Early America Research Articles

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States

Book Review| January 01 2020 Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States Seth Perry. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Candy Gunther Brown Candy Gunther Brown Reviewed by Candy Gunther Brown (PhD, Harvard University) is professor of religious studies at Indiana University. Brown is the author or editor of six books, including The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mormon Studies Review (2020) 7: 143–147. https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.7.2020.0143 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Candy Gunther Brown; Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2020; 7 143–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.7.2020.0143 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States by Seth Perry

Reviewed by: Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States by Seth Perry John Fea (bio) Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States. By Seth Perry. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xv, 195. Cloth, $35.00.) Seth Perry joins scholars such as Peter Thuesen, Paul Gutjahr, Mark Noll, Lincoln Mullen, Timothy Beal, Candy Brown, David Nord, and John Fea in examining the centrality of the Christian scriptures to American politics, civil society, public discourse, and lived religion. Perry's monograph is deeply theoretical and perhaps unnecessarily dense. The fascinating stories he has uncovered in the archives and elsewhere often take a backseat to his methodological musings. But scholars willing to wade through the academic jargon will be challenged to think differently about the use of the Bible by ordinary Americans in the early republic. Some of the earliest Bible societies in the United States, including the American Bible Society (ABS), claimed to publish the scriptures "without note or comment." In 1824, Jeremiah Day, president of Yale College and a trustee of the ABS, asked, "Should not the Scriptures … be accompanied with notes and comments? So far as commentators enable us to understand what we read, we may be grateful for his aid. But we [End Page 572] are not to look for improvements on a revelation from heaven."1 Comments like Day's are representative of the way American Protestants have understood the Bible for more than three centuries, but as Perry notes, this "Bible alone" mentality does not represent the way most Protestants engaged the scriptures. As Perry reminds us, "the Bible was never, ever alone" (dust jacket). Perry examines the Bible not as "source" of religious authority in the early republic, but as a "site" of authority, "a cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships" (dust jacket). His book draws heavily on what religious-studies scholar Vincent Wimbush has called "scripturalization" in his book White Men's Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (Oxford, UK, 2012). According to Wimbush, the study of sacred texts should focus "not upon texts per se (that is, upon content-meanings), but upon textures, gestures, and power—namely the signs, material products, ritual practices and performances, expressivities, orientations, ethics, and politics associated with the phenomenon of the invention and uses of 'scriptures.'" Scripturalization, according to Perry, implies an "ongoing, dialogic process, replacing 'scripture' and its connotations of fixity" (5–6). Perry applies this theory of scripturalization to five different moments in the religious history of the early republic. In Chapter 1, he introduces us to what printers believed to be the ideal American Bible reader. This reader was white and Protestant but also "some combination of marginally literate, lower-class, and often female." She read the Bible in the context of family prayer. While printers often hoped that their Bibles would contribute to a white Christian nation, readers often made their own meaning of the text, suggesting that "real and imagined readers exist always in dialogic relationships" (39). Chapter 2 deals with "paratexts," the commentaries, cross-references, illustrations, concordances, and children's Bibles that "carried scholarly, ecclesiastical, social and state authority into the text itself" (41). These texts, what the ABS used to refer to as "helps," allowed readers to assert their own authority of the scriptures. In the process, they were creating new texts and "refracting the scripturalized status of the Bible in new directions" (62). In his last three chapters, Perry examines forms of biblical citation in [End Page 573] the early republic that "expanded upon rather than referred specifically back to the Bible itself." For example, when Denmark Vesey led his famous slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina, he employed a Bible-based rhetoric of resistance and violence that Perry calls "performed biblicism" (xx). Evangelical itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow often performed in the role of "apostle" to "cultivate relationships of authority with audiences" (77). His wife Peggy expanded the scriptures for her audiences by publishing a memoir that built upon biblical models for women such as Martha and Mary. Visions, Perry writes, were another way the scriptural text was extended beyond the printed word. Published accounts of spiritual visions—Perry calls them "visionary...

Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan

Reviewed by: Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan Catherine L. Evans (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) Law, Civil rights, Legal culture, Violence Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America. By Kelly A. Ryan. (New York: NYU Press, 2019400. Pp.. Cloth, $39.00.) Kelly A. Ryan’s Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America opens with two beatings. In 1741, the Boston Post Boy dispassionately reported a Massachusetts slave master’s violent assaults on an enslaved woman whom he accused of theft, and an enslaved man, her alleged accomplice. Ryan uses this incident, and others like it, to explore corporal punishment in early America, focusing on Massachusetts and New York. She argues that “legally and socially dependent peoples,” including “slaves, wives, and youthful servants,” were considered fitting objects of violent chastisement, and were therefore often denied legal redress when their safety was threatened or violated (1). However, legitimate violence had limits. While husbands could punish their wives and children, masters their slaves, and employers their servants, excessive or spectacular violence could attract both social censure and legal liability. Everyday Crimes describes the uneven topography of violence across groups over time. Throughout, Ryan emphasizes the complexities of [End Page 755] “dependence.” Gender, marital and slave status, age, race, and class collectively shaped an individual’s imagined susceptibility to violence. The book is divided into three chronological parts, from the colonial era through the Revolutionary period and into the early republic. Some chapters within parts take up particular groups, such as apprentices, “white wives,” and enslaved people. Others pursue themes, including “relationship building,” loyalty and suspicion, and “legal strategies for civil rights” (vii). Ryan characterizes the seventeenth century as a period of “great possibility,” as British North American settlers contemplated where to “draw the line between correction and abuse” in rapidly evolving colonial contexts (62). The eighteenth century, conversely, brought conservative retrenchment. Stable institutions, growing populations, and northerners’ deepening ties to the transatlantic slave trade prompted a renewed emphasis on social hierarchy and the authority of husbands and masters. The looming American Revolution prompted officials and other elites to regard dependent peoples’ protests as threats to social order. The crisis also brought some opportunities for change, and married women and African Americans made significant gains in New England and New York courts in the first decades of the new republic. Everyday Crimes is densely peopled. Ryan draws on archival records of criminal complaints and cases in which dependent victims of violence sought a variety of legal remedies, from peace bonds to convictions, against their aggressors. She structures her chapters around sketches of violent confrontations gleaned from newspapers and government records. These stories illustrate the ways in which dependent groups resisted their legal guardians’ violence, whether through resort to the courts or by less formal means, such as escaping, avoiding abusive masters, or seeking support from “bystanders,” including neighbors, patrons, and activists. Ryan is centrally interested in how even unsuccessful claims of abuse by dependent victims against violent guardians “influenced the creation of standards for safety in the community even if community members disagreed” (27). Although courts generally sided with guardians over dependents, she sees both power and politics in individual complainants’ choices to reveal their injuries and to “put their narratives about abuse on the map to be discovered” (5). She argues that these cases reveal human-and civil-rights consciousness among dependents, as they asserted their “belief in the human rights to safety and freedom from coercive labour” (5). In this, she challenges historians, such as Samuel Moyn, who see “human rights” as a twentieth-century innovation. Even those who locate [End Page 756] the birth of human rights and humanitarian discourses in the antislavery movements of the nineteenth century are, in Ryan’s view, overlooking the quiet campaign of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century dependents against abuse. Ryan is similarly eager to connect early American dependents’ efforts to the broader historiography of civil-rights legal activism, which she sees as unnecessarily confined to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some may be reluctant to follow Ryan in describing dependents’ petitions, freedom suits, peace suits, and requests for divorce as...

Sacred Violence in Early America by Susan Juster

Reviewed by: Sacred Violence in Early America by Susan Juster E. J. Kent Juster, Susan, Sacred Violence in Early America (Early American Studies), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; paperback; pp. xiii; 288; 17 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $26.50, £19.99; ISBN 9780812224191. This is a book that recommends itself to scholars in all fields of early modern European research, but particularly to those who consider the early modern Transatlantic. While it focuses on the Anglosphere, the themes of the book are relevant to the entire European encounter with the New World. Sacred Violence in Early America is, Susan Juster writes, 'a deep cultural history of the theology of violence: the presuppositions, referential chains, and linguistic homologies that structured how early Americans narrated, rationalized and fantasized about, and occasionally apologized for violence against a variety of religious "others"—heretics, sectarians, and, especially, Indians' (p. 3). Juster shows, clearly and vividly, that the violence inherent in the European religious contestations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries moved with them to the New World. Once there, far from becoming a new people as was once supposed, they continued the patterns of thought, behaviour, and belief structured and attuned to violence as fundamental to their religious project, and thus to all other habits of life. Juster goes about 'unearthing the logics that sustained such paradigmatic acts as warfare, captivity, conversion, heresy-hunting, and iconoclastic attacks' from 'English justifications for their own actions with an ear attuned to the rich semiotic and devotional traditions' of Western Christianity (p. 3). Through an 'archaeology of discourse' Juster examines the 'distinct theological paradigm' of 'blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction and iconoclasm' (each a chapter) and 'peels away the discursive layers to reveal the medieval and early modern antecedents' that provided 'form and meaning for […] colonial violence' to 'reconstruct the grammar of religious encounter' (p. 4). Her method is to 'identify and then tug, sometimes vigorously, at the ideological and rhetorical threads that bind early American religious violence […] to Europe's wars of religion' (p. 4). This enables Juster to follow the 'bright red line' of blood sacrifice, or the more episodic appearance of cannibalism, or concern about unruly tongues, through 'the entire corpus of colonial texts' (p. 4) to show that violence was in the very bones of the European encounter with 'America'. Juster's literary methods may not please all readers, particularly those attuned to the traditional political and religious histories of Puritanism. But what Juster offers here is not 'individual findings, many of which have been known to scholars for some time, but the assembling and juxtaposing of these historical fragments [End Page 264] to create a discursive map of early Anglo-American encounter with the religious other' (p. 5). Juster's work particularly reveals how the language of religious violence saturated everyday religious life for early Anglo-Americans. Her contention is that understanding this aspect of their religious mentalities enables comprehension of 'the combustible mixture of sacred and profane fears and desires that led English men and women to behave […] in such a savage manner toward their enemies in the New World' (p. 7). In calling this 'sacred violence' Juster is saying that even quotidian violence (against Quakers, Native Americans, African-Americans, other Anglo-Americans) was 'motivated and justified in significant part by religious aversion and/or desire' (p. 6) intended to 'restore the boundary between the sacred and the profane or to render profane what others find sacred' (p. 7). While not saying religious motivations were the only motivations to violence in early Anglo-America, Juster (with a nod to Natalie Zemon Davis, p. 7) demonstrates that the 'conquest and settlement of the New World was in fact the final bloody chapter of the Reformation Wars' (p. 13). If there are any concerns about this work, they would relate to what it does not include. This is in no way a criticism of Juster's study, which, in addressing the continuity of paradigms of religious violence from Europe to the New World, is a major contribution to the historiography of the early modern Transatlantic World and provides an important new perspective. But in taking her insights further, scholars must...

Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle

Reviewed by: Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle Shannon K. Withycombe (bio) Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America nora doyle University of North Carolina Press, 2018 286 pp. At some point in my courses in history of women and history of reproduction I like to show students images of pregnancy from eighteenth-century medical anatomy texts. I ask my students to gaze at images from William Hunter or William Smellie, to think about how these illustrations of [End Page 276] disembodied pelvises, chopped-off limbs, and abdomens splayed open affected how doctors and others approached reproducing women. If a young man learned about childbirth from a dismembered torso, detached from a woman’s mind and voice, how could this shape his actions in the midst of a birthing scene? How could these illustrations influence understandings of women’s bodies or their reproductive activities, and limit women’s roles in determining medical care or their ability to be heard? Nora Doyle answers these questions and many more with her study of the maternal body in early America. Uncovering descriptions, images, and ideals of the maternal body in print culture between 1750 and 1850, Doyle examines popular narratives about women birthing and nursing children, but more compellingly compares these narratives to women’s personal writings about their reproducing bodies. Juggling this multiplicity of sources, Doyle is able to present an original, timely, and captivating history. While the histories of reproduction and motherhood are rich genres, historians have rarely placed the body so squarely in the center of a study. Bodies often show up on the margins, but usually remain background or context for learned medicine, female activism, and governmental policy. Doyle considers both bodies in their unruly corporeality—leaking breasts, aching backs, tearing flesh—and their culturally mediated discursive and visual representations; perhaps most importantly, she delves into how these aspects of the maternal body are indelibly intertwined. Doyle shows not only that bodies matter but also that we cannot understand the institution of motherhood without a deep analysis of understandings of the bodies involved. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, two cultural transformations severely shaped the maternal body in American print culture. Following a similar movement in Europe, American medical men began to seek out the business of birthing women. These men instantly faced the social task of overturning the notion that entering a birthing room, sitting with a laboring woman, and examining how her labor was progressing (which usually included raising her skirts and looking directly at her vagina) was not something that a respectable man should be doing. As Doyle demonstrates, aspiring male-midwives, seeking to desexualize the experience, shifted the focus during birth from the woman to the uterus. Medical texts and advice manuals depicted the womb as an active agent in charge of expelling the child, and in illustrations as physically separated [End Page 277] from a woman with a voice, a will, or even complete legs. As male practitioners divided and dismembered the female body, women were essentially erased from the event; their maternal bodies became invisible and inactive. At the same time, Enlightenment projects crafted idealized womanhood as a mother focused on the emotional, moral, and spiritual nature of producing and raising children. Prescriptive literature, fiction and poetry, and images appearing in women’s magazines depicted an orderly, gentle, calm maternal body. Doyle highlights the presentation of breastfeeding in these narratives, the one physical activity that could be reconstructed as a moral, orderly pursuit. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers could portray breastfeeding as a pleasurable emotional activity, unlike childbirth. The typified sentimental mother only received pleasure from her mothering; it was dangerous to acknowledge the pain, distress, and the supreme physicality of motherhood. To fulfill her goal of restoring the body “to its rightful place in the history of motherhood,” Doyle cannot rely only on the print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (210). She also analyzes the impact of these genres by investigating the centrality of the body within women’s personal writings about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. Doyle discovers a range of women’s reflections on and reactions to their physical...

