The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America 9780812291315

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The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America

MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

The SOCIAL LIVES of POEMS in NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

Michael C. Cohen

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cohen, Michael C., author. The social lives of poems in nineteenth-century America / Michael C. Cohen. pages cm — (Material texts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4708-4 1. American poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Poetry—Social aspects—United States— History—19th century. 3. Literature and society— United States—History—19th century. 4. Books and reading—Social aspects—United States—History— 19th century. I. Title. II. Series: Material texts. PS316.C64 2015 811'.309355—dc23 2014040834

For Murray

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Contents

Introduction. How to Read a Nineteenth-Century Poem

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Chapter 1. Balladmongering and Social Life

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Chapter 2. The Poetics of Reform

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Chapter 3. Contraband Songs

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Chapter 4. Old Ballads and New Histories

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Chapter 5. The Reconstruction of American Poetry

164

Chapter 6. The Minstrels’ Trail

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America

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Introduction

How to Read a Nineteenth-Century Poem

On Not Reading Poems The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America is an exploration of the lived history of literary writing in the United States, which I hope will illuminate for contemporary readers some of the many ways in which people in the past engaged with poems in their daily lives. Rather than offering a history of poetry, this book instead attempts to think through a variety of social relations that poems made possible, whether materially (as when one person transcribes and sends a poem to another, for example) or theoretically (such as the imagined history projected by a nineteenth-century genre like the ballad). The next six chapters thus open up a series of arguments about the encounters between nineteenth-century people and their poems, in which “their poems” is a deliberately ambiguous possessive meant to conflate the poems people read, the poems they wrote, and the poems they used in other ways. While I try to be as precise as possible when I discuss how encounters with poems structured the experiences of much larger forms of being, I also speculate a great deal. This project partially falls within the history of reading, and reading is a speculative enterprise. I will examine many instances of readers reading poems, which I draw from different kinds of archival sources, but to introduce the problems of reading historically, I would like to begin with two scenes of people not reading poems. Nonreading, as we will see, can also be a productive enterprise, one that takes many forms, from ignoring, forgetting, and suppressing to copying, transcribing, reciting, memorizing, collecting, exchanging, and mimicking. All of these ways to not read a poem are important counterpoints to their more obvious alternative, and together they help me ask: What might a poetic history of the United States look like when it is

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generated from a place beyond the bounds of “reading” as we typically understand it? My question is partly defensive, since the engagements between people and poems that I take up throughout The Social Lives of Poems often have a problematic relationship to reading. I am mostly interested in poems that have not been read in a long time; poems that, based on what I can deduce from their archival context, may never have been read at all; and poems I assume some readers might think not worth reading or, at least, and this is a key distinction, not closely. Put another way, many of the poems I consider have a vexed connection to literariness. I will respond in part by showing that debates about taste, value, and merit can be found throughout the entire period covered in this study: people in the 1790s questioned the social and literary value of broadside ballads; in the 1830s, of antislavery verse; in the 1860s, of war poetry; and in the 1880s, of minstrel songs and slave spirituals. But for now I want to look at some fictional moments in which nineteenth-century ideas of value bracket and are bracketed by nineteenth-century acts of reading poems— or, rather, not reading them. In William Dean Howells’s 1886 novel The Minister’s Charge, a crucial scene in the apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker takes place over the exchange of a poem. Barker— a farm boy from rural Massachusetts with literary propensities— comes to Boston in a disastrously misguided effort to sell his poems. His money and manuscripts are stolen on his first night in town, but, with no desire to return to the misery of hardscrabble farming, he stays on to make his way in the city. After a series of scrapes and misadventures, Barker finds employment as a hotel clerk, and one evening, two of the hotel’s residents, the art students Miss Swan and Miss Carver, ask him to read aloud a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. The scene begins with Mr. Berry, a law student from the Wyoming territory, coming to Barker’s room. “The young ladies sent me down to ask if you had a copy of Whittier’s poems; they want to find something in it. I told’em Longfellow would do just as well, but I couldn’t seem to convince’em. They say he didn’t write the particular poem they want.” . . . It appeared that it was Miss Swan who wished to see the poem; she could not remember the name of it, but she was sure she should know it if she saw it in the index. She mingled these statements with her greetings to Lemuel, and Miss Carver seemed as glad to see him. She had a little more color than usual. . . . [Miss

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Swan] insisted upon Lemuel’s reading. “Jessie says you read beautifully.” . . . At heart he was proud of his reading, and he ended by taking the book. When he had finished the two girls sighed. “Isn’t it beautiful, Jessie?” said Miss Swan. “Beautiful!” answered her friend. Berry yawned. “Well, I don’t see much difference between that and a poem of Longfellow’s. Why wouldn’t Longfellow have done just as well? Honestly, now! Why isn’t one poem just as good as another, for all practical purposes?”1 This is a poetry “reading” in multiple senses, since Barker “is proud of his reading” in that he knows and understands Whittier’s poems and also that he knows he can recite those poems beautifully. This reading (that is, the scene and my interpretation of it) depends on two related tensions: between the materiality of Barker’s book (his “copy of Whittier’s poems” with its helpful index) and the affective transports his reading enables (the girls’ sighs, Berry’s yawn) and between the senses of intimacy and unfamiliarity the poem engenders— Miss Swan “could not remember the name of [the poem], but she was sure she should know it if she saw it.” This complex “reading” creates a situation that allows Howells to “read” the relations made visible in the shared act of reading. The characters’ responses index a range of social positions: the girls’ sighs comically contrast with Berry’s yawn, a difference that maps the distance between the sentiment of feminine New England and the hardy, if uncouth, Western territories. With so much in play around this unnamed poem, however, it may be easy to overlook that the poem is, in fact, unnamed. Indeed, the passage is ambivalent about Berry’s only apparently obtuse question: why isn’t one poem just as good as another? The novel never quotes from or identifies the poem, and even if the women declare it “beautiful,” they cannot remember its title, which, for “the practical purposes” of the plot, is irrelevant. What matters is the scene of recitation and exchange; one poem would seem just as good as another, for any might serve the pretext of bringing together a mixed company in a private space (this is the closest thing to a sex scene in Howells’s novels). Thus, the novel seems tacitly to endorse Berry’s position, that the difference between Longfellow and Whittier is less important than what they share, a place of distinction in late nineteenth-century letters. But the scene would look much different if they were reading Whitman, and so despite what Berry says, the use of Whittier in The Minister’s Charge is anything but accidental. Both Barker and Whittier were farm boys who made good. Like Barker, Whittier was renowned locally in his youth for writing

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morally serious poetry. Unlike Barker, of course, Whittier became one of the most famous and beloved poets of the nineteenth century, known first as a zealous abolitionist and reform advocate, then later as a nostalgic chronicler of the legends and lost worlds of old New England. The passage from the novel intrigues me because its use of the poem evacuates the poem of content, making it a cipher to facilitate what looks like a moment of pure exchange. At first, it seems that Whittier’s name (which is not Longfellow’s, a difference that matters, pace Berry) organizes the scene. But then it becomes clear that even if the poem is “by Whittier,” it is no longer “his poem” since it generates readings, like the company’s sighs and yawns or Barker’s beautiful recitation, which transform it from a literary text into a social relation. The poem acquires a social life because it creates social life, and the intimate reading of the poem seemingly requires no concern for the poem itself. Or not. The Minister’s Charge is concerned with the dissolution of moral authority in postbellum America, which Howells tracks across a range of institutions, from the family, to the ministry, to literature, art, and culture. In fact, the novel may be critiquing the cultural investment of such authority in poetry, rather than mocking any perceived decline in poetry’s literary value at the end of the century (a story often told as the “twilight of the poets”).2 For the scene I describe is not the only instance of missed reading (and misreading) in this novel, which begins just after Barker has recited his verses to the Rev. and Mrs. Sewell while they are vacationing near his home in the country. The Reverend’s “passion for saying pleasant things to people” leads him to give Barker false praise, thus kicking the plot into motion. “You knew the poetry was bad,” Mrs. Sewell reproaches him. “I could tell you were dishonest,” she continues, but Barker “pinned his faith to every syllable.” Blessed with a boundless capacity for self-justification—he is “faithfuller and busier in [his parish duties] than he might have been if he had not laid so much stress upon duties of all sorts, and so little upon beliefs”—Rev. Sewell concludes that “it requires no end of [profuse syllables] to make the worse appear the better reason to a poet who reads his own verses to you” (3, 5). Sewell’s commitment to social forms therefore determines his misreading of Barker’s reading. These poems (which we also never read) “were not without ideas of a didactic and satirical sort, but they seemed so wanting in literary art beyond a mechanical facility of versification” that Sewell fails to realize just how serious Barker’s literary ambitions are (6). The nonalignment of social and literary forms in the reading and misreading of poems constitutes a serious failure in The Minister’s Charge. There are consequences if you get it wrong.

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In this sense, Howells’s accounts of missed readings make interesting companions to the better-known example of Emmeline Grangerford’s unthinking verse writing in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Barker’s “mechanical facility of versification” makes his poems unreadable if not wholly unread. Emmeline’s verses, like Lemuel’s (and Whittier’s), also seem unreadable— and, like theirs, literally cannot be read in this novel, with one major exception. Yet the lure of aesthetic contempt that Twain dangles before us belies just how compulsively creative verses can be when they go unread. Huck, of course, has a fraught relationship with books and reading, and the Grangerfords’ literary culture famously mystifies him. As Huck explains, their parlor displays “a big family Bible, full of pictures . . . ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ about a man that left his family; it didn’t say why . . . [and] ‘Friendship’s Offering,’ full of beautiful stuff and poetry but I didn’t read the poetry.” Huck’s nonreading of these books leads him to the family’s “crayons,” “which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old.” While the books leave Huck feeling secure, Emmeline’s pictures give him the “fan-tods,” and they drive him finally to her scrapbook. This young girl kept a scrap book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head. It was very good poetry. . . . Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn’t ever have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn’t find anything to rhyme with it she would just scratch it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn’t particular, she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about, just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker—the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person’s name, which was Whistler. She warn’t ever the same, after that; she never complained, but she kind of pined away and did not live long. . . . Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn’t seem right that there warn’t nobody to make some about her, now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn’t make it go, somehow.3

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Even though Huck appreciates her verses, this episode (the most caustic piece of satire in the novel) could be read as a death-knell for nineteenth-century poetry.4 Like her books, Emmeline is full of “stuff and poetry,” which comes “out of her own head” yet never demands her “to stop to think” as she slaps down lines and then scratches them out in a process that “warn’t particular” because it attends only to the materiality of rhyme, just as Huck attends only to the materiality of the books on the parlor table, looking in but hilariously not reading them. The ironclad association between death and poetry proves fatal for Emmeline, who pines away after hanging fire on a failed rhyme, a joke that would be cruel if her creative process were not so utterly de-animated as to make her seem already dead long before. At the very least, the heavily embodied, nearly embalmed work of Emmeline’s poetics lacks any classical sense of inspiration—her poems breathe death, not life. Yet if verse “tributes” mark death even when they do not also produce it, then Emmeline’s death is incomplete, for “there warn’t nobody to make some about her, now she was gone.” This “didn’t seem right,” so Huck tries to “sweat out a verse or two” himself, but “can’t make it go, somehow.” Somehow. In these scenes, poems are everywhere and yet nowhere, everywhere because they are nowhere—like Emmeline, whose death puts her on display throughout the house in the relics that attest to a presence made possible by dying. The missing poems structure social relations (private conversations, public tributes) between men and women, individuals and institutions, and the living and the dead, yet they are so generic as to have no identity and need none. That said, I hope some readers will have noticed that my quotation elides Emmeline’s most famous tribute, her “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d,” emphatically delivered in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which for so many readers has condensed all that they think was awful about nineteenth-century verse (“comically mawkish” in the words of one recent account, which finds nothing else worth saying about it).5 Although I yearn to know more about those poems Huck did not read, and that poem he could not sweat out, I too have little to say about the poem Twain allows him and us to read. I love nineteenth-century “stuff and poetry,” but I have often found myself reading, writing, and talking around nineteenth-century poems, with much to say about everything except them. To some extent, this book investigates why. A preliminary conclusion is that nineteenth-century poems are often most interesting for the ways nineteenth-century people did or did not read them and the ways they did or did not sweat them out. That is, this book details how poems facilitated

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actions, like reading, writing, reciting, copying, inscribing, scissoring, exchanging, or circulating, that positioned people within densely complex webs of relation. These webs could be communal (Chapters 1, 2, and 5), political (Chapters 2, 3, and 4), historical (Chapters 4 and 5), or racial (Chapters 3, 4, and 6). As every chapter demonstrates, these webs were both intellectual and affective, linking readers with their poems but also with themselves, with each other, with the dead, with authors, with the past, and with various forms of imagined community— a term original to nineteenth-century poetics and not twentieth-century political theory (as Chapter 4 explains). I cannot reach these worlds of lived experience by reading poems in the way I normally would, using the protocols of close reading, since close reading emphasizes the careful analysis of formal, complex uses of language, while producing and valuing interpretation above all else. A large majority of nineteenth-century poems seem unable to hold up to the rigors of this kind of relation. Part of my aim in this book is to recapture some of the ways poems were meaningful outside of a model based on literary analysis; these alternative modes of making meaning can be difficult to see when interpretation is the goal. The relations that made nineteenth-century poems meaningful for nineteenth-century readers therefore require different readings from us, and The Social Lives of Poems will demonstrate how a contemporary critical account of poetry might engage with and integrate historical readings of poems.

On Reading Poems Let me now introduce one such scene of historical reading. “For a long time it has been a cherished purpose of mine, stranger though I am, to write you,” explained the Civil War veteran N. G. Awtell in an 1873 letter to Whittier. Chapter  5 will work through several dozen of these epistolary encounters between Whittier and his readers. Awtell’s letter is unusually descriptive, however, and makes a worthy introduction to a scene of reading as it looked in the nineteenth century. Renewing an intention to establish in fact a relationship long cherished in fancy, Awtell explained to Whittier, That purpose was recalled last night, on my return from the evening ser vice, by finding in the hands of my eldest son, two small volumes of blue and gold, in which he seemed to be intensely interested. The volumes are somewhat soiled, and they are pencil-marked on

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many a page. Long years ago they were a gift to me from my fatherin-law. . . . Those volumes were an inspiration to me in the “moral warfare” which ushered in the Great Conflict which resulted in the accomplishment of some of the stirring prophecies which are found in them; and they were my companions through all the bloody struggle. What a troop of recollections come thronging into my mind as I look upon those volumes! The bidding adieu to the dear ones at home, the rush across Penn. in open cars, the toilsome marches under the broiling sun, or through the long dark nights, the weary days of waiting and watching, floundering in the mud, and snow, and rain, the storm of battle, and all the grim and ghastly scenes of war. How at times the burning words read in those volumes have fired my soul! Read in many a quiet nook, in Maryland, and on Virginia’s sacred soil, and under the magnolias and Palmettos of South Carolina; read by bivouac fires in the ears of many of my noble comrades, who reddened that southern soil with their life blood; and in the presence of dusky forms, whose souls caught their inspiration; read too in “the smoking hell of battle,” and on the hospital’s tiresome couch! Surely all these recollections are a sufficient apology for intruding upon your attention. I owe you a debt of gratitude for these volumes. So oft did I commune with them before the war, that their author was like a personal friend to me; and now he is to me as a faithful comrade who has stood by my side, and shared my tent, and with me felt the battle’s fiery breath, and has been true in defeat and in victory.6 Like the notebooks crafted with painstaking care by the peddler Thomas Shaw, which I consider in Chapter 1, or like the collaborative books of the antislavery community that I examine in Chapter 2, the blue and gold volumes (likely an edition of Whittier’s Poetical Works published by Ticknor and Fields in 1857) that Awtell discovered in his son’s hands one night condense a whole system of social relations in their soiled and pencil-marked pages. Such smudges and marks poignantly archive encounters with the poems over time, in which the physical connections between hand, pencil, and book mark out the psychic and moral connections that the letter elaborates at greater length. Seeing the books in his son’s intensely interested grip, Awtell recalls the multigenerational ties of family that passed reformism from his father-in-law to

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him and then again from him to his son. The books then trace his history in the war, bringing forth a “troop of recollections” that march with him back across the wartime landscape (like Union soldiers, the volumes are in blue), from his home in Rhode Island, through Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and down into South Carolina. Memories of reading Whittier’s poems link experiences of “the weary days of waiting and watching . . . and all the grim and ghastly scenes of war” to the literary tropes of warfare (“the smoking hell of battle”) and the American landscape (“Virginia’s sacred soil,” “the magnolias and Palmettos of South Carolina”). Poems “read by bivouac fires in the ears of many of my noble comrades” transfer to bodies that later “reddened that southern soil with their life blood.” These deeply embedded memories and associations in turn bind Awtell to Whittier, a stranger and yet “like a personal friend to me.” Awtell records the bond between the material volumes he possessed and the emotional values they possessed for him: the “debt of gratitude” he owes Whittier is, I think, more than merely a metaphor. The poems are not abstracted texts—like Barker, he never specifies which poems he read, nor does he assess their literary qualities or even what he thinks of them as poetry. Instead, Awtell relates to the books through the attachments they foster and the personal, familial, poetic, imaginative, and historical memories they record. Therefore, if his account cannot be characterized as a critical reading of Whittier’s poems, Whittier’s poems are valuable to him (as they are to Barker and company) precisely because they do not require such a reading. In place of a critical posture in which the poem becomes a piece of language that demands interpretation, Whittier’s volumes prompt a familiar and familial relation in which the poems stand in for a whole host of intimacies. The Social Lives of Poems focuses on engagements such as these. I work across an extended nineteenth century (from the 1790s to 1903), examining how people used poems, how they read them, and how their readings—what they read, how they read, and what they thought about what and how they read— can themselves be read to recapture otherwise evanescent traces of the past. To “use” a poem, in this project, includes a broader range of functions than poems are usually imagined to have.7 As a critical term, “use” helps me link the material worlds of poems and poetic genres with their textuality and language, in order to build a history of literariness and genre from a wide array of engagements with poems, of which reading is one option among many.8 Poems long occupied a complex position in the history of social life and sociality, I argue, and their roles in creating lived and imagined relations among

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people require an outlook that includes but is not limited to reading. While some readers found in poems a resource for critical interpretation, literary and aesthetic plea sure, and the enjoyment of linguistic complexity, many more turned to poems for spiritual and psychic well-being; adopted popular song tunes to spread rumor, scandal, satire, and news; or used poems as a medium for personal and family memories, as well as local and national affi liations, as the following chapters demonstrate.9 While people sometimes testified directly to these kinds of intimate associations with their poems in letters or diaries, for example, I also read the history of use out of a diverse set of practices that include acts of quoting, reciting, memorizing, rewriting, parodying, reading collectively, reading aloud, exchanging, scrapbooking, cataloging, editing, anthologizing, and transcribing poems. Therefore, throughout this book, I suspend the assumption that poems are meant to be read.10 This is not an argument for distant or surface reading, for uncritical or reparative reading. I will closely read and interpret many poems, and I will closely read many different readings of poems, which I take from various kinds of archives. But my goal in opening up the material and social histories of poems is not to fold that context back in to my interpretation of the poem. Instead, I want as much as possible to take my cue as a reader from the practices of nineteenth-century readers. As we have already seen, things happen when people read poems (even when they don’t “read” them), and it is not always clear what those things are, nor is it always clear what reading a poem means. But is also not clear that reading a poem is necessarily the proper way to use it. This last point questions a belief that is so basic to critical practice as to seem hardly critical at all: namely, reading is what you do with poems. In fact, the twentieth-century history of lyricization, provocatively theorized by Virginia Jackson, could be an extended elaboration of critics’ longstanding assumption that poems want to be read.11 Lacking a reader, they supply a “speaker,” who “reads” (that is, recites) the poem in a fictive temporality, always now again. Yet the ambiguous “they” of my last sentence demonstrates the ambiguity of lyric reading: as Jackson demonstrates, critical readings supply the speaker; poems do not. Or, as Paul de Man put it more outrageously, “No lyric can be read lyrically nor can the object of a lyrical reading be itself a lyric”—interpretation is always mystified, because the action is identical to its object, so that interpretation creates what it claims to uncover.12 “Reading,” in this critical sense, does not require a historical reader; indeed, critical reading may never require any reader. It does not matter if no one (including, notoriously, the author) has ever found the meaning that my reading

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discovers in a poem; as the condition of their very possibility, critical or lyric readings must supplant historical reading.13 Interpretation is the “fallacious lyrical reading of the unintelligible,” according to de Man, but “true ‘mourning’ ”—by which I think he meant noninterpretation—“is less deluded. The most it can do is to allow for non-comprehension.” Much of what the following chapters describe will fit into these spaces of noncomprehension, where misreadings, missed readings, and everything in between offer evidence of the “historical modes of language power” toward which de Man’s essay finally gestures.14 Reading, then, is difficult to pin down. After all, “reading” is a pliant word form, sliding between verb and noun and shifting from action to subject to object. A short list of meanings includes perusing, studying, scanning, interpreting, analyzing, reciting, a recitation, an interpretation, an evaluation, a sense, or a piece of information. This set indicates that “reading a poem” might involve seeing, hearing, and speaking, as well as a range of relations from objective (as when I “take a reading” from an instrument like a thermometer) to personal (as when I give you “my reading” of an ambiguous situation). But if it is difficult to locate reading conceptually, it is even harder to find it historically. Reading has mostly been an invisible and ephemeral process, and no reader has ever left behind an account of his or her engagement with a book that can be taken as simple evidence, let alone aggregated into the sort of data (sales figures, signature counts, print runs, pricing) familiar to adjacent fields like descriptive bibliography, the historiography of literacy, and book history. Whether taking a wide-angle approach to the social, cultural, and political contexts of books and reading or focusing narrowly on specific case studies that illuminate different mechanisms of the book trade, ways of teaching reading and writing, or modes of consuming texts, these critical disciplines have said little about reading as an intimate or personal practice.15 Indeed, efforts to construct deep frameworks for understanding the conditions of reading have often been presented as antithetical to any consideration of the opinions or responses of individual readers, which always contain irreducibly idiosyncratic elements.16 The “ordinary reader” is the one invisible to history; because so few readers have ever left a mark, those who leave behind traces of their reading are, by definition, no longer representative. Histories of reading always note the problems of evidence with which their projects must grapple. The archive of reading is limited and also open-ended—limited to individual responses that may or may not characterize broader opinion, while simultaneously spread across very different types of records. But perhaps because of these challenges,

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scholars have been inventive and imaginative in uncovering reading’s histories, which, like nineteenth-century poems, are everywhere and nowhere at once.17

On Poetry Being everywhere and nowhere at once is the condition of the open secret, and poetry is the open secret of American literature: so much of it, so popu lar, so unread, so seemingly unreadable. If I continually anticipate— defensively— a complaint about lavishing attention on work so obviously marginal and justly forgotten (marginal and forgotten in ways that cannot be recuperated by “reading against the grain”), I do so in part because open secrets disturb what is better left unsaid or unread.18 For much of the twentieth century, nineteenth-century poetry was not part of American literature. Canonical accounts of American literary history, stretching from the work of George Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks in the 1910s to the “New Americanists” of the 1980s, excised American poetry (versions of Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville excepted), for complex institutional and ideological as well as aesthetic reasons, leaving behind a literary history that considered poetry and prose two separate traditions.19 The clean separation of poetry and prose in the study of American literature may seem normal now but would have been baffling in the nineteenth century, when most authors wrote in every genre; poems appeared in newspapers, novels, and other prosaic formats; and readers were promiscuous in their tastes. In the past twenty years, however, there has been a surge of interest in nineteenth-century American poetry.20 This surge was galvanized by recovery projects in feminist and African American literary scholarship, and it has accelerated since the publication, in the 1990s, of major anthologies edited by John Hollander, Cheryl Walker, Joan Sherman, and Paula Bennett.21 Even if nineteenth-century American poetry is not yet, and possibly never will be, a field (its asymmetry with Victorian British poetry is structural and dates to the nineteenth century itself ), it is no longer possible to read it in terms of lack or impoverishment. Nineteenth-century American poetry is large; it contains multitudes. Having said that, though, I want to make a final point about how contemporary practices of reading poetry sometimes obscure our understanding of its past. The word “poetry” will appear relatively infrequently in the following

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pages. I  am far more interested in nineteenth-century poems than I  am in nineteenth-century poetry, for “nineteenth-century poetry” is an invention of the twentieth century.22 This jejune point (all periods are conceived retrospectively) has a twist, for “poetry” is a term with almost no purchase on the subjects of this book, because in the nineteenth century, poetry is not a genre. Poems have operative functions for nineteenth-century readers and writers, but poetry is a retro-projection. Of course, I do not mean that the nineteenth century had no concept of “poetry” as something distinct from other forms of writing. John Stuart Mill’s essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1859) is only the most famous English-language example of a much longer history of thought on the question “what is poetry?” My point is that “poetry” refers to an abstraction— something both immaterial and impossible to localize in any poem or even any genre. While all genres are abstractions, they have historical value if they exist in reflexive relation to their own myriad specific instances. This is not true for “poetry” in the nineteenth century, because that abstraction has no meaningful affiliation with any nineteenth-century object. Nineteenth-century poems did have clear, legible relations to specific genres, formats, media, modes of circulation, and forms of discourse and address, and nineteenth-century readers knew how to read these relations in ways that twentieth-century readers did not. For example, magazine verse, which has often seemed hopelessly abstract and ahistorical—that is, generic—took on meaning through its location in the magazine. The format and the medium supplied historical force to the poems, but this force cannot be isolated or read out of any poem’s words alone. The Social Lives of Poems will have much to say about poems that are “generic” in this forceful sense and how such forces were generated, understood, and deployed by readers and writers. The bifurcation of poetry and prose therefore has worked in tandem with two related processes: the abstraction of “poetry” into a synonym for pure expressiveness (this is what Mill means when he says that “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” or what Jackson identifies as “lyricization”) and a concomitant elevation of “poetry” into a standard for absolute literariness.23 This tripartite process of abstraction, isolation, and elevation has meant that “poetry” is something few poems, and certainly few early American poems, can easily be.24 As Mill’s essay demonstrates, it is not yet possible to talk about both “poetry” and a poem, except in terms of the latter’s relative failure to realize the former. The idea that “poetry” can mean something both abstract and also specific (the idea that there can be such a thing as nineteenth-century

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poetry, or African American poetry, or American poetry) comes later, at the turn of the twentieth century, and the formation of this latter-day nongenre is an event this book only glimpses at its very end. So, when I say that I will consider poems more often than I consider poetry, I mean two things: I will look carefully at (that is, read) poems that almost certainly fail any test of literariness. But I will also consider poems outside the abstraction of “poetry.” Poetry was not a nineteenth-century genre; instead, in the nineteenth century, there were many poetic genres that operated hierarchically but also in dynamic tension with each other.25 Poems were not all equal, but their relative values and functions could change over time. One of the major through-lines of The Social Lives of Poems will be to track the movements of certain genres— specifically, ballads and their ancillary forms, including minstrel songs, contraband songs, and spirituals— as they moved up and down the hierarchy of genres in nineteenth-century America. The genres on which I focus were never clearly disarticulated from each other, and a term like “ballad” was ascribed to widely varying types of poems. As we shall see, much of the social charge that ballads carried was generated by the ambiguities of their uncertain relations to other kinds of poems above and below them in the hierarchy: ballads could be both priceless and worthless, the vestiges of ancient culture and racial authenticity (which I discuss in Chapters 4 and 6), vehicles of divisive politics (Chapter 2) or national affiliation (Chapter 3), highly aestheticized forms of value and sentiment (Chapter 5), or the cheap medium of scandal and schlock peddled by figures like Jonathan Plummer and Thomas Shaw (whom I take up in Chapter 1). These peddler-poets helped to constitute legitimate poetic culture through their marginality, the worthlessness and scurrility of their ballads defining, through their exclusion, the parameters of literariness and public decorum. If the shifts and transformations of ballads in the nineteenth century form one through-line in this book, the other through-line is the career of John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier is not so much the book’s focus as he is a witness to the histories that it tells.26 Whittier was one of the most popu lar nineteenth-century writers, and his popular readership was central to his authorial persona—that is, he was understood as America’s most well-loved and widely read author, intimately familiar to readers from very different geographic, social, economic, and cultural places. The earlier examples of Barker and Awtell attest to some of the ways readers made Whittier’s popu lar persona contribute to their own investments in his poems. His popularity was a postbellum phenomenon, and it marked a dramatic shift from Whittier’s earlier

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identification with radical abolition. Chapters  2 and  5 will examine this transformation; as we shall see, many readers attributed Whittier’s power as an author (of everything from antislavery invective to regionalist nostalgia) to his facility with ballads. Whittier’s work therefore provides convenient points of access through which to view various phases in the social history of poems during America’s long nineteenth century. A roadmap of the project is as follows: the first three chapters track the circulation of ballads and other, related kinds of poems in three antebellum places: the local culture of New England circa 1800 (Chapter 1), the antislavery movement in Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s (Chapter 2), and the (imagined) borderlands between North and South and black and white during the Civil War (Chapter 3). In each case, the exchanges and encounters between poems and people encode competing politics of affiliation, variously grounded in notions of community, friendship, and race. The second half of the book observes the institutionalization of such politics in the postbellum decades: in the production of a scholarly “popular ballad,” collected into authoritative anthologies and enshrined as the authenticating figure of racial, national, and cultural identity (Chapter 4); in the creation of regionalist nostalgia through aesthetic ballads and other sanctioned poetic forms (Chapter 5); and in the consolidation of racial difference through the performances of traveling choirs such as the Fisk Singers and other, less legitimate groups from the 1870s to the 1890s (Chapter 6). Every chapter teases out the connections between poems as material objects (written on sheets, printed in broadsides and books, or sung over the air) and poems as literary texts. Every chapter negotiates the relations between poems and songs and readers and audiences, in which readers, amateur poets, and published authors share equal footing. And every chapter plays through an interlinked set of tensions—between legitimate and illegitimate, authentic and fake, authorized and illicit, good and bad, black and white, local and national, material and abstract—that the circulation of poems made manifest to the social life of nineteenth-century America.

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Chapter 1

Balladmongering and Social Life

Peddling Ballads When John Greenleaf Whittier was a boy, the routine on his family’s isolated farm was periodically interrupted and enlivened by the appearance of “Yankee gypsies,” a motley parade of beggars, peddlers, vagrants, and wanderers, who broke the monotony of farm life by stopping over to beg, preach, sell their wares, sing, or sleep in the barn. One of these gypsies, “a ‘pawky auld carle’ of a wandering Scotchman,” introduced Whittier to the songs of Burns, which would become his most important literary model: “after eating his bread and cheese and drinking his mug of cider he gave us Bonny Doon, Highland Mary, and Auld Lang Syne. He had a rich, full voice, and entered heartily into the spirit of his lyrics.” But Whittier reserved his warmest memories for a different character: Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler and poet, physician and parson,— a Yankee troubadour,—first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality. He brought with him pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread for my mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for my father; and verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts, for the delectation of the younger branches of the family. No lovesick youth could drown himself, no deserted maiden bewail the moon, no rogue mount the gallows, without fitting memorial in Plummer’s verses. Earthquakes, fires, fevers, and shipwrecks he regarded

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as personal favors from Providence, furnishing the raw material of song and ballad. Welcome to us in our country seclusion as Autolycus to the clown in Winter’s Tale, we listened with infinite satisfaction to his readings of his own verses, or to his ready improvisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by his auditors. When once fairly over the difficulties at the outset of a new subject, his rhymes flowed freely, “as if he had eaten ballads and all men’s ears grew to his tunes.”1 Whittier’s essay, despite its sheen of ironic nostalgia, portrays a rural culture defined by vagrancy, homelessness, and decentralization, a depiction of New England at odds with the colonial mystique that emerged during the postbellum years, when Whittier’s best-selling poem Snow-Bound (1866) strongly impressed a domestic ideal of early New England rusticity upon the public imagination.2 In Snow-Bound, Whittier characterized his youth as a world of songs and lore, told and retold around the fireside by an intimate domestic circle of family and friends. In “Yankee Gypsies,” however, traditions of song and poetry come from outside the home and hearth, in the person of the traveling peddler, a figure that combines cultural and economic exchanges in complex ways. Before being perceived as literature, Plummer’s “verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts,” are objects on sale, just like the “pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread . . . jack-knives, razors, and soap” that also come out of his pack, and the poems’ performance as goods for purchase helps incorporate the Whittiers into an economic system of exchange. Yet Whittier’s description of the balladmonger occludes the relationship between the economic and the poetic: although Whittier may have meant the “Yankee gypsy” to seem quaint to his readers, itinerant peddlers like Plummer were actually agents of modernization in rural New England. According to William J. Gilmore, peddlers were part of an “informal” circulation system that helped bring both print reading and market economies to all but the most remote areas of New England. Peddlers not only interrupted the “country seclusion” of rural farms but also purveyed an array of matter uncommon to life there, and the almanacs, broadsides, and chapbooks that constituted the majority of a peddler’s print stock provided rural readers with “the key bridge between traditional intensive reading fare and novels, travel accounts, and other newer forms of reading matter.”3 The vagrant peddler in Whittier’s essay is pure “outside”: coming from somewhere else, he destabilizes the

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insularity of the home, bringing the world in and pulling the family out. Yet though he sells “the raw material” of news, scandal, and gossip, he seems an irruption from antiquity, encircled with “the very nimbus of immortality.” His liminal position secures this power, and its medium is the ballad. Residing in and out of literature, and in and out of time, the balladmonger and his wares condense an image of decentralized culture and the grassroots dissemination of news and knowledge. If broadside poems like those sold by Jonathan Plummer helped to pull the rural world into the orbit of a more modern and urban realm, then it is all the more striking that Whittier identifies the peddler with exotic and older modes of tradition— gypsy, troubadour, minstrel—rather than with the contemporary “Yankee peddler,” which by the 1840s typified (in the figure of “Sam Slick,” for example) the New Englander as an amoral sharper.4 For Whittier, Plummer’s verses and the exchange value they accrue emblematize a history he locates in “the ballad”: “His productions answered, as nearly as I can remember, to Shakespeare’s description of a proper ballad,—‘doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant theme sung lamentably.’ ”5 “The ballad” figures Whittier’s conflicted representation of a poet whose wares seem not to be “poetry” in any secure sense. Plummer, after all, is a source for both printed objects and songs sung spontaneously: in the essay, the economic exchange of broadsides is complemented by Plummer’s “ready improvisation” on a suggested topic, which succeeds so wonderfully that Whittier imagines him creating the very possibility of oral culture itself. Blending these modes of circulation creates a poet with an eccentric relation to space and time. Plummer is “a Yankee troubadour” and the “first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac,” akin to Autolycus, the archetype of early modern balladry. Each of these terms—troubadour, minstrel, and balladeer—places Plummer in an imagined poetic culture of unspecified antiquity. But his poems report current events— drownings, epidemics, fires, executions, and so on— and his creative performances supplement the objects (including the broadside poems) that are, literally, his stock-in-trade. “Yankee Gypsies” vacillates between young Whittier’s enchantment with the sale of printed broadsides and his enthusiasm for Plummer’s minstrel-like performances of ballads. The essay therefore offers an outlook—however obscured and ambivalent—upon a rural, local culture of poetry constituted by a system of hybrid exchanges (economic and bardic, print mediated and oral, ephemeral and ancient); such a system necessarily lies outside the institutionally sanctioned, author-centered, national tradition that Whittier and his

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fellow Fireside Poets were later imagined to have inaugurated. The circulation of poems in this other poetic culture was a social process facilitated by exchanges of cheap print, old tunes, and new songs and made up of genres like execution sermons, shipwreck poems, disaster laments, satirical ballads, and mournful elegies. Whittier’s description gives further insight into the protocols of this world: he cherished the memory of Plummer selling and singing his songs to the gathered family but made no mention of anyone privately reading these poems alone in their room. And despite the “nimbus of immortality” encircled around Plummer’s brow in Whittier’s young eyes, Plummer’s poems seem to have no intrinsic value as “literature”—their meaning and value lay in their social transmission, the way they retold scandals or disasters to a group gathered to hear them sung. Aesthetic distinction, formal or linguistic complexity, and the celebration of universal or national ideals are not criteria of merit because consuming (“reading” seems not the right word) a peddler’s poems offered other kinds of pleasure. Sarah Emery, who grew up in nearby Newburyport around the same time, recalled that in her girlhood, “an old lame peddler named Urin . . . came round five or six times a year.” Old Urin was quite a character. He would stump in, usually near dusk, with a bag and basket, and sinking into the nearest chair, declare himself “e’en a’most dead, he was so lame!” Then, without stopping to take breath, he would reel off, “Tree fell on me when I was a boy, killed my brother and me jest like him, here’s books, pins, needles, black sewing silk all colors, tapes varses, almanacks and sarmons, thread, fine thread for cambric ruffles, here’s varses on the pirate that was hung on Boston Common, solemn varses with a border of coffins atop, and Noble’s sarmon preached at this wife’s funeral, the’lection sarmon when the guv’ner took the chair, Jack the Piper, Whittington’s Cat, Pilgrim’s Progress, Bank of Faith, The History of the Devil, and a great many other religious books.” We always kept the old man over night besides purchasing his wares. As I had an eager avidity for books, the peddler’s advent was hailed with delight.6 Emery’s marked inflection of “varses” and “sarmons” places these materials in a pointed relation to literariness, with the accented words clearly intended to contrast the peddler’s matter with a legitimate standard against which

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it fell short. Yet if the proximate distinction between “varses” and “verses” marks the first as a debased version of the second, the proximity also blurs this same distinction, collapsing the space between legitimate and illegitimate forms just as the cheap broadsides hawked by the lame peddler work their way into the middle-class parlor. The conflicted irony of these accounts indicates the complexity of the poetic culture in early nineteenth-century New England, a time and place where varses and verses could mingle without strongly enforced rules of genre or taste. The careers of “Old Urin” and Plummer also show how poems, when peddled by a local character, could deploy a wide range of meanings to elicit a wide range of responses. A poem’s circulation and the medium (or media) by which it traveled and was consumed shaped its value in important ways. Such meanings and values begin with the poems’ sources, the itinerant peddlers who “circulated the widest variety of printed matter available in America, a selection broader than all but the most daring bookstores sold.”7 The peddler’s “matter,” and the way he sold it, also shaped people’s experiences of media like print. Histories of the book in North America have detailed how “print” was itself mediated in early American culture. Michael Warner has argued that the “New England printing trade and its cultural settings were anything but monolithic” but were instead a decentralized and heterogeneous set of structures and relations, a point also made by book historians like Gilmore, David D. Hall, and Meredith L. McGill.8 These structures and relations could underwrite the institutional authority of the ministry and the state, or the cultural authority of writers like Alexander Pope and Isaac Watts, while also creating a “counterpublic print discourse in broadsides and cheap pamphlets” that depended “on an invisible worthlessness for its very existence. Not only did it have to be cheap in order to be hawked in the countryside, but in order to be counterpublic . . . it had to be ‘foolish,’ that is, without status.”9 If Pope or Watts stand atop a hierarchy of literary power, Plummer’s broadsides— cheap, lurid, hawked in the street and the countryside—would seem to lie at the bottom. But Emery and Whittier show that these poems clearly had value that was neither literary nor economic. Their accounts also show that the broadsides hawked by peddlers like Urin and Plummer helped to establish the cultural meanings of poems among readers just as much as the works of Pope, Watts, Milton, or Byron. Worthington Chauncey Ford and Richardson Wright long ago noted that broadside poems, which were cheap to print, easy to distribute, and reliably popular, helped to sustain many printers by offering the prospect of steady sales with relatively

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small financial and legal risk.10 At the same time, broadside peddlers and their poems gave readers a relation to literature that was ephemeral, worldly, heterodox, and often illicit (a Newburyport writer alleged that Plummer also sold pornography, which may have been broadly true of itinerant peddling as a trade).11 These peddlers reached farm boys like Whittier and urbane readers like Emery, incorporating them into a shared poetic culture characterized by a heady delight in the cheap, the sensational, the timely, and the lurid. While “varses” and “sarmons” may have been marked as subliterary, their travels cut across distinctions in readers’ class, gender, and location, much more readily than the “verses” and “sermons” with which they were intimately connected. Broadsides and broadside peddlers therefore illustrate some of the ways in which “poetry” in the nineteenth century was not a single, coherent category with stable social meanings but was instead a hodgepodge of genres, formats, and media that engaged readers in many different ways. Whittier and Emery may have treated the peddlers’ “varses” with irony, but they also greeted their appearance with delight. This ambivalence can stand for a larger cultural relation toward poems in early American culture, and it is embodied in the figure of the balladmonger, whose vagrant relation to social and generic hierarchies enabled him (and his poems) to remain in and out of literature, literary history, and literariness. Balladmongers and peddlers are interesting, I will argue in this chapter, not merely because they now seem exotic to a literary history defined by major authors and prose genres. Their exoticness was historical, and the challenges they posed to literature and literariness helped to define those concepts in a period of transition. I present two case studies: Jonathan Plummer, who lived and wrote in eastern Massachusetts from the 1790s to the 1810s, and Thomas Shaw, a poet from southern Maine who was active from the 1770s to the 1830s. Plummer published more than fifty texts, including a long autobiography. Shaw, on the other hand, printed fewer than a dozen poems, but these represent only a tiny fraction of his oeuvre— around two thousand poems— almost all of which resides in manuscript books held at the Maine Historical Society. Both authors sold their poems on itinerant peddling circuits, although only Plummer depended on peddling for his livelihood, and their poetic itineraries took them through a variety of settings and institutions in the landscape of turnof-the-century New England. It is difficult to judge how unusual or how common these poets were. Certainly, there were other author-peddlers from the early 1800s, like Mason Locke

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Weems, an agent for the Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey who wrote many heroic biographies and invented the fable about George Washington and the cherry tree.12 In various archives, I have found similar poets from later in the century, such as A. W. Harmon (1812–1901), who, like Plummer and Shaw, published poems about murders, accidents, and Indian wars, along with songs about his own miraculous conversion, and George Gordon Byron DeWolfe (1835–73), the self-titled “Steam Machine Poet” of Nashua, New Hampshire, who wrote poems on demand (often claiming speed-writing records) and distributed them in railway depots.13 Poets like Robert Dinsmoor (1757–1836), the “Rustic Bard” of New Hampshire, and George Moses Horton (1797–1883), the “Colored Bard of North Carolina,” were endowed with a similar aura of unlettered prolixity, especially because of their eccentric relations to print-based norms of literariness.14 And, of course, many poets wrote prolifically despite rarely (or never) seeing their work in print (Emily Dickinson is only the most famous of these and not at all atypical in her scribal practices).15 Part of what makes Plummer and Shaw exceptional is simply the size of the archives they left behind: the large number of poems they wrote and the lengthy memoirs they recorded. Peddler-poets may be entirely unexceptional features of the nineteenth-century literary field—but this would make them all the more compelling, given the received history of American poetry, which usually begins with internationally celebrated authors like William Cullen Bryant or Lydia Sigourney. The balladmongers’ ballads, in contrast, are interesting because of the challenges they pose to literary history and literary criticism. Although Shaw and Plummer occasionally pop up in critical accounts of early American poetry, their work has always been dismissed as self-evidently worthless. So while scholars are once again taking seriously the work of Bryant, Sigourney, Longfellow, and other popular nineteenth-century poets, poets like Plummer or Shaw belong only to the archive, not the canon. In this way, the twenty-first century agrees with the nineteenth; as my readings will show, the publicness of their performances as poets caused conflict in their own time. That is, while they wrote poems and were sometimes well liked, neither were “really” poets, even to their contemporaries. This ambivalence throws into relief the ways in which poetic genres, authorship, and literariness emerge from, and fold back into, broader debates about public order and social cohesion; part of the animus against balladmongers came from the threat they were believed to pose to all of these. Thus, the cases of Shaw and Plummer demonstrate how local culture in the early national period was characterized by

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multifaceted engagements with poems, and their histories present an opportunity to interrogate early nineteenth-century “poetry” as a set of texts, objects, practices, and institutions.

The Yankee Troubadour Jonathan Plummer was born in 1761 in Newbury, Massachusetts, a town located about thirty-five miles north of Boston, near the mouth of the Merrimack River. He was the son of a cordwainer and, in his early childhood, displayed an unusual aptitude for reading and memorization. He briefly served in a militia during the Revolutionary War, took up peddling in the 1780s, and participated in several literary circles, although always as an interloper. In the 1790s, he began composing poems to sell among his other wares, and stories of his bizarre behavior, and possible mental illness or disability, began circulating along with his poems, pins, and tape. These stories were aided by two developments in Plummer’s life: his quest for patronage from the wealthy and eccentric merchant “Lord” Timothy Dexter and a religious awakening that prompted him to street preaching and millennial prophecy (like his contemporary Lorenzo Dow, he was also known for interrupting church ser vices). After Dexter’s death in 1806, Plummer lived entirely on sales of his poems and other goods and actually accumulated a respectable estate. He was tolerated by town authorities and became a figure of fun, especially for his oftenproclaimed (and always frustrated) desire to find a wife. He wrote, printed, and peddled his work continuously in and around Newburyport until his death in 1819.16 During his lifetime, Newburyport (which became a separate town three years after his birth) was an important trading and shipping post on the northern Atlantic seaboard, and Plummer’s career roughly fits the contour of the area’s economic rise and fall. The capture of Louisbourg in French Canada by New England forces in 1745 had ignited an upsurge of millennial enthusiasm throughout the region while also relieving coastal trade from the depredations of French privateers. The repeated forays of George Whitefield in and across the region during the second half of the eighteenth century helped to maintain a punctuated cycle of evangelical revivalism and economic speculation. By the time of Whitefield’s death—in Newburyport—in 1770, the town had become a regional center of shipbuilding and competed with Salem as the second-largest depot on the New England coast. Amid the imperial crisis and

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the onset of war, and particularly during the blockade of Boston, Newburyport was a base for piracy against British vessels, and a number of people in the town accumulated large fortunes from privateering. While many of these fortunes collapsed in the postwar economic depression, the revival of trade during the Federalist period brought wealth flowing back in, illustrated most spectacularly by the career of Plummer’s patron Dexter. Newburyport engaged primarily in the West Indies trade (one of the largest American rum distilleries was in town), but local commercial firms also maintained agents in England, Spain, Cape Verde, Brazil, Surinam, and Peru, situating the town in a circum-Atlantic constellation. Trade was flourishing enough in the 1790s that William Lloyd Garrison’s father, who had come to New Brunswick as an indentured servant, chose to settle there after working off his indentures. He thought Newburyport had better prospects than Boston; he was wrong. The town’s prosperity declined precipitously with the embargo of 1807, and a major fire in 1811 further checked commercial expansion. Economic growth would henceforth be seated further up the Merrimack, at the new mill towns of Lowell and Lawrence.17 Plummer’s work was imbued with the spirit of speculation and enthusiasm that characterized the era and the region, and despite his celebrated strangeness, his career aligns with the situation of the town. His poems generally focused on two kinds of topics, trade-related disasters (shipwrecks, fires, epidemics) and local scandals, usually involving the ministry. His texts were dotted with news from abroad gleaned from the town’s privileged position as an entrepôt of Atlantic trade, and they inclined toward millennial interpretations of events. The broadsides are difficult to categorize generically, because they often combined a prose account (always assuredly “factual”) with a “sermon” on the topic and one or two poems inspired by the same, tucked into the upper left or lower right corners of the sheet. Most included woodcuts at the header— standard black coffins for the most part but sometimes more elaborate designs. As in the case of “The Last Words and Dying Confession of Samuel Frost” (1793), the sheet could strongly resemble a contemporary newspaper, and many seem intended to function in just that way, so referring to Plummer’s works as “poetry” is inexact.18 Beginning in the 1790s, Plummer hawked his broadsides and other goods and recited his poems at the base of Market Street, where most of the town’s printers and booksellers clustered. His recitations often garnered a crowd; a contemporary described him “having a voice strong, flexible, and euphonious,” although “spoiled by the affectation of being wonderfully pathetic.”19 He

Figure 1. Jonathan Plummer, “Last Words and Dying Confession of Samuel Frost” (Newbury, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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seems to have had working relationships with the printers in the neighborhood, because he was regularly able to get his work published. His bibliography totals more than fifty attributed items, at a time when booksellers’ catalogs featured few local authors and most broadsides were anonymous. Thus, his “authorship,” while eccentric to norms of literariness, was also exceptionally successful. His work usually appeared on the heels of some catastrophe, most accounts suggest it was popular, and this popularity tracked closely with the poems’ timeliness. “Plummer was wise enough to give only that which the occasion called forth, and never stereotyped or seldom published a second edition. He knew the signs of the times, and the tastes and habits of the public.”20 But Plummer sold these timely texts in tandem with almanacs, captivity narratives and other pamphlets, steady-sellers such as “A Dialogue Between a Blind-Man and Death” and Robert Russel’s Seven Sermons, popular verses like “Father Abbey’s Will,” and also remainders of his own unsold works.21 This stock of new and old matter made a distinctive blend of the historical and the contemporary. Plummer’s broadsides could be purchased individually for 4½ pence or in bundles at “2s. and 8d. per Dozen,” so it is possible that other peddlers sold his poems in secondary markets.22 Whittier’s reminiscences show that Plummer traveled into the surrounding countryside to sell his goods (the Whittier farm was about 10 miles from Plummer’s base of operations), and Plummer claimed to have marketed his work in Boston and Salem as well. Several of his poems were reprinted in newspapers in Pittsfield, Newport, and Providence, each more than 100 miles from Newburyport. Although he contributed to almanacs and newspapers, the materiality of the broadside as the saleable item is crucial to the business of Plummer’s work. Broadsides were usually published as proclamations to be read aloud and posted or passed along to the next set of eyes, ears, and hands for further exchange through singing, recitation, and silent reading. This held true for all kinds of genres, from government announcements to ballads and elegies.23 Observing from Salem, the minister William Bentley noted during a yellow fever epidemic that “Plummer, a droll fool, has published an elegy upon the sufferings at Newbury Port . . . & hawkes them with success.”24 A broadside was cheap and easy to carry around, making it an ideal format for itinerant preachers, peddlers, and poets (all professions with which Plummer identified). Broadsides were therefore particularly adept at cultivating scandal, rumor, news, and prophecy, and the format drew from a long history of such associations: as one scholar of seventeenth-century New England puts it, a “discourse of sensationalism and immediacy [was attached] to the broadside format,” which

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derived from the “sensational stories of monstrous births, natural devastations, and unnatural deaths, as well as . . . the latest political and social developments” that were its stock-in-trade.25 In addition, because Plummer’s broadsides were not identified with specific printers (the colophon most often read “printed for the author”), they could incorporate personal material about prominent community members without much risk of legal reprisal. Plummer loved to name names and reflect on the peccadillos of the pious: one title was “Hints to Elder Pottle,” prompted by rumors that “Elder Pottle has for a short time lately lived rather too much after the flesh”; another was “Parson Pidgin, or Holy Kissing. . . . Occasioned by a report, that Parson Pidgin had kissed a young woman.”26 A third text, “Elegy On the death of the Rev. Mr. John Murray,” prompted Bentley to record angrily: Was circulated here in the form of Ballads, &c. an Elegy & character of Murray of Newbury Port,—purporting to have been written by a Jonathan Plummer, in which by dogril verses & the curious character, the Hero of the piece is held up to contempt, & a strange curiosity excited to investigate all the exceptionable parts of every exceptionable character. It is not known here how many hands were concerned in it.27 While it is difficult to verify Bentley’s suspicion that Plummer had financial backers sponsoring his “characters” of the ministry, his response does indicate how Plummer’s marginal position gave his work a subversive edge.28 Much like the libels that Robert Darnton has excavated from the ancien régime, Plummer’s “dogril verses” excited “strange curiosity” into the characters of prominent men by virtue of their markedly subliterate form, “Ballads, &c.,” which in Bentley’s reference seems to mark both a genre and a format.29 This subliterariness feeds the text’s capacity to move around with a mysterious agency (it “was circulated” by unknown hands), spreading contempt and “strange curiosity” “to investigate all the exceptionable parts of every exceptionable character” by way of the gossip, slander, lies, news, and facts the sheet retells. Ironically, the vagrant retelling of gossip and slander sometimes ensnared Plummer, too: “A lie having got into circulation, concerning Jonathan Plummer, the pedlar, and poet, much like the following one, viz. ‘He’s an Hermaphrodite,’ this may certify, that I being a physician, have inspect [sic] the said Plummer, and found him to be wholly and properly a man”; of course, he attempted to contain this lie with yet another wayward broadside.30 Plummer’s

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peculiar relation to his texts and his readership comes from his being outside the standard of legitimate authorship or literariness. Neither printers nor booksellers nor authors served as the means of dissemination for poems like these; only “dogril verses” could move this way, and only a vagrant balladmonger could so move them. Peddling and hawking— defined by itinerancy, salesmanship, the materiality of printing, and charges of scandal or the illicit—were important structuring principles for all Plummer’s published work. He was always on the move (he characterized himself as “a great traveler, and rarely to be found two days together, in one house”), meeting new people and exchanging tales, songs, sermons, and news with them.31 The sociability of peddling is at least as important as its material or economic features for understanding the cultural import of Plummer’s “Ballads, &c.” According to his autobiography, Plummer’s poetic ambitions did not originate from peddling, nor was peddling the only outlet for his poems. Despite the low status of his occupations (which included “acting the pedagouger,” “repeating select passages from authors, selling holibut, sawing wood, selling books, ballads, and fruit in the streets, serving as a porter and post-boy, filling beds with straw, and wheeling them to the owners thereof, [and] collecting rags”), and despite having no formal education, Plummer managed to read extensively among authors like “Shakespear, Fielding, Juvenal, Dryden, Swift, Smallet, Stern, De Corvantes,” as well as the poems of Pope and Gay and the “tuneful works” of Allan Ramsey, which so “ravished my soul with such transporting joys” that “[I] soon attempted to write in poetry myself, and not without success.”32 As he gives it, he was grounded in the best authors of civility and politeness, a far cry from the rudeness of his own later work, and the primary value of this reading was the opportunity that it offered for sociable encounters, since he gained access to these authors through the private libraries of men and women of learning in the area. Reading was an occasion for conversation, and Plummer’s earliest poems fit a milieu of polite exchange among intimate acquaintances. The experience of poetry as a mode of socialization was common for turnof-the-century Newburyport readers, who had access to the most current English and European Romantic poets, as well as revered classics like the works of Milton, Watts, Thomson, Cowper, and Pope. Newburyport’s Social Library, founded in 1794, provided patrons an “easy method to obtain” “useful valuable works” like Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808), a poem that Margaret Searle, a young resident of the town, reread in 1809 “with renewed delight—I began it to Grandmother but it interested her so much

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she would not let me go on with it, she did not she said see the advantage of having one’s feelings so worked up for nothing. . . . I think this is a flower in Walter Scotts cap.”33 Searle read contemporary poems like Southey’s “After Blenheim” (1796), Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), among many others, usually in a setting characterized by group reading and the exchange of books among friends.34 Her reading history supports David S. Shields’s account of the improving effects granted to certain kinds of poems in a culture of civility and refinement.35 In her voluminous letters and diaries, Searle never mentions Plummer, although the two lived close by, and as a single woman, she was an example of the “sisters of the skies” over whom Plummer often rhapsodized in print. For women like Searle, he composed poems such as the Ovidian satire on “L.L.—transformed to a two quart bottle” and thematic allegories like “SelfConceit,” which he recited for female acquaintances or exchanged through letters.36 This grounding in polite sociability is the unexpected genesis of Plummer’s mendicant, considerably less polite balladry. With some (apparently) successful poems under his belt, in the early 1790s, he began printing poems for sale. These addressed topics of national and international concern, such as a poem to George Washington printed in a local almanac; a broadside on the Haitian Revolution that included an extended narrative of the rebellion and a long poem addressed to white refugees, some of whom had resettled in Newburyport; and a broadside poem deploring the execution of Louis XVI, which he wrote “at the Request of many true Republicans” in an archly Federalist town that had tolled church bells to mourn the occasion.37 Plummer quickly gained a sense of his market: “I had found that serious writings commonly went off faster than others. I had published merry works of my own, and found them rather unsaleable. I had hypocritically composed elegy’s, &c. and sold them very fast.”38 Unlike the poems written for limited circulation among the educated ladies and men he knew, these broadsides offered sensational and melodramatic accounts of ongoing or recent events and were related much more closely to newspapers and pamphlets than to classical or neoclassical literary models like the poems of Pope, Dryden, or Ramsay (as we have seen, many even looked like newspapers). But if Plummer’s choices of topic and style reflected his desire to write poems saleable in the local market, this market orientation only partly explains his subsequent career. In the mid-1790s, Plummer began addressing poems to Timothy Dexter, an eccentric leather-dresser who had made a fortune in trade and had become, by the 1790s, one of the town’s most notorious citizens. In

Figure 2. Jonathan Plummer, “The Tragedy of Louis Capet” (Newburyport, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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1793, Plummer published a note of congratulations to Dexter on his fortune, and Dexter rewarded Plummer with a new suit consisting of “a long, black, frock coat, with stars on the collar, and also at the front corners; this livery also was fringed, where fringes could be put; a black under dress, shoes and large buckles, with a large cocked hat, and a gold-headed cane.”39 Plummer hereafter named himself “Poet Laureate” to “Lord Dexter,” declaring, “I am, my Lord, in frost or summer, / Your Poet Laureat, Jon’than Plummer.”40 Despite the fact that he purveyed news and other goods, this claim to being a poet laureate in the equipage of Lord Dexter gave Plummer a much more antiquated role in the community, one that enabled a richly ironic contrast between the pseudo-aristocratic styling of his vocation and the genres of his verses.41 His addresses to Dexter, most of which were published in newspapers, accordingly called upon a pastoral register similar to that of his coterie poems and quite different from the sensationalized, reportorial language of his broadsides (although this poem, too, details the news of Dexter’s recent return to town). Your lordship’s welcome back again— Fair nymphs, with sighs, have mourn’d your staying So long from them and me your swain, And wonder’d at such long delaying: But now you bless again our eyes; Our melting sorrow droops and dies.42 During the period of this “laureateship,” Plummer began to have prophetic dreams in which a voice announced to him, in verse, his fortune and the fates of those around him. These dreams prompted a religious conversion, and his poems from this point forward adopted the language of providential utterance, using disasters and catastrophes—“terrible accidents, drownings, suicides, and hangings,” in the words of one contemporary— as evidence of the wondrous interventions of God into human affairs and as a pretext to exhort audiences to repent while they still had time.43 Plummer’s “Elegy on the death of His Excellency Sir Timothy Dexter” combined several of the genres in which Plummer’s broadsides circulated. The elegy begins venally enough, with Plummer lamenting Dexter’s death as a loss of patronage: “Of this kind patron, I’m bereft, / He’s all his cash, and poet left.”44 Yet rather than aligning himself with Dexter’s fame, wealth, or position or casting his elegy as the

JONATHAN PLUMMER, POET LAUREAT TO LORD DEXTER.

Figure 3. Jonathan Plummer, poet laureate to Lord Dexter. Illustration from Samuel L. Knapp, Life of Lord Timothy Dexter (Newburyport: John G. Tilton, 1852).

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security for Dexter’s future renown, Plummer takes Dexter’s death as an occasion to call all unrepentant sinners to account: O let us solemn warning take, And all our sins at once forsake, Rememb’ring that’twill soon be said, Of all of us, that we are dead! Rememb’ring that quite soon we must, Be mouldering into loathsome dust! Ah! on this earthly, weeping shore, My patron, Dexter, lives no more!45 The poem eschews the conventional maneuvers of neoclassical elegy and instead adopts the hortatory tone of millennial religion. The “Sketch of the character of Lord Dexter” clarifies Plummer’s position: “by the kindness of God [Dexter] was generally a very triumphant conquerer; but in regard to the main business that he was sent into the world to transact I cannot positively say how it was with my deceased friend. I must confess that though I have hopes of him through the kindness of God, I am not without fears.”46 Fealty to his Lordship was no longer enough to blind Plummer to the more pressing needs of his calling: This I do know courteous reader, that you & I will shortly follow the generous Dexter through the dark valley of the shadow of death, and appear before the judgment seat of Christ, at the judgment day, to be judged according to the deeds done in the body, whether they have been good, or whether they have been evil. . . . It may therefore be proper for us, while we indulge ourselves in proper reflections concerning the departed Dexter, to be very careful to consider our own ways.47 Not surprisingly, Plummer identified himself on this sheet as “a travelling preacher, & poet lauret to his Lordship,” and itinerancy thereafter defined his stance toward the public. In later broadsides, he titled himself, among other things, “a traveling Preacher, Physician, Poet and Trader,” “an independent traveling preacher,” “a lay Bishop extraordinary; and a traveling preacher, Physician, Poet, and Trader,” and “a latter-day Prophet, Lay-Bishop, traveling

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Preacher, Physician, Poet and Trader.”48 Yet while Plummer’s poems trafficked in cosmic revelations and global exhortations to repent, his subjects stayed local and timely, so that these later broadsides remained generically linked to news, scandal, and rumor, even while they also adopted the styles and modes of sermons, exegesis, and disputation. For instance, “Dreadful Fire at Portsmouth!” (1814) concerned many things, including a great, and dreadful fire at Portsmouth (N. H.) that began to consume houses on the evening of the 22d of December, 1813. About 180 buildings, it is thought were burned. On the deaths of about 200 American and British soldiers, marines and sailors, and about 535 Creek Indians, killed lately in various battles. On the deaths of Captain Manour, and another man drowned in the Merrimack, and of Capt. John Brockway of Newburyport, Capt. Lambert and one Woodbury of Salem, Peter Queening, probably of Gloucester, one Nye of Hallowel, and 11 others belonging probably to Fish-island, in New York, drowned in or near the Atlantic Ocean. On the deaths of about 20 people who have died lately of the spotted fever in Vermont, and Newhampshire: on the death of one Norris, one Ring, and a young woman named Hovey of Hallowell, who lately perished in, or near the Atlantic: and on the deaths of one Smiley, who it is said cut his throat at Newington (N. H.) and one Phippes and a woman named Nichols, who it is supposed have killed themselves at Salem.49 The broadside collated local news items (the fire at Portsmouth), more personal local tragedies (the various suicides and deaths at sea), and also international dispatches from the ongoing war with Britain, including a lurid description of the massacre at Fort Mims, Alabama, which had taken place the year before. These tragedies and disasters all revealed divine providence: Almighty Father! Potent God! How awful is thy chast’ning rod; When wicked men are lifted high, And swords are drawn, and bullets fly, And sins provoke thy potent hand, To put destruction in a land,

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And make proud sinners hopes expire, By shewing of thy dreadful ire!50 The sermonic aspects of the poem and the narrative worked in tandem with their sensational features—this broadside also resembles a tabloid with a banner headline—to produce the idiom of latter-day prophecy that imbues the sheet as a whole. However, it is not the case that the lurid details satisfied one set of readerly desires, while the sermon and its providential interpretations satisfied another, higher set of desires; nor did the lurid details attract readers simply so that the providential interpretation could then moralize them. Instead, the work of divination—revealing the providential motive behind such a random assemblage of events— drove the dissemination and market orientation of the sheet just as much as did the shocking details and gruesome descriptions. As Plummer explains, Being sent, courteous reader, through the surprizing grace of the loveliest of the lovely to preach and write concerning the gladsome tidings of salvation, I have found a great plenty of business, and although I have yet preached but little, I have found many of my works in print, very saleable indeed, insomuch that there seems to be much room to hope that my fickle efforts in that way have served by the blessing of king Jesus, to edify, comfort, and instruct many of the sons of men, and the daughters of women.51 The outlandish ambition of this self-description only partially overshadows the interesting theory of the market that it lays out: when Plummer states, “I have found a great plenty of business,” he implies both that he has preached and written often “concerning the gladsome tidings of salvation” and also that he has discovered numerous occasions for preaching and writing (i.e., many scandals, atrocities, and tragedies to print for a desiring public). The work of sermonizing, in other words, becomes the basis for collating various items about drownings, hangings, and the like. Tragedies and atrocities are not only instances of divine providence; rather, providential interpretation is also the pretext for spreading news about death, disease, and disorder. Thus, the genres of sermon and scandal work together to create Plummer’s “business” in the broadsides that he hawks and preaches. With vagrancy its modus operandi, such poems dwelt beneath the domain of legitimate literature, and therefore, like slander or gossip, they could

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propagate themselves far beyond the control of truth, authority, or legitimate culture. It is worth remembering that itinerancy was one of the most controversial aspects of the eighteenth-century evangelical awakening, and in many eighteenth-century polemics on religion, itinerant preachers were often scathingly contrasted with the settled pastorate. Adopting a title like “an independent traveling preacher” therefore carried distinct implications for contemporary norms of public order. Similarly, the vagrancy of the peddler’s work, I think, accounts for the ambivalence and hostility directed against it, which surfaces most pointedly in the frequent references made about his “ballads.” Such references are surprising, since he never wrote any. All the descriptions that exist of Plummer speak of him as though he wrote, sang, and sold ballads, even though he never titled any of his texts as a “ballad” (so far as I have discovered), and though none of his poems resemble ballads in any formal sense. Samuel L. Knapp, a writer and lawyer in Newburyport in the first half of the nineteenth century, concluded that Plummer “grew up among fishermen, clam diggers, and lobster catchers, yet his works were read by thousands. . . . The ballad maker and death’s head vender grew rich on the sale of his trash.”52 The ballad here marks a social class rather than a genre or form: designating Plummer a “ballad maker” signaled his ability to reach thousands of readers, made a normative distinction about the worthlessness of his poems and those who read them, and tied him and his work to a form of production only indirectly under the control of legitimating forces. Worthier writers, Knapp suggests, went ignored, while ballad makers grew rich selling their trash to the unwashed. Another memorial to Plummer, written by Redford Webster (brother of the novelist Hannah Foster), made a similar case: Now there was a man named Plummer, and he was numbered among the bards of Essex. . . . And he traveled from place to place, holding converse with the wayfaring man and stranger, gathering accounts of strange accidents that befell them by flood and fire; likewise of all great or singular men and women. . . . And, like the minstrels of old, he sat in the chimney corner and recited to an admiring audience the adventures he had heard or witnessed; and he wove them into ballads that circulated with great rapidity. And when he walked forth, the farmers rested upon their hoe-handles to listen to his marvelous tales, or to his astonishing fluency of song; and when he ended, loaded his bags and pockets with the ripe product of their fields; as Homer of old was rewarded by the

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Cossite dames, after singing his Iliad to their listening children, with a trencher of figs and a cup of mulled wine.53 This memorial placed Plummer even more firmly in an archaic register, as one “numbered among the bards,” “like the minstrels of old,” or “as Homer of old,” despite the fact that Plummer “visited the University . . . frequented the markets and fairs, attended camp-meetings and commencements, and had sojourned in every place of public resort.”54 As a figure of antiquity, moving among the spaces of contemporary life in America, Plummer seemed, for this author, to endanger national culture. The vagrant represented not only the irruption of the antique into the modern; his itinerancy also threatened to inculcate popular disregard for legitimate public culture. Because “the song and the ballad will be remembered while there are natural feelings, and a sensibility to simplicity of expression,” this memorial concluded, “Let us not therefore any longer leave the composition of songs and ballads, to the journeymen of the Pedlar. For lo! he no longer keepeth in a corner, but under the eye, and even under the license of the police; he spreadeth out his verses, and his tales, full of superstition, of horror, of immorality; thus corrupting the innocent youth, and confirming the abandoned.”55 The passage, with all its pointed irony, betrays significant worry about the prospect of an unrestrained, popular culture of “songs and ballads” that fails to remain “in a corner” but instead brings its tales “full of superstition, of horror, of immorality” out into the open. Like a slanderous broadside—the chief virtue of which, according to W. C. Ford, was its “quiet circulation, difficult to counter or trace to its source”—the kind of poetry Plummer embodied appeared to propagate itself easily and endlessly (he wove “ballads that circulated with great rapidity”), thereby imperiling social decorum and good taste (in a historical irony, Webster’s son John would later be the defendant in one of the most infamous and sensational murder trials of the nineteenth century, a crime straight out of a Plummer broadside).56 In the face of the local, decentralized, ephemeral, and vagrant features of this poetics, a more elite stance toward culture projected the language and emblems of an imagined antiquity onto writers like Plummer. This move defined local poetry as a residual formation, one that did not merit inclusion in any narrative of American literature. By placing such poetry, and the system of relations it engendered, under the domain of “the ballad,” interpreters arrogated to themselves the power to arbitrate literary history, because to locate such work under the name of “the ballad” was to define retroactively the values and meanings of the culture in

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which that poetry had mattered. The hybridity of ballads—always already antique, printed, and yet oral objects of elite interest yet folk forms as well, and, most important, ubiquitous yet fated imminently to disappear—ably represents the fictions of a conflicted literary history, because the figure of “the ballad” could incorporate the material that the literary defined as other than itself.57 The unlicensed circulation of poems under the sign of “the ballad” thus gives rise, at the turn of the century, to a more restrictive sense of the poet’s relation to public order, and the balladmonger helps to make manifest an incipient sense of literariness, as a second instance illustrates.

