Drawn Together:

Collective Representation in United States Visual Culture, 1815–1860

by

Abigail Sara Glogower

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by Professor Paul Duro

Program in Visual and Cultural Studies Arts, Sciences and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester Rochester, New York

2017

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Dedication

To the late bloomers and

non-traditional students.

May we get there eventually

and honor our stories every step of the way.

~

Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion of equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. This complete equality every day slips through people's fingers at the moment when they think they have a hold on it; it flees, as Pascal says, in an eternal flight.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

How clean the sun when seen in its idea, Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven That has expelled us and our images . . .

—Wallace Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”

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Table of Contents

Biographical Sketch iv

Acknowledgments vi

Abstract xii

Contributors and Funding Sources xiii

List of Figures xiv

Chapter 1 Introduction: Representation in Absentia 1

Chapter 2 “An Event Like a Ritual”: Representative Fictions in the Declaration of Independence 29

Chapter 3 “This Will Show You What You Are”: Thomas L. McKenney’s Problems of Indian Representation 83

Chapter 4 Portraits in and on Stone: Visualizing Deafness, 1817–1855 154

Chapter 5 “Why Ask a Name?”: Women’s Autograph Collecting and the Suturing of Social Space 218

Conclusion The Cultural Logic of Imperfect Symbols 264

Bibliography 280

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Biographical Sketch

Abigail (Abby) Sara Glogower was born in Waltham, Massachusetts and grew up

in Washington, DC and Ann Arbor, Michigan. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in

from Oberlin College in 2002, where she also began a career in museum education. Since

serving as a docent and educational programs assistant in the Allen Memorial Art

Museum at Oberlin, she has developed and led educational programming at the Brooklyn

Museum, the Mattress Factory Museum, the Spertus Museum, the National Veterans Art

Museum, and the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Between 2004 and 2008, she was an

active musician, writer, and member of collective artist live-work-venue spaces in

Oakland, California and Chicago, Illinois while working in public libraries, where she

specialized in teaching internet literacy skills to adult learners. She completed her Master

of Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and began doctoral

study in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in

2010, under the supervision of Professors Paul Duro and Janet Berlo. During her time at

the University of Rochester, Abby received the Celeste Bishop Hughes Award for

Distinction in Graduate Studies; curated exhibitions and digital projects in the library;

taught classes in the Art History Department, the Library Department of Rare Books and

Special Collections, and the Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program; and has served

as book reviews editor for the journal Invisible Culture, a writing tutor, and a docent in

the photography galleries at the George Eastman Museum.

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Publications

“‘This Will Show You What You Are’: Thomas L. McKenney’s Problems of Indian Representation,” manuscript in progress for Winterthur Portfolio.

Review of Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America by Jennifer

L. Roberts. Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4 (November 2015): 912–14. “On Visual Eavesdropping and the White Noise of History: Albert Newsam and Deaf

Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.” Blog, Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind, September 1, 2015. http://commontouch.librarycompany.org/on-visual-eavesdropping-and-the-white-noise-of-history-albert-newsam-and-deaf-culture-in-nineteenth-century-america/.

“‘Now Let Us Meet the World’: Being, Appearing and Seeing in Hawthorne’s The House

of the Seven Gables.” In Technology and Humanity. Edited by Carol Colatrella. Critical Insights. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press-EBSCO, 2013.

Review of Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of LJM Daguerre by

Stephen C. Pinson. Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 1 (February 2013): 89-91.

“Between Two Worlds: Ghost Stories Under Glass in Vienna and Chicago.” With

Margaret Olin. In Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History. Edited by Richard I. Cohen. Studies in Contemporary Jewry 26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Acknowledgments

The Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester has

afforded me tremendous breadth and creativity in my graduate studies and the

opportunity to study with many talented scholars and teachers. I have had the good

fortune of being supervised and mentored by Professors Paul Duro and Janet Berlo,

whose fine writing and great sensitivity of thought are matched only by their patience,

professionalism, and commitment to their students.