Perry, Seth. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 216 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPerry, Seth. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 216 pp. $35.00 (cloth).Abram Van EngenAbram Van EngenWashington University in St. Louis. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 100, Number 1January 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/706170 Views: 51Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Abolishing Slavery in Motion: Foreign Captivity and International Abolitionism in the Early United States

During the late eighteenth century, servants, apprentices, and free people of African descent were taken into captivity in one nation and enslaved in another. Abolishing this kind of international slavery in motion comprised an element of the antislavery agenda for abolitionists in the United States. Existing work on the early antislavery movement has focused largely within national contexts and on abolitionists’ dogged attempts to abolish the institution of slavery. Yet abolitionists had to create cosmopolitan antislavery strategies to dismantle the kinds of coerced mobility that rendered people enslaved in foreign realms. Captives and their abolitionist allies worked to make freedom papers a key part of antislavery law. Scholars have ably shown that freedom papers could be protectors of liberty, and examining attempts to eradicate slavery in motion helps to unpack why and how documents acquired important power. Crafting antislavery law and politics to end the coerced mobility of servants, apprentices, and free people in the wider Atlantic world fit within a broad antislavery agenda in the early United States.

The letters of Mary Penry. A single Moravian woman in early America. Edited by Scott Paul Gordon. (Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist Studies.) Pp. xx + 295 incl. 7 ills. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. $84.95. 978 0 271 08108 3

The letters of Mary Penry. A single Moravian woman in early America. Edited by Scott Paul Gordon. (Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist Studies.) Pp. xx + 295 incl. 7 ills. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. $84.95. 978 0 271 08108 3 - Volume 71 Issue 1

One Husband, One Wife, Whaddya Got?

One Husband, One Wife, Whaddya Got? Kathleen DuVal (bio) Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Polygamy: An Early American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xv + 397 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $32.50. In January 1855, Parley Pratt wrote a loving letter from San Francisco to Belinda Marden Pratt, his wife. He told her about a woman he believed— correctly—that his wife would sympathize with, because both women had suffered through difficult first marriages. “She is the very counterpart of your self,” Parley wrote. As Belinda once had, she “is groaning under a bondage,” but one “tenfold more terrible ... than yours once was” (p. 279). Their stories would take a happier turn, though, with both women finding a safer home and a kinder husband. Both would become wives of Parley Pratt. Parley’s tender words and Belinda’s appreciation of them are pretty much the opposite of what most of their American contemporaries thought of plural marriage. Critics of women who defended plural marriage would call them an “infernal minister of the devil,” a “duped drudge,” and a “martyr to unbridled lust” (p. 3). Just the year before Parley sent his letter, a U.S. official in Utah had written that polygamy “belongs now to the indolent and opium-eating Turks and Asiatics, the miserable Africans, the North American savages, and the Latter-Day Saints” (p. 284). That sentence alone reveals a great deal about the 1850s, and a lesser book focused on polygamy in early America would have found plenty of material by centering only on ignorant critiques like that one, starting with Spanish priests coming to North America to change the continent’s heathen ways. Sarah Pearsall’s marvelous new study does analyze these many critiques and uses them to illuminate the long history of early American thinking about marriage, gender, sexuality, and power. Even more significantly, though, Polygamy introduces us to people like Belinda Marden Pratt who lived in—and sometimes purposefully chose— plural marriage. Parallel to more prominent nineteenth-century reformers, she scrutinized marriage, and she came to the conclusion that polygyny (one husband and multiple wives) was the best system for children and for women. In her experience, “by mutual and long continued exercises of toil, [End Page 13] patience, long-suffering sisterly kindness” as they maintained a household and mothered children together, sister-wives created the best kind of family (p. 277). Through this kind of close look at polygamy in practice, this breathtakingly ambitious and successful book analyzes power in early America “as seen through households, which is where most people actually lived” (p. 1). As Pearsall’s diverse and compelling chapters on polygamy took me from the seventeenth-century Pueblos of New Mexico to the palaces of eighteenth-century Dahomey to 1850s Utah, I found myself surprised at just how useful polygamy was. Polygamous marriages, like monogamous ones, served many purposes: production and reproduction, legitimizing lineages and inheritance, forging diplomatic ties, building and broadcasting power, and providing long-term love, sex, and companionship. Sister-wives lightened Belinda Marden Pratt’s work both physically and emotionally at the same time as they bolstered their husband’s prestige among other men and into future generations (including Mitt Romney, a great-great-grandson of Parley and his fourth wife). In addition, as Pearsall repeatedly proves, plural marriage is (to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss) useful to think with, for historians as much as for theologians, politicians, and reformers. By de-normalizing monogamy, the book contextualizes all marriage and brings new insights to women’s history, family history, and the study of sexuality. Pearsall’s tenacious research in archaeology, language, and astoundingly wide-ranging primary and secondary writings uncovers polygamy in all kinds of places, often where it was hidden in plain sight. As she did in her previous book, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (2009), Pearsall connects the intimate to the grandest scales of power, colonialism, and race, showing that gender, family, and sex are hardly sidebar subjects but instead are key to understanding just about everything men and women do. First of all, polygamy “was as much about economics as it was about sex” (p. 40). In...

Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M. S. Pearsall

Reviewed by: Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M. S. Pearsall Sandra Slater Polygamy: An Early American History. By Sarah M. S. Pearsall. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 397. $38.00, ISBN 9780-300-22684-3.) Sarah M. S. Pearsall's recent publication, Polygamy: An Early American History, at first glance appears to be a story of Mormonism. However, from its first pages, Pearsall makes a compelling argument for the presence and importance of plural marriages throughout early America and successfully disrupts the European narrative of monogamy as the only acceptable and practiced system of marriage in early America. Using individual biographies to investigate concepts of matrimony among Indigenous, African, and European people in the Atlantic world, this book does more than simply demonstrate that polygamy existed in a myriad of forms throughout the Atlantic; her work challenges the underpinnings of the Western Christian narrative of marriage. As she concludes, "Monogamous heterosexual marriage as the only form of allowable marriage was one of the legacies of colonial conquest" (p. 291). The chapters of the book focus on various locations and chronologies with Mormonism appearing only toward the end of the narrative. Grounding her narratives in widely practiced plural marriages among Natives in America, Pearsall reveals the extensive anxieties expressed by colonial officials and religious missionaries who asserted the sanctity of a monogamous marriage, an often difficult endeavor given the amount of plural marriage in the Old Testament. For Europeans, the practice of polygamy indicated deviance, barbarism, and extensive male lust. Natives accepted components of Christianity but were reluctant to embrace monogamy as a cultural practice because of its impracticality. Women, often perceived as victims of polygamy, eagerly embraced the concept to share the burdens of the household, childbirth, and the rearing of large families. Large networks of kinship provided security and community for men and women alike. This narrative also applied to West African tribes who extensively practiced plural marriage for similar reasons. Europeans quickly targeted polygamy as indicative of the lack of civilization, which provided justification for enslavement and subsequent oppression. In slavery, marriage was a complicated institution, often forbidden to enslaved men and women, and yet many practiced plural marriages in their own cultural constructions and behaviors. The necessity of multifaceted networks of family were crucial to survival in enslavement. The use of biography in each chapter as a point of exploration makes Pearsall's extensive work accessible to a wide audience. Working with European, Indigenous, and African narratives, a broad Atlantic scope, and a 250-year chronology challenges readers to master various historical narratives, though Pearsall moves from one to another seamlessly. Her use of biography as an entry point is successful in this regard. However, this structure is also indicative of the weakness of such a book. Chapters on Native and African plural marriages are far stronger than others where single narratives suggest broader adoption of plural marriages without ever quantifying the practice. How widely practiced was plural marriage in Europe? Yes, there was a larger discourse that redefined marriage during the early modern period in the Atlantic world, but how did this discourse affect daily choices? Despite these unanswered [End Page 684] questions, Polygamy does a remarkable job of displacing the construction of monogamy as universal in the Atlantic world. Moreover, Pearsall underscores the active participation and consent of women who entered plural marriages. Polygamy, often imbued with judgments and prejudices, was central to the narrative of Atlantic intimacy. Sandra Slater College of Charleston Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

“Caring for Our Affairs Ourselves”: Stockbridge Mohican Women and Indian Education in Early America

Indian education has long been acknowledged in American historiography and American Indian Studies as the primary conduit for the cultural genocide of indigenous peoples. The rise of federal Indian boarding schools looms large over the long narrative of Indian education in America, often shading the way scholars interpret earlier Indian engagement with Anglo-style education. This is particularly evident in scholarship that traces the roots of American education and civilization policies to Henry Knox in the 1790s. The emphasis scholars have placed on white men and their initiatives toward "civilizing" Indian people have inadvertently erased indigenous agency and power within the early education system. Informed by indigenous feminism, this article utilizes ethnohistorical approaches to piece together how Mohican women advocated for the prioritization of girls' education in the 1790s. Their emphasis on female education resulted in greater prosperity for the nation, but their work to establish this model was quickly hijacked by white missionaries and Indian agents who took credit for the idea and Stockbridge success. The female-first strategy that was originally deployed to aid in the securing of Stockbridge land and sovereignty was later adopted by white architects of Indian education as a tool of tribal destruction. Drawing upon Mohican women's never-before-analyzed letters, Mohican craft works, and a careful reevaluation of War Department and missionary records, this piece contributes to the growing body of literature on indigenous women and power in early America while complicating the narrative of the decline of indigenous women's authority in the early years of the American Republic.

