; and so are all our friends’ – a claim confirmed by most who met Adams (LHA, 5: 239). Nevertheless, his sense of being a member of a dispossessed aristocracy informed the narrative arc of The Education as well as his interactions with islanders during his South Pacific sojourn in 1890 and 1891. He wrote to John Hay from Samoa, for example, that in ‘former times a great chief went into battle with no thought of the common warrior . . . Chiefs fought only with chiefs,’ but now firearms had changed this stability. These days, Adams was told by a Samoan chief in ‘a voice of horror,’ it was the case that ‘any hunchback, behind a tree, can kill the greatest chief in Samoa’ (LHA, 3: 342). On Tahiti, his adoption into the Teva clan cemented his dislocation, since the Tevas had been the ruling tribe on Tahiti before being supplanted by the Pomares, a history he relates in Memoirs of Arii Taimai. Of the Tevas he noted in a letter to Gaskell that: ‘Polynesian chiefs are aristocrats such as one reads about in books; aristocrats with a backing of endless tradition and war’ (LHA, 3: 428). The Adams family was never known as a particularly jovial group of people, and no one was more aware of that than Henry. Late in life, he wrote to Cameron: ‘Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants’ (LHA, 6: 672). Indeed, he often identified his family with what he perceived to be a personality type characteristic of New Englanders – ‘narrow, nervous, self-distrustful often, always introspective, uneasy, and till lately, intolerant’ (LHA, 2: 323). He could easily have been describing himself. From his earliest days, he was prone to depression; at age twenty he was already complaining of ‘fits of crossness and disagreeable feelings,’ and after 1885 the nihilistic complaints in his correspondence are as regular as social gossip or political commentary (LHA, 1: 8). Viola Hopkins

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Winner, moreover, notes that after 1893 his letters are increasingly weakened by ‘formulaic ennui’ and ‘obsessive screeds against the degeneracy of the age.’16 Unfortunately, those screeds are at times anti-Semitic, since Adams, like many of his class, associated Jewry with money-lending, and his economic predictions of disaster were laid at the feet of bankers. The hysteria surrounding the Dreyfus affair in the late 1890s only concentrated his venom.17 Even if we accept that many of his ‘direct statements of world-weariness, nihilism, and alienation seem more often to be tainted with pose,’ the grief Adams suffered over his wife’s death should not be understated.18 Without doubt the blackness of his perspective on the world grew exponentially after Marian’s suicide in 1885. Thus to Elizabeth Cameron he confessed that: ‘There is always in my mind a queer sense of waiting for the skies to fall; probably the consequence of the one great shock of my life which left my nervous ganglia all tangled up’ (LHA, 5: 230). His relentless pessimism combined with his fierce loyalty garnered him the title from his friends of ‘Porcupinus Angelicus,’ but Adams successfully masked the depths of his despair from most of his correspondents.19 The few surviving fragments of his diary that escaped his systematic destruction, included in the Harvard Letters of Henry Adams, offer glimpses into his depression devoid of any poses. In an entry for 12 February 1888, Adams writes, ‘I am weary of myself and my own morbid imagination, but still more weary of the world’s clack and bustle, and the dreary recurrence of small talk’ (LHA, 3: 100). In May, memories of his wife’s descent into depression and suicide recur, and he observes in the journal, ‘I am almost alone except an occasional visit from Martha [Cameron] or her mother, and I have been sad, sad, sad. Three years!’ (LHA, 3: 114). And finally, in June, he records that: ‘I have had a gloomy week, not quite so desperate and wild as in my worst days, but, so far as I can remember, equally hopeless and weary’ (LHA, 3: 118). A letter from Henry Adams might have been personal, then, but it would never truly plumb the depths of his private anguish and despair. Nonetheless, William Merrill Decker accurately reads Adams’ late letters through the lens of bereavement, noting that the increase in his correspondence after 1885 indicates that it had ‘become his principal means of relieving loneliness.’20 The litany of loss that punctuates those letters is constant, and he was often the person survivors turned to for assistance in publishing the collected letters or biography of the dead. As he noted to Gaskell, he was ‘in a way, the literary executor of my circle, and, as last survivor, I am harnessed to their funeral hearse’ (LHA, 6: 43). Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, in addition to other genres memorializing the dead, he became increasingly adept at writing condolence letters. Indeed, some of his most beautiful and moving letters are occasioned by the death of an associate. A note to Lord Curzon acknowledging the death of his wife in 1906, for example, opens with a statement about why he waited to write before confessing that ‘even now I write rather to quiet my own memories than with any idea of quieting your pain. Twenty years ago when I went through the same suffering, I found relief only in the sudden revelation that I was not alone; that others were nursing the same acute memory of intolerable loss, like a secret society that silently opened its arms to let me in’ (LHA, 6: 23). The repetition of the word ‘quiet’ in the first sentence and the gentle alliteration of the last line indicate the care Adams took in constructing the letter. He concludes with a further reference to the brotherhood of bereavement and the recognition of language’s failure to signify the depths of its intensity: ‘I do not understand how we bear such suffering as we do

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when we lose them; but we have to be silent, for no expression approaches the pain. You know it all now. If you can put it in words you will speak not only for yourself, but for all of us who suffer’ (LHA, 6: 24). Whether from repeated loss or a constitutional proclivity to depression, Adams’ dour outlook also manifested itself in his philosophical perspective. As an older man, returning to the Roman stoics and Schopenhauer, Adams claimed in 1905 that there were but two schools of philosophy: ‘[O]ne turns the world into me; the other turns me into the world; and the result is the same. The so-called me is a very, very small and foolish puppy-dog, but it is all that exists, and it tries all its life to get a little bigger by enlarging its energies’ (LHA, 5: 660). These hints of solipsism recurred throughout the years, including his claim in 1915 that ‘my logic drives me further, to the unreality of all phenomena’ (LHA, 6: 692). Self-aggrandizement, however, was not restricted to one Adams; he thought it a family trait. ‘Everyone of us has to be fired out of a cannon to be roused into consciousness of anything but ourselves,’ he wrote a family friend in 1889 (LHA, 3: 162). That self-absorption combined with his tendency to cast his own internal dyspepsia onto the world led Adams to take a bleak view of most of the political events he lived through. As he meditated on the distant future of the U.S. in a letter to John Hay, he asked: ‘What is to happen then, I am curious to know, – very, – but I never shall; and I know only that whatever it is, it will not suit me’ (LHA, 5: 269). Not unfittingly, the most common trope of many of his letters, as well as The Education, is failure. His late letters, especially, are punctuated by a kind of mantra that only appears from time to time but that essentially expresses the mordancy he espoused: ‘My experience in life is to prepare always for the worst I could imagine; and, in all great matters, the worst I could imagine has proved to be invariably better than the actual result’ (LHA, 5: 239). One topic that affirmed his dire predictions and proved to be a recurrent theme throughout his letters – and indeed all of his late works – is the impact of technological development on the human condition. After the first confrontation between ironclad ships anywhere in the world took place during the Civil War, Adams wrote: ‘Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world’ (LHA, 1: 290). That theme would resonate loudly in the closing chapters of The Education, of course, and in a subsequent, less well-known, but crankier volume, A Letter to American Teachers of History (1910). In each book he turns to the physical sciences – particularly the second law of thermodynamics – in his quest to discover what he considered the science of history. Through charting increases in power, measured in the form of coal production, steamship development, and ever-expanding high explosives, he predicted via what he called his ‘dynamic theory’ that some cataclysm would occur when the forces reached an uncertain climax.21 As he put it in a 1902 letter: ‘Our mechanical power is now our master, and we must let it break our neck’ (LHA, 5: 431). By 1909, moreover, he was informing Brooks that his calculations of cataclysm were fixed ‘not at 1927 where we both came out on other grounds, but at 1917, ten years earlier. It may well be. The dead ride fast’ (LHA, 6: 217). Indeed, he lived long enough to see a version of that dire prediction fulfilled in the carnage of the Great War, about which he wrote to Cameron, a few months after the fighting began

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in Belgium and France: ‘Of course you will pick yourselves all up, and go on somehow, but you see, I can’t. We are done, – my civilisation and I. The whole thing is at an end, morally, and so am I’ (LHA, 6: 666). Admittedly, Adams’ misanthropy at times appears in comic form. Writing to Brooks in 1902, for example, he declared: ‘My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don’t in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to’ (LHA, 5: 400). Similarly, in 1908 he observed that the ‘world is now like a girl with bad teeth. Touch them anywhere and she screams. I am afraid of whispering. We are on the ragged edge of politics, finance, industry and time’ (LHA, 6: 124). And that same year he noted to Elizabeth Cameron that he was ‘a confirmed grumbler and pessimist, and my nervous system is a bundle of wasps, but really I have for many years depended on you to keep ’em quiet, and unless you help, I just buzz and beat. I hate buzzing’ (LHA, 6: 195). To express his sense of isolation, he even resorted at times to a play on the children’s song about being so unpopular that one is reduced to eating worms. Thus, in 1907, he closed a letter: ‘Nobody loves me, and I live on worms’ (LHA, 6: 96). This pose of nihilistic gleefulness was put to the test in the single most significant historical disaster of his later years, however: the sinking of the Titanic on 15 April 1912. At this point in his life, Adams retired to Paris for at least six months each year, so his letters contain regular commentary on the ease of different passages across the Atlantic. He had returned to America in December 1911 on the Titanic’s sister ship Olympic, and in early 1912, he announced that he had booked passage on the Titanic itself on its return voyage to England, set to depart on 20 April 1912. When the news of the sinking reached Adams, he was therefore understandably affected, if for no other reason than he was acquainted with more than a few of the 1,500 individuals who perished. Given his fascination with modern technological developments, the loss of the world’s fastest ocean-liner on its maiden voyage unsettled his perspective on the advancing nature of modern engineering, though it seemingly supported his thesis regarding humans’ inability to harness the powers they had created. Tellingly, he could not maintain his misanthropic pose of gleeful delight in the face of this most shocking mishap. On the day of the sinking, he wrote at the conclusion of a short letter: ‘When the cosmos is quite wrecked, I shall be happy. The world gets better every day, and I am best’ (LHA, 6: 534). Yet, his pessimistic persona revealed its cracks almost immediately. A day later, as he noted to Cameron that the disaster ‘strikes at confidence in our mechanical success,’ he also confessed: ‘By my blessed Virgin, it is awful! This Titanic blow shatters one’s nerves. We can’t grapple it’ (LHA, 6: 534). A letter to her on 21 April contained a confession regarding his nihilistic posturing, to the effect that he adopted it only for show and that it functioned only in abstraction. ‘Only in history as a fairy tale,’ he noted, ‘does one like to see civilizations founder, and to hear the cries of the drowning. My sole compensation is denied me. I can’t even tell them: – “I told you so!” ’ (LHA, 6: 538). His usual means of self-assurance – the ability to gloat over having predicted the coming wreck of civilization – cannot be enjoyed in the face of these actual, horrible deaths in the icy North Atlantic. A gleeful anticipation of the crumbling of the West, Adams admits, is best experienced from afar. Nine days after the Titanic’s demise, disaster came even closer to home, as Adams suffered a severe stroke and was left quite seriously ill for several months before eventually recovering enough to resume his yearly migrations to Europe by the spring of

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1913. He had already complained to Cameron for a few years of having spells of aphasia, including one in September of 1908 when he walked into an antique store in Paris, ‘and, to my consternation, my French tumbled out all in a heap. The words came without connection’ (LHA, 6: 180). Knowing that his father had died from dementia, from that point on he began routinely predicting his own grim conclusion, and the stroke confirmed these dire forecasts. Very much weakened by it, he allowed himself ‘an hour a day with my pen, and an hour with me now counts for a good many’ (LHA, 5: 567). As writing became more challenging, his letters inevitably became noticeably shorter, until in early 1917 he began using an amanuensis for his correspondence. This slow retreat from direct contact with the world around him was, moreover, intellectual as well as physical. Surveying the slaughter of the Great War, he wrote to Cameron in late September 1914, after fleeing France for England, that ‘the war has been rather too much for me. I have to coddle myself and avoid it, but I am hard on seventy-seven and a blooming old paralytic idiot besides . . . For the first time in my life, I am quite staggered’ (LHA, 6: 663). Once back in the U.S., his means of keeping himself sane amid the carnage was to retreat to twelfth-century France and the transcription of medieval chansons. ‘Throughout all the terrors and roars of German howitzers we have lived on “Seigneurs sachez” and “A vous amants,” in France and England as here, and they alone have given us repose,’ he reflected. ‘Reims fells, but Thibaut rose’ (LHA, 6: 677). Just over three years later, on 27 March 1918, Adams died, without witnessing the end to this destruction that he felt he had predicted. The final entry in the Harvard Letters of Henry Adams, dictated twelve days before his death, ends with a fitting valediction. ‘You are therefore that wonderful object in creation, my last reader,’ he told the historian William Roscoe Thayer, ‘and I give you herewith my final blessing, with the prayer that when you reach the same point long hence, you may also have a last reader as sympathetic as yourself’ (LHA, 6: 791). Even to the very end, then, Adams conceived of the letter as a means of mediation between two minds, a site of conversation. Knowing that, we must also remember that the letters he wrote and received also contained the seeds of their own destruction in the possibility of being made public or of potentially revealing an aspect of one’s character better kept hidden. To read Adams’ correspondence is to listen to a protean writer converse while ‘sitting in the next room,’ so close but always securely removed.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank the Massachusetts Historical Society for access to Adams’ library, and his student Athena Lathos for assistance in preparing this chapter.

Notes 1. Adams’ extant personal library is housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. The collection appears in their electronic catalogue under the title ‘Henry Adams Library.’ 2. Chesterfield, Letters, 1: 349. 3. Horace Walpole’s eighteenth-century correspondence had become famous by the nineteenth century for elevating the personal letter to the status of aesthetic object, at the same time as detailing the historical, political, and social events of his day. 4. Decker, The Literary Vocation, 15. 5. Adams, The Education, xxx. 6. Porter, Seeing and Being, 185.

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508 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

john c. orr Habert, So Much Closer, 14, 19. Jacobson, Authority and Alliance, 19. Adams, ‘Buddha and Brahma,’ 88. Ibid. Levenson, Samuels, Vandersee, and Winner, ‘Editorial Note,’ xxix. See Dykstra, ‘Letters Shed New Light.’ Decker, Epistolary Practices, 39. For further discussion of this point see Jacobson, Authority and Alliance, 76. Decker, Epistolary Practices, 197. Winner, ‘Style and Sincerity,’ 98. The best reading of Adams’ anti-Semitism is Leveson, ‘The Etiology of Israel.’ Winner, ‘Style and Sincerity,’ 101. See Samuels, Henry Adams, 399. Decker, Epistolary Practices, 207. Adams, The Education, 474.

Works Cited Adams, H. [1907] (1973), The Education of Henry Adams, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Adams, H. (1915), ‘Buddha and Brahma,’ Yale Review, 5: 82–9. Adams, H. (1982–8), The Letters of Henry Adams, 6 vols., ed. J. C. Levenson, E. Samuels, C. Vandersee, and V. H. Winner, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cited parenthetically as LHA. Chesterfield, P. (1793), Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope to His Son Philip Stanhope, 4 vols., London: J. Dodsley. Decker, W. M. (1990), The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Dykstra, N. (2010), ‘Letters Shed New Light on Henry Adams,’ The Beehive: Official Blog of the Massachusetts Historical Society, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Harbert, E. N. (1977), The Force So Much Closer Home: Henry Adams and the Adams Family, New York: New York University Press. Jacobson, J. (1992), Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Levenson, J. C. (1994), ‘The Etiology of Israel Adams: The Onset, Waning, and Relevance of Henry Adams’s Anti-Semitism,’ New Literary History, 25: 569–600. Levenson, J. C., E. Samuels, C. Vandersee, and V. H. Winner (1988), ‘Editorial Note,’ in J. C. Levenson et al. (eds.), The Letters of Henry Adams – Volume 4, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, xxix–xxii. Porter, C. (1981), Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Samuels, E. (1958), Henry Adams: The Middle Years, Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press. Winner, V. H. (1986), ‘Style and Sincerity in the Letters of Henry Adams,’ in G. G. Fromm (ed.), Essaying Biography: A Celebration of Leon Edel, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 91–104.

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33 THE LETTERS OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN: EPISTOLARY PERFORMANCE AND NEW PATHS FOR SCHOLARSHIP Philip Barnard

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harles Brockden Brown was born into a Quaker merchant family in Philadelphia in 1771, at the beginning of the revolutionary age, when that city was the largest and wealthiest hub of British and global commerce in North America. Although his family prepared him to become an attorney, apparently in the hope that he would help manage the litigation that accompanied their interests in the lucrative carrying trade of the time, he abandoned his legal apprenticeship in the early 1790s. After a period of literary experimentation that took place partly in his letters, he embarked on a publishing career between 1798–1809 that made him the most notable novelist in the early U.S., as well as a key editor, historian, and man of letters within the era’s circumatlantic literary culture. His novels remained influential and widely read in the U.S. and Europe well beyond his early death from tuberculosis at age thirty-nine in 1810. Brown’s 179 extant letters and a related set of three fragments of early epistolary fiction closely associated with them have played an important but problematic and arguably underappreciated role in the author’s reception history from 1815 to the present. In this chapter I want to reflect on and intervene in this reception history by describing the corpus of Brown letters and commenting on three interrelated aspects of these letters and their relation to wider interpretations and understandings of Brown’s career and achievement. The three key issues at hand are: (1) interpretive or hermeneutic questions about what we can call the ‘performative’ or carefully constructed nature of Brown’s epistolary personae, which have been the subject of psychological interpretation and speculation; (2) the senses in which Brown’s early correspondence and epistolary fragments (fictional episodes or entire letters woven into the non-fictional correspondence) function as a laboratory for his literary aspirations, including the first elaborations of his theory of ‘romance’ writing as a form of speculative or conjectural history; and (3) the emergence, from recent work on the letters, of new archival paths or openings for Brown scholarship, from previously unknown information concerning Brown’s engagement in debates about religion and cultural politics to the (re)discovery, via work on the letters, of important new documents and facts concerning Brown’s life, career, and the contexts of his writing. The extant corpus of Brown’s letters falls into four groups or sequences, each corresponding to a distinct phase of Brown’s life and career, and all drawing on archival and print sources with different provenance, implications, and explicit or implicit 511

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challenges for interpretation. That fewer than 200 letters have survived to the present indicates, most immediately, that the image of Brown that emerges from these letters is heavily filtered and mediated by the friends and family executors who preserved them. As a well-connected editor and author, and a partner in a family business firm, Brown undoubtedly penned thousands of letters. The small fraction of this total that survives only offers windows into particular close friendships, and into specific moments and relationship networks in the author’s life. The first and largest group, Letters 1–61 in the sequencing of the 2013 Bucknell University Press edition of Brown’s Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, dates from 1788 to 1795 (and primarily 1792–5, when the author was twenty-one to twenty-four years of age). It displays Brown largely in the context of early family relationships and his social circle in Philadelphia during the years when he abandoned his law apprenticeship and developed his earliest experiments with fiction writing. Above all, fortyfive of this group’s sixty-one letters chart Brown’s elaborate and stylized interactions in 1792–3 with two close friends and associates: William Wood Wilkins, a rising fellow law apprentice and then attorney, and Joseph Bringhurst, Jr., a medical student and former classmate of Brown’s from the Friends Latin School. The forty-three letters to Bringhurst (the single largest group of extant Brown letters to a single correspondent), which were preserved as part of the Bringhurst family papers, did not become available to scholars in archival form until the mid and late twentieth century, and are only published for the first time in their entirety in the Letters and Early Epistolary Writings collection. The remarkable feature of this first group, and the feature that has attracted more scholarly commentary to date than any other aspect of Brown’s letters, is the unique manner in which the author uses these early missives to Wilkins and Bringhurst to experiment with fictional writing, theorize about narrative, and otherwise articulate and enact his literary ambitions. These letters incorporate imaginary passages, sketches, and outlines in narrative, dialogue, or poetic format. Brown creates characters and sometimes makes himself a fictional character pursuing fictional activities or reflections, thereby blurring the line between the letters’ invented and non-invented elements. Such scenes and dialogues appear in seventeen of the forty-five letters from 1792 and 1793. Playful and fancied foreign settings and scenarios are introduced in Letters 4 and 13 (dated from London) and 14–15 (dated from Switzerland). Letter 16 presents a lengthy synopsis for an epistolary novel previously discussed in the scholarship as ‘The Story of Julius,’ and Letter 46 sketches out a dramatic fictional episode condemning domestic abuse.1 This group’s intertwining of fictional and non-fictional elements is extended in its extremely close relation to three untitled fragmentary epistolary narratives, the earliest surviving examples (along with the periodical essay ‘The Rhapsodist,’ published in 1789) of Brown’s fiction writing. The first and best known of the trio, referred to as The Henrietta Letters, was partially printed in a modernized transcription by David Lee Clark in his 1948 biography of Brown before being fully transcribed for the first time in the Letters and Early Epistolary Writings.2 This text identifies its own generic model in Rousseau’s Julie (1761) and consists of seventeen amorous–pedagogical letters between Henrietta and a fictionalized ‘CBB.’ Tellingly, the final letter, number XVII, opens with an incipit and salutation that is part of Brown’s ordinary correspondence to his friend John Davidson, before returning to the fictional narrative concerning ‘CBB’

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and Henrietta, thereby breaking the fictional frame of the series to mark and playfully acknowledge the boundary between invented and ‘real’ letters. The second and third fictional manuscripts, now (in the Letters and Early Epistolary Writings) called the Ellendale and Godolphin Fragments, are shorter elements of a never-completed group of early fictions that feature common characters residing at an estate called ‘Ellendale.’ The common context and provenance of these fictional manuscripts and the early Brown–Wilkins–Bringhurst correspondence is further underlined when one notes that all three, despite now residing in different archives, are written on the same batches of paper as other early correspondence and related fragments. The Henrietta Letters (part of a Brown family collection now housed at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin) use the same batch of paper as Letters 4–22 to Bringhurst (part of a Bringhurst family collection housed at Bowdoin College), while the Ellendale and Goldolphin fragments are on the same paper as other drawings and fictional fragments in the Ransom collection from 1793. Finally, it is notable that this first group of letters contains the most information of any of the four groups concerning Brown’s social relations and his thinking about larger questions of literature and culture. Brown is habitually extremely discreet about private matters and personal opinions in his correspondence, but one good example of the rare contexts in which they emerge is the notable crisis, discussed in Letters 57–8 of October 1795, which interrupted and ultimately ended his friendship with Bringhurst. Prompted by his fiancée Deborah Ferris, Bringhurst attempted to intervene in Brown’s friendship with Ruth Paxson, another (married) female member of their Philadelphia social circle, on the grounds that the relationship was improper and illicitly romantic. Bringhurst’s intervention was couched in religious terms, as his fiancée Ferris had recently undergone an evangelistic conversion and was urging Bringhurst to action on specifically pious and Christian grounds (she likewise, for example, advised Bringhurst to get rid of his pianoforte, arguing that musical performance and enjoyment was impious).3 Brown’s rejoinders both reject Bringhurst’s and Ferris’s attempts to meddle in his personal affairs – all other attestation from the moment suggests that no romantic involvement with Paxson existed – and, more interestingly, move immediately to the dispute’s larger cultural–intellectual stakes. Brown spends the greater part of his energy in these letters rejecting Bringhurst’s appeal to Christianity as a moral compass, thereby affirming the rationalist, anti-theist principles that he shared with his likeminded associates Elihu Hubbard Smith and William Dunlap during his next, New York phase. In this context it is notable that Bringhurst, who preserved these letters, did not likewise preserve his own side of this correspondence in the collection passed down to his descendants, possibly suggesting that he subsequently judged his position in the dispute to be a source of embarrassment and regret. The second major grouping of Brown’s correspondence, Letters 62–116, dates from 1796 to 1800 and displays Brown at the moment when he moved to New York and entered his storied novelistic phase. The great majority of these letters (forty-six of the fifty-four in the group) exist only in carefully edited transcriptions or paraphrases in the diaries of Brown’s close friends and literary collaborators Smith and Dunlap. As we have them today, this group of letters documents Brown’s diligent literary labors and eager participation in the life of his social circle in New York, but the format and provenance of the group makes it clear that the information available from these sources was significantly shaped and controlled by Smith and Dunlap. Brown

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is discreetly observed and applauded by his interlocutors, but personal information, including details, for example, about Brown’s family conflicts concerning an attempted courtship with a woman named Susan Potts (mentioned in Letters 88–92), is carefully occluded as the author’s letters are transferred to his associates’ diaries and thence forward to contemporary readers. The third grouping, Letters 116–45, however, consists of courtship letters written between December 1800 and April 1801 to Brown’s future wife Elizabeth Linn. As was customary in this period, these letters were preserved in a bound keepsake notebook and thus survived as part of the Brown family collection now archived at the Ransom Center. Indeed, ‘customary’ is an appropriate keyword for this grouping, as the letters, and Brown’s persona in them, are carefully crafted along the lines of late-eighteenth-century correspondence manuals. Brown presents himself throughout the group as a solicitous and eminently respectable suitor with an eye on future life in the professional class (concerned with founding and editing a new magazine, and participating in his brothers’ shipping concerns), thereby demonstrating his suitability as a marriage partner for the daughter of a ministerial–pedagogical family with more cultural capital than his own. Thus this group exhibits a careful construction of narrative persona in a manner related to but distinct from that of the earliest grouping of Bringhurst–Wilkins letters. Whereas the ‘real’ author morphed into playful fictional personae in the early letters, now the ‘real’ CBB appears as a proper bourgeois suitor in letters whose initial goal is to persuade Elizabeth to consent to marry him. Finally, the fourth grouping, Letters 146–79, contains Brown’s surviving letters from May 1801 to summer 1809, which are written primarily to Linn family in-laws and a small group of business and literary associates. In terms of recipients, focus, archival provenance, and the period of time covered, this is the longest and most miscellaneous of the four major phases. Its thirty-four letters address sixteen different correspondents, over half of the twenty-eight addressed in Brown’s entire corpus, and incidentally reflect the influence of early private manuscript and autograph collectors such as Robert Gilmor, Jr. (1774–1848), whose collections were later sold or donated to larger archival institutions.4 Despite this variety, like the previous groupings, the overall selection of letters in this final phase clearly reveals the editorial hand of Brown’s widow Elizabeth and his first biographer and former literary collaborator William Dunlap (ten of the thirty-four in this group exist only in Dunlap’s heavilyedited transcriptions from his 1815 biography). These letters present a diligent family man – ever solicitous of his in-laws in numerous letters to Elizabeth’s siblings and Linn family associates more generally – and an editor whose respectable and influential standing in the period’s literary marketplace is reflected in exchanges with contributors and notables such as John Elihu Hall (a contributor to Brown’s Literary Magazine and American Register and later editor of the Philadelphia Port-Folio), John Howard Payne (a literary prodigy in the New York publishing world), and Albert Gallatin (then Secretary of the Treasury in the second Jefferson Administration). Given this limited corpus, a persistent interpretive challenge, recurrent in different stages throughout Brown’s reception history, concerns the tendency to construe the letters in terms of what we can call psychological authenticity or interpretive transparency. That is, editors and commentators, from Brown’s contemporary biographers William Dunlap and Paul Allen down to the present, have, to varying degrees but quite consistently, approached and presented Brown’s letters as hermeneutically transparent

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documents revealing deep psychological verities, inner states, or abiding characteristics of the author’s personality that would inform his wider writings.5 Certainly the assumption, which has both practical and theoretical dimensions, that letters are a transparent medium conveying ‘sincere,’ ‘authentic’ or ‘genuine’ voices is a common one, and partly underlies the commonplace scholarly uses of letters as documentary evidence and archival resource. Yet Brown’s letters, most especially (but by no means only) the interweaving of ordinary and fictional discourse in the 1792–3 Bringhurst and Wilkins correspondence, readily confound this assumption. As Elizabeth Hewitt has argued, ‘from the beginning of his career, Brown’s use of the epistolary form challenged [the] assumption of epistolarity as delivery system for authentic sentiment,’ and in what follows I will echo and extend her proposed responses to this ‘refusal to abide by the genre’s most essential law’ (AFL, 81).6 Two tendencies related to these assumptions of psychological authenticity have shaped interpretation of Brown’s letters in problematic ways. The first is the repeated confusion or conflation of fictional and non-fictional elements in the early letters to Bringhurst and Wilkins and in the closely related Henrietta Letters. As previously noted, the mixing of fictional and conventional authorial personae is a central feature of both these missives and the Henrietta text, where an invented ‘CBB’ persona is interwoven with Brown’s ordinary correspondence. Confronted with this unusual mixing, commentators have repeatedly construed fictional letters or elements of them to be Brown’s ‘true’ voice and used them as ‘authentic’ evidence of biographical events or inner psychological states. Interpretations of the Henrietta Letters as ‘real,’ or at worst thinly veiled biographical confession, have persisted since 1948, when this text first appeared in print. Publishing a first, expurgated and modernized transcription with the title ‘The Journal Letters’ in his biography of Brown, David Lee Clark acknowledged the possibility that the text is ‘a youthful attempt to write a novel in epistolary form,’ but ultimately concluded that ‘the work is autobiographical, representing an actual experience in Brown’s life.’7 Even after Eleanor Tilton published a 1954 article pointing out, and rejecting, Clark’s conflation of fiction and actual correspondence, thereby initiating a general consensus that the text is an early, never-completed epistolary fiction, scholars have continued to speculate about the text as a thinly disguised biographical confession.8 Peter Kafer, for example, has renewed this reading in his recent study Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of the American Gothic with an argument that acknowledges the text as partly fictional, but argues that the Henrietta character refers to a biographical person Brown may have known. This commentary orients itself primarily to a biographical–psychological thesis, even as it grants that the text does not contain ‘for the most part, “real” letters’ and that any real-world inspirations ‘effloresce into a world of their own. They are a fiction, too.’9 Thus in Clark and Kafer’s work, to mention only two key instances at either end of this text’s reception, assumptions of psychological authenticity or transparency underlie the overall approach to the text and its interpretation.10 A second, related and theoretically-speaking even more insistent problem, meanwhile, involves readings of the letters intended to inform larger claims about Brown that have repeatedly taken the form of far-reaching psycho-biographical speculation. These approaches typically position the letters – and again, most particularly the early 1792–3 letters to Wilkins and Bringhurst – as documentary evidence of Brown’s innermost psychic states or even his extreme emotional dysfunction. Couching his

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commentary in clinical terminologies, among them various ‘Freudian terms,’ Steven Watts, for instance, characterizes the 1792–3 letters to Bringhurst as ‘highly schizoid’ and as evidence of a ‘psychological disintegration’ wherein ‘Brown’s sense of self had shattered into psychological fragments.’11 Caleb Crain, like Kafer, acknowledges fictional elements of the letters and the Henrietta text, but like Watts he too organizes his reading around depth-psychological assumptions, this time used as a means of considering the homosocial aspects of Brown’s early friendships. Citing clinical discussions of ‘imposture’ as a neurotic symptom, Crain reads the early letters as evidence of a species of ‘swindling the world into believing [the] ego and [the] ego-ideal are the same’ in which Brown’s rhetorical and fictional gestures cross over into ‘lies’ and ‘duplicity.’12 Of the final Henrietta letter, which begins with an address to a real correspondent, John Davidson, Crain declares: ‘In a pattern Brown would repeat, Brown chose a doctor to hear his intimate confessions; then instead of confessions, he delivered lies.’13 To be clear, in pointing out this critical reliance on assumptions of psychological authenticity or discursive transparency, I am not presenting the interpretive questions at stake as either/or options (that is, as cases of authenticity versus opacity), nor am I dismissing the contributions to Brown scholarship that have been produced in these and other similar readings. My point, rather, is that such readings, drawing on under- or poorly-theorized assumptions about the subject’s relation to discourse, produce commentaries that make claims about Brown primarily as a psychological or biographical subject, and thereby paradoxically downplay or marginalize the contextual, historical, and intellectual texture of the letters, which in fact display extensive patterns of reference to legal, literary, rhetorical, and other intellectual–scientific traditions that are of intense interest to Brown and his circle of friends. In the previously mentioned Letters 4 and 13 to Wilkins, for example, fictional settings in London provide a context for playful but detailed references to British legal theory, partisan positions in Parliamentary debates during the 1780s, and several central figures of Scottish Enlightenment historiography. Psychologically oriented approaches have debated the degree to which these fictionalized passages are or are not ‘authentic’ expressions of Brown’s inner self, when arguably there is more to gain in using them to trace out patterns of reference, allusion, and debate that can shed light on Brown and his circle’s relations to late Enlightenment thinking and intellectual history. Toward this end, and as a step toward reading Brown’s letters both as a whole and in relation to his larger corpus of writings in all genres, I would propose a concept of epistolary performance as one way to emphasize the degree to which Brown’s voice is constructed and otherwise calculated throughout the existing corpus of his correspondence. Approaching letter-writing as performance, a useful theoretical category familiar to current scholars via Joseph Roach, Judith Butler, and other theorists, may help us to focus on two key points.14 Performance theory: (1) approaches cultural practices or artifacts (e.g., letter-writing) in terms of ‘surface’ functionality and behaviors rather than as an expression of ‘depth’ or inner nature, thereby de-psychologizing them and dispensing with essentialist models of subjectivity and expression-from-within; and (2) it views a practice or artifact’s legibility not in isolation or on its own terms, but primarily in terms of its situation within real social relations and contexts. Epistolary performance, like other categories of cultural performance, then, constructs and implicitly contests identities in contingent and variable ways that are only adequately understood as behaviors connected with wider socially and historically determined

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settings. It is always in dialogue with dominant and normative categories, whether as reflection and symptom or as parody and commentary. Accordingly, in the case of Brown, one considerable virtue of performance theory is that it dispenses with psychologistic and essentialist models of personhood which, as we have seen in the examples drawn from Brown’s reception history, have tended to de-contextualize and de-intellectualize interpretations of the letters. In her incisive discussion of the interpretive challenges related to the fiction/nonfiction distinction in Brown’s letters, Elizabeth Hewitt has persuasively argued that Brown’s letters challenge traditional claims concerning epistolarity as ‘genuine expression’ and, indeed, that his practice effectively ‘theorizes the dividing line between familiar letter and epistolary fiction’ in a way that destabilizes ‘common scholarly assumptions not just about Brown’s letters, but about the use of biographical letters more generally’ (AFL, 81). While I would concur with Hewitt’s reading, however, I would argue that in adopting the category of performance we can advance this analysis, and the overall approach to Brown’s letters it implies, by uncovering some of the features of Brown’s letters that come into clearer focus as a result of this perspective. Whereas Hewitt’s discussion, if I read it correctly, locates the interpretive challenge posed by Brown’s letters primarily in a pervasive ambiguity between authentic and fictional aspects of the letter-writing considered in itself, for instance, the category of performance widens our focus to the letters’ social location, which needs to be considered beyond a focus on Brown’s writing understood in itself, as an autonomous literary object. In a related manner, Marc Amfreville’s reading of the Henrietta Letters, which rightly links the construction of epistolary voice in them to Brown’s narrative voice in his fiction more generally, reads this question in terms of metafictional potentials in language and textuality as a whole. Noting that all of Brown’s novels present themselves as book-length letters or firstperson memoirs and thus reenact the partial or ‘blind’ perspective of the letter-writer in the epistolary model, Amfreville points out that on one level the question of epistolary performance eventually becomes inseparable from that of narrative voice and perspective in Brown’s wider oeuvre.15 The category of epistolary performance may thus allow us to re-orient familiar hermeneutic questions in Brown scholarship around the relation between Brown’s construction of narrative personae and the questions concerning social relations that they imply and enact. Seen from the perspective of performance, and its attendant dispensing with assumptions of psychological authenticity, Brown’s letters look very different from the critical accounts we have already delineated. This helps explain why, in Hewitt’s canny formulation, prior readings of Brown’s letters to Bringhurst and Wilkins have been ones ‘in which we feel we are witnesses to the musings of a solipsistic young man, and yet we also learn almost nothing about him’ (AFL, 90). The interpretive approach of critics like Watts and Crain invariably tends toward the gothic, asserting that Brown’s letters, on some level, reveal pathological emotional states or willful misrepresentations and deceptions, but ‘what is striking is that his letters are surprisingly lacking in biographical or psychological detail’ (AFL, 90). Indeed, when these letters are read in context and as a whole what is notable is that they are more playful than melodramatic, and that they are never taken as any sort of misrepresentation by their recipients. Brown’s joking fictional dialogue with Bringhurst in Letter 8 or his satirical poem on card-playing in Letter 10 (both from May 1792) are good examples. The long ‘Story of Julius’ synopsis in Letter 16, written in the same month, is also significantly introduced and concluded

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on notes of what we might call performative exuberance. Introducing his narrative exposition, Brown writes to Bringhurst, ‘I shall amuse you however with a sketch of the plan of one of my performances, written at a period propitious to fancy and invention,’ while in concluding the lengthy summary, he exclaims: ‘What! have I reached the bottom of the second sheet? . . . I am almost ashamed of my prolixity. I have hitherto acted Julius, but next week must personate my good friend Ellen [another character in this and a group of interrelated narrative projects], and apply myself indefatigably, for eight or ten days, to law; after which I will again metamorphose myself into Julius, and enjoy as much happiness as heaven permits’ (LEEW, 89, 98). In performing various voices and personae, then, many notable aspects of these letters become ‘fanciful’ (to use a period-specific term for creatively inventive discourse) in ways rarely mentioned or explored in previous commentary on them. Considering wider questions of epistolary context and social relations, it is likewise important, nay crucial, to note that Wilkins and Bringhurst participated with Brown in a literature-oriented Society for the Attainment of Useful Knowledge (earlier styled the Belles Lettres Society). The exchanges that occur in his early letters cannot be adequately understood outside the context of this collective, which enacted the kind of intellectualized social exchanges that scholars such as Fredrika Teute and Bryan Waterman have identified as a characteristic form of cultural engagement, on the part of educated, professional men and women like those in Brown’s circle, during this era.16 The multiple discursive registers and narratively performative features of the 1792–3 letters clearly participate in this social–institutional milieu in the manner whereby they combine philosophical reflection and erudite allusions (to law, rhetoric and oratory, politics, science, art, and classical literature) with carefully considered elements of rhetorical structuring, literary experimentation, and personal communication. Indeed, one often sees this institutional framework in Brown’s early letters in explicit ways: Brown contributes to the group’s ongoing interest in shorthand, for example, with three tentative and experimental attempts at shorthand composition in Letters 33, 39, and 40. Likewise, the discussions of suicide in Letters 25–9 to Bringhurst, which span late 1792, are not motivated by personal or psychological concerns, but contribute to the Society’s collective discussion of the ethics of suicide following Wilkins’ early 1792 oration entitled ‘Is Suicide Justifiable?’17 In enlarging our perspective to include all of the extant letters and not only the early correspondence with Bringhurst and Wilkins that has been the focus of most previous commentary, performance also offers a useful means of connecting the different parts of Brown’s epistolary oeuvre (and a means of contextualizing some of the more neglected modes or types of his epistolary practice). The most notable example here is surely the twenty-nine ‘courtship’ letters from early 1801, addressed to Brown’s future spouse Elizabeth Linn. The letters in this group, in principle predicated on the author’s most sincere and personal emotions, are arguably the most conventional of any in the existing corpus. They resemble the models offered in period letter-writing manuals (even to the point of being written in an especially legible and meticulously regularized hand), and one might argue that their performance of conventionality was well-suited, in Brown’s calculations, to his self-presentation in these letters as a solicitous, respectable, and indeed ‘conventional’ suitor.18 Turning to familiar epistolary conventions and tropes, the courtship letters develop a pedagogical relationship between lover and beloved that echoes not only with epistolary-fiction precedents from Rousseau

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to Wollstonecraft, but with Brown’s own earlier epistolary-fiction experiments in the Henrietta Letters and with his two final novels Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, both of which are classically epistolary in form and were prepared for press during and immediately after the January–April 1801 period of the courtship letters. Letter 127, which is dated 23 March 1801, to take but just one example, emphasizes the epistolary voice and function of the amorous and encouraging pedagogue. ‘So; you wish me to be your task setter,’ Brown begins. ‘Charming pupil, whom my whole life shall be devoted to instruct in that wisdom that makes [one] happy . . . How, at this distance and thro’ this cold medium, shall I contend with your despondency; inspire you with self-respect, & convince you that, among all the women that I know, your purity, your good sense, your taste, your sensibility . . . your dignity & gracefulness of carriage are pre eminent’ (LEEW, 504). The thematic and conceptual interface between the fictional universe of these courtship letters and Brown’s last two novels, both of which return to classic epistolary-fiction form to address bourgeois marriage and questions around the meaning of ‘letters [written in] a hand disguised,’ should offer a fruitful topic for future investigation.19 In any case, the courtship letters provide a good instance of the way in which the conveyance of ostensibly passionate emotionality paradoxically employs or requires the most conventionalized modes of performance. Similarly, if we pursue a more functional and culturally contextualized perspective on the mixture of fictional and conventional elements in the 1792–3 letters to Bringhurst and Wilkins, these letters also appear less as outlets for a strained psyche than as laboratories for artistic experimentation and development. They were, after all, written during the period when Brown made his initial, personally and financially risky, but intellectually and culturally ambitious decision to abandon legal training and undertake fiction-writing. Indeed, since Brown is still primarily discussed as a novelist (despite an increasing awareness of his work in other forms, including the letter), it is surprising that the importance of these much-commented-upon early missives for understanding Brown’s theory and practice of fiction has not been traced out more systematically. An important task for new readings of the letters in relation to Brown’s larger corpus, then, should consist in clarifying at least two aspects of the fictional experimentation in his early correspondence: first, the relations of these experiments to a sizable but little-examined body of fragmentary or unfinished narratives that predate the better-known works of the 1798–1801 period; and second, the early and heretofore unnoted appearance in these letters and related fragments of a key aspect of Brown’s entire body of writing, his theory of fiction as a form of conjectural history. A web of thematic and conceptual interrelations links the fictions embedded in Brown’s letters to other fictional fragments and suggests that these letters provide the earliest glimpses of an ambitious set of themes and concerns that he sketched out but never brought to completion over most of the 1790s. The fictional conceit and characters appearing in ‘The Story of Julius,’ which was embedded in a letter to Bringhurst on 19 May 1792, link this narrative, for example, by way of interrelated and overlapping characters, settings, and themes centered around an estate called Ellendale, to at least six other partial narratives: the Henrietta Letters, and the Ellendale and Godolphin Fragments (all now transcribed in the Letters and Early Epistolary Writings volume); the ‘Harry Wallace’ and ‘Signior Adini’ fragments (both with no extant manuscripts, but printed by Paul Allen); and the ‘Medwaye’ fragment (a manuscript at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania). Thus the framing narrative in Brown’s letter to Bringhurst includes ‘the excellent and

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amiable Henrietta G—,’ another version or instantiation of the character in The Henrietta Letters, as well as ‘Lauder Ellen,’ one of a numerous family of Ellen characters in these fictions, whose estate outside Philadelphia – Ellendale – recurs as a setting in almost all of them (LEEW, 89, 98). The Godolphin, Ellendale, and Adini fragments are located on this estate and are narrated by a character named ‘R. H.’ or the character Raphael Hythloday – a name adopted from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Internal dates in this ensemble of fragments extend up to 1795 (‘Medwaye’) and 1796 (‘Harry Wallace’), suggesting that Brown continued to develop the imaginary ensemble established in his early letters up until he turned to the narratives that would be published in his novelistic period beginning in 1798. In ways that need to be more closely examined, these fragments develop networks of highly mobile and cosmopolitan characters, Rousseau-derived amorous relationships organized around pedagogical goals rather than conventional marriage plots, independent and intellectualized female characters, and reflections on utopic projects that allegorize the radical potential of Enlightenment social and political theory, all of which variously relate to the later published novels. Seen from this perspective, the fictional elements of Brown’s early letters pose many questions concerning the continuities between his unfinished or fragmentary early texts and similar concerns in the published novels and later fragments. Perhaps most surprisingly, the fictional elements in the early letters include early formulations of Brown’s theory of fiction (or what he called ‘romance’) as conjectural history. Scholars have frequently commented on the importance of this theory as it appears at the height of Brown’s novelistic phase in the well-known essays ‘Walstein’s School of History’ (1799) and ‘The Difference Between History and Romance’ (1800).20 In these essays, Brown articulates a twofold argument about fiction and its social–ideological role, clearly indicating that this argument stands as a model for his own fictional practice. The two essays assert, firstly, that fictional narrative or romance serves a social and pedagogical end in providing examples of behavior for consideration, whether virtuous behavior to be emulated or vicious behavior to be avoided; and secondly, that fiction and history should be understood as two sides of the same narrative coin. The crucial distinction is not between fiction and non-fiction, but rather between narratives that attest that events occurred but cannot establish ultimately unknowable causes (history), and narratives that conjecturally explore possible motives and circumstances that cause or motivate events, thereby leading their audiences to consider how forces and institutions shape and limit behaviors (romance or novel). This theory appears not once but several times in a tentative form in the early letters and related fragments, most notably in 1793. In the Godolphin fragment (dated 2 and 3 July 1793), for example, the narrator Raphael Hythloday contrasts the perspectives on human history generated by scientific ‘Understanding’ (history) and poetic ‘Imagination’ (romance), arguing that ‘the prerogatives of the poet are ample’ because the province of imagination is to speculate on the causes and conditions of events and thereby provide a valuable mode of conjectural history (LEEW, 781). ‘Provided imagination is disciplined by observation & expression,’ Hythloday concludes, it can illustrate knowable relations and systems that structure a world otherwise unknowably fluid and complex, ‘in constant flux or perpetual mutation’ (LEEW, 782). Similarly, a letter to Joseph Bringhurst dated 29 July to 1 August 1793 (very shortly after the composition of the Godolphin fragment) provides an elaboration of the theory that adopts the same contrast between classical and modern exempla that structures

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‘Walstein’s School of History.’ Just as this later essay contrasts historiography that illustrates virtue based on classical and elite exempla (the historical Cicero) with more useful fictions that develop social observation based on modern and plebian exempla (the fictional character Olivo Ronsica), Brown’s letter to Bringhurst contrasts the lessons to be drawn from the Plutarchian Roman figure Lucullus with the kind of modern social observation produced in the story of an abusive husband named Jackie Cooke, a sketch that Brown presents as ‘the groundwork of a noble tale’ (LEEW, 254). Instead of ‘general events flowing from general causes,’ Brown explains to Bringhurst, fiction focused on detailed social observation of ‘domestic history’ can lead us to consideration of the ways particular behaviors are shaped by and in turn influence larger forces: ‘The personal character of individuals, their visages their dress, their accent their language, their habits, manners and opinions; their personal behaviours I am desirous of Knowing. Life and Manners, I must repeat, is my favorite Science . . . That is the Knowledge which only is desirable, and the Knowledge of general and national acts is useful only as it is instrumental in the attainment of this’ (LEEW, 249). Well before he entered his major novelistic phase, and as early as 1792–3, then, Brown had developed the basic outlines of the theory of romance as conjectural history that has long been considered a signal achievement and feature of the latter period of his work. Since Brown’s evolving thinking about a fiction–history nexus is a key dimension of his major writings (not only in the 1798–1801 novels, but in his 1803 political pamphlets, the 1805–6 ‘Historical Sketches’ and the 1807–9 ‘Annals of Europe and America’), the realization that his theory of romance emerged in his letters as early as 1792 must be accounted a significant advance in understanding the overall shape and development of his career. Turning from aspects of the letters that engage with hermeneutic and theoretical issues to the more traditional use of letters as sources for information and evidentiary material, meanwhile, there is little question that Brown’s epistolary corpus opens up important new paths for scholarship from this angle as well. One dramatic example can illustrate the manner in which the triangulation of these letters with other known and previously unknown archival materials generates significantly new perspectives on, and information about, Brown’s life and writings. A letter Brown wrote on 4 May 1802, prior to work on the Letters and Early Epistolary Writings edition, was archived in the Houghton Library at Harvard (as part of the autograph collection of Robert Gilmor, Jr.) and appeared to be a brief business note of little interest, mentioning two parties (‘Mr. Robert Cumming’ and ‘Mr. Dawson’) involved in an unknown legal case (LEEW, 576). The letter’s addressee was as yet unknown, as no address wrapper survived, and neither the salutation ‘My dear Friend’ nor the text of the note provided contextual information identifying the recipient (LEEW, 576). Pursuing the proper names Cumming and Dawson in electronic and print records, however, it became evident that the letter concerned a discovery request in a much-cited and precedent-making lawsuit involving the Brown brothers’ shipping firm: Brown v. Cuming or, to give its full title, ‘James Brown, assignee of George B. Dawson, a Bankrupt, vs. Robert Cuming’ (LEEW, 577). Since the case was adjudicated first in the New York Circuit Court (in November 1802) and subsequently before the New York State Supreme Court, where Alexander Hamilton represented the Brown brothers’ opponent just weeks before his death in July 1804, the case is documented in several published and archival sources, including Hamilton’s legal papers. The manuscript

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‘judgment roll’ concerning the case at the New York City Hall of Records then identified one of Brown’s close friends, the legal recorder William Johnson, as representative for the Brown brothers’ firm in the initial phase of the case, thereby establishing him as the previously unknown recipient of the May 1802 letter. The evident potential of epistolary detective work aside, this discovery significantly provides a wealth of contextual information that can be connected, for example, to Brown’s third major novel Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800). In the briefest of terms, the litigation involved the Brown brothers’ firm in a complex tissue of questions concerning large sums tied up in carrying trade investments, shipping insurance, debts, and cargo seizures that occurred in 1800 when a vessel traveling from St. Croix (the business base of the defendant Cuming) via Philadelphia (the business base of plaintiff Dawson and his investment partners the Brown brothers) to Amsterdam was seized by the British navy. Since Brown notes in his letter to Johnson that the events discussed in the case occurred in early and mid-1800, it is more than likely that the knowledge Brown derived from this transaction (and others like it that remain undocumented) informs the complex intrigues involving currency transactions, insurance fraud, cargo seizures, and fortunes originating in Caribbean slave labor in Arthur Mervyn, whose second part appeared in September or October 1800, well after the events related in the lawsuit. The lawsuit, that is, provides a detailed link between information available to Brown via his family business and the novel’s panoramic portrayal of a circumatlantic world-system of financial, legal, and socio-political antagonisms generated by the period’s slave-based commerce. The threads leading from the Johnson letter to the Brown family’s shipping interests, however, extend significantly farther than this single lawsuit. Thanks to the growth of archival digitization and the more powerful aggregation of information it allows, the project of identifying the recipient of this letter and the case to which it refers eventually led to the (re)discovery of a total of thirty-five lawsuits previously unknown to Brown scholarship and involving the Brown brothers’ firm, with which Brown continued to work during his later Philadelphia years, from 1800 to his death in 1810. The greater part of these cases consists of thirty lawsuits filed in New Orleans County and City Courts in 1805–7, revealing the considerable extent of the Brown brothers’ investments in this area immediately after the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803. The youngest of the Brown siblings, Elijah Brown, Jr., was representing the family’s interests in New Orleans during this period, and most of the lawsuits involve relatively mundane disputes concerning, for example, ruined shipments of flour (Antoine Faisandeau v. Elijah Brown, Jr.) or non-payment of bills of exchange (C. & T. Bullet v. Elijah Brown, Jr.). Nevertheless, taken as a whole, these lawsuits open a hitherto unknown window onto Brown’s interests, by way of his family firm, in the Louisiana question and its commercial implications, which are one important focus of his latecareer political pamphlets An Address to the Government, on the Cession of Louisiana to the French (1803) and Monroe’s Embassy, or, the Conduct of the Government, in Relation to Our Claims to the Navigation of the Mississippi (1803), and a continuing topic of concern in his 1809 anti-Embargo pamphlet An Address . . . on the Utility and Justice of Restrictions Upon Foreign Commerce. A survey of these lawsuits will certainly bring considerable new information to bear on our understanding of the context informing these and other writings by Brown. As with the Wilkins–Bringhurst or Elizabeth Linn correspondence, Brown’s letter to William Johnson must stand in

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for the thousands that have been lost, but in doing so it can help us to begin to answer a question that Brown teasingly posed to Wilkins in late 1791 when he promised access to a ‘voluminous correspondence’ (written by a fictional character) that never appeared: ‘Shall I tell you what these letters contained: by whom they were written or to whom they were addressed?’ (LEEW, 10).

Notes 1. For differing readings of the authenticity of ‘The Story of Julius’ see Brown, ‘Charles Brockden Brown’s “The Story of Julius,” ’ and Crain, American Sympathy, 65–6. 2. See Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, 55–107. 3. For a sampling of the Bringhurst–Ferris correspondence see Brown, Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, 305–7. For Ferris’s strictures concerning Bringhurst’s piano see ibid. 323, 325. 4. For more on Gilmor’s career see Rutledge, ‘Robert Gilmor, Jr.’ 5. The first publication of Brown letters was in Dunlap’s 1815 Life of Charles Brockden Brown. Brown’s widow Elizabeth initially hired Paul Allen to prepare the publication, but after Allen failed to bring it to completion she turned to Brown’s friend Dunlap, who expanded Allen’s one-volume draft version into a two-volume work. Thus this initial source for Brown’s letters is itself shaped and filtered by three hands in succession: those of Brown’s wife, who oversaw the project and had final approval of the material included, and the two biographers, both of whom edited the letters they included in extensive ways. 6. Another important discussion of this long-standing question concerning Brown’s early letters is Amfreville’s ‘Sang d’encre.’ 7. Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, 55. 8. See Tilton, ‘The “Sorrows” of Charles Brockden Brown.’ 9. Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution, 51. 10. Likewise, in recent scholarship, Caleb Crain conflates the narrator of the fictional Ellendale Fragment with Brown (see American Sympathy, 85–6, 94–5). 11. Watts, The Romance of Real Life, 43, 45, 47. 12. Crain, American Sympathy, 75, 286. 13. Ibid. 56. 14. See Roach, Cities of the Dead, and Butler, Gender Trouble, in particular. 15. See Amfreville, ‘Sang d’encre,’ 47, 50–1. 16. See Teute, ‘A Republic of Intellect,’ and Waterman, Republic of Intellect. 17. Notably, Brown concurs with Wilkins’ rejection of Christian arguments that suicide is morally wrong, thereby linking this question to his long-term disagreements with Bringhurst on Christianity (see Brown, Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, 37). 18. For more on the letter-writing manuals that Brown and his contemporaries would have been exposed to see Bannet, Empire of Letters. 19. Brown, Jane Talbot, 350. For more on Brown’s uses of epistolarity in this novel see Verhoeven, ‘Persuasive Rhetorick,’ 152–64. 20. See, for example, Kamrath, The Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown.

Works Cited Amfreville, M. (2008), ‘Sang d’encre: les “Henrietta Letters” de Charles Brockden Brown,’ in A. Savin and P. Lévy (eds.), Mémoires d’Amérique: Correspondances, Journaux Intimes, Récits Autobiographiques, Paris: M. Houdiard, 42–52. Bannet, E. T. (2005), Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Brown, C. B. [1801] (1986), Jane Talbot, ed. S. J. Krause, S. W. Reid, and D. Ringe, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Brown, C. B. (2013), Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown – Volume 1: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, ed. P. Barnard, E. Hewitt, and M. L. Kamrath, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Cited parenthetically as LEEW. Brown, H. R. (1973), ‘Charles Brockden Brown’s “The Story of Julius”: Rousseau and Richardson “Improved,” ’ in J. Woodress, Essays Mostly on Periodical Publishing in America, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 35–53. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Clark, D. L. (1948), Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crain, C. (2001), American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dunlap, W. (1815), The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the Rarest of His Printed Works, from His Original Letters, and from His Manuscripts Before Unpublished, 2 vols., Philadelphia: James P. Parke. Hewitt, E. (2009), ‘The Authentic Fictional Letters of Charles Brockden Brown,’ in T. S. Gaul and S. M. Harris (eds.), Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 79–98. Cited parenthetically as AFL. Kafer, P. (2004), Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kamrath, M. (2009), The Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown: Radical History and the Early Republic, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Roach, J. R. (1996), Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia University Press. Rutledge, A. W. (1949), ‘Robert Gilmor, Jr., Baltimore Collector,’ Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 12: 18–39. Teute, F. (2004), ‘A Republic of Intellect: Conversation and Criticism among the Sexes in 1790s New York,’ in P. Barnard, M. L. Kamrath, and S. Shapiro (eds.), Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the New Republic, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 149–81. Tilton, E. M. (1954), ‘The “Sorrows” of Charles Brockden Brown,’ PMLA, 69: 1,304–8. Verhoeven, W. M. (1996), ‘ “Persuasive Rhetorick”: Representation and Resistance in Early American Epistolary Fiction,’ in A. R. Lee and W. M. Verhoeven (eds.), Making America/ Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 123–64. Waterman, B. (2007), Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Watts, S. (1994), The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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34 PUBLISHING AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS IN THE CORRESPONDENCE OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER Lance Schachterle

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eaders of the correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper expecting to learn how he transmuted his inner life into his thirty-two novels will be disappointed. Unlike Hawthorne, Melville, and James, he eschewed, even when communicating with other writers, any discussions of the art of fiction. At best, Cooper’s letters occasionally comment on how a locale like Glen’s Falls captured his imagination and led to a work of fiction such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826).1 But while the aesthetic dimensions of authorship rarely occupied his epistolary attention, the business of authorship emphatically did. Much of his professional correspondence is of great value in shedding light on author–marketplace relationships before the modern practices of international copyright, contractual royalties, systematic marketing of backlists, and editorial support and oversight emerged. His letters to various agents in the publishing business reflect the necessity of improvising and often revising commercial relationships to support himself entirely through his publications. From 1820 to 1850 he drove hard bargains with and had high expectations for his publishers.2 And equally, though reticent about sharing his private life in his letters, he was never reserved therein to articulate his opinions about public affairs.3 His engagement with American and European politics was significant throughout his career, and especially in the 1830s he contributed a large number of letters on political issues to New York and Parisian newspapers. To various personal correspondents too he revealed his views on the crucial need for American cultural independence, on the efficacy and faults of a nascent American democracy, and on the heated issues of the day such as states’ rights, Nullification, slavery, and the New York ‘Anti-Rent’ turmoil. After his return home to Cooperstown in 1834 following a seven-year trip to Europe, Cooper’s letters contain occasional and frank self-assessments of the importance of his career as well as biographical details of his intense activity as a writer and polemicist. Chatty (but rarely self-reflective) personal correspondence to his family and closest friends had already begun during his European sojourn and increased when his publishing strategies of the 1840s required his presence in Philadelphia and New York to oversee the production of his novels. Such removals resulted in warm and gossipy letters to his wife Susan, which disclose their affectionate and trusting relationship. The letters to her, to his children, and to his closest friends, like the South Carolinian naval officer William Branford Shubrick and the New York lawyer Peter Augustus 525

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Jay, are very informal, loaded with local gossip, and warm-spirited; though ‘getting and spending’ often intermingle with social relationships as reminders of the author’s perpetual need for new income.4 But his personal remarks at this time also record his increasing sense of alienation from a country he believed he had served well as an artist who told the truths about America that increasingly his readers did not want to hear. Cooper’s career as a professional author began with a letter to Andrew Thompson Goodrich, a small-scale New York bookseller, on 31 May 1820 marked ‘MostStrictly confidential’ (LJJFC, 1: 41).5 The ensuing twenty-four letters, through late October, form the single largest thematic collection of his extant correspondence dealing with publishing. Both Mathew Carey in Philadelphia and Isaiah Thomas in Boston and Worcester had published novels by American authors before Cooper. But as yet the production of home-grown American fiction was marginal, and New York had not emerged as a significant hub of commercial printing. In choosing Goodrich, then, Cooper probably sought a book agent he thought he could dominate during the production process, as the tone of many of his letters suggests. Yet these letters also preserve the uncertainties, fears, and frustrations of a neophyte writer who asked for direction, in his first letter, on even the simplest issues, such as how many printed pages could be made up from a single holograph sheet. Thus from Goodrich he both sought information and gave advice, on everything associated with the commerce of producing what became Precaution (1820) – costs, commissions, publicity, print size, paper, and the overall dimensions of the book. He conceded on 28 June and 2 July that the printers would have problems with his poor handwriting and excessively crowded holograph, but his response of 4 July about the abundant errors in Goodrich’s first proofs initiates a series of protests, culminating in his angry remarks of 25 August that the printers should ‘tak[e] up a new subject where they can find full scope for their talents – let my book be literally my own’ (LJJFC, 1: 54). In a letter from early September, meanwhile, he sternly warned Goodrich that he served as an agent at the author’s pleasure and could be held legally responsible for ‘a crisis’ developing in the production of the book (LJJFC, 1: 58). Nonetheless, subsequent letters report more errors as Cooper, or Susan in his absence, worked through more proofs. Importantly, Goodrich preserved both the manuscript of Precaution and these letters from Cooper (although his responses sadly are not extant), donating these materials to the New-York Historical Society in 1838. Thus scholars today can judge the balance of fault between author and printers. (My own cursory examination places the burden of blame on the fledgling author’s unreasonable expectations that even experienced printers could decipher his wretched handwriting and negotiate his parsimonious use of paper). In addition to providing the most detailed account of the production of any of Cooper’s works, these letters provide much information of value to subsequent readers about Cooper’s preferences and dislikes in composition. Speeches and paragraphs should be set off, he stated on 28 June, not run together, although he blithely reported he often did so during inscription. Further, he reports (on 17 July) that he preferred dashes to periods to render dialogue more informal, cautions (in midSeptember) about the need to properly discern his often minuscule final letter s, and expresses dislike (on 27 August) of the excessive adjectives characteristic to him of the overwrought style he called Della Cruscan. Above all, he granted that his orthography was difficult but expected the compositors to deal with it scrupulously, repairing his blunders without creating their own – clearly an impossible task in a 600-page novel.6

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His tone suggested he could not or would not change his mechanics of inscription to make life easier for the compositors; it was their job to get his meaning correctly into print – even the poorly-inked punctuation marks and crabbed words. Nonetheless, occasionally (as on 12 July) he confesses his attempts to make his letters and punctuation easier to read, and the later letters reflect less outrage over bungled proofs – indeed, in the end, he had to concede to an errata sheet. Compounding his frustration with producing Precaution, no doubt, was his announcement to Goodrich on 28 June that he was sixty pages into a new novel which captured far more of his interest than the current project, ‘to be called the “Spy” [its] scene in West-Chester County, and [at the] time of the revolutionary war’ (LJJFC, 1: 44). ‘The task of making American Manners and American scenes interesting to an American reader is an arduous one,’ he added of this fresh project (LJJFC, 1: 44). But unfortunately no further correspondence is extant concerning Cooper’s arrangements for the publication of his first great success, which went through three editions in the winter and spring of 1821–2. Cooper entrusted publication of The Spy to his friend, the New York bookseller Charles Wiley, with the company of Wiley & Halsted remaining his American publishers for his next four novels. But Wiley’s declining health, and Cooper’s recognition of the heavy demands on his own time in continuing to manage so much of the production process, led him for The Last of the Mohicans (1826) to agree to a proposition from Henry C. Carey to take over managing this and future titles. As Carey, senior partner at Carey & Lea, argued his case in an initial letter to Cooper on 28 November 1825, ‘we now publish more original works than any other house in the country . . . One occupation is enough for one man . . . Authors rarely make money by being at once authors & booksellers.’7 Furthermore, Carey suggested just over a month later: ‘The best evidence, & all the evidence we require, that we do it well, is that when once an author makes an arrangement with us he is never disposed to leave us.’8 Cooper was not thus disposed for nearly two decades, and remained with Carey & Lea and its successor partners until eventually his (unproved) suspicions that the firm was not living up to its contracts to pay him for copies sold over an established limit led him to drop them for the two parts of Afloat and Ashore (1844).9 Thenceforward Cooper resumed his initial practice with Precaution of contracting out the production of his novels to subordinates and keeping the profits to himself, although this strategy proved the accuracy of Carey’s 1825 warning that authors did not make good booksellers.10 But Cooper’s efforts at epistolary negotiation with the publishing world did not just take place on a domestic level, of course, for he was one of the first American writers to forge an international reputation. Thus, between 1822 and his departure for Europe four years later, Cooper was already exploring how to maximize commercial advantage in England. A tentative letter full of questions, for example, was sent to Benjamin U. Coles on 24 April 1822, who ultimately arranged, with an assist from Washington Irving, for John Murray to publish The Pioneers (1823) in London. By the time he was seeking to place his seventh novel, meanwhile, Cooper felt so secure in the value of his work – which he referred to bluntly as ‘mere articles of trade’ – that after preliminary discussions with the London publisher Henry Colburn on 17 October 1826, he secured a contract for The Prairie (1827) of £300; £200 more than the opening offer Colburn had made (LJJFC, 1: 165). Moreover, one of Cooper’s objectives in subsequently visiting Europe was to master the strategies for securing American, British, and European

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copyrights in the absence of any international copyright agreement. In Paris, in the winter of 1826, he met Sir Walter Scott, who enlisted Cooper to write a long letter of 9 November to Carey & Lea pressing the advantages for Americans and British recognizing each other’s copyrights; and when Charles Dickens raised the same issue two decades later, Cooper wrote a public letter to the New York Evening Post on 6 August 1842 affirming his agreement with his new British rival. Negotiating changes in national copyright rules would remain a concern for Cooper to the end of his career. But here, and in his more day-to-day efforts to maintain the business of authorship, he was often frustrated. International copyright was only secured forty years after his death, for example, in 1891, and as his own career developed his relationship with his London publishers deteriorated. After Henry Colburn sold out in 1832 to his younger partner, Richard Bentley, Cooper and Bentley kept up a constant correspondence, year after year, with Cooper sharing the political news of the day along with cool demands that Bentley pay the highest prices possible for every new work, regardless of conditions in the book trade or recent failures. In all, Bentley published thirty-four more Cooper titles, patient with an author who typically announced a new title and laid down his expected fee with little concern about Bentley’s balance sheets. Unhappily, though, by the end of his life, Cooper began to distrust his oldest business associate, refusing to believe his sales in England had diminished as much as Bentley stated. Considering dropping Bentley in a letter to him on 7 July 1849, he remarked that ‘I am a creature of habit, keep old dogs, horses cows &c, often at a loss, and dislike parting with any thing, even when it might be better to do so’ (LJJFC, 6: 53). Even so, he concluded, ‘I take my leave with kind feelings, and wishes for your future success’ (LJJFC, 6: 53). In fact, the break was never effected, but only because Cooper was perhaps too ill to do so. He dickered with Bentley for a better price for his last novel, Ways of the Hour (1850), and kept correspondence up through his final letter of 5 August 1851, motivated more by securing good prices for the work his eldest daughter Susan was now publishing than for his own projects. In sum, Cooper’s thirty years of correspondence with publishing agents in the United States, England, and the Continent offers perhaps the best archive of publishing practices for fiction before the development in the U.S. of a national book market in the 1850s. Before the opening of the Erie Canal and the rise of railroads made mass transportation of heavy loads of books feasible, and thus provided the infrastructure for publishers to conduct business on a larger scale, most book production in America was local, with individual booksellers trading the few titles they helped to produce with other booksellers.11 But Cooper had a vision of his work that was more than local, even as he doggedly stuck to trusting his often-faulty business acumen and struggled with distrusting publishers; a vision that a younger generation of authors would benefit from.12 Starting with the pliable Andrew Thompson Goodrich and ending with one of the first modern publishers, George Palmer Putnam, who began putting out revised ‘author’s editions’ of his novels in 1849, Cooper forever improvised strategies for his works that he hoped would maximize his return on what he termed ‘an article of traffick [for which I] must be content to take as much as I can get, and no more’ (LJJFC, 2: 42).13 Of equal concern were issues more public, since Cooper was living through decades of intense cultural struggle between North and South, between conservative landowners and a rising merchant class, and among constantly-shifting – and bitter – political

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party factions. For a literary man who neither sought nor achieved a government position, his private and public correspondence is remarkable for how well-informed he was about public affairs and how profusely – and vehemently – he shared his views.14 He commented, often at great length, on contemporary political events, especially when writing back to America about his observations of European political turmoil in the early 1830s. And when his literary reputation secured him national attention, he occasionally wrote respectfully but as an equal to national figures. He presented unsolicited advice to, or made requests of, three presidents, for example: Andrew Jackson (on 8 March 1832), Martin Van Buren (on 15 March 1840), and James Polk (on 28 January 1845 and 29 April 1847). In the bulk of his correspondence, though, three broad (and often overlapping) political topics dominated his attention: the necessity for American cultural independence; the threat of oligarchic aristocracies to subvert the popular will; and the proper interpretation of the Constitution as the foundation for an effective democracy.15 The first of these themes represents the point where his literary endeavors met his political interests. Writing on 14 April 1823 to Richard Henry Dana (father of the novelist, and one of his few regular Boston connections), Cooper declared his aim as a novelist was ‘to create an excitement that may rouse the sleeping talents of the nation, and in some measure clear us from the odium of dulness, which the malice of our enemies, has been quick to insinuate’ (LJJFC, 1: 94). His fiction, in this respect, was avowedly nationalist. ‘We never shall get to be the thoroughly manly people we ought to be and might be, until we cease to look to European opinions for anything except those which are connected with the general advancement of the race,’ he pronounced to Luther Bradish on 16 August 1828; and in protesting against marketing him as ‘the “American Walter Scott”,’ he declared on 21 May 1831 to Samuel Carter Hall that American ‘mental independence is my object, and if I can go down to the grave with the reflection that I have done a little towards it, I shall have the consolation of knowing that I have not been useless in my generation’ (LJJFC, 1: 287, 2: 84). In more practical terms, meanwhile, Cooper energetically supported young American artistic talent as an important path to cultural independence. To the young Massachusetts sculptor Horatio Greenough, for example, whom he was encouraging to become the first great American master, he opined bluntly on 5 November 1829 that: ‘We must break the chain of mental dependance [sic] which enslaves us, and having so long acted, begin to think, for ourselves’ (LJJFC, 1: 395). Cooper’s subsequent letters to Greenough carried loans and were full of detailed advice on how to gain favor in his native country, including on 4 July 1831, specific marketing strategies to maximize profits from exhibiting a piece of statuary, ‘The Chanting Cherubs,’ that Cooper had commissioned. In his March 1832 letter to President Jackson, Cooper even solicited national support for Greenough, which resulted in a commission for a classical statue of George Washington (although its classically-inspired bare-chested figuration ultimately debarred it from the Capitol Rotunda.) Cooper also supported, through personal loans and help with literary contacts, the aging artist and critic William Dunlap, writing to Colburn & Bentley on 12 October 1832 to encourage their publication of Dunlap’s History of the American Theatre (1832), for instance. And Cooper effectively treated the painter (and later, inventor of the telegraph) Samuel Finley Breese Morse as his protégé, commissioning from him a panoramic picture of the Cooper family in the Louvre surrounded by its

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masterpieces. Morse, like Greenough, became a lifelong confidant to whom Cooper sent loans and directed many letters of advice, and from whom he solicited assistance on various projects. Moreover, Cooper apparently advocated so strongly for Congress to engage Morse to paint a large mural for the Capitol in a public letter to the New York Evening Post that he offended John Quincy Adams to the point where Adams blocked the commission.16 If Cooper’s efforts were unintentionally counterproductive here, his relations with his literary countrymen were more consciously competitive. Unlike the epistolary friendships he developed with artists, Cooper never engaged with younger writers. In a letter sent to the New York Typographical Society on 5 January 1850 to commemorate Benjamin Franklin’s birthday, he saluted representatives of the printing industry and listed the American writers he regarded at mid-century as creators of an independent American literature: ‘Bryant – I always put him at the head, his proper place – . . . [and] Irving, Paulding, Halleck, Willis, Longfellow, Kennedy, Bird, Simms, Bancroft, Prescott, and fifty more, cannot be put down. We have got a foothold, and by God’s blessing we will maintain it’ (LJJFC, 6: 108). But while to some degree all these writers are read today, most are from Cooper’s New York circle of friends and only a few had met with success, as he had, as historical novelists. His list includes no women and no Hawthorne, much less Melville. That a new generation of writers from New England was beginning in the 1830s to define the first distinctively American literary movement, Transcendentalism, simply escaped his geographical and intellectual orbit. Ultimately, as this omission might suggest, Cooper’s epistolary patronage did not stretch to literary tyros. Beside the cause of cultural maturation, another pathway to independence about which Cooper corresponded throughout his career was strengthening the United States Navy, which he had observed closely during his own youthful service in 1808–10. From Paris on 28 October 1827, for example, Cooper wrote in extraordinary detail to Samuel Southard about optimal naval staffing, and his letters to his close friend Commodore Shubrick are filled with naval gossip, including repeated mentions of his gathering data for a History of the Navy of the United States, which eventually appeared in 1839. In the 1840s, the highly partisan reception of Cooper’s History (which occasioned numerous pained letters from the author to friends as well as a series of public letters printed in Brother Jonathan, a leading New York anti-Whig newspaper) was then compounded by the ongoing rancor over the actions of the American commander Oliver Hazard Perry and his second, Jesse Duncan Elliott, in the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie. Cooper was again drawn into a very public debate, beginning with two lengthy letters published in the Cooperstown Freeman’s Journal on 8 July 1839, where the author argued he had represented the known facts about the battle rather than taking sides on the issue of whether Elliott had come soon enough to the aid of his commander. Cooper’s letters defending his impartiality, published in newspapers friendly to him between May 1840 and March 1841, elicited new attacks and new rebuttals, and mushroomed into a widely reported battle with a descendant of and advocate for Perry, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, whose high-handed execution of several alleged mutineers in 1842 led to an exoneration at court-martial that Cooper eagerly condemned as a whitewash in long analyses sent to Shubrick. Nonetheless, as bitter as these quarrels were, for Cooper, the biggest threats to America’s mental independence were not military or cultural, but political, and

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involved both external malice and internal weakness. The careful analysis of British and French struggles for more representative democracies found in many of his letters was particularly stimulated by his first-hand observations during his sojourn in Europe from 1826 to 1833. Writing at length to his frequent American correspondent, Peter Augustus Jay, on 15 July 1830, for example, Cooper stated that: ‘The whole of this quarter of the world is divided into two great parties. They have different names, in different countries . . . One side is struggling to reap the advantages of the revolutions, and the other to arrest them. Of course the latter class is composed of all those who are in possession of power and emoluments’ (LJJFC, 1: 418). Or, as he put it more simply, again to Jay, on 16 June 1831: ‘There is at this moment a deep conspiracy, among the higher classes, to cheat the lower out of their natural rights’ (LJJFC, 2: 107). Cooper even questioned the objectives of the liberal British Whig aristocracy who had welcomed him during his three-month stay in London in spring 1828. Although the Whigs backed the Reform Bill, eventually passed in 1832, Cooper wrote to his Yale science teacher, Benjamin Silliman, on 10 June 1831 that they ‘[s]till . . . were aristocrats,’ who were able to use their wealth to control voting, since ‘England [is] in truth more of a monied Corporation than a government – a sort of another East India Company, on a grand scale’ (LJJFC, 2: 95). And in a letter to John Stuart Skinner two weeks later, he opined that: ‘There is a deep conspiracy of Aristocrats who are now striving to keep all they can from the people . . . All are not liberal who seem so, and the Reform Bill, in England, is a forced concession artfully contrived to appear to yield a great deal more than it actually does’ (LJJFC, 2: 112). Nonetheless, he embraced the hope for both England and Europe that ‘when a people is sufficiently advanced to rule itself well, it will rule itself’ (LJJFC, 2: 74). There were certainly some models for this hope. In July 1826, for example, Cooper accepted a warm invitation from Lafayette, the leader of the French Republicans, to visit the international symbol of liberal politics at his home at La Grange, and they became frequent correspondents. Indeed, Cooper’s later letters from his Paris sojourn, beginning with one to his wife on 21 August 1830, provide vivid observations of Lafayette’s role in the July 1830 political turmoil that led to the ‘Citizen King’ Louis Phillipe displacing Charles X. Letters to various recipients on 24 August and 8 September, for instance, emphasize Lafayette’s nobility in refusing to head the new government himself, although by spring 1831 Cooper was writing to Shubrick that: ‘The people in power, in France, have completely cheated the people out of their liberty, and are aiming now at an Aristocracy. They will keep a King as a cloak; but the English system is their aim’ (LJJFC, 2: 77). Perhaps as a result of his tendency toward political pessimism, Cooper appears more clearly than the old General to have seen how oligarchs took over the July revolution, replacing Republicans with bankers. Nevertheless, the two men remained close. Lafayette’s desire to position Cooper in France as the representative American democrat had already led the General to encourage him to set the record straight about U.S. politics and culture by refuting the abundant body of anti-American literature being written in the 1820s by European visitors. The fruit of this effort was Cooper’s first major work of non-fiction, Notions of the Americans (1828), which was appropriately written in the form of a series of letters exchanged among a cosmopolitan set of European gentlemen and one American, John Cadwallader. Subsequently Lafayette then solicited the author’s support in a crucial debate over the costs of taxing and supporting a democracy. In a series of

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nine long letters published in pamphlets and Parisian newspapers from 25 November 1831 to 7 March 1832, Cooper rebutted critics of America by marshalling detailed statistics that demonstrated the costs of a democracy were significantly less than the monarchists claimed.17 Cooper’s command of American outgoings and expenses at the local, state, and national levels was extraordinary for someone not immersed in such issues professionally, and he concluded this successful foray into political economics with a letter dated 1 October 1832 and published in a Philadelphia newspaper, which summarized his arguments and vigorously made the case that his analysis properly accounted for all types of taxation. ‘Governments, in this quarter of the world, are in fact degenerating into stock-jobbing companies, in which the mass are treated as so many producers to enable the few to get good securities for their money,’ he concluded, in typical fashion (LJJFC, 2: 345). Cooper’s advocacy for the effectiveness of American democracy left him feeling bruised, though. He was disappointed that few Americans at home or abroad endorsed his support of that democratic icon Lafayette – disappointment he expressed to Lafayette himself in a letter of 11 August 1833. On 2 April of the same year, meanwhile, he lamented to Morse that an anonymous review in the New-York American on 7 June 1832 had been written by a political hack to denigrate Cooper’s support for the General, leading him to wonder ‘how much longer America means to tolerate this slavish dependence on foreign opinion’ (LJJFC, 2: 381). Still, Cooper refused to abandon the form of the political letter. Soon after his return to New York in 1834, for example, he began a series of letters in the New York Evening Post under the pseudonym ‘A.B.C.,’ which were soon recognized as his work. Between 19 December 1834 and 10 February 1836, ‘A.B.C.’ contributed twenty letters on the refusal of the new French oligarchic government to pay agreed-upon reparations for American losses to shipping during the Napoleonic wars, and another eleven, from 8 January 1835 to 1 July 1836, discussing, often in learned detail, his views of interpreting the U. S. Constitution, especially the balance between executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Writing to his friends in a more private vein, Cooper readily disclosed the link between the two topics. To Yale classmate Micah Sterling, for example, he wrote on 27 October 1834 that ‘the great danger we have to apprehend is legislative usurpation,’ and on 6 April 1835 in a letter to Richard Bentley he characterized French and American merchants as mutually aristocratic (LJJFC, 3: 59). That is, the oligarchs who had destroyed Lafayette’s hopes for a true French republic were dodging their obligations to the American republic, while the merchant class in the U.S. Senate (still constituted by state-based political appointment) were acting like the European oligarch aristocrats he had observed at work suppressing democratic movements in the early 1830s. Cooper discerned another connection between American and European politics, too: just as the English and French aristocracy cloaked their power behind a figure-head king, so the American monied ‘aristocracy’ sought to encroach upon the Constitutional powers of the presidency. Thus in the ‘A.B.C.’ letter of 7 February 1835 Cooper supported the actions of President Jackson in destroying the national bank, and condemned the senators attacking him. These senators (who represented the ‘corporate interests’ of a single state) should not seek unconstitutionally to overturn ‘the President, who in his single person represents the entire constituency of the Union,’ he noted (LJJFC, 3: 101).

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Two ‘A.B.C.’ letters, of August and September 1835, broached the most controversial issues of the day: states’ rights and slavery. Cooper’s first piece of public journalism had been a jocular 1823 account of a horse race on Long Island, featuring rival favorites supported by the North and the South. But the North–South regional schism was soon no laughing matter, as Southerners increasingly argued for the right of their states to reject tariffs favorable to Northern manufacturers, and some Northerners began aggressively to advocate abolition of slavery in the South. Writing at length on 20 September 1830 to Shubrick, a native of South Carolina (the most outspoken state behind nullifying tariffs), Cooper showed respect for the former arguments, but greater respect for the Constitution: ‘There can clearly be no Nullification, under any construction of the powers of the Constitution, since it is destructive to the government itself. The doctrine that States are independent is fallacious’ (LJJFC, 2: 21). Moreover, Cooper affirmed, while he regarded himself as a citizen of Cooperstown and New York: ‘I have but one country . . . and that Country is America’ (LJJFC, 2: 21). Characteristically, Cooper added that American civic dissension was fomented by English interests eager to see the dissolution of the Union. But he also referred in this letter to his correspondence with another South Carolinian, Henry Cruger, whose detailed and eloquent arguments for Nullification he had already begun to rebut with Peter Augustus Jay. As is so often the case with Cooper, then, his public epistolary pronouncement on states’ rights in the ‘A.B.C.’ letter of August 1835 emerged from and interacted with his private correspondence. Cooper’s ‘A.B.C.’ letter of September 1835, meanwhile, trod even more controversial territory. Here Cooper conceded ‘slavery to be a sin,’ but immediately asked ‘does it justify any one to attempt overturning the institution, without regard to the effects?’ (LJJFC, 3: 169). That is, while he conceded the power of Congress to ban slavery in the District of Columbia – the specific issue being addressed in his letter – he urged that this question be settled by a ballot of D.C. voters in order to avoid a national crisis. That crisis was not to be averted, of course. The Mexican American War of 1846–8, for example, significantly heightened national tension by raising the issue of annexing Texas as a slave state, and was closely followed by Cooper. Chauvinistically he at first welcomed American victories but eventually, like many Americans, grew weary as the conflict raged on. Writing to Shubrick, for example, who was personally involved in the fighting, he objected in January 1847 to bombarding the unfortified town of Tobasco: ‘It is such acts that inflame a country against its invaders. Towns should never be fired into, unless an important military object is to be gained’ (LJJFC, 5: 187). Cooper’s ambivalence about the war is reflected too in his novel Jack Tier, or The Florida Reef (1848), where a wicked American ship captain smuggles arms to Mexico and the only character acting nobly is a Mexican. But it is reflected above all in his comments on the prospect of Texas becoming a slave state. In a long letter of 18 September 1844, for instance, parts of which were published in The Tompkins Democrat, Cooper insisted that despite the current controversies ‘[t]he Union . . . is stronger than is commonly supposed’ (LJJFC, 4: 475). And writing to Shubrick on 25 September 1847, he called the Texas annexation ‘a troublesome, but a very silly question to settle relative to slavery,’ before going on to argue that each territory could decide the slavery issue itself, but only Congress could craft and enforce the compromises going back a generation whereby free and slave states were admitted in pairs to the Union (LJJFC, 5: 237).