The Down-East Homer Thomas Shaw is sometimes called (usually with tongue in cheek) Maine’s first poet.58 Shaw was born in 1753, near Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. When he was about ten years old, his family moved to the Maine territory (then part of the Massachusetts colony), where they helped establish a settlement project (Pearsontown, later renamed Standish) on the Saco River northwest of Portland. His father Ebenezer ran the settlement’s sawmill, and he built the second frame house in the area, where Thomas would live the rest of his life. Thomas served in the Revolutionary War, fighting in the siege of Boston, and sometime during his military ser vice he began writing poems. He returned to Maine in the late 1770s, carried on the family’s farm and mill, held a number of minor offices in Standish, and died there in 1838. During his life, Shaw published around ten poems (that I have found), which were printed as broadsides, except for one published as an eight-page pamphlet. These poems focus on local tragedies (shipwrecks, executions, and accidental deaths) and national events (the Peace of Ghent; Lafayette’s visit in 1825), and they circulated widely, with at least one reprinted in New York City. Shaw’s print bibliography is, however, only a tiny fraction of his output: he wrote somewhere around two thousand poems, which he transcribed repeatedly, over many decades, in a series of voluminous manuscripts and homemade books. His reputation as a local balladmonger (the “Down-East Homer,” as an early twentieth-century historian called him) probably derived from both his published and unpublished work. Although he has been accorded a minor place in the history of a minor region, his career has usually provided literary criticism a means to mark the difficulties that stood in the way of any aspiring poet in the early national

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period: “His verse was indeed ‘unlernt,’ lamentably bad, worthless today, except that it indicates the isolation of mind and poverty of vision that was inevitable in those days of material and political struggle.”59 Where it has been noted at all, the archive left by a poet like Shaw is treated as a forlorn hope, and an amused condescension has been the standard critical approach to it. However, Shaw’s manuscripts speak to the conditions of early nineteenth-century poetic culture with a different sort of eloquence: Shaw is interesting precisely because he was not a mute, inglorious Milton but was instead all too profuse and prolix. If his poems forestall a critical analysis predicated on the conditions of literariness abstracted from print textuality, their seemingly self-evident worthlessness is also anticipated throughout his writings, which meditate obsessively on the conditions of their own mediation. The interplay between media in his archive, and between media and his archive, offers a compelling opportunity to imagine the social being of poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Shaw described the region where he grew up as “the wilderness, where there was no schools nor meeting untill I was 15 years old. Now my parents lernt me, as well as the rest of his Children to read, and I never went to school a moment in my life.”60 Shaw’s ambivalent relation to literacy and print literature—he could read and write, yet regularly characterized himself as “an old foole / That never once did go to school”— serves as an organizing principle for both his massive poetic output and the marginal position of his poems in relation to the literary culture of his time and after.61 The ways in which the borders of the poetic were policed at the turn of the century was a regular topic in his writings. When he was thirty-two, Shaw wrote a warrant for his own arrest: Whereas Thomas Shaw, of Pearsontown in the County of Cumberland & Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Poet, did, on the twenty seventh Day of March, Anno Domini, one thousand, seven hundred & Eighty five, maliciously and of malice propense, commit a most horrid, barbarous and inhuman murder, on the Bodies of the Muses— Guardians of the liberal Arts, These are to command you by virtue of a power to me granted, from the high Court of Apollo, to apprehend the Body of the said Thomas, & him safely keep, so that he be had before the said Court aforesaid, on or before the twenty first Day of May next. Thereof fail not, ________ Anno 1786 Mercury62

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The delightful self-deprecation of this moment indicates a wry awareness of the conditions of writing in rural North America just after the close of the American Revolution. While the warrant would indict Thomas Shaw, Poet, for the temerity of writing and writing badly—his crime is both trespass and murder—writing the warrant reveals a self-conscious literariness that the warrant’s intention would deny. If the “Guardians of the liberal Arts” keep out those interlopers not vested with power “from the high Court of Apollo”— here the defendant seems to walk both sides of the line—the familiarity with legalese (“maliciously and of malice propense”) and classical mythology shows a knowledge of writing’s discursive power, making the “horrid, barbarous and inhuman murder, on the Bodies of the Muses” look a bit like an inside job. Shaw’s warrant therefore seems contradictory, because it indicates someone capable of judging his own work critically and of anticipating critical judgment. Though forbidden to enter “the high Court of Apollo,” he knows the way in. This warrant both is and is not prescient regarding Shaw’s poetic career. All his life, he struggled for public recognition as a poet, but despite his continual efforts, only a handful of his poems were ever printed. While these were quite popular (a young Nathaniel Hawthorne was one enthusiastic reader), such publications did not win him deference as an author but instead engendered their own forms of punitive discipline.63 Yet the sheer size of his archive belies his frustrations getting into print. As he noted late in life on the flyleaf to one of his daybooks, “I Have been a writing 60 years and my books and papers lie very loose under my hands and are now very many.”64 Or, as he put it in “Thomas Shaws Wrtings. Colected from his Manuscripts &c. The interduction to what followes”: Here in this volom you may see My Songs both old and new to be Sience Seventeen hundread Seventy five I wrote them all I do beleve I have colected them and here Many of them here doth appear Untill there pile here may be high That have my thoughts in them to lie In Sixty years I have wrote down Many a thought out of my crown

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And now to vew them my week mind Hardly there meaning all may find A thought has led me to begin To write them all over agin The good and preshous here to land And all the bad fling from my hand.65 The poem introduces Shaw’s effort to collate and revise his work by collecting clean copies of his poems together in one book. Copying is never a neutral act: it was one of the central practices of contemporary pedagogy, so Shaw thus engages (or imitates) the work of the schooling he had been denied as a young man.66 But whereas a student of the early 1800s would copy texts primarily from a canon of approved Christian piety, Shaw copies his own (albeit often pious) poems. “To write them all over agin” is a self-canonizing process that enters in “the good and preshous” poems while flinging away “all the bad”: “good” and “bad” may be both moral and aesthetic terms here, and the act of distinguishing blends both kinds of judgment. Rewriting involves copying over his poems, which then rewrites the terms of his authorship by condensing the poetry into a single “volom”: Shaw reviews his sixty-year poetic career by invoking and remediating the materiality of that career, such that rewriting proliferates the poems while at the same time rendering their materiality invisible. Imagined first as scattered sheets, the poems “doth appear / Untill there pile here may be high,” but rewriting consolidates the pile into a book, making poems into spaces for “my thoughts . . . to lie.” Similarly, “a thought” occasions Shaw’s act of rewriting and the critical distinction that guards inclusion in the “volom.” Thoughts precede and succeed poems, which become no more than the vessels for “many a thought out of my crown.” Of course, the sheer labor of so much rewriting (the manuscript book is more than two hundred pages long) spectacularly contradicts this logic of effacement. But the manuscript’s handwritten-ness is itself obscured by a thematic of printing that organizes this project. The book’s title, “Thomas Shaws Wrtings. Colected from his Manuscripts,” separates “Writings” from “Manuscripts,” implying that the collection is something other than what it is—another manuscript. And, what is more, Shaw incorporates the structures of print into this book by supplying many of the organizational supports of the printed codex, including a table of contents, page numbers, and index meticulously written out. As poems reveal thoughts by disguising the labor of their own reproduction, the

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Figure 4. Table of contents from one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry books. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.

laboriously transcribed manuscript cloaks handwriting in the approximation of print. Shaw’s scribal practice approaches— or, supplements— conventions of the printing he could not reliably access. His journals regularly detail frustrations regarding a newspaper, the Maine Wesleyan Journal, which, although it often printed requests for submissions, apparently refused or ignored his contributions. Several of Shaw’s manuscript books have hand-sewn covers made from sheets of the local newspapers, one of which includes a poem. By folding his poems and other writings into newsprint sheets, Shaw places his work “in” the newspaper in a way that the newspaper’s editors would not. Th is minor effort to correct his exclusion from print publication is echoed within some of these books, where Shaw wrote out lengthy “letters to the Editor of the Maine Wesleyan Journal” on topics such as the playing of instrumental music in church (a favorite bugbear of his, on which the newspaper printed a

Figure 5. Index to one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry books. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.

Figure  6. Back cover of one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry books, sewn from a leaf of the Cumberland Gazette (July 1786). Note the poem in the left-hand column. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.

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short series of opinion pieces in 1834). On one occasion, the newspaper’s editor appears to have responded publicly to Shaw’s many submissions: We wish to speak plainly on another subject without reference to any person or article. We have seen long pieces of composition called extempore poetry, said to have been written by a boy or girl, as the case might have been, not indeed for publication, but probably for the want of better employment; now we beg that our good friends will be sparing of such articles, as we feel incompetent to decide on their merits, and still more reluctant to fill up the Journal with articles which, however interesting they may appear at home, ought never to be sent abroad. To write poetry, requires something more than an ability to write lines of equal length, ending with a similar sound.67 There is no evidence that this statement was directed toward Shaw specifically. But regardless of who submitted the unpublishable poems, the editor’s critical standard speaks to the conflicts over mediation and canonization that partially structure Shaw’s poetics. What counts as “poetry” in antebellum Maine? Here, poetry and printedness have an intimate, if underarticulated relationship. Rhyme and meter do not by themselves make language into a poem; writing “poetry” requires at least the intention of print publication in order to be something more than mere “want of better employment” and thereby merit critical distinction (“we feel incompetent to decide on [the] merits” of the poems in question, which “might have been [written] not indeed for publication”). These are standards Shaw seems to have internalized within his own unpublished (if not unpublishable) poems: Messieurs Printers if people would me hear I would send you something that is very fare Now your custemor a year I have been And as for your press I dare not enter in Prehaps sum people will call me a poet But my lerning will not let me shoe it Because to be a poet if I shout begin It is your press I cannot enter in

Balladmongering

And What if I should go on for to shoe How fare a lernt man before can go But if I should beet your lernt man agin It is your press I cannot enter in . . . If I had the lerning of sum lernt man To put me in your press twould be your plan But to lern now is to late to begin Therefore it is your press I cannot enter in For a man of no lerning to think to write To fill your gazette does not you delight So he had beter never think to begin Because your press he cannot enter in For a man that never did go to scool To write for your press I think he is a fool Now to write for you he beter not begin For it your press he will not enter in I do not want a lernt man to shoe to me How a poeteckile stanze should formed be But other lerning is to late to begin For which your press I cannot enter in For an unlarnt man to think to write for the He beter not begin no no not he For if he does people at him will grin For your press he beter not enter in . . . Now such a lernt man Sirs I can beat Although he can spell and write very neat Now to beat him I cannot now begin Because your press I cannot enter in Now such a lernt man I dare to defy For to beet me a writing poetry

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And if your press I could enter in To bet such a one I would then begin.68 This manuscript poem poses a series of challenges structured by a set of associations between learning, poetry, and the press. Shaw emphasizes his own lack of learning to explain his exclusion from the press (“If I had the lerning of sum lernt man / To put me in your press twould be your plan . . . For a man of no lerning to think to write / To fill your gazette does not you delight”), but in deferring to the exclusivity of print, Shaw defies the link between poetry and printedness, as well as poetry and learning. Only the learned may get into print, but “I do not want a lernt man to shoe to me / How a poeteckile stanze should formed be.” Thus, although “sum people will call me a poet / But my lerning will not let me shoe it,” Shaw refuses to let the learned— those in print and those who control the press— entirely appropriate the claim to poetry: “Now such a lernt man I dare to defy / For to beet me a writing poetry.” To be a poet is to be in print— Shaw is excluded from the press, not his work. But Shaw’s failure to get into print becomes the occasion to write even more poems, thereby magnifying both his exclusion from poetry and his claim to the title of poet. Despite the frustrations expressed in poems like “Messieurs Printers,” Shaw did sometimes get published, although this success not only required substantial efforts on his part but also provoked occasional reprisals from his audiences. Shaw’s most popular effort was “A Mournful Song, on the Death of the Wife and Child of Mr. Nathaniel Knights” (1807), which was printed in at least three editions in Portland and reprinted in New York. In his diary, Shaw described “the solemn news” of the drowning, noting in an incidental rhyme how Mrs. Knight “To god only she could then cry, When that she knew that she must die.” He then wrote out the text of his poem, copying from the broadside he had printed shortly after the accident occurred. According to his journal, he had composed the poem on February 23, 1807, the day after the tragedy. This after noon I composed the above Mournfull song on the death of the Wife, and child of Nathaniel Night of Windham, and read it after meeting, and a Coppy was requested and I returned home late at night a praising god for his good ness to me. Thursday 26 we had a meeting at the Widdow Stuarts, and Brother Lumbard preached from those words, And I heard a voice saying unto me, arise, for

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blessed are the dead that die in the lord, &c. and Miss ford, and Brother Sar. Shaw, and Brother Aims exorted, and we had a powerfull meeting indeed, now this night two copies was requested of me, and Brother Lumbard had one for to read to parent of the child that was drowned Wife not found.69 Shaw drew inspiration from both the tragedy itself (which was a major news story, remembered for decades afterward) and the exhortations of the Methodist meeting, which took the tragedy as one of its texts. Shaw read his verses aloud at meetings and then transcribed them on the request of fellow members. Knowledge of the poem spread in the first days, and Shaw wrote out additional copies, one of which was intended for Nathaniel Knight himself. The song began circulating orally and in manuscript through the close circle of the Methodist meeting (which convened in private homes, rather than a church), and while interested readers initially turned to Shaw himself, Brother Lumbard’s example indicates that readers soon began reciting it in settings where Shaw was not present. As news of the accident spread, Shaw realized the song’s potential popularity: The above mournfull song was wrote the next day after the awfall sean happened, and it the first edition was was [sic] printed the fourth day of March, 10 days after the sean in 1807. Now I had 1444 pamphlets printed and there was such rapped sail for them, that another man took my workes without my leave within five days and printed at five hundred coppies for sail. And then I had a second edition printed the 18th of march; now I had three thousand copies printed at this time, and there is rappid sail for them, both east, and west.70 If we take this account at its word, it offers an unusually specific record of the production of a broadside poem at the beginning of the nineteenth century.71 The poem appears in forty quatrain stanzas, divided in two columns and headed with a brief account of the tragedy and a woodcut of two coffins; the broadside looks crude even by the standard of its day. The price listed on the sheet was 6½ cents per copy, or 62½ cents per dozen. The bundle pricing indicates that Shaw or the printer anticipated a market for secondary circulation; in a port city like Portland, sailors or passengers on outbound ships might have carried copies very far indeed (this is the likeliest way that the

Figure  7. Thomas Shaw, “A Mournful Song on the Death of the Wife and Child of Mr. Nathaniel Knights” (Portland, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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song reached New York, where it was printed in a different broadside format later that year). Shaw claims that he sold “30 dollars worth” (about 460 copies, going by the face value of the broadside) in the three days after the first edition of the song was printed.72 Later, he “let Josiah Jarmon have 21 one duzon of the watch night songs for four dollars,” and he sold copies after various Methodist meetings in the area south of Portland.73 Shaw was intimately involved with each stage of a process that took the “Mournful Song” from manuscript to recitation to printed broadside to recitation once again and back into scribal transcription.74 The song’s mournful timeliness occasioned a “rappid sail,” which in turn prompted a dispute over ownership: the song quickly slipped beyond Shaw’s control, and in a supplemental stanza inserted at the bottom of the second edition of the broadside, he complained, “Take notice good people of Portland fair town, / I think I’m impos’d on by Printer Mc Kown: / He’s taken my verses and printed the same, / Which I think you’ll agree is much to his shame.”75 This address to readers indicates the complex ways in which familiarity and anonymity were encoded in print. Shaw seeks to shame the printer for taking “my verses and [printing] the same,” by proclaiming himself as the verses’ rightful owner and mobilizing readers’ assent to this claim. But this appeal, and the attendant identification of the verses with Shaw, depends on the same diff use, anonymous transmission that enables McKown to co-opt them in the first place. Elsewhere, Shaw lamented the barriers keeping his work (and himself ) out of print; here the problem is reversed, as he finds himself in print against his will. The dynamics of print circulation destabilize the status of “poet,” keeping it perpetually in transit, along with the recitations, manuscripts, and broadsides moving around the region, and the author following in their wake, trying—unsuccessfully—to control them. The year 1807 seems to have been a bad one for travel over water and, consequently, a good year for Shaw’s poetry; his poem “Melancholy Shipwreck,” written after the schooner Charles ran aground at the mouth of Portland harbor (killing sixteen people), proved as popular as his poem on the Knight family tragedy. [As] I was riding to Portland, I heard the Melencoly news of Capten Adams Shiprack on Richmend Iland, and began a Mounfull song on the accashen. I wrote 9 verces on the rode, and finisht the same in Portland. . . . I comited my song to the press, and have reached home the third day. The next Saturday I rode to Portland

Figure  8. Thomas Shaw, “Melancholy Shipwreck” (Portland, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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saw to the fi xing of the tipe for printing the Shipwreck song, and staid to quarterly meeting on the Saboth & herd Elder Breal, and Brother Wintch preach, and attended the Sacrement there, on monday I took out my Songs and spread them about, which met with great approbation, and returned home at night.76 This broadside was dated July 14, 1807, two days after the accident. This timeliness outcompeted the newspapers, and one of the poem’s primary functions was to convey information about the disaster; a postscript appended to the bottom of the sheet (probably of a later impression) included the names of the drowned, as well as information about the rescue of six surviving passengers. The poem itself works as a news report of the event, a providential interpretation of it, and also a meditation on the social work of poems in communicating information and forming communities. It begins by invoking a collective audience in the ser vice of collective mourning: Come let us weep with those that weep, For their lost friends, plung’d in the deep; And let us all now take some part In grief which breaks the tender heart.77 Reading the poem (or attending a recitation of it) establishes the medium of a social emotion, communal grief. The news of the accident therefore works within a moral paradigm: O God! who know’st the wants of men, Direct my mind, and guide my pen, That I may bring the truth to light, On this dread scene, and awful night.78 Elaborating the news of the accident serves as a means to reveal God’s power (“my dear friends pray eye the rod, / And know’tis from a holy God”) while also calling for consolation (“Good Lord send cheering comfort down / To those who mourn in Portland town”), but these revelations and consolations come specifically through the dissemination of the poem. In other words, events do not interpret or reveal themselves but must be revealed through the inspiration, production, circulation, and consumption of poems.

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Thus I have some few truths here told The whole I cannot now unfold; But if occasion e’er doth call, The world at large shall have it all. And now good people I must close This solemn scene that since arose. Then take the truth in this my song, And overlook where I am wrong.79 The concluding disclaimer shifts responsibility to the reader, who ultimately must filter the poem’s truths from its errors (a standard trope in disaster poems like this). In the context of the poem’s exchanges through recitation and the dissemination of printed or handwritten copies, this conclusion also links poet and reader in a community grounded in the work of poetry. The broadside thereby offers an occasion for audiences to reflect on the occasion that brings them together, which is not the sinking of the Charles but the recount of that tragedy in the distribution of the poem, its sale in song and sheet by a balladmonger. Here, too, Shaw has left a very specific record of his travels and travails hawking this poem. His peddling circuits wound through a large piece of southern Maine. After printing the song in Portland, he peddled it around town before following a sales route that went from Portland to Saco on the south and west and then to Buxton, Windham, and Gorham on the north and west, an itinerary of roughly 80 miles. According to Shaw’s record, the trip took a week, during which “I had four thousand & and five hundred copies printed of, and disposd of nigh three thousand.”80 The next week, he rode a circuit northeast from Portland to Bath and New Gloucester, traveling around 90 miles. In August, Shaw followed a trade route west, to Limington, Maine, and Effingham, New Hampshire, southwest to Wolfeboro, and then back through Buxton to Standish, a journey of more than 100 miles. Along the way, he stayed with Methodist friends and elders, attended meetings, and listened to much “lively exortation.”81 While his diary emphasizes his successes, he also mentions setbacks on the road, such as one near Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where “the colledge Boys beset me devil like, and I told them that they were burning to preach the gospel, & I told them that if they did not mend there ways, the devil would have them.”82 The community imagined in the poem

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did not necessarily materialize in the way that the poem envisioned, for the crowds gathering to listen and buy were not always docile. The abuse also indicates the widely different responses that the itinerant poet could anticipate. When distributed in the Methodist meeting, poems like the “Mournful Song” on the Knight family tragedy elicited communal grief, godly exhortation, and the desire to recirculate the poem in other contexts. The “colledge boys,” however, beset Shaw when they met him in the street. The derisive abuse he suffered shows how fragile the poet’s right to perform in public could be, especially when presented in the guise of the balladmonger peddling his wares. Publication and publicity did not necessarily meliorate Shaw’s marginal relation to public culture, for while so much of his work expresses his inability to be recognized as a poet, even when such recognition came, it could easily be used against him. The incident rankled and perhaps happened on other occasions as well, for Shaw complained about this sort of harassment in a poem, “To Those that Cry Me Poet,” which he recorded in another of his daybooks sometime around 1837. To all of you, that ofton due At me both laugh and hout For all you say, this is my way My Rhyems for to throw out I make a Rhyem, in little time As fast as I can say A song by heart, and never start On jot out of my way— You that hant wit, do say poet And at me you do hollow With your mouth wide so one can slide Clear down into your swollow Is not it shame, that some by name Beset me in the street And at me yell, which is not well Such languge to repeate—

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As true as I, cant pass you by Without that word you Poet You cry aloude, like man thats proude And thus I think you shoe it— What have I dun, that makes your fun At me to fly so harsh When I to you, prove always true, But you throw out your trash.83 This mournful address shows that attaining the name of “poet” was not all Shaw thought it would be. The crowd’s mockery is a bit hard to parse: hooting and shouting “you Poet” at Shaw might undermine his claim to the title by derisively (if implicitly) contrasting his “Rhyems” with an idealized sense of poetry as elevated language, or “you Poet” might itself just be a term of contempt, like “get a job!” Either way, the public performance of the Poet is the source of conflict (“Is not it shame, that some by name / Beset me in the street”). Such a performance is, of course, enacted through the making of verses: Shaw “throws out” his rhymes (which could variously mean that he produces, disseminates, or discards them) “as fast as I can say / A song by heart.” These acts of song making in the street prompt retaliatory verbal acts from his antagonists: “You that hant wit, do say poet / And at me you do hollow.” And this retaliation prompts from Shaw his recurring resentment about status and schooling: Ye Silly Fools, go to your schools Pay for your entrence in Your night-cap darn, an manners lern Before I come agin—84 In this case, though, it is the allegedly superior college boys who prove their ill breeding by harassing Shaw in the street; schooling and status are revealed as structures of power that merely enforce existing hierarchies rather than reflect inherent worth. Shaw is decried as “you Poet” not (or not only) because his poems are bad or his intentions impure, but because in issuing them publicly, he steps out of his place; literariness colludes with public decorum to push a poet like Shaw off the street, if not off the page. One final,

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poignant example encapsulates the conflicted place of poetry in the social world of the early nineteenth century, which Shaw’s example makes manifest. Then took my pen & ink in hand Here in this Book I did it land So any one may reade the same And so take it from whence it came Its Author never went to school To lern to spell & write by Rule As men of lerning are made great By Schooling, both for Church & State— But I a poore old Ignorent Man At first when I for self began Livd in the woods & what I have be Came luckily as men may see— By luck and chance My Parents they Lernt me to Reade from day to day Saying I should a Reader be As people now may look & see85 These opening stanzas portray a social world stratified by uneven access to language and education, and they announce Shaw’s subject-hood in a gesture of performative literacy. The material process of writing (“pen & ink in hand”) produces the poem as a testament to Shaw’s creative management of the tools of education, which normally underwrite status (“men of lerning are made great / By Schooling, both for Church & State”) but in his case testify by contrast to his distance from the seats of cultural power. His home schooling retains its rough edges—he never did “lern to spell & write by Rule” but succeeded mostly through “luck and chance” and his parents’ initiative—yet he has prospered enough that an implied audience of future readers can open his book and find there the legacy of literacy in the shape of a poem. For I began to write while young In Poetree imployd my Tung

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And Thoughts & hours by night & day As if it was but sport & pley On many thing I chose to write Both on the day & on the night As god ofton did leede my mind On subjects as I was Inclind, And on many a Funereal Song I have studied & wrote along And some of them I sent abroade As if these things were ends of god86 His fluency with poems crosses different kinds of media (both writing and speaking) with such ease and abundance (“As if it was but sport & pley”) that it seems divinely inspired, although God simply leads his mind “on subjects as I was Inclind” already. This qualified divine sanction is an important component of the backward glance that he casts over his career. The popularity of the songs he has “sent abroade” makes it appear “as if these things were ends of god,” but ultimately their legacy is uncertain. What is certain, though, is that this poet’s lifelong project of writing poems touches on almost every aspect of his social world, from the organization of public life, to the structure of literate communication, and finally to the constitution of the subject, who can exist through the creation and consumption of poems, as the final stanza makes clear. The successful materialization of poetry in the community seems to underwrite the hand of God, but, as he acknowledges in a haunting conclusion: Whether they be, I cannot tell But god surely doth know full well And so I cease— at this time draw A line & end with—Thomas Shaw.87

* * * The case studies of Plummer and Shaw lead to several preliminary conclusions about the work of poems in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century. First, “poetry” was an irregular category—not a genre but a mixed

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bag of genres arrayed in an unstable hierarchy. Because of that instability, the culture of poetry was only ever partly legible to its members, and which objects could count as poems— and which people as poets—was subject to considerable debate, because literariness was a shifting standard, although still forceful nonetheless. Second, literariness is mediated—it is subject to the scenes and conditions in and by which it is produced—but it also mediates broader social contests about public order and the legitimation of power. The sometimes scurrilous, sometimes scandalous ballads and doggerel verses I examine here played a particularly salient role in such contests. These poems were not only widely consumed, but more important, they were also widely produced, often by individuals with, at best, tangential access to cultural and economic capital. Third, much of the anxious force behind such poems derives from the dense relationship between their modes of circulation—the wayward, vagrant ways in which they moved, beyond established paths of communication—and the genres of scandal, gossip, rumor, slander, and news. While none of these communicative genres may seem particularly germane to modern senses of poetry (at least, not to good poetry), for nineteenth-century readers, the associations made a key contribution to the work of these texts. The readers of Plummer or Shaw did not value their poems—most of the copies that survive are badly mutilated—because they were not valuable, at least not in a literary sense. Instead, the social exchange value enticed their many readers (or customers, since they were balladmongers). “Ballads” like these thus condense the power of circulation as a social force. This force could be applied to scandal, news, and tragedy, or it could be mobilized in the ser vice of politics. As the most controversial and also communal form of antebellum political association, antislavery and its poetics will be the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 2

The Poetics of Reform

The Poetics of Reform Chapter 1 concluded with the claim that in the early national period, certain genres of poetry condensed societal anxieties about circulation and public order. Particular kinds of poems were understood to have a constitutively social function, or, rather, particular kinds of poems were understood to be constitutive of sociality. That is, they engaged large audiences on diverse arrays of topics, but more important, they enabled certain concepts of community to become visible to members of the community. This relation was recursive, since people imagined such poems to participate in relations that the poems helped lay down. As we saw, these genres (most prominently the ballad) produced ambivalent feelings: they were and also were not literary, decorous, and decent, and while they were known to be popular and powerful ways of communicating, their powers were felt to be potentially and potently dangerous. Chapter 2 continues this line of thought by examining how one social reform project, abolition, drew upon the ambivalent charges ascribed to poems in the Jacksonian and antebellum eras. How did antislavery—the project most transformative in its vision and most incendiary in its practice—mobilize the energies encoded into common and widely read poetic genres? What sort of work did antislavery poems do? And what sorts of communities were formed or deformed by the circulation and exchange of antislavery verse? I must begin by emphasizing that the work of abolition was borne on the wings of poetry, for—to put the point as strongly as possible—poems made reform possible as a social project. Anthologies by Marcus Wood and James Basker have demonstrated that antislavery poetry dates back at least one hundred years earlier than the organized movement itself.1 Thousands of authors wrote songs,

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hymns, laments, satires, ballads, and odes in the service of antislavery, to change hearts and minds, to recruit new members, and to build solidarity within local organizations and across the transnational movement. Abolitionist newspapers relied heavily on poems to provide front-page commentary or even to report news. Giftbooks of poetry, such as The North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by her Friends (discussed later), sold to raise money at abolitionist fairs, were exchanged as tokens among acquaintances, thus securing bonds of friendship in sympathy with the bondage of the slave. Making these books was one way to act politically; buying and giving them away were others. Songs and hymns condensed the evangelism at the heart of much antislavery activism, most famously in “Amazing Grace,” but also in hundreds of other hymns sung in and out of church. Such songs, which after the 1820s could be cheaply printed in large numbers, for distribution across the Atlantic world, also epitomized the mass mediation of reform. One example is Whittier’s poem “Our Countrymen in Chains!” (1835): as a broadside featuring Josiah Wedgwood’s famous engraving for the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it sold for two cents a copy and was so widely distributed that in 1837, William Lloyd Garrison described it as having “been circulated in periodicals, quoted in addresses and orations, and scattered broad-cast, over the land.”2 Garrison’s biblical-sounding language shows how the evangelical mission of antislavery was bound up in its practices of communication and circulation. To sow the word was to spread the word; to reach hearts and minds, one had to reach eyes and ears. While pamphlets and orations could make a formal case against slavery, other genres— satires, invectives, polemics, songs, hymns, and ballads—were better able to reach larger numbers of people and ignite their passions. Sarah Lewis, an activist in Philadelphia, dramatically posed the advantages that “a few abolition songs” offered to “materially advance our cause” in 1841: “We know Tippecanoe songs did much towards the great Whig victory last year—When thee is in the humor of writing poetry could thee not write a song or two to some favorite national air—‘Hail Columbia’ or ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ for dignified composition and Yankee Doodle for the mobocracy— or to any popular air—national or not—.”3 Lewis’s bourgeois distinction between dignified and mobocratic compositions still emphasizes how important a “favorite national air” was to the work of reform: by harnessing the associative powers of tunes like “Yankee Doodle,” abolition could propagate on an almost subconscious level, controlling the mob or the quality as though without their will (which was a common interpretation of William Henry Harrison’s “Old Tippecanoe” songs of 1840).

Figure 9. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Our Countrymen in Chains!” (New York, n.d.). Courtesy of the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College.

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Lewis’s comment may idealize the efficacy of circulation, but it also demonstrates an astute understanding of how airs, tunes, and songs generate political agency, as Harrison’s campaign had made compellingly clear. The familiarity of a popular air, not its literary qualities, made it effective. Lewis diagnoses the media ecology of the 1840s, where new genres and technologies of communication worked in tandem with old ones (such as the familiar melody) to influence public discourse. Thus, as we will see, even though antislavery poets were keenly interested in the literariness of their work, they viewed a poem’s literary value as a subsidiary aspect of its broader social value, its ability to be carried in people and to carry people away. This chapter extends the argument from Chapter 1 by examining the poetics of reform in the 1830s and 1840s. Antislavery activists used poems to mobilize energies and anxieties similar to those that suff used the scurrilous broadsides of balladmongers like Thomas Shaw or Jonathan Plummer. Those wares had seemed, at least to some contemporaries, to spread themselves invisibly and insidiously, despite the all-too-human presence of their peddlers, who attracted audiences while also exciting their disdain. Abolition songs and poems aspired to this idealized, invisible communication, to be so potent as to be always already familiar with audiences and so portable as to require no apparent means of transport. But as with the balladmonger, the abolitionist poet’s aspiration to invisible immediacy paradoxically heightened the visibility of communications systems in Jacksonian society. The antislavery conflict was very often waged in fights about speech, assembly, and circulation, in which battles to control institutions like the postal system or the lecture hall served as proxy challenges to local sovereignty, regional autonomy, or federal authority. In this kind of political situation, the blank, abstract conventions of so many antislavery poems promoted their circulatory power and intensified their messages about the freedoms of speech, thought, and association, as well as freedom from chattel servitude. The typical antislavery poem therefore works first and foremost at the formal level, as something generic and conventional in the most positive sense. Abolitionist verse needed to be formally familiar: stanza patterns, airs and melodies, and rhetorical commonplaces all carried information in excess of any particular poem’s specific content and circumstances of composition, while the authority of the individual writer was always necessarily subordinated to the needs of the collective enterprise. Like ballads, antislavery songs are above all communal property. And one poet’s ability to cite or pass along the work of another, in the ser vice of a social project requiring all the powers of circulation,

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created a circumstance in which the literary coterie could embody the imaginative work of reform. Friends forging bonds through the exchange of verses (often on the breaking of legal bonds or bondage) mimicked the kinds of sociable forces encoded in popular genres like the ballad. But the paradoxical capacity to pitch one’s “voice” through poems characterized by the way they could “echo” large numbers of similar poems led, in the 1840s, to a tangled set of political affi liations in which antislavery authors drew affective charges from the minstrel theater, thereby turning racial mimicry inside out into new social productions. The beginnings of an African American poetry (something I will trace in Chapter 6) are to be found in the “abolitionist minstrelsy” of the 1840s, which deployed the open conventions of antislavery verse genres (such as the “lines” and “stanzas” discussed below) to create a distinctly inauthentic, secondary, derivative voice of freedom.

The Politics of Circulation in the 1830s As the most popular and prolific poet of the antislavery movement, Whittier’s career can illustrate the permutations of verse in the project of reform. Whittier began writing poems in the late 1820s, and his work first appeared publicly in a newspaper system that was firmly embedded in New England, even in rural areas. He sent his earliest poems anonymously to Garrison, who at the time was editing the Newburyport Free Press; as legend later had it, Garrison tracked Whittier down, found him laboring on the family farm, and encouraged him to contribute more poems, only to be chased away by Whittier’s father, who considered verse writing a dubious line of work. Whittier and Garrison had both grown up at the margins of the Era of Good Feelings, Whittier the son of small-scale Quaker farmers, Garrison of indentured servants transported from England, and both had entered public discourse through the partisan press before moving into organized antislavery.4 Before his 1828 conversion to abolition, Garrison had been a printer’s devil at the Newburyport Herald (a Federalist paper) and editor of a series of Federalist and National Republican newspapers; Whittier, after a brief stint teaching, wrote for pro-Clay papers in Hartford and Boston, a political association that overlapped with his conversion to antislavery in the early 1830s.5 This newspaper culture was, in Meredith L. McGill’s words, “regional in articulation and transnational in scope,” and Whittier published prolifically in it, putting out more than seventy poems in 1828 alone.6

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Whittier’s earliest work was heterogeneous and not explicitly political: georgics describing the surrounding area (“The Vale of Merrimac”), biblical narratives (“Judith at the Tent of Holofernes”), vignettes culled from European legend (“The Sicilian Vespers,” “Isabella of Austria”), accounts of Native American history in New England (“The Fratricide,” “Mogg Megone,” “Metacom”— efforts perhaps meant to dovetail with Edwin Forrest’s hugely popular performances as Metacomet), even an elegy for Simón Bolívar, and a dialect temperance song, “The Drunkard to His Bottle,” presented in homage to Burns as “lyrics the great poet of Scotland might have written had he put his name to a pledge of abstinence”: Nae mair o’ fights that bruise an’ mangle, Nae mair o’ nets my feet to tangle, Nae mair o’ senseless brawl an’ wrangle, Wi’ frien’ an’ wife too, Nae mair o’ deavin’ din an’ jangle My feckless life through.7 When he compiled his Complete Works in the 1880s, Whittier excluded nearly all of these poems (most remain uncollected to this day), and the diversity of their topics and styles indicates the job-work nature of newspaper verse writing; they cannot really be organized according to abstractions of the work or oeuvre, and even the author is an inadequate frame, since these poems were published anonymously (a few were not identified as Whittier’s until after his death). The decentralized and dispersed character of periodical culture in the 1820s and 1830s worked against the specificity and organicism necessary for post-Romantic literariness; the poems’ generic-ness was their most important quality, since it prepared them for reprinting and reproduction across different venues.8 A set of social, cultural, and technological developments converged in the 1830s to politicize the emergent mass production of print, of which Whittier’s early career was part; the ability to disseminate text rapidly across a diverse range of formats and broad geographic space increasingly provoked reactions against the more networked infrastructure that was coming to characterize the Jacksonian era, a period marked, variously, by the “transportation revolution” and “market revolution” and named, in one biting poem, the “Era of Paper, and the Age of Print.”9 The 1830s were a decade of conflict on many fronts, and antislavery prompted some of the strongest antagonism. After Nat

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Turner’s rebellion in 1831 (also the year Garrison founded the Liberator), violence over antislavery was directed primarily against its system of communication—free association, public speaking, and print circulation. While the worst riots were intended to disrupt abolitionist lectures and meetings (Garrison and Whittier were each attacked during the speaking tour of George Thompson, for example), mobs just as often targeted abolitionist publications and printing presses; in the most infamous instance, Elijah Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer, was murdered while defending his press, which mobs had destroyed three times previously. The violent tensions surrounding antislavery and communication are savagely satirized in Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, which used the conceit of metempsychosis to send up Jacksonian society. At one point, the title character jumps into the body of a Quaker reformer, who is immediately kidnapped by proslavery agents and taken to Virginia to be lynched. Just before this denouement, he jumps into the body of a local slave, who then participates in a bloody uprising incited by a stray abolitionist tract.10 Although Garrison was a higher profile target, Whittier’s abolitionist writings (especially an 1833 pamphlet, Justice and Expediency) earned him notoriety from New England to the border states. Unlike Garrison, though, and unlike other important abolitionist poets such as Frances E. W. Harper, Whittier’s relation to antislavery was almost entirely print based—he was a poet, editorialist, pamphleteer, and political organizer but rarely a lecturer or recruiter. This commitment to communication as the agent of social change imbued Whittier’s poems— even those written much later in his career—with the idiom of the 1830s’ embattled public culture. That is, his poems locate agency in a discourse structured by immediate publication and immediate emancipation, where freedom comes from the ability to speak and move without restrictions. Whittier’s antislavery poems are, therefore, greatly concerned with efforts to suppress a popular voice, and they urge that voice to resist by talking back—but the voice belongs to the Yankee and not the slave. And, if his poems respond to specific moments in the struggle over antislavery, their political power is realized more through their genre and the metapragmatics of their circulation than by their content. The poems’ rhetoric and politics track closely with major campaigns of the American Anti-slavery Society (AAS) (for which Whittier was a paid secretary) involving exercises of free speech and free circulation, commitments that grounded moral suasion in mass-mediated print.11 The era’s technological innovations and infrastructure improvements better enabled organized

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abolition to imagine a national public as the target of its reformist address. In 1835, the AAS (which was at its peak in the mid-1830s, with 300,000 members) began a direct-mailing campaign, sending several hundred thousand letters, pamphlets, tracts, stories, poems, and appeals into the South, thereby using the federal postal system to circumvent local restrictions against immediatist material.12 By mid-July, 175,000 items (among them Justice and Expediency) were in the New York City Post Office, ready to be mailed.13 When these materials reached Charleston, they inflamed raw fears that Northern “incendiaries” wanted to ignite a slave rebellion, and local leaders quickly and ruthlessly suppressed the distribution of “Tappan, Garrison & Co’s papers, encouraging the negroes to insurrection.”14 A mob stormed the Charleston post office, seized the sacks of mail, and burned them in a wild pubic display.15 This riot sparked similar panics across the slaveholding states, as “postmasters censored the mails and mobs roamed the countryside,” with numerous cities suspending habeas corpus and arresting anyone suspected of being an abolitionist (one case involved a man who was jailed and nearly lynched in Washington for passing a copy of Justice and Expediency).16 After failing to transform private sentiments by disseminating pamphlets, tracts, and letters, the AAS organized a congressional petition drive to use government as a platform for public speech; to give a sense of the scale of this project, Congress received 225,000 antislavery petitions in 1837 alone.17 This campaign initiated a second controversy, about the role of Congress in social reform debates. While Congress had read petitions against slavery since the 1790s, the abolitionist mails campaign prompted Southern legislators to argue that such petitions were insurrectionary, and they sought to bar Congress even from receiving them, let alone having them read on the floor. Debates about the right to petition consumed the House of Representatives throughout 1836. Under an arrangement brokered by South Carolinian Henry L. Pinckney, the House resolved that no petition pertaining to slavery could be read, printed, or discussed by the House.18 This resolution became known as the “gag rule,” and no sooner had it passed than northern Whig congressmen, most prominently John Quincy Adams, began defying it, using ploy after ploy to read antislavery petitions to the House and thereby creating a spectacle that riveted national attention on slavery and free speech.19 These battles over the circulation of discourse provide context and coherence for the otherwise centrifugal antislavery verse of the 1830s. Efforts to regulate or suppress debate became the content of debate, and the freewheeling, atomized newspaper culture— so resistant to literary authorship

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or authority—became the surest means for resisting authorized control over the diffusion of debate. The reflexivity of this fight (a debate about the right to debate, a discourse on the virtues of discourse) enabled polemicists to encode the terms of one struggle onto another: antislavery poems, letters, pamphlets, and editorials relentlessly equated gag rules, suppression laws, and antiabolitionist intimidation with chattel slavery, a rhetorical move that enlisted in the fight against “the slave power” or “King Cotton” many who were not otherwise friendly to emancipation. When Whittier exhorts readers to fight slavery, he often means them to stand up for themselves. “Stanzas for the Times” (1835), for example, bridges the rhetorical gap between chattel slavery and “the suppression of free speech”: according to the poem, those living with a “fettered lip” must ultimately “Yoke in with marked and branded slaves, / And tremble at the driver’s whip” (271). The poem’s occasion was a proslavery meeting in Boston, and it addresses the “Yankee farmer” (the poem was signed originally “A Farmer”) facing the prospect, should he capitulate, that “his freedom stands / On Slavery’s dark foundations strong” (ibid.). In the poem’s rhetoric, the Yankee’s commitment to freedom is first a commitment to New England’s land and history; freedom entails an obligation to section as much as to abolition. Is this the land our fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win? Is this the soil whereon they moved? Are these the graves they slumber in? Are we the sons by whom are borne The mantles which the dead have worn? And shall we crouch above these graves, With craven soul and fettered lip? Yoke in with marked and branded slaves, And tremble at the driver’s whip? Bend to the earth our pliant knees, And speak but as our masters please? (Ibid.) By living with “fettered lip,” the community bows down to Southern masters, forfeits its Revolutionary heritage, and empties the land of sacred national value. The poem’s questions destabilize a collective identity based on shared relations to a symbolic landscape: if “we speak but as our masters please,” the poem implies, then we will no longer be the sons born of our fathers or borne

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upon this land. Whittier continues in this mode, asking, “Shall tongue be mute . . . shall Truth succumb? / Shall pen, and press, and soul be dumb?” to which he answers, No; guided by our country’s laws, For truth, and right, and suffering man, Be ours to strive in Freedom’s cause, As Christians may, as freemen can! Still pouring on unwilling ears That truth oppression only fears. (Ibid.) By answering in this way, the poem’s readers stand up to the threat of slavery and assert themselves as true heirs to “all the memories of our dead”—in other words, they constitute themselves as a free people supported by Christianity, law, truth, and right. At the conclusion, Whittier assures the “brethren of the South,” No seal is on the Yankee’s mouth, No fetter on the Yankee’s press! From our Green Mountains to the sea, One voice shall thunder, We are free! (272) By speaking freely, “the Yankee” comes to figure a people bonded to the New England landscape (our Green Mountains) and possessing one voice, whose self-authorizing annunciation is “We are free!” The discourse of liberation in the poem agitates not for the end of slavery but for the unquestionable right and use of free speech, and the threat of slavery is not the harms it inflicts on chattel slaves but is rather slavery’s power to destroy the social selfunderstanding of Yankees. As a poem to and for Yankees, “Stanzas for the Times” gained persuasive force from its sites of publication, because the poem’s referents were also its audience, the readers of the newspapers where it appeared. “Stanzas for the Times” was first published in the Essex Gazette, Whittier’s hometown paper, and then quickly reprinted around New England and in further-flung abolitionist papers, even appearing in Niles’ Register, the preeminent proslavery paper of the day (one editorial referred to it as “Whittier’s well known and soul stirring lines”).20 The sites of publication— small New England or antislavery newspapers— enhanced the poem’s rhetorical force by aligning its address with

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its readership (“it speaks for the general public,” says a character in the fin-desiècle historical tale “She Loved a Sailor,” by Whittier’s friend Amelia Barr).21 To press the point, continuous reprinting helped actualize the poem’s politics— free speech and movement were the poem’s consequence more than they were its content or intention. Yet the capacities of a poem like “Stanzas for the Times” to secure political agency through reprinting conflicts with the specificity of context and audience that made it powerful. “The times,” after all, can be any time, and any poem that addresses them can be stanzas for the times. Whittier wrote at least four other poems called “Stanzas for the Times” (similarly, he titled eight different antislavery poems “Lines”), which addressed new concerns and controversies in the continuing fight against efforts to suppress free speech.22 For example, in 1839, he penned a “Stanzas for the Times” to attack Pennsylvania Governor David Porter, who had stated in his inaugural message that “to agitate the question [of slavery] anew, is not only impolitic, but it is a virtual breach of good faith to our brethren of the South.” The new “Stanzas” rejoined: We ask no boon: our RIGHTS we claim— Free press and thought—free tongue and pen, The right to speak in Freedom’s name, As Pennsylvanians and as men: To do, by Lynch Law unforbid, What our own Rush and Franklin did.23 These “Stanzas” reproduce the ideology and iconography of their earlier counterpart: “we” Pennsylvanians will assert free press and thought, tongue, and pen (“the right to speak in Freedom’s name”), with “our own Rush and Franklin” standing as the genii loci for free speech (the earlier stanzas had cited heroes from Bunker Hill as New England’s presiding spirits). In a political discourse organized through meetings and assemblies, newspapers and broadsides, “Stanzas for the Times” could never be quoted out of context. Genericness (considered pragmatically rather than aesthetically) made these poems effective. To be agents of change, they must be deemed capable of addressing and intervening in their situation; not only must they circulate freely, but readers also have to anticipate and recognize that freedom. Conventions help this happen: a blank title like “Stanzas for the Times” (further enabled by recognizable stanza forms and meters) elicits that sense of open timeliness, since the absence of markers frees the poem for unlimited transposition. In a process

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that Chapter 5 will examine in detail, the blankness of this verse later made it difficult to read; as one of Whittier’s biographers requested in the 1880s, I now write to beg of you that ere it is too late you will prepare an edition of [your antislavery poems] with little paragraphs attached—headings rather than notes—indicating the circumstances which called them forth. I am sure that such an edition would be very welcome & that it would be immensely useful in the way of distinction concerning many features of the anti slavery struggle. Your poems will be read much more than any history.24 In order to be abstracted from its setting, the antislavery poem had to already be abstract; to be read as history, it first had to be history, or to become history, by addressing a time it did not name. Thus, while “Stanzas for the Times” angrily speaks out against the times, it makes few references to them; assured that readers live in the times, the poem foregoes historical description to go straight to their hearts and minds. Temporal immediacy and contextual immanence therefore made “Stanzas for the Times” available for redeployment throughout the antebellum era: it was sung on many occasions and reprinted at moments of national crisis until as late as December 1860.25 Whitman Bennett has described this kind of poem as a very special brand—for which poetry in the accepted sense may not be quite the just word. . . . In fact, nothing quite like them is to be found in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century literature . . . these versified outbursts of indignation, satire, reproach, scorn, and exhortation, all mingled with specific arguments and supplications for divine aid, reached the ears and hearts of millions . . . who would never have read prose pamphlets or have been influenced by them.26 Versified outbursts of scorn and supplication reach ears and hearts otherwise beyond the grasp of more formal discourse (prose pamphlets, congressional debates, etc.); in this description, free circulation aligns with freed verse, verse that can move freely because it is conventionally marked. The conventions of the newspaper antislavery poem elicit readings unique to the newspaper, because readers encounter the poem amid articles, editorials, and advertisements pertaining to the events the poem described. For instance, the Liberator printed “Stanzas for the Times” next to an article by Whittier

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reporting how he had been attacked by a mob in New Hampshire; this place on the page (the front page, no less) provided the poem with evidence to support its urgent tone. The high level of context and recognition between the poem and its readers demonstrates not only that newspaper antislavery poems are a distinct genre but also that the “speaker” of the poem is, in this case, Whittier, and his readers (readers of the Liberator) would know him and would know themselves to be addressed by him. This conclusion seems broadly true for newspaper antislavery poems—they do not have abstract, anonymous speakers but function as direct address between author and reader—they are heard, not overheard, and the space of the newspaper determined that they would be heard (or read) collectively. We can best understand the political efficacy of antislavery verse by detailing its production, distribution, and consumption: the newspaper, the pamphlet, the broadside, and the oration are not incidental sites for these poems but are instead crucial to their form and meaning. Poems in ephemeral settings must be understood in relation to the mobility of their formats, which differ widely from the anthology or single-authored book (Whittier wrote poems for fifteen years before he published a book of them under his own name). But the combination of topical subjects and ephemeral formats also meant that republication changed poems’ meanings. When Whittier reprinted “Stanzas for the Times” in May 1837 as the conclusion to a pamphlet of Adams’s speeches against the Pinckney resolution, this new setting made the poem a comment on the gag rule and legitimized it by association with Adams (a juxtaposition made possible by the pamphlet format of Letters from John Quincy Adams to His Constituents). Placing the poem in this context gave it a different meaning, without changing any of its original lines. Another example can highlight the stakes of an antislavery poetics that advocates a politics (both abolition and free speech) in the ser vice of a sectional spirit. “Lines,” Whittier’s response to “the passage of Pinckney’s Resolutions in the House of Representatives, and of Calhoun’s ‘Bill of Abominations’ in the Senate of the United States,” also grounded New England identity in the historical prerogatives of free communication and association.27 Like “Stanzas for the Times,” “Lines” plays with the generic sense of its own portability, which enforces its message of free speech while complicating its coherence as a poem. After publication in June 1836, “Lines” appeared in many formats, under several titles, and in relation to various political and historical contexts, over a period of fifty years.28 The poem internalizes the temporal disjuncture

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between immediate events and long-term purposes by juxtaposing New England’s “ancient freedom” with contingencies of the moment, “Mammon’s lure or Party’s wile” (273). To the “Sons of old freemen,” Whittier asks, “do we but inherit / Their names alone? // Is the old Pilgrim spirit quenched within us . . . To silence now?” Now, when our land to ruin’s brink is verging, In God’s name, let us speak while there is time! Now, when the padlocks for our lips are forging, Silence is crime! (Ibid.) Like “Stanzas for the Times,” “Lines” presents antislavery as a struggle over speech, between people whose identities derive value and meaning from historical associations that must be defended against current exigencies—in order to live up to “the old Pilgrim spirit,” “Our New England” must speak in the face of “Mammon’s lure or Party’s wile.” If one purpose of Calhoun’s act was to assert local control over a national system (the U.S. Post Office), Whittier’s poem draws out a further sectionalist consequence—passage of Calhoun’s act would constitute Southern dominion over ancient New England privileges. In a sign of things to come, a battle over communication and discourse becomes a fight between the irreconcilable prerogatives of different sections. The only alternative to those “padlocks for our lips” is a voice that emerges from the geography of New England—“her wild, green mountains . . . her rough coast, and isles”— and from “her unbought farmer . . . her free laborer . . . From each and all, if God hath not forsaken / Our land” (ibid). Their voice will be borne on Northern winds “Over Potomac’s to St. Mary’s wave,” where “buried Freedom shall awake to hear it.” Oh, let that voice go forth! The bondman sighing By Santee’s wave, in Mississippi’s cane, Shall feel the hope, within his bosom dying, Revive again. Let it go forth! The millions who are gazing Sadly upon us from afar shall smile, And unto God devout thanksgiving raising, Bless us the while.

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Oh for your ancient freedom, pure and holy For the deliverance of a groaning earth, For the wronged captive, bleeding, crushed, and lowly, Let it go forth! (273–74) “Men of the North-land” need only speak to assert their freedom; what they say is less important. This expression of New England identity will necessarily cut against Southern tyranny; in its very form, and regardless of its content, the “People’s voice” will transcend sectional lines and revive the spirits of despairing slaves. Even if “A People’s voice” does not free slaves directly, “Lines” comes as close as any of Whittier’s poems to connecting Northern free speech with the liberation of Southern slaves. “A People’s voice” is thus the matrix of agency and freedom, and it is materialized by the poem, which “speaks out” against slavery, in defiance of Pinckney and Calhoun’s proscriptions (never even mentioned in the poem), by virtue of its public existence. It is the fact of a voice going forth, the movement of the poem in itself, more than any particular message, that accomplishes the political work desired in the poem’s lines. To consider the antislavery poem as a genre mediating politics, debate, and communication requires a different view of antislavery than that offered through the discourse on sentimentality, which is the lens most often used by critics of antebellum antislavery.29 While the lament or complaint was a popu lar genre for capturing the slave’s voice in poems going back at least to Cowper— and while Whittier’s own take on this genre, “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother,” is probably his most recognizable poem today, due to its inclusion in Frederick Douglass’s slave narratives—it is important to note that very few antislavery poems, at least from the 1830s, purported to represent either the experience or the voice of a slave and that very few were avowedly sentimental. Thus, if nineteenth-century sentimental fiction (especially that written to advocate abolition) has often been critiqued for its perceived tendency to privatize political energies and replace public sentiments with personal feelings, then it is also important to note that antislavery verse, at least that which circulated in ephemeral formats, sought to mobilize very different social capacities.30 Indeed, the kind of sociality that Whittier’s abolitionist verse depends upon could only come into being through the circulation of explicitly nonsentimental, nonprivatized, nonlyric poems, making his work rhetorically and conventionally quite different from that of later abolitionist poets like Maria Lowell and Frances Harper.31 Whittier’s work participated in specific debates, but it also performed and promoted the specific media of those

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debates by being generic in the strong sense. The blankness of his antislavery poems enabled them to be transportable and transposable acts of freed speech that could change hearts and minds while also reforming a fallen social world.

Antislavery and a Circle of Friends So far, I have supported my claims about the dynamics of antislavery verse through reading poems in relation to the context that prompted them (controversies over the communication of discourse in the 1830s), the medium (print) and formats (broadside, newspaper, pamphlet) in which they appeared, and the contingencies of circulation that governed the poems’ content and their reception. I have not yet provided much evidence that readers actually dealt with poems in the ways that I claim. In this section, I want to invert the argument and provide some of that missing evidence by looking at a circle of antislavery poets active in Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s, examining in particular how the dynamics of exchange, citation, and recirculation, so crucial to the political efficacy of antislavery verse, also helped structure the shared social world of these “friends of the slave.” This circle of friends (who were, as we will see, also a circle of Friends, that is, Quakers) offers an intimate view of the relationships between poems, politics, and people. To return to a point I raised in the Introduction, examining how these friends used poems, along with reading their poems from the 1830s and 1840s, provides a more personal account of the poetics of antislavery. Whittier moved to Philadelphia in 1838 to edit the Pennsylvania Freeman, a Quaker-affiliated antislavery paper founded by the peripatetic reformer Benjamin Lundy. For the next two years, he lived, worked, and socialized with a circle of young Quaker activists, about fifteen men and women from prominent merchant families in the city: the Lloyds, especially Elizabeth Lloyd; the Nealls; the Nicholsons; the Wendells, cousins of Whittier; the sometime antislavery editors William J. Allinson, Charles C. Burleigh, Benjamin Jones, and Moses and Joseph Cartland (who were also Whittier’s cousins); and Whittier’s sister Elizabeth Hussey Whittier.32 While the history of these friends no doubt sheds light on the intersection between religion and politics, I am interested in them because their politics, religion, and domestic and family lives were intensively and extensively mediated by poems. Indeed, this section will examine this circle as a richly detailed and specific instance of poetry’s socializing power.

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Early in his stay, Whittier wrote, “I am enjoying myself ‘hugely’—in the society of some excellent people— and have had a fine excursion into Delaware, visiting among the ‘Friends’—reading poetry to the girls, and talking about George Fox and Woolman—[and] Thomas Elwood—to the older Friends.”33 The note captures how poetry and religion were enmeshed in the rounds of social life; the meanings of Quaker history grew out of discussion, while the functions of poetry took shape in readings with friends. Whittier’s gendered distinctions (reading poetry to the girls, discussing Quaker Fathers with the elders) are an inaccurate characterization of his friends’ interests, however; as their letters and books attest, the men and women of this group all loved to read and write poems and also discuss Quaker faith and its history. As the best-known author among them, Whittier received special attention, but he was not the center of the circle. For these friends, poetry was a collaborative venture: acts of reading, transcribing, circulating, and giving poems were significant in ways different from writing poems, and acts of writing poems (or, as we shall see, books of poems) always involved more than one person. Rather than viewing Whittier as the point around which a peripheral cast orbited, we can understand this group as the collective source of an antislavery poetics endowed with the political idiom of friendship. Poetry and friendship provided two means for friends of the slave to understand their work in a broader political context. The North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by Her Friends (1840) is a particularly clear testament to these relations. Elizabeth Nicholson, Lloyd, and Whittier edited the book and included poems from at least seven other members of their circle.34 The book’s preface expressed its intent to be “instrumental in awakening the attention of some now indifferent to the wrongs of the slave—in calling forth sympathies now dormant—in exciting inquiry on the great question of Human Rights, and in animating the irresolute and doubting to redoubled diligence.”35 The poems’ affective labor depended on their capacity to spread the word, so that “awakening attention” to the wrongs of the slave dovetailed with “calling forth sympathies” on the slave’s behalf. This was a variation on the reformist rhetoric outlined at the beginning of the chapter: awakening readers to reality empowered them to change it— and, as this chapter claims and this volume evinces, poetry was an ideal vehicle for this project. But more unusual than its presumed impact on an anonymous readership was the book’s intended effect on its contributors, those presumably already at attention and animated to action:

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Amidst the trials and weariness attendant upon their protracted efforts for the promotion of the holy cause of Universal Liberty— separated as they are from the general sympathy of the community, and continually exposed . . . to unceasing prejudice, suspicion, and calumny—the friends of Emancipation have need of all the solace which may be derived from intellectual, as well as moral communion with one another. Placed, in the allotment of Providence, in different sections of our widely extended country . . . our hearts pine for kindred and companionship: we would hold converse with the spirits of our fellow-laborers: the knowledge of the fact that they sympathize with us on a single point, fails to satisfy us; we look eagerly for some token of their peculiar characteristics— some memorial of their individuality as intellectual and moral beings.36 Isolated by prejudice, suspicion, and calumny—cut off from kindred, companionship, and communion—the friends of Emancipation seek the solace of sympathy for themselves as much as for the slave. The book was intended for friends, to let each reader know she or he had friends. The basis of friendship would be poetry, for antislavery commitments were not enough to instill solidarity (“the fact that they sympathize with us on a single point, fails to satisfy us”), and the poems in The North Star materialized political commitments with tokens of fellow activists’ “individuality as intellectual and moral beings.” The North Star was therefore a book of friendship: poems written by the friends of freedom and the slave, for other friends, and put in a format, the giftbook, meant for exchange among friends. This rationale might explain the inclusion of poems that seem otherwise unrelated to antislavery, such as Elizabeth Margaret Chandler’s “To a Friend, on returning a copy of Halleck’s Poems.” I here return, with many thanks, Our Halleck’s tale of Alnwick castle; And if this be a world of banks,— While bards like him so well can weave A song to make us laugh or grieve, Of modern times or ancient wassail,— They must be banks by gushing streams, Bright places for poetic dreams.37

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Chandler inscribes social exchange value into a poem for a friend, which gives thanks for the imaginative resource offered by the friend’s book. Reading works like “Alnwick Castle” allows Chandler to translate “a world of banks” from the divisive world of the Second Bank of the United States (located in Philadelphia) into those “bright places for poetic dreams” where “banks by gushing streams” signal a return to romantic balladry. This imaginative project is a friendly enterprise, dependent on exchanges between poem and reader (reading Halleck’s poem allows Chandler to imagine herself elsewhere), which themselves depend on exchanges from one friend to another (the unnamed friend gave her the poem, and returning it enables her to write her own poem). In this way, Chandler’s poem counters the charge of Halleck’s, which relentlessly disenchants the magical associations of popular balladry. “Alnwick Castle” begins with Halleck’s visit to the “home of the Percy’s high-born race,” where, inspired to a fever pitch of Romantic contemplation, he hears the buildings tell “in melancholy glory, / The legend of the Cheviot day, / The Percy’s proudest border story,” that is, “Chevy Chace,” one of the most famous English ballads and a story that featured the Percy family. Yet though such tales seem to bounce off the Castle’s walls, Halleck concludes by noting, These are not the romantic times So beautiful in Spenser’s rhymes, So dazzling to the dreaming boy: Ours are the days of fact, not fable . . . The Highlander, the bitterest foe To modern laws, has felt their blow, Consented to be taxed, and vote, And put on pantaloons and coat.38 Chandler therefore uses the friendly exchange of Halleck’s collection to reverse the terms of Halleck’s poem and reestablish the affective power of verse. Nowhere, however, does “To a Friend” mention anything about slavery or abolition. Its inclusion in The North Star is especially strange because Chandler (who had died in 1834) was well known in Philadelphia as the author of many poems on abolition, Indian removal, the treatment of prisoners, and other reform topics; moreover, “To a Friend” was not collected with her 1836 Poetical Works.39 So while Nicholson and Lloyd might have chosen it to avoid copyright entanglements, it is also possible they chose “To a Friend” because

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Halleck’s “Alnwick Castle” already held currency in their own circle of friends. For instance, Nicholson wrote her own “Parody on Alnwick Castle” for Whittier. Her poem keeps closer to the structure, if not the tone, of Halleck’s, and concludes, The age of “Broken Banks” is come— We may not march to beat of drum, Or rather Poet’s fables; Our war cry is, repent—repent— Look, look, to dollar and to cent! And, women, learn your Tables! Your “Rights”? I guess you’ve found them out; They are to stir, and look about, And turn to sober prose; And leave all fine-spun theory, And high-born thoughts of Poetry— That every body knows! (ELW, 63–64) Nicholson’s spirited riff on Halleck’s verses targets Whittier’s opposition to including women’s rights in the antislavery platform, which Nicholson, Lloyd, and other friends strongly favored. She facetiously advises women to give up high-born Poetry for sober prose not merely because “the age of ‘Broken Banks’ is come” but because poets like Whittier have proven so disenchantingly pragmatic in their politics. Nicholson’s poem therefore presupposes a readership familiar with the friends’ debates, and indeed it was exchanged only in manuscript among the friends and was never published. Lloyd transcribed the single extant copy of it in an 1841 letter to the Whittiers, though other friends apparently knew it—Nicholson described the parody as one of the “queer things” she wrote to amuse Lloyd and Ann Wendell, though she declared “that nonsensical stuff of mine is all to be given up, for my friends shall not be amused at my expense, as I find it gets beyond our set.”40 The set provided a horizon of legibility; beyond it, the poem might be misread or give the wrong reading of its author (turnabout was fair play; Nicholson had circulated unauthorized copies of Lloyd’s work, and as a result the poem “Jerusalem” was published without Lloyd’s permission). Poems about “Alnwick Castle”—whether or not they said anything about slavery—thus spoke eloquently to the sociability of versification among these friends and therefore

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made good references in a volume like The North Star, which was grounded in the imaginative work of friendship. Nicholson’s parody also commemorated two manuscript books of Whittier’s work that she, Lloyd, and a loose network of collaborators had been compiling since the late 1830s (Nicholson actually copied her parody on the first book’s pasteboard cover, which she removed after having the volume rebound in leather; she then sewed the old cover onto a family account book, hence the poem’s many references to domestic economy).41 An extraordinary degree of care went into the compilation and design of these two books, which are among the most beautiful and meticulous examples of manuscript books from the nineteenth century.42 The frontispiece of Volume 1 is written on embossed heavy paper and includes an astonishing hand-drawn illustration by Lloyd of the White Mountains (perhaps drawn to resemble a woodblock print). Volume 2 features a hand-drawn miniature of Whittier as well as a series of illustrations and incidental pictures that Lloyd produced over several years. In a process that resembles Thomas Shaw’s work on his manuscript collections (although executed far more beautifully), the scribes’ immense labor of the hand replicates many features of printing, including a “copyright” on the front page, black letter font (itself a print remediation of medieval script), errata slips, flourishes to indicate breaks in the text, footnotes, and other intratextual references (unlike Shaw, the friends included neither tables of contents nor indices). The volumes feature a medley of prose extracts, clippings, and poems of all variety of genres, most of which were culled from newspapers, magazines, giftbooks, and other ephemeral and periodical formats. Volume 1, especially, gathered work never collected together in any other location (including Whittier’s later Complete Poems), a point of pride for Nicholson and Lloyd.43 These two books condense a historical record of collaborative devotion to the work of poetry. The volumes also offer an intimate insight into the ways that poems shaped social formations: the books’ travels among the friends, who exchanged them regularly, portray circulation as a set of shared exchanges visible to others besides giver and receiver, while the history of the books’ compilation allows us to see readers’ personal engagements with poems as literary, political, and personal objects. Whittier was central to this circle of poets, but he was not at its center; the books feature his writing, but he did not write them. As Lloyd explained in late 1840,

Figure 10. Elizabeth Nicholson, “Fragments from the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier,” cover page and frontispiece by Elizabeth Lloyd. Note the inscribed copyright date at the bottom of the cover page. Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Journals and Diaries Collection, 975A.