As my advisor, Paul has calmly and encouragingly shepherded this project from

inchoate kernel to complete thesis, always holding me accountable for my potential while

quietly lobbying for my success. Janet has been my generous copyeditor, my chief

consoler in times of distress, my constant inspiration to write and create, and my guide in

the ways of Sisterhood. Ezra Tawil in the English Department completed this team of

superheroes by being one of the best “idea therapists” I’ve met in the business, and his

candor, enthusiasm, and insight have been a great source of inspiration to me along the

way. Happily, Ryan Prendergast from the Department of Modern Language and Cultures,

whose acuity is equal to his wit, graciously agreed to chair my defense. Thank you all for

your unwavering belief in me, even (and especially) when I did not believe in myself.

Looking back, many of the ideas that have shaped this thesis were first introduced

to me by Dr. Margaret Olin in her “Visualized Communities” seminar at the Art Institute

of Chicago. I have immense gratitude for her scholarship, wisdom, and encouragement to

stick with art history because “every discipline needs scholars who feel like misfits.”

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Wonderful people too numerous to list here have made Rochester into a fun and

loving home these past seven years. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the following

colleagues and friends whose enthusiasm for ideas and warm camaraderie have

contributed significantly to my success and happiness here: Tara Ahmadi, Amy Arbogast,

Keturah Bixby and David Ruskin, Abby Brengle, Alicia Chester and Kate Phillips, Ryan

Conrath and Lauren DiGiulio, Josh Dubler and Lisa Cerami, Berin Golonu, Mitch Gruber

and Amy Natiella, Gloria Kim, Alex Marr and Jen Mossgraber, Clay Matlin and Sarah

McDougald Kohn, Chris and Abby Patrello, Hardeep Sidhu and Liz Goodfellow,

Serenity Sutherland and Matthew Vollmer, and Laura and Chris Whitebell.

Brilliant and generous friends from other points in my life have sustained me

through this experience. Annie Novotny and Kate Walsh have radiated endless love,

support, and inspiration to me from Chicago. Drs. Sara Feldman and Radhika Natarajan

have read numerous drafts and workshopped countless ideas. They continue teaching me

how “to academic,” with their coaching and advice and, most importantly, by providing

exemplary models of astute, compassionate, and rehabilitative thinking, scholarship, and

activism. Sara, more than anyone else, served as my “midwife” during the final months,

keeping me organized and motivated and encouraging me with daily affirmations. I look

forward to returning the favors when her first book is due.

We must never forget that administrative support staff are the secret heroes of the

university. Very deep thanks go to “Papa” Marty Collier, “Mama” Cathy Humphrey, and

Lorna Maier for making the Art and Art History Department a welcoming home these

past seven years. They, along with Juliet Carello in the Film and Media Studies Program,

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have provided a refuge for me within the tempestuous world of academia. In their kind

and capable hands, I’ve always felt appreciated, valued, and able to navigate any

bureaucratic obstacle in my path.

Faculty and staff in other departments have been instrumental in my success here,

sometimes indirectly. I’m grateful to Tyler Brogan in the Department of Modern

Languages and Cultures for all the delicious sweet treats over the years, but more

importantly for hiring my partner, Josh, and being a great boss to him. Faculty in MLC

who have been especially kind and supportive of us both include: John Givens, Ting

Huang, June Hwang, Kirt Komocki, Jason Peck, William Schaefer, and Luisa-Maria

Rojas-Rimachi.

Others who have supported me immensely are my therapist, Leslie Stern-Gastell,

and my doctor, Brenda Cooley. These talented and caring women have helped me in the

great challenge of caring for my body, mind, and heart during graduate school. I thank

Michelle and Nah and their associates at Orchid Nails in Henrietta for keeping me from

masticating my fingers into oblivion with their excellent work. Also, I will always love

Eric Phamdo for doing the impossible: getting me to enjoy yoga!

In my experience, a dissertation is not a solitary endeavor; it took a village to

produce one. Jacob Lewis in Art History provided insightful feedback on an early draft of

my third chapter. Over the years, many talented friends and colleagues in the Writing,

Speaking, and Argument Program have helped me with my writing: Abby Brengle, Tyler

Cassidy-Heacock, Emily Kolhasse, Dan Kraines, Rachel Lee, Liz Tinelli, Hilary

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Wermers, Peter Zogas, and most especially this past year, the incomparable, brilliant R.