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At the same time, however, Cooper resisted the attempts of Southern politicians led by Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina to enshrine such compromises in the Constitution. Writing to Shubrick on 22 July 1850, for example, he observed that: It is evident that the slaveholders wish to introduce a new feature into the Constitution – that of Mr. Calhoun’s ‘equilibrium’ – in other words such changes must take place, from time to time, as will give the slave states equal power in the Union. Slavery is, consequently, to be an element in the government. And these are the men who talk of the Constitution. They say that the Constitution requires slavery. I should like to see in what clause. (LJJFC, 6: 207) Cooper could not stop the Compromise of 1850, a set of bills passed that September which intensified the fugitive slave laws, abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, admitted California as a free state, and settled territorial issues after the Mexican War; but he saw the underlying issue clearly. ‘A crisis has been reached in the history of slavery which any one could have for[e]seen,’ he continues, ‘the slave states are overstocked, and space is needed to render the negro of any value as property. The Constitution must be bedeviled in order to do this’ (LJJFC, 6: 208). He predicted, accurately, that this Compromise notwithstanding, Northern Abolitionist and Southern slavery expansionists would drive the Union apart. ‘At the next Presidential election [the Union] will snap,’ he declared; a prediction fulfilled, thanks to Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860 (LJJFC, 6: 208). Yet even here Cooper could not help but express a certain sympathy for the Southern position, partly perhaps because he had always perceived the right to property as sacrosanct. ‘Property in man is no more opposed to Christianity than property in a horse,’ he assures Shubrick in the conclusion of his July 1850 letter (LJJFC, 6: 209). In expressing such attitudes, Cooper therefore joined many non-Abolitionist Northerners who wanted to find a middle ground. His own personal experience with slaves was with comparatively well-treated domestics in New York, and he had never traveled further south than the national capital, nor seen firsthand the effects of chattel agricultural slavery which Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) would engrave on the national conscience the year after his death. Interestingly too, Cooper’s attitudes toward property also colored his pronouncements on the ‘Anti-Rent’ agitation of some New York farmers who during the late 1830s were seeking to break their ‘feudal’ obligations to pay rent in labor and produce to the large landowners of the Hudson Valley such as the Rensselaers. Predicting that the Anti-Renters would destroy the country, Cooper wrote to his wife on 14 December 1839 that although ‘the Manor War is over for the present . . . the evil lies deeper than the surface’ (LJJFC, 3: 448). And indeed the agitation would continue, through the mid-1840s, prompting Cooper to make a case for the Constitutional protection of private property in The Chainbearer (1845) and The Redskins (1846). Wisely he avoided any public letters on the matter, given that his Whig opponents already regularly branded him an ‘aristocrat,’ but he did respond privately to unsolicited letters supporting his agenda, noting on 4 November 1848, for example, that: ‘How far this downward tendency will go, I do not pretend to say; but I think it quite clear that, unless arrested, it must lead to revolution and bloodshed’ (LJJFC, 5: 388). Likely too it was the success of the ‘Anti-Rent’ faction that led Cooper, a month later, to respond to Anson Judd Upson’s request to explicate the phrase ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ with his hope that: ‘Divine Providence reigns over even majorities, and the “vox dei” may interpose, after all, to save us from its miserable counterfeit the

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“vox populi” ’ (LJJFC, 5: 394). Whatever the cause of this statement, however, it is clear that, late in his career, Cooper began to fear his life’s work had failed to arrest the threats posed to a constitutional democracy by the mob. This feeling of disappointment is perhaps reflected in his inability to write a final book on American politics akin to his earlier Notions of the Americans. ‘I am about to publish a work on American Democracy,’ he announced to Richard Bentley on 30 March 1848. ‘It will be a bold book, taking the bull by the horn, and showing the mistakes of popular opinion on that subject, as it exists here’ (LJJFC, 5: 326). But despite promising Bentley that ‘I shall write you again shortly, touching this work,’ it never appeared, and no drafts of it are known to exist (LJJFC, 5: 326). Thus it is in the private letters that we get the best sense of Cooper’s final literary and political opinions. Writing to Micah Sterling on 27 October 1834, he had neatly summarized his mid-life political views thus: ‘Au reste, I am a democrat – not a party democrat, but a real democrat – on conviction that it is the best form of government for all countries that are sufficiently enlightened to bear it’ (LJJFC, 3: 59). But in his final years, his emphasis shifted from the first to the last part of this credo. On 9 May 1846, for example, Cooper responded to a request from James Kirke Paulding for information on his literary earnings with a long lament that concluded: ‘Had I employed the same time in trade, or travelling as an agent for a manufacturer of pins, I do not doubt I should have been better off, and my children independent. The fact is, this country is not sufficiently advanced for any thing intellectual, and the man who expects to rise by any such agency makes a capital mistake, unless he sell himself, soul and body, to a faction’ (LJJFC, 5: 131). Underpinning this shift, meanwhile, his newlydetailed attention to the Bible, as disclosed in various 1848 journal entries, suggests a turn from political engagement to religious resignation; a turn also visible in his 1848 letter to Anson Judd Upton, which expresses a new quietism in Cooper’s hope that the ‘vox dei’ could silence the ‘vox populi.’ Nonetheless if, in his final years, Cooper became uncertain that America would ever be ‘sufficiently advanced’ enough to maintain professional authors or an effective democracy, for the preceding decades few if any American novelists had engaged in their public and private correspondence with such energy. On all the issues discussed here, Cooper had strong opinions and expressed them freely, as well as marshaling statistics, historical documents, and legal opinions to his side. He fought on behalf of American cultural and political independence, defended his highly personal interpretations of the Constitution, and advocated for liberal politics in Europe against the conservatives he saw threatening the American Revolution. Throughout his career, he also struggled to establish creative authorship as a responsible (and financially viable) profession for an American with sharp-edged political and social views. Thus in both strands of his correspondence as addressed here, Cooper strove, in the inchoate new republic, to create and sustain a role for an American democrat as author and engaged citizen.

Notes 1. See Cooper, Letter to John Miller, c. 7–12 February 1826, in The Letters and Journals, 1: 128. Cooper often used his prefaces in early novels like The Pilot (1824) to articulate his views of the relationships between fact and fiction, history and romance, and the role of ‘poetry’ in describing a prosaic America. Apparently Cooper believed such statements necessary to help his readers appreciate these distinctions when fiction written by an American about Americans was still comparatively new. See Shulenberger, Cooper’s Theory of Fiction.

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2. The individual titles of the scholarly editions published under the rubric of The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1980–present), a series initiated by James Franklin Beard and now with myself as editor-in-chief, are the best sources of information on the publication strategies of specific works. For more information about this ongoing project see Schachterle, The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper. Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, provides much new archival information on the author’s publication practices before his seven-year sojourn in Europe that began in 1826. For a concise overview of Cooper’s changing publication practices, see Schachterle, ‘Cooper’s Works in Print.’ 3. Cooper’s use of his letters to conduct business and discuss public affairs chimes with the epistolary habits of his class and generation as, before the arrival of cheap postage in the mid-1840s, the mail was used most by merchants and politicians, for whom it was most necessary and most affordable. See Henkin, The Postal Age, 15–22. 4. As with so many other nineteenth-century figures the first organized publication of Cooper’s correspondence came about through the posthumous efforts of his family. Cooper’s grandson, who shared his full name with the author, published the Correspondence of James FenimoreCooper in 1922, a silently-edited, two-volume collection. Between 1960 and 1968, James Franklin Beard produced the first scholarly collection, a carefully annotated six-volume edition of 1,130 letters from Cooper, along with extant journals, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper. Jeffrey Walker is currently compiling those Cooper letters which have emerged since Beard’s edition. For succinct accounts of the history of Cooper’s letters and archive, see Beard, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, 1: xxxvi–xl, and Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, xiii–xvii. 5. For a richly contextualized analysis of the Cooper–Goodrich correspondence, placing this economic venture alongside the author’s whaling voyage and his legal battles over the collapse of the family estate, see Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, 247–68. 6. For a detailed study of how Cooper wanted his printers to set his holographs, and his expectations for their limited corrections of ‘obvious’ authorial blunders, see Schachterle, ‘Cooper and His Collaborators.’ 7. Quoted in Beard, ‘Historical Introdution,’ xxvi. 8. Ibid. 9. See Cooper, Letter to Unidentified Publisher, c. 6–9 April 1844, in The Letters and Journals, 4: 447–8, and Cooper, Letter to W. B. Shubrick, 30 May 1844, in ibid. 4: 462–3. 10. For an account of Cooper’s costs and meagre profit on Afloat and Ashore see Philbrick and Philbrick, ‘Historical Introduction,’ 1: xx–xxv. 11. See Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, and, more recently, Loughran, The Republic in Print. 12. The classic account of Cooper’s efforts to be a professional author, which also situates him in relation to other nineteenth-century writers, is Charvat, The Profession of Authorship, 68–83. For a re-evaluation of Charvat’s model of authorial professionalization that stresses the complex role letters played in negotiations between writers and publishers see Jackson, The Business of Letters. 13. Gura’s recent comprehensive history of the American novel through the 1860s, Truth’s Ragged Edge, points to Wiley and Putnam’s ‘Library of American Books’ of 1845 as pioneering such modern practices for supporting authors as ‘paying a sum up front and then guaranteeing a 10 percent royalty after the edition broke even and allowing them to keep the copyright’ (77). Unfortunately, Cooper’s arrangements for a deluxe complete edition of his works with Putnam ultimately foundered on competition from cheaper editions by Stringer & Townsend, to whom Cooper had unwisely sold the rights of some of his earlier novels. 14. It was not unusual in the nineteenth century for literary figures to take up public office. The position of Secretary of the Navy, for example, which Cooper told various correspondents he was not interested in, was held in his lifetime by two authors with less knowledge of the Navy than Cooper – James K. Paulding (1838–41) and George Bancroft (1845–6).

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15. For an extended discussion of how and why nineteenth-century Americans understood the function of letters to be closely related to the articulation of these political themes see Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, especially 1–51. 16. Although the offending letter, which appeared in the New York Evening Post under the pseudonym ‘An Amateur,’ was ascribed by some at the time to Morse himself, it has been attributed by Beard to Cooper. See Cooper, Letter to William Cullen Bryant and William Leggett, c. 23 December 1834, in The Letters and Journals, 3: 79–81. 17. For Cooper’s texts as they appeared in French and James Franklin Beard’s useful annotations on this ‘Finance Controversy’ see The Letters and Journals, 2: 187–229.

Works Cited Beard, J. F. (1983), ‘Historical Introduction,’ in J. F. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, ed. J. A. Sappenfield and E. N. Feltskog, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, xv–xlviii. Charvat, W. (1959), Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Charvat, W. (1968), The Profession of Authorship in America 1800–1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Cooper, J. F. (1960–8), The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, 6 vols., ed. J. F. Beard, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cited parenthetically as LJJFC. Cooper, J. F. [grandson], ed. (1922), Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper, 2 vols., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Franklin, W. (2007), James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gura, Philip F. (2013), Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, L. (2008), The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Loughran, T. (2007), The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, New York: Columbia University Press. Philbrick, T., and M. Philbrick (2004), ‘Historical Introduction,’ in J. F. Cooper, Afloat and Ashore, ed. T. and M. Philbrick, 2 vols., New York: AMS Press, 1: i–xxxvii. Schachterle, L. (2003), ‘Cooper and His Collaborators: Recovering Cooper’s Final Intentions for His Fiction,’ Studies in Bibliography, 56: 317–37. Schachterle, L. (2007), ‘Cooper’s Works in Print,’ in J. Walker (ed.), Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper, New York: AMS Press, 158–81. Schachterle, L. (2011–present), The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Shulenberger, A. (1955), Cooper’s Theory of Fiction: His Prefaces and Their Relation to His Novels, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

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35 THE TRANSATLANTIC VILLAGE: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE EPISTOLARY FRIENDSHIP OF CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK AND MARY RUSSELL MITFORD Melissa J. Homestead

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n June 1830, the American novelist and short-story writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick used the imminent London publication of her novel Clarence as a pretext for initiating a correspondence with the British author Mary Russell Mitford. In her first letter to Mitford, Sedgwick addressed her as ‘My dear Miss Mitford,’ a violation of epistolary decorum in a letter to someone to whom she had not been introduced (FOMRM, 155).1 As Sedgwick protested, however, ‘I cannot employ the formal address of a stranger towards one who has inspired the vivid feeling of intimate acquaintance, a deep and affectionate interest in her occupations and happiness’ (FOMRM, 155). In this letter Sedgwick did not explicitly mention Our Village (1824–32), the title under which multiple volumes of Mitford’s sketches of country life had already appeared, but she referred by name to recurring characters in these sketches and proclaimed that Mitford’s ‘power over the imagination’ in depicting them had ‘wrought on our affection like realities’ (FOMRM, 156). In Our Village, Mitford – an unmarried woman from an aristocratic but impecunious family, who lived in the village of Three Mile Cross in Berkshire, England, and supported her ne’er-do-well father with the proceeds from her writing – presented a thinly fictionalized version of life in an English country village as narrated by a genteel woman who resides there. As Alison Booth has argued of this autobiographical strain in Mitford’s work, she ‘took pains to create the intimacy of correspondence, to “talk to the public as a friend,” but in an artful arrangement of the lifelike.’2 Sedgwick was not the only female writer who read in Our Village an apparent invitation to write to its author in familiar terms, but she arguably had more reason to feel a strong kinship with Mitford than most, despite the Atlantic Ocean lying between them.3 Sedgwick was, like Mitford, unmarried and devoted to her family, and she was born and raised in the Berkshires, a mountainous region of Massachusetts named after the English county where Mitford lived. ‘[W]e all have dim impressions of the actual existence of those unknown and distant,’ Sedgwick told Mitford in her first letter, making it ‘difficult for you to realize that your name has penetrated beyond our maritime cities, and is familiar and honored, and loved through many a village circle’ 538

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(FOMRM, 156). Thus, although Sedgwick initially wrote to Mitford from New York City, where she lived half of each year with her brother Robert, by adverting to the circulation of Mitford’s works in the ‘village circle[s]’ of the U.S. she aligned herself with rural life in the American Berkshires, where she lived the other half of each year with another brother. Moreover, because the narrator of Our Village frequently indulges a village girl, ‘dear, bright little “Lizzie”,’ in her rambles, Sedgwick also allowed her niece and namesake, Katherine Sedgwick (Robert’s daughter), to add a postscript asking whether various human characters and the dog May in Mitford’s sketches were real (FOMRM, 156–7). In response to these subtle gestures of affiliation, Mitford wrote back to ‘My dear Miss Sedgwick’ in September with enthusiasm and gratitude (LOMRMTH, 116). While she had not yet received the promised copy of Clarence, she had read Sedgwick’s earlier novels A New-England Tale (1822) and Redwood (1824), and she admitted in both her letter to Catharine and her postscript to Kate that ‘[t]he indices of my private story’ in the Our Village books ‘which have been so kindly received by the public, are for the most part strictly true’ (LOMRMTH, 117). Adding details of her family life not included in Our Village, Mitford implored Catharine, ‘if you ever do come to our little England you must come and see us. We should never forgive you if you did not’ (LOMRMTH, 118). For a decade thereafter, the imagined co-residence of Sedgwick and Mitford in a transatlantic village flourished: they corresponded regularly with sympathy and a sense of identification, promoted each other’s works to their respective national reading audiences, and sent letters of introduction with friends and family crossing the Atlantic. It is thus ironic that the actual meeting of the two authors on Sedgwick’s first and only trip to Europe in 1839 and Sedgwick’s subsequent description of their encounter in Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841) led to the friendship’s collapse. Their epistolary friendship was embedded in the broader Anglo-American circulation of texts, which often crossed and recrossed between manuscript and print as they circulated, and the rise and fall of their friendship illuminates the unstable boundaries between public and private that resulted when published authors corresponded transatlantically in the mid-nineteenth century. When antebellum New Englanders ‘pictured the cultural geography of their region in their mind’s eye,’ Lawrence Buell has observed, ‘the first thing they thought they saw was a patchwork of largely rural “towns” . . . small, self-contained, preindustrial districts . . . dotted with hamlets and with a central village as the social or economic hub’ (NELC, 304). As represented in the literature of this period, the village was ‘a self-contained unit, sheltered from the outside world and organically interdependent: a bird’s nest shielded from wind and “foreigners” ’ – its key qualities were ‘smallness, isolation, cohesiveness, innocence, and unchangingness’ (NELC, 306). Across the ocean, meanwhile, Mitford’s famous opening passage in the first volume of Our Village praised and described village life in England in very similar terms. ‘Of all the situations for a constant residence,’ she wrote, ‘that which appears to me the most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages . . . with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers of our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive . . . where we know every one, are known to every one, interested in everyone, and authorised to hope that everyone feels an interest in us.’4 Sedgwick, unlike Mitford, seldom used

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a first-person participant-observer narrator, but some of her fiction of the 1820s is thematically akin to that of her English correspondent. Her representation of village life in her first novel, A New-England Tale, for example, may be less eulogistic than Mitford’s (Buell calls it ‘more an exposé than an exposition of provincial village culture’), but Redwood certainly idealizes the intimacy of village life (NELC, 295). Thus, when describing the customs of a village funeral, the narrator of Redwood admits that despite its being ‘quite primitive,’ its ‘simplicity is more touching than the most pompous ceremonial,’ for ‘in the country where life is not so plentiful . . . each knows his neighbour, the events of his life, and the hope he may have had in death.’5 Similarly, when a character loses his home to a fire, ‘the voluntary contributions of his townsmen’ enable him to quickly rebuild it, thereby demonstrating ‘the prompt benevolence of our country people.’6 Moreover, the novel with which Sedgwick sought to initiate her correspondence with Mitford, Clarence, even more pointedly contrasts urban and rural lifeways, with an important interlude from the scenes set in New York City taking place in Clarenceville, a ‘thriving village’ where the genteel heroine faces a series of challenges as she attempts to pull off an unexpected dinner party without ruffling the feathers of a series of village types from whom she must procure her provisions.7 Based on the presumption that Mitford’s Our Village sketches, which began appearing in British gift books and magazines in 1822, were widely disseminated in the U.S. soon after their original publication, scholars have usually supposed that they influenced Sedgwick’s village fictions of the 1820s. However, even though U.S. copyright law permitted American periodicals to reprint individual sketches, and publishers to reprint entire volumes, without Mitford’s permission, her sketches did not catch the attention of American magazine editors until 1826, and Our Village did not appear in book form under an American imprint until New York’s Bliss & White – also the publisher of Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale, Redwood, and The Travellers (1825) – issued the first three volumes of collected sketches simultaneously in late 1828.8 Although Mitford had access to Sedgwick’s works of the 1820s in London editions published by John Miller not long after the American editions appeared, Our Village apparently entered the Sedgwick family circle in Bliss & White’s delayed edition.9 As one of Catharine’s nieces wrote to her father in March 1829, her brother had ‘brought up quite an importation of Novels’ from New York to Stockbridge, amongst which, ‘[w]e were all delighted with Miss Mitford.’10 It is thus possible that Sedgwick influenced Mitford rather than vice versa. Regardless, their first exchange of letters in 1830 reveals a shock of recognition between the two women – a sense that throughout the 1820s they had embraced similar literary themes and were thus neighbors in a village who had before failed to become acquainted but who could now proceed immediately to intimacy. For Mitford, this sense of recognition was particularly strong, since before receiving Sedgwick’s initial letter she had already selected three of the American’s gift-book tales – ‘The Catholic Iroquois’ (1825), ‘The Country Cousin’ (1829) and ‘Cacoethes Scribendi’ (1829) – for her not-yet-issued anthology Stories of American Life (1830). Indeed, in her introduction to the three-volume collection, Mitford singled out Sedgwick twice – praising ‘the moral tales of Miss Sedgwick’ as among the book-length American works already well-known to British readers and acknowledging Sedgwick as one of the authors to whom she was ‘chiefly indebted’ for shorter tales she had

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chosen ‘from a great mass of Annuals, Magazines, and other periodicals.’11 Mitford no doubt sensed a kindred spirit in a narrative like ‘Cacoethes Scribendi,’ which affectionately sends up the residents of a ‘little secluded and quiet village’ named ‘H.’ that ‘lies at no great distance from our “literary emporium” ’ (a thinly disguised version of Sedgwick’s hometown of Stockbridge, Massachusetts).12 Its protagonist, Mrs. Courland, an enthusiastic amateur author, writes gift-book tales deriving from events in H., within which the village’s ‘church and school house [stand] there according to their actual dimensions.’13 A delighted Mitford added this footnote, the only one in her anthology: ‘This story is a curious illustration of the universality of the fashion of the day. Many editors of our splendid English Annuals could . . . bear testimony to a similar passion for literary fame on this side of the water.’14 Serendipitously, meanwhile, Sedgwick introduced herself to Mitford during the gap between the printing of Stories and its publication, thus allowing Mitford to realize on a personal level her prefatory intention ‘to make American manners better known in England’ by ‘promot[ing] kindly feelings between two nations, who, described from a common ancestry, possessing the same rich and noble language, and alike distinguished by a love of public freedom and domestic virtue, ought . . . to be to each other, in a social and political sense, brethren and friends.’15 Having arrived at this sense of personal recognition and affiliation, however, the difficulties of transatlantic correspondence very nearly ended the two writers’ epistolary friendship before it began. Mail did not travel on regularly scheduled steamships between North America and Britain until 1840, and sending letters on both sides of the Atlantic required the payment of high postage charges (potentially borne by the recipient) and following confusing regulations. Consequently, Sedgwick and Mitford, like other international correspondents, often sent letters with private individuals traversing the Atlantic instead. Nonetheless, whether sent by post or privately carried, transatlantic letters commonly suffered long delays or miscarriages.16 Indeed, the first editor of Mitford’s published correspondence, Alfred L’Estrange, likely had possession of Mitford’s September 1830 reply to Sedgwick’s first letter because it never left England.17 In her second letter, written 10 October 1830, Mitford attempted to reconstruct her first, explaining that she had sent it to ‘an American Gentleman in London to be forwarded’ to Sedgwick, but that ‘Mr. Jones’ had changed lodgings and the letter’s whereabouts were unknown (CMSP, III.3.11). Mitford wrote this second letter ‘on the full gallop’ because the gentleman himself, most likely the lawyer, editor, and poet James Athearn Jones, was standing by waiting to carry it to London, where he would entrust it to John Miller for its transatlantic crossing.18 On 7 January 1832, a chagrined Mitford reported that this ‘American Gentleman’ had failed once more, having departed England without transmitting yet another letter addressed to both Catharine and her niece Kate – a miscarried letter that would partially fill a two-year gap in Sedgwick and Mitford’s early correspondence (CMSP, III.3.13). Recognizing the threat to their budding friendship, Sedgwick proffered an elaborate Shakespearean metaphor in replying to this news on 14 May, calling Jones ‘my Petruchio’ because he had denied her the food she craved – namely, letters from Mitford (FOMRM, 169). ‘His very name has a knell in it,’ Sedgwick protested, suggesting a bell tolling for a friendship that might die without correspondence to sustain it (FOMRM, 169). In response, Mitford wrote on 2 September confessing that, despite Jones being a ‘well intentioned person,’ his ‘carelessness’ had made her ‘suspicious even of trustier people’

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– indeed she had delayed responding to Sedgwick because she wanted to convey the letter to London herself in order to ensure its safe passage (CMSP, III.3.13). For the next decade, in fact, Sedgwick and Mitford’s correspondence would continue to bear out William Merrill Decker’s observation that the carrying and miscarrying of letters is a common ‘thematic concern of the epistolary text.’19 Commentary on persons carrying letters, queries about postage and escaping it through ‘franking’ (by Mitford’s friends in Parliament), as well as explanations of delays, occupy space in nearly every letter the two women sent. Because of such issues, their initial round of personal disclosures took a great deal of time. Nevertheless, by January 1832 they had made clear to one another the similarities in their familial circumstances, with Mitford stressing her sense of responsibility toward her father (‘one of the most beautiful of men . . . a perfect specimen of the English gentleman’) and Sedgwick writing of her brothers, her sister, her sisters-in-law (‘as true, and devoted as if they were born flesh of my flesh’) and her ‘little community of nieces and nephews,’ all of whom were said to share in her delight at Mitford’s letters (CMSP, III.3.11; FOMRM, 170). This latter emphasis on the familial circulation of letters is, indeed, another common trope in the two women’s correspondence. Scholarship on transatlantic epistolarity has often focused on letter-writing as a means to maintain relationships, including family ones, over distance within expanding empires, but if, as Konstantin Dierks has argued, such relationships ‘were reduced almost completely to letters’ for many ‘transatlantic immigrants and frontier migrants,’ the relationship between Mitford and Sedgwick from 1830 until 1839 was not merely ‘reduced’ to letters – it consisted entirely of them.20 To compensate for this lack of physical familiarity they therefore resorted to what Elizabeth Hewitt has described as a ‘frequent conceit’ in nineteenthcentury letter-writing – the assertion ‘that there is no essential difference between the letter-writer’s body and her letter.’21 In this respect, as Eve Tavor Bannet adds, letters were understood as a ‘form of silent speech that both issued from conversation and returned to it,’ especially through being read aloud in company.22 Thus, in May 1832, Sedgwick reported a dialogue between herself and her eleven-year-old niece after she read aloud a letter in which Mitford commended the stability of class hierarchies in England: ‘I said, I suspect our dear Miss Mitford is an anti-reformist. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “I wish that everybody we love in England would not be against the reform!” ’ (FOMRM, 170). In the same letter, Sedgwick reported another response to Mitford that was both far less ambivalent and far more emphatic in its physicality: ‘My brother Robert . . . is your devoted admirer. I wish I could describe to you the unaffected enthusiasm with which he kissed your signature’ (FOMRM, 170). Several years later Sedgwick wrote to Mitford about another familial dialogue, this one concerning the imminent departure from New York of Mitford’s old and Sedgwick’s new friend, the Anglo-Irish writer Anna Jameson, during which Sedgwick’s sister-in-law similarly consoled her by observing that ‘Miss Mitford will be here in the next packet’ (FOMRM, 251). While Mitford was less effusive she nevertheless praised Sedgwick’s letters in March 1835 as the ‘most welcome & most delightful pieces of sweet talking which come to me across the Atlantic’ (CMSP, III.4.3). Mitford herself never did cross the Atlantic, but in the first decade of her correspondence with Sedgwick travelers carrying letters of introduction sometimes did, becoming a means for them to establish physical intimacy by proxy. In December 1832, for example, Sedgwick began a long, intertwining series of introductions by putting a letter

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to Mitford in the hands of her nephew George Pomeroy. ‘He is in some sort entitled to the pleasure of seeing you,’ Sedgwick explained, ‘being among your most enthusiastic admirers’ (FOMRM, 173). Pomeroy eventually ensured the safe passage of his aunt’s letter to Mitford’s home, but had to return to America before he could present himself in person, making Mitford rue, in a letter from January 1833, her lost opportunity to ‘have questioned him about you & yours!’ (CMSP, III.3.14). Nonetheless, Sedgwick soon put a letter of introduction into the hands of another nephew, Theodore Sedgwick III, the relation responsible for bringing Our Village to the family’s attention in 1829. This young man delighted Mitford – indeed, he even commenced his own correspondence with Mitford and in 1836 returned with his father to stay with her at Three Mile Cross for nearly a month. Meanwhile, during the gap between Theodore setting off to serve as secretary to the American legation in Paris in 1833 and his first meeting with Mitford, Mitford had in turn presented the sculptor Henry Westmacott to her American friend. Describing Westmacott’s desire to seek opportunities in ‘your wide & flourishing nation’ for his ten children in a note from September 1833, Mitford assured Sedgwick that she ‘would not trouble you with any introductions except to persons worthy of your confidence’ (CMSP, III.4.2). That is certainly true of her most consequential letter of introduction, written on 9 July 1834, which acquainted Sedgwick with Harriet Martineau. Although Martineau was coming to make a study of American political economy ‘laden with letters of recommendation from the cleverest men of our country to the cleverest men of yours,’ Mitford claimed she placed more ‘value [on] an introduction from one quiet & respectable woman to another’ (CMSP, III.4.3). ‘I am delighted to owe to you the right to ask this distinguished lady to visit us in Berkshire,’ Sedgwick tellingly replied. ‘This is a new bond between us, and though those that already exist are sufficient to bind me to you for life, and all beyond, yet I care not how much they are multiplied’ (FOMRM, 184). In response to Sedgwick’s celebration of their multiplying personal bonds, Mitford judged their friendship as emblematic of broader Anglo-American cultural relations. ‘Every day seems to me to encrease the union between [our] countries – I mean the union of taste & feeling,’ she wrote in 1835, and the connections between American and British culture were in fact a recurrent theme in the two women’s correspondence (CMSP, III.4.3). As in her very first letter, for example, Sedgwick continued to write about Our Village as a living reality bridging the gap between the nations. Thus in May 1832, she invited Mitford to tell her ‘anything of your noble father (long may he live!), whom I have loved ever since you took that ride with him in a one-horse chaise on a misty morning,’ before adding ‘Do you remember?,’ thereby implicitly turning an incident from Mitford’s fictional village sketch ‘The Bird Catcher’ (1828) into a shared memory (FOMRM, 171). Sometimes, moreover, Sedgwick oddly transposed Mitford’s village sketches onto American soil, as in May 1833, when she described taking a drive in the country outside New York with a friend who instructed the driver to turn ‘into Miss Mitford’s lane,’ a ‘deeply shaded, nooked’ place (FOMRM, 179). This moment, Sedgwick informed Mitford, ‘made my heart beat quicker. Is it not something to have given a name and a heightened charm to nature three thousand miles away?’ (FOMRM, 179). These sympathetic crossings of the Atlantic divide also sometimes stretched into the two writers’ published works, as with Sedgwick’s use of a quotation from Mitford’s historical play about the Roman republic, Rienzi (1828), as the epigraph to her 1835 novel on the American Revolution The Linwoods

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(‘The Eternal Power / Lodged in the will of man the hallowed names / Of freedom and country’), or Mitford’s long footnote to her 1837 story ‘The Widow’s Dog,’ in which she describes ‘the pleasure of exporting, this spring, to my friend Miss Sedgwick’ the ‘roots and seeds’ of an English primrose and other ‘indigenous plants which our Transatlantic brethren want.’24 Extending this botanical metaphor for cultural exchange, Sedgwick then included some of Mitford’s advice on growing flowering vines from another footnote to ‘The Widow’s Dog’ in her 1839 advice book for teenage girls, Means and Ends, or Self Training. Simultaneously this pattern of reciprocal exchange crossed into and through the less public realm of the epistolary. Thus in July 1839, Sedgwick sent the British edition of Means and Ends she had arranged for during her time in London to Mitford, calling the book ‘a piece of utility, which is entirely unadapted to you, but you may find some one among your humble friends to whom it may be acceptable’ (FOMRM, 272). Mitford accordingly lent the book to a deserving recipient, whose situation and response to the text she described at length in an 1839 letter, where she also made clear that she herself had read it closely by proclaiming she was ‘proud of’ Sedgwick’s ‘kind mention’ of her own work (CMSP, II.1.4). Notwithstanding Sedgwick and Mitford’s warm and enthusiastic embrace of one another in letters and print, their relationship was always inextricably intertwined in a broader public history of misunderstanding between Britain and the U.S, a friction fueled by travel writing and heightened by the sense that the two countries should understand one another. In Clarence Sedgwick herself launched her own sally in this ongoing battle by lampooning Captain Basil Hall – who had featured an encounter with ‘the accomplished author of . . . “Hope Leslie” ’ in his infamous Travels in North America (1829) – as the character Edmund Stuart, a snobbish, clueless British travel writer.25 Sedgwick and Mitford’s mutual negotiation of these frictions early coalesced around Hall’s successor Frances Trollope and her even more controversial travelogue The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). On 2 September 1832, shortly after the publication of Trollope’s book, Mitford wrote reassuringly to Sedgwick that each would genuinely like the other’s nation should they visit, before concluding ‘you must not confound me with Mrs. Trollope, who although she is my friend will never convince me to the opinions promulgated in her work not though she should write a thousand such’ (CMSP, III.3.13). Sedgwick then responded by using a financial metaphor to assert that without Mitford’s endorsement, Trollope’s book was worthless – the references to her ‘friend Miss Mitford’ in Domestic Manners were like reading the name ‘Baring’ or ‘Rothschild’ on ‘doubtful paper,’ she declared (FOMRM, 173). After rejecting Trollope’s critique of the absence of social distinction in American culture, Sedgwick repeated Mitford’s earlier conviction that they would each be at home in the other’s country. ‘I am certain you would like America,’ she stated, while also proclaiming that she herself more than ‘liked’ England – ‘I love and honor it as a dutiful child loves a parent’ – and offering the mourning of both the American nation and the Sedgwick family over Sir Walter Scott’s death as evidence of this (FOMRM, 174). Moved by Sedgwick’s tribute to Scott and her proclamation of filial love for England, Mitford wrote back on 28 January 1833 to describe in more detail the origins of her friendship with Trollope and the course of Trollope’s life as she and her barrister husband had ascended into higher social circles. These latter experiences made Frances Trollope, Mitford explained, the most ‘complete . . . specimen of the Blue Stocking Fine Lady’ in her ‘whole circle of acquaintance’ and accounted for the

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views expressed in Domestic Manners: ‘Imagine such a personage as this landed on the banks of the Wolf River expecting to find a Paradise opening in the Wild . . . & you will cease to wonder at her bitter disappointment & the complete convulsion of feeling . . . [America] occasioned in her mind’ (CMSP, III.3.14). Moreover, to Sedgwick’s delight, Mitford added that her father, though ‘an old Whig,’ was ‘a hearty lover of your American institutions’ who found Domestic Manners unforgivable, and observed that she herself wished ‘to go to America & write an answer’ to Trollope’s book (CMSP, III.3.14). Trollope thus became a touchstone, both implicit and explicit, against which Sedgwick and Mitford each measured the potential for a form of AngloAmerican understanding already realized in their friendship. Writing of Harriet Martineau’s reception in New York, for example, Sedgwick later noted with approval that she ‘has been received . . . with a cordiality befitting her claims,’ despite ‘our good people’ being ‘a little shy’ of ‘our English friends’ having ‘been so roughly handled’ by them (FOMRM, 184). And in return, in August 1836, Mitford assured Sedgwick that ‘Miss Martineau will do justice to America,’ unlike ‘Mrs. Trollope [who] has another American book upon the stacks!’ (CMSP, II.1.11). Mitford and Sedgwick exchanged many such confidences in their letters and imaginatively connected their verbal exchanges in manuscript to distant bodies and voices, but they could not actually see one another. ‘I half envy Miss Martineau the pleasure of making your personal acquaintance,’ Mitford remarked to Sedgwick on 9 July 1834, ‘whilst I have only this faint & feeble means of communication with one whom I love so much’ (CMSP, III.4.2).26 They thus eagerly examined visual representations of one another to supplement letters. Sedgwick, for example, enjoyed Henry Westmacott’s visit – describing him to Mitford as ‘a most amusing and original person’ – but valued even more his gift of a ‘charming bust’ of their mutual friend, ‘looking just so intellectual, sweet-tempered, and kind-hearted as does the dear Miss Mitford of my imagination’ (FOMRM, 181). Similarly in March 1836, Sedgwick expressed a desire to send Mitford a ‘picture’ of her niece Kate – ‘a perfect Hebe’ – while including in the same package the first volume of The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (1834), which featured an engraving of Catharine derived from an earlier portrait by Charles Cromwell Ingham (FOMRM, 223). Sedgwick did not explicitly mention her inclusion in the book, telling Mitford that she sent it ‘for your father’s amusement’ and that ‘as the characters [are] for the most part military or political, they cannot have much interest for you’ (FOMRM, 224). However, in Mitford’s long, fulsome remarks on the ‘valuable set of American portraits’ in August she coyly observed, ‘I need not tell you the portrait that interested us the most,’ before concluding that the Ingham picture seemed to her to resemble ‘our great actress’ Eliza O’Neill ‘before she grew fat,’ more than the ‘notion’ of Sedgwick she had formed in her mind (CMSP, II.1.11). Such misconceptions were evidently part and parcel of the process of long-distance correspondence and could be brushed off with a joke. When refracted through a direct encounter, on the other hand, they could prove more damaging, as Sedgwick and Mitford found when the former arrived in England, accompanied by a large family group, in June 1839. On 10 June (after several days in the south of England, where Captain Basil Hall, to Sedgwick’s surprise, was a generous host) Sedgwick wrote to Mitford asking if she would believe herself ‘threatened with an incursion of Goths & Vandals’ if ‘Kate & I and some of our people’ made a visit to Three Mile Cross the very next day en route to London.27 Although postponed until 13 June their long-awaited

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meeting finally took place and then, after several weeks in London during high season, the Sedgwicks departed for the Continent. The family’s intention to make a long return visit to England was later thwarted by a sudden turn for the worse in the health of Catharine’s brother Robert, which obliged them to merely transit through London on their way home. This curtailment notwithstanding, in July 1840, Sedgwick prevailed upon Basil Hall to write her a letter of introduction to his publisher, Edward Moxon, describing her ‘plan to give her observations to the world,’ and by February 1841 she was writing to Moxon herself, authorizing Hall to negotiate on her behalf for publication of ‘my journal.’28 In April 1841, meanwhile, with its American production already underway, Sedgwick signed a contract with New York’s Harper & Brothers for the work by then titled Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home. A decade earlier the slow and unreliable nature of transatlantic transport links had helped to delay the British publication of Clarence, but by 1841 a steam packet service from New York to England sped Harper & Brothers’ proofs of Volume Two of Letters from Sedgwick’s hands in late June to Moxon’s by early July.29 British reviewers of Letters from Abroad found Sedgwick’s brief description of her visit to Mitford therein to be an attractive target for excerpting. Sedgwick sets the scene by describing her family’s conversation with the coachman on their journey to Three Mile Cross. This man claimed ‘an acquaintance of some twenty years’ standing with Miss M., and assured us that she was one of the “cleverest women in England,” and “the doctor” (her father) an “’earty old boy”,’ Sedgwick recalled: And when he reined his horses up to her door, and she appeared to receive us, he said, ‘Now you would not take the little body there for the great author, would you?’ and certainly we should have taken her for nothing but a kindly gentlewoman, who had never gone beyond the narrow sphere of the most refined social life. (LFANY, 1: 46) Sedgwick then goes on to describe the ‘gentlewoman’ herself (her ‘pale gray, soul-lit eye,’ prematurely white hair, and natural, frank and affectionate manner), but provides little detail of a long social visit, including only a vignette of its beginning, where Mitford proclaims, ‘I must show you my geraniums while it is light, for I love them next to my father,’ while leading them directly to her garden (LFANY, 1: 47). After briefly describing ‘this little paradise of flowers’ so her own ‘countrywomen . . . might learn how taste and industry . . . and the art of garden-culture, might triumph over small space and means,’ Sedgwick simply concludes by describing Mitford’s domestic establishment (including an enumeration of her servants) and praising the high literary reputation the Englishwoman has earned while laboring within its humble precincts (LFANY, 1: 47). In contrast to British reviewers, who treated Letters from Abroad as a public document, many U.S. reviewers, as Lucinda Damon-Bach has noted, took a cue from Sedgwick’s styling of each chapter as a letter to ‘Dear C’ (her brother Charles) and ‘treated it as familial correspondence not [originally] intended for publication.’30 Yet as Damon-Bach also demonstrates, Sedgwick in fact crafted the book very carefully from multiple sources, including travel journals kept by herself and other members of her party. Specifically analyzing the ‘letter’ featuring Sedgwick’s visit to Mitford, for example, Damon-Bach observes the care with which the American revised her longer journal entry in order to create a ‘flattering’ portrait of ‘the English writer [as] gentle and unpretentious, Sedgwick’s belle ideal of female author-ity.’31

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While Sedgwick undoubtedly intended to flatter Mitford, the subject of this portrait, and some of her friends, perceived it differently. Sedgwick soon received a long letter of criticism from the poet John Kenyon, whom she had met in London (perhaps via Mitford) and who shared some of her family’s travels on the Continent. Kenyon also numbered Edward Moxon, his publisher, and the poet Elizabeth Barrett, his cousin, among his correspondents. On 10 July 1841, Kenyon wrote to Sedgwick to explain that he had ‘happened to hear’ that Sedgwick mentioned him in Letters (albeit not by name, like Mitford, but in a way that nonetheless made his identity clear) and that he had rushed to Moxon’s print-shop wanting to ‘buy up the whole impression and burn it’ (CMSP, II.2.8). After reading Sedgwick’s ‘eulogy’ of him, he had then persuaded Moxon ‘to cancel the sheet’ featuring it, and to allow him half an hour to make revisions to Sedgwick’s description of her English travels, including ‘necessary (as I feel) alterations in what you have said about Miss Mitford and her father’ (CMSP, II.2.8). Sedgwick defended her intentions, but Kenyon replied on 17 October that the problem in the Mitford passages lay in the coachman’s slangy epithets: ‘Now even in your Wigwam of Stockbridge . . . you would not say “little body” of a lady nor “earty old boy” of a gentleman of 80 – whom you wished to please or not displease. – Now I happen to know and others happen to know – and he knows and his daughter knows that to be rather too much of a “hearty old boy” is the sin of Dr. Mitford’s character and the phrase would have wounded in proportion as it fitly applied’ (CMSP, II.1.15). Thus, in Moxon’s edition of Letters from Abroad as published, Mitford’s father is a ‘fine “old gentleman” ’ and Mitford a ‘lady’ and ‘pleasing person’ rather than a ‘little body’ (LFALON, 1: 36, 37).32 As Kenyon had observed on 10 July, however, proofs of the first volume (encompassing Sedgwick’s time in England) went to reviewers before Kenyon edited them, and it was early reviewers’ excerpts from the unedited proofs that initially led to Mitford’s own disapproval. Writing to a friend sometime around 15 July, for example, Mitford broadly characterized Sedgwick’s description of her visit as ‘a specimen of the very coarsest Americanism ever put forth’ and remarked upon ‘how unexpected [her] coarse detail has been’ (LMRM, 188). Seeming to forget that Catharine had introduced the two Theodore Sedgwicks to her, Mitford complained that the former ‘had been received as their kinswoman,’ and that the ‘chief annoyance to me is the finding the aunt of a dear friend so grossly vulgar’ (LMRM, 188). Indeed, Mitford seemed determined that her correspondent should read Sedgwick in the worst possible light, specifically advising her to ‘get the “Literary Gazette”,’ which excerpted Sedgwick’s entire description of her visit to Mitford from the unedited proofs, rather than the Athenaeum, which excerpted only part of the description as edited by Kenyon (LMRM, 188). Not all of Mitford’s friends were persuaded of Sedgwick’s sinfulness. Having seen only the Athenaeum, Elizabeth Barrett initially expressed puzzlement at Mitford’s outrage and observed that when ‘a man has either by great deeds or noble writings, passed into the heart of the world, he gives that world the right to love to sit at his fireside & hear him speak face to face & with a friend’s voice . . . Well done Miss Sedgewick [sic]!’33 Later, having read the longer, unedited excerpt in the Literary Gazette, Barrett wrote Mitford that she wondered how ‘you c[oul]d take these details any other way than as proofs of the high estimation & deep interest in which you are held, not simply by [Sedgwick] & her family, but by that great new world whose large listening ears stand erect to hear all about you, through Niagara!’34 Perhaps the longer, unedited description of Sedgwick’s visit to Mitford showed ‘some BAD

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TASTE,’ Barrett conceded, but she objected more strongly to Kenyon’s unauthorized intervention, since ‘[p]roof sheets are private papers – are they not?’35 Nonetheless, the damage was done, and Mitford and Sedgwick’s friendship imploded. All of which leaves us, like Barrett, to ask why. How did three printed paragraphs – styled as part of a letter but not actually derived from one – undo an intimacy established through a decade of correspondence? As Barrett’s reference to ‘private papers’ suggests, for nineteenth-century authors categories of public and private did not map clearly or unproblematically onto print and manuscript respectively. Mitford and Sedgwick, in line with nineteenth-century norms, knew their letters to one another were not, in any simple sense, solely private. Letters not only circulated among family members, as we have already seen; they also often circulated – either in print or manuscript form – well beyond their original addressees.36 Knowing this, Mitford occasionally warned Sedgwick when subject matter required discretion. Having explained how the inherited class status of ‘Country Families’ produced ‘refinement & elegance’ in a 7 January 1832 letter, for example, Mitford cautioned Sedgwick: ‘Do not let this National trait get into your newspapers with my name dearest Miss Sedgwick because the London papers copy copiously from the American & one should not like to be known to speak even truth too freely of one’s native land’ (CMSP, III.3.13). Similarly, Mitford’s 28 January 1833 biographical sketch of Frances Trollope came with the parenthetical caution that it was ‘(in confidence to you & your own family circle)’; a long letter from June 1837 recounting a dispute with the American actor Edwin Forrest, who had failed to pay her for a Londonstaged play he had commissioned, included three warnings about confidentiality; and her last extant letter to Sedgwick, from 1839, contains a caustic portrait of an elderly Wordsworth seeking ‘flattery at great tables’ in London rather than staying home with his family in the country, before concluding with the assertion that ‘this is between ourselves’ (CMSP, III.3.14; II.1.12; II.1.4). Beyond the question of epistolary privacy, moreover, Mitford and Sedgwick’s friendship always balanced on the unsteady edge between their private lives as women devoted to family and their public lives as authors. They first acquired knowledge of one another and developed the desire for greater intimacy by reading each other’s works in print, but once they had struck up a correspondence they repeatedly assured one another that their identities as authors were secondary to their identities as private women. Thus Mitford wrote to ‘grumble’ at her ‘enforced authorship’ in 1836, proclaiming that she published ‘purely for bread & would never send a line to the press’ except for financial exigency, while in 1838, when Sedgwick first announced her intention to travel to England, she told Mitford that she lacked ‘the common curiosity to see authors as authors’ during her visit but wished instead ‘to see . . . friends’ (CMSP, II.1.11; FOMRM, 251). Indeed, after eventually meeting Mitford, Sedgwick specifically broke off from her reflections on the pleasure of ‘hav[ing] your image realized’ to insist that being introduced to people ‘with an initiatory sentence about my books’ made her ‘feel as if cold water were thrown in my face. I have not yet got familiar with my name in print; it always seems to me as if that Miss Sedgwick was quite an individual independent of myself’ (FOMRM, 271). That Sedgwick had nonetheless planned a travel book and would turn her visit with Mitford into fodder for it seemingly surprised Mitford, even though the American’s visit already came thoroughly embedded in their own extended dialogue over transatlantic travel writing. The two women, as we have already seen, corresponded repeatedly about

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Basil Hall and Frances Trollope, while the American travels and eventual emigration of the British actress Frances Kemble, who published her journals of her first years in America, became a more positive epistolary node for them. Nor was the other direction in transatlantic travel writing ignored in their letters. Indeed, in 1836 Mitford urged Theodore Sedgwick III to turn the journal of his English travels into a book in order to ‘cement the bonds of union’ between the two countries (CMSP, II.1.13). Theodore did not take up Mitford’s suggestion, but the American writer Nathaniel Parker Willis had earlier provoked an uproar when he published accounts of his visits to British celebrities’ private homes, eventually collected as Pencillings by the Way (1835). Nevertheless Mitford – who did not feature in Willis’s travel book – continued to praise his poetry and his personal distinction in letters to Sedgwick, and even lent her one of Willis’s books when she visited Three Mile Cross.37 Appropriately, British reviewers linked Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to all of these published antecedents, whether they objected to her portrayal of private scenes or not. In fact, nothing Sedgwick wrote about Mitford – neither her humble cottage, her devotion to her father and her flowers, nor her physical appearance – was news to the reading public, who had access to numerous physical and verbal portraits of the author of Our Village, many of them unflattering.38 As Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine pointed out in its September 1841 issue, Mitford had ‘spoken so often and freely of her home, her pleasures, and her pets’ in her published works that ‘a similar sketch’ from Sedgwick’s ‘very friendly hand’ should offend no one.39 Ironically, in Letters from Abroad, Sedgwick had tried to defend her friend against some of the public images of her that were circulating in the press. Mitford in person, she stressed, was ‘as unlike as possible to the faces we have seen of her in our magazines, which all have a broad humour bordering on coarseness’ (LFANY, 1: 46–7). Yet on seeing herself portrayed in the book, Mitford allowed what Lawrence Buell has called ‘the presumption of New World primitiveness’ to trump a decade of sympathetic identification – Sedgwick was no longer a friend, but, as she herself had predicted, part of the invading mob of ‘Goths & Vandals.’40 During Mitford’s lifetime, her rage at Sedgwick’s betrayal circulated only in manuscript form. She last mentions Sedgwick in print in her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852), off-handedly referring to her as ‘my friend.’41 However, the epistolary trail ends in 1843. In April of that year, Sedgwick wrote to John Kenyon about receiving a ‘note’ from Mitford together ‘with several of her Manifestos,’ printed circulars seeking funds to pay debts incurred during her father’s final illness.42 Notwithstanding the rather selfserving nature of this missive, Sedgwick was driven to reply. In her last extant letter to Mitford, from June 1843, an apparently futile effort to reclaim Mitford as her friend and neighbor in their transatlantic Berkshire village, she apologized for a long silence, caught Mitford up on Sedgwick family news, both happy and sad, and expressed her satisfaction at hearing that the circulars had now raised enough funds to pay Mitford’s debts. Moreover, Sedgwick devoted an entire paragraph to an ‘account of the product of the geranium seeds’ that Mitford had sent her many years before. Sedgwick had shared them, she explained, with her friend Andrew Jackson Downing, ‘a gentleman who has written some charming books on landscape-gardening and rural architecture,’ who showed her ‘with pride, his Mitfords, as he calls them’ (FOMRM, 288). Projecting many future generations of plants derived from these seeds, which she had also planted in her own garden, Sedgwick concluded by positioning them as evidence of ‘a visible relationship between the Berkshire of the old and the new world’ (FOMRM, 288). But, it seems, this transatlantic epistolary friendship was not destined to bloom again.

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Acknowledgments For research travel funding, thanks to: the Eccles Center at the British Library (Fellowship in North American Studies) and University of Nebraska–Lincoln (English Department and Research Council Maude Hammond Fling Faculty Travel Fellowship). For research assistance: Carmen Smith. For advice, feedback on drafts, and sharing of resources, thanks to: Thomas Baker, Eve Bannet, Elise Boshero-Bondar, Lucinda Damon-Bach, Ellen Foster, Kevin Morrison, and members of the Midwest Nineteenth-Century Americanists (John Barton, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Laura Mielke, Patrickia Okker, and Paul Outka).

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

See Patterson, ‘The “Anna Jameson and Her Friends Database,” ’ n.pag. Booth, ‘Revisiting the Homes,’ 46. See Halsey, ‘ “Tell me of Some Booklings,’” 125. Mitford, Our Village, 1: 1–2. Sedgwick, Redwood, 1: 111. Ibid. 1: 150. Sedgwick, Clarence, 142. Those asserting Mitford’s immediate influence on Sedgwick (such as Killick in ‘Mary Russell Mitford,’ 26) don’t account for the anonymous publication of her earliest village sketches in scattered venues, meaning that Our Village did not become a coherent phenomenon until 1824 (see Morrison, ‘Foregrounding Nationalism’). A search of periodicals databases, such as ProQuest’s American Periodicals Series, Gale’s Nineteenth-Century U.S. Newspapers, and the American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collections, finds scattered references to imported copies of Our Village volumes before 1826 but no evidence of reprinting from them. Those claiming earlier U.S. circulation of Mitford’s village sketches (such as Sullivan, ‘Mary Russell Mitford,’ 195) cite not a single concrete instance. See Homestead, ‘American Novelist.’ Maria Banyer Sedgwick, Letter to Theodore Sedgwick III, 7 March 1829, in Theodore Sedgwick II Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Box 7, Folder 11. Mitford, ‘Preface,’ iv–v. Sedgwick, ‘Cacoethes Scribendi,’ 162. Ibid. 176. Ibid. 162. Mitford, ‘Preface,’ vi–vii. See Gerber, Authors of Their Lives, 143–53. Nineteenth-century collections of letters in print are notoriously unreliable, and the work of L’Estrange as Mitford’s primary nineteenth-century editor is no exception. His transcriptions of Sedgwick’s letters are riddled with apparent errors and almost certainly omit portions (see Boshero-Bondar, ‘Mitford’s Letters’). Unfortunately, most of Sedgwick’s side of this correspondence is accessible only in L’Estrange’s 1882 The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters. Two brief manuscript letters from Sedgwick to Mitford not in this volume survive, but the whereabouts of most of the letters to Mitford that L’Estrange presents, including eleven from Sedgwick, remains a mystery. L’Estrange included only the one waylaid letter from Mitford to Sedgwick in his 1870 Life of Mary Russell Mitford, and eleven additional manuscript Mitford letters survive in Sedgwick’s papers. Jones spent several years in London working for Colburn & Bentley, publishers of both Clarence and Stories of American Life – indeed he provided the American gift books and magazines from which Mitford selected the contents of the latter (see Pease, ‘James Athearn Jones’).

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19. Decker, Epistolary Practices, 58. 20. Dierks, In My Power, 101. See also Round, ‘Neither Here Nor There,’ 428, and Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 5. 21. Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1. 22. Bannet, Empire of Letters, 46. 23. For this sketch see Mitford, Our Village, 3: 254–65. 24. Sedgwick, The Linwoods, 1: vii; Mitford, ‘The Widow’s Dog,’ 206. 25. Hall, Travels in North America, 2: 74. See Homestead, ‘Introduction,’ 12–19. 26. Similarly, in her next letter, after Sedgwick reported Martineau’s imminent arrival in Stockbridge, Mitford protested that she ‘env[ied] her the delight of seeing you’ and ‘our Kate’ (Sedgwick’s niece). See Letter to Catharine Mara Sedgwick, 29 March 1835, in Sedgwick, Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, III.4.3. 27. Sedgwick, Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 10 June 1839, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, MSS 6970-d. 28. Hall, Letter to Edward Moxon, 14 July 1840, Houghton Library, Autograph File H, 1584–1988; Sedgwick, Letter to Edward Moxon, 28 February 1841, Beinecke Library, YCAL MSS 446, Box 26. As Lucinda Damon-Bach has demonstrated, writing a book was, from the first, one object of Sedgwick’s European travels (see ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick Tours England,’ 22). 29. See Sedgwick, Letter to Edward Moxon, 25 June 1841, Pennsylvania State University, RBM 3586. 30. Damon-Bach, ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick Tours England,’ 22. 31. Ibid. 36. 32. One can only imagine Kenyon’s horror had Sedgwick published the coachman’s actual words as recorded in both her and her niece Kate’s journals, where Mitford is dubbed a ‘rum old file’ rather than a ‘little body.’ See Katherine Sedgwick, Travel Diary, 56, and Sedgwick, Travel Journal, Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, I.12.1, 99. 33. Barrett, Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 15 July 1841, in The Brownings’ Correspondence, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 34. Ibid. and Barrett, Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 26 July 1841, in The Brownings’ Correspondence, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 35. Ibid. 36. See Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 36–7, and Bannet, Empire of Letters, xvii–xviii. As Bannet observes, the conventions of the travel letter ‘turned every traveler into a spy’ (282). 37. See Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity, 62, 70–1. 38. See Booth, ‘Revisiting the Homes.’ 39. ‘Miss Sedgwick’s Letters,’ 592. 40. Buell, ‘Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic (Mis)Understandings,’ 8. 41. Mitford, Recollections, 515. 42. Sedgwick, Letter to John Kenyon, 25 April 1843, John Kenyon Autograph Album, Huntington Library, HM69273-69383.

Works Cited Baker, T. (1999), Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame, New York: Oxford University Press. Bannet, E. T. (2005), Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Barrett, E. (1806–61), The Brownings’ Correspondence, Wedgestone Press, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Booth, A. (2008), ‘Revisiting the Homes and Haunts of Mary Russell Mitford,’ NineteenthCentury Contexts, 30: 39–65. Boshero-Bondar, E. (2013–present), ‘Mitford’s Letters,’ Digital Mitford: The Mary Russell Mitford Archive, University of Pittsburgh, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Buell, L. (1986), New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance, New York: Cambridge University Press. Cited parenthetically as NELC. Buell, L. (2013), ‘Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic (Mis)Understandings from Washington Irving and Frances Trollope to Mark Twain and Lord Bryce,’ in R. Peel and D. Maudlin (eds.), Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations, Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 1–19. Damon-Bach, L. L. (2012), ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick Tours England: Private Letters, Public Account,’ in B. L. Lueck, B. Bailey, and L. L. Damon-Bach (eds.), Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, Durham, NH: University Press of New England, 21–48. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Dierks, K. (2009), In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gerber, D. A. (2006), Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North American in the Nineteenth Century, New York: New York University Press. Hall, B. (1829), Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, 3 vols., Edinburgh: Cadell & Co. Hall, B. (1840), Letter to E. Moxon, 14 July 1840, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Autograph File H, 1584–1988. Halsey, K. (2011), ‘ “Tell me of Some Booklings”: Mary Russell Mitford’s Female Literary Networks,’ Women’s Writing, 18: 121–36. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Homestead, M. J. (2012), ‘Introduction,’ in C. M. Sedgwick, Clarence, ed. M. J. Homestead, Peterborough: Broadview, 9–40. Homestead, M. J. (2015), ‘American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–1857,’ Yearbook of English Studies, 45: 196–215. Killick, T. (2004), ‘Mary Russell Mitford and the Topography of Short Fiction,’ Journal of the Short Story in English, 43: 11–28. L’Estrange, A. G. (1870), The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, Told by Herself in Letters to her Friends, New York: Harper. Cited parenthetically as LOMRMTH. ‘Miss Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home’ (1841), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 8: 590–600. Mitford, M. R. (1824–8), Our Village, 3 vols., London: G. B. Whittaker. Mitford, M. R. (1830), ‘Preface,’ in M. R. Mitford (ed.), Stories of American Life, 3 vols., London: Colburn and Bentley, 1: iii–vii. Mitford, M. R. (1837), ‘The Widow’s Dog,’ in Country Stories, London: Saunders and Otley, 203–28. Mitford, M. R. (1852), Recollections of a Literary Life, New York: Harper. Mitford, M. R. (1872), Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, 2 vols., ed. H. Chorley, London: Bentley. Cited parenthetically as LMRM. Mitford, M. R., et al. (1882), The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from her Literary Correspondents, ed. A. G. L’Estrange, New York: Harper. Cited parenthetically as FOMRM.

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Morrison, K. A. (2008), ‘Foregrounding Nationalism: Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village and the Effects of Publication Context,’ European Romantic Review, 19: 275–87. Patterson, K. (2000), ‘The “Anna Jameson and her Friends Database”: Mapping Anna Jameson’s Associative Links with the Victorian Intellectual Community,’ Digital Studies, 7: n.pag, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Pearsall, S. M. S. (2008), Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pease, R. L. (1881), ‘James Athearn Jones,’ Memorial Biographies of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2: 204–22. Round, P. H. (2005), ‘Neither Here Nor There: Transatlantic Epistolarity in Early America,’ in S. Castillo and I. Schweitzer (eds.), A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, Oxford: Blackwell, 426–45. Sedgwick, C. M. (1798–1908), Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N-852.1–3. Cited parenthetically as CMSP. Sedgwick, C. M. (1824), Redwood, 2 vols., New York: Bliss & White. Sedgwick, C. M. [1829] (1830), ‘Cacoethes Scribendi,’ in M. R. Mitford (ed.), Stories of American Life, 3 vols., London: Colburn and Bentley, 3: 162–86. Sedgwick, C. M. [1830] (2012), Clarence, or A Tale of Our Own Times, ed. M. J. Homestead, Peterborough: Broadview. Sedgwick, C. M. (1835), The Linwoods; or ‘Sixty Years Since’ in America, 2 vols., New York: Harper & Brothers. Sedgwick, C. M. (1839), Letter to M. R. Mitford, 10 June, Special Collections Library, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, MSS 6970-d. Sedgwick, C. M. (1841), Letter to E. Moxon, 28 February, Beinecke Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 446, Box 26. Sedgwick, C. M. (1841), Letter to E. Moxon, 25 June, Catharine Maria Sedgwick Letters and Portraits, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University, RBM 3586. Sedgwick, C. M. (1841), Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, 2 vols., New York: Harper. Cited parenthetically as LFANY. Sedgwick, C. M. (1841), Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, 2 vols., London: Edward Moxon. Cited parenthetically as LFALON. Sedgwick, C. M. (1843), Letter to J. Kenyon, 25 April, John Kenyon Autograph Album, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, HM69273-69383. Sedgwick, K. (1839), Travel Diary, Charles Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, IX.B.VIII, Ms. N-853. Sedgwick, T., II (1780–1839), Theodore Sedgwick II Papers, Sedgwick Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N-851. Sullivan, M. R. (1992), ‘Mary Russell Mitford,’ in B. K. Mudge (ed.), British Romantic Novelists, 1789–1832, Detroit: Gale, 192–200.

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36 THE LITERARY PROFESSIONAL AND THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN: THE LETTERS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE AND PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE Kevin J. Hayes

W

hen James A. Harrison edited the extant letters to and from Edgar Allan Poe as the final volume of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe in 1902, little did he realize the rest of the century would pass without another edition of Poe’s full correspondence. This is not to say that there have not been later editions of Poe’s own letters. In 1948, John Ostrom published an elegant two-volume edition of letters written by Poe. Though he included twice as many letters by Poe than Harrison had, Ostrom deliberately omitted letters to Poe, thus providing only one side of the correspondence. Readers greatly regretted the omissions.1 When Ostrom published a second edition in 1966, with an appendix containing new Poe letters discovered since the first, he still excluded those written to Poe. Finally, another edition of Ostrom’s collection appeared in 2008, corrected by Burton Pollin and Jeffrey Savoye, and including all the letters by Poe discovered since 1966, but the new editors again omitted letters to him. Savoye had been amenable to the idea of including letters to Poe, but his co-editor was adamantly against it. Instead, they included a checklist of letters to and from Poe and a separate index to the checklist. (In the amount of space the wordy checklist and its cumbersome index occupy, the editors could actually have included all the known letters to Poe.) Savoye has since compensated for these omissions by uploading the surviving letters to Poe to the website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.2 Still, it would be good to have the whole correspondence contained within a lasting printed edition instead of an ephemeral electronic medium. The reluctance to include letters to Poe in editions of his correspondence may have something to do with an attitude that has pervaded Poe scholarship for decades. Traditionally, Poe experts have been quite protective of their subject, using their scholarly work to mask or minimize Poe’s personal failings. In an interview Ostrom granted when he first published his edition of Poe’s letters, for example, he made excuses for their tone and content: ‘Poe did a lot of whining, but it must be remembered that he was not only destitute, but sick much of the time.’3 Such protectionism seems to have motivated Ostrom’s editorial decisions and those of subsequent editors. But some of Poe’s correspondents were excellent letter-writers. Placed beside his, their letters further reveal his shortcomings. His letters do show occasional flashes of brilliance, but seldom did Poe put the effort into his correspondence that he put into his published work: verse, fiction, and criticism. 554

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The difference in quality between Poe’s letters and those of his best correspondents reflects contrasting attitudes toward the written word. Throughout his literary career, Poe worked hard to make literature his profession. Whereas so many other contemporary journalists were happy to write without compensation, Poe insisted on being paid for the articles he wrote. Many newspaper and magazine editors had independent sources of income and turned to editing as an avocation, but Poe wanted editors to earn a regular salary. He hoped to make literature a profession, to elevate authors and editors to the level of lawyers and doctors.4 Writing personal letters, alternatively, was an amateur pursuit. Letters were works written for an audience of one or, at most, a small circle of people (since recipients would often share well-written letters with their family and friends). In Poe’s view, the finely crafted letter was a throwback to the time before the profession of letters had begun to emerge, a time when cultured men and women possessed good letterwriting skills simply as a matter of education and breeding. He cared nothing about such amateur literary pursuits. Poe had to write to editors, publishers, and magazine contributors as part of his literary work, but his letters are remarkably pragmatic and unimaginative. As Jay Hubbell has observed, Poe’s letters are those of ‘a hard-working magazinist.’5 Many of Poe’s correspondents, on the other hand, especially ones from the South, still saw literature as an amateur pursuit and, consequently, still devoted time to carefully crafting letters for their friends. The letters of Philip Pendleton Cooke, perhaps the finest letter-writer among Poe’s correspondents, embody this traditional attitude toward letter-writing. Whereas Poe’s letters can be boring and businesslike, Cooke’s are filled with personality and charm. Poe’s are the letters of a literary professional practicing his trade in a hostile environment; Cooke’s are the letters of a refined country gentleman. Despite their differing attitudes toward the literary profession, the lives of Edgar Allan Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke share many points of contact. Born in Boston on 19 January 1809, the son of David and Eliza Poe, a husband-and-wife acting duo, Edgar Poe spent his first few years of life traveling with his parents’ troupe. David Poe abandoned the family, and Edgar, shortly before his third birthday, witnessed his mother’s death. John and Frances Allan, a well-to-do Richmond couple, then took him in. They never officially adopted him but did give him the education of a gentleman, in both Virginia and England. Nonetheless, Poe often quarrelled with Allan and, though quite wealthy, Allan left him out of his will. Before he could complete his education at West Point, Poe was court-martialed and dismissed, after which he moved in with his Baltimore aunt Maria Clemm and her adolescent daughter Virginia. Philip Pendleton Cooke was the son of John Rogers Cooke, a prominent lawyer, and Maria Pendleton, and had been born on 26 October 1816 in Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia). In 1828, the family moved to Winchester, Virginia in the Shenandoah. At fifteen, Philip went to Princeton College, where he almost did not graduate because he and a fellow student were suspended for fighting. Eventually, however, he was allowed to receive his degree and he entered the legal profession. When he was twenty, he married Willianne Corbin Tayloe Burwell, who lived near Winchester. After her father’s death, her uncle Nathaniel Burwell adopted Willianne. Burwell, like Allan Poe, was well-off, but he strongly disliked Philip and sought to control his niece’s life. He built the couple a handsome home in Clarke County, which they called The Vineyard, but only gave Philip enough money to run the estate – and no more.

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In Baltimore, meanwhile, Edgar Allan Poe had befriended Cooke’s cousin, John Pendleton Kennedy, who encouraged him to submit articles to the Southern Literary Messenger, the pioneering literary journal that Thomas W. White had established in Richmond. White accepted ‘Berenice,’ which was published in the March 1835 issue, and ‘Morella’ appeared the following month. White soon hired Poe to help edit the Messenger. Thus Maria and Virginia Clemm followed Poe to Richmond, where Edgar and Virginia married. Poe wrote many of the magazine’s book reviews during the year and a half he spent with White. Importantly, another contributor was Cooke. In 1834, White had written to John Rogers Cooke, asking him to contribute to the Messenger. With neither the time nor the inclination, he passed White’s request to his son Philip. More than happy to oblige, Philip began writing for the magazine. In the same issue containing Poe’s ‘Berenice,’ for example, Cooke published one of his best early poems, ‘Young Rosalie Lee.’ Cooke also published much other verse, fiction, and criticism in the Messenger, even after White died in 1843 and John R. Thompson took over the magazine. Cooke’s poems brought him to the attention of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, then editing The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). Though the two never met, Griswold considered Cooke one of his ‘pleasantest friends,’ and called him the finest poet in Virginia: a backhand slap at Poe.6 Griswold’s friendship provides a testament to Cooke’s letter-writing skill: they became friends solely through their correspondence. Griswold offered to do what he could for Cooke, who had another powerful ally in the literary world, his cousin John Pendleton Kennedy. Together Griswold and Kennedy helped him publish Froissart Ballads and Other Poems (1847), a collection of narrative verse partly based on episodes from Jean Froissart’s Chronicles (c. 1369–1400), a fourteenth-century work that captured the fancy of many nineteenth-century readers. (Poe’s 1849 story ‘Hop-Frog’ is also based on an episode from Froissart). Having left the Messenger, Poe’s quest for a professional editing position next brought him, his wife, and her mother to New York, where he remained unemployed, and then to Philadelphia, where they lived in poverty until he obtained a position as an assistant editor with Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. He eventually left Burton’s but took a similar position with Graham’s. Then, after Graham’s, Poe relocated to New York, where he worked as a staff writer for the Evening Mirror and later edited the Broadway Journal, which he considered a stepping stone to The Stylus, the ideal magazine he envisioned. Poe spent the final years of his life drumming up support for The Stylus. He died at forty from alcohol-related causes and Griswold’s vicious obituary, which depicted Poe as a debauched misanthrope, affected his posthumous reputation for decades. Cooke continued to contribute to the Messenger and other newspapers and magazines through the 1840s. But while on a duck hunting expedition in 1849, he waded into the icy Shenandoah to retrieve his quarry. He caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, and died on 20 January 1850, just three months after Poe. He was only thirty-three. Though their literary lives thus crossed paths several times, the attitudes Poe and Cooke had toward professional writing differed considerably. Born into poverty, snubbed by his wealthy foster father, and marrying a woman as poor as he, Poe had little choice but to try and make a living with his pen. He had no other professional skills, but neither did he have any other inclination. From his teens, he was determined to become a professional writer. Cooke saw writing as a way to free himself from the

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iron grip of his wife’s uncle by providing extra cash that would let him indulge himself and devote more time to hunting, a pastime and a passion. Unlike Poe, Cooke did not have to write to survive. The differences between their letters therefore highlight the differences between their attitudes toward writing. Viewed in a roughly chronological order and subdivided into thematic periods, their correspondence reveals the approach both men took to letter-writing. Using what Poe called a ‘clear, forcible, and legible’ hand, Cooke cultivated the art of letter-writing.7 Whereas Cooke sought to entertain his correspondents, however, Poe saw letter-writing as a practical task otherwise unrelated to the creation of literature. The earliest surviving letter Poe wrote from the University of Virginia is brief and factual. Written to John Allan, the letter describes what was happening among the students on campus. Its best part is the postscript: ‘Will you be so good as to send me a copy of the Historiae of Tacitus – it is a small volume – also some more soap.’8 The two objects Poe requests in this postscript present a weird conjunction, displaying him engaged in the noble pursuit of reading Roman history in the original Latin while acknowledging that the body must be kept clean and healthy to enable the mind to do its work. The letter is typical of the ones Poe wrote as a young man. Almost invariably, the best part of each is its postscript. Instead of simply providing additional information the writer has forgotten to put into the body of the letter, the postscripts in Poe’s early correspondence possess rhetorical and stylistic value. They give the impression that Poe used the body of the letter itself for basic communication, the postscript forming a brief rhetorical flourish in conclusion. Poe wrote only a few letters to Allan before he left university. In the face of his foster son’s extravagant gambling debts, Allan forced him to drop out of school. He brought Poe to Richmond, moving him back into his house and giving him a low-level job in his mercantile business. Poe eventually quit this job and left the Allan home. In an angry letter he wrote after leaving, Poe expresses his animosity toward Allan for taking him out of college. Reprinting it as an example of a ‘flaming-tongue letter’ in her recent writing manual, Samara O’Shea aptly titles this letter ‘How to Tell Your Father You’re Leaving His House and Never Coming Back.’9 The belligerent letter closes with a dramatic postscript, which ominously places the responsibility on Allan’s shoulders for whatever may happen: ‘It depends upon yourself if hereafter you see or hear from me.’10 O’Shea identifies this addendum as a good example of how to end an angry letter with a strong sentence.11 As this letter indicates, the postscript was one place Poe demonstrated the histrionic flair he shared with his actor-parents. Poor, desperate, and hungry, Poe then wrote another letter to Allan the next day, assuming a more sheepish tone. This letter exemplifies Marius Bewley’s characterization of Poe’s letters as a whole, which ‘offer a mélange of self-pity, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and rationalized weakness; but they also offer a picture of deep emotional sickness, despair, and wounded affection.’12 Poe pleads with his foster father for direly needed assistance, adding a postscript designed to evoke his pity: ‘I have not one cent in the world to provide any food.’13 John Allan wasn’t moved by the letter’s cry for help. After reading it, he turned it over and scrawled a mocking note on the back: ‘Pretty Letter.’14 Once Poe began writing poetry for publication, he continued to use the postscript for rhetorical effect. One of his best early letters he wrote to Philadelphia publisher Isaac Lea. Poe was trying to persuade Lea to publish his second volume of poetry, Al

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Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829). The letter stands out because Poe wrote an original poem for it. The quatrain expresses his dedication to literature: It was my choice or chance or curse To adopt the cause for better or worse And with my worldly goods and wit And soul and body worship it15 In this poem, Poe uses the language of the wedding ceremony to convey his profound dedication to literature. His commitment to his craft is inspiring, but he did not rely on the poem alone to persuade Lea. He also described the contents of ‘Al Aaraaf’ and quoted some lines of Spanish verse to demonstrate his erudition. As if all this were not enough, he appended a one-sentence postscript to drop the name of William Wirt, Baltimore’s grand old man of letters: ‘I cannot refrain from adding that Mr Wirt’s voice is in my favor.’16 Separated from the body of the letter, this postscript seems to provide independent testimony verifying Poe’s abilities as a poet. Actually, the postscript is misleading. Raised on heroic couplets, Wirt had considerable difficulty with ‘Al Aaraaf,’ a challenging and highly experimental poem.17 The postscript asserting Wirt’s approval is characteristic of Poe’s correspondence. His letters are filled with similar deceptions. As Willard Thorp explains: ‘These little fibs, added together, are Poe’s image of himself, more real than any character in his tales because Poe drew from it his strength to live.’18 Poe’s epistolary fibs did not merely lie to others; they also reflect Poe’s self-deception. He needed to believe, for example, that he was admired by other writers. The lies kept him going, sustaining him through adversity, and giving him hope in a bleak world. One more postscript must suffice. Writing to Edwin Buckingham and his father Joseph, the editors of the New England Magazine, Poe sent them ‘Epimanes’ (1836), an early short story, for consideration. If Poe’s letters are, as one modern commentator has remarked, ‘by turns audacious and desperate,’ then the letter accompanying ‘Epimanes’ also represents his correspondence.19 Poe audaciously proposes that the Buckinghams publish a whole series of tales in their magazine. This proposal reinforces his dedication as a writer. The sound of desperation occurs after the body of the letter: ‘P.S. I am poor.’20 Whereas Poe speaks in a highly professional manner in the letter itself, the postscript strikes a personal note, attempting to evoke his correspondents’ sympathy and pity. As he matured, Poe would largely abandon the postscript as either a rhetorical ploy or a stylistic device. Instead, the bodies of subsequent letters would take on the tone of his early postscripts. Precisely when Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke first began corresponding is unknown. Writing to John R. Thompson shortly after Poe’s death, Cooke mentions that he possessed several letters Poe had written him.21 The earliest reference to Poe in Cooke’s correspondence occurs in a letter to Thomas W. White complimenting the quality of Poe’s writings in the Southern Literary Messenger. The letter’s complete text has been lost; it is known solely through an excerpt White published to promote his magazine. Speaking about Poe’s literary abilities, Cooke implores White: ‘For God’s sake, value him according to his merits, which are exceeding great. I say this with deliberation, for I have been months in coming to the conclusion that he is the first genius, in his line, in Virginia. And when I say this, how many other States are included – certainly all South of us.’22 Cooke then provides capsule appreciations of

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different aspects of individual tales: the use of dialogue in ‘Morella’; the psychological description in ‘Berenice’; the setting and characters of ‘The Visionary’ (1834); and the imagery in ‘Hans Phaal’ (1835). After commenting on these tales, Cooke continues, ‘I am too much hurried to write good English, but you may understand from what I have scribbled above, that I admire Poe greatly.’23 The last sentence reveals much about Cooke as a letter-writer. After his appreciation of another author, he deliberately provides a self-effacing comment, giving a reason to explain whatever shortcomings the reader may discern and dismissing his own writing as a scribble. The sentence contrasts Poe, the serious author of several fine tales published in the Messenger, with Cooke, who assumes the persona of an unpolished amateur author. Poe’s first reference to Cooke, in turn, occurs in a long letter to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, a professor at the College of William and Mary. In addition to what it says about his relationship to Cooke, the letter reveals much about Poe’s attitude toward letter-writing. Near the start, he offers some thoughts on originality in poetry – already a bugbear with him – but then states: ‘What is, or is not, poetry must not be told in a mere epistle.’24 Poe’s words denigrate the letter as a literary form, placing it below published writings. A critical essay written for publication would be the place to define poetry, not a manuscript letter. From Poe’s perspective, such lofty concepts are inappropriate for ‘a mere epistle.’ Tucker had written to critique a tale Poe had published in the Messenger. In his response, Poe thanks Tucker for his criticism, saying that there were few people whose critical opinions he respected: ‘I have met with no one, with the exception of yourself and P. P. Cooke of Winchester, whose judgment concerning these Tales I place any value upon.’25 Poe’s remarks honor both Beverley and Cooke, but they also amount to a celebration of Virginia’s literary tradition. Of all the critics he had personally encountered, the best ones could be found in Virginia. In the coming years, Poe would seek out Cooke’s opinion on other literary matters. Once he started working as assistant editor at Burton’s, he wrote to Cooke to solicit an article from him. Poe used this same letter to ask his opinion of ‘Ligeia’ (1838), a new story he had recently published. Cooke’s response is a delight. He apologizes for the lateness of his letter, using an opening strategy that would occur throughout his correspondence. In this instance, Cooke provides additional reasons to explain his delinquence, effectively portraying the lifestyle of a country gentleman whose social and sporting activities take precedence over letter-writing: ‘My wife enticed me off to visit her kins-people in the country, and I saw more of guns and horses and dogs than of pens and paper. Amongst dinners, barbecues, snipe shooting, riding parties etc. I could not gain my brains into the humour for writing to you or to any body else.’26 Cooke was flattered that Poe had asked him to contribute to Burton’s but unsure whether he could. He explains why: The ‘madness of scribbling’ which once itched and tickled at my fingers-ends has been considerably cured by a profession and matrimony – money-cares and domestic squabbles – buying beef and mutton, and curing my child’s croups, colicks, etc. The fever with which I was afflicted has given way to a chill – or, as romantic young persons say, ‘The golden dream is broken.’27 Since Poe had honored him by asking for his opinion, Cooke rose to the task, providing a detailed discussion of the strengths of ‘Ligeia’ but also offering suggestions for improvement. Cooke enjoyed the story, he says, until ‘the Lady Ligeia takes possession

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of the deserted quarters (I write like a butcher) of the Lady Rowena.’28 Cooke’s double entendre, though clever, is a little crass. Calling the body of Rowena ‘deserted quarters,’ he compares it with both a house and a cut of meat.29 As Cooke equates his own writing style to that of a butcher, he reinforces his amateur persona, which gives him the freedom to create clever, yet crass remarks. Cooke’s amateur stance is somewhat at odds with his critical opinions, which are really quite perceptive. He did not necessarily dislike the supernatural ending of ‘Ligeia’: he simply thought Poe should have prepared the reader for it more gradually. After critiquing the tale, Cooke distances himself from the specific criticism to speak in more general terms: ‘As for your compositions of this class, generally, I consider them, as Mr. Crummles would say, “phenomenous.” You write as I sometimes dream when asleep on a heavy supper (not heavy enough for nightmare).’30 The reference to a lovable character from Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) adds a touch of humor, but Cooke’s parallel between dreams and Poe’s writings makes a serious point, one Poe shared, as his speedy response demonstrates. Poe replied to Cooke the same morning he received the letter, his promptness a sign of both professionalism and an eagerness to befriend someone who appreciated him. Poe’s response shows him recognizing Cooke as a kindred spirit who could read his ‘inmost spirit “like a book”.’31 Cooke’s letter obviously inspired Poe, whose reply rises above the mundane quality of his typical letters. Poe conveys a sense of camaraderie more characteristic of Cooke’s letters. Recording his reaction to a comment Cooke had made, Poe explains: It makes me laugh to hear you speaking about ‘romantic young persons’ as of a race with whom, for the future, you have nothing to do. You need not attempt to shake off, or to banter off, Romance. It is an evil you will never get rid of to the end of your days. It is a part of yourself – a portion of your soul. Age will only mellow it a little, and give it a holier tone.32 Poe heartily welcomed any articles Cooke wished to publish in Burton’s and promised to give them the choicest spots in the magazine. To cement their friendship, Poe sent Cooke a copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), his two-volume collection of short stories. Cooke read them with gusto. In a thank-you letter, he compliments Poe’s work, calling his writing style the finest of all living authors. In addition, Cooke describes the overall effect of Poe’s tales, which he characterizes as ‘the visible presentation of your ideas instead of the mere expression of them.’33 Cooke also comments on specific tales, not always positively. Toward the end of the letter, Cooke typically backs away from his critique, providing some more self-effacing comments that impugn his own critical abilities. Finally, he tells Poe about the poems he was sending to Burton’s, which he denigrates in parentheses: ‘I send you two pieces of verse (Poetry I dare not call them) which I made a year ago; if you think them worth publishing publish them – if not I am too hacknied [sic] to consider your decision an affront.’34 ‘Florence Vane’ (1840), one of the two poems Cooke so casually brushes off, would prove to be the most famous poem he would ever publish. Beyond the endearing quality of Cooke’s remarks, his thank-you letter seems structured to please the reader. In other words, Cooke devotes the first part to a flattering discussion of Poe’s writings. Not until he has finished discussing Poe’s work does he broach the subject of his own. In his letters to

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fellow authors, Poe, on the other hand, usually keeps the focus on his own writings, not theirs. Cooke cultivates the persona of the nonchalant country gentleman and amateur writer in letters to other littérateurs. The forthcoming publication of Froissart Ballads prompted him to write to his cousin John Pendleton Kennedy, and to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, both of whom were helping him bring the book to completion. In a letter to Griswold, Cooke supplies some biographical facts before describing his general way of life: ‘I am happy by my fireside at this place on the banks of the Shenandoah, in view, and within a mile, of the Blue Ridge. I go to county towns, at the sessions of courts, and hunt and fish, and make myself as happy with my companions as I can.’35 In conclusion, Cooke thanks Griswold for the attention he has given his poetry and tells him that his writings scarcely deserved it. Like all good letter-writers, Cooke shaped his letters to suit individual correspondents. Writing to Kennedy, he apologizes for the lateness of his letter. Instead of attributing its delay to the exigencies of country life, as he had in an earlier letter to Poe, Cooke attributes its delinquency to hereditary causes: ‘I have purposed writing to you for a long time, but my Mother’s milk infected me with the Pendleton procrastination.’36 That same procrastination also delayed the completion of Froissart Ballads. As Cooke explains: ‘The poems are going on with that alternation of fervid execution and half desponding, half loathing after-feeling, which has cut off so many of my pieces in past times, like the story of the Bear and the Fiddle – in the middle.’37 Cooke’s simile alludes to lines from Samuel Butler’s opening verse argument to Hudibras (1684): ‘The adventure of the bear and fiddle / Is sung, but breaks off in the middle.’38 Cooke’s allusion further illustrates his ability to shape a letter for a specific correspondent. Though a longtime favorite among Southern readers, Hudibras was being read less and less in Cooke’s day. As the author of Swallow Barn (1832), the foremost plantation novel in American literature, Kennedy represented conservative Southern values and idealized the time when many Southern planters enjoyed Hudibras. In addition, bears and fiddles were common motifs in the traditional culture of the antebellum South, so this thoughtful allusion does double duty, recalling a memorable work of English literature while reinforcing Southern culture. Cooke wrote what may be the finest letter he ever wrote to Poe on 4 August 1846. The letter shares qualities with earlier ones. After the typical opening apology, it proceeds to a pressing matter: a biographical sketch Poe had asked him to write, which would continue a biographical article James Russell Lowell had written earlier. Having agreed to write the sketch, Cooke asks Poe for copies of his latest works, which he would need to complete the article. With this bit of literary business over, Cooke resumes his appreciation of Poe’s writing. Cooke often made his letters more lively by incorporating snippets of conversation.39 In this letter, he relates a conversation with his cousin John Pendleton Kennedy, who had said about Poe: ‘The man’s imagination is as truth-like and minutely accurate as Defoe’s.’40 Cooke next says he had enjoyed ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) but saves his fullest praise for ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845), the story of a mesmerist who hypnotizes a patient at the moment of death and sustains him in a mesmeric state long after death. Cooke’s letter amounts to the single finest contemporary appreciation of the story. After reading Harrison’s edition of Poe’s correspondence, Jack London thought that Cooke’s letter illustrated the powerful effect Poe’s writing had on contemporary

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readers.41 Emphasizing the effect Poe’s tale had on him, Cooke describes where and when he read it: The ‘Valdemar Case’ I read in a number of your Broadway Journal last winter – as I lay in a Turkey blind, muffled to the eyes in overcoats, etc., and pronounce it without hesitation the most damnable, vraisemblable, horrible, hair-lifting, shocking, ingenious chapter of fiction that any brain ever conceived, or hands traced. That gelatinous, viscous sound of man’s voice! there never was such an idea before. That story scared me in broad day, armed with a double-barrel Tryon Turkey gun. What would it have done at midnight in some old ghostly country house?42 Written in August about an experience that had happened the preceding winter, the letter is out of season. Its author obviously took months to mull over his description. Portraying himself reading ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ while seated in a turkey blind, Cooke extends the persona of the country gentleman and evokes a vivid image in the mind of his reader. Anyone who reads his letter can easily picture Cooke seated in the woods with his gun and a copy of the Broadway Journal. Oddly enough, episodes depicting the act of reading in the nineteenth century are fairly rare.43 Recreating his reading experience, Cooke contributes to both Poe’s biography and the history of American literature. Poe’s letters, on the other hand, add comparatively little to the history of American literature. Marcus Cunliffe observes that few of Poe’s letters ‘have much literary content; the majority are hurried documents: appeals for aid, details of editorial work, angry or pathetic messages to enemies and friends.’44 Seldom did he use personal experiences as the basis for epistolary anecdotes. Poe used to hunt for bobolink when he lived in Philadelphia, a fact known solely because a friend recorded one time they went hunting together.45 To be sure, Poe never turned his bobolink-hunting experiences into a lively episode for a correspondent. Speaking of Poe’s letters, Norman Holmes Pearson has observed that he almost never succeeded ‘in the establishment of easy epistolary relationships which could serve as the channel for uninhibited expressions of personal convictions.’46 Poe’s response to Cooke’s turkey-blind letter may represent the closest he came to the kind of personal letter Pearson describes. Cooke’s letter encouraged Poe to elevate his letter-writing style to match. In his reply, Poe graciously excuses Cooke’s delinquency, telling him that he understood ‘the unconquerable procrastination which besets the poet.’47 Showing a sense of camaraderie, Poe admits that the woods also appealed to him, not necessarily as a place for hunting game fowl but as a site for meditation and contemplation: ‘Were I to be seized by a rambling fit – one of my customary passions (nothing less) for vagabondizing through the woods for a week or a month together – I would not – in fact I could not be put out of my mood, were it even to answer a letter from the Grand Mogul, informing me that I had fallen heir to his possessions.’48 Poe’s hyperbolic, yet nonetheless revealing reply indicates how a finely crafted letter could affect him. Cooke’s turkey-blind letter was so charming, so endearing, so delightful that it coaxed Poe to reveal more about himself in his response than he typically revealed, even to his closest friends. Poe’s comments provide an insight into his creative process unavailable elsewhere. Once he devised a new story idea, apparently, he would often go walking through the woods along the Wissahickon River when he lived in Philadelphia, or

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along the Hudson in New York. The story would take shape as he mulled it over in these little patches of wilderness on the edges of the city. While Cooke temporarily inspired Poe to apply his literary talents to letter-writing, however, Poe’s reply has a self-centered quality alien to Cooke’s. Whereas the turkeyblind letter is largely devoted to a discussion of Poe’s writings, Poe’s response says comparatively little about Cooke’s writings. Poe mainly talks about Cooke’s writings as they relate to his own: ‘I do not think that any one so well enters into the poetical portion of my mind as yourself – and I deduce this idea from my intense appreciation of those points of your own poetry which seem lost upon others.’49 Cooke’s ability to write poetry gave him the ability to appreciate Poe’s writings. Continuing the letter, Poe reveals his attitude toward the short story, telling Cooke that he sought to write tales with as much variety as possible. That Poe shared his philosophy of fiction with Cooke in this ‘mere epistle’ reinforces the effect Cooke’s sympathetic letter had on him. George Iles considered Poe’s response to Cooke’s turkey-blind letter a little masterpiece of autobiography, which provides a succinct discussion of his approach to the short story.50 Cooke’s surviving letters to others similarly perpetuate the persona of the country gentleman, a man who would rather hunt than rhyme. At times, he celebrates his ignorance of the publication process. Writing to Griswold in the second week of November 1846, he asks his opinion about a publisher for Froissart Ballads, providing a reason why he needs help: ‘I am quite as ignorant as any country gentleman ever was of the business part of literature, and no doubt if my ballads are not to be printed until I (personally) induce a publisher to print them, they will be converted into gun wads first.’51 And in a follow-up letter, Cooke apologizes to Griswold for the uneven quality of his verse: ‘The Froissart Ballads sent you are certainly not in the high key of a man warm with his subject, and doing the thing finely; I wrote them with the reluctance of a turkey-hunter kept from his sport – only Mr. Kennedy’s urgent entreaty and remonstrance whipped me up to the labor.’52 Nonetheless, Griswold arranged to publish Froissart Ballads with Carey and Hart, a leading Philadelphia firm, negotiating a 10 per cent royalty. In February 1847, Cooke wrote to accept the deal. In his letter of acceptance, he almost cringes at the thought of putting his poetry on the marketplace, making it a product to be bought and sold: ‘I am somewhat mortified that my limited means and family obligations make it impossible to issue the book at my own charge.’53 The attitude toward publishing Cooke articulates is antithetical to Poe’s. Whereas Poe continually sought to achieve professional status for the author, to be paid a wage for his writings commensurate with their quality, Cooke felt shame at the idea of subjecting his writings to market forces. He would much prefer to maintain his amateur status. Given his druthers, he would rather pay for publication himself than sign a contract with a commercial publisher. As a contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger in the late 1840s, for example, Cooke also developed a correspondence with John R. Thompson, who took over the magazine in 1847. Though writing to a new correspondent, Cooke continues in the same vein as he had in his letters to Poe, Griswold, and Kennedy. Thus in a February 1849 letter he tells Thompson: ‘I have a diabolical cold, and brains as barren as “pummies” from which the cider has been twice squeezed.’54 Cooke’s home-grown simile is a delight, comparing, as it does, his brain to the leavings of a cider press. His current malady is especially unfortunate, Cooke says, because otherwise he is in an ideal situation to write

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letters, his family being away from home. Much as he portrays himself all bundled up in a turkey blind to Poe, he creates another picture of himself within his country home for Thompson: ‘I have wheeled a sofa close before the fire, propped my sides with cushions, and am in a condition of non-interruption.’55 This, like so many of Cooke’s letters, has an endearing quality difficult to resist. It is easy to see how Griswold could consider Cooke one of his most pleasant friends solely on the basis of their correspondence. Whether seated in a turkey blind on a cold winter day or settled on a sofa before well-stoked fireplace, Cooke welcomes his readers to take a seat next to him and enjoy his company. After Poe’s tragic death in October 1849, though, Cooke wrote to Thompson to offer some more serious reflections on his life and work. Finding the current literary criticism in a pitiful state, Cooke observes that: ‘Poor Poe will be greatly missed in this department.’56 He tells Thompson that his own modest reputation as a poet was largely due to the positive comments Poe made about his work in the magazines. After expressing his appreciation for ‘Ulalume’ (1847) and ‘Annabel Lee’ (1849), Cooke observes: ‘How the world is ringing now with the name and fame of poor Poe, whom the same world starved and “maddened to drink and destruction”.’57 Moreover, Cooke continues his meditation on Poe’s life and death as part of a lengthy postscript: By the way, his life and death are eloquent against the folly of trusting alone to the pen for support in this country. Poe has gained less in a pecuniary sense from the very large mass of his writings, than a clerk in a country shop would have made in the same time. For myself I would as soon think of turning pearl-diver in the Chesapeake, as of going deliberately into letters for a sole support.58 Unlike the postscripts in Poe’s early letters, Cooke’s postscript has more continuity with the body of the letter. Instead of striking a different note, as Poe does, Cooke continues to develop thoughts he had introduced earlier in the letter. Cooke’s postscript has the quality of the moral drawn at the conclusion of a fable. Colorful, absurd, and local, the image Cooke creates in his postscript – diving for pearls in the Chesapeake – underscores the impossible quest Poe set for himself. It also suggests why Poe’s personal letters lack the sparkle and pluck of his published work. Busy trying to write for a living, Poe simply could not indulge himself in the same way Cooke could. He did not have time to cultivate a companionable letter-writing persona. Writing for the magazine-reading public in an effort to make a living with his pen, Poe could not justify spending the time and effort it took to create clever metaphors or vivid images solely for an audience of one.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

See Laverty, ‘Letters,’ 247, and Hubbell, ‘Letters,’ 297. See The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Savoye, Edgar Allan Poe Society. Quoted in ‘Edgar Allan Poe Was No Toss-Pot,’ 11. See Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word, 38. Hubbell, ‘Letters,’ 297. Griswold, ‘Philip Pendleton Cooke,’ 300. In this article, Griswold quotes from several letters, which must be used with extreme caution. He plays fast and loose with Cooke’s correspondence, sometimes combining quotations from separate letters and attributing them to the same letter.