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Figure 11. Elizabeth Lloyd, miniature of John Greenleaf Whittier. This handdrawn author illustration accompanies “Whittier Leaves,” the second volume of Elizabeth Nicholson’s manuscript compilation. Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Journals and Diaries Collection, 975A.

I have an embossed sheet of Bristol Board like the first, for the Frontispiece [of Vol. 2]—now Greenleaf—could thee not write something from which I could devise a picture, different from the first—yet of the same character?—Is there not some cherished spot of N England scenery yet unsung—which could be painted and poetized—something grand—bold—and characteristic—If thee feels like it, do oblige me by writing what would serve for the first piece in the volume—and from which I could paint a frontispiece. (ELW, 56)

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Figure 12. Elizabeth Lloyd, incidental illustration in “Fragments from the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier.” Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Journals and Diaries Collection, 975A.

The functions of authorship are spread around among at least three people here (Nicholson, Lloyd, Whittier), with Whittier belatedly requested to contribute something to a book of “his own” poems. Nicholson expanded this point in a letter to Elizabeth Whittier: Can thee not send me somewhat for my “Whittier Book”? It is hungering & thirsting for something new— and save “Democracy,” kindly sent by G, (which I shall not now stop to praise, particularly as he “had too much before”) and lines wrung from E Howard, I have had positively nothing. Pray what is the “Literature” he slightly alluded to Ann— Oh send me some of that. I should enjoy it all the more, if he did not want me to have it.44 The passage illuminates the crisscrossing discussions and exchanges that the Whittier books materialized: poems circling back and forth, in letters or

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Figure 13. “The White Mountains,” detail from “Fragments from the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier.” Note the handwritten black letter font, itself a print remediation of medieval script. Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Journals and Diaries Collection, 975A.

by word of mouth, among friends always eager to join others’ conversations. In a phrase that will resonate in the next chapter, Lloyd referred to all this activity as a “contraband trade in poetry” (ELW, 64). This contraband trade took on many forms. In some instances, publications became the literal basis for messages by hand. Whittier wrote one letter to Lloyd on the verso of a leaflet edition of his poem “To the Memory of Daniel Wheeler,” written to commemorate a Quaker activist who was a close family friend of the Lloyds; he apologized for “sending thee a duplicate of my poetry, as I do not happen at this moment to have any other sheet than this to write upon” (ELW, 17). If abundance in this instance prompted a use for the poem unrelated to reading it, in other cases the scarcity of texts provoked an opposite desire. Whittier regularly asked friends to send him copies of his own work: on one occasion, he thanked Elizabeth Neall for supplying an illustrated version of his poem “Moll Pitcher,” noting, “My sister wishes me to say that she is greatly obliged to thee for so beautiful a copy of some of her brother’s rhymes.”45 The “contraband trade in poetry” moved in so many directions that Whittier was just as

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Figure 14. Errata slip tipped in “Fragments from the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier.” Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Journals and Diaries Collection, 975A.

often the correspondent seeking his verses as he was the poet writing them down for others. Authorial agency was diff used so thoroughly among so many that it cannot function as the principle of thrift famously defined by Michel Foucault. If anything, Whittier’s name proliferated heterogeneous uses for the poems written under them, as Marisa Galvez has argued about manuscript songbooks in a different context.46 So many friends had access to Whittier poems (whether in print or manuscript) that Nicholson could get them into her book whether Whittier liked it or not. The books had such a life, however, that Whittier conceded to many new contributions, intended only for them. About “The Cypress-Tree of Ceylon,” which he included in a letter to Nicholson, Whittier added, “I transcribe it for thee, earnestly begging thee to keep it by all means, from the printers. Don’t let it be published. It may fill a page in thy Book.”47 Scribal circulation, from Whittier’s letter to Nicholson’s book, exceeds

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Figure 15. “The World’s Convention,” detail from “Fragments from the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier.” Note the features of this inscription, including the illustration, flourishes, and bold type, handwritten to resemble a printed broadside of the poem. Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Journals and Diaries Collection, 975A.

print, detaching authorship from publication and the singularity of the particular writer. As the volume grew, even more friends participated in its construction: “Sarah Lloyd has painted ‘The Haverhill Farm’ beautifully in my book, & I have copied ‘Raphael’ right after—is not that nicely?”48 The collective authorship and communal exchanges of the Whittier books intensified the connections among contributors; as Nicholson wrote to Elizabeth Whittier, “When I read thy marked passages over, copied in my common-place book, thee is present with me.”49 The pathways of this volume trace the contours of a social enterprise, where poems accrue meaning in excess of their content,

Figure 16. Sarah Lloyd, “The birth place of J. G. Whittier.” Illustration in “Whittier Leaves.” Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Journals and Diaries Collection, 975A.

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through their passage among many hands. The books traveled widely— at least as far as New Hampshire on one occasion— and Nicholson was often unsure where they were: “I have concluded that [Benjamin Jones] borrowed the W. Book, to pay off his outstanding poetical debts. I met a bride in a large company, the other eve (& who I had never before seen, or heard of ) who entertained me with an account of a beautiful book which Ben had lent her! it was that same.”50 Poems move in multiple directions, not simply from Whittier outward to a peripheral circle, but just as often along other arcs and tangents. Lending the books paid off poetical debts, and an entertaining description of them became a form of sociable credit with a force of its own. Jones could pay his debt forward through the network, from one recipient to another, with accounts of the books radiating away from the books themselves, until Nicholson has an uncanny encounter with her own work in the experience of a stranger.51 Years later, the Whittier books were still in trade; in 1849, Nicholson told Elizabeth Whittier, “Thee should see those books. Hannah Lloyd declares the Sanitary Com. ought to take them under notice, and I tell her that’s Fame, such fame as I’m inclined to think wouldn’t soil our poems.”52 As Leah Price has argued, the abstraction of “reading” as exclusively a mental process belies the sheer messiness of human handling: reading is often unkind to books, and those books most heavily read tend to be least well preserved (and, hence, most invisible to literary history).53 A history of reading exists in traces, the smudges and stains hands leave behind; bookish materiality (that part fit for a Sanitary Commission) registers the friends’ attention to poetry in its social dynamics. Marked so much over so long, the Whittier books record a legacy of fame that, even if dirty, could never sully the poems. A poem’s social history is a product of what it is—transcendent linguistic text and immanent material thing— and what it does, the host of uses and purposes that this book seeks to describe and explain. Friends registered their affection for verse by a desire to know it, a desire to have it, and a desire to pass it along: describing an evening of poetry and talk, William J. Allinson wrote, “If thou could have been E. L.’s eyes glow and glisten as she heard ‘what the Quaker said to the Transcendentalist’ [included in Vol. 2] thou wouldst have thought the fire wast applicable to better purposes than lighting cigars. Every shade of thought in that poem was appreciated. So be thankful that I kept thee awake to copy it & tell Elizabeth of thy wickedness in seeking to abstract my moss from stones.”54 Nicholson thanked Whittier for a copy of his poem “In Remembrance of Joseph Sturge,” writing “I longed for one all

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to myself—they are not to be had here. . . . I especially enjoyed lending it to such as Charles Yarnall.”55 Or, as she elsewhere described, “I will not say how exquisitely we have enjoyed G’s late productions, but only that Anna says ‘our house is perfect hotel of people coming for them.’ She proposes a sign hung out ‘What the Quaker said &c sold loaned here.’ . . . Thank G for ‘Follen’— not but what I knew it all by heart then, but it was most opportunely sent for me to supply one who wanted it me to copy it. . . . John Cox of Bur. [Burlington, New Jersey] sent for it. Ben Jones was here & . . . bro’t a talisman by which to obtain it, in the shape of G’s letter to the Carolinian lady.”56 The intimacy of knowing by heart makes a strange complement to the image of a shop or hotel where poems—or, rather, copies of poems—could be sold, loaned, or traded to an indefinite assortment of people, but the mixed register of this description aptly characterizes the ways that exchanges of poems literally brought people together. Collecting, transcribing, giving, and exchanging poems constitute forms of verse making that are parallel to writing and creative originality but not subordinate to these. As Elizabeth Neall commented, The verses thee was so good as to write I had never seen, and should like vastly to get the whole of them. I never have been as fortunate as . . . my friends who have here & there and everywhere very many of thy ‘eff usions’—which to thy discredit be it said and obstinancy too—thee wont get together. . . . Mary was displaying a Com. Place Book nearly filled with thy rhymes—which she had with Ben’s assistance hunted up.”57 Ann Wendell wrote with “a fierce resolution that to-morrow’s mail shall bear thee a letter and I have got the largest sheet of paper I could find coarse & crumpled tho’ it be so that if my strength and patience do not fail I can copy some poetry for thee & Lizzy for I have no less than three times had a package of poetry & letters for both.”58 Lloyd promised Whittier “a packet of new poetry” by Nicholson and herself, which Whittier later read with “unalloyed delight” (ELW, 31, 34). Nicholson wrote to Elizabeth Whittier, “W.J.A. [Allinson] would like me to copy & send you his lines to cousin M L Newbold . . . But I shall not send such a large coarse sheet on my own account as I am famous for mean coarse paper already, but will copy it for Ann to send.”59 These multidirectional exchanges of poems (in almost all cases written by others) secured the social group both by affiliating senders and recipients and

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by establishing relationships among the politically and poetically likeminded. Open exchange and good fellowship went together, as Thomas S. Cavender explained in his account of a recent antislavery meeting: “Every Subject connected with Anti Slavery— except Political Action—was discussed; the fullest freedom of debate was allowed— and yet, throughout the whole time, not one Sentence, not one Word, as far as I can remember, was uttered to destroy the harmony or good feeling of the Meeting.” He then switched topics to a different interest that he and Whittier shared. “I’ll send thee one or two of my last compositions.” I should be glad to make some improvement in my writing, if it were only to show I am grateful for the advice and encouragement thee gave me, when I first took up the pen. Oh! The “Sins of my luckless boyhood”! And now, my dear friend, will thee not send me a line . . . as well as what Poetry thee is writing.60 Lines of verse are lines of communication that link one friend to another. Yet Cavender’s quotation also demonstrates that he had read the Whittier manuscript books. Toward the end of Volume 1, Whittier inscribed a poem about the book, which has never been published in any collection of his work since. This poem describes Whittier’s ambivalent feelings of pride and regret over the poems Nicholson and Lloyd had collected; perusing this volume of his own work in the hands of others allowed Whittier to revise (at least imaginatively) the narratives of his life and career to that point. Sins of my luckless boyhood! Ghosts of rhyme! Vain dreams and follies of my early time! Fruits of brief respites from the student’s lore, Or conned at intervals of labor oer . . . The idle dreams of the enthusiast boy— Imagination’s sorrow and its joy— Woe upon paper—misery in reams— Distress in Albums— and Despair in dreams— The dim world of the Ideal— all the vain And shadowy architecture of my brain And thou, whose partial hands hath kindly penned These frail and wayside offerings of a friend . . . Thou unto whom is given that gift of mind

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Figure 17. Detail from “Sins of My Luckless Boyhood,” manuscript poem inscribed in “Fragments from the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier.” Note the pencil instruction in Whittier’s hand, “(not to be copied).” Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Journals and Diaries Collection, 975A.

Which, pure itself, delights still to find Beauty in all things—. . . assigns to make known Anothers gifts, while careless of thine own; Forgive me, if in gazing coolly now With Manhoods cautious eye, and thought-worn brow, Even with a grateful sense of secret gladness There blends the shadow of regretful sadness.61 In two places by this poem, Whittier penciled a request that the poem not be published or copied.62 Cavender’s citation therefore identifies Cavender and Whittier in several ways. He quotes the line to indicate that they shared a similar kind of youth, spent without advantages of education,

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but marked by the desire for literary improvement; internalizing Whittier’s poem allows Cavender to express his own experience. But by citing a poem that existed only in one place— and which Whittier had proscribed from further reproduction— Cavender also identifies himself as a member of the poetic circle, with privileged access to work otherwise unavailable to those beyond the set. The line thus affiliates the two men through a shared relation to a book of friends.

Abolitionist Minstrelsy “Sins of my luckless boyhood” demonstrates Whittier’s growing sense of anxiety about poems that offered a too-easily-legible record of the writer’s life and past— exactly the use made of it by Cavender. Whittier’s fondness for the “partial hands” dedicated to inscribing his work belies his fear that books like these kept in circulation “Woe upon paper—misery in reams—/ Distress in Albums”—sentiments of spurious value or authenticity, which, even when read for the right reasons, had been written for the wrong ones. Whittier may have felt “regretful sadness” upon reviewing the work collected in the manuscripts, but the ambivalence expressed in the poem also reflects on seeing that work in circulation (thus the double proscription against copying or printing the new poem). Otherwise abstract “Lines” become meaningful when circuited through the newspaper or the coterie, which transform “Ghosts of rhyme” into the “wayside offerings of a friend.” But such circulation also decenters authorship from authors, so that writers cannot control the proliferating representations of their work, any more than they can control who reads their books— especially when the books are not really “theirs.” Whittier’s discomfort with the collection also may have derived from the fact that relatively few of the poems in it were antislavery. The volumes record aspects of his career (in fact, the majority of it) not oriented to the politics for which he was best known at the time; the Whittier books of Nicholson and Lloyd therefore attest to an author’s limited ability to define the terms of authorship in a system of mass, decentralized circulation—the same system that gave antislavery its political purchase in the 1830s. Thus, if the exchange of poems helped to realize the politics of antislavery, and if the exchange value of poems depended on their being interchangeable, the anxiety expressed in “Sins of my luckless boyhood,” which had been inscribed to authorize the ongoing transfer of poems from one friend to another, indicated that copying

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too many poems too easily held certain hazards. As other examples demonstrate, copying could easily trend into forgery, meaning could dissipate with the diffusion of authorship, and compulsive repetition could produce new possibilities for deviant identifications. “My counterfeit passed for the sterling coin of one Whittier,” Nicholson gleefully reported on one occasion. A friend “went home copied it into a nice book, in his best round hand, and not till he had reached the last line did he discover my Slambang.”63 The excited zeal with which Nicholson imagines her counterfeit spoiling a nice book indicates the pleasures made available when imitation becomes mimicry. The problem here is not so much the counterfeit, or the confusion over placing original and imitation, but instead that the mimicry reveals how the systems of exchange operative in this environment made all poems potential mimics. Even among friends, mimicry complicates intimacy. Poems helped the members of the Philadelphia circle to understand themselves socially, but that does not mean that they always understood where a poem was coming from or where it would be going. One evening in 1840, some of the Philadelphia friends gathered to discuss a poem making the rounds of their circle. Who wrote the “Echo to the World’s Convention”? According to Ann Wendell, “Some said John wrote it others said no” even John Cox & Dr Parrish received the impression from some source that it was thine—E Lloyd said that [hers] was beside it like the poetry of a lady’s nag beside the prancing of a war horse still she thought if it was thine thou had not reached thy own height, Wm J A wrote an interesting note to E L— criticising some parts but was unwilling to think it thine at first I unhestitatingly said it could not be thine but when nothing else of thine appeared in the Freeman as thou said thou had written something I began to think it possible, when WJA discovered the author called at I Lloyds store to write the following lines to Elisabeth[:] I take up my pencil to tell thee in haste That I’ve found out the author of Echo at last* That the chorded shell of the lord is unbroken And “Echo” alone in this instant has spoken That in spite of thy figure of “war horses prancing” Twas only the shadow we yet have seen dancing This echoing shadow I know thou will ken

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Could ever the Amesbury minstrel have BEN *Thou knows perhaps that B Jones is called thy Echo To be B Jones’ it is beautiful and spirited but the last part is talk—.64 The “Echo to the World’s Convention” was a response to Whittier’s poem “The World’s Convention,” which was itself written in response to the 1840 humanitarian conference in London, which had produced repeated calls for— and responses to—the versified participation of a global network of antislavery poets. Th roughout the spring and summer of that year, antislavery newspapers printed verses on the topic of responding in verse to the call of the convention; it is accurate in more than one sense to describe all this work as “conventional.” So many reverberating echoes made it difficult to distinguish individual voices, and so it was fitting that Benjamin Jones, known among his friends as “Whittier’s Echo,” penned the “Echo” to Whittier’s poem written in response to a call for verse on the convention. While William J. Allinson’s poem of revelation revels in the humor of the incident, the friends’ spirited debate over authorship and their near-universal failure to distinguish voice from echo indicate possible misgivings about the abundance of verses among them: the “ ‘Echo’ alone in this instant has spoken,” indeed. Antislavery poetry, I am arguing, was grounded politically by the ease with which authors could borrow airs, meters, or stanza forms from recognizable sources in order to adapt familiar poems and songs for new times and circumstances: a politics of free speech, association, and exchange relied upon a poetics of convention defined by repetition and reproduction. Mimicry, however, is an ambivalent way to identify with something or someone, because it estranges and makes strange both halves of the relation, rendering potentially unrecognizable both the mimic and the mimicked.65 As Carolyn Williams has argued, parody reverses the usual temporality of imitation, so that the original work becomes transformed by its parody.66 Believing the “Echo to the World’s Convention” to have been Whittier’s, Elizabeth Lloyd dismissed her own parody as the “poetry of a lady’s nag beside the prancing of a war horse,” but as Allinson revealed, “in spite of thy figure of ‘war horses prancing’ / Twas only the shadow we yet have seen dancing”: the din of “echoing shadows” all but silenced originality as a criterion of authorship. Given the general anxiety about fraudulence that Lara Langer Cohen has identified with antebellum antislavery (especially in light of Whittier’s involvement with James Williams’s discredited 1838 slave narrative), the waning of authenticity amid the play of

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shadows had some uncomfortable implications.67 A week after Jones’s echoship had been safely revealed and each author (momentarily) reconnected with his poem, Whittier joked about the predicaments facing the abolitionist poet in a verse culture that so closely affiliated antislavery, poetry, and mimicry: Pray does Benj Jones seriously intend to persevere in his design of getting up another anti-slavery Book? The fates order it otherwise!—There have been some half dozen imitations of our North Star already— a sort of wooden nutmeg one in Connecticut— one or two in Boston— and of late a scare crow one in Rhode Island. The thing is getting to be sadly overdone. Everybody rhymes for them— as if an abolitionist must be ex-officio a rhymer, as one of the Shaking Fraternity must be a dancer,— a sort of philanthropic Della Cruscan style in which “slavery’s night” jingles with “Truth & Right”— and “down-trodden slave” treads upon “Freedoms grave,” and such unlucky wights as myself are doomed to see their own ideas dressed up in every variety of costume. . . . One hates to be haunted with caricatures, parodies, imitations—to see one’s own ideas hunted down by one of these merciless Djezza Pachas in literature, maltreating & disguising them to suit his purposes, & then sending them into the world limping, eyeless, tongueless. (ELW, 36–37) Whittier’s not-so-ironic lament for “unlucky wights as myself ” marks a line where the compulsive imitation at the center of antislavery poetics (all those wooden nutmegs and scarecrow books, with their jingling rhymes and treading measures) acquires a cutting racial edge. Note the (perhaps inadvertent) pun on the word “wights”: Whittier’s anxiety about poetic imitation is also an anxiety about racial imitation, so that seeing one’s ideas “dressed up in every variety of costume” is like seeing them on the minstrel stage, which also relies heavily on “caricatures, parodies, imitations.”68 More darkly, his anticipation of bad poems sent “into the world limping, eyeless, tongueless” conjures grim images of the antiblack violence documented in Theodore Weld’s and Sarah and Angelina Grimké’s American Slavery as It Is (1839). In this minstrel vision, antislavery poetry becomes an engine for violent circulation; taking the byword for Orientalist cruelty, poems are hunted down by “merciless Djezza Pachas in literature,” maltreated, disguised in some convenient, threadbare costume, and forced back out into the world, so that the promiscuous

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reproduction of poems overwhelms all efforts to distinguish original from imitation, good from bad, black from white. As an 1845 satire in the Knickerbocker put it, every time a “negro minstrel” living “in the swamps of Carolina” composed a new song, “it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended, (that is, almost spoilt) printed, and then set upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, or perhaps the world.”69 Minstrelsy meant a boundless replication that crossed every imaginable line. To complicate matters, Whittier was considered abolition’s foremost minstrel, whose “harp of liberty was never hung up,” as one admirer put it, and the publisher Samuel Shipley later approached Nicholson about creating a collection of Quaker Minstrelsy out of her manuscript books.70 The iconography of minstrelsy worked ambivalently within antebellum reform culture, offering both a politics of freedom and an imagined culture of slavery, a progressive vision of liberated society and the regressive racism of blackface. Many critics of Atlantic antislavery have noted the fertile cross-pollination between abolition and blackface minstrelsy, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which borrowed rhetoric and scenarios from Jim Crow (in the opening chapter, Harry performs a Jim Crow routine for Mr. Shelby), and then was adapted into a hugely popular drama in the minstrel theater.71 This association has almost always been read negatively. But rather than critique the relation, I want to conclude this chapter by highlighting how in the 1840s, the outrageous mimicry that minstrelsy elicited from its audiences opened up possibilities for new forms of black poetry. Whether or not the minstrel wore blackface, minstrelsy called forth a structure of relations characterized by performative iterations and imitations. Mimicking poems was a means for mimicking people, and in the song culture of antislavery, this alignment between genres and persons created openings for what would become African American poetics (a point Chapter 6 will elaborate). In his song collection The Liberty Minstrel (1845), George W. Clark observed that “during the night, the streets of [the] cities . . . are filled with all sorts of minstrelsy” and that “sentiments of love, of sympathy, of justice and humanity, so beautifully expressed in poetic measure, [and] embalmed in sweet music” would enable all “who have hearts to feel, and tongues to move, [to] sing of the wrongs of slavery, and the blessings of liberty, until every human being shall recognize in his fellow an equal.”72 In contrast to the abolitionist verse of Whittier (although, ironically, it opens with Whittier’s “Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother”), Clark’s collection favored sentimental laments, many written in the voices of various slave characters—“The Bereaved Father,”

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“The Slave Girl Mourning Her Father,” “The Fugitive Slave,” “The Slave’s Lamentation,” and so on. Performing these pieces required users of the songbook to assume the voice or the role of the enslaved character, which turned the book into a compilation of antislavery minstrelsy.73 Song-mediated mimicry created the possibility for identification, according to Clark: working from the tongue through to the heart, the performance of antislavery songs would enable people to recognize their likeness to each other. The Liberty Minstrel found at least one sympathetic listener in William Wells Brown, whose first published book, The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848), explicitly imitated and extended the work of the earlier collection. Brown’s collection, however, ranged more widely across various kinds of mimicked relations. Songs that took the perspective or voice of slaves regularly used airs and melodies from well-known Scottish or Irish sentimental pieces. “The Bereaved Mother,” for instance, is sung to the air of “Kathleen O’Moore,” while “The Blind Slave Boy” adopts the air of “Sweet Afton.” In other songs, Brown invokes Scottish minstrelsy through the work of Robert Burns (“Auld Lang Syne,” “Scots wha hae,” etc.), as in “The Slave’s a Man, for A’ That”: Though stripped of all the dearest rights Which nature claims and a’ that, There’s that which in the slave unites To make the man for a’ that. For a’ that and a’ that, Though dark his skin, and a’ that, We cannot rob him of his kind, The slave’s a man, for a’ that.74 Brown’s lines adapt the Scots refrain of Burns (also Frederick Douglass’s favorite poet) to collapse the false distinction between slave and man. Though dark of skin and stripped of rights, the slave cannot be dis-identified from the man. Compare Burns: Is there, for honest Poverty, That hings his head, and a’ that; The coward-slave, we pass him by, We dare be poor for a’ that! For a’ that, and a’ that,

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Our toils obscure, and a’ that; The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.75 Burns’s defiance of the “coward-slave” who defers to the arbitrary stamp of hierarchy asserts a radical equality in which “the man’s the gowd for a’ that . . . A man’s a man for a’ that.” The dis-identification between cowardslave and man in Burns’s song offers Brown the estrangement necessary to defy the false hierarchy of slavery: altering Burns’s most famous line to read “the slave’s a man, for a’ that,” Brown makes black skin another form of spurious distinction. Th is kind of Scots minstrelsy (blackface in reverse) produces a mimicry that identifies man and slave. Elsewhere, however, Brown conscripts popular blackface minstrel tunes (“Dan Tucker,” “Resin the Bow”) to the work of antislavery, as in “The North Star,” which sets the air of “Oh! Susannah” to voice the runaway slave’s escape: “Oh! Star of Freedom, /’Tis the star for me; /’Twill lead me off to Canada, / There I will be free.”76 An even more startling example comes in “A Song for Freedom”: Come all ye bondmen far and near, Let’s put a song in massa’s ear, It is a song for our poor race, Who’re whipped and trampled with disgrace. . . . They take our wives, insult and mock, And sell our children on the block, Then choke us if we say a word, And say that “niggers” shan’t be heard.77 Sung to the tune of “Dandy Jim,” “A Song for Freedom” puts the slave’s account through a minstrel melody, doubling down on the fantasy of slave culture encoded into blackface performance. Derisively ventriloquizing nationalist pieties about freedom (the chorus goes: “My old massa tells me O / This is a land of freedom O; / Let’s look about and see if ’t is / Just as massa tells me O”) through the minstrel voice evoked by the tune, Brown’s song disenchants the language and rhetoric surrounding slavery.78 Whoever the audience for this song might have been, they would not likely have been slaves themselves. Therefore, the imposture of the performance (singers assuming the voices of slaves) calls out the imposture of proslavery arguments about

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contented slaves. Mimicry allows “slaves” to be heard through the medium of antislavery poetry’s (and also blackface minstrelsy’s) mostly white, Northern audience, making “A Song for Freedom” an abolitionist minstrel song that uses the conventions of racial performance to “put a song in massa’s ear,” an act otherwise unavailable to voices choked off “if we say a word.” The imitative repetitions and masquerade that structured abolitionist poetry thus created an alienated figure of the performing slave and an alienated form of slave song making, open to all and therefore belonging to none. Like the fugitive slave (as Brown announced himself to be on the title page to The Anti-Slavery Harp), this song making was a form of property that disavowed ownership. Available temporarily and only through gestures of mimicry, poems in this mode allowed otherwise foreclosed utterances to come into expression. As a resource that would prove crucial to the articulation of ideological crisis, this kind of “contraband trade in poetry” will be the next chapter’s subject.

Chapter 3

Contraband Songs

The Properties of Songs “I wish, dear Lissie, thee could have heard the music we had in our kitchen . . . from our boy ‘John,’ ” Mary Carter wrote to Elizabeth Whittier in February 1864. Carter was a Gideonite who had volunteered in 1863 to work with former slaves in Norfolk, Virginia, after the city’s surrender to the Union Army. Carter’s letters to the Whittiers detailed the daily tedium and occasional terrors of life near an army encampment, while her accounts of the refugee slaves self-consciously created an eyewitness record for her interested Massachusetts friends. Singing slaves, like those Carter carefully transcribed, appeared everywhere in Gideonite accounts. If the figure of the fugitive slave had managed concepts of alienated property and alienated song making in the discourse of antebellum antislavery, as Chapter 2 concluded, this rhetorical device became even more ideologically charged during the Civil War, when the “contraband slave” stepped into national debates as a site to manage the incoherence of the war. Carter’s letter introduced a contest between songs and poems, on the one hand, and inchoate concepts of race, authenticity, and appropriation, on the other. Her descriptions narrated a story for the Whittiers about the circulation of songs and the disarticulation of racial difference: Mrs Hart and some of the darkies joined with [John] in the chorus— and it sounded very well. I took my pen and wrote down what I could understand of it. The song was sentimental, thus— Don’t you see the little turtle dove Flying from pine to pine

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Lamenting for its own true love As I have done for mine? Chorus But you cant come dissemble [?] over me, young man— You cant come dissemble over me But you cant come dissemble over me, Young man For my true love, he is gone to the sea And who will shoe your little feet And who will glove your hands And who will kiss yr red rosy lips While yr love is in foreign lands? My father will shoe my little feet And my mother will glove my hands My sister will kiss my red rosy lips While my love is in foreign lands. Mrs Hart has a fine voice and she was quite taken with the musical vein of this. Then [John] gave us one of the patriotic songs his regiment improvised: Hussa, hussa for our nation so true We’ll stand by our color, the red, white and blue. If it hadn’t been for McDowell,’tis all we could do We’d have marched into Richmond, with the red white & blue Hussa, hussa &c— The secesh they writing & working gainst the North Abe Lincoln sent a force down to give them a heavy loss. Hussa hussa &c At the battle of Mannassas the Secesh we met And gave them such a licking they never will forget. Hussa &c.1 Carter’s story reverses the trajectory described at the end of Chapter 2: instead of imagining slave songs that could be smuggled back and forth across lines geographic and racial (putting “a song in massa’s ear” via the melody of a minstrel tune), this anecdote details how sentimental ditties and

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patriotic anthems worked their way into the army regiments and refugee encampments of former slaves. Her description sometimes resembles the blackface theater (the scene of “Mrs Hart and some of the darkies” singing in the kitchen, for example), but it also exemplifies how musical appropriation dovetails onto other forms of appropriation, symbolic or otherwise. In this case, the patriotic song improvised by John’s regiment seems to echo the improvisational patriotism that black military ser vice enacted so controversially. These fleeting instances of song making are both utterly outside the war’s purview—that sentimental song about “my love in foreign lands” seems very far afield— and also manifestly central to it. How did songs mediate the strange encounters and strong shocks of the war? In what ways did the circulation of songs and poems fold into other questions the war raised about circulation and property? Edmund Wilson memorably dismissed the war’s poetry (and most of the rest of its literature) as mere “patriotic journalism,” and subsequent cultural, intellectual, and literary histories of the war have tended to give short shrift to wartime poems and song, even while acknowledging their pervasive popularity, and even though anthologies of Civil War poems have been in print since the war years themselves.2 The scene in Mary Carter’s kitchen (or the account by N. G. Awtell that I narrated in the Introduction) might give some sense as to why: the forms of popular, sometimes sentimental engagement that wartime verse cultivated also justified its exclusion from serious critical inquiry in the twentieth century.3 As a result, war-era poems have usually featured in literary analysis only to fill out the stories of already canonical authors like Whitman, Dickinson, or Melville, whose wartime works are most often read to reveal the sort of modernist detachment taken as a characteristic of sophisticated poetry.4 But to return to one of this book’s central premises, complex social relations inhere in poems even when they seem to offer little reward for close reading or critical interpretation. Such poems can illuminate historical connections among people, but only if they are understood to have functions and purposes other than reading. The sociality of poems beyond reading— their history outside of literature—became especially salient during the Civil War.5 Whatever the degree to which war-era poems responded to or depicted the war, they always also participated in it. This chapter will focus on the participatory, material history of poems and songs in the war years: their means of circulating, their work as mediations of the conflict and its debates, and the potent sense (felt in readers, institutions, and texts) that songs and poems were both the origins

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and the objects of belonging, new forms of property that could materialize new forms of sociality and social agency, amid a war that was fundamentally a contest over property and belonging. The conventional power of mid-century songs to link people into affective folds of belonging is a property folded into their lives as material objects; from an economic standpoint, during the midnineteenth century, certain songs became very valuable properties indeed. Ironically, only in the decade between 1855 and 1865 did the publishing industry develop the capacities to organize a national book market, and the broadside song sheet was its premier commodity.6 Considered as a physical object, a Civil War song sheet was the output of a capitalized, industrialized, and vertically integrated business, in which, for the first time, the sale of a song in hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies was both possible and also a key advertisement for continued sales. Mass, nationwide circulation became encoded into the generic meaning of songs as communal property. However, the song-as-commodity opens up deeper questions about belonging. To whom did songs belong? As the example that opened this chapter attests, wartime poems could foster complex sets of possessive relations: whose songs were those that Carter overheard and wrote down? The traditional economy of slavery would dictate that slaves’ labor was fully alienated: nothing they created belonged to them. While the war certainly challenged this principle, it was still very much in debate even after 1863—hence the in-between designation of freed slaves as “contraband of war,” which I will discuss below. In the particular case Carter detailed, these songs seemed to come from somewhere else and belong to no one in particular. They certainly do not sound like traditional “slave songs” as those came to be defined after the war. Popular war songs raised similar questions on a broader scale: in the context of a conflict that was both intra- and international, which songs belonged to which people? This question applied famously to “Dixie,” a northern, urban minstrel song (allegedly a favorite of Abraham Lincoln’s) claimed as the Confederate national anthem and redeemed after Appomattox for Yankee enjoyment once again.7 But it applied to many other songs and tunes, which crisscrossed the porous borders between Union and Confederacy. Yet while people collectively claimed songs with new intensity during the war years, belonging worked in two directions: new genres of songs suddenly possessed people. This is especially true of the slave songs that burst into public view shortly after the onset of fighting and prompted a new format for imagining national and racial traditions, as Chapter 6 will argue. But it is also true for the genre of the “popular ballad,” which has longstanding historical relations to civil warfare

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and reconstruction, as Chapter 4 will argue. War songs, slave songs, and popular ballads emerged from the war as privileged forms for a new concept of “the people,” in which social affiliation would be secured by the fantasy of an indexical bond to certain cultural genres.8 This would indicate a new phase in the social lives of poems: in the second half of the nineteenth century, abstractions of genre, such as “poetry,” would underwrite abstractions of personhood. Property, possession, personhood, belonging—this chapter argues that these resonances attached to particular kinds of songs and poems in the crisis conditions of the 1860s. At the center of my discussion is a genre new to the war years, the “contraband song,” a song put in (or taken from) the mouths of “the contrabands,” that is, slaves who sought refuge with the Union Army. The contraband song, I argue, is an important genre for conceptualizing the import of poems in the war. As the chapter will show, songs in the war years inculcated belonging and identification through performative dislocations from the scenes of their imagined origin. Carter’s account shows this process, since it narrates both a source for the two songs (the scene of their production) and also a sense that they have been displaced from somewhere else, like the soldiers each song describes. Songs, I argue, accrued value by moving, in the same moment that the valuation of slaves—whether or not they were property— became a question because of their movements off of plantations and into military camps. In the next section, I will discuss the ideological history of contraband as a concept and “the contraband” as a figure, but first let me outline the historical circumstances from which the contraband song emerged. This history began in November 1861, when the U.S. Navy seized the harbor at Port Royal, South Carolina, thereby taking control of the Sea Islands, a series of barrier islands on the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. The area had been a hotbed of secessionism since the 1830s and was home to some of the South’s wealthiest families, who hastily abandoned their plantations in advance of the invasion, leaving behind a bumper crop of cotton and as many as ten thousand slaves. Following a practice established by Gen. Benjamin F. Butler at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, the military declared these slaves “contraband of war.” In early 1862, antislavery and evangelical organizations in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia set up missions to educate and proselytize the former slaves, while the federal government established the first wartime reconstruction bureau to manage their labor. Soon hundreds of military personnel, government agents, abolitionists, educators, and missionaries descended upon the region,

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inaugurating what one historian has called a “rehearsal for Reconstruction.”9 These Northerners were mostly people like Mary Carter, white, middle class, and evangelical. They soon began publishing reports on all aspects of the Sea Islands in a wide range of newspapers and magazines. The topic of greatest interest, however, was “the contrabands,” and firsthand accounts of them soon became a staple of the Northern press. From the outset, the contraband was a figure of controversy. The military’s designation of refugee slaves as “contraband of war” sidestepped any decision on their ultimate status. Although the Confiscation Act of 1861 ensured that Confederate slave owners could not reclaim escaped or abandoned slaves, President Lincoln also countermanded the emancipation order of Gen. John C. Fremont, who in 1861 had freed slaves in Missouri. The refusal to decide on the status of refugee slaves marked a broader refusal to locate slavery within the ideological contest of the war, and the debate on the “contraband question” closely linked the refugees to questions about the war’s intentions, conduct, and possible consequences.10 Alice Fahs may be correct that “the term ‘contraband’ caught on rapidly precisely because it provided a means for Northerners to continue thinking of escaped slaves as property, without disturbing antebellum racist preconceptions,” but the sort of property denoted by the term could not lawfully be owned or exchanged.11 Neither a slave nor a free person, the contraband represented a new kind of subject brought into being by the war and as such became a key site to interrogate the war’s contradictory meanings. The contraband was also new to the repertoire of representations that had shaped prevailing ideas about race and slavery in the antebellum North (like blackface minstrelsy and abolitionist sentimentality), and this figure was articulated at first through the reports and essays emerging from the wartime reconstruction departments. The shock of material coming from Port Royal, Fortress Monroe, and other frontlines sought to negotiate the alienating experience of contact through intimate descriptions of the personalities, customs, religion, language, culture—and, often, the “voice”— of the former slaves. This contact literature frequently emphasized the refugees’ music and song making as the most natural and expressive indices of slave culture. Jon Cruz and Ronald Radano have vividly described how the song-making practices of slaves entered into a post-Romantic system of thought in Northern liberal culture, and the evangelical Protestantism that informed much of the Port Royal experiment led many Gideonites to hear the contrabands’ songs as testimony to their humanity and Christian spirit.12 However, the status of being

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“contraband” also equated these former slaves with other things seized from the Confederacy, like weapons and cotton, and thus constrained the dimensions of their humanity.13 The ideological figure of the contraband, imagined to have limited capacity for insight and interiority and carrying connotations of seized or illicit material, defined the “songs of the contrabands” as detachable and reusable commodities, available and amenable to the needs and desires of their users. Because no one could rightfully own a contraband song, anyone could claim it, and by the war’s end, contraband songs moved across genres, media, and per formance sites in a complex blend of meanings and intentions that transmitted controversial claims about slavery, property, nationality, and the war. Since a slave’s capacity for subjectivity was itself a contested point during this time, the genre exploited the flatness of its imagined speaker to sing many different tunes to many different audiences under the cover of a figure whose status was already central to public debates about the war’s purpose. And since a slave became contraband by crossing over from the Confederacy to the Union, cross-sectional and cross-racial engagements—the crux of many battles over the meaning of the war—were associated with the genre from the outset. Thus, while the term “contraband song” refers specifically to songs in the voices of refugee slaves, it also speaks to the conditions of songs and poems during the war years, a period in the United States when the imaginative relationships between property, culture, and community became sharply salient as structuring principles for social life. This chapter will therefore present a broadly construed notion of “contraband” songs to understand how the public crisis of the war ultimately produced a vastly different sense of the social force of poetry.

At Port Royal, 1862 “Contraband” is an overdetermined term. Because local, national, and international entities can each declare something “contraband” within their respective domains, the term applies both to goods and to acts of intra- or international exchange. While things such as narcotics may be deemed illegal in themselves, the concept of “contraband” more broadly marks out the transport, trade, and sale of particular goods across juridical space but outside the law: things can be possessed, transported, bought, or sold illegally, even if the things in themselves are not illegal. “Contraband” is thus one term within a constellation of

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concepts and practices—including piracy, counterfeiting, smuggling, black marketeering, and free trade—that, as Adrian Johns argues, tests the connections between commerce, culture, creativity, and the state.14 And, as Johns demonstrates so powerfully, literature and communications bear a strong relation to the history of these concepts. William St. Clair and Robert Darnton have each shown how the illegal production and distribution of books was an international affair in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: many (if not all) of the most popular books of the ancien régime were produced in London or Geneva and smuggled into France, while Paris was the capital for pirated publications that flooded the British book market with cheap editions of copyrighted (and, for ordinary readers, otherwise prohibitively expensive) works.15 In addition to revealing the international ground on which ostensibly national literatures flourished (a state of affairs especially germane to antebellum America), both examples also demonstrate that the effort to centralize control over the business of communication often made apparent the limits of state power.16 “Contraband” correlates with the hidden history of piracy excavated by Johns, but while “piracy” usually entails a spectacularly public flouting of state power and territoriality, “contraband” centers more narrowly on surreptitious circulation—smuggling—which juridical regimes may outlaw but can never extinguish with certainty.17 A history of federal power in the United States can be charted from such moments of illicit exchange. Jefferson’s embargo of 1807, for example, was a notoriously weak effort to realize the fantasy of American isolation; the flagrant traffic in British imports showed the starkly limited powers of federal regulation over national space. In contrast, the national legitimacy or illegitimacy of the Confederate States of America depended on the ability of the United States to enforce embargoes on Southern ports: if the federal government could not control traffic in and out of the South, it could not claim that territory for the United States. Counterfeiting provides another such history: according to Stephen Mihm, from the 1780s until the 1860s, the counterfeiting of American currencies flourished in spaces just beyond the United States (over the border in Canada or in western territories) and in the absence of unified controls over monetary policy within the country. The federalization of the greenback dollar during the Civil War (and the consolidation of policing power under the Secret Ser vice) marked the emergence of a newly empowered federal state.18 But by far the most inflammatory debate over contraband circulation in the first half of the nineteenth century concerned runaway slaves. The property fiction of chattel slavery transformed a slave’s running away into an act

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of auto-larceny: to free oneself was to steal oneself, and the surreptitious traffic in runaway slaves equated smuggling with emancipation. The juridical regimes and discourses of the slave states sought to localize slavery, declaring it a subject of “local sovereignty” while making slaves’ movements the subject of heavy surveillance, in theory if not always in practice. The resistance movement that countered such efforts at emplacement and localization—known, in association with the transportation revolution of the day, as the “Underground Railroad”—was thus, among other things, a smuggler’s network.19 Before 1850, the runaway slave challenged local control over property, mobility, and space, while charting the fissures in national territory, as the fleeing individual followed the North Star or crossed the Ohio River from slavery to freedom. After the Fugitive Slave Law (1851), which was at the time the largest ever federal intervention into local law and commerce, the runaway (or, more tragically, the recaptured ex-slave) marked the point of collision between state authority and individual autonomy. The runaway—contraband— slave therefore confronted antebellum concepts of property and power, and the systematized smuggling of slaves out of slavery highlighted the ways in which illicit transport could convert property into personhood.20 All of this is to say that the figure of the contraband, neither a person nor a thing, negotiated prevailing concepts of commodity-hood and subjectivity, and that by 1861 this figure was intensely historical, even if “the contraband question” was new. And if “the contraband” was meant to be a placeholder that could defer thornier questions about the war, a slave could only become contraband through the kind of action—escape—that antislavery discourse had long understood as constitutive of free agency. With the contraband, being out of place was the precondition for being free, and the contraband song emerged into public discourse as the record of dislocated experience. This is where the “contraband song” enters wartime culture. In Whittier’s poem “At Port Royal,” which set many of the expectations that would define the genre, the disorientation of cross-racial engagement with former slaves is an experience that demands the intervention of the contrabands’ song. Published in the Atlantic Monthly just when the contraband question became a major topic of public debate, the poem describes a boat ride along the coast of Beaufort, South Carolina, during which a group of passengers views the despoiled landscape, ruminates on the war, listens to a song sung by the black oarsmen rowing the boat, and speculates about the future.21 The poem has three sections: the first and third consist of quatrains written in Standard English that take the perspective of the passengers; the second, subtitled “Song

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of the Negro Boatmen,” is written in black dialect and consists of the lyrics of the boatmen’s song, which becomes the central object of contemplation for the visitors. Although Whittier never visited the Sea Islands nor heard black song performances until long after the war had ended, “Song of the Negro Boatmen” was received productively— and for decades— as a firsthand record of refugee experience.22 The poem begins with a brooding vision of a landscape at war, “wild with fear and hate,” where “field and garner, barn and byre, / Are blazing through the night.”23 As the plantation economy goes up in flames around the boat’s passengers, the boatmen—“our negroes”—sing with “The joy of uncaged birds” (337, 338). Where the passengers see “the rout [running] mad and fast” across the land, “the lurid glow” of the scene “falls strong across / Dark faces broad with smiles: / Not theirs the terror, hate, and loss / That fire yon blazing piles” (337). Instead of “terror, hate, and loss,” the boatmen see the war as a divine rupture that has ended their slavery and inaugurated their freedom. Weaving “in simple lays / The pathos of remembered wrong, / The hope of better days,” the “Song of the Negro Boatmen” declares confidence in the war’s redemptive possibilities: “We know de promise nebber fail, / An’ nebber lie de word; / So, like de’postles in de jail, / We waited for de Lord.” Oh, praise an’ tanks! De Lord he come To set de people free; An’ massa tink it day ob doom, An’ we ob jubilee. De Lord dat heap de Red Sea waves He jus’ as’trong as den; He say de word: we las’ night slaves; To-day, de Lord’s free men. (338) For the passengers, the fires along the water’s edge remind them that “God is just, / And every wrong shall die” (ibid.). The boatmen’s song inverts this grim sense of justice into celebration, turning the “day ob doom” into a day “ob jubilee.” Though the plantations seem abandoned in the passengers’ eyes, the boatmen know that only the “Ole massa” has gone; hierarchical relations of power and property (master-driver-slave) have been replaced by liberal selfownership: now “We own de hoe, we own de plough, / We own de hands dat hold; / We sell de pig, we sell de cow, / But nebber chile be sold” (ibid.). The singers connect the scene to biblical precedent, thereby locating emancipation

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in divine strength. The war’s events are thus presented as the Lord’s word, which transforms slaves into free men. This account of liberation supersedes the passengers’ vision of fear, hate, and loss: though the passengers “dare not share the negro’s trust, / Nor yet his hope deny,” the poem ends with an appeal for the boatmen’s song to continue into the future: Sing on, poor hearts! your chant shall be Our sign of blight or bloom, The Vala-song of Liberty, Or death-rune of our doom! (Ibid.) While this ending is ambivalent—the song’s words are runic, not directly transparent, and may yet forecast “our doom”—the call to “sing on” indicates that the war’s meanings can no longer be encompassed by the passengers’ interpretation. Instead, the poem ends by pushing the “Song of the Negro Boatmen” outward, spreading to an expanding audience its interpretation of the war as an emancipatory, divine interdiction of slavery. The engagement between slaves and free people, manifested in the circulation of the song, is thus the sign of the Lord’s involvement in the war. The poem’s conclusion prospectively extends the song’s reading of the war, for only eventually will the song’s true identity—“Vala-song of Liberty / Or death-rune of our doom”—become apparent. To “sing on,” the boatmen must move on; new events and new audiences will discover the true import of their words. But in “At Port Royal,” communication and interpretation are uneasily grounded in racial difference. The boatmen sing in “broken Saxon words” softened “with Afric’s mellow tongue,” creating an account that links the experiences of the passengers and oarsmen and enables the poem’s final stanzas to project a vision of the future when “close as sin and suffering joined, / We march to Fate abreast” (ibid.). At the same time, the differences between the “Afric’s mellow tongue” and the song’s “broken Saxon words” are forcibly manifested by placing the dialect “Song of the Negro Boatmen” in the Standard English frame of “At Port Royal.” Within the narrative context of this frame, the song bridges differences between singers and audience, bringing together two experiences of the war in a shared (though differentiated) language, but in the print context of the poem, the dialect of the song disarticulates it from the poem and allows difference to be perceived in wholly material terms. This materiality reinscribes the identities of the boatmen, whose potential subjecthood, made possible by the war and its divine mover, can be foreclosed by

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their status as contraband of war. Floating free of its original context, the song itself becomes a new form of property created by the dislocating force of the war, its identity continually reassessed and reestablished in a proliferating set of new contexts. In its content and in its history, then, “Song of the Negro Boatmen” is emblematic of the Civil War poem as a contraband song. It became a very popular war song— or, rather, songs, because it was widely reprinted in many formats (newspapers, magazines, songsters, broadsides, books), set to music in multiple arrangements for piano and voice, and sung in northern homes, among the Union Army, and among freed slaves as well. The song’s multimedia expansion began almost as soon as it was first printed: Dwight’s Journal of Music advertised two different musical arrangements of “Song of the Negro Boatmen” only three weeks after the poem’s publication, at which point Whittier’s poem had “been read in every nook and corner of the loyal North.”24 In all of the different musical versions of the poem that came on the market in 1862, only the boatmen’s “Song” was scored. While some sheet music printed the full text of Whittier’s poem, most arrangements presented the “Song” alone, and subsequent accounts make clear that the dialect “Song” circulated independently of the poem “At Port Royal,” which soon dropped from public view.25 The disarticulation of the sections may have enabled readers to identify “Song of the Negro Boatmen” as a song coming directly from Port Royal, one that expressed the true spirit of the former slaves. Whittier’s authorship and his associations with New England antislavery were not enough to control the subsequent uses to which the song was put.26 To give one example, a few days after its publication in the Atlantic Monthly, Anthony Trollope clipped a copy reprinted in a Pittsburgh newspaper and sent it to James T. Fields (editor of the Atlantic), asking, “Who is the author of the enclosed? I want to know— also whether it is new or an old song?”27 The poem’s timeliness, appearing amid the highly publicized Sea Islands campaign, could not by itself establish the song’s occasion; meanwhile, the poem’s history became increasingly indeterminate, as various versions of the song— detached from the poem—became set pieces of abolitionist performance, popular parlor music, and also items for the minstrel stage. Soldiers carried the song with them, in their heads and hearts, perhaps, but also in pocket-sized pamphlets like “Songs for the Times,” a collection of four songs that printed “Negro Boatmen’s Song” next to a musical arrangement, in a format designed for easy transportation into the Union camps.28

words by-

Song of the Negro Boatman,

J.G.WHITTLER

3 Music by H.T.MEBBIL

INTRODUCTION

1. oh, -praise an' tanks! De Lord he come To set de peo- -ple2. -ole mas sa on he trab-bles gone; He leab ..de __land be 3. we pray de Lord he gib us signs nat some day we be 4. we know de prom ise neb ber fail An' neb ber lie de

free An' mas sa think it day b doom An' we ob ja- hi hind De Lord'sbreffblow him fur der on Like corn shuckin de free De Norfwind tell it to de pines De wild duck to de word So like de 'pos-tiles in de Jail we wait ed for de

1'83

Figure 18. H. T. Merrill, “Song of the Negro Boatman” (Chicago: Root and Cady, 1862). Image is provided courtesy of the Trustees of the Haverhill Public Library, Special Collections Department.

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NEGROBATM'S opraisen'tk!DLdhcmTontdeplfr;An'mastikdyob,AnweobjuicDeLordathpRSwHvesju,s'atrongdH;eaydorwls'nThot-dvayLr'sfemn!CROUS.Deyamwilgro,dctnbWe'lhabdricno;Onoberyufa,ihDedrivblowhsn! Olemasnohtrbg,ldehinD;eLord'sbflwhiman,kc-dewiW.eowndh,plugasthod,WelpigwscoButnebrhilsod! WepraydLohglbnsi may;DeNorf-windtlps, ucktodenW.etinkwhdcuawledgr,amitn,Deric-bdmantwhsg,lecrm! Weknowdprmisbfal,A'Wr;Soliked'pstnja,WwfrdL An'owhepbryd,taekHetinkwbhmorf!Wluite

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nNEGROBATM'SNG praisen'tk!DLodhcmT otdeplfr;A'usaikybm, weobju-icDLrdathpRSvs,H'ng den;Hsaywor,l'ightvT-Lfm! Deyarnwilgo,dct-b' habdericn'o:yuf, nebryouhaDdivlws! Moderate

Figure 19. “Negro Boatmen’s Song,” Songs for the Times (n.p., 1862). Image is provided courtesy of the Trustees of the Haverhill Public Library, Special Collections Department.

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Northerners working with the former slaves at Port Royal looked for (and discovered) the song in the repertoire of black song making, and writers reporting from the Sea Islands quoted it as a product of people’s experiences there. The song’s association with collective black expression—instead of a white abolitionist’s version of collective black expression—became even stronger after the war. Into the twentieth century, writers called upon “Song of the Negro Boatmen” as the voice of black folk on the cusp of emancipation. For instance, T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the African American newspaper the New York Age, commented in 1906 that “John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet of freedom, voiced [the] feelings” of “the slaves in the Pine forests of Georgia and the rice swamps of the Carolinas and the bayous of the Mississippi . . . in the following lines of pathos: ‘We pray de Lord he gib us signs / Dat some day we be free.’ ”29 At least one twentieth-century account assumed Whittier had transcribed the song directly from black singers while visiting the Sea Islands himself.30 “At Port Royal” was created from representations of the encounters between Northerners and refugee slaves, and in 1862 it mobilized abolitionist and evangelical missionary efforts toward the contraband question while promoting emancipation as the war’s purpose. Whittier’s poem was read to conclude the meeting that established the New York National Freedmen’s Relief Association, and it was paraphrased at a meeting in Philadelphia by a speaker who argued that the contrabands’ “claims on us are very special; our destiny is bound up with theirs. They are to be our salvation, or, I verily believe, they are to be our doom.”31 These institutional uses linked Whittier’s song of the contrabands with evangelical representations of the former slaves. The rapid dissemination of “Song of the Negro Boatmen” outside of the poem and beyond Whittier’s intentions also made the song into evidence for a song-making tradition already present among the former slaves of the Sea Islands. As the missionary work of the “Port Royal experiment” progressed, “Song of the Negro Boatmen” established a precedent for hearing and interpreting contraband songs, particularly in the emerging genre of the slave spiritual.

Hearing Songs on the Sea Islands “At Port Royal” thematizes how a contraband song could mediate ideas of race and history at a moment of contact and crisis, while the material history of “Song of the Negro Boatmen” draws attention to the ways that contraband

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songs mediated the experiences of readers, speakers, and listeners. “Song of the Negro Boatmen” helped to establish many of the conventions of the contraband song, but it was not the only such song in circulation at the time. By February 1862, there were already many accounts of black singing on the Sea Islands and elsewhere, as well as published songs that remain in the canon of slave songs. The most significant of these was “Let My People Go, A Song of the ‘Contrabands,’ ” later known as “Go Down, Moses,” which was first printed in the New York Tribune in December 1861, several weeks before “At Port Royal” was published in the Atlantic Monthly. The print version of this song emerged from missionary work conducted at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, by the American Missionary Association, and it was first transcribed and reported by L. C. Lockwood, a Congregationalist minister from New York City. The first transcription had a headnote that explained the song’s history: “It is said to have been sung for at least fifteen or twenty years in Virginia and Maryland, and perhaps in all the Slave States, though stealthily, for fear of the lash; and is now sung openly by the fugitives who are living under the protection of our government, and in the enjoyment of Mr. Lockwood’s ministry. The verses surely were not born from a love of bondage, and show that . . . the slaves are familiar with the history of the past, and are looking hopefully forward to the future.”32 According to this account, “Let My People Go” was contraband, part of a counter-history of slavery constituted by secretive song making. The conditions of enslavement both enabled and constrained the song’s discourse: the “fear of the lash” forced slaves to sing it “stealthily,” but this stealth granted “Let My People Go” its counter-historical power. As a song performed openly in public, however, “Let My People Go” was very much a product of the war, which enabled fugitive slaves to look “hopefully forward to the future” by coming over to the “protection of our government.” Once in the “enjoyment of Mr. Lockwood’s ministry,” the song moved into new formats, which gave it a set of varying meanings and intentions, none of them necessarily connected with its original secret history. The headnote implies that only after the song emerged into public discourse and circulated in print did it achieve a fully socialized power. This power was circuited through the networks of evangelical antislavery, and the song’s meanings outside the plantation were shaped by the media and the social settings through which it was reiterated. By mid1862, “let my people go” had become a catchphrase for emancipation, and the song was sung “to awaken fresh sympathy for the bondman” among Northern audiences.33

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“Let My People Go” could testify against slavery both secretly and publicly because it deployed a rhetoric that was either invisible or legible, depending on the performance context. It could, for instance, assert a violent resistance to enslavement: Thus saith the Lord, bold Moses said, O! let my people go! If not, I’ll smite your first-born dead! Then let my people go! No more shall they in bondage toil, O! let my people go! Let them come out with Egypt’s spoil, O! let my people go!34 The language of Exodus warned an 1862 audience that retribution awaited anyone who opposed emancipation (“If not, I’ll smite your first-born dead!”). While such meanings could hide in the song’s biblical register, the song still played on fears of the possibly violent repercussions of emancipation, as well as tensions over the status of seized Confederate property, “Egypt’s spoil,” which also included the former slaves themselves. As a piece of contraband secreted from “fear of the lash” on the plantation, the song’s interventionist meanings remained hidden in plain sight, but in the antislavery press, these latent meanings could be made explicit. Poems that responded to “Let My People Go” avowed its militancy: one poem, suggested “on reading ‘A Song of the Contrabands, O Let My People Go,’ as somewhat appropriate to the present crisis,” turned “Let My People Go” into a divine warning of impending racial violence: When Afric was in Dixie’s land, They plead for mercy so; Oppressed so hard on every hand, They cried, “O let us go!” . . . The Lord on high has heard their prayer . . . He’s heard their cry, and thus decreed: “It shall not long be so! I’ll break the power, annul the deed, That binds my people so!

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Though sable hands you bind in chains, Nor aught in fear forbear, Yet latent in the soul remains A power that yet shall dare To strike the blow, in deadly fray, And bring the oppressor low.”35 The Lord’s voice responds to Afric’s prayer (“O let us go!”) by threatening Dixie’s land with the retributive violence of the Civil War, which will “make the land all Freedom’s land, / And keep it to the end.” This poem positions “Let My People Go” as the war’s spark, since the song’s expression of suffering incites God to authorize the Northern military response. Other variations presented the song as a cultural front to the war: according to one, “Let My People Go” was a “murmur in the midnight” that whispered “a tremulous hope / That battle’s earthquake tramp may ope / The bondman’s dungeon, deep and dark! . . . Slaves in their cabin chant it low, / And red-mouthed cannon shout it loud.”36 The antislavery press used the contraband song to reorient the war as a response to slavery, and it took up the biblical language of “Let My People Go” to provide the emancipationist military mission with a divine mandate: as another version of “Let My People Go” put it, “Ay, let them go, or God in wrath / His plagues on us will send . . . Till all the land be drench’d in blood, / Which shall not cease to flow, / If all unheeded the command / To ‘let my people go.’ ”37 Amid these responses, antislavery activists and institutions promoted “Let My People Go” as the original contraband song. It was set to music within days of its appearance in the Tribune, and at lectures, meetings, and rallies, it publicly testified for emancipation. It also served as a performance piece for black singers: at one lecture, for instance, “Mr. Horace Waters and his juvenile vocalists” performed a version of the song, “the same as sung by the slaves in Virginia,” with “electric effect.”38 “Let My People Go” worked in tandem with “Song of the Negro Boatmen” to produce a sense of connection between Northern abolitionists and the refugees fleeing behind the Union lines. Abolitionist and evangelical organizations prominently featured both songs in their events during the early 1860s, because for contemporary audiences, both songs offered testimony against slavery and in favor of immediate emancipation, in slaves’ voices. The two songs were at the center of celebrations on January 1, 1863, emancipation day: in Washington, D.C., “a great flock of contrabands—men,

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women, and children . . . sang ‘The Negro Boatman’s Song’ with a volume of voice that could be heard miles off,” followed by “Let my people go,” which was sung “with thrilling effect.”39 But, ironically, on the Sea Islands themselves, Whittier’s song reverberated most loudly, echoing through accounts of the missionary experience published by Northern aid workers. Dena J. Epstein, the foremost historian of early black music, has written that Whittier’s song was a “literary imitation of folk poetry” that “prepared the public mind for the authentic songs themselves,” a comment borne out in the published and private remarks of participants in the Port Royal experiment.40 Writing from St. Helena Island in mid-1862, James H. Palmer informed Whittier, Your song of the “Negro Boatman” bids fair to become the real of what, as is probable, it was only the ideal at time of publication. Perhaps no boats crew have as yet beat its measures with their oars but ones ears are often greeted with the familiar words. This song of course struck our fancy when we were on board ship on our passage from N.Y. last March, and it was sung somewhat to the tune of “Dearest May”. One of the ladies who has had a very large and successful school on Ladies Island, taught it to her scholars: and from them it has spread to other localities. They sung a stanza of it at our celebration on the 4th of July.41 While Palmer seems clear that the boatmen’s song came (was smuggled?) into South Carolina from New York with him and his fellow Gideonites, even so this “ideal” piece of contraband music had become real through the institutions of the Port Royal experiment, to the extent that former slaves celebrated their incorporation into the national body politic by singing it—originally expressive of an alienated identification— on Independence Day. In “Songs of the Port Royal Contrabands,” an essay published in late 1862 and widely reprinted, Lucy McKim, an expert on slave music who later coedited the first anthology of slave songs, wrote that “Song of the Negro Boatmen” “seemed wonderfully applicable as we were being rowed across Hilton Head Harbor among United States gunboats. . . . I thought the crew must strike up ‘And massa tink it day ob doom, / And we ob jubilee.’ ”42 At a “jubilee” near Beaufort on Christmas night, 1864, Elizabeth Hyde Botume, a teacher from the Boston-based Freedman’s Aid Society, described how in the people’s “shouting

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songs, with the clapping of hands and stamping of feet,” she “fancied that in the rhythm I could follow the lines of Whittier’s ‘Song of the Negro Boatmen.’ ”43 Charlotte Forten, a teacher on St. Helena Island and a prominent black activist, after hearing some boatmen sing “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” “so sweet and strange and solemn,” wrote in her diary that “I want to hear these men sing Whittier’s ‘Song of the Negro Boatmen.’ I am going to see if it can’t be brought about in some way.”44 Forten apparently made good on this idea; in a letter to the Liberator, she explained how the “children have just learned the John Brown song, and next week they are going to learn the song of the ‘Negro Boatman.’ ”45 For these activists, “Song of the Negro Boatmen” was the appropriate expression for the experiences of the freed slaves with whom they worked and also for their own experience working with freed slaves on the Sea Islands. After the war, “Song of the Negro Boatmen” would continue to mix with spirituals from the Sea Islands as a representative expression of the slaves’ experience: for example, a playbill from an 1872 concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers lists “Song of the Negro Boatman” as part of their performance, along with “Go Down, Moses” and other spirituals.46 Whittier’s song may not have originated at Port Royal, but it determined how people heard and understood other contraband songs, including the spirituals later collected among the former slaves of the Sea Islands by McKim, William Francis Allen, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others.47 Such commingling, in which secondary derivations of collective expression became the basis for hearing those expressions in the first place, undercuts the concept of authenticity, which often serves as a critical standard in the theorization of black song making and poetics. The power of these contraband songs as wartime expressions depended on this commingling. The force of dislocation that structured both the experiences of the refugee slaves and the representations of those experiences (through which the Northern public first engaged the consequences of the war on received notions of national belonging) was encoded into the “contraband” as a historical concept. Therefore, the prior circulation of these songs (in print, in the North) in no way impeded their ascription to refugee slaves in Virginia or the Sea Islands, because such songs could only be ascribed an origin if they first were taken out of place. That is to say that contraband songs projected the aura of belonging—and served as a site for wartime debates about belonging— only after they were smuggled out of the South, imaginatively or otherwise, in one format or another. But if being contraband enabled these songs to align

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a group with a genre, then being contraband also ensured that such alignments would be sites of struggle as well.

Contrabands in Blackface Contraband songs, in the definition this chapter offers, belonged to no one, but as such they could constitute the basis for imagining songs or poems as a medium of belonging. As hyperbolically disoriented objects, contraband songs circulated as collective expressions capable of mouthing all kinds of politics. Thus, if objects like “Song of the Negro Boatmen” and “Let My People Go, a Song of the ‘Contrabands’ ” used the networks of evangelicalism and antislavery to produce meanings sympathetic to emancipation, reconstruction, and the Union, these songs competed against other contraband songs that were unsympathetic to such policies. Numerous parodies of “Let My People Go” appeared in Democratic and Confederate newspapers during 1862. One example, simply titled “Song of the Contraband,” was published in the magazine Vanity Fair in May 1862. This song used the voice of a black refugee to criticize the evangelical abolitionism that informed much of the Port Royal experiment: I wish I war in Georg’a Dat dear ole land again, Among de flowerin’ cotton, Among de sugar-cane; Den ef a Yankee preacher Came lyin’ bout de Lord, An’ chains, and things—by golly, I’d knock him wid a gourd! De Abolition S’ciety, I guess um monstrous stuff, Dey call us men an’ brodders— I tink I hear enuff ! 48 Anti-emancipationist songs appropriated the figure of the contraband to mock both the war and abolition, accusing advocates like Wendell Phillips or Horace Greeley of expanding the war by focusing it wrongly on slavery. In these songs, the contraband lamented the lost plantation, often complaining that he was worse off in the cold, racist North. As another song put it,

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I have heard that Horace Greely [sic] lets his tongue go pretty freely Says he’d like to free the niggers everywhere, But such men they ought to check, put a rope around his neck And swing him up to dance upon the air; Such silly “white trash” should all be sent to smash For lying so about emancipation, For I tell you white folks, the poor black mokes Are better off down on the old plantation, That’s the idea of the Happy Contraband.49 Published in newspapers or printed as sheet music, such songs sought to expose the pretenses of “amalgamationists” intent on using the war to overturn the social order. As the expressions of nonsubjects (neither slave nor free) created by the war, dislocated from a scene of origin and set into a circulation both spectacular and surreptitious, contraband songs could be repurposed for almost any political opinion. A different “Song of the Contraband” used the slave’s voice to make “the old cabin ring,” as in many a minstrel tune, but this time with joy at the prospect of freedom: Let us sing, brothers, sing, But no longer in sadness! Let the old cabin ring With the shouts of our gladness! Our bondage is o’er, To return again never; We are chattels no more— We are freemen forever!50 These songs make little effort to present themselves as real expressions coming directly from freed or former slaves; if anything, the songs parade their inauthenticity as they express widely divergent opinions about the ongoing conflict over emancipation. While institutions like evangelical antislavery labored to authenticate their contraband songs as genuine expressions of historical communities, the contraband song (by definition) easily slipped free from such institutional controls into other readily available contexts like blackface per formance. A series of blackface contraband songs dramatically demonstrate how far this genre could move from whatever original intentions it might have had. For instance, a broadside entitled

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“A Contraband Song. Old Shady,” begins squarely in the terms of minstrelsy: Oh! ya, ya! darkies, laugh with me; For de white folks say old Shady’s free! Don’t you see dat de jubilee Is comin’, comin’! Hail, mighty day! 51 But this song continues as a parody of the Confederacy, as “Old Shady” bids “Good bye, Massa Jeff ! good-bye, Missus Stevens, /’Scuse dis nigger for taking his leavins; /’Spec, pretty soon, you’ll see Uncle Abram’s / Comin’, comin’! Hail, mighty day.” “Old Shady” shows how wartime minstrelsy could negotiate the prospect of emancipation by conscripting plantation caricature into a mockery of secessionist aspirations. Yet the headnote to a broadside of “Old Shady” labors to present the song as an authentic production of freed slaves: “The following rare lyric is the favorite freedom song of the Mississippi Contrabands. Its character and enthusiasm are great, and, among songs of its kind it has no superior. A wellknown anti-slavery gentleman of this city presents it to Forney’s Press as a curiosity of contraband genius.”52 And, intriguingly, broadsides of this song were published by the “Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments.” Here the contraband song moves off the minstrel stage on sheets attempting to enlist black men via the inspiration of songs that are ostensibly their own. To produce the sense of national affiliation necessary for enlistment evidently required that selected songs travel, in altered, cheap print formats, back to the communities that had supposedly created them. Contraband songs could thus turn blackface inside out, as it were, using minstrel conventions to attain ends flatly opposed elsewhere in the minstrel theater. Other examples pursued similar strategies, juggling minstrelsy, emancipation, and anxieties about black citizenship. “A Song, Dedicated to the Colored Volunteer” praises the ser vice of the black regiments in the Union Army: Then here is to the Fifty Fourth, Which has been nobly tried, They were willing, they were ready, With their bayonets by their side, Gen Birney led them on, And he had no cause to fear, About the courage of the Colored Volunteer.53

A CONTRABAND SONG The following rare lyrics is the favourite freedom song of the Mississippi Contrabands. Its character and enthusium are great, and, among songs of its kind it has no superior . A well-known anti-slavery gentteman of this city presents it to Forney's Press as a curiosity of contraband genuis:

OLD SHADY Air--AWAY DOWN SOUTH.