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States by Seth Perry

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States by Seth Perry

Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec III.

Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec III.

Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan

Reviewed by: Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan Gabriel Loiacono (bio) Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic. By Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 225. Cloth, $35.00.) “Ding! You are now free to move about the country,” Southwest Airlines used to advertise to its passengers. That freedom did not exist in the early American republic, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan demonstrates in Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic. Instead, municipal officials tightly controlled how Americans moved about the country. Using settlement laws and vagrancy statutes, local governments denied mobility to significant numbers of poor Americans, which had a chilling effect on the mobility of others. Going by different titles in different states, local officials could stop and interrogate newcomers to town. Then, they could incarcerate or banish the newcomers from town if they thought it appropriate. While other scholars believe that warning out was not practiced much past 1800, O’Brassill-Kulfan finds the practice thriving into the 1830s, and occasionally used in the 1930s. Moreover, she argues, these official responses to mobility among the poor gave shape to citizenship, policing, and poor relief in the early republic and continue to shape ideas about race and immigration today. Vagrants and Vagabonds focuses readers’ attention on important truths about the early United States. Foremost is how circumscribed mobility was for Americans before the Civil War. Another is how important local governments, rather than state or federal, were in shaping the lives and citizenship rights of early Americans. Readers of this journal might particularly be interested in how efforts to control the movement of freed slaves around 1865 were prefigured by northern states’ responses to emancipation in the 1780s and after. Not only that, but the fugitive slave laws of the pre–Civil War period were predicated in part on vagrancy statutes. Chapter 4, in particular, unpacks the connections between slavery, emancipation, runaways, race, and warning out. The mid-Atlantic states provide the geographical scope of this book about geographical freedom. Much of the evidence is drawn from the Philadelphia City Archives, but Vagrants and Vagabonds makes use of an array of local, state, and private archives. Drawing on lots of individual stories, O’Brassill-Kulfan illustrates the big themes of why and where people migrated in this region. Readers meet migrating Americans who [End Page 254] were caught up in the local police systems of Pennsylvania and New York or, less frequently, Delaware and Maryland. Readers also get a sense of how civic leaders and low-level officials responded to these movers about the country. Immigrants, escaped slaves, casual laborers, children, widows, and families with frozen feet all make their appearance. So do inspectors, guardians of the poor, watchmen, and the kinds of social critics who might get published in local newspapers. The result is a collection of individuals moving and institutions responding to that movement. It is a story built from the constituent parts up to the big narrative. This story built from the local up recovers the often forgotten constraints imposed on Americans by local governments. Rightly, Vagrants and Vagabonds hammers the theme of what O’Brassill-Kulfan calls “the state’s largely reactionary efforts to exert social, spatial, behavioral, and economic control on the lower and working classes in response to the social and economic instability that defined the period” (6). Also rightly, the book documents individual migrants’ efforts to move freely in spite of those constraints. In these emphases, Vagrants and Vagabonds follows some of the interpretive trails blazed by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Social Welfare, originally published in 1971. Like that work, Vagrants and Vagabonds emphasizes the “social control” aspects of the poor laws. Also like Regulating the Poor, Vagrants and Vagabonds gives little space to the more positive flip side of the settlement laws. In theory, settlement laws meant that everyone in need should be able to find unlimited access to food, housing, medicine, even doctoring, in their own place of settlement. To argue that settlement laws are intended primarily...