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edgar allan poe and philip pendleton cooke 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

565

Poe, ‘Chapter on Autography,’ 282. Poe, Letter to John Allan, 25 May 1826, in Collected Letters, 1: 6. O’Shea, For the Love of Letters, 50–2. Poe, Letter to John Allan, 19 March 1827, in Collected Letters, 1: 11. O’Shea, For the Love of Letters, 45–6. Bewley, ‘Poe’s Letters,’ 102. Poe, Letter to John Allan, 20 March 1827, in Collected Letters, 1: 13. Ibid. Poe, Letter to Isaac Lea, before 27 May 1829, in Collected Letters, 1: 26. For a discussion of this poem, see Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word, 25–6. Poe, Letter to Isaac Lea, before 27 May 1829, in Collected Letters, 1: 27. See Hayes, Edgar Allan Poe, 48. Thorp, ‘Letters,’ 121. Kennedy, Portable Edgar Allan Poe, 445. Poe, Letter to Joseph T. Buckingham and Edwin Buckingham, 4 May 1833, in Collected Letters, 1: 77. Cooke, Letter to John R. Thompson, 23 October 1849, in ‘Philip Pendleton Cooke,’ 96. Cooke, Letter to Thomas W. White, September 1835, in Walker, Edgar Allan Poe, 82. Ibid. Poe, Letter to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, 1 December 1835, in Collected Letters, 1: 114. Ibid. Cooke, Letter to Edgar Allan Poe, 16 September 1839, in Philip Pendleton Cooke: Poet, Critic, Novelist, 301. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 302. Poe, Letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke, 21 September 1839, in Collected Letters, 1: 193. Ibid. 194. Cooke, Letter to Edgar Allan Poe, 19 December 1839, in Philip Pendleton Cooke: Poet, Critic, Novelist, 305. Ibid. 306. Cooke, Letter to Rufus W. Griswold, 15 October 1845, in Griswold, Passages, 190–1. Cooke, Letter to John Pendleton Kennedy, c. October 1845, in Campbell, ‘Kennedy Papers,’ 351. Ibid. Butler, Hudibras, 2. See Allen, Philip Pendleton Cooke, 55. Cooke, Letter to Edgar Allan Poe, 4 August 1846, in Philip Pendleton Cooke: Poet, Critic, Novelist, 307. See London, ‘Terrible and Tragic,’ 539. Cooke, Letter to Edgar Allan Poe, 4 August 1846, in Philip Pendleton Cooke: Poet, Critic, Novelist, 307. This statement is intended as a spur to further research. Recent studies (viz. Hochman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution) have turned up some episodes of reading. Further research may turn up additional ones. The main problem is that people often did not see their everyday reading experiences as activities worth recording for posterity. To be sure, few recorded reading experiences with the level of charm and detail Cooke evinces. Cunliffe, ‘Letters,’ 250. See Hayes, Edgar Allan Poe, 117.

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566 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

kevin j. hayes Pearson, ‘Poe in His Letters,’ 568. Poe, Letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke, 9 August 1846, in Collected Letters, 1: 594. Ibid. Ibid. 595. See Iles, Library of Little Masterpieces, 4: 30–3. Cooke, Letter to Rufus W. Griswold, 8 November 1846, in Griswold, Passages, 191. Cooke, Letter to Rufus W. Griswold, 20 January 1847, in Griswold, Passages, 193. Cooke, Letter to Rufus W. Griswold, 1 February 1847, in Griswold, Passages, 193. Cooke, Letter to John R. Thompson, 9 February 1849, in ‘Philip Pendleton Cooke,’ 86. Ibid. Cooke, Letter to John R. Thompson, 23 October 1849, in ‘Philip Pendleton Cooke,’ 96. Ibid. Ibid.

Works Cited Allen, J. D. (1942), Philip Pendleton Cooke, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Bewley, M. (1949), ‘Poe’s Letters as Autobiography,’ Partisan Review, 16: 100–3. Butler, S. [1684] (1835), Hudibras, ed. T. R. Nash, London: John Murray, 1835. Campbell, K., ed. (1917), ‘The Kennedy Papers,’ Sewanee Review, 25: 348–60. Cooke, P. P. (1847), Froissart Ballads and Other Poems, Philadelphia: Carey and Hart. Cooke, P. P. (1969), Philip Pendleton Cooke: Poet, Critic, Novelist, ed. J. D. Allen, Johnson City: East Tennessee State University Research Advisory Council. Cooke, P. P. (1973–4), ‘Philip Pendleton Cooke and The Southern Literary Messenger: Selected Letters,’ ed. E. L. Tucker, Mississippi Quarterly, 27: 79–99. Cunliffe, M. (1950), ‘The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe,’ Modern Language Review, 45: 249–50. ‘Edgar Allan Poe Was No Toss-Pot’ (1948), Lowell Sun, 25 October, 11. Griswold, R. W. (1851), ‘Philip Pendleton Cooke,’ International Monthly Magazine, 4: 300–3. Griswold, R. W. (1898), Passages from the Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold, ed. W. M. Griswold, Cambridge, MA: W. M. Griswold. Hayes, K. J. (2000), Poe and the Printed Word, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hayes, K. J. (2009), Edgar Allan Poe, London: Reaktion. Hochman, B. (2011), Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hubbell, J. B. (1949), ‘The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 48: 297–8. Iles, G., ed. (1913), Library of Little Masterpieces, 6 vols., Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page. Kennedy, J. G., ed. (2006), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Penguin. Laverty, C. D. (1949), ‘The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe,’ American Literature, 21: 246–8. London, J. (1903), ‘The Terrible and the Tragic in Fiction,’ Critic, 42: 539–43. O’Shea, S. (2007), For the Love of Letters: A 21st-Century Guide to the Art of Letter Writing, New York: Collins. Pearson, N. H. (1949), ‘Poe in His Letters,’ Yale Review, 38: 568–9. Poe, E. A. (1841), ‘A Chapter on Autography,’ Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, 19: 273–86. Poe, E. A. (1902), The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 17 vols., ed. J. A. Harrison, New York: T. Y. Crowell. Poe, E. A. (1948), The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols., ed. J. W. Ostrom, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Poe, E. A. (1966), The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols., 2nd edn., ed. J. W. Ostrom, New York: Gordian.

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Poe, E. A. (2008), The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols., ed. J. W. Ostrom, B. R. Pollin, and J. Savoye, New York: Gordian. Poe, E. A. (2008–present), The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Savoye et al., Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Thorp, W. (1949), ‘The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe,’ Virginia Quarterly Review, 25: 119–23. Walker, I. M., ed. (1986), Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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37 MELVILLE’S FLUMMERY Wyn Kelley

H

erman Melville appears to have faced high expectations and deep frustrations when it came to writing letters. Sophia Hawthorne, the wife of Melville’s most valued friend, perhaps uniquely understood his predicament. In a note to her sister, Elizabeth Peabody, from April 1851, Sophia copied out a section of one of Melville’s communications with her husband Nathaniel in which, in a whimsical parody of literary journalism, Melville reviews The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Sophia here seems to penetrate Melville’s somewhat chaotic expressions of feeling for Hawthorne and his work. As she explains of Melville’s letter: The fresh, sincere, glowing mind that utters it is in a state of ‘fluid consciousness,’ & to Mr. Hawthorne speaks his innermost about GOD, the Devil & Life if so be he can get at the Truth – for he is a boy in opinion – having settled nothing as yet – informe – ingens – & it would betray him to make public his confessions and efforts to grasp – because they would be considered impious.1

Sophia here quotes a line from Book III of Virgil’s Aeneid (c. 26–19 bc) that describes Polyphemus as, in John Dryden’s translation: ‘A monstrous bulk, deformed, deprived of sight.’2 The words she selects – ‘informe’ and ‘ingens’ – emphasize not just physical size but also existential terror. Polyphemus is formless, shapeless, and hideous, as well as vast, and somewhat resembles the nameless horror Melville was wrestling with that summer as he completed Moby-Dick (1851). In invoking Virgil’s monster, Sophia labors to describe Melville’s intellectual turbulence, which she pictures as ‘tumultuous waves of thought [dashing] up against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences.’3 Scholars looking for evidence of Melville’s feelings about Hawthorne have tended to focus on Sophia’s conclusion that these tumultuous waves reveal ‘such a love & reverence & admiration for Mr. Hawthorne as is really beautiful to witness.’4 But her phrase ‘tumultuous waves of thought’ also seems an apt image of Melville’s fundamental incoherence, his struggle to express what could be considered ‘impious.’ As closer study of the Melville family correspondence suggests, his thoughts might indeed have been considered impious, but not so much in terms of religious orthodoxy, as in regard to the rules and boundaries of letter-writing. As significant as Sophia’s remarkable insight into Melville’s ‘fluid consciousness’ and his frustration with conventional expectations for letter-writing is, it is a less noted fact that she read the letter thoroughly, copied out the parts that interested her, and forwarded them to her sister with extended commentary. She seems, then, to operate in a zone somewhere between the privacy of her husband’s first reading (if he did indeed read it alone before sharing with her) and the place where Melville would have to ‘make public his confessions.’ 568

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Her intervention in Melville’s communication with Hawthorne raises questions about whether Melville expected his ‘innermost’ expressions to remain within Hawthorne’s bosom. Melville’s letter, for example, includes the celebrated passage in which he delivers a judgment of Hawthorne that some biographers and critics have taken as either a self-portrait or a veiled declaration of love: ‘There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes’ (WHMC, 186). However this and other such extravagant passages have been read, Melville’s letters to Hawthorne have typically been viewed as utterances of the most intimate and confidential kind. Yet he ends the letter with greetings ‘to Mrs. Hawthorne and the children,’ and Sophia’s subsequent letter to Elizabeth makes it clear that Hawthorne did not keep Melville’s effusions to himself (WHMC, 187). Can we then take Melville’s letters as spontaneous outpourings of one soul to another? Or are they an artful performance intended for a somewhat larger audience? Did he write outside the boundaries of conventional correspondence or not? Melville attacks this problem more explicitly himself in his next letter to Hawthorne, when he speaks of intending ‘to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my “Whale” while it is driving through the press’ (WHMC, 191). Melville, however, then digresses from his ‘Whale’ to expatiate at length on other topics, arriving eventually at his own development as a writer: Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. (WHMC, 193) This passage is justly celebrated as the kind of ‘fresh, sincere, glowing’ utterance Sophia Hawthorne admired. Along with other passages from Melville’s letters to Hawthorne, it has seemed to establish the self-revealing depth of this significant correspondence. But Melville also disconcertingly appears to undermine such constructions of his intentions. Later in the same paragraph in which he speaks of his miraculous unfolding, for instance, he mercilessly lampoons it. Declaring Goethe’s philosophy – the mandate to ‘Live in the all’ – to be ‘nonsense!’ he continues: ‘As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me’ (WHMC, 193). And he ends the letter by imagining Hawthorne’s relief that he is finally done: ‘ “Amen!” saith Hawthorne’ (WHMC, 194). We may read Melville’s depiction of his letter-writing as ‘flummery’ in a number of ways: as self-deprecating humor, brusque petulance, nervousness in the presence of Hawthorne’s ‘great, genial, comprehending silences,’ or plangent criticism, however colloquially expressed. But above all, his comment deserves to be taken seriously. Melville did write an immense deal of flummery in his letters, and it behooves us to consider exactly what kind of flummery it is and what it signifies. Given Sophia Hawthorne’s perceptive comment, we might understand ‘flummery’ to mean that which Melville felt he could say, even in a letter. Or it could define the number of ways one might evade Victorian expectations for correspondence. It could certainly describe a range of creative, fanciful, and delightful forms of expression. Most provocatively, for anyone wanting to use his letters as windows upon the soul, it also seems to point to Melville’s masking of his inner self in an elaborate display or performance of mockery – including the mockery of letter-writing itself.

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Importantly, anatomizing Melville’s ‘flummery’ flies in the face of a scholarly tradition that values Melville’s correspondence primarily for its relevance to his biography and as a source for psychoanalytical criticism. More recently, the family letters collected by his sister Augusta, and only rediscovered in 1983, have challenged the concept that Melville’s correspondence is significant only for what it reveals about his literary development, emotional growth, or sexual identity. In this respect, the Augusta Melville papers place him within a family network that includes other writers, and they suggest that Melville in some ways failed to meet or deliberately avoided the family’s expectations of what letters were for. In seeking to understand Melville’s epistolary persona, then, this chapter will look at the impact of the Augusta Melville collection on scholarly interpretations of Melville’s letter-writing and will examine more closely the varieties and functions of his literary flummery. Writing in an appendix to the now-standard Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville’s correspondence in 1993, Lynn Horth, its chief editor, succinctly identified the difference between this volume and any previous collections of Melville’s letters: ‘The decision was . . . to include all surviving texts of letters to Melville and consequently to change the volume title from Letters to Correspondence.’5 This decision, although Horth does not directly say so, most likely reflects two important influences: Jay Leyda’s 1951 The Melville Log, an archive of letters, clippings, reviews, and sightings of Melville drawing from a wide range of sources; and Augusta Melville’s collection of family papers, lovingly boxed and put away in 1863, then fortuitously uncovered 120 years later in the attic of a house in upstate New York.6 It also harks back to Eleanor Melville Metcalf’s 1953 book Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, which, like Leyda’s Log, places Melville among a circle of family and friends and quotes from letters and other documents to show him embedded within an active social network. Like Leyda too, Metcalf resisted the tendency of early Melville scholars and editors such as Raymond Weaver, Meade Minnegerode, and Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman to treat their subject in isolation from his social environment.7 In its understanding of Melville as part of a rich, varied social context, the Northwestern-Newberry’s move from Letters to Correspondence responds decisively to the Metcalf–Leyda tradition. Perhaps more significantly, though, the Northwestern-Newberry Correspondence volume also acts on exciting revelations embedded in Augusta Melville’s collection of family letters. If Metcalf and Leyda saw Melville as part of a larger family network, Augusta’s collection renders him so much a part of it as to be nearly invisible: only one letter written by her brother survives among Augusta’s papers. And although most of her roughly seventy correspondents are female, she includes about fifteen men, among them her other brothers, as well as brothers-in-law, nephews, cousins, and friends. It is clear, then, that she does not discriminate against men, yet at the same time does not favor Herman in any way. What then did Augusta have in mind in gathering, sorting, and tying up these documents, as the family prepared to leave the Berkshires for their new home in New York City?8 Not, most certainly, an epistolary biography of her brother Herman, for both Melville and the family burned many of his papers.9 Among over 500 documents saved by Augusta, only just over a quarter, or 141, pertain to Herman, and often only in the most perfunctory way, with the correspondent asking to be remembered to him, sending a brief message, or recording whether Herman has visited or corresponded with others in the family.10 It seems far more probable, therefore, that Augusta meant to preserve a record of the family’s female writers.

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Whatever her intentions may have been, by filling in crucial details in the day-to-day lives of her extended clan, Augusta’s papers have become vital to late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Melville biography.11 They have also informed scholarship on topics like Melville’s epistolary style, the manuscript of Typee (1846), the ‘private’ Melville, the Melville–Hawthorne relationship, the history of Melville criticism, Melville as poet, Melville and women, and a host of other issues.12 Yet they have received only minimal attention as a collection or even edition of texts, as a product of what Augusta called her ‘literary thirst,’ or as an indication of a critical theory of correspondence.13 Even if the story of Augusta Melville as literary figure – writer, editor, or critic – remains to be written, though, we can derive from her choices a sense of the family’s rules for correspondence and the astounding ways in which Melville repeatedly broke them. As Lynn Horth has pointed out, Melville played an ‘aloof role in the close-knit writing world of widowed mother, three brothers, four sisters, and numerous uncles, aunts, and cousins.’14 Even from the first, Melville’s letters often convey his sense of the heavy duties imposed by his early critics. To his aunt, Lucy Melvill, young Herman wrote that: ‘You asked me to write you a letter but I thought tht [sic] I could not write well enough before this’ (WHMC, 4). And to his grandmother, Catherine Van Schaick Gansevoort, he stated at age nine that: ‘This is the third letter that I ever wrote so you must not think it will be very good’ (WHMC, 5). From childhood Herman, then, seems to have been aware of his deficiencies as a writer of letters amongst demanding and possibly more gifted relatives. The Augusta papers give abundant evidence of how much the family expected from its members in terms of regular, dutiful, and reciprocal correspondence. Most striking is Augusta’s inventory of letters sent and received, showing the complexity of the family’s correspondence pathways and the difficulty of keeping track and staying on top of one’s obligations as correspondent. Indeed Augusta’s letters betray some of the tension surrounding these obligations. In a letter to her sister Helen, for example, she remarks that: ‘It was high time, Miss Helen, I should think to write us’ (AMP, 21 December 1850). Another letter to Helen, meanwhile, shows that in order to maintain her side of the correspondence she must write even when she has little to say: ‘Having given you to understand that you should hear from me in a week’s time, I am bound not to disappoint you, notwithstanding the famine in the land – for positively there is nothing to write. Mamma is well, & Herman is well, & Fanny is well, & Malcolm is well, & I myself am well’ (AMP, 22 November 1850). And she also records her failures with considerable, if witty, chagrin: ‘This is the most inelegant letter I ever wrote – I am positively ashamed to subscribe my name’ (AMP, 14 January 1851). The headnotes to letters in the Northwestern-Newberry Correspondence volume show that Augusta was not alone in feeling responsible for monitoring letters received and sent. In 1854, for instance, Helen wrote to Augusta to observe that ‘it is more than three weeks since Herman’s letter reached me.’15 Their mother Maria Gansevoort Melville too was vigilant and vocal in tracking the mail: in a typical example, she writes to Helen that: ‘We heard from Herman & Allen this morning – Herman is very busy correcting Omoo.’16 Maria was equally active in directing the family correspondence, telling Augusta in a February 1846 letter, ‘you had better write Herman on Thursday at New York,’ and in September 1855 asking her: ‘Did Herman write an apology to the publishers.’17 Such attention to epistolary duty could be seen as excessive, but as Horth affirms, after the death of her husband

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Allan Melvill, ‘Maria Gansevoort Melville, and her children depended on letters as an emotional and economic lifeline.’18 Letters mattered in the family’s perpetual efforts to stay afloat financially, surviving on timely handouts from powerful allies like Herman’s uncle Peter Gansevoort and his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw. Thus, cultivating a decorous style of expressing the requisite thanks, condolences, apologies, and news ‘was not a matter of social pleasantry, but of family unity.’19 The discovery of Augusta’s papers, then, gave scholars a vivid picture of how the family correspondence worked, why it mattered, and how Herman typically seemed to ‘stand on the periphery of this constant round of letters among the women.’20 Lynn Horth’s superb editing of the Northwestern-Newberry volume makes that point abundantly clear, emphasizing Herman’s ‘unorthodox’ attitude to the family’s rules for letter-writing.21 If his mother and uncle scolded him for his lapses as a correspondent, however, the family seem also to have tolerated and even appreciated his rebellious behavior, or what Helen humorously called ‘your usual [cavalier] mode of treating such documents’ (WHMC, 781). Still, as later events also proved, the family destroyed letters they deemed sensitive, and Horth emphasizes how very little Melville’s readers now have to inspect: 313 letters that Melville wrote, eighty-eight he received, and 542 unlocated.22 Remarkably, Horth was able to add fifty-two missives to the 271 that Merrell Davis and William Gilman included in their 1960 edition of the letters (twenty-nine of them from her extensive researches) and to add ninety unlocated letters by Melville, along with 305 unlocated letters to Melville.23 Yet although this expanded collection greatly increases our knowledge of Melville’s correspondence, it represents a small number of the letters he probably wrote and, more importantly for critics, a minimal sample of his writing style. Among the Northwestern-Newberry volume’s 313 Melville letters, for example, nearly eighty are brief notes to business associates, acquaintances, or strangers. About sixty-nine are addressed to editors and concern his publications; many of these are vivid and entertaining, but not remarkable in terms of either style or personal content. That leaves the roughly seventy-five letters to friends and ninety-two to family members, among which the most revealing are addressed to a small number of intimates: Evert Duyckinck, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana, Melville’s cousin Catherine Gansevoort Lansing, his uncle Peter Gansevoort, his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, and his brothers Gansevoort, Allan, and Tom. We have one letter to his wife Elizabeth, two to Augusta, two to his mother, three to his sister Catherine, and two to his children. In short, even with the rich revelations in Augusta Melville’s papers, when it comes to judging Melville’s output as a correspondent, we have very little to go on. Thus it is all the more remarkable that within such a small pool so many of Melville’s letters are full of what he might call ‘flummery.’ And what, you might ask, is ‘flummery’? The word is Welsh and signifies: ‘A kind of food made by coagulation of wheatflour or oatmeal.’24 From that it comes to mean ‘a name given to various sweet dishes made with milk, flour, eggs, etc.,’ and then: ‘Mere flattery or empty compliment; nonsense, humbug, empty trifling.’25 Melville provides definitions himself by variously identifying his letters as ‘nonsence [sic]’ (WHMC, 30), ‘gibberish’ (WHMC, 213), ‘mere moonshine’ (WHMC, 452), and ‘absurd scribble’ (WHMC, 454); or himself, the writer, as ‘asinine’ (WHMC, 212), a ‘conceited donkey’ (WHMC, 377), or a ‘spoonie’

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(WHMC, 381). He calls one letter, to the editor John Murray, ‘unconscionable’ and another ‘egotistical,’ a word he invokes as well with his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, and with Hawthorne, to identify his own foolishness in speaking excessively of himself (WHMC, 57, 102). Beyond these different kinds of nomenclature, Melville’s flummery takes so many distinct forms that we might construct a taxonomy of them – a Cetology of Flummery, in other words. Hence, then, a list: 1. The Ill-Advised Rant 2. The Awkward Compliment, or Clumsy Attempt at Flirtation 3. The Conceited Boast or Vaunting Challenge a. Unsolicited Opinions, with Aimless Meandering among Same b. Railing at the Universe c. Abuse of Kindness d. Rank Teasing e. Ruthless Democracy 4. Blustering Blasphemy 5. Officious Invitation A few examples may suffice to show how Melville, sometimes artfully but often maladroitly and certainly in violation of decorum, wove these various forms of flummery into his letters. The Ill-Advised Rant appears often and most alarmingly in Melville’s business letters – a generally risky move, given the context. For example, he calls his July 1846 letter to John Murray ‘unconscionable’ because he has: instructed his English editor in great detail how to revise and reissue Typee; complained about the prosaic British title (A Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence Among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands) and insisted that he replace it with Typee; proposed a new manuscript; and apologized for his haste in writing. All of this appears in a jumble of dashes, exclamations, and items he has forgotten but must now add. In a September 1846 letter to Murray, meanwhile, he interrupts preposterously into a stream of proposed revisions to Typee to exclaim: ‘You ask for “documentary evidences” of my having been at the Marquesas – in Typee. – Dear Sir, how indescribably vexatious, when one really feels in his very bones that he has been there, to have a parcel of blockheads question it!’ (WHMC, 65). ‘Not (let me hurry to tell you) that Mr John Murray comes under that category – Oh no,’ he hastily adds, before nevertheless continuing in this vein for a few more paragraphs (WHMC, 65). In another example of ill-advised levity, he writes in a June 1848 letter to Murray that he wishes to submit to him the draft of a new book – ‘in spite of the Antarctic tenor of your epistle’ (WHMC, 109). Elsewhere, while apologizing in a March 1848 letter to Murray, he verbosely wonders if ‘you will still continue, Mr. Murray, to break seals from the Land of Shadows – persisting in carrying on this mysterious correspondence with an imposter-shade, that under the fanciful appellation of Herman Melvill [sic] still practices upon your honest credulity?’ (WHMC, 105). Melville appears to have been no more politic in his letters to women, whom he often addresses with an odd mixture of gallantry and gaucherie that we have to

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hope his correspondents found amusing. One rather lengthy example of the Awkward Compliment appears in a January 1845 letter to his nineteen-year-old sister Catherine. It begins: My Dear Sister: What a charming name is yours – the most engaging I think in our whole family circle – I dont [sic] know how it is precisely, but I have always been very partial to this particular appellative & can not [sic] avoid investing the person who bears it, with certain quite captivating attributes; so, when I hear of Kate Such a one – whether it be Kate Smith or Kate Jones, or Kate Any Body Else I invariably impute to the said Kate all manner of delightful characteristics. (WHMC, 28) The compliments surge ahead, addressing his sister’s beauty, her propensity for mischief, the ‘two sweet merry eyes & a round merry face, and a merry smile, & even a kind of a merry little walk’ characteristic of most Kates (WHMC, 29). As he imagines her discomfiture at this deluge of flattery, he then teases her more, saying: ‘Don’t look so abashed! What! Face, neck & bosom all bathed in glowing floods of vermilion! – Verily, Modesty is the cheifest [sic] attributes of the Kates’ (WHMC, 29). He ends by acknowledging that the letter is ‘nonsence [sic]’ and asks her to ‘send me a sober letter like a good girl’ (WHMC, 30). He adopts a similar tone in addressing his cousin Catherine Gansevoort Lansing as ‘Incomparable Kate’ in February 1863, and ‘Inimitable Kate’ in September 1868, and, in an August 1868 letter, complimenting her in this flowery fashion: The country hereabouts is looking as fresh as – yourself. I was going to say a rose, but chose the more appropriate comparison. However, I must cease this strain, for Lizzie [Melville’s wife] just sat down by me and may catch me at it, and consider that I slightly, it may be, exceed the due limits of cousinly compliment. (WHMC, 183, 407, 406) Another female correspondent, his friend and Berkshires neighbor Sara H. Morewood, arouses gallantry as well, but this time couched in terms of medieval chivalry. Hence in a December 1853 letter he addresses her as ‘My Lady Countess’ and ‘your Ladyship of Southmount’ and himself as the ‘humble Knight on the Hill,’ bidding her farewell with ‘due obeisance & three times kissing of your Ladyships hands, & salutes to all your Ladyship’s household’ (WHMC, 253). In a response to an August 1856 invitation, meanwhile, he addresses her as ‘My Dear Lady Broadhall,’ ‘Thou Lady of All Delight,’ and ‘The peerless Lady of Broadhall’ (WHMC, 297). Acknowledging her note, he writes here that: ‘Forever hereafter be this day thought a fortunate one, instead of a luckless. For has it not brought me some share of a kind invitation from the ever-excellent & beautiful Lady of Paradise – slip of the pen – of Broadhall, I mean?’ (WHMC, 297). One cannot help wondering what he said in his letters to Lizzie that caused her to later burn them – did he knowingly ‘exceed the due limits of . . . compliment’ with compliments even more exuberant and unrestrained? Still, lest we think that Melville reserved his flattery only for women, a couple of letters suggest that he was equally fulsome with men. In sending Evert Duyckinck a presentation copy of Mardi (1849) in February 1850, for example, he praises Duyckinck’s library

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as ‘a choice conservatory of exotics & other rare things in literature’ and offers him a ponderous witticism: ‘How natural then – tho’ vain – in your friend to desire a place in it for a plant, which tho’ now unblown (emblematically, the leaves, you perceive are uncut) may possibly – by some miracle, that is – flower like the aloe’ (WHMC, 154). He favors Hawthorne with an even more prolix compliment on the publication of The Blithedale Romance in 1852, beginning with a declaration that the ‘name of “Hawthorne” seems to be ubiquitous,’ before listing at length the occasions and places he has seen Hawthorne mentioned in Naushon, Boston, and ‘Brooklyne [sic],’ and ending with: ‘And this morning, lo! On my table a little note, subscribed Hawthorne again. – Well, the Hawthorne is a very sweet flower; may it flourish in every hedge’ (WHMC, 230). One might assume that in these passages Melville has simply fallen prey to flowery Victorian forms of diction. But his business letters, commonplace family missives, and communications with strangers show that he could be brusque, straightforward, and impersonal in his writing. All the more noteworthy, then, to find him at other times indulging in extravagant flights of rhetoric, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. When Ishmael – or, let’s say, Emily Dickinson – does the same thing, the effect is generally considered humorous, ironic, or sharply satirical. It is harder to know what to make of Melville’s Conceited Boasts and Vaunting Challenges, perhaps the most striking example of which is Herman’s February 1849 letter to brother Allan on the occasion of the birth of the former’s son Malcolm – a letter that has generated a book-length critical study.26 The only one of Herman’s letters to have turned up among Augusta’s papers, this missive offers a plainly joyous, Rabelaisian spirit of festivity: ‘It takes three nurses to dress him; and he is as valiant as Julius Caesar. – He’s a perfect prodigy. – If the worst comes to the worst, I shall let him out by the month to Barnum; and take the tour of Europe with him. I think of calling him Barbarossa – Adolphus – Ferdinand – Otho – Grandissimo Hercules’ (WHMC, 116). Herman’s glee rises to heaven, ‘for last night I dreamt that his good angel had secured a seat for him above; & that the Devel [sic] roared terribly bethinking him of that lusty foe to sin born into this sinful world’ (WHMC, 117). Later, in May 1862, Melville used a similarly heightened tone when reminding his brother Thomas of the time ‘[this] conceited donkey repeated to you about three cables’ length of his verses,’ but by then he may have come to recognize if not rue his own propensity for vaunting boasts (WHMC, 377). In any case, the boasts take a number of intriguing forms. A letter to Evert Duyckinck expressing his view of Emerson gives a fine example of Melville’s delight in abrupt and unsolicited Opinions. This March 1849 missive begins without salutation: ‘Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man’s swing’ (WHMC, 121). The opinion may not be completely unsolicited, since he is responding to an earlier question from Duyckinck, but his meditation on Emerson swerves sharply from considering him ‘a brilliant fellow’ to calling him a ‘humbug,’ from saying he was expecting to hear ‘oracular gibberish’ to finding him ‘quite intelligible,’ from naming him a ‘fool’ to saying that ‘I had rather be a fool than a wise man’ and concluding that ‘I love all men who dive’ (WHMC, 121). Not satisfied with this elegant series of paradoxes, he finally goes on to criticize Emerson’s egotism, praise Shakespeare’s truth-telling, and lament his own prolixity: ‘There, I have driven my horse so hard that I have made my inn before sundown’ (WHMC, 122).

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If Melville loves to opine, he also appears to be fond of Railing at the Universe. His December 1849 letter to Duyckinck, on the reception of his novel Redburn (1849), offers a characteristic sample: [W]e that write and print have all our books predestinated – & for me, I shall write such things as the Great Publisher of Mankind ordained ages before he published ‘The World’ – this planet, I mean – not the Literary Globe. – What a madness & anguish it is, that an author can never – under no conceivable circumstances – be at all frank with his readers. (WHMC, 149)27 Melville’s railing at the universe often takes the form as well of railing at Duyckinck, and in some cases deliberately and self-confessedly Abusing his Kindness. In another letter to Duyckinck from the same time he implies that such habits have long blemished his character: ‘I could almost whip myself that after receiving your most kind & friendly letter, I should suffer so long an interval to go by without answering it. But what can you expect of me? I have served persons the nearest to me in like manner’ (WHMC, 148). An otherwise sober and affectionate letter, written a year later, finds Melville issuing Duyckinck a challenge, to the effect that: ‘If you expect a letter from a man who lives in the country you must make up your mind to receive an egotistical one – for he has no gossip nor news of any kind’ (WHMC, 173). And in a more irritated response to Duyckinck’s February 1851 request for an article, Melville writes: ‘How shall a man go about refusing a man? – Best be roundabout, or plumb on the mark? – I can not write the thing you want. I am in the humor to lend a hand to a friend if I can; – but I am not in the humor to write the kind of thing you need’ (WHMC, 180). As for the daguerreotype of Melville that Duyckinck had also asked for: ‘I would not send it for such a purpose, even to you’ (WHMC, 180). Fortunately, Duyckinck seems to have had considerable tolerance for his friend’s crotchets, but Melville finally succeeded in alienating him a year later, when he canceled his subscription to Duyckinck’s magazine The Literary World after it published a mixed review of Moby-Dick.28 Their correspondence would eventually be resumed by 1860, but on a more subdued note. As these examples show, another aspect of Melville’s insistent challenges to correspondents is his Rank Teasing, and Duyckinck came in for a good deal of it. The tone can be gentle and friendly, as in an August 1850 letter when, adopting the rhetoric of the Song of Solomon, Melville coaxes Duyckinck to leave broiling New York City and visit him in the Berkshires: What are you doing there, My Beloved, among the bricks & cobble-stone boulders? Are you making mortar? Surely, My Beloved, you are not carrying a hod? – That were a quizzical sight, to see any godly man, with a pen behind his ear, and a hod on his shoulder. – I have a horrible presentiment that you are even now hanging around the City-Hall, trying to get a contract from the Corporation to pave Broadway between Clinton Place and Union-Square. For heaven’s sake, come out from among those Hittites and Hodites – give up mortar forever. (WHMC, 167) As in many other instances, Melville does not let up. This particular strain goes on a dozen lines more until he concedes defeat: ‘But enough – the visions come too thick for me to master them’ (WHMC, 168). Elsewhere, Melville’s teasing takes a more explicitly political turn in a June 1851 letter to Hawthorne in which he launches

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into an extended stream of what he calls Ruthless Democracy, a vigorous protest against elitism: With no son of man do I stand upon any etiquette or ceremony . . . So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of the sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a person as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. (WHMC, 190) Acknowledgments of his own ludicrousness seem to happen fairly often when Melville is writing to Hawthorne, and frequently take the form of noting his ‘egotism.’ To this extent, egotism in correspondence is clearly conceived of as a fault, and Melville excuses his display of it in a January 1848 letter to John Murray (‘[a]ll of this to be sure, is confidential – & egotistical – decidedly the latter’), and in an October 1849 letter to Lemuel Shaw (‘it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to “fail.” – Pardon this egotism’) (WHMC, 102, 139). But to Hawthorne in the ‘ruthless democracy’ letter, Melville excuses his egotism as well as critiquing it: ‘Though I wrote the Gospels in the century, I should die in the gutter. – I talk all about my self, and this is selfishness and egotism. Granted. But how help it? I am writing to you; I know little about you, but something about myself. So I write about myself, – at least, to you’ (WHMC, 192). This passage fairly droops with the relief of shedding for a time any solicitous concern for the correspondent that the Melville family’s habits of letter-writing seemed to require. Indeed, in a late June 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Melville again excuses his egotism: ‘I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself, – for if I say so much on that head, be sure all the rest of the world are thinking about themselves ten times as much. Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses’ (WHMC, 196). A ruthless democracy, it would seem, enables freedom to speak one’s own mind, whatever its faults and weaknesses. Melville apparently suspected that his reader might find him excessive in his sentiments. As he closed the latter dispatch to Hawthorne, he mused: ‘This is rather a crazy letter in some respects, I apprehend’ (WHMC, 196). He was even more direct in a March 1877 letter to his brother-in-law John Hoadley, in which he enclosed a copy of his poem ‘The Age of the Antonines’ (1891) and, in ways that by now appear characteristic, offered a lively apology ‘for my remissness in allowing your most friendly note of the 25 ult. to remain unanswered so long’ (WHMC, 452). Here, he apparently fears that Hoadley might take his somewhat jumbled letter amiss, for in a postscript he adds: ‘It is a queer sort of an absurd scribble . . . [A]t my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling. Life is very short’(WHMC, 454). And then for good measure he adds a striking second postscript: ‘N.B. I aint crazy’ (WHMC, 454). Melville knew he was on even riskier ground in expressing anything that approached sacrilege, but in his letters to Hawthorne he gave vent to some of his most Blustering Blasphemy. One example, in the late June 1851 letter already mentioned, is delivered slyly and sotto voce: ‘Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked – though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this. This is the book’s motto (the secret one), – Ego non baptiso te in nomine – but make out the rest for yourself’ (WHMC, 196).

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His November 1851 letter to Hawthorne on his response to reading Moby-Dick, meanwhile, makes the blasphemy more explicit: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb’ (WHMC, 212). Knowing that he may have strained even Hawthorne’s patience, he ends by apologizing for ‘such gibberish!’ and assures Hawthorne that he will not always write in such a passionate fashion: ‘No such thing! I sha’n’t always answer your letters, and you may do just as you please’ (WHMC, 213, 214). This brusque conclusion clearly masks his vulnerable emotion in this most expressive of his letters to Hawthorne. He used that brusque and insistent tone often, particularly in the Officious Invitation, some of the oddest flummery in his oeuvre. His first of these could not have pleased Sophia Hawthorne, who had apparently cast cold water on Melville’s hospitable plans: That side-blow thro’ Mrs. Hawthorne will not do. I am not to be charmed out of my promised pleasure by any of that lady’s syrenisms. You, Sir, I hold accountable, & the visit (in all its original integrity) must be made. – What! spend the day, only with us? – A Greenlander might as well talk of spending the day with a friend, when the day is only half an inch long. (WHMC, 176) The tone then becomes more even pressing when Melville tells his friend: Another thing, Mr. Hawthorne – Do not think you are coming to any prim nonsensical house – that is nonsensical in the ordinary way. You wont be much bored with punctilios. You may do what you please – say or say not what you please. And if you feel any inclination for that sort of thing – you may spend the period of your visit in bed, if you like – every hour of your visit. (WHMC, 176) Other invitations are less insistent but no less unconventional. To Hawthorne in July 1851 he writes: ‘My dear fellow-being, we – that is, you and I – must hit upon some little bit of vagabondism before Autumn comes. Graylock – we must go and vagabondize there’ (WHMC, 199). And to Duyckinck a few days later: ‘Come, and give yourself a week’s holyday on the hay-mow. “In fact,” Come . . . By no means let George stay behind. If he does, I shall write to the Chief of Police Matsell, to send him on’ (WHMC, 201). Melville committed all sorts of other forms of flummery in his letters, including weak parodies, bad puns, and in one case a wild prank when in 1854 he switched his letters to sisters Helen and Catherine so that each received the one written for the other, and ‘how we did laugh over it.’29 ‘But enough,’ as Melville would say – and regularly did (WHMC, 168). It should be evident by now that Melville’s flummery includes some of his most explosive, inventive, and unexpected writing. Why, then, his elaborate pretense that his letters, even when they tell the Truth, are ‘the silliest thing under the sun’? Why his insistence that, like Goethe, he has ‘a monstrous deal’ of flummery in himself? And why the endless effort, to the point of seemingly unbearable strain, to convince the people whose opinion mattered to him most that he was writing ‘nonsense,’ ‘gibberish,’ and ‘absurd scribble’? Would not a letter be the one place where Melville could be himself? We err, however, in supposing that Melville considered any letter private. He had been schooled, after all, to make his letters entertaining for an extensive family circle. As Augusta’s papers show, any correspondent had to assume a large audience for his

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or her literary effusions, and as burdensome as Melville may have found these strictures at first, he quickly learned to delight his readers, as their responses frequently reveal. Even in letters to Hawthorne and Duyckinck, Melville sends sociable greetings to family members, aware that they may well read his rhapsodic outbursts and soulful confessions. Knowing that he could be interrupted at any time, Melville adopts an almost exaggeratedly public self in his letters. His flummery is the elaborate mask that allows him to say as much as he does. Melville admired truth-telling and thought that his hero Hawthorne, like Shakespeare, had mastered it. As he put it in ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ (1850): Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, [Shakespeare] craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them. Tormented into desperation, Lear the frantic King tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth.30 Melville recognized that the people speaking truth in Shakespeare’s plays were actors. Even when ‘Lear’ tears off the mask, he is still performing. Melville’s flummery gave him a similar license to play a part and simultaneously to hint at what in him might be considered monstrous, or indeed ‘informe – ingens.’

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

Quoted in Melville, Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 184. Virgil, Aeneid, 83. Quoted in Melville, Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 184. Ibid. Horth, ‘Editorial Appendix,’ 816. On the discovery of the Augusta Melville papers see ibid. 790, and Mitgang, ‘Scholars to Examine.’ See: Weaver, Herman Melville; Minnigerode, Some Personal Letters; Davis and Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville. Since none of the letters dates from later than 1863, when the family moved, we can surmise that this was the reason for their collection. See Horth, ‘Editorial Appendix,’ 774. See New York Public Library, Guide to the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection, 123–4. See, for example: Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography; the two volumes of Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography; and Delbanco, Melville. On Melville’s epistolary style see Cohen and Yannella, Melville’s Malcolm Letter; on the Typee manuscript see Bryant, Melville Unfolding; on the ‘private’ Melville see Young, The Private Melville; on the Melville–Hawthorne relationship see the essays in Argersinger and Person, Hawthorne and Melville; on the history of Melville criticism see Kelley, ‘Out of the Bread Box’; on Melville as poet see Parker, Melville: The Making; and on Melville and women see the essays in Schultz and Springer. For exceptions to this rule see Bryant, ‘Gansevoort Revises,’ and Kelley, ‘ “My Literary Thirst.’” Horth, ‘Editorial Appendix,’ 774. Quoted in Melville, Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 263. Ibid. 69.

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Ibid. 574, 281. Horth, ‘Editorial Appendix,’ 775. Ibid. Ibid. 779. Ibid. 781. See ibid. 813. See ibid. 819. ‘flummery, n.,’ n.pag. Ibid. See Cohen and Yannella, Melville’s Malcolm Letter. Melville is punning throughout this passage on the title of Duyckinck’s journal The Literary World. 28. For the letter of cancellation see Melville, Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 222–3. 29. Quoted in Melville, Writings of Herman Melville – Correspondence, 262. 30. Melville, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses,’ 244.

Works Cited Argersinger, J., and L. Person, eds. (2008), Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Bryant, J. (2008), Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of ‘Typee’, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bryant, J., ed. (2013), ‘Gansevoort Revises Augusta,’ Melville Electronic Library: A Critical Archive, Hofstra University, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Cohen, H., and D. Yannella (1992), Herman Melville’s Malcolm Letter: ‘Man’s Final Lore’, New York: Fordham University Press. Davis, M. R., and W. H. Gilman, eds. (1960), The Letters of Herman Melville, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Delbanco, A. (2005), Melville: His World and Work, New York: Knopf. ‘flummery, n.’ (2015), Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Horth, L. (1993), ‘Editorial Appendix,’ in H. Melville, The Writings of Herman Melville – Volume 14: Correspondence, ed. L. Horth, with H. Hayford, H. Parker, and T. T. Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 773–888. Kelley, W. (1997), ‘ “My Literary Thirst”: Augusta Melville and the Melville Family Correspondence,’ Resources for American Literary Study, 25: 46–56. Kelley, W. (2011), ‘Out of the Bread Box: Eleanor Melville Metcalf and the Melville Legacy,’ Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 13: 21–33. Melville, A. (1821–76), Augusta Melville Papers, Gansevoort–Lansing Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, MssColl 1109. Cited parenthetically as AMP. Melville, H. [1850] (1987), ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses,’ in H. Hayford, A. A. MacDougall, and T. T. Tanselle (eds.), The Writings of Herman Melville – Volume 9:The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 239–53. Melville, H. (1993), The Writings of Herman Melville – Volume 14: Correspondence, ed. L. Horth, with H. Hayford, H. Parker, and T. T. Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. Cited parenthetically as WHMC.

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Minnegerode, M., ed. (1922), Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography, New York: The Brick Row Book Shop. Mitgang, H. (1983), ‘Scholars to Examine Melville Treasure,’ New York Times, 28 December, 17. New York Public Library (2015), Guide to the Gansevoort–Lansing Collection, Gansevoort– Lansing Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Division, MssColl 1109, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Parker, H. (1996), Herman Melville: A Biography – Volume 1, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Parker, H. (2002), Herman Melville: A Biography – Volume 2, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Parker, H. (2007), Melville: The Making of a Poet, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Robertson-Lorant, L. (1996), Melville: A Biography, New York: Clarkson Potter. Schultz, E., and H. Springer, eds. (2006), Melville and Women, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Virgil [c. 26–19 bc] (1989), The Aeneid, trans. J. Dryden, ed. H. W. Clarke, University Park: Penn State University Press. Weaver, R. (1921), Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, New York: Doran. Young, P. (1993), The Private Melville, University Park: Penn State University Press.

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38 THE EPISTOLARY ROMANCE AND RIVALRY OF SOPHIA AND NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Patricia Dunlavy Valenti

I

n the late fall of 1837, a reclusive American writer sent a copy of his collected short stories to ‘Miss Elizabeth Peabody, with the respects of the Author.’1 That inscription to Twice-Told Tales was in keeping with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s habit of anonymous and pseudonymous publication, though the redoubtable publisher Miss Peabody had already ferreted out the identity of the writer whose work she had admired in publications like The Token and The New-England Magazine. Elizabeth had discovered that the Hawthornes and the Peabodys had been neighbors decades earlier, and their past history and his present overture emboldened her to invite Nathaniel and his sisters to visit the Peabody home on 11 November. But when the Hawthorne siblings arrived, the youngest Peabody sister refused to descend from her second-floor bedroom.2 In lieu of meeting Sophia in person that day, Nathaniel instead made her acquaintance through her letters, more than 850 pages of them bound into three volumes. So began an epistolary romance that would eventually become an epistolary rivalry. Between December 1833 and May 1835, Sophia Peabody had sojourned in Cuba during a hiatus in her career as professional artist. As one of America’s first women to merit that title, she was a painter of original oil canvases, some of them exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum, and an accomplished copyist. She had supported herself though her art since the late 1820s, but her talents were not suited to Elizabeth’s demands that she illustrate a book on Grecian mythology she was planning.3 Exhausted by her efforts to master the practice of lithography, Sophia availed herself of an opportunity to recover by accompanying her sister Mary to Cuba where she would be governess at La Recompensa, a coffee plantation owned by the Morrell family. Many travelers to Cuba during the nineteenth century – and there were many – committed their impressions of the island to writing, thereby creating a sub-category within the genre of travel literature that was very popular in the United States at the time. Such ‘travelogues,’ according to Louis A. J. Perez, were frequently ‘frivolous, selfindulgent, and unabashedly racist and sexist.’4 American visitors to the island ‘often failed to observe what was significant or misrepresented what they observed.’5 But such criticisms would have been irrelevant to Sophia. She quickly acculturated, learned Spanish, and became an intimate member of the Morells’ circle. Mary, on the other hand, maintained her distance from the Cuban people, whom she considered to be dissolute, morally inferior Catholics, and, worst of all, slaveowners. The horror of slavery dominated Mary’s perception of Cuba, while Sophia experienced no incompatibility 582

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between sympathy for slaves and affection for slaveholders. Her habitual philosophical optimism, grounded in a theology of divine providence, reconciled the temporal evil slaves endured with their promise of eternal reward.6 Nor did the specter of slavery prevent Sophia from indulging in Cuba’s myriad natural and social pleasures. These she described in vivid, lengthy letters to her mother. Sophia intended to obliterate distance – geographical and emotional – between herself and Mrs. Peabody, an audience to whom Sophia could safely reveal, as she put it in December 1834, all her ‘bursts & enthusiasms & opinions & notions!’ (CJ, 3: 90). Such candor, more typically found in a diary, results in a telling conflation of genres: for Sophia’s letters functioned as a kind of daily record, a private account of events written for oneself, that was nonetheless circulated beyond its intended recipient under the title ‘Cuba Journal.’ In these letters, Sophia depicted the extravagant beauty of the natural world in elegant word-paintings. The Cuban sunrise was a ‘gorgeous display of saffron & purple,’ while the intense color of the tropics demanded redundancy: ‘The green of the trees is greener than any green I ever saw before’ (CJ, 1: 214, 96). The ‘terre rouge’ of the island meanwhile recalled the red earth of paradise, one of many allusions to Eden that dotted Sophia’s letters at the time (CJ, 1: 40). And the extraordinary shapes, enormous size, and overwhelming abundance of Cuba’s tropical flora exceeded anything Sophia – or other New Englanders – had ever seen. Anticipating she would be accused of exaggeration, Sophia claimed that if a stick were planted in the ground, it would immediately blossom forth: ‘Such intense life!’ (CJ, 2: 208). ‘You will ask no more for the senses’ than may be found in Cuba, Sophia concluded (CJ, 3: 209). Her ‘olfactories ached’ from the ‘wild aromatics’ of palm trees and orange groves and cocoa plants (CJ, 2: 199, 18). Tasting a delicious guava picked from a tree prompted another comparison to Eden: ‘[H]ad there been an Adam near, I am sure I should have said, “take thou & eat likewise” ’ (CJ, 1: 46). Rain caressed her skin with ‘diamond drops,’ and in the tropical heat her perspiration glistened like the ‘gentle dew’ (CJ, 1: 167, 2: 201). Flowers, particularly the night-blooming cereus, epitomized the sensual pleasures of nature as well its transcendent potential. In a letter of 8 October 1834, for instance, Sophia wedded word and image by representing the cereus with a sketch that curved diagonally from the bottom right to the top left of her page. Around this sketch, she described the flower’s ‘bunches of reddish white wool’ and ‘snake like tendrils – very strange indeed’ (CJ, 2: 278).7 Touching the cereus was an ecstatic experience: ‘[S]uch was the extraordinary beauty & splendor, & so sweet & strong the perfume that I could not help shouting to the extent of my capability’ (CJ, 2: 278). The flower opened its petals to ‘a sanctuary of exquisite beauty, [and] . . . an overpowering perfume like musk’ (CJ, 2: 279). Though Cuban friends warned that danger lurked in the scent of some flora, Sophia avowed, ‘I feel consecrated by the breath of flowers’ (CJ, 2: 279). In fact, in Cuba, Sophia’s senses became a conduit to the divine. ‘There is no need of logic to convince the harkening spirit that there is a GOD,’ she wrote upon observing the rising moon, ‘it is knowledge communicated by the still voice – & in that is the majesty of the Lord made manifest as clearly to the consciousness as this moon to the eye’ (CJ, 2: 230). But just as nature was linked to the divine, so was nature linked to the human, and Sophia wrote about plants as if they were her kin. The tracery of vines on lime hedges was a ‘flowery garment for our good old mother’ – the earth (CJ, 2: 204).

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The trees in the tropical forest formed a ‘brotherhood,’ possessing ‘an intelligence – a soul’ (CJ, 3: 101, 2: 185). And while nurturing her ‘godchild,’ she lamented when the plant languished and rejoiced when it sprouted (CJ, 3: 8). Sophia assumed the intimacy with nature of a fellow creature, but her intimacies were not restricted to plants and trees. Within weeks of her arrival at La Recompensa, she began writing about the young Don Fernando Zayas, scion of an influential, wealthy family of Spanish peninsulares. With his long hair pushed back from his forehead, he ‘look[ed] like a very Apollo’ and ‘made the best appearance among the Señoritos’ (CJ, 1: 116, 20). She was smitten. During almost daily visits, Fernando engaged Sophia in a number of pleasurable activities. They discussed their reading, played games of chess, staged tableaux vivants, and went horseback riding. During one six-mile ride through the countryside, Sophia’s ‘knight’ led her ‘Rocinante’ through a small break in a fence in order to recover from the ‘genial heat’ (CJ, 2: 43). Fernando’s display of chivalry and strength garnered her admiration for the ‘power in his slender person’ (CJ, 2: 44). During another ride, with a group of young people, a ‘horrid looking man’ intruded, but Fernando’s ‘commanding & severe glance’ sufficed to intimidate the ruffian into leaving (CJ, 2: 18). Like a ‘winged Pegasus,’ Fernando positioned his horse between the interloper and Sophia, who rode away with her companions (CJ, 2: 18). She insisted, probably for the sake of her worried mother that: ‘There was no danger in all this . . . but it made an adventure’ (CJ, 2: 19). While Sophia’s Cuban adventures possessed the qualities of ‘a bright gorgeous dream,’ her actual dreams encoded the erotic tensions beneath the surface of her activities (CJ, 2: 126). She dreamt, for example, she was ‘dishabille’ in her parlor when one of the Zayas brothers rode up, and once when Fernando roused her from a nap, they entertained the fantasy of being awakened after a night’s sleep (CJ, 1: 151, 2: 124). Sketching Fernando’s portrait was similarly fraught with sexual innuendo: Ay de mi! These divine mornings! . . . A certain fable occurs to my mind – describing a certain animal’s irrepressible desire to become bigger! but I would not mention it for the world – . . . Don Fernando came – in his very most brilliant mood – He was very anxious to know whether I had ‘el animo dispuesto’ [‘the mind disposed’] for my proposed act – & when he was satisfied upon this point – he established himself in the right attitude & light, & I drew . . . I caught the inspired look in his eye so well that I wanted to shout but before I finished it, I came to take a Siesta – as he was exceedingly concerned that I should get tired . . . [I]t is the ideal of his face. (CJ, 2: 34) Her enthusiasm for this ‘ideal’ drawing later turned to disappointment when she ruined it with an errant stroke. But although she intended to withhold a subsequent sketch from Fernando until it was completed, she yielded to ‘the urgency of his desire’ to see her work in progress (CJ, 2: 101). ‘[I]t is impossible to resist him,’ she informed her increasingly fretful mother when he pressed dainties on her at dinner (CJ, 2: 103). Sophia also succumbed to ‘La Musica del Niño Fernando,’ for at the piano he was ‘not shackled by the mere notes’ (CJ, 1: 176, 2: 138). Perhaps most worrisome to Mrs. Peabody was Sophia’s gleeful announcement, ‘I waltzed!!’ – a line that was underscored four times (CJ, 2: 47). The waltz had only recently been imported from Europe to the Americas, much to the dismay of those in New England, where ministers chastised young women who permitted ‘a man who

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is neither your lover nor your husband to encircle you with his arms.’8 Similarly, an 1833 etiquette book published in Boston insisted that ‘the waltz is a dance of quite too loose a character, and unmarried ladies should refrain from it in public and in private,’ while the author of Exercises for Ladies (1836) warned that waltzing could produce ‘vertigo, . . . syncopes, spasms and other accidents.’9 Waltzing did, in fact, make Sophia dizzy – ‘borracha’ [‘inebriated’] was how Fernando described her – though she was pleased rather than distressed by the sensation (CJ, 2: 48). Sophia’s mother, on the other hand, was among those who feared waltzing would damage a lady’s health and virtue. ‘[B]e sober-minded . . . lest some of the exquisite machinery . . . [be] fatally injured,’ she cautioned euphemistically in December 1834.10 Nonetheless, during the 1834 Christmas season, when Sophia was swept up in a whirlwind of Cuban social life, her letters remained full of engaging, vivid, and marvelously detailed descriptions of balls, visitors, and feasts. Regarding the superb Fernando, she could not resist remarking on ‘the ineffable natural grace with which he bounded lightly from the floor with a step that never could be taught . . . [and] seemed the result & expression of the music’ (CJ, 3: 163). It seems that Sophia defied her mother’s advice and continued to waltz with him, even as she announced in the same letter that she had resisted that particular temptation. The above extracts from the ‘Cuba Journal’ demonstrate why it has garnered contemporary attention as a remarkable literary achievement.11 As Pamela Lee rightly claims, Sophia’s letters constitute a ‘tour de force of historical, literary, religious, and aesthetic observations, embedded in the narrative of daily life.’12 Moreover, Sophia’s letters reveal her as a ‘proto-Transcendentalist,’ who yokes divinity, humanity, and nature into a beneficent whole, all the while revealing herself to the reader with startling candor.13 Spirited, at times unladylike, she shouts for joy over a painting or flower, celebrates her dewy perspiration, and rides horses to tropical adventures. She dances the scandalous waltz, while mischievously toying with her mother about that transgression. And she unabashedly announces her right to the pleasure her senses convey. ‘Put together all your ideas of glory & softness, & freshness & beauty & music & fragrance,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘& you may have some notion of my estate under the combined influence of all’ (CJ, 1: 107). The very qualities in the ‘Cuba Journal’ that engage contemporary readers greatly concerned its intended reader. Sophia’s mother urged her in April 1834 to ‘be quiet, pray leave every exciting object, and if possible, be idle in mind and body.’14 Other family members, meanwhile, chided Sophia for what they assumed to be exaggerated descriptions, and she reported that her sister Mary had called her a ‘tinder box’ (CJ, 2: 48). Her eldest sister, Elizabeth, recognized the tremendous appeal of the ‘Journal,’ however, and circulated it without Sophia’s permission among family and friends, and to New England notables such as the Alcotts and the Channings.15 Elizabeth even prepared some of the letters for publication in the American Monthly, also without Sophia’s permission, although the latter eventually thwarted this plan. ‘Betty is too bad,’ Sophia opined of this episode. ‘If I were stuck up bodily upon a pole & carried about the streets I could not feel more exposed . . . – for it seems exactly as if I were in print’ (CJ, 3: 90). And in a way she was, for letters read aloud by those gathered for tea parties or knitting circles was a form of publication. ‘[E]very body had got the key to my private cabinet & without leave of the owner,’ Sophia grumbled (CJ, 3: 90). Yet she permitted the circulation of the ‘Cuba Journal’ then and for decades to come.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne was thus not the only stranger to meet Sophia Peabody through the ‘Cuba Journal.’ But he became indisputably her most important reader. Sophia would later acknowledge that she and her future husband ‘first met personally’ some time in 1838, ‘though he had before known of me through . . . my Cuban letters and others which E[lizabeth] unknown to me had showed him.’16 Thus, according to Sophia, the fire was ‘kindled’ between them.17 Sophia – and her letters – were radically different from anyone and anything in Nathaniel’s previous experience. As a boy of four, his father’s death thrust his mother into ‘an exaggerated, almost Hindoo-like . . . seclusion’ which ‘could not fail to have [had] its effect’ on Nathaniel and his sisters, as Julian Hawthorne would later explain in a biography of his parents.18 Though Nathaniel broke free of the Hawthorne women to attend Bowdoin College, upon graduating in 1825 he returned to their house in Salem, Massachusetts. For nearly a decade, he occupied a ‘dismal and squalid chamber,’ his words describing the room where he wrote hack pieces, short stories, and sketches for magazines, which, if published at all, did not bear his name (CEWNH, 23: 152). He rarely left home. A trip through New England and New York State in the early 1830s (roughly the period when Sophia was in Cuba) yielded only one brief extant letter, a banal note to his mother confirming his ‘health and safety’ (CEWNH, 15: 226). His record of this trip instead took the form of after-the-fact literary sketches in which the author/narrator cautiously analyzes his position in the natural world and his relation to the humans who inhabit it with him. Nathaniel’s next trip of note would not occur until 1838, after he had been perusing the ‘Cuba Journal’ for a period of months. He left Salem on 25 July, telling his friends and family only that he would be on a ‘mysterious tour’ and so ‘would be defunct civilly.’19 ‘He neither intended to write to anyone nor be written to,’ Sophia explained in a letter to Elizabeth, written on the day of his departure.20 Nonetheless, he maintained a form of epistolary contact with her via the ‘Cuba Journal,’ his only traveling companion. Although he documented his three-month trip through New England in notebooks replete with vignettes and character sketches, Nathaniel kept his promise and wrote no letters while away. Not then, nor in the future, would he deploy letters as a vehicle for capturing and communicating insights about travel. But after he and Sophia were secretly engaged in January 1839, he did become a prodigious writer of courtship correspondence, his achievement in that epistolary genre as much an artifact, sui generis, as is Sophia’s ‘Cuba Journal.’ The 109 extant letters that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to Sophia Peabody between 6 March 1839 and 30 June 1842 may be situated among more than sixty surviving collections of nineteenth-century American courtship correspondence. According to Karen Lystra, many of Nathaniel’s expressions typify those of other mid-nineteenth-century lovers, and reflect the common cultural characteristics of the middle class, which emphasized concepts of domesticity, expressive skill, and emotional control.21 ‘Total privacy was the foundation of romantic expression,’ Lystra explains, ‘and romantic relationships were guarded by a deliberate wall of secrecy.’22 Sophia’s letters were therefore read behind closed doors and often anthropomorphized as objects interchangeable with the beloved. The private space of courtship correspondence, in Lystra’s view, permitted such couples to surmount ‘emotional crests and valleys,’ discover an ‘ideal self,’ and even express ‘sexual enthusiasm.’23 While Nathaniel’s love letters to Sophia were less unique than he may have supposed, his distinctive orientation toward privacy propelled him toward an exaggerated

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performance of that cultural convention. Although Sophia immediately informed her family of their engagement, Nathaniel kept it from his mother and sister until two months before the wedding. He maintained this dissimulation by refusing to accompany Sophia to public events such as parties, lectures, and sermons. ‘Darlingest, pray let me stay at home this afternoon,’ Nathaniel beseeched her in March 1840 (CEWNH, 15: 421). Moreover, he further guarded his courtship by keeping their correspondence secret, even suggesting that Sophia adopt a masculine penmanship when addressing her envelopes in order to prevent others from guessing that he received letters from her.24 Such hyper-vigilance would have allowed Nathaniel to negotiate in strictest confidentiality the ‘valleys’ occasioned by her sensitivity or his procrastination. And he could also sequester evidence of sexual intimacy in letters such as those that recalled the ‘intimate communion . . . of our last blissful evening,’ or his longing for another rendezvous in a ‘boudoir, or anywhere else, [where] we have been clasped in one another’s arms!’ (CEWNH, 15: 494, 449). While Nathaniel evidently delighted in discovering ‘what it is to be mingled with another’s being,’ he also maintained that, ‘I never look heavenward without thinking of you . . . [A]ll that is spiritual within me so yearn[s] towards you’ (CEWNH, 15: 494, 333). Sophia had done more than reveal to him his best self – she was the very origin of his being: Thou only hast revealed me to myself . . . [W]e are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream – till the heart is touched. That touch creates us – then we begin to be . . . Now, dearest, dost thou comprehend what thou hast done for me? . . . [A] few slight circumstances might have prevented us from meeting, and then I . . . never should have been created at all! (CEWNH, 15: 495) Endowing Sophia with such power, her letters merited ritual reverence; he never read them without first washing his hands.25 How to reconcile Sophia’s colliding personae – the spiritual woman who now called him into existence with the sensual woman who had called to him from the ‘Cuba Journal’ – was a challenge Nathaniel then managed by deploying pet names. As Lystra has pointed out, pet names were one of the vehicles nineteenth-century men used to express an emotional life in private that they kept carefully guarded in public.26 But for Nathaniel, these performed a specific function beyond the endearments – ‘Dearissima,’ ‘Mine ownest,’ ‘blessedest,’ ‘very dearest-est’ – similar to those used by others. He invented three names for Sophia: ‘Dove,’ ‘Sophie Hawthorne,’ and ‘Naughty Sophie.’27 The Dove, according to Nathaniel, should ‘glide away from all the world’ and those who would ‘keep her wings fluttering’ so that she might rest ‘in peace and quietness’ (CEWNH, 15: 459). So otherworldly is the Dove that though she rides horses, Nathaniel imagines she cannot be injured by an accident; his lack of logic adumbrating his need to imagine Sophia’s removal from a mortal sphere. Similarly, he reveres Sophia’s artistic ability to ‘show me the images of my inward eye,’ but insists only he should view her paintings, and warns his ‘Ownest Dove’ not to risk a headache by sculpting the bust of Laura Bridgman, a blind, deaf, and mute student who had famously learnt to read and write (CEWNH, 15: 398, 578). Nathaniel’s cautions ironically point to a woman who is not frail at all, but whose life brims with physical and professional activity. She rides, she paints, she sculpts. All the while, he insists she cannot function in the world.

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But when Nathaniel must acknowledge her worldly – even fleshly – activities, he calls her ‘Sophie Hawthorne,’ this surname indicating his habit of considering her his wife years before they wed. This figure buys carpet for Nathaniel’s study; possesses ‘critical acumen’ and ‘severity’ that provokes his dread; and perceives, before he does, deficiencies in financial arrangements with his publisher (CEWNH, 15: 363). Sophie Hawthorne is also invoked to sustain the Dove while she nurses her dying brother and to protect Nathaniel when he ventures into company.28 But Sophie Hawthorne – that is, the social, practical, passionate Sophia Peabody as she depicted herself in the ‘Cuba Journal’ – becomes ‘Naughty Sophie’ when she shows impatience with Nathaniel’s tardiness for a tryst or refuses to come to him in dreams. Nathaniel ‘actually trembled’ when he interpreted the ‘very noble-looking cavalier’ in the Dove’s 1840 paintings ‘The Menaggio’ and ‘The Isola’ to represent himself, though the female companion in these images – who represents Sophia – turns her head defiantly away from the viewer (CEWNH, 15: 404). ‘How I wish that naughty Sophie . . . could be induced to turn her face towards me!’ Nathaniel lamented. ‘Nevertheless, the figure is her veritable self’ (CEWNH, 15: 414). Naughty Sophie represents an imperfect human being, the nonidealized, real-world Sophia, who at times resists his overtures. Both ‘Sophie’ and ‘naughty Sophie’ existed long before Nathaniel made their acquaintance, but the ‘Dove’ was his fragile creation. As his wedding to Sophia approached, for instance, he insisted: ‘Oh, my poor little Dove, thou dost need a husband with a strong will to take care of thee; and when I have charge of thee, thou wilt find thyself under much stricter discipline than before. How couldst thou be so imprudent!’ (CEWNH, 15: 633). Sophia had persisted in exercising her own judgment, most tellingly when it came to ‘imprudent’ decisions about her health. For years she had found relief from headaches through mesmerism, though her fiancé was mortified that she repeatedly allowed herself to be put into a trance. ‘I cannot think, without invincible repugnance, of thy holy name being bruited abroad in connection with these magnetic phenomena,’ he declared in October 1841. ‘Some (horrible thought!) would pronounce my Dove an imposter’ (CEWNH, 15: 590). And perhaps she was, inasmuch as he had invented her. There is little extant from Sophia’s prolific pen during the three years of her engagement to Nathaniel because he destroyed almost every letter she wrote to him during that period. ‘I burned great heaps of old letters and other papers,’ he confided to his notebook in July 1853. ‘Among them were hundreds of Sophia’s maiden letters – the world has no more such; and now they are all ashes’ (CEWNH, 8: 552). Despite this conflagration, however, one may surmise the tenor of her letters based upon the few remnants that survive. One snippet dated 28 April 1840, and found in a commonplace book that Sophia used to copy or draft letters, reads: Dearest, I know how sensitive is thy nature – how easily thy heart might be broken – how soon thou wouldst vanish away from the earth, were thy soul to be wronged or violated in any manner . . . But thou wilt be happy – we will both be happy . . . God hath married us; but to our perfect peace and fullness of security on earth, it is necessary that man should marry us too. It will be an external pledge of one eternal and infinite union.29 Sophia’s assertion that they should wed and her characterization of Nathaniel’s less than manly sensitivity are matters that he surely would have wished to keep private. And we

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may easily imagine how freely the woman who authored the ‘Cuba Journal,’ with its ‘bursts & enthusiasms & opinions & notions’ about the delights of the senses – among them, those provided by Don Fernando – might have expressed herself to her fiancé (CJ, 3: 90). For a man like Nathaniel, whose cultivation of privacy was nearly pathological, destroying Sophia’s love letters was understandable though regrettable. ‘What a trustful guardian of secret matters fire is!’ Nathaniel claimed when he consigned Sophia’s ‘maiden letters’ to flames, in advance of the Hawthornes’ 1853 removal to England, where Nathaniel was to serve as the United States Consul in Liverpool (CEWNH, 8: 522). His destruction of a later set of Sophia’s letters to him defies immediate comprehension, unless we ascribe to him motives of jealousy. In England, damp, foggy weather proved inimical to Sophia’s health, and in September 1855 she sought relief from pulmonary problems by sailing for Portugal with her daughters, Una and Rose. They lived first in Lisbon at the palatial home of the Hawthornes’ long-time friend John Louis O’Sullivan, who was Chargé d’Affaires, and then later relocated to sunnier Madeira, and the estate of John George Welsh, a wealthy American. Sophia wrote ‘magically descriptive and narrative’ letters about her experiences in Portugal, according to her husband, who praised them with hyperbole reminiscent of his comments about her love letters (CEWNH, 17: 398). ‘[T]here never were such letters in the world as thine,’ he told his wife (CEWNH, 17: 398). Even so, he eventually burned many of them, just as he had her courtship letters. Una, the precocious first conservator and curator of her mother’s letters from Portugal, transcribed those that had not been destroyed. This transcription of ‘journal letters’ to Nathaniel became a treasured artifact that Una guarded into adulthood, before Rose finally became guardian of what she herself copied again and called the ‘Madeira Journal’ (despite the fact that it includes letters from Lisbon as well).30 The ‘Madeira Journal’ rivals Sophia’s ‘Cuba Journal’ as a vivid, engaging record of a foreign land and cements her position among the first American women to document their travels abroad. Both trips occasioned keen, sometimes whimsical and irreverent observations of nature and society, and both trips allowed Sophia to immerse herself in a pleasurable life of ease, elegance, and excitement. But in Portugal, she ventured into new territories for observation. Her analyses of religious practices, for example, reveal an astonishing freedom of appreciation unlike anything documented in her Cuban experiences. And according to O’Sullivan’s biographer Sheldon Howard Harris, Sophia’s loving, sometimes worshipful descriptions of that man constitute ‘the best glimpse into the social life the O’Sullivans led in Portugal,’ one which revolved around the court of the country’s king, Pedro V.31 At first, Sophia recorded displeasure with Lisbon, a city ‘defaced & ragged & bare looking,’ with neither trees, nor grass, nor any kind of shrub – the lasting result of the destruction caused by the great earthquake of 1755 (MJ, 665). One hundred years later, its rubble oddly suggested to her ‘the aspect of a cat walking out without a bonnet & shawl, with its ears cut, its tail stripped of hair, its body shaven in patches’ (MJ, 665). Sophia also observed customs that differed from those in the United States. For example, a prescribed period of mourning required black attire, which stood out like a ‘crow on a gala day’ against the backdrop of buildings colorfully painted scarlet, blue, and yellow (MJ, 689). Such images helped to mitigate Sophia’s initial judgments of the city, however. Its newer portions, she noted, contained ‘tall & stately’ homes,

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even if they lacked ‘order and fashion’ (MJ, 712). And she found the Portuguese to be ‘heartily polite and self-possessed,’ instinctively honorable and trustworthy, ‘so perfectly at ease, so finished are the manners of all’ (MJ, 720). More importantly, the Portuguese people also introduced Sophia to new ways of thinking about Catholicism. Her Transcendentalist philosophy, and her long-standing association with Unitarians, who considered Catholicism to be the religion of superstitious Irish maids, did not prepare her to be overwhelmed by emotion while viewing a Lenten procession. Observing the enactment of Christ carrying his cross, with the ‘long lines of brethren, in purple silk cloaks; priests in black silk & white muslin; children as angels, & soldiers; & a band with muffled instruments, playing a deathmarch,’ she burst ‘into a convulsion of tears . . . [A]ll Christ’s suffering & life of pain came to me with a reality it never had before’ (MJ, 745). Sophia was as moved by this religious spectacle as she was enchanted by the opera, ballet, balls, parties, and presentation at the court. A grand ball at the residence of the Belgian minister, for instance, occasioned a playful remark about her host, who was ‘so lame with rheumatism that he went hobbling about with his ministerial right leg stuck out straight like a stick’ (MJ, 708). The O’Sullivans – who moved in the highest circles of Portuguese society – conducted bi-weekly soirées, but protocol prohibited Susan O’Sullivan from directly inviting members of the royal family, so she merely dropped welcoming hints that Sophia duly recorded: ‘I could not presume to ask [his] Majesty, but my house, & all that is mine, is at [his] Majesty’s disposal’ (MJ, 718). The Majesty so coyly addressed here, and so often a visitor, was Dom Ferdinando, the thirty-nine-year-old German prince and father of the reigning boy-king Pedro V. Dom Ferdinando – whose name would surely have invoked memories of Sophia’s Cuban admirer Don Fernando – was a lover of flowers, an artist, and a wonderful singer who enriched the O’Sullivans’ gatherings with his melodious voice. He was also physically attractive, according to Sophia – a ‘magnificent athlete’ with a ‘buoyant, bounding step’ (MJ, 674, 687). One day, when Sophia and Susan encountered him at the Pateo Publico, he greeted them, Sophia recorded, with a radiant smile, and made a ‘motion of the head like that of a superb stag – a little thrown back’ (MJ, 677). The gait of this ‘extraordinary’ figure commanded Sophia’s attention, as did the appearance of her long-term host, John Louis O’Sullivan (MJ, 691). During a soiree at the palace, this attractive gadabout looked particularly handsome to Sophia with his attire signifying status as an American diplomat and eagle-embossed buttons on his coat announcing his rank. O’Sullivan was a man who loved society, high society in particular. Thus Sophia, whose sociability had often been curtailed by her husband’s habit of refusing invitations, could now indulge her convivial instincts. Indeed, Sophia’s life was plainly full of excitement that excluded her husband, who proclaimed ‘the absolute necessity of expression. I must tell thee I love thee. I must be told that thou lovest me’ (CEWNH, 17: 436). As this letter then makes clear, Sophia’s close bond with O’Sullivan was a particular source of anxiety. ‘Did we not entirely agree,’ Nathaniel asked, ‘on thinking “John” an undue and undesirable familiarity?’ (CEWNH, 17: 437). Though Nathaniel immediately conceded, ‘thou mayst call him “John,” or “Jack” either, as best suits thee,’ the balance of his very long letter gently warned Sophia about her relationship with O’Sullivan, who had ‘never been in such fortunate circumstances as during his present intercourse with thee; and I am willing to allow that thou bringest out his angelic part, and therefore canst not be expected

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to see anything but an angel in him’ (CEWNH, 17: 437). We can only guess what Nathaniel had made of Una’s awkward remark that ‘Uncle John’ (as she called him) ‘is next to you to her she says . . . She cannot pour out her heart to me as she does to [him].’32 Months after her husband’s elaborate cautioning, Sophia was still singing her friend’s praises, but now to her sister Mary. John ‘was a light & joy for us, & took such tender care of us, that we each felt like a very precious thing,’ she wrote to her in April 1856.33 One can only guess whether such remarks about ‘John’ prompted Nathaniel to burn so many of Sophia’s letters from Portugal. Or perhaps Nathaniel’s jealousy issued from a different epistolary source. Sophia returned to England in June 1856, but the following year, between 10 April and 7 July 1857, she set off on another journey, this time touring England and Scotland with her husband and son. On this occasion, Una’s decision to remain at home with Rose and her nursemaid presented Sophia with the opportunity for another series of journal-letters. ‘I want you to have a complete idea of what I am seeing and doing, or I shall not be contented without you,’ Sophia told Una. ‘I want you to read my letters quietly & alone and endeavor to see as pictures what I write.’34 In the resulting, very lengthy letters, carefully crafted and numbered one through fifteen, Sophia returned to topics addressed before. Touring English churches, for example, she continued to develop an aesthetic of religious art begun in Portugal. Gothic architecture was the very ‘image of the soul,’ she declared, with its ‘frenzy’ of ‘curves baffling geometric thought, setting unknown rules at defiance,’ while Oliver Cromwell was deemed wrong to have ‘daubed’ religious statues with white or yellow wash: ‘[If] Love exists, let us have ruby red, heavenly blue and golden yellow & every intermediate hue.’35 But for good and for ill, these letters to Una also differ significantly from those Sophia had written from Cuba and Portugal. When she asked Una ‘how can I make you see with me these majestic sepulchers for the dead,’ Sophia answered her own question with several drawings that are among the dozens with which she illustrated this ‘British Journal.’36 She penned gargoyles and bits of lace, flowers and landscape – all rendered with exquisite precision. Less elaborate sketches, meanwhile, are sometimes surrounded by sentences, indicating that her visual representations preceded the verbal descriptions. Some sketches – one of undulating hills, for example – look like faint watermarks behind her sentences. Large, intricate drawings, such as one of an arched bridge over a stream or another of an architectural façade, occupy the entirety of one or more leaves. These sketches might easily stand alone as framed works of art. In this efflorescence of artistic creativity, then, Sophia yoked visual with verbal representation as never before. Sophia’s letters to Una, however, were uncharacteristically cautious and reticent, her tone unexpectedly formal. Perhaps she was attempting to create an epistolary version of the calm she wished Una to experience when reading these letters. After all, the daughter writing to the mother from Cuba so many years ago was now herself a mother writing to her own daughter from Bridge of Allan or Nottingham, Peterborough, or Dumbarton. Mrs. Peabody would no doubt have approved of Sophia’s tour-guide tone in letters lacking the self-disclosure that so invigorates the ‘Cuba Journal.’ Sophia’s idiosyncratic characterization of the Portuguese language was not matched by her more prosaic transcriptions of the Scottish burr. Nor did she entertain Una, as she had Nathaniel, with quirky metaphors. Perhaps preconceptions constrained Sophia’s impressions at this moment of her life. She had seen Cuba and Portugal with virgin eyes, but like so many other travelers,

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she had already seen England and Scotland by reading Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Dickens, Scott, and the myriad others whose writing shaped American understandings of the Old World. In this respect, although her drawings and sketches created a highly original form of expression, her thoughts were often adjusted to a template supplied by previous writers.37 Or perhaps even more significantly, Sophia may have been anticipating a wider literary audience for her letters than Una and other close family members. Because the Hawthornes were short of money, Nathaniel wrote to one of his current publishers, William D. Ticknor, in June of 1857, that: ‘I have now hundreds of [journal] pages which I would publish if the best of them were not too spicy. But Mrs. Hawthorne altogether excels me as a writer of travels. Her descriptions are the most perfect pictures that ever were put on paper’ (CEWNH, 18: 63). Nathaniel immediately hastened to avert misunderstanding of Sophia’s letters, adding that ‘it is a pity they cannot be published; [since] neither she nor I would like to see her name on your list of female authors,’ but continuing financial difficulties soon forced him to return to the idea of publishing ‘an immense book of travels’ (CEWNH, 18: 63, 90). ‘I entirely yield the palm to Sophia on the score of fullness and accuracy of description,’ Nathaniel reiterated, only once again to retreat from this possibility (CEWNH, 18: 90). When Ticknor’s business partner, James T. Fields, appealed directly to Sophia about contributing to the Atlantic Monthly, she replied that ‘nothing less urgent and terrible than the immediate danger of starvation for my husband and children would induce me to put myself in a magazine or a pair of book covers’ (CEWNH, 18: 202). Perhaps a more compelling reason for her refusal may be surmised from her husband’s comment to a friend: ‘I don’t know whether I can tolerate a literary rival at bed and board’ (CEWNH, 18: 204). Eventually, in the early 1860s, Nathaniel’s dwindling powers of imagination would force him to generate income by publishing portions of his English notebooks, and after his death in 1864, when Sophia faced the lingering consequences of her husband’s financial miscalculations, her words to Fields proved nearly prophetic. She averted bankruptcy, if not actual starvation, by publishing selections from Nathaniel’s American and Italian notebooks. She also published portions of letters she had written to Una from England and Scotland, as well as journals she had kept in Italy during the late 1850s. Notes in England and Italy (1869), as she titled her book, appeared shortly before Sophia died; though, to her profound disappointment, without her magnificent sketches, which were prohibitively expensive to print.38 Sophia’s letters from Cuba and Portugal remain available only in the archive. But as the recovery of the breadth and richness of nineteenth-century American letter-writing gathers pace, Sophia’s record of travel to Cuba, Portugal, England, and Scotland surely awaits editions that present her ‘most perfect pictures’ in all their glory.