E. Fulton.

One of the benefits of attending graduate school in the humanities in a STEM-

heavy school is feeling like the incredible resources in the library exist for you alone.

Never did I have to so suffer a “recall war,” but more importantly the dedicated staff at

the River Campus Libraries have made Rochester a home for me and my scholarship over

the years. I’m grateful to Solomon Blaylock, Amy Lund, Kathy Metz, Katie Papas, and

everyone in Access Services, as well as my indefatigable research detective, Eileen Daly-

Boas in Reference, and Judy Viken and the staff in Interlibrary Loans. Marc Bollman,

Tom Clifford, and Stefanie Frontz made the Art Library my colorful and sardonic home

away from home. Thanks also go to Lori Birrell, Travis Johansen, and the wonderful

team up in Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, for affording me many

opportunities to grow as a researcher, curator, and teacher.

At the Library Company of Philadelphia, Erika Piola introduced me to Albert

Newsam and has been a constant source of research assistance and intellectual

camaraderie ever since. I am grateful to her and Nicole Joniec for letting me take up

residence in their study room and making me way more photocopies than they were

obliged to.

A special word of thanks must be made to Raymond N. Ball, former treasurer at

the University of Rochester, and his friends and family for setting up the Raymond N.

Ball Dissertation Year Fellowship, of which I was the lucky recipient during my last year.

Some leave their legacy in the form of a grand edifice; Raymond Ball chose instead to

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support the life and labor of the mind inside those buildings. This fellowship has not only

enabled me to finish, but to finish with a minimum of psychic and financial anguish. It

has made all the difference in the life of this particular scholar, and I hope more

philanthropists will follow his generous and sustaining example.

Somehow my parents, Rabbi Rod and Nehama Glogower, have kept believing in

me all these years. I am grateful that they read so many books to me when I was a child

who struggled to read on her own (but treasured the pictures!), and that they have always

encouraged me to follow my addled dreams. My five siblings, Ari, Naomi, Shira, Yoni,

and Jo—and the siblings I’ve gained through them, Katy, Jon, and Mary—form the

richest of family networks that ensures I will never be bored or lonely as long as I live.

Whether by luck or design, I also managed to marry into more kind and hilarious kin and

I’m grateful to the Boydstun family for expanding the circle of love and support around

me.

Sadly, I lost two grandparents while this dissertation was in progress: Jules

Glogower and Goldie Stampfer. I am very sorry they did not get to see me finish but hope

this accomplishment will bring nachas to my beloved surviving grandparents, Janet

Glogower and Rabbi Joshua Stampfer. I never had the chance to meet my partner’s

maternal grandmother, Rosalind Appel Rappaport, but every day in our home I get to

cherish just some of the many beautiful images and objects she collected throughout her

lifetime. Chapter 3 of this dissertation is dedicated to her.

Finally, at the end of everything, there is Joshua: my gifted research assistant,

eagle-eyed copyeditor, tutor in presidential trivia, co-parent of canines, best friend, and

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love of my life, to whose unending capability and support I owe everything. By the

measures of adoration, companionship, laughter, and mutual respect, I believe we are the

wealthiest two people on earth. The highest degree I aspire to earn in this world is in

continuing to build a life with you.

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Abstract

This dissertation explores visual endeavors to create e pluribus unum: out of

many, one. Each chapter engages group portraits that were assembled across time,

distance, and difference in order to forge stable and unifying visual symbols. I

demonstrate that these “collective representations” offered people in the United States a

means of both seeing togetherness and seeing together during a time of expansion and

change. Merging theories of representation from art history and politics, I consider how

the shared operations of “making present again” work to draw individuals together, both

visually and socio-politically. Assembling projects as varied as reproductions of the

Declaration of Independence, an early portrait-based compendium of Native American

history, emerging minority participation in monument culture, and women’s autograph

collecting for political causes, I interrogate the motives for and consequences of

constructing these visual and social composites. In every instance, a gap or a need has

prompted the visualization of a social corpus, thereby bringing it—productively and

problematically—into being. This intractable entwinement of presence and absence, I

argue, lies at the core of United States representative democracy, and collective

representations are sites where this tension can be explored, expanded, negotiated, and

contested. By embracing that paradox of representation, this study offers new glimpses

into a rapidly expanding and diversifying American population struggling to see and

know itself.