The Adelaide Brent Letters: Queer Care in Medical Correspondence

The Adelaide Brent Letters:Queer Care in Medical Correspondence Julia Dauer Nine years before the publication of Thomas DeQuincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), a young woman named Adelaide Brent wrote a letter about her opium habit. The letter, dated 1 December and likely composed in Washington, DC, in 1812, was meant for Dr. Benjamin Rush, the most famous physician in the early United States. Brent's family and physicians had written to Rush detailing her opium use and questioning her sanity, so she sent her own letter to counteract their reports. This Feature introduces four letters from Rush's incoming correspondence, all of which concern Brent's health. During his long career as a physician in Philadelphia, Rush received letters from patients and physicians all over the East Coast. He participated in a robust network of epistolary medicine, which allowed physicians to share information while also inviting patients to actively participate in narrating their own experiences of illness (Knott 646, 674; Dauer 781–82). Brent was one of many people who wrote to Rush to ask for medical advice and to shape her own care. Although she sought Rush's assistance, Brent does not appear to have been interested in subordinating her own assessment of her behavior to his expert authority. She instead aimed to mobilize Rush's expertise in support of her self-assessment. In their content and context, Brent's letters offer us an opportunity to locate queer forms of refusal and care in medical correspondence. Brent powerfully revises discourses of independence and freedom to justify her opium use and her rejection of normative standards of behavior. The queer freedom she posits relies on her attachment to a female friend, whose letter of support legitimizes Brent's account and suggests a network of resistant homosocial care at work in early republican medicine. [End Page 132] The Brent letters are compelling because they record a conflict among Brent, her family, and her physicians. These letters offer a glimpse into the disputes around appropriate care and trustworthy observation that permeate medical practice in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Letter 1 describes Brent as a woman whose "ambitious notions of Independence" have fueled her life-threatening opium habit (138). The letter describes Brent as "perverse," details her opium and laudanum usage and other objectionable behavior, and muses about how best to control her in the future (137). On first reading, this letter comes across as a devastating account of addiction, linked to conflicts about inheritance (Brent took control of her father's estate at a young age after her mother's death), the appropriate role of women in their families (Brent's father and brothers continually wrangle with her behavior), and the impacts of education (Brent's liberal education and high ideals are deemed partially responsible for her mental distress and substance abuse). Already, a strain of queer desire runs through this narrative of addiction and refusal, as the writer of this letter links Brent's prolific opium use to her rejection of normative expectations about gender and attachment. As this writer puts it, Brent's behavior is "elevated by her high and ambitious notions of Independence," which guide her conduct "in defiance of the disapprobation of her friends & the censure of the World" (138). Convictions about the ideal of independence and the power of desire supersede moral judgment. Letters 2 and 3 shift this picture significantly, adding depth to the conflicts around self-determination, desire, and gender that are hinted at in Letter 1. Letter 2 is Brent's own letter to Rush, rebutting the narrative produced by her father, brother, and physicians. Brent outlines her experience of health, her use of opium, and her objection to the forms of evidence offered in the unsigned first letter. While Brent acknowledges her "distress" over the possibility of having committed an unforgivable sin, and her use of opium to assuage her "exquisite" suffering, she also maintains that she is a moral, socially fit, and rational person, fully in control of her opium usage and her behavior in the rest of her life (140, 141). Brent's letter is self-assured and insistent...

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires

The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires

Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec, III.

Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec, III.

Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship by Carrie Hyde

Reviewed by: Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship by Carrie Hyde Kevin Butterfield (bio) Keywords citizenship, slavery Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship. By Carrie Hyde. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 308. Cloth, $46.50.) What are we to make of the fact that Attorney General Edward Bates, writing during the Civil War, was utterly and justifiably perplexed as to "what constitutes a citizen of the United States?" The meaning of citizenship was, for Bates in 1862, "as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and to speculative criticism, as it was in the beginning of the government" (1). Only with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, could Americans finally see citizenship in their own nation as a codified, clarified concept. Carrie Hyde has stepped into this field of uncertainty in a provocative and ambitious study of the contested possibilities of citizenship in the early United States. She explores how and why Americans turned to speculative traditions like theology, natural law, and fictional literature in order to create and defend wholly new notions of what citizenship ought to mean. And this really is her key point: Nebulous and imprecise definitions of citizenship "did not inhibit its cultural idealization; it actually facilitated it" (19). In a stratified, post-Revolutionary United States in which slavery, dispossession, and oppression were daily realities for many of its inhabitants, the lack of legal specificity of what was meant by the term citizen created powerful opportunities for imaginative and often radically more inclusive visions of American belonging. Hyde's first chapter is the most law-focused section of the book, laying the groundwork for the claim that incoherence and open-endedness in Americans' conceptions of citizenship before 1868 gave writers an especially open field in which to aspire, critique, and challenge. The author's [End Page 162] strengths lie in her close reading of literary texts, which means that her account of the diverse array of laws governing citizenship and alienage is relatively abbreviated and superficial compared with, say, James Kettner's still-definitive work on The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978). But it also means that, when Hyde does turn her interpretive eye to words that lay at the heart of these questions, fresh insights abound. Roger Taney's tortured originalism in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) gets an incisive reading, for instance, in part because she situates Taney's words as being, themselves, suggestive and speculative. In fact, Taney serves as evidence that speculation and creativity could just as easily work against inclusivity as for it. Somewhat strangely, though, Hyde never addresses at all what exactly the case was about. To be sure, readers of this journal hardly need any reminder of who Dred and Harriet Scott were and why the suit mattered. But the omission of even a brief mention that this was a case in which enslaved people were suing for their freedom is a sign that this book is—and of course was always intended to be—rewarding only for those with a firm knowledge of the period. For those readers, though, the book is exceptionally rewarding. Each of the final four chapters dives deeply into how vague legal and constitutional descriptions of citizenship afforded particularly salient opportunities for Americans to raise new possibilities or even to challenge the existing order. Chapter 2 considers the simple fact that one of the most common uses of the word "citizen" in the Founding era had nothing to do with an earthly polity at all. Rather, it concerned affiliation in the kingdom of God. It was at this time that translations of the New Testament began to find in Philippians 3:20 a reference to the idea that, for Christians, "our citizenship is in heaven." (Previous translations had referred to "conversation," not citizenship, in the heavenly realm.) Critiques of our world founded in this Christian estrangement from mundane things like political life "provided a way of authorizing visions of citizenship that exceeded the racialized, gendered logic of the still-emergent juridical citizen," though they could of course also serve to reinforce "existing...