Acknowledgments Parts of this chapter first appeared in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life: Volume 1 and 2, Copyright ©, 2004, 2015, by The Curators of the University of Missouri, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 66201. Quotations from the Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Collection of Papers appear courtesy of The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Quotations from Sophia Hawthorne’s 6 November 1865

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letter to James T. Fields appear courtesy of of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library/ Rare Books. Quotations from Sophia Hawthorne’s ‘Madeira Journal’ appear courtesy of the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. Quotations from the Hawthorne Family Papers appear courtesy of The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY.

Notes 1. Quoted in Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, 166. 2. See ibid. 166–7. 3. See Valenti, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, 1: 38–41, and Valenti, ‘A Study in Artistic Influence,’ 1–7. 4. Perez, Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society, xxv. 5. Ibid. 6. See Valenti, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, 1: 53. 7. For a full transcription of this letter and a copy of the page upon which Sophia sketched that flower, see Badarraco, ‘The Night-Blooming Cereus,’ 61–4. 8. Quoted in Kraus, History of the Dance, 109. 9. Celnart, The Gentleman and Lady’s Book, 187; quoted in Aldrich, From the Ballroom to Hell, 19. 10. Mrs. Peabody, Letter to Sophia Peabody, 27 April 1834, in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Correspondence, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Family Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 11. See, for example, Ciani-Forza, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “Cuba Journal,” ’ and Garcia, ‘ “With the Eyes That Are Given Me.” ’ 12. Lee, ‘Queen of All I Surveyed,’ 164. 13. Ibid. 168. 14. Mrs. Peabody, Letter to Sophia Peabody, 27 April 1834, in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Correspondence, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Family Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 15. Claire Badaracco has identified at least fourteen groups or individuals who read these letters in 1834. See ‘The Night-Blooming Cereus,’ 57–9. 16. Sophia Hawthorne, Letter to James T. Fields, 6 November 1865, Boston Public Library. 17. Ibid. 18. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife, 1: 4–5. 19. Sophia Peabody, Letter to Elizabeth Peabody, 25 July 1838, Correspondence, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Family Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 20. Ibid. 21. See Lystra, Searching the Heart, 28–55. 22. Ibid. 3, 23. 23. Ibid. 205, 7, 6. 24. See Valenti, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, 1: 161. 25. See ibid. 26. See Lystra, Searching the Heart, 19–20. 27. For other discussions of Nathaniel’s uses of pet names for Sophia see: Person, ‘Writing and Relationship,’ which claims that Nathaniel is ‘confronted with a woman (Sophia) who alternates between opposed “characters” (“the Dove” and “naughty Sophie”)’ (212); Norko, ‘The Threshold World of Sophia Peabody,’ which suggests that Nathaniel is ‘experimenting with symbols he would later resurrect’ in his fiction (129); and Warren, The American Narcissus, which traces the relationship between the feminine identities attributed to Sophia and the types of women who surface in the later fiction (see 203–4).

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28. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to Sophia Peabody, 23 October 1839, in The Centenary Edition, 15: 389. 29. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, ‘Commonplace Book,’ n.pag., Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Family Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 30. Transcriptions in Rose’s hand of sections XV and XVI, numbered pages 659 through 721, and 722 through 771, are housed at Stanford and catalogued as Rose’s ‘Editing of Sophia A. Hawthorne’s Madeira Journal.’ No holographs or additional transcript letters of the ‘Madeira Journal’ have been located. 31. Harris, ‘The Public Career of John Louis O’Sullivan,’ 372. 32. Una Hawthorne, Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 3 February 1856, in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Correspondence, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Family Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 33. Sophia Hawthorne, Letter to Mary Mann, 13 April 1856, in Correspondence, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Family Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 34. Sophia Hawthorne, Letter to Una Hawthorne, 24 May and 30 June 1857, in Correspondence, Hawthorne Family Papers, Morgan Library and Museum. 35. Sophia Hawthorne, Letter to Una Hawthorne, 28 May, 23 May and 26 May 1857, in Correspondence, Hawthorne Family Papers, Morgan Library and Museum. 36. Sophia Hawthorne, Letter to Una Hawthorne, 24 May 1857, in Correspondence, Hawthorne Family Papers, Morgan Library and Museum. For reprints of several of these illustrations see Hall, ‘Romantic Gothic,’ and Valenti, ‘Editing.’ 37. See, for example, Sophia Hawthorne, Letter to Una Hawthorne, 2 July 1857, in Correspondence, Hawthorne Family Papers, Morgan Library and Museum, which describes looking at the waterfall of Glenfalloch through the lens of Wordsworth’s ‘The Highland Girl’ (1803). 38. For more on this book see Elsden, ‘Watery Angels.’

Works Cited Aldrich, E. (1991), From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Badarraco, C. M. (1978), ‘The Night-Bloomng Cereus: A Letter from the Cuba Journal of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne with a Check List of her Autograph Materials in American Institutions,’ Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 81: 56–73. Celnart, E. (1833), The Gentleman and Lady’s Book of Politeness and Propriety of Deportment, Boston: Allen & Ticknor. Ciani-Forza, D. (2011), ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “Cuba Journal”: A Link Between Cultures,’ The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 37: 73–96. Elsden, A. F. (2006), ‘Watery Angels: Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s Artistic Argument in Notes in England and Italy,’ in M. M. Elbert, J. E. Hall, and K. Rodier (eds.), Reinventing the Peabody Sisters, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 129–45. García, I. M. (2014), ‘ “With the Eyes That Are Given Me”: Early Transcendentalism and Feminist Colonial Poetics in Sophia Peabody’s Cuba Journal,’ in J. L. Argersinger and P. Cole (eds.), Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 59–78. Hall, J. (2011), ‘Romantic Gothic, Ruskin’s Aesthetics, and Sophia Hawthorne’s Notes in England and Italy,’ Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 37: 121–43. Harris, S. (1958), ‘The Public Career of John Louis O’Sullivan,’ Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University. Hawthorne, J. (1884), Hawthorne and His Wife, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hawthorne, N. (1962–97), The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. W. Charvat et al., 23 vols., Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Cited parenthetically as CEWNH.

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Hawthorne, S. P. (1809–71), Correspondence, Hawthorne Family Papers, Morgan Library and Museum, New York, MA 1220. Hawthorne, S. P. (1822–71), Correspondence, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Berg Coll MSS Hawthorne, S. Hawthorne, S. P. (1833–5), ‘Cuba Journal,’ Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Berg Coll MSS Hawthorne, S. Cited parenthetically as CJ. Hawthorne, S. P. (1855–6), ‘Madeira Journal,’ Hawthorne Family Papers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Green Library, Stanford University, M0981, Box 2, Folders 11–12. Cited parenthetically as MJ. Hawthorne, S. P. (1862–9), Commonplace Book, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Berg Coll MSS Hawthorne, S. Hawthorne, S. P. (1865), Letter to James T. Fields, 6 November, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, MS BPL MSC.1.11 (84). Kraus, R. (1969), History of the Dance in Art and Education, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lee, P. (2006), ‘Queen of All I Surveyed: Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “Cuba Journal” and the Imperial Gaze,’ in M. M. Elbert, J. E. Hall, and K. Rodier (eds.), Reinventing the Peabody Sisters, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 163–79. Lystra, K. (1989), Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press. Norko, J. M. (1993), ‘Hawthorne’s Love Letters: The Threshold World of Sophia Peabody,’ American Transcendental Quarterly, 7: 127–39. Perez, L. (1992), Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801–1899, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources. Person, L. (1987), ‘Hawthorne’s Love Letters: Writing a Relationship,’ American Literature, 59: 211–27. Ronda, B. (1999), Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valenti, P. D. (1990), ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Study of Artistic Influence,’ in J. Myerson (ed.), Studies in the American Renaissance, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1–21. Valenti, P. D. (2004–15), Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life, 2 vols., Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Valenti, P. D. (2011), ‘Editing Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s Travel Writing and the Conundrum of Copies,’ Documentary Editing, 32: 1–11. Warren, J. (1984), The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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39 CO-RESPONDING WITH WALT WHITMAN Ed Folsom

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alt Whitman’s letters have generally been viewed as something of a disappointment – useful in fleshing out his biography during the early 1860s and especially during the final two decades of his life but, except for his descriptions of Civil War hospitals and wounded soldiers, oddly flat and of little use in understanding his poetry and other writings or in clarifying his relationship to other writers, and of very limited use in tracing the development of his aesthetics or his political ideas. This chapter will argue, however, that previous scholarship has not fully appreciated just how thoroughly letter-writing influenced Whitman’s poetics, and just how important the idea of correspondence was for a writer who saw his whole life’s work as an attempt to prompt a response from the reader. In this respect, Whitman’s very idea of the reader was at once of an intimate single person and a representative democratic self – ‘whoever you are now holding me in hand’ – who would join the poet in a ‘co-response’ and would become his literal co-respondent (CPCP, 270). As Whitman put it in an early draft of ‘Poets to Come’ (1860): ‘Merely what I tell is not to justify me, / What I provoke from you, and from the ensuing times, is to justify me.’1 Indeed, it can be argued that, with Whitman, we need to broaden our definition of what constitutes a writer’s correspondence, since this particular writer’s association with letter-writing is so remarkably deep and complex. From the series of ‘letters’ he published as a young journalist through the ‘correspondence’ he published in the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856) to the letters he wrote for soldiers during the Civil War to the thousands of letters he copied as a clerk in Washington, D.C., right on through to the hundreds of letters from his readers that he read and re-read in his final years, Whitman’s epistolary career was remarkably diverse and continuous. As he sat in his little house in Camden, New Jersey in the final years of his life, and pored over those unsolicited letters while writing many hundreds of letters himself, he thought long and often about the nature of correspondence and even, at the end of his life, articulated what he called ‘a philosophy of correspondence’ (WWWC9, 3).2 In order to understand this ‘philosophy’ we can begin by considering the fascinating etymological and definitional history of the terms correspond and correspondence, which echoes back through the Old French correspondance and Medieval Latin correspondere to mean a ‘concordant or sympathetic response,’ ‘answering each other in mutual fitness or adaptation,’ ‘congruity, harmony, [and] agreement.’3 There is, then, a promise of harmony, a pledge of return, a fantasy of mutual response, when one enters into correspondence, and it is thus not surprising to find that, while to correspond in the sixteenth century meant ‘active communication,’ and by the mid-seventeenth century meant ‘communication by letters,’ it also came by the eighteenth century 596

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to connote ‘sexual intercourse.’4 This slippage from the verbal to the physical, from isolated inscription by the writer to paired intimacy with a reader/partner, is in turn the very basis of Whitman’s poetics, and it is the reason for his lifelong fascination with, investment in, and probing of the nature of correspondence. His poetry is, in effect, a product of his discovery of the evocative power of letters. In this regard, Terry Eagleton’s wonderfully sensual evocation of the sexuality always latent in the letters within Samuel Richardson’s epistolary fiction applies equally well to Whitman’s writing. ‘Nothing [is] at once more intimate and more alienable’ than a letter, Eagleton observes: ‘The letter is part of the body which is detachable: torn from the very depths of the subject, it can equally be torn from her physical possession . . . [T]he letter comes to signify nothing quite so much as sexuality itself, that folded secret place which is always open to violent intrusion . . . There is always within the letter’s decorously covered body that crevice or fissured place where the stirrings of desire can be felt’ (RC, 54). Whitman, too, was fascinated with what was ‘unfolded out of the folds’ and when he used that phrase in an 1856 poem he meant to evoke the folds of the brain, out of which writing comes, the folds of the letter, manuscript, or printed book, through which writing is communicated, and the vaginal folds of woman, out of which life emerges (CPCP, 515). ‘Co-responding’ always works for Whitman, then, on multiple layers of signification: to read a letter or book was, he knew, a bodily, physical activity, erotic and private even when it was printed and available to be read by anyone. In the final years of his life, much of Whitman’s physical activity involved the endless reading and discussion of letters with his friend, disciple, and daily visitor, Horace Traubel. During these visits, the two seldom recited Whitman’s poetry itself or discussed its meaning, but they almost daily unfolded the letters the poet had received, read them aloud, and analyzed them. Since Whitman was housebound in these last years, letters were his conduit to the world. He frequently ruminated with Traubel about the mysterious nature of correspondence, and came to realize in these discussions, perhaps for the first time, that his sense of the inherent intimacy of letters was in fact the original inspiration for Leaves of Grass, the book of poetry that he worked on, revised, and expanded from the early 1850s up to his death in 1892. For Whitman, then, letters were ultimately revealed as the very source of his radical discovery of how he could construct a poetry that spoke off of the page directly to the reader, and how he could intimately speak to each and every reader of his poems and evoke the sensuality of the reading process. With letters, as much as poems, Whitman envisaged reading as an act of the body as well as the mind, carried out by the hands and the breath and the muscles that controlled the eyes, and involving the touch of the reader’s fingers to the folds of the paper. Thus, one night in January 1889, in the midst of an intimate conversation with Traubel during which they read together some of the poet’s old letters, Whitman shared this revelation: ‘We were just talking of personal things – of the Leaves – the complete book: we insist upon the personal: well, you have it in these letters too: they, too, demonstrate me – my theory, philosophy, what I am after: they too. If you want to know what I mean watch what I do’ (WWWC3, 577). If we follow Whitman’s advice here and watch what he did in his poetry, we find of course that he constructed two main characters – ‘I’ and ‘you’ – who correspond to the co-responding pair that constitutes the basic act of letter-writing, an activity built on its own intercourse between an ‘I’ and a ‘you.’ Whitman, in short, adapted

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this intimate and familiar epistolary exchange to the art of writing a new kind of poetry, one in which the ‘I’ claimed to sense the very presence of the reader through the conduit of the printed page, even when the ‘I’ ‘was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us’ (CPCP, 89). As he declares in ‘So Long!’ (1860): Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? Are we here together alone?) It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms – decease calls me forth. O how your fingers drowse me, Your breath falls around me like dew, your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears, I feel immerged from head to foot, Delicious, enough. (CPCP, 611) Here, crucially, the poet and reader are both ‘unfolded out of the folds’ of the book, and the ‘I,’ which is embodied in the material book (and continues to exist there even after the writer’s death), feels the reader’s fingers as they lightly caress the lines during the act of reading; it feels the reader’s breath moisten the physical page as she/he mouths the words. Whitman, thus, consciously manipulated the erotic intimacy of love letters (that ‘folded secret place’ that Eagleton identified) into his paradoxically public/private poetry, where the ‘you’ is always both the singular reader, you, in the intense verbal embrace of the poet, and, at the same time, is always the plural ‘you,’ anyone and everyone who happens to pick up the book. Whitman’s ‘you’ is above all a promiscuous pronoun, and he is keenly aware of the way the second-person pronoun in English – unlike in virtually all other languages – so readily slides from the singular to the plural, from the intimate to the formal: English letter-writers (and speakers), after all, use it to address a lover as well as a total stranger. Whitman works hard to create the illusion that, at any moment, he is addressing only you even while, at some level, you are aware he is potentially addressing any other ‘you’ (all other yous) with equal devotion. While Whitman thus crafted his radical poetic address out of the experience of letter-writing, he was also aware that actual letters performed a quite different kind of work than the letter-inspired poems he wrote to each and every person who read them. Over the years, he received hundreds of actual epistolary responses to his poetry, and he came to treasure them – for these were letters from readers who had taken Whitman’s poetic address as an intimate epistolary one, who had recognized that he invited (even demanded) a co-response. As Whitman’s fame grew, so did the volume of letters he received, many of them from autograph collectors (most of which he ‘consigned to the waste-paper basket’) but many too from devoted readers of his poetry, who responded to that poetry as if it were a personal letter to them, even a love letter (VWW, 52).5 Since he built his poetry on this kind of intense intimacy, it delighted him to get such responses, which were often addressed to him both as ‘Walt Whitman’ the individual person, and ‘Walt Whitman’ the representative American. Indeed, he specifically noted the peculiarity of the way in which many envelopes were addressed to him. ‘[L]etters come to me all ways: even the letters addressed by some people more daring than others to “Walt Whitman, America,” ’ he told Traubel in January 1889, to which Traubel responded: ‘Some day they’ll know where to find you if a letter is

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just addressed to “Walt Whitman, World”!’ (WWWC4, 3). Whitman’s broader genius was to embody this epistolary power in his poetry, to write as if to an intimate correspondent while also leaving the poem open to everyone. And so naturally readers both in the United States and across the world responded, one letter at a time, to the democratic authorial figure they conceived of as ‘Walt Whitman, America.’ One of the most suggestively erotic of these letters came from a woman in Chicago named Helen Wilmans, whose life had changed when she first encountered Whitman’s work (she left her husband and her life of toil on a farm to become a well-known journalist and eventually a pioneer of mental science). Whitman kept it in the chaotic pile of papers surrounding his rocking chair in the bedroom of his Camden home, where Traubel, who came on nightly visits for the last four years of the poet’s life, would invariably encounter ‘letters, [and] envelopes, . . . scattered over the floor, . . . [and] boxes more or less laden with letters’ (WWWC2, 110). One evening in April 1888, Whitman dug around in this mess, which contained note after note from admiring female correspondents, handed Wilmans’ ‘soiled letter’ to Traubel, and asked him to read it aloud (WWWC1, 49). In doing so, Traubel noted that in the corner of this particular missive Whitman had written ‘beautiful good letter June ’82’ (WWWC1, 49). ‘I don’t feel that I should apologize for writing to you,’ Wilmans’ address to the poet began: I have loved you for years with my whole heart and soul. No man ever lived whom I have so desired to take by the hand as you. I read Leaves of Grass, and got new conceptions of the dignity and beauty of my own body and of the bodies of other people; and life became more valuable in consequence . . . Because I love you so I have written these lines. It is nothing to me who sees them. I am proud of my feeling for you. It has educated me; it has done more to raise me from a poor working woman to a splendid position on one of the best papers ever published, than all the other influences of my life. I know you must have many letters from strangers, and so I will not take any more of your time in reading what I have to say. Of course I have no hope of receiving an answer to this. But I thought it no harm to let you know that my love went with you, and perhaps in some unknown way was a blessing to you all these years. (WWWC1, 49) Whitman’s response upon hearing Traubel read out these words is then telling. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bright letter for a dark day?’ he asked Traubel. ‘I like these letters from people I don’t know, from people who don’t know me, these confessions of love, these little “how do you dos” that appear every now and then out of mysterious obscure places . . . But such a letter as this has a verity, a sureness, a solid reason for itself, which gives it special value. I confess it pushed clean into my vitals’ (WWWC1, 50). Significantly, Whitman is here expressing something very close to the ‘full confession’ of what he had set out to do with poetry, a confession contained in an 1876 preface to Leaves of Grass (CPCP, 1010). ‘I . . . sent out “Leaves of Grass”,’ he wrote there, ‘to arouse and set flowing in men’s and women’s hearts, young and old, endless streams of living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now and ever’ (CPCP, 1010). Letters like Wilmans’ were the very confirmation for Whitman that his work had succeeded; he could feel the flow of ‘pulsating love’ from her coming directly toward him, and even into him, within his ‘vitals.’ The purpose of Whitman’s poetry, in this sense, was not to send love to his reader so much as to get love back from them, to generate love in their hearts: as with a

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letter, which needs a reply to verify its arrival, so only would that returned love indicate that the original writing had had its impact. Indeed, this love was designed to have its impact on that very odd epistolary ‘you,’ the co-respondent that Whitman invented for his poetry – an intimate you that was nonetheless a total stranger, one of those people he called ‘the beautiful unknowns’ (WWWC4, 233). As Whitman remarked to Traubel of an 1887 ‘letter from one of the beautiful unknowns,’ an English admirer named Louisa Snowden, ‘they get nearer to me, I get nearer to them, than any others’ (WWWC4, 233). Whitman received many letters like those from Wilmans and Snowden, some of them even more extreme in their declarations of affection. The distinguished British writer Anne Gilchrist, for example, notoriously wrote to Whitman (‘my darling’) in October 1871 and offered to bear his children, ‘if God should so bless me’ (LAGWW, 66). But more importantly she wrote often and at length about the depth of her response to Leaves of Grass. ‘[S]till it comforts me to touch, to press to me the beloved books,’ she told Whitman, ‘like a child holding some hand in the dark – it knows not whose – but knows it is enough – knows it is a dear, strong, comforting hand’ (LAGWW, 65). Whitman, for his part, answered Gilchrist with kindness yet caution. When she announced in that same 1871 letter that she was planning to move to the U.S. to live near him, he tried in vain to stop her. He explained what she already knew intensely, namely that it was his book, not his physical self, that – thanks to its epistolary power – was the source of his attraction: ‘My book is my best letter, my response, my truest explanation of all. In it I have put my body and spirit. You understand this better and fuller and clearer than any one else’ (LAGWW, 65). Since Whitman’s own erotic attachments were to men, it is a testament to the force of his often judiciously genderless sexual imagery that his poetry prompted such letters from women readers. Indeed, Gilchrist was not the first to offer her body to Whitman; such letters began arriving as early as 1860, when a Connecticut woman named Susan Garnet Smith wrote passionately to him of reading Leaves of Grass while hiking outdoors. ‘Know Walt Whitman that thou hast a child for me!’ Garnet proclaimed: A noble beautiful perfect manchild. I charge you my love not to give it to another woman. The world demands it! It is not for you and me, is our child, but for the world. My womb is clean and pure. It is ready for thy child my love . . . He must be begotten on a mountain top, in the open air. Not in lust, not in mere gratification of sensual passion, but in holy ennobling pure strong deep glorious passionate broad universal love. I charge you to prepare my love. (WWWC4, 313) Smith then concludes with a feverish profession that begs Whitman to respond to her sensual offers, but, perhaps tellingly, to do so in words: ‘I love you, I love you, come, come. Write’ (WWWC4, 313). Whitman had Horace Traubel read this letter out loud, too, and Traubel was puzzled that his friend had written ‘? insane asylum’ on the envelope, when Garnet had responded precisely as Leaves had asked her to – with openness and passion (WWWC4, 313). ‘Isn’t it crazy?’ Whitman asked, to which Traubel answered, ‘No: . . . it sounds like somebody who’s taking you at your word . . . You might as well write “insane” across . . . the Song of Myself’ (WWWC4, 313). Relenting somewhat, Whitman then admitted: ‘I’ve had more than one notion of the letter: I suppose the fact that certain things are unexpected, unusual, makes it hard to get them in their proper perspective’ (WWWC4, 313).

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Certainly, what becomes clear from a consideration of Whitman’s correspondence is the way in which the letters he received from readers gradually taught him over the years just how they heard his poetry and just how passionate a response his poems could generate. Beginning with the very first letter that he received in response to his published verse – from none other than the literary giant Ralph Waldo Emerson – Whitman experimented with innovative ways to mix his epistolary poetry with the epistolary response it generated. When he received Emerson’s enthusiastic but private letter of support, Whitman immediately began to conceive of ways to render the personal public. Emerson’s letter is now one of the most famous in American literature precisely because of Whitman’s shameless exploitation of it: he carefully copied it out by hand and placed his transcriptions in copies of Leaves of Grass that he gave to other literary notables; he arranged to have the letter published in the NewYork Tribune and then pasted cut-out copies of this printed version in many of the remaining numbers of the 1855 edition of Leaves; and he emblazoned a line from the letter – ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career’ – on the spine of the 1856 edition of Leaves, thereby inventing the cover blurb.6 All of this was done without Emerson’s knowledge or permission. Whitman’s most breathtaking use of the letter, however, was his reprinting of it at the back of the 1856 edition in a special section he named ‘Leaves-Droppings,’ an awkward pun on ‘eavesdropping’ – the act of listening in on private conversations one is not meant to hear. Whitman entitled the first part of this new section ‘Correspondence,’ and it was here he offered in its entirety Emerson’s personal letter.7 In reprinting the letter under the title ‘Correspondence,’ Whitman most fully and most brazenly turns Emerson’s private letter into a public correspondence. Correspondence about Leaves is, Whitman’s actions here suggest, always a personal/ public activity, because Leaves itself is addressed to a personal/public ‘you.’ Emerson’s letter had seemingly performed the I/you or author/reader reversal that Whitman’s poetry – thanks to its own epistolary force – invited. Yet perhaps the most striking aspect of the ‘Correspondence’ section of the 1856 edition is Whitman’s decision to print his own 4,000-word epistolary response to Emerson’s note. This letter, addressed to ‘Dear Master,’ never even existed as a folded and mailed manuscript letter, and was never sent to Emerson except as a printed document in Whitman’s book, so that when Emerson read it everyone else who purchased the book was already eavesdropping (LG1856, 346). In reciprocating Emerson’s gesture of epistolary connection, Whitman thus completely absorbs their personal ‘correspondence’ into the public realm. His letter to Emerson is available only in his typeset book of poetry, and so the book of poetry itself becomes part of his letter, as Whitman makes clear in his opening lines to Emerson: ‘Here are thirty-two Poems, which I send you, dear Friend . . . not having found how I could satisfy myself with sending any usual acknowledgment of your letter’ (LG1856, 346). Later in his life, Whitman would spend a good deal of time reading Emerson’s published correspondence with Thomas Carlyle. But the intense literary conversations recorded in those letters seemed strange to him, since his own missives were very seldom about his poems or prose (he often wrote about matters related to the publication of his work, but not about the work itself or his ideas concerning writing). In this respect, while he certainly exchanged letters with prominent literary figures like Emerson, Bram Stoker, John Addington Symonds, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, the overwhelming bulk of his letters were to (and from) relatively unknown people, and

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these letters (the ones from the ‘beautiful unknowns’) are the ones Whitman appreciated the most. ‘Such correspondence as that of Carlyle and Emerson would be impossible to me,’ he remarked to Traubel in May 1888, ‘though I see it is all right in itself and for them. It is a matter of taste – of temperament. I don’t believe I ever wrote a purely literary letter – ever got discussing books or literary men or writers or artists of any sort in letters: the very idea of it makes me sick. I like letters to be personal – very personal – and then stop’ (WWWC1, 137). Nonetheless, in a different sense, these ‘very personal’ letters are in fact the basis of Whitman’s poetics. Whitman’s letters do not so much discuss his poetic ideas as enact them – for they are intense exercises in the interplay between ‘I’ and ‘you.’ Just as his poetry invited his readers to enter into a physical relationship with his words via the material object of the book, so his letters ask their recipients to do the same. They often record, for instance, intensely physical details and intimate descriptions that capture life as lived in a body. Thus the notorious physicality of Whitman’s poetry is matched, especially from the Civil War on, by an epistolary physicality, in letters that are relentless in their focus on wounded and maimed soldiers’ bodies and, eventually, their focus on the poet’s own half-paralyzed, aging body. When Traubel suggested in 1891 that Whitman should give some of his correspondence to Richard Maurice Bucke to help him in preparing a biography of the poet, Whitman demurred. ‘My letters are too full of bowels,’ he observed, ‘the ups and downs of the physical critter, prisoned here, suffering fleshly ills too many to mention. This frank commentalism would not do for our purpose!’ (WWWC8, 160). Indeed, a large percentage of Whitman’s late letters at least are ‘full of bowels,’ as he writes in disarmingly direct ways to a wide variety of correspondents, offering candid descriptions of his growing infirmities. ‘Getting along still . . . sort of (very moderate) bowel movements the last three or four days – water works I guess better action – use the catheter – feelings dull & heavy enough nearly all time,’ he told Bucke three weeks before the above conversation with Traubel (C, 5: 181). This unblinking embrace of his full physicality – from the ‘scent of these arm-pits’ to ‘a spirt [sic] of my own seminal wet’ – was of course visible in Whitman’s poetry from early on (CPCP, 51, 73). ‘I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,’ he remarks in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, and bowels remained there until the end, when his poems, like his letters, became much briefer reports on life in a decaying body, as with ‘As I Sit Writing Here’ (1888): As I sit writing here, sick and grown old, / Not my least burden is that dullness of the years, querilities, / Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui, / May filter in my daily songs. (CPCP, 51, 614) ‘As I Sit Writing Here’ is, in a sense, a poetic re-forming of the subject of any number of his letters from around the time it was composed. ‘Ab’t same – fair bowel movem’t to day (first in ten days) – have been sitting up seven hours & am now going to lie down – warm – skin moist,’ one letter to Bucke from May 1891 reads in its entirety (C, 5: 199). One of Whitman’s earliest extant letters, in fact, written in August 1840, when he was a schoolteacher on Long Island, even evokes bowel movement as a tortured metaphor for the production of letters themselves. ‘Moved by the bowels of compassion, and pushed onward by the sharp prickings of conscience, I send you another epistolary gem,’ Whitman tells a friend, Abraham Paul Leech, here. ‘Besides, conscience spurs me

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to a full confession; which generally operates on me like a good dose of calomel on one who has been stuffing immoderately, making a clear stomach and comfortable feelings to take the place of overburdened paunch and rumbling intestines. – Excuse the naturality of my metaphor’ (C7, 6). Notably, the forced nature of this trope and the precious writing style came as something of a shock to Whitman scholars when the cache of early letters of which this missive is part was discovered in the mid-1980s. Although this cache helped to fill in the extremely sparse record of Whitman’s correspondence before the Civil War, the most accomplished editor of Whitman’s correspondence, Edwin Haviland Miller, characterized the persona of these early letters as ‘a fop given to affectations in diction, literary analogies more pretentious than substantial, and sophomoric puns mixed in with a condescending, hostile wit,’ all in the service of mocking the rural citizens of Long Island.8 During the early years of his life at least, then, it is evident that Whitman did indeed labor at the ‘purely literary’ (and not ‘very personal’) kind of letter-writing that he eventually came to reject. Letters such as the one to Leech thus give us a starting point that allows us to track a dramatic shift in Whitman’s notion of the efficacy and purpose of letter-writing, but one problem in following that path is that we have so few examples of his correspondence before 1855, when he published the first edition of Leaves. We now possess around 3,000 extant letters by Whitman, originally collected in five large volumes published in the 1960s by Miller as part of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman project. The first of those five volumes contained what at the time were all the known letters Whitman wrote before 1868 – that is, up to the point where he was forty-eight years old. The remaining four volumes collected letters he wrote during his final twenty-five years, and two of these covered just his final six years. The record of Whitman’s correspondence, then, is very heavily weighted toward the 1880s, and we have no epistolary material from the time when he was first conceiving of Leaves of Grass. Letters by Whitman have continued to turn up since the 1960s, of course; Miller’s fifth volume already had an addendum of letters that had emerged since the earlier ones were published, and he was eventually able to issue a sixth volume in 1977 to supplement the previous five. After Miller’s death, Ted Genoways published another supplemental volume, noting that it may well be ‘the last edition of The Correspondence to appear in a print format,’ since the online Walt Whitman Archive, directed by Kenneth M. Price and myself, had by then begun to re-mediate the correspondence, and because space limitations were no longer an issue in the electronic environment, was broadening the definition of what we might mean by Whitman’s ‘correspondence.’9 In order to trace the evolution of Whitman’s epistolary career, then, scholars can now look beyond the conventional evidence for such things, since the Walt Whitman Archive has – for example – embarked on collecting not only all the letters Whitman wrote and all the letters he received, but also the many letters Whitman copied as a clerk in the Attorney General’s office from 1865 to 1873. The Archive currently offers around 3,000 of those scribal documents – almost the same number of letters as written by Whitman in a personal capacity.10 These documents are important because they indicate how Whitman became what we might call a professional letter-writer, whose job was to copy for the government’s files all the letters the Attorney General (and other functionaries in his office) wrote. Not only do these transcriptions give us a window into the various social and political matters that Whitman would have been aware of during the years he was writing his penetrating study of democracy Democratic Vistas

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(1871), the very act of transcribing also taught Whitman a practice that would eventually lead to the conservation of his late correspondence. For during the time he was copying letters in the Attorney General’s office, he began the practice of copying and saving drafts of his own letters and thus preserving a record of his correspondence from the 1860s on, much of which would otherwise have been lost. Of course, by the time Whitman joined the Attorney General’s office, he was already in a sense something of a professional letter-writer. Some of his early journalistic writing consisted of multiple series of ‘letters’ that he published in New York newspapers – including ‘East Long Island Correspondence’ (1847) in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, ‘Letters from a Travelling Bachelor’ (1849–50) in the New York Sunday Dispatch, ‘Letters from New York’ (1850) in the National Era, and ‘Letters from Paumanok’ (1851) in the New York Evening Post. These were experiments in journalistic reportage (on-the-scene journalists were then only just beginning to be called ‘correspondents’), and the letter genre seemed the ideal vehicle for Whitman’s accounts of his local travels around Long Island. Ezra Greenspan has even gone so far as to argue that it was in his early journalism that Whitman developed his characteristically intimate address to the reader. In Greenspan’s words: ‘Whitman right from the first made it his practice to personalize himself and his relations with his readers to a degree exceptional even in a day of editor-dominated journalism’ (WWAR, 49). This is undoubtedly true, but what is particularly striking is that Whitman most thoroughly develops that remarkably close ‘I’/‘you’ relationship in his journalism when he is writing in the form of ‘letters.’ In one of the ‘Letters from a Travelling Bachelor,’ for example, he declares of mid-nineteenth-century town planning, ‘let us in confidence reader, just whisper to you that we are not friend to thoroughfares that are rigid and right-angular.’11 And in one of his later ‘Letters from Paumanok,’ he intensifies this whispering familiarity: ‘Come, I will not talk to you as to one of the superficial crowd who saunter here because it is a fashion; who take opera glasses with them, and make you sick with shallow words, upon the sublimest and most spiritual of the arts. I will trust you with confidence; I will divulge secrets.’12 Here, then, is the genesis of the intimate epistolary ‘you’ that Whitman would deploy in Leaves of Grass (where he writes that: ‘This hour I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you’), already being presented in a typically public way – as a whisper in confidence to you, the reader, and to all other readers who may pick up this printed letter (CPCP, 206). Writing such journalistic ‘letters,’ in short, taught Whitman a great deal about how he could manipulate and modulate the private epistolary ‘you,’ as would be the case when he came to handle Emerson’s congratulatory letter. Later on, during the Civil War, as Whitman joined the first generation of journalists who would come to be called ‘war correspondents,’ he again reverted to the genre-title of ‘letters’ as he filed regular reports to the New York Times and other papers with titles like ‘Letter from Washington’ (1863). These powerful epistolary descriptions of the capital during the war, and the soldiers in the many hospitals that now occupied government buildings and temporary structures throughout the city, form some of Whitman’s most effective prose writing, and eventually found their way into his books about the period, Memoranda During the War (1875) and Specimen Days (1882). Indeed, many of these journalistic letters derive from the actual letters that Whitman wrote to his mother and his brother Jeff during the conflict, which themselves constitute some of the most poignant and powerful writing he ever did.

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His correspondence with his mother, in particular, became important at this stage of Whitman’s life, because after he went to Fredericksburg in search of his brother George (a wounded soldier) and ended up staying in D.C. to attend to other wounded soldiers and work as a government clerk, he was for the first time truly apart from his family for an extended period. His strong connection to them thus now demanded the writing of long letters, letters that often turned into an outpouring of emotion and pathos and horror like nothing he had ever before expressed. As on 29 March 1864: I came up to the nearest hospital & helped – Mother, it was a dreadful night (last Friday night) – pretty dark, the wind gusty, & the rain fell in torrents – One poor boy (this is a sample of one case out of the 600) he seemed to me quite young, he was quite small, (I looked at his body afterwards) – he groaned some as the stretcher-bearers were carrying him along – & again as they carried him through the hospital gate, they set down the stretcher & examined him, & the poor boy was dead – they took him into the ward, & the doctor came immediately, but it was all of no use – the worst of it is too that he is entirely unknown – there was nothing on his clothes, or any one with him, to identify him – & he is altogether unknown – Mother, it is enough to rack one’s heart, such things – very likely his folks will never know in the world what has become of him – poor poor child, for he appeared as though he could be but 18 – . . . things get worse & worse, as to the amount & sufferings of the sick, & as I have said before, those who have to do with them are getting more & more callous & indifferent – Mother, when I see the common soldiers, what they go through, & how every body seems to try to pick upon them, & what humbug there is over them every how, even the dying soldier’s money stolen from his body by some scoundrel attendant, or from some sick ones, even from under his head, which is a common thing – & then the agony I see every day, I get almost frightened at the world – Mother, I will try to write more cheerfully next time – but I see so much – well, good bye for present, dear Mother. (C, 2: 205) It was as a result of such experiences, in fact, that Whitman also became a professional letter-writer of another sort, taking it upon himself to write letters on behalf of hundreds of wounded soldiers. A number of these letters are signed with the name of the soldier, though the signature and the letter itself are in Whitman’s hand, as if he had taken dictation. ‘When eligible,’ Whitman noted of his years visiting the hospitals, ‘I encourage the men to write, and myself, when call’d upon, write all sorts of letters for them, (including love letters, very tender ones)’ (CPCP, 715). Once these letters are added to the ones Whitman copied in the Attorney General’s office, he becomes probably the only major writer who wrote more letters that he signed with other people’s names than he signed with his own. Indeed, in the case of the letters for soldiers, it is often difficult to tell whether a missive was actually composed by Whitman or merely transcribed by him, making it all the more difficult to decide with certainty just what documents should be included in any gathering of Whitman’s ‘correspondence.’ Whatever the case may be, one of Whitman’s most popular Civil War poems, ‘Come Up from the Fields Father’ (1865), evokes a scene Whitman surely imagined many times as he wrote letters in his own hand for wounded soldiers.13 In ‘Come Up’ one of these letters arrives at the family home of a soldier, where the excitement of receiving it quickly turns to horror as the mother realizes, ‘O this is not our son’s

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writing, yet his name is sign’d, / O a strange hand writes for our dear son’ (CPCP, 437). The disconnect between her son’s name and the ‘strange hand’ it is written in then causes the mother to read the letter itself as a severed and fragmented thing: ‘All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only, / Sentences broken’ (CPCP, 437). Even though the letter states that her boy ‘will soon be better,’ she detects ‘something ominous’ in its script, and indeed, ‘While they stand at home at the door he is already dead’ (CPCP, 438). Whitman himself often had to be the bearer of such brutal truths in writing to the families of soldiers who had just died, and these letters too are some of the most powerful and suggestive in all of his correspondence. In an August 1863 letter to the parents of a deceased soldier named Erastus Haskell, for example, Whitman begins by presenting himself in the role of nurse. ‘From the time he came . . . there was hardly a day but I was with him a portion of the time – if not during the day, then at night,’ he observes. ‘I had no opportunity to do much, or any thing for him, as nothing was needed, only to wait the progress of his malady’ (C, 1: 127). But the intensity of the relationship increases as the letter goes on – ‘sometimes when I would come in, he woke up, & I would lean down & kiss him, he would reach out his hand & pat my hair & beard a little, very friendly, as I sat on the bed & leaned over him’ – and, by the end of the missive, he is addressing Erastus directly as a child he too has lost: ‘Poor dear son, though you were not my son, I felt to love you as a son, what short time I saw you sick & dying here’ (C, 1: 128, 129). Looking back on such letters later in his life, Whitman appropriately recalled how ‘my relations with the boys there in Washington had fatherly, motherly, brotherly intimations’ (WWWC3, 110). Indeed, as Peter Coviello has recently argued, through letters such as the one to Mr. and Mrs. Haskell, Whitman was attempting to enter into the soldier’s affectional circle as a parental surrogate, a comrade and lover, a brother, and a nurse, all at the same time, for in doing so he glimpsed ‘the possibility of a familial relation as vibrant with desire as the love of comrades had been’ (WC, 81). These letters undoubtedly represent Whitman’s letter-writing at its best. There is not a single mention of his poetry or of literature more broadly, yet in and of themselves they are a kind of poetic invention, an evocation and invocation of a lost presence, of bodies gone forever missing. Discovering one of his old Civil War letters among the chaos of papers on his floor in November 1888, Whitman described the find to Traubel: Oh yes! . . . a hospital letter: it’s a long one: I looked it over to-day: it made me feel quite sad, so to speak: it was a reminder – brought so many things back: the boys: most of them now gone – dead: scattered everywhere . . . It may be that bits of this letter have found their way into print in other places – in Specimen Days: it may be: I don’t know. (WWWC3, 100) Whitman’s Civil War letters fed and inspired both his war prose and war poetry, then, but it is in the letters themselves that we find the rawest reporting of the carnage. His letters to his brother Jeff from this period, for example, contained powerful and moving descriptions of his hospital work, even though, as Martin Buinicki has recently demonstrated, they were also quite functional tools, very much in the service of raising funds to support his charitable endeavors, whether it be giving wounded soldiers ice cream, money, brandy, or some other small item they needed.14 Jeff specifically urged Whitman to sharpen and extend his hospital descriptions and then shared his brother’s

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letters with potential donors in order to give them an experiential feel for the importance of the poet’s work. In encouraging the poet to write detailed personal letters and direct appeals explaining exactly how he had used donated funds, Jeff helped Whitman to become one of the inventors of the genre of the fundraising letter. Indeed, Whitman often saw his letters as documents with particular missions; and increasingly so in his later years. He wrote many letters to his string of young male companions, for instance, with whom he had complex and intricate relationships, and positioned himself just as he had with the Civil War soldiers – part brother, part father, part lover, part friend.15 These letters were often filled with advice, as when on a January day in 1881 (‘the sun shines, but sharp cold & the wind whistling’), Whitman wrote to the young and temperamental Harry Stafford, who was flustered about an argument he had entered into, and the poet advised him to ‘Take it easy . . . be quiet & good natured & even attentive & not get mad worth a cent’ (C, 3: 207). Whitman went on to reveal to Harry that the secret of ‘a good life’ was to be ‘steady trying to do fair, & a sweet, tolerant liberal disposition,’ thereby creating a quality that ‘shines like the sun, tastes like the fresh air of a May morning, blooms like a perfect little flower by the road-side,’ so that ‘all the blowing, talking & powwowing both sides amounts to little or nothing’ (C, 3: 208). Effectively, Whitman in this letter models for Harry this ‘liberal disposition,’ which does take cultivation and nurturing in order to produce a sense of individual identity that can stand up to ‘all the blowing’ around it, the ‘talking and powwowing’ that always tries to whip people into taking sides.16 At moments like this in his correspondence, especially in relation to his young male comrades, Whitman is trying to put into epistolary prose the ideas of democratic virtue that fueled his poems, wherein although ‘Trippers and askers surround me, / . . . Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, / I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait’ (CPCP, 191). Perhaps because of this sense of distance from contention, or as a result of copying thousands of letters for the Attorney General, whereby he surely learned the value of brevity, Whitman’s late correspondence is devoted to briefer and briefer messages – a quick report on his health here, an instruction about the binding or typeface for his latest book there. Indeed, when, in 1873, the U.S. government began issuing penny postal cards, Whitman quickly took to this new technology of communication, and the bulk of his late letters are brief notes in this new form, the epistolary corollary to his increasingly brief old-age poems. Nonetheless, these late letters still capture something that had long been central to his letter-writing aesthetic: from his printed reply to Emerson in 1856, to the Civil War letters to his mother that were redeployed as newspaper ‘letters,’ right through to the postcards, Whitman always probed the possibilities of writing things that were at once intimate and public, written to a single ‘you’ that could be anyone. Postcards, in fact, perfectly embodied that aesthetic: when you wrote a postcard, you knew that the message was no longer sealed and folded, to be opened only by the intended recipient – anyone along the sending and delivering distribution line could read it, and anyone seeing it lying on a table could peruse it. It was addressed to one person, yet also available to anyone who happened upon it. Whitman had spent a lifetime exploring the possibilities of that permeable border between private and public: it was the basis of his democratic aesthetics – the source of an endless inquiry into how both the ‘simple separate person’ and the ‘En-Masse’ could be served and honored in an evolving American democracy (CPCP, 165). But his embrace of the postal card

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still caused something of a stir, and even generated newspaper coverage. In February 1889, for example, the Philadelphia Times noted that ‘Walt Whitman’s partiality for postal cards is well known to his correspondents and of late he rarely uses paper and envelopes . . . Even the most urgent business propositions he will answer on a postal card’ (WWWC4, 164). Some correspondents were insulted that Whitman sent them postcards, the Times added, but ‘this is a little eccentricity of the old poet . . . To him the postal card is a luxury; it confines him to brief writing and, with eyes that are no longer of the best and fingers not as supple as they were fifty years ago, surely we may grant the old man this trifling breach of epistolary etiquette’ (WWWC4, 164). According to Horace Traubel, Whitman responded to this article by declaring that its author had been ‘yawning for a paragraph – so I became the victim,’ and similarly Traubel also records Whitman disputing with or commenting on the old letters that he read aloud to the poet (WWWC, 165). As Traubel read them out, Whitman would often interrupt, answering back to the absent correspondent as if the letters were still a living conversation. Thus, as Traubel’s transcription and eventual publication of both the letters themselves and such observations might suggest, these missives were what sustained Whitman in his final years. Consequently, editions of Whitman’s correspondence like Edwin Haviland Miller’s can seem oddly disappointing, with the vast bulk of Whitman’s own letters sounding for the most part quite functional, and only rarely literary. Instead, it’s in the letters to Whitman, the ones he had scattered on the floor all about him, that we find what for Whitman was the real power of correspondence – namely, the co-response to his life’s work. Back in 1855, in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had used letters as a key image of the surprise and delight that every moment of our lives contains for us, if we are only awake to those moments: ‘I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name, / And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever’ (CPCP, 85). Over three decades later, Whitman, after watching Traubel dig around in the piles of letters on his bedroom floor and pick one up, asked him what he had discovered. Finding it to be a short memo on what Whitman was doing the night of the Astor Place Riot, Traubel joked that the poet’s line from Leaves of Grass was an appropriate indicator of the chaotic state of his room: ‘ “Wherever I go I find letters from God dropped,” &c.’ (WWWC1, 365). Whitman only smiled at Traubel’s comment and asked him to read the note out. But the following year, when the poet asked, ‘Why is it everybody delights in letters?’ and Traubel responded that, ‘Every letter is a surprise: the best of life is in its surprises,’ Whitman concurred: ‘That seems reasonable’ (WWWC4, 118). Like God’s letters dropped in the street, Whitman knew that endless new surprises would always come with the daily mail. ‘How great is the joy of letters!’ he told Traubel in April 1889 (WWWC5, 5). As Whitman’s correspondence enters the digital age, and open-access projects like The Walt Whitman Archive pair and publish his incoming letters with the letters that he wrote, we can perhaps begin to grasp that joy again, and come to understand the remarkable vitality and ultimate literary importance of his correspondence.17 This literary significance is what Whitman himself came to acknowledge in the very last year of his life, as he articulated his ‘philosophy of correspondence’ to Traubel: A letter is very subtle! Oh! The destiny of a letter should be well-marked from the first. We should know, make, every letter to fit its purpose – to go to the doctor, to the intimate friend, to the admirer, and so on and on, each having a

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quality its own, and for a specific end. It may seem queer for me to have a philosophy of correspondence, but I have. And of course, freedom is the charm of a letter – it before all other qualities. And a letter without freedom certainly has nothing left to it. (WWWC9, 3) In the letters Whitman wrote throughout his life, that ‘freedom’ is abundantly apparent as he addresses his correspondents with directness and ease, and tailors each missive ‘to fit its purpose’ – expansive when he needs to be, concise when, as is often the case, he needs to say just one thing. There may be little explicit literary discussion in Whitman’s epistolary prose, but his words are honed, as if he felt a burden of precision for each particular recipient. ‘The modern letter is less elaborate and more like reality,’ he told Traubel in June 1888. ‘Oh, not so long ago, even fifty years, in my memory – letter writing was . . . not a pastime, an act of a moment, for a direct expression of some necessary fact – then silence; but real work, involving time, quiet, patience. I was never a fulsome correspondent myself – wrote no superfluous letters: wrote very deliberately’ (WWWC1, 315).

Notes 1. Whitman, ‘Song of Myself, c. 1855–1889,’ in Papers of Walt Whitman, University of Virgina, Box-Folder 188, AMs #3829, 21. For a digitized version see ‘In Whitman’s Hand – Manuscripts,’ The Walt Whitman Archive, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 2. This quotation is from Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906–96), all nine volumes of which have now been digitized by The Walt Whitman Archive. See ‘Commentary: Disciples – Horace Traubel (1858–1919),’ The Walt Whitman Archive, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 3. ‘Correspondence, n.,’ n.pag. 4. Ibid. 5. For more on Whitman’s feelings about ‘autograph mail’ see Traubel, Walt Whitman in Camden – Volume 2, 82–3. 6. See Folsom, Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman, 15–16. 7. See Whitley, ‘Presenting Walt Whitman,’ 4. 8. Miller, ‘1840–1841,’ 3. 9. Genoways, ‘Introduction,’ xv. 10. See Whitman, ‘In Whitman’s Hand: Scribal Documents,’ The Walt Whitman Archive, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 11. Quoted in Rubin, The Historic Whitman, 348. 12. Whitman, ‘Letters from Paumanok, Brooklyn, August 11,’ The Walt Whitman Archive,

(last accessed 22 September 2015). 13. For an intricate reading of ‘Come Up from the Fields Father’ in relation to the letters Whitman wrote for soldiers, see Maslan, ‘Whitman’s “Strange Hand”.’ 14. See Buinicki, ‘The “need of means additional”.’ 15. This revealing set of letters begins with Fred Vaughan’s 1860 letters to Whitman (first collected by Charley Shively in Calamus Lovers), although Whitman’s to Vaughan are missing, and continue with Whitman’s letters to his young bohemian friends known as the ‘Fred Gray Association,’ his numerous letters to and from Civil War soldiers, his long correspondence with his former Confederate soldier companion in Washington, D.C., Peter Doyle, his revealing correspondence with Charles Warren Stoddard, and his extensive

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correspondence with Harry Stafford. These sets of letters, as the title of Shively’s edition suggests, develop Whitman’s concepts of ‘Calamus’ affection – the male–male affectional relationships (or ‘manly love,’ as he calls it in Leaves of Grass) that Whitman found essential for the creation of a true American democracy, where capitalism otherwise set males in competition or battle with each other (‘I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,’ in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 280). Such letters have been analyzed by critics such as Jonathan Katz as key documents for our understanding of the development of what has come to be known as homosexuality or gay culture (see Love Stories, passim). 16. For a more extensive reading of this letter see Folsom and Price, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, 107–15. 17. See Whitman, ‘Life and Letters: Correspondence,’ The Walt Whitman Archive, (last accessed 22 September 2015).

Works Cited Buinicki, M. (2014), ‘The “need of means additional”: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Fundraising,’ Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 31: 135–57. ‘Correspondence, n.’ (2015), in Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, (last accessed 20 September 2015). Coviello, P. (2013), ‘Whitman’s Children,’ PMLA, 128: 73–86. Cited parenthetically as WC. Eagleton, T. (1982), The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson, Oxford: Blackwell. Cited parenthetically as RC. Folsom, E. (2005), Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman, Iowa City: Obermann Center. Folsom, E., and K. M. Price (2005), Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Genoways, T. (2004), ‘Introduction: The Many Faces of Walt Whitman,’ in W. Whitman, The Correspondence – Volume 7, ed. T. Genoways, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, ix–xvi. Gilchrist, A., and W. Whitman (1918), The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, ed. T. B. Harned, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company. Cited parenthetically as LAGWW. Greenspan, E. (1990), Walt Whitman and the American Reader, New York: Cambridge University Press. Cited parenthetically as WWAR. Johnston, J., and J. W. Wallace (1917), Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Cited parenthetically as VWW. Katz, J. N. (2001), Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maslan, M. (1991), ‘Whitman’s “Strange Hand”: Body as Text in Drum-Taps,’ ELH, 58: 935–55. Miller, E. H. (1990), ‘1840–1841,’ in W. Whitman, Selected Letters of Walt Whitman, ed. E. H. Miller, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1–4. Rubin, J. (1973), The Historic Whitman, University Park: Penn State University Press. Traubel, H. (1906), With Walt Whitman in Camden – Volume 1, Boston: Small, Maynard. Cited parenthetically as WWWC1. Traubel, H. (1908), With Walt Whitman in Camden – Volume 2, New York: D. Appleton & Company. Cited parenthetically as WWWC2. Traubel, H. (1914), With Walt Whitman in Camden – Volume 3, ed. S. Bradley, New York: Mitchell Kennerley. Cited parenthetically as WWWC3. Traubel, H. (1953), With Walt Whitman in Camden – Volume 4, ed. S. Bradley, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cited parenthetically as WWWC4.

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Traubel, H. (1964), With Walt Whitman in Camden – Volume 5, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Cited parenthetically as WWWC5. Traubel, H. (1996), With Walt Whitman in Camden – Volume 8, ed. J. Chapman and M. MacIsaac, Oregon House, CA: W. M. Bentley. Cited parenthetically as WWWC8. Traubel, H. (1996), With Walt Whitman in Camden – Volume 9, ed. J. Chapman and M. MacIsaac, Oregon House, CA: W. M. Bentley. Cited parenthetically as WWWC9. Whitley, E. (2001), ‘Presenting Walt Whitman: “Leaves-Dropping” as Paratext,’ Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 19: 1–17. Whitman, W. (1838–1987), The Papers of Walt Whitman, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, University of Virginia, 3829–5604. Whitman, W. (1856), Leaves of Grass, Brooklyn: Fowler and Wells. Cited parenthetically as LG1856. Whitman, W. (1961–77), The Correspondence, 6 vols., ed. E. H. Miller, New York: New York University Press. Cited parenthetically as C. Whitman, W. (1981), Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. J. Kaplan, New York: Library of America. Cited parenthetically as CPCP. Whitman, W. (1987), Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Camerados, ed. C. Shively, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine. Whitman, W. (1995–present), The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. E. Folsom and K. M. Price, . Cited parenthetically as WWA. Whitman, W. (2004), The Correspondence – Volume 7, ed. T. Genoways, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Cited parenthetically as C7.

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40 ‘RARE SPARKLES OF LIGHT’: INTIMACY AND DISTANCE IN EMILY DICKINSON’S LETTERS TO THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON Linda Freedman

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mily Dickinson’s letters have typically attracted readers interested in making two potentially conflicting claims. On one hand, there are those concerned with her use of authorial poses and multiple personae. Commenting on Dickinson’s frequent use of carefully chosen pseudonyms in place of her signature, Jane Eberwein, for example, argues that: A stylistic trait of the letters that Dickinson carefully nurtured in preparation for her poetry was play on literary and scriptural allusions – . . . [a] device for establishing a privileged relationship with the particular reader who would appreciate their personal resonance and also a means of enlarging trivial circumstances to adumbrate her haunting themes of fragility, loss, death and immortality.1 Pushing this line of interpretation even further, Marietta Messmer has suggested that Dickinson’s correspondence should be afforded a ‘central significance’ within accounts of her career since ‘it is her letters and letter-poems – rather than her (fascicle) poems alone or in isolation – which seem to be the most representative of Dickinson’s fundamental choices about literary production.’2 On the other hand, there are those who read Dickinson’s missives primarily as a window onto her emotional life. Critics intrigued by the three love letters she wrote between 1858 and 1862 to a man identified only as ‘Master’ have, for instance, invariably played detective in order to tease autobiographical data from these deliberately oblique narratives. Thus Judith Farr dismisses ‘theories that the letters are fictions’ in favor of the argument that they ‘reflect different stages of an actual emotional experience.’3 Similarly, scholars interested in Dickinson’s relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan, tend to treat their correspondence as evidence of a genuine erotic intensity. Martha Nell Smith concludes that: ‘Dickinson’s brilliant masking and unveiling . . . obscures unconventional, possibly even lesbian interpretations of [her] letters in which the imploring rhetoric most resembles not the rhetoric of letters to . . . her male correspondents, but the beseeching rhetoric of many of her letters to her beloved Sue.’4 Both these lines of inquiry, the imaginative and the autobiographical, have frequently been brought to bear upon Dickinson’s correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the most-studied groups of letters in her epistolary corpus.5 612

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Higginson himself first brought their correspondence to wider attention in 1890, four years after Dickinson’s death, when he published a selection of her early letters to him in the Atlantic Monthly by way of eulogy and as context for the first edition of her poems, published under his editorship that same year. Dickinson’s brother Austin reportedly claimed that she ‘posed in those letters,’ coyly pretending to Higginson to be innocent and confiding in a way that her true character could not sustain.6 Yet to characterize Dickinson’s letters to Higginson as simply a series of impersonations does not quite do justice to their extravagant play, nor capture the complexity of her epistolary voice. In fact, her dexterity was such that she rarely maintained the same tone within a single letter, let alone across a correspondence that lasted for more than twenty years. Taking on the inextricable mingling of life and art in Dickinson’s letters, this chapter will concentrate on this question of tone, and argue that there is a close connection between tone and theme in Dickinson’s missives to Higginson which elucidates not only her playful self-fashioning in relation to her chosen mentor, but also her more honest and artless moments of affectionate friendship in the context of loss and grief. There can be no doubt that Dickinson associated epistolary practice with intimacy. Her famous poem about reading a letter, written in 1863, around the time she began her correspondence with Higginson, describes the experience in terms of an illicit and erotic encounter: The Way I read a Letter’s – this – ’Tis first – I lock the Door – And push it with my fingers – next – For transport it be sure – And then I go the furthest off – To counteract a knock – Then draw my little Letter forth And slowly pick the lock – Then – glancing narrow at the Wall – And narrow at the floor For firm Conviction of a Mouse Not exorcised before – Peruse how infinite I am To no-one that You – know – And sigh for lack of Heaven – but not The Heaven God bestow – (PED, 2: 669) Importantly, the speaker’s seclusion is described here in terms which deliberately blur the distinction between the physical confines of a private chamber and the emotional space designated by a letter. Her withdrawal to a space ‘furthest off’ suggests both a physical removal from the door of the room in which she hides, and a mental removal to a secret place in her internal emotional landscape. The feeling of illicit intimacy is, moreover, heightened by the sudden reversal of roles where Dickinson’s speaker assumes the position of intruder, picking at the lock of a forbidden door,

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when she opens the letter to read it. Our voyeuristic position in this poem too is brought center-stage in the final stanza, when the speaker abruptly unmasks the reader’s intrusive eavesdropping on her intimate encounter and the feelings of lack and longing that it generates. The speaker’s uncomfortably direct address lets us know that she knows we are watching. And there is a final, further complication to the depiction of epistolary intimacy in the way that the act of reading a letter turns on self-reflection in the closing lines. The speaker’s absorption arises from the ‘infinite’ image of herself that she finds reflected in another’s words. The intimate encounter of a letter therefore becomes not only a performance of intimacy but also an experience of self-love. In effect, Dickinson’s voice in this poem takes on a knowingly exaggerative quality that we often find in her letters to Higginson. The speaker’s comical suspicion of a sneaking mouse, not yet ‘exorcised,’ in the third stanza, for example, is deliberately bathetic, encouraging us to read her ‘transport’ with more than a little skepticism and find amusement in her performance of intimacy. And in her early letters to Higginson, Dickinson frequently engages in a similar performance of selfexposure and self-fashioning, which he clearly found both attractive and baffling. In her first letter to him, for instance, written on the 15 April 1862, Dickinson made an extravagant play of intimacy, writing: ‘I enclose my name – asking you, if you please – Sir – to tell me what is true? That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is it’s [sic] own pawn –’ (LED, 2: 403). Critics have long thought that the letter was sent in response to Higginson’s essay ‘Letter to a Young Contributor,’ which Dickinson had likely just read in the Atlantic Monthly, wherein Higginson offered practical and aesthetic advice to youthful writers, specifically addressing himself to aspiring women who, he thought, often wrote to him under male pseudonyms. For her part, in place of a signature on the letter, Dickinson wrote her name on a small card, which she enclosed in its own envelope. There is a playful double meaning, therefore, in her request that he tell her ‘what is true.’ On the one hand, she seems to be asking for a faithful evaluation of her poems, four of which were enclosed with the letter. But she is also playing on the association between language and integrity, staging an act of honest but secret revelation that asks the same in return. In ‘enclos[ing]’ her name, Dickinson uses a deliberately performed act of intimacy to set the terms of their relationship, taking on Higginson’s ideas about women writers and turning them to her advantage. Her final expression of confidence similarly makes a mockery of his own advice. For while Higginson had encouraged contributors to court their editors with ‘soft approaches and mild persuasions,’ Dickinson’s intimate assurance only takes on the guise of tenderness: there is little that is genuinely ‘soft’ or ‘mild’ about her assumptions on his ‘Honor.’ Dickinson, in effect, leaves Higginson no room for manoeuvre in this opening epistle. The correspondence has been established on her terms, with intimacy as her weapon of choice. Dickinson’s uninvited displays of intimacy ironically led to a sense of unbridgeable distance, which Higginson clearly felt very strongly. Thus, in the summer of 1869, after they had corresponded for seven years, he wrote: ‘I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery

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mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light’ (LED, 2: 461). Higginson’s wish that he ‘might be something’ to her is especially noteworthy, because this letter responded to one in which Dickinson had dramatically and inexplicably declared that he had ‘saved her life’ and that to thank him in person had long been one of her dearest ambitions (LED, 2: 460). Characteristically, she never explained her startling statement, though she did repeat it ten years later.8 Higginson was, understandably, baffled by her repeated postures of humility. In her third letter to him, sent on 7 June 1862, she had asked if he would be her ‘Preceptor’ (LED, 2: 409). Higginson asserted in reply that it was an absurd attitude, but Dickinson never let it go.9 Even in very late letters to him, written in 1880, she was still signing herself ‘Your Scholar,’ and telling Higginson of her poems that he should ‘Reprove them as your own – To punish them would please me, because the fine conviction I had so true a friend’ (LED, 2: 681). Dickinson frequently styled herself as innocent, artless, and ingenuous, claiming on one occasion, ‘I hav’nt [sic] that confidence in fraud which many exercise’ (LED, 2: 415). Yet Higginson, rather astutely, credited her with a ‘naïve skill such as the most experienced and worldly coquette might envy’ (EDL, 445). Nevertheless, one area in which Dickinson’s bold intimacy does seem undeniably coy is that of physical self-description. In her early letters she frequently plays with altered states of being, including inebriation, anaesthesia, explosion, and dissection or anatomization. She began her initial ‘Preceptor’ letter to Higginson in 1862, for example, with the following cryptic statement: ‘[Y]our letter gave no Drunkeness, because I tasted Rum before – Domingo comes but once – yet I had few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue’ (LED, 2: 408). Dickinson is talking, in this passage, about the satisfaction of discovering his positive attitude toward her work, but there is some ambiguity over precisely what is being revealed here. The odd reference to ‘Domingo,’ the Carribean Island that Christopher Columbus discovered in 1493, perhaps offers one clue, since it was noted for its exotic flora and fauna, and Dickinson often used flowers as avatars of her own self. When Higginson finally visited her in Amherst in 1870, for instance, she reportedly ‘came to [him] with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into [his] hand & said “These are my introduction” ’ (LED, 2: 473). Referring to the discovery of Domingo also leaves room, however, for the suggestion that Higginson’s discovery of her writing is equivalent to Columbus’s world-changing encounter with the Americas. Though such bravado is characteristically also undermined when the assertion of being struck dumb with gratitude contained in ‘block my tongue’ is developed a few lines later into a clearer image of physical paralysis: ‘I felt a palsy, here – the Verses just relieve –’ (LED, 2: 408). Dickinson thus describes writing as her temporary salvation from debilitation, and implicitly credits Higginson with the same power, immediately following this declaration with: ‘Your second letter surprised me, and for a moment, swung – I had not supposed it’ (LED, 2: 408). This sudden injection of involuntary movement neatly illuminates the carefully choreographed nature of Dickinson’s letter, in which Higginson’s previous and present praise both animates and enervates her body through acts of intoxication, discovery, pleasure and surprise.

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This complex sequence of responses is, moreover, reflected in a poem that Dickinson enclosed with the letter, which depicts a sublime narrative of strength through destruction: As if I asked a common alms, And in my wondering hand A Stranger pressed a Kingdom, And I, bewildered, stand – As if I asked the Orient Had it for me a Morn – And it should lift it’s [sic] purple Dikes, And shatter me with Dawn! (LED, 2: 409) Her speaker’s initial innocent, expectant, and ‘wondering’ state here anticipates nothing of the glory she ultimately receives. Like the biblical Jacob, whom Dickinson described in an earlier poem as a ‘bewildered Gymnast,’ this speaker has a moment of darkness and wandering – one can also see a pun on ‘wondering’ – which precedes divine illumination (PED, 1: 44). The ‘shatter[ing]’ violence of the last line is an integral part of the narrative of sublime encounter. Weakened by awe, she emerges stronger for it. As in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s earlier account of the emergence of literary genius in Nature (1836), the ‘keys of power are put into [her] hands.’10 But in this poem, Dickinson is also deliberately implicating Higginson in the role of sublime ravishment. Her coyness lies precisely in the way in which she then adopts the rather demure pose of the student, immediately following her verse with the question to which she did not seem to need or expect an answer: ‘But, will you be my Preceptor, Mr. Higginson?’ (LED, 2: 409). Elsewhere, meanwhile, Dickinson’s coyness also turned on images of anatomization and dissection. In this same letter she informed Higginson that ‘the Balm’ of his kindness ‘seemed better, because you bled me, first,’ an echo of her previous missive in which she had thanked him for his ‘surgery,’ claiming somewhat wryly that it was not as ‘painful’ as she had supposed (LED, 2: 408, 404). On the occasion of her fourth letter, moreover, she again cast Higginson as a doctor, this time instructing him to treat her poetry with an invasive and cutting eye: ‘Men do not call the surgeon, to commend – the Bone, but to set it, Sir, and fracture within, is more critical’ (LED, 2: 412). Figuring her art as part of her own anatomy, she deliberately invites intimacy even as her pretended vulnerability contrasts strongly with the authoritative tone of her admonition. Finally too, the ambiguous coyness of Dickinson’s physical self-description is apparent in the anatomized self-portrait that she gives Higginson in this fourth missive, in response to his request for a likeness. Casting him in the role of doubting Thomas she begins the letter by asking: ‘Could you believe me – without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass that the Guest leaves –’ (LED, 2: 411). Dickinson here teases Higginson’s desire to have an image of her by giving him very little to go on and weighting that which she does give him with multiple similes. Commenting first on her own diminutive size, for example, she repeats the one thing he already knows about her appearance. For in her previous letter she had elided the difference between her own physical presence and that of her poetry by claiming ‘I have a little shape – it would not crowd your Desk – nor make much Racket as the

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Mouse, that dents your Galleries –,’ while in her second exchange she had confessed: ‘My size felt small – to me –’ (LED, 2: 409, 405). Again relishing her own tininess in refusing a likeness, Dickinson then goes on to describe her hair and eyes in terms of unwanted leftovers, burr and dregs, thus inflecting her self-portrait with a characteristic delight in self-abasement. She reveals just enough to tantalize but not enough to satisfy. But more importantly, perhaps, she retains control over Higginson’s impression of her, directing his interpretation as well as his vision. It is not surprising, therefore, that Higginson often felt the distance in her forceful displays of intimacy. Significantly, approaching Dickinson’s letters in terms of this manipulation of intimacy and distance allows us to see more clearly how she toyed with the conventions of nineteenth-century epistolarity. Drawing on Janet Gurkin Altman’s influential theorization of the letter-form as one that ‘lies halfway between the possibility of total communication and the risk of no communication at all,’ Elizabeth Hewitt has recently suggested that Dickinson’s correspondence with Higginson reveals ‘how epistolary writing both protects the self from the intrusions of others, thereby intensifying the “warrant of secrecy,” at the same time that it eliminates such a warranty by reporting this secret to another.’11 Moving repeatedly between images of transcendent communion and inscrutable silence, often within the space of a single sentence, Dickinson seems to have been always conscious of the wider fantasies and anxieties her culture invested in letter-writing. ‘The formal requirements of the familiar letter interested Dickinson,’ as Hewitt observes, ‘precisely because they emphasize the distance between writer and recipient . . . Curiously, this emphasis on the protocols of letter-writing has the paradoxical effect of revealing the ways in which epistolary transit is a risky business.’12 Above all it is this ever-present prospect of miscommunication that Dickinson turned to her advantage when corresponding with Higginson, deliberately keeping him off-balance through her blurring of the lines between truthful and false revelation. The coyness of her physical self-description was one key way she developed for doing this. The riddling, aphoristic, and oblique quality of her salutations and signatures was another. Dickinson signed her seventh letter to Higginson ‘Your Gnome,’ for instance, a moniker which Higginson expressed some bafflement over (LED, 2: 424). ‘I cannot explain this extraordinary signature, substituted for the now customary “Your Scholar,” ’ he remarked in his 1891 essay on Dickinson’s letters, ‘unless she imagined her friend to be in some incredible and remote condition, imparting its strangeness to her’ (EDL, 449). Certainly, Higginson was not averse to ‘imparting . . . strangeness’ to Dickinson, often by commenting on the gnomic qualities of her poetry and prose (thus perhaps prompting her adoption of the title ‘Gnome’). ‘Sometimes I take out your letters & verses . . . and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write & that long months pass,’ he confessed in June 1869. ‘I should like to write to hear from you very often, but feel always timid lest what I write should be badly aimed and miss that fine edge of thought which you bear’ (LED, 2: 641). Higginson was puzzled too by her reclusion, saying it was hard for him to empathize with her solitary way of life, although he conceded that she would not fit very well into his busy public world: ‘It is hard [for me] to understand how you can live s[o alo]ne, with thoughts of such a [quali]ty coming up in you . . . Yet it isolates one anywhere to think beyond a certain point or have such luminous flashes as come to you – so perhaps the place does not make much difference’ (LED, 2: 461). Still, if Higginson was sometimes perplexed by the crystalline quality of Dickinson’s turn of phrase he was also clearly sensitive to it.

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Reading her letters to him, we quickly discover them as a source for many familiar and oft-quoted Dickinsonian soundbites. In a letter she sent Higginson in February 1863, for instance, while he was commanding a regiment of freedmen in South Carolina, she wrote: ‘I was thinking, today – as I noticed, that the “Supernatural” is only the Natural, disclosed –’ (LED, 2: 424). Dickinson’s imagination in this letter is evidently turning on the idea of immortality as she worries about Higginson’s possible death on the battlefield. Yet the line has an aphoristic quality which extends beyond its contextual meaning. Moving beyond his initial surprise at the ‘oblique angle’ of vision contained in this letter, Higginson would later recall that he found the contents of it ‘most refreshing in that clime of jasmines and mocking-birds’ where he first read it (EDL, 449).13 In her fourth letter to Higginson, written in July 1862, Dickinson meanwhile coined another of her now-famous aphorisms: ‘My Business is Circumference’ (LED, 2: 412). Importantly, it occurs in one of those frequent passages in her epistolary corpus where she is emphasizing her physical vulnerability: Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die . . . And for this, Preceptor, I shall bring you – Obedience – the Blossom from my Garden, and every gratitude I know. Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that – My Business is Circumference – An ignorance, not of Customs, but if caught with the Dawn – or the Sunset see me – Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, Sir, if you please, it afflicts me, and I thought that instruction would take it away. (LED, 2: 412) The much-discussed bon mot embedded in these lines has often been taken as a reference by Dickinson to her oblique poetic style, or a veiled allusion to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay on ‘Circles.’14 Yet, in context, Dickinson’s comment about circumference seems more obviously to reflect a sense of awkwardness and clumsiness – the ungainly alien ‘Kangaroo’ stumbling amidst the majesty of nature’s cycles. This inadequacy is, of course, at odds with the elegant economy of her language, suggesting a performance of affliction to match the performance of childlike innocence and promised obedience which precedes it. ‘My Business is Circumference’ makes a claim to truth and definite vocation, yet Dickinson deliberately couches it in ambivalence. She leaves unspecified the way in which ‘Circumference’ relates to her ‘ignorance,’ suggesting only that it is not an ignorance of etiquette or ‘custom’ but an otherness less easily defined, which catches her unawares at the rare moments in which she sees herself as she claims to believe others see her: a graceless interloper. Her self-presentation is undeniably controlled, directing Higginson to view her as alternately ailing patient, humble petitioner, and clumsy outsider, such that her vulnerability is subtly overcome through her command of these personae. Read together, however, the conjunction of ‘My Business is Circumference’ and ‘An Ignorance’ rather lacks the surefooted sense of poetic vocation that we might associate with the first four words alone. Dickinson seems to want Higginson to receive her aphoristic or gnomic statements with a degree of uncertainty and doubt as to their meaning. Indeed, her attraction to the aphoristic form undoubtedly lay in her desire to lay the status of truth open to question. Classically, the mode was associated with accurate concision. The Hellenistic meaning of the term was ‘definition,’ and carried implications of limit and boundary-setting. But by being paired with ‘ignorance,’ Dickinson’s self-reflexive aphorism on ‘Circumference’ can be seen to problematize its truth claim

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at the very moment at which it stands out as a memorable and quotable statement of truth. Here, then, as elsewhere, the gnomic quality of Dickinson’s language takes on some of the attributes of a riddle, although she could be scathing about the latter. In late 1870, for instance, she included the following short poem in the body of one of her letters to Higginson: ‘The Riddle that we guess / We speedily despise – / Not anything is stale so long / As Yesterday’s Surprise –’ (LED, 2: 480). These lines not only suggest Dickinson’s rather Keatsian irritation with explanation and her love of mystery, doubt, and epistemic uncertainty, they indicate the underlying intention of her aphorisms. For in pushing toward impenetrability, her dense axioms and oblique juxtapositions were seemingly designed to keep Higginson guessing, without offering him the satisfaction of ever feeling that he had fully or finally deciphered her meaning. Her epistolary statements were intended not so much to disguise truth but to render its very basis problematic. In this sense, then, Dickinson was ultimately closer to the playful, disruptive, and self-contradictory aphoristic tradition of writers like Emerson and Blake than those in the classical tradition, who would associate aphorism with self-evident truth or scientific and philosophic wisdom. Dickinson’s play of intimacy and distance both frustrated and suited Higginson, who continued to see her as something of a novelty – a perception that was not inconsiderably of her own making and, it seems, desire. Certainly, when Higginson introduced Dickinson’s letters to a public audience in the Atlantic Monthly five years after her death, he did it with a sense that he was revealing a delightful oddity to the world. ‘Few events in literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame,’ his essay on her began, ‘only more accentuated by the utterly recluse [sic] character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity’ (EDL, 444). Having established Dickinson’s reputation as ‘the Myth of Amherst’ for his readers, Higginson then introduced her letters to him as a means to a more intimate acquaintance with her eccentricity, claiming that no other examples from her ‘accessible correspondence . . . bring us quite so intimately near to the peculiar aroma of her nature’ (EDL, 444). Dickinson comes across here as a sort of speciality taste (even her handwriting is described as ‘peculiar’), though one that Higginson implies he is uniquely privileged to explicate, since Dickinson apparently chose him as ‘a literary counselor and confidant’ over many possible others (EDL, 444). Forestalling the suspicion that he might be betraying that confidence by publishing her letters, Higginson effectively presents it as his duty to satisfy the public’s curiosity, which he represents not as intrusiveness but rather as a just interest. ‘[I]t has been urged upon me very strongly that her readers have the right to know something more of this gifted and interesting woman,’ he declares (EDL, 444). Although he made their intimacy the basis for his publication of Dickinson’s letters, however, Higginson did admit the distance that he always felt from her, and confessed that it had not gone away during their first meeting in August 1870. ‘She was much too enigmatical a being for me to solve in an hour’s interview, and an instinct told me that the slightest attempt at direct cross-examination would make her withdraw into her shell,’ he recalled (EDL, 453). Indeed, his account of his interview with the poet confirms that cryptic apothegms were intrinsic to Dickinson’s everyday pattern of speech as well as her letters: ‘She went on talking constantly and saying, in the midst of narrative, things quaint and aphoristic. “Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?” “Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.” “I find

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ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy enough” ’ (EDL, 453). Dickinson, in short, maintained her highly constructed self-presentation in person too, and as such was consistent at least in the image she portrayed to Higginson. Unlike a riddle, Higginson recognized, an enigma does not disguise a truth and therefore cannot be solved, but rather maintains its mystery in the face of direct scrutiny. Higginson was thus compelled to acknowledge himself as powerless in controlling the dynamic of a relationship so different to the ones he was used to in his life as an army man. ‘I should have been most glad to bring it down to the level of simple truth,’ he observed, ‘but it was not altogether easy . . . Hence, even her letters to me show her mainly on the exaltée side . . . I could only sit still and watch as one does in the woods; I must name my bird without a gun’ (EDL, 453). If Dickinson’s letters to Higginson typically pivot on this tension between intimacy and distance, which he found both enticing and embarrassing, and which she deliberately crafted and enjoyed, then it was only partly a function of Dickinson’s writing style and scripted self-presentation. For this tension was also fostered by a mutual sense that they inhabited completely different worlds. Whenever Higginson traveled, for instance, Dickinson would write to him with a barely disguised sense of pique. Writing to him in late 1872, after he had spent several months in Europe, Dickinson begins with what feels like a clear reproach for his absence: ‘To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations though Friends are if possible an event more fair’ (LED, 2: 500). Higginson’s worldliness was, to Dickinson’s mind, something which got in the way of their relationship, and she often chastises him for forgetting about her in the rush of his busy and exciting life. ‘I often saw your name in illustrious mention and envied an occasion so abstinent to me,’ she adds in her 1872 note. ‘Thank you for having been to Amherst. Could you come again that would be far better – though the finest wish is the futile one’ (LED, 2: 500). Dickinson here explicitly juxtaposes her solitary private life with his bustling public one, and presents herself as pining for him while he had better things to do, though she characteristically ends by implying that this is a situation she quite enjoys. Certainly, she makes no attempt to disguise her possessiveness, including this short lyric in the body of the letter, after expressing her relief that he ‘met neither accident nor Death’: ‘Our own Possessions though our own / ’Tis well to hoard anew / Remembering the dimensions / Of Possibility’ (LED, 2: 500). Her own world, as she makes clear in the remainder of this missive, is far removed from his metropolitan environment: ‘When I saw you last, it was Mighty Summer – Now the Grass is Glass and the Meadows stucco, and “Still Waters” in the Pool where the Frog drinks’ (LED, 2: 501). Such images of atrophied stillness, which resonate with the images of physical paralysis Dickinson uses to depict herself elsewhere, provide a deliberate contrast to the exciting urban scenes that feel so distant from her own existence. In particular, Dickinson felt a very strong distance between herself and Higginson over the matter of war, which she was intensely aware of as a sphere in which she could not participate. It was after Higginson took up command of a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War that she sent him the letter containing the curious subscription ‘Your Gnome,’ for instance, a signature whose oddity makes some sense when read in relation to the deep sense of alienation she felt from his military life. This letter makes no mention of the cause he is fighting for or the troops he is leading. Dickinson’s chief concern, instead, is the possibility that his fighting may bereave her and she quickly turns the subject of war into a broader meditation on death and immortality, a topic about

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which she clearly had much more to say. Indeed, right from the outset, Dickinson mixes military terminology and cosmic language, claiming she suffered ‘an Exchange of Territory, or World’ when he went away to battle (LED, 2: 423). ‘War feels to me an oblique place,’ she confesses of her attitude toward his endeavors, before asking: ‘Should there be other Summers, would you perhaps come?’ (LED, 2: 423). Thus Dickinson both expresses her sense of estrangement from him, and affirms the bond between them. Indeed, enclosed with the letter was the following poem: The Soul unto itself Is an imperial friend Or the most agonizing Spy An Enemy could send Secure unto itself No treason it can fear Itself it’s Sovreign of itself The Soul should be in Awe (PED, 1: 529) Urging self-reliance and self-scrutiny, Dickinson here deliberately turns the vocabulary of war and espionage into a metaphor for interiority. In particular she implies a strong distrust of those surrounding Higginson, hinting in the second stanza that he may be at risk of ‘treason’ from his soldiers, if not from himself. But in any case the self-reflexive turn of her language leaves no room for other people. The community, camaraderie, and loyalty that Higginson might expect on the battlefield is deliberately excluded and opposed. Turning war into a metaphor for the triumph of the sovereign self, Dickinson directs Higginson away from his world and toward her own. There were, though, two subjects on which Dickinson recognized a genuinely shared interest and experience between Higginson and herself. The first was literature. The second was grief. In regard to the former, she repeatedly asked him for help and advice, sending him her poems and performing an exaggerated play of humble submission. She also offered advice, and sent him numerous books, as well as opinions on texts she had read, including his own essays and poems. One letter, sent in November 1871, effectively shows the lack of reserve Dickinson felt in expressing her views on literary matters. ‘I did not read [Joaquin] Miller because I could not care about him,’ she bluntly informed Higginson, before adding that: ‘Mrs. Hunt’s Poems are stronger than any written by Women since Mrs – Browning, with the exception of Mrs. Lewes . . . While Shakespeare remains literature is firm’ (LED, 2: 491). Just as Dickinson was quite confident in expressing her tastes to Higginson, she was also fiercely possessive over her writing, even as she would often ask him to ‘fracture’ and ‘set’ her poems. On one occasion, in August 1862, for instance, she proclaimed her unquestioning obedience, stating that ‘I shall observe your precept – though I don’t understand it always,’ only to directly follow with an assertion of independence: ‘[I] never consciously touch a paint, mixed by another person’ (LED, 2: 415). It is thus difficult to read Dickinson’s requests for help outside the framework of her confident self-fashioning and forthright literary criticism. Though she incessantly asked Higginson for advice, there is not much to suggest that she genuinely felt herself to be his literary inferior.