Oh! ya! ya! darkies, laugh with me; For de white folks old Shady's free! Don't you see dat de jubilee Is comin', comin'! Hail, mighty Day! CHRORUS. Den away, den away, for I can't stay any longer; Hurra, hurra! for I am going home. [Repeat.] Massa got scared, and so did his lady! Die chile broke for ole Shady comin', comin'! Hail, mighty Day! comin', comin'! Hail, mighty Day! CHRORUS [Repeat] Good bye, Massa Jeff! goodbye, Missus Stevens, cuse dis nigger for taking his leavins; "Spec, pretty soon, you'll see Uncle Abram's comin', comin'! Hail, mighty Day! CHRORUS [Repeat] Good-bye, hard work, and never any pay--I'm goin'up Norf where de white folks stay; White wheat-bread and a dollar a day! comin', comin'! Hail, mighty Day! CHRORUS [Repeat] I've got a wife, and she's got a baby, Way up Norf in Lower Candy--Won't dey shout when dey see ole Shady comin', comin'! Hail, mighty Day! CHRORUS [Repeat]

Published by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments.

Figure 20. “A Contraband Song. Old Shady” (published by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments, n.d.). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets Collection.

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The chorus demands, “Give us the flag, all free without one slave, / And we will defend it as our fathers did so brave,” making the song’s politics apparently clear: emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers will help the Union win the war. The praise for the ser vice of black volunteers is complicated, though, by a different broadside version of the song, which presents the words under a lithograph of a blackface performer playing a banjo on stage— thus figuratively staging the song as a performance in a minstrel theater. This version alters the final chorus in several significant ways: Here’s to the gallant Fourth which has not yet been tried, They are willing and are ready with their brothers to divide; General Birney leads us on, so we have no right to fear, And that is the making of the Colored Volunteers.54 This variation of the song muddies the politics— does it praise black soldiers or mock them? Does it view emancipation as the solution or the problem? In the first version, the courageous volunteers give General William Birney “no cause to fear” about their conduct, while in the second, the volunteers “have no right to fear” because Birney is their leader; rather than being willing and ready to fight, “with their bayonets by their side,” as the first version asserts, the soldiers in the second are “ready with their brothers to divide,” meaning perhaps that they are ready to join in the divisive struggle or that they will divide brothers by joining the fight. The two versions seem to make the song argue both sides of the debate over black enlistment. The ambivalent combination of a contraband song with Northern politics and blackface conventions is typical of the milieu in which songs like “Song of the Negro Boatmen” or “Let My People Go, a Song of the ‘Contrabands’ ” circulated. In fact, both songs did circulate as minstrel performances: a “Parody on ‘Song of the Contrabands’ ” was advertised less than a month after the initial publication of “Let My People Go,” while an arrangement of “Song of the Negro Boatman” was included as part of an “Ethiopian and Comic Songs” collection put out at the end of the century by the music.55 And in early spring, 1862, both “Let My People Go” and a “Parody on ‘The Song of the Contrabands’ ” were listed in the contents of The Harp of Freedom, a collection of “Anti-Slavery, Patriotic and ‘Contraband’ Songs” intended to “be sung by the million, in order to awaken a deep interest in behalf of the ‘Contrabands,’ whom God, in His providence, has cast upon the Free North to clothe and educate.”56 Like the dislocated refugees projected onto the North by an inscrutable

THE

COLORED VOLUNIEERS Fremont told us, when this war first begun, How to save this Union, and the way it should be done, But Kentucky swore so hard, and old Abe he had his fears, So that's what's the matter with the Colored Volunteers. CHRORUS.-Give us a flag all free without a slave, We wlii fight to defend it as our fathers did so brave Onward boys, onward, it's the year of jubilee, God bless America, the land of liberty. Little Mack went to Richmond with three hundred thousand braveSaid keep back the negroes and the Union he would save; But Mack he was defeated, and the Union now in tears, Is calling for the help of the Colored Volunteers, CHRORUS.-Give us a flag all free without a slave, &c. Old Jeff he says he'll hang us if we dare to meet him armedIt's a very big thing, but we are not at all alarmed: He has first got to catch us before the way is clear, And that's what's the matter with the Colored Volunteers. CHRORUS.-Give us a flag all free without a slave, &c. Here's to the gallant Fourth which has not yet been tried, They are willing and are ready with their brothers to divide; General Birncy leads us on, so we have no rights to fear, And that is the making of the Colored Volunteers. CHRORUS.-Give us a flag all free without a slave, &c.

500 Illustrated Ballads, lithographed and printed by JHARLES MAGNU. No.12 Frankfort Street, New York. Branch Office .No.520 7th St. Washington, D.C.

Figure  21. “The Colored Volunteers” (New York: Charles Magnus, n.d.). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets Collection.

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Providence, every contraband song could circulate as a figure of collective expression, as a piece of antislavery advocacy, and also as a blackface minstrel performance— all at the same time. One final example illustrates the complex iterations of contraband songs during the war. “Kingdom Coming,” by Henry Clay Work, was first advertised in Chicago in April 1862 as part of the repertoire for Christy’s Minstrels, and it became one of the most popular songs of the war, appearing widely on broadsides, as sheet music, and in performances by blackface stars like Dan Bryant.57 Although the poem was written in dialect for the minstrel stage (and although its origin in the minstrel theater was often reinforced by broadside lithographs), its lines speak strongly against slavery: Say, darkeys, hab you seen de massa, Wid de muffstash on his face, Go long de road some time dis mornin’, Like he gwine to leab de place? He seen a smoke way up de ribber, Whar de Linkum gunboats lay; He took his hat, an’ lef ’ berry sudden, An’ I spec’ he’s run away! De Massa run? ha! ha! De darkey stay? ho! ho! It mus’ be now de kingdom comin’ An’ de year Jubilo! 58 The song’s crude dialect and its place in the minstrel theater should not obscure its antislavery sentiment, as well as the surprising ways it plays with anxieties about emancipation and their attendant images of race. The song jokingly inverts the figure of the runaway slave: here, the master runs, while the slaves take over the plantation. The lines of the chorus, “It mus’ be now de kingdom comin’ / An’ de year Jubilo,” echo Whittier’s “Song of the Negro Boatmen” (“An’ massa tink it day ob doom, / An’ we ob Jubilee”), but “Kingdom Coming” seems less ambivalent about this inversion than does Whittier’s song. As Work’s song continues, it invokes other racial taboos: the “Massa” almost literally becomes black as he runs away, while his former slaves move into the big house: “Massa” “get so dreff ul tanned” that “I spec’ he try an’ fool dem Yankees, / For to tink he’s contraband”; meanwhile, the slaves “move dar tings to massa’s parlor, / For to keep it while he’s gone.” Nothing in the

KINGDOM COMING. Copied by permission of ROOT & CADY, Music publishers, 95 Clark St., Chicago owners of the copyright. As sung by DAN BRYANT Say, darkeys, hab you seen de massa, Wid de muffstash on his face, Go long de road some time dis mornin', Like he gwine to leab de place? He seen a smoke way up de ribber, Whar de Linkum gunboats lay; He took his hat, an' let' berry sudden. An' I spec' he's run away! Chrorus-De massa run? ha,ha! De darkey stay? ho,ho! It mus, be now de kingdom comin' It mus, be now de kingdom comin' An' de year Jubilo! He six foot one way' two foot tudder. An. he weigh t'ree hundred pound, His coat so big, he coundn't pay de tailor, An' it won;t go half way round. He drill so much, dey call him Cap'an, An' he try an' fool dem Yankees, I space' he try an' fool dem Yankees' For to think he's contraband.

Chrorus

De darkeys feel so berry lonesom, Libing in de log-House on de lawn, Dey move dar tings to massa's parlor, For to keep, it while he's gone, Dars wine an' cider in de kitchen, An' de darkeys dey'll hab some; I spose dey'll all be cornfiscated, When de Linkum sojers come.

Chrorus.

De oberseer he make us trouble, An' he dribe us round a spell, We lock him up in the smoke-House cellar. Wid de key trown in de well. De whip is lost, de han-cuff broken, But de massa'll hab his pay, He's ole enuff, big enuff, ought to know better Dan to went. an; run away.

Chrorus.

500 Illustrated Ballads, lithographed and printed by

CHARLES MANGUS. No.12 Frankfort Street, New York.

Branch Office .No.570 7th St. Washington, D.C.

Figure 22. Henry C. Work, “Kingdom Coming” (New York: Charles Magnus, n.d.). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets Collection.

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text indicates concern about these developments; the song mocks the slaves’ owner, first calling his identity and status into question—he has become “contraband” because he has gone on the run, thereby tanning his skin or earning him a whipping, making his status even more ambiguous—then moving the slaves into his place. The conclusion parodies racial violence on the masterless plantation, with the slaves again triumphing over the white men: De oberseer he make us trouble, An’ he dribe us round a spell, We lock him up in the smoke-House cellar Wid de key trown in de well. De whip is lost, de han-cuff broken, But de massa’ll hab his pay, He’s ole enuff, big enuff, ought to know better Dan to went, an’ run away.59 Although it may be a minstrel song, “Kingdom Coming” mocks only slave masters. Minstrelsy therefore seems to have provided Work (the son of Alanson Work, an abolitionist jailed for several years in the 1840s) with the necessary cover to indulge in a fantasy of violent retribution on the plantation.60 The song’s imaginative release of retributive racial violence was a marketing point for it and its sequels. For instance, “Babylon is Fallen! A Sequel to Kingdom Coming,” printed the following year (as the Union Army began enlisting black soldiers), appeared with a cover illustration of black soldiers shooting a white Confederate officer. Similarly, “The Patriotic Contraband!,” a song composed to the air of “Kingdom Coming,” makes a gleeful proposition for black soldiers: as they march through Dixie, they can turn Confederates into minstrel figures. O darkies, I’se a gwine in de Armey, And I’se called a Contraband, I’se a gwine to jine de Union armey, And march through Dixie land, . . . And when we reach de foe, Jeff Davis, O den we see de fun, We’ll blaze away, den bayonet charging,

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Den see de rebels run. We’ll keep it up on quick and double, And make dar lines to reel, We’ll break dem down, we give dem trouble, And chase dem toe to heel.61 The song presents enlistment as an opportunity for contraband slaves to make Confederate soldiers run “quick and double” and dance “toe to heel” like Jim Crow. As with the plantation folk of “Kingdom Coming,” the patriotic contrabands turn white Southerners into the hapless figures of minstrel humor. These songs use the inversions and alienated identifications of minstrel parody to make a joke out of the feared misrule of black liberation, at a moment when total emancipation was anything but uncontroversial in the North. In fact, like “Song of the Negro Boatmen” and “Let My People Go,” “Kingdom Coming” was sung at rallies called to generate support for the Emancipation Proclamation, such as one in Lane, Illinois, where it was performed, along with the “Star Spangled Banner,” with “telling effect,” presumably by a white crowd.62 But the blackface contraband song’s anarchic impulses were also channeled into expressions that starkly opposed the policies of the Lincoln administration. For example, the anti-conscription song “The Draft Is Coming” transfers the Southern setting to New York City. The song attacks the class-based policies of conscription (whereby for three hundred dollars, a man could purchase a “replacement” to fight in his stead) and augurs violence for government officers and contractors: Say gents hab you seen de enrolling officer, Wid de muffstach on his face, Go long dis block some time dis morning, Like he gwine to lebe de place? He seen de smoke way up in Harlem, Whar de anti-draft-men lay; And he took his books an’ lef ’ berry sudden, So I spec’ he’s run away! De rich man run, ha! ha! De poor man stay? Ho, ho! It mus’ be now de kingdom is a comin’ In de year ob jubilo!63

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The song offers a thoroughly disenchanting lesson about the war: the contractor, the rich man, and, perhaps by extension, the federal government are “gwine to try to fool us Yankees, / To fight wid de contraband.” Although “us Yankees” speak the dialect of minstrelsy, the song works to ensure that its subjects will never be dislocated like the contraband with and for whom they will not fight. “The Draft Is Coming” reveals some of the pressures that the war placed on national consensus: For when de draft goes in operation, Dey’ll call on ebery one: But rec’lect some hab t’ree hundred, And dere exempt you know— An’ those dat hab got to do the fighting, Are de poor dat hab to go.64 Instead of the Rebels, “Congress makes us a good deal of trouble, / For de Union dey don’t care,” so that the song’s subjects must refuse allegiance with a group they do not like (the contrabands), in a fight they do not want, for a government concerned only with “some money spec’lation.” “The Draft is Coming” thus co-opts the contraband song to reframe belonging in terms that are class and race based and also antinationalist (or, at least, opposed to the federalization of the state under Lincoln). Here the minstrel aesthetics use the contraband song as a figure for imposture that can expose the wartime lies of Lincoln’s government. In contrast, “The Conscript’s Lay,” yet another song composed to the air of “Kingdom Coming,” adopts the contraband song to recuperate the conscript’s voice in the ser vice of redemptive national belonging: Say, Conscripts, have you got your notice, To gird your armor on, And go to fight for Uncle Sammy, Way down at Washington? The draft has changed our occupations, And though our feet are sore, We are now coming Father Abraham, Three hundred thousand more. They took us all, ha! ha!

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We could not stay, hey, hey, And while we march for the Kingdom Coming, We will sing the Conscript’s Lay.65 Like the contraband, the conscript is a figure of wartime policy, whose status is defined by the involuntary conditions of its creation. This song attempts to reframe that status as the product of volition—“We are now coming, Father Abraham,” the conscripts sing, without marked dialect (and partly in response to another popular draft-era song)—in which being conscripted becomes a sign of national affiliation: “We couldn’t raise our little ‘three hundred,’ / But still we don’t much care,” the song declares, for “We’re going because the nation needs us.”66 It is worth remembering that these conscription songs were sold amid the Draft Riots, at the time the largest civil insurrection in American history other than the Civil War itself. This context helps to make evident how the air to a famous contraband song “Kingdom Coming” was necessary to produce “belonging” under such crisis conditions. The heteronomy that the war placed on its subjects made necessary a category of identification that could allow for a fiction of individual will; the special sense of belonging is one substrate within the other anarchic associations of this tune in wartime politics. If military ser vice is usually presented (in wartime at least) as the highest fulfillment of national belonging, this series of songs, all written to the tune of the contraband song “Kingdom Coming,” demonstrates how the particular circumstances of the Civil War challenged the codes of such ser vice. The capacity to bend the highly fraught controversies of military ser vice around the politics of race and emancipation (from immediate emancipation, to the recruitment of black soldiers, to conscription and the violent resistance to it) defines the work of “Kingdom Coming.” The contraband song’s slippery, dislocated form of subjectivity enabled it to project a sense of identification that could be both outside national belonging but also intimately dependent on it. For these reasons, the song (or at least its tune) could serve both pro- and antinationalist sentiments among Northern white audiences and also become a tutelary text for ex-slave, ex-contraband audiences in wartime Reconstruction departments. A visitor to a New Orleans school in 1864 reported that the students, “500 little blacks from four to fifteen years of age, [had] learned to sing from memory many of the songs in Bradbury’s Golden Chain and in the Sabbath School Bell, besides such songs as “Kingdom Coming,” and others equally

KINGDOM COMING. Say, darkeys, hab you seen de massa, Wid de muffstash on his face,

Go long de road some time dis mornin', Like he gwine to leab de place? He seen a smoke way up de ribber, Whar de Linkum gunboats lay; He took his hat, an' let' berry sudden. An' I spec' he's run away! Chrorus-De massa run? ha,ha! De darkey stay? ho,ho! It mus, be now de kingdom comin' It mus, be now de kingdom comin' An' de year Jubilo! He six foot one way' two foot tudder. An. he weigh t'ree hundred pound, His coat so big, he coundn't pay de tailor, An' it won;t go half way round. He drill so much, dey call him Cap'an, An' he try an' fool dem Yankees, I space' he try an' fool dem Yankees' For to think he's contraband.

Chrorus

De darkeys feel so berry lonesom, Libing in de log-House on de lawn, Dey move dar tings to massa's parlor, For to keep, it while he's gone, Dars wine an' cider in de kitchen, An' de darkeys dey'll hab some; I spose dey'll all be cornfiscated, When de Linkum sojers come.

Chrorus.

De oberseer he make us trouble, An' he dribe us round a spell, We lock him up in the smoke-House cellar. Wid de key trown in de well. De whip is lost, de han-cuff broken, But de massa'll hab his pay, He's ole enuff, big enuff, ought to know better Dan to went. an; run away. Chrorus.

H.DE MARSAN. DERLER IN SONGS TOY BO KS & C NO 54 CHATHAM. N.Y. Figure 23. Henry C. Work, “Kingdom Coming” (New York: H. De Marsan, n.d.). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets Collection.

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interesting to them. Their rendering of ‘Kingdom Coming’ was remarkable for the zeal with which the little ones entered into the chorus, which is exactly suited to their style of music.”67 Like Whittier’s song, “Kingdom Coming” was adopted into the networks of the Freedmen’s Bureau as a medium for inscribing people into the project of nationality.68 The children of this school, not unlike the contrabands of Port Royal or the conscripts of New York, do not necessarily sing this song out of free will—they are, ultimately, another involuntary audience—but the song’s relay of alienated identifications helps to set the stage for imagining belonging as a shared project. As such, “Kingdom Coming” seems actually to have become a popular object of black culture in the Reconstruction departments. A New York Times correspondent reported that black people in Richmond celebrated the first anniversary of the Confederate capitol’s fall by singing “Kingdom Coming” with “great delight” and “a long drawn out ‘Massa run, aha-a-a.’ ”69 What had begun as a Northern blackface satire against slave owners became, in effect, real—former slaves singing a minstrel song about contraband masters to celebrate the downfall of the “Slave Power.” The frame of one broadside version of the song nicely illustrates the complex ideological circuits that I have outlined. Printed in New York by the song publisher H. De Marsan, the frame parodies a standard ballad frame for broadsides from the period. A black (or blackface) troubadour is depicted on the lower left margin, plucking a banjo under the moon and singing for a black (or blackface— and possibly cross-dressing) maiden, who stands in a tower at the upper right margin. A blackface performance of an imagined medieval minstrelsy wonderfully allegorizes the conflated fantasies about cross-racial contact, mediation, and nationality that energized the contraband song during the Civil War; although marginal to the text, this frame brings out the obvious fakery of the song’s supposed origin among former slaves.70 Yet the subsequent circulation of the song demonstrates that it actually moved off the minstrel stage and into the mouths of black folk.

Postbellum Echoes A songster from 1865 included both “Kingdom Coming” and “Negro Freedman’s Song,” a version of Whittier’s “Song of the Negro Boatmen,” along with songs like “The American Union,” “God Bless America,” and “Vive l’America.”71

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Printed beneath a heading of “Justice, Liberty, Union,” this collection indicates that contraband songs were brought together under a unionist political orientation in the immediate postbellum period. “Kingdom Coming” in particular had a long afterlife, as a nostalgic keynote to military reunions and as the air to a variety of Reconstruction-era songs, including a campaign song for the 1868 Republican presidential ticket of Ulysses S. Grant and Schuyler Colfax: Grant with his soldiers of the Union, Has thrash’d the men in grey, He fought so well they couldn’t but surrender, And down went the C.S.A.! He did so well the rebels hate him, For they got so dreadful tanned; Now they think if they put in Seymour That they soon shall rule the land!72 This song indicates that Unionist politics in the late 1860s simply glossed over sectional animosities that the war had done little to resolve: “The rebels feel so dreadful living /’Neath the rule of loyal men, / They throw their hats for massa Seymour” (ibid.). Southerners are still rebels in search of a massa, and the campaign song seems eager to anticipate their further subjugation to a Northern Republican administration. During the 1868 campaign, Grant made clear that he would not oppose the Reconstruction plans of the radical Republicans, including passage of the Fifteenth Amendment; the Republican Party intended to use black suffrage (and the disenfranchisement of ex-Confederates) to counter the Democratic Party in the formerly rebellious states. The associations of “Kingdom Coming” with the war, the liberation of the slaves, the humiliation and defeat of Southern white men, and the grotesquerie of the minstrel stage made it a highly appropriate tune to carry the ambitions of the Republican ticket. The portability of airs like “Kingdom Coming” partly explains the longevity of songs and poems in nineteenth-century public culture. Precisely because popular nineteenth-century songs and poems were not organic, original, or integrated objects but were instead derivative, detachable, and disposable, they could circulate widely and effectively from one format to another, from one medium to another, and from one context to another. Portable, adaptable, recognizable, timely: the conventional features of contraband songs are ultimately as important to their life in wartime culture as

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the content or quality of any single text. Such features also demanded the exclusion of these songs from the canons of American literary history that emerged in the decades following the war. In an influential essay on “The Songs of the War” (1887), Brander Matthews declared that “of the purely lyrical outburst which the war called forth, but little trace is now to be detected in literature except by special students. In most cases neither words nor music have had vitality enough to survive a quarter of a century.”73 A writer for the Chicago Inter Ocean disagreed, saying “Mr. Matthews views the question from a standpoint remote from the emotional experience of the common people.” In the smaller towns and in the country at large, outside of what may be termed the musical circles, there is constant resort to the stirring tunes and songs of the war. The old soldiers and the children of old soldiers and of those who took interest in the war sing them and whistle them unconsciously. At Grand Army posts, at political meetings, at the small conference in the households nothing is more common than to hear the war melodies. It is not because they are war melodies or because they recall the war, but because they are full of the patriotic spirit and because they stir the heart as other music does not.74 This defense of wartime songs through an invocation of “the emotional experience of common people” emphasizes once again the value of wartime songs as vehicles of collective belonging, rather than as verbal icons or wellwrought urns. At no point did any critic consider the value of such poems and songs to lie in the beauty of their words or music; instead, their power came from their capacity to “stir the heart,” to inspire “old soldiers and the children of old soldiers . . . [to] sing them and whistle them unconsciously.” The unconsciousness of such stirring and whistling— or rather, the production of such a sense of unconsciousness— comes out of the generic history of nineteenth-century poetry. Indexicality trumps literariness, or to put it another way, if a song or a poem is a part of you, carried in your head or your heart, it no longer matters whether or not it is good. This possessive capacity is a legacy of the Civil War, and the development of songs and poems as media of belonging and identity is a story that will be told in three versions over the second half of this book.

Chapter 4

Old Ballads and New Histories

Rough Meters A major event in Anglo-American scholarship occurred in 1867, with the publication of Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, a three-volume facsimile edition of a famous piece of English literary lore. As students and lovers of balladry well knew, Thomas Percy had based the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) on a manuscript he had rescued during a visit to the Shropshire estate of his friend Humphrey Pitt in the 1750s. One morning Percy saw a chambermaid lighting the fire with some old papers, which on closer view he discovered to be “a parcel of Old Ballads,” “written about the middle of the last century, but [containing] compositions of all times and dates, from the ages prior to Chaucer, to the conclusion of the reign of Charles I,” whose contents were “too curious to be consigned to oblivion.”1 This act of recovery became a touchstone in narratives of heroic scholarship, as well as an allegory for understanding the work of ballad antiquarianism in an era of media shift and cultural transition.2 European scholarship, as Ann Blair argues convincingly, has long been haunted by the specter of information loss: traumas such as the fire at the Alexandrian library, the pillaging of manuscripts after the dissolution of the English monasteries, and the disappearance of classical learning in the “Dark Ages” shaped the self-understanding of humanist scholarship as a project of recovery, preservation, and maintenance.3 Traditions were perceived as fragile—memories forgot, minds filled with rubbish, paper rotted or burned, and, in the end, songs, stories, texts, knowledge, languages, and entire cultures vanished. The anecdote of the manuscript rescued from the fire (saved, in a characteristic move, from an unreliable woman by a male editor) fits into a series of notable near misses in the history of English literary canon formation, including

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the burning of the Nowell codex (which held the only copy of Beowulf ) in 1731. Such anecdotes not only speak to fears about feckless noblemen and bad maids but also illustrate a more general eighteenth-century paradigm for understanding media shift as an epochal period of loss—in the transition from orality to literacy or from scribal production to printing, most of the old disappeared forever; not coincidentally, the concept of “extinction” in natural history was first postulated at this same time. While media theory often depicts these shifts as diachronic, so that literacy supersedes orality or digital replaces analog, this diachronic narrative began in the 1750s, not the 1450s or 450 bc.4 Paula McDowell has shown how even while oral communication outcompeted writing and printing late into the eighteenth century, nevertheless by the 1760s, antiquarians were defining “orality” as the archaic and outmoded precursor (which they projected backward to the fifteenth century) to a literate era constituted by the widespread diff usion of print.5 The mid-eighteenth century, the period where McDowell locates this story of media shift, was also the moment when ballads began to be formally collected and studied as the premier objects of so-called oral cultures. In a scholarly tradition beginning with Percy’s Reliques and culminating in Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), English literature came to be understood as having an oral antiquity that had dissolved sometime in the sixteenth century with the advent of printing. Education and technology had driven oral traditions to a country’s rural fringes (like the Scottish highlands), where they lingered, momentarily, in the mouths of old folk, all the while facing an imminent demise. The solution to this problem lay in designated cultural forms—most prominently, the “popular ballad”—that could be preserved beyond the extinction of oral culture in specially designed critical anthologies. Even for scholars hostile to oral tradition, like Percy, ballad anthologies and collections offered a means to materialize the vanishing traditions of antiquity, thereby stabilizing the folk past and making it immanent to the fragile present. While most studies of ballad discourse have strongly criticized “the writing of folklore” for being, in Susan Stewart’s words, “a method for making oral genres extinct,” such a critique will not be my focus in this chapter.6 Rather, this chapter will argue that ballads and ballad anthologies are literary institutions for an era of nation building, oriented by reconstruction as an imaginative goal. In particular, I will show how practices of anthologizing ballads, as well as the fantasies about the cultural and national past such poems and practices fostered, became crucial to the project of reconstruction in the postbellum United States.

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Whatever else they have been or might be, ballads are contested property.7 Though they often lack authors, they never lack claimants. To return, therefore, to Percy’s manuscript and the story of its publication: enthusiasm for the recovery of a poetic tradition stretching back to Ossian helped make the mid-eighteenth century an era of antiquarian renaissance in Britain, but such visions were tempered by anxieties of fakery and fraud, and notorious forgery scandals involving Elizabeth Wardlaw, Thomas Chatterton, and James Macpherson (among others) helped to define the project of canon formation along axes of authenticity and authentication.8 What was genuine? What was fake? And where was the line between them? These questions were pressing to ballad scholarship, a discourse peculiarly susceptible to fears of inauthenticity. Although Percy “endeavored to be as faithful, as the imperfect state of his materials would admit,” he freely acknowledged touching up his rough reliques for a “polished age,” and he atoned “for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems” by mingling them with “modern attempts in the same kind of writing . . . [and] little elegant pieces of the lyric kind” (R, xii, x). In the midst of the Ossian debate, such admissions made Percy a target of suspicion, and his rival Joseph Ritson launched a vituperative war against him, demanding access to the manuscript and later accusing him of fabricating it. After his death in 1811, Percy’s family kept the folio under tight control; by 1865, no one had seen it in a hundred years. This absence was felt sorely by literary scholars of the Victorian era, who worked within a new paradigm of philological research. Philology, as distinct from bibliophilia or antiquarianism, demanded a commitment to the study of original sources and documents in order to reconstruct the historical background and contexts in which languages and literatures came into being.9 In this vein, mid-Victorian British scholars founded a series of organizations, including the Early English Text Society (1864), the Ballad Society (1868), the Chaucer Society (1868), the Spenser Society (1871), and the New Shakspere Society (1873), that were dedicated to the recovery, study, annotation, and publication of key texts in English literary history, in the oldest and most original forms possible. The Percy Society had been founded (in 1840) to publish early English ephemeral texts, including broadsides, tracts, and chap-books (although they also published an edition of The Canterbury Tales), making faithful facsimile reproductions by consulting archives at the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum, the British Museum, and the Pepys collection at Cambridge University. However, efforts to see (let alone publish) the Percy manuscript had stalled by the 1850s (when the society disbanded) and likely would never

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have gone forward without the efforts of the American scholar Francis Child. Child was the son of a Boston sail maker and a scholarship student at Harvard; after graduating, he studied philology at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he attended lectures by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and the University of Göttingen, where he received an honorary doctorate. When he returned to the United States in the 1850s, he taught at Harvard and remained there the rest of his life, eventually becoming its first professor of English. His career was capped with the publication of the ten-volume English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which codified the genre of the Child ballad (a term still used by folklorists) and has never gone out of print. In addition, Child was a founding member of the Modern Language Association and the American Folklore Society, thus helping to institutionalize literary and folklore studies in formations that endure today. Upon his death in 1896, Child was eulogized as one of America’s greatest scholars.10 Child’s earliest projects in the United States aligned with contemporary work in England: he edited a collection of Elizabethan plays (1848) and Spenser’s poems (1855) before embarking on an eight-volume English and Scottish Ballads (1857), published as part of a 130-volume reprint series of British authors. In the preface to the second edition of this work (1860), Child explained that while his anthology contained “all but two or three of the ancient ballads of England and Scotland, and nearly all those ballads which, in either country, have been gathered from oral tradition,” it was in fact entirely “compiled from the numerous collections of Ballads printed since the beginning of the last century.”11 Out of step with the reigning paradigm of textual criticism, such dependence on printed sources assembled after the fact by questionable editors made Child very unhappy; though he strongly differentiated “true popu lar ballads, the spontaneous products of nature” from “the artificial literature” of the later “professional ballad-maker,” he had to depend on collections that likely included both sorts, since he had no access to manuscript archives. “We have not even the Percy Manuscript at our command,” he lamented, “and must be content to take the ballads as they are printed in the Reliques, with all the editor’s changes” (ESB, I: vii, xi). Without manuscript sources, Child felt complicit with the embarrassing emendations and errors of editors like Percy. His preface therefore reversed the standard introduction to collections of ephemera—rather than apologizing for the rudeness of his ballads, Child begged readers to excuse their polish and refinement, “the editor’s changes” he could not help but include. Child was clear that ballad scholarship could not progress without access to Percy’s manuscript: “The greatest ser vice that can now be done to English

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Ballad-literature is to publish this precious document. Civilization has made too great strides in the island of Great Britain for us to expect much more from tradition” (ESB, I: xii). Motivated by his own editorial frustrations, as well as the historicist anxiety about civilization’s effect on tradition, he began a drive to get it. This included a ten-year letter-writing campaign with leading English scholars, such as Frederick Furnivall and Walter W. Skeat, as well as with Percy’s descendants, in addition to raising money to purchase the document (it was sold for £150 and now resides in the British Library).12 These efforts paid off, so to speak, in 1867, when the Early English Text Society finally succeeded in publishing a facsimile. The editors, Furnivall and John W. Hales, dedicated Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript to Child, writing that “the cause of the printing of Percy’s MS., of the publication of this book, was the insistence, time after time, by Professor Child, that it was the duty of English antiquarian men of letters to print this foundation document of English balladry.” As an Englishman one could not but feel it a disgrace that an American should take more interest in an English MS. than oneself, and the more a disgrace that in this case the genuineness or falsity of the text of a score of our best ballads was involved. Was one to acknowledge that the old Sidney spirit had taken flight from its native land, and found a new home even in that noble North which had at last gone “thorough” for the slave, fighting the worthiest fight one’s life had seen?13 The dedication offers insight into the imaginative possibilities and anxious undercurrents of transatlantic balladry in the wake of the American Civil War. Ballads were property, but they also carried properties and, like some forms of property, could be carried away. What kind of property were they? Percy had presented the Reliques as real property, the “select remains of our ancient English Bards and Minstrels” that now, in his anthology, could be returned to the Countess of Huntington, his patroness, “by a kind of hereditary right” (R, ix, viii ). They were a national inheritance, possessing and displaying the heritable properties of English poetry. But the history of the Percy manuscript (itself a piece of heritable property, the rights to which were claimed strongly by Percy’s family) had opened a rift in ballad nationalism. With Child working so hard to recover this manuscript, Furnivall and Hales felt pressure as Englishmen to promote the cause of English balladry, and they worried about the consequences of international scholarship on a history of

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English poetry stabilized by popular ballads. Percy’s Reliques might contain “our best ballads,” but right of possession entailed having a fighting spirit aligned with civil warfare, the border skirmishes between North and South—England and Scotland or the Scottish highlands and lowlands— stretching from Otterburn to Culloden. But now, just after the American Civil War— another fight, “the worthiest fight one’s life had seen,” between a North and a South— “the old Sidney spirit” of Republicanism suddenly seemed mobile, capable of flying to a different “noble North” and taking the ballads with it.14 If ballads were in consequence not real but moveable property, what sort of properties did they display, and what did this display indicate about the poetic inheritance? Furnivall and Hales cited the two properties most common to the discourse on ballads, genuineness and falsity. Such emphasis on the genuine derived from anxieties about forgery, which was a problem of both aesthetics and authority—to succeed as forgeries, poems had to be made to look old, then presented as though they were old, and finally received and authenticated as such. How should “genuine” ballads be presented? What would distinguish them from false versions? Ultimately, these are questions about representation and mediation rather than questions about the objects themselves. In discussing the properties of their objects, editors defined the assumptions of their methods, and after Percy, such methods depended on an aesthetic of roughness. Percy had felt compelled to defend his rough reliques in a “polished age,” but in an important sense, their roughness was their defense, since it distinguished them from modern imitations and therefore authenticated them as the genuine “ancient literature of our own country” (R, xiv). In “On the Alliterative Metre, Without Rhyme, in Pierce Plowman’s Visions,” an essay that introduced the second volume of the Reliques, Percy described a verse form “the harmony of which neither depended on the quantity of the syllables, like that of the ancient Greeks or Romans; nor on the rhymes at the end, as in modern poetry; but consisted altogether in . . . a certain artful repetition of the sounds in the middle of the verses” (R, 265). This was the meter of “Anglo-Saxon” poetics, and roughness was its determining quality (R, 266): “After all, the old alliterative and anapestic metre of the English poets being chiefly used in barbarous age, and in a rude unpolished language, abounds in verses defective in length, proportion, and harmony; and therefore cannot enter into a comparison with the correct versification of the best modern French writers” (R, 269). This dependence on roughness and fragmentation to mark national poetics (old English versus modern French) evokes strongly ambivalent desires

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throughout the Reliques: rough meters and poetic fragments elicit Percy’s curatorial passions and cultivated sensibilities but also his red pencil. Again, roughness, fragmentation, smoothness, and polish are effects of editorial mediation, not qualities of poems. Because the fragments instantiate the fantasy of plenitude through the pathos of loss, their capacity to conjure lost authenticity also arouses a drive to finish them off. Percy’s text for “The Child of Elle,” for example, “[is] given from a fragment in the Editor’s folio MS.: which though extremely defective and mutilated . . . excited a strong desire to attempt the completion of the story. The reader will easily discover the supplemental stanzas by their inferiority, and at the same time be inclined to pardon it, when he considers how difficult it must be to imitate the affecting simplicity and artless beauties of the original” (R, 87). Because the original is both artlessly beautiful and also mutilated and defective, Percy inscribes on it his “strong desire” for completion, making the song a portal that brings the past into the present, fulfilling and redeeming it. This desire elides the historical breach marked by the manuscript’s mutilation; Percy’s ballad now embodies both past and present, and an aesthetic sensibility will differentiate original from supplemental. Here is Percy’s unpardonable sin, in the view of later editors: polishing the roughness of fragmentary authenticity effaces its value as an origin. Accordingly, Furnivall and Hales announced in the facsimile that the original manuscript’s “poor fragment” of “The Child of Elle” “[is] now printed for the first time, as in the ‘Reliques’ it is buried in a heap of ‘polished’ verses composed by Percy.” There are 200 [lines] in the thing called the “Child of Elle” in the “Reliques.” But in those 200 lines all the 39 originals do not appear. Now and then one appears, always . . . a little altered to fit it for the strange bed-fellows with which the polishing process has made it acquainted, its good manners corrupted, so to speak, by evil communications. On the whole, the union of the genuine and the false— of the old ballad with Percy’s tawdry feebleness—makes about as objectionable a mesalliance as that in the story itself is in the eyes of the father. (PFM, 1: 132–33) The editors’ weird conjugal language demonstrates how the representation of old poems linked up closely with fantasies about national inheritance. “The union of the genuine and the false” in “The Child of Elle” (and in the Reliques more generally) constituted an editorial “mesalliance” that threatened

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to steal England’s poetic birthright. As this example also indicates, the publication of the manuscript revealed what scholars since Ritson had suspected: Percy had extensively “retouched and repaired” the poems “to suit the ‘improved state of literature’ in his time,” as Child commented in a review of the facsimile’s first volume.15 To polish, retouch, or repair old poems was to corrupt with “evil communications,” and Furnivall, Hales, and Child indicted Percy for arranging a bad marriage that smoothed away the rough patrimony of English poetry. Therefore, the facsimile edition transformed Percy’s aesthetics of rough alliterative verse into an ideology of the “poor fragment,” as “The Child of Elle” shows. Here is Percy’s version: But light nowe downe, my deare ladyè, Light downe, and hold my horse; While I and this discourteous knight Doe trye our valour’s force. (R, 89) This textbook ballad quatrain nicely illustrates Percy’s alliterative metrics, while balancing the lady and knight within a neat pattern of romantic images, signaled in the clean rhyme of “horse” and “force.” Furnivall and Hales return the stanza to the “extremely defective and mutilated” state in which (they claim) Percy had found it: but light now downe, my lady gay, light downe & hold my horsse, whilest I & your father & your brether doe play vs at this crosse. (PFM, 1: 134) Now alliteration is muted (if not mutilated) significantly, and Latinate lines like “While I and this discourteous knight, / Doe trye our valour’s force” become the unpolished “whilest I & your father & your brether / doe play vs at this crosse,” which restores typographic peculiarities along with an almost flamboyant metrical irregularity. Bad editing, polemical intervention, and editorial restoration set the pattern for Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. The authenticating roughness that indicated old English paternity had been smoothed over by Percy’s galling tendencies toward Gallic polish, so, in ballad after ballad, Furnivall and Hales exposed Percy’s bad faith by reconstructing the original entry according to the manuscript’s authority. Percy had derived “The Heir of Linne,” for example, from an “original . . . found in the Editor’s folio MS.,

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the breaches and defects in which, rendered the insertion of supplemental stanzas necessary” (R, 214). According to Furnivall and Hales, Percy’s version “was polished till he could see his own face in it,” while “the best version of the ballad—the purest and neatest—is, to our thinking, the one now given in puris naturalibus” (PFM, 1: 174). Percy’s relique describes the wanderings of the prodigal Lord this way: Away then hyed the heire of Linne Oer hill and holt, and moor and fenne, Untill he came to lonesome lodge, That stood so lowe in a lonely glenne. (R, 216) The metrical alliteration, patterned repetition, and legendary incident of these lines are nowhere apparent in the later version, which reduces Percy’s two-part, 216-line narrative to a 125-line, fragmented dialogue. Again, the editors’ return to the pure naturalness of the manuscript restores lexical and typographical idiosyncrasy and metrical irregularity, which highlights Percy’s interpositions while eliding their own: he had not beene in Edenborrow not 3 qwarters of a yeere, but some did giue him, & some said nay, & some bid “to the deele gang yee!” (PFM, 1: 177) The facsimile is thus both less and more than the relique, both older and more contemporary, since it restored archaic form under the aegis of a modern paradigm that valued roughness and fragmentation as signs of the genuine. After Percy, the recuperation of history through balladry became a paradoxical process of restoring fragmentation, undoing the misbegotten alliances forged by prior generations, and rendering editorial intervention transparent. If eighteenth-century antiquaries like Percy mediate ballads through the aesthetics of roughness, polish, and completion, the nineteenth-century philological editing of Furnivall, Hales, and Child follows protocols of remediation, which Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define as the conjunction of “twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy.”16 The hand of an editor restores a ballad’s original materiality (whether print, scribal, or oral), in the process erasing itself (at least, in theory). Genuineness and falsity are therefore properties not of objects but of media and mediation.

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The publication of Percy’s manuscript therefore scandalized in another way, for the facsimile showed that only a small number of poems in the Reliques actually came from the manuscript, while a far greater number were based upon the broadside collections of Pepys, the Diceys, the British Library, and other archives of cheap print.17 Rather than bringing to light vestiges of the folk tradition from which “a score of our best ballads” had come, the Percy manuscript was revealed to be a heterogeneous amalgam of “shreds and patches” containing “ballads and romances” as well as “moral and didactic dullness” and, worst of all, “rank and noxious specimens of comparatively modern dirt, such as would suit the age of Charles II.”18 Child wrote privately to James Russell Lowell that the Percy manuscript was “poor stuff most of it and in the main not new,” with “an appendix of ‘Loose Songs’ . . . just as dirty as they can be.”19 Rather than moving scholars closer to the vanished antiquity of oral tradition, the Percy manuscript circuited ballads back into print traditions that were embarrassingly modern, ephemeral, and “Loose.” England’s folk heritage seemed scattered into “rank and noxious specimens,” its traditions—“our best ballads”—mingling promiscuously with the “modern dirt” of delinquent cheap literature.

Reconstructed Traditions Or not. The Danish folklorist Svend Grundtvig wrote to Child that the facsimile would have been better had Child edited it, because Child “knew how to distinguish the very different kinds of poetical productions, older and later, popular and artificial, which by English editors, ever since the time of Bishop Percy, have been mixed up indiscriminately under the general head of ‘Old Ballads.’ ”20 In a strangely circular form of nationalist reasoning, Grundtvig claimed that the Englishness of Furnivall and Hales did nothing to enlighten them about “their” best ballads, because no English editor could distinguish the ballad generically. In England, “ ‘Old Ballads’ ” were, like Percy’s Reliques or his manuscript, simply repositories for “poetical productions older and later, popular and artificial,” thrown together without distinction or discrimination. More discerning editors knew better. In a review of the complete facsimile in 1868, Child addressed the Ballad Society, which had been founded that year to publish “all the known collections of English ballads.”21 Describing the Pepys and Roxburghe collections of broadside ballads as “about as dull and useless reading as in a considerable

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acquaintance with worthless literature we have ever met with,” Child asked this society, [Why] should not the Ballad Society put its best foot forward, and print the manuscript ballads first? . . . Give us, then, first, all that is left, or all that can be found, of the genuine ballads of the people. Ransack the public libraries. . . . Hunt up private manuscripts. . . . And next, where are the Mrs. Farquhars, the Mrs. Browns, the Mrs. Arnots, the Miss Rutherfords themselves, and the nurses who taught them ballads? . . . [It] cannot be that the diff usion of useful knowledge, the intrusion of railroads, and the general progress of society, have quite driven all the old songs out of country-women’s heads. . . . From these sources, public libraries, parish scrap-books, and the memory of living persons, it is probable that much might be gathered.22 For Child, “actual tradition” transcended its forms of communication or storage: performance and recitation, public libraries, and private manuscripts afforded equal access to “the genuine ballads of the people,” and all sources were susceptible to “corruption” and mutilation by the “critical ingenuity” of editors—no kind of material (parish scrapbooks or the memory of living persons) assumed absolute privilege, because a good editor’s method would be necessary to determine the genuineness or falsity of any. Getting the poems (whether sung, written, or printed) was the important point. The urgency of Child’s appeal expressed a fear that access to “the genuine ballads of the people” dwindled as modernity—the diffusion of useful knowledge, railroads, social progress— overtook the world. In a gesture that rehearsed Percy’s rescue of the manuscript, Child moved to replace “the Mrs. Farquhars, the Mrs. Browns, the Mrs. Arnots, the Miss Rutherfords” with the critic and his anthology, which would preserve and transmit popular ballads long after progress had “driven all the old songs out of country-women’s heads.” In late and literate times, the ballad scholar’s work was to collect, authenticate, anthologize, and preserve, thereby reconstructing national culture in the pages of a book. When Child began working on a revised and expanded anthology in the early 1870s, his major effort was to collect every available version of any ballad he considered genuinely “popular.”23 Rather than merely collating previously published anthologies, Child would base his texts on the sources behind

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those collections, in addition to using newly discovered manuscripts and oral transcriptions solicited through printed announcements and circulars. Child’s methodology proffered the fantasy of immediacy through the remediation of orality and manuscript in print. At stake was a vision of tradition seen through complex editorial machinery: the editor’s authority guaranteed the authenticity and authentication of materials, and a poem’s inclusion in the anthology therefore determined its genre as a popular ballad. Being “popular,” like being genuine or false, was not a quality of any poem, something Child’s critics have tended not to understand.24 Perhaps to reinforce this point, Child never defined “popular ballad”; he died before writing a theoretical introduction to the anthology’s final volume, and his criteria for determining whether or not a ballad was “popular” have long puzzled scholars.25 However, in an 1874 essay on “Ballad Poetry,” Child located the “popular ballad” “anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art, to which it has formed a step, and by which it has been regularly displaced, and, in some cases, all but extinguished.” The condition of society in which a truly national or popular poetry appears explains the character of such poetry. It is a condition in which the people are not divided by political organization and book-culture into markedly distinct classes, in which consequently there is such community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form an individual. Such poetry, accordingly, while it is in essence an expression of our common human nature, and so of universal and indestructible interest, will in each case be differenced by circumstances and idiosyncrasy.26 Child’s account of the popular ballad was not a formal description: after a glancing definition of the genre (“a narrative song, a short tale in lyric verse” characterized by “the absence of subjectivity and self-consciousness”), he devotes the essay to analyzing the ballad’s emergence, the social conditions of its production, and the causes of its eventual disappearance.27 Child’s interest in popular ballads lay with the “popular,” not the “ballad.” Popular ballads, according to Child, were the boundary between two cultural and social epochs, and they contained within their form the vanished orality and the characteristic “circumstances and idiosyncrasies” of the folk who had created them. Popular ballads, in Child’s argument and his anthology, were made the objects of a fantasy in which a collective people acted like an individual—a fantasy, therefore, about nation-states, which also figure disparate populations into

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singular personifications. This balladic fantasy about a singular folk resonated powerfully in the postbellum United States: Furnivall and Hales may have identified English balladry with the American Civil War, “the worthiest fight one’s life had seen,” but the political, sectional, and racial conflicts of the postwar era were fatally challenging efforts to instantiate a sense of national American identity and culture. In the context of Reconstruction, which ended in 1877 after disastrously failing to reconcile sectional animosities into political unity, Child’s effort to establish an authoritative and exhaustive anthology was, consciously or unconsciously, a project of national reconstruction through literature: by providing access to an English and Scottish folk heritage, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads offered to make popular ballads the wellspring of an imaginary that could transcend the sectionalism and discord of historical time. Yet for all the unity projected by the term “Child ballad” and the generic concept it purportedly upholds, it is a shock to discover the heterogeneity of the “ballads” in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. “Child ballad” is a misnomer: for each of the 305 titles in the anthology, Child printed as many as twenty different versions, variants, and fragments, which often bore little resemblance to each other. Like Percy’s manuscript, which cohered a hodgepodge of print-based “shreds and patches” into a mythic tradition of minstrel antiquity, each Child ballad brought together a motley array of poems, songs, and fragments under the fiction that they derived from one source, be it a folk tale, impulse, idea, or musical or metrical air. Child argued for unities among all these variants in the scholarly prefaces to each entry, which sometimes ran thirty pages or more. “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight” (Child ballad 4), for instance, had a thirty-two-page introduction and featured texts with opening stanzas as different as the following: A. Fair lady Isabel sits in her bower sewing, Aye as the gowans grow gay There she heard an elf-knight blawing his horn. The first morning in May. B. There came a bird out o a bush, On water for to dine, An sighing sair, says the king’s daughter, “O wae’s this heart o mine!”

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C. False Sir John a wooing came To a maid of beauty fair May Colven was this lady’s name, Her father’s only heir.28 The entry includes six complete versions, some of which are themselves collations of three or four different print and manuscript sources, so that the singular Child ballad is progressively disaggregated into a dozen variations as one reads the entry from beginning to end. Formal, thematic, or linguistic features do not stabilize this “ballad”: only A, for instance, includes a traditional burden; B, C, and D have a standard 4/3 ballad meter, but A, E, and F do not; only some versions use Scots dialect, legendary action, or specific locales like “Wearie’s Well” (B) or “Bunion Bay” (D); and finally, although every text tells a compressed story, these stories are all complete—no version typifies the fragmentation that Child and his contemporaries identified with the antiquated “poetry of nature.” Indeed, it is hard to see how any one of these ballads are less “polished” than Percy’s reliques; only collectively do they conjure the fragmentation characteristic of Child’s “genuine ballads of the people.” As I hope this example also indicates, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads is a wonderfully bizarre and disorienting object, in which each illusory ballad devolves into a series of disparate, discrepant instances. Child provides order by drawing out structural parallels among the texts’ stories and, most important, by locating comparable poems and stories in the popular literatures of other European (and occasionally non-European) countries. The prefaces therefore emphasize the paths of circulation along which songs and stories moved among traditions; although Child defined popular ballads as the natural property of the people who sang them, in his anthology, a ballad’s diff usion through many different literary and linguistic traditions authenticated it as folk culture.29 Child’s introduction to “Lady Isabel and the ElfKnight” catalogues versions in Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German, Polish, Wendish, Bohemian, Serbian, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Breton, Magyar, and Transylvanian traditions. Sheer accumulation of details and specimens transforms a collection into a theoretical argument—the overwhelming amount of variations and versions paradoxically makes plausible the claim for a folk unity among all the examples. In order to complete his project as he intended, then, Child required material. Through the initial stages of the project, he issued circulars that entreated

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“the aid of gentlewomen in Scotland, or elsewhere, who remember ballads that they have heard repeated by their grandmothers or nurses” and asked “clergymen and schoolmasters, living in sequestered places, to exert themselves to collect what is left among the people.”30 Yet despite his inclination toward oral transcriptions, most of the songs Child anthologized came from printed collections or manuscripts. For all of Child’s celebrated genius at authenticating popular ballads, his relentless acquisition of manuscripts and rare books was the more far-reaching implication of his work (today Harvard’s libraries—including the Child Memorial Library—house one of the world’s premier collections of folklore).31 From his position at Harvard, which was rapidly expanding and modernizing, both intellectually and economically, under the leadership of Charles W. Eliot (president from 1869–1909), Child was empowered to spend freely to acquire British and European materials, and his letters are replete with details about the money he had available.32 In one letter to Lowell, he noted that “we can spend nigh 16000 a year now, one gets pretty much what he asks for” (SF, 37). To a degree strikingly unusual for a humanities professor (then and now), his resources matched his ambitions, and thus The English and Scottish Popular Ballads embodied not only a particular moment in ballad scholarship, but, funded by the wealth that flowed into Harvard in the late nineteenth century (when its endowment increased ten-fold), it also exemplified more general postbellum American expansionism.33 Child was not shy about asserting this prerogative. For instance, he liked to joke that Lowell, who spent nearly a decade as ambassador to Spain and the United Kingdom, could order the European folk to bring forth their ballads like so much treasure. While Lowell served in the Spanish foreign ministry (1877–80), Child wrote him, “We are receiving a lot of Catalan things (Milás & others) just now, but no ballads. Milás ballads are so good that your excellency ought to . . . sweep the province” (SF, 31). Later, Child put the joke more bluntly: “Can’t you make somebody collect the ballads in other parts of Spain as they have been collected in Catalonia (and Portugal)? . . . There must be a great lot that could be recovered in Spain—no country more likely to be rich in them” (SF, 41). These lines fit into a larger pattern of relations between the United States and Spain, the remaining colonial domains of which were objects of American imperial ambition in the 1870s; Lowell’s ambassadorship coincided with a period of heightened tension that culminated in the Spanish-American War of 1898 (coincidentally, the year the anthology was completed). Child’s jokes thus align inadvertently with the entry of the United States onto the stage of global imperialism, and

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such exchanges continued throughout Lowell’s years in Europe. During his tenure as British foreign minister (1880–85), the students of St. Andrews University elected Lowell Rector. Child congratulated him, declaring, “Was there ever such a series of conquests, triumphs, sports, since Caesar?” As Rector of St Andrews, thou art naturally lord of all Scotland. Let thy first decree be that every ballad known to any lady, maidservant, fishwife, dairywoman or nurse be given up under penalties of misprision & praemunire to all that shall be art & part in the withholding of the same. (SF, 57) Here the joke sounds nastier: not only will ballads be taken down from the lips of old Scottish crones, but the women themselves will be seized and stripped of their songs should they resist the imperial authority of Child’s or Lowell’s appeal (misprision and praemunire were crimes against the Crown that could result in the forfeiture of property): the Scots must give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s—“their” ballads.34 My point is not that Child and Lowell were acquisitive Yankees plundering Europe’s cultural treasures like characters from a novel by Henry James. Instead, I want to emphasize that the rising political and economic power of the United States gave Child’s project a set of meanings and consequences that go well beyond a particular ballad theory or scholarly method. At least some European contemporaries saw this. The Scottish folklorist John Francis Campbell, for instance, rebuffed Child’s efforts to buy Campbell’s manuscript collection: “[Though] I entirely understand your hunger after writings, & collections, I rather prefer to keep mine ‘for Scotland and for me’ as the song says. . . .—Now sir the very classes from whom I made my very large collections of Folklore of all known kinds orally have migrated in tribes to America. . . . If you will do in Yankeedoodledom as I did here, you may gather a bigger harvest orally than I did, for the people of this old country are now in the New World; legends, stories, ballads, and all.”35 Campbell’s ethnographic language indicates that, like Child, he believed songs inhered in people: as the tribes of Scottish folk migrated, they took their “legends, stories, ballads, and all” with them. Child could “gather a bigger harvest” by delving among them in the New World than by purchasing Campbell’s manuscript. If oral transcripts seem to trump written records here, Campbell also used the abstraction of orality to resist the westward flight of the Scottish folk and folklore by keeping his manuscript “for Scotland and for me,” as the song said— and it is worth considering what exactly that song did

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say, for the old ballad Campbell quoted reveals quite a lot about the stakes of this exchange. The song in question was Robert Burns’s Jacobite ballad “The Highland Widow’s Lament,” in which an emigrant widow comes “to the low Countrie . . . Without a penny in my purse,” and contrasts her present penury with her past “in the Highland hills,” when “Nae woman in the Country wide / Sae happy was as me.” Oh! I am come to the low countrie, Och-on, och-on, och-rie! Without a penny in my purse, To buy a meal to me. It was na sae in the Highland hills, Och-on, och-on, och-rie! Nae woman in the country wide Sae happy was as me. . . . I was the happiest of a’ the Clan, Sair, sair may I repine; For Donald was the brawest lad, And Donald he was mine. Till Charlie Stewart cam’ at last, Sae far to set us free; My Donald’s arm was wanted then For Scotland and for me. Their waefu’ fate what need I tell, Right to the wrang did yield: My Donald and his Country fell Upon Culloden field.36 The song expresses a strongly historicist sensibility about the fate of belonging in an era of nation building, which, according to Burns, began with the battle of Culloden. A foundational event in the development of English nationalism, the political and ideological consolidation of “Britain,” and, according to Ian Baucom, Atlantic modernity at large, the Jacobite rising of 1745 and its crushing defeat at Culloden in 1746 established English hegemony over

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the so-called Celtic fringe but also created a new mode of imagining national identity across Britain and Ireland in the terms of a melancholy or romantic historicism, or what Baucom calls “the news of loss.”37 Depicted most famously in Waverley and other novels by Walter Scott, the defeat of the ’45 redefined Scottish identity in literary rather than political terms, but what the ghosts of the vanquished clans lost in political force, they more than recovered in cultural power. The sources of this power can be glimpsed in Burns’s song. “The Highland Widow’s Lament” invokes “Donald’s arm” as a figure for Scottish resistance and the guarantor “for Scotland and for me,” but military resistance fails when “right to the wrang did yield . . . Upon Culloden field.” The song characterizes this defeat as the loss of a clannish world of plenty, but the losses of Scottish heroes and Scottish clans are countered by songs like “The Highland Widow’s Lament,” which emerge from Culloden as new spaces for the collective identification formerly provided by the clans and the highlands. “The Highland Widow’s Lament” exemplifies this new order by recuperating an old tune for a modern song about the loss of traditions. Burns wrote “The Highland Widow’s Lament” for a different ballad anthology, James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803), and it deploys one of the “fugitive airs” he had collected for that project.38 The burden of Burns’s song, “och-on, och-on, och-rie,” adapts the burden of “Oh ono chrio,” a Scots song of the late seventeenth century (which Child also included in ballad 106, “The Famous Flower of Serving Men”).39 Like Burns’s song, “Oh ono chrio” tells “the news of loss,” beginning, Oh was not I a weary wight! Oh ono chri O! Oh ono chri O! Maid, wife, and widow, in one night, Oh! onochri onochri O!40 According to Burns’s annotation, this song referred to the Glencoe massacre, an atrocity committed against the Highlanders in 1692 after the first Jacobite rising. By transforming “Oh ono chrio” to “och-on, och-on, och-rie,” Burns links into a tradition of metrical dissonance. The burden is the affective center of these ballads, where their investments in pathos are most clearly heard. The burdens also resist the language and disrupt the meter of the poems; although to English ears they might sound like typical nonsemantic refrains (“Oh hey diddle diddle,” etc.), both are in fact Gaelic lamentations, and as such they work against the manifest content of the poems. The material

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difference between the Gaelic words and the English line, the way they resist scansion according to English metrics, matters more than the semantic content of the phrases (which mean, roughly, “Woe is me!”). Though each song tells news of loss, the Gaelic burdens speak otherwise by conjuring a tradition of rebellion that resists ascription to the emergent world order of Anglo-Atlantic modernity. Cast out upon “the low countrie,” the scattered fragments of the vanquished clans reunite through the airs of their songs, as the Highland Widow calls them back through a metrical invocation starkly materialized in the burden “och-on, och-on, och-rie!”41 At least, this is the function served by Campbell’s invocation of “The Highland Widow’s Lament” in his correspondence with Child, where Scottish nationalism is collapsed into the manuscript that they both desire, and the nationalization of this desire is circulated through the traces of the song. It was fitting, then, that Campbell invoked this ballad to oppose the predations of “Yankeedoodledum,” a figure for the United States also made in terms of a popular tune. This exchange reveals much about the nineteenth-century uses of ballads like “The Highland Widow’s Lament” or anthologies like The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Campbell actually invoked Burns’s song as a representative not for Scotland but for his manuscript collection of “legends, stories, ballads, and all.” That is, “The Highland Widow’s Lament” did not vocalize a nation but instead figured a manufactured assemblage of texts, whose construction into a tradition of “legends, stories, ballads, and all” both mediated and was mediated by the cultural fantasies encoded in the ballad genre. Campbell’s invocation of “The Highland Widow’s Lament” calls attention to the remediating work of balladry: Child and Campbell valued the contents of the manuscript but also the manuscript object itself, which made tradition visible as a constructed entity even as it seemed to collapse the distance between the past and the present, the oral and the written, the folk and the nation. Campbell’s refusal to share his manuscript is all the more striking because on other occasions, he willingly transcribed songs and secured manuscripts for Child, including a collection held by Hugh Hume Campbell that proved crucial to the completion of Child’s anthology.42 The protracted negotiations for Hugh Campbell’s collection lasted several years and involved not only J. F. Campbell and Lowell but also Granville Leveson-Gower, British minister for foreign affairs, and Alvey A. Adee, U.S. assistant secretary of state. The relation between ballad scholarship and state power became even more evident when Lowell had the manuscript sent to Washington, D.C., via official

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diplomatic pouch to avoid “all question of Custom Houses.” When Child finally received it, he triumphantly announced, “I almost felt that I was the American nation personified” (SF, 55). Where, in the essay “Ballad Poetry,” Child had fantasized about a collective folk who created poetry as an individual, here the individual—the ballad collector—fantastically morphed into the nation. Thinking through ballads became a way to imagine “the American nation” as a person, but beyond the spaces of particular songs, this ballad nationalism resided in the scholarly anthology, which converted disparate texts, fragments, and variants into literary traditions. By the 1880s, then, the popular ballad (as a kind of poem, book, or discourse) was serving scholarly, literary, and political projects. If Percy’s anthology monumentalized the ballad for an era of nation building, Child’s remade it for an era of national reconstruction. In a time when “the songs of the people are no longer handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth,” wrote The Nation, it was essential that “the ancient ballads of our tongue should be secured and preserved in the earliest and most authentic form attainable.”43 The anthologized ballad was an emblem of the cultural losses attendant to media shift and also the tradition-saving labors of scholarship. The importance of the project for contemporaries manifested in the ways they restricted its imagined audience—paradoxically, given the anthology’s focus on a supposedly popular literature: “Child’s book of Ballads,” Charles Eliot Norton explained to John Ruskin, “is a study of the favorite forms in which the poetic imaginations of the common people shaped themselves.” Despite this emphasis, and although it “is a masterpiece of pleasant scholarship and character,” Norton warned that the anthology “is not a book for boys and girls, or for amusement, but a learned book.”44 Transferring the popular poetic imagination from “word of mouth” into a “learned book” enabled the popular ballad to secure a literary basis for nationalist claims, and this was serious business. As the Atlantic Monthly put it, “Independently of the pride which an American may properly take in every enterprise which shows how rapidly scholarship in this country is progressing, there is a special reason why he may be pleased that the English folksong should have first received adequate attention and study in the United States. It seems to attest his claim of coproprietorship in the treasures of the language. In particular, many of these ballads have been handed down and sung, from generation to generation, in the New England as well as in the Old.”45 In fact, few of the versions in Child’s anthology came from American sources, but the point was well taken: the publication of The English and

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Scottish Popular Ballads claimed these ballads as sources for an American literary identity. As the culmination of more than a century of ballad scholarship, the anthology rendered invisible a slippage between literature and nation: the work “is one of which not only America may well be proud, but for which every lover of English literature, and every earnest student of the inner side of human history, owe [Child] a debt of profound gratitude.”46 Patriotic and literary sentiments blend into one; identifying the popular ballads of “our tongue” identified them as “ours.” This ambiguous shift from tongue to nation made language the basis for “co-proprietorship in the treasures of the language,” a move that allowed ballads to be handed down as easily and as often in “the New England as well as the old,” for the future, if not also for the past.