Beyond Prophecy: Native Visionaries in American Religious Studies - Más allá de la profecía: Los visionarios nativos en los estudios de la religión americanos

This three-part article traces the use of the word “prophet” to describe Native actors such as Neolin and Handsome Lake in colonial North America and the early United States; details the category's perpetuation and effects in work by ethnologists, anthropologists, historians, and scholars of religious studies; and, finally, proposes a focus on visionary media, including wampum and maps, as articulations of Native peoplehood—a concept borrowed from Native American and Indigenous Studies. The goal is to show how “prophet” classifications emerged within a context of colonization and religious dispute. Continued use reinforces narratives of Native disappearance, if not excuses anti-Native violence, in American religious studies. In response, I call on scholars to decolonize their writing and teaching about Native visionaries by focusing on their media as evidence of the futures they projected for their people.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution by Tyson Reeder

Reviewed by: Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution by Tyson Reeder Edward P. Pompeian (bio) Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution. By Tyson Reeder. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 368. Cloth, $45.00.) This carefully researched, multi-local study analyzes the politics, ideology, and diplomacy of free trade during the Age of Revolutions by highlighting the fundamentally commercial nature of U.S. relations with the Luso–Atlantic world. With a comparative approach that entangles the [End Page 557] history of the United States with the Portuguese Empire, Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots offers another window into the political and economic development of the United States. Its citizens saw free trade and republicanism as a lever to pry open Iberian American markets and to oppose monarchy and empire. Notwithstanding a minority of unruly republican insurgents in Pernambuco, the peoples of the Luso–Atlantic overwhelmingly did not share the North Americans' beliefs. Reeder's thesis is that U.S. free traders were repeatedly disappointed as liberal economic and commercial reforms in the Luso–Atlantic world bolstered the imperial status quo under a crown and scepter. Their hopes for a Brazilian republican bonanza were dashed when neither republicanism nor free trade arose and British merchants retained dominance over the region's commerce after independence in 1822. In the process, Brazilians undermined U.S. Americans' vision for a hemisphere of independent free-trade republics, and slavery became their only commonality. In the United States, the ideology of free trade and republicanism was the victim of the nation's political leaders who chose to safeguard the country's international reputation rather than to help secure South Americans' freedom. Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots illustrates why the long-eighteenth-century perspective is crucial to understanding the early United States republic. The American Revolution and the creation of the United States gave birth to what Reeder calls a "new paradigm" or "syllogism that equated independence from Europe with republicanism, republicanism with free trade, and free trade with prosperity" (5). This paradigm was born from the Atlantic empires' reliance on trade networks that required inter-imperial trade and triggered contraband in defiance of strict mercantilist policy. He suggests that the paradigm took hold in British North America in the 1760s and 1770s largely because the British Empire refused to implement liberal reforms, unlike the Portuguese who linked "trade liberalization with imperial cohesion rather than fragmentation" (58). Reeder argues that the commercial disputes of the British imperial crisis were intimately tied to Anglo Americans' participation in Luso–Atlantic trade. And yet the American Revolution had the unforeseen consequence of severing the once extensive legal and illicit commercial relations British North Americans had enjoyed particularly with the Wine Islands under Anglo–Portuguese treaties. From the 1780s through the early 1820s, U.S. officials were stymied repeatedly in their efforts to [End Page 558] negotiate a trade deal with Portugal. In the meantime, Portuguese imperial regulations vacillated between bans and permissions for U.S. shipping which "reinforced the developing notion that European monarchies made poor trade partners" (86). As the free-trade ideology became the foundation of the new republican paradigm, U.S. commerce shifted to Brazil. Reeder broadens analysis of early United States international relations by considering the divergent perspectives of disobedient merchants, unruly privateers, and rogue consuls alongside diplomats and government officials. He posits that a deeply conflictive relationship existed between free traders and the state. Whether they were Anglo Americans or Brazilians, republican citizens or monarchical subjects, the free traders appearing in this book did not share an ideology, but they all desired access to foreign markets free of government regulation and prohibitive policies. The final chapters make the strongest case for this argument by focusing on familiar privateers, studied most recently by David Head and Caitlin Fitz, and obscure self-serving zealots who were temporarily appointed U.S. consuls before being removed for abusing their office and undermining U.S. foreign policy. Reeder seems to favor these and other free-trade "dissidents who challenged state authority" (2) because of their anti-state variant of liberty and commerce. There are dogged inconsistencies in this conflict-based interpretation that...