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On the subject of death and grief too, Dickinson was authoritative and eloquent. As William Merrill Decker has suggested, Dickinson claimed that ‘a letter always feels to me like immortality’ (in an 1869 note to Higginson) because ‘her correspondent’s absence prefigured death . . . Absence as death is the fundamental trope of her epistolary writing’ (LED, 2: 460).15 Thus, while the tone of her letters to Higginson may have become more melancholy and less playful in her final years, her preoccupation had long been with the psychological and epistemic uncertainties of loss. Sometime around October 1870, for example, Dickinson wrote an important letter to Higginson which focuses on the relationship between death, grief, and language. It was penned at least partly as a response to one of Higginson’s essays, entitled ‘A Shadow,’ which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1870. Later included in his book of reminiscences Oldport Days (1873), ‘A Shadow’ was a sentimental homage to the power of love, particularly of the maternal variety, in a world of sorrow and grief. Higginson had already asked Dickinson whether his essay had influenced the tone of her previous letter, and here she makes it clear that she had read the work, stating that: ‘I thought I spoke to you of the shadow – It affects me –’ (LED, 2: 481). But, as ever, Dickinson was reluctant to be pinned down to narrow explanations. This is, indeed, the letter which she begins with her disparaging four-line verse about ‘The Riddle that we guess,’ and she follows this brief poem with an appropriately gnomic statement that forges a suggestive link between style and theme: ‘The Risks of Immortality are perhaps its charm – A secure Delight suffers in enchantment’ (LED, 2: 480). This line is demanding rather than easily resolvable, and creates a parallel with the inscrutability of death through its own enigmatic form. Dickinson thus encodes the very real possibility of doubt into enchantment. She aligns uncertainty with the afterlife at the very same time as connecting it with aphoristic writing (as opposed to a riddle that is decipherable). Dickinson’s opening recognition of death in this letter then slips very quickly into a more extended meditation on loss and grief. The dead haunt Dickinson with precisely the same kind of suggestiveness that she values in poetic language, as they too encode the possibility of resurrection and reunion. But it is a possibility defined, as far as she is concerned, both by its insistent presence and by its inexplicable remoteness and incomprehensibility. The dead, she writes, ‘harrow like a Sunset, proved but not obtained’ (LED, 2: 481). The image of sunset implies something inevitable and manifestly present (a truth that is ‘proved’); yet it also hints at the lure of mystery and intangibility (a fact that cannot be ‘obtained’). The dead, therefore, ultimately lie beyond Dickinson’s reach, even as she entertains the hope of communing with them. ‘Tennyson knew this, “Ah Christ – if it be possible,” ’ Dickinson adds, an allusion to the British poet’s Maud: A Monodrama (1855), in which he too agonizes over the mysteries of the afterlife: ‘Ah God, that it were possible / For one short hour to see / The souls we loved, that they might tell us / What and where they be.’16 Like Tennyson, then, Dickinson recognized that uncertainty and loss of control are central to our experience of death and grief. Her distinctive turning of Tennyson’s lines, however, lies in the way in which she makes this uncertainty central to the ‘charm’ of ‘Immortality.’ Dickinson’s fear of death was sometimes expressed as a fear that death may not deliver this charm, but rather close down such suggestive possibility with unavoidable finality. ‘Experiment escorts us last –,’ she writes in the same letter to Higginson, ‘His

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pungent company / Will not allow an Axiom / An Opportunity –’ (LED, 2: 481). Like aphorism, axiom is a starting point for reasoning. In the classical word, an axiom was thought to define a self-evident truth. But for Dickinson, in the modern world both axioms and aphorisms call the very basis of truth into question. Her use of ‘Experiment’ in the first line seems distinctly ironic, since there is really little place for experiment in the ‘pungent company’ of death, whose rigidity and overwhelming presence allow no room for manoeuvre. This letter is important, then, partly because it offers an insight into the linguistic manoeuvres of Dickinson’s early correspondence with Higginson, and partly because it initiates a transition from Dickinson’s playful and posturing self-fashioning to a more melancholy and pensive preoccupation with death and grief. Although Dickinson never stopped asking Higginson to guide her literary efforts, she increasingly turned to him more as a friend, and there are some moments in her later letters which seem genuinely candid and tender.17 True, at least one of these letters, from February 1876, should make us a little skeptical of how to read this change in tone, for Dickinson writes, with the air of a challenge: ‘Candour – my preceptor – is the only wile. Did you not teach me that yourself’ (LED, 2: 548). Simultaneously denying artifice and daring Higginson to read sincerity as its opposite, Dickinson her belies her own knowing stance. Yet this is also a letter which Dickinson ends on a more straightforward note, saying with touching simplicity: ‘Thank you for speaking kindly / I often go Home in thought to you’ (LED, 2: 548). It is a letter, too, in which her obliqueness shows itself in melancholy rather than playfulness, as Dickinson’s imagination turns on the changing seasons and the cycle of rebirth: ‘You asked me if I like the cold – but it is warm now. A mellow Rain is falling. It won’t be ripe till April – How luscious is the dripping of February eaves!’ (LED, 2: 548). The tone is notably softer and the statements more transparent. The subject of grief, it would seem, is something she can share with Higginson, and it bonds them. This is strikingly apparent in her response to Higginson’s 1874 poem ‘Decoration,’ an elegy written in remembrance of Higginson’s fallen comrades in the Civil War. Dickinson first commented on this poem in late May 1874, in a letter in which she describes Higginson himself as a ‘Poem’ (LED, 2: 525). For her, what appears to have been so striking about ‘Decoration’ was the means it offered for bridging the distance she had previously felt from his battlefield experiences. Declaring that it ‘seemed like going Home, to see your beautiful thought,’ Dickinson asserted her kinship with him (LED, 2: 525). Higginson was clearly writing as a soldier addressing his fallen comrades, but Dickinson asks whether ‘it [is] intellect that the Patriot means when he speaks of his “Native Land?” ’: thus turning the loyal fighter into a mental warrior in such a way as to move their connection onto literary ground (LED, 2: 525). Dickinson remains somewhat awkward in this context. Later in the letter, for example, she writes that: ‘Existence has overpowered Books. Today, I slew a Mushroom –’ (LED, 2: 525). The deliberate bathos emerges all the more strongly in the light of Higginson’s noble and heroic military achievements. Once again, Dickinson is acutely aware that her own life seems parochial and uneventful when compared with Higginson’s ‘illustrious’ record. Yet the act of mourning gives her one crucial way of bridging that gap. Death and grief are subjects she understands, and about which she is confident to comment. Dickinson would go on to refer to ‘Decoration’ three more times in the course of her correspondence with Higginson, each time making it relevant to her personal experiences of loss. Thus she next mentioned it after the death of her father in July 1874,

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when she wrote to Higginson asking: ‘Your Beautiful Hymn, was it not prophetic? It has assisted the Pause of Space which I call “Father” ’ (LED, 2: 528). In June 1877, she again wrote a letter to Higginson deeply preoccupied with death, loss, and the preciousness of time, and mentioned that she had been ‘re-reading your “Decoration” ’ (LED, 2: 583). And the last time she alluded to the piece was in the penultimate letter she ever sent him, in the spring of 1886 – a reply to Higginson’s inquiry as to whether she had heard of the death of Helen Hunt Jackson. Dickinson begins by directly alluding to the fifth stanza of Higginson’s poem before fulsomely praising his literary talents: ‘What an Elegy!’ (LED, 2: 903). It was clearly a text which not only stuck in her mind, but appealed to her more as a general meditation on loss and mourning than a specific tribute to fallen soldiers. This was, of course, not a new theme for Dickinson. As early as June 1866 she had referred to immortality as her ‘Flood Subject’ in a letter to Higginson (LED, 2: 454). But it became more central to her correspondence with him as they both grew older and more experienced in grief. Ultimately, Dickinson’s fascination with the unknowable aspects of death, and her emphasis on the ‘charm’ of immortality, is one way of understanding the enigmatic tone of her letters and her love of confounding aphorisms. The often baffling tone of Dickinson’s early correspondence with Higginson comes from her deliberate and uncomfortable juxtaposition of intimacy and distance, a juxtaposition that becomes less jarring and more melancholy when Dickinson moves toward a genuinely confessional friendship with him. It is not entirely clear from his published statements whether Higginson felt the change. Introducing Dickinson’s letters to a general audience for the first time in the Atlantic Monthly, he focused heavily on her early letters and let them set the stage for a poet he wished people to think brilliantly and intriguingly enigmatic. ‘[S]he was always . . . assuming on my part a preceptorship which it is almost needless to say did not exist,’ he writes there (EDL, 450). Had Higginson remembered one of the last letters Dickinson wrote to him, however, as he surely must have, he could have been left in little doubt as to how a shared sense of mortality had brought them closer. Reflecting on Higginson’s poetic tribute to Helen Hunt Jackson, ‘To the Memory of H. H.’ (which had just appeared in the Century Magazine), Dickinson wrote in late April 1886 that: The beautiful Sonnet confirms me – Thank you for confiding it – The immortality she gave We borrowed at her Grave – For just one Plaudit famishing, The Might of Human Love – (LED, 2: 904) ‘Did you not give her to me?’ Dickinson concludes this letter by asking – a question, unlike so many of her earlier ones to Higginson, designed not to perplex or unsettle, but to assert a fundamental reciprocity (LED, 2: 904).

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Eberwein, Dickinson, 49. Messmer, A Vice for Voices, 3. Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson, 199. Smith, Rowing in Eden, 18. For a sample of the range of scholarship on the Dickinson–Higginson correspondence see: Wells, ‘The Soul’s Society’; Rodier, ‘What is inspiration?’; Asahina, ‘Fascination is the

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

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Absolute of Clime’; Hoppe, ‘Personality and Poetic Election’; and various essays in Eberwein and MacKenzie, Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters. Dickinson’s posthumous editor Mabel Loomis Todd writes in a journal entry from October 1891: ‘Those [letters] to Mr. Higginson are not of a private nature. As to the “innocent and confiding” nature of them, Austin smiles. He says Emily definitely posed . . . [since] he knows her thoroughly, through and through as no-one else ever did’ (quoted in Bingham, Ancestor’s Brocades, 166). Higginson, ‘Letter to a Young Contributor,’ 402. See Dickinson, Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, c. 1879, in The Letters, 2: 649. See Dickinson, Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, July 1862, in ibid. 2: 415. Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Lectures, 23. Altman, Epistolarity, 43; Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 144. William Merrill Decker has also usefully discussed the feeling of distance from the addressee that haunts Dickinson’s epistolary displays of intimacy (see Epistolary Practices, 151). Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 149, 148. Higginson is playing here on the title of a poem Dickinson included with the letter – ‘The Robin.’ Even during her lifetime Higginson took care to extract and record those of Dickinson’s sayings that he found striking. See, for instance, Letter to Mary Higginson, August 1870, in Dickinson, The Letters, 2: 473–6. See, for example: Estes, ‘Out Upon Circumference’; Novich, ‘Emily Dickinson’s Religion’; New, ‘Difficult Writing, Difficult God’; and Lachman, ‘Time-Space and Audience.’ Decker, Epistolary Practices, 160. Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama, in Selected Poems, 258. A shared sense of loss also brought Dickinson closer to Higginson’s wife Mary. When the latter’s father died in early 1876, Dickinson began to offer regular epistolary comfort and advice that lasted until Mary’s own death in September 1877. See Wagner-Martin, Emily Dickinson, 149–50.

Works Cited Altman, J. G. (1982), Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Asahani, M. (2005), ‘ “Fascination is the Absolute of Clime”: Reading Dickinson’s Correspondence with Higginson as Naturalist,’ Emily Dickinson Journal, 14: 103–19. Bingham, M. T. (1967), Ancestor’s Brocades: The Literary Discovery of Emily Dickinson and the Editing and Publication of her Letters and Poems, New York: Dover. Decker, W. M. (1998), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Dickinson, E. (1958), The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., ed. T. H. Johnson and T. Ward, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dickinson, E. (1998), The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Varorium Edition, 3 vols., ed. R. W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cited parenthetically as PED. Eberwein, J. D. (1985), Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Eberwein, J. D., and C. MacKenzie, eds. (2009), Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters: Critical Essays, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Emerson, R. W. (1983), Essays and Lectures, ed. J. Porte, New York: Library of America. Estes, D. C. (1979), ‘ “Out upon Circumference”: Emily Dickinson’s Search for Location,’ Essays in Literature, 6: 207–17. Farr, J. (1994), The Passion of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Higginson, T. W. (1862), ‘Letter to a Young Contributor,’ Atlantic Monthly, 9: 401–11. Higginson, T. W. (1891), ‘Emily Dickinson’s Letters,’ Atlantic Monthly, 68: 444–56. Cited parenthetically as EDL. Hoppe, J. (2013), ‘Personality and Poetic Election in the Preceptual Relationship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 55: 348–87. Lachman, L. (2003), ‘Time-Space and Audience in Dickinson’s Vacuity Scenes,’ Emily Dickinson Journal, 12: 80–106. Leonard, D. N. (1984), ‘Emily Dickinson’s Religion: An Ablative Estate,’ Christian Scholar’s Review, 13: 333–48. Messmer, M. (2001), A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. New, E. (1986), ‘Difficult Writing, Difficult God: Emily Dickinson’s Poems beyond Circumference,’ Religion and Literature, 18: 1–29. Rodier, K. (1995), ‘ “What is inspiration?”: Emily Dickinson, T. W. Higginson and Maria White Lowell,’ The Emily Dickinson Journal, 4: 20–43. Smith, M. N. (1992), Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, Austin: University of Texas Press. Tennyson, A. (2007), Selected Poems, ed. C. Ricks, London: Penguin. Wagner-Martin, L. (2013), Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wells, M. A. (1986), ‘ “The Soul’s Society”: Dickinson and Colonel Higginson,’ in R. B. Nathan (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English Speaking World, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 221–9.

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41 ‘SOUL FRIENDS’: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE AND LADY BYRON IN CORRESPONDENCE Beth L. Lueck

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n the salutation to a letter dated 5 November 1856, written from London while en route to Paris, Harriet Beecher Stowe addresses Lady Byron as ‘Dearest Friend’ (LBV, 253). And after discussing their mutual efforts to assist a struggling artist, the American author then concludes, in a passionate valediction: ‘Farewell! I love you, my dear friend, as never before, with an intense feeling I cannot easily express’ (LBV, 254). Since their first meeting, some three years before, and through the long periods of subsequent time spent apart, Stowe’s valediction had evolved in emotional intensity from the pious – ‘I sign myself yours in the truest love – the love of Christ’ – to the warm but friendly ‘Affectionately yours,’ to the emotional outpouring of this letter.1 In Lady Byron’s own letters to her American friend she had started with the formal valediction, ‘In that confidence I am yours most truly’ and evolved to ‘Yours affectionately’ during the same period of time (LBV, 211, 215). By 1859, moreover, the friendship had further deepened, and Stowe described Lady Byron as her ‘soul friend,’ an expression with which they both seemed comfortable.2 But how did these two public women of the mid-nineteenth century grow to become such fast friends when they spent most of the time separated by the Atlantic Ocean? What brought them together when they were almost a generation apart in age? And what role did their correspondence play in this relationship, beyond reflecting the evolving nature of their friendship? Scholars now tend to focus almost exclusively on the explosive years of 1869–70 when discussing the connection between the American literary lion and the British aristocrat, even though by 1869 the latter had been dead for almost a decade. For in these years the simultaneous September 1869 publication of Stowe’s ‘The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life’ in the Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan’s Magazine, was rapidly followed by the 482-page Lady Byron Vindicated, a History of the Byron Controversy, from its Beginnings in 1816 to the Present Time (1870). Although the formative years of their friendship lack the fireworks of this later period, however, there is much to learn about each individual from their early correspondence, the foundations of their friendship, and the role that letters themselves played in their relationship. More particularly, understanding what happened between them in the 1850s helps to answer two key questions: what kind of friendship was this, and how did they become so intimate so quickly?

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When Stowe met Lady Byron during her first trip to Great Britain in 1853, the poet’s widow was only one of a number of ‘distinguished guests’ at a luncheon given by abolitionist Elisabeth Reid – the writer and art critic Anna Jameson, whose work Stowe greatly admired, was also present (SMFL, 2: 106). But it is Lady Byron who is accorded the most attention in Stowe’s 1854 travelogue Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, where she describes meeting both women for the first time. For the American author who had loved Byron’s poetry in her youth, Lady Byron was ‘a slight figure, formed with exceeding delicacy, and her whole form, face, dress, and air unite to make an impression of a character singularly dignified, gentle, pure, and yet strong’ (SMFL, 2: 103). Her conversation on religion in England, Stowe said, touched her ‘inner soul’ deeply, and she remarked upon Lady Byron’s ‘consistent, active benevolence,’ as exemplified by her support of the former slaves William and Ellen Craft (SMFL, 2: 106). In a later description of the same meeting, meanwhile, Stowe offered further details, commenting on the Englishwoman’s bright eyes and ‘silvery-white hair,’ ‘the transparent purity of her complexion,’ and the ‘pearly whiteness’ of her hands, the latter one of the hallmarks of a Victorian lady (LBV, 206). According to Stowe, Lady Byron’s views on American slavery – the topic of the day among this group of British abolitionists – were well-informed; her morality on the same issue ‘far higher and deeper than the common sentimentalism of the day’ (LBV, 207). Evidently, the British aristocrat stood out in Stowe’s mind, even among a group of equally benevolent peers. At their first meeting, Lady Byron was sixty-one, nineteen years older than Stowe. But both were celebrities, albeit of a different kind. While the American woman was being lionized on her 1853 tour as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a runaway bestseller in both Great Britain and in the United States, the Englishwoman was leading an only comparatively quieter life of charitable and abolitionist work as the pious widow of the infamous Romantic poet. Little about their first meeting, or their first letters, might suggest the intensity of the friendship that was to develop between them, much less the impact it would have on British and American readers and critics more than a decade later. Yet through their visits and correspondence over the next six years their friendship deepened, with each woman offering the other advice and solace over the difficulties of the public position each one occupied. On a personal level, Stowe’s devotion to Lady Byron, in particular, became passionate, and even imprudent, during these years. Focusing on one key moment in the early period of their epistolary relations – the late summer and autumn 1856 – can then help us to understand why. But to fully understand the role played by correspondence in the friendship of these two women, we first need to consider the more general role played by letter-writing in Stowe’s private and public life as an author. In the early 1830s, for example, when she was in her twenties, Stowe had initiated a series of circular letters that would travel from Cincinnati, where she was living with her parents, to other relations in Illinois and Ohio, then east to family members in New York and Connecticut, and back again to the West. This ‘serial epistolary form,’ as Joan Hedrick has called it, kept the widely scattered family together, informed as they were of individual births, deaths, marriages, and day-to-day family life.3 Two decades later, meanwhile, Stowe used the epistolary form to structure much of Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, combining the folksy tone of familial letters with an informative narrative about her travels in Great Britain, France, Switzerland, and Germany that included detailed commentaries on the people she met, tourist sites she visited, and artworks she viewed. Travel letters were a well-established

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genre by this point, of course, and there is some evidence that Stowe based her itinerary itself, and the resulting book, on Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s earlier Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841).4 But as earlier critics have noted, Sunny Memories combines parlor literature with the emerging high culture of the 1850s, capturing a moment in American society when a growing middle class was ready to travel abroad and eager to read a guide to the European Grand Tour.5 As well as gesturing toward this emergent audience, Stowe’s 1854 travelogue also set the collaborative tone for many of her future books, whether in its use of narrative embedded in epistolary form, its use of entries lifted wholesale from her brother Charles Beecher’s journal, or its use of public speeches given by her husband, Calvin Stowe, in response to accolades for the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sunny Memories, in this regard, reflects a period of expanding literary and personal horizons for Stowe. But by contrast, apart from securing the international copyright to her second abolition novel, Dred, Stowe’s second tour abroad in 1856 was devoted to the author’s recouping her health after an intensive period of writing.6 Rather more than the usual sightseeing, then, the trip was dedicated in part to renewing friendships that had originated in Stowe’s first tour, with the American author spending time with two particular Englishwomen she had met three years earlier: Lady Byron and the Duchess of Sutherland. Extended periods were set aside to visit these aristocratic friends, both in London and Richmond (for Lady Byron) and at Dunrobin Castle in the Scottish Highlands (for the Sutherlands), but the former seems to have taken priority. Indeed, Stowe later commented that: ‘The hope of once more seeing Lady Byron was one of the brightest anticipations held out to me in this journey’ (LBV, 212). Between August and December 1856, for example, during which time Stowe and her family only visited Dunrobin for a fortnight in September, Stowe and Lady Byron exchanged at least thirteen letters and had five or more meetings in person, always at one of Lady Byron’s homes due to her chronic ill health. This intense period of visiting and correspondence, rather than serving as evidence of the two women becoming genuinely intimate friends, has been interpreted cynically by some critics, who argue that Lady Byron manipulated a naïve Stowe in order to ensnare her in a plot to destroy Lord Byron’s reputation.7 Any close examination of the Stowe–Byron correspondence, and the other documentary evidence we have of their meetings, must therefore attempt to throw light on which of these interpretations is closer to the truth. For this reason, I shall focus on four distinct groups of letters that demonstrate the growing relationship between the two women: three letters exchanged in a week in August 1856; four letters written in mid-October; and four more letters penned in late October through mid-December, including those written both before and after Lady Byron revealed the secret of her broken marriage to her friend. The intensity of a final letter posted in June 1857, the day before Stowe sailed for the United States, then marks the apex of this phase of their friendship. The first group of letters identified above began in a flurry just after Stowe’s arrival in England. Having sailed from the United States on 1 August 1856, her party must have scarcely arrived before notes began to fly back and forth to Lady Byron. The first of these letters, dated 13 August 1856, comes from Lady Byron and briefly reads: ‘I will be indebted to you for our meeting, as I am barely to leave my room. It is not a time for small personalities, if they could ever exist with you; and, dressed or undressed, I shall hope to see you after two o’clock’ (LBV, 212). The note is signed, ‘Yours very

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truly, A. I. [Anne Isabella] Noel Byron,’ the subscription Lady Byron almost always used for her letters to Stowe, who, in turn, usually signed herself ‘HBS’ (LBV, 213). Written with Lady Byron’s fine penmanship, this otherwise cursory missive implies that a meeting between the two had already been arranged in advance, and the visit duly took place at Lady Byron’s house on Cambridge Terrace in Regents Park. ‘I found Lady Byron in her sick-room,’ Stowe later recalled, her entrée into this private domain confirming the suggestion in the lines about being ‘dressed or undressed’ that a degree of intimacy already existed between them (LBV, 213). According to Stowe’s sister, Mary Beecher Perkins, who accompanied her on this trip abroad, ‘H[arriet] enjoyed the call very much.’8 This visit was not merely a pleasant diversion, however, for the conversation of Stowe and Lady Byron apparently covered matters public as well as personal. Lady Byron’s next letter, for example, dated 15 August, speaks of a plan to get the Scottish publishers W. & R. Chambers to put out a book of letters relating to violence between proslavery and antislavery groups that was occurring in Kansas, Missouri, which in turn would help the British public to be ‘better prepared’ for the appearance of Dred (LBV, 215). ‘There is always in England a floating fund of sympathy for what is above the every-day sordid cares of life,’ Lady Byron writes, and these ‘better feelings’ may now turn to abolition (LBV, 215). Thus Stowe’s new book might bring about ‘a deeper abolition than any legislative one, – the abolition of the heart’ (LBV, 215). Prefiguring Stowe’s later description of Lady Byron’s sick-room as ‘a telegraphic station whence her vivid mind was flashing out all over the world,’ this letter, then, offers a sweeping, sympathetic take on the cause of racial emancipation (LBV, 213). But it also ends on a more personal note. ‘I have been obliged to give up exertion again, but hope soon to be able to call, and make the acquaintance of your daughters,’ Lady Byron observes, before signing off with a valediction that suggests a slightly more intimate tone than the previous note: ‘Yours affectionately’ (LBV, 215). Although there are no extant letters from Stowe written during this week, we might infer from Lady Byron’s half of the correspondence that the social call anticipated in her letter of 15 August did not take place, perhaps due to her ill health or because her American friend had a change of plans. For Lady Byron’s next letter, dated 19 August, begins abruptly, without even a salutation: ‘So grievously disappointed that I must try to see you by going to Town tomorrow – but as it would add much to my fatigue to go to Russell Square – I hope it will not inconvenience you to call.’9 This was evidently to be Stowe’s first visit to her friend in this location because Lady Byron includes her address and offers her visitor some helpful directions. There is no record of whether Stowe took her nineteen-year-old twin daughters Hatty and Eliza with her on this social call, but there is a great deal more information available about their third meeting, on 23 August 1856, when Lady Byron hosted almost all of Stowe’s traveling party for lunch. This visit is not only discussed by Stowe herself in Lady Byron Vindicated; it was described at length in a newsy letter that Mary Beecher Perkins penned to her husband back home in Connecticut. According to both sources, it was most decidedly a family affair: Harriet, Calvin, the twins, and Mary were the American guests, while Lady Byron’s granddaughter, Lady Anabella (daughter of the Byrons’ only child, Ada), her governess, and a Mr. and Mrs. Noel represented the hostess’s relatives. Interestingly, national differences seem to have formed a mild undercurrent at this meeting, at least for Mary Perkins, who in her letter home disparages the Byrons’

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parlor (‘not nearly as richly furnished as half the parlors in Hartford’) and notes the order of precedence into the dining room.10 Unfortunately, though, she was more interested in the food served (turbot, roast mutton, tongue, fried veal, and even ‘jelly apricots & tarts’) than in the conversation, for she had nothing to say about the latter.11 After lunch ‘Lady Annabell [sic] gave us a little music,’ she merely noted, before adding that when the party broke up they departed ‘all feeling we had a very pleasant time.’12 For her part, too, Stowe was won over by the pleasures of the occasion, although she seems to have viewed its social dynamics through a slightly more forgiving lens than her sister. Thus, in Lady Byron Vindicated, Stowe uses the lunch to illustrate ‘the unselfishness which was so marked a trait’ with Lady Byron (as evinced by her entertaining them when she was in poor health) and commends their host on her ‘tenderness for all young people,’ noting how she conversed with the Stowe girls individually and suggested what each one might enjoy doing on a first visit to London (LBV, 218). As a result of this family luncheon, Stowe and Lady Byron seem to have cemented their renewed friendship, since their fourth meeting apparently took place the very next evening. According to a letter from Lady Byron written on 25 August, and Stowe’s supporting description of the visit, the circle of guests present this time was much wider.13 Lady Byron, for example, notes in her missive that because of the ‘mixed party’ she had hosted the night before she had been prevented from inquiring ‘more deeply’ into her friend’s views.14 Indeed, the party had been ‘mixed’ not only because it involved individuals beyond the Stowe and Byron family, but because both Christians and Jews were present, with Lady Byron specifically remarking in her note that the father of a Miss Goldsmith, one of the guests, was ‘the most munificent of the Jewish Millionaires to Christian Institutions.’15 Nonetheless, the Stowes and the Byrons still had the opportunity to bond: Harriet’s eighteen-year-old son, Henry, and Lord Ockham, Lady Byron’s grandson, apparently got on famously. ‘It was pleasant to see your Son & my Grandson so cordial,’ Lady Byron observed.16 Thus with these frequent visits and exchanges of letters (the latter presumably on both sides, although Stowe’s are lost) the friendship between Stowe and Lady Byron that had been initiated three years earlier had, in less than a fortnight, quickly become both more widely shared and more intimate. Shortly after this dinner the Stowe party traveled north to Scotland for their muchanticipated visit to Dunrobin, and then, following a two-week stay at the castle of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, the family returned to London. This return, which occasioned two more series of letters between Stowe and Lady Byron, along with more meetings, would eventually culminate in the revelations about Lord Byron that were imparted to Stowe in early November. In each of these two groups of letters between mid-October and mid-December 1856 we hear more directly from Stowe, either because she wrote more letters during this period or simply because more of her letters have survived. The first group of these letters dates from 15–18 October 1856, when, for part of the time, Stowe was a guest at Stoke Park near Windsor Castle, the home of Lady Mary Howard and her husband, the reform politician Henry Labouchere, Lord Taunton. Interestingly, this phase of the Stowe–Byron correspondence shows a more even balance between the political and the personal, perhaps because the two women were now more at ease in expressing their opinions. In a letter dated 15 October, for example, Lady Byron, wanting to send a check for the relief of the ‘sufferers in Kansas,’ declares that she is anxious to see her friend in order to learn how best to help them.17

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To this appeal, Stowe responded with an outpouring of feelings. ‘How glad I was to see your handwriting once more how more than glad I should be to see you. I do long to see you,’ she wrote back a day later.18 The repetition in her phrasing here and the intensifying emotion underscores her need for Lady Byron’s presence, and this pattern continues when Stowe adds: ‘I have so much to say – so much to ask & need to be refreshed with a sense of a congenial & sympathetic soul.’19 Importantly, Stowe is using the word ‘sympathy’ in two ways in this letter: firstly, in the personal sense (Lady Byron is a ‘sympathetic soul’ because she shares her friend’s feelings); and secondly, in a political sense (to describe Lady Byron’s understanding of and feeling for those who suffer for the cause of abolition). But the political ultimately becomes personal when Stowe admits, in regard to a critical attack on her second novel in the Edinburgh Review, that she is ‘not insensible to the fiery darts which thus fly around me.’20 The public controversy generated by her work is one that clearly calls for a ‘congenial & sympathetic soul’ who can comfort and advise her.21 Just as the American woman is hurt by the ‘fiery darts’ of the Edinburgh Review, Lady Byron has suffered ever since leaving her husband due to the insinuations of those who admired him and his poetry. If Lady Byron chooses to ‘step to my side,’ she might share the criticism that Dred has attracted, Stowe notes.22 But as a counterpoint to this fear Stowe also recalls the ‘great consolation’ she had received at Dunrobin from the duchess, a ‘noble wide hearted & deep hearted woman.’23 Lady Byron’s response was as much as a budding friend could wish for. Recalling the abuse she herself had suffered through a lifetime of criticism, she refers to it as ‘holy water,’ implying that she has been paradoxically blessed by the barbs of her critics.24 Earlier in Stowe’s career, she recalls, ‘[w]hen you were overwhelmed by multitudes who . . . “ignorantly worshipped,” I stood aloof,’ but, she pledges, in an echo of Stowe’s own words: ‘Now let me be “by your side.” ’25 Offering some specific advice about how to handle the reviewer’s criticism, Lady Byron then adds: ‘Do not be susceptible to these “darts,” my dear friend. No one can tell you better than I that there is an invisible shield which turns them away.’26 Tellingly, in her own brushes with notoriety as a result of her private yet unfortunately public marriage, Lady Byron had maintained a dignified silence toward the gossip that surrounded her (though she had confided the truth, as she saw it, to her intimates).27 Yet this is not quite what she means by suggesting the adoption of an ‘invisible shield’ here. Instead, in Stowe’s rather different situation – concerning a published novel and the private suffering she was experiencing because of journalistic criticism – the widow is advising speech, not silence; even to the point of telling the American author in which British periodicals she should respond. Public speech, then, requires a public response. And should those ‘fiery darts’ still prick her friend, Lady Byron offers herself as a kind of ‘invisible shield,’ promising to stand by her friend, both in private and in public, by sending a check for the relief of Kansas abolitionists and by writing a letter (at Stowe’s request) to publicize her support of them. With Stowe and Lady Byron having now conjoined their sympathies both politically and personally, the stage was thus set for the third phase of their 1856 correspondence – a group of letters surrounding a last meeting before Stowe left for Paris and then Italy, that includes missives written both before and after Lady Byron’s disclosures to her friend about her husband. In these letters there is, from both writers, a sense of urgency as their parting becomes imminent. Less than a week after Lady

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Byron’s letter to Stowe pledging to ‘be by your side’ in the critical debate over Dred, Stowe tells her friend that she is reading St. Augustine and finding great strength in this prayer: ‘Let my heart calm itself in Thee – Let the great sea of my heart that swelleth with waves calm itself in thee.’28 Almost half of this letter is devoted to Stowe’s desire to meet her friend. ‘I don’t want to be tiresome but I do want to see you so much that I can’t help feeling as if you must want to see me,’ she writes, and in order to find a time for a private visit, she accordingly details her schedule for the next week ‘to see if there may not be found an hour when I can talk with you alone about a good many things.’29 Crucially, a letter such as this belies the claim of some critics that Stowe later wrote Lady Byron Vindicated either in ‘a self-publicizing attempt to regain her flagging popularity’ or out of ‘her naïve hero-worship of this lady of the European aristocracy,’ for there is real emotional urgency here.30 Tellingly, the letter is signed, ‘Very affectionately as ever Yours,’ and two days later Lady Byron expressed her own disappointment that a visit had not taken place, declaring: ‘You have only to say what time you can give me & you will find me Gratefully yours A. I. Noel Byron.’31 In fact, as it turned out, there would be two more visits before Stowe’s departure. The first was easily accomplished, since Harriet and her sister were able to have lunch with Lady Byron at her Richmond home on 27 October on the way from London to Eversley, where they were to visit the novelist and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley and his wife. And, by prior arrangement, on their return trip they agreed to stay overnight with Lady Byron since, as Stowe later recalled, ‘she said she had a subject of importance on which she wished to converse with me alone’ (LBV, 232). Along with ‘two ladies of her most intimate friends’ who viewed their hostess ‘with a sort of worship,’ the Stowes had lunch, after which Harriet and Lady Byron retired for their private conversation (LBV, 233). In the context of a publisher’s plan for a new edition of Byron’s poetry, along with renewed gossip about his marriage, the object of this tête-à-tête was apparently for Byron’s widow to ask Stowe’s advice about whether to reveal the truth of why she had left him one year after their wedding. Noting in Lady Byron Vindicated that she had previously heard at least the outline of the story from one of Lady Byron’s friends, Stowe was apparently not shocked to hear that she had left her husband due to his incestuous affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.32 Indeed, even without the detailed retrospective account she provided in 1870, Stowe’s considered reaction to this disclosure from her friend is evident in her correspondence from this period; and especially in two letters, one that Stowe wrote just after their meeting and another sent six weeks later from Paris. Before parting from Lady Byron, Stowe had requested ‘some memoranda of [the] dates and outlines of the general story’ so as to enable her to better respond to her confidant’s request for advice (LBV, 252). Her first letter after leaving, dated 5 November 1856 and written from London, then addresses Lady Byron as ‘Dearest Friend’ and opens abruptly: ‘I return these [memoranda]. They have held mine eyes waking!’ (LBV, 253). Moreover, the archaic, almost biblical diction of ‘mine eyes’ is followed by a pair of exclamations: ‘How strange! how unaccountable!’ (LBV, 253). But Stowe is not letting her emotions overwhelm her here, for she immediately goes on to inquire whether Lady Byron ever consulted a doctor about her husband (suggesting he suffered from a ‘nervous pathlogy’), before noting that since she is leaving for the Continent in two days, ‘my purpose to-night is not to write you fully what I think of this matter. I am going to write to you from Paris more at leisure’ (LBV, 253). What is more, the

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conclusion to this letter, although extensive and passionate, serves as an affirmation of friendship, rather than an expression of bewilderment at Lady Byron’s scandalous revelation: ‘I love you, my dear friend, as never before, with an intense feeling I cannot easily express. God bless you!’ (LBV, 254). Precisely because they viewed each other as women in the public eye who needed to stand together against the barbs of critics, as their earlier exchanges suggest, Lady Byron’s confession seems to have brought the two even closer together, with the American now reassuring her friend of her devotion and assistance.33 As promised, a letter with a fuller consideration of her friend’s request for advice was then penned six weeks later from Paris. ‘I have thought often and deeply,’ Stowe writes on the subject of their last conversation together (LBV, 254). Immediately after the revelation she had wanted to urge Lady Byron to tell the world the truth about her husband, but following an all-night conversation with her sister, who counseled against it, she now apparently wants time to consider the question more carefully. ‘I have changed my mind somewhat,’ she succinctly states, and suggests that the facts remain hidden for the moment: ‘Considering the peculiar circumstances of the case, I could wish that the sacred veil of silence, so bravely thrown over the past, should never be withdrawn during the time that you remain with us’ (LBV, 255). This kind of ‘invisible shield’ would, of course, continue the self-abnegation that had characterized Lady Byron’s life up until then. Stowe was aware that intimates of the poet’s widow knew the truth; one of them had, after all, told her an outline of the story even before Lady Byron’s disclosure. But for Stowe, this was not evidence of Lady Byron’s hypocrisy – of her pretending to keep silent while actually telling people privately – because she understood the value of female friendship: she understood, in other words, that many women would tell such a story to their closest friends in order to seek advice and support, yet not tell the tale publicly, in print or otherwise. Stowe’s letter from Paris thus counsels a third option besides silence or exposure: ‘Leave all with some discreet friends, who, after both have passed from earth, shall say what was due to justice’ (LBV, 255). Importantly, Stowe’s logic in suggesting this course is clear, but her language and syntax are tortured. Given ‘how low, how unworthy, the judgments of this world are,’ she writes, ‘I would not that what I so much respect, love, and revere should be placed within reach of its harpy claw, which pollutes what it touches’ (LBV, 255). The passive construction and the awkward noun clause here reflect Stowe’s prioritizing of her love and respect for Lady Byron, and attempt to contrast the reverence that she feels for her with the ‘harpy claw’ of the unworthy. The image of this ‘claw’ is perhaps too vivid: one is led to imagine the talons of these critics sinking into the pure flesh of the victim in a far more horrifying way than the ‘fiery darts’ earlier flung at Stowe herself. Nonetheless, Stowe assures Lady Byron that justice will one day prevail, and appropriately quotes from the Bible: ‘ “There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known” ’ (LBV, 255). Here, as elsewhere, then, both women – as ‘kindred spirits in righteousness,’ to borrow the words of Alice Crozier – look to the next world for judgment and justice.34 Indeed, in closing, Stowe, after again commenting that her thoughts are now ‘different from what they were since first I heard that strange, sad history,’ offers a valediction that is both sweet and sad in its gesture toward the afterlife: ‘Meanwhile, I love you ever, whether we meet again on earth or not. Affectionately yours, H. B. S.’ (LBV, 255).

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Given Lady Byron’s delicate health – now sixty-four, she was suffering from lung cancer – Stowe was well aware that each visit or letter might be the last. Yet the friends did meet at least once more, on Stowe’s last day in London before she sailed for home in June 1857. Stowe describes this final visit in a letter written to her daughters in Paris, where she had decided to leave them for a few more months to continue their education. ‘I spent the day before leaving . . . with Lady Byron,’ she noted. ‘She is lovelier than ever, and inquired kindly about you both.’35 The fairly brief mention here seems almost casual, but Stowe’s letter to Lady Byron herself, written three days earlier, is an outpouring of love to her ‘soul friend.’ ‘I left you with a strange sort of yearning throbbing feeling – you make me feel quite as I did years ago a sort of girlishness quite odd for me,’ Stowe exclaims at one point.36 The emotion she describes here is intensely somatic, with almost sexual undertones, and as such suggests that by this stage Stowe and Lady Byron had entered into that ‘female world of love and ritual’ that Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued increasingly defined the relationships between women in this period (DC, 53). ‘Intense bonds of love and intimacy bound together those women who, offering one another aid and sympathy, shared . . . stressful moments,’ Smith-Rosenberg writes. ‘These bonds were often physical as well as emotional. An undeniably romantic and even sensual note frequently marked female relationships . . . throughout the stages of a woman’s life’ (DC, 71). Stowe’s passionate response to leaving her friend is clearly reminiscent of this ‘world of love,’ then, and what is more it also invokes the ‘rituals’ associated with such female friendships. Describing how she experiences ‘a strange longing to send you something,’ and telling her friend of her ‘weakness for your pretty parian things,’ Stowe goes on to list the pieces of bisque porcelain she is sending Lady Byron, probably with this letter: ‘[A] cup made of primroses – a funny little pitcher quite large enough for cream & a little vase for violets & primroses – which will be lovely together.’37 Such an exchange of gifts, whether in person or in the form of packages sent through the mail, often characterized close female friendships of the period. As Jane Silvey has recently shown, for instance, the exchange of gifts, alongside regular letters and visits, similarly helped to maintain the close relationship between Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Ward across the space of the Atlantic Ocean.38 In her own letter of June 1857, Stowe explicitly spells out the intention of such presents: ‘When you use [them] think of me. That I love you more than I can say.’39 In an odd sort of way the young Harriet Beecher Stowe who was once so passionate about Byron’s poetry – and who was so dejected when she heard of his untimely death – has now become a mature woman who has transferred that passion to his widow. ‘I often think how strange it is that I should know you – you who were a sort of legend of my early days – that I should love you is only a natural result,’ Stowe muses.40 It is this love that led to the imprudence of her later, very public defense of Lady Byron. But a decade earlier Stowe herself seemed to realize that the wholehearted and unreserved outpouring of her affection toward Lady Byron might seem excessive. Thus, in her June 1857 letter, she puts this expression of her emotions into context by explaining that it is her friend’s nearness to death which encourages her to speak forthrightly. ‘You seem to me to stand on the confines of that land where the poor formalities which separate hearts here pass like mist before the sun,’ she writes, ‘& therefore it is that I feel the language of love must not startle you as strange or unfamiliar.’41 Although her poetry may not be as well-known as her novels, Stowe’s simile here reminds us that her

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imagery could be both moving and fanciful. Clearly this daughter, wife, and sister to ministers understood that liminal stage where life is ending and gradually leading to the relinquishment of the body. ‘You are so nearly there in spirit that I fear with every adieu that it may be the last,’ Stowe reflects, ‘yet did you pass within the veil I should not feel you lost.’42 This easy acceptance of her friend’s approaching death (though Lady Byron would not actually depart for another three years) is both a consolation and a promise to the younger woman. Her strong faith reassures her. ‘I have got past the time when I feel that my heavenly friends are lost by going there,’ she explains. ‘I feel them nearer rather than farther off.’43 Read in the light of later events, this letter seems both optimistic and foreboding in its talk of heaven and the porousness of the veil between life and death, for Stowe’s beloved son Henry, who had accompanied her on the first part of this trip to Europe and had met Lady Byron, would be drowned in the Connecticut River scarcely a month later. ‘So good bye dear dear friend,’ Stowe signs off, ‘& if you see morning in our Fathers [sic] house before I do carry my love to those that wait for me & if I pass first you will find me there & we shall love each other forever.’44 Indeed, while only a handful of letters survive from the last two years of the Stowe–Byron correspondence, of these extant letters two relate specifically to ‘those that wait[ed]’ for them on the other side. The condolence letter sent by Lady Byron to Stowe upon the death of Henry has not survived, but Stowe’s reply indicates how much it meant to her: ‘I did long to hear from you at a time when few knew how to speak, because I knew that you had known every thing that sorrow can teach, – you, whose whole life has been a crucifixion, a long ordeal’ (LBV, 399). Lady Byron too had lost a child, her daughter Ada, six years earlier, but the reference here is more likely to be to her suffering since her husband’s death in 1824, which Stowe (and the widow herself) interpreted as preparation for saving the poet’s ‘chained and defiled’ spirit once in heaven (LBV, 400). A second letter from Lady Byron on the death of Stowe’s son, on the other hand, speaks more explicitly to the death of Ada. Like some of their earlier letters, the political mixes with the personal, and the balance of this missive discusses mutual friends and the American economy, along with an inquiry about Stowe’s latest writing project. But its most striking moments pertain to Lady Byron’s reflections on human mortality. ‘The words I would have uttered at one time were like drops of blood from my heart,’ she confesses. ‘Now I sympathize with the calmness you have gained, and can speak of your loss as I do of my own’ (LBV, 224). ‘Loss & restoration,’ she then adds, have become linked more closely in her mind, meaning that although a loved one has died, the mourner can look forward to a reunion with them in heaven: ‘As long as they are in God’s world, they are in ours. I ask no other consolation’ (LBV, 224). Ultimately, in one of the last letters in her correspondence with Lady Byron, Stowe underscored the importance of intimate female friendships for her. In an April 1859 letter of introduction she writes for the American novelist E. D. E. N. Southworth, who had befriended and advised her early in her career, Stowe speaks of her own upcoming trip to England – her third and last – and looks forward to visiting ‘my dear saint,’ whom she describes as ‘a soul in whom the redeeming work is done & only waiting for the frailest thread to break.’45 Still thinking of the fragile widow, Stowe comments on other friends whom she did not see very often but ‘whose presence in the world was a constant help to me so that when they had departed I was made conscious of their loss whenever I felt . . . any thing greater or nobler, or whenever any note worthy event

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of human progress made itself felt.’46 ‘These my soul friends,’ she muses, ‘were mine by right of common sympathies.’47 The latter statement in particular is possessive and insistent, as if the writer has staked a claim on the hearts of her departed intimates. Their ‘common sympathies’ (which, as we have already seen, were both personal and political – formed from feelings that bound them and principles that they shared) have both brought them together and held them close. In an echo of the emphasis on summoning absent presences here, then, Stowe forged her ideal friendship with Lady Byron, unlike the epistolary friendship she later shared with George Eliot in the late 1860s and 1870s, through using letters as a way of recalling physical intimacy.48 While Stowe and Eliot never met, Stowe and Byron shared a transatlantic friendship of sick-room visits, ladies’ lunches, family dinners, shared causes, and one-to-one confidences. And the strong connection forged by these two sympathetic souls who saw each other infrequently but intensely over the course of seven years was kept alive between personal encounters by their correspondence. If Stowe erred in later publishing what she viewed as the truth about Lady Byron’s relationship with her husband, she did so out of love for – even a sense of duty to – her by that point irretrievably absent friend. In December 1856 she had, after all, already counseled that Byron’s widow should leave the truth about her marriage ‘with some discreet friends’ who could do justice to it. This is exactly what Lady Byron did with all the documents she had assembled related to her marriage, leaving them with her trustees on her death.49 Stowe herself did not have access to these papers, but in the context of the publication of Countess Teresa Guiccioli’s memoirs in English in 1869, she felt herself called upon to counter the exaggerations of Byron’s former mistress with the truth. If the American woman’s decision to publish a counter-narrative was imprudent, it was nonetheless driven by love and admiration for her ‘dear saint’ rather than a thirst for publicity. Recalling their earlier pledge to stand by each other in the face of ‘fiery darts’ and ‘harpy claws,’ when Stowe spoke for Lady Byron, she believed that she spoke for all good women slandered by critics. As Joan Hedrick has observed, we can put Stowe’s defense of Lady Byron into the context of her growing understanding of women’s subjugation and her recent reading of John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women (1869).50 Her ‘defense of wronged womanhood’ in Lady Byron’s Vindication was, in Hedrick’s words, ‘motivated by her burgeoning political consciousness.’51 Yet it is telling that even as her taste for public controversy grew, Stowe, whose health had always suffered when she was under stress, collapsed under the strain of writing ‘The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life’ and had to be coaxed back to health. Still, Lady Byron’s revelation to her friend in that private conversation on an autumn day in 1856 had brought the two women together in a kind of pact. As Stowe had written upon hearing the truth about Lady Byron’s marriage directly from her friend, ‘I love you . . . as never before.’ Yet the author who could move millions with her descriptions of the suffering of slaves also wrote in this letter that it was a love she could not ‘easily express.’ Just as Stowe attempted to articulate this affection through the epistolary support and advice she offered Lady Byron during her lifetime, so the sense of reciprocal obligation forged in their letters extended after the latter’s death, with Stowe feeling compelled to defend her dear friend’s life and reputation in the decade after 1860. Inspired by the shared pain of critics’ barbs and their common love of family, cemented by their mutual goals of improving the world by benevolence, and above all sustained by their faithful correspondence, their friendship endured.

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people for their help with this chapter: Barbara Bren, Elizabeth Giard Burgess, Beth Mary Darlington, Vicki Devitt, Gail K. Smith, and Alison Townsend. Quotations from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 26 October 1856 letter to Lady Byron appear courtesy of The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Notes 1. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, c. March 1854, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 244, (last accessed 22 September 2015); Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 16 October 1856, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 2. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 9 April 1859, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 246, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 3. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 97. 4. See Damon-Bach, ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick,’ 44. 5. See, for example, Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 266. 6. See Charles E. Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 268. 7. For a sample of the different takes on Stowe’s relationship with Lady Byron see: Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline, 423–4; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 353–68; Cognard-Black, Narrative in the Professional Age, 63–86; and Franklin, ‘Stowe and the Byronic Heroine.’ 8. Perkins, Letter to Thomas Perkins, 13–15 August 1856, in Correspondence, Katharine Seymour Day Collection, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. 9. Lady Byron, Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 19 August 1856, in Stowe, Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 10. Perkins, Letter to Thomas Perkins, 23–6 August 1856, in Correspondence, Katharine Seymour Day Collection, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Mary Beecher Perkins does not mention this visit in her lengthy letter, perhaps because she was not included. Only Harriet, Calvin, and their son Henry were present. 14. Lady Byron, Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 25 August 1856, in Stowe, Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Quoted in Charles E. Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 281. Lady Byron’s reference here is to antislavery settlers in the new territory whose lives and property were being threatened and destroyed by proslavery forces. For more on Stowe’s response to the violence in Kansas, see Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 257–8. Since both Charles E. Stowe and Annie Fields regularized punctuation and occasionally made errors when transcribing Stowe’s letters, I have checked their published versions against the manuscript versions (either in the form of photocopies of Stowe Center manuscripts or from digital copies online) and silently corrected any errors.

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18. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 16 October 1856, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Rita Bode has argued that Stowe’s epistolary friendship with George Eliot represents ‘an inspiring and multifaceted intersection of their commitment to addressing moral injustice and influencing moral action,’ and the same could be said of Stowe’s correspondence with Lady Byron (‘Belonging, Longing, and the Exile State,’ 205). 22. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 16 October 1856, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 23. Ibid. 24. Lady Byron, Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 18 October 1856, #2, in Stowe, Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Crozier usefully discusses the problems of silence as a strategy for Lady Byron in The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 200–1. 28. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 24 October 1856, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 29. Ibid. 30. Franklin, ‘Stowe and the Byronic Heroine,’ 5. 31. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 24 October 1856, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015); Lady Byron, Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 26 October 1856, Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 32. See Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated, 233. Hedrick calls Byron’s relationship with his half-sister ‘common knowledge’ in England and notes that Lady Byron had disclosed the truth to other intimate friends, although the story was not openly discussed (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 356). 33. It is worth noting that the personal and the political were once again intertwined in this letter; a note in both published versions states that the middle portion of the letter discussed a benevolent project in which both Lady Byron and Stowe were involved (see Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated, 254, and Charles E. Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 450). 34. Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 196. 35. Quoted in Fields, Life and Letters, 235. 36. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 2 June 1857, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 37. Ibid. Two years later, in what Stowe describes as ‘the last [letter] I received from [Lady Byron],’ her English friend writes: ‘The best flowers sent me have been placed in your little vases, giving life to the remembrance of you, though not, like them, to pass away’ (Lady Byron’s Vindication, 226, 228). 38. See Silvey, ‘ “The Sympathy of Another Writer”,’ 301. 39. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 2 June 1857, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 245, (last accessed 22 September 2015).

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640 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

beth l. lueck Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Stowe, Letter to Lady Byron, 9 April 1859, in Correspondence, Schlesinger Library, A-102, Folder 246, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Ibid. Ibid. For more on Stowe’s relationship with Eliot, whom she never met, see Bode, ‘Belonging, Longing, and the Exile State,’ and Cognard-Black, ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe,’ 23–4. In 1887 her grandson, the 2nd Earl of Lovelace, published them privately so that the family, at least, could judge for themselves the nature of the Byrons’ estrangement. Much later, the literary historian Malcolm Elwin was given access to this private collection of documents for Lord Byron’s Wife, the first major biography of its subject using these papers, though one colored by his evident dislike for her (see Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife, 18–20). See Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 359–62. Ibid. 377.

Works Cited Bode, R. (2012), ‘Belonging, Longing, and the Exile State in Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot,’ in B. L. Lueck, B. Bailey, and L. L. Damon-Bach (eds.), Transatlantic Women: NineteenthCentury American Women Writers and Great Britain, Durham, NH: University Press of New England, 188–207. Byron, A. I. N. (1856), Letter to H. B. Stowe, 26 October, The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York Public Library, B’ANA 0056. Cognard-Black, J. (2004), Narrative in the Professional Age: Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, New York: Routledge. Cognard-Black, J. (2006), ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe,’ in J. Cognard-Black and E. M. Walls (eds.), Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865–1935, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 21–4. Crozier, A. C. (1969), The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, New York: Oxford University Press. Damon-Bach, L. L. (2012), ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick Tours England: Private Letters, Public Account,’ in B. L. Lueck, B. Bailey, and L. L. Damon-Bach (eds.), Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, Durham, NH: University Press of New England, 21–48. Elwin, M. (1963), Lord Byron’s Wife, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Fields, A. (1897), Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Franklin, C. (2006), ‘Stowe and the Byronic Heroine,’ in D. Kohn, S. Meer, and E. B. Todd (eds.), Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 3–23. Hedrick, J. D. (1994), Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, New York: Oxford University Press. Perkins, M. B. (1805–1900), Correspondence, Katharine Seymour Day Collection, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, CT. Silvey, J. (2012), ‘ “The Sympathy of Another Writer”: The Correspondence between Sarah Orne Jewett and Mrs. Humphry Ward,’ in B. L. Lueck, B. Bailey, and L. L. Damon-Bach (eds.),

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Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 279–307. Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985), Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, New York: Oxford University Press. Cited parenthetically as DC. Stowe, C. E. (1889), The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Letters and Journals, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Stowe, H. B. (1811–96), Correspondence, Beecher-Stowe Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, A–102, M-45. Stowe, H. B. (1854), Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 2 vols., Boston: Phillips, Sampson. Cited parenthetically as SMFL. Stowe, H. B. (1870), Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy, Boston: Fields, Osgood. Cited parenthetically as LBV. Wilson, F. (1941), Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Philadelphia: Lippincott.

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42 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT’S FAMILY POST BOX Judie Newman

F

or Bronson Alcott letter-writing was primarily an educational and instructional practice. Writing in a report on the schools of Concord, Massachusetts, in 1861 he was confident that: Every child feels early the desire for communicating his emotion and thoughts, first by conversation and then by writing. Letters and diaries are his first confidants: the records of life and the stuff of its living literature. With the writing of these let composition begin . . . The post office is his birthright, let us encourage him to find uses for it early as a foretaste of his little state in affairs of State. (RSC, 64) That birthright extended to women. Despite his relentless pronominal masculinity, Alcott encouraged epistolarity in children of both sexes. In 1832, for example, he was corresponding regularly with eight-year-old Elizabeth Lewis, one of his girl pupils.1 Indeed, in nineteenth-century America, instruction in knowledge and virtue was commonly considered to be part of writing letters, and teaching children how to be letterwriters was also a way of inculcating them with the manners and morals of society.2 Letter-writing, however, could also be a means of resisting dominant social codes, and the Alcotts, who were at the forefront of reform movements of every type, certainly understood that. Many of Bronson’s letters were essentially essays, designed for publication and the promotion of various social causes. Earlier in the nineteenth century, few Americans would have seen the post office as their birthright. Before the postage acts of 1845 and 1851 most of them did not engage in long-distance communication; but the change to cheap postage effected by charging for weight, not distance, meant that by 1870 most Americans did.3 As Bronson noted, letter-writing enrolled the citizen in the state, however little his own role. The postal service was a means of bringing every American, from east to west, into a connected society, reorganizing perceptions of space, time, and community, and developing a sense of national unity and a network of sociability which bound Americans together. Even the impecunious Alcotts, perpetually stony-broke and beset by creditors, could write and receive letters. Bronson’s thirty-seven manuscript volumes at Harvard College Library somewhat eclipse Louisa’s more modest epistolary output (less than 700 surviving letters) and despite his attempts to destroy his wife Abba’s writings, even she left an epistolary trail. Letters were also the foundation of Louisa’s literary success. Although her letters from the Civil War do not survive, her father’s copies of them 642

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formed the basis for her first really successful book, Hospital Sketches (1863), describing her experiences nursing the wounded. Louisa’s career exemplifies the evolution of letters in nineteenth-century America: from the intimate missives exchanged through the Alcott family post box, regulating private behavior and gender relations; to the transformation of letter-writing into entertainment and cultural exchange as that post box entered the fictional story of Little Women (1868); through the Civil War letters, designed to be read by a wider audience and couched in literary terms, complete with pseudonymous signature; to the Alcott sisters’ letters from Europe, closer to travelogues than personal communications; and finally to the commodification of the author, overwhelmed by fan mail and autograph hunters, as satirized in Jo’s Boys (1886). Louisa even wrote a story (1882’s ‘The Dolls’ Journey from Minnesota to Maine’) in which the action takes place in a mailbag crossing the prairie from the point of view of the contents of a parcel. In broad terms this literary oeuvre neatly demonstrates how her understanding of the letter changed, from the intimate, familiar, individual artifact, to a cog in the machine of a national technology of mass communication. Louisa’s attitude to the letter was always highly ambivalent, though, displaying reservations about both its earlier and more modern incarnations. Letter-writing was a daily event in the Alcott household. The Alcotts home-schooled their children for the most part, and were not alone in establishing a family post box. The educationalist Peter Bullions, for example, suggested in 1854 that ‘a post-box might be set up in [every] school, with its letter box to be opened at stated seasons, and its contents read for the amusement and instruction of the school. This exercise, because voluntary, would be entered into with spirit, and prove a great benefit’ (PL, 31). Whereas the formalization of the postal system in the nineteenth century constrained the writer with rules (what was permitted on a postcard, posting times, stamps, etc.), the private post box ostensibly offered an entirely free exchange. Clara Gowing, for one, who grew up in Concord during the 1840s and played with the Alcott children, had happy memories of the Alcott post box, a hollow stump midway between their respective homes, in which a box was fitted. ‘Much sentiment and much fun passed through this repository,’ she writes. ‘It was visited daily or oftener, and cruelly abused did we feel if going there we did not find something for ourselves’ (AIKT, 136). Each correspondent had a fictitious signature, and the notes were not at all conventional. Gowing recalled that none of the surviving notes in her possession began in the usual schoolgirl fashion of the time (‘I now take my pen in hand’) or ended with ‘My pen is poor, my ink is pale,’ and that poem-letters flew between the girls (AIKT, 136). A similar post box, meanwhile, features in Little Women as a medium of friendly sociability and entertainment. It is set up in the old martin house in the hedge (a bird box): The P.O. was a capital little institution, and flourished wonderfully, for nearly as many queer things passed through it as through the real office. Tragedies and cravats, poetry and pickles, garden seeds and long letters, music and gingerbread, rubbers, invitations, scoldings and puppies. (LW, 134) Age and class are no barriers; even crusty old Mr. Laurence participates, and his gardener sends a love letter to the Marches’ servant, Hannah. The box seems to stand in some contrast to the official communications of the novel, notably ‘one of them horrid telegraph things’ announcing the father’s serious illness, the acerbic letter from Aunt March (supplying funds to nurse him, but decrying his stupidity in being at the front

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in the first place), or the further telegram summoning Mrs. March home when Beth is at the point of death from scarlet fever (LW, 192). Examples of the girls’ letters to the front are also provided: Meg’s ‘prettily written on scented paper,’ and fragrant with filial piety; Jo’s scribbled on a big sheet of her writing paper covered in blots, and describing how she has blotted her copybook by losing her temper with Laurie (LW, 233). But letters are not just the province of women. Little Women begins with a letter from the Civil War, but it is not from a daughter at the front. It is from Mr. March, who asks his daughters to ‘fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully, that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women’; a letter – in short – which is the catalyst for their various attempts to conquer vanity, temper, or other faults (LW, 50). Although Mr. March is offstage for most of the novel, his patriarchal power goes on controlling his family through the medium of the letter, which enjoins each of his daughters to give up a particular vice. In the novel the idea of the post box also originates with a man, Laurie, who is grateful that he has been allowed to join the girls’ Pickwick Club. The four March girls publish a newspaper, The Pickwick Portfolio, including poetry, stories, and more importantly, letters, signed pseudonymously as Samuel Pickwick (Meg), Augustus Snodgrass (Jo), Tracy Tupman (Beth), and Nathaniel Winkle (Amy). One of these letters, rather lacking in punctuation, is reproduced, from ‘N. Winkle’ and begins, ‘Mr. Pickwick, Sir, I address you upon the subject of sin the sinner I mean is a man named Winkle’ (LW, 155). The editorial voice of the Portfolio comments favorably on this ‘manly and handsome acknowledgment of past misdemeanors,’ but also adds: ‘If our young friend studied punctuation, it would be well’ (LW, 157). Instruction in moral behavior and composition thus go hand in hand. Interestingly, the practice of writing under a pseudonym was engrained in Alcott from an early age, often as a defensive mechanism. In her letters she is Damon to her sister Anna’s Pythias, a reference to the close friendship of the legendary Greek youths (SLLMA, 31); Sophie Tetterby to Alfred Whitman’s Dickensian Dolphus, characters from Dickens’ The Haunted Man, which she had dramatized for the stage in 1857, and in which the pair had played these roles (SLLMA, 36); Tribulation Periwinkle as in her Hospital Sketches (SLLMA, 86); and implicitly Dickens’ Sarey Gamp, in references to her room as ‘Gamp’s Garret’ (SLLMA, 115). Although not all her pseudonyms are male, most are borrowed from the works of male authors and create a barrier, often comic, between her own emotions and the reader. Later, of course, she penned any number of Gothic thrillers as A. M. Barnard, in order to write her family out of their grinding poverty. In Little Women too, then, letters come with the stamp of male authority, or male sponsorship. While Laurie describes his idea of the post box as ‘a means of promoting friendly relations between adjoining nations,’ however, this is something of an odd comment on the entirely amicable March and Laurence households (LW, 161). What it in fact points to is that the Alcott family post box had its origins in a bitter household conflict – and it was a woman’s idea. In 1843 tensions had arisen in the Alcotts’ Utopian, consociate community at Fruitlands, particularly between Louisa’s mother Abba and Bronson’s ardent admirer, and fellow Transcendentalist, Charles Lane – exacerbated by the vegetarian diet of rough bread, potatoes, and apples, the daily freezing baths, and the dress code (linen to avoid all animal products), which was desperately impractical

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in rural Massachusetts in winter. Abba decided to establish a family post box to provide the girls (‘and indeed all of us’) with a way of sharing their thoughts and feelings.4 The box – a basket hanging by the front door – was emptied every evening after supper and its contents distributed, though as the Alcotts could not afford candles and would not use animal oil, reading them often had to wait for daybreak. Abba argued that the post box would be ‘a pleasant way of healing all differences and discontents.’5 When Bronson went off to Boston with Lane she used the box to monitor the children’s behavior, placing each evening ‘a ticket with “Bon” or “Mauvais” upon it, as an expression of my approbation or dissatisfaction of their conduct through the day.’6 The post box did seem to reduce conflict between the children, but despite Lane’s attempts it does not seem to have lessened Abba’s antipathy toward a man whom she viewed as usurping her domestic realm. Lane wrote to her via the post box attempting to address their misunderstandings, admitting that he was disappointed (having crossed the Atlantic) to discover the small scale of Bronson’s Utopia, and making placatory reassurances of his good intentions. He closed his second letter: ‘Wafers are but small things but they will serve as introductions to the new order.’7 Wafers, slivers of gummed paper used to seal letters, often bore improving aphorisms, converting the personal letter into public propaganda. Examples from Fruitlands included: Vegetable diet and sweet repose. Animal food and nightmare. Pluck your body from the orchard; do not snatch it from the shamble. Without flesh diet there could be no blood-shedding war.8 Vegetarianism, however, did little to resolve the conflicts at Fruitlands. The letters hardly crossed a distance of twenty feet, but the gulf between the occupants was everwidening. The post box might have been a means to defuse issues, but its very existence implied a sense of distance between the correspondents.9 In the upshot the community dissolved, and for a short period Abba and Bronson separated. The post box, moreover, was itself an extension of the family practice of using letters as a disciplinary force. The Alcotts’ little state was an autocracy. Louisa in particular was subjected to rigorous training by her father from an early age, with Bronson determined to conquer what he saw as her unruly passions, anger and obstinacy. In his journal, for example, Bronson memorably describes Abba and Louisa as ‘two devils . . . the mother fiend and her daughter,’ whom he could not vanquish.10 The Alcotts promoted what Richard Brodhead has termed ‘disciplinary intimacy’ in their parenting practices, enmeshing the child in bonds of love so that it wanted to earn parental approval (CL, 18). John Pratt Alcott recalled that neither Bronson nor Abba rebuked their children openly. The child would not know that she had done anything wrong until she went to bed and found a note under her pillow, discussing the fault and how to correct it. The children were expected to send back written replies. The process supposedly discouraged outbursts of temper, promoted the silent contemplation of wrongdoing, and the expression of contrition in writing.11 Abba, for example, wrote a note to Louisa at Fruitlands which began ‘my Louy, I was grieved at your selfish behaviour this morning but also greatly pleased to find you bore so meekly Father’s reproof for it,’ before closing, ‘Oh!, how lovely to see a child penitent and patient when the passion is over.’12 Birthdays were also marked by exchanges of letters. On Louisa’s tenth, Bronson wrote to her asking her to appreciate his goodness, and to ‘earnestly desire to become daily better and wiser, more kind, gentle, loving,

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diligent, heedful, serene.’13 Abba, slightly less of an ‘Indian giver,’ as the phraseology of the time would have it, presented her with a pencil case and encouraged her to go on writing, but also exhorted her to be ‘gentle with sisters, obedient to parents, loving to everyone.’14 For the Alcotts, letters and journals were porous entities. In 1845 Louisa found a note from her mother in her journal saying that she often ‘peeped into it hoping to see some record of more happy days,’ to which Louisa replied, in a dutiful echo, still via the pages of the journal, ‘Dear Mother, You shall see more happy days.’15 The dialogic nature of letters gave the children a voice, but a voice often ventriloquized by the parent. While most nineteenth-century parents thought they had the right to inspect unmarried daughters’ letters, and it was commonplace for family members to share their personal writings, the Alcotts took surveillance to extremes. In 1836 Elizabeth Peabody severed relations with Bronson when she discovered that Abba had gone into her room and read letters between her and her sisters, which she had passed to Bronson, who upbraided Elizabeth for the remarks made about his inability to pay tradesmen’s bills.16 Elizabeth was outraged, but their behavior made sense in the context of their Transcendentalist beliefs. Bronson, for example, considered that people should be open books; secretiveness was a form of selfishness, and frankness was connected to generosity.17 He showed his own diaries and letters to family and friends, circulated family letters well beyond their intended recipients, and showed no compunction in copying or censoring the journals and letters of his wife and daughters. Louisa’s later use of pseudonyms no doubt betrays the influence of the punitive surveillance of her early writings, and her constant awareness that her letters could be read by third parties. Even in Little Women, the post box does not sidestep conflict – and secretiveness is its cause. Laurie, annoyed because Jo conceals Mr. Brooke’s love for Meg, forges a letter to Meg, supposedly from her suitor. Meg replies (though in very proper terms), and is horrified to receive a second letter from Brooke denying ever having sent the first. Unusually for the post box, the letter is ‘all sealed up,’ its contents secret (LW, 273). Meg had replied because she wanted to keep her little secret, like ‘the girls in books’ (LW, 275). Jo is swift to see that neither letter was in fact from Brooke. The first opens most unsuitably, ‘I can no longer restrain my passion,’ and she knows that the sensible Brooke would not write ‘such stuff as that’ (LW, 274). This plotline responds in some respects to the concern in mid-century America about the dangers of unsupervised female correspondence, but it also reflects the ideals of openness and frankness of the Alcott parents. Indeed, Mr. Laurence adopts their modus operandi. After losing his temper and shaking Laurie furiously, he apologizes to him in a formal letter which succeeds in restoring his grandson’s injured dignity: ‘The note was written in the terms which a gentleman would use to another after offering some deep insult’ (LW, 283). Veronica Bassil has argued persuasively that Louisa’s early experiences and training produced a conflict between passion and duty which runs right through her fiction.18 Duty is in the ascendant in the Little Women series, whereas in the Gothic thrillers the heroines tend to be orphans threatened by evil older men who are intent on taming them. Throughout her writing there is a tension too between the image of letters as a means of instruction and improvement, and a darker, more punitive vision of epistolarity as power. In works for the young, instruction is dominant, as is the use of the letter to evoke a better, less corrupt past. In ‘Pansies’ (1887), for example, the letters of

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two lovers are all that survive of their long-ago love. They are decidedly unromantic: ‘Curious love-letters – full of advice, the discussion of books, reports of progress, glad praise, modest gratitude, happy plans’ (P, 94). The female recipient, Lucretia, has been trying to improve herself by study to be worthy of her beloved Frank, who has gone to the South to get on in his career and be able to marry her; but yellow fever gets him first. An even more striking example of the instructive nature of contrasted letters from past and present occurs in An Old-Fashioned Girl (1869). Alcott draws attention here to the ways in which letters have changed in material terms, when Grandma draws forth a bundle of old letters tied with pink ribbon, on rough, thick paper with red wafers adhering to the folds, written ‘before the day of initial notepaper and self-sealing envelopes’ (OFG, 90). Letters from the past are not merely curiosities: Grandma reads two letters, one from the present and one from the past, and invites Polly and Fanny to compare them. The 1868 letter, from Florence, a social butterfly reporting on her first trip to London, describes ‘a whirl of gaiety’ (OFG, 109). Florence is to be presented at court and has danced with the Prince of Wales – she misses home only ‘a little’ (OFG, 109). The earlier letter is also from a young woman transplanted from home to London, but she thoroughly dislikes it, complaining that the citizens get up too late, ‘seldom before six o’clock,’ and do not go to bed early enough, ‘scarcely before ten’ (OFG, 107). She reports that she has lost her appetite; in the country she breakfasted on a pound of bacon and a tankard of ale, but now eats only half as much, and she closes by asking her sister to look after her beloved poultry. The modern girls disagree over which letter they prefer, the healthy home-loving country girl of the past or the modern socialite. The irony, however, cuts in several directions. The older letter is dated 1517, and is from Anne Boleyn before her marriage to Henry VIII. The really old-fashioned girl, Anne, is much less enamored of the courtly milieu than the modern American, with her fixation on archaic aristocratic ritual. Anne’s letter erases time and distance to suggest that modernity was a problem even for the Tudors. The discussion is also shadowed by the reader’s knowledge that her own presentation at court eventually cost her both her reputation and her life. The letters carry a moral message, but it is not a clear-cut opposition between past and present. In contrast to her works for younger readers, Alcott’s thrillers offer images of letters primarily in terms of their relation to female power, or the lack of it. Critics have made much of Alcott’s strong women and the way that her proto-feminist heroines win out over other characters. What reader, indeed, can forget the moment in Behind a Mask (1866) when the respectable governess Jean Muir retires to her room to remove her wig, her rouge, and her false teeth, metamorphosing into a moody thirty-year-old actress who swigs a stiff drink and settles down to lay the plans which eventually lead her to outwit an entire aristocratic family and become Lady Coventry (BM, 12)? Jean’s major weapon is control over letters. She is a master forger, can imitate any hand, and can even open letters using a heated knife below the seal – skills which she deploys in the plot to her considerable advantage. Threatened with discovery when her correspondence is read by a third party (‘her own letters convict her’), she foils her enemies by flinging them into the fire (BM, 97). The contrast between her assumed role as instructor and governess, and her real self as an amoral creator of fictions, gaining power through her skill with a pen, offers a suggestive reflection of Louisa’s own movement from private letters to public ‘Letters’ (that is, literature).

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Not all Alcott’s thrillers, though, offer such an unambiguous example of the letter as access to power. Perhaps the most extreme example of the ‘taming’ plot in her work, ‘A Whisper in the Dark’ (1863), has attracted strong feminist readings as bearing a subversive message of resistance to patriarchy. The story opens as the orphaned Sybil’s guardian, her adoptive uncle, carries her off to his estate, planning to marry her to his son Guy and get his hands on her inheritance. In the carriage seventeen-year-old Sybil flirts outrageously with her uncle, perching on his knee and kissing him. When her uncle reciprocates with vigor, however, she struggles to get free and bites him. Her uncle then refuses to release her ‘till I tame you as I see you must be tamed’ (WD, 33). Sybil’s inability to control her temper is her downfall. Aptly named for the classical Sybil, who speaks out in frenzy, she allows her ‘capricious moods’ to rule her, and flirts alternatively with Guy and his father (WD, 42). Yet when her uncle proposes, she erupts in a fury, which is promptly coded by her uncle and a doctor accomplice as madness. Drugged and imprisoned in a distant lunatic asylum, she hears above her the pacing of another incarcerated woman. Taking her cue from Bellini’s La Somnambula (1831), she feigns sleepwalking (thereby further reinforcing the diagnosis of madness) in order to locate the other inmate’s room, which is guarded by a fierce dog. A spectral hand emerges, and she hears the whisper, ‘find it before it is too late’ (WD, 52). When the whisper is later repeated at her door, Sybil takes fright, cries out, and betrays the escapee, who meets her death as a result. Finally, the following day she recognizes, in the room above, the dead body of her own mother, and finds on the dying dog two letters tied to its collar by a curl of golden hair, both warning her to flee at once. Sybil does escape, though only because of a house fire, and it then transpires that a clause in her father’s will would have disinherited her in favor of Guy had she inherited her mother’s madness. So far, so Gothic. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser has read the story as a key text in Alcott’s oeuvre, which underlines her subversive messages against patriarchy, by delineating its intertextual links to two staple figures of the Gothic that represent the oppression of women under patriarchy: the madwoman in the attic, as in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847); and the rebellious woman confined to a lunatic asylum, as in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798).19 Other critics have also read the trope of the Gothic mother who is absent, dead, imprisoned, or in other ways abjected, as a literalization of the invisibility and civil death of women generated by the two legal principles of coverture and primogeniture.20 In the nineteenth century children did not belong to their mothers legally, and in fictions they are frequently removed from them. Sybil and her mother, for example, never actually see each other alive. The unnamed uncle, his identity hovering between father figure and demon lover, also directs the charge of the story squarely at the patriarch. Yet the mother’s letters complicate any feminist reading of the story. As family post boxes go, a dead dog is certainly something of a novelty; a live one growling ferociously an even less reliable means of communication. Sybil has to bite through the lock of hair even to get at the letters, which is hardly likely to be possible with a live canine. The letters themselves neither advance the plot nor transmit any useful information, and largely replicate each other. The first, almost illegible and stained with rust from the dog’s collar, warns that if Sybil is not mad now, she soon will be, and advises immediate flight. The second, fresher but more feebly written, reiterates the advice, lamenting that Sybil has not found the first note: ‘You fear the dog, perhaps, and my plot fails’ (WD, 56). The mother nonetheless ties the second note in a paper with the first and reattaches

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both to the collar. The letters bear no address or signature; the identities of sender and recipient are unmarked. When Sybil later finds her mother’s body the emphasis is upon their perfect likeness – it is as if she had found her own dead body: ‘It was a room like mine, the carpet worn like mine, the windows barred like mine’ (WD, 54). ‘The face I saw was a pale image of my own,’ she further adds, and even their rings are identical (WD, 55). This is an image of the mother as spectral other, threatening to dissolve the boundaries of the daughter’s identity. Indeed Sybil remains haunted by her, despite marrying Guy. The story closes with the reflection that ‘over all these years, serenely prosperous, still hangs for me the shadow of the past, still rises that dead image of my mother, still echoes that spectral whisper in the dark’ (WD, 58). Claire Kahane has argued that in the Gothic masterplot, the individuation of the heroine depends upon the escape from the mother; and similarly Virginia Woolf suggested that the figure of the benevolent mother, the Angel of the House, has to be killed before the female author can write.21 Significantly, Sybil had been contemplating her own suicide (‘I had plotted death,’ she notes) but it comes to her mother, whom Sybil betrays by crying out (WD, 55). Only the absence of the mother, it seems, allows the Gothic story to flourish in all its deviant power. It is for this reason that the mother’s letters neither realize their purpose nor advance the plot. Where Keyser sees the story as helping readers to find the woman writer’s secret message of rage and rebellion, the story actually shows women’s writing as ineffectual and empty of meaning.22 ‘A Whisper in the Dark,’ in short, offers a highly ambivalent Gothic version of the Alcott family post box. It is a horrible exaggeration of the admonitory notes that Louisa used to find as a child, but also a story in which the daughter does not receive or heed the mother’s warnings. While a father figure is vilified, it is under a concealed identity, as not merely an uncle but also an adoptive one. In the plot Sybil’s uncle and her father are at loggerheads because the former is a debt-laden spendthrift and the other has effectively disinherited him – a reverse image of the triangle of Abba, her impecunious husband, and her brother Samuel May, who frequently came to her financial rescue. Abba’s inheritance was a bone of contention, too, for when her father died leaving one seventh of his estate to her, Bronson’s creditors, to whom he owed more than twice the sum, immediately sued.23 Fortunately (although to Bronson’s bitter resentment) her father had left the inheritance in the hands of executors, including Abba’s brother, who functioned as trustees and guardians of her portion, which was thus preserved for her. Abba had considered separating from her husband in 1844, but as a divorced woman she would have had no legal rights to her children. While Louisa distributes the roles of father, uncle, and guardian in a fashion which avoids a direct attack on the father, then, the story nonetheless offers a nightmare version of the Alcott family history. ‘A Whisper in the Dark’ cries out for psychoanalytic readings, but the letters in themselves do not say much about the relation of epistolarity to nineteenth-century American culture. In later works, however, Alcott moves on to consider letters less as personal or familiar than as instances of communication technology, implicated in broader social practices. In this respect, her evolution reflects the current evolution in critical understandings of epistolarity, from the personal approach (letters as biography or as content) to an approach that situates them in relation to the theoretical and empirical concerns of book history. Two works are particularly significant in this regard – Jo’s Boys and ‘The Dolls’ Journey from Minnesota to Maine’ – in both of which the modern postal system is central to the action. Jo’s Boys is a very different

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novel to Little Women. It abounds with scenes involving recognizably modern activities or technologies, games of basketball and tennis, amateur photography, diets, dime novels, express trains, telegrams, and postcards. The young characters are all leaving family behind to pursue careers out in the world, and the reach is global, involving travel to Leipzig, Montana, Australia, California, and London. Mobility and separation are, as Gregory Eiselein has noted, the major features of the plot: ‘Modern transportation moves characters along, while communication technologies allow them to simultaneously bridge and maintain geographical distance.’24 Ted, for example, runs away to find Dan but is discovered on the train by Laurie, who looks after him and sends a telegram to reassure Jo. Nat, meanwhile, who has gone astray in Leipzig, is overwhelmed by a shower of bills, but amongst them ‘one well-worn envelope with an American stamp’ immediately gives him the strength to reform: ‘[T]he helping hand had been stretched across the sea, and Love, the dear Evangelist had lifted him out of the slough and shown him the narrow gate, beyond which deliverance lay’ (JB, 219). The notion of the evangel – the good news of the gospel – is thus yoked to the postal system. Similarly, when Emil’s ship founders he is feared drowned until ‘the longed for letters came,’ letters which are repeatedly read when his parents say their prayers at night (JB, 243). Even the wayward Dan succeeds in communicating with home, by routing letters from gaol through a friend’s widow and then, on his release, using postcards ‘to gratify his longing for home news, and to send brief messages to quiet their surprise at his delay in settling’ (JB, 308). Jo, now a successful writer, is described bundling requests for autographs into the waste-paper basket, but carefully keeping all Dan’s cards in a drawer. When Dan is finally located she spends more time ‘composing a letter that should bring him, than she did over the most thrilling episodes in her “works” ’ (JB, 314). The contrast between the personal letter to Dan and the fan mail reveals Alcott’s ambivalence toward modern communication technologies. While distance and separation loom large for the characters in Jo’s Boys, fan mail shortens the distance between the author and her readers. Alcott herself had been pestered mercilessly by her fans. She wrote to the Springfield Republican in 1869 threatening to turn the hosepipe on them, or as she put it, ‘one irascible spinster, driven to frenzy by twentyeight visitors in one week, proposed to get a garden engine and “play away”,’ and in 1870 she asked her mother not to keep forwarding mail from ‘so cracked girls,’ particularly because she had to pay for those forwarded to her in Europe by her bank (SSLMA, 126, 148). Not much had changed by 1885, when she wrote to Viola Price, a teacher, and complained that: ‘Autograph letters I do not answer, nor half the requests for money and advice upon every subject from “Whom shall I marry?” to “Ought I to wear a bustle?” ’ (SSLMA, 296). She earnestly hoped that Price would teach her five hundred pupils to love books but let their authors rest in peace, as a service to those ‘whose lives are made a burden to them by the modern lion hunter and autograph fiend’ (SSLMA, 296). Echoing these comments, Chapter Three of Jo’s Boys, ‘Jo’s Last Scrape,’ dramatizes a typical day in the author’s life as one beset by readers and their letters. The chapter does not pull its punches. Alcott describes the events it depicts as ‘a true tale’ and includes a real poem from an insane admirer amongst fictional letters demanding money, autographs, advice, literary patronage, and even the adoption of a child (JB, 46). Quite apart from their enormous numbers, which interrupt Jo’s writing time, the letters also threaten her identity. A visiting lady from Oshkosh is disappointed

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by Jo’s portrait, and fails to recognize her in a kerchief and apron doing housework. Distance may have been erased by technology but the result is that just as the letters have become commodities (to be sold as autographs), so has their author. Another fan wants her old clothes, to put into a rug with Emerson’s vest and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s trousers. The whole episode has a curiously modern ring to it, reflecting the need for the author to cultivate her readership, look good in the public eye, and be endlessly available. The post may well have pulled the nation together, but the apparently close connection between author and fan, Alcott suggests, is entirely inauthentic. Predictably, her acerbic representation of her readers caused offense. On the day after the novel appeared Alcott wrote to her publisher Niles to lament that ‘the first gun fired seems to object to “Jo’s Last Scrape” ’ – a response to the reviewer for the Boston Daily Advertiser, who had complained that the chapter was personal gossip and should have been omitted (SSLMA, 300). Alcott was not impervious to her public. Indeed, she married Jo off in direct response to fans’ requests, although not to Laurie. And as Sheryl Englund has argued, Alcott quite astutely allowed herself to be marketed as an autobiographical writer drawing on her family experiences.25 Jo does admit the right type of fan – seventy devout YMCA lads in muddy boots, for example – but excludes others. The remaining nineteen chapters are thus labeled private by the presence of the frustrated crowd on the doorstep of Chapter Three. In the words of Katherine Adams: ‘By turning fictional supplicants from Jo’s door, Alcott enhances our sense of privileged access’ (OU, 161). Notwithstanding Alcott’s unease, then, the way that new communication technologies of the nineteenth century reaffirm connections with the family – calling Dan back, rescuing Nat from dissipation, and locating Ted – is echoed in the potentially closer relationship Alcott could build with her ideal readers. This ambivalence is even more marked in ‘The Dolls’ Journey from Minnesota to Maine,’ an account of a journey through the postal system. In this 1882 story Mr. Plum, a railroad president, hears his daughters lamenting that rain means they cannot play in the garden at paying an imaginary visit to their Aunt Maria, and suggests that they send their dolls to her by post. Flora and Dora are promptly wrapped in brown paper, weighed, stamped, and dispatched with the expectation that they will reach Maine, where Aunt Maria lives, in a week or two. Although the dolls are somewhat alarmed by the darkness of the mail bag in which they find themselves rumbling eastward, they are diverted by the conversation all around them. The newspapers ‘all talked politics,’ some with such bad language that the dolls would have covered their ears had their hands not been tied; and there is no escape from the national economy, as a heavy book keeps ‘droning on about reports and tariffs’ (DJ, 245). The letters are somewhat better behaved, but ‘they told one another the news they carried, because nothing is private in America, and even gummed envelopes cannot keep gossip from leaking out’ (DJ, 245). Nothing here is personal; all is part of a social or political world. Fortunately ‘the mails are often sorted in the cars,’ which gives the dolls the opportunity to encounter other mail-companions (DJ, 245). A pink, scented love letter makes polite overtures, and they sympathize with a homesick alligator being sent to a small boy in Chicago. Others, however, are unfriendly. A shabby bundle addressed to ‘Michael Dolan, at Mrs. Judy Quin’s, next door to Pat Murphy, Boston, North Street,’ tells them to ‘whisht and slape quite [sic passim]’ (DJ, 246). ‘Such low people!’ responds the undemocratic Dora (DJ, 246). When the railroad car rolls into a river (good news for the alligator, who is thus provided with a watery route home), a large

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envelope with an official seal and the name of a senator on it assures them blandly that, despite the rising water, public safety is not at risk since ‘mail bags are always looked after,’ just as a fashion magazine reassures them that ‘water won’t hurt calico’ (DJ, 246). While the Saint Louis Cosmos takes an equally long view, happy its pages are for once not dry as dust, by advising them to wait with fortitude for deliverance or death, the Barahoo Thunderbolt, ‘a dingy sheet’ presumably from Wisconsin, is more opportunistic, expressing the hope that news of their accident will be telegraphed in time for the evening papers to carry the story (DJ, 246). The water then engulfs them all, and ‘a moist silence prevailed’ (DJ, 247). Alcott has simply drowned out the din of news, gossip, ephemeral fashion, and self-interested utterance. But the mail must get through, and after the dolls’ bag is rescued the train continues its headlong rush across the prairie: ‘A slight accident like this did not delay the energetic Westerners a moment longer than absolutely necessary’ (DJ, 247). At this point, however, the dolls quit their companions by falling out of a window, are adopted by a girl from a Chicago family of German musicians, abused by another child, rescued by a dog, and finally fall into the hands of a doctor who uses them to console Midge, a dying child of a saintly nature. After Midge finally expires, he decides not to send the parcel on by post, since ‘I’d rather not have it knock about in a mailbag,’ and they complete their journey in the bag of Mr. Mount Vernon Beacon, a New Englander (DJ, 252). The dolls are no longer tied together, and differences make themselves felt. In this new bag Dora is very taken with the conversation around her and admires the refined society of Boston, eventually retreating into the poems of Emerson that sit with them, whereas Flora means ‘to be a real Westerner, and just enjoy myself’ (DJ, 253). An avalanche of Boston papers promptly falls upon her but she remains defiant, declaring: ‘I don’t care! Minnesota forever’ (DJ, 253). Finally Beacon delivers the dolls to Aunt Maria, a pretty young lady with whom he promptly falls in love. As he has railroad business in Minnesota he accompanies her and the dolls back there, and by Thanksgiving there is a wedding, with the dolls on top of the cake, ‘for there never would have been any marriage at all if not for this dolls’ journey from Minnesota to Maine’ (DJ, 254). As Elizabeth Hewitt has argued, for nineteenth-century Americans epistolarity implied unity between writer and reader, with letters used to emphasize social mediation and to theorize the kinds of social intercourse necessary to the articulation of a national identity.26 Alcott’s contemporaries frequently credited the Post Office with the establishment of a unified national character, as thought flew along its paths and reached everywhere, connecting government and people. Sentimental as ‘The Dolls’ Journey’ is, its action clearly demonstrates Alcott’s own awareness of the ways in which the postal system drew Americans together. Aunt Maria and Mr. Beacon would not have been united without the postal service, and the railways. Minnesotan Flora would not have encountered German immigrants in Chicago, or opinions from New England, Wisconsin, and Saint Louis; Dora would not have read Emerson. At the same time, though, Alcott still privileges older forms of connection. After the death of Midge, the mails are not good enough for the dolls, now sanctified by association with her more spiritual journey to heaven. The promiscuous jostling of different views and objects, and the potential for damage as a result of speed, are also underlined in the story. There is conflict in the mail-cars as well as companionship. Some of the views expressed are thoroughly unpleasant, but the dolls cannot avoid exposure to them. The mail thus offers an image of America tainted by commercialization, political opportunism, loss of

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intimacy, and lack of respect for privacy. Sentiment and romance only take center stage when the dolls are not in the care of the postal service. First published in a collection tellingly entitled An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, the story hijacks the faceless anonymity and efficiency of the modern communication process to let in love and death, and to assert their enduring priority over the ephemera of the contemporary.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

See Stepanski, Home Schooling, 58. See Schultz, ‘Letter Writing Instruction.’ See Henkin, The Postal Age, 15–41. Quoted in LaPlante, Marmee and Louisa, 108. Ibid. Quoted in Stepanski, Home Schooling, 101. Quoted in Francis, Fruitlands, 126. Ibid. For a development of this argument see Francis, Fruitlands, 123. Quoted in LaPlante, Marmee and Louisa, 135. See Shealy, Alcott in her Own Time, 156–7. Quoted in Bassil, ‘The Artist at Home,’ 191. Quoted in LaPlante, Marmee and Louisa, 107. Quoted in Keyser, Whispers in the Dark, xvi. Quoted in LaPlante, Marmee and Louisa, 134. See Francis, Fruitlands, 135. See Francis, Fruitlands, 28. See Bassil, ‘The Artist at Home.’ See the first chapter of Keyser’s Whispers in the Dark. See, for example, Anolik, ‘The Missing Mother.’ See Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ and Woolf, ‘Professions for Women.’ See Keyser, Whispers in the Dark, 13. See LaPlante, Marmee and Louisa, 95. Eiselein, ‘Modernity and Jo’s Boys,’ 97. See Englund, ‘Reading the Author.’ See Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 5.