Lost Causes The English and Scottish Popular Ballads is therefore a Reconstruction text and the Child ballad a Reconstruction genre, with both anthology and genre offering ways to imagine the American nation in literary terms. Child’s anthology formalized a reading of social history in which abstracted genres (popular songs, fairy tales, games, lore, etc.), preserved in anthologies and other scholarly discourses, became the bases for conceiving social life and public culture as imagined communities— and here I refer not to Benedict Anderson but to the ballad scholar, folklorist, and student of Child’s, Francis Barton Gummere, who coined this phrase in 1911.47 In the context of the ongoing violence of the postbellum era, this was an important outcome. To put it differently, the Jacobite rising was not the only “lost cause” remediated by poems like “The Highland Widow’s Lament.” From its inception in the early 1870s through its completion in 1898, Child’s anthology project was at the center of a postbellum literary reconstruction of the United States that reimagined the Civil War as the origin of both a united American nation and a communalized American literature. Or, as Walt Whitman wrote in 1876, “All the hitherto experience of the States, their first century has been but preparation, adolescence—and [this] Union is only now and henceforth, (i.e. since the secession war,) to enter on its full democratic career.”48 “Those four years,” he put it a few years later, are “the verteber of poetry and art, (of personal character too,) for all future America.”49

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[The] immeasurable value and meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest to a nation, (and here all our own)—the imaginative and artistic senses—the literary and dramatic ones. . . . A long and varied series of contradictory events arrives at last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement. . . . Its sharp culmination, and as it were solution, of so many bloody and angry problems, illustrates those climax-moments on the stage of universal Time, where the historic Muse at one entrance, and the tragic Muse at the other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in the long drama of creative thought, and give it radiation, tableau, stranger than fiction. Fit radiation—fit close! How the imagination—how the student loves these things! . . . that parturition and delivery of our at last really free Republic, born again, henceforth to commence its career of genuine homogeneous Union, compact, consistent with itself.50 The passage comes from Whitman’s most popular text, the lecture “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” which he first performed in 1879. Billed as a dramatic retelling of Lincoln’s assassination, the lecture was more concerned with rethinking the Civil War and Lincoln’s death as indices for a new, national American identity (Whitman pointedly referred throughout the talk to the “Union war” rather than the secession war). “I have call’d you together,” he announced, to mark a “tragic reminiscence. No narrow or sectional reminiscence. It belongs to these States in their entirety.”51 The historical dialectic of the war, Whitman’s “series of contradictory events,” represented as tragic drama or tableau “stranger than fiction,” reached a synthesis in the “visible incidents and surroundings of Abraham Lincoln’s murder, as they really occur’d.”52 Synthesis is also the drama’s curtain, drawn on the “highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement,” the culmination of a “long drama of creative thought” that realizes the “genuine homogeneous Union” whose career can henceforth commence, with a people united in a common identity for the first time. As Whitman seems aware, such an outcome must be expressed in literary forms, whether as drama, tragedy, lecture, or ballad. The staginess of Whitman’s performance contributed to the ideology of his script by enacting the national incorporation that his lecture narrated: if the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination (which occurred in front of a stage) is the index by which future Americans recognize their shared identity, then the local, staged reading of

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this drama carries forward the drama’s dialectical intent by activating national collective memory in the audience. As Bayard Taylor’s “The Ballad of Abraham Lincoln” (1870) had it, You know it all: you can’t forget The names of many a day, When, armed for death, our blue-coats met The Southern coats of gray. You saw the Union’s heroes go With trump and rattling drum: And then—in solemn march and slow, You saw their coffins come.53 After Lincoln’s assassination, “A gloom on all the nation fell . . . By millions wept, his burial car / Across the land was drawn.”54 The many anonymous deaths of soldiers Northern and Southern are rendered personal in the memories of readers and audience members, while the spectacle of Lincoln’s funeral procession makes his death a moment of national catharsis. In both cases, however, the funeral marches of common soldier and martyr president need to be collected in the ballad in order to become touchstones of collective feeling. The ballad forcibly reminds its readers (“you can’t forget”) of what they (presumably) already know or remember; shared feelings are the content of a literary form necessary to make them into national affect. For Whitman on the public stage, such work is the task of the bard, whose magnetic words and stories, according to Edward Whitley, negotiated the “complex set of loyalties . . . to communities both smaller and larger than the nation itself ” that the Lincoln lecture would reconcile (“no narrow or sectional reminiscence” but instead one taking place “on the stage of universal time”).55 Accounts of the lecture accentuated Whitman’s hoary features, his flowing hair and beard and loose clothing, which added weight to his authority as historical witness by presenting him as a reminder and remainder of the past: “His bushy hair was snow-white, rather long, and floated backward in ripples from a convex forehead of ample breadth and height. His eyes looked keenly from under a pair of jutting, shaggy brows, perfectly white also, as were his ample moustaches and spreading beard. All this snowy fringe made the bard look strikingly patriarchal: and his shirt collar was one more white and negligent matter, which he wore open about his sturdy throat, undecorated by tie or cravat.”56

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This costume was familiar to many representations of Whitman, but only on this lecture stage did the open collar and unkempt hair endow him with the bardic authority he had been claiming for himself since the 1850s.57 Whitman’s performance of embodied historicity depended on an aesthetics of aged roughness similar to that which governed the scholarly presentation of antiquated genres—indeed, like the fragmentary authenticity generated through the medium of the ballad anthology, Whitman’s strategies of self-representation had for two decades depended on making himself appear older than his age alone would have indicated, as becomes especially apparent by comparing portraits of him from the late 1840s with those of the late 1850s and after.58 Whitman himself was the relic that evoked the historical epoch he narrated. As one writer put it before a reading in 1887, “In view of his age and failing strength, it is improbable that New Yorkers will have many opportunities of hearing him read it here again.”59 As a fable of Reconstruction, in which the catastrophic violence of the war could be recuperated as the parturition of the “genuine homogeneous Union,” “Death of Abraham Lincoln” shows Whitman to have been closely engaged with the era’s poetics of lost causes. “The last inclosing sublimation of race or poem is, what it thinks of death,” he explained, and such prospective extinction (the “post-mortem effects” D. H. Lawrence famously mocked) remade his poetry into the index of lost history.60 In this way, Child’s popular balladry modeled the kind of indexical power Whitman imagined for Leaves of Grass after the Civil War: poems would be the “nutriment and influences” toward the “development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man . . . [by which] the United States of the future . . . are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal’d into a living union.”61 At issue for Whitman was the basic tenet of the Child ballad, the appeal to a popular audience. What made a poem popular? And what did such popularity mean? One member of Whitman’s audience in 1879, the critic and poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, provided an answer. At the time, Stedman was writing an essay series on American poets for Scribner’s Monthly, and his essay on Whitman, published a year later, acknowledged Whitman’s complex role in nineteenth-century public culture: although “others are more widely read,” no one else was so “widely talked of ” or “had held even a few readers with so absolute a sway.”62 However, while “various editions of [Whitman’s] poems have found a sale, he is little read by our common people, who know him so well, and of whose democracy he is the self-avowed herald. In numberless homes of working-men . . . the books of other poets are treasured.” According to Stedman, Whitman was not truly

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popular because his poems circulated through elite readerships rather than through the homes and hearts of common laborers: “Whitman is more truly the voice and product of the culture of which he bids us beware.” The “formalism” of Whitman’s “irregular, manneristic chant” placed his poems “at the other extreme of artificiality” and appealed only to highly sophisticated readers: “thus he is, in a sense, the poet of the over-refined and the doctrinaires.”63 Paradoxically, Stedman argued that the “pieces whose quality never fails with any class of hearers— of which ‘My Captain’ is an example— are those in which our poet has approached most nearly, and in a lyrical, melodious manner, to the ordinary forms.”64 In other words, the few poems in which Whitman followed regular rhyme and metrical patterns were his least “formalist” because they were his most popular, appealing to the widest class of readers. Therefore, it was entirely appropriate that Whitman concluded his lecture on Lincoln by reciting “O Captain! My Captain!” because the work of national commemoration carried on in the lecture text was amplified by a poem that audiences could easily remember and carry away with them. A year or more ago I was one of a small but sympathetic audience gathered in New York to hear Mr. Whitman, at the cordial request of many authors, journalists and artists, deliver a lecture upon Abraham Lincoln. . . . A patriot of the honest school spoke to us, yet with a new voice— a man who took the future into his patriotism, and the world no less than his own land. I wished that the youths of America could hear him, and that he might go through the land reading, as he did that night, from town to town. I saw that he was, by nature, a rhapsodist, like them of old, and should be, more than other poets, a reciter of the verse that so aptly reflects himself. . . . When the brief discourse was ended, he was induced to read the shorter dirge, “O Captain! my Captain!” It is, of his poems, among those nearest to a wonted lyrical form, as if the genuine sorrow of his theme had given him new pinions. He read it simply and well, and as I listened to its strange, pathetic melodies, my eyes filled with tears, and I felt that here, indeed, was a minstrel of whom it would be said, if he could reach the ears of the multitude and stand in their presence, that not only the cultured, but “the common people heard him gladly.” 65

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Reciting his most “lyrical” poem on the stage, Whitman came as close as he ever did to reaching the “ears of the multitude,” but the stage could only gesture toward an idealized popular circulation: “something of Lincoln himself seemed to pass into this man who had loved and studied him,” Stedman wrote, and he wished that “the youths of America could hear him, and that he might go through the land reading, as he did that night, from town to town.” This was Whitman at his most bardic, when his audience experienced from his words, as Stedman did, “a confirmation of the common cultural values that define them.”66 Because Whitman could not travel the land reciting the “strange, pathetic melodies” of his most lyrical verse, the reconstruction of Lincoln would reach the “ears of the multitude” through the medium of poems that assumed “wonted lyrical forms,” like “O Captain! My Captain!” O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

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But I, with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.67 Although the poem seems to mask the violence of the Civil War through the metaphor of the ship of state— a denial of the war’s human costs that are so much the focus of Whitman’s other wartime poems—this elision throws into ironic relief the exultation of the swaying masses on shore. The illusions of military and nationalist rhetoric are part of this poem’s pragmatics: the poem conceals war in its extended metaphor, but in so doing, it also projects that concealment onto the exulting crowds, who fail to realize that the Captain has died and who thus fail to see that the ship has brought home both triumph and tragedy. The elegy’s recognition of death is therefore an act of annunciation: since the poet is sole witness to the Captain’s death, he alone must convert the crowd’s unthinking triumphalism into the nation’s sentimental mourning. Standing before the crowd, on the deck where the fallen Captain lies, the poet will organize a public (the crowd on shore, as well as audiences in the theater, the street, the schoolroom, or the parlor) around the collective work of grief, in the process condensing shared meanings out of the unrepresented traumas of the unnamed war. Through the end of the century, “O Captain! My Captain!” was reserved as an instance in which Whitman’s adherence to “wonted lyrical forms” enabled him to reach a popular readership. As one review of the 1881 Leaves of Grass put it, “Having found a publisher, it remains to be seen if Mr. Whitman shall find a public. . . . [It] will be a fine stroke of the irony of fate if he shall be destined to be remembered only by the few pieces which are marked by the ‘piano-tune’ quality that he derides—the true and tender lyric of ‘My Captain’ . . . [is] likely to be preserved in memory when his more characteristic pieces—those which are without form and void— shall exist only as curiosities.”68 For this reviewer, “finding a public” meant being preserved in the memories of a popular readership. “O Captain! My Captain!” achieved this because its “piano-tune” form, its meter and its rhythm, enabled it to transcend the formless curiosity Leaves of Grass. Even though Leaves of Grass was to be published by J. R. Osgood, Whitman would only find a public if his poems were carried beyond the pages of his books.69 Thus, the performance quality of “O Captain! My Captain!,” its capacity for endless recitation and reiteration, made it the perfect vehicle for creating a public and commemorating American history by instilling it poetically into the bodies, hearts, and

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memories of its readers and auditors. “O Captain! My Captain” is therefore a poem preeminently in the mode of postbellum historicism, and the ease with which it moved about in the 1880s and 1890s testifies to Whitman’s engagement with the reconstructive poetics of the ballad.70 Like Whitman’s other tributes to Lincoln besides “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” “O Captain! My Captain!” has not fared well with later readers. F. O. Matthiessen characterized twentieth-century opinion when he castigated the poem’s nineteenth-century popularity: the poem “reverted to the hackneyed cadences and imagery of his first newspaper verse. That this ballad, wholly untypical of his poems, should have been the only one to have found its way to the great world of grammar school readers is ample and ironic comment on how far Whitman’s authentic idiom was from even the rudimentary means by which a wide audience is reached.”71 The poem’s schoolroom context was famously reproduced in Peter Weir’s 1989 film Dead Poets Society, which concludes with the students of Welton Academy testifying their allegiance to the cashiered teacher John Keating by standing on their desks and declaiming the title line to him. The film portrays the boys’ education in and out of the classroom as a discovery of poetry’s power to shape social life, with “O Captain! My Captain!” as the touchstone for competing notions of social value. By quoting the title line, the boys identify themselves against the repressive conformity that pervades the school. Such an appropriation is highly ironic, then, because this poem is now almost always taken as a unique instance of Whitman’s capitulation to Victorian convention. As Matthiessen’s comment indicates, the poem’s nineteenth-century popularity has become the mark of its low literary value. But as he also astutely noted, the poem was exceptional among Whitman’s oeuvre for being a ballad that moved off the page and into the recitation culture of the schoolroom, the parlor, and the theater. The many reprintings, performances, and citations of the poem in the 1870s and 1880s indicate that the features of “O Captain! My Captain!” obnoxious to Matthiessen in the 1940s had made the poem valuable to the era of Reconstruction. Against the failures of political Reconstruction, the postbellum United States sought out cultural solutions to the problems of sectional, social, and racial violence. Carried beyond the limited circulation of Leaves of Grass and into the popular heart, “O Captain! My Captain!” abstracted the war into social affect and collective sentiment, converting public violence into a memory of shared loss by remaking history in the shape of a ballad.

Chapter 5

The Reconstruction of American Poetry

Misquoting Whittier Whitman was not the only old poet getting his due at the end of the 1870s. The occasion of Whittier’s seventieth birthday in December 1877 prompted a nationwide outpouring from fans elite and humble, black and white, male and female, young and old, who celebrated the eminent poet in communications public and private. A group of poems printed in that month’s Literary World ran a range of forms and styles, from the sentimentalism of Josiah Gilbert Holland’s “Ten Times Seven” (“Thou art ten gentle boys of seven, / With souls too sweet to stray from heaven”) to political addresses like “To the Poet in Whittier,” by the ex-Confederate poet Paul Hamilton Hayne, and “The Poet of Our Love,” by William Lloyd Garrison.1 Hayne offered Whittier sectional reconciliation through a poem: “From this far realm of Pines I waft thee now, / A Brother’s greeting . . . Earnest in heart as pen, / The tests of time have left thee undefiled.”2 Despite Whittier’s long antislavery career and his poems denouncing the Southern states, Hayne took the occasion to claim intersectional fraternity with Whittier, a significant gesture in 1877, the year Reconstruction ended. Whittier was “undefiled” by his involvement in antislavery, which Hayne could overlook for the “laurels on thy reverend brow.” On the other hand, Garrison presented Whittier’s antislavery partisanship as his great poetic claim: Whittier had not “the highest reach of the sublime, / Nor loftiest flight on fancy’s airy wings, / Nor strongest power of genius” (he went on at length in this vein), yet “he stands without his peer,” because “When millions in our guilty land were held / In chattel servitude,” Whittier “in thrilling verse / Rehearsed the dreadful story of their wrongs.”3

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While the poems printed in the Literary World varied in their representations of Whittier’s career and achievements, they all addressed Whittier as a national poet whose claims to attention came from his popular celebration. In other words, Whittier was the proper site for expressions of national feeling because of his relation to common readers. This was not an obvious way to read the poet or his career, and Whittier’s emergence in the 1860s and 1870s as a poet of national consensus was not a simple process. Instead, as I will argue in this chapter, Whittier’s postbellum prominence came about through a complex renegotiation of his antislavery work (situated in a broader reappraisal of the legacy of antislavery activism) and a concomitant critical reorganization of his oeuvre. The invention of Whittier as a national figure tracked across the system of mediations that related the poet to his readers: in critical essays in national-market periodicals like Harper’s, Appleton’s, and the Atlantic Monthly; in canon-making books, including biographies, travelogues, anthologies, and textbooks, all of which popularized a certain selection of his work; in public celebrations of his birthday, which became an annual occasion for readers to fete their beloved author according to certain norms; and, most important, in the dispersed, heterogeneous, and intimate ways that individual readers assimilated, adopted, and engaged his poems. This chapter therefore traces Whittier’s reconstruction at the macro level, the level of taste-making authorities and institutions, and at the micro level, the personal experiences of readers. Throughout the entire system of literary culture, Whittier’s national importance was based on the presumed intimacy with which he spoke to, and was beloved by, ordinary readers. And this intimacy was understood to be the direct result of his particular genius with ballads. Thus, in the poetic celebration of Whittier’s seventieth birthday, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps highlighted how “the common heart and mind” had claimed the “seventy years of music [that stirs] / The common pulse to-day”; Bayard Taylor emphasized that “Men know thee most as one that loves his race, / And bless thee with their love!”; and George Parsons Lathrop wrote that “thy threescore years and ten / Are numbered to the hearts of men / In songs that fill our fleeting days.”4 The public fanfare was underwritten by a representation of Whittier as a poet beloved by the people, so that celebrating Whittier (in verse or otherwise) reflexively celebrated the American people and their collective identification with and through his poems. But this common understanding, as well as its embedded dynamic of literary nation making, did not go uncontested during the month of celebrations. At a dinner on Whittier’s

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birthday, December 17, 1877, the model of a national literature organized by genial authorial personae was challenged in ways that reveal the tensions inhering in the public circulation of poems in the postbellum era. The Boston publisher H. O. Houghton planned the occasion as a joint commemoration of Whittier’s birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the Atlantic Monthly.5 Whittier, Emerson, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. headlined the event, which was attended by over sixty of the Atlantic’s most well-known authors, although, significantly, none of its female contributors were invited. “Certainly there has been nothing like this dinner to Whittier in this country, for its manifestation of the swiftly growing power of the literary body in America,” wrote the New York Evening Post the next day, when many of the evening’s speeches were reproduced in newspapers across the country.6 The evening’s most infamous moment came when Mark Twain tweaked the images of Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes by telling a tale in which three hoboes adopt the poets’ names and besiege a hapless California miner. Although the burlesque did not seem to offend anyone at the dinner, newspaper accounts quickly criticized it as “flat, silly, coarse, rough, and unpardonable.”7 Clemens himself felt the joke to be a colossal blunder and a “humiliation” from which his public image might never recover, and William Dean Howells later wrote that Twain had badly underestimated “the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those nearest them.”8 According to Howells, Twain’s great blunder was to have “trifled” with the “personality” of the three poets: “to have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes . . . was a break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair.”9 Twain’s joke refracted the cultural veneration of the “Fireside Poets,” and his speech masterfully traded in the circulation of their poems and the publicness of their personae. Speaking “here on the shore of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its biggest literary billows,” Twain looked back on his own first attempt to “try the virtue of my nom de guerre” during “an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California.”10 Clemens successfully deployed his new name to gain entry to “a miner’s lonely log-cabin in the foot-hills of the Sierras,” but on hearing Twain’s name, the miner told him he was “the fourth literary man that’s been here in twenty-four hours—I’m a-going to move” (129). Then followed the miner’s story of how “Mr. Emerson,” “a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed,” “Mr. Holmes,” “as fat as a balloon,” with “double-chins all the way down to his stomach,” and “Mr. Longfellow,” “built like a prize fighter,” had invaded his home, eaten all his food, gambled, fought, demanded

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him to “sing ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ till I dropped,” stolen his boots, and then departed (130, 132). Throughout the story, the hoboes quote poems by Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes—“queer talk,” according to the miner—usually to insult him or to make further demands upon his hospitality: Mr. Emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says: “Gives me agates for my meat; Gives me cantharides to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones an’ altitudes.” Says I, “Mr. Emerson, if you’ll excuse me, this ain’t no hotel.” You see it sort of riled me; I warn’t used to the ways of littery swells. (130) The joke ends when Twain informs his host “these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were imposters,” to which the miner responds, “Ah! Imposters, were they? Are you?” (133). In trifling with the celebrity of Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow, Twain’s speech thematized the propagation of these “biggest literary billows” through a world that went well beyond the “shore of the Atlantic.” His joke thus played upon the “Atlantic” literary establishment and its relation to the new literature of the “West,” represented now by “Mark Twain.”11 The humor of Twain’s speech, and the source of its offense, was the way it split these authors’ poems from their authorial presence: “Fancy making Mr. Emerson, even in travesty, stand for such a vulgar little scamp, and Holmes and Longfellow in such a guise,” one editorialist huffed.12 The speech may have been an elaborate hoax on Clemens’s painstaking efforts to establish his own persona, but in order to do so, the speech necessarily satirized the institution of “literature” as such. Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes might indeed be “the most dignified” poets in “our literature,” but even their most famous and beloved poems could become “queer talk” in the right (or wrong) circumstances.13 Twain’s speech therefore brings into visibility a conflict between the public circulation of poems and the construction of a hierarchical literary field: if the instantiation of a literary elite (what Henry Nash Smith calls the “institution of the Man of Letters”) relied upon the circulation of particular authors

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and texts through culturally sanctioned institutions and media, this same public circulation could also destabilize the very sense of authorial presence on which literary institutionalization depended.14 The cultural capital vested in the names of eminent Men of Letters does not impress the miner (they’re just “littery swells” to him), but the humor does not really depend on him misrecognizing the hoboes as actual poets, nor is the joke really about the incongruity of reciting poems by Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes in a California mining camp (as I hope to show in this chapter, such a scene of recitation was not incongruous). It is not that two literary regions cannot speak to each other—in the story, the hoboes quote ceaselessly from these authors’ poems. The joke, in other words, was that the hoboes actually were familiar with the authors, and they could use the “queer talk” for their own purposes. By putting these poems into the mouths of the people, so to speak, Twain highlighted the inability of authorial personae to control the uses of the poems that spoke in their name. In Twain’s story, then, every “nom de guerre” is a potential “impostor,” because authorship could only ever exert a weak control over the social meanings of poems. Twain’s speech was therefore particularly inappropriate (or appropriately wicked) for Houghton’s dinner, which was meant to showcase the splendor of postbellum American literature. This twist to Twain’s speech would have an immediate and uncomfortable application later that evening. During the three hours of toasts and speeches in Whittier’s honor, Emerson read his favorite Whittier poem, “Ichabod.” Emerson described the poem as “unique and masterly,” and R. H. Stoddard wrote that when “the sage” read the poem, “familiar to so many and . . . so universally admired,” the company fell silent.15 However, “Ichabod” was a peculiar choice. As Emerson read the first stanza, an awkward feeling descended on the room: So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore! The glory from his gray hairs gone Forevermore!16 Not surprisingly, a number of guests thought with horror that he was referring to Whittier (several reports of the evening made veiled references to Emerson’s senility to explain why he chose this poem).17 Whittier had written “Ichabod” in 1850 to attack Daniel Webster shortly after Webster’s infamous “Seventh of March Speech” (later known as “The Union and the Constitution”),

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a speech that, although it may have been “a passionate paean to the Union and a call to reconcile sectional differences,” infuriated people across New England because it endorsed the extension of slavery into Texas and called for a new fugitive slave law.18 Whittier had called Webster’s support of this legislation a “scandalous treachery” that left abolitionists with “nothing to hope for from the great political parties or religious sects,” and the antislavery community (particularly in Massachusetts) quickly demonized Webster.19 As the celebrants at Whittier’s dinner discovered to their discomfort, the peculiar power of the poem comes from the way it indicts Webster without ever naming him. Revile him not, the Tempter hath A snare for all; And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, Befit his fall! . . . Let not the land once proud of him Insult him now, Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, Dishonored brow. But let its humbled sons, instead, From sea to lake, A long lament, as for the dead, In sadness make. . . . All else is gone; from those great eyes The soul has fled: When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead! Then, pay the reverence of old days To his dead fame; Walk backward, with averted gaze, And hide the shame! (186–87) The title referred to 1 Samuel 4:21, “the glory is departed from Israel,” and this reference encapsulated the negative model of critique pursued in the poem.

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“Ichabod” enjoins readers not to condemn or rebuke and instead emphasizes what has been lost without ever stating the cause for this loss: “Revile him not . . . Let not the land once proud of him / Insult him now” (186). The suppression of rebuke underscores its occasion, and the poem consoles “the land once proud of him” by moving among readers who have no need to hear Webster’s name, or to read a description of his crime, since they already know him and already feel the pain of his treachery. The poem’s rhetorical force as an invective derives from its refusal to name, and the poem’s readership comes into being as a community through the same act of nonnaming. “Ichabod” required a particular milieu for such a strategy to work. As was the case for the antislavery verse discussed in Chapter 2, the print context had to support the poem’s rhetoric, making its sites of publication crucial to establishing the poem’s meaning. “Ichabod” was first published in the National Era, where it appeared alongside an article on “Preparing the Way for Compromise—Facts for the People,” which quoted from newspapers around the country on the compromise debates, summaries and transcriptions from debates and speeches on the House and Senate floors, editorials on the Compromise Committee, and letters, reviews, and other news items on the topic. Just as important, however, was the poem’s own critical mass of context. Like many of Whittier’s antislavery poems, “Ichabod” was reprinted around the country and was quoted in places where debate over the compromise legislation took place—in one case quite immediately, when Horace Mann recited it on the floor of the House of Representatives— so that “Ichabod” not only responded to a political situation but became part of the political debate.20 Its incorporation into the discourse then became the occasion for further responses: one subsequent poem quoted from “Ichabod” to make an even more damning indictment of Webster: “Revile him not”? Whom God hath cursed, Him can we bless? Or spare our “tears” for him? No! first, Let him confess! When God’s own truth shines in the way, “The Tempter’s snares” Lie open to the light of day;— Fall, then, who dares! . . .

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When such a man turns fiend, our “scorn” Should blast his fame! And generations yet unborn Should curse his name!21 Such a poem (which provided a headnote, “ ‘Ichabod’ means ‘Webster,’ of course”) “speaks to” “Ichabod” directly and literally: this response poem gains nearly all its rhetorical force from association with Whittier’s poem, and it assumes readers’ familiarity, that they will know “Ichabod” and therefore will recognize how the “Reply” raises the rhetorical stakes.22 The original milieu for “Ichabod,” then, was the decentralized “culture of reprinting” characterized by Meredith L. McGill, which enabled the poem to be disseminated rapidly and widely across a range of different settings.23 This fluid system worked quite differently from the scenario of the Whittier dinner. The newsprint publications of “Ichabod” had circulated the poem in conjunction with articles about Webster, the legislative debates, and the antislavery agenda, and this context controlled the range of meanings available for the poem. In these settings, it mattered little that “Ichabod” never names Webster, since the print and recitation contexts established the poem’s framework of meaning.24 At the Whittier dinner, however, the heated political environment of 1850 had long since passed, as had the controversy over Webster, who by 1877 was a revered New England hero. Emerson’s recitation of “Ichabod” worked like the “queer talk” of the hoboes in Twain’s burlesque: at worst, it insulted Whittier, since the poem easily seemed to apply to him; at best, the poem was at odds with the genial persona of Whittier much in play that month. The absence of the original setting opened the poem to uncomfortable meanings while also evacuating its social use, and the lost materiality of the poem’s former milieu could not be captured in anthologies or collected editions of Whittier’s work. As a reviewer had noted of Emerson’s 1875 anthology Parnassus, I observe that Mr. Whittier’s “Ichabod” is cited without the naming of the intended original personal aim of the poem, which the poet himself, in his earlier editions, at least, as I remember, was fain to make sure of by a note of explanation. This is well on Mr. Emerson’s part; for the indefinite wider application may leave the poem free from that personal bitterness which the jealous lover of

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Mr. Whittier’s muse dislikes to be obliged to attribute, even for once, to his generally gentle spirit.25 The reviewer downplayed the significance of Whittier’s antislavery activism on the meaning of his poems, and this evasion aligns with many postbellum critical accounts of Whittier that sought to separate his antislavery work from his career as a poet. The “indefinite wider application” for “Ichabod” was made possible by its placement in an anthology that rigorously separated poem text from political context. If this new setting made the poem meaningless, the meaninglessness also saved from any charge of “personal bitterness” Whittier’s “generally gentle spirit,” the persona by which his audience knew him best in the 1870s. Significantly, Whittier omitted “Ichabod” from the authoritative seven-volume Collected Works he published in 1888; there was literally no place for such work in the postbellum monument to the gentle bard of Amesbury. Emerson’s choice to read “Ichabod” at the Whittier dinner therefore exposed the ambivalent status of Whittier’s antislavery career in the 1870s. No American poet was more celebrated in the late nineteenth century than Whittier. His birthdays were recognized and publicly honored by schoolchildren, reading groups, ministers, fellow authors, politicians, and newspapers and magazines across the country (Whittier allegedly wrote 2,300 replies to well-wishers in December 1877).26 Schools, colleges, streets, ships, towns, mountains, and a glacier were named in his honor. Yet one 1877 review claimed that “his reputation as a poet will rest chiefly upon what he has done since the abolition of slavery”—in a fifty-year career, only the last ten years counted for anything.27 According to R. H. Stoddard, “Whittier is in some respects the most American of all the American poets,” but he reached this place through “a succession of tangled paths and by-ways in which he was often bewildered.” “I cannot bring myself to admire Mr. Whittier’s anti-slavery poetry,” Stoddard confessed, “It was not necessary to be an abolitionist to be moved by these anti-slavery productions of Mr. Whittier; but it was necessary to be a very ardent one in order to find them, or make them, poetical. They were wrung from his heart—torn from his soul; but strange to say, they made no mark in our literature; they contained no unforgettable verse—no line which the world would not willingly let die.”28 Yet despite writing so much forgettable poetry, Whittier had become “one of the few American poets who have succeeded in obtaining the suffrages of the reading pubic and of the literary class.”29 He reached this readership through poems like “Cassandra Southwick,” “Maud Muller,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” “Barbara Frietchie,” and “Telling the Bees,” which appealed directly to “the

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human sympathies of their readers”: “The reputation of such poems is immediate and permanent, and beyond criticism . . . the touch of nature in them is beyond all art. I should never think of comparing ‘Barbara Frietchie’ with Bryant’s ‘O Mother of a Mighty Race,’ but I am sure that it has a thousand readers where Bryant’s poem has one.”30 Stoddard identified these poems as ballads, and to him they displayed “the touch of nature” that belied art and craftsmanship and brought together the most diverse array of readers, all of whom found common ground in their love of the poems. In this way, such poems were “beyond criticism,” since readers needed no guidance to discover or understand them; because ballads appealed directly to “human sympathies,” they were always already familiar. Stoddard contrasted these poems with Whittier’s antislavery “productions,” which had the capacity to move readers but which only an ardent abolitionist could “make poetical.” Thus, an admiration for antislavery verse separated partisans (abolitionists) from everyone else, while a love for ballads evinced the touch of nature that made all readers kin—and American. Other critics echoed this appraisal. According to E. C. Stedman, Whittier was “that uncrowned laureate, the people’s poet,” because “of all our poets he is the most natural balladist,” and, like Stoddard, when Stedman referred to ballads, he meant short narrative poems about life, labor, history, and folklore in rural New England, or “ballads of our eastward tradition and supernaturalism, such as those pertaining to witchcraft.”31 Critical emphasis on the value of “our eastward tradition and supernaturalism” in ballads that directly appealed to readers’ hearts conflated Whittier’s title as “Poet of New England” with his national appeal. We find the true gauge of popular feeling in songs that are dear to the common people and true to their unsophisticated life and motive. Here we again confront the statement that the six Eastern States were not and are not America; not the nation, but a section— the New Englanders seeming almost a race by themselves. But what a section! And what a people. . . . This hive of individuality has sent out swarms, and scattered its ideas like pollen throughout the northern belt of our States. As far as these have taken hold, modified by change and experience, New England stands for the nation, and her singer for the national poet.32 The most national songs were those songs “dear to the common people,” a folk Stedman identified with rural New England. Although he conceded

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that New England was “not the nation, but a section,” still the New Englanders were almost “a race by themselves,” like the Scots, and the songs dear to them were therefore much like the ballads of Scotland—they were the index or “true gauge of popular feeling.” As a friend put it to Whittier, “You have done for New England what Scott did for Scotland.”33 Stedman deployed a familiar discourse about balladry, complicated by a politicized regionalism, which Joseph Conforti has termed the “national regionalism” that associated New England with the deepest traditions of American thought and culture and that, after the Civil War, “represented cultural consummations of the victory over the South.”34 Stedman’s fable of the bees naturalized the identification between “New England” and “America” by imagining that New England “has sent out swarms, and scattered its ideas like pollen throughout the northern belt of our States.” American popular feeling could be found in the songs beloved by the New England folk, the poems of Whittier, “her singer” and thus also, in Stedman’s view, “the national poet.” In the postbellum critical tradition, therefore, Whittier’s high place in an American poetic history required that his New England ballads be the center of his canon, a reorganization that necessarily marginalized his antislavery poems. According to this critical discourse, a New England ballad could pass among any group of readers at any time and, because of its New England folksiness, would produce a sense of collective, American identity. As the Whittier dinner proved, in contrast, antislavery poems like “Ichabod” no longer circulated effectively as poetry because the context that had produced them was too specific, and outside that context, the poems’ meanings became too diffuse. Whereas ballads were “permanent and immediate,” “three-fourths of Whittier’s anti-slavery lyrics are clearly effusions of the hour; their force was temporal rather than poetic.”35 Whereas ballads take a long historical view, reaching far back to the earliest stories and legends of a region, antislavery poems intervened in conflicts of the moment, which prevented them from creating identifications that could transcend time and place. Because their temporality was too specific, too immediate, and too local, antislavery poems could not elicit the sort of responses necessary to create communal identity.

Using Whittier Postbellum discussions about Whittier’s place in the emerging canon of American poetry, about the history of his career, and about the meanings of his

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work all mark shifts in the generic history of the ballad that we began following in Chapter 4. The sources of Whittier’s value for readers, for national history and national literature, changed dramatically in the two decades following the Civil War. Where he had been known in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s for timely and incendiary poems, almost always published in cheap and ephemeral formats, that activated and mobilized political agency, in the 1860s and 1870s, he came to be loved for contemplative, aesthetic narratives, almost always published in upmarket magazines and luxuriously produced books, that indexed particular modes of historical and communal identification. These shifts were uneven processes, however, and readers cathected widely differing ideals and values depending on their version of the poet and his ballads. Whittier’s old friend Elizabeth Lloyd forecast some of these changes, telling Whittier in 1860, “I think the best of all thy poems of nowadays are Ballads. ‘Maud Muller’ is an exquisite thing.”36 The poet Edna Dean Proctor concurred. After reading Whittier’s Home Ballads (1860), “I thought with heartfelt joy that when we are all gone from earth— entered into fuller life—men and women yet unborn would be cheered and uplifted by the beauty and hope and faith you have breathed in song.”37 Another reader’s response compounds this sense that poems like “Maud Muller” indexed popular feeling in a way that transcended the vagaries of time and place: “Thank you from the very soul of my heart, for the poem of ‘Maud Miller’ [sic]. It is the true expression of a million of hearts this day. It will remain immortal as the English language. Its sentiments will survive that language, and will thrill & sanctify the hearts of men, as long as civilized men, cultivates the earth.”38 For this person, ballads like “Maud Muller” expressed the best sentiments of a million hearts, such that they would outlast even their own language. These comments track closely with the nineteenth-century reading of ballads, but like the Child ballads discussed in the last chapter, the poems in question cannot really be organized according to a coherent set of shared conventions or features. For instance, “Maud Muller,” Whittier’s 1854 poem about a fleeting encounter between a judge and a farm girl, displays the strange mix of sentiment, nostalgia, didacticism, humor, and realism that readers came to cherish as Whittier’s “ballads.” Though the poem seems set up to be a fairy tale that will end with a cross-class marriage, the dreams of urbane ease and rustic simplicity that judge and farm girl evoke for each other go unrealized, as both marry unhappily within their station. The poem’s lesson deflates pastoral ideals with wistful knowledge that comes too late for either party:

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Alas for maiden, alas for Judge, For rich repiner and household drudge! God pity them both! and pity us all, Who vainly the dreams of youth recall. For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” (48) “Maud Muller” goes beyond evocations of barefoot boys and girls and speaks to the poet’s power to weave present and past together. This power, which transcended the regional affiliations of nineteenth-century readers, was at the source of Whittier’s appeal as a poet of New England. Another example is “Mabel Martin, A Harvest Idyl” (1857). Despite its initial publication in the antislavery National Era, this poem about the seventeenth-century witchcraft crisis exemplifies Whittier’s facility with “simple legends told . . . the beautiful and old”: “I call the old time back: I bring my lay / In tender memory of the summer day / When, where our native river lapsed away // We dreamed it over” (63, 62). Like many of Whittier’s regional poems, “Mabel Martin” evokes its power to bring back lost time and return author and reader to a richer, fuller sense of imagined existence. To do so, these poems emphasize their historical transmission through the oral lore of the region; Whittier often invokes the telling of the tale across generations as a way to ground a poem in the deep time of its setting. “The Swan Song of Parson Avery,” a ballad about a shipwreck, ends on such a note: “And still the fishers outbound, or scudding from the squall, / With grave and reverent faces, the ancient tale recall, / When they see the white waves breaking on the Rock of Avery’s Fall!” (61). Compare this emphasis on recalling the legendary with the timely newsworthiness of the shipwreck poems examined in Chapter 1. These new ballads stress the endurance of songs and poems over time, as with “Telling the Bees”: “And the song she was singing ever since / In my ears sounds on:—/ ‘Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! / Mistress Mary is dead and gone!’ ” (60). Mistress Mary may be long gone, but her song lingers still. Whittier’s legendary poems actually range across folklore from around the world, with a formal inventiveness and generic variation that belie their common designation as “ballads.”39 Readers’ responses to these poems as simple ballads therefore speak more to the cultural construction and valuation of

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“the ballad” than to any particular poem’s form or content. The reading of Whittier in the 1870s and 1880s thus calls attention to the social construction of this genre. For readers, Whittier’s poems were often linked to fantasies about the modes in which the poems circulated. Ballads were not simply poems about certain subjects or written in a particular style; rather, ballads were those poems that moved in prescribed modes and could therefore engage readers in particularly intimate ways. That is, “ballads” lodged instantly in the “common hearts and mind” (to adopt Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s terms) and stayed there forever. Like superstitions and legends, ballads like Whittier’s were handed down from one generation to the next, and the principle of continuous dissemination marked them as “popu lar” much more than their content, style, or language. Such poems were resources for imagining the past as a chain of living memories and traditions open and permeable to the present. Since the shift in critical perspective on Whittier was driven, at least in part, by an argument that his ballads lodged in the hearts and minds of humble readers, it is crucial to assess whether readers (humble or not) actually felt this way about the work. Was this sense of “common hearts and mind” merely a critical commonplace? Or did it express the understanding that readers had toward their own experiences with Whittier’s poems? While assessments of historical reading experiences must always be tentative and provisional, I believe there is evidence that readers felt an intimate connection with Whittier’s work and that this sense of intimacy differentiates him from other popular nineteenth-century authors.40 One piece of evidence comes from Susan O. Curtis, a columnist for the Portland Transcript who published under the name “Hope Harvey.” In an 1883 letter, she wrote, I wish, Dear Sir, that I could tell you in some way you would believe and remember, how you are beloved, appreciated and honored by Maine people, and I can speak more especially for us humble dwellers in Penobscot and Piscataquis Cos. away up here in the heart of Maine. I know you would rather have the hearty homage of the humble than the great, and I assure you it is heartily yet discriminatingly bestowed by communities like the one, for instance, in which I live. . . . Although, of course, some are highly educated, yet the majority are plain, hardworking folks, who have only a fair book education, yet whose minds have been developed

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and cultivated by attentive intercourse with Nature, a variety of strengthening reading, and a deal of vigorous, independent thought which is coming to characterize them. And these are the people, a set after your own heart, if you only knew them, who appreciate your works as you would desire, and are capable of doing so. “Whittier” is usually seen upon their tables, is read and quoted lovingly and appropriately, by the elders, and committed to memory and recited enthusiastically by the youngerlings at school and home.41 Curtis’s tribute opens up some of the problems in accessing and assessing the history of reading. Her description fancifully summarizes Whittier’s reception in general (the alliterative “hearty homage of the humble”), focusing on “Penobscot and Piscataquis Cos” but generally evoking a more fictional region, “the heart of Maine,” rather than narrating any one reader’s encounter with any one of Whittier’s poems. Thus, her letter may evince the penetration of critical accounts of Whittier’s popular readership rather than provide evidence of that readership itself. Certainly, these accounts did influence how readers understood their own relations with Whittier and their own experiences reading his work. But we do not need to construct a hypothetical or implied reader—nor do we need to create a reception history— out of such evaluative essays alone. While so far I have depended mostly on the published evaluations of influential writers from the Genteel era, I turn now to a different kind of archive: a collection of letters sent to Whittier by several hundred readers and housed at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Samuel T. Pickard, Whittier’s nephew and literary executor, assembled the archive after Whittier’s death, and he discarded autograph requests while retaining letters from readers who were not well known, so the collection gives perspective on a broad range of responses to the poet and his poems, which for the most part are personal rather than professional or economic. I think it is better, therefore, to understand these letters as insights into the social history of poems, rather than as a reception history of Whittier’s work patterned on the theories of Wolfgang Iser or Hans Robert Jauss.42 Reception histories depend upon a static model of reflection in which responses (usually published reviews) stand as a synecdoche for a broader cultural mind-set. This is a problem because, as I shall shortly make clear, Whittier’s actual readers were much more diverse than the elite, mostly male— or, in the case of the Whittier Dinner, entirely male—

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critics of the literary establishment who wrote about him. Reception histories can chart the transformations of a writer’s literary value over time, but only by reducing reading to interpretation or, as I argued in the Introduction, by assuming that what a person should do with a poem is read it. The responses of the abstract or implied reader often then fold back into a new interpretation of the source text.43 I think this approach largely misses what is interesting about Whittier’s nineteenth-century popularity, which was both conventional and personal, formalized by generic expectations but also sociable and unpredictable. To return to the example of Susan Curtis, her letter goes on to offer a much more specific encounter with Whittier’s poems: “Many years ago, when ‘Snow Bound’ first appeared, two or three young ladies including myself, were invited to share the honors in reading it aloud at a quilting! Think of that, in a place where wicked critics assert that woman’s tongue and gossip do most prevail, instead to spend nearly an afternoon in listening to that pure and charming story. And as different characters were introduced, one lady after another would give an intelligent bit of information concerning each, making it so delightful and real to us.”44 Here is a precise instance of a poem securing a web of communal relations. The anecdote about Snow-Bound that Curtis details— a group reading during a quilting— opens out onto a much wider social world. The women’s reading places Snow-Bound in the kind of domestic economy the poem celebrates, and the imaginative performances Curtis describes echo the exchange of stories in the poem, as the women not only read it aloud but also make up stories about its various characters. More important for Curtis, however, the women’s performance of the poem rebuts gendered assumptions about the use of language. Where “wicked critics” would have expected to hear only gossip, the recitation of Snow-Bound instead attests to different—and in Curtis’s view, more elevated and refined—uses for “woman’s tongue.” Such an act of exchange speaks obliquely to an entire realm of relations to poems not encompassed by the usual sense of “reading.” Curtis does not interpret Snow-Bound or even respond directly to it. Instead, she tells this story to show Whittier how much his work was celebrated in rural Maine and also to celebrate rural Maine as a place of sociability anchored by poetry, where women could imaginatively transform the conditions of their work through a collective performance of a poem. Judged on the broader basis of reading and use, Whittier’s poems were not simply popular; they helped to shape the self-understanding of a wide swath of the postbellum American public.

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A letter from the activist Dorothea Dix elaborates how personal engagements with Whittier’s poems redounded upon larger social networks of exchange and communication. The values readers found in his work came from the texts themselves and also from a more diff use sense of those texts’ values for a community of others. “Mr. Whittier I wish I could tell you in language which would seem reasonable, how much I owe you through yr various precious published works. They have helped me to improvement, they have comforted me; they have cheered me; they do this still. . . . And will you not allow me to add that many who write to me very often quote or write passages from yr various published works. Persons of fine culture & intellectual vigor—the humble & more numerous readers.”45 Dix supplemented her testimonial to Whittier’s publications by evoking the circulation of his words among her correspondents, “persons of fine culture” as well as “humble & more numerous readers.” The qualities of relation she lists—improvement, comfort, cheer—were moral and emotional rather than aesthetic or literary; in her account, even readers of “intellectual vigor” took emotional consolation from his writings. This affective sense of connection was mediated through epistolary quotation: a reader’s bond with the poet became the basis for bonds with other readers. Early twentieth-century critics directed particular scorn against this kind of reading, which they viewed as sentimental and anti-intellectual.46 However, recent studies of Walt Whitman’s readership by Max Cavitch, Michael Robertson, and Peter Coviello have sought to rehabilitate these affective, spiritual modes of reading and connection, which characterized the vast majority of nineteenth-century readers’ relations to poems and poets.47 As another writer put it, Whittier’s poetry “sinks deep into the heart” and “writes itself in my memory”—psychic, heartfelt inscription was an end in itself, whatever else might be said of the poems.48 This poetics of intimacy could be generalized (as in the descriptions of Dix and Curtis) or made vividly specific, as it was in an 1875 letter from a reader in Pittsburgh. Though utterly unknown to you, I cannot resist the prompting to tell you something of the influence you have exerted on forming my mind and character. . . . After reading [your poems] to my son last night, looking on through the Vol. I saw so many pieces that from the time when, not ten years old, I learned from my brothers lips “The Yankee Girl”—have awakened heart and mind to quick response in sympathy for the oppressed Slave and indignation at

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the wrongdoer. In girlhood, still further endeared by the reverential regard in which you were held by him who was afterwards my husband— our hearts responsive to the claims of human brotherhood as of love; and I still have the copy of “Massachusetts to Virginia” in his own hand writing which he sent me on its first appearance—While the heart that thrilled with its stirring words and noble sentiments and the hand that wrote it have long been cold in death, the love which we have borne for one so enthroned in our hearts is shared by our children and I have frequently heard in tones tremulous with feeling, the despairing cry of the “Slave Mother” from the lips of my youngest son.49 This narrative details a multigenerational web of relationships circuited through cherished associations with Whittier’s poems. The book of poems (which she identified as “Edition of ’49 Benj. Massey Boston”) bore the physical traces of her life (it was “well worn & with childrens finger marks on its pages”) while also materializing her emotional history, as poems like “The Yankee Girl” called to mind first an original scene of memorization, when she learned it from her brother, and then her later antislavery activism, the “sympathy for the oppressed Slave and indignation at the wrongdoer” elicited by the poem.50 Some of this writer’s deepest commitments found physical expression in the history of her relations to Whittier’s poems. The memories of her husband were retained in a copy of Whittier’s “Massachusetts to Virginia” (1843) that he had transcribed for her, and though his heart and hand “have long been cold in death,” their shared love for Whittier lived on in her children, to whom she read Whittier’s poems and who sang them back “in tones tremulous with feeling.” This feeling expressed both the lament of the Slave Mother (she refers to the 1838 “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother”) and also the deep network of associations carried by Whittier’s poems in this family. These poems ensured that, unlike the Slave Mother, no one in this woman’s life would ever be fully “lost and gone.” Such associations and the consolations they offered could, like the narratives retold in his ballads, carry far over space and endure over a long time; as one writer put it, Whittier’s poems did more good than cathedrals, which, “However beautiful or grand those might be—they would be confined to a very limited space— but these words can float on the wind, they can cross oceans—they can be reproduced in many forms & languages—they will be cherished with gratitude in many hearts.”51 After Whittier’s Philadelphia friend

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Hannah Neall had moved to San Francisco, she wrote him that a book of his poems had sustained her during a bout of desperate homesickness: “Dost thou wonder, Oh! my friend that thy songs bring tears to my eyes, and sweet memories to my heart.”52 The burden of these songs was a feeling of home (“sweet memories”) that Neall felt she would lose if not for them. A teacher in London explained that Whittier’s “At School Close” “has cheered me often, when it seems so hard to influence the young lives around me, and under my care.”53 From Edinburgh, a student informed Whittier that he and his friends “learn from you lessons in plain living & high thinking. It has been often in my mind to write to you & tell you that in this land of ballads [there] are those to whose hearts your every word of truth & melody are precious.”54 For these correspondents, Whittier’s poems offered meanings and purposes that seemed more personal and affecting than anything else offered by school, ministry, or church. But perhaps the most extraordinary example of the long-distance range of Whittier’s affective work comes from New Zealand. “It may afford thee pleasure to hear that some study thy writings in this remote bastion of the earth’s surface,” wrote Elizabeth Sinclair, a teacher at a Māori school in Waharoa, in 1891. It is many years since I first heard thy name and became acquainted with thy writings. I have valued them greatly and they have helped me much in fighting the battle of life. . . . When I was quite a young girl my father set me to copy out for him “Maud Müller.” By the time I had transcribed it I knew most of it by heart, and it has ever since been much in my mind and often on my tongue. “The Angel of Patience,” “In School Days,” “The Sisters,” “My Soul and I,” “My Psalm,” “Agricultural Ode,” “A Sea Dream,” &c are ones I am still learning by heart, taking this phrase in its deepest and fullest sense. . . . I myself have known many vicissitudes, the lot of a household drudge has been mine for quite thirty years I think, therefore I can so well understand Maud Muller’s musings.55 The occasion of Sinclair’s letter was an assignment she had given her class. Henry Mitchell, a “half-caste” student from Rotorua, had written Whittier the previous year, after memorizing “Barclay of Ury” (1847), a poem about the trials of a Scottish veteran of the Thirty Years’ War who had become a Quaker

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in old age: “One of our reading lessons was ‘Barclay of Ury’ and I liked it so much that I thought I should like to write a letter to its author.”56 His teacher Sinclair elaborated, “The children who read ‘Barclay of Ury’ all liked it. The last verses were quoted in a speech widely praised by teachers. I liked it better each time I saw the lines.” A complex dynamic of poetry and power emerges in these exchanges. Clearly, the scene of recitation in a colonial school for native children is not neutral, and Whittier’s poem reaches Mitchell encoded with imperial force. Yet the tone of the scene differs strikingly from, for example, Jamaica Kincaid’s experience memorizing Wordsworth in Antigua in the 1950s.57 As an American poet, Whittier is eccentric to the British imperial context, as is the Scots character of Barclay. And while Barclay has a specific history in the imperialist violence of the seventeenth-century wars of religion, the poem details his willing renunciation of power for new faith as a Quaker, before a mob “foul of mouth and evil-eyed” (33). Not in vain, Confessor old, Unto us the tale is told Of thy day of trial; Every age on him who strays From its broad and beaten ways Pours its seven-fold vial. (34) While the poem may uphold the virtue of Christian resignation, a tendentious lesson for a colonized audience, it also denigrates British authority, and it seems reasonable to imagine that a Māori student reciting this poem in an English school might cast the surrounding colonial regime as the venal soldiers, drunken churls, and begging carlins who beset Barclay or cast himself as the one removed from the “broad and beaten ways” the poem encourages readers to leave.58 The letters of Mitchell and Sinclair reveal how the emotional identifications activated by Whittier’s work reached around the globe. Sinclair concluded her letter by informing Whittier, “I do not possess a copy of thy works. Being poor and in a country so unsettled that people frequently remove from one district to another, I hardly venture to keep many books other than those actually needed for school work; but in a scrap book I have some of thy poems pasted in from newspapers or copied out.” She thus describes memorizing, transcribing, and scrapbooking Whittier’s poems, so that they were “much in my mind and often on my tongue”—reading Whittier was, for her, “learning by heart, taking this phrase in its deepest and fullest sense.”59

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This intensive “learning by heart” marks a key feature of the postbellum relation to Whittier’s legendary poems and ballads. Many readers noted a similarly strong emotional bond with the poems, in which their personal experiences blended with the histories detailed in the poems. “The lot of a household drudge has been mine for quite thirty years,” Sinclair explained, “therefore I can so well understand Maud Muller’s musings.” “Year after year I have pored over words of yours,” wrote another reader, “till words and sentiments have become part of my life.”60 These powerful identifications created a sense of communion with the author, a kind of association through reading that Gillian Silverman has argued is characteristic of nineteenth-century culture.61 “Tho’ personally a stranger,” an English correspondent hailed Whittier in 1890, “your writings have made you to our imagination and grateful affection a very real and helpful friend.”62 Another reader explained how a passage from SnowBound had given him solace after his child’s death: “Its adaptation to my own case is so remarkable that I find myself continually repeating it. Outside of Holy Writ . . . nothing in the whole range of literature has afforded me such a degree of comfort.”63 As Lydia Maria Child put it, “Often have your writings solaced & strengthened me in such moods— Often when my pathway here seemed steep & wearisome, your voice has come to me, like a golden harp from above, luring me upward to the heights wherever you stood. I thank you, more than words can say, for all you have been to me, dear friend, & to thousands upon thousands of other human souls.”64 Child had known Whittier for forty years when she wrote that, so her experiences reading his poems aligned with a long personal history with him; even still, her sense of knowing Whittier, and her sense that he knew her, went well beyond their fellowship in the antislavery struggle. His poems spoke to her in a way that he himself could not, and many readers shared this feeling that Whittier’s poems transcended the commonplace of “voice” as a metaphor for poetry. It is a great thing surely to be the voice of one crying out in this world’s wilderness because of oppression & of wrong, but you are now to me far more than a voice, it is curious sometimes how long one may own a goodly gift without truly possessing it, I have had your poems about ten years, & have always been greatly stirred with the more striking & picturesque pieces such as Barclay of Ury, the two slaveships & others—but now a soul looks up to me from its pages, it is my friend, near to my heart & often, almost unintentionally in my hand, bringing me, as a true loving friend & no

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other earthly thing brings a feeling of rest & of refreshment at the same time.65 For this reader, the bond with Whittier went beyond a sense of his “voice” speaking out against injustice in poems like “The Slave-Ships” and became a sense of his soul looking through the pages of a book held “near to my heart & often, almost unintentionally in my hand.” The “true loving friend” was a blend of the imagined author and the physical, material book, which this writer had long owned but only now truly “possessed.” Readers of all types attested to this sense of intimacy and emotional engagement with a book. “Mother has had jubilee over her book,” wrote the educator Frances E. Willard in 1891. “We have been reading the poems we have known by heart so long. How happy you must be who can so easily and richly confer happiness!”66 Knowing poems by heart linked mother and daughter in shared feelings expressed by “jubilee” over the book they could read together, and the poet’s greatest happiness became the emotions his works conferred through such acts of reading. “It must be delightful to the Poet to know how much pleasure he has given to young & old . . . how many noble impulses he has quickened & how many griefs he has helped to soothe. Only this morning have I read with fresh delight & profit several of your pieces in the 3 vol. edit. which I obtained in Boston,” wrote another correspondent in 1884.67 Robert C. Winthrop, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, wrote that after receiving “the seven beautifully printed volumes” of Whittier’s complete works, “one or the other of them has been in my hand almost ever since. But, far above even the exquisite poems . . . I shall prize the volumes for the character of their author, whom, amid all differences of opinion, I have held, & shall ever hold, in the highest respect & admiration.”68 A beautiful book in the hand seamlessly melded with “the character of their author” printed on the heart, so that “exquisite poems” became the medium for an ideal relationship that stood above “all differences of opinion.” Intensive reading, collective reading, memorization, recitation, scrapbooking, transcribing: these are all ways to use poems that conjure this sense of possession, of a personal connection with an ideal figure of the poet, as the reader bonds with a poem both as an idealization or abstraction and as a physical thing. Elizabeth Sinclair noted how, lacking a published book of Whittier’s poems, she created her own. Acts of transcribing poems cemented bonds with her father at home and with an author on the other side of the world. Susan Curtis did something similar: “Anything by ‘Whittier’ in our weekly

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prints moved and thrilled me when even the tiniest child. . . . I culled these, (the poems), carefully for ‘scrap books’ while still a girl. . . . The poems always touched my heart and enlarged my life. They have been my educators until now.” Scrapbooking materially connected the young woman with a sense of herself and her past, so that she came to self-awareness through an education in Whittier’s poems, which recalled her own history to her each time she reread them. Reading Whittier was a way of remembering her life through poetry: “I reveled in it. I thought I understood it. I believe now I did, as soul touched soul spite of disparity of age or education.” 69 The physical act of making the scrapbook folded over the psychic record inscribed in her repeated rereadings of the poems. For many readers, books encoded this sort of moral and spiritual education; even when readers did not make their own book, the memories of reading personalized the poems, making books testaments to their lives. After Whittier inscribed a book for a young reader, the boy’s father responded, “Let me also express to you most heartily my thanks for the beautiful lines you have put in the book of our little boy. As he gets old enough to understand them, I trust they may grow into his life, into his growing thoughts and purposes. We shall never fail to direct his attention to them and trust they may be one of the inspirations of his life.”70 Growing up entailed growing into Whittier’s poems, the inspiration for one’s most intimate “growing thoughts and purposes.” I want to clarify two points before moving on. First, these communications cannot be aggregated into a singular response— or even a set of responses—to Whittier’s work. The two dozen or so examples I have cited may not even represent the entire archive, which itself cannot represent the whole of Whittier’s readership, let alone the nineteenth century at large. These narratives each need to be interpreted on their own terms, because they do more than provide data for a hypothesis about reading. Instead, they speak eloquently to the profound, even uncanny intimacy that nineteenth-century people could feel toward and through poems. Scorn for such private, intimate familiarity with an author was a particularly sharp weapon in the affective arsenal of Modernism (although “loving” authors and books has remained a central feature of literary appreciation).71 But this later scorn must not obscure the power that intimacy conferred on poetry at the end of the nineteenth century. People could use poems in ways that may now seem strange and to ends that may now seem naïve, but the repertoire of uses made poetry central to public culture— or, to put the point more strongly, it made poetry constitutive of public culture.

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Second, this sense of intimacy engendered (at least in part) the centralization of the ballad in the generic hierarchy of the nineteenth century. Postwar revaluations of Whittier’s canon map onto both the political realignments of the 1870s and the generic developments within postbellum culture that Chapter 4 discussed. Ballads were believed to provide a usable past that readers could share, even as each reader personalized his or her own associations with particular poems. The nineteenth-century ballad is therefore more than a set of formal or thematic features. To read something as though it were a ballad was to make assumptions about the relationship between poems and persons: affective affiliation through poems formalized relations with oneself and others. Such affects are crucial to understanding what readers meant when they named something a ballad. They meant something about the poem but also about their relationship with that poem. Though intimately known, ballads are always shared. And public intimacy is political.72

Reading Whittier Reading Whittier as the voice of the American people depended on an understanding of balladry as the genre of popular expression and produced a major shift in the center of gravity within his oeuvre, from the antislavery verse that had defined his early career to the legendary narratives associated with the historic lore of old New England. Whittier’s relation to the popular voice, his connection to the rural “folk,” and his ability to speak nationally by way of his local identity became functions of the cultural project of ballad reading. Critics, anthologists, and readers all made assumptions about Whittier’s poems that follow the peculiar pattern of ballad reading: these poems could be identified with the popular spirit, with regional and national history, and also with Whittier’s personal history. “I made a little Whittier itinerary along the storied Essex coast— a voyage through Whittier ballad-land, bringing before my eyes the very scenes of the poems in the study of the sources of which in the libraries I had made such delightful and exciting discoveries,” wrote one biographer.73 Such a reading naturalized the relationship between Whittier’s ballads and the landscape and history of New England, while at the same time centralizing Whittier’s New England–themed poems as his best art. In pursuing this multipronged conception of balladry, whereby the (ballad) poem became a transparent resource for imagining both personal and regional

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history, critics, biographers, and other readers followed the example of Whittier’s most famous poem, Snow-Bound. Not only did this poem offer itself as a resource for understanding rural life in old New England, but it also presented that historical consciousness as a tradition of poetry that led from one medium to another until finally settling permanently in the aestheticized balladry of the present. Everything written about Whittier after 1870 identified the publication of Snow-Bound, A Winter Idyl (1866) as the crucial event in his life that heralded a new era in his career. According to Stedman, Snow-Bound “grounded safely” the “claim that he has found and preserved in fit and winning verse the poetic aspect of his own section.”74 Certainly, Stedman could justifiably claim that Snow-Bound achieved for Whittier a “more than local reputation,” since the poem sold seven thousand copies on the day of its publication, twenty thousand copies over the following three months, and tens of thousands of copies a year well into the twentieth century.75 Snow-Bound was the first poem of Whittier’s to be published only in book format (it sold for $1.25, a fairly expensive price) and was beautifully illustrated and aesthetically appointed (James T. Fields told Whittier, “We have expended a large sum of money on the drawings and engravings. . . . But we meant to make a handsome book whether we get our money back or not”).76 From the moment of its publication, critical accounts of Whittier used Snow-Bound as a primary source for historical information on rural New England life at the turn of the century. The poem became a key documentary text in the colonial revival, which used it as a source detailing the artifacts and materials proper to an early New England farmstead; eventually, Whittier’s childhood home (the poem’s setting) was made into a heritage museum displaying the domestic scene of a colonial family.77 From the outset, then, Snow-Bound slipped back and forth between poem and history, serving as a resource for maintaining both personal and collective memories that otherwise would disappear. As the venerable North American Review put it, [The poem] describes scenes and manners which the rapid changes of our national habits will soon have made as remote from us as if they were foreign or ancient. Already, alas! even in farm-houses, backlog and forestick are obsolescent words, and close mouthed stoves chill the spirit while they bake the flesh with their grim and undemonstrative hospitality. . . . Let us be thankful that we can sit in Mr. Whittier’s chimney-corner and believe that the blaze he has

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kindled for us shall still warm and cheer, when a wood fire is as faint a tradition in New as in Old England.78 Although Snow-Bound is obviously and avowedly autobiographical, the ease with which readers granted it such transparency as a folk history of New England and as a matrix of childhood memory indicates that other generic forces were at work in their reading. Thanking Whittier for a gift of the illustrated volume, Elizabeth Lloyd resignedly noted, “As the world grows older & we grow older—nothing seems to me so great as what is perfectly true & simple—& I love to get back to the sweet air & fair breath of childhood— The energy & faith are always refreshing—.”79 Such associations with the simplicity and truth of childhood align the poem with the broader cultural construction of the ballad (William Sloan Kennedy wrote that “although not a ballad,” Snow-Bound was “closely allied to that species of poetry”), which helped make it a resource for imagining bygone forms of folk life.80 Such readings play into the poem’s own instructions that readers take it as the last source for particular types of histories that can no longer circulate actively among people. In roughly eight hundred lines, the poem narrates the events following a blizzard in Whittier’s childhood, when, shut in on their farm, his family gathered at the fireside, telling stories and reading to each other while the storm raged outside. These stories create a cultural history of the family and the region, and they also comment on the present moment of the poem’s writing in the immediate postbellum period. The poem is framed as a series of remembrances: the narrator remembering the events and people of the poem, most of whom have died; the family members recalling and retelling events from their own lives and history as they sit by the fireside; and the future readers of Snow-Bound, who, when they read it “with me by the homestead hearth,” will recall their own childhoods (406). These nested memories are the poem’s apparatus of nostalgia, which help to contain various social modes of communication within the printed book, a strategy that ultimately authorizes the poem as the preeminent form of cultural reproduction. The fireside serves as the site for retelling stories and poems—both the stories and poems retold in the poem and Snow-Bound itself, which imagines itself being read and reread at the firesides of future generations.81 In several ways, the fireside becomes the author or narrator of local culture and folk history. As the poet’s family settles down to its evening by the fireside, the narrator explains,

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Our own warm hearth . . . Whispered the old rhyme: “Under the tree, When fire outdoors burns merrily, There the witches are making tea.” (400) Not only is the fireside the site for exchanging folk poetry and lore, but it itself recirculates such traditions. But before any stories or poems can be retold, the poem returns to the elegiac present, and the narrator expostulates, O Time and Change!—with hair as gray As was my sire’s that winter day, How strange it seems, with so much gone Of life and love, to still live on! . . . We turn the pages that they read, Their written words we linger o’er, But in the sun they cast no shade, No voice is heard, no sign is made. (401) This return to the present firmly establishes the nostalgic tone of the poem, but the nostalgia is not figured through the evocation of personal memory. Instead, the people remembered in the poem are remembered through their “written words” and the “pages that they read.” Writing and print replace spoken words—in the present, “no voice is heard” of the dead— and, figured as readable written pages, the memories and histories evoked by and in the poem can be retold perennially through the recirculation and rereading of the words and pages of Snow-Bound. Within the poem, exchanges of local culture and recollection happen through multiple genres, formats, and media. Specific poems are quoted directly, like Sarah Wentworth Morton’s “The African Chief,” which the children “stammered from our school-book,” Caleb Bingham’s American Preceptor (401). This quote locates the time and place of Snow-Bound ’s setting in relation to a print history of poetry while simultaneously commenting on the recently concluded fight against slavery: How often since, when all the land Was clay in Slavery’s shaping hand, As if a far-blown trumpet stirred

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The languorous sin-sick air, I heard: “Does not the voice of reason cry, Claim the first right which Nature gave, From the red scourge of bondage fly, Nor deign to live a burdened slave! ” (401) The quoted poem functions within personal and social realms: as a memorial touchstone, it can be recalled from early childhood reading, but it also bears on the political moment of Snow-Bound’s writing and publication (1865– 66) by calling readers to action in the present. The quotations, “stammered” and “heard,” combine features of oral and print citation— schoolbooks and primers like The American Preceptor are part of the library of the rural homestead, but they also serve as the basis for oral exchanges like recitation and collective reading. This blended form of discourse, grounded in a range of genres and material formats, constitutes the field of memory in Snow-Bound and serves to evoke its lost world of the fireside, but Snow-Bound actually produces memories by containing the culture of the fireside within the temporality of the book now held in the reader’s hands. Verbal exchanges thus constitute positively the content of Snow-Bound, but Snow-Bound ’s form is defined negatively by contrasting the printed, aesthetic, book-based present with a folk past of stories, tales, superstition, poems, and ephemeral publications. In the headnote to the poem, Whittier described how the “lonely farmhouse” of his boyhood had “scanty sources of information; few books and only a small weekly newspaper. Our only annual was the Almanac. Under such circumstances story-telling was a necessary resource in the long winter evenings.” My father when a young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures with Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in the French villages. My uncle was ready with his record of hunting and fishing and, it must be confessed, with stories which he at least half believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, who was born in the Indian-haunted region of Somersworth, New Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth, told us of the inroads of the savages, and the narrow escape of her ancestors. She described strange people who lived on the Piscataqua and Cocheco, among whom was Bantam the

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sorcerer. I have in my possession the wizard’s “conjuring book,” which he solemnly opened when consulted. (399) While the record of “my boyhood in our lonely farm-house” is compiled from the oral stories and small print stock of the Whittier family, this collection of lore details a much larger history of New England, reaching outward from the Haverhill farmhouse to northern Maine and backward from the present to early colonial history. New England history and culture is created and preserved through tales told and stories read by the fireside (which itself retells folklore in an “old rhyme”). The narrator carefully lists the family’s “little store” of reading, all of which comes forth to the hearth: The Almanac we studied o’er, Read and reread our little store, Of books and pamphlets, scarce a score; One harmless novel, mostly hid From younger eyes, a book forbid, And poetry, (or good or bad, A single book was all we had,) Where Ellwood’s meek, drab-skirted Muse A stranger to the heathen Nine, Sang, with a somewhat nasal whine, The wars of David and the Jews. (405–6) In addition to rereading “our little store / of books and pamphlets,” the family “sped the time with stories old, / Wrought puzzles out, and riddles told” (401). The retelling of these tales, songs, and lore makes up the majority of the poem. However, the stories themselves are not retold in the poem, but instead only the act of their retelling is retold: “Our father rode again his ride / On Memphremagog’s wooded side; / Sat down again to moose and samp / In trapper’s hut and Indian camp” (ibid.). Elsewhere, the poem recounts rereadings, where books serve as the source of stories either read aloud or told from memory by Whittier’s mother: some tale she gave From painful Sewel’s ancient tome, Beloved in every Quaker home,

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Of faith fire-winged by martyrdom, Or Chalkey’s Journal, old and quaint. (402) This pattern repeats for each member of the fireside circle, with the exception of Whittier himself. In all of these instances, the family circle and the histories and memories produced in it are constituted by the reproduction, recirculation, and retelling of stories, and the narrator figures this culture through poetry, calling it “the common unrhymed poetry / Of simple life and country ways” (401). “The common unrhymed poetry” brings to the fireside histories of religious intolerance, Indian removals, antislavery resistance, the Revolutionary War, and the ecology of northern New England, along with popular legends, local superstitions, and accounts of daily life and labor in a rural community. But as members of the family circle are introduced and their acts of storytelling are summarized or retold, the narrator reminds readers that these people are now dead or absent, and in the present, their access to expression must come through the narrator and his retelling of them telling their stories in the poem. In this way, Snow-Bound removes from active circulation the past’s “common unrhymed poetry” and the histories this poetry formalizes, restricting it to the framework of elegiac memory, so that “Henceforward, listen as we will, / The voices of that hearth are still” (ibid.). Snow-Bound thereby silences the storytelling of the hearth in a format that is written and not heard: when “the voices of [the] hearth are still,” only “their written words” remain, in the form of Snow-Bound itself. All of this “common unrhymed poetry” is hereafter lost to time, its existence made available only through the poem, which alone can revive the voices and histories of rural New England. Snow-Bound concludes with an invocation to the “Angel of the backward look”: Clasp, Angel of the backward look And folded wings of ashen gray And voice of echoes far away, The brazen covers of thy book; The weird palimpsest old and vast, Wherein thou hid’st the spectral past; Where, closely mingling, pale and glow The characters of joy and woe; The monographs of outlived years . . .