Works Cited Adams, K. (2009), Owning Up: Privacy, Property and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing, New York: Oxford University Press. Cited parenthetically as OU. Alcott, A. B. [1861] (2002), ‘Reports of the School Committee, and Superintendent of the Schools, of the Town of Concord, Mass.,’ in M. B. Stern (ed.), L. M. Alcott: Signature of Reform, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 63–5. Cited parenthetically as RSC. Alcott, L. M. [1863] (1995), ‘A Whisper in the Dark,’ in M. B. Stern (ed.), Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 32–58. Cited parenthetically as WD. Alcott, L. M. [1866] (1985), Behind a Mask; or, A Woman’s Power, London: Hogarth Press. Cited parenthetically as BM. Alcott, L. M. [1868] (2013), Little Women: An Annotated Edition, ed. D. Shealy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cited parenthetically as LW.

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Alcott, L. M. [1882] (1992), ‘The Dolls’ Journey from Minnesota to Maine,’ in D. Shealy (ed.), Louisa May Alcott’s Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 242–54. Cited parenthetically as DJ. Alcott, L. M. [1886] (1983), Jo’s Boys, London: Puffin. Cited parenthetically as JB. Alcott, L. M. [1869] (1996), An Old Fashioned Girl, London: Puffin. Cited parenthetically as OFG. Alcott, L. M. [1887] (1908), ‘Pansies,’ in A Garland for Girls, New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 79–106. Cited parenthetically as P. Alcott, L. M. (1987), The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. J. Myerson and D. Shealy, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Cited parenthetically as SLLMA. Anolik, R. B. (2003), ‘The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic Mode,’ Modern Language Studies, 33: 24–43. Bassil, V. (1987), ‘The Artist at Home: The Domestication of Louisa May Alcott,’ Studies in American Fiction, 15: 187–97. Brodhead, R. (1993), Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cited parenthetically as CL. Bullions, P. (1854), Practical Lessons in English Grammar and Composition, New York: Pratt, Woodford, Farmer and Brace. Cited parenthetically as PL. Eiselein, G. (2006), ‘Modernity and Louisa May Alcott’s Jo’s Boys,’ Children’s Literature, 34: 83–108. Englund, S. A. (1998), ‘Reading the Author in Little Women,’ American Transcendentalist Quarterly, 12: 198–220. Francis, R. (2010), Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and their Search for Utopia, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gowing, C. (1909), The Alcotts as I Knew Them, Boston: C. M. Clark. Cited parenthetically as AIKT. Henkin, D. M. (2006), The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago. Hewitt, E. (2004), Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865, New York: Cambridge University Press. Kahane, C. (1985), ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ in S. N. Garner, C. Kahane, and M. Sprengnether (eds.), The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 344–51. Keyser, E. L. (1993), Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. LaPlante, E. (2012), Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother, New York: Free Press. Schultz, L. M. (2000), ‘Letter Writing Instruction in 19th Century Schools in the United States,’ in D. Barton and N. Hall (eds.), Letter Writing as a Social Practice, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 109–30. Shealy, D. (2005), Alcott in Her Own Time, Iowa City: Iowa University Press. Stepanski, L. (2011), The Home Schooling of Louisa May Alcott, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Woolf, V. (1942), ‘Professions for Women,’ in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, London: Hogarth Press, 150–3.

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43 PROFANITIES, INDECENCIES, AND THEOLOGIES: MARK TWAIN’S LETTERS TO JOSEPH TWICHELL, WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, AND HENRY ROGERS Peter Messent

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amuel L. Clemens (aka Mark Twain) was a prodigious letter-writer. The Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley have originals or copies of ‘approximately 11,000 letters [written] by him or his immediate family’ – an extraordinarily high number, especially when we remember the many, too, that will no longer be extant.1 Letters are an unusual area for literary investigation, since we tend automatically to categorize them as private, existing on a different plane from novels, short stories, autobiographical writings and the like, all of which are intended for publication and a public audience. Such distinctions, though, are never entirely firm, especially in Twain’s case. For, from an early point in his career, he seems to have had his long-term literary reputation in mind, and to have realized that his private letters were likely to end up in the public domain. This is not to say that he wrote these intimate documents with a larger audience in mind. It is to suggest, however, that he kept a weather eye open to the future, and to a potential posthumous interest in all his literary remains.2 Justin Kaplan, in his landmark 1966 biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, spoke of Clemens/Twain as a ‘double creature,’ and explored what he saw as a profound split between the public Mark Twain, a product of the American West, comic exposer of all varieties of hypocrisy and sham, and the private Sam Clemens, driven by the values and sentiments of (mainly) east-coast Victorian genteel society.3 Such a reading now seems problematic, both in the light of our further knowledge of Twain’s life and more recent analyses of identity and subjectivity. Twain was a complex man, full of contradictions, responding to different audiences in different ways. His letters, too, tend to exemplify the multiple projections of selfhood that made up his identity, revealing (both in communication with intimates and with the larger public) that exuberant sense of humor that we find in his best published work, but also illustrating his quick temper, his explosive anger, his deepest feelings, his anxieties about the ongoing direction of his life and its failures and tribulations, and his enthusiasm and pleasure when all was going well. The letters too address his attitudes (and frustrations) toward both his immediate American, and a wider transnational, world. From within the huge corpus of Twain’s letters we can learn much by focusing particularly on Twain’s letters to his three closest male friends: Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, and Henry H. Rogers. These letters have much in common, especially 655

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as they reflect assumptions about masculine identity and white male privilege in the America of the time. But they tend, too, to reflect the contexts of the three friendships to reveal different aspects of Twain’s life: his religious beliefs, his role as a professional writer, his business enterprises. Twichell was Congregationalist minister in conservative Hartford’s Asylum Hill Church, with a certain local celebrity as a result of his Civil War career, his Yale connections, and his own (limited) output of literary and theological publications. Howells, as editor and critic, novelist and cultural commentator, was an iconic figure of his time, the very symbol of establishment literary values. Rogers, on the other hand, as vice-president of the Standard Oil Company, was one of the country’s richest and most powerful businessmen, rapacious in his (often dubious) commercial activities, but clearly too – when he wanted to be – a man of great charm, generosity, and wit. These three sets of letters tell us much about Twain’s literary career and ongoing family life and (most especially in the later Twichell letters) the social and political aspects of his thought. But in them we also glimpse a larger cultural dynamic. For, in this period, the different professions represented by Twain’s three correspondents were engaged in a battle for cultural authority. In a time of rapid modernization and changing social values, religion and literature (which were of so much importance in mid-nineteenth-century America) looked to compete with, and accommodate themselves to, the rise of capitalist and business values in a newly corporatizing nation. If this sense of conflict and tension is rarely explicit in the letters between Twain and his three friends, it nonetheless forms the backdrop to their correspondence, and to the way they thought of, and responded to, each other. We can start a closer examination of the letters themselves, though, with what might seem a more random choice of material, when Twain writes to Rogers from Paris on 27 December 1894. Twain, now fifty-nine years old, was in deep financial trouble, his publishing firm, Webster & Co., having declared bankruptcy earlier that year. He was still, though, hanging his hopes on the success of the Paige typesetter, the (unfinished) mechanical compositor into which he had sunk so much of his money. Twain had just heard from Rogers that the Paige machine had again failed when performing under test conditions, news that hit him ‘like a thunderclap’ (MTC, 108).4 In the 27 December letter, written five days later, Twain reflects again on this ‘despairing day’ (MTC, 112). He also, though, tells Rogers how, on that same night, he had attended a masked ball, ‘blacked up as Uncle Remus’ (MTC, 112).5 Twain’s decision to appear as an ex-slave (though one who has a certain authority as a storyteller) as he entered this carnivalesque world – with all the jumbling of status and identity that costumes, masks, and disguise introduce – can be seen as highly significant. His very identity as a successful and well-respected member of his American world, indeed as someone with a wider transatlantic celebrity, is subject to unconscious and anxious dismantling in his adoption of this role. We should remember here Twain’s description of Joel Chandler Harris himself: ‘He visited us in our home in Hartford and was reverently devoured by the big eyes of Susy and Clara, – for I made a deep and awful impression upon the little creatures, who knew his book by heart . . . – by revealing to them privately that he was the real Uncle Remus whitewashed so that he could come into people’s houses the front way.’6 In adopting blackface at that Paris ball, Twain, I would suggest, plays out his sense of a damaged social respectability and his doubts about his worthiness to serve in the ranks of the

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hegemonic white male community.7 If this is a type of momentary symbolic slippage in Twain’s self-representation, it indicates, nonetheless, how larger questions of hierarchy and relative cultural authority – of class, gender, and particularly (in America) race – were the conditioning context for male sociability and friendship. Seemingly ‘uncomplicated’ male friendships were riddled by such determining factors (to which we could add tradition, money, politics, religion and the like). All friendships are, as Sarah Cole puts it, ‘shot through with social meanings.’8 So, in the last analysis, the underlying glue holding together the three sets of friendships I want to examine here was not just their personal compatibility, but also their sharing of common ground in terms of such matters as race, prestige, social position, and cultural authority. For Twain, always aware of the relative poverty of his childhood, his Western and bohemian background and the lack of social polish it brought with it, and the fact that the type of ‘literature’ he practiced could all too easily be judged (in his own words) ‘of a low order – i.e. humorous,’ these relationships helped to bolster a sense of identity that was not always entirely secure.9 The letters Twain wrote to the three friends considered here all have their different trajectories. For friendships are varied, having different functions and levels of intimacy and intensity depending on the needs of the individual sender and recipient. Friendships – and the letters that represent them – can serve a number of functions: to confirm, or change, one’s prejudices; to reflect particular interests and passions; to act as an ideological, psychological, and/or emotional support structure; and/or to confirm one’s sense of identity in a fast-changing and unpredictable world (as Twain’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century environment undoubtedly was). Twain himself – in a half-jocular, half-serious letter from 17 April 1909 to Howells – recognized the way in which his display of thoughts and feelings depended both on the topic at hand and his relationship with the correspondent in question. ‘[B]urning to pour out a sluice of intimately personal, & particularly private things,’ he invents a scheme for writing a series of letters to relieve that need, ‘fir[ing] the profanities at Rogers, the indecencies at Howells, the theologies at Twichell’ (MTHL, 845). ‘Oh, to think,’ he adds, ‘I am a free man at last!’ (MTHL, 845). Twain says that he does not actually intend to send these letters (with the absolute freedom of expression they promise him) but that his imagining of such different recipients would help him in his need for release. Thus ‘the scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you can choose the target that’s going to be the most sympathetic for what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment’ (MTHL, 845).10 If this is, finally, comic imagining, it bears at least some relation to the nature of Twain’s actual correspondence with these men. So the letters to Joe Twichell certainly have a stronger concern with the theological than those to Howells and Rogers. Twichell, an ex-Yale man, was by October 1868, when he first met Twain, already part of the fabric of the highly respectable Hartford social world. It is clear that he thought the humorist (with his Western and bohemian background) something of a rough diamond: ‘eminently a man “with the bark on”.’11 But Twichell’s time as a young Civil War chaplain to the Seventy-First New York Infantry, a group of mainly Irish Catholic roughnecks, had made him highly adaptable, and he was immediately attracted to Twain, to ‘the brightness of his mind, the incomparable charm of his talk, and his rare companionableness.’12 Twain too, obviously, took to Twichell from the first, and seemingly without reservation, as a sympathetic and likeable fellow-spirit

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in an otherwise alien environment, writing to his wife-to-be Olivia within six months of the two men’s first meeting: ‘Good fellow, Twichell is, & faithful & true – wholehearted – magnificent. I love him.’13 Twichell undoubtedly helped to ease Twain’s way into Hartford’s world of wealth and privilege. This is not to say that Twain’s motives in building the friendship were in any way suspect, or to question the genuine warmth of the two men’s relationship. But it was as spiritual adviser that Twichell played his most important role at this early stage in Twain’s Eastern life. For Twain, in the fifteen-month period between his meeting Olivia Langdon and their marriage (on 2 February 1870), relied heavily on Twichell as he struggled to prove his better qualities to her rich and respectable Northern liberal family: that he had turned over a moral new leaf after his earlier years of Western excess, and that he could also engage with their religious beliefs. Twichell acted as a sounding board to Twain in this process, and supported him in his programme of spiritual reform. Much of this is evidenced not in the letters to Twichell (for they were in immediate daily contact), but in those to Livy, at her family home in Elmira in upstate New York. Thus, on 9 December 1868, Twain writes to her of his holding ‘a long and earnest conversation about the subject of religion’ in Twichell’s home, in which Twain, ‘turn[ing] to seek the Savior . . . began clearly to comprehend that one must seek Jesus for himself alone, & uninfluenced by selfish motives.’14 He echoed this sentiment in a slightly earlier missive to Twichell himself, when Livy and her parents, after his persistent courtship, had finally acceded to his suit: ‘My Dear J. H. / Sound the loud timbrel! – & let yourself out to your most prodigious capacity, – for I have fought the good fight & lo! I have won! . . . I walk in the clouds again. I bow my reverent head – thy blessing!’15 Given his career-long skepticism about conventional religious belief, Twain’s use of the discourse of religious piety here might seem to strike a false note. But it would be hard to accuse him of hypocrisy, given his then genuine desire for reform as he looked to match Livy and her family’s expectations.16 Twichell was clearly a crucial figure of support to Twain here, the confidant and spiritual guide who effectively helped ease his way into the ranks of the Hartford elite. Following the marriage in Elmira – which Twichell helped conduct – and now supported by Livy and her father’s money, Twain and his new wife would, after a brief period in Buffalo, move back to Connecticut, building the house on Farmington Avenue (in 1873–4) that would be their much-loved family home through to 1891. Once back in Hartford, though, the relationship between Twain and his nearneighbor Twichell gradually underwent a sea-change, as Twain’s celebrity grew and as he became a respected and (generally) respectable member of the prestigious Nook Farm community. Twain would attend Twichell’s church and recognize him as his pastor throughout his life, but his sense of religious conviction quickly faded. Meanwhile, Twichell became – in the realm of social and secular affairs, at least – very much a satellite to Twain’s star. Twain and Livy, for example, played a significant role in helping out the Twichell family financially over the years. Twain, too, would make use of a lightly fictionalized version of Twichell in his writing, as, for instance, ‘Harris’ in A Tramp Abroad (1880), the companion and comic foil to its quasi-fictional narrator, ‘Mark Twain.’ During the Hartford years, the day-to-day intimacy between the two men meant that the letters between them are only generally of any significance when Twain

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was away in Elmira (where he tended to spend his summers) or in Europe. So, once Twichell had left for America after their Tramp Abroad trip (with Twain still abroad), Twain wrote him a deeply fond letter, mourning the ‘dismal truth that you were really gone, & the pleasant tramping & talking at an end,’ and celebrating the warmth of Twichell’s companionship, as one ‘which to me stands first after Livy’s.’17 Twain also enjoyed teasing Twichell, testing his limits in matters of a sexual or smutty nature. So, for instance, writing from Paris on 10 June 1879, and speaking of his friend Hjalmar Boyesen, he builds a sentence particularly ripe in double-entendres: ‘Boyesen called on Renan & Victor Hugo, also, & had a good time with both of those old cocks, but I didn’t go – my French ain’t limber enough. I can build up pretty stately French sentences, but the producing of an erection of this sort is not my best hold – I make it too hard & stiff – & so tall that only a seaman could climb it.’18 Twain’s letters to Twichell increased in frequency once the former had left Hartford, and during those years when he suffered so many personal tragedies: the death of youngest daughter Susie in 1896, of Livy in 1904, and of daughter Jean in 1909. At this stage of his life, he really does fire theologies at Twichell, but fires too both his trenchant political opinions and the savage ironies that mark his late view of humankind. There was, indeed, a method underlying his use of Twichell as a correspondent in this way, and one similar to the earlier-mentioned ‘profanities,’ ‘indecencies,’ ‘theologies’ subsets. So, in a 24 June 1905 letter to Twichell, for instance, Twain launches a long tirade against Theodore Roosevelt and his ‘[w]hitewash & slumgullion.’19 Near the letter’s end, however, he breaks off to say that he has written to Twichell, ‘not to do you a service, but to do myself one.’20 Needing to ‘work my bile off,’ and knowing the ‘risk’ involved in ‘empty[ing] it into the North American Review [the oldest literary magazine in the U.S.],’ he writes to Joe, instead, in his role as a calming influence.21 As he notes: ‘I have used you as an equilibrium-restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, I guess.’22 This takes us back to Twain’s by then long-established role in the cultural iconography of the period as a much-loved humorist and celebrity, indeed as the very representative of American national identity – ‘the best-known American of his time.’23 We can speculate that his awareness of this public reputation was at least one of the factors in his thinking here.24 Thus he lets loose his ‘bile’ at a number of targets when he writes to Twichell. On 19 April 1909, he dismisses the figure of the late-nineteenth-century Christian missionary, one which was close to Twichell’s own heart, as ‘easily the most criminal criminal that exists on the planet.’25 Similarly, on 17 November 1899, despite Twichell’s whole life being committed to that end, he describes church-going as ‘a hypocrisy that’s smug and respectable.’26 He challenges too the progressive and providentialist versions of history peddled by so many of his contemporaries, including Twichell, writing to him that: ‘My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies . . . I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.’27 And his overall misanthropy can be deduced from a cancellation in a 4 November 1904 letter where he refers to humankind as ‘that noble race constructed out of the excrement of angels.’28 As to the possibility of a Deity, benign or otherwise, he writes a slightly earlier letter to Twichell on 28 July 1904 which acts as a type of rehearsal for the solipsism of the ending of the posthumouslypublished No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1897–1908). For he answers the question ‘[h]ow life & the world – the past & the future – are looking to me?’ with the assertion

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that they are ‘NON-EXISTENT. That is, there is nothing. That there is no God & no universe; that there is only empty space, & in it a lost & homeless & wandering & companionless . . . thought. And that I am that thought.’29 These late letters to Twichell are, then, of great importance. They illustrate some of Twain’s darkest thoughts, his growing sense of anger and injustice, and his ironic contempt for so much of what he saw around him. Ever-conscious of his reputation, however, Twain tended to mute such thoughts, or to express them only relatively occasionally, in his published writings.30 As for Twichell himself, in his letters back to Twain he would humor his old friend, gently deflecting his ‘bile’ and responding in a calmly good-humored and unflustered way to his various barbs. To the end of their relationship he remained, as one would expect given his profession, the nay-sayer to what he called Twain’s ‘menagerie . . . [of] abominable heresies.’31 And their friendship scarcely seems to have faltered despite the fact that, by the turn of the twentieth century, they had moved a very long way apart in terms of political and religious opinion and philosophical outlook. Twain, for his part, clearly retained a vast fondness for his old friend even as he refuted so many of his opinions. Thus on 14 March 1905 he writes to Twichell lambasting his views of inevitable historical progress. But he ends the letter with what is a typical, and charming, Twainian touch: ‘N.B. No charge for these informations. Do come down soon, Joe. With love, Mark.’32 If Twichell played an important spiritual role before Twain’s marriage, as the years passed Twain rather left him behind as a determining influence on his life and thought. This was indicative, perhaps, not just of their differing personal responses to the ongoing circumstances of their lives, but also of a larger American reality where the cultural prestige and influence of the church and its ministers had diminished. The early relationship with Twichell offered the moral support Twain needed to help launch his marriage and family home, but the friendship with William Dean Howells helped him gain the type of literary status that would have seemed improbable (for any American) at the start of his writing career. When he speaks in that 1909 letter of ‘fir[ing] . . . the indecencies at Howells,’ we can take it that this was in part a joke aimed at his friend’s impeccable respectability. Indeed, that respectability formed the context for their first meeting in 1869, with Twain, the flamboyant and unconventional ex-Westerner, calling on Howells at the offices of the Atlantic Monthly, where Howells worked as an assistant editor, to thank him for his generous review of The Innocents Abroad (1869).33 Remembering this meeting, Howells reported that Twain wore ‘a sealskin coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or a love of strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life,’ and contrasted the freedom of Twain’s metaphoric ‘graphic touch’ with his own ‘fainter pencil.’34 This highly symbolic encounter, then, saw Howells now (despite his own Western background) representing Eastern propriety and established literary values, in sharp contrast to the still relatively untamed ex-Californian humorist. The friendship between the two men would help bridge this gulf, as it followed what was ultimately, to borrow and slightly adjust a phrase from Peter Stoneley, a mundane and professional logic (though my analysis here is certainly not meant to be either dismissive or, ultimately, reductive).35 Howells’ role, both as the editor of the Atlantic (which he became in 1870) and as one who had already established his position in the Eastern literary world, undoubtedly helped Twain to build his literary reputation and to provide him with an extraordinary amount of assistance both in editing

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and proofreading his books before publication, and in getting them reviewed after. As in the case of the Twichell friendship, Twain would quickly cease being the dependent partner in the relationship, even if his reputation as a serious writer and member of the literary establishment would never quite match that of Howells. For the friendship soon came to reinforce and further the professional interests and careers of both men. Howells would act throughout Twain’s literary career as adviser, promoter, and careful critic, and Twain would very much rely on him in this role. Examples from the letters suffice to illustrate. One of Howells’ initial interventions in Twain’s career came when he accepted the latter’s ‘A True Story’ for inclusion in the prestigious Atlantic in 1874. Twain had sent it almost apologetically, writing on 2 September 1874 that it ‘has no humor in it. You can pay as lightly as you choose . . . for it is rather out of my line’ (MTHL, 22). Howells, though, recognized its value, paying well for it, and signaling at this early stage (‘in the highest recognition of his writing as literature’) that Twain’s appeal as a writer went far beyond that of a mere ‘humorist’ who would (as Twain put it a letter on 4 December) ‘paint himself striped & stand on his head every fifteen minutes’ (MTHL, 26, 49). In doing so, he showed himself remarkably prescient as regards his friend’s literary and cultural potential. A little later, in July 1875, Twain would finish The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) with a decision, as he wrote to Howells, not to ‘take the chap beyond boyhood’ in the belief ‘it would be fatal to do it in any shape but autobiographically.’36 He then (on 5 July) asked Howells to read the manuscript both to confirm that decision and to ‘point out the [book’s] most glaring defects for me.’37 ‘It is a tremendous favour to ask,’ he continued, ‘& I expect you to refuse, & would be ashamed to expect you to do otherwise.’38 Howells, in reply, is his normal congenial self (‘Send on your ms. When it’s ready. You’ve no idea what I may ask you to do for me some day’), and consequently praised the book to the skies, as ‘altogether the best boy’s story I ever read’ (MTHL, 94). He did, though, suggest, contrary to Twain’s original intention, that he ‘ought to treat it explicitly as a boy’s story. Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do’ (MTHL, 110). Moreover, he also made ‘some corrections and suggestions in faltering pencil’ and advised Twain to cut the last chapter (MTHL, 112). In replying, Twain suggested that he already half-knew that this was the right decision: ‘I think of just leaving it off & adding nothing in its place’ (MTHL, 113). Throughout Twain’s career, Howells played a similarly generous role on countless occasions. Twain wrote to him on 30 January 1879, for example, when he was having problems writing A Tramp Abroad, asking for his ‘plain, square advice, for I propose to follow it’ (MTHL, 248). He later gave Howells carte blanche to make corrections on the proofs of Huck Finn. Howells would also proofread A Connecticut Yankee (1889) for him, and acted variously as editor, promoter, appreciative reader, and generous reviewer of his friend’s work.39 But the relationship was not just onesided, for Twain consistently appreciated and encouraged Howells too. Thus, on 21 January 1879, speaking of their future reputations, he writes of his own place in the encyclopedias of that day: ‘ “Mark Twain; history & occupation unknown – but he was personally acquainted with Howells.” There – I could sing your praises all day, & feel & believe every bit of it’ (MTHL, 246). Twain and Howells’ mutual drive for professional and financial success, which was an important element in the sustaining of the friendship, is also clear in their collaborative work. For almost whenever they met, especially in the earlier years of the

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relationship, some type of new literary scheme would follow. Writing to John Hay in March 1882, Howells described his frequent contact with Twain, and how each had confessed that the passing years had brought a diminishing of ‘literary ambition’ (MTHL, 392). But, he then added, ‘before we went to bed we had planned a play, a lecturing tour, a book of travel and a library of humor’ (MTHL, 392). To read through the two men’s correspondence is to find Twain suggesting to Howells in July 1875 that he ‘tackle’ a play based on Tom Sawyer ‘in the odd hours of your vacation’ or, elsewhere, suggesting they jointly put Orion Clemens, Twain’s somewhat hopeless brother, ‘into drama’ (MTHL, 95, 269). Though the anthology Mark Twain’s Library of American Humor, on which both men worked, did appear in 1888, the fact that so little else resulted from such planned collaboration is significant. For these projects were always subsidiary to their single-authored projects, their main sources of income, and, in fact, both men came to take some comic delight in a certain ineptitude as far as any joint work was concerned. Even when their collaboration on the play Colonel Sellers as a Scientist (1887) turned into a debacle, and this time with little comedy to it, as Howells lost faith in the project, Twain (unusually for him) retained his good humor. Complaining of his friend’s large part in the collapse of the project on 19 May 1886, he nonetheless wrote that ‘I give you absolution. But don’t you turn again – lay quiet’ (MTHL, 566).40 There is a repeated pattern in the Twain–Howells letters where the writing of one is then endorsed (privately, publicly, or both) by the other. This is unsurprising, given that each man ‘had a stake in the career of the other.’41 Both were committed to literary success, public recognition, and to the securing of the role and status of the professional writer in a period of extreme social and cultural change. But there is much more to their letters than this. Leland Krauth is right when he describes them as ‘wonderful letters full of information, plans, criticisms, affection, and fun – letters that range from cockamamie schemes to cool-headed calculations, from tender reflections to angry condemnations, from contrived performances to spontaneous revelations . . . [W]hatever was secret or concealed or just hard to discern in their published works is quite visible in their personal letters.’42 I only touch on aspects of the letters here, since my focus is more on repeated dimensions of the epistolary relationship rather than its development over time. For me, though, the most noteworthy of the qualities Krauth mentions is the ‘affection and fun’ – the deep warmth and boyish humor that runs insistently through the Twain–Howells correspondence, testifying to the real pleasure that the friendship brought to both men. So we see Twain, for example, targeting his friend with pretend abuse, describing him (in an invented scenario) in a 13 February 1903 letter as ‘a stumpy little gray man with furtive ways & an evil face,’ and elsewhere initialing a gloomy-faced and long-bearded photo of the Sultan of Turkey ‘W. D. H.’ before sending it to a mutual friend with accompanying witty remarks (MTHL, 764, 718–19, 723). But it is his genuine warmth toward ‘Dear Howells’ that is everywhere clear to see. Thus in a late exchange, Howells, on 24 June 1906, thanks Twain for his public compliments (in an essay on Howells that had just appeared in Harper’s): ‘I find none now living whose praise I could care for more . . . Dear friend of forty years, thanks!’ (MTHL, 813). Twain then starts his reply: ‘It is lovely of you to say those beautiful things – I don’t know how to thank you enough. But I love you, that I know’ (MTHL, 814).

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The final set of letters on which I focus is the correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers. ‘Hell-hound’ Rogers (as he was known) came into Twain’s life at a relatively late stage, in Autumn 1893, when Twain was in serious trouble – his publishing business Webster & Co. was in crisis and his large-scale investment in the Paige typesetting machine was about to prove catastrophic. Rogers, introduced to Twain by a mutual friend, came to Twain’s aid, steering him through his firm’s bankruptcy, extricating him as best he could from the typesetter fiasco, and conducting complex negotiations with Twain’s various publishers to secure his financial future. Rogers also invested money on Twain’s behalf, using his inside knowledge of the market to bring considerable profits his way. Twain was fully aware of the debt he owed Rogers, even as he expressed the nature of their relationship in a comic way. Thus, in February 1899, referring to the large returns Rogers had made on his investments, Twain called him ‘a magician who can turn steel and copper and Brooklyn gas into gold,’ only then to add the punch-line: ‘I mean to raise your wages again – I begin to feel I can afford it’ (MTC, 389). Twain here acknowledges a relationship of financial dependency on Rogers, but at the same time uses a joke to claw back his own (diminished) status, as the one in the superior role, the boss to Rogers’s waged employee. In terms of both financial advice and practical help, though, Twain would thoroughly rely on Rogers through to the latter’s sudden death in May 1909, and their relationship would become one of the closest and most sustaining of these years. As it did so, Twain’s confidence in his own business abilities and his sense of assertive masculinity within the business world, which had been shattered by the Webster business failure and all that followed, began to return. So, to give one telling example, in his letters to Rogers from Austria (where he lived for a time in the late 1890s), Twain represents himself as a successful negotiator and businessman (‘I’ve landed a big fish today’) as he explores the possibility of investment in a textile-design machine (MTC, 327). He establishes joint ground with Rogers as he at the same time blurs the boundaries between their roles and abilities, comically distorting the nature of their relationship. Thus he writes to Rogers, on 7 November 1898, about the Federal Steel stock his friend has purchased on his behalf, using a mask of naïveté to humorously establish himself as Rogers’s near-equal as a capitalist: ‘It just occurs to me: am I a Vice-President, or a Director in the Steel Company, or only a General Manager? And what do I get? What is the wages? . . . Do you think I had better go on with literature for a while, or begin to run the company now?’ (MTC, 375). There are undoubtedly complex factors at play here concerning Twain’s own diminished sense of masculine authority and the larger relationship between art and business in American culture. Twain, though, uses comedy both to lessen the sense of his own dependency on Rogers and to complicate any simple reading of the differences between the corporate and literary worlds. The Rogers friendship, and that with his family too, proved increasingly crucial in Twain’s life in the years following Livy’s death on 5 June 1904. With his primary emotional buttress now gone, Twain came to rely on Rogers’s companionship and the welcoming warmth of his household as an alternative source of support. The period Twain spent in New York, at 21 Fifth Avenue, between August 1904 and June 1908, was clearly a difficult one for him emotionally as he would later write to Emilie, Rogers’s second wife, that: ‘It was always lonesome . . . in New York’ (MTC, 650). But Rogers

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would often drop in on him just to pass the time of day or to take him out – perhaps to lunch, to the theatre, a boxing match or billiard game. And Twain was clearly a welcome guest at the Rogers home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, with the Rogers clan serving him as a type of surrogate family. The playfulness that Twain brought to his relationship with Rogers, and that Rogers would reciprocate, can be glimpsed in another letter to Emilie (from summer 1906) where he jokes, following one of his visits, about his supposed kleptomaniac tendencies: ‘In packing my things in your house yesterday morning I inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around. I thinking about theollogy and not noticing . . . Two books, Mr. Rogers brown slippers and a ham. I thought it was ourn it looks like one we used to have [sic passim]’ (MTC, 613). Rogers – for whom the letter was primarily intended – replied in kind: ‘I learn that, instead of taking old things, you took my best . . . I am going to Fairhaven this afternoon. I hope you will not be there’ (MTC, 616). I am reminded here of what Peter Stoneley says about the ‘juvenile’ quality of all these friendships, their quality of being ‘slightly out of the way of adult life.’43 For if there are many dimensions to the sets of correspondence explored in this chapter, then this was certainly one of them. There is a certain reversion to boyhood freedom and irresponsibility (what Stoneley calls ‘vital inconsequential[ity]’) in the Twain–Rogers letters and their particular kind of jocular masculinity: a pleasure in badinage, offcolor humor, attitudes and forms of expression taboo to the world of female domesticity.44 So Twain, in April 1903, tells Rogers an anecdote about the deaf Mary Stover and the ‘small fart’ he used to test her hearing (MTC, 522). And Rogers, in June 1907, refers to the ‘drunkenness, profanity and sodomy’ promised by a transatlantic voyage together (MTC, 627).45 This sense of vital inconsequence takes us back to the way in which these three sets of friendships and the letters which represent them have to be seen in their larger context – bounded and conditioned by the race, prestige, social position, and cultural authority of the four protagonists. Thus, for example, Twain’s passing joke to Rogers about the ham, representing himself as an unlearned thief, in fact serves as a reminder of his real social status – as a member of an elite and sophisticated social world in which this suggestion can only be taken as jocular. Indeed, though Twain was more gregarious than Rogers, and much more of a public celebrity, both men moved in the same elite circles of American society. And as the relationship developed, so Twain spent more and more time in Rogers’s immediate social sphere, whether watching the heats of the 1901 America’s Cup yacht race from the decks of his cruiser, the Kanawha, or traveling with him on longer Kanawha expeditions to Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia in 1901 and to Miami, Havana, Key West, and Charleston in 1902 (to name just some of the places visited). Rogers’s other guests on these trips – businessmen, politicians, and ministers – merely confirm the relative ease Twain had come to feel in this world of power and wealth, and the way, too, in which the values and actions of such men came (perhaps necessarily) to affect his own worldview.46 Twain’s letters to Twichell, Howells, and Rogers, then, offer a rich picture of his relationships with these three men – and form an admirable testament to the warmth, affection, and loyalty that characterized their bond. But we see evidence here, too, of a larger cultural dynamic – the way the friendships, and the letters that represent them, bridge the space between private and public in fascinating ways. For they also give us considerable insight into aspects of the religious, literary, and business life of the

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period, and into the values of four men who (variously) played significant roles in these key areas of American cultural life. The letters form, accordingly, a set of documents of real importance for our understanding both of intimate homosocial relationships and of a larger cultural dynamic in a period of particularly rapid change in American national life.

Notes 1. The Mark Twain Papers and Project, (last accessed 22 September 2015). ‘Almost four trunks’ of Twain’s letters to his mother were evidently destroyed in 1904 on Twain’s own original instructions (Frank and Smith, Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 6, 733). No doubt many more were lost or discarded. The six volumes of Twain’s letters so far published by the University of California Press have already been well supplemented by the unpublished, newly discovered, and expertly annotated correspondence made available digitally by the Mark Twain Project Online. 2. Twain’s note on an 1865 letter to his brother reinforces the point: ‘You had better shove this in the stove – . . . for I don’t want any absurd “literary remains” & “unpublished letters of Mark Twain” published after I am planted’ (My Dear Bro, 9). As Robert Hirst notes: ‘Considering that Mark Twain issued that gentle command . . . almost two years before he published his first book, it was a remarkably prescient thing to say, even as a joke. The letter to his brother survives because his brother ignored the instruction to burn it, and Mark Twain himself soon changed his mind about what should be done with his “literary remains” ’ (Who is Mark Twain?, vii). 3. Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 18. 4. Twain’s financial collapse stretched out over a considerable period, as did Rogers’s work to mitigate its consequences. See Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 125–40. 5. Uncle Remus was a former slave and narrator of the African American dialect stories written by Joel Chandler Harris (a white Georgia newspaperman). The first Uncle Remus book was published in November 1880. For Twain’s letters to Harris see Mark Twain to Uncle Remus. 6. Twain, Autobiography, 2: 260. This recollection was dictated on 16 October 1906. 7. In a 1909 speech, Twain would refer to Henry Rogers as ‘the whitest man I have ever known’ (Mark Twain Speaking, 642). For more on ‘white male exceptionality’ and ‘white fraternity’ and the sense of the larger civic whole in late-nineteenth-century America, see Nelson, National Manhood (quotes at 181). 8. Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, 4. For a more detailed development of this argument in relation to Twain’s world see Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship. 9. Twain, Letter to Orion Clemens, 19 and 20 October 1865, in Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1, 322. Forrest Robinson goes further, speaking of Twain’s sense of identity as ‘so unformed and free-floating that it provided no anchor from which various roles and masks might be perceived to depart. Because it had no centre, his sense of self was vague, almost boundless’ (‘Mark Twain, 1835–1910,’ 26–7). 10. This letter breaks off mid-flow, so we cannot know its final shape or conclusion. 11. Quoted in Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 41. This line comes from an obituary notice that Twichell wrote for Twain in the Hartford Courant on 22 April 1910. For a fuller account of the relationship between Twichell and Twain see Messent, 39–82. 12. Quoted in Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 41. Twichell adds that, ‘I was not long in finding out that he had a big, warm and tender heart.’ We should not forget that this obituary was bound to present his friend in a good light, and was written forty-plus years after the events described.

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13. Twain, Letter to Olivia L. Langdon, 13 March 1869, in Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 3, 173. 14. Twain, Letter to Olivia L. Langdon, 9 December 1868, in Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2, 318. 15. Twain, Letter to Joseph H. Twichell, 28 November 1868, in Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2, 293. 16. See Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 67, 197. 17. Twain, Letter to Joseph H. Twichell, 9 September 1878, in The Mark Twain Project Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 18. Twain, Letter to Joseph H. Twichell, 10 June 1879, in The Mark Twain Project Online, (last accessed 22 September 2015). 19. Quoted in Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 75. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. ‘Mark Twain is Dead at 74,’ 1. 24. Twain’s relationship to his country was a complex one, and he would speak out against what he saw as its shortcoming (viz. his anti-imperialism). But this did not mean that he wanted all such critical impulses, or his more sharply misanthropic thoughts, on repeated public display. 25. Quoted in Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 201. 26. Ibid. 200. 27. Twain, Letter to Joseph H. Twichell, 27 January 1900, in Paine (ed.), Mark Twain’s Letters, 2: 695. Readers should be warned that Paine’s versions of Twain’s letters are not always completely accurate. 28. Quoted in Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 77. He does add a postscript, in line with his general deterministic philosophy: ‘That erasure was an ungentle slur at the human race . . . I retract it . . . [I]t is unjust and dishonourable to put the blame on the human race for any of its acts.’ Paine omits both erasure and postscript in his published version of this letter. See Twain, Letter to Joseph H. Twichell, 4 November 1904, in Paine (ed.), Mark Twain’s Letters, 2: 763–4. 29. Quoted in Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 77. 30. They are fully evident in posthumously published collections like Letters from the Earth (1962) and The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts (1969), however, and there were exceptions (as I have already noted). 31. Quoted in Courtney, Joseph Hopkins Twichell, 255. 32. Twain, Letter to Joseph H. Twichell, 14 March 1905, in Paine (ed.), Mark Twain’s Letters, 2: 770. 33. See Howells, ‘Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad.’ 34. Howells, My Mark Twain, 3–4. 35. Stoneley argues that ‘the unexpected and playful aspects’ of Twain’s relationships with all three of these friends (Twichell, Howells, and Rogers) ‘were underpinned by a more mundane social logic’ (‘Mark Twain and Gender,’ 75–6). 36. Twain, Letter to William Dean Howells, 5 July 1875, in Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 6, 503. 37. Ibid. 504. 38. Ibid. 39. Goodman and Dawson, William Dean Howells, 167.

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40. The ‘turn again’ reference was a response to Howells’ suggestion that Twain should share some part of the blame for the failure to bring the play to stage. Twain would salvage some of this material in his 1892 novel The American Claimant. 41. Eble, Old Clemens and W. D. H., 126. 42. Krauth, Mark Twain & Company, 69. 43. Stoneley, ‘Mark Twain and Gender,’ 75. 44. Ibid. Remember here, too, the line I have already quoted from Twain about ‘fir[ing] the profanities at Rogers.’ 45. Sodomy at this time had a broader meaning than it has now, and did not necessarily refer to same-sex relationships. See Yacovone, ‘Abolitionists,’ 94. 46. So, for instance, in May 1908, Twain would give public support, alongside Rogers, to the two J. D. Rockefellers (Sr. and Jr.) as they looked to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of a public disenchanted with Standard Oil’s rapacious business practices. This is not to say Twain abandoned all aspects of his political and social conscience, for he did not. But see Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 141–56, for more detail on Twain’s increasing acceptance of the capitalist values of Rogers and his ilk.

Works Cited Cole, S. (2003), Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War, New York: Cambridge University Press. Courtney, S. (2008), Joseph Hopkins Twichell: The Life and Times of Mark Twain’s Closest Friend, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Eble, K. E. (1985), Old Clemens and W. D. H.: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Goodman, S., and C. Dawson (2005), William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life, University of California Press. Hirst, R. H., ed. (2009), Who is Mark Twain?, New York: Harper Collins. Howells, W. D. (1869), ‘Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad,’ Atlantic Monthly, 24: 764–6. Howells, W. D. (1910), My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms, New York: Harper. Kaplan, J. [1966] (2006), Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, New York: Simon and Schuster. Krauth, L. (2003), Mark Twain & Company: Six Literary Relations, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. ‘Mark Twain is Dead at 74’ (1910), New York Times, 22 April, 1. The Mark Twain Papers and Project (2007–present), The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, (last accessed 22 September 2015). The Mark Twain Project Online (2005–present), The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Messent, P. (2009), Mark Twain and Male Friendship: The Twichell, Howells, & Rogers Friendships, New York: Oxford University Press. Nelson, D. (1998), National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robinson, F. (2002), ‘Mark Twain, 1835–1910: A Brief Biography,’ in S. F. Fishkin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, New York: Oxford University Press. Stoneley, P. (2005), ‘Mark Twain and Gender,’ in P. Messent and L. J. Budd (eds.), A Companion to Mark Twain, Oxford: Blackwell, 66–77. Twain, M. (1917), Mark Twain’s Letters, 2 vols., ed. A. B. Paine, New York: Harper and Brothers. Twain, M. (1953), Mark Twain to Uncle Remus, 1881–1885, ed. T. H. English, Atlanta, GA: Emory University Library.

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Twain, M. (1961), My Dear Bro: A Letter from Samuel Clemens to His Brother Orion, ed. F. Anderson, Berkeley: Berkeley Albion. Twain, M. (1976), Mark Twain Speaking, ed. P. Fatout, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Twain, M. (1988), Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1: 1853–1866, ed. E. M. Branch, M. B. Frank, and K. M. Sanderson, Berkeley: University of California Press. Twain, M. (1990), Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2: 1867–1868, ed. H. E. Smith and R. Bucci, Berkeley: University of California Press. Twain, M. (1992), Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 3: 1869, ed. V. Fischer and M. B. Frank, Berkeley: University of California Press. Twain, M. (2002), Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 6: 1874–1875, ed. M. B. Frank and H. E. Smith, Berkeley: University of California Press. Twain, M. (2013), Autobiography of Mark Twain – Volume 2, ed. B. Griffin and H. E. Smith, Berkeley: University of California Press. Twain, M., and W. D. Howells (1960), Mark Twain–Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872–1910, ed. H. N. Smith and W. M. Gibson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cited parenthetically as MTHL. Twain, M., and H. H. Rogers (1969), Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893–1909, ed. L. Leary, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cited parenthetically as MTC. Yacovone, D. (1990), ‘Abolitionists and the “Language of Fraternal Love”,’ in M. C. Carnes and C. Griffen (eds.), Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 85–95.

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44 CHARLES W. CHESNUTT’S LETTERS: ‘THE VAGUELY DEFINED LINE WHERE RACES MEET’ Maria Orban

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harles W. Chesnutt made up his mind early on that he was going to change the world. And he knew exactly how he was going to do it. In an entry in his journals from 1878 he reveals his plans: ‘I will live down the prejudice, I will crush it out. I will show to the world that a man may spring from a race of slaves, and yet far excel many of the boasted ruling race.’1 He was, then, determined to shape reality and his place in it. Fully aware of racial prejudice, he decided he was going to succeed despite it, and change some other minds in the process. His youthful enthusiasm may have dampened some later on, but he never gave up the fight. In the Emersonian tradition of American self-reliance, he had no doubt it was up to him to prove himself and as such create his own universe, without being much impressed that the odds were against him. But in doing so, he also had to reconcile competing realities even within his circle of friends and acquaintances, the very people who valued and supported his literary career. Chesnutt’s letters shed some important light on the dynamics within this circle of friends, and on his social and economic circumstances, but perhaps even more significantly they illuminate the way he dealt with the hurdles he had to face in his literary career. They give us a glimpse into his everyday struggles as he walked the tightrope of the color line, where it seemed hard to predict people’s allegiances. And importantly, the letters also show how reality struck back when the world he wanted to change so much did not seem too keen to oblige. While visiting Nashville in 1889, George Washington Cable, one of Chesnutt’s friends and supporters, managed to create a controversy by having dinner at the home of the black civil rights leader James Carroll Napier. The incident, which violated the propriety of white Southerners, made the papers. The Christian Advocate denounced Cable’s association with Napier, while the Nashville American, in an article entitled ‘Cable and Negro Equality,’ blasted him for his poor judgment. In their opinion Cable had ‘lived in the South long enough to know the folly and wickedness of inspiring ignorant negroes with vain dreams of social equality.’ 2 The ignorant ‘negro’ in this case was a lawyer and Republican politician, but nevertheless, the incident caused enough embarrassment to William M. Baskervill, whose guest Cable was at the time, to warrant his unambiguous condemnation of the latter’s inappropriate behavior. Importantly, Baskervill, a professor of English at Vanderbilt, was the Nashville representative of the Open Letter Club, a network 669

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of writers and academics that Cable had created in 1888 as a forum for interested parties to express their viewpoints on the ‘Negro problem.’ With a counterpart to its Nashville office also set up in New York City, the Open Letter Club was ultimately meant to encourage a broad, cross-regional public debate with the purpose of solving the Southern Question. Its members, as Ralph Luker has noted, were supposed to ‘generate essays on regional problems . . . exchange them for criticism, and publish the revised drafts as symposia in journals.’3 But the Open Letter Club was also clearly quite progressive for the time in providing a platform for diverse ideas. As it proclaimed in 1888: ‘The Open Letter Club does not make itself responsible for the sentiments or principles expressed in the papers it publishes, but simply offers a medium for the interchange of information of every sort, and from every direction, valuable to moral, intellectual and material interests of the South.’4 Within this context, then, Baskervill was sympathetic to the plight of blacks but had a different solution to the problem than that entertained by Cable. Indeed, he would eventually have a serious disagreement with Cable over social equality that led to the dissolution of the Open Letter Club in 1890. As for Chesnutt, the only African American member of the Club, he seemed rather amused by the uproar over Cable’s Nashville visit. ‘I see our Southern friends are very much worked up over the fact that you stopped with Mr. Napier,’ he wrote to Cable on 30 December 1889, ‘and the Memphis Appeal solemnly declares that you are the most thoroughly despised man, among Southern people in the United States. I presume you can stand it if they can.’5 Chesnutt’s views on the ‘Negro problem’ were, indeed, closer to Cable’s than Baskervill’s. In a letter to Cable on 8 January 1890, for example, Baskervill chastised him for offering even the merest impression of social equality, which in his mind would only backfire and set back the solution to the race problem. As he warned Cable, ‘my opinion in regard to the Negro question is that it is difficult enough in itself and that we must not handicap it with social equality or with any actions that can be so construed.’6 Essentially, Baskervill feared such ‘actions’ might lead to interracial marriages, of which he noted in the same letter: ‘I abhor miscegenation, for it would be a degradation of our race without any great resultant good to the other race.’7 A decade later, in his novel The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt would have George Tryon, a Southern aristocrat who falls hard for Rena, a black girl he takes for white, come ‘upon an article by a Southern writer’: [Who] maintained that owing to a special tendency in the negro blood, however diluted, to revert to the African type, any future amalgamation of the white and black races, which foolish and wicked Northern negrophiles predicted as the ultimate result of the new conditions confronting the South, would therefore be an ethnological impossibility; for the smallest trace of negro blood would inevitably drag down the superior race to the level of the inferior. (THBC, 105) Chesnutt himself was, of course, not only the product of miscegenation but also saw it as the solution to the race problem; a problem of which he was part. He was both the subject and the object in this case, and often found himself in a position outside the clearly labeled racial categories of nineteenth-century America. In a society sharply divided along race lines, Chesnutt’s place was uncertain; in a world that saw everything in black and white, he was neither.8 As he stated in an 1896 letter: ‘As for myself, I doubt whether I could call myself much of a negro, although I have always been more

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or less identified with the colored people. I am really seven-eighths white, but I have never denied the other.’9 Thanks to his circumstances, Chesnutt was way ahead of his time, having a much more sophisticated view of race than most of his contemporaries. In a world with fixed categories he could move between them at will. Having been persistently taken for white, yet labeled black, he understood that race was an arbitrary construct with no substance to it. But still, he found himself in the ambivalent position of being caught between worlds. Both a representative and an outsider at the same time, within both white and black society, he belonged to a white culture that excluded him on racial grounds and was classified as part of a black culture he didn’t really belong to. His solution was simple: no more races. His letters and journals show that he first perceived racial difference at a young age as denoting lack of schooling and lack of prospects, and this is why he then worked tirelessly to better educate himself and earn a richly deserved and uncontested, middle-class position in society. But in Chesnutt’s view integration was not the final goal. It was only meant to prove that the racial divide was misplaced and able to be surpassed, thereby removing the social stigma of miscegenation, which in turn would deem interracial marriages acceptable. In effect, Chesnutt envisioned a post-racial society. A time shall come, he argued in ‘The Future American’ (1900), ‘when distinctions of color shall lose their importance, which will be but the prelude to a complete racial fusion.’10 This idea is, in short, paramount for his vision of the disappearance of races as he explains its genesis in this last article of an aptly entitled essay series he wrote for the Boston Evening Transcript. ‘Eventually,’ he concludes here, ‘a complete amalgamation will likely occur that will eradicate differences in color.’11 Cable, on the other hand would not necessarily go so far. In his opinion, as expressed in The Negro Question (1903): ‘Race fusion is not essential to National unity; such unity requires only civil and political, not private social homogeneity.’12 Chesnutt, though, tried to avoid racial identification so as not to get sucked into a system based on binary distinctions rooted in prejudice and discrimination. In a June 1890 letter to Cable, for example, written when Century Magazine rejected his story ‘Rena Walden,’ Chesnutt – while talking about his competition from writers dealing with similar realities but enjoying public success – insightfully analyzes the social stigma attached to labels, making the case for his different approach: ‘Thomas Nelson Page and Harry S. Edwards depict the sentimental and devoted Negro who prefers kicks to half-pence. Judge Tourgée’s cultivated white Negroes are always bewailing their fate and cursing the drop of black blood which “taints” – I hate the word, it implies corruption of their otherwise pure race.’13 Besides the irony underpinning the oxymoronic ‘white Negroes,’ this term also shows that Chesnutt’s vision of a post-racial society had support in reality and was not just a dream of a better and more just future world. When terms cancel out each other out and so render race invisible, Chesnutt is asking, what can be the basis of racial identification? This was, of course, the existential question Chesnutt grappled with every day in his personal life and played out in his letters. The arbitrariness of labels was amplified by the skewed value attached, without any justification, to one of the terms within ‘white Negroes.’ A white-skinned black person was automatically considered black – or were they? If visibility doesn’t always work, if it is the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ rule that applies, then all there is left to identify race is performance.

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Indeed, this ambiguous definition was supported by legislation such as that embodied in the 1848 Negro Law of South Carolina, which under Chapter 1, Section 2 – ‘The Status of the Negro, his Rights and Disabilities’ – stated that ‘it has been uniformly held, that color is prima facie evidence, that the party bearing the color of a negro . . . is a slave: but the same prima facie result does not follow from the Indian color.’14 Moreover, Section 7 of this legal digest further specifies that: ‘Whenever the African taint is so far removed, that upon inspection a party may be fairly pronounced to be white, and such has been his or her previous reception into society, and enjoyment of the privileges usually enjoyed by white people, the Jury may regard the party as white.’15 Thus, in nineteenth-century America, if you looked white and you acted white (or at least well enough for society to buy into it), you were white under the law.16 Chesnutt’s frustration in his younger years is easy to understand, then, since he didn’t even have to attempt to look white, even as so much depended on it. ‘Twice to-day, or oftener I have been taken for “white,” ’ he reflected on 31 July 1875. ‘At the pond this morning one fellow said “he’d be damned” if there was any nigger blood in me. At Colemans [store] I passed. On the road, an old chap took me for a [white] student coming from school. I believe I’ll leave here and pass anyhow, for I am as white as any of them.’17 In fact, he did not pass in real life, but he did experiment with the idea later on, in his fiction. These novels and stories reflect Chesnutt’s philosophy of race. His ambition ever since his youth had been to become a writer valued by white audiences for his merit and talent, thus taking race out of the equation entirely. ‘The fact is that I never wrote or tried to write as a Negro,’ he observed in a letter written two years before he died, ‘but, as nearly as possible in the American atmosphere, from an impersonal point of view, seeking the truth without malice, with of course a friendly slant toward my Negro cousins.’18 Though a staple of realism, this quest for ‘the truth’ was not so much a programmatic statement for Chesnutt as his way of carving out his own literary space by being true to himself; an attempt (albeit an impossible one) to convey in his writing his position in a no man’s land of racial identification.19 Chesnutt, convinced that ‘a man writes best about what he knows best,’ captures in his letters the realities of post-Reconstruction Southern life and explores the plight of those caught outside the race binary, those without a clear place or choice.20 In this respect, of course, as he was only too aware, he had stiff competition even among his friends. As he pointed out in a 1932 letter to a student with literary aspirations who was seeking his advice, ‘[s]ome of the best American writers have made their reputations writing about Southern conditions.’21 The list that follows then begins with the name ‘George W. Cable,’ and indeed Cable (like his close friend Mark Twain, with whom he did speaking tours) was a more popular writer of Southern life than Chesnutt.22 Not a Creole himself, but born and raised in New Orleans, Cable – who had served in the Confederate army – enjoyed great success with books such as Old Creole Days (1879), Madame Delphine (1881), The Creoles of Louisiana (1884), and The Cavalier (1901), all of which explored the decline of a multi-racial and multi-cultural Louisiana. Appropriately, then, Chesnutt asked for Cable’s advice while working on ‘Rena Walden’ (a story that would eventually evolve into The House Behind the Cedars), telling him that: ‘Its local color is certainly new; it deals with a class similar to your Louisiana Quadroons, but of course not so romantic.’23 Indeed, according to their correspondence, Cable was instrumental in reshaping Chesnutt’s short story into a longer and more complex exploration of racial identification and displacement.

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However, while Cable might have been a more experienced writer, Chesnutt was – in some sense – Rena. As he elaborated in a later letter, Rena ‘was of “mine own people.” Like myself, she was a white person with an attenuated streak of dark blood, from the disadvantages of which she tried in vain to escape, while I never did.’24 Understandably, this letter has prompted many critics to conclude that Chesnutt most identified with this character from The House Behind the Cedars, and her ultimately tragic lack of success in leaving her black heritage behind, and it has given rise to many speculations as to what informed this choice. But Ernestine Pickens Glass has also made the case for Chesnutt identifying with John Walden, Rena’s more successful brother, instead; matching biographical and epistolary evidence with the character, she argues that John Walden ‘could be a mirror to Chesnutt.’25 Most likely, he needed both characters in order to showcase how racial performance worked. In any case, he undeniably used his fiction to dramatize his views on racial categorization, and to foreground the unwarranted ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ distinction it was based upon through eliciting the readers’ empathy. He hoped, as in his letters, to persuade his readers to side with his views of race and reject the unreasonable and illogical social stigma of segregation. As Margaret Toth has argued, his novels consistently ‘challenge the reliability of the body as evidence of race, for we are reminded at every turn that race is not securely imprinted in or on the body.’26 And his letters too underscore how if one could not see race, all there was left to racial identification was ‘the privileges usually enjoyed by white people’ – a form of performance that Chesnutt knew well, because all along he was living it. Indeed, as numerous studies of epistolarity have pointed out, letters not only allow their writers to freely adopt different personae, they also have the ambiguous capacity to stand in for the physical presence of an absent correspondent. ‘Chesnutt’s visual discourse,’ Toth usefully adds, ‘requires us, ultimately, to move beyond the materiality of the body in our understanding of race. By over-determining a cluster of interrelated visual terms – passing, masquerade, performance, imitation, and theatricality – he works to detach race from the body, exposing race as artifice, a social construct.’27 Thus, in The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt uses John and Rena Walden to expose the fact that race is only as convincing as its performance. Through these two characters, he showcases two different performances side by side in order to explore how they work, how they could be successful or not. Only it turns out that the personal merit or abilities of these characters has nothing to do with their success or failure. Instead, Chesnutt goes to great length to show not only how Rena’s failure is in no way her fault, but that it is everything revolving around her that decides the outcome – that decides, that is, her race.28 The point Chesnutt is making here is that whether the performance of race works or not is a random and completely unpredictable thing, with no rhyme or reason to it. Ironically, Rena turns out to be black almost literally by accident. It is a series of coincidences, mishaps, and failed attempts to salvage the situation that accumulate to create the final outcome. And, interestingly, it is here that a letter comes to play a crucial role in the novel. When Rena’s white suitor Tryon haphazardly stumbles into her hometown of Patesville in Chapter 12, without being able to quite make up his mind whether he is frustrated by his beloved’s sudden departure, longing for her, following her, taking the opportunity to do some business, or a combination of all of the above, Chesnutt meticulously builds suspense for his readers. What race, we are led to ask, will Rena

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be stuck with? For with Tryon’s arrival in town, she is in danger of being discovered to be black. But then the kindly Judge Straight decides to send a note to warn her, and promises to tip the boy who carries this message on his return with an answer. Before the boy leaves, however, Straight, remembering he would be gone to lunch, abruptly changes his mind and tips the boy right away; which undermines his urgent purpose, as it leads the boy to go and buy gingerbread instead, before finishing his game of marbles. Eventually, he does give the note to Rena’s mother, only she cannot read. She, in turn, asks the boy to read it for her, but the boy cannot read either. Meanwhile, other efforts to warn Rena, such as that of the decent Frank Fowler, also founder on messages missing their target, until Tryon happens to be with the local doctor exactly at the time when the latter gets called to help a collapsed Rena. Tryon decides to accompany the clueless doctor, who invites him to have a look at the ‘pretty face’ of his patient, at which point the uninterested Tryon unwittingly catches a glimpse of his beloved (THBC, 139). This is a long list of coincidences, orchestrated by Chesnutt to have Rena rendered alternatively black or white with every twist and turn, without her ever being aware of it. Everything happens around her. The pace of the narrative picks up. Every new development undercuts the previous one. People are running around in circles, getting nowhere. And when the dust settles, Rena is stuck with a nightmarish ‘double body,’ ultimately arriving at a contradiction in terms that she will have to pay for.29 Not for nothing, in this respect, is one of the following chapters entitled ‘Two Letters,’ wherein John receives missives from both his mother and Tryon revealing what has happened in Patesville. For the role of letters in determining identity, whether accidentally or intentionally, is a recurring motif in the novel. Indeed, the narrative strategy I have described above not only closely mimics the messy reality of constructing race, but maybe too the well-intended efforts of the Open Letter Club leading nowhere. Whatever the case, at the moment when the Open Letter Club was first founded, Chesnutt also had high hopes for the story of ‘Rena Walden,’ coming as it did on the heels of ‘Po’ Sandy,’ which he had published in the exclusive Atlantic Monthly in 1888. After having sent ‘Rena Walden’ to Cable for advice, the latter forwarded it to the editor of the Century Magazine, Richard Watson Gilder, who read and returned it with his comments. But Chesnutt seems to have been taken aback by these. On 5 June 1890, in a letter to Cable, he responded to Gilder’s criticisms of ‘Rena Walden,’ and he was not happy: ‘I’m a little surprised at Mr. Gilder’s suggestion of a want of humor in the writer. Almost everything I have written has been humorous, and I had thought that I had a rather keen sense of humor. But my position, my surroundings, are not such as to make me take a humorous view of life. They rather tend the other way.’30 Chesnutt could ill afford to antagonize or disregard the well-established editor of a prestigious magazine, a man who could be instrumental in boosting his literary career, but he was clearly irritated by Gilder’s advice. He took Gilder’s view of Rena’s character as ‘amorphous’ personally, because he knew well the audience he had to deal with and was aware of whether ‘this line or this sentiment would offend somebody’s prejudices, [or] jar on somebody’s American-trained sense of propriety.’31 Indeed, he was so disappointed that he mentioned the idea of moving to Europe where he saw the prospect of a different environment for his work: ‘I have read a number of English and French novels recently, in which Negroes, and “Colored People” play either principal or subordinate parts. They figure as lawyers, as doctors, as musicians, as authors, as

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judges, as people of wealth and station. They love and they marry without reference to their race . . . They seem to find nothing extraordinary in a talented well-bred colored man, nothing amorphous in a pretty gentle-spirited colored girl.’32 The popular authors of Southern fiction, some – like Albion Tourgée – friends with Chesnutt, others – like Thomas Nelson Page – foes, whether descendants of plantation owners, or of impoverished prominent Southern families, provided the same view of the South.33 They created a nostalgic image of idyllic antebellum Southern life that glorified an Old South governed by the laws of chivalry and a quest to preserve racial purity. They also created a faithful audience whose expectations were shaped by the popular historical novels of figures like Walter Scott, who had long been idolized for his romantic view of the Anglo-Saxon race. Thus, in order to appeal to the same audience, albeit with an ironic twist, Chesnutt sometimes adopted the romantic model revered by Southern readers and turned it back on them.34 As he acknowledges in The House Behind the Cedars: ‘The influence of Walter Scott was strong upon the old South. The South before the war was essentially feudal, and Scott’s novels of chivalry appealed forcefully to the feudal heart’ (THBC, 42). A novel like Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), Chesnutt knew, prompted the reader to root for the underdog thanks to its narrative strategies, and its point of view in particular. So Chesnutt used the same techniques to make his readers empathize with Rena’s plight; the same narrative framework would cast Rena as the underdog, ‘the mysterious damsel in distress,’ with Tryon as her ‘unknown champion,’ and the reader – by implication – as her oppressor (THBC, 52). If race is performance, in other words, Chesnutt provides this performance with a vengeance in The House Behind the Cedars, as he stages a mock medieval tournament of the Clarence Social Club. At this tournament, which John tellingly calls a ‘masquerade,’ Rena, now redubbed Rowena, is crowned as the Queen of Love and Beauty, and begins her courtship with Tryon (THBC, 62). Mixing fairy-tale elements with the romance elements, for example, Chesnutt has Rena worry that her ‘Prince will never try on the glass slipper’ (THBC, 71). In the process too, Chesnutt displays how performance is enacted and how bodies, and female bodies in particular, are constructed through time. Going in detail over how the medieval courtly love tradition of feminine beauty is staged, and alluding to Greek ideals ‘of proportion, of fitness, [and] of beauty,’ the whole episode provides a historic overview of what informs our sense of femininity (THBC, 65).35 Bodies here are no longer black and white, and race is seen as fluid, even as Chesnutt makes sure to come full circle by subsequently presenting Rena through the conventions of the present time as a ‘belle of the ball’ (THBC, 61). But crucially, letters once again both disrupt and expose Rena’s efforts at self-making. For the first breach in Rena and Tryon’s fairy-tale romance comes just before Rena relates a dream of their mother’s illness to John, when Tryon must leave on business and asks Rena to send him a letter every day. Rena’s deflatory reply here, to the effect that the mail only goes twice a week, both signals their eventual emotional separation, and foreshadows the missed letters so crucial in the later Patesville scenes. In presenting Rena’s body using the shifting perspective of several reflections through different cultural lenses, culminating in these stray letters, Chesnutt proved he could provide an insider view of race issues; a perspective different from more popular Southern writers, thanks to his ability to talk about things he had experienced and knew well. But this perspective crashed their parade. Indeed, Chesnutt would find out

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the hard way that if he was to fight prejudice and change people’s minds, as he had decided early on, he would have to face the fact that white audiences did not care to have their views challenged and would not pay for the privilege. In preparation for the publication of The House Behind the Cedars, his editor at Houghton, Mifflin & Co. considered ways to advertise and market the book and Chesnutt was consulted on the various matters, including how to promote it. Whether it was wishful thinking on his part or genuine concern, Harry D. Robins wrote to Chesnutt on 20 September 1900: ‘You must be aware that in certain quarters the book will no doubt raise a commotion.’36 Responding a week later, Chesnutt, on the other hand, stuck to his approach to writing, arguing he was interested in the literary merits of the novel, not the controversial side of it: I do not know that I can specify any locality where the subject of the book, bluntly stated as the story of a colored girl who passed for white would tend to cause any great rush for the book. I rather hope it will sell in spite of its subject, or rather, because of its dramatic value apart from the race problem involved. I was trying to write, primarily, an interesting and artistic story, rather than a contribution to a polemical discussion.37 In any case, the anticipated controversy apparently did not make enough waves to boost public interest. Disappointed by the sales of the novel, Chesnutt appears overcome by doubt in a letter to Houghton, Mifflin & Co. on 30 December 1901: I would . . . like your opinion, as the publishers who have handled my books, as to what the chances are, so far as you might be able to guess from your long experience, as to my being able to write a book dealing with the color line from my point of view which would be likely to make a popular success? . . . I am beginning to suspect that the public as a rule does not care for books in which the principal characters are colored people, or with a striking sympathy with that race as contrasted with the white race.38 At this point, of course, it may look like Chesnutt is wanting to have it both ways. That ‘impersonal point of view’ he mentions in another letter, ‘seeking the truth without malice,’ seems to clash with presenting the color line from his own point of view. It may look like he did not want to bring race into the equation, until he did. But, in fact, this 1901 letter only underscores the impossibility of his goal in trying to present the way things look from ‘no man’s land.’ From his perspective he was writing about what he knew, but it seemed that American readers were not too keen on acquiring that kind of knowledge. Consequently, in writing to Houghton, Mifflin, he bitterly quotes William Dean Howells’ advice ‘that there is no color line in literature.’39 Howells, for his part, had positively reviewed Chesnutt’s short stories in The Atlantic, and seemed to take an interest in his writing, but did not seem to like his novels as much. In a letter dated 30 May 1889, Cable had advised Chesnutt, ‘don’t found fiction on fact. Found your fictions on truth, but stay away from actual occurrences of historical value.’40 Following on from The House Behind the Cedars, however, Chesnutt did quite the opposite. In his next novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), which was based on real events, he felt the need to voice the black perspective on a painful issue. He may have believed that he was still ‘seeking the truth without malice,’ but it was not a truth his readers recognized. ‘The book was written, as all my books have been

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with a purpose – the hope that it might create sympathy for the colored people of the South in the very difficult position which they occupy,’ Chesnutt explained in a 1905 letter. ‘I could never be so placed in life that I should not have an abiding interest in the welfare of our people in the South. The book was received by the public with respect, but not with any great enthusiasm . . . It had a fair sale, but was criticized for being bitter. I did not intend it to be so. Nor do I think it was.’41 One of these critics was, once again, Howells.42 But at this point, the more opposition he encountered, the more Chesnutt seemed to double down. In spite of the publisher’s best efforts to mount an aggressive publicity campaign, The Marrow of Tradition had simply not been a success through the usual channels. As Houghton, Mifflin observed in a letter to Chesnutt on 27 November 1901, ‘we took the leading bookstore in Boston, and displayed a thousand copies with portraits, press notices, newspaper advertisements, and display posters, and the result was the sale of 43 copies during the whole week.’43 Realizing that he could not reach a large readership, Chesnutt therefore tried to exert his influence in a different way, by targeting influential political figures. After having read the copy of The Marrow of Tradition Chesnutt had sent him, for example, the Ohio Congressman Edgar Crumpacker wrote back a polite letter in which he complemented Chesnutt’s book while also mentioning the competition, Thomas Dixon’s novel The Leopard’s Spots (1902), which he called ‘a very readable story upon the other side of the question.’44 Chesnutt, for his part, did not seem particularly pleased with Crumpacker’s suggestion that Dixon’s views were as valid as his own, and replied in an effort to set the record straight that: ‘I have read Mr. Dixon’s book. It doubtless represents the views of an extreme and I trust a very small portion of the Southern people. He is a North Carolinian and for the past years race feelings have been very acute in that state.’45 Indeed, Dixon, who sold 105,000 copies of The Leopard’s Spots in its first year, was something of a target for Chesnutt in these years. After Rabbi Moses J. Gries of Cleveland had invited Chesnutt to participate in the Temple Course lecture series in 1900, for example, the latter complained in a letter to Booker T. Washington that ‘among their oratorical attractions are Thomas Dixon . . . I have appeared before them myself, but local talent cuts no great figure in such affairs.’46 Chesnutt certainly had his advocates. The North Carolinian editor and journalist Walter Hines Page was a great supporter of Chesnutt’s literary efforts, for instance, and after he became partner at Doubleday, Page & Co. he published Chesnutt’s next novel The Colonel’s Dream (1905). But Page also published Dixon (which was probably a smart business decision), and years later, after the sales of The Colonel’s Dream proved even more disappointing than those for previous efforts, Chesnutt, in a letter to an old acquaintance from Fayetteville, E. J. Lilly, was still sounding bitter about his public success while blasting Dixon: ‘Unfortunately for my writings, they were on the unpopular side of the race question, and any success they may have had must have been due to their merit. Dixon, who took the other side, was not satisfied to present it fairly, made a fortune prostituting his talent to ignoble uses.’47 Chesnutt may not have achieved his dream of becoming a best-selling author, then, but by the end of his life he had achieved upper-middle-class status as a prosperous businessman thanks to his stenography business. As he remarked in a 1927 letter to W. E. B. Du Bois: ‘For many years I made more money and lived better than any colored man in my city.’48 Updating his old acquaintance E. J. Lilly about his circumstances

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in life a decade earlier, meanwhile, he seems nothing but content with his situation: ‘I am a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Cleveland Bar Association, the City Club . . . and also of the very exclusive Rowfant Club . . . membership in which is noted in Who’s Who in America, [and] which includes among its members half a dozen millionaires, a former United States senator, a former ambassador to France, and three gentlemen who have been decorated by the French government.’49 Chesnutt makes references to his ‘ample income, from the standpoint of a moderately successful professional man’ on several other occasions too.50 As his daughter Helen relates in her 1952 biography of Chesnutt, which goes over their lifestyle and circumstances in detail, she (and her siblings) lived a life of privilege attending elite schools and going on European tours, both occasions for letter-writing within the family. As an eager businessman, Chesnutt was invested in the stock market, and when he lost money because of bad advice was furious about it to the point of gloating over the larger troubles of the firm he had bought shares in as compensation. Arguing that their failure was well-deserved, if only for how much money they had lost him, he explained in a 1931 letter to the lawyer Francis Cull that: Otis & Company got soaked in the stock slump, to which they contributed so largely. I know I asked one of their men when a certain stock for which I paid $98.50 was selling at $145.00 if I should sell out. He said no, that he had three times as much as I had and he was holding on – and I held on, and as a consequence my stock dropped from $145.00 to $5.00 and it’s only a few cents above that now. That was only one rotten apple in the barrel. I had three or four others which I had bought at their suggestion.51 Even during the Depression, however, the Chesnutts were very well off, living in a big fourteen-room house in Cleveland with a garage for their car. Chesnutt and his family could also afford to spend nine weeks of their year at a summer house in Idlewild, Michigan, where – as Chesnutt wrote to a friend – they ‘carried a maid with us – [who] made the summer more endurable for Mrs. C.’52 Moreover, being part of the socio-economic elite was increasingly complemented by literary prestige. Chesnutt himself considered one of the pinnacles of his literary recognition to be the invitation he received in 1905 to join a select group of writers at Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday dinner at Delmonico’s in New York City. This invitation caused a lot of excitement in Cleveland, and the Chesnutt household itself buzzed with preparations. The dinner, when it came, was an inspiration: the speeches were brilliant, autographs were exchanged, and many complimented Chesnutt on The Colonel’s Dream, which had been published only two months previously. Every guest was given a plaster bust of Mark Twain (Chesnutt later put his in ‘a place of honor’ in his library) and there was quite a bit of gay rivalry in getting the busts inscribed.53 Altogether it was a wonderful occasion, which Chesnutt saw as a validation of his life’s work. ‘It was . . . very inspiring . . . and something to be long remembered,’ he writes in a letter from the time.54 The young lad down in Fayetteville, North Carolina, who had filled his letters and journals with his aspirations and hopes, had never dreamed of anything like this. Chesnutt’s own turn to be publicly celebrated meanwhile came in 1928 when he was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP for his ‘pioneer work as a literary artist depicting the life of struggle of Americans of Negro descent.’55 In his acceptance speech he reaffirmed his earlier literary creed that ‘one should exalt humanity above race,’ by

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emphasizing that: ‘I tried to write . . . not primarily as a Negro writing about Negroes, but as a human being writing about other human beings . . . and most of my writing ran along the color line, the vaguely defined line where the two races of the country meet.’56 Chesnutt, whose ambition was to be valued as a writer irrespective of race, and who had long felt excluded, was in the end recognized and honored by both races for his fiction and essays. But he also left his metaphorical stamp on the field of letterwriting, so it is only appropriate that the U.S. Postal Service honored him in 2008 with a real stamp.57

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Chesnutt, The Journals, 93. Quoted in Chesnutt, To Be an Author, 55. Luker, The Social Gospel, 69. Quoted in H. Chesnutt, Pioneer of the Color Line, 43. Chesnutt, Letter to George Washington Cable, 30 December 1889, in To Be an Author, 54. Quoted in Frazier, Open Letter Club Records, 3. Quoted in Chesnutt, To Be an Author, 55. It is astounding how these categories of racial identification have persisted into the twentyfirst century, and how they still resonate in the realm of letters. Mary Ziegler relates the following incident: ‘To announce the unveiling of [a] new heritage stamp, members of the Charles W. Chesnutt Association met with Georgia State University students during a forum sponsored by the Office of African American Student Services and Programs. When students saw a picture of the stamp, their reactions were mixed. Many were expressionless as they looked at the picture and read the flyer. Some others raised their eyebrows in questioning doubt. Despite the fact that Chesnutt’s picture appeared on the “Black Heritage” stamp, the question still arose, “Is he black?” The answer: “NDUH-uhh! The BLACK Heritage stamp?!” ’ (‘Charles Waddell Chesnutt,’ x). Chesnutt, Letter to S. Alice Haldeman, 1 February 1896, in To Be an Author, 89. Chesnutt, ‘The Future American,’ 135. Ibid. For further discussion of Chesnutt’s view of the eradication of races see McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, 25. Cable, Negro Question, 46. Chesnutt, Letter to George Washington Cable, 13 June 1890, in To Be an Author, 66. O’Neall, Negro Law, 5. Ibid. 6. The same principle of racial and ethnic self-identification applies today in the U.S. where one can declare one’s race or ethnicity, or not, in official documents like the census. One can claim to be Native American, for instance, with just a single Cherokee princess among one’s ancestors. Chesnutt, The Journals, 78. Chesnutt, Letter to John Chamberlain, 16 June 1930, in An Exemplary Citizen, 258. Wilson rightly describes this attempt as ‘utopian’ in Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt, 30. Chesnutt, Letter to Harvey M. Williamson, 25 April 1932, in An Exemplary Citizen, 299. Ibid. Ibid. Chesnutt, Letter to George Washington Cable, 8 September 1889, To Be an Author, 42. Chesnutt, Letter to John Chamberlain, 16 June 1930, in An Exemplary Citizen, 257. Glass, ‘Chesnutt’s Identity,’ 80.

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26. Toth, ‘Staged Bodies,’ 72. 27. Ibid. 28. Some critics, such as Ferguson, argue that Rena fails because she is ‘psychologically black’ – she cannot leave the past behind, together with the superstitions associated with the black race – but I would disagree with this position (‘Rena Walden,’ 77). 29. The concept of Rena’s ‘double body’ is further explored in Ryan, ‘Rena’s Two Bodies.’ 30. Chesnutt, Letter to George Washington Cable, 13 June 1890, in To Be an Author, 67. 31. Ibid. 65, 68. 32. Ibid. 65. 33. See Martin, ‘The Two-Faced New South,’ and Hebard, ‘Romance and Riot.’ 34. See Schmidt, ‘Walter Scott,’ 545. 35. I discuss how Chesnutt employs the courtly love tradition in Orban, ‘The Fiction of Race,’ 84–6. 36. Quoted in Chesnutt, To Be an Author, 151. 37. Chesnutt, Letter to Harry D. Robins, 27 September 1900, in To Be an Author, 149. 38. Chesnutt, Letter to Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 30 December 1901, in To Be an Author, 171. 39. Ibid. 40. Quoted in Chesnutt, To Be an Author, 41. 41. Chesnutt, Letter to W. B. Henderson, 11 November 1905, in To Be an Author, 234. 42. See McElrath, ‘W. D. Howells and Race.’ 43. Quoted in To Be an Author, 172. 44. Ibid. 176. 45. Quoted in H. Chesnutt, Pioneer of the Color Line, 181. 46. Chesnutt, Letter to Booker T. Washington, 31 October 1903, in To Be an Author, 195. 47. Chesnutt, Letter to E. J. Lilly, 16 October 1916, in An Exemplary Citizen, 126. 48. Chesnutt, Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, 11 January 1927, in An Exemplary Citizen, 228. 49. Chesnutt, Letter to E. J. Lilly, 16 October 1916, in An Exemplary Citizen, 127. 50. Ibid. 126. 51. Chesnutt, Letter to Francis X. Cull, 13 October 1931, in An Exemplary Citizen, 288. 52. Chesnutt, Letter to Jessie Parks, 17 November 1931, in An Exemplary Citizen, 291. 53. H. Chesnutt, Pioneer of the Color Line, 214. 54. Quoted in Chesnutt, To Be an Author, 236. 55. Quoted in Chesnutt, ‘Remarks,’ 515. 56. Chesnutt, ‘The Race Problem,’ 200; Chesnutt, ‘Remarks,’ 514. 57. See Ziegler, ‘Charles Waddell Chesnutt.’

Works Cited Cable, G. W. (1903), The Negro Question, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Chesnutt, C. W. [1900] (1988), The House Behind the Cedars, Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press. Cited parenthetically as THBC. Chesnutt, C. W. [1900] (1999), ‘The Future American: A Complete Race-Amalgamation Likely to Occur,’ in J. R. McElrath, R. C. Leitz, and J. S. Crisler (eds.), Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 131–6. Chesnutt, C. W. [1904] (1999), ‘The Race Problem,’ in J. R. McElrath, R. C. Leitz, and J. S. Crisler (eds.), Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 196–205. Chesnutt, C. W. [1928] (1999), ‘Remarks of Charles Waddell Chesnutt in Accepting the Spingarn Medal,’ in J. R. McElrath, R. C. Leitz, and J. S. Crisler (eds.), Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 510–15.

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Chesnutt, C. W. (1993), The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. R. Broadhead, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chesnutt, C. W. (1997), To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905, ed. J. R. McElrath and R. C. Leitz, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chesnutt, C. W. (2002), An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1906–1932, ed. J. S. Crisler, R. C. Leitz, and J. R. McElrath, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chesnutt, H. (1952), Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Cited parenthetically as CL. Ferguson, S. H. (1982), ‘Rena Walden: Chesnutt’s Failed “Future American”,’ Southern Literary Journal, 15: 74–82. Frazier, M. W. (1968), Open Letter Club Records: 1886–1967, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Glass, E. P. (2010), ‘Chesnutt’s Identity and the Color Line,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination, 43: 71–84. Hebard, A. (2011), ‘Romance and Riot: Charles Chesnutt, the Romantic South, and the Conventions of Extralegal Violence,’ African American Review, 44: 471–87. Luker, R. (1991), The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Martin, M. (1998), ‘The Two-Faced New South: The Plantation Tales of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles W. Chesnutt,’ The Southern Literary Journal, 30: 17–36. McElrath, J. R. (1997), ‘W. D. Howells and Race: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Disappointment of the Dean,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51: 474–99. McWilliams, D. (2002), Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. O’Neall, J. B., ed. (1848), The Negro Law of South Carolina: Collected and Digested, Columbia, SC: John G. Bowman. Orban, M. (2009), ‘The Fiction of Race: Folklore to Classical Literature,’ in D. Izzo and M. Orban (eds.), Charles Chesnutt Reappraised, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 81–90. Ryan, M. (2011), ‘Rena’s Two Bodies: Gender and Whiteness in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars,’ Studies in the Novel, 43: 38–54. Schmidt, P. (2003), ‘Walter Scott, Postcolonial Theory and New South Literature,’ The Mississippi Quarterly, 56: 545–5. Toth, M. (2012), ‘Staged Bodies: Passing, Performance, and Masquerade in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars,’ MELUS Journal, 37: 69–91. Wilson, M. (2004), Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ziegler, M. (2010), ‘Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Placing a Stamp on America,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination, 43: vii–xiv.

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45 SARAH ORNE JEWETT’S FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE Mark Storey

H

ow do we read nineteenth-century letters? Almost any significant published work by a nineteenth-century American is now freely and instantly available online, whereas an individual’s private letters continue to pose a significant research challenge. Anyone wishing to compile or even simply read the correspondence of many prominent nineteenth-century figures faces major logistical and institutional hurdles, and once the letters are finally collected together there is the potential for a distorting soliloquy effect because an inherently dialogic form is being presented as a series of unidirectional instances.1 While the status of the letter as a valuable and autonomous literary form is increasingly accepted (as this current volume attests), such a status necessarily asks how we are to read its private ‘literariness’ as distinct from the conventionally public forms of the novel, the poem, the essay, and so on. There is perhaps nothing surprising in this preamble, but I offer it in order to underline the point that when it comes to reading those letters that have been made available in published editions we are frequently only being granted access to carefully selected and sometimes bowdlerized selections that collectively constitute a highly controlled and conspicuously partial version of the writer they seem to be revealing in all their unguarded intimacy. Treating published editions of letters as literary objects – as distinct from compendia of biographical data – requires a bifocal critical attention that keeps the particular publishing and editing context as much in view as the raw content of the letters themselves. An exemplary case of this duality, I will argue, is to be found in the letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, a writer celebrated in her own lifetime for her ‘local color’ stories of New England, and institutionalized in the later twentieth century as the quintessential American regionalist. Turning specifically to the published editions of Jewett’s correspondence does not entirely undo these characterizations, but it does begin to allow for a reading of her work that resists much of the way it has traditionally been categorized, revealing the letters to be a kind of ‘counter-archive’ (however partial and fragmentary) that unsettles the geographically discrete accounts of her fiction that have tended to dominate critical discussion. Invariably treated by the numerous critics of her work as little more than contextual grist, Jewett’s letters are in fact self-consciously literary (or more accurately writerly) pieces in their own right; not simply records of lived experience, but actively engaged in an aesthetic and political dialogue with her fictional material.