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Shut down and clasp the heavy lids; I hear again the voice that bids The dreamer leave his dream midway. (406) Whereas the folkways of early New England are made up of fleeting exchanges of “common unrhymed poetry” in its many forms, the “Angel of the backward look” is evoked through the weighted materiality of the book— a “voice of echoes far away” becomes a monograph bound by “brazen covers” and clasped with “heavy lids.” This emphasis on bookishness gives the poem its power as the new site for circulating popular history: by closing the past within the sealed pages of a book like itself, Snow-Bound can be offered to future generations of readers, who, with the poem in hand, will “Sit with me by the homestead hearth, / And stretch the hands of memory forth / To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze” (406). Various forms of expression, as well as various genres of folklore and history, are condensed and contained in the printed poem, which becomes, in the end, the only means of cultural reproduction that can extend into the future.82

Reconstructing Whittier Snow-Bound both recounts and exemplifies a material shift in the circulation of poems, from the ephemeral exchanges of “the rustic Muse” by way of fireside, newspaper, and schoolbook to the solid and perennially reiterating format of the book, ever available for rereading at the firesides of the future (406). However, these changes in the forms of cultural transmission were underread as a nostalgic history of “time and change” in New England life. In this way, Snow-Bound could conveniently stand as an allegory for Whittier’s own authorial career. Critics universally read the poem as both Whittier’s autobiography and the biography of rural New England, and they followed the poem’s realignment of genres to read Whittier’s most important poems as ballads retelling personal and regional history. Because they were memorial, these histories could best be retold through a genre of memory, and however minor such memories might be, they told a truth more real to readers than any official history could provide. As another of Whittier’s biographers put it, the history of New England “is not to be gained alone from formal annals; it comes from personal knowledge of the scenes . . . and traditions told at ancient firesides.”83 In this schema, reading a poem like

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Snow-Bound became a way to know personally the popular life of bygone, rural America. The book’s impulses toward personal and regional commemoration clearly resonated with readers. To give one example, John S. Brown wrote Whittier from Kansas, describing how the annual rite of rereading the book formalized his own memories of boyhood on a New England farm: I have just finished the reading of your “Snow Bound” I have read it once at least every winter since it was published. It carries me back to my old New Hampshire home in Flat Mountain-New Ipswich. It brings up fresh to memory father [and] mother—my two brothers and sister all older than myself— all now dead—“The chill weight of the winter snow for “years” upon “their” graves has lain” . . .— all gone—all gone. Yet I am not alone not even lonely so long as I can have my eye sight to read.84 The poem’s reanimating impulses are on strong display here: just as the narrator instructs, Brown uses the poem to bring back to life, for a moment, the family he had lost years ago. Brown modifies Whittier’s lines about his sister Elizabeth—“With me one little year ago:—/ The chill weight of the winter snow / For months upon her grave has lain”—to express his own circumstances of loss, thereby maintaining the poem’s sense of autobiographical intimacy, while making himself the subject (403). Brown’s letter indicates that he accepted the invitation to “Sit with me by the homestead hearth, / And stretch the hands of memory forth” offered at the poem’s conclusion (406). Like the narrator of Snow-Bound, Brown traveled back to his farm-boy days through the medium of the poem, which folded into his own memories of childhood in rural New England. His is just one instance of the way that reading Whittier became a way of reading New England, and writing about Whittier became a way of writing about New England. This discourse on Whittier and New England in turn became a way to write and theorize about the “new Americanism” made possible by the Civil War. The “new Americanism” was Stedman’s term for “an imagination in keeping with our political enlargement” that produced “indigenous” poems characterized by “the closer inspection of our own ground . . . our more realistic method, [and] the genuine quality.”85 To Stedman and others, Snow-Bound and Whittier’s postwar New England ballads were the best examples of modern poems in the new Americanist ideal: “The sense of reality is prominent in every line of this really national (in its

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best sense) little poem,” wrote another reviewer. “Mr. Whittier is ever strongest when he plants his foot on New England soil.”86 The reading practices that distinguished these regional, aesthetic, book-based ballads from other poetic formats and genres reproduced the history told in Snow-Bound. Thereafter, according to the poem and its discourse, any poem that evoked a memorial sense of identity tied to a particular geography could be read as a “new American ballad.” In Whittier’s case, these “ballads” had to be differentiated from his antislavery poems, which could not be assimilated to the new Americanist poetics because of their sectarian politics and temporal specificity. To return to the occasion of Whittier’s seventieth birthday, a New York Times editorial celebrated Whittier for “gradually acquiring a national reputation as the maker of our best lyric poems and ballads,” while it consigned his career as “the poetical leader of the anti-slavery movement” to “other days” now past.87 These “other days” and their antislavery poems did not live on in the hearts and minds of Whittier’s national audience, as Emerson’s failed reading of “Ichabod” demonstrated. The idiom and the aesthetics of “Ichabod” were entirely wrong in the discourse of the new American ballad. American ballads told American stories about American places for American readers, but they also helped to make Americans by providing a set of songs that were American, in both their content and their form, so that a person might become American by identifying with the song. Poems like “Ichabod” offered no such possibility, for antislavery poems “are not as a class those upon which his fame is in the end to rest. They have served their purpose to foster political passions; they have even done more, and greatened the nation’s heart and warmed anew the dormant patriotism of the time; but it is the poetry and not the opportune passion of them that pleases even now.”88 In other words, fame rested on poems only in the absence of their political or historical context— antislavery poems had been valuable for “[greatening] the nation’s heart,” that is, ending sectional difference by promoting the cause of union and antislavery, but in the present, such effects were seen to have come through the “opportune passion” raised by the poems and not by their “poetry.” With sectional passions transformed into “patriotism,” the “opportune passion” of antislavery poetry was no longer needed. As another reviewer put it, “All readers of poetry will welcome Mr. Whittier from the thorny paths of political polemics to his own New-England. . . . The power of word-painting can scarcely go beyond what Mr. Whittier has done to reproduce . . . scenes familiar to all.”89 By turning from “the thorny paths of

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political polemics to his own New-England,” Whittier could now create “scenes familiar to all” and thereby embrace “all readers of poetry.” One dramatic example illustrates this process in action. In 1873, amid the depths of political Reconstruction, the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne (a Confederate veteran) wrote Whittier from Charleston, describing how the other night, taking up the exquisite illustrated edition of “Snow-Bound,” your own invaluable present, I read the whole poem aloud to my wife, mother, and son. My mother, an old lady now, and one who has experienced many hard trials—was peculiarly affected by your pathetic pictures of home life, although I don’t believe that any of us rose from the perusal of the poem with dry eyes. . . . Touching indeed are these noble lines, so full, at once, of resignation, & of faith.—Poor Timrod’s sister, (Mrs Goodwin) used to write me when near her dissolution, that she held them in her heart of hearts!90 I think there can be no more striking example of Whittier’s reconstruction as the nation’s poet than the scene of the “bard of the Confederacy” crying over Snow-Bound with his family in South Carolina. Although the poem looked forward to a future when antislavery New England would remake the South in its own image, the Hayne family’s tearful reading shows how easily Reconstruction politics shifted into a general sensibility of resignation and faith in the collective effort of nostalgic memory. Such reading practices, elicited by material transformations in the culture of poetry and by the centrality of ballads to the generic hierarchy of the later nineteenth century, explain why Whittier became for readers and critics the major “American” poet, the figure at the center of literary “new Americanism,” around whom accounts of American literary history and identity would need to be organized. Whittier, and not Whitman, was the nineteenth-century American bard. As Edward Whitley has explained, the American bard enabled “a moment of cultural (mis)recognition, a moment when audiences experience either a sense of solace as they see an imaginary reflection of their own best selves embodied in a poet, or a sense of discord as they are forced to admit that the poet who is addressing them does not represent them.”91 The response of the Haynes family might seem like an especially extraordinary moment of misrecognition, but their tears also testify to Whittier’s capacity to articulate “a complex set of affiliations that put national allegiance into tension with deeply felt loyalties” that lay elsewhere.92

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Whittier became an American bard because as a cultural institution, he was a site to negotiate and resolve the political, social, and cultural conflicts and contradictions of the postbellum United States. Celebrations of “Whittier” the literary institution, like the one surrounding his birthday in 1877, made him into the kind of national memory that overlooked the Civil War by hearkening back balladically to a lost and lovingly remembered past. “The ballad,” as a genre of postbellum culture’s “new Americanism,” was an emblem of forgetting, and balladic reading became a way to read the past as a shared social history told and retold at the fireside. “We have all been ‘Snow-Bound’ in that old New England farmhouse,” wrote one correspondent from Milwaukee.93 Or, as the New York Evening Post put it in its tribute to Whittier’s seventieth birthday, “His simple ballads, breathing the very life-breath of truth and nature, are in the hands, the memories, the hearts of men and women and children all over the land.”94 “Simple ballads” constituted American history by circulating in people and so forming the medium of their fellowship, a fantasy about poetic collectivity that remade Whittier the bard of a newly “American” poetry.

Chapter 6

The Minstrels’ Trail

The Passing of Slavery “The problem of the Twentieth Century,” W. E. B. Du Bois predicted in 1903, would be “the problem of the color line.”1 This problem, as Du Bois presented it in the essays of The Souls of Black Folk, was a problem of relation across the color line and also “within the veil,” and it had come to be articulated as a problem in the decades after emancipation. Considered discursively, slavery had operated as a disciplinary system of knowledge production, which fi xed the slave within a comprehensive social grid and demanded a subject easily positionable, locatable, and absolutely transparent and legible.2 Post-1831 legal regimes had attempted to proscribe cultural and social forms, such as literacy and religious instruction, that pushed back against the demand for total exteriority; for abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, who famously acquired his literacy under a regime of heightened surveillance in the Auld household and hatched his first escape plan in the extempore Sunday school meetings that he organized on William Freeland’s plantation, slave culture was valuable precisely for the ways in which it resisted slavery’s systems of knowledge making. Although “the songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart,” Douglass believed the songs’ true meanings were easily misunderstood by those outside the circle, who mistook them as expressing contentment rather than sorrow.3 Whether or not Douglass believed that the slaves themselves understood their songs, he presented them (songs and slaves) as a format that could, when properly analyzed, play back the hidden inner life of slavery. Slave songs mediated the color line—they stood between the two sides (within and without the circle, in Douglass’s terms) as both a bridge and barrier to understanding.

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But what happened when slavery ended? The second half of this book has argued that after the Civil War, poems and songs participated in a broadly based reconstruction of American culture. In the absence of other unifying institutions, poetic genres like the ballad took pride of place as carriers of group identity, collective history, and social meaning. The racial consequences of these projects only became more intense over time. Where politics, science, and the law failed to differentiate group identities (a failure registered in the fin de siècle’s intense focus on racial passing, for example) or provide stable means for creating knowledge about collective history and racial essence, poetic genres largely succeeded. This chapter tells a history of this ambiguous success. So— what happened to race after slavery ended? “The passing of slavery from the land marked a new era in the life of the nation,” according to Pauline Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood (published the same year as The Souls of Black Folk): “[The] Negro possessed a phenomenal gift of music, and it was determined to utilize this gift in helping to support educational institutions of color in the Southland. A band of students from Fisk University were touring the country, and those who had been fortunate enough to listen once to their matchless untrained voices singing their heart-breaking minor music with its grand and impossible intervals and sound combinations, were eager to listen again and yet again.”4 In this novel, the songs of the Fisk Singers dwell at the limits of interpretation, becoming vehicles of pure transport that break hearts as they roll through “impossible intervals and sound combinations.” When the soprano Dianthe Lusk, a character “not in any way the preconceived idea of a Negro,” performs “Go Down, Moses” (with a voice that also “passed all conceptions”), the song “pictured to that self-possessed, highly-cultured New England assemblage as nothing else ever had, the awfulness of the hell from which a people had been happily plucked” (453–54). In this sequence, bodies and voices pass conception, while songs move people emotionally and physically, for the novel follows this song (which we, too, have followed) out of Cambridge and way down to Egypt’s land, where, on an archaeological expedition intended to “establish the primal existence of the Negro as the most ancient source of all that you value in modern life,” the novel’s protagonist, Reuel Briggs, a Harvard medical student and mesmerist passing as a white man, is discovered to be not only “African” but the last in an ancient line of African kings (520–21). Of One Blood depends upon exchanges layered over time and space: the travels of the Fisk Singers from Nashville to Cambridge to England; the

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per formances of songs and poems; the dispatch of agents to the Northern United States and Britain, as well as the flow of money back to the “Southland”; the progress of a people, and a nation, out of slavery to freedom; a passage to Africa; and a return to the mythic origin of culture and race. These crisscrossing trajectories are mapped but also occluded by the spiritual “Go Down, Moses,” which functions in the novel as an itinerary for finding the way back to an imagined beginning. Coming to himself in the mythical city of Telasser, Reuel recovers the “transient reflection of a past perfectly familiar to him,” a past and a culture that he had not known he already knew (551). As Du Bois put it, “Sorrow songs” like “Go Down, Moses” had always “stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me . . . and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine” (204). Like ancient African ruins stupendously brought back to life, such songs were “siftings of the centuries” that still spoke “the articulate message of the slave to the world” (207). Du Bois did not need to know this message to recognize that it articulated him as well. In the work of Du Bois and Hopkins, spirituals like “Go Down, Moses” transform unfamiliar memories into expressions of collective being that transcend other markers of race, taking even white-skinned characters like Dianthe or Reuel back to their African roots. The logic of these texts thus depends upon substituting an abstraction of race—African-ness—for an abstraction of genre— the spiritual. But as each text acknowledges, however indirectly, the meanings of spirituals, as well as their power to speak racial experience or transcend time and space, were produced by their circulation through specific institutions, networks, and discourses. Primary among these were the performances of Fisk University’s Jubilee Singers, a choir formed in 1871 to raise money for the school’s endowment by giving concerts across the Northern United States. According to Du Bois, who was a student at Fisk in the 1880s, spirituals became a lasting part of world culture because “the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly forget them again” (205). From the 1870s onward, critical reflection on the Fisk Singers has affiliated the group with spirituals, which has usually meant a canon of traditional, orally composed religious songs. Some critics, like Du Bois or Eric Sundquist, credit the troupe with saving spirituals from the threats of modernization, abandonment, and appropriation.5 Others, like Zora Neal Hurston or Lawrence Levine, have contended that the Singers commodified black culture into a set of art objects lacking the oral authenticity and creative spontaneity of the

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original songs.6 Yet, as I will argue in this chapter, such idealizations of the spiritual as an abstraction for race—in the fetish forms of an originary Africanness or folk authenticity— obscure a richer and more complex history of songs and poems that passed around the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. As this chapter demonstrates, spirituals took shape in collaboration and conflict with minstrel tunes, contraband songs, popular ballads, evangelical hymns, and patriotic anthems—the subjects of this book—and these genres cannot be cleanly separated by a color line. The contest among genres and performance forms (the pure expressions of a group like the Fisk Singers versus the caricatures of a burnt-cork minstrel) has often been staged as a Manichean struggle between authenticity (unmediated, vernacular, African) and appropriation (secondary, derivative, blacked up), in which primal forms of folk expression must be protected or rescued from the predatory, frequently racist forces of commodity systems such as minstrelsy or the recording music industry.7 “Black song,” figured as an abstraction, must in this view always precede the forms of mimicry (like blackface) that would hijack it or profit from it. The concert tours of the Fisk Singers have featured on both sides of this argument, as either a heroic salvage operation that rescued slave music or as an unfortunate capitulation to the genteel (if not racist) norms of the late nineteenth century. Rather than advocating one view or the other, however, I draw together lines of thought laid down elsewhere in this book to examine how genres of black music were precipitated from the circulation of minstrel songs in antebellum antislavery (Chapter 2) and the Civil War (Chapter 3). “Spirituals,” “sorrow songs,” “slave songs,” “negro ballads,” and “black music”— all nineteenth-century terms for a shifting alignment of genres— came forth out of the Civil War in a process that paralleled the rise of popular ballads and other types of poems as authentic forms of national culture (Chapters 4 and 5). However, the effort to idealize an abstract form of racial authenticity and, consequently, the effort to identify cultural forms of expression and performance that could stabilize abstractions of race and racial difference were complicated by the postbellum emergence of black blackface performance troupes, as well as by the explosion of dialect writing after 1870, which reached its apogee in the career of Paul Laurence Dunbar at the turn of the century. These literary and performance traditions generally have not fared well in the hundred years since; black minstrelsy remains almost wholly invisible to the canon of African American literature, while authors such as Dunbar have at

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best a problematic relation to it.8 However, in this chapter, I will consider the tours of the Fisk Singers in relation to contemporary phenomena like black minstrelsy in order to better understand how amorphous notions like authenticity or essence came to be grounded in specific genres or performance practices. In this effort, I follow recent work in performance studies, which focuses on the “productions” of race (in the sense of both discursive and theatrical productions) in historically specific contexts. This work offers a more nuanced understanding of how cultural and performance traditions like minstrelsy or slave singing interacted to produce race as a contingent, unstable, and passing phenomenon. Daphne Brooks, for example, has drawn attention to the ways black performers engaged minstrel conventions in what she calls “Afro-alienation acts,” performances that “render racial and gender categories ‘strange’ and . . . ‘disturb’ cultural perceptions of identity formation.”9 In his masterful study of Bert Williams, Louis Chude-Sokei writes that minstrelsy, which was “the only national space allowed black theater performers . . . [until] the Jazz Age,” made “racial authenticity . . . independent of race and utterly dependent on performance”: “For black performers to perform the realness of the fictional ‘coon’ was a direct political contestation that occurred in the realm of American racial fantasy. This gesture was an act of reclamation that links black minstrelsy to the emergent black nationalisms in turn-of-the-century America.”10 The gesture of black minstrelsy, in other words, was a claim upon representation and fantasy rather than authenticity or essence, within a performance culture that had been intensely commercialized from its beginnings in the 1820s. This is an often-overlooked component of Eric Lott’s influential thesis about blackface; the libidinal energies of minstrelsy were cathected into a bewildering array of commodities, products, and texts that moved in an eccentric orbit around the Atlantic world, without any clear reference back to an originating moment.11 As Lott makes clear, the plaintive effort to identify the origins of Jim Crow responded in part to this scene of commodified performance. In the later nineteenth century, black minstrelsy, which allowed, in Tavia Nyong’o’s words, “a virtuoso performance of the supposedly congenital,” turned racial authenticity itself into a commodity whose affective charge could be endlessly reproduced or mimicked.12 Read in relation to the social history of poetics and performance that this book has charted, the Fisk Singers’ tours (which, as we will see, comprised a repertoire including spirituals, minstrel songs, and genteel poems) can therefore exemplify the ways in which

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unstable relations among genres produce and circulate figures of race and culture in the shapes of poems and songs.

The Songs of Black Folk Black music, as Dena Epstein, Jon Cruz, and Ronald Radano have argued, has long been contested ideological territory.13 While writings on slave songs date back to the seventeenth century, interest in the topic intensified during the nineteenth, reaching a peak during the Civil War, when abolitionists working for the U.S. government collected and published anthologies of slave songs according to a methodology of “ethno-sympathy” (in Cruz’s term) that featured fieldwork, oral transcription, systematic methods for recording dialect, and painstaking efforts to score music accurately.14 The study of slave songs found value by allying with the ongoing interest in ballads, and it was energized by contemporary projects in comparative philology and folklore, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, the work of the Grimm brothers, and ballad anthologies in the United States and Europe. Thomas Wentworth Higginson introduced one of the first collections of spirituals by characterizing himself as “a faithful student of the Scottish ballads,” who “had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones.” The songs Higginson recorded from black soldiers in the First South Carolina Volunteers seemed to him “a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy.”15 Four years later, in 1867, Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript and Slave Songs of the United States were published simultaneously, further aligning each genre as the ideal expression of a primitive consciousness. Having securely and accurately transcribed the songs into scholarly anthologies (and thereby removing them from what they regarded as vanishing oral traditions), editors presented these genres as henceforth capable of reconstructing racial history and stabilizing racial difference. But as much as “balladry” or “minstrelsy” evoked the lost oral culture of the Scottish highlands, they also referred to contemporary blackface theater, and the terms “negro minstrelsy” and “negro ballad” slipped back and forth between the songs of Southern plantation slaves and the songs of Northerners like Jim Crow and Zip Coon. For example, an 1855 satire on “Negro Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern” hearkened back to “the golden age of Negro literature,” when songs like “Jim Crow,” “Zip Coon,” “Long-tail blue,” and

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“Ole Virginny neber tire” “touched a chord in the American heart which had never before vibrated.” Mocking contemporary philological debates on cultural origins, the essay questioned where such songs had come from—were they American music, or African? “Whether [such songs were] first sung upon the banks of the Altamaha, the Alabama, or the Mississippi; whether [they were] pre-American, and a relic of heathen rites in Congo, or in that mysterious heart of Africa, which foot of civilized man has never trod, is a problem whose solution must be left to the zeal and research of some future Ethiopian Oldbuck.”16 Regardless of where it originated, such “approved poetry of the African School” was “no senseless and ridiculous [imitation] forged in the dull brain of some northern self-styled minstrel.” It is as impossible to counterfeit, or successfully imitate, one of these songs, as it would be for a modern poet to produce a border ballad like Chevy Chase or Lord Jamie Douglas. It is not alone the patient and laborious student of negro minstrelsy that can detect the ring of the false metal. The shameless imitations carry their imposture on their face. Walpole, with all his credulity, would never have been deceived, had Chatterton turned his attention to manufacturing plantation songs. The allusion to ancient English and Scottish ballads cannot fail to bring to the mind of the poetical scholar, the striking similarity that exists between many of the ‘specimens’ of Percy, Ritson and others, and the most approved poetry of the African school.17 With tongue in cheek, this essay linked minstrel songs to an imagined sense of African authenticity (“Jump Jim Crow” was of the “African School”) and further mixed both of these with the minstrelsy of the Scottish border, the high water mark for nineteenth-century folklore. Would-be Scotts like Higginson thus worked on discursive ground that had already conflated the Scottish ballad’s authenticity with the stylings of the minstrel stage. Veering between widely different genres and styles of performance, minstrelsy and popular balladry were shifting and unstable contexts for the mid-century emergence of black song making as a cultural phenomenon. Evangelicalism provided a third and often decisive framework for constructing “spirituals” as objects of authentic experience. During the Civil War and in the decades after, audiences most often encountered spirituals in evangelical or evangelically minded institutions like the Freedmen’s Bureau, the

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American Missionary Association (AMA), or Fisk University (which had been founded by the AMA in 1866 to train black teachers). As Chapter 3 demonstrated, an early “song of the contrabands” like “Let My People Go” competed with more ambiguous objects, which might or might not be blacked up, like the “Song of the Negro Boatmen” or “Kingdom Coming,” but unlike those songs, “Let My People Go” was almost only performed during missionary lectures and never became popular outside the evangelical network.18 Additionally, many of the people who first transcribed, collected, and studied spirituals had either been trained in the ministry or were involved in missionary projects, an orientation that shaped the terms in which they received and interpreted slave songs, while also determining the kinds of songs they were likely to encounter.19 As William Francis Allen noted in the introduction to Slave Songs of the United States, the Freedmen’s Commission, a heavily evangelical organization, had influenced which songs black singers performed for their white audiences. Allen lamented that the “secular songs” prevalent elsewhere in the South, “ ‘fiddle-sings,’ ‘devil-songs,’ ‘corn-songs,’ ‘jig-tunes’. . . and the ‘Jim Crow’ songs,” were impossible to find in and around Port Royal, because “our intercourse with the colored people has been chiefly through the work of the Freedmen’s Commission, which deals with the serious and earnest side of the negro character” (note the inclusion of “Jim Crow” songs among those genres Allen wished to hear).20 The term “spiritual,” which came into vogue around 1867, itself indicates the strong role evangelicalism played in shaping black poetry. The multivalent term “negro minstrelsy” had been the common name for black singing before the Civil War, but in the 1860s, critical essays began insisting that religious music was the most characteristic form of genuine black song making.21 As James Miller McKim (an agent for the Freedmen’s Aid Commission and a Unitarian minister) wrote, “Their songs are all religious, barcaroles and all. I speak without exception. So far as I heard or was told of their singing, it was all religious,” a claim only slightly modified by H. G. Spaulding, who argued “apart from the religious songs, there is no music among the South Carolina freedmen, except the simple airs which are sung by the boatmen.”22 Higginson and Allen, editors of the first anthologies of slave songs, each also emphasized the point, and any doubt about the religious orientation of black singing was put to rest by the global popularity of the Fisk Singers, who hailed from an evangelical school and specialized in performing religious music (although, as we shall see, they sang many other kinds of songs, too).23 Their concerts were coordinated through the ministry, particularly that of charismatic

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preachers like Henry Ward Beecher and Dwight L. Moody, who gave the Singers a tremendous boost by incorporating their performances into their sermons and revivals.24 The deployment of black singing through the networks of U.S. evangelicalism had two profound effects on the cultural formation of black poetry. First, this framework restricted a wide-ranging and varied set of song practices to a fairly narrow and stable canon of religious texts. Second, as Chapter 3 noted in the case of “Let My People Go,” the emphasis on religious interpretation allowed black poems to be heard in an ahistorical and apolitical manner, which greatly enabled their circulation during the Civil War. These removals imaginatively back-projected contemporary songs— songs that were actually about the war—into a distant “African” past and a disappearing black or African folk spirit, which made it easier to align spirituals with the emergent genre of the popular ballad, an alignment that was not otherwise straightforward or obvious (as we shall see, minstrel songs offered an equally compelling generic model). According to Spaulding, “The ‘Shout Songs’ of the American freedmen will take their own place, as most original and unique specimens of what . . . we must term ballad music. Too fragmentary to be called ballads in the ordinary meaning of that word, they are yet genuine products of what . . . we might call the ballad-making consciousness.”25 Many agreed this consciousness was on its way out: “They sing but very little nowadays [compared] to what they used to,” wrote one correspondent from the Sea Islands in 1863; wrote another, “There is no doubt that as their military habits develope [sic], these chants disappear & the regular Ethiopian melodies of the North become more common.”26 Allen justified his anthology by arguing that the songs and music of the slaves “should not be forgotten and lost, but [these] relics of a state of society which has passed away should be preserved while it is still possible,” a point many reviews acknowledged: “We may thank the editors for their effort to save from oblivion a portion of this wild and unique minstrelsy that is now rapidly passing away under the influence of the new civilization.”27 Collectors and interpreters of black poetry therefore used abstractions of the black folk (tied, after the 1870s, to an abstraction of “Africa”) and a notion of innate black religiosity (itself a product of the evangelical settings of war time intellectual culture) to orga nize geographically and generically disparate songs, making “the spiritual” a coherent and natural category on the model of the popu lar ballad. Lucy McKim’s description of slaves singing demonstrates the connection between balladry and religious per formance:

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It is difficult to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat; and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on score, as the singing of birds, or the tones of an Aeolian Harp. The airs, however, can be reached. They are too decided not to be easily understood, and their striking originality would catch the ear of any musician. Besides this, they are valuable as an expression of the character and life of the race which is playing such a conspicuous part in our history. The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves never could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull daily misery. . . . On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith in rest in the future—in “Canaan’s air and happy land,” to which their eyes seem constantly turned.28 For McKim, “negro ballads” were natural, like “the singing of birds,” and therefore difficult to transcribe into musical notation, but the airs were so distinctive that they could not help but indicate their origins. “Negro ballads,” like popular ballads, were indexical, making present to any listener the collective experience of “crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull daily misery” and also the faith “in the future” in ways that “the sufferers themselves never could.” The songs’ peculiarity (the “striking originality” of their “wild, sad strains”) marked them, in McKim’s description, both aesthetically and bodily (in the “turns of the throat”); racial authenticity was a matter of performance (“the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals”), as well as form (strains “too decided not to be easily understood”) and content (words that “breathe a trusting faith in rest in the future”). If black music was religious according to the evangelical interpretation, then secular songs and poems were increasingly cast as artifacts of the minstrel theater. Time and again, those who wrote about black song making set these performances against blackface minstrelsy, which they deplored as much for its professionalism and inauthenticity as for its racism. But if most critics assumed the burnt-cork minstrel to have a parasitic relation to the “most approved poetry of the African school,” stealing the melodies of genuine negro minstrelsy and promoting false images of black life, the actual chronology of minstrelsy was difficult for writers to establish. The minstrel was hard to place, temporally and also generically, and he seemed both subsequent but also prior to the traditions he allegedly co-opted. According to a correspondent in Dwight’s

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Journal of Music, “It is in religion that the African pours out his whole voice and soul. . . . No song of a concert room ever thrilled us like one of these simple African airs, heard afar off in the stillness of a summer night. Sailing down the Mississippi, the voyager on the deck of the steamer may often hear these strains, wild, sad and tender, floating from the shore.” The natural authenticity of this scene contrasts strongly with the performances familiar to the magazine’s audience: “We at the North hear these songs only as burlesqued by our Negro Minstrels, with faces blackened with charcoal.”29 While this writer clearly preferred “simple African airs” heard on a Mississippi night over tunes from “our Negro Minstrels,” the ideal of pure song (the wild, sad, tender, floating strains) seems to come after its supposed imitation, since the experience of hearing it is made meaningful only in contrast with the concerts of “Negro Minstrels” already familiar to Northern audiences. Other writers expressed this temporal confusion (which per formance comes first, the natural or the cultivated?) as a generic confusion that left unclear which songs were “simple African airs” and which were the burlesques of charcoal-blackened minstrels: “If ‘Coal-black Rose,’ ‘Zip Coon’ and ‘Ole Virginny nebber tire’ have been succeeded by spurious imitations, manufactured to suit the somewhat sentimental taste of our community,” wrote Allen in the introduction to Slave Songs of the United States, “the fact that these were called ‘negro melodies’ was itself a tribute to the musical genius of the race.”30 Staples of the minstrel stage like “Coal Black Rose” (popular since the 1820s) had spawned generations of spurious imitations, with tribute paid in respect to “the musical genius of the race” by mistakenly attributing such songs as “ ‘negro melodies.’ ” Allen left it unclear where the Slave Songs fit into this generic timeline: did the songs of his anthology precede “Zip Coon” and its spurious imitations, or did they come later? But observant readers might have noted that the collection mostly postdated the earliest popular minstrelsy. As a review of the anthology graphically put it, A very small proportion [of the songs] belong to the Jim Crow category, the remainder being religious hymns or “spirituals” . . . if the Tract Society and the Bible Society had performed their mission as faithfully in South Carolina as in Timbuctoo . . . we should have had something besides the gospel of Christy.31 A misplaced evangelism, imagined by this writer as having gone to Africa when it should have stayed at home, produces in its absence “the gospel

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of Christy” (referring to the troupe Christy’s Minstrels) as a grotesque false prophecy venerated (wrongly) as authentic expression. Again, the temporal and formal relations between genres seems unclear; these statements all confuse the question of what counts as “minstrelsy,” ancient or modern, negro or otherwise. The inability to define or determine minstrelsy is, ultimately, an inability to place it before or after religious spirituals. “These songs are not the ‘Jump Jim Crow’ medleys or the ‘Old Kentucky Shore’ [sic] melodies, which the burnt-cork and lamp-black minstrels give us, but are the wild, irregular, generally plaintive, though sometimes . . . rollicking ‘shouts’ or ‘spirituals’ from which the negro minstrelsy, so called, was conceived, and which all who have lived or traveled in the slave States have heard.”32 If this review obscures whether spirituals conceived the burnt-cork and lamp-black minstrels or the other way around— since the supposed authenticity of the spirituals must be set off by declaring what the songs are not, namely the medleys and melodies of minstrelsy—other reviews falter even more: “It must be said that there are some of those plaintive songs that are supposed to belong peculiarly to burnt-cork minstrelsy, which possess a charm that compensates for much of their nonsense. . . . Who is not better for hearing ‘Poor Lost Lillie Dale,’ ‘Darling Nellie Gray,’ ‘Dear Evelina, Sweet Evelina,’ ‘Carrie Lee,’ ‘Dear Annie of the Vale,’ ‘Katy Darling,’ and poor absurd ‘Rosa Lee’?”33 In this review of an anthology that explicitly sought to canonize a tradition of authentic, ballad-like folk songs, the descriptive terms of “genuine negro songs, taken down from the lips of freedmen” (plaintive, charming, nonsensical) apply just as easily to the songs of burnt-cork minstrelsy.34 Those on the lookout for “negro minstrelsy” of whatever variety often noted the uptake of Northern patriotic or minstrel songs by freed and former slaves. Higginson, for instance, recorded in his journal that “there is a small clique of rather stylish youths from Savannah who know all the Ethiopian melodies & play violin, violincello, castanets, tambourine, or anything.”35 Chapter 3 described how a Northern contraband song like “Kingdom Coming,” which had originated in the minstrel theater, became popular among former slaves at the end of the war; in response to this kind of phenomenon, a writer for Lippincott’s complained that “the ‘Spirituals,’ or religious songs, peculiar to the colored people . . . [are] now almost extinct, having given place to ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp,’ ‘Rally round the flag, boys,’ and similar songs.”36 These early postwar examples follow the standard trajectory from original/authentic to derivative/fake, although in this case, the role of the color line is ambiguous, since the problem is not burnt-cork minstrels stealing genuine spirituals but

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rather black singers dropping the songs “peculiar” to them for Ethiopian melodies, patriotic tunes, and the instruments of Northern performance styles. By the 1880s, however, this trajectory had reversed: “The so-called ‘negro melodies,’ ” wrote one writer, “chiefly consist of songs by Foster and others, which have been popularized by ‘Ethiopian minstrels’ . . . adapted by colored congregations and companies of colored students to suit their own tastes, purposes, and capacities.”37 In the postbellum decades, minstrelsy structured the larger discourse on black song making by creating a generic double bind, a before-and-after-ness that conflated song and performance traditions while confuting chronologies that would place originals prior to imitations. Describing a tour of Richmond, Mary Early explained how she went “to a tobacco factory to hear the negro operatives sing”: “first they selected . . . ‘Old Folks at Home,’ or ‘Way down upon the Swanee River,’ a song which in its simple pathos and sweetness can be properly rendered only amongst the people from whom it sprang. Next they sang ‘Camptown Races,’ an air full of sparkling, child-like mirth. . . . Lastly they sang a hymn, and this I enjoyed most of all, for hymn singing, my uncle told me, was their peculiar forte and delight.”38 This type of narrative completes the circle, as the traveler to the south ventures among black folk (now shifted from cabin and field to city and factory) to hear Stephen Foster’s minstrel songs “properly rendered” as they could be only by the people from whom they sprang. The Fisk Singers would capitalize enormously on this particular error; “Old Folks at Home” was their most popular piece.39

Staging Spirituals The per formance tours of the Fisk Singers, which began in October 1871 and have continued, periodically, ever since, developed upon the patterns of circulation and reception that had defi ned the spiritual during the Civil War. Their concerts took place mostly in churches and other religiously affi liated venues, like the World’s Peace Festival and the Chautauqua Institution. By performing during ser vices at Beecher’s Plymouth Church or Moody’s London revivals, the Singers garnered large audiences and widespread press attention. But, just as important, this evangelical sanction— perhaps more than their music itself—made it appropriately “popular to attend their concerts,” in the words of Gustavus Pike, the group’s fi rst biographer.

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[Did] the large class of Christians, who would scarcely patronize negro concerts, deem it respectable to attend those of the Jubilee Singers? Was there not so much odium attached to negro concerts, as represented in burnt cork minstrels, that people of taste and character did not think it becoming to rush in crowds to a paid concert given by negroes? . . . The fact that immense crowds flocked to hear them when they appeared at a prayer meeting or Sunday ser vice, where a person could attend a religious meeting and not a negro concert, leads me to this conclusion.40 Pike’s analysis displays (by now, I hope, clearly) how difficult it was to differentiate generically between types of song and types of performance. Initially, the issue is about marketing, how best to attract the Singers’ ideal audience of evangelicals and other Protestants. For the group’s promoters, the “odium” attached to minstrel shows was a question of taste and status, especially given the historic association of minstrelsy with the urban working classes, as well as a longstanding evangelical bias against professional theater more generally (“We were not showmen,” Pike insisted; “we were out to promote the cause of Missions, not like an organ-grinder, to gain a livelihood”).41 This marketing question had its solution in the staging of the performance, meaning that the Singers played religious meetings and Sunday services rather than “negro concerts.” But what did Pike mean by “negro concert”? The passage conflates “negro concerts, as represented in burnt cork minstrels,” which the Fisk Singers repeatedly assured audiences they were not, with “a paid concert given by negroes”— something they clearly were. The effort to distinguish the Fisk Singers from blackface minstrels was further complicated by the fact that minstrel groups had set the conditions for the Singers’ success, much more so than the very modest popularity of spirituals in the 1860s (Slave Songs of the United States, like “Let My People Go,” sold poorly and was not reprinted until the twentieth century). As one early reviewer noted, “The songs which [the Fisk Singers] sing are characteristic of the rude negro melodies which have been rendered so famous by white imitators,” another instance of imitations preceding and in this case literally setting the stage for the more authentic original that followed.42 But, in an additional twist, by the 1870s, many of the “white imitators” (i.e., blackface performers) were black. H. G. Spaulding’s wartime essay “Under the Palmetto” provides a vivid example of the phenomenon of black minstrelsy as it emerged. In the essay, Spaulding analyzed “Negro ‘Shouts’ and Shout Songs” in detail,

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and he concluded by describing a concert in Beaufort, South Carolina, “given by a band of genuine ‘negro minstrels.’ ” The company had taken the name of the ‘Charleston Minstrels,’ and was composed mainly of refugees . . . the first view of the performers, as they sat round the stage, a dozen finely formed and good-looking negroes, caused the spectator to fancy himself in the presence of the famous band of Christy, or some other company of white Ethiopian serenaders. Soon, the opera glass revealed the amusing fact, that, although every minstrel was by nature as black as black could be, yet all the performers had given their faces a coating of burnt cork, in order that their resemblance to Yankee minstrels might be in every respect complete. There were excellent voices among the singers, and some of the players handled their instruments with surprising skill. . . . Not a single song which could be called comic was included in the programme; and, with the exception of a few patriotic airs, the songs were of the ‘Lily Dale,’ half-mournful sort. . . . As an imitation of our Northern minstrelsy given by a band of uneducated negro musicians, the performance was a wonderful success. Yet the general impression left upon the mind of the hearer was far from pleasing. One could not help feeling that a people, whose very natures are attuned to harmony, are capable of something better than even the most perfect imitation of those who have so grossly caricatured their race.43 The gaps between natural performativity, professional theatrics, and racial caricature are uneasily closed in this scene, and the confusions extend from the songs (“patriotic airs” and songs “of the ‘Lily Dale,’ half-mournful sort”) to the bodies of the “negro minstrels,” who imitate their imitators with an excellent, though “far from pleasing,” professional skill. The Charleston Minstrels, allegedly a “band of uneducated negro musicians,” replicated “the famous band of Christy” much too closely for Spaulding’s enjoyment. Thus, despite acknowledging the success of the performance as “an imitation of our Northern minstrelsy,” he could not appreciate it, because the performers, “a dozen finely formed and good-looking negroes . . . as black as black can be,” part of “a people, whose very natures are attuned to harmony,” were “capable of something better.” In this performance, everything was imitation, from the songs

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the singers performed, to their style, to the way they made up their bodies, and the impression “was far from pleasing.” Spaulding’s account predates by nearly a decade the first tour of the Fisk Singers, and it demonstrates how, even during the war, a “negro concert” had become an ambiguous event, both a performance by burnt-cork minstrels and a performance given by “genuine ‘negro minstrels.’ ” This confusion grew more pervasive after the war, and it repeatedly ensnared the Fisk Singers: several times they were mistaken for being a blackface troupe (minstrel companies like the Morris Brothers had used the name “Jubilee Singers” for years before the Fisk Singers formed), and they were thrown out of segregated hotels in Newark, New Jersey, and Springfield, Illinois, after they were discovered to be, in effect, “genuine.” After the Singers’ successes in 1872, at least a dozen groups (black and blackface) began calling themselves the “Jubilee Singers” and playing the same circuits, making it hard to distinguish groups of “genuine Colored People . . . [who] give the best and truest Pictures of Slave Life,” as the “Original Norfolk Jubilee Singers” advertised themselves, from groups like the “Ole Plantation Minstrels and Jubilee Singers,” who guaranteed “Positively no Burnt Cork!” and offered “novel and unique Entertainments consisting of ‘Jubilee Singing’ (original with the members of this Company only),” along with “songs, dances, burlesques, [and] farces,” or groups like Barnum’s “Original Jubilee Singers,” who became part of his “Great Traveling World’s Fair” in 1873, immediately after the Fisk Jubilee Singers left for Britain.44 Competition around the name “Jubilee Singers” grew especially fierce that year. “Fired by the success of the Jubilee singers,” wrote a Washington, D.C., correspondent, “a company of barbers and waiters of New York, numbering twenty or thirty, have started out” on tour.45 Choirs affiliated with other Southern black colleges, such as the Hampton Jubilee Singers (from the Hampton Institute, Virginia), the North Carolina Jubilee Singers (from the Shaw Collegiate Institute in Raleigh), and the Tennesseans (from Jackson College), began touring to raise money for their institutions, while other groups with ostensibly charitable purposes, like the Jubilee Singers of Hartford, the New Orleans Jubilee Singers (“the last of the representatives of the slave singers of the south,” according to one Philadelphia account), and the Knoxville Tennessee Colored Jubilee Singers, also went on the road in the 1870s.46 This proliferation put pressure on any group’s claim to originality and authenticity. For instance, one review of a concert by the Hampton Singers acknowledged how the group had copied the Fisk Singers while also claiming that it exceeded them in expressive authenticity: “The Hampton Singers sing with wonderful

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spirit, mingling the pathetic, the solemn, and the ludicrous in all shades and combinations. There is more of the uncultivated, native African in their music than in that of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and for that reason has more of the charm of nature and spontaneity. It is unlike all other music, and bears off the imagination to the rice-fields and the cotton-fields, and the villages of Africa, where, years ago, Mungo Park heard the same sort of melody, which soothed and delighted the weary traveler.”47 Derivation set the Hampton Singers that much closer to Africa, as their musical association with the Fisk Singers revealed the Hamptons to be “more of the uncultivated, native African,” or at least more like a fantasy that linked American cotton fields with African villages, and the “weary traveler” (the auditor who imaginatively overhears such songs) with the eighteenth-century explorer Mungo Park. Despite the familiarity of their melodies, supposedly heard by Park in Africa a century before, the Hampton Singers’ songs are “unlike all other music.” By being less original, the Hampton Singers became more authentic—that is, more African—thereby staking equal claim to being “Jubilee Singers.” Contemporary opinion was clear that the Hampton Singers, as well as other groups associated with evangelical or educational organizations, had at least some right to call themselves “Jubilee Singers.” But other iterations of the “Jubilee Singers” were more ambiguous. “Callender’s Jubilee Singers,” for example, appeared in Cincinnati in 1875 while touring “under the same management” as the blackface Georgia Minstrels. Although “composed of colored singers altogether,” Callender’s Jubilee Singers followed “the same line of minstrelsy” as the Georgia Minstrels, and while certain details indicate that they were a black blackface troupe, they were promoted in the local press for making “a specialty of genuine plantation melodies.”48 Direct links to blackface minstrelsy need not discredit a group from claiming the “genuine” melodies of the Jubilee Singers. Elsewhere, however, the appropriation of the name provoked a sharper backlash, and ambiguous bands (possibly in blackface, possibly not) were accused of imposture, vulgarity, fraud, and theft. In a postbellum corollary to the “racialization of fraudulence” that Lara Langer Cohen has examined in the antebellum period, the travels of dubious singing troupes prompted Northern newspapers to put readers on heightened alert, in the process further troubling the very concepts of ownership and credibility that they sought to shore up.49 “The original jubilee singers,” wrote one Connecticut paper in 1875, “should not be confounded with other and inferior companies who have appropriated their name . . . and palmed off poor performances under its cover.”50

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We have unquestionable authority for saying that a pack of black swindlers calling themselves “the Jubilee Singers of Jackson University, Jackson, Tenn.,” are traveling about the country and endeavoring to palm themselves off as the well-known company of that name from the Fisk University of Nashville. These bogus minstrels have stolen part of the commendations bestowed by the press and by eminent citizens upon the Jubilee Singers and are trading in a most shameless way upon the reputation made by the Nashville company. They ought to have no countenance where uprightness and fair play are appreciated.51 Like the hucksters, double dealers, and inside traders pilloried in Mark Twain’s and Charles Dudley Warner’s contemporary satire The Gilded Age (1873), the primary offense these “black swindlers” committed was their double theft of credit, first stealing the “commendations” and “reputation” of the Fisk Singers and then imposing upon the belief and benevolence of wellmeaning (if credulous) audiences throughout the North. “Bogus minstrels,” the papers warned, should not be confused with genuine. In fact, no less an authority on fraud than Twain himself commented that the Fisk Singers’ “success in this country is pretty well attested by the fact that there are already companies of imitators trying to ride into public favor by endeavoring to convey the impression that they are the original Jubilee Singers.”52 Such actions constituted a “fraud upon the public,” which “should be on their guard against this attempt at imposition,” and they required the Fisk Singers and their promoters to put forward elaborate assurances that they were indeed “the veritable and original ‘jubilee singers,’ ” while advising patrons “to avoid all other companies that tamper in any way with the name ‘Jubilee.’ ”53 But accusations of tampering with the name “Jubilee” were also leveled against members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers themselves. After the group had concluded its first overseas tour, several of them elected to remain in Europe and perform for their own benefit, to the chagrin of the group’s manager George White, who desired everyone to return immediately to the United States for another domestic tour. As the singer Henry Watkins reported, “Mr. White says we have no right to [remain on our own], and will be doing wrong, and he is using his influence against our enterprise, and has threatened to bring suits against us if we use the name of ‘Jubilee Singers.’ ”54 Infringements on the “Jubilee Singers,” coming even from within the group, only underscore the degree to which that name had become a particularly appropriable kind

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of circulating property. At a moment when genres like the spiritual and the ballad were coming to be understood as inalienable property (cultural forms that could not help but demonstrate their origins), the primary format in which spirituals circulated (performances by black choirs) was proving to be, instead, highly alienable. I think it is more productive to view the proliferation of “Jubilee Singers” not as the parasitic appropriation of an originally authentic object but instead as the indicator of a larger set of problems about genres in circulation. A final example, from the 1880s, is worth quoting in detail to illustrate the complicated passages of blackface minstrels, black minstrels, and Jubilee Singers in performance. This essay surveyed those “sable performers known to the world at large as negro minstrels,” remaining notably vague about what it meant by “negro minstrels.” After ridiculing a performance by “a pair of blacked-up and hopelessly h-less Cockneys [attempting] an exact imitation of the sayings and doings of the American plantation negro, studied by them at second-hand from some Irish-American performer who had probably never in his life seen a cottonfield or a sugar-house,” the writer described an experience at a Saratoga hotel, where the waiters (“varying in hue from the ebony of the full-blooded black to the tawny ivory of the octoroon”) “sometimes obtain permission to give ‘a minstrel show’ in the dining-room.” It was one of these minstrel shows, given . . . by genuine darkeys, that we were privileged to attend; and when the curtains were drawn aside, discovering the row of sable performers, it was perceived to the great and abiding joy of the spectators that the musicians were all of a uniform darkness of hue, and that they, genuine negroes as they were, had ‘blacked up,’ the more closely to resemble the professional negro minstrels.55 It is worth lingering over the knotted circuit of imitation and identification that, for this writer, distinguished successful “negro minstrels” from abject. Even the most exactingly imitative Cockney performers could not hope to succeed as minstrels, since they gleaned their performances from a chain of transmissions that began with “some Irish-American performer” and ended nowhere near “the American plantation negro.” Such minstrels, in other words, could only hope for a formal craft, imitating (badly, since they dropped their hs) the conventions of performance (representations of “sayings and doings”) rather than an original reality grounded in “a cotton-field or a sugar-house.”

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When “genuine negroes” blacked their faces, on the other hand, their performances succeeded—but not, apparently, because as “genuine negroes,” they better represented “the sayings and doings of the American plantation negro,” but instead because they “more closely [resembled] the professional negro minstrels.” The differences were in the degree of the singers’ professionalism and performativity, rather than their identity or essence, and the writer drew a lesson about theatricality from this concert: “This personal experience is valuable in so far as it may show how firm is the rule of convention in theatrical circles, and how the accepted type comes in time to seem preferable to the real thing.” It is useful also in suggesting that the negro minstrel is getting to be a law unto himself, and ceasing to be an imitator of the exact facts of plantation life. In the beginning of negro minstrelsy, when the first band of “Ethiopian Serenaders” . . . came into existence, its sole excuse for being was that it endeavored to reproduce the life of the plantation darkey. The songs sung . . . were reminiscences of songs heard where the negro was at work, on the river steamboat, in the sugar-field, or at the camp-meeting. . . . These songs retained the flavor of slave life, with all its pathos, its yearning, its hopelessness, its mournfulness. To this period belongs Stephen C. Foster. . . . The actual melodies of the plantation slave have been made known to European critics by the various wandering bands of Jubilee Singers, who have traveled the world over singing their rude and effective hymns.56 If theatrical success depends on imitating conventions rather than reality, and if black minstrels follow “the rule of convention” by imitating the “accepted type” of the “Ethiopian Serenader” rather than “the exact facts of plantation life,” their concerts demonstrate all the more clearly how racial authenticity is a matter of performance— even when or, rather, especially when the performers were also “genuine darkeys.” The writer cements this view by juxtaposing Stephen Foster songs, “reminiscences of songs heard where the negro was at work . . . [that] retained the flavor of slave life,” with “the actual melodies of the plantation slave.” If the Foster songs derive from memories of songs overheard “on the river steamboat, in the sugar-field, or at the camp-meeting,” they also precede by decades the “actual melodies” put into circulation by “the various wandering bands of Jubilee Singers,” whose performances benefit from the close competition with each other as well as with “professional negro minstrels.”

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Fantasies about the musical or poetic origins of race and culture work at cross-purposes, and fraud is therefore an especially fertile concept in the history of poetics, because figures of authenticity and appropriation tend to stick together. One night in March 1875, a Cincinnati newspaper warned readers of another “party of colored minstrels terming themselves as the original Jubilee Singers from Fisk University at Nashville,” who were actually “a complete fraud, and gave a performance which abounded in vulgar witticisms and jests,” forcing “the more respectable portion of the audience [to leave] the hall in disgust.”57 That same evening, the “real” Fisk Singers gave a concert in Boston that abounded in the “weird negro melodies, which possess the peculiar and strongest charm.” The event was capped off with the evening’s highlight, “Miss Jennie Jackson’s pathetic rendering of ‘Down by the Swannee River,’ ” a moment that elicited several encores.58 If such a performance could highlight an evening filled with “weird negro melodies,” it is worth considering what audiences heard when they listened to such “pathetic renderings.” On a different occasion, an audience was described as “well satisfied to hear this simple melody from the lips of one of the race for which it was written, and who needed none of the arts of the stage to weave about it charms to captivate, as they were to listen to it from the most distinguished vocalist.”59 This account conflates artlessness (no “arts of the stage” were needed) with artistry (the distinguished vocalist had even better “charms to captivate”) in its confusion about the origins of Foster’s “famous Southern melody,” which was neither Southern nor written for “one of the race.”60 This is a confusion built into the structure of “Old Folks at Home,” which like “Go Down, Moses” invites its audience to travel back to a mythic origin, the place where bees hum, banjoes thrum, and “my heart is turning ebber,” the old plantation. Whatever else it might be, this song is not authentic, at least not to any tradition other than the history of imaginative fraud (songs about the “reminiscences of songs heard” somewhere else). In their captivating renditions of it, the Fisk Singers make it sound natural; like the band of Saratoga waiters, they establish their originality by ceasing to imitate “the exact facts of plantation life” and imitating instead the “rule of convention.” “Old Folks at Home” was one popular staple in a repertoire that was far more eclectic than critics then and now have recognized. One of the Fisk Singers’ first New York concerts featured “a wide range of pieces; choruses from the operas, familiar English and Scotch ballads, and occasionally a Sundayschool hymn,” as well as “the ‘Praise songs’ which they bring out of their old slave life.”61 While their performances featured spirituals like “Go Down,

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Moses” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” some of their best-loved songs were “Old Folks at Home,” “Home, Sweet Home,” “John Brown’s Body,” “Sheridan’s Ride,” and the “Star-Spangled Banner.” But their concerts also featured temperance medleys, contemporary hymns like “The Gospel Train,” and comic, even possibly minstrel songs like “The Smack in School” and “I’m a roving little darkie, all the way from Alabam.” And as we saw in Chapter 3, they performed Whittier’s “Song of the Negro Boatmen” on at least one occasion.62 “As a relief from the labored fun and dubious sentiment of professional negro minstrels,” wrote one early reviewer, “their interpolation of plantation songs merits praise. They do not confine themselves to those, but also sang last night a chorus from Ernani, and a selection from the cantata of the Haymakers.”63 Most accounts, however, disavowed the heterogeneity of the evenings, which also included speeches, recitatives, and missionary appeals (in fact, these prosier parts of the evening often predominated, much to the annoyance of many concertgoers).64 According to one 1873 review, The most absolute successes of their concerts are their singing of real negro songs and hymns, which they deliver with a fire, an unction, and a will that rouse an audience to enthusiastic approbation. Their nearest approaches to failures are when they attempt solos or part-songs, written for and by an utterly different class of musical culture from theirs. We wish their managers might learn this wisdom for them. People can hear German and English songs elsewhere; they go to the concert of the Jubilee Singers to hear negro music—from the plantation and the flat-boat, from the forest and the cotton-field— slave-songs; and, if you please, Jubilee songs, but, specifically, negro songs. What they may do hereafter, with more and different cultivation, is another point; but now their business is to create and maintain an interest in negro music.65 Such emphatic prescriptions illustrate the desire to align race with genre, which the Jubilee Singers seemed apparently unwilling to do. “They do not resist the temptation to sing modern music. It has been suggested that they should confine themselves to the slave music entirely, but they seem to be ambitious to go beyond this; certainly the specimens of their ability in rendering modern music in last night’s programme would justify them in making use of this means of giving variety to their concerts.”66 Indeed, the popularity of

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their concerts indicates that cross-generic, cross-racial dynamics were a large part of their appeal. “I thought I should blush myself to death . . . and Charlie made fun of me for sitting so near the darkeys, but they do sing so!” wrote one enthusiastic patron after a concert in New York City.67 The giddy thrill of racial crossing, mediated through the Fisk Singers’ performances, was not confined to the hall; Theodore F. Seward, the group’s conductor and a music professor at Fisk, composed arrangements of their songs for voice and piano, and “during these days we sold many copies of the Jubilee Songs, and the hills and valleys, the parlors and halls, all over the regions where we traveled, were vocal with the melodies of the Singers.”68 Thus, despite the hard work that went into distinguishing these concerts from minstrel shows, the sale of “Jubilee Songs” facilitated a kind of genteel blackface imitation in reverse, as white singers re-created the Fisk Singers’ performance style at home (Seward explained that “if [the Songs] are sung or played exactly as written, all the characteristic effects will be reproduced”).69 In 1872, one observer gushed how “all New York is singing plantation songs, caught from the Jubilee singers.”70 As another critic put it, “Everything becomes new under the charm of their un-English voices,” and such genre-bending charms became acutely audible when these voices carried over to England in 1873.71 Their British concerts may have “set new public standards of authenticity for black cultural expression” in the United Kingdom, as Paul Gilroy has argued, but their international travels did as much to disrupt alignments of nationality, race, and genre.72 Throughout their tour, British audiences heard in the Fisk Singers’ performances uncanny echoes of themselves. In a development resonant with the history of connecting spirituals to ballads, the group found special favor in Scotland. “Scottish Presbyterians are specially moved by what so touchingly recalls to memory ‘Lays of the Covenant,’ ” wrote one correspondent. “The dark hours of American bondmen were not altogether unlike the dark hours of the heroes of the Covenant two hundred years ago.”73 These echoes, called to the Scottish mind by hearing the Fisk Singers in concert, operated through the model of genre this book has outlined: as Francis Child explained less than a year later, the “popular ballad,” “while it is in essence an expression of our common human nature, and so of universal and indestructible interest, will in each case be differenced by circumstances and idiosyncrasy.”74 Performances of affected naturalism, like those of the Fisk Singers, inspired audiences to draw out of the songs a popular history, which, while distinctive, could also be compared transhistorically and transculturally to their own.

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The character of the music . . . is purely natural, as distinguished from artistic; and has much in common with the national melodies of Scotland. Such airs as the negro “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” remind the Northern hearer forcibly of such sacred airs of the Covenanters as “Martyrs,” “Elgin,” “Bangor,” &c.; while others recall the tones of “The Land o’ the Leal,” “A wee bird cam to our ha’door,” &c., the cadences of which are the most touching and pathetic to be found in music. The song of “The Ten Virgins” is essentially the same as “There grows a bonnie brier bush in oor kail yard.” And the two first lines of “O sinner man” are all but identical in structure with one of the finest Highland laments. With so much of the Scottish character in this music, it is no wonder that the Jubilee Singers have met everywhere in the North with so warm a welcome, and that so many of our Scottish compatriots are ready to say of their singing what was beautifully remarked the other day by a Highland girl, who, when asked to describe it, replied “It filled my whole heart.”75 We have already seen this sort of Scottish-African comparison (“the striking similarity that exists between many of the ‘specimens’ of Percy, Ritson and others, and the most approved poetry of the African school,” for example).76 In this case, however, the “Northern hearer” responds to the “Scottish character” of the negro music in a mode that is affective rather than satirically philological—the Highland girl, herself an archetypal figure of Scottish balladry, feels that the spirituals “fill my whole heart.” The “charm of their music” reminds Scottish audiences—“forcibly”— of songs and histories that were (presumably) already their own. Transatlantic interpretations that would position songs on the points of the triangle trade—Africa, North America, Britain—therefore responded to the racially and culturally destabilizing effects of the Fisk Singers’ performances. Commentators pointedly contrasted the Singers’ British reception with their treatment in the United States (primarily, their ongoing confusion with blackface troupes, both in performance and at segregated hotels), but such contrasts undercut the associations between race and genre that the Singers’ concerts supposedly promoted. In England, they “never found a hotel closed to them, and probably have enjoyed everywhere as much social privilege and felt as much ‘at home’ as though they had been white.”77 Moments of racial vertigo appear repeatedly throughout the commentary on the Singers’ transatlantic tour: after

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first hearing one of their performances, the Earl of Shaftesbury exclaimed, “When I find these young people, gifted to an extent that does not often fall to the lot of man, coming here in such a spirit, I don’t want them to become white, but I have a strong disposition myself to become black.”78 They famously sang “Go Down, Moses” to Queen Victoria, but their performances of “modern songs” did as much to widen their British appeal. For example, audiences regularly requested “John Brown’s Body,” which the Fisk Singers performed before the Gladstones, at the birthplace of Wilberforce, and at meetings of evangelical organizations like the Freedmen’s Missions Aid Society: “Here again the ‘John Brown’ song electrified the audience. As the stirring refrain rang out, ‘John Brown died that the slave might be free!’ the dense audience rose to their feet, hats and handkerchiefs waved in the air, and the deafening applause was kept up until the Singers answered with ‘God Save the Queen.’ ”79 This account is striking for many reasons, not the least being that the “stirring refrain” that so whipped up the audience never appears in any “John Brown” song I have found. The quote seems to conflate a line from Edna Dean Proctor’s “Emancipation Song,” which begins “John Brown died on a scaffold for the slave,” and a passage from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle-hymn of the Republic,” “As He died to make men holy, / Let us die to make men free,” but whatever the stirring refrain may have been, its misquotation here only highlights the strangeness of this moment on the London stage. In the “John Brown” songs, dying for the freedom of others is not an ideal voiced or celebrated by those others; slaves don’t liberate themselves, nor are their deaths imagined to bring forth the “redeemer nation” that Ernest Tuveson identified as the horizon of texts like “The Battle-hymn of the Republic.”80 Singing this song (whatever the lyrics), the Fisk Singers perform the moral imaginary of antislavery, becoming both the subjects and objects of its militant evangelism: they sing, “John Brown died that the slave might be free,” not “that we might be free.” The audience thus responds not to a testimonial from the depths of slavery—to a song like “Go, Down Moses,” for example—but to the uncanny sound of themselves in the voices of the black singers. This moment is shaped aurally by crossing race and genre, with another turn of the screw given by the performance’s transnational setting.81 The “deafening” applause that follows ends only when the Singers perform “God Save the Queen” in another intensely resonant performance of crossing—though one far different than if they had sung “Rule, Britannia,” the chorus of which famously declares to the world that “Britons never will be slaves.”82 In a savage historical irony, however, the Fisk Singers so popularized “John Brown” in England that it became

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the combat song of British soldiers who fought in the Ashanti War, in what is now Ghana, later that year, thus taking it (back) to Africa.

Back to Africa On subsequent domestic tours, working in a much more competitive performance environment, with many “Jubilee Singers,” variously legitimate and spurious, all vying for attention, the Fisk Singers advertised their English reception to protect the now highly prized originality and authenticity of their singing. Wrote one sympathetic editor, “A great difficulty with which the singers have to contend in their present work is to distinguish themselves, in the minds of the public, from the companies—whose name is legion—who, during their absence abroad, have used their name and hard earned reputation— even testimonials, their individual names and photographs—for fraudulent gain.”83 Concert playbills prominently cited English praise for the Fisk Singers’ high cultivation and also their self-evident naturalness: in one blurb, Colin Brown, a professor of music at Edinburgh University, remarked that “such singing (in which the artistic is lost in the natural) can only be the result of the most careful training.”84 Their later performance style therefore elaborated a complex artistry of natural affect to help them stand out in a field crowded with latecomers and fakes. As the previous sections have attempted to make clear, the emergence of black poetry and song in the later nineteenth-century United States was a highly mediated and complexly contingent process that depended upon, but was not limited to, the circulation of key genres (“negro ballads”) through certain institutions (evangelicalism, blackface theater) and formats (concerts, sheet music, songsters). Performance, and not race, consolidated black poetry as a tradition after 1870. If African American poetry, imagined as a transatlantic set of distinct practices and expressive forms, can be said to have an origin, that origin must be located not in Africa but in the welter of mid-century and postbellum popular American poetry. African origins came later. As Fisk’s principal Adam Knight Spence put it in 1879, songs like those the Fisk Singers popularized were “Echoes from unknown ages, / From Afric’s distant strand,” that had traveled “Down through the generations / To wake in a captive land.” O Africa, land of shadow, O Africa, land of song,

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Land of long night’s oppression, Land of sorrow and wrong, Thy echoes return unto thee, Bearing on golden wing The tidings of earth’s salvation, The song that the angels sing.85 Spence’s verse nicely traces the reconstructed history of circulation that by 1900 would be permanently inscribed onto African American culture in the full measure of its imagined authenticity. Songs arising in America return as echoes to (not of ) their African home, bearing tidings of salvation—for others— on their “golden wing.” This project of African repatriation began to appear in force after the Fisk Singers returned from their English tour. Antebellum essays had sarcastically dismissed associations between black music and Africa; in one example, a reviewer scoffed at the typical city paper’s advertisement for concerts by “African Melodists.” “African melodists! As well might the Hutchinson’s [sic] call themselves English melodists, because their ancestors, some six or eight generations back, came from England. Whether these performers are blacks, or whites with blacked faces, does not appear. . . . They are American melodists, par excellence.”86 It was already commonplace by the 1850s to consider the songs of racial mimicry to be America’s first distinctive music; this writer’s passing confusion over whether the performers are black or blackface merely highlights the question’s irrelevance— either way, “African Melodists” were American. William Francis Allen’s account of dialect in the spirituals also largely dismissed the theory of African origins: while noting “a peculiar character that might point to an African origin,” Allen concludes that “there is no doubt that their music as a whole has been influenced by their civilization, and is rather European than African in its character.” Similarly, the introduction to Slave Songs of the United Songs mentions the possibility of African origins only once, and reviews of the collection generally disputed the notion on the few occasions when they discussed it at all.87 Just a decade later, this attitude had changed dramatically. Despite the often-doubtful authenticity and the very avowed imitativeness of many “Jubilee” troupes, their spread helped normalize an idea of African origins; the Hampton Singers, as we have already seen, were described as having “more of the uncultivated, native African in their music” than the Fisk Singers, while a group called the New Orleans University Singers received praise in 1879 for their “rendering of the native African songs”: “no African troupe,” this

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paragraph added, “since the old Fiske [sic] Jubilees, has excited so much interest.”88 The profusion of these groups clearly influenced essays on black culture in the emerging discipline of folklore studies. George Washington Cable’s wellknown work on “Creole Slave Songs,” for instance, mentioned African origins nearly a dozen times in its account of New Orleans’s antebellum culture.89 This turn was part of a trend. “All tribes and people have their folk-lore,” wrote William Owens in 1877, “The folk-lore of Africo-Americans, as appearing in our Southern States, is a medley of fables, songs, sayings, incantations, charms and superstitious traditions brought from various tribes along the West African coast. . . . Travellers and missionaries tell us that the same sweet airs which are so often heard in religious meetings in America, set to Christian hymns, are to be recognized in the boats and palm-roofed houses of Africa, set to heathen words.”90 The African origins Owens described in this essay depended on the circulation of “sweet airs . . . heard in religious meetings” in order to become legible as tribal history; the American context of the spirituals came prior to—and made possible—their discovery in “the boats and palm-roofed houses of Africa.” Africanization not only remade the music in a fetish form, but it helped to unify disparate nineteenth-century song traditions into a single, timeless, racial abstraction, the “African.” As George Griffin put it, using language that strikingly anticipates Du Bois’s, “If ever the real genius for music seems to have been born in the soul of an entire race, that race is the African.” 91 These narratives displaced black singers or poets with the imagined coherence of “the soul of an entire race” while at the same time projecting this black soul out of America, hardly a neutral development in the post-Reconstruction period. At the end of the century, a lecture on “folk song” theorized that because “the negroes of the United States [were] descended from various African tribes,” therefore “many peculiarities of the ‘spirituals’ . . . may possibly be traced back to the original uncultured musical expressions of their respective ancestors,” while another reviewer, nicely completing the rhetorical circle this chapter has traced, explained that “those whose knowledge of negro minstrelsy has been gained by familiarity with that form of it which exists under burnt cork . . . have but little idea of the extent of the poetic and musical instinct, or faculty, inherent in the African race.”92 The post-1870s racialization of black song effaced the priority of “negro minstrelsy” (under burnt cork or not) with the figure of the abstracted “African race.” These statements seem to anticipate the logic of the “fetish-character” defined by Theodor Adorno later in the twentieth century: “the ideologies of primitivism and return to nature” in the fetish-character

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glorify a “musical underworld . . . [which] now only lives on what is handed down to it from above.”93 In the era of the color line, critical scholarship in a range of disciplines would be devoted to returning the African primitive to American poetic and performance forms. By providing a false historical value, the figure of the “African race” negotiated new genres of fraud and authenticity that appeared through the turn of the century, such as dialect writing, ragtime, and coon songs. William Dean Howells celebrated the dialect poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1896 volume Majors and Minors as “expressions of a race-life from within the race” by carefully distinguishing these from the “pseudo-Negro poetry of the minstrel show,” though, as we should by now expect, this binary was everywhere confounded—as Lisa Gitelman has noted, for example, a June 1905 advertisement for Edison’s phonograph company featured a pair of recordings, one a “romping coon song” and the other a “Negro dialect poem” by Dunbar.94 Writing in 1903, Jeanette Robinson Murphy commented that the ongoing craze for coon songs demonstrated that “people in America to-day, not discerning the wealth and beauty of the true negro songs, not only tolerate the manufactured ‘coon songs,’ but fail to recognize their spurious quality, and permit these attempted imitations with which the country is flooded to pass unchallenged as the true article.” In the face of such debauched taste, it would be up to those who had been “rocked to sleep on the broad, tender bosoms of old black mammies” to ensure for posterity “that the genuine African music be handed down in all its purity.”95 Acidly noting how “it is quite the fashion among learned Northern men to call this imported African music ‘the only folk music of America,’ ” Robinson asked, “should we not with equal justice call the transplanted Scotch, Irish and the music of other races our American music?” The comparatism of this question parallels Du Bois’s almost exactly contemporary argument, although with a very different intent: “These melodies,” she wrote, “certainly were brought by the negroes from the Dark Continent along with the customs and traditions and sickening voodooism which are surviving here to-day.”96 At the outset of the Progressive Era, the myth of the Dark Continent would gain immense explanatory power for valuing, interpreting, and also containing black culture. The abstraction of “Africa,” when understood as a late nineteenth-century effort to authenticate and remove certain cultural forms from the context of their performative reproduction, helps to situate The Souls of Black Folk as an originating text of African American literature. Du Bois famously prefaced every chapter of the book with several bars of unidentified musical notation,

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along with quotations from nineteenth-century poems. This representation of the sorrow songs in the format of “a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men,” emphasized music as the natural medium of the songs’ authority (204). Musical performance, especially that of the Fisk Singers, established “true Negro folk-song” in the “hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people” (206). The unmarked bars proved his point by assuming the music to be transparently readable as racial expression (even while their actual identities as songs has proven vexingly opaque), such that no additional commentaries, explanations, or gestures of authentication were needed. African beats pulsed beneath the surface of these songs, according to Du Bois, and it was this essentialism that made them both innately recognizable and at the same time incomprehensible (“unknown to me” and yet “of me and of mine”). In what is surely the most dramatic moment in his chapter “The Sorrow Songs,” Du Bois illustrated this contradictory relation (unknown and yet familiar) through the story of a particular African song that also retold his family’s Atlantic history: My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looking longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees. . . . The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and so two hundred years it has traveled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music. (207) Du Bois printed the song with musical notation, explaining how he had reconstructed its words from the history of their transmission through six generations, shifting from an African language (to date unidentified) into English script. Unknown to them and yet of them, his family sang it, “knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music”: Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me! Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me! Ben d’ nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, ben d’ le. (Ibid.)

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“O Africa, land of song . . . Thy echoes return unto thee.” Scholars have tried, unsuccessfully, to identify this song and find it somewhere in Africa, in the process stabilizing it as a real historical artifact.97 While I do not denigrate these efforts at establishing provenance, I want to make clear that in undertaking them, scholars elide the nineteenth-century history of black song making that I have traced in this chapter. In effect, it does not matter whether or not the song refers back to some original, because the song’s real power derives from the imaginative possibilities it offers: “Knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music,” the song was powerful for Du Bois because he could not understand the meaning of its words, which as purely material signs could much more readily index the African past.98 Read in this light, Du Bois’s unknown song might be said to have founded African American poetry. Rather than reading the spiritual as an organic index of authentic folk culture, I have presented it as a contested object of the later nineteenth century. Ideas of black expressivity played out in the tangles of blackface minstrelsy, evangelical reform, ethnography and folklore studies, ballad scholarship, and performance culture, and notions of the racial folk were circulated through formats that included the newspaper, the songbook, the anthology, the minstrel performance, and the tours of choirs like the Fisk Singers. Like so much ideology, this history ends by obscuring its own beginnings; the turn to Africa is both a consequence of and a solution to the decades-long proliferation of imitation and fraud— and this story of “love and theft,” with its conclusions about the greater moral value of authentic originality, will perhaps be the only one that twentieth-century American music tells about itself. The major implication of the turn to Africa is that, by 1900, certain genres (spirituals, dialect poems)—which were intensely mediated and dramatically aestheticized— could be read as authentic, vernacular cultural forms, the disappearance of which seemed to herald, however obliquely, the closure of political debate on the “negro question” and its resolution into the “problem of the color line.” Cultural forms thus could replace the people they were imagined to index. The consequences of this shift, which might indeed be understood as “the problem of the Twentieth Century,” are perhaps the largest and most difficult legacy of nineteenth-century poetics—but that story of social life must be told under the aegis of a different notion of the thing we now call “poetry.”

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Notes

Introduction 1. William Dean Howells, The Minister’s Charge, or The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker, in Novels 1886–1888 (New York: Library of America, 1989), 216–17. All quotations refer to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically. 2. See Elizabeth Renker, “The ‘Twilight of the Poets’ in the Era of American Realism, 1875–1900,” The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, ed. Kerry Larson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 135–56. 3. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in Mississippi Writings (New York: Library of America, 1982), 724, 725, 726–27. 4. In an irony Twain might have appreciated, Emmeline’s “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d” appears, under his name, not hers, in John Hollander’s two-volume American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Library of America, 1992), a landmark anthology that went a long way to reviving critical interest in nineteenth-century poetry. 5. Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 75. Garvey has plenty to say about Emmeline’s scrapbook but nothing else about this particu lar scrap. 6. N. G. Awtell to John Greenleaf Whittier, 14 July 1873, Pickard-Whittier papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (19). 7. Another use of the term “use” is Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 8. Here my argument is guided by recent interventions into media history that push for interpreting media (new and old) “amid uses and users, rather than simply amid descriptions of product development, product placement, business models, or calculations of market share,” as Lisa Gitelman puts it (Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006]: 59). Similarly, David Edgerton emphasizes the use of technologies to provide a global archaeology of the twentieth century; a very different history emerges when the timeframe for a particu lar technology is a century rather than just the year of its invention and when the field of study is worldwide rather than limited to industrialized nations— bicycles become more important than automobiles, rifles than atomic bombs, corrugated metal than microchips. See The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 9. Mary Louise Kete’s fascinating history of “Harriet Gould’s Book” offers an example of the ways in which the exchange of poems in manuscript secured communal and family bonds across time and space, although her larger argument about the formation of middle-class

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identity is not convincing. See Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 10. Histories of reading that focus on America rarely discuss poetry, although this is not true for work in other languages and historical periods. Christopher Nugent and Marisa Galvez, for example, each consider how the materiality of manuscripts played against contexts of oral recitation and exchange in conceiving of both “poetry” and “reading” as institutions of social practice: see Nugent, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), and Galvez, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Leah Price emphasizes the material book’s resistance to reading (as an object in and of history); her work has been important to my argument in this introduction. See How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 11. Virginia W. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 12. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 254. The quote comes from the essay “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric.” Jackson gives a bravura reading of this essay and this sentence in particular; see Dickinson’s Misery, 100–109. 13. “The intentional fallacy” protected critical reading against exactly this charge of creating something never before there in a work. See William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–88. I have been influenced by Walter Benn Michaels’s polemics against the tendency of critical reading (which he calls “Theory”) to split meaning from intention; see Michaels and Stephen Knapp, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): 723–42, and Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 14. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 262. 15. For some examples of the wide-angle approach, see William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli [1968] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The twentieth-century historiography of literacy was the digital humanities in nascent form; Bernard Bailyn was possibly the first humanist to use a mainframe computer to generate the terms, objectives, and conclusions of his project. See Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). Kenneth Lockridge’s narrowly focused critique of Bailyn’s thesis (Literacy in Colonial New England: An Inquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West [New York: Norton, 1974]) was equally data driven and uninterested in individual readings or readers. Book history also has been flummoxed by the effort to understand readers’ thoughts and feelings toward books and usually focuses on the materiality of the codex as the stable ground for its analyses. For exceptional studies that take into account individual relationships with books, see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); and Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). However, of these three, only Brown looks at poems. 16. For examples of this problem, see Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), especially the essays “What Is the History of

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Books?” (107–35) and “First Steps Toward a History of Reading” (154–87). “Despite a considerable literature on its psychology, phenomenology, textology, and sociology, reading remains mysterious,” he writes (131). “In short, it should be possible to develop a history as well as a theory of reader response. Possible, but not easy; for the documents rarely show readers at work, fashioning meaning from texts, and the documents are texts themselves, which also require interpretation. Few of them are rich enough to provide even indirect access to the cognitive and affective elements of reading, and a few exceptional cases may not be enough for one to reconstruct the inner dimensions of that experience” (157). It becomes clear in these essays that reading’s mystery largely results from its resistance to the more positivist methods of book history. 17. This scholarship ranges across periods, fields, and languages, and it varies in the degree of skepticism toward the project of assessing readers’ mind-sets, as well as in the ways it extrapolates individual relations to books into broader arguments about literacy, literature, and literariness. Works that have influenced me include Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin, 1982); Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 18. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 19. For a concise narrative of this process, see Joseph Harrington, “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature,” American Literary History 8.3 (1996): 496–515. 20. In addition to books already cited, see Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transnational Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Paula Bernat Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Mary Loeffelholz, From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); John D. Kerkering, The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham, NC: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005); Virginia W. Jackson, ed., special issue on “American Victorian Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 43.2 (2005); Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetics of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Meredith L. McGill, ed., The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Augusta Rohrbach, ed., special issue on “Poetry,” ESQ: A Journal of the

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American Renaissance 54.1–4 (2008); Edward Whitley, American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Faith Barrett, To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Cristanne Miller, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Alexandra Socarides, Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 21. Hollander, American Poetry; Cheryl Walker, ed., American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Joan Sherman, ed., African American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Paula Bernat Bennett, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). 22. For related arguments, see Michael Cohen, “E. C. Stedman and the Invention of Victorian Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 43.2 (2005): 165–89, and Sarah Ehlers, “Making It Old: The Victorian/Modern Divide in Twentieth-Century American Poetry,” Modern Language Quarterly 73.1 (2012): 37–67. 23. Mill defines poetry only through antithesis and his definition hinges on the asociality of poetry as opposed to other forms of communication: “Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling. But . . . eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols, which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.” As his essay realizes, however, no poem ever achieves this ideal nonencounter. Mill, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 195. The essay is better known today by its earlier title, “What Is Poetry?” (1833). Mill republished it as “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” in Dissertations and Discussions (1859), and this version was much better known in the nineteenth century, particularly in America. The quote comes from the second edition (1867). 24. Jay Grossman makes a similar point with his brilliant observation that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1855 letter to Walt Whitman—possibly the most canonical nineteenth-century (non) reading of a poem—never once refers to Leaves of Grass as either poetry or a poem. One of Whitman’s responses was to title almost every object in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass “Poem of . . .”. See Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 93. 25. The weakness that besets recent studies such as Rubin’s Songs of Ourselves is their failure to discern the incoherence of “poetry” in nineteenth- century culture. Rubin elides the massive diff erences among the objects and genres in her book by referring throughout her study to poetry as “the genre,” as though that means something specific or precise. 26. My model is Jay Fliegelman’s use of Thomas Jefferson in Declaring Independence: “I treat Jefferson less as the autonomous subject of this study than as a witness to, and conflicted participant in, a new affective understanding of the operations of language.” Declaring Independence: Jeff erson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 2. If Whittier and Jefferson seem like vastly disproportionate figures with which to perform this work, that is partly my point: popu lar nineteenth-century poets

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have been so thoroughly elided from American cultural history that their ubiquity in daily life is difficult to imagine as anything other than unfortunate.

Chapter 1 1. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Yankee Gypsies” [1845], The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889), 334–35. 2. For an account of the relation between Snow-Bound and postbellum colonial nostalgia, see Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), 35–67. 3. William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 176. 4. The clockmaker and peddler “Sam Slick” of “Slicksville, Connecticut” was a character invented by Thomas Halliburton in the 1830s. More complex versions of this figure also appear in the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. See Joseph Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 156–62. 5. Whittier, “Yankee Gypsies,” 335. 6. Sarah Anna Emery, Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian (Newburyport, MA: William H. Huse, 1879), 29. 7. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, 176. 8. Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 23; Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 9. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 24. Hall describes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England in similar terms, as a place where “people who eagerly read street ballads on sensational events . . . also treasured Bibles; who slipped off at night to sample dirty books, but who also memorized the contents of a schoolbook with its pious verse and catechism” (Worlds of Wonder, 21). 10. W. C. Ford, Broadsides, Ballads &c. Printed in Massachusetts 1639–1800 (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1922), v–xiv; Richardson Wright, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America: Strolling Peddlers, Preachers, Lawyers, Doctors, Players, and Others from the Beginning to the Civil War [1927] (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965), 50–88. 11. Samuel L. Knapp alleged that Plummer dealt in illicit printed material: “He, at times, under his mass of straw concealed certain publications, that were frowned at, if not prohibited, at common law.” Life of Timothy Dexter; Embracing Sketches of the Eccentric Characters that Composed his Associates (Boston: G. N. Thomson, 1838), 88. On the clandestine peddling of pornography and illicit literature in early nineteenth-century New England, see Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, 178, and William J. Gilmore, “Peddlers and the Dissemination of Printed Material in Northern New England,” Itinerancy in New England and New York. The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Annual Proceedings 1984, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1986), 76–89. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin make a similar claim about peddlers in early modern France; see The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard (London: NLB, 1976), 238.

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12. Weems’s work as a peddler is contextualized within the antebellum book trade in Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 37–54. 13. The American Antiquarian Society has at least twenty-two different broadsides by Harmon and twenty-one by DeWolfe. DeWolfe claimed to have written “The Lawrence Disaster” (1860), about a horrific mill fire, in less than nine minutes, while waiting for a train in Manchester, New Hampshire. Like Plummer, DeWolfe referred to himself on occasion as “The Wandering Poet,” and like Plummer he seems to have been considered the village fool. I have not found much evidence about the means through which he circulated his works, but information on his broadsides points to some key differences between his career and those examined in this chapter. “Speed-writing” is an important aspect of DeWolfe’s poems, since many were either about trains or written on board them. This railway emphasis, which links him to industrial production and the mid-century transportation revolution, as well as his Civil War era, makes DeWolfe’s example less germane to the interests of this chapter. Authors like him might complicate arguments about the mass production of books and the formation of national markets after 1860, however. 14. Dinsmoor’s Scots dialect poems were collected into Incidental Poems and published in 1828, mainly through the efforts of his friends and with heavy editorial intervention by Whittier. Horton’s relation to printedness is especially difficult since, as a slave, the law forbid him to read or write and compelled him to use white intermediaries. On Horton, see The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry, ed. Joan R. Sherman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 15. Dickinson scholars are slowly withdrawing their investment in her exceptionality to nineteenth-century poetics. Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller offer an interesting comparison between the unpublished poems of Dickinson and the soldier poet Obadiah Ethelbert Baker in “Words for the Hour”: A New Anthology of Civil War Poetry (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith take seriously the collaborative enterprise of Dickinson’s letters with Susan Gilbert in Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998). The scribal circulation of manuscript poems is studied in Mary Louise Kete’s account of nineteenth-century mourning culture, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 16. My account of Plummer’s life mostly derives from his autobiography, Sketch of the History of the Life and Adventures of Jonathan Plummer, Jun. (Written by Himself ), vol. 2 (Newburyport, MA: Blunt and March, 1795). Plummer advertised these memoirs as a three-part narrative, but only the second part is extant, and it is unclear whether he wrote all three. Other sources include Knapp, Life of Timothy Dexter, 86–100; John J. Currier, History of Newburyport, Mass. 1764–1909 (Newburyport, MA: Printed for the Author, 1909), 424–38; Sidney Perley, The Plumer Genealogy. Francis Plumer, Who Settled Newbury, Massachusetts, & Some of His Descendants (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1917); and Roger Wolcott Higgins, “The Memoirs of Jonathan Plummer, Jr. 1761–1819,” New England Quarterly 8.1 (1935): 84–98. It is worth noting that some of these sources give highly tendentious accounts of Plummer, usually as a way to attack his patron Dexter. 17. For this history, I have drawn upon Knapp, Life of Timothy Dexter; Currier, History of Newburyport; Russell Leigh Jackson, History of Newburyport Newspapers, Essex Institute Historical Collections vol. 88 (1952); John P. Marquand, Timothy Dexter Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960); and Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998).

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18. The case of “The Last Words and Dying Confession of Samuel Frost” is interesting, since Plummer apparently had the text reprinted from a different broadside that Isaiah Thomas had printed in Worcester. The colophon, which lists no printer, states, “Sold by Jonathan Plummer, travelling-trader, in Newbury.” The layout of Plummer’s version is very different from two other extant examples, using many more illustrations, type sizes, and columns, though it repeats the same text. My thanks to Erin Forbes for some clarifying conversations about this document. 19. Knapp, Life of Timothy Dexter, 100. 20. Ibid., 99. 21. Richard Standfast, A Dialogue Between a Blind-Man and Death [c. 1686] (Boston: E. Russell, 1793). According to the imprint, this edition was “re-printed (at the earnest Request of a Number of well-disposed Christians) by E. Russell, next Liberty-Stump, for J. Plumer, Trader, in Newbury. Price Six Pence single. May be had, The Tragedy of Louis Capet, and sundry other New Pieces.” The sixteen-page pamphlet also advertised Plummer’s broadside on the Haitian Revolution and “How’s curious Indian Narrative,” which probably refers to A Genuine and Correct Account of the Captivity, Suff erings & Deliverance of Mrs. Jemima Howe, of Hinsdale, in NewHampshire (1792). For a reference to Robert Russel’s Seven Sermons (published in at least sixty-three editions between 1701 and 1809), see Jonathan Plummer, “A Sermon for Seamen” (Newburyport, MA: 1809). For “Father Abbey’s Will” (written by John Seccombe and first published in 1732, with a broadside version published in the 1790s), advertised with “a number of other songs,” see Jonathan Plummer, “Death of Mr. Charles Austin” (Newburyport, MA: 1806). 22. This pricing information can be found in Jonathan Plummer, “The Tragedy of Louis Capet” (Newburyport, MA: 1793). 23. On the relationship between broadside circulation and the propagation of “oral” ballads in early modern England, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and, for the eighteenth century, Paula McDowell, “ ‘The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making’: Broadside Ballads in Long-Eighteenth Century Ballad Discourse,” The Eighteenth Century 7.2–3 (2006): 151–78. 24. William Bentley, entry for 17 November 1796, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., 4 vols. (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1907), 2: 205. 25. Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 148–49. 26. Plummer, “Hints to Elder Pottle, On the necessity of mortifying the deeds of the body” (Newburyport, MA: c. 1800), and Jonathan Plummer, “Parson Pidgin, or Holy Kissing” (Newburyport, MA: 1807). 27. Bentley, entry for 5 April 1793, Diary of William Bentley, 2: 14. 28. In “Hints to Elder Pottle,” Plummer wrote that “since the thing to which I allude, has been publicly talked of, a considerable number have spoken to me about verses, and it seems to me very proper to compose a few” about Pottle’s “living too much after the flesh.” While the details of these conversations remain elusive (if they even took place), the indication at least is that Plummer sometimes was prompted by others to compose poems that mocked leaders in the local churches. 29. Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water; or, the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 30. Jonathan Plummer, “A Looking-Glass for lovers of strong drink & another Looking Glass for a persecuted Saint: or Jonathan Plummer no hermaphrodite” (Newburyport, MA: 1818). 31. Jonathan Plummer, “A Lecture and a Song, concerning the Robbery at Newbury” (Newburyport, MA: 1816).

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32. Plummer, Sketch of the History of the Life, 2: 85, 133, 135, 67–70. Unless otherwise noted, I have preserved Plummer’s spelling and punctuation. 33. “Library. To the Public,” The Morning Star, 29 October 1794: 3; “By-laws, and Catalogue of Books, of the Social Library, in the Town of Newburyport” (Newburyport, MA: 1810); Margaret Searle Curson, diary entry for 15 January 1809; Curson Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1175.1 (1). 34. On the various readings, see Searle’s diary: 11 September 1809 (“After Blenheim”); 8 October 1809 (Gertrude of Wyoming); and 14 June 1813 (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), Curson Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1175.1 (1–5). 35. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Although Shields focuses on colonial America, I think his argument holds good for nineteenth-century readers as well. 36. Plummer, Life, 80–82 and 88–91. 37. Jonathan Plummer, “A Poem on Gen. Washington,” Bickerstaff ’s Boston Almanack, or Federal Calendar, for 1790 (Boston: E. Russell, 1789); Jonathan Plummer, “A True and Particu lar Account of the Cruel Massacre, And Devastation, at Cape-Francois” (Newburyport, MA: 1793); and Plummer, “The Tragedy of Louis Capet.” 38. Plummer, Life, 138–39. 39. Knapp, Life of Timothy Dexter, 89–90. 40. Jonathan Plummer, “An Ode and Sermon, on the Subject of Studying to be Quiet. Occasioned by a difference between the Rev. Dr. Dana and his Consort” (Newburyport, MA: 1805). 41. For a contemporary instance, see the fan site http://www.LordTimothyDexter.com/. A short narrative about Plummer can be found at http://www.lordtimothydexter.com/His_Lordships_Poet_Laureate.htm. Accessed 9 September 2011. 42. Jonathan Plummer, “To Sir Timothy Dexter, On his returning to Newburyport, after residing a long time at Chester, in Newhampshire— A Congratulatory Ode,” Political Gazette, 17 March 1797, 188. 43. Knapp, Life of Timothy Dexter, 88. 44. Jonathan Plummer, “Elegy, on the death of His Excellency Sir Timothy Dexter” (Newburyport, MA: 1806). 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. See, respectively, “Hints to Elder Pottle”; “An Ode and Sermon, on the Subject of Studying to be Quiet”; Jonathan Plummer, “Great and Dreadful Fire at Newburyport. Fire, Fire, Fire” (Newburyport, MA: 1811); and Jonathan Plummer, “A funeral Sermon and a funeral Psalm, on the death of about ten or fifteen thousand of people killed by an earthquake” (Newburyport, MA: 1812). 49. Jonathan Plummer, “Dreadful Fire at Portsmouth! and many sudden deaths” (Newburyport, MA: 1814). 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Knapp, Life of Timothy Dexter, 99. 53. [Redford Webster?], Selections from the Chronicle of Boston and the book of retrospections & anticipations: compiled in the last month of the last year of the town, and the first month of the first year of the city, being the year of our Lord MDCCCXXII (Boston [?]: 1822 [?]), 37–38. 54. Ibid., 38.

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55. Ibid., 40–41. 56. Ford, Broadsides, Ballads &c., v. For a fascinating overview of ballad circulation and the law, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 299–334. John W. Webster was a professor of chemistry at Harvard; he was convicted and executed for killing George Parkman in 1850. 57. Susan Stewart offers the best critique of this kind of historicism: see Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 66–132. 58. Information about Shaw’s life comes from “A Book of the Oregion of the People Callead Shaws in the Town of Standish &c” [c. 1835], Folder 11, Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. Other information comes from Windsor P. Daggett, “Where Are the Mournful Songs Written by Thomas Shaw of Standish?” Sprague’s Journal of Maine History 4.3 (1916): 194–96, and Windsor P. Daggett, A Down-East Yankee from the District of Maine (Portland, ME: A. J. Huston, 1920), 57–75. 59. Daggett, “Where Are the Mournful Songs?” 194. 60. Thomas Shaw, “A Short Journal of my life,” MS p. 104, Daybook, Box 2, Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. Unless otherwise indicated, I reproduce Shaw’s spelling and punctuation as they appear in his manuscripts. 61. Thomas Shaw, “When I am dead I may Speeke Hebrews 11–4 July 6-1837,” Daybook, n.p., Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. 62. Thomas Shaw, Songbook, folder 3, MS p. 27, Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. 63. The evidence regarding Hawthorne’s familiarity with Shaw is circumstantial but suggestive. As a boy, Hawthorne lived in Raymond, Maine, within the ambit of Shaw’s peddling routes, and according to William Symmes, a childhood friend of Hawthorne’s, Hawthorne once read aloud a ballad about the Knight tragedy, which appears to refer to Shaw’s work. Symmes described this incident long after the fact and mistakenly assumed Hawthorne had written the poem, which on at least one later occasion was published under Hawthorne’s name. See Windsor P. Daggett, “The Story of a Mournful Song,” Lewiston Journal, 24 February and 3 March 1917, and Donald A. Sears, “Folk Poetry in Longfellow’s Boyhood,” New England Quarterly 45.1 (1972): 99. 64. Thomas Shaw, Daybook, n.p., 27 July 1837, Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. 65. Ibid. The poem is dated “Standish June 6-1836.” 66. I am indebted to Karen Sánchez-Eppler for conversations on the production of manuscript books in the early nineteenth-century United States. On copying as pedagogy, see her essay, “Copying and Conversion: An 1824 Friendship Album ‘from a Chinese Youth,’ ” American Quarterly 59.2 (2007): 301–39. 67. “Long Articles—Poetry— Obituaries,” Maine Wesleyan Journal, 9 October 1834, 158. 68. “Messieurs Printers” [untitled poem], Songbook, MS p. 15, Folder 3, Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. 69. Thomas Shaw, entry for February 23, 1807, “A Short Journal of my life,” Daybook, MS p. 137, Box 2, Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. 70. Ibid. Shaw copied the poem into his journal, possibly using the printed broadside as his source; see “A Short Journal of my life,” MS pp. 138–41. 71. It is unclear when Shaw wrote this journal. The consistency of the handwriting, pagination, and spacing of entries make it appear as though he wrote it during a brief period of time, rather than over the many years that the journal covers. It is possible that Shaw was

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recording events long after they occurred, which might call into question the accuracy of the entries, although it is also possible that the account in the daybook was recopied from earlier journals that are no longer extant, which would be in keeping with Shaw’s practice elsewhere in the manuscript book. 72. Thomas Shaw, entry for “Monday the second day” [2 March 1807], “A Short Journal of my life.” 73. Thomas Shaw, entry for “Tuesday” [7 April 1807], “A Short Journal of my life.” 74. My argument here has been influenced by Christopher Nugent’s fascinating study of the mediation and circulation of Tang dynasty poetry in China, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 75. Thomas Shaw, “A Mournful Song, on the death of the Wife and Child of Mr. nathaniel knights,” 2nd ed. (Portland, ME: 1807). I consulted the copy at the New York Historical Society 76. Thomas Shaw, entry for “Tusday” [sic] [14 July 1807], “A Short Journal of my life.” 77. Thomas Shaw, “Melancholy Shipwreck” (Portland, ME: 1807). 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Thomas Shaw, “A Short Journal of my life,” entries for July 1807. 81. Thomas Shaw, entry for “Saboth 9th day” [9 August 1807], “A Short Journal of my life.” 82. Thomas Shaw, entry for “Wendsday” [sic] [29 July 1807], “A Short Journal of my life.” The first class of students at Bowdoin College matriculated in 1802. 83. Thomas Shaw, “To Those That Cry Me Poet,” Daybook, n.p., Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. 84. Ibid. 85. Thomas Shaw, “Then took my pen & ink in hand” [untitled poem], Daybook, n.p., Thomas Shaw Papers, Coll 186, Maine Historical Society. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid.

Chapter 2 1. James G. Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Marcus Wood, ed., The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology 1764–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. Garrison’s quote comes from the headnote to “Stanzas” (“Our Countrymen in Chains!”) in Poems written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States, between the years 1830 and 1838 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837), 35. 3. Sarah Anna Lewis to Whittier, 15 November 1841, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College, MS Am 1844 (192). 4. For Whittier’s early life, see Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton, 1894); for Garrison’s, see Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 5. Garrison was converted to abolitionism by Benjamin Lundy, an itinerant Quaker abolitionist, and he coedited the Genius of Universal Emancipation with Lundy in Baltimore before founding the Liberator in 1831. Whittier worked at the pro-Clay American Manufacturer

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and the New England Weekly Review in the early 1830s. See Whitman Bennett, Whittier: Bard of Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 47–62. 6. Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1; Thomas Franklin Currier, A Bibliography of John Greenleaf Whittier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 637–38. 7. “The Drunkard to His Bottle,” in Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 490. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Whittier’s poetry refer to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically. 8. On antebellum periodical culture, see Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), and McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting. 9. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution (New York: Rinehart, 1951); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Grenville Mellen, The Age of Print: A Poem (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1830), 5; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Michael C. Cohen, “Peddling Authorship in the Age of Jackson,” ELH 79.2 (2012): 369–88. 10. Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself [1836] (New York: New York Review Books, 2008), 253–378. 11. On mass mediation and moral suasion, see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 269–89, and Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal Service from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 169–205. For accounts of antislavery during the 1830s, see Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Mayer, All on Fire; and Kathryn Kish Sklar, ed., Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Antislavery Movement 1830–1870 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000). Sklar’s documentary history reveals a cruel irony in the relationship between antislavery and free speech, since the American AntiSlavery Society would eventually bar women from speaking publicly against slavery. 12. For an overview of the abolitionist mails controversy, see John, Spreading the News, 257–83; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, Jeff erson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), 410–12; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 428–39; and Loughran, The Republic in Print, 303–61. 13. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 145. As Wyatt-Brown notes, the petition campaign made antislavery “a subject no American could ignore.” On Justice and Expediency, see Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 124–25. 14. “Miscellaneous,” Niles’ Register, 15 August 1835, 410. 15. William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina 1816–1836 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 341–53. 16. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 341. The man, Reuben Crandall, was acquitted, but he died soon after from tuberculosis contracted during his incarceration. His case quickly became a major piece of abolitionist propaganda, with a pamphlet about him, “The Trial of Reuben Crandall,” becoming exactly the sort of “incendiary” material he was accused of circulating. Pickard identifies Justice and Expediency as the pamphlet Crandall was caught possessing, although contemporary accounts do not; see Life and Letters, 125. For contemporary accounts of Crandall’s case, see “Trial of Reuben Crandall,” New York Evangelist, 23 April 1835, 67; “News

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of the Day: Trial in Washington for Circulating Incendiary Publications,” Liberator, 30 April 1836, 71; and “Hail Columbia, Happy Land,” Philanthropist, 13 May 1836, 3. 17. Leonard L. Richards, The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 126. 18. Ibid., 115–25. The gag rule was part of a series of resolutions, which also included declarations that Congress had no power over slavery in the slave states and that it “ought not” abolish slavery in Washington, D.C. The gag rule lasted until 1844. For an extended overview of the petition crisis, see William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776– 1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). The resolutions did not satisfy Southern states’ rights radicals, who wanted to establish definitively that Congress had no constitutional power over slavery; Pinckney was voted out of office later that year. See Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 351–53. 19. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 471–73; Marie B. Hecht, John Quincy Adams: A Personal History of an Independent Man (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 544–49; Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (New York: Knopf, 1997), 351–59. 20. The Quincy Patriot, quoted in the Liberator, 16 February 1838, 26. The poem is quoted in Niles’ Weekly Register, 3 October 1835, 65. 21. Amelia E. Barr, “ ‘She Loved a Sailor’: An American Romance,” Christian Union, 26 February 1891, 274. 22. These other poems include “Stanzas for the Times—1839,” “Stanzas for the Times— 1844,” and “Stanzas for the Times—1850.” Their later titles were, respectively, “The Response,” “The Sentence of John L. Brown,” and “In the Evil Days.” 23. “Stanzas for the Times,” Liberator, 22 March 1839, 48. The poem was also printed in the Richmond Enquirer, the Pennsylvania Freeman, and the Philanthropist. 24. John W. Chadwick to John Greenleaf Whittier, 3 March  1881; Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (72). 25. “Stanzas for the Times” was sung at a meeting of the Old Colony Anti-Slavery Society (Abington, Massachusetts) on 17 January 1838; see Liberator, 16 February 1838, 26. A Mr. Galloway, of Ohio, read part of the poem at the Whig National Convention in 1848; see the transcript of the third day’s proceedings in the National Era, 15 June 1848, 95. Some later reprintings that I have discovered are Monthly Off ering (December 1841): 179; Liberator, 5 April 1844, 56; National Era, 12 December 1850, 198; Christian Watchman and Reflector, 2 January 1851, 4; and Liberator, 28 December 1860, 208. 26. Bennett, Whittier: Bard of Freedom, 85. 27. This headnote appeared in all of the newspaper versions of “Lines” published in the 1830s. A more extensive headnote to the poem published in Whittier’s Complete Poetical Works stated that “Mr. Calhoun’s bill made it a penal offence for postmasters . . . ‘knowingly to deliver, to any person whatever, any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill, or other printed paper or pictorial representation, touching the subject of slavery, where, by the laws of the said State, District, or Territory, their circulation was prohibited’ ” (273). 28. As “Lines,” the poem was published in the Haverhill Essex Gazette, 11 June 1836, 2; Liberator, 25 June 1836, 104; Liberator, 18 January 1850, 11; and Littell’s Living Age, 30 August 1862, 386. As “The Bill of Abominations,” it appeared in the Philanthropist, 5 August 1836, 4, and the Cincinnati Western Messenger (December 1836), 359. As “Silence Is Crime,” it appeared in the Liberator, 21 December 1860, 204, and the Wilmington, Delaware Circular, 7 February 1861, 4. In 1836, the poem was published as a broadside titled “Lines Written on the Passage of Pinckney’s Resolutions in the House of Representatives, and of Calhoun’s ‘Bill of Abominations’

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in the Senate of the United States. By the author of Stanzas for the Times.” It was also published, along with “Stanzas for the Times,” in Letters from John Quincy Adams to His Constituents (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837), 66. Under various titles, the poem appeared in Poems written during the Progress of the Abolition Question (1837) and Voices of Freedom (Boston: Waite, Pierce and Co., 1846). In Whittier’s later collected works (1888), the poem was titled “A Summons.” 29. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 30. Th is critical tradition largely derives from the work of Ann Douglas (The Feminization of American Culture [New York: Knopf, 1977]); much of it focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe, and very little of it discusses poetry. For instance, two foundational collections on sentimentality and nineteenth-century American culture include only one essay on poetry between them; see Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19thCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Two exceptions to this prose-centeredness are Mary Louise Kete (Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000]) and Joanna Brooks (“Our Phillis, Ourselves,” American Literature 82.1 [2010]: 1–28). 31. In her account of nineteenth-century women’s poetry, Mary Loeffelholz reads White and Harper in relation to the ways they navigated the politics of the mid-century literary field in “politically engaged poetry that mediated between pedagogical rhetorics and more autonomous aesthetics, between school culture and the emergent world of high culture.” From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 67. Harper’s career is the closer analogue to Whittier’s, although because “print authorship was throughout her career inseparable from encountering the public gaze” as a lecturer and public speaker addressing “large audiences of enormously mixed literacies” in ways that were not true for Whittier, and with gender and racial constraints that he never encountered, Harper’s efforts at “decorporealizing her poetry” led to a very different kind of generic voice (99, 97). On Harper’s public speaking career, see Carla Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 119–45. 32. Thomas Franklin Currier provides brief biographies for most of these people in Elizabeth Lloyd and the Whittiers: A Budget of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). Quotations from this collection will be abbreviated ELW and cited parenthetically in the text. 33. Whittier to Harriet Minot, 18 March 1838, in The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 3 vols., ed. John B. Pickard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 1: 289. 34. Allinson, Jones, Elizabeth Whittier, Nicholson, Lloyd, Sarah Webb, and William Burleigh all contributed poems. Significantly, their contributions were anonymous, while most of the other authors were attributed. 35. Th e North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by Her Friends (Philadelphia: Merihew and Thompson, 1840), vi. 36. Ibid., v. 37. Ibid., 42.

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38. Fitz-Greene Halleck, Alnwick Castle, with Other Poems (New York: G. and C. Carvill, 1827), 3, 4, 7. “Alnwick Castle” was written in 1822. 39. The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, with a Memoir of Her Life and Character (Philadelphia: Lemuel Howell, 1836). Chandler is known today as a pioneer author; in 1830, she moved with her family from Philadelphia to the Michigan territory, where she continued to write until her death. See Remember the Distance That Divides Us: The Family Letters of Philadelphia Quaker Abolitionist and Pioneer Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, 1830–1842, ed. Martha J. Heringa Mason (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004). 40. Elizabeth Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, 6 June 1841; Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (847). 41. See Lloyd’s description in ELW, 61–64. 42. Volume 1 is entitled “Fragments from the Unpublished Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier” and dated 1839; volume 2 is entitled “Whittier Leaves” and dated 1841. The books belong to the Haverford College Library Special Collections, MS Coll 975A. 43. After purchasing Rufus Griswold’s 1842 anthology Poets and Poetry of America, Nicholson noted that the selection of Whittier’s verse might have been better had Griswold relied on her book: “Greenleaf may thank him, for his selection, albeit he may will wince under Mogg [“Mogg Megone”]. I should have been happy to lend him my thick book for a selection.” Letter to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, [Spring 1842], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (847). 44. Elizabeth Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, 20 February 1842, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (847). 45. Whittier to Elizabeth Neall, 10 February 1839; The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 1: 323. 46. Marisa Galvez, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 59–93. 47. Whittier to Nicholson, 2 February 1841; The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 1: 485. 48. Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, [1841?], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (847). 49. Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, September [1841?], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (847). 50. Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, January [1841?], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (847). 51. The Whittier books weren’t the only manuscripts moving in this open-ended coterie circulation. William J. Allinson recorded his 1842 visit to the Whittiers’ Amesbury home in “a journal in the form of letters to his Rebecca,” as Margaret Wendell explained. Th is book “faithfully chronicled every passing event—yes by means of that little volume we have been perfectly conversant with all that passed during his whole journey.” However, in another example of the ways coterie circulation could delimit authorial control, Allinson’s journal was nearly lost in its passage from hand to hand at the outer limits of the circle: “The journal had been sent down to him by the steamboat and had never reached him—E Lloyds father had given it to a man that he knew but slightly and poor Wm and Elizabeth were both of them in much trouble I pitied E Lloyd most (though I regretted that the papers should be lost) for thee knows Wm is very careful of his own productions—however as they have been recovered we will leave them to their fate—.” Wendell to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, 8 September 1842, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (901).

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52. Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, 18 October 1849, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (847). Ten years later, she discovered even more matter: “Cowering amid my Aunts old books, I find a scrapbook containing very many of G’s poems & prose, written when quite a boy, with the most flattering notices of the press—so that really, by a sort of co-incidence, I doubt if there is, extant, so full a collection of his writings as here at 114. It is curious, in another state too. They are all of value for coming time.” Letter to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, 5 September [1859?], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (847). 53. Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 54. William J. Allinson to John Greenleaf Whittier, 25 August 1842, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (12). 55. William J. Allinson to John Greenleaf Whittier, 10 August 1842, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (12). Nicholson’s letter is on the verso of Allinson’s. 56. Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, November [1842?], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (847). 57. Elizabeth Neall to John Greenleaf Whittier, 6 March 1839, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (213). 58. Ann E. Wendell to John Greenleaf Whittier, 25 October 1840, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (332). 59. Elizabeth Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, November [1842?], PickardWhittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (847). 60. Thomas S. Cavender to John Greenleaf Whittier, 9 September 1842, PickardWhittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1844 (70). 61. “Sins of my luckless boyhood” (untitled poem), “Fragments of the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier,” manuscript book: Philadelphia, 1839 [233–35], Haverford College Library Special Collections, MS Coll 975A. 62. Nicholson violated the letter of this law, if not its spirit, since she (or another collaborator) copied parts of this poem in one other location in the volumes. 63. Elizabeth Nicholson to John Greenleaf Whittier, [1840?], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (218). 64. Ann E. Wendell to John Greenleaf Whittier, 25 October 1840, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (332). 65. The classic text on mimicry is Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 121–31. 66. Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 67. Lara Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 101–32. 68. I thank Max Cavitch, who pointed out this possible word play to me. 69. J. K., Jr., “Who Are Our National Poets?” The Knickerbocker Magazine (October 1845): 340–41. 70. Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869), 263; Elizabeth Nicholson to Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, 9 April [1850?], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (847).

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71. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly [1852] (New York: Norton, 1994), 3–4; Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy & Transatlantic Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 72. George W. Clark, The Liberty Minstrel (New York: Leavitt and Alden, 1845), iii, iv. 73. This process worked in reverse, too, as when “Come Join the Abolitionists” uses the tune of the spiritual “When I Can Read My Title Clear”; The Liberty Minstrel, 96. 74. William Wells Brown, The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1849), 44. Th is poem appears in the second edition of the collection. 75. “Song—For a’ that and a’ that,” The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols., ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 2: 762. 76. Brown, The Anti-Slavery Harp, 9. 77. Ibid., 36–37. 78. Ibid., 36.

Chapter 3 1. Mary E. Carter to John Greenleaf and Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, 28 February 1864, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (66). 2. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 470. Since Wilson, the major literary and intellectual histories of the war years, such as those by George Frederickson (The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union [New York: Harper & Row, 1965]) and Daniel Aaron (The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War [New York: Knopf, 1973]), have focused on prose writings. 3. Some recent books and anthologies of popu lar wartime literature have worked against this model. For example, “Words for the Hour”: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (ed. Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005]) includes a wide range of popu lar and ephemeral songs and poems, as well as recently discovered manuscript poems, in order to document the scale of poetic responses to the war. As Faith Barrett writes in To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), “In the Civil War era, Americans on both sides of the conflict believed that poetry had a vital role to play in developing and disseminating the ideologies of national identity”; her recent book is one of the first volumes to address systematically the “remarkable outpouring of poetry by men and women from all walks of life” during the war, although she pays slight attention to Confederate poets and poems (2). Coleman Hutchison’s work is one of the few serious studies of Confederate poetry; see Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 143–72. For a consideration of popu lar song sheets in the Union, see the discussion by Harry Stout in Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), 110–16. 4. For representative studies of these authors in wartime, see Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Cody Marrs, “A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville’s Poetic Turn,” American Literature 82.1 (2010): 91–119.

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5. One intriguing example of the extra-literary poetic history of the Confederacy comes from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! [1936] (New York: Vintage, 1990). Rosa Coldfield, the novel’s reliquary of the war years, was known in her youth as “the town’s and the county’s poetess laureate” because she issued “to the stern and meager subscription list of the county newspaper poems, ode eulogy and epitaph, out of some bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat,” her work constituting a “folio in which the lost cause’s unregenerate vanquished were name by name embalmed” (6). Although, sadly, Faulkner gives no examples of her work, and whatever the degree of irony intended in his description, Coldfield’s militant historicism displays the public orientation of verse that I take as characteristic of wartime poetics. 6. See William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 [1959] (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli [1968] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). These histories are limited to the extent that they only consider books, rather than more ephemeral and less literary forms of print publication. 7. For Lincoln’s enjoyment of “Dixie,” see Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four in the White House [1868] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 172. On the implications of the song and its complex history, see Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks, Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), and Coleman Hutchison, “Whistling ‘Dixie’ for the Union (Nation, Anthem, Revision),” American Literary History 19.3 (2007): 603–28. 8. While I am convinced by Brad Evans’s argument about the belatedness of the concept of culture in postbellum thought and about the repercussions of that belatedness on the study of nineteenth-century literature, I think his focus on dialect and local color writing in prose is mistaken and that his account can be more powerfully supported by turning to war songs, slave songs, and popular ballads. See Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The only poet he considers is, ironically enough, William Dean Howells. 9. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (London: Oxford University Press, 1976). 10. Representative publications in this debate include [Edward L. Pierce], “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” Atlantic Monthly (November 1861): 626–40; “Our Port Royal Correspondence,” New York Times, 20 November 1861, 1–2; “The War For the Union,” New-York Tribune, 21 December 1861, 6–7; W. P. Strickland, “Letter from Port Royal,” Christian Advocate and Journal, 6 February 1862, 41; and “Our Washington Letter,” Chicago Tribune, 7 February 1862, 1. 11. Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861– 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 152. 12. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 164–229. 13. For this reason, it is important to remember that the Treasury Department was in charge of managing the former slaves on the Sea Islands and not the Gideonites, who had no authority to shape official policy or determine conditions there.

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14. Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Johns devotes a chapter to sheet music piracy in late nineteenth-century Britain; see 327–56. 15. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 293–306; Robert Darnton, Th e Forbidden Best Sellers of PreRevolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1996); Robert Darnton, Th e Devil in the Holy Water, or, the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 16. On antebellum American literature, see Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), and Johns, Piracy, 179–246. 17. For a lively account of piracy’s spectacular publicity in the twentieth century, see Adrian Johns, The Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (New York: Norton, 2011). 18. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 19. Frederick Douglass famously complained about the ostentatious publicity of the Underground Railroad, and he distanced himself from runaways like Henry “Box” Brown and William and Ellen Craft, who generated a lucrative business performing their escapes (and securing their freedom) in front of transatlantic audiences: My Bondage and My Freedom [1855], in Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 339–40. The spectacle of escape is a set piece in any number of abolitionist novels, plays, and narratives, which, as in the most famous example of Eliza Harris running across the frozen Ohio River, tend to combine the subterfuge of smuggling with the outrageous performativity of piracy. See Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 20. It may be important to note here that the vast majority of runaway slaves did not attempt to reach free soil but stayed in their local vicinity and returned home after some length of time (in the words of a spiritual, they would “steal away”). Such periodic disappearances may have been a standard form of resistance in the repertoire of relations between slaves and masters. See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 648–57. Scholars debate the total number of people who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad before 1861, with numbers ranging from six thousand to one hundred thousand; even at the higher end, though, this would have been a small percentage of the more than four million people enslaved at mid-century. Similarly, the number of people rendered back into slavery through the machinations of the Fugitive Slave Law was quite small, perhaps a few hundred between 1850 and 1861. However, the excessiveness with which the public drama of escape and rendition transcended the numbers of people involved supports my point, I think, about the potency of the figure of the runaway. For a concise summary, see Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), 648–49. 21. “At Port Royal. 1861,” Atlantic Monthly (February 1862): 244–46. The report of Edward L. Pierce, who had been dispatched by the Trea sury Department to gather information on the refugee slaves at Fortress Monroe and the Sea Islands, was also published at the beginning of February 1862. 22. Although Whittier never visited the Sea Islands or personally encountered refugee slaves, the poem may have been based on a real incident: “At Port Royal” resembles an anecdote

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reported by a correspondent for the New York Express, which was reprinted in one of Whittier’s local papers, which also later reprinted the poem. See “A Trip Inland from Port Royal,” Farmers’ Cabinet, 12 December 1861, 1. 23. The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 337. All quotations of “At Port Royal” refer to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 24. “Latest Music,” Dwight’s Journal of Music, 22 February 1862, 376. The two songs were “Ole Massa on his trabbels gone,” by S. K. Whiting, and “Song of the Negro Boatmen,” by L. O. Emerson. Dwight’s Journal also advertised arrangements by E. Wiebi (“The Negro Boatman’s Song,” 8 March 1862, 392) and W. H. Doane (“Negro Boatman’s Song,” 21 June 1862, 96). 25. Sheet music arrangements of the song that I have found include E. W. Kellogg, “Song of the Negro Boatman at Port Royal” (Boston: Russell & Tolman, 1862); Ferdinand Mayer, “The ‘Contraband’ of Port Royal” (Boston: Russell & Tolman, 1862); and H. T. Merrill, “Song of the Negro Boatmen at Port Royal, 1861” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1862). 26. For a comparable narrative, although one with very different implications for the gendered work of authorship, see Jennifer Putzi’s account of the multiply mediated reprintings and misappropriations of Elizabeth Akers Allen’s poem “Rock Me to Sleep”: “ ‘Some Queer Freak of Taste’: Gender, Authorship, and the ‘Rock Me to Sleep’ Controversy,” American Literature 84.4 (2012): 769–95. 27. Anthony Trollope to James T. Fields, 20 January 1862, in The Letters of Anthony Trollope: Volume One, 1835–1870, ed. N. John Hall (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 173. 28. Songs for the Times (n.p., n.d.). Th is eight-page pamphlet included three other songs: “A New Plantation Song,” by “Vanity Fair”; “Song of the Sneak,” by “The Man That Went Parole”; and “Soldier’s Oath,” by C. T. Brooks. 29. T. Thomas Fortune, “Mr. Fortune on Lincoln. Address Spoken at Montclair for Literary Union,” New York Age, 22 February 1906, 2. Fortune quoted the entire stanza. 30. See the reference in “By the Rivers of Babylon,” Methodist Review (May 1909): 459: “In such strong confidence the Negro boatmen, when Whittier heard them at Port Royal, were singing to the rhythmic beating of their oars: ‘We knowed de promise nebber fail, / And nebber lie de Word; / So, like de’postles in de jail, / We waited for de Lord.’ ” 31. For the proceedings of the New York meeting, see “Aid for the Contrabands,” NewYork Tribune, 21 February 1862, 8; for the Philadelphia meeting, see “The Port Royal Contrabands,” Friends’ Intelligencer, 29 March 1862, 41. 32. “The Contrabands’ Freedom Hymn,” New-York Tribune, 13 December 1861, 7. 33. Advertisement for “The Song of the Contrabands,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 14 December 1861, 3. 34. “Let My People Go. A Song of the ‘Contrabands,’ ” New-York Tribune, 13 December 1861, 7. 35. N. S. W., “Let the Bondmen Go!” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 18 January 1862, 4. 36. George S. Burleigh, “Let My People Go. The Song of the Slaves’ Hope,” Independent, 3 April 1862, 6. 37. Amelia, “Let My People Go,” Liberator, 23 January 1863, 16. 38. The song was arranged by Thomas Baker and sold by Horace Waters in New York. It was fi rst advertised in Circular, “Song of the Contrabands,” 12 December 1861, 179. The

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arrangement evidently is no longer extant, although Dena J. Epstein has called it “deplorable”; see Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 258. For accounts of the song’s per formance, see “Contrabands— Cooper Institute,” New York Times, 14 January 1862, 5, and “Novel and Interesting Meeting,” Independent, 16 January 1862, 1. 39. “Rejoicings over the Proclamation,” Independent, 8 January 1863, 1. 40. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 258. 41. James H. Palmer to John Greenleaf Whittier, 13 August 1862, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (226). Palmer’s letter also includes an early transcription of “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” 42. Lucy McKim, “Songs of the Port Royal Contrabands,” Dwight’s Journal of Music, 8 November 1862, 255. 43. Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands [1892] (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 73. Botume quoted the entire song in her text. 44. Diary entry for 28 October 1862, in The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 389–90. Thomas Wentworth Higginson misquoted “At Port Royal” in his diary description of a boat ride on the Beaufort River: see the entry for 24 November 1862, in The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ed. Christopher Looby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 44. 45. C. F. [Charlotte Forten], “Letter from St. Helena’s Island, Beaufort, S.C.,” Liberator, 12 December 1862, 199. 46. Playbill, “American Missionary Association. Vocal Concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers,” Mechanics Hall, Worcester (MA), 26 March 1872. See also Chapter 6. 47. Higginson transcribed and annotated a collection of spirituals from the black regiment in which he served as lieutenant; these were printed in “Negro Spirituals,” Atlantic Monthly (June 1867): 685–94. Allen, McKim, and Charles Pickard Ware, who all worked in the wartime reconstruction effort on the Sea Islands, published the first anthology of spirituals, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson, 1867). For critical accounts of these anthologies, see Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 303–42; Cruz, Culture on the Margins, 143–63; and Radano, Lying Up a Nation, 164–229. 48. “The Song of the Contraband,” Vanity Fair, 10 May 1862, 229. 49. Emerson, “The Happy Contraband,” Southern Songs of the War (New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1864). 50. J. C. Hagen, “Song of the Contraband,” Liberator, 13 June 1862, 96. 51. “A Contraband Song. Old Shady” (published by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments, n.d.). 52. Ibid. 53. Tom Craig, “A Song, Dedicated to the Colored Volunteer” (Philadelphia: J. Mc. C. Crummill, n.d.). 54. “The Colored Volunteers” (New York: Charles Magnus, n.d.). 55. “Parody on ‘Song of the Contrabands’ ” was advertised under “New Music,” Independent, 9 January 1862, 7; J. W. Dadmun, “The Song of the Negro Boatman,” Ethiopian and Comic Songs (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1890). 56. “New Publications: The Harp of Freedom,” New York Times, 22 March 1862, 9. 57. “ ‘Kingdom Coming,’ the new negro melody, brought out much applause” on its first performance. “The City: Christy’s Opera House,” Chicago Tribune, 24 April 1862, 4.

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58. [H. C. Work], “Kingdom Coming” (New York: Charles Magnus, n.d.). 59. Ibid. 60. In 1841, Alanson Work was sentenced to twelve years in prison in Missouri for aiding fugitive slaves across the Mississippi River into Illinois. He served more than three years before being pardoned. See “Death of an Abolitionist,” New Haven Evening Register, 7 July 1879, 4. 61. A. Anderson, “The Patriotic Contraband!” (n.p., n.d.). 62. T. F., “Great War Meeting at Lane, Ogle County,” Chicago Tribune, 16 February 1863, 2. 63. B. A., “The Draft Is Coming” (New York: J. Wrigley, n.d.). 64. Ibid. 65. “The Conscript’s Lay” (Philadelphia: L. Johnson, n.d.). 66. “The Conscript’s Lay” clearly responds in part to the song “We Are Coming, Father Abraham,” which was itself a response to Lincoln’s call in 1862 for 300,000 more volunteers. Approximately 8 percent of the soldiers who fought in the war were either draftees or substitutes. 67. “From New-Orleans,” New York Times, 3 July 1864, 3. 68. Here I want to distinguish “nationality” from “nationalism,” because I think that nationality requires an ethical commitment to the project of belonging (which this chapter sees as crucial to the public life of the contraband song) in ways that nationalism does not. Another way to put this is that nationality depends on a social orientation while nationalism depends on the individual’s submission to the apparatus of the state, in the guise of the imagined community. 69. E. P. B., “Affairs in the South: Virginia,” New York Times, 9 April 1866, 1. 70. And, as other broadsides illustrated in this chapter make clear, this frame was standardized and appeared on many different songs. Thus, there is no reason to assume an intentional relation between the song’s text and frame, but the unintentional echoes that therefore arise help, I think, to support my claim about the factitiousness of the contraband song, the way its contrived, self-evidently fraudulent identity helped make possible a set of grounds for imagining identity under the war’s crisis conditions. 71. “Songs for the Audience at W. A. Gordon’s Musical Evenings” (Philadelphia: L. Johnson, n.d.). 72. George G. B. DeWolfe, “Union Republican Campaign Song” (Nashua: n.p., 1868). 73. Brander Matthews, “Songs of the War,” Century (August 1887): 619. 74. “War Melodies and Their Origin,” Inter Ocean, 7 August 1887, 4.

Chapter 4 1. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London: Dodsley, 1765), xiii, ix. Hereafter abbreviated R and cited parenthetically. 2. On ballad antiquarianism, see Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 85–120. 3. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 4. Some of the most influential media histories of this type are Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962);

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Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: Th e Technologization of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). Eric Havelock argued that Plato’s philosophy could be understood in part as a response to the replacement of oral pedagogy by alphabetic writing; see Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). 5. Paula McDowell, “Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year,” PMLA 121.1 (2006): 87–106. Adam Fox has also demonstrated that oral forms of communication far outstripped writing and print during the early modern period. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 299–405. 6. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 104. For a strong, although not always careful, critique of ballad antiquarianism, see Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong” 1700 to the Present Day (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985). 7. There is a vast critical literature on popu lar ballads. Sources I have used include Albert Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Leslie Shepard, The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962); David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Tristram Potter Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977); William McCarthy, The Ballad Matrix: Personality, Milieu, and the Oral Tradition (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990); Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 339–56; and Paula McDowell, “ ‘The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making’: Broadside Ballads in Long-Eighteenth Century Ballad Discourse,” The Eighteenth Century 7.2–3 (2006): 151–78. 8. On this point, see Stewart, Crimes of Writing, esp. 31–65 and 102–31. Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw (1677–1727) was the author of “Hardyknute” (1719), a ballad supposedly based on a manuscript discovered at her home in Fife, and included in the first edition of the Reliques (the second edition [1767] identifies Wardlaw as the author). Taken as an old ballad, the poem was hugely influential for Walter Scott, who memorized it as a boy. In the nineteenth century, Robert Chambers accused Wardlaw of forging several other cherished ballads, including “Sir Patrick Spens.” Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) forged a series of poems by Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk, which he fabricated as fragments of an old manuscript; although their authenticity was always disputed, philologists continued to study their language as late as the 1870s. James Macpherson (1736–96) translated a cycle of Gaelic poems by the third-century bard Ossian in the 1760s. These were attacked as spurious by Samuel Johnson, although Hugh Blair and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, held them to be genuine. While scholars today believe Macpherson wrote much of the material himself, it is also likely that the songs were based in part on oral traditions. 9. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 10. For Child’s biography, see George Lyman Kittredge, “Professor Child,” Atlantic Monthly (November 1896): 737–42, and Mary Ellen Brown, Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), esp. 7–68. Critical accounts of Child’s career include Walter Morris Hart, “Professor Child and the Ballad,” PMLA 21.4

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(1906): 755–807; Sigrid Rieuwerts, “ ‘The Genuine Ballads of the People’: F. J. Child and the Ballad Cause,” Journal of Folklore Research 31.1–3 (1994): 1–34; and Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts, eds., Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997). 11. F. J. Child, ed., English and Scottish Ballads, 8 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1860), 1: vii. Hereafter abbreviated ESB and cited parenthetically. 12. Brown, Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece, 84. 13. Frederick J. Furnivall and John W. Hales, eds., Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, 3 vols. (London: N. Trübner, 1867–68), 1: ix, x. Hereafter abbreviated PFM and cited parenthetically. 14. The “Sidney” in question is ambiguous: it could refer to the poet and courtier Philip Sidney (1554–86), who celebrated the power of ballads and also died fighting against the Spanish in the Netherlands, a conflict seen by nineteenth-century historians as an early instance of the struggle for republican liberty. However, it could also refer to Algernon Sidney (1623–83), a republican political theorist, hero of the English Civil War, and opponent of Charles II, whose Discourses Concerning Government greatly influenced American debates about liberty at the end of the eighteenth century. 15. F. J. Child, “Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript” [1867], rpt. in Journal of Folklore Research 31.1–3 (1994): 28. 16. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 5. 17. For a detailed accounting of Percy’s sources, see Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), particularly 145–92. 18. Child, “Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript,” 29. 19. Child to Lowell, 23 June 1867, The Scholar-Friends: Letters of Francis James Child and James Russell Lowell, ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe and G. W. Cottrell Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 18. Hereafter abbreviated SF and cited parenthetically. 20. Grundtvig to Child, 17 February 1872, rpt. in Sigurd Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men: Raids and Rescues in Britain, America, and the Scandinavian North Since 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), 243. 21. F. J. Child, “Ballad Books” [1868], rpt. in Journal of Folklore Research 31.1–3 (1994): 32. 22. Ibid., 32–33. 23. Brown gives an exhaustive account of the assembling of the collection (Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece, 78–155). 24. Accusations of Child’s bad faith depend on the assumption that a more authentic (because more oral) balladry lies outside of, and is ignored by, his book, which uses print to fi x an improvisational and performative tradition in permanent form. My point is that authenticity is not a formal quality but instead represents the experiences of reception and mediation. See Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 25. Hustvedt, whose 1930 Ballad Books and Ballad Men remains the best study of Child’s work, wrote that the “popular ballad may be taken to mean the sort of verse so named by Child” (4). Thelma James indirectly defines Child’s principles by tracking the changes he made to the contents of his 1857, 1860, and 1882–98 anthologies; she includes a useful table of these changes as well. “The English and Scottish Popu lar Ballads of Francis J. Child,” Journal of American Folklore 46.179 (1933): 51–68. 26. F. J. Child, “Ballad Poetry” [1874], rpt. in Journal of Folklore Research 31.1–3 (1994): 214. 27. Ibid.

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28. F. J. Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads [1882–1898] (New York: Dover Publications, 1965), 1: 55–56. 29. See also Brad Evans’s argument about the role of diffusion in the anthropological understanding of culture that was developing at the same time: Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 14–16. 30. F. J. Child, “Old Ballads—Prof. Child’s Appeal,” Notes and Queries, 4 January 1873, 12. 31. For more on Child’s collection networks, see E. B. Lyle, “Child’s Scottish Harvest,” Harvard Library Bulletin 25.2 (1977): 125–55, and Brown, Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece, 159– 212. Brown identifies Child’s “most durable gift” as “the books and manuscripts he gathered in making the ESPB” (77). 32. Samuel Eliot Morison refers to Eliot’s presidency as Harvard’s “Olympian Age”; among other reforms, Eliot championed the study of English literature and established the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, both of which materially advanced Child’s career and anthology. Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 323–99. 33. Between 1869 and 1909, Harvard’s endowment increased from $2,387,232 to $22,716,759, its faculty expanded from 45 to 194, and its student body grew from 1,050 to 3,882. See Samuel Eliot Morison, The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), lxxxix–xc. 34. It is ironic, in this light, that Lowell’s Rectorship at St. Andrews was disputed and later overruled because he was not Scottish, even though citizenship was not an explicit requirement for the post. 35. Qtd. in Lyle, “Child’s Scottish Harvest,” 143. 36. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols., ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 2: 877–78. 37. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 226–27, 217. 38. James C. Dick, ed., Notes on Scottish Song by Robert Burns [1908] (Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1962), xlviii. “The Highland Widow’s Lament” was published in 1796. 39. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3: 1515; Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 2: 430. 40. James Johnson, The Scots Musical Museum, 2 vols. [1787] (Portland, ME: Amadeus Press, 1991), 1: 89. 41. Scott’s novels also play upon the imagined capacity for old songs and tunes to secure property and identity; for example, the disinherited Harry Bertram recovers the lairdship of Ellangowan through the agency of a remembered ballad. See Guy Mannering, or the Astrologer [1815] (New York: Penguin, 2003). 42. Lyle, “Child’s Scottish Harvest,” 142–43. 43. “English Popu lar Ballads,” The Nation, 29 March 1883, 278. 44. Norton to Ruskin, 3 April 1883, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols., ed. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 2: 147–48. 45. “English and Scottish Popu lar Ballads,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1883): 406. 46. Thomas Davidson, “Prof. Child’s Ballad Book,” American Journal of Philology, 1 October 1884, 478. 47. F. B. Gummere, Democracy and Poetry (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1911), 17. Anderson, as is well known, bases his theory of nationalism on the print circulation of different forms

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and genres, especially newspapers and novels; see Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). To my knowledge, he has never cited Gummere as a precursor. 48. Walt Whitman, “Preface, 1876,” Prose Works 1892, 2 vols., ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 2: 464, 468. 49. Whitman, “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” Prose Works 1892, 2: 502. 50. Ibid., 507–8. 51. Ibid., 498. 52. Ibid., 507. 53. Bayard Taylor, “The Ballad of Abraham Lincoln,” rpt. in Abraham Lincoln Quarterly (March  1940): 52–53. The ballad appeared in Brave Ballads for American Children (Boston: Fields, Osgood and Company, 1870). My thanks to Richard Wightman Fox for showing me this poem. 54. Ibid., 55. 55. Edward Whitley, American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), x. 56. “Walt Whitman on the Rostrum,” New York Sun, 15 April 1879, 1. 57. David Haven Blake reads the lecture’s stagecraft in relation to Whitman’s history of public relations management; Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 188–94. 58. Whitman was only sixty when he first read the lecture, although he had been in poor health for a number of years. 59. “Notes,” The Critic, 9 April 1887, 184. 60. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature [1923] (New York: Viking, 1968). For a different reading of Whitman’s postbellum reorientation toward the past, see Cody Marrs, “Whitman’s Latencies: Hegel and the Politics of Time in Leaves of Grass,” Arizona Quarterly 67.1 (2011): 47–72. 61. Whitman, “Preface, 1876,” 469, 471. 62. [E. C. Stedman], “Walt Whitman” Scribner’s Monthly (November 1880): 47. 63. Ibid., 60–61. 64. Ibid., 58. 65. Ibid., 63. 66. Whitley, American Bards, 8. 67. Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!” The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Michael Warner (New York: Penguin, 2004), 267. 68. Untitled review, The Dial (January 1882): 219. 69. Osgood, one of the most important publishers of the era, was forced to stop publication of Leaves of Grass when the attorney general of Massachusetts threatened the firm with prosecution under the Comstock Act. 70. Later critics have sought to mute this engagement by citing Whitman’s ambivalence about the poem and its popularity, a gesture that aligns Whitman with contemporary critical tastes in opposition to the nineteenth century. See, for example, Jay Grossman, Reconstituting American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 152, and Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetics of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 284–85.

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71. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 618; emphasis added.

Chapter 5 1. Josiah Gilbert Holland, “Ten Times Seven,” Literary World, 1 December 1877, 120. 2. Paul Hamilton Hayne, “To the Poet in Whittier,” Literary World, 1 December 1877, 120. 3. William Lloyd Garrison, “The Poet of Our Love,” Literary World, 1 December 1877, 121. 4. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The Songs of Seventy Years,” Literary World, 1 December 1877, 128; Bayard Taylor, “A Friend’s Greeting,” Literary World, 1 December 1877, 120; George Parsons Lathrop, “Song,” Literary World, 1 December 1877, 120. In addition to the poems cited, the Literary World also published pieces by Charlotte F. Bates, Lydia Maria Child, James Freeman Clarke, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hiram Rich, William S. Shurtleff, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Celia Thaxter. 5. N. P, “Boston—The Powwow Against Mark Twain’s Dinner-Speech—The General Conclusion,” Chicago Tribune, 30 December 1877, 16. 6. “The Whittier Dinner,” New York Evening Post, 18 December 1877, 1. 7. Channing, “The Whittier Dinner,” The Independent, 27 December 1877, 2. Henry Nash Smith has pointed out that criticism of Mark Twain actually began outside of Boston, in central Massachusetts (the Worcester Gazette and Springfield Republican), and in the Midwest (the Cincinnati Commercial and Chicago Tribune). With the exception of the Tribune, which had a correspondent at the dinner, the other papers responded to published accounts and transcriptions of the evening. Only after these papers had come out against Twain’s speech did the Boston newspapers weigh in— several weeks later. Smith concludes that Clemens and Howells felt the affair to be far more disastrous than it really was. See “ ‘That Hideous Mistake of Poor Clemens’s,’ ” Harvard Library Bulletin 9 (1955): 145–80. 8. Clemens to Howells, 23 December 1877; Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells 1872–1910, ed. Henry Nash Smith, William M. Gibson, and Frederick Anderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 1: 212; Howells, My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (New York: Harper, 1910), 59. 9. Howells, My Mark Twain, 63, 62. 10. Twain defended himself thirty years later in “The Story of a Speech” (1906), which included the original speech with his account of the controversy. The version Twain republished differs slightly from newspaper transcriptions printed in the days after the event. Great Short Works of Mark Twain (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 129. All quotations from the speech refer to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 11. Smith writes that Twain’s performance could “shock” because it verbalized the idea that “the ‘littery swells’ at the head table . . . [could] be perceived by their admirers, and even by themselves, as imposters—when they are viewed within a horizon wider than that of Boston, Cambridge, Concord, and Amesbury.” “ ‘That Hideous Mistake,’ ” 169. 12. N. P., “Boston,” Chicago Tribune, 23 December 1877, 16. 13. The poems quoted in Twain’s speech were Holmes, “The Chambered Nautilus,” “Mare Rubrum 1858,” and “A Voice of the Loyal North 1861 (January Third)”; Emerson, “Mithridates,” “Concord Hymn,” “Brahma,” “Song of Nature,” and “Monadnoc”; and Longfellow, “Hiawatha,” “Evangeline,” “The Village Blacksmith,” and “A Psalm of Life.” 14. Smith, “ ‘That Hideous Mistake,’ ” 168.