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The first of the two existing editions of Jewett’s letters appeared in 1911, just two years after her death, and was edited by her closest friend and companion (and possibly her lover) Annie Fields. The second, an avowedly more scholarly volume, was assembled by a long-time professor of English at Maine’s Colby College, Richard Cary, first in 1956 and then as an expanded edition in 1967. Jewett’s letters are presented in both of these editions as important biographical material that aids and deepens our understanding – either of the woman herself (which is Fields’s emphasis) or of the professional and imaginative labor that went into her fiction (which is Cary’s emphasis). Fields, for instance, opens her collection with a characteristic conflation of subject and place. Having described South Berwick, Maine, and its immediate vicinities, she states that: ‘Here, and among these descendants, Sarah Orne Jewett grew up with hills and waters and a large open country all about her. This wild land she knew and loved well, as her books show.’2 Cary’s introduction, meanwhile, occupies a similarly admiring territory, and again posits in Jewett’s surroundings the same qualities he finds translated into her fiction: She concerned herself with the commonplace, propounding observations and attitudes lightly, without pretension. Constantly she displays the same eagerness ‘to know the deep pleasures of simple things, and to be interested in the lives of people around me’ that brought instant success to her train of books from Deephaven to The Country of the Pointed Firs. In these letters lie discoverable the rhythm and the flavor of Miss Jewett’s daily round of living, exhibited coolly, gaily, enthusiastically, thoughtfully, affectionately.3 Such passages are revealing of the assumptions that swirl around Jewett’s work in seeking to locate an authentically ethnographic and geographic origin for her fiction in the biographical ‘truth’ of her day-to-day life. They suggest as well how the presentation of her letters has been used to solidify Jewett’s reputation for an intimate and deeply personal connection to the New England region she metonymically comes to embody. She is, in Cary’s words, ‘Maine’s most representative writer,’ a view echoed by a more recent, influential critic of regionalism, Richard Brodhead, who argues that Jewett’s ‘literary identity bears an inescapable mark of local derivation.’4 What emerges when examining both Fields’s and Cary’s volumes together, however, is the extent to which this ongoing emphasis on an autochthonous relationship between the aesthetics of Jewett’s writing and the region she repeatedly described is literally misplaced, a critical and public hemming-in of a writer’s reputation and material that her letters often break free from. Looking closer at the published editions of Jewett’s letters, then, not only exemplifies the vested politicization involved in publishing public figures’ correspondence, but more strikingly questions the geographical parameters of even the most localized and bounded of American literary genres. In particular, and as befits a writer so closely associated with the fictional inscription of a particular place, it is worth emphasizing an aspect of letter-writing that is often overlooked. Many epistolary scholars have commented on the correspondence between specific – often prominent or public – individuals (indeed, numerous published editions of letters are premised on this idea), but less frequently has attention been paid to what it means to write from a particular location. Such details frequently form the paratextual frame for letters, of course, but with Jewett this takes

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on a special significance because of the mutual relationship that has been posited between the seemingly limited geographical territory of her life and the quiet rural communities she invariably described in her fiction. A superficial biographical sketch certainly suggests a life lived in unvaryingly close proximity to South Berwick: she was born there, in the family home, the same place she would die sixty years later, and for a large portion of her adult life would spend spring and autumn in the town, while summering in Manchester, New Hampshire, and spending winter in a well-appointed townhouse on Charles Street in Boston.5 These seasonal rhythms suggest a certain degree of mobility, but hardly a roving cosmopolitanism; all of these residences are within seventy miles of one another. The critical and popular image of Jewett has consequently been one of a woman who moved almost exclusively within the discreet environs of upper-class New England, to the point that by the time F. O. Matthiessen published his biography of Jewett in 1929, the condescending implications of his opening line were virtually a distilled convention: ‘The first thing she could remember was a world bounded by the white paling fences around her house.’6 According to countless synoptic literary histories, anthologies, and tourist brochures ever since, she remains the representative practitioner of a localized and ‘bounded’ form of nineteenth-century writing. Reading Jewett’s letters, however, reveals someone who came to conceive of that region from far broader geographical horizons than these characterizations tend to suggest, and indicates a degree of internationalism that became harder and harder to reconcile with the critical compartmentalization of her work in the years after her death. Between the Fields and Cary editions of her letters, a more bounded and more ‘regionalized’ version of Jewett emerged, but at the cost of a more accurate sense of where the distinct stylistic tone of her work derives from. This is not to say that refocusing on her international reach leads to a re-assessment of her political reputation; in fact, what we find in the letters Jewett wrote from outside New England is someone for whom traveling seemed to largely reinforce existing prejudices. The point is not to suggest that Jewett has been a secret multiculturalist all along, but that her letters reveal someone who identified with a far more transnational sense of rural identity than her nativist reputation has allowed for. They reveal a conception of New England regionalism that was able to find cultural similarity not just with historical lineages of Old World ethnicity but also with geographically distant regions of contemporary rural life. Because the truth is that, despite her homely image, Jewett was a fairly well-seasoned traveler. From her thirty-second birthday until her death in 1909 at the age of sixty, she would make five trips abroad, spending a combined total of over two years away from the U.S. This time was spent mainly in France, Britain, and Italy, but she also visited several other European countries (including Greece and Turkey), as well as taking a two-month cruise around Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Haiti. She wrote many letters while away on these trips – Paula Blanchard claims that on Jewett’s first visit to Europe she reported back on a daily basis – and although some of these letters have made it into the published editions, many have not.7 The question of archival absences (and making up for editorial gaps or biases by simply adding previously excluded material) is perhaps less interesting, however, than the question of what those few foreign letters that have been made widely available, if we choose to emphasize rather than sideline them, do to an understanding of Jewett’s work.

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Comparing the two editions of Jewett’s letters with this geographical emphasis in mind, we can see how significantly more ‘regionalized’ Jewett appears to be in the Cary edition. Of the eighty-six letters in the Fields edition where the place of origin is identified, eighteen of them (more than 20 per cent) are from abroad, while the 142 letters in Cary’s edition include just four, or under 3 per cent, sent from non-U.S. locations.8 Cary supplemented his own efforts by publishing further letters in the Colby Quarterly, including, in 1975, thirty-three between Jewett and her friend Louisa Dresel (of these, one is marked from Rome, another from St. Rémy de Provence).9 It is crucial not to place too much interpretive weight on these numbers, mainly because a wide variety of circumstantial and institutional factors contribute to the partiality of both editors’ end results – not least the fact that Cary seems to have worked almost exclusively within Colby College’s own archives. Equally, we cannot be sure, especially with Fields, how many available letters were excluded from the finished edition or on what grounds such exclusions might have been made. But something worthwhile does become clear from this brief enumeration: that general readers and scholars have so far had available to them two editions of Jewett’s letters that imply a markedly different geographical range, with the transnational flavour of an edition nearly contemporary with Jewett’s own life, and prepared in idiosyncratic fashion by her closest acquaintance, being succeeded by a more modern and scholarly volume that barely registers Jewett’s life outside of New England. In effect, the more international Jewett discernible in the earlier edition represents someone whose reputation for politicized localism was still in the process of being canonized and institutionalized (before the days of American literature degrees and the academic study of ‘American regionalism’), while the Jewett we glimpse in the later edition seems to solidify the exegetical industry that had by then attached itself to her work. The ways in which the international Jewett was largely silenced and ignored as her canonization took hold might therefore be read across these two editions, so that a return to the 1911 collection not only allows this perhaps surprising element of her life to be recovered, but does so in a way that tells us something important about the scholarly production of American regionalism’s reputation and categorization.10 One of the first letters reproduced in the Fields edition, which is simply dated to ‘Monday evening, 1883,’ includes Jewett’s reflection that: ‘The wet weather has kept us in, but we did manage to get a drive yesterday among the green fields and trees. Do you think the country ever looked so lovely as it does this summer? I seem to have brought new eyes home from last year’s travels!’11 Writing to Fields herself (probably from South Berwick, although neither writer nor editor mention it), Jewett here invokes ‘last year’s travels’ in reference to the first European trip the two women had taken together in the summer of 1882; four months in Ireland, Britain, Italy, and, finally, France. Worth noting is Jewett’s sense that these foreign excursions have apparently given her ‘new eyes’ through which to see and deepen her appreciation of the New England countryside. A writer celebrated for her affinity with the New England landscapes she so insistently describes thus acknowledges here that it has actually been other landscapes – those of Europe – that have conditioned her ability to see. The ‘new eyes’ that Jewett celebrates in this letter offer, in short, a useful route into thinking about how her correspondence more generally reveals a transnational sense of ‘seeing,’ a literary trope that uproots Jewett’s Maine landscapes from their native

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ground and makes us aware of how even these most local of sights might be involved in a constantly oscillating relationship with the landscapes Jewett knew and loved on the other side of the Atlantic. Versions of these transatlantic experiences certainly filtered down into Jewett’s fiction in various ways, perhaps most obviously in her collection of short stories published in 1895, The Life of Nancy. She had been on another trip to Europe by the time she came to write it – the whole spring and summer of 1892 were spent largely in Italy, France, and England – and whatever new eyes she had gained from her accumulating experiences of foreign places appears to have influenced what a character from the title story ‘The Life of Nancy’ brings back from his own lengthy excursion to the Old World. In this tale, the wealthy Bostonian Tom Aldis develops an intimate friendship with the eponymous Nancy, and with it an affection for her home village of East Rodney, a few miles outside the city. ‘The society and scenery of the little coast town were so simple and definite in their elements that one easily acquired a feeling of citizenship,’ Jewett writes. ‘Tom had an intimate knowledge, gained from several weeks’ residence, with Nancy’s whole world.’12 To have gained something like ‘citizenship’ from just a few weeks’ residence seems to echo an intensity of located experience found again and again in Jewett’s work, from Helen Denis and Kate Lancaster’s vacation in Deephaven (1877) to a similarly consuming summer for the nameless narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). We might wonder, though, where Jewett developed this temporally-condensed qualification for local affiliation; in the familiar communities of New England, or perhaps too in the extended vacations she had taken in Western Europe. In ‘The Life of Nancy’ it is indeed to Europe that Jewett sends Tom Aldis, not for a lazy summer but for a new life that takes him away for ‘nearly twenty years.’13 When he does return in the story’s final part, he at first seems like a predatory developer intent on selling off the coast for exploitation, but his own ‘new eyes’ end up re-enchanting him as to the value of his native ground: ‘I came down meaning to sell my land to a speculator . . . or to a real estate agency which has great possessions along the coast; but I’m very doubtful about doing it, now that I have seen the bay again and this lovely shore. I had no idea it was such a magnificent piece of country.’14 Although the Europeanized Tom initially appears to have developed a cosmopolitan sneer toward simple rural types, being back amongst the contours of the New England coast reawakens his localist sympathies. The ‘return of the native’ trope had already been well-used by Jewett, and other regionalists, when ‘The Life of Nancy’ appeared, but here it is not the usual parable of a former resident arriving back in the honest and restorative rural community from an alienating New York or Boston that forms the geographical arc of the story. Tom is certainly an urbanite with yearnings for rural simplicity, but one whose adult life has been spent in cultured foreign cities rather than within a more confined national sphere. It is these experiences that allow him to see, for the first time, the ‘magnificent piece of country’ represented by East Rodney. First rehearsed in Jewett’s letters as a variety of personal experience that also served as aesthetic conditioning, episodes in her fiction such as this can be read not just as autobiographical sifting but also as an engagement with the expanding range of her ‘regional’ optic. Tracing how the international experiences that Jewett describes in her letters find themselves translated into the published work is not just a case of recognizing direct

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allusions or citing references to apparently foreign objects – though, as Bill Brown and several others have demonstrated, Jewett’s fictional world is crammed with a transnational material culture; the ‘things’ brought to New England by the shipping routes of a globalized mercantile economy.15 The substantive and tactile world of Jewett’s New England – and in particular, its exhaustively documented topographical details – also seem less specifically local when considered alongside the similar obsession with European landscapes that we find in her foreign correspondence. Indeed, what we find again and again in the Fields collection is a desire to record and report back European experience in terms that emphasize its apparent contiguity with the life of distant Maine. Writing to her friend Alice Howe from Chailly (a village in the countryside southeast of Paris) in July 1892, for example, Jewett details a series of archetypal rural sights – a farmer cutting wheat with a scythe, a vine-covered old house, a pig pen – and declares that ‘I feel very much at home, being in truth a country person.’16 The second part of this statement is standard fare in the critical sense of Jewett’s life, but for her to insist on feeling ‘at home’ when she is in France is perhaps not. Nonetheless, the typologies of rural life here translate effortlessly – naturally, as it were – into her French context, so that Jewett’s sense of rural-ness, her empathetic connection to a way of life marked by particular agrarian rhythms and forms, disembeds itself from ‘the region’ to become an emotional and cultural affiliation across geographical space. This sense of finding home abroad recurs in Jewett’s foreign correspondence at numerous times, to the degree that it must have seemed an essential part of her epistolary character as Fields was selecting and editing the letters for publication. Indeed, if Jewett included any lengthy descriptions of the cities she visited on these trips then Fields chose to omit them; the letters that constitute the volume spend considerably more effort in reporting back on rural scenes and village life than they do on the sights of London, Paris, or Rome. Thus, to Sara Norton in April 1898, writing from the ‘green fields’ and ‘brooks’ of a pastoral England this time, Jewett finds in a local Devon newspaper reports that a cuckoo has been heard in Brixham, heralding the new spring: it ‘sounded homelike, because Brixham is a parish of the town of York next [to] Berwick.’17 Dwelling amidst the original place names of the Old World means that the names of her New England home return as the colonial echoes that they are, reinforcing the historical relationship that elsewhere in her work – most notably in the essay ‘From a Mournful Villager’ (1881) – she celebrates as essential to New England identity. This sense of a deeper historical, even ethnographic model of community exists not only between Old and New England, however, as Jewett’s well-documented fascination with French history attests: she also finds the same sense of homeliness in the genteel residences of rural Europe.18 The author Marie-Thérèse Blanc was a close friend and frequent host on Jewett’s visits to France, and appears often in her foreign letters; over the years Jewett and Fields spent many weeks in Blanc’s house in La Ferté sous Jouarre, situated between Paris and Reims.19 Arriving there in June 1898, Jewett promptly wrote to the artist Sarah Whitman in Massachusetts to say that ‘[i]t is almost like getting home, to find myself here with Madame Blanc at last’; and on the same day, to another correspondent, she again declared that ‘I am delighted to be with Madame Blanc, and it is almost like coming home.’20 This emphasis on homeliness (albeit qualified by that ‘almost’) is important to Jewett and important to her correspondents, but it is also important to Fields: the letters selected for the volume present these foreign trips in a somewhat resistant and self-controlling way, so that the

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experience of Europe seems consoling and intimate rather than provocative or alienating. The comfort Jewett finds abroad is often in affective connections with new and old friends, but it is also clear from the letters that it is in more than this; the sensory familiarity of the rural environment itself feels reassuringly like home. The letters also point to the way in which Jewett exercised her ability to capture ‘local color’ whilst away from home, so that the accumulating descriptions of European places and landscapes take on the same literary qualities of attentive miniaturism and aesthetic contemplation that seemed then as much as now to be a hallmark of her New England writing. Indeed, she explicitly tells Louisa Dresel, whilst writing from Aix-lesBains in southeast France, that her time in Europe has inspired her fiction: ‘It is a great temptation to write in this spirit about people you don’t know [and] . . . I find myself beginning to think of new story-people in these days.’21 Jewett finds in her own position as a tourist something akin to the empathetic observers who so often control the narrative point of view of her fiction. In Torcello near Venice in 1892, ‘the stone shutters, the . . . greenness, [and] the birds that sing’ she describes in a letter to Alice Howe become a way to arrest a specific time and place in exactly the same way critics have argued her regional fiction operates: ‘Well, when you wish to give me a happy moment of the sweetest remembrance, just say Torcello, and back I shall fly to it.’22 In the town square of Aix-les-Bains, meanwhile, Jewett ‘found my old friends all alive’ – meaning ‘the funny old peasant women . . . with their brown smiling faces’; and Whitby in Yorkshire (on the 1898 trip again) could easily be one of the Maine coastal villages of Jewett’s fiction: ‘It is a noble seacoast and a most quaint fishing-town, quite unchanged and unspoiled.’23 Realist attention to character and place-specific detail typifies the foreign letters, just as an aesthetic of the sympathetic touristic gaze had become the primary signature of Jewett’s fictional literary method. Her attraction to these foreign places is clear, but what the letters also show, not simply in the way they record her activities but in the precise stylistic manner in which these places are depicted, is a strong and growing sense of foreign correspondences: that Jewett found in Europe not only traces of her ethnic ancestry, but also something more simultaneous with the late-nineteenth-century moment, places that represented a continuing (even if always threatened) transatlantic republic of rural life. In this regard, the affiliation Jewett feels with the European countryside speaks of a shared way of life across national borders that at the very least questions any kind of fetishized or nativist American conception of ‘region.’ A transnational sense of rural identity can even be found in the texture of landscapes seemingly an ocean apart. From Naples in March 1900, she writes to Sara Norton about the hills of Salerno on the Italian coast. The ‘grey fig trees . . . and the olives’ she finds there would seem at first glance quite alien to the pointed firs of Maine, but Jewett sees in them something as ‘thick and warm and tufted as one of my own hills of pines.’24 The imaginative connection between life on either side of the Atlantic is, in other words, a reciprocal relationship that turns Europe into familiar terrain at the same time as rendering the American scene in European terms. ‘You see what a New England – I may say State of Maine – person now holds the pen!’ she declares to Norton, aware that the descriptions of her travels that fill the letters stem from the same aesthetic sensibility – the same writerly imagination – that by 1900 was famous for its deep associations with her home state.25 The contours of Italian hills, and even their distinct indigenous flora, are transposed through Jewett’s pen into details less tied to a specific physical place and more to a quality of association only possible in the literariness of her letter-writing.

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Jewett’s great passion for plants and gardening means that she repeatedly goes into detail about the flowers she identifies across her European travels, and the letters list, sometimes at great length, the names of the various flora she sees. The deep interest in botanicals displayed by Jewett has been well noted by critics, very often, as Bill Brown discusses, in terms of the ‘culture of nature’ that attends many of the uses of plants in her stories – usually, as in the case of The Country of the Pointed Firs’ Mrs. Todd, as herbal medicines.26 Rather than an interest in natural indigeneity that such attention might suggest, however, Jewett’s constant reference to plants in her letters, and concomitantly the detailed way in which she locates her stories within New England landscapes, can be seen to derive from a more open and geographically expansive impulse. Brown traces in The Country of the Pointed Firs a use of botanical analogies that equates the acceptance of displaced peoples to displaced plants, so that foreignness achieves a kind of assimilation not unlike the cultivation of flowers and herbs in Mrs. Todd’s garden. Typologies in botany lend their reasoning to typologies of human character, so that the narrator’s ‘recognition of types allows her to see characterological congruities between city and country.’27 Breaking the assumption of regionalism’s valorization of local determinism even further, Kaye Wierzbicki has recently argued that the ‘metonymic traces’ of England found in the plant names ‘Canterbury Bells’ and ‘London Pride’ that Jewett explicitly cites in ‘From a Mournful Villager’ demonstrate that the very material of the American landscape is intimately ‘forged by foreignness.’28 The recurring discussion of fenced gardens found here and elsewhere in Jewett’s writing, she argues, implies a preference not for the apparent naturalism of ‘bioregional authenticity,’ but a designed formalism that encourages the cultivation of all kinds of ‘foreign’ plants within the controlled space of the garden – a space that amounts to ‘an inclusion of foreign aesthetics in America.’29 Fields’s presentation of Jewett’s letters from abroad – if we place them at the center of our consideration and begin to read them as literary texts – thus construct a more international figure than current criticism tends to emphasize, but the connection also extends beyond the touristic into a more fundamental relationship. A pattern of ‘foreign correspondence’ emerges that suggest the regional aesthetic that Jewett developed and turned into a profitable authorial identity was honed and developed as much in her European experiences as out of intimacy with her New England locales. But is this to say that Jewett has been a closet cosmopolitan all this time? It would be hard to claim so, especially given the turn to critical historicist readings of her work in the 1990s that sought (often convincingly) to unveil her as a deeply conservative, racist, and even protofascistic defender of ethnic purity.30 Any number of these readings might be cited – but Sandra Zagarell’s damning analysis of The Country of the Pointed Firs in a now-classic 1994 essay is exemplary.31 Focusing on the novel’s consistent concern with notions of community, Zagarell compellingly observes that ‘it seems to me impossible to understand what “community” in the book is without exploring the racial attitudes, nativism, and exclusionary impulses that inflect [it].’32 While this claim is persuasive, I am less sure about Zagarell’s sense that these reactionary attitudes configure Dunnet Landing, the setting for the novel, as ‘entirely local, congruent with its particular geography and none other.’33 Such an apparent congruence posits a circumscribed geographical correlative to Jewett’s conservatism, conflating her attitudes toward cultural homogeneity and racial purity with an apparent veneration of the uniqueness and coherence of localized identity. ‘Given Jewett’s beliefs and

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temperament,’ Zagarell maintains, ‘and her history of having lived much of her life in the coastal Maine village of South Berwick, it is understandable that Country features a long-lived, stable, and homogeneous community.’34 If politicized readings of Jewett like Zagarell’s were, and still are, important correctives to a persistently nostalgic strain of regionalist criticism that can feel entrenched in a mindset of pastoral antimodernism, however, we can again turn to another sample of Jewett’s letters from the Fields edition to demonstrate the importance, aesthetic as well as political, of Jewett’s foreign correspondence in the literary construction of her native region. In these letters, written during a two-month trip around the Caribbean in 1896, the ‘transatlantic republic of rural life’ that can be detected in Jewett’s personal correspondence from her time in Europe fades from view and something more politically troubling makes itself clear. Jewett’s 1896 trip to the Caribbean was the first and only time she visited the area, and she seems to have done so in some style: along with Fields and their friend Henry Pierce, Jewett traveled with the writer – and former editor of the Atlantic Monthly – Thomas Bailey Aldrich and his wife Lilian aboard their private steam yacht the Hermione.35 In her edition of the letters Fields includes just two missives from this trip, yet they contain some of the most often-quoted material from all of Jewett’s correspondence (even if, as Patrick Gleason notes, it is precisely because of their troubling contents that they have tended to be glossed or quoted out of context by some of Jewett’s more sympathetic commentators).36 The first of these letters, addressed to Sarah Whitman on 16 January 1896, was written while the touring party’s boat was docked in Nassau in the Bahamas.37 Jewett initially seems to be offering the same kind of impressionistic ‘local color’ sketches that fill her European correspondence, but then moves suddenly and bluntly into an idiom of racial caricature: It is a charming little town along the waterside, with its little square houses with four-sided thatch roofs; and down the side lanes come women carrying things on their heads, firewood and large baskets of grapes, and an idle man-person on a small donkey, and little black darkeys, oh, very black, with outgrown white garments.38 Read against the other examples of her international letters, these comments from the Bahamas act in some ways to continue an already familiar anecdotal approach to representing local scenery, but the ‘little black darkeys’ sound a rather different and uncharacteristic note of pointed racial distinction. Whereas race is unsurprisingly never a part of Jewett’s descriptive register when writing home about France or England, here it becomes essential to her writerly sense of scene-setting. A couple of weeks later, moreover, she wrote again, this time to Louisa Dresel from Kingston in Jamaica, and here the integral relationship between touristic sightseeing and the locals that occupy those sights is even more in evidence: I find Jamaica a most enchantingly beautiful country . . . with its wild marshes and huge flock of flamingos, like all your best red paints spilt on the shining mud . . . Then we went to Hayti, which was oh, so funny with its pomp of darkeys. Port au Prince was quite an awful scene of thriftlessness and silly pretense – but one or two little Haytian harbours and the high green coast were most lovely. And then Jamaica, with all its new trees and flowers, and its coolies, Loulie! with their bangles and turbans and strange eyes.39

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These letters together tell an important story about the insidious casualness of Jewett’s racism, but they also relate in important ways to the previous and subsequent letters she sent from her travels in Europe. Writing in affectionate terms to Dresel from Jamaica, it is clear there is still much to positively relate in the flora and fauna of Caribbean landscapes, but the minstrelization of those ‘darkeys’ and the crude wonder at those ‘coolies’ (Asian laborers brought to Jamaica following the abolition of the slave trade), flatten the non-white population of these places into only another picturesque detail in the literary postcard Jewett is sending home. The affective identification of her European correspondence is replaced here with a more culturally distanced relationship to a part of the world that cannot be incorporated into Jewett’s geography of affiliation because its land and its people together constitute only something strangely ‘other.’ Such attitudes might well have been naturalized to the point of invisibility on board the Hermione. Patrick Gleason points out that Jewett’s traveling companions Thomas and Lilian Aldrich were ‘fervent nativists and outspoken opponents of immigration,’ and Jewett clearly felt that her correspondents back home at least partially inhabited the same mindset.40 What is more, these views are something Fields chose to include as part of her epistolary portrait; our understanding of Jewett’s easy way with racial exoticism is only possible because of Fields’s own ease, in 1911, with this kind of descriptive register. The Caribbean letters thus hint at a more widespread acceptance of such perspectives among Jewett’s circle and her social class – so while they have served to impugn the individual letter-writer in the eyes of later critics, it is also important to acknowledge the cultural context within which such private letters could end up forming part of a public and laudatory edition of a well-known writer’s correspondence. This tendency of the letter-form to ripple out from the private realm is certainly evident in those works Jewett chose to publish in her own lifetime. The trip to the Caribbean took place at a crucial moment in her writing career: the first two parts of The Country of the Pointed Firs had been written before she departed, and appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in January and March of 1896, during the time Jewett was actually in the Caribbean, but the story was not completed until Jewett had returned to Maine, with two more parts being published in July and September of 1896. The whole book, moreover, was thoroughly revised in the summer of 1896, including the addition of two new concluding chapters, so that Houghton Mifflin could publish it as a single volume later the same year.41 The trip around the Caribbean, in short, took place in the midst of Jewett writing her most celebrated and most scrutinized work, and this important biographical detail makes it possible to see those Caribbean letters not just as indicative of a worldview that many critics have detected in the later chapters of the book itself, but as pieces of writing that literally put into words the formative experiences she would revisit in more complex terms in her fiction. Even if we just take the material world of Jewett’s fiction as an indication of the global context of its regionalism, for example, there are numerous items of Caribbean origin that litter the book’s carefully described interiors, including: ‘West Indian curiosities’; a tea-caddy and cups ‘brought . . . from the island of Tobago’; and the ‘West Indian basket’ that the narrator receives as a parting gift from Mrs. Todd in ‘A Backward View,’ the final chapter added for the later book publication.42 Picking up on these references, Elizabeth Ammons cites such ‘things’ (to echo Bill Brown again) as the ‘[t]races of empire,’ and they can indeed be read as the remnants of Dunnet Landing’s historical connections to networks of trade and exploitation.43 But there is

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also a temporally immediate quality to Jewett’s inclusion of these objects, for these souvenirs and trinkets are an objective correlative of the exotic ‘bangles and turbans’ Jewett details in her letters from the Caribbean. As Patrick Gleason has recently demonstrated, the short Caribbean trip Jewett took in early 1896 seems to have had a disproportionately profound impact on her work, so that by the time she wrote the strange and disquieting short story ‘The Foreigner’ (1900), one of four that she used to revisit and extend the fictional world described in Country, its gothic preoccupation with imperial and racial repression serve to ‘bring Jamaica – and the complex maritime interconnections of the Atlantic slave trade – home to Maine.’44 What is less often remarked is that these wider political circuits within Jewett’s work, so well elucidated by the critics mentioned here and by many others, can be traced in letters that seem to be not just passive commentaries on her trips abroad but part of an active process of imagining and claiming those places (and their people) through an epistolary aesthetics. The strain of recent criticism that emphasizes Jewett’s nativism and the buried racial priorities of her fiction can tend to reduce her conspicuous focus on community to a crudely articulated veneration of New England localism and its roots in a historically distant white European ancestry. Reading her letters as ‘local color’ sketches in their own right, however, helps to complicate this critique of her work, because it insists that the connections between Europe and New England – the landscapes, the topography of plants and trees, the very material of the land itself – are an indication of Jewett’s transnational bonds of affiliation with a particular kind of rural people, a conception of a ‘rural culture’ that may well be conservative, and certainly did include a strain of racial prejudice, but that was not necessarily about historical lineages of ethnicity, because it was also something contemporaneous and even aesthetically grounded. In using Jewett as the exemplar of American regionalism, scholars have tended to emphasize the importance of proximity in her work – whether that is the geographical proximity of the ‘region,’ or the physical proximity of like-minded and sometimes like-gendered people. In this regard, the geographer David Harvey’s sense that ‘for most people the terrain of sensuous experience and of affective social relations . . . is locally circumscribed’ is quite right, but a similar conception of affective geography in regionalist studies tends to miss the rather different spatial order that tentatively and inchoately emerges, for example, in Jewett’s foreign correspondence.45 In other words, it is possible to track a different conception of affiliation in Jewett’s letters, one that is equally alert to emotional and geographical bonds across national borders in the contemporary moment; an affective geography that is non-proximate. Conversely, however, Jewett’s letters also help to nuance a different critical account of American regionalism, one which shifts from seeing regionalism as an inwardlooking and wholly localized form to one that sees the region as imbricated in all kinds of globalized networks and exchanges. Very often this shift has been used to articulate a politics of space at work in the notion of transnationalism, as if affiliations which transcend or supersede or in some way negate the ‘national’ are always already progressive, cosmopolitan, and able to neutralize the iniquitous logics of American nation-building. These more positive accounts of the cultural work of regionalism might well look again at the version of transnationalism that finds voice in Jewett’s foreign letters. What can be found there is an affective geography which does indeed circumvent the political entity of ‘the nation,’ but often only because it is on its way

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to potentially more exclusionary, reactionary, and dangerous fantasies of cultural and racial alliance. These are conjectural points, and ones that these few letters cannot convey in themselves, but they do begin to suggest that the aesthetics of Jewett’s private epistolary writing might usefully be read with the same critical attention that her published fiction continues to be afforded.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Terry Heller for his help in the initial stages of research for this chapter.

Notes 1. Janet Gurkin Altman sees the ‘particularity of the I–you’ relationship, what she calls ‘pronominal relativity,’ as one of the central characteristics of epistolary discourse – something that must necessarily be inferred or interpreted by an outside reader if both sides of the correspondence are not present (Epistolarity, 117). 2. Fields, ‘Preface,’ 4. 3. Cary, ‘Introduction,’ 15. 4. Ibid. 13; Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 176. 5. See Bell, ‘Chronology,’ 920. 6. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett, 1. 7. See Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 140. 8. My point is to emphasize the image of Jewett we have got from her published texts, but it is worth reiterating that her collected letters represent only a fraction of those that have survived. Supplementary material has been published through the years, much of it now digitally reproduced by the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project (see ‘Letters and Diaries of Sarah Orne Jewett’). But as Stoddart notes, this leaves around 2,000 letters, spread across sixty-three locations, still unpublished (see ‘Selected Letters,’ 2). 9. See Jewett, ‘Jewett to Dresel.’ 10. Hence my decision in what follows to cite Jewett’s letters as they appear in the Fields edition. 11. Jewett, Letter to Annie Fields, 1883, in Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, 18. 12. Jewett, ‘The Life of Nancy,’ 11. 13. Ibid. 34. 14. Ibid. 36. 15. See Brown, ‘Regional Artifacts.’ 16. Jewett, Letter to Mrs. George D. Howe, 9 July 1892, in Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, 92. 17. Jewett, Letter to Sara Norton, 19 April 1898, in ibid. 136. 18. Jewett had a lasting interest in the European roots of New England, articulated nowhere more strikingly than in her history book for young readers, The Story of the Normans (1887). She ends this volume with an assertion of a shared origin point for certain Atlantic families that is at once a statement of ethnic purity and a recognition of a shared topographical environment: ‘Among the red roofs and gray walls of the Norman towns, or the faint, bright colors of its country landscapes, among the green hedgerows and golden wheat-fields of England, the same flowers grow in more luxuriant fashion, but old Norway and Denmark sent out the seed that has flourished in richer soil. To-day the Northman, the Norman, and the Englishman, and a young nation on this western shore of the Atlantic are all kindred who, possessing a rich inheritance, should own the closest of kindred ties’ (366). 19. Jewett had translated Blanc’s essay ‘Family Life in America,’ originally published in France in 1895, for The Forum in 1896. See Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 46.

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20. Jewett, Letter to Sarah Whitman, 6 June 1898, in Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, 143; Jewett, Letter to Sara Norton, 6 June 1898, in ibid. 146. 21. Jewett, Letter to Louisa Dresel, 14 June 1898, in ibid. 154. 22. Jewett, Letter to Mrs. George D. Howe, 1892, in ibid. 100. 23. Jewett, Letter to Sarah Whitman, 6 June 1898, in ibid. 144; Jewett, Letter to Sarah Whitman, 11 September 1898, in ibid. 159. 24. Jewett, Letter to Sara Norton, 18 March 1900, in ibid. 170. 25. Ibid. 171. 26. Brown, ‘Regional Artifacts,’ 201. 27. Ibid. 204. 28. Wierzbicki, ‘The Formal and the Foreign,’ 74. 29. Ibid. 77. 30. The accusation of ‘protofascism,’ a source of much discussion among Jewett scholars, is to be found in Ammons, ‘Material Culture,’ 96. 31. As well as the above see, for instance, Shannon, ‘The Country of Our Friendship,’ and Schrag, ‘ “Whiteness” as Loss.’ 32. Zagarell, ‘Country’s Portrayal of Community,’ 40. 33. Ibid. 44. 34. Ibid. 43. 35. See Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, 301. 36. See Gleason, ‘Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Foreigner”,’ 28. 37. It is indicatively idiosyncratic of Fields that she wrongly labels both of the Caribbean letters as having been written in 1899. Biographers all agree that the trip actually took place in 1896, so I amend Fields by using the correct date here. 38. Jewett, Letter to Sarah Whitman, 16 January 1896, in Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, 161. 39. Jewett, Letter to Louisa Dresel, 30 January 1896, in ibid. 163. 40. See Gleason, ‘Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Foreigner”,’ 27. 41. See Homestead and Heller, ‘Unpublished Chapter,’ 336. 42. Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs, 384, 418, 485. 43. Ammons, ‘Material Culture,’ 92. 44. Gleason, ‘Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Foreigner”,’ 24. 45. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 85.

Works Cited Altman, J. G. (1982), Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ammons, E. (1992), Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, New York: Oxford University Press. Ammons, E. (1994), ‘Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs,’ in J. Howard (ed.), New Essays on ‘The Country of the Pointed Firs’, New York: Cambridge University Press, 81–99. Bell, M. D. (1994), ‘Chronology,’ in S. O. Jewett, Novels and Stories, ed. M. D. Bell, New York: Library of America, 915–30. Blanchard, P. (1994), Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work, Reading, MA: AddisonWesley Publishing Company. Brodhead, R.H. (1993), Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, B. (2002), ‘Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett),’ American Literary History, 14: 195–226.

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Cary, R. (1967), ‘Introduction,’ in S. O. Jewett, Sarah Orne Jewett Letters, ed. R. Cary, Waterville, ME: Colby College Press, 13–17. Fields, A. (1911), ‘Preface,’ in S. O. Jewett, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. A. Fields, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 3–12. Gleason, P. (2011), ‘Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Foreigner” and the Transamerican Routes of New England Regionalism,’ Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 28: 24–46. Harvey, D. (2000), Spaces of Hope, Berkeley: University of California Press. Homestead, M. J., and T. Heller (2014), ‘ “The Other One”: An Unpublished Chapter of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs,’ J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 2: 331–65. Jewett, S. O. (1887), The Story of the Normans: Told Chiefly in Relation to Their Conquest of England, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Jewett, S. O. (1895), ‘The Life of Nancy,’ in The Life of Nancy, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1–42. Jewett, S.O. [1896] (1994), The Country of the Pointed Firs, in M. D. Bell (ed.), Novels and Stories, New York: Library of America, 371–487. Jewett, S. O. (1911), Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. A. Fields, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Jewett, S. O. (1975), ‘Jewett to Dresel: 33 Letters,’ ed. R. Cary, Colby Quarterly, 11: 13–49. Jewett, S. O. (1988–present), ‘Letters and Diaries of Sarah Orne Jewett,’ The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project, Coe College, Iowa, (last accessed 22 September 2015). Matthiessen, F. O. (1929), Sarah Orne Jewett, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Schrag, M. (1999), ‘ “Whiteness” as Loss in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Foreigner,” ’ in K. L. Kilcup and T. S. Edwards (eds.), Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 185–206. Shannon, L. (1999), ‘The Country of Our Friendship: Jewett’s Intimist Art,’ American Literature, 71: 227–62. Stoddart, S. F. (1988), ‘Selected Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett: A Critical Edition with Commentary,’ Ph.D. Diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Wierzbicki, K. (2014), ‘The Formal and the Foreign: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Garden Fences and the Meaning of Enclosure,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature, 69: 56–91. Zagarell, S. (1994), ‘Country’s Portrayal of Community and the Exclusion of Difference,’ in J. Howard (ed.), New Essays on ‘The Country of the Pointed Firs’, New York: Cambridge University Press, 39–60.

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46 ‘TOO INTIMATE TO PUBLISH, TOO RARE TO SUPPRESS’: HENRY JAMES IN HIS LETTERS Michael Anesko

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n early November 1899, Henry James scribbled an entry in his private journal, sketching out the plot of a short story that would pivot on the publication of a volume of letters. The ‘germ’ (as he often called these preliminary, inspired insights for future fiction) must have gripped his imagination firmly, because the tale in question – ‘The Abasement of the Northmores’ – was included in The Soft Side, a collection of stories published just nine months later. In fact, the author’s agent was negotiating a contract for the book in early January 1900 and proofs of the finished volume were ready as early as May of that year.1 These otherwise silent bibliographical details tell us how fixedly James must have worked on the story, as most of the other tales included in The Soft Side already had benefited from previous serial publication and were ready at hand for inclusion. The subject of letters – their composition, circulation, and possible publication – was clearly one to which Henry James was irresistibly drawn.2 ‘The Abasement of the Northmores’ chronicles the posthumous fate of two men who had been bitter rivals in public life – one crowned with success, the other seemingly doomed to failure. The widow of the successful Lord Northmore wants to enshrine her husband’s fame by collecting and publishing his correspondence. Hearing of this plan, the embittered Mrs. Warren Hope cherishes the idea of collecting her late husband’s letters, knowing that they will show the world (otherwise so indifferent) how much superior an intellect he possessed. ‘He was a letter-writer if you liked,’ she muses, ‘– natural, witty, various, vivid, playing, with the idlest, lightest hand, up and down the whole scale. His easy power – his easy power: everything that brought him back brought back that.’3 To her chagrin, however, none of Hope’s correspondents have preserved his letters, and her plan for vengeful publication sourly dissolves. When at last Northmore’s letters do appear in print, however, they are ‘an anti-climax, for mediocrity and platitude, a grotesqueness (for his reputation – turning it inside out)’ (CN, 188). Their publication gives the world ample proof of the great man’s fathomless dullness and fatuity. The avenging wheel of justice has made a final turn of its own accord. The dreaded monument to Northmore’s fame instead will be ‘within a week the opportunity of every humourist, the derision of intelligent London.’4 The epistolary memory of Warren Hope resides only in the letters he had written long ago to his future wife: these she has lovingly kept, and then transcribed and printed (in a single 696

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copy), intending them to be published when she, too, is in the grave. ‘If there were pages too intimate to publish,’ she consoles herself, ‘there were too many others too rare to suppress.’5 They will be the ultimate testament to her late husband’s matchless qualities of mind and spirit. The power of letters to consecrate – or embarrass – their author was almost an obsession in the James family. Various biographers of all its illustrious (and even less familiar) members have remarked upon the occasional ravages visited upon their correspondence, much of it deliberately destroyed by their own hands. Perhaps most notably, Henry James periodically made bonfires of others’ postal vanities, incinerating almost all the letters written to him by hundreds of friends and, not infrequently, other family members. And he wanted others to do the same, enjoining his addressees to burn whatever they received. (Fortunately, few did.) Throughout his career, whenever ‘great changes & marked dates & new eras [&] closed chapters’ were registered, the novelist unapologetically ‘committed to the flames a good many documents,’ wanting not merely to clean house but also to impede the prospects for subsequent inquiry into his private life (LiL, 399). Immortalized in the ritual burning of the eponymous love letters in ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888), James’s tactics of secrecy became a confirmed law – a law, he once said, ‘that I have made tolerably absolute these last years as I myself grow older and think more of my latter end: the law of not leaving personal and private documents at the mercy of any accidents, or even of my executors!’ (HJL, 4: 541). When James died in 1916, his executors were almost immediately faced with the delicate question of how best to answer the public’s natural curiosity about the contours of a great writer’s life and the epistolary record that would give it shape. After much soul-searching and hand-wringing by the author’s collateral descendants, Percy Lubbock, one of James’s most devoted acolytes, was authorized to compile a two-volume selection (The Letters of Henry James), published by Scribner’s in 1920.6 Even though Lubbock’s edition included just 403 letters, its contents quickly enthralled most readers, including James’s nephew Henry (‘Harry’) James III, who screened the work in galley-proof on board the S.S. Rotterdam as he was returning home to the United States after the end of World War I. ‘The book makes a deeper & bigger impression on careful reading,’ he wrote to his sister: It will, I rather think, make Uncle Henry count very much more than he did already. For it’s full of literature as well as character. In fact I suspect that these letters will become, in the history of English literature, not only one of the ½ dozen greatest epistolary classics, but a sort of mile stone – the last stone of the age whose close The Great War has marked . . . These Letters will be the final, classic and magnificent manifestation of their kind.7 Before long, more disinterested reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic echoed this judgment. Representative of many, the venerable North American Review affirmed that James’s letters were ‘matchless for their prodigal and eager flow of sympathy, their inexhaustible kindliness, their ample and exquisite tenderness, their beautiful generosity.’8 Together with Lubbock’s authoritative headnotes, this selection of the author’s correspondence constructed a version of Henry James that the world would long know: an artist always in control of his powers, comfortably enmeshed in a

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thoroughly cosmopolitan milieu. Like the fictional Warren Hope’s, James’s letters, with their inimitable style, affirmed the author’s ‘easy power,’ his masterful command of English prose, and his central place in the modern epistolary canon. When other James letters began to trickle into print, however, the writer’s surviving family chose to close ranks. Besides trespassing against the heirs’ legal copyright, those who published letters in their possession were (in Harry’s view) ‘merely reaching out for a few shillings or ministering to their own vanity.’9 Worse yet was the public circulation of documents that invited speculation about the author’s private life, letters that Harry damned with the euphemistic adjective, ‘trivial.’ Determined to curtail such practices, Harry erected formidable safeguards when, at last, he and the other surviving legatees bequeathed the James family archive to the Harvard College library in 1941. For many decades to come, permission to quote from (let alone publish) James’s letters was severely restricted.10 Only a handful of scholars – most notably F. O. Matthiessen and Leon Edel – were relatively free to make use of what the family had given (as well as later acquisitions). Apart from the tantalizing excerpts from family letters that Matthiessen included in his compendium volume The James Family (1947), those interested in the writer’s correspondence would have to wait for Edel to finish his fourvolume edition of Henry James Letters, not completed until 1984 – a project that added another 900 or so items to the total previously published by Percy Lubbock. Unfortunately, the inadequacies of Edel’s work as an editor of James’s letters were grievously obvious from the start, and they only multiplied with the years.11 His transcriptions were riddled with errors; his principles of selection were gratuitously selfserving (dovetailing with the narrative outline of his five-volume biography of James); his annotations were spare and remarkably unhelpful.12 As one commentator rued: ‘If we can’t trust that a given sentence is what James wrote, or we have no idea what he is writing about, or we suspect that some other important statement is missing, we are inhibited as readers and critics.’13 And, despite the undeniable heft of Edel’s four volumes, only a small fraction of James’s letters was yet in print. (Knowledgeable critics have estimated that the writer penned between twelve and fifteen thousand letters in his lifetime, of which approximately 10,500 are known to have survived.)14 Small wonder that James himself could lament: ‘My correspondence is the struggle of my life!’ (HJL, 3: 135). That correspondence has since become the struggle of other lives, becoming the basis for two genuinely heroic scholarly undertakings. At the virtual dawn of academic computing in the humanities, Steven H. Jobe began to compile a Calendar of Henry James Letters, an ever-increasing database assembled from the records of public and private archives as well as volumes of published correspondence. Copies of his early dot-matrix printouts initially circulated among a handful of grateful scholars; a later version appeared in the Henry James Review; and it is now available online, together with a biographical register compiled with the assistance of Susan E. Gunter.15 This project, in turn, has made possible another monumental academic enterprise: the publication of The Complete Letters of Henry James, edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias, first announced by the University of Nebraska Press in 1997, with its earliest volumes appearing in 2006. The scale of this work in progress is unprecedented – given the ‘10,423 letters known to date,’ the editors have estimated a need for ‘at least 140 individual volumes’ – and it promises to answer a necessity that James scholars (and not a few general readers) have long felt.16

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Already the pressure of that necessity had encouraged others to supplement James’s epistolary availability, even in defiance of Edel’s restrictive monopoly. Not surprisingly, most of these other projects have concentrated on particular subsets of the correspondence: letters to Henry Adams, to Hendrik Andersen, to William Dean Howells, to William James, to the publishing house of Macmillan, to Edith Wharton, to groups of various male and female friends.17 (And this list is hardly exhaustive.) Undeniably helpful as all of these volumes have been, eventually having the entire epistolarium in print will go much farther to cement James’s place in the modern canon. If Percy Lubbock’s two-volume edition set in place the figure of Henry James as a kind of mandarin of letters, ensconced in the ivory tower of his art, Edel’s and all these later volumes have gradually helped to dislodge him from that lofty (and rather artificial) perch.18 While evidence relating to his creative life will always hold an abiding interest, James’s letters offer their readers many other insights about the social and economic milieu in which he lived. Even when he is chatty and ironic, chronicling the relatively small happenings of his literary life to amuse his family and friends, such letters today ‘become the picture of an age’ (as Edel maintained) – ‘they contain the penetrating glimpses by a pair of American eyes into the manners and society of England and Europe, so that gossip often becomes history’ (I, xxviii). Rather remarkably, we find glimpses of this power even in the earliest letters that survive, especially those that James wrote back home while he was abroad (between 1869 and 1870) on his first solo journey to England and the Continent. ‘England is a good married matron,’ he metaphorically summarized, ‘Switzerland a magnificent man & Italy a beautiful dishevelled nymph of fable’ (CLHJ, 2: 95).19 The picturesque charms of Italy, in particular, unleashed the writer’s romantic fervor, his keen wit, and, not occasionally, his quasi-Protestant irreverence. Finally reaching Rome – after having seen the northern cities of Milan, Venice, and Florence – James seemed almost overwhelmed by a force of revelation. ‘At last – for the 1st time – I live!’ he exclaims to brother William. ‘It beats every thing: it leaves the Rome of your fancy – your education – nowhere. It makes Venice – Florence – Oxford – London – seem like little cities of paste-board. I went reeling & moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment’ (CLHJ, 2: 166). But if Saint Peter’s basilica impresses him beyond its reputation, Pope Pius IX does not. ‘When you have seen that flaccid old woman waving his ridiculous fingers over the prostrate multitude,’ he reports to sister Alice, ‘& have duly felt the picturesqueness of the scene – & then turn away sickened by its absolute obscenity – you may climb the steps of the Capitol & contemplate the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius . . . As you revert to that poor sexless old Pope enthroned upon his cushions – & then glance at those imperial legs swinging in their immortal bronze, you cry out that here at least was a man!’ (CLHJ, 2: 175). Again feeling the contrast between old and new, he affirms that the appeal of ancient relics and the remnants of Roman architecture is irresistible. To stand beneath the classic dome of the Pantheon ‘makes you profoundly regret that you are not a pagan suckled in the creed outworn that produced it’ (CLHJ, 2: 174). Especially after James chose to maintain permanent residence in England, his literary reputation in the United States always was vulnerable to charges of a want of patriotism. But his early letters help redress the balance, written as they were before he felt obliged to justify his own exile. Already wanting in 1867 ‘to do for our dear old English letters and writers something of what Ste. Beuve and the best French

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critics have done for theirs,’ James nevertheless amplifies his ambition by conceding that Sainte-Beuve ‘is a man of the past, of a dead generation; and that we young Americans are (without cant) men of the future’: I feel that my only chance for success as a critic is to let all the breezes of the west blow through me at their will. We are Americans born – il faut en prendre son parti [we must make up our minds to it]. I look upon it as a great blessing; and I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. We have exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely with forms of civilisation not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically &c) claim our property where we find it. (CLHJ, 1: 179)20 Afraid that in some of his letters he has exaggerated the merits of Europe, James concedes: ‘It’s the same world there after all & Italy isn’t the absolute any more than Massachusetts. It’s a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe’ (CLHJ, 2: 438). Further acquaintance with the British helped make that avoidance possible. ‘Never from a single Englishman of them all have I heard the 1st word of appreciation or enjoyment of the things here that I find delightful,’ he complains elsewhere: To a certain extent this is natural: but not to the extent to wh. they carry it. As for the women I give ’em up, in advance. I am tired of their plainness & stiffness & tastelessness – their dowdy heads, their dirty collars & their linsey woolsey trains . . . I revolt from their dreary deathly want of – what shall I call it? – Clover Hooper has it – intellectual grace – Minny Temple has it – moral spontaneity. They live wholly in the realm of the cut & dried . . . The English have such a mortal mistrust of any thing like ‘criticism’ or ‘keen analysis’ (wh. they seem to regard as a kind of maudlin foreign flummery) that I rarely remember to have heard on English lips any other intellectual verdict (no matter under what provocation) than this broad synthesis – ‘so immensely clever.’ What exasperates you is not that they can’t say more, but that they wouldn’t if they could. (CLHJ, 2: 314)21 Exploring such cultural contrasts – between social classes as well as nationalities – would soon become the hallmark of the author’s fiction. While James was engaged on that first European sojourn, news came to him of the untimely death (on 8 March 1870, at the age of twenty-four) of Minny Temple, his beloved cousin – an event that inspired two of his most extraordinary epistolary outpourings. To his mother James confided, ‘I have been spending the morning letting the awakened swarm of old recollections & associations flow into my mind—almost enjoying the exquisite pain they provoke’ (CLHJ, 2: 336). As he turned these bittersweet memories over in his mind, he found: Minny somehow present, directly or indirectly – & with all that wonderful ethereal brightness of presence which was so peculiarly her own. And now to sit down to the idea of her death! As much as a human creature may, I fancy, she will survive in the unspeakably tender memory of her friends . . . Oh poor struggling suffering dying creature! But who complains that she’s gone or would

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have her back to die more painfully? She certainly never seemed to have come into this world for her own happiness – or that of others – or as anything but as a sort of divine reminder & quickener – a transcendent protest against our acquiescence in its grossness . . . It comes home to me with irresistible power, the sense of how much I knew her & how much I loved her. As I look back upon the past, from the time I was old enough to feel & perceive, her friendship seems literally to fill it – with proportions magnified doubtless by the mist of tears. (CLHJ, 2: 336) That the memory of this delicate young woman would inspire such characters as Daisy Miller (in the eponymous novella of 1878), Isabel Archer (in 1881’s The Portrait of a Lady), and Milly Theale (in 1902’s The Wings of the Dove) hardly seems surprising, given the vividness and intensity of James’s troubled consecration. Just a little while later, he was impelled to take up his pen again, this time writing to his brother William about Minny’s death. ‘A few short hours have amply sufficed to more than reconcile me to the event & to make it seem the most natural – the happiest, fact, almost in her whole career,’ he noted: So it seems, at least, on reflection: to the eye of feeling there is something immensely moving in the sudden & complete extinction of a vitality so exquisite & so apparently infinite as Minny’s. But what most occupies me, as it will have done all of you at home, is the thought of how her whole life seemed to tend & hasten, visibly, audibly, sensibly, to this consummation. Her character may be almost literally said to have been without practical application to life. She seems a sort of experiment of nature – an attempt, a specimen or example – a mere subject without an object. She was at any rate the helpless victim & toy of her own intelligence – so that there is positive relief in thinking of her being removed from her own heroic treatment & placed in kinder hands. What a vast amount of truth appears now in all the common-places that she used to provoke – that she was restless – that she was helpless – that she was unpractical. How far she may have been considered up to the time of her illness to have achieved a tolerable happiness, I don’t know: hardly at all, I should say, for her happiness like her unhappiness remained wholly incomplete: but what strikes me above all is how great & rare a benefit her life has been to those with whom she was associated. I feel as if a very fair portion of my sense of the reach & quality & capacity of human nature rested upon my experience of her character: certainly a large portion of my admiration of it. She was a case of pure generosity – she had more even than she ever had use for. (CLHJ, 2: 341–2) Though never a professed Christian in any conventional sense – he once begged a prim English acquaintance not to be ‘scandalized if I tell you that I never by any chance go to church!’ – James (like his idiosyncratic father) nevertheless had an abiding reverence for true spiritual feeling.22 The ‘religious passion,’ he affirmed to Charles Eliot Norton in 1873, ‘has always struck me as the strongest of man’s heart’ – so much so that ‘it is hard not to believe that some application of the supernatural idea, should not be an essential part of our life’ (LiL, 53). Not many years later, when another close friend reached out to him in anguish, James answered her with what he called ‘the voice of stoicism’ (HJL, 2: 424).

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‘I don’t know why we live, – the gift of life comes to us from I don’t know what source or for what purpose,’ he confessed: [B]ut I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words, consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one’s place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake . . . We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other – even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. (HJL, 2: 424) How deeply these feelings resonated for James can be read in the journal entry he made decades later (on 3 November 1894) about ‘some young creature . . . preferably a woman’ who, ‘on the threshold of a life that has seemed boundless, is suddenly condemned to death . . . by the voice of the physician’ (CN, 102–3). She becomes acquainted with a young man who discovers her fate and, all in pity, ‘wishes he could make her taste of happiness, give her something that it breaks her heart to go without having known. That “something” can only be – of course – the chance to love and to be loved’ (CN, 102–3). From this The Wings of the Dove took flight. Many of James’s letters are more down to earth, especially those in which he discloses the reach of his artistic and professional ambition. If some of the early ones display mock self-deprecation – as when he assures the editor of the Atlantic Monthly that his (very feeble) first novel, Watch and Ward (1878), will stand as ‘one of the greatest works of “this or any age” ’ – others reveal a shrewd self-awareness about the inherent limitations of his popular appeal (CLHJ, 2: 382). When editors and members of his family criticized the ‘over-refinement’ of his style, James (in 1872) defended his priorities with a clear head – and a clear conscience. ‘Beyond a certain point,’ he answered, dispensing with that quality in his work ‘would not be desirable I think – for me at least, who must give up the ambition of ever being a free-going & light-paced enough writer to please the multitude. The multitude, I am more & more convinced, has absolutely no taste – none at least that a thinking man is bound to defer to. To write for the few who have is doubtless to lose money – but I am not afraid of starving’ (CLHJ, 1: 114). Once he really had launched his transatlantic career as a man of letters and taken up permanent residence in London, his letters evince a deeper confidence in the rightness of his priorities. In 1878, for example, he tells his mother: ‘It is time I should rend the veil from the ferocious ambition which has always couvé [smoldered] beneath a tranquil exterior; which enabled me to support unrecorded physical misery in my young years; and which is perfectly confident of accomplishing considerable things!’ (HJL, 2: 156). Especially to brother William, his stingiest critic, James wants to set the record straight. With the tailwind of Daisy Miller (an international succès de scandale) filling his sails, the author breezily can affirm, ‘I am working along very quietly & steadily, & consider no reasonable share of fame & no decent literary competence out of my reach’ (WHJ, 123).

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Just as telling, of course, are James’s responses to failure and disappointment. When both The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima (his two great novels of social realism from 1886) were published to derision – or, worse, silence – a stunned James sought comforting counsel from his old friend (and long-time editor) William Dean Howells. ‘How much I wish I could keep this lonely new year by a long personal talk with you,’ James confides: I am troubled about many things, about many of which you could give me, I think (or rather I am sure,) advice & direction. I have entered upon evil days – but this is for your most private ear. It sounds portentous, but it only means that I am still staggering a good deal under the mysterious & (to me) inexplicable injury wrought – apparently – upon my situation by my 2 last novels, the Bostonians & the Princess, from which I expected so much & derived so little. They have reduced the desire, & the demand, for my productions to zero – as I judge from the fact that though I have for a good while past been writing a number of good short things, I remain irremediably unpublished. Editors keep them back, for months & years, as if they were ashamed of them, & I am condemned apparently to eternal silence. (LFL, 265–6) When his next long novel, The Tragic Muse (1890), seemed destined to meet a similar fate, James could steel himself with a (by now) familiar resolve. ‘I have no illusions of any kind about the book, & least of all about its circulation & “popularity”,’ he told his brother William: ‘From these things I am quite divorced & never was happier than since the dissolution has been consecrated by (what seems to me) the highest authorities. One must go one’s way & know what one’s about & have a general plan & a private religion – in short have made up one’s mind as to ce qui en est [what is there] with a public the draggling after which simply leads one in the gutter. One has always a “public” enough if one has an audible vibration – even if it shld. only come from one’s self’ (WHJ, 241). Such discouragements eventually led James back to the world of the theatre, where his dreams of financial windfall were dashed by the catch-penny vulgarities of the London stage. Years of work went mostly unproduced; and when George Alexander, one of the leading actor-managers of the day, mounted Guy Domville in the first week of January 1895 – and an unprepared author came out before the curtain – the house erupted with jeers and catcalls. ‘[W]hen I stood in the presence of that yelling crew,’ James ruefully acknowledged, ‘(gallery pure & simple – out-vociferating the applause, thanks to leathern lungs,) I felt with bottomless dismay how the atmosphere of any London theatre is in mortal danger of becoming a complete non-conductor of any fine intention or any really civilized artistic attempt – & I saw, in one sickened moment, (it wasn’t pleasant,) the effondrement [collapse] of my labour & my hope’ (LiL, 275). The only answer for James was to reconsecrate his devotion to a better muse: to ‘take up my own old pen again,’ as he wrote in his journal on 23 January 1895, ‘the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles’ (CN, 109). Just the day before he had promised as much in a letter. After baring his lacerated soul to Howells, James took the first step toward self-recuperation. ‘I did say to myself,’ he wrote, ‘ “Produce again – produce; produce better than ever, & all will yet be well” ’ (LFL, 298). ‘It is now indeed,’ his journal entry concluded, ‘that I may do the work of my life. And I will’ (CN, 109).

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By any measure, James lived up to his promise. Most critics willingly have followed F. O. Matthiessen in describing the author’s late works – The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904) – as constituting his ‘major phase,’ a sustained period of remarkable technical innovation and psychological penetration of character.23 Still, the specter of chronic unsalability dogged James, just when the term ‘best-seller’ was becoming familiar in English usage and contemporaneous publicity accounts trumpeted the staggering popularity of other authors’ works. All the same, the author’s cultural capital circulated in curious ways, as when (in 1901) a real-estate entrepreneur in New York City decided to name a new uptown apartment house ‘The Henry James,’ advertising its modern amenities (including ‘liveried service’) and assuring potential residents that the building would appeal especially ‘to refined persons.’24 When Howells clipped the advertisement and sent it to his friend, James responded with characteristic self-deprecation. ‘Your most kind communication, in respect to the miraculously-named “uptown” apartment house has at once deeply agitated & wildly uplifted me,’ he wrote back: The agitation, as I call it, is verily but the tremor, the intensity of hope, of the delirious dream that such a stroke may ‘bring my books before the public,’ or do something toward it – coupled with the reassertion of my constant, too constant, conviction that no power on earth can ever do that. They are behind, irremovably behind, the public, & fixed there for my lifetime at least; & as the public hasn’t eyes in the back of its head, & scarcely even in the front, no consequences can ensure. The Henry James, I opine, will be a terrifically ‘private’ hotel, & will languish, like the Lord of Burleigh’s wife, under the burden of an honour ‘unto which it was not born.’ Refined, liveried, ‘two-toileted,’ it will have been a short-lived hectic paradox, & will presently have to close in order to reopen as the Mary Johnson [sic] or the K. W. Wiggin or the James Lane Allen. Best of all as the Edith Wharton! (LFL, 368–9)25 As usual, James’s take on the literary marketplace of his time was right on the money – even if so little of it, comparatively, made its way into his pocket. By the end of his life, James was an accustomed target for all the slings and arrows that outrageous commercial fortune could hurl. But through it all, he maintained (as he told a struggling sculptor) that ‘friction with the market’ was a very real benefit, especially for ‘solitary artists too much steeped in their mere personal dreams’ (BB, 75). In his relations with other writers, James sometimes felt a different kind of friction. As the years went by, he found it harder and harder to read works of fiction without succumbing to the temptation of rewriting them or giving gratuitous advice to authors about work already in print. ‘I am a bad person, really, to expose “fictitious work” to,’ he admitted to Howard Sturgis, who was ready to withdraw his novel Belchamber (1904) after James rendered a negative verdict on the manuscript. ‘I, as a battered producer and “technician” myself, have long since inevitably ceased to read with naïveté,’ he helplessly explained to Sturgis, ‘I can only read critically, constructively, reconstructively, writing the thing over (if I can swallow it at all) my way, and looking at it, so to speak, from within’ (HJL, 4: 286). Not everyone could stomach James’s criticism unflinchingly. Having received The Master’s much-qualified praise for over a decade, H. G. Wells finally had enough. In 1915 he parodied James in a soufflé he entitled Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump: Being

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a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times. ‘Having first made sure that he has scarcely anything left to express, [James] then sets to work to express it, with an industry, a wealth of intellectual stuff that dwarfs Newton,’ the character of Boon avers: He spares no resource in the telling of his dead inventions. He brings up every device of language to state and define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits his infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come. And all for tales of nothingness . . . It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. (JW, 248) Denying that James’s fictions were in any sense true to life, Boon concluded that ‘the only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins. His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string’ (JW, 249). James came upon this volume almost by accident (it was handed to him by a member of one of his clubs), although Wells had had it sent there with the intent of intercepting him. With characteristic understatement, James confessed to Wells that he found the book ‘very curious and interesting after a fashion – though it has naturally not filled me with a fond elation’ (JW, 261). When Wells tried to apologize, saying that ‘Boon is just a waste-paper basket,’ James seized upon the comparison and retorted that ‘what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what one doesn’t commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one’s estimate of one’s contemporaries by’ (JW, 264). Seeing that his own priority for artistic form never could be reconciled with the kind of didactic social agenda that drove so many of Wells’s novels, James knew that their friendship had reached an end; but before he terminated it, the Master also wanted to make clear to Wells how empty and perverse his hollow philosophy of composition truly was. ‘It is art that makes life,’ James emphasized, ‘makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process’ (JW, 267). Once one has had the pleasure of dipping into James’s correspondence, it is hard to resist the conclusion (voiced by Philip Horne) that his letters ‘are among his works; that many of them are in themselves major works or contain major writing’; even that they ‘constitute an involving narrative – a narrative of passionate creation’ (IHJ, xiii). To recognize this is simply to reaffirm a judgment James himself made about published volumes of correspondence. ‘The best letters seem to me the most delightful of all written things,’ he once testified, ‘and those that are not the best the most negligible. If a correspondence has not the real charm I wouldn’t have it published even privately; if it has, on the other hand, I would give it the glory of the greatest literature’

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(HJL, 4: 123). Surely his letters deserve that measure of greatest glory. When the University of Nebraska Press Edition is finished, the Complete Letters will hugely complement (if not altogether supersede) James’s volumes of memoirs – A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The Middle Years (1917) – and they will certainly inspire new lines of interpretation with respect to the author’s life and creative work.

Notes 1. Details of the book’s prepublication history can be traced in letters from James to his agent, J. B. Pinker, now archived in the Collection of American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The most relevant are those dated 15 January and 27 June 1900. See James, Letters to J. B. Pinker, Henry James Collection, Yale University, Vol. 1, 7 May 1898 – 9 November 1905, f. 676, ff. 643–5. 2. Other James stories which prominently feature letters include ‘A Bundle of Letters’ (1879), ‘The Point of View’ (1882), ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888), and ‘Sir Domick Ferrand’ (1892). 3. James, ‘The Abasement of the Northmores,’ 245. 4. Ibid. 250. 5. Ibid. 245. 6. The best accounts of the complicated back-history of the Lubbock edition are available in Edel’s ‘Introduction’ to Henry James Letters: Volume 1, xiii–xxix, and – somewhat more critically – in Anesko, Monopolizing the Master, 46–108. 7. Henry James III, Letter to M. (James) Porter, 6 September 1919, Bancroft Library. 8. Gilman, ‘The Letters of Henry James,’ 682. 9. Quoted in Anesko, Monopolizing the Master, 160. 10. Public notice of the restrictions was given in Perry, ‘The James Collection,’ 79. 11. ‘This edition of James’s letters is a disaster,’ is how Bernard Richards greeted the first two volumes in 1981 (see ‘Amateurism,’ 61). 12. See the five volumes of Edel’s Henry James. 13. Horne, ‘The Editing of James’s Letters,’ 141. 14. See Horne, ‘Introduction,’ xvi. 15. See Jobe, ‘A Calendar,’ and Jobe and Gunter, ‘A Calendar.’ 16. Habegger, ‘Introduction,’ lxvii. 17. See, respectively: James and Adams, Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams; James, Beloved Boy; James and Howells, Letters, Fictions, Lives; James and James, Correspondence of William and Henry James; James, Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan; James and Wharton, Henry James and Edith Wharton; James, ‘Dear Munificent Friends’; and James, ‘Dearly Beloved Friends’. 18. Lubbock’s exposition of James’s artistic credo might favorably be compared to Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1821) in lyric force. ‘It was absolute for him,’ Lubbock declaimed, ‘that the work of the imagination was the highest and most honourable calling conceivable, being indeed nothing less than the actual creation of life out of the void. He did not scruple to claim that except through art there is no life that can be known or appraised. It is the artist who takes over the deed, so called, from the doer, to give it back again in the form in which it can be seen and measured for the first time; without the brain that is able to close round the loose unappropriated fact and render all its aspects, the fact itself does not exist for us’ (quoted in Edel, ‘Introduction,’ xv). 19. This edition does not correct James’s misspellings or expand his abbreviations. For the sake of clarity, I have followed the editors’ wording but substituted clear text for their ‘plain text,’ which displays James’s cancellations and insertions with various typographical devices.

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20. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was one of the most influential French literary historians and critics of his time. His weekly articles were collected in the fifteen-volume Causeries du lundi (1851–62) and later Nouveaux lundis (1863–70). James published an unsigned review of an English translation of Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits in the Nation in 1868, in which he singled out two qualities about the French author that he most valued and that, prophetically, he, too, would come to personify. In Sainte-Beuve, he wrote, there is ‘[a] writer and a psychologist – an empiric, if you will, in each case, but a most successful one’ (‘SainteBeuve’s Portraits,’ 455). 21. Marian (Clover) Hooper was a gifted conversationalist, who married Henry Adams in 1872; Mary (‘Minny’) Temple was James’s vivacious first cousin, renowned (or notorious) for her quick judgments and sharp tongue. 22. James, Letter to Louisa Lawrence, 5 March 1879, Eton College. 23. See Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase. 24. Quoted in Anesko, Monopolizing the Master, 8. 25. The other writers James mentions all enjoyed sales far beyond his own – Mary Johnston with To Have and to Hold (1900), Kate Douglas Wiggin with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), James Lane Allen with A Kentucky Cardinal (1894), and Edith Wharton with The Valley of Decision (1902).

Works Cited Anesko, M. (2012), Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Edel, L. (1953–72), Henry James, 5 vols., Philadelphia: Lippincott. Edel, L. (1974), ‘Introduction,’ in H. James, Henry James Letters: Volume 1, 1843–1875, ed. L. Edel, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, i–xxxvi. Cited parenthetically as I. Gilman, L. (1920), ‘The Letters of Henry James,’ North American Review, 211: 682–90. Habegger, A. (2006), ‘Introduction,’ in P. A. Walker and G. W. Zacharias (eds.), The Complete Letters of Henry James: Volume 1, 1855–1872, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, i–lxxv. Horne, P. (1986), ‘The Editing of James’s Letters,’ Cambridge Quarterly, 15: 126–41. Horne, P. (1999), ‘Introduction,’ in H. James, Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. P. Horne, London: Allan Lane/Penguin Press, xiii–xxv. Cited parenthetically as IHJ. James, H. (1868), ‘Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits,’ The Nation, 6: 454–5. James, H. (1878), Letter to L. Lawrence, 5 March, Eton College, Tower Store, L139. James, H. (1898–1915), Letters to J. B. Pinker, Henry James Collection, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 830, Box 2. James, H. [1900] (1996), ‘The Abasement of the Northmores,’ in Complete Stories, 1898–1910, ed. D. Donoghue, New York: Library of America, 235–54. James, H. (1920), The Letters of Henry James, 2 vols., ed. P. Lubbock, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. James, H. (1974–84), Henry James Letters, 4 vols., ed. L. Edel, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cited parenthetically as HJL. James, H. (1987), The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. L. Edel and L. H. Powers, New York: Oxford University Press. Cited parenthetically as CN. James, H. (1993), The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan, 1877–1914, ed. R. S. Moore, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. James, H. (1999), ‘Dear Munificent Friends’: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, ed. S. Gunter, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. James, H. (1999), Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. P. Horne, London: Allan Lane/Penguin Press. Cited parenthetically as LiL.

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James, H. (2001), ‘Dearly Beloved Friends’: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, ed. S. E. Gunter and S. H. Jobe, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. James, H. (2004), Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915, ed. R. M. Zorzi, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Cited parenthetically as BB. James, H. (2006–present), The Complete Letters of Henry James, 8 vols., ed. P. A. Walker and G. W. Zacharias, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cited parenthetically as CLHJ. James, H., and H. Adams (1992), The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 1877–1914, ed. G. Monteiro, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. James, H., and W. D. Howells (1997), Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells, ed. M. Anesko, New York: Oxford University Press. Cited parenthetically as LFL. James, H., and W. James (1997), The Correspondence of William and Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. I. K. Skrupskelis and E. Berkeley, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Cited parenthetically as WHJ. James, H., and H. G. Wells (1959), Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and their Quarrel, ed. L. Edel and G. N. Ray, London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Cited parenthetically as JW. James, H., and E. Wharton (1990), Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915, ed. L. H. Powers, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. James, H., III (1919), Letter to M. (James) Porter, 6 September, Bruce Porter Papers: Additions, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, BANC/MSS 72/35c, Box 1. Jobe, S. H. (1990), ‘A Calendar of the Published Letters of Henry James,’ Henry James Review, 11: 1–29, 77–100. Jobe, S. H., and S. E. Gunter, eds. (1990–present), ‘A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James & A Biographical Register of Henry James’s Correspondents,’ (last accessed 22 September 2015). Matthiessen, F. O. (1945), Henry James: The Major Phase, New York: Oxford University Press. Perry, R. B. (1942), ‘The James Collection,’ Harvard Library Notes, 4: 74–9. Richards, B. (1981), ‘Amateurism,’ Essays in Criticism, 31: 61–8.

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47 ‘ILL CORRESPONDENT’: STEPHEN CRANE’S TROUBLE WITH LETTERS John Fagg

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n March 1897, Stephen Crane began a short note to his brother William Howe Crane, ‘My dear Will: I suppose that you have again felt assured that I was the worst correspondent in the world. . .’ (CSC, 1: 281). While intended as self-defense, the inevitable ‘but’ that follows actually serves only to underscore the point – ‘but really I have been for over a month among the swamps further south wading miserably to and fro in an attempt to avoid our derned U.S. navy’ (CSC, 1: 281) – for as Paul Sorrentino has pointed out, this explanation of Crane’s lost time in Florida constitutes ‘considerable hyperbole.’1 In truth, Crane had been in Jacksonville courting the businesswoman Cora Taylor, who owned the town’s Hotel de Dreme brothel and who would soon become his common-law wife. More than two years later, meanwhile, in a short-lived flurry of regular communication apparently spurred by the acquisition of a typewriter, Crane was required to reassure William that: ‘Since we have had this machine I have lost some of my habits of being an ill correspondent’ (CSC, 2: 446). Such excuses for and acknowledgments of his shortcomings as a writer were not solely reserved for Crane’s family, peppering as they do the correspondence he sporadically addressed to his friends, nor was he alone in his bad habits, for similar apologies crop up in the missives of many of his peers. Indeed, Crane’s epistolary troubles are symptomatic of the wider dilemmas facing his generation of American writers as they adjusted to new forms of masculinity and male friendship, the emerging codes and practices of bohemianism and college fraternity culture, and the increasing demands of literary professionalism in ways that profoundly shaped both the letters they wrote and those they did not. Before addressing Crane’s particular trouble with letters, though, it is necessary to say something about the trouble with Crane’s letters. ‘Stephen Crane’s scarce letters are not often interesting,’ his first full biographer, Thomas Beer, explained in 1923, but unfortunately for subsequent scholars Beer’s innovative response to the problem of ‘the worst correspondent in the world’ was to invent a number of convenient interlocutors (such as boyhood friend Willis McHarg and early love Helen Trent) and conjure up the kinds of letters he believed Crane might have written to them.2 Reflecting on Beer’s legacy in 2003, Sorrentino – who has worked tirelessly to establish an authoritative record of Crane’s life and letters – provides as sympathetic an explanation as is possible for his predecessor’s fabrications, including health problems, deadline pressures, a dearth of verifiable material and the difficulty of dealing with Crane’s surviving relatives. Notwithstanding this generosity, however, Sorrentino also amply 709

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demonstrates the damaging impact of Beer’s inventions.3 Beer grafted the language of Crane’s poems into invented letters and self-servingly dated them, for instance, thus creating the impression that the fictitious Helen Trent was the inspiration for ‘later’ lines in The Black Riders (1895). Strikingly, such distortions even affected the reminiscences of those, such as the journalist Karl Harriman, who had met Crane and might be assumed to speak from personal experience, but who in fact tailored their recollections to fit with these already documented ‘truths.’ Beer’s fabrications were then taken up and even embellished in John Berryman’s influential 1950 biography, before being acknowledged, though not rectified, by the next generation of Crane scholars, which included the editors of a 1960 edition of his letters, R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes. Indeed, even after 1990, when Sorrentino and his editorial partner Stanley Wertheim published compelling documents demonstrating the mechanics of Beer’s inventions, scholars continued to draw – often second- or third-hand – on sources solely attributable to Beer.4 Like a hard-to-shake virus, Beer’s sixty or so ‘composed letters’ have infected perceptions of Crane and by extension our understanding of the literary and historical figures with whom he was connected.5 Wertheim and Sorrentino have established rigorous standards for Crane scholarship in their authoritative co-edited 1988 edition of the Correspondence and in the Crane Log they co-authored in 1994, as well as in Wertheim’s 1997 Stephen Crane Encylopedia and Sorrentino’s comprehensive 2014 biography, A Life of Fire. These books, then, provide the published documentary materials with which all diligent Crane scholars should begin. It would thus seem counterintuitive to linger any longer on the fabricated letters quoted in Beer’s biography. But some brief further discussion of these inventions can draw out precisely what is absent from the verifiable record and give a flavor of the kind of assumptions about epistolarity that have shaped past Crane scholarship. A striking absence that the letters attributable only to Beer seek to fill is the sort of gossipy, critical commentary that would position Crane within the fin de siècle literary scene. At pains to assert that while ‘[u]nliterary in his conduct Crane was yet a man of letters,’ Beer cites letters that criticize the writing of Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells, observe that while ‘Mr. James has ridiculous traits . . . it seems impossible to dislike him,’ and make passing reference to the Goncourt brothers, Velasquez, Cervantes, and Tolstoy.6 These details imbue Crane with a far broader cultural compass and critical sensibility than the verifiable, surviving letters convey. In the latter corpus Crane does refer to Oscar Wilde as a ‘mildewed chump’ in a letter to Arnold Bennett and, when writing to William about a charitable appeal following the death of his friend Harold Frederic, states: ‘Neither do I much like Mr. James’ manner. He professed to be er, er, er much attached to H[arold] and now has shut up like a clam’ (CSC, 2: 507, 496). This is at once gossip and, in its stilted ‘er, er, er’ a critique of James’s prevaricating narratorial style. But these potshots at Wilde and James stand out as exceptions among Crane’s more typically ‘unliterary’ letters. One significant problem Beer faced was that he did not know about or was debarred from using Crane’s correspondence with three of the significant women in his life: Cora Taylor; Lily Brandon Munroe (a married woman who could not go through with their plan to elope); and Nellie Crouse (a wealthy girl who he met just once but pursued with a series of seemingly unrequited love letters). ‘Helen Trent’ was likely invented to account for these relationships without getting too close to more uncomfortable truths. In his letters to Crouse, for example, Crane does indeed take

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on something of the ‘man of letters’ persona that Beer sought to concoct for him. The letters intersperse falsely modest references to his literary success with claims such as ‘I go through the world unexplained’ and ‘upon my soul I have lost all appetite for victory, as victory is defined by the mob’ that give the appearance of an artistic creed or disposition (CSC, 1: 163, 186). The difficulty with these statements, however, is that they often feel like poses adopted as part of an elaborate courtship: Edwin Harrison Cady and Lester G. Wells have aptly described the Crouse letters as ‘calculated’ and determined by ‘strategies.’7 Crane also set out to project a vision of his authorial identity in the letters he penned to the journalist John Northern Hilliard, which were written with one eye on their eventual publication. But he never seems comfortable with this exercise, beginning the first of these missives with a long account of his family history, and offering only brief references to his published works and his associations with William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland, before balefully concluding, ‘I live in Hartwood, Sullivan Co., N. Y., on an estate of 3500 acres belonging to my brother and am distinguished for corduroy trousers and briar-wood pipes. My idea of happiness is the saddle of a good-riding horse’ (CSC, 1: 167). There are, in short, few passages in Crane’s letters that give an insight into his sense of himself as a writer that are not touched by the very particular demands of courtship or publicity. Finally, as well as seeking to establish Crane as a ‘man of letters,’ Beer also works to interject some psychological drama into Crane’s correspondence by presenting him as a wild, impulsive figure prone to bouts of artistic temperamentality. To this end, Beer claims that amidst the humdrum letters Crane wrote he occasionally ‘exploded into an utterly informal and prolonged expression. These vital papers must have been dashed down at the end of a mood. They are seldom dated, seldom headed, and recipients say that they were usually addressed haphazardly.’8 As with much of Beer’s biography, though, and most obviously the claim that many of Crane’s ‘last letters were written in a singular blue ink that turned purple when dry and has now faded beyond process of revival,’ this passage hides its dubious scholarship in plain sight.9 Thus Beer’s evidence for Crane’s susceptibility to ‘utterly informal and prolonged expression’ consists of a letter written to an unknown recipient in which he vilifies a vindictive small-town matron for accusing him of sinful conduct with a girl named Frances. ‘If you hear I have been hanged by the neck till dead on the highest hill of Orange County you may as well know that it is for killing a man who is really a pug,’ this missive, purportedly written in Port Jervis in November 1894, begins. ‘No, by the legs of Jehovah! I will not insult any dog by comparing this damned woman to it.’10 But such an outlandish epistolary style, and the friend with whom he supposedly shared such angry and misogynistic letters, are surely inventions. For there is nothing like this incident, tone, or interlocutor in the verified correspondence. A better sense of Crane’s preferred style of private communication comes, ironically, in Joseph Conrad’s introduction to Beer’s biography. Conrad, who befriended Crane shortly after his arrival in England in 1897, notes there that: ‘Superabundance of words was not his failing when communing with those whom he liked and felt he could trust . . . The sympathy that, even in regard of the very few years allotted to our friendship, may be said to have sprung up instantaneously between us, was the most undemonstrative case of that sort in the last century.’11 Moreover, rather undermining Beer’s claim for Crane as a ‘man of letters,’ Conrad then goes on to confess that ‘we were no critics. I mean temperamentally. Crane was even less of a critic than myself.

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Criticism is very much a matter of vocabulary, very consciously used; with us it was the intonation that mattered. The tone of a grunt could convey an infinity of meaning between us.’12 It is, indeed, this word-shy style of personal communication that carried over into Crane’s correspondence, which tends to be short and to the point. Crane’s efforts at epistolary courtship provide one exception to this rule, of course, and a series of relatively expansive letters sent from rural Hartwood, in New York State, in autumn and winter of 1895 offer another. Crane was holed up there finishing his romance novel The Third Violet (1897), and began writing frequently to the journalist Willis Brooks Hawkins, who provided a lifeline back to New York City. In these letters, Crane variously describes his pleasure in riding an unbroken horse (‘Let him fling himself to the side of the road because a sumach tassle [sic] waves’) and a boat trip on which he lost his temper (‘Anything that could obstruct, promptly and gracefully obstructed. Up to the 5th stump I had not lost my philosophy but at the 22d I was swearing like cracked ice’) (CSC, 1: 127, 145). Yet while there are flashes of a poetic style here, and glimpses of the private man, the correspondence soon petered out. For ultimately, Crane just did not seem to value the exchange of expressive letters as an end in itself or as a means to maintain friendship. Having gone to some lengths to seek out Hamlin Garland as a mentor in 1893, for instance, he declares in a May 1894 letter, ‘I have not written you because there has been little to tell of late. I am ploding [sic] along on the Press in a quiet and effective way,’ before signing off, ‘When anything happens I’ll keep you informed’ (CSC, 1: 68). His next, surviving, letter to Garland, from November 1894, meanwhile begins: My dear friend: So much of my row with the world has to be silence and endurance that sometimes I wear the appearance of having forgotten my best friends, those to whom I am indebted for everything. As a matter of fact, I have just crawled out of the fifty-third ditch into which I have been cast and now feel that I can write you a letter that wont [sic] make you ill. (CSC, 1: 79) If writing a note to a ‘dear friend’ seems to be a painful process here, Crane evidently soon learned to take the matter more lightly. Thus a September 1899 letter to Mark Barr, an American scientist he had got to know while living in England, finds Crane simply confessing: ‘You know me about writing letters. I cant [sic] do it’ (CSC, 2: 526). The intervening years, as should be clear by now, had seen many similar, if often less blunt, excuses and admissions – to his brother William, to Garland, and to a host of others. Indeed, Crane’s initial letter to Conrad from November 1897 begins with this jovial apology: ‘My first feat has been to lose your note and so I am obliged to send this through [the publishing house] Heinemann’ (CSC, 1: 310). Crane was not, of course, the first person to lose an address or fail to reply to a letter. But such omissions are both a particularly notable feature of his correspondence and, it would seem, express a set of specific attitudes shared by other authors of his generation. Frank Norris, for example, addressing his friends Ernest and Mary Piexotto in February 1900, gamely declared, ‘I’m ashamed of myself that I have not written you in all this long time, but never mind. I guess we are all good friends enough to write each other how and when and where we jolly well please,’ while in November 1910, Jack London cautioned Sinclair Lewis: ‘And remember one thing, old man. I’m the rottenest letter-writer that ever came down the pike. I hate letter-writing.’13 True, such apologies were perhaps more merited in Crane’s case. For Norris – who maintained sustained

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correspondences with Garland, William Dean Howells, the editor Isaac Marcosson, and numerous family members – they were something of a pose; and similarly, as Earle Labor has pointed out, ‘[d]espite many such protestations, London was, in fact, a conscientious letter-writer.’14 Yet if London’s assurance in an earlier missive that ‘I answer all letters and all telegrams’ is closer to the reality of his epistolary practices, that should only make us ask more urgently why he, like so many of his peers, professed to ‘hate letter-writing.’15 One answer, no doubt, is that both these genuine and feigned antipathies to letterwriting are a consequence of the broader cultural patterns that were reshaping male, middle-class, and authorial identities at the end of the nineteenth century. Writing his introduction to Beer’s biography from the vantage point of 1923, Conrad set his grunting exchanges with Crane in contrast to the prevailingly more demonstrative homosociality of the previous century. With the rise of industrial and entrepreneurial capitalism in the postbellum period, middle-class men had been encouraged to embrace, in the private sphere, feminine traits deemed necessary to check the aggressive energies demanded by public life.16 The role of letters as an important vehicle for the cultivation and expression of such traits is then suggested by the October 1893 reply Howells sent to a letter from the novelist Henry Blake Fuller (which he had evidently shared with his wife): ‘There was a delicate sympathy in your letter which we both found very sweet, and I hope you may not have to “suffer in the cause” quite so much as I have suffered.’17 In another exchange that draws attention to the way male sentiment was encoded in the practice of letter-writing, meanwhile, Howells was chastised by, and immediately wrote to apologize to, Charles Eliot Norton after having inadvertently signed a letter with the rotely inexpressive ‘Yours Sincerely.’ He carefully concluded this apology, ‘You know that with love to you all, I am / Yours ever / W. D. Howells.’18 Notably, both Crane and Norris sought out a correspondence with Howells, the so-called ‘Dean of American Letters,’ early on in their careers – almost as a rite of passage. But while each courted such connections within the literary establishment, neither achieved the kind of sustained and sustaining epistolary friendship that Michael Anesko reconstructs from Howells’ correspondence with Henry James, or that Peter Messent traces in the letters Howells shared with Mark Twain.19 Norris did maintain a jovial correspondence with Hamlin Garland that speaks of a friendship deep enough to withstand some teasing – as when Norris chides the older writer for sloppy phrasing in his novel The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop (1902): ‘Matter-of-factly! !! – oh fie – and you a litry [sic] Gent!’ – but in these exchanges the emotional range still remains limited.20 The fact that Norris died at the early age of thirty-two, only months after writing this letter, and that Crane and London were similarly short-lived (to twenty-nine and forty respectively), no doubt suggests one reason why these writers never achieved the epistolary rhythm Howells and James enjoyed in their middle and later years. Yet those unfortunate circumstances alone do not fully explain their markedly different epistolary legacy. In this respect, the sentiments expressed in Howells’ letters to and from Fuller, Norton, James, and Twain were, although potentially attractive to a younger generation of writers, somewhat out of step with the times. The historian E. Anthony Rotundo identifies, in a wide sample of private writings by nineteenth-century Americans that includes the letters and diaries of figures like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore

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Roosevelt, and John Burroughs, the emergence of a ‘Masculine Primitive’ identity, which contrasts sharply with the genteel ideals of the preceding generation in its emphasis on manly strength and vigor.21 This ideology, which Rotundo argues increasingly ‘asserted its power in the private writings of the middle class’ in the latter part of the nineteenth century, can then in turn be seen as part of a wider transition within the signs and practices of American male identity, from manhood being defined against boyhood to masculinity being defined in opposition to femininity.22 Unlike Howells’ letters, therefore, those of Crane, Norris, and London, with all their protestations about the burdens of correspondence, were shaped by personae, formations, and codes that embraced ‘Primitive Masculinity.’ This is apparent in the laconic, vernacular expressiveness of London’s ‘I’m the rottenest letter-writer that ever came down the pike,’ and in the allusions to and influence of youthful bohemianism and fraternal rituals in the epistolary practices of his contemporaries. Norris’s assertion that he and the Piexottos could ‘write each other how and when and where we jolly well please,’ for instance, specifically derives from their recent shared experiences in bohemia as well as their long acquaintance. He and Ernest had been friends for more than a decade, having met as students at the California School of Design in 1886, and the previous year both men had boarded at 61 Washington Square South – which came to be known as the ‘House of Genius’ for its host of notable turnof-the-century tenants, including Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, O. Henry and, possibly, Stephen Crane.23 Its ‘much-loved and generous landlady,’ as Paul Sorrentino has noted, ‘rented only to artists even though they were often late in paying rent.’24 61 Washington Square South thus came to be at the center of the Greenwich Village bohemia circle that found its fullest expression in the 1910s but that had its roots in the fin de siècle. Norris’s bohemianism was not confined to his time in New York, back in his hometown he was (along with London) a member of the illustrious San Francisco Bohemian Club. Whether he stayed at the ‘House of Genius’ or not, Crane certainly participated in unconventional lifestyles and living arrangements, lodging for a time at an East 23rd Street studio with a group of aspiring artists who wrote on the walls, shared a bed, and lived out a version of picturesque poverty.25 Since they harbored strong loyalties to their more conservative families, neither Norris nor Crane straightforwardly embraced bohemianism, but their letters do include playful rejections of genteel epistolary practices and American bourgeois culture. Norris begins a typical letter to the Peixottos from May 1899, ‘My dear oleman and Mrs. Billy Magee,’ before going on to discuss how ‘[I] feel just as if I were out of doors playing after being in school for years,’ while another from early 1900, addressed to ‘My dear Billymagee & Mollypeixotto,’ springs the ‘surprise’ of his recent marriage to Jeanette Black.26 Crane’s letters, on the other hand, tend to start more formally, and sadly have little to say about his dalliances with opium dens and chorus girls, but his exchanges with Willis Brooks Hawkins do refer to late-night poker games, mornings spent sleeping off the night before, and the activities of a circle of writers who met in a ramshackle clubhouse atop a tenement building. ‘My remembrances to all the lanterns,’ Crane wrote to Hawkins at one point. ‘I am getting mighty anxious to hear the Apache Scalp Dance again’ (CSC, 1: 119). The Lantern Club, which like the earlier Pendennis Club he formed with his Delta Upsilon brother Fred Lawrence, was one of several informal groupings that Crane instigated or joined during his career, and which carried the spirit of the college fraternity house over into his later life. In another letter to Hawkins, for

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example, Crane expresses glee over the fact that the writer Elbert Hubbard’s Philistine Society was planning to honor him with a dinner. ‘You could have knocked me down with a gas-pipe,’ he declares, before using a reference to ‘their bid’ for his presence to liken this literary accolade to the initiation ceremonies of college and fraternity life (CSC, 1: 140). As Crane’s earlier pining for ‘the Apache Scalp Dance’ might suggest, meanwhile, these structures and rituals were also closely tied to the adoption of exotic personae. In some of his earliest letters, Crane, and his fellow Claverack College student Odell Hathaway, describe their classmate Earl T. Reeve as a ‘Sioux’ and ‘the Rushville Indian,’ and this imagery carried over into Crane’s later correspondence (CSC, 1: 36, 37). He and Hawkins refer to the acquaintances they made at the Philistine’s dinner as ‘Indians,’ while Crane’s first letter to Conrad ends by asking: ‘Did we not have a good pow-wow in London?’ (CSC, 1: 164, 31). In this regard, as Joanna Levin’s account of late-nineteenth-century American bohemianism would suggest, Crane and his friends were not alone, for many of the literary and cultural productions of this generation of writers ‘centred on the desire to embody ethnic, cultural, or racial Others, implicitly connecting these groups with the freedoms of “unconscious” life.’27 If bohemians typically invoked a loosely defined ‘Other’ to distance themselves from conventional bourgeois society, then fraternity men used this language even more pointedly to assert a particular kind of male identity. In his history of college fraternities, Nicholas Syrett argues that during the late nineteenth century American students and their teachers became the ‘greatest proponents’ of the new ‘emphasis upon masculinity’ that ‘began to supersede that of manliness.’28 As Syrett persuasively shows, the fraternal culture of hazing, sports, codes, and nicknames was one of the key realms in which the transition from manliness – with its ‘connotations of loyalty, honor, and responsibility’ – to masculinity – which ‘was much more bound up in aggression, physicality, and virility’ – played out.29 Both Crane and Norris (who was an enthusiastic member of Phi Gamma Delta) maintained their college-man personae long after leaving college, and in Crane’s case at least this was a way to absolve himself of manly duties – such as replying to letters and meeting contractual obligations – and assert a masculine self-determination. Similarly too, although he felt less attached to his college days, London also adopted the rhetorical strategies evident in Crane’s emphasis on ‘pow-wows’ and ‘Indians,’ as with his reference to ‘coming down the pike,’ which invokes a poor white migrant identity (‘piker’ carrying similar connotations to the later ‘Okie’ at this point).30 Indeed, the scholarship on later American letter-writers suggests that such attitudes and techniques had a wide and pervasive influence. Thus Carlos Baker, in his introduction to an edition of Ernest Hemingway’s selected letters, notes that ‘Papa’ often ‘leaned over backward to avoid the accusation of pretentiousness in language, a habit that produced what has been called “Hemingway Choctaw.” ’31 He adopted this pared-down approach, Baker adds, ‘as a mode of utterance both in speech and in letters because he thought it down-to-earth, laconic, and manly. “Difference with us guys,” he once wrote William Faulkner, “is I always lived out of country . . . since kid.” ’32 The recipient of this latter missive too, like Crane (though admittedly unlike Hemingway, who made cultural gossip into an art form), avoided ‘the purely literary . . . in content or in tone’ when writing letters and presented himself ‘without the self-consciousness one finds in the correspondence between authors whose letters sound as though they were written with an eye on future publication.’33 In fact, as

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one of the editors of Faulkner’s correspondence has observed: ‘Apart from his basic temperament, Faulkner’s indifference – sometimes his aversion – to correspondence was intensified by his work as postmaster at the University of Mississippi [during the 1920s].’34 As with Crane’s generation, then, a youthful distaste for the stultifying routines of conventional employment can be seen to feed directly into a masculinized resistance to the epistolary. Certainly it is fitting that one of Faulkner’s rare and typically blunt excursions into literary criticism comes in a letter about Crane himself. ‘The Red Badge is a beautiful book,’ he declares to Bennett Cerf in December 1932. ‘I thank you a lot for it. It’s the only good war story I know.’35 That Faulkner’s words were echoed in Hemingway’s later praise for The Red Badge of Courage (1895) draws attention to Crane’s status as a forerunner of modernist literary style.36 That Crane’s approach to letter-writing also had much in common with Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s meanwhile points to the way that a modernist ideology and its reconstruction of the role of the artist was already being forged in the late nineteenth century, in opposition to the genteel ‘man of letters.’ The fin de siècle rupture in letter-writing practice suggested here accords with the sensibility encapsulated in ‘A Vanishing World of Gentility,’ Randolph Bourne’s scathing 1918 review of Brander Matthews’ autobiography These Many Years (1917). Matthews was a particularly well-connected member of the literary establishment to whom – on Hamlin Garland’s advice – Crane had over two decades earlier sent a short letter of introduction and a copy of his novel Maggie (1893).37 While Crane no doubt felt obliged to flatter, however, These Many Years brought Bourne close to ‘the secret of that American race of men of letters of whom Mr. Matthews is one of the naïver specimens, a race to whom literature was a gesture of gentility and not a comprehension of life.’38 Matthews was, for Bourne, representative of a generation of deskbound writers who were more immersed in correspondence with one another than a dialogue with the world: ‘He seems to have known everybody, and to have felt nothing.’39 Bourne, of course, had the benefit of hindsight: he was skewering Matthews from the heart of Greenwich Village, in the pages of the ultra-progressive The Dial, at a moment when American bohemianism was arguably at its peak. Yet while Crane and his peers may have lacked this purview, in their pursuit of journalistic assignments like covering the Spanish-American War and of fieldwork like traversing the Bowery dressed as a tramp, as well as in their earthily naturalistic fictions, they enacted the embrace of real life and the rejection of gentility Bourne urged.40 Indeed, these endeavors not only inevitably took them far from their desks, but also far from the apparatus and routines of a stable correspondence. In the spring and summer of 1897 alone, for instance, Crane went from his post as a Spanish-American War correspondent in Florida to cover the Greco-Turkish War and then on to England, where he would establish his last permanent addresses, at Ravensbrook near Oxted and Brede Place in Sussex. Moreover, he was accompanied on these travels by Cora Taylor, with whom he was now living but, because her estranged husband refused to divorce her, could not marry. This unconventional arrangement, together with a mounting critical backlash against Crane’s writing in America and altercations with the New York Police Department over their treatment of prostitutes, has led Paul Sorrentino to observe that the ‘decision to settle in England . . . was an act not of expatriation but of exile.’41 All the more reason, then, for Crane to turn to letter-writing as a means of maintaining crucial friendships and familial relationships strained by

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distance and circumstance. After all, many Americans before him had relied upon the post to heal rifts and put their side of the argument. In Crane’s case, however, his peripatetic lifestyle only exacerbated the trouble he had with regular, expressive correspondence. As Sorrentino notes, Cora’s background and her uncertain marital status put Crane in conflict with the ‘straitlaced residents of Hartwood,’ and by implication with his brothers William and Edmund.42 Yet Crane did little to act on his earlier apology to William for ‘being an ill correspondent.’ One June 1897 letter to Edmund revolves around a functional request to send manuscripts left in his possession over to England, while even in his next missive to Edmund, in response to news of his nephew’s death, Crane misses the opportunity to fully generate a sympathetic connection.43 ‘Your letter concerning little Bill’s death has just reached me after going to Athens and coming here,’ Crane begins the latter: I knew of it from [William’s daughter] Helen’s letter but have not written because this is a most difficult letter to write. I don’t know what to say to you. I cant [sic] say the conventional thing and yet there are so few phrases which I could use to express to you how I feel about the death of brave bold little Bill. Good old Bill and the way he used to smoke my pipes! Give my love to Mame and the kids. (CSC, 1: 294) Given Crane’s evident affection for children in general and Bill in particular, this was no doubt a genuinely ‘difficult letter to write.’ But it is also hard for Crane to put pen to paper because of the trouble he has negotiating the wider tensions within his family. What is most revealing here is that Crane’s congenital aversion to ‘the conventional thing’ or to some more expressive register has delayed his response and left him stuck for words when he did, eventually, write. In circumstances where some sentiment, however clichéd, might have been appropriate, his gentle recollection of Bill with the pipes is left to carry a good deal of emotional weight. An even more emotionally challenging period, meanwhile, ensued the following spring when, leaving Cora at Ravensbrook, Crane set off for Cuba to once more cover the Spanish-American War. Concerned by this turn of events, Conrad wrote to Cora to invite her to visit his family and to reassure her that ‘Stephen’s absence won’t be very prolonged and we may have the felicity of seeing you all here together. I trust you will let me know how he fares whenever you hear from him. He is not very likely to write to any one else – if I know the man’ (CSC, 2: 357). As is apparent from his perceptive recollection of their friendship in the introduction to Thomas Beer’s biography, Conrad did indeed, to some extent, ‘know the man,’ yet in this instance he also underestimated Crane’s status as ‘the worst correspondent in the world.’ For between his departure for Cuba in April 1898 and his return to England in January 1899, Crane seems to have dropped contact not only with Conrad and his other friends but also, for extended periods, with Cora. The only surviving personal letters sent by Crane during this period, at least, are an apology for a missed reunion sent to Lily Brandon Munroe’s sister Dorothy in May 1898 and an oblique – if very telling – missive addressed to an unknown recipient which reads in full: ‘My dear sir: / I have forgotten everything just now. Sorry’ (CSC, 2: 364). It is evident from letters exchanged between Cora and other correspondents that some dialogue between herself and Crane was maintained, but here too the key note is one of miscommunication and silence. In June 1898, for

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instance, she wrote to an unknown recipient, ‘Dear Sir: / Mr. Crane cables that he has received no letters from me,’ while in September, having evidently heard nothing from him in turn, and reading newspaper reports that he was missing in Havana, she came to believe he was in grave danger and began an urgent campaign of letter-writing intended to secure his safe passage back to England (CSC, 2: 364).44 Among those Cora appealed to for help was Crane’s New York-based literary agent, Paul Revere Reynolds. This was a smart move, since while Crane appears to have largely withdrawn from personal correspondence during this period he maintained a relatively steady flow of business communication with Reynolds and, to a lesser extent, the British literary agent James B. Pinker. The need to generate an income from his writing evidently triumphed over more intimate epistolary matters. While this situation suggests a neat division between erratic personal letters and orderly business dealings, in fact Crane’s professional correspondence was if anything an even more troublesome enterprise. As Christopher Wilson has persuasively argued, while the professionalization of authorship only gradually took place over the second half of the nineteenth century, the years in which Crane’s short career played out saw a particular expansion and intensification in this process.45 Riding this wave of new opportunities, in 1893 Crane made the entrepreneurial move of investing all the money he could lay his hands on in the private publication of his first novel, Maggie, and sending copies to prominent literary figures including William Dean Howells and Brander Matthews. This first step launched a career defined, unlike that of many earlier American writers, by dealings with literary agents, the negotiation of separate contracts for U.S. and British publication rights, requests for advance payments against manuscripts pledged to publishers, and the need to constantly balance the quick financial fix of magazine short stories against book publishers’ demands for long, and potentially more remunerative, novels. That Crane was notoriously bad at all of this has become a staple of American literary history: Charles Johanningsmeier’s short survey of naturalist writers’ dealings in the literary business includes a section tellingly headed ‘Stephen Crane: Neophyte in the Marketplace.’46 Yet the kind of trouble Crane got into, and the language in which his correspondence records it, speaks of more than mere personal incompetence. The same year that Crane made his speculative pitch with Maggie, Howells published ‘The Man of Letters as a Man of Business.’ Although it acknowledges the stark reality that he and his peers are busily engaged in monetizing all aspects of their work, this essay nonetheless begins with the utopian assertion that ‘I do not think any man ought to live by an art.’47 For Howells, who had come of age in the more genteel cultural world of the antebellum period, such an ideal still seemed viable. But for Crane, who entered the literary field at a moment when the idea of the writer being solely devoted to and supported by their craft was increasingly taken for granted, this aspiration was far more remote. What is more, Crane’s investment in masculine vigor, as opposed to Howells’ sense of manly conscientiousness, ironically made it all the more difficult for writers of his generation to adjust to the innovative demands of the late-nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Professionalization created a new and time-consuming line of correspondence as arrangements and negotiations – often involving numerous parties – multiplied, transatlantic communications intensified and the working through of a nascent, but increasingly legalistic, language of literary business became the norm. In Crane’s case these changes become most apparent in the frantic final years of his life as his correspondence

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is taken up primarily, and at points almost exclusively, with the task of selling his work. The to-and-fro of Crane’s business correspondence – with his American and British literary agents, Reynolds and Pinker, with publishers such as Frederick A. Stokes, and with publishers’ representatives such as Sidney Pawling of Heinemann – effectively hints at this new world of literary commerce and indicates his struggles to operate within it. The first four months of 1899, for instance, were a particularly busy period as Crane sought to put his affairs in order upon returning to England from Cuba. Of the seventyfive letters from this time verified as authentic, thirty-five were sent to Crane from Cora, Reynolds, Pinker, and Pawling, and William Morris Colles of The Author’s Syndicate. Of the thirty letters written by Crane himself, ten are to Reynolds, five to Pinker, and three to Colles, while Cora exchanged a further eight letters with Pawling and Pinker conducting business on Crane’s behalf.48 The value of such counts is, of course, limited insofar as they record only the correspondence that still survives (while Crane wrote at least four letters to his brother William during this period, the replies that he evidently received are now lost). Nonetheless the proportion of business letters is striking, especially given that many refer out to a much wider correspondence, including notes and telegrams sent and received by agents and publishers on Crane’s behalf. In March 1899, Crane told William that he was ‘hustling to get out of this hole,’ and it is clear that the phrase applied not only to his breakneck production of fiction but also to some sharp business dealings (CSC, 2: 446). The same month, Crane’s British agent J. B. Pinker complained to Cora regarding the short story ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen’ (1899), ‘I wish we could make some arrangement to prevent the possibility of Mr. Reynold’s and my operation overlapping’ (CSC, 2: 452). Crane’s subsequent letter to Pinker, regarding his much-anticipated novel Active Service (1899), contained a fairly brazen effort to play his agents off against each other, stating that ‘the English Market seems so stagnant and Reynolds is so successful that I have delayed sending you a copy of the first half of the book in order that I might get a copy off to Reynolds’ (CSC, 2: 457). Pinker ultimately won out, becoming Crane’s sole representative by June 1899, but this commercial strategizing accords with Crane’s wider efforts to hustle the literary marketplace. As Frank Norris observed in his 1897 account of their time as Spanish-American War correspondents, ‘I do not know how many papers and magazines [Crane] represented but he has since told me that to fulfil his contracts the war must last for something over five years.’49 In attempting to hustle, Crane repeatedly tied himself in knots – pledging work to multiple publishers and taking advances he could not repay. One such transaction, conducted with Frederick Stokes during the summer of 1899, reveals the difficult position Crane often found himself in. Despite believing that the enterprise would lose money Stokes agreed to publish collection of war stories – Wounds in the Rain (1900) – on the basis that this would then secure the rights for the anticipated novel Active Service. Crane harried Stokes for an immediate advance on the publication, and attempted to break the agreement when this approach failed. In turn Stokes admonished: ‘We are ready to carry out the agreement and to do so in the most considerate and careful way possible, but do not hesitate to express our dislike of irregular or unbusiness-like methods’ (CSC, 2: 514). Even more damningly, in a subsequent letter Stokes told Crane: ‘If we should show you quotations from the letters of our traveling salesmen, showing that for some reason or other the leading houses in the trade throughout the country have a strong prejudice against you and your work,

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you would we think have a little more consideration for us’ (CSC, 2: 523). Reviewing this exchange, and refusing to side with his friend against their mutual publisher, the Canadian novelist Robert Barr sensibly advised Crane: ‘You may lay it down as an axiom that the real literary man should get some one else to write his business letters’ (CSC, 2: 529). While Barr may have expressed a general truth about the difference between business letters and imaginative writing, several of Crane’s contemporaries nonetheless proved more adept at moving between these domains. Norris’s correspondence with his British agent Grant Richards, for example, although not always amicable, contains little of the evasiveness or extemporaneity of Crane’s equivalent dealings.50 The problem that Stokes astutely identified was Crane’s unwillingness or inability to grasp his own position within the marketplace, and act accordingly. This contrasted markedly with both the business conduct of Norris, who quickly gained a sense of his own worth, and that of Hamlin Garland, the older writer that each at times looked to as a mentor. As Keith Newlin and Joseph McCullough have observed, by 1900 Garland’s productivity, public acclaim, and relative financial success had created ‘a confidence in his writing that enabled him to adopt a querulous tone with [his] agent, Paul Revere Reynolds, and with publishers.’51 This tone is apparent even in his initial approach to Reynolds, made some time before November 1898: ‘Now I should like to employ a literary agent but I want to know how it advantages a man in my position. I have a long serial to sell. How could you do me good unless you secured bids for it? If I fix a price and you merely send it round you are of no advantage to me for I can do the same. I am disposed to use an agent but I want to know that he earns his commission the same as any other salesman.’52 Several years later, meanwhile, Garland complained to Reynolds: ‘Your system has always repelled me. You are no more value to me than a mailing agent unless you can find out my highest market value and sell my goods at that price.’53 Crane, on the other hand, repeatedly fell into the trap of naming his price and expressing gratitude when agents secured it. Revealing his hand in this unbusinesslike fashion in January 1899, for instance, Crane told Reynolds that ‘I am all fuzzy with money troubles and last night a writ was served on me by a leading creditor,’ and in a subsequent letter declared: ‘Of course I need money and need it badly’ (CSC, 2: 418, 423). Written under intense financial pressure, and without the internal censorship that often guided the correspondence of his peers, Crane’s letters offer frank statements of his desperate struggle with the market; but also more subtle expressions of this conflict too. Thus, a year earlier, in January 1898, at the moment when his financial predicament first began to hit home, Crane told Reynolds, ‘I am going to write about a thousand or twelve hundred more dollars in short stuff and work only on my big book [Active Service]. In the meantime every hundred dollars is a boon!’ (CSC, 1: 332). Here, intriguingly, words collapse into dollars and short stories are wholly synonymous with their market value. And similarly, Crane later remarked to Reynolds, ‘I have worked up my English short story market until I can command from six to ten guineas a thousand for the English rights alone’ (CSC, 2: 422). Indeed, as Active Service neared completion Crane’s letters to agents (and friends) incessantly charted the mounting word-count. Once more slipping into the language of bulk trading, for example, Crane told Pinker in April 1899, ‘I send you 22 chapters of ‘Active Service.’ The balance you will get the end of this week’ (CSC,

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2: 474). In such passages, Crane’s attitude toward literary work slips out in figures of speech that reveal the deep impress of money on his artistic consciousness. In their own way too, the letters of many of Crane’s contemporaries also suggest how professionalization created a sharp contrast between personal letters and writing that paid. Thus Conrad, who once calculated that he needed to push out ‘1,000 words per day’ in order to support his ‘wife and kids,’ began a November 1897 letter to Crane: ‘I must write to you before I write a single word for a living to-day’ (CSC, 312).54 Sat at his desk and ready to make his time and effort pay, Conrad here expresses his sense of guilt – or at least his guilty pleasure – in first turning his hand to unproductive labor. A similar tension, meanwhile, surfaces when, shortly after the birth of his daughter in 1902, Frank Norris concludes what would be his final letter to Hamlin Garland: ‘Say I’ve got to quit now. I’ve thought pages about you all since you went away, but the Lampson Type setter must be fed and men must work to buy shoes & socks for the children.’55 As Ernest Hemingway would later neatly sum up this state of affairs: ‘Any time I can write a good letter it’s a sign I’m not working.’56 In a highly market-oriented literary world where every word was counted and calculated for monetary value, extensive correspondence became fraught, and, when maintained, imbued with a sense of self-reproach. In Crane’s particular case, temperament and personal circumstances were no doubt significant factors in his trouble with letters. Not only did his early death rob him of his best letter-writing years, in which he might have spun epistolary yarns with Conrad or acted as a mentor to Hemingway, but his oft-stated belief that his respiratory problems would lead him to die young surely shaded the way he lived and wrote. However, much in his epistolary voice and attitudes was shared with other writers of his generation and those of the next, and so his letters illuminate a wider moment of social and artistic transition. Crane’s letters rarely offer the literary value or biographical insight contained in the correspondence of that generation of genteel writers from whose literary culture he marks an early point of rupture. Instead, like many of his most fragmented and hack-like scraps of short fiction and journalism, they record, in their subtle allusions and nuances of language, a roving physical engagement with the hectic demands of everyday life.

Notes 1. Sorrentino, ‘Jacksonville and the Commodore,’ 264. 2. Beer, Stephen Crane, 114. 3. See Sorrentino, ‘The Legacy of Thomas Beer,’ which is also the source for the discussion that follows. 4. See Wertheim and Sorrentino, ‘Thomas Beer.’ 5. Sorrentino, ‘The Legacy of Thomas Beer,’ 187. 6. Beer, Stephen Crane, 244, 179. 7. Cady and Wells, ‘Introduction,’ 18, 19. 8. Beer, Stephen Crane, 114. 9. Ibid. 259. 10. Ibid. 114. 11. Conrad, ‘Introduction,’ 8, 12. 12. Ibid. 24.

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13. Norris, Letter to Ernest and Mary Piexotto, 16 February 1900, in Frank Norris: Collected Letters, 104; London, Letter to Sinclair Lewis, 1 November 1910, in The Letters of Jack London, 2: 938. 14. Labor, ‘Introduction,’ xiii. 15. London, Letter to Sinclair Lewis, 1 November 1910, in The Letters of Jack London, 2: 938. 16. See Rotundo, American Manhood, 22–5, 222–46, and Kimmel, Manhood in America, 81–116. 17. Howells, Letter to Henry Blake Fuller, 27 October 1893, in W. D. Howells: Selected Letters, 52. 18. Howells, Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 17 December 1896, in ibid. 137. 19. See Anesko’s extensive critical apparatus in James and Howells, Letters, Fictions, Lives, 5–58, 161–216, 317–48, and Messent, Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 83–124. 20. Norris, Letter to Hamlin Garland, 14 April 1902, in Frank Norris: Collected Letters, 192. 21. See Rotundo, ‘Learning About Manhood.’ 22. Ibid. 43. On the significance of race for definitions of masculinity in this period see Bederman, Manliness, 1–44; for a rethinking of the meaning of masculinity for the earlytwentieth-century modernists discussed elsewhere in this chapter see Forter, Gender, Race, and Mourning. 23. See McElrath and Crisler, Frank Norris: A Life, 70, 330. 24. Sorrentino, Stephen Crane, 116. 25. See Levin, Bohemia in America, 306–10, and Sorrentino, Stephen Crane, 115–17. 26. Norris, Letter to Ernest and Mary Piexotto, 7 May 1899, in Frank Norris: Collected Letters, 77; Norris, Letter to Ernest and Mary Piexotto, 16 February 1900, in ibid. 104. 27. Levin, Bohemia in America, 229. 28. Syrett, The Company He Keeps, 140. 29. Ibid. 30. As well as identifying ‘pike for turnpike’ as an example of the distinctive American-English ‘habit of clipping or back-formation,’ H. L. Mencken’s 1919 book The American Language describes ‘piker’ as part of ‘the vocabulary of disparagement’ (184, 183, 191). 31. Baker, ‘Introduction,’ xi. 32. Ibid. 33. Blotner, ‘Introduction,’ xv. 34. Ibid. 35. Faulkner, Letter to Bennett Cerf, December 1932, in Selected Letters of William Faulkner, 69. 36. See Hemingway, ‘Introduction,’ x. 37. See Crane, Letter to Brander Matthews, 21 March 1893, in Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 2: 49. 38. Bourne, ‘A Vanishing World,’ 359. 39. Ibid. 40. For more on Crane’s journalistic adventures and experiments and their relation to broader shifts in American literary culture see Robertson, Stephen Crane. 41. Sorrentino, Stephen Crane, 249. 42. Ibid. 43. For the first of these letters see Crane, Letter to Edmund Crane, June 1877, in Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 1: 292. 44. For more on Crane’s correspondence during these months and Cora’s reaction to his silences see Sorrentino, Stephen Crane, 307–17. This period also put further strain on Crane’s relationship with his brothers. As Sorrentino observes: ‘William must have been wondering about his brother’s behavior. When Stephen telegraphed him for a loan in November [1898], William’s letters to Havana were returned because Stephen had not picked them up’ (325).

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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See Wilson, The Labor of Words. Johanningsmeier, ‘Naturalist Authors,’ 362. Howells, ‘The Man of Letters,’ 429. See Crane, Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 1: 411–75. Quoted in McElrath and Crisler, Frank Norris: A Life, 275. When Norris experienced problems with Richards in 1900, for example, it was the author who maintained professional decorum and felt himself in a position to ‘insist upon better business methods – to say nothing of common courtesy’ while threatening to find another collaborator if his demands were not met (Letter to Grant Richards, 4 December 1900, in Frank Norris: Collected Letters, 133). Newlin and McCullough, ‘The Activist,’ 129. Garland, Letter to Paul Revere Reynolds, c. 25 November 1898, in Selected Letters, 118. Garland, Letter to Paul Revere Reynolds, 1 March 1903, in ibid. 171. Conrad’s calculation appears in Letter to Norman Douglas, 30 October 1911, in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 495. Norris, Letter to Hamlin Garland, May 1902, in Frank Norris: Collected Letters, 194. Quoted in Baker, ‘Introduction,’ ix.

Works Cited Baker, C. (2003), ‘Introduction,’ in E. Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. C. Baker, New York: Scribner, ix–xxii. Bederman, G. (1995), Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beer, T. (1923), Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters, London: William Heinemann. Blotner, J. (1977), ‘Introduction,’ in W. Faulkner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. J. Blotner, London: The Scholar Press, xiii–xvi. Bourne, R. [1918] (1977), ‘A Vanishing World of Gentility,’ in R. Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918, ed. O. Hansen, New York: Urizen Books, 537–9. Cady, E. H., and L. G. Wells (1954), ‘Introduction,’ in S. Crane, Stephen Crane’s Love Letters to Nellie Crouse, ed. E. H. Cady and L. G. Wells, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 17–23. Conrad, J. (1923), ‘Introduction,’ in T. Beer, Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters, London: William Heinemann, 1–35. Conrad, J. (1990), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad – Volume 4: 1908–1911, ed. F. R. Karl and L. Davies, New York: Cambridge University Press. Crane, S. (1988), The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 2 vols., ed. S. Wertheim and P. Sorrentino, New York: Columbia University Press. Cited parenthetically as CSC. Faulkner, W. (1977), Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. J. Blotner, London: The Scholar Press. Garland, H. (1998), Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland, ed. K. Newlin and J. B. McCullough, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hemingway, E. (1942), ‘Introduction,’ in E. Hemingway (ed.), Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, New York: Bramhall House, viii–xiv. Howells, W. D. (1893), ‘The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,’ Scribner’s Magazine, 14: 429. Howells, W. D. (1981), W. D. Howells: Selected Letters – Volume 4: 1892–1901, ed. T. Wortham, C. K. Lohmann, and D. J. Nordloh, Boston: Twayne. James, H., and W. D. Howells (1997), Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells, ed. M. Anesko, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Johanningsmeier, C. (2011), ‘Naturalist Authors and the American Literary Marketplace,’ in K. Newlin (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 357–72. Kimmel, M. (1996), Manhood in America: A Cultural History, New York: The Free Press. Labor, E. (1988), ‘Introduction,’ in J. London, The Letters of Jack London – Volume 1: 1896–1905, ed. E. Labor, R. C. Leitz, and I. M. Shepard, Stanford: Stanford University Press, xiii–xxiv. Levin, J. (2009), Bohemia in America, 1858–1920, Stanford: Stanford University Press. London, J. (1988), The Letters of Jack London, 3 vols., ed. E. Labor, R. C. Leitz, and I. M. Shepard, Stanford: Stanford University Press. McElrath, J. R., Jr., and J. S. Crisler (2006), Frank Norris: A Life, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mencken, H. L. [1919] (2009), The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, New York: Cosimo. Messent, P. (2009), Mark Twain and Male Friendship: The Twichell, Howells, and Rogers Friendships, New York: Oxford University Press. Newlin, K., and J. B. McCullough (1998), ‘The Activist: 1900–1918,’ in H. Garland, Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 129–35. Norris, F. (1986), Frank Norris: Collected Letters, ed. J. S. Crisler, San Francisco: Book Club of California. Robertson, M. (1997), Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Rotundo, E. A. (1987), ‘Learning About Manhood,’ in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin (eds.), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 35–51. Rotundo, E. A. (1993), American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, New York: Basic Books. Sorrentino, P. (1988), ‘Jacksonville and the Commodore,’ in S. Crane, The Correspondence of Stephen Crane – Volume 1, ed. S. Wertheim and P. Sorrentino, New York: Columbia University Press, 261–4. Sorrentino, P. (2003), ‘The Legacy of Thomas Beer in the Study of Stephen Crane and American Literary History,’ American Literary Realism, 35: 187–211. Sorrentino, P. (2014), Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Syrett, N. (2009), The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Wertheim, S., and P. Sorrentino (1990), ‘Thomas Beer: The Clay Feet of Stephen Crane Biography,’ American Literary Realism, 22: 2–16. Wilson, C. P. (1985), The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Judith A. Allen (Indiana University Bloomington) is the author of Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880 (Oxford University Press, 1990), Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, 1880–1925 (Oxford University Press, 1994), and The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Histories/Sexualities/Progressivism (University of Chicago Press, 2009). She currently has two books in progress: ‘Black Market in Misery’: Criminal Abortion and British Sexual Cultures, 1780–1980, and Alfred Kinsey, ‘Females’ & the Feminine. Michael Anesko (Pennsylvania State University) is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship (Stanford University Press, 2012). He is also a General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, the first volumes of which will be appearing in 2015, and co-General Editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James, an ongoing project published by the University of Nebraska Press. Philip Barnard (University of Kansas) has written extensively on Charles Brockden Brown, and is the co-editor of Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings (Bucknell University Press, 2013) as well as the essay collection Revising Charles Brockden Brown (University of Tennessee Press, 2004) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. He has translated numerous dramatic, fictional, and theoretical works, and is currently completing Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and Social Gospel, a study of pulp modernism co-written with Stephen Shapiro. Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Nottingham) is the author of African American Visual Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2012), and Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin (Temple University Press, 2015). She currently has two books in progress: Imaging Resistance: Representing the Body, Memory and History in Fifty Years of African American and Black British Visual Arts, and Living Parchments: Artistry and Authorship in the Life and Works of Frederick Douglass. Robert Bray (Illinois Wesleyan University) is the author of Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and of three plays about Abraham Lincoln’s life. The most recent, Lincoln in Limbo, was produced over Easter weekend, 2015, in commemoration of the 150 Easters since Lincoln’s death. 725

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Eileen Ka-May Cheng (Sarah Lawrence College) is the author of The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784–1860 (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Historiography: An Introductory Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). She has also written articles on loyalism and American historical writing, and is currently working on a book project entitled The Loyalist Historians and Their Legacy: From British to American Nationalism. William Merrill Decker (Oklahoma State University) is the author of The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams (University of North Carolina Press, 1990), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), and Kodak Elegy: A Cold War Childhood (Syracuse University Press, 2012). His edited works include Henry Adams and the Need to Know (University of Virginia Press, 2005), and an edition of Henry James’s Daisy Miller (Bedford, 2013). He has also published articles on travel writing and the literature of American color lines from the colonial period to the present. John Fagg (University of Birmingham) is the author of On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism (University of Alabama Press, 2009) and several articles on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art and literature. He is currently working on a monograph project, Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1900–1940. Janet Floyd (King’s College London) is the author of Writing the Pioneer Woman (University of Missouri Press, 2002), and Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the American West (University of New Mexico Press, 2012). She has also published on the literature of the domestic and the material culture of the home, as well as the visibility of women in nineteenth-century U.S. culture. She is currently working on a study of understandings of friendship in Gilded Age America. Ed Folsom (University of Iowa) is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on Walt Whitman and other American writers. He is editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, co-director of the online Whitman Archive, and editor of the Whitman Series at The University of Iowa Press. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and six grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has discussed Whitman on many national radio and television news programs, and was featured in the 2008 PBS American Experience documentary Walt Whitman. Rebecca J. Fraser (University of East Anglia) is the author of Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina (University Press of Mississippi, 2007) and Gender, Race, and Family in Nineteenth Century America: From Northern Woman to Plantation Mistress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and was co-editor of Reconstruction: People and Perspectives (ABC-Clio, 2008). Linda Freedman (University College London) is the author of Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011). She has also published widely on transatlantic and interdisciplinary connections across nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American literature, and is currently completing a book about William Blake and America.

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Tina Gianquitto (Colorado School of Mines) is the author of ‘Good Observers of Nature’: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820–1885 (University of Georgia Press, 2007), and co-editor of America’s Darwin: Darwinian Evolution and U.S. Literary Culture (University of Georgia Press, 2014). She has published numerous essays on women naturalists, Darwinian botany, and Jack London, and has received fellowships from The Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. David Greenham (University of the West of England) is the author of Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism (Palgrave, 2012). He has published widely on Emerson in various journals and edited collections, including ESQ, Journal of the History of Ideas and Emerson in Contexts (Cambridge, 2013), and is a member of the Emerson Society Advisory Board. Martin Halliwell (University of Leicester) is the author of Romantic Science and the Experience of Self (Ashgate, 1999), The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), and Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970 (Rutgers University Press, 2013). He has also co-edited two essay collections: American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), and William James and the Transatlantic Conversation (Oxford University Press, 2014). Kevin J. Hayes (University of Central Oklahoma) is the author of Poe and the Printed Word (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Edgar Allan Poe (Reaktion Books, 2009). He has also edited The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is currently completing work on The Annotated Poe for Harvard University Press. David M. Henkin (University of California-Berkeley) is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia University Press, 1998) and The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and co-author of Becoming America (McGraw-Hill Humanities, 2014). He is currently engaged in a study of seven-day rhythms in U.S. history. Alea Henle (Western New Mexico University) holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Connecticut. She has published widely on electronic resources, usage statistics, and library and archival history, and her ongoing book project centers on how efforts to preserve materials for the writing of history in the early United States shaped the historical records available to modern scholars. Elizabeth Hewitt (Ohio State University) is the author of Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and co-editor of Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings (Bucknell University Press, 2013). Melissa J. Homestead (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) is the author of American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 (Cambridge University Press,

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2005), and the co-editor of Willa Cather and Modern Cultures (University of Nebraska Press, 2011), and E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist (University of Tennessee Press, 2012). She has published numerous scholarly essays on authors ranging from Susanna Rowson to Bess Streeter Aldrich, and has a monograph in progress on Willa Cather’s creative partnership with Edith Lewis. Christopher A. Hunter (California Institute of Technology) is currently completing a book on American autobiography and the book trades. His next project, a cultural history of facsimile, will explore how the nineteenth-century explosion of printed script altered readers’ perception of the relationship between writing and print. Leon Jackson (University of South Carolina) is the author of The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford University Press, 2008), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print culture and literary history. The recipient of a NEH fellowship, he is currently writing a history of blackmail in the Anglophone Atlantic world from the late medieval period to the present. Richard R. John (Columbia University) is the author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Harvard University Press, 1995), which received the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians, and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), which received the Ralph Gomory Prize from the Business History Conference. His current research interests include the history of global communications networks. Michael Jonik (University of Sussex) has published essays on Berkeley, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Charles Olson. He is currently completing two book projects: Melville’s Uncemented Stones: Character, Impersonality, and the Politics of Singularity, and A Natural History of the Mind: Science, Form, and Perception from Cotton Mather to William James. He is a founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA). Wyn Kelley (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is the author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Herman Melville: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), and co-author of Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing ‘MobyDick’ in the English Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2013). As well as editing The Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (Blackwell, 2006) and serving as Associate Director of MEL (Melville Electronic Library), she has published numerous essays in edited collections, including Melville and Women (Kent State University Press, 2006), Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Beth L. Lueck (University of Wisconsin – Whitewater) is the co-editor of Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (University of New Hampshire Press, 2012). She directed the international conference Transatlantic

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Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe at Oxford University in 2008 and has been an officer of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society since 2000, and president since 2006. Sarah Meer (University of Cambridge) is the author of Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (University of Georgia Press, 2005). Her current research projects include a book on transatlantic cultural forms in the nineteenth century, as part of which she is examining the use of letters in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and a study of the nineteenth-century stage in relation to Dion Boucicault. Peter Messent (University of Nottingham) is the author of Mark Twain and Male Friendship: The Twichell, Howells, and Rogers Friendships (Oxford University Press, 2009), which won the American Studies Network Book Prize, and The Crime Fiction Handbook (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He is currently preparing an edition of the Mark Twain – Joseph Twichell Letters. Emma Moreton (Coventry University) holds an M.Phil. in Corpus Linguistics from the University of Birmingham, and is currently in the final year of her Ph.D., also at the University of Birmingham. Her thesis explores the digitization and annotation of correspondence collections. She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Networking Project, ‘Digitising Experiences of Migration’ (www.lettersofmigration. blogspot.com). Magdalena Nerio (University of Texas–San Antonio) completed her Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame in 2013 with a dissertation entitled Morally Speaking: AngloAmerican Women Writers and the Literature of Social Concern, 1844–1877. She has published articles discussing Margaret Fuller’s literary journalism, George Eliot, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and is currently developing a book project linking Victorian women’s letter-writing to Wollstonecraft’s correspondence and political writings. Judie Newman (University of Nottingham) is an OBE, a Recipient of the Arthur Miller Prize, and former Chair of the British Association for American Studies. She has published ten books and some 100 scholarly essays, including six on Harriet Beecher Stowe. She published the first modern edition of Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp with Edinburgh University Press in 1992. Peter S. Onuf (University of Virginia) is a Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. He is the author of Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (University of Virginia Press, 2000), among many other books on the history of the early American republic, and co-author of the forthcoming ‘Most Blessed of Patriarchs’: The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson (Norton, 2016). He is co-host, with Edward Ayers and Brian Balogh, of the popular radio program and podcast, ‘BackStory with the American History Guys.’ Maria Orban (Fayetteville State University in North Carolina) is the co-editor of Charles Chesnutt Reappraised: Essays on the First Major African American Fiction Writer (McFarland & Co., 1999), for which she received the Sylvia Lyons Render Award from the Charles Waddell Chesnutt Association. She is currently working on a book about ethnic women writers.

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John C. Orr (University of Portland) is the author of numerous articles on Henry Adams, and has also published on women writers from the American West who were writing in the early decades of the twentieth century. His current research project on Henry Adams centers on the marginalia in Adams’ personal library and their relation to Adams’ readerly practices. Matthew Pethers (University of Nottingham) has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, history, and print culture, including articles in Early American Literature, History of Science, and American Studies, and book chapters in John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (Bucknell University Press, 2012), The Materials of Exchange Between Britain and North East America, 1750–1900 (Ashgate, 2013), and Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature (Routledge, 2014). He is currently working on two interrelated books about social mobility, the circum-Atlantic novel, and American class formation between 1688 and 1830. Elizabeth A. Petrino (Fairfield University) is the author of Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: American Women’s Verse, 1820–1885 (University Press of New England, 1998), and co-editor of Jesuit and Feminist Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century (Fordham University Press, 2012), which won an Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award. She has published numerous articles on Emily Dickinson and her female literary peers in journals including ESQ, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. She is currently co-editing a collection of essays entitled Reconsidering Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views. Sarah R. Robbins (Texas Christian University John V. Roach Honors College) is the author of Managing Literacy, Mothering America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), which won a Choice Book Award, and co-editor of Nellie Arnott’s Writings on Angola (Parlor Press, 2010), and Teaching Transatlanticism (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), which is complemented by a website of teaching resources to which scholars on both sides of the Atlantic contribute. Several of her other book projects grew out of sustained civic engagement projects and partnerships. Phillip H. Round (University of Iowa) is the author of three books, including Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), which won the Modern Language Association’s Lowell Prize, and many articles on Native American literature and literacy practices. His current research project on the intersection of Native vernacular writing and nationhood has been supported by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Lance Schachterle (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) is the co-editor of numerous CSEapproved scholarly texts of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, including The Pioneers (State University of New York Press, 1980), The Deerslayer (State University of New York Press, 1987), The Spy (AMS Press, 2002), The Bravo (AMS Press, 2011), and The Chainbearer (AMS Press, 2015). He became Editor-in-Chief of The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (www.wjfc.org) in 2002, and in 2007 was elected first president of the reorganized James Fenimore Cooper Society, upon whose Advisory Board he remains.

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731

Ben Schiller (Teesside University) holds a Ph.D. from Edinburgh University. His thesis, Self and Other in Black and White: Slaves’ Letters and the Epistolary Cultures of American Slavery c. 1815–1865, focused on the history of letter-writing by and for enslaved, formerly enslaved, and slave-descended Americans in the nineteenth-century South. He is currently completing a monograph examining the epistolary cultures of slavery and the ways in which these were exploited both by slaveowners and by the people they enslaved. David M. Stewart (National Central University in Taiwan) is the author of Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America (Ohio State University Press, 2011). His work has appeared widely in journals and edited collections, including Library Quarterly, American Literature, and Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature (Routledge, 2014). He is currently working on two book projects: one on sensationalism as a mode of public address in nineteenth-century America, and the other on the changing role of literature in Taiwanese college English programs. Mark Storey (University of Warwick) is the author of Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has published numerous articles in journals including Nineteenth-Century Literature, Modernism/Modernity, and Journal of American Studies, and is currently working on a book about ancient Rome and U.S. imperialism. Fionnghuala Sweeney (Newcastle University) is the author of Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool University Press, 2007). Her current research focuses on the writing of African American women radicals, and she is at work on a monograph entitled Afromodern London: Black Radicalism and Aesthetics Between the Wars. Graham Thompson (University of Nottingham) is the author of Male Sexuality under Surveillance (University of Iowa Press, 2003), The Business of America (Pluto Press, 2004) and American Culture in the 1980s (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). His essays have appeared in American Literature, Leviathan, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of American Studies, and American Literary Realism. He is currently completing a book on Herman Melville’s magazine fiction, and initiating a new project on magazines and American literature in the nineteenth century. Patricia Dunlavy Valenti (University of North Carolina at Pembroke) is the author of To Myself a Stranger: A Biography of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (LSU Press, 1991), and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life: Volumes 1 and 2 (University of Missouri Press, 2004, 2015). She has also published widely on women’s literature, and on the writers of the American Transcendentalist period and the domestic politics of authorship that affected their creativity. Information about her books is available at www. patriciadunlavyvalenti.com. Robin Vandome (University of Nottingham) has written on editorial practices in scientific journals for American Periodicals, and is currently completing a book on the intellectual history of the natural history sciences in the United States from 1830 to 1900.

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732

notes on contributors

Rebecca Weir (Independent Scholar) has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Her thesis, Written War: Reportage and the Literary, 1861–1866, examined the relationship between journalism and poetry in the Civil War era. She has co-edited an open-access digital edition of Civil War newspaper poetry for the journal Scholarly Editing, and is currently writing a book about wartime poetry, reprint pathways, and editorial practice in weekly newspapers of the 1860s. Michael Zakim (Tel Aviv University) is the author of Ready-Made Democracy: A Political History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and the forthcoming Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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INDEX

Memoirs of Arii Taimai (Tahiti), 497, 503 Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, 497, 501 ‘The Rule of Phase Applied to History,’ 500 Adams, John, 305–16 and aristocracy, 309–11 and slavery, 306, 308 and theology, 313–16 Defence of the Constitution, 308 see also Jefferson Adams, John Quincy, 160, 497, 530 Agassiz, Louis, 349, 357, 422–4 Alcott, Abigail, 642, 645, 646, 649 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 325–6, 333, 642–4, 645, 64 Conversations with Children on the Gospels, 326 ‘Psyche,’ 326 Alcott, Louisa May, 288, 642–53 and family postbox, 643–6, 649 fan mail, 643, 650 and Gothic, 644, 646, 648–9 and pseudonyms, 644 works Behind A Mask, 647 ‘The Dolls’ Journey from Minnesota to Maine,’ 643, 649, 651–2 Hospital Sketches, 643, 644 Jo’s Boys, 643, 649–51 Letters From Europe, 643 Little Women, 643, 644, 645, 650 ‘An Old-Fashioned Girl,’ 647 ‘Pansies,’ 646–7 ‘A Whisper in the Dark,’ 648–9 Alcott, William, 47 American Anti-Slavery Society, 62, 369, 377, 380 Anderson, Jourdan, 381–2 Arthur, T. S. (Timothy Shay), 50 Augst, Thomas, 185, 186

abolitionism, 62–3, 158–60, 261–2, 416; see also Douglass; Jacobs Adams, Abigail, 308, 310, 312 Adams, Henry, 99, 171, 172, 179–82, 428–9, 496–507 and Brooks Adams, 497, 498, 501–2, 505, 506 and Charles Adams, 496, 498, 499, 501 and Charles Francis Adams, 179, 495 and Marion (Clover) Hooper Adams, 179, 498, 504 and Elizabeth Cameron, 179–82, 498, 499–507 and Lord Curzon, 504 and Charles Milnes Gaskell, 498, 500, 503, 504 and John Hay, 497, 498, 500, 502, 503, 505 and Henry James, 477 and John La Farge, 180, 499 and Mabel Hooper La Farge, 498 and Cabot Lodge, 497 masking of, 497, 498–500 as public intellectual, 496 and Theodore Roosevelt, 497, 502 and Robert Louis Stevenson, 180 and William Roscoe Taylor, 507 and technology, 505–6 and Titanic, 506 works ‘Buddha and Brahma,’ 499 ‘Chanson of Thibaud,’ 501 Democracy, 497 The Education of Henry Adams, 179, 429, 492, 503, 505 Esther, 492 The History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, 497 A Letter to American Teachers of History, 505

733

4914_Bernier et al.indd 733

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734

index

autographs, 108–9, 110, 453, 514, 521, 598 Avery, Rev. Ephraim K., 75–86 cartoons of, 81–2 pamphlets about, 82–5 trial of, 75–86 see also Cornell Ballard, Rice C., 250–2 Baskervill, William M., 669–70 Beecher, Henry Ward, 140 Belknap, Jeremy, 104, 108, 110–13 History of New-Hampshire, 108, 110 Bibb, Henry, 372, 381, 382 Black Elk, 238–9 Boudinot, Elias, 234–5 Boyd, Virginia, 250–2 Branch, Billy, 249–50 Brodhead, Richard, 186, 645 Brontë, Charlotte, 648 Brooks, Philip, 140 Brown, Charles Brockden, 511–23 and archives, 511, 521–3 and authenticity, 514–16 and Joseph Bringhurst, Jr., 512, 513, 515, 517, 518, 520, 521 and Brown v. Cuming, 521–2 and William Dunlap, 513, 514 and Albert Gallatin, 514 and John Elihu Hall, 514 and lawsuits, 521–3 and Elizabeth Linn, 514, 518 literary experimentation of, 511, 519–20 and Ruth Paxson, 513 and John Howard Payne, 514 and performance, 511, 516–18 political pamphlets of, 522–3 and Susan Potts, 514 and Elihu Hubbard Smith, 513 theory of fiction as conjectural history, 520–1 and William Wood Wilkins, 512, 513, 515, 517, 518, 523 works Annals of Europe and America, 521 Arthur Mervyn, 522 Clara Howard, 519 ‘The Difference Between History and Romance,’ 520 ‘Historical Sketches,’ 521 ‘The Rhapsodist,’ 522 ‘The Story of Julius,’ 512, 517–18, 519

4914_Bernier et al.indd 734

Jane Talbot, 519 ‘Walstein’s School of History,’ 520, 521 Brown, John, 95, 160 Brown, William Wells, 159 Three Years in Europe, 384 Bullions, Peter, 643 Burbank, Eldridge Ayer, 232 business colleges, 50–1 Byron, Lady, 627–37 Cable, George Washington, 669–70, 671, 672, 676 and James Carroll Napier, 669–70 and Mark Twain, 692 works The Cavalier, 672 The Creoles of Louisiana, 672 Madame Delphine, 672 The Negro Question, 671 Old Creole Days, 672 Carkin, Philena, 290, 295 Carlyle, Thomas, 34–5, 601–2 Channing, William Ellery, 339 Channing, William Henry, 335, 339, 343 Cheney, Edna Dow, 287–98 Chesnutt, Charles W., 669–79 and W. E. B. DuBois, 677 and Richard Watson Gilder, 674 and William Dean Howells, 676 and performance, 675 philosophy of race, 671–2 and Mark Twain, 678 and Booker T. Washington, 677 works The Colonel’s Dream, 677–8 ‘The Future American,’ 671 The House Behind the Cedars, 670, 672–6 ‘The March of Progress,’ 287 The Marrow of Tradition, 676–7 ‘Rena Walden,’ 671, 672, 674 Chesterfield, Lord, 495 Child, Lydia Maria, 291, 381, 392, 396, 400 Civil War, 92, 124, 126, 129, 158, 159, 188, 267, 271–82, 387, 420, 620–1, 623–4, 642, 643, 644; see also Alcott; Dickinson; Jacobs; Lincoln; Whitman Clarke, James Freeman, 93, 335, 338–9 Clay, Cassius Marcellus, 158 Clemens, Samuel L. see Mark Twain Collinson, James, ‘Answering the Emigrant’s Letter,’ 218

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index Comstock, Anthony, 67 Conan Doyle, Arthur, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ 163 conduct books see Sigourney Cooke, Philip Pendleton, 555–64 and Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 556, 561, 564 and John Pendleton Kennedy, 556–61 Cooper, James Fenimore, 525–37 and aristocracy, 529, 530–2 and business of authorship, 525–8 and the Constitution, 529, 533–5 and copyright, 528 and cultural independence, 529–30 and intimate letters, 525–6 and political issues, 525, 528–33 and printers, 526–7 and publishers, 525–8 works Afloat and Ashore, 527 The Chainbearer, 534 History of the Navy of the United States, 530 Jack Tier, 533 The Last of the Mohicans, 525, 527 Notions of the Americans, 531, 535 The Pilot, 535 The Pioneers, 527 The Prairie, 527 The Redskins, 534 The Spy, 527 Ways of the Hour, 528 Cornell, Sarah M., 75–7, 80 correspondence as philosophical concept see Thoreau; Whitman and scientific networks see letters and science Craft, William and Ellen, 294, 628 Crane, Stephen, 709–21 authorial identity of, 711, 713 and Mark Barr, 711, 720 bohemianism of, 714–15 and Joseph Conrad, 711, 712, 713, 717 and Edmund Crane, 717 and William Howe Crane, 709, 712, 717, 719 and Nellie Crouse, 710, 711 fabricated letters of, 709–10 and fraternities, 715 and Henry Blake Fuller, 213

4914_Bernier et al.indd 735

735

and Hamlin Garland, 711, 712, 716, 720 and Karl Harriman, 710 and Willis Brooks Hawkins, 712, 714 and John Northern Hilliard, 711 and William Dean Howells, 711, 713, 715 literary opinions of, 710 and masculinity, 709, 713–14, 715 and Lily Branson Munroe, 710 and Charles Eliot Norton, 713 professional correspondence of, 718–21 and Spanish-American War, 716–17 and Cora Taylor, 709, 710, 716, 717–18, 719 works Active Service, 719, 720 ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,’ 719 Maggie, 716, 718 The Red Badge of Courage, 716 The Third Violet, 712 Wounds in the Rain, 719 Crapsey, Edward, 137–8 The Nether Side of New York, 66 Darwin, Charles, 92, 435, 436, 440, 443, 445 Dead Letter Office, 65, 70, 136–48 and Columbian Exposition, 142 as museum, 145–7 and photographs of Union soldiers, 145 tours of, 147 dead letters, 72, 136–48 and currency, 142 and market relations, 137 and Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby,’ 142–5 and privacy, 138 and religion, 140 and romances, 141 and short stories, 141, 142–5 and the state, 136–7 and Metta Fuller Victor, The Dead Letter, 146 volume of, 137 Delano, Alonzo, A Live Woman in the Mines!, 217 Delia, 250 The Dial, 319, 325, 327, 340, 341, 343, 350 diary letters, 180–2, 500 Dickens, Charles, 37–8 The Haunted Man, 644 Household Words, 37 Nicholas Nickleby, 568 Our Mutual Friend, 37, 38

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736 Dickinson, Emily, 3–5, 172, 276–9, 612–14 and anatomisation, 616 and aphorisms, 617–19, 623 and Austin Dickinson, 613 and Susan Dickinson, 612 and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 616, 618 and grief, 621–4 and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 277–9, 612–14 and Helen Hunt Jackson, 624 literary views of, 621 manipulation of intimacy and distance, 613–17, 619–20, 624 and performance, 614, 618 physical self-description of, 615–17 and war, 276–9, 282, 620–1, 623–41 disciplinary intimacy, 186, 645 Dixon, Thomas, The Leopard’s Spots, 677 Douglass, Anna Murray, 371 Douglass, Annie, 387 Douglass, Frederick, 245–7, 252, 362–74, 377–88 and African American families, 373–4 and Thomas Auld, 245, 365, 368, 369, 371, 380–1, 382 and Maria Weston Chapman, 369 and Ruth Cox, 370–1 and William Lloyd Garrison, 245, 254, 363, 366, 367, 368, 369 and Julia Griffiths, 373, 377, 378, 382–8 and George Latimer, 366–7 and self-division, 362–74 and Gerrit Smith, 41, 369–70 and A. C. C. Thompson, 245–7 works The Heroic Slave, 383 My Bondage and My Freedom, 365, 368, 380 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 245, 363, 368 ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,’ 383 Douglass, Lewis, 5, 378, 379 DuBois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, 287, 397, 677 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 93, 319–30, 575, 651, 652, 616, 618 and book trade, 319 and Thomas Carlyle, 34–5, 319, 325 and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 323–4

4914_Bernier et al.indd 736

index and Lydia Emerson, 324, 328 and Mary Moody Emerson, 320–2, 325, 327, 329 and Waldo Emerson, 328, 329–30 and improvement, 319, 320 and individuality, 322–3, 325 and nature, 304, 320–2, 325 and poetry, 327 and Jones Very, 325 and Walt Whitman, 325, 601–2, 607 works ‘The American Scholar,’ 323, 325 ‘The Divinity School Address,’ 325 ‘Fate,’ 355 ‘Friendship,’ 351 Nature, 325 ‘The Poet,’ 327 ‘Self Reliance,’ 325 see also The Dial; Fuller; Thoreau emigrants’ letters, 198–212, 216–26 and acculturation, 216–17, 218, 221 of Rebecca Butterworth, 218–22 and distance, 222–6 and homesickness, 206, 208, 210–12 of Hiram Lewis Hurlbut, 223–5 and narratives of illness, 218–22 of Sarah Stebbins, 225–6 see also Lough envelopes, 33, 277 epistolary memoir, 450 epistolary novel, 75, 343, 517, 519 epistolary travelogue, 629 evangelical publishing, 63 fan mail and Louisa May Alcott, 643, 650 and Fanny Fern, 69, 460 and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 69, 460 and Lydia Sigourney, 460–1 and Mark Twain, 69 and Walt Whitman, 598–9 Faulkner, William, 715–16 feminism, 647–9; see also Gilman; Sigourney feminism, difference, 450, 453, 462 feminism, equality, 450 Fern, Fanny, Ruth Hall, 69, 281, 460 Foucault, Michel, 352, 355, 419 Franklin, Benjamin, 89, 136, 148, 450 Freedmen’s Record, 288–98 freedmen’s schools see Cheney

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index Fruitlands, 644–5 Fuller, Margaret, 171, 172–6, 332–43 and William Ellery Channing, 339 and William Henry Channing, 175, 335, 339 and James Freeman Clarke, 173, 335, 338–9 and democracy, 337 as editor, 334 and Emerson, 173, 175, 325, 329, 333, 335, 338, 349 and family, 335–6 and form, 332–3, 337, 339 and Richard Fuller, 175 and James Nathan, 173, 174, 341–2 and New York Tribune, 174, 175, 337, 342 and Giovanni Ossoli, 174 and Caroline Sturgis Tappan, 174, 325, 333, 335, 337 and Henry David Thoreau, 348, 350, 356 works Life of Goethe, 335, 338–9 New York Tribune Reports, 339 Summer on the Lakes, 173 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 173, 339, 341 Gardner, Anna, 292–4, 295 Garland, Hamlin see Crane Garrison, William Lloyd, 15, 158–9, 160, 245–54, 287, 380, 395 Gerber, David, 185–6 Gibbons, Abigail, 159 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 465–76 and feminism, 466 and George Houghton Gilman, 465, 467, 468, 472 and gynaecocentrism, 471–2 and professional correspondence, 469, 474–5 as public intellectual, 465–6, 469–72 and Olive Schreiner, 466, 473, 475 and Charles Walter Stetson, 465, 468 and travel, 473–4 and Arthur Vance, 474 and Frank Lester Ward, 470–2 works Concerning Children, 469, 470 Herland, 471 His Religion and Hers, 469, 471

4914_Bernier et al.indd 737

737

The Home: Its Work and Influence, 469, 470 Human Work, 469 The Man-Made World, 466, 469 ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ 468 Women and Economics, 466, 469, 470, 474, 475, 476 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 322, 335, 337, 339, 569 Gowing, Clara, 643 Griffiths, Julia, 377, 382–8 Autographs for Freedom, 383 Letters from the Old World, 377, 383–8 Grimké, Charlotte and Angelina, 451 Hale, Edward, 287 Hale, Sarah, 291 Hamilton, Alexander, 311, 521 Hamilton, Gail (Mary Abigail Dodge), Our Young Folks, 69 Hancock, John, 111 handwriting, 49–52, 76–81, 83–4, 280–2 Hawthorne, Julian, 6, 334, 586 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3, 35, 195, 325, 334, 348 and courtship, 586–9 and pet names, 587–8 works The Blithedale Romance, 575 The House of the Seven Gables, 586 Passages from the English Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 592 see also Sophia Peabody Hawthorne; Melville Hawthorne, Rose, 589, 591 Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, 3, 35, 325, 334, 568–9, 582–92 and Catholicism, 590 and ‘Cuba Journal,’ 583–6, 587, 591 and drawings, 591 and King Fernando II of Portugal, 590 and ‘Madeira Journal,’ 589–90 and Notes in England and Italy, 592 and John Louis O’Sullivan, 589, 590–1 and tour of Britain, 591–2 and Fernando Valente Zayas, 584–5 Hawthorne, Una, 489, 591 Hemingway, Ernest, 123, 715–16, 721 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 3, 277–9, 713; see also Dickinson Hildreth, Richard, 81

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738

index

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 425 Homer, Winslow, 271, 274 Howells, William Dean, 34, 429–30, 655, 656, 657, 660–2, 676, 699, 703, 704, 711, 713, 718 Howitt William and Mary Howitt, 384 Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 384 Huxley, Thomas, 92 Indians see Native Americans ink, 53 Irving, Washington, History of New York, 105 it-narratives, 32, 643, 649, 651–2 Jackson, Andrew, 62 Jacobs, Harriet, 294, 391–402 and activism, 394–5, 400, 402 and Lydia Maria Child, 392, 396, 400 and William Lloyd Garrison, 395 and Rev. Albert Gladwyn, 396–7 and Francis J. Grimké, 391 and Haiti, 396 and John Jacobs, 394 and Louisa Jacobs, 396 and refugees, 394–7, 400 and General John Slough, 397 and Julia Wilbur, 394, 396, 397 Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, 391–4, 398, 399, 400, 401 James, Alice, 420, 425, 699 James, Alice Howe (née Gibbens), 420, 425, 430 James, Henry, 34, 40–1, 477, 696–706 and Hendrik Andersen, 699 and William Dean Howells, 699, 703, 704 and William James, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 428, 429, 699, 701, 702, 703 letters from Europe, 699–70 and Macmillan publishing, 699 and Minnie Temple, 700–1 and theatre, 703 and H. G. Wells, 704–5 works ‘The Abasement of the Northmores,’ 696 The Ambassadors, 704 The American Scene, 429 ‘The Aspern Papers,’ 697 The Bostonians, 424, 703

4914_Bernier et al.indd 738

Daisy Miller, 702 The Golden Bowl, 429, 704 Guy Domville, 703 The Middle Years, 706 Notes of a Son and Brother, 706 Portrait of a Lady, 123, 701 The Princess Casamassima, 703 A Small Boy and Others, 706 The Soft Side, 696 The Tragic Muse, 430, 703 Watch and Ward, 702 The Wings of the Dove, 701, 702, 704 James Senior, Henry, 420, 425, 428 James III, Henry (‘Harry’), 697, 698 James, Robertson, 420 James, Wilky, 420 James, William, 419–30, 699, 701, 702, 703 and Henri Bergson, 421, 426–7 and John Dewey, 426–7 and experience, 419, 420, 427–8, 430 and family relations, 420, 424, 426 and William Dean Howells, 429–30 and pluralism, 420 and Charles Renouvier, 421 and Alexander Von Humboldt, 424 works ‘The Energies of Men,’ 423 ‘The Hidden Self,’ 425 The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, 420 ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,’ 424 A Pluralistic Universe, 420, 426 The Principles of Psychology, 419, 422, 424, 426, 427, 428 ‘A Suggestion about Mysticism,’ 428 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 420, 424, 426, 427, 428 see also Henry James Jefferson, Thomas, 31, 108, 109, 158, 305–16 and aristocracy, 309–11 and theology, 313–16 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 428, 635, 682–93 and Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Lilian Aldrich, 690–1 and Marie Thérèse Blanc, 687 and botany, 689 and Caribbean, 690–2 editors of her letters, 683–4, 685, 687 internationalism of, 684–7, 689

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index as local color writer, 682–4, 688, 692 works The Country of the Pointed Firs, 683, 686, 689, 690, 691 Deephaven, 683, 686 ‘The Foreigner,’ 692 ‘From a Mournful Villager,’ 687, 689 The Life of Nancy, 686 The Story of the Normans, 693 Keckley, Elizabeth Hobbs, 265, 372 Kemble, Frances, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839, 265, 549 Knox, William, 409 Lane, Charles, 644–5 Lavinia, 252–4 Lesley, J. Peter, 91–9 and American Association for the Advancement of Science, 90, 91, 96 and American Philosophical Society, 91 and James Freeman Clarke, 93 and James Dwight Dana, 96, 98, 99 and James Hall, 96, 98 and Leo Lesquereux, 96, 98 and John Amory Lowell, 97 and Theodore Parker, 93 and Pennsylvania Geological Survey, 94, 98 and Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 94 and Wendell Phillips, 93 and Chauncey Wright, 95, 97 Man’s Origin and Destiny, 98 Lesley, Susan (née Lyman), 93, 94, 98, 99 letters addresses on, 67–9 African American, 139, 272–3; see also Chesnutt; Douglass; Jacobs; slavery as bodily parts, 597 and business, 46–56, 142 and business of authorship, 525–8, 656, 660–2, 718–21 collections of, 2, 123, 696 and community punishment, 157, 161–2 of condolence, 406–8, 429 counterfeit see Avery; circulars; mass mailing as danger to women, 646 and democracy see Cooper; Fuller; Whitman

4914_Bernier et al.indd 739

739 discourse analysis of, 201–12 and extortion, 155–6 facsimiles of, 76, 82–6 formal features of, 230–41, 332–3, 337 and forty-niners, 189–91, 217–18, 222–5 and freedmen’s schools see Cheney and frontier, 218–22 and historical societies, 103–14 and history, 103–14, 481–92 and homesickness, 199, 206–12, 225 illustrated, 154; see also letter-sheets intimate, nostalgia for, 63: longing in, 171–82; love letters, 3, 341–2, 586–9, 598 of introduction, 502, 542, 636 and Irish emigrants, 198–212 and kidnapping, 162–3 as legal evidence, 75–86 and material form, 5–6, 31–41, 52–3, 78–80, 155, 163, 437, 500 meaning of as dependent on reception, 377 as memorials, 235–6, 457–8: The Memorial of John Ross and Others, 235–6 from migrants, 185–96, 198–212, 216–26 and millgirls, 75–6, 191–5; see also Cornell miscarrying of, 136–48, 275, 541–2 and missionaries, 232, 236 and national unity, 1, 136–7, 642, 652 and novel see Louisa May Alcott; Chesnutt; Fern; Ridge; Southworth; Stowe and orality, 232 as performance, 511, 516–18; see also Henry Adams; Dickinson; Melville in periodicals, 218, 289–98, 377–88, 644 and political engagement, 156–8, 525, 528–33 and population mobility, 185–96 as power, 6, 151–7, 644, 647 and religion, 451–2 and role of woman see Cheney; Fuller; Gilman; Sigourney round-robins, 456 salutations in, 231, 232 as sacred objects, 239–40 and science, 89–99, 349, 435–45

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740

index

letters (Cont.) and short story, 141, 145; see also Louisa May Alcott; Arthur Conan Doyle; Henry James; Melville signatures in, 154, 232; see also autographs and slaveholders, 245–54, 365, 368, 369, 371, 377–82; see also Sarah Hicks Williams and slavery, 11, 109, 245–254, 272–3, 582–3; see also Douglass; Jacobs from slaves, 245–54, 272–3, 364–5, 372; see also Douglass; Jacobs and social crime, 156 and state bureaucracy, 137, 230 as technology of mass communication, 643, 649 threatening, 152–63 and travelogue, 384, 629, 643; see also Sophia Peabody Hawthorne unclaimed letter lists, 65, 67 and voice see Fuller and women scientists, 435–45 working class, 185–96 letter-sharing, 456, 542, 555, 578–9, 585 letter-sheets, 223–5 letter-writing as instruction, 454–6, 642–3, 644, 645 mechanical (manifold letter-writer), 362 letter-writing manuals, 2, 36, 48, 153, 289, 514, 518 Liberator, The, 15, 94, 158, 159, 160, 380, 395 Lincoln, Abraham, 152, 154, 155, 158, 160, 267, 405–17 and Lydia Bixby, 406–7 and Eliza H. Browning, 405, 411, 413 and Elmer Ellsworth, 407–8 and William H. Herndon, 405, 409 homosexuality (alleged) of, 413–14 and Mary Todd Lincoln, 405, 412, 414, 415 literary writings of, 408–11 and Fanny McCullough, 408 and General George Meade, 406 and Mary S. Owens, 405, 411–13, 414 and Anne Rutledge, 411 and Joshua F. Speed, 405, 413–16 telegrams of, 123–4, 129 works

4914_Bernier et al.indd 740

‘My Child-Hood Home I See Again,’ 409–11 ‘Peoria Speech,’ 416 ‘The Suicide’s Soliloquy,’ 409 Loguen, Jermain, 382, 383, 398 London, Jack, 712, 713, 714 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 69 Lough, Julia, 199–212 McLean, John, 136 Madison, James, 108 mail Confederate, 272 and newspapers, 651–2 as political tool, 290 as terrorism, 378 see also mass mailing Martineau, Harriet, 36–7, 333, 344, 543, 545 mass mailing, 62–71 abolitionist, 62–3, 451 circulars, 65–6, 105–8 evangelical, 63 fraud in, 62–6, 71 Valentines, 70 Matthews, Brander, 716–18 May, Samuel, 158, 649 Melville, Augusta, 570–2, 575, 578 Melville, Herman, 568–81 and business letters, 572 and Evert Duyckinck, 38, 40, 574, 578 and family letters, 570–2, 578–9 handwriting of, 51 and Nathaniel Hawthorne, 35–6, 38, 568–9, 575, 576, 578, 579 letters to women, 573–4, 578 and masking, 569–81 and John Murray, 573, 577 works ‘The Age of the Antonines,’ 577 ‘Bartleby,’ 71, 72, 142–5 Mardi, 574 Moby Dick, 37–8, 568, 576, 578 Omoo, 571 ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,’ 37–8 Redburn, 40, 526 Typee, 571, 573 Mitford, Mary Russell see Sedgwick

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index

741

Murray, John, 527, 573, 577 Myers, Frederick, 425 Native Americans, 230–41, 471, 489; see also Sigourney New England Freedmen’s Aid Society see Cheney New York Historical Society, 105, 526 newspapers, 64, 121, 128–30, 161–2, 218, 234–5, 274–5, 276–80, 347, 354, 359, 437–8, 453, 651–2; see also Alcott; Cheney; Douglas; Fuller; mass mailing; Thoreau Norris, Frank, 712, 713–14, 715, 719, 720, 721 Northup, Solomon, 11, 14 Norton, Charles Eliot, 701, 713

Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, 560 ‘Ulalume,’ 564 ‘The Visionary,’ 559 see also Cooke polygraph, 31 Posey, Alex, 241 Post Office, The, 5, 34, 62, 63, 66, 121, 136–7, 231, 642, 652 post offices, 1–2, 34, 68–70, 231, 240–1 postage acts, 1, 63, 119, 120, 136, 142, 186 postal delay, 387–8 postal system see mail postbox see Louisa May Alcott postcards, 607–8, 650 printing, 81–4

Occom, Samson, 233 Office of Indian Affairs, 231 Old Master letters, 377–82 Open Letter Club, 670, 674 Orne, Caroline, ‘The Clerk of the Dead Letter Office,’ 145

Rice, Spotswood, 272–3 Ridge, John Rollin, The Lives and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, 70 Riggs, Stephen, 231, 236 and Riggs orthography, 238, 239 Rogers, Henry H., 655, 656, 657, 663–4 Rush, Benjamin, 308

paper, 31–41, 46, 138 as evidence, 75, 79–80 in literature see Dickens; Melville papermakers, 33–4, 138 Peabody, Elizabeth, 325, 568, 569, 582, 585, 646 Peabody, Mary, 582, 583, 585, 591 pens, 31–3, 39–40, 53–4 Poe, Edgar Allan, 85, 554–64 and John Allan, 555, 557 and magazines, 556, 558 postscripts of, 557–8, 564 and Southern Literary Messenger, 556, 558–9 works Al-Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, 558 ‘Annabel Lee,’ 564 ‘Berenice,’ 556, 559 ‘Epimanes,’ 558 ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,’ 561–2 ‘Hans Phaal,’ 589 ‘Hop-Frog,’ 556 ‘Ligeia,’ 559–60 ‘Morella,’ 556, 559 ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ 561 ‘The Raven,’ 417

4914_Bernier et al.indd 741

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 700, 707 science, 85–99 and women, 435–45 Scott, Sir Walter, 319 Ivanhoe, 528, 675 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 538–49 and Elizabeth Barrett, 547–8, 549 and Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America, 544, 545, 546, 549 and Frances Kemble, 549 and John Kenyon, 547, 549 and Harriet Martineau, 543, 545 and Mary Russell Mitford, 538–50 and Jared Sparks, 487–8 and Frances Trollope, The Domestic Manners of the Americans, 544–5 and Henry Westmacott, 543, 545 works Clarence, 538, 540, 544, 546 Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, 539, 546–9 The Linwoods, 488, 543 Means and Ends, or Self Training, 544 A New-England Tale, 539, 540 Redwood, 593, 540 The Travellers, 540

28/01/16 12:57 PM

742

index

Sigourney, Lydia, 450–62 and Julia Brace, 456–7 and Laura Bridgman, 456 and Alice Cogswell, 456 and conduct books, 458–60 and the deaf, 451, 456–8 as difference feminist, 450, 453, 462 and Maria Edgeworth, 454 and education, 454–5 and fan mail, 460–1 and Native Americans, 451, 453–4, 456 and sentimentality, 454, 456, 457, 458 and Charles Sigourney, 452 professionalism of, 451 works ‘The Cherokee Mother,’ 453 ‘Letter to the Delegation,’ 453–4, 457 Letters of Life, 450, 451, 460, 461 Letters to Mothers, 451, 458 Letters to My Pupils, 451, 455, 456 Letters to Young Ladies, 451, 458, 459 Poems, 452 A Sketch of Connecticut Forty Years Since, 452 Traits of the Aborigines, 452, 453 slavery, 109, 306, 308, 416–17, 533–4, 628; see also abolitionism; Child; Douglass; Jacobs; letters: from slaves; slaveholders; Weld; Sarah Hicks Williams Smith, John, 47 Southworth, E. D. E. N., 636–7 The Hidden Hand, 70 Sparks, Jared, 4, 109, 349, 481–92 and Benedict Arnold, 482 and George Bancroft, 481, 482, 483, 486 as editor, 482 and Joel Tyler Headley, 484, 486 and historians, 483–6, 491 and loyalists, 487–91 and Lord Mahon, 483–4 and Native Americans, 489 and nationalism, 482, 492 and William Prescott, 481, 482, 483, 485, 486 and Lorenzo Sabine, 488, 489–91 and Catherine Sedgwick, 487–8 and Robert Southey, 487 and Charles Upham, 485–6 and Leopold von Ranke, 485, 491 and Henry von Schaak, 488

4914_Bernier et al.indd 742

and George Atkinson Ward, 488–9 and George Washington, 481, 482, 483–4, 487 The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, 482 stamps, 33, 49, 679 Stevens, Thaddeus, 160 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 627–37 and Beecher family letters, 289, 628–9 and Lady Byron, 627–37 and George Eliot, 637 and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 469 and Harriet Jacobs, 400 and Anna Jameson, 628 and Charles Kingsley, 633 and Elizabeth Reid, 628 and John Stuart Mill, 637 son’s death, 636 and E. D. E. N. Southworth, 636–7 and Duchess of Sutherland, 629, 631 works Dred, 629, 630, 632, 633 Lady Byron Vindicated, 627, 630, 631, 633, 637 Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 384, 628, 629 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 534, 628, 629 Tappan, Caroline (née Sturgis), 174, 326–30, 333, 335, 337 Tappan, Lewis, 378 Taylor, General Zachary, 70 telegram in literature, 643, 650 see also telegraph telegraph, 7, 119–30, 630 and James Gordon Bennett, 119–21, 126 and James Gordon Bennett, Jr., 128 and Nellie Bly, 128–9 in Britain, 120 and business, 124–5 and censorship, 129 and diplomacy, 124 and English language, 123 exclusivity of, 120, 121 and Jay Gould, 124 and Henry James, 123 and journalism, 125–8 and Abraham Lincoln, 123–4, 129 and Samuel Morse, 121 and night letter, 120

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index and Francis O. J. Smith, 119, 120, 121 and Henry Morton Stanley, 128 and war correspondents, 129 Thompson, George, 159–60 Thoreau, Henry David, 347–57, 334, 339 and Louis Agassiz, 349, 357 and Harrison Otis Blake, 349, 351–5, 356, 357 and Lydia Emerson, 350 and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 348, 349, 350, 351, 355, 356, 357 and Waldo Emerson, 350, 356 and family, 350 and friendship, 351–3 and Margaret Fuller, 348, 350, 356 and Richard Fuller, 351 and Horace Greeley, 348 and Nathaniel Hawthorne, 348 and Charles Lamb, 347 and newspapers, 347, 354 and Daniel Ricketson, 353–4, 355, 357 and science, 349 and sentiment, 347–8 and Jared Sparks, 349 and Stoicism, 350–1, 356–7 and Sophia Thoreau, 350 and Walt Whitman, 349 works ‘Chastity and Sensuality,’ 349 Letters to Various Persons, 357 Life without Principle, 354 ‘Love,’ 349 Walden, 348, 349, 355, 356, 357, 358 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 348, 351, 357 Tilton, Theodore, 279 Transcendentalism, 324, 334, 340, 530, 646 Truth, Sojourner, 393, 401 Tubman, Harriet, 393, 401 Twain, Mark (Samuel L. Clemens), 126, 171, 172, 176–9, 428, 655–65 business enterprises of, 656, 663–4 and George Washington Cable, 692 and Charles W. Chesnutt, 678 and Jane Lampton Clemens, 176 and Olivia Langdon Clemens, 176–9, 658–9, 663 and Orion Clemens, 176 and daughters’ deaths, 659 and Joel Chandler Harris, 656–7 as professional writer, 656, 660–2

4914_Bernier et al.indd 743

743

religious beliefs of, 656, 657–60 works The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 661 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 661, 662 Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, 662 A Connecticut Yankee, 661 The Gilded Age, 178 The Innocents Abroad, 176, 660 Mark Twain’s Library of American Humor, 662 The Mysterious Stranger, 659 Roughing It, 176 A Tramp Abroad, 658, 659, 661 ‘A True Story,’ 661 Twichell, Joseph, 655, 656, 657–60 typewriters, 33, 52, 709 underground railroad, 363, 382 Upham, Timothy, 85 Von Humboldt, Alexander, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, 424 wafer seals, 78, 645 war correspondents see Crane; Whitman Washington, George, 108, 481, 482, 483–4, 487 Weld, Theodore Dwight, 378 American Slavery As It Is, 380 Wharton, Edith, 40, 428, 699 White, Avenia, 250–1 Whitman, George Washington, 273, 274–5, 280, 605 Whitman, Walt, 275, 281–2, 349, 596–609 and Astor Place Riot, 608 and body, 599, 602–3 and Thomas Carlyle, 601–2 and Civil War, 280–1, 596, 602, 604–7 as clerk, 605, 607 and correspondence, 596–7, 601 and democracy, 596, 603, 607 and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 601–2, 607 and Anne Gilchrist, 600 journalism of, 604 and male affection, 609 and New York Tribune, 601 and postcards, 607–8 and readers, 597–601 and Susan Garnet Smith, 600

28/01/16 12:57 PM

744

index

Whitman, Walt (Cont.) and Horace Traubel, 597, 598, 600, 602, 606, 608, 609 and Helen Wilmans, 599 works ‘Come Up from the Fields, Father,’ 281–2, 605–6 Democratic Vistas, 603–4 Leaves of Grass, 596, 597, 600, 601, 602, 603, 604, 608 Memoranda During the War, 604 Specimen Days, 604 Williams, Sarah Hicks, 258–68 and abolitionism, 261–2 and concept of home, 258–61 proslavery views of, 264–5, 267 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, Pencillings by the Way, 549 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 648 women scientists, 435–45 and American Association for the Advancement of Science, 438

4914_Bernier et al.indd 744

and Mary Pulsifer Ames, 441 and Rebecca Austin, 440–1 and Katherine Layne Brandegee, 440–1, 443–5 and Charles Darwin, 435, 436, 440, 443, 445 and Elizabeth B. Davenport, 441–2 and Alice Eastwood, 443–5 and Asa Gray, 435, 439, 442, 444 and Jane Gray, 435 and Joseph Hooker, 436, 440 and Francis Meyers, 440 and Emily O. Pelton, 439–40 photographs of, 439–40 and sex, 443–4 and Smithsonian Institution, 436, 438 and sympathy, 440–1 and John Torrey, 436 and Mary Treat, 439, 440, 442, 443 Woolf, Virginia, 649 Wovoka, 239–41 and Messiah Letters, 240–1

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