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15. R. H. Stoddard, “Whittier,” Chicago Tribune, 22 December 1877, 12. 16. Whittier, “Ichabod,” Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1894), 186. All quotations from Whittier’s poems, unless otherwise noted, will refer to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Interestingly, this posthumous collection puts “Ichabod” under “Personal Poems” rather than “Anti-Slavery Poems.” 17. See, for example, the report in the Springfield Republican, 19 December 1877, 4. 18. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 488. 19. Whittier to William Lloyd Garrison, 13 May 1850; The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, ed. John B. Pickard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 2: 155. For an overview of the response to Webster’s speech, particularly among clergymen and writers, see Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: Norton, 1997), 675–79. Remini describes “Ichabod” as “the most stinging and enduring condemnation” of Webster (677). 20. On the controversy over Whittier’s poem, the Liberator wrote, “All the puppies of the press are snarling at the poet Whittier, because he speaks out the feelings of a true man in relation to the course of Webster. . . . The poet will lose none of his well earned famed because of these spiteful exhibitions” (4 October 1850, 159). James Freeman Clarke noted the poem’s appearance in Congress, but I have been unable to locate a reference to this reading in the Congressional Globe for the 31st Congress. See Anti-Slavery Days [1883] (New York: AMS Press, 1972), 139. 21. Old Colony, “Ichabod! Reply to Whittier,” Liberator, 7 June 1850, 92. 22. “The Apostate,” an anti-elegy printed after Webster’s death, also seems to refer to “Ichabod”: “He worshipped the Tempter, and fell in that hour.” Liberator, 12 November 1852, 184. A headnote stated that “the application none of our readers can fail to make correctly.” 23. Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 24. To give another example, Thomas Wentworth Higginson recited “Ichabod” during a sermon delivered just after Webster’s death in 1852. As he put it, in rhetoric adopted from Whittier’s poem, “Not anger, not sarcasm, not petty criticism, is meet for an occasion like this. . . . The true tragedy of Daniel Webster was at its crisis long months ago. Whittier struck the key-note of the voice of Massachusetts and of posterity, long since, in that wonderful poem, which may yet be remembered longer than its subject.” “Elegy Without Fiction,” Liberator, 10 December 1852, 200. 25. William C. Wilkinson, “An Hour on Parnassus,” Independent, 21 September 1876, 6. 26. For the number of well-wishers, see Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 3: 367. 27. “A Notable Anniversary,” Chicago Tribune, 5 December 1877, 4. 28. R. H. Stoddard, “John Greenleaf Whittier,” Scribner’s Monthly (August 1879): 569, 575, 578. 29. Ibid., 581. 30. Ibid., 581–82. 31. E. C. Stedman, Poets of America (Boston: Houghton, 1885), 385, 112. 32. Ibid., 98–99. 33. Edna Dean Proctor to John Greenleaf Whittier, 29 September [1885], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (243). 34. Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 208. 35. Stoddard, “John Greenleaf Whittier,” 581; Stedman, Poets of America, 122.

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36. Elizabeth Lloyd Howell to John Greenleaf Whittier, 13 September 1860, PickardWhittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (162). 37. Edna Dean Proctor to John Greenleaf Whittier, 19 April [1884?], Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (243). 38. Julius Rockwell to John Greenleaf Whittier, 1 February 1855, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (257). 39. For a related argument about the dialectic between generic variety and homogeneity in mid-century poetry, see Mary Loeffelholz’s discussion of the “nested anthology form,” which, she argues, offered poets a “sophisticated way of thinking through the conditions of print culture in poetic form. . . . Nested-anthology poems literalize the matrix of print culture from which they emerge.” “Anthology Form and the Field of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry: The Civil War Sequences of Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1–4 (2008): 220. 40. I am not saying that Whittier was the only poet with whom readers felt bonds of intimacy. My argument is that Whittier was the only poet for whom the model of popular identification and expression—the ballad reading— structured relations with actual readers. The social value accorded to the other Fireside Poets, the poets with whom Whittier was most often grouped after the Civil War—Bryant, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Emerson— derived largely from their close associations with Harvard University and other institutions of cultural authority. Whether or not such authority was readable in the content of these authors’ poems, it was built into the construction of their public images (Longfellow’s professorial persona; Lowell’s connections to the North American Review; Holmes’s role as Harvard class poet) and accordingly affected the kinds of relationships that readers formed with them. While Holmes and Longfellow have archives of fan letters similar to the one I describe below, my sense from scanning them is that they are much more oriented toward the business of authorship and celebrity (half of the 4,000 letters in the Longfellow collection are autograph requests) and that readers’ relations to these authors are based more on prestige than intimacy. 41. Susan O. Curtis to John Greenleaf Whittier, 27 July 1883, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (103). 42. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 43. Stanley Fish’s work is exemplary in this regard. While he presents a thoroughly compelling interpretation of Paradise Lost through his elaboration of the “figure of the reader,” the interpretation explains little about how any particu lar reader read the poem at any particu lar time. In fact, Fish’s interpretation of the poem would hold up even if no reader had ever actually read Paradise Lost the way he describes. See Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin’s, 1967). Note the preposition in the title’s second clause: the reader in Paradise Lost, not the reader of Paradise Lost. 44. Susan O. Curtis to John Greenleaf Whittier, 27 July 1883; Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (103). 45. Dorothea Lynde Dix to John Greenleaf Whittier, 5 May 1884, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (108). 46. George Santayana and his circle at Harvard were especially withering and influential on twentieth-century opinion about the nineteenth century. See Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Culture” (1911), in The Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion

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(New York: Scribner’s, 1913), and Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915). 47. Whitman’s nineteenth-century readership offers a complex and compelling contrast with Whittier’s. As Cavitch, Robertson, and Coviello show, “Whitmaniac” readers felt a very strong sense of intimacy with Whitman, and in many cases this intimacy was infused with a belief in the spiritual or even scriptural value of Leaves of Grass. Whitman and Whittier are alike in generating identifications with readers through practices of reading religiously, although the kinds of religiosity they engendered are quite different. However, the intimacy readers felt toward Whitman was often sexual or erotic, and such erotic-spiritual identifications seem to have been structured by readers’ sense that only an elect few felt these bonds or truly appreciated Whitman’s poetry. Something like the opposite was the case for Whittier. Max Cavitch, “Audience Terminable and Interminable: Anne Gilchrist, Walt Whitman, and the Achievement of Disinhibited Reading,” Victorian Poetry 43.2 (2005): 249–61; Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Peter Coviello, “Whitman’s Children,” PMLA 128.1 (2013): 73–86. For much of the twentieth century, “Whitmaniac reading” was also the target of acute critical hostility. 48. George Spring Merriam to John Greenleaf Whittier, 3 January 1882, PickardWhittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (207). 49. Phila Stanton Wolcott to John Greenleaf Whittier, 1875, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (351). 50. It may or may not matter that the writer’s brother was Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war. 51. Robert Castle Waterston to John Greenleaf Whittier, 18 December 1860, PickardWhittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (329). 52. Hannah Lloyd Neall to John Greenleaf Whittier, 19 November 1856, PickardWhittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (214). 53. Lili Winter to John Greenleaf Whittier, n.d., Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (348). 54. Samuel Rutherford Crockett to John Greenleaf Whittier, 1883, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (100). 55. Elizabeth Sinclair to John Greenleaf Whittier, 17 May 1891, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (278). 56. Henry Mitchell to John Greenleaf Whittier, 17 May 1890, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (208). A notation on the letter in Whittier’s hand states that he answered Mitchell, although Pickard includes no such response in his three-volume collection of Whittier’s letters. 57. In Kincaid’s 1990 novel Lucy, the heroine is forced to memorize “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” although, of course, she has no idea what a daffodil looks like. 58. My thinking about this exchange has been greatly influenced by Catherine Robson’s work on schoolroom memorization and recitation: Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 59. Sinclair to Whittier, 17 May 1891. 60. Phila Stanton Wolcott to John Greenleaf Whittier, 1875 Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (351). 61. Gillian Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

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62. George Thomas Coster to John Greenleaf Whittier, 17 March 1890, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (99). 63. Charles Carroll Bombaugh to John Greenleaf Whittier, 10 May 1880, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (37). 64. Lydia Maria Child to John Greenleaf Whittier, 19 June 1870, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (76). 65. Dora Greenwell to John Greenleaf Whittier, 11 January 1860, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (138). 66. Francis E. Willard to John Greenleaf Whittier, 11 December 1891, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (342). 67. D. H. Tuke to John Greenleaf Whittier, 21 December 1884, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (316). 68. Robert C. Winthrop to John Greenleaf Whittier, 27 February 1889, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (349). 69. Susan O. Curtis to John Greenleaf Whittier, 27 July 1883, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (103). 70. Charles Stuart Weld to John Greenleaf Whittier, n.d., Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (331). 71. Helen Deutsch, Loving Doctor Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 72. On this point, see Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). By “public intimacy,” I mean something different than the “intimate publics” theorized by Lauren Berlant, which she identifies with women’s culture and tracks more generally through twentieth-century adaptations of nineteenth-century sentimentality: The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). “An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people’s particu lar core interests and desires,” Berlant explains, although the personalized details of this relation are largely absent from her account, which adheres to the abstraction of the market to explain its skepticism (5). What’s missing from the intimate public, in other words, is a richer understanding of reading as a multiform, collaborative, and creative social enterprise. The consequences of reading in the nineteenth century matter as something beyond simply an alternative to the political, which is not to suggest those consequences are necessarily progressive or liberating— although why they should be is an open question that much recent critique leaves largely unasked. 73. William Sloan Kennedy, John G. Whittier: The Poet of Freedom (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1892), iii. 74. Stedman, Poets of America, 121. 75. In Poets of America, Stedman argued “it is chiefly that portion of [Whittier’s canon], written from 1860 onward, that has secured him a more than local reputation” (109). SnowBound was issued on 17 February 1866; for that day’s sales, see Round Table, 24 February 1866, 123; for the month’s sales (10,000 copies), see Round Table, 17 March 1866, 166; for the first three months’ sales, see Round Table, 2 June 1866, 343. The book went through three editions in its first month: see the advertisement in American Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular, 15 March 1866, 282. Ellen Ballou notes that Snow-Bound sold nearly 50,000 copies in 1908 and 13,000 in 1921; see The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin’s Formative Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 513.

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76. James T. Fields to John Greenleaf Whittier, 16 August 1867, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (123). On the price of Snow-Bound, see “Literary,” Chicago Tribune, 23 February 1866, 2. The reviewer noted that “the day of cheap things has departed—for although so small, and of a size that before the war would have been sold at fifty cents, it retails at a dollar and a quarter.” On a few occasions, column-length portions of the poem were reprinted in newspapers under separate titles. The Saturday Evening Post, for example, reprinted around one hundred lines of the poem as “My Two Sisters,” 7 April 1866, 4. Of course, reviews of the poem were often little more than assemblages of extracts, but to my knowledge Snow-Bound was never reprinted in its entirety in any newspaper or periodical. 77. This building, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, is still a public museum. It was in the Whittier family from the late seventeenth century until Whittier sold it in 1836. A former mayor of the town purchased it in 1893 and presented it to the Haverhill Whittier Club, which maintains it to this day. Whittier’s birthplace is not to be confused with Whittier’s home, in Amesbury, Massachusetts, which is also a museum, dedicated more specifically to the poet than to early New England life. On the colonial revival movement more broadly, see Conforti, Imagining New England, 203–62. Following Conforti, Angela Sorby places this nostalgia system in the political field of Reconstruction and argues that Snow-Bound ’s colonialist aspirations toward the South are primarily about “learning to be white.” Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Perfor mance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), 35–67. 78. “Snow-Bound,” North American Review (April 1866): 631–32. 79. Elizabeth Lloyd Howell to John Greenleaf Whittier, 1866, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (162). 80. William Sloan Kennedy, John Greenleaf Whittier: His Life, Genius, and Writings (Akron, OH: Saalfield Publishing Co., 1903), 242. 81. Snow-Bound “will probably be read at every fireside in New England, reread, and got by heart, by all classes, from old men to little children, for a century to come.” “Literary Notices,” Monthly Religious Magazine (March 1866): 206. 82. The context of the printed book that authorizes Snow-Bound and that Snow-Bound circulated and authorized was one mode through which poetic genres produced and accrued cultural authority in the postbellum era. Other institutional contexts, such as schools, the theater, and private salons, circulated and authorized different poetic genres to different ends, although by the end of the nineteenth century, Whittier and other New England poets dominated some of these other contexts as well, particularly the schools. See Sorby, Schoolroom Poets. Mary Loeffelholz provides a longer historical survey of the contexts of poetic production, circulation, and consumption, focusing on women’s poetry, in From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 83. Francis H. Underwood, John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography (Boston: Osgood, 1884), 181. 84. John S. Brown to John Greenleaf Whittier, 1 January 1886, MS Box 1, folder B, Whittier Room, Haverhill Public Library. 85. Stedman, Poets of America, 10. 86. “New Books,” New York Times, 6 March 1866, 4. 87. “Whittier’s Birthday,” New York Times, 17 December 1877, 4. 88. W., “Boston,” Round Table, 9 June 1866, 365. 89. “Books of the Month,” Hours at Home (April 1866): 575.

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90. Paul Hamilton Hayne to John Greenleaf Whittier, 21 November 1873, Pickard-Whittier Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1844 (146). 91. Edward Whitley, American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 16. 92. Ibid., 157. 93. Elizabeth, “A Tribute to the Quaker Poet,” Chicago Tribune, 22 December 1877, 10. 94. “Whittier,” New York Evening Post, 17 December 1877, 2.

Chapter 6 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [1903] (New York: Penguin, 1989), 1. All quotations will refer to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3. Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave [1845], in Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 24. 4. Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood. Or, the Hidden Self [1903], in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 449–50. All quotations are from this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 5. Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 6. Zora Neale Hurston, “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard [1934] (New York: Ungar, 1974); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 7. Sundquist’s description of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in To Wake the Nations exemplifies this argument. In his view, the Fisk Singers saved a set of trea sures that were “under assault” from debased appropriations like minstrelsy and also from the uplift movement, which sought to leave behind the cultural vestiges of slavery: “The very roots of a people’s being [were] set in contest with demanding notions of progress and assimilation to white cultural models” (472). For arguments about black music, blackface appropriation, and racial authenticity in the early recording music industry, see Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), and Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather (New York: Little, Brown, 2001). 8. As Gavin Jones writes, “Questions of authenticity have always been central to criticism of Paul Laurence Dunbar,” and this criticism has largely followed the model I lay out here, with most critics casting Dunbar’s dialect poems as either authentic expressions of a popu lar voice, working in coded messages against racist regimes, or as shameful capitulations to the racist tastes of 1900, in which exemplary nondialect poems like “We Wear the Mask” or “The Poet” serve as a mea culpa. Jones helpfully narrates the history of Dunbar’s critical reception, which waned from the 1920s into a near-total eclipse before he was partially recovered beginning in the 1980s. Th is critical history does not mirror Dunbar’s popu lar readership, which remained strong through most of the twentieth century. See Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 182–207, quote at 182. However, Jones’s appreciative reappraisal depends on close readings of Dunbar’s poems to generate subversive subtexts out of them, and this process seems to work against the

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history of those poems’ reception by actual readers. For an account of Dunbar’s work in its nineteenth-century context, see Michael Cohen, “Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Genres of Dialect,” African American Review 41.2 (2007): 247–58. 9. Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1860– 1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4–5. 10. Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black- on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 28. 11. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 12. Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 113. 13. Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 14. Cruz, Culture on the Margins, 3. 15. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Negro Spirituals,” Army Life in a Black Regiment [1870] (New York: Penguin, 1997), 149. The essay first appeared in the June 1867 Atlantic Monthly. 16. “Negro Minstrelsy— Ancient and Modern,” Putnam’s Monthly (January 1855): 72. The essay’s title plays upon William Motherwell’s 1827 anthology Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern; the joke about a future “Ethiopian Oldbuck” refers to Jonathan Oldbuck, the title character of Walter Scott’s 1816 novel The Antiquary. Jokes like these, as well as the overall tenor of the essay, lead me to read it as a satire on antiquarianism and American music. However, there is debate about the essay’s irony, or lack thereof: Maureen N. McLane, for instance, reads it straight and, in my view, significantly misreads it, overlooking in particu lar the essay’s context in an American periodical with national-market ambitions in the 1850s. See Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 117–18. Cristanne Miller takes a more neutral stance, describing the essay as “perhaps in mockery”; see Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 87. 17. “Negro Minstrelsy,” 72. 18. There are almost no advertisements for “Let My People Go” after mid-1862, and references to sheet music versions of it stop after mid-1863. Allen, Garrison, and Ware left it out of Slave Songs of the United States, although the tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers repopu larized it in the 1870s and 1880s. See Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 340–41. 19. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 192–219; Cruz, Culture on the Margins, 131–50; Radano, Lying Up a Nation, 181–86. 20. William Francis Allen, “Introduction,” Slave Songs of the United States, ed. Allen, Lucy McKim Garrison, and Charles Pickard Ware (New York: A. Simpson, 1867), x. 21. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 219; Radano, Lying Up a Nation, 181. An example of “negro minstrelsy” used as a term for slave songs is this 1857 description reprinted from the Christian Advocate: “Methodism . . . produced the first native melodies of our country. They preceded and gave birth to some of those beautiful airs which have become national among us, and are pronounced, as yet, our only national music, the Negro Minstrelsy.” Even at the cusp of the Civil War, it was not a contradiction to present religious slave songs as minstrelsy. “Old Fashioned Methodist Music,” Littell’s Living Age, 18 April 1857, 189–90.

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22. James Miller McKim, “The Freedmen of South Carolina,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 26 July 1862, 4; H. G. Spaulding, “Under the Palmetto,” Continental Monthly (August 1863), 200. The popularity of Whittier’s “Song of the Negro Boatmen” might account for the exceptional status of barcaroles and boatmen’s songs in these essays. 23. Higginson, “Negro Spirituals”; Allen, “Introduction,” Slave Songs, x; Gustavus D. Pike, The Jubilee Singers, and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1873); J. B. T. Marsh, ed., The Story of the Jubilee Singers; with their Songs (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1877). 24. Pike, The Jubilee Singers, 108–20; Marsh, The Story of the Jubilee Singers, 29–41; “The Jubilee Singers; Singing Their Plantation Melodies in Plymouth Church,” New York Times, 9 February 1880, 8; “Back in Plymouth Church; Mr. Beecher Again Talking to his Congregation,” New York Times, 22 October 1883, 5. 25. H. G. S. [H. G. Spaulding], Review of Slave Songs of the United States, Christian Examiner (January 1868): 122; emphasis in the original. 26. T. Edwin Ruggles to Charles Pickard Ware, 21 May 1867, in Letters from Port Royal 1862–1868, ed. Elizabeth Ware Pearson [1868] (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 328; Thomas Higginson, entry for 12 September 1863, in The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ed. Christopher Looby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 167–68. 27. Allen, “Introduction,” Slave Songs, iii; “The Hymnody of the Blacks,” Independent, 28 November 1867, 2. Not everyone mourned the disappearance of slave songs: the songs, wrote one reviewer, “make us glad that they are rapidly fading out by the disappearance of the social system under which they sprang up. They are the black shadows of a gigantic crime. They make one’s heart ache to read them, and still more to listen to them. Musical they are, and even fascinating; but they are so sad, so simple, so barbarous, let us add, that we shall rejoice when the antiquary announces in his most pathetic strain that no further trace of them is to be found in the land forever.” Berwick, “Slave Songs of the South,” Zion’s Herald, 8 October 1868, 482. 28. McKim, “Songs of the Port Royal Contrabands,” 255. 29. Evangelist, “Songs of the Blacks,” Dwight’s Journal of Music, 15 November 1856, 51. 30. Allen, “Introduction,” Slave Songs, i. 31. “Slave Songs of the United States,” Nation, 21 November 1867, 411. 32. Review of Slave Songs of the United States, National Anti-Slavery Standard, 21 December 1867, 3. 33. George Wakeman, “Popu lar Songs.” Galaxy (February 1868): 162. 34. A reviewer in Lippincott’s Magazine more forcefully separated song traditions: “We do not credit the assertion that ‘Jim Crow,’ ‘Zip Coon’ and others of that class of tunes, poor as they are, were composed by the Africans on the plantations.” Th is essay, however, muddled the picture of racial authenticity in a different way, claiming that “we do not believe that the negro, in his native state, knows what music is,” and asking, “Have not all the colored musicians we have known been of mixed blood? Is it not the musical genius of the white man grafted upon the African’s love of music?” The review concludes by panning Slave Songs of the United States: “It was hardly worth while to try to perpetuate this trash, vulgarity and profanity by putting it in print.” “Literature of the Day,” Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1868): 342–43. 35. Higginson, entry for 21 April 1864, Civil War Journal, 219. 36. K. G. S., “Negroes’ Spirituals,” Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1871): 331. 37. “Some Old Songs,” Musical Visitor (August 1885): 205. 38. Mary W. Early, “Negro Music,” Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine (January 1877): 8.

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39. Pike, Jubilee Singers, 82. 40. Ibid., 107–8. 41. Ibid., 147, 126. 42. “The Jubilee Singers,” Boston Daily Journal, 12 March 1872, 4. 43. Spaulding, “Under the Palmetto,” 200. Spaulding also wrote and marketed his own “slave song,” “Times hab Change’ Ole Massa Now: Song of the Freedmen” (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1866). A reviewer in the Nation (29 March 1866) wrote, “This melody is quite pretty, but is evidently a latter day composition, a song of the new regime, and an imitation of the popu lar ‘negro melody’ of white origin” (409). In keeping with the more general confusion over slave songs described above, this reviewer’s language obscures what he thinks the song imitates— genuine songs of the freedmen, or other popu lar “negro melodies” of white origin? In other words, it is unclear whether “Times Hab Change’ Ole Massa Now” is a fake slave song or a fake minstrel song. 44. See playbill for the “Original Norfolk Jubilee Singers” (Providence [?]: n.d.); classified advertisement, “Ole Plantation Jubilee Singers,” Daily Constitution [Middletown, CT], 11 September 1874; and classified advertisement, “P.T. Barnum’s Great Travelling World’s Fair,” Lowell Daily Citizen and News, 10 May 1873, 3. 45. “Afternoon Topics,” Daily Critic, 15 April 1873, 3. 46. On the North Carolina Jubilee Singers, see New Hampshire Sentinel, 18 September 1873, 2; on the Hartford Jubilee Singers, see “Temperance Matters,” Daily Constitution, 14 February 1874, 2; on the New Orleans Jubilee Singers, see “Jubilee Singers,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 16 June 1874, 2; on the Knoxville Colored Jubilee Singers, see “Amusements: The Jubilee Singers,” Inter Ocean, 24 March 1875, 8. 47. Untitled paragraph, Religious Magazine and Monthly Review (June 1873): 596. 48. “Amusements,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 1 February 1875, 8. Advertisements in other cities indicate that this group was in fact the same as the Georgia Minstrels. One Nebraska paper promoted them as “The Original Georgia Minstrels and Brass Band! The Great Slave Troupe and Jubilee Singers . . . Composed of 20 Genuine Colored Artists”; “Amusements,” Daily Nebraska Press, 10 March 1875, 4. 49. Lara Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 102. In an especially close parallel to the situation I am outlining here, Cohen discusses the phenomenon of “imposter slaves” giving lectures on phony experiences and subsequent newspaper hysteria warning readers to demand “rigorous credibility tests [that] often placed fugitives in impossible situations” (107). 50. “The Jubilee Singers,” Daily Constitution, 2 March 1875, 2. 51. “Bogus Minstrels,” Lowell Daily Citizen and News, 5 February 1875, 2. 52. Twain quoted in “City and Vicinity: The Jubilee Singers,” Lowell Daily Citizen and News, 22 March 1875, 2. 53. “Occasional Notes,” Christian Union, 16 December 1874, 483; untitled paragraph, Independent, 8 April 1875, 16. 54. “Troubles of the Jubilee Singers,” Jamestown Journal, 22 May 1874, 5. 55. “Banjo and Bones,” Critic and Good Literature, 28 June 1884, 308. The essay was reprinted from the Saturday Review. 56. Ibid. 57. “Not the Original Singers,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 11 March 1875, 1. 58. “The Jubilee Singers,” Boston Daily Advertiser, 11 March 1875, 4.

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59. Quoted in Pike, The Jubilee Singers, 82–83. 60. Ibid. 61. W. H. Goodrich, “Slave Songs,” New York Evangelist, 30 November 1871, 1. 62. I have gleaned performance repertoires from many sources, including concert programs, newspaper reviews, and the biographies by Pike and Marsh. For the minstrel songs, see Pike, Jubilee Singers, 91, 94. For “Song of the Negro Boatmen,” see the playbill “American Missionary Association. Vocal Concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers,” Mechanics Hall, Worcester (MA), 26 March 1872. 63. “The ‘Jubilee Singers,’ ” New York Daily Tribune, 28 December 1871, 8. 64. “I wish simply to suggest that the speeches—the recitative, as one might call it— be omitted. We had two or three, long and short, from Mr. White, and one of considerable length from a gentleman who spoke between the parts. There was nothing said that was not already in print before our eyes, and, indeed, there was nothing necessary to be said or read. . . . The nine singers told their own story, by their appearance and their songs, far better than any one else could tell it for them.” L., “The Jubilee Singers,” Boston Daily Advertiser, 15 March 1872, 4. 65. “Musical Notes,” Christian Union, 22 January 1873, 78. 66. “The Jubilee Singers,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 19 January 1875, 8. 67. “Our Washington Letter: Singing,” Prairie Farmer, 30 March 1872, 99. 68. Pike, Jubilee Singers, 146–47. The “Jubilee Songs” included only the spirituals, not the more varied parts of their repertoire. 69. Ibid., 164. 70. “Our Washington Letter,” 99. 71. Goodrich, “Slave Songs.” 72. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 90. 73. “The Jubilee Singers and Lays of the Covenant,” New-York Evangelist, 25 December 1873, 2. 74. F. J. Child, “Ballad Poetry” [1874], rpt. in Journal of Folklore Research 31.1–3 (1994): 214. 75. “The Jubilee Singers and Lays of the Covenant,” 2; emphasis in the original. 76. “Negro Minstrelsy— Ancient and Modern,” 72. 77. “Foreign News,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 22 September 1873, 9. 78. Marsh, Story of the Jubilee Singers, 83. 79. Ibid., 59–60. 80. Ernest Tuveson, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). There is another savage irony here, since Brown was the only white abolitionist to advocate an armed rebellion among slaves—he died precisely in the effort to help slaves free themselves. 81. Mark Twain recalled a similar “afternoon in London, when their ‘John Brown’s Body’ took a decorous, aristocratic English audience by surprise and threw them into a volcanic eruption of applause before they knew what they were about,” and this memory also reiterated an imaginative transatlantic transfer: “John is not in this evening’s programme,” Twain wrote before a concert in Hartford in 1875. “Cannot it be added? It would set me down in London again for a minute or two, and at the same time save me the tedious sea voyage and the expense.” “City and Vicinity: The Jubilee Singers,” 2. More than a decade earlier, Higginson had noted the popularity of “John Brown’s Body” among former slaves, and given the song’s ubiquity throughout the Union Army, this suggests another interesting engagement across race through music; see the entry for 3 December 1862, Civil War Journals, 56.

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82. Continuing these Atlantic crossings, the Fisk Jubilee Singers performed “God Save the Queen” in their first concert after returning to the United States. See “Return of the Jubilee Singers,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 30 May 1874, 3. I have found no evidence that they ever sang “Rule, Britannia,” although the possibility remains tantalizing. My thanks to Catherine Robson, who pointed out to me the difference between these British anthems. 83. “The Jubilee Singers,” Church’s Musical Visitor (October 1881): 13. After returning from a second European tour in 1875, the Fisk Singers did not tour again until 1879. 84. Playbill, “First Concert in Worcester of the Jubilee Singers,” Mechanics Hall, Worcester (MA), 15 March 1875, 1. 85. Ibid., 4. 86. J. K. Jr., “Who Are Our National Poets?” Knickerbocker Magazine (October 1845): 334. 87. W. F. Allen, “The Negro Dialect,” Nation, 14 December 1865, 745. Allen writes in the anthology’s introduction that “the greater number of the songs which have come into our possession seem to be the natural and original production of a race of remarkable musical capacity and very teachable, which has been long enough associated with the more cultivated race to have become imbued with the mode and spirit of European music— often, nevertheless, retaining a distinct tinge of their native Africa”; Slave Songs of the United States, viii. For an example from the reviews, see “Literature of the Day,” Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1868): “It has been a common idea for many years, accepted without examination or proof, that the negro was essentially musical in his nature. We now venture boldly to assert that the claim is unfounded in fact. . . . Of the numerous travelers in Africa, none have reported anything but horribly discordant noises (both vocal and instrumental) when anything which represented music was introduced” (341). 88. Untitled paragraph, Zion’s Herald, 26 June 1879, 204. 89. George Washington Cable, “Creole Slave Songs,” Century (April 1886): 807–28. 90. William Owens, “Folk-Lore of the Southern Negro,” Lippincott’s Magazine (December 1877): 748, 749. 91. George H. Griffin, “The Slave Music of the South,” Musical Visitor (February 1885): 35. 92. Charles Michling, “Folksong and Folk-music in America,” lecture transcribed in “American Folk Songs,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 August 1892, 35; Eben E. Rexford, “Negro Music,” Musical Visitor (April 1897): 85. 93. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” [1938], Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 292. 94. W. D. Howells, “Life and Letters,” Harper’s Weekly, 27 June 1896, 630; Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 1999), 134–35. 95. Jeanette Robinson Murphy, “The True Negro Music and Its Decline,” Independent, 23 July 1903, 1723. 96. Ibid., 1726. 97. David Levering Lewis describes the song as the “one truly palpable tie to that motherland [Du Bois] would spend an academic and political lifetime trying to interpret and shape.” Lewis hypothesizes that the song was “a Wolof song from Senegambia about confinement or captivity” but concludes, “I have not been able to solve this mystery.” W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868– 1919: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 14, 585 n.7. 98. Scholars are therefore mistaken to view the song as offering only a slim connection to the past. Daniel G. Williams, for instance, argues, I think wrongly, that although “the song

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and its remembrance represent a linguistic connection to the past, the fact that the words aren’t understood underlines the tenuousness of that connection. . . . The impenetrability of the words, for both author and reader, foregrounds the fundamentally fractured, untotalisable nature of African-American history.” Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 201–2. While Williams may be right on this last point, he is wrong about the “tenuousness” of the connection forged between an American present and an African past—the song can make such connections precisely— and only— because “the words aren’t understood.”

Index

abolition. See antislavery abolitionist mails campaign, 67 Adams, John Quincy, 67 Adee, Alvey A., 154 Adorno, Theodor W., 226 Africa, 201, 215, 224–27 African American poetry, 64, 96, 224–27, 267 n.87 “Age of Print,” 65 Allen, William Francis, 119, 206–7, 209, 225, 267 n.87 Allinson, William J., 75, 88–89, 93, 244 n.51 “Alnwick Castle,” 78–79 “Amazing Grace,” 61 American Anti-Slavery Society, 66–67 American Civil War, 9, 100–106, 156, 195. See also Civil War poetry; contraband songs American Folklore Society, 139 American Missionary Association, 115, 206 American Preceptor, 190–91 American Slavery as It Is, 95 Anderson, Benedict, 156 antiquarianism, 136–38 antislavery, 59–63, 66–68, 96, 126. See also antislavery poetry Antislavery Harp, 97–99 antislavery poetry, 2, 8, 60–75, 168–72; circulation of, 70–71, 75; conventions of, 63, 70–72, 75, 94; evangelicalism and, 61; and free speech, 67–68, 70; as a genre, 74; lack of sentimentality in, 74; and mimicry, 93, 95, 99; and minstrelsy, 64, 95, 97–99; postbellum marginality of, 173–74; and reprinting, 72; sectionalism of, 72; social value of, 63; and sympathy, 76–77; Whittier’s ambivalence toward, 95; and the World Antislavery Convention, 94. See also Whittier, John Greenleaf

Appleton’s Magazine, 165 Atlantic Monthly, 108, 111, 165 authenticity, 119, 141, 144, 253 n.24; and genre, 203; and performance, 203, 208, 215, 218 Awtell, N. G., 7–9, 102 “Babylon is Fallen! A Sequel to Kingdom Coming,” 128 balladmongers, 18–19, 22–23, 29, 39. See also Plummer, Jonathan; Shaw, Thomas “Ballad of Abraham Lincoln,” 158 ballads, 136–63; ambivalence toward, 37–38, 58–60; and American literature, 156, 198, 200; anthologies of, 137, 146; and antiquarianism, 136; and antislavery, 60, 196; and authenticity, 138, 141–42, 144; and belonging, 103, 152, 163; circulation of, 37–39, 59, 177; collecting of, 146; and decentralization, 19; editing of, 139, 141–50; exchange value of, 20–21, 59; and forgery, 138, 141, 252 n.8; as fragments, 143; generic instability of, 145, 147, 175; in the hierarchy of genres, 14, 37; historicism of, 174, 176, 187; history of, 136; hybridity of, 39; ideology of, 154; and libel, 28; and literariness, 14, 19; and literary history, 38–39, 147; and media shift, 155; and mediation, 144–45, 147; and memorization, 184; and minstrelsy, 133; and national identity, 140–42, 151, 154–55, 158, 174, 196–97, 200; and national reconstruction, 148, 158, 163; and nation-building, 137; and oral tradition, 146, 151; and popu lar audiences, 159, 173, 198; postbellum ideas about, 173, 175, 177, 187; as property, 141; and public order, 38, 59–60; and race, 200; and reading, 187, 197–98; and

270

index

ballads (continued) regionalism, 15, 194; and remediation, 144; and Romanticism, 78; roughness of, 141–43; and scandal, 59, 145; scholarship on, 136, 138; and social class, 37; sources of, 146; and spirituals, 204–5, 207; and tradition, 145; and transnationalism, 140–41; and Whittier’s career, 173–75. See also Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript; Child ballads; English and Scottish Popular Ballads; popu lar ballads Ballad Society, 145 Barnum’s Original Jubilee Singers, 214 Barr, Amelia, 70 Barrett, Faith, 246 n.3 Basker, James, 60 Baucom, Ian, 152–53 Beecher, Henry Ward, 207, 211 Bennett, Paula Bernat, 12 Bennett, Whitman, 71 Bentley, William, 27–28 Beowulf, 137 Berlant, Lauren, 260 n.72 Bingham, Caleb, 190 Bird, Robert Montgomery, Sheppard Lee, 66 Birney, William, 123 Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, 136, 140, 142–45, 204 blackface, 96, 98, 121–22. See also minstrelsy; negro minstrels black music, 204–5 Blair, Ann, 136 Blair, Hugh, 252 n.8 Bolter, Jay David, 144 Botume, Elizabeth Hyde, 118 Bowdoin College, 54 broadsides, 18–22; as commodities, 103; decentralization and, 38; and libel, 38; materiality of, 27; mediation and, 51; and minstrelsy, 133; as news sheets, 25–26, 35–36, 53; and peddling, 27–28; sensationalism of, 28; and vagrancy, 36. See also Plummer, Jonathan; Shaw, Thomas Brooks, Daphne, 203 Brooks, Van Wyck, 12 Brown, Colin, 224 Brown, John S., 195 Brown, Mary Ellen, 254 n.31 Brown, William Wells, 97–99 Bryant, Dan, 126 Bryant, William Cullen, 23, 173

Burleigh, Charles C., 75 Burns, Robert, 17; “The Highland Widow’s Lament,” 152–54, 156; “A Man’s a Man For A’ That,” 97–98 Butler, Benjamin F., 104 Cable, George Washington, 226 Callender’s Jubilee Singers, 215 Campbell, Hugh Hume, 154 Campbell, John Francis, 151–52, 154 Carey, Matthew, 23 Carter, Mary, 100–105 Cartland, Joseph, 75 Cartland, Moses, 75 Cavender, Thomas S., 90–92 Cavitch, Max, 180 Chambers, Robert, 252 n.8 Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret, 77–78 Charleston Minstrels, 213 Chatterton, Thomas, 138, 252 n.8 Chautauqua Institution, 211 “Chevy Chace,” 78, 205 Child, Francis James, 137, 139–40, 145–56, 221. See also Child ballads; English and Scottish Ballads; English and Scottish Popular Ballads; popu lar ballads Child, Lydia Maria, 184 Child ballads, 139, 148–49, 156, 159, 175. See also Child, Francis James; English and Scottish Popular Ballads; popu lar ballads Child Memorial Library, 150 “Child of Elle,” 142–43 Christy’s Minstrels, 126, 209 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 203 circulation, 177, 198; and ballads, 37–39; and Civil War songs, 102; and conventionality, 63; and coteries, 92; and emancipation, 74; and free speech, 71; and genre, 103; informal networks of, 18; politics of, 63–64; and racial difference, 100; and smuggling, 107; as a social formation, 80, 88 Civil War poetry, 2, 100–106, 121–35, 210. See also American Civil War; contraband slaves; contraband songs Clark, George W., 96–97 Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark close reading, 7 “Coal Black Rose,” 209 Cohen, Lara Langer, 94, 215, 263 n.49 Colfax, Schuyler, 134

index colonial revival, 188, 261 n.77 “Colored Volunteers,” 125 communications networks, 65–66, 73, 107 Conforti, Joseph, 174 congressional petition campaign, 67 “Conscript’s Lay,” 130–31 contraband slaves, 100, 103; class politics of, 130; history of, 105–6, 108; as ideological figures, 106–8, 119. See also American Civil War; contraband songs “Contraband Song. Old Shady,” 122, 124 contraband songs, 14, 104–33, 210, 220; and American literary history, 135; and antislavery, 114, 116, 126; antinationalism of, 130; authenticity of, 118–19; and belonging, 119–20, 131, 133; circulation of, 120–21; class politics of, 130; as commodities, 106, 111; conventions of, 134; dislocation and, 108; and emancipation, 123; and enlistment of black soldiers, 122–25, 131; and evangelicalism, 114; flatness of, 106; historical background to, 104–5; inauthenticity of, 121; institutional settings of, 118; mediation and, 111, 133; and military ser vice, 122–23, 128–31; and minstrelsy, 121–26, 128–29; and newspapers, 116; postbellum history of, 134–35; and spirituals, 115–16, 206; used against emancipation, 120–21. See also Civil War poetry; contraband slaves coon songs, 227 coteries, 29, 64, 92, 244 n.51 counterfeiting, 107 Coviello, Peter, 180 Cox, John, 89, 93 Crandall, Reuben, 241 n.16 Cruz, Jon, 105, 204 Culloden, battle of, 152–53 Cumberland Gazette, 45 Curtis, Susan O., 177–80, 185–86 “Dandy Jim,” 98 Darnton, Robert, 28, 107, 232 n.16 Dead Poets Society, 163 De Man, Paul, 10 DeWolfe, George G. B., 23, 236 n.13 Dexter, Timothy, 24–25, 30, 32, 34 dialect, 109–10, 126, 227 “Dialogue Between a Blind-Man and Death,” 27 Dickinson, Emily, 23, 102

271

Dinsmoor, Robert, 23, 236 n.14 Dix, Dorothea, 180 “Dixie,” 103 Douglass, Frederick, 74, 97, 199, 248 n.19 Dow, Lorenzo, 24 “Draft is Coming,” 129–30 Draft Riots, 131 Du Bois, W. E. B., 201, 226; The Souls of Black Folk, 199–200, 227–29 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 202, 227, 262 n.8 Dwight’s Journal of Music, 111, 209 Early, Mary, 211 Early English Text Society, 140 “Echo to the World’s Convention,” 93 Edgerton, David, 231 n.8 Eliot, Charles W., 150 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 166–67, 171–72, 196 Emery, Sarah A., 20–22 English and Scottish Ballads, 139 English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 137–39, 148–49, 150–51, 154–56. See also Child, Francis James; Child ballads; popu lar ballads Epstein, Dena J., 118, 204 Essex Gazette, 69 Fahs, Alice, 105 “Famous Flower of Serving Men,” 153 “Father Abbey’s Will,” 27 Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom!, 247 n.5 Fields, James T., 111, 188 Fireside Poets, 20, 166–67, 258 n.40 Fish, Stanley, 258 n.43 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 119, 200, 206, 211–25, 229; and Africa, 225; American tours of, 201–3, 211; and antislavery, 223; and authenticity, 202, 224; and black blackface minstrels, 202, 212, 214–15; British tours of, 221–23; competition over the name Jubilee, 214–16; criticism of, 201, 220, 266 n.64; and evangelicalism, 207, 211–12; imitations of, 215–18, 224; marketing of, 211–12, 224; and racial crossing, 221–23, 267 n.82; repertoire of, 219–20, 223; Scottish reception of, 221–22; and spirituals, 201, 219–20 Fisk University, 200–201, 206 Fliegelman, Jay, 234 n.26 Ford, Worthington Chauncey, 21, 38

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forgery, 93, 138, 252 n.8 Forten, Charlotte, 119 Fortune, T. Thomas, 114 Foster, Stephen, 218; “Old Folks at Home,” 211, 219–20 Foucault, Michel, 85 “Fragments from the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier,” 81. See also Whittier manuscript books Freedmen’s Commission, 206 Fremont, John C., 105 friendship, 61, 75–79 Fugitive Slave Law, 169, 248 n.20 Furnivall, Frederick E., 140–44. See also Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript gag rule, 67, 242 n.18 Galvez, Marisa, 85, 232 n.10 Garrison, William Lloyd, 25, 61, 64, 66, 164 genre, 9, 14, 60; abstractions of, 201; and personhood, 104; and race, 221–23 Georgia Minstrels, 215 Gideonites, 100, 105, 118, 247 n.13 giftbooks, 61 Gilmore, William J., 18, 21 Gilroy, Paul, 221 Gitelman, Lisa, 227, 231 n.8 Glencoe massacre, 153 “Go Down, Moses.” See “Let My People Go” “God Save the Queen,” 223, 267 n.82 Golden Chain, 131 “Gospel Train,” 220 Grant, Ulysses S., 134 Greeley, Horace, 120 Griffin, George, 226 Grimké, Angelina, 95 Grimké, Sarah, 95 Grossman, Jay, 234 n.24 Grundtvig, Svend, 145 Grusin, Richard, 144 Gummere, Francis Barton, 156 “Hail Columbia,” 61 Hales, John W., 140–44. See also Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript Hall, David D., 21, 235 n.9 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 78–79 Hampton Jubilee Singers, 214–15, 225 Harmon, A. W., 23 Harp of Freedom, 123 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 74, 243 n.31

Harper’s Magazine, 165 Harvard University, 139, 150, 254 n.33 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 41, 239 n.63 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 164, 197 “Heir of Linne,” 143–44 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 119, 204–6, 210, 257 n.24 Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 164 Hollander, John, 12 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 166–67 Hopkins, Pauline, Of One Blood, 200–201 Horton, George Moses, 23, 236 n.14 Houghton, H. O., 166 Howe, Julia Ward, “Battle-hymn of the Republic,” 223 Howells, William Dean, 166, 227; The Minister’s Charge, 2–4 Hurston, Zora Neale, 201 Hustvedt, Sigurd, 253 n.25 imagined community, 7, 156 Inter Ocean, 135 Iser, Wolfgang, 178 itinerancy, 37–38 Jackson, Jennie, 219 Jackson, Virginia W., 10, 13 Jacobite rising of 1745, 152 Jauss, Hans Robert, 178 Jefferson, Thomas, 234 n.26, 252 n.8 Jim Crow songs, 204–6 “John Brown’s Body,” 220, 223, 266 n.81 Johns, Adrian, 107 Johnson, James, 153 Johnson, Samuel, 252 n.8 Jones, Benjamin, 75, 88–89, 94–95 Jones, Gavin, 262 n.8 Jubilee Singers. See Fisk Jubilee Singers Jubilee Singers of Hartford, 214 “Jump Jim Crow,” 204–5, 210 Kennedy, William Sloan, 189 Kete, Mary Louise, 231 n.9 Kincaid, Jamaica, 183 “Kingdom Coming,” 126–34, 206, 210 Knapp, Samuel L., 37, 235 n.11 Knickerbocker, 96 “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight,” 148–49 Lathrop, George Parsons, 165 Lawrence, D. H., 159

index “Let My People Go,” 115–18, 123, 200–201, 212; and evangelicalism, 206–7; parodies of, 120; performances of, 117–18, 219, 223 Letters from John Quincy Adams to His Constituents, 72 Leveson-Gower, Granville, 154 Levine, Lawrence, 201 Lewis, David Levering, 267 n.97 Lewis, Sarah, 61, 63 Liberator, 66, 71–72 Liberty Minstrel, 96–97 Lincoln, Abraham, 103, 105, 130 Lippincott’s Magazine, 210, 264 n.34, 267 n.87 literacy, 11, 40, 57, 137 literariness, 2, 9; and ballads, 14, 19; and circulation, 168; and local culture, 41; and poetry, 40; as a power structure, 56; public standards of, 46, 59 Literary World, 164–65 Lloyd, Elizabeth, 75–76, 89, 175, 189; compiles the Whittier manuscript books, 80; edits The North Star, 78; illustrates the Whittier manuscript books, 81–82; “Jerusalem,” 79; poems misattributed to Whittier, 93–94 Lloyd, Hannah, 88, 182 Lloyd, Sarah, 86–87 Lockwood, L. C., 115 Loeffelholz, Mary, 243 n.31, 258 n.39 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 3, 4, 23, 166–67 “Long-tail blue,” 204 Lott, Eric, 203 Lovejoy, Elijah, 66 Lowell, James Russell, 145, 150–51, 154 Lowell, Maria White, 74 Lundy, Benjamin, 75 lyricization, 10, 13 lyric reading, 10–11 Macpherson, James, 138, 252 n.8 Maine Wesleyan Journal, 43, 46 Mann, Horace, 170 Matthews, Brander, 135 Matthiessen, F. O., 163 McDowell, Paula, 137 McGill, Meredith L., 21, 64, 171 McKim, James Miller, 206 McKim, Lucy, 118–19, 207–8 McLane, Maureen, 263 n.16 media shift, 137, 155

273

Melville, Herman, 102 Merrill, H. T., 112 Methodism, 49, 51, 53–54 Mihm, Stephen, 107 Mill, John Stuart, 13, 234 n.23 Miller, Cristanne, 263 n.16 mimicry, 93–95 minstrelsy, 2, 14; and antislavery poetry, 95–99, 126; and authenticity, 205, 208, 210; and ballads, 202, 204–5, 208, 224; black blackface performances of, 202, 212–13, 217–18; commercialism of, 203; and contraband songs, 122–29; difficulties defining; and emancipation, 122, 129; and imitation, 96; and imposture, 98, 202; and race, 95, 203; and spirituals, 208–9, 210. See also blackface; Foster, Stephen; “Kingdom Coming”; negro minstrels Mitchell, Henry, 182 Modern Language Association, 139 Moody, Dwight L., 207, 211 Morris Brothers, 214 Morton, Sarah Wentworth, “The African Chief,” 190 Murphy, Jeanette Robinson, 227 National Era, 170, 176 Neall, Elizabeth, 84, 89 negro minstrels, 96, 206, 210–11, 218. See also minstrelsy “Negro Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern,” 204–5, 263 n.16 New Americanists, 12 Newburyport, 24–25 Newburyport Free Press, 64 Newburyport Social Library, 29 New England, as a literary region, 21, 173–74, 194 New Orleans Jubilee Singers, 214 New Orleans University Singers, 225 newspaper poetry, 64–65, 71–72 New York Evening Post, 166, 198 New York Tribune, 115 Nicholson, Elizabeth, 76, 88, 245 n.52; compiles the Whittier manuscript books, 80, 83, 85, 244 n.43; distributes Whittier’s work, 89; edits The North Star, 78; and manuscript circulation, 79, 85; “Parody on Alnwick Castle,” 79; poems misattributed to Whittier, 93; proposes a volume of Quaker minstrelsy, 96

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Niles’ Register, 69 North American Review, 188 North Carolina Jubilee Singers, 214 North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by Her Friends, 61, 76–80 Norton, Charles Eliot, 155 nostalgia, 189–90, 197 Nugent, Christopher, 232 n.10 Nyong’o, Tavia, 203 “Oh ono chrio,” 153 “Oh! Susannah,” 98 Ole Plantation Jubilee Singers, 214 “Ole Virginny neber tire,” 205, 209 oral culture, 19, 137, 146–47 Original Norfolk Jubilee Singers, 214 Osgood, J. R., 162 Ossian, 138, 252 n.8 Owens, William, 226 Palmer, James H., 118 Park, Mungo, 215 Parnassus, 171 “Patriotic Contraband!,” 128–29 peddling, 17–23, 29, 37, 54. See also Plummer, Jonathan; Shaw, Thomas Pennsylvania Freeman, 75 Percy, Thomas, 136–38, 140–44, 155. See also Reliques of Ancient English Poetry Percy Society, 138 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 165, 177 Philadelphia, 75–76 Phillips, Wendell, 120 Pickard, Samuel T., 178 Pike, Gustavus, 211–12 Pinckney, Henry L., 67 piracy, 107 Pitt, Humphrey, 136 Plummer, Jonathan, 14, 17–38, 63; antiquation of, 32, 38; and the archive, 23; as an author, 27; as a balladmonger, 25; and ballads, 37–38; as a case study, 58; as a hermaphrodite, 28; biography of, 24; “Dreadful Fire at Porsmouth!,” 35; early publications of, 30; “Elegy on the death of Timothy Dexter,” 32, 34; “Elegy on the Rev. Mr. John Murray,” 28; “Hints to Elder Pottle,” 28, 237 n.28; itinerancy of, 34, 37; “Last Words and Dying Confession of Samuel Frost,” 26; market

orientation of, 30, 36; memorial to, 37–38; “Parson Pidgin, or Holy Kissing,” 28; and peddling, 17–18, 29; as a poet laureate, 32–33; polite works of, 30; print stock of, 27, 237 n.21; providentialism of, 35–36; reading history of, 29; religious awakening of, 32; scandalmongering of, 28; “Self- Conceit,” 30; sensationalism of, 30, 36; sermons of, 36; subjects of, 25; “To L. L.—transformed to a two quart bottle,” 30; “Tragedy of Louis Capet,” 31; Whittier’s memories of, 17–20. See also broadsides; peddling poems, 1–15; and antislavery, 60–61; circulation of, 183; and correspondence, 89; distinction from poetry, 13–14; materiality of, 9, 15; and memory, 181–82; and reading, 179; social exchange value of, 89, 92; uses of, 179, 183, 185–86 poetry, 229; as an abstraction, 13–14, 234 n.25; and civility, 30; and collaboration, 76; consequences of the Civil War for, 106; and friendship, 77; and intimacy, 186; as an irregular category, 58–59; and learning, 48; and local culture, 24; and publication, 46, 48; and public culture, 186; and reading, 102; separation from prose, 12–13; and social change, 60–61, 76; and socialization, 29, 102; and sympathy, 77; uses of, 76, 89 popu lar ballads, 15, 137, 147–49, 155. See also Child, Francis James; English and Scottish Popular Ballads Porter, David, 70 Port Royal, 104–5, 111, 114 Price, Leah, 88 Proctor, Edna Dean, 175; “Emancipation Song,” 223 Quakers, 75–76 race, and poetry, 95–99, 201–3, 219–27 Radano, Ronald, 105, 204 ragtime, 227 readers, 1, 7–10, 29–30, 177–87 reading, 1–15; and affect, 180; and the archive, 11; and communal grief, 53; contrasted with reception, 178–79, 186; forms of, 11; and gender, 179; history of, 1, 12, 177–79; and interpretation, 10, 179;

index and intimacy, 4, 9, 180–81, 184–87; materiality of, 8–9, 88, 185; and memorization, 182–84; and poetry, 10; and sociability, 181, 185; and use, 9–10, 177, 179–80, 183, 185–86 recitations, 3, 18, 25, 49, 55–56, 160–63 regionalism, 173–74 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 136–37, 140–42, 145. See also Percy, Thomas remediation, 42–43, 48, 144, 154 Remini, Robert V., 257 n.19 Ritson, Joseph, 138, 143 Robertson, Michael, 180 “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” 119 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 234 n.25 “Rule Britannia,” 223 runaway slaves, 107–8, 248 n.20 Ruskin, John, 155 Russel, Robert, 27 Sabbath School Bell, 131 “Sam Slick,” 19 Santayana, George, 12, 258 n.46 Scots Musical Museum, 153 Scott, Walter, 29, 153, 252 n.8; Guy Mannering, 254 n.41 Sea Islands, 109, 114 Searle, Margaret, 29–30 Seward, Theodore, 221 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 223 Shaw, Thomas, 8, 14, 22, 39–58, 63; accosted in public, 54–56; accounts of peddling by, 48–49, 51, 53–54; and the archive, 23; authorship and, 41–42, 51, 55–56; biography of, 39; as a case study, 58; critical judgments on, 41; diary of, 48–49, 51, 53, 239 n.71; education and, 40, 47–48, 56–57; and future readers, 57; and literariness, 46, 56; and literary history, 39–40; and Maine Wesleyan Journal, 43, 46; manuscript books of, 39, 42–45; and mediation, 40, 46; “Melancholy Shipwreck,” 51–54; “Messieurs Printers,” 46–48; Methodism of, 49; “Mournful Song on Nathaniel Knight,” 48–51; productivity as a writer, 41, 58; publications of, 39; and public culture, 55; and publishing, 43, 48; recitations by, 49; and reprinting, 51; scribal practices of, 42–43, 58; “Then took my pen & ink in hand,” 57–58; “Thomas Shaws

275

Wrtings,” 41; “To Those that Cry Me Poet,” 55–56 Sherman, Joan, 12 Shields, David S., 30 Shipley, Samuel, 96 Sigourney, Lydia H., 23 Silverman, Gillian, 184 Sinclair, Elizabeth, 182–85 Skeat, Walter W., 140 “Slave’s a Man for A’ That,” 97–99 slavery, 107–8, 199 slave songs, 101, 103, 105, 199. See also “Let My People Go”; spirituals Slave Songs of the United States, 204, 206, 209, 212, 225, 264 n.34 Smith, Henry Nash, 167, 256 n.7, 256 n.11 “Song, Dedicated to the Colored Volunteer,” 122–23 “Song for Freedom,” 98–99 Songs for the Times, 113 sorrow songs. See spirituals Spaulding, H. G., 206–7, 212–14, 265 n.43 Spence, Adam Knight, 224–25 spirituals, 2, 14, 114–19; as abstractions, 201–2; and African origins, 207, 226; anthologies of, 119, 204; and antislavery, 115; authenticity of, 202, 208–10, 229; and ballads, 204–5, 207, 221–22, 229; and evangelicalism, 205–7; Fisk Jubilee Singers and, 201, 219–20; institutional formation of, 207; mediations of, 119, 199, 201, 217, 228–29; and minstrelsy, 202, 204, 207–11, 229, 263 n.21; per formances of, 200, 209; postbellum history of, 200. See also “Let My People Go”; slave songs; Slave Songs of the United States “Star Spangled Banner,” 61 St. Clair, William, 107 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 159–60, 173–74, 188, 195, 260 n.75 Stewart, Susan, 137 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 168, 172–73 Sundquist, Eric, 201, 262 n.7 Symmes, William, 239 n.63 Taylor, Bayard, 158, 165 Tennesseans of Jackson College, 214 Thompson, George, 66 Tippecanoe songs, 61

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“To a Friend, on returning a copy of Halleck’s Poems,” 77–78 “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” 210 Trollope, Anthony, 111 Turner, Nat, 66 Tuveson, Ernest, 223 Twain, Mark, 256 n.7, 266 n.81; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 5–6; Th e Gilded Age, 216; “The Story of a Speech,” 166–68 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 96 Underground Railroad, 108 Vanity Fair, 120 Victoria, Queen, 223 Walker, Cheryl, 12 Wardlaw, Elizabeth, 138, 252 n.8 Warner, Charles Dudley, Th e Gilded Age, 216 Warner, Michael, 21 Waters, Horace, 117 Watkins, Henry, 216 Webster, Daniel, 168–71 Webster, John W., 38, 239 n.56 Webster, Redford, 37–38 Wedgwood, Josiah, 61 Weems, Mason Locke, 23 Weir, Peter, 163 Weld, Theodore Dwight, 95 Wendell, Ann, 79, 89 Wendell, Margaret, 244 n.51 White, George, 216 Whitefield, George, 24 Whitley, Edward, 158, 197 Whitman, Walt, 102, 156; “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” 157–60; “O Captain! My Captain!,” 160–63; readership of, 180, 259 n.47 Whittier, Elizabeth Hussey, 75, 83–84, 86, 88–89, 100 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 2–4, 14–15, 64–96, 164–98; as abolitionist minstrel, 96; ambivalence about antislavery poetry, 95; and antebellum newspapers, 64; antislavery poetry of, 66–75, 164–65, 172–73, 196; “At Port Royal,” 108–11, 114, 248 n.22; “At School Close,” 182; and ballads, 15, 165, 172–77, 184, 187–88, 194–98; “Barclay of Ury,” 182–84;

childhood reading of, 191; and circulation, 74, 177, 181; Collected Works, 172; “The Cypress Tree of Ceylon,” 85; “The Drunkard to his Bottle,” 65; early career of, 64–65; and emancipation, 74; “Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother,” 74, 96, 181; and free speech, 70, 73; Home Ballads, 175; “Ichabod,” 168–72, 174, 196, 257 n.20, 257 n.24; “In Remembrance of Joseph Sturge,” 88; Justice and Expediency, 66–67, 241 n.16; letters to, 7–9, 90, 175, 177–86; life in Philadelphia of, 75–76; “Lines,” 72–74, 242 n.28; “Mabel Martin,” 176; “Massachusetts to Virginia,” 181; “Maud Muller,” 175–76, 182; mediation of, 165; memories of Jonathan Plummer, 17–20; misreadings of, 168, 171; “Moll Pitcher,” 84; as a national poet, 165, 173–74, 187, 196–97; and New England, 73–74; “Our Countrymen in Chains!,” 61–62; Philadelphia friends of, 75–76, 84–85, 89, 92; Poetical Works, 8; popu lar readership of, 165, 170, 173, 177–80, 258 n.40; postbellum career of, 171–72, 175, 177, 194; print orientation of, 66; as the recipient of poems, 79, 84; and reprinting, 70, 72, 171; regional identity of, 173–74, 176, 187–88, 192, 194–96; sectional politics of, 73; “Sins of My Luckless Boyhood,” 90–92; seventieth birthday celebration of, 164–65, 198; seventieth birthday dinner for, 166–68, 171–72, 256 n.7; Snow-Bound, 18, 179, 184, 188–97, 260 n.75; “Song of the Negro Boatmen,” 109–14, 118–20, 123, 126, 133, 206, 220; “Stanzas for the Times,” 68–71, 242 n.25; “The Swan Song of Parson Avery,” 176; as target of violence, 66, 72; “Telling the Bees,” 176; “To the Memory of Daniel Wheeler,” 84; transnational reception of, 182–83; “The World’s Convention,” 94; “The Yankee Girl,” 181; “Yankee Gypsies,” 17, 19–20 “Whittier Leaves,” 82. See also Whittier manuscript books Whittier manuscript books, 80–92. See also “Fragments from the Uncollected Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier”; “Whittier Leaves” Willard, Frances E., 185 Williams, Bert, 203

index Williams, Carolyn, 94 Williams, Daniel G., 267 n.98 Wilson, Edmund, 102 Winthrop, Robert C., 185 Work, Alanson, 128, 251 n.60 Work, Henry Clay. See “Kingdom Coming” Wood, Marcus, 60

World Antislavery Convention, 94 World’s Peace Festival, 211 Wright, Richardson, 21 “Yankee Doodle,” 61 “Zip Coon,” 204, 209

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Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure long deferred to thank all the individuals and institutions that have made this book possible. A Joyce Tracy Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society got me started back in 2005. Thanks to the AAS staff, especially John Hench, Caroline Sloat, Laura Wasowicz, and Marie Lamoureux, for being so supportive. A Council on Research Junior Faculty Grant from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Louisiana State University generously funded my research at the Houghton Library and the Maine Historical Society; my thanks to Gaines Foster at LSU and to the staff of both libraries for all their help (and patience). A Gest Fellowship from the Quaker and Special Collections Library at Haverford College in 2013 let me get to know the Whittier books and their wonderful collection of manuscript poetry. My thanks to the staff at Haverford, including John Anderies, Ann Upton, and Emma LapsanskyWerner, for being such generous hosts. I would also like to thank the librarians at the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the New York Historical Society, and the Haverhill Public Library. And finally, I would like to acknowledge the support I have received from UCLA. My thanks to David Schaberg, dean of the College of Letters and Science, and Ali Behdad, chair of the English Department. A portion of Chapter 1 was originally published as “Peddlers, Poems, and Local Culture: The Case of Jonathan Plummer, a ‘Balladmonger’ in Nineteenth-Century New England,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1–4 (2008): 9–32, copyright 2008 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University. Parts of Chapter 3 originally appeared, in a different form, as “Contraband Singing: Poems and Songs in Circulation during the Civil War,” in American Literature 82.2 (2010): 271–304, copyright 2010 Duke University Press, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of Duke University Press (www.dukeupress.edu). A previous version of Chapter 4 was published as “Popular Ballads: Rhythmic Remediations in the Nineteenth Century,” in

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Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Hall (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 267–94; this material is used by permission of Ohio University Press (www.ohioswallow.com). Portions of Chapter 5 first appeared as “Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” in Arizona Quarterly 64.3 (2008); revised version printed by permission of the Regents of The University of Arizona. My thanks to Jerry Singerman at the University of Pennsylvania Press for his support of this book and for guiding me through the process with such grace and good humor. Thanks as well to the manuscript’s readers for two thorough, incisive, and careful reports. It goes without saying—though it is still better to say—that any remaining errors or infelicities are mine alone. Although this book has had more stages than I can count or care to remember, I care very much to remember the people who have counted in its long coming-into-being: at New York University, Kahlil Chaar-Perez, Emily Cone-Miller, Patricia Crain, Elaine Freedgood, Martin Harries, Melissa Hillier, Alyson Kiesel, Jesse Morgan Owens, Mary Poovey, and Sarah Townsend; at Macalester College, Daylanne English, Marlon James, and Casey Jarrin; at LSU, Daphne Cain, Benjy Kahan, Jerry Kennedy, Elsie Michie, Rick Moreland, Dan Novak, Lisi Oliver, and Sharon Weltman; at UCLA, Helen Deutsch, Joe Dimuro, Jonathan Grossman, Carrie Hyde, Chris Looby, and Sarah Mesle, as well as the regular participants in the Americanist Research Colloquium, especially Benjamin Beck, Daniel Couch, Bert Emerson, Christian Reed, Grant Rosson, Samantha Sommers, and Jordan Wingate. Beyond the departments that I’ve called home over the years, my work has benefited from sustained conversations and chance encounters with colleagues whose suggestions, questions, critiques, and compliments have made this project better than it would have been had I not been so lucky to meet them: in scholarly life, there is no greater happiness than being taken seriously by others. Particular thanks to Faith Barrett, Mary Ellen Brown, Anne-Lise François, Kathleen Frederickson, Caroline Gelmi, Claire Jarvis, Erin Kappeler, Cristanne Miller, Elizabeth Renker, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Martha Nell Smith, and Elissa Zellinger. While the critical and intellectual genealogy of my work can be traced in its argument and documented through the endnotes, the story goes back a lot further than that. Like reading or research, education is as much about contingency and good fortune as it is about willpower or self-determination. In that sense, I have been especially fortunate in my teachers. Although some of them have likely not thought about me in years, I am grateful for the

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opportunity to acknowledge them. The traces of their impact are harder to read but are nonetheless the foundation to what follows: thanks to Jane Rymer, George Neville, Wende Greenberg, Helen Aslanides, Dino Eftychiou, Peter Saccio, Matthew Rowlinson, Monika Otter, Brenda Silver, Jonathan Crewe, and Melissa Zeiger. Since 2007, I have been part of the Historical Poetics working group, and I am endlessly inspired and energized by the conversations and collective goodwill that the HistPoes offer. The critical integrity and intellectual rigor that they bring to the study of nineteenth-century poetry is a model for me, and throughout the many dislocations that have punctuated this project, they have been my audience, always near at hand even when far away. Thanks to Max Cavitch, Tricia Lootens, Meredith Martin, Meredith McGill, Yopie Prins, Eliza Richards, Jason Rudy, Alex Socarides, Carolyn Williams, and, most especially, Virginia Jackson. Jennie has been with me every step, from New York City to Los Angeles, and she’s read every one of these sentences more than once. I’m sure her influence can be felt on each page, but nonetheless it makes me happy to acknowledge it here. Thanks for all your enthusiasm and support. In one of my earliest memories, my grandfather chased my cousin and me out of his attic office so he could finish writing his newspaper column. Later he let me tap out a story on his manual typewriter, and I can still recall vividly the sheer delight I took in the creative power of hammering on the keys, notwithstanding that the story was gibberish. My family has always offered the best encouragement for a life spent reading and writing. Thanks to them all: Nate, Carolyn, Logan, and Quinn Caldwell; Luke and Julie Kaye Caldwell; Bill Caldwell; Kate Keating; Alix McArdle and the late Tom McArdle; my brother Andrew Cohen; and my parents Dan and Toni Cohen. Jacque Marshall and Toby came into my life at the very end of this book, but I’m excited to share with them its introduction to the world. But, finally, this book is dedicated to Murray, who did his dogged best to make sure it would never get finished. Your infinite good cheer and assurance that things will always work out for the best are lessons I can only hope to learn. And now I’m happy to shut the computer and spend the rest of the day with you.