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Contributors and Funding Sources

This dissertation has been supervised by Professors Paul Duro, advisor

(Department of Art and Art History), Janet Catherine Berlo (Department of Art and Art

History) and Ezra Tawil (Department of English). The research and writing of this

dissertation was generously supported by the Dean’s Teaching Fellowship (2014–2015),

the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship (2015–2016), and the Raymond N. Ball Dissertation

Fellowship (2016–2017) at the University of Rochester. An Oberlin College Alumni

Research Grant (2012) and a short-term fellowship from the Consortium for the History

of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Philadelphia (2013) provided additional

support, particularly of my research for Chapter 4.

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List of Figures

Figure Title Page

Figure 1.1 Phillip Sossou with a self-portrait and some of the 411 2 portraits of his classmates, at the Boston Latin School, 2016.

Figure 1.2 Detail of the Preamble of the Constitution of the United 4 States, 1787.

Figure 1.3 Benjamin West, American Commissioners of the 7 Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain, 1783– 1819. Oil on canvas, 72.3 ´ 92.1 cm.

Figure 1.4 Charles Willson Peale, Mrs. Charles Willson Peale (Rachel 14 Brewer) and Baby Eleanor, 1790. Watercolor on ivory, 6.5 ´ 5.2 cm.

Figure 1.5 Page on King Henry VIII from Richard Bull’s extra- 17 illustrated copy of James Granger’s Biographical History of England . . . , ca. 1769–1774.

Figure 1.6 Top left, John Trumbull, Eleanor (Nelly) Parke Custis, 1792. 18 Oil on wood, 9.8 ´ 8.3 cm. Top right, John Trumbull, Cornelia Schuyler, 1792. Oil on wood, 9.8 ´ 8.6 cm. Center, John Trumbull, Mrs. George Washington, 1792. Oil on wood, 9.8 ´ 8.3 cm. Bottom left, John Trumbull, Sophia Chew, 1793. Oil on wood, 10.2 ´ 8.3 cm. Bottom right, John Trumbull, Harriet Chew, 1793. Oil on wood, 10.2 ´ 8.3 cm.

Figure 1.7 Huntington High School Class of 2012. 23

Figure 2.1 The Engrossed Declaration of Independence Declaration 31 (1776) is significantly faded after years of public display and is now maintained under strict archival conditions. Iron gall ink on parchment, 75.6 ´ 62.2 cm.

Figure 2.2 John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, 1818 38 (placed 1826). Oil on canvas, 365.8 ´ 548.6 cm.

Figure 2.3 In Congress, July 4, 1776. A Declaration by the 46 Representatives of the United States of American, in General Congress Assembled (Philadelphia: John Dunlap,

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1776). Belonging to the National Archives, this is one of only 26 extant copies of the Dunlap Broadside.

Figure 2.4 Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, Proposal for United States Coat 49 of Arms, September 20, 1776. This image has been manipulated to increase contrast.

Figure 2.5 Detail of In Congress, July 4, 1776. The Unanimous 52 Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America (Baltimore: Mary Katharine Goddard, 1777), showing the annotations “Attest Chas Thomson Secy” and “A True Copy [signed] John Hancock Presid.”

Figure 2.6 John Binns, Declaration of Independence, 1818–1819. 54 Engraving on wove paper, 91.8 ´ 68 cm (sheet), printed by James Porter, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 2.7 Benjamin Owen Tyler, In Congress, July 4th. 1776. The 56 Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, 1818. Engraving, with facsimile signatures, on parchment, 75 ´ 61 cm. Copied from the Engrossed Declaration of Independence by Tyler; engraved by Peter Maverick, Newark, NJ; and published by Tyler, Washington, DC.

Figure 2.8 William J. Stone, Facsimile of the Engrossed Declaration of 58 Independence, 1823. Copperplate engraving on vellum, approx. 75.6 ´ 62.2 cm. This copy of Stone’s facsimile bears the imprint, “ENGRAVED by W. I. STONE for the Dept. of State, by order | of J. Q. ADAMS Sect. of State, July 4th. 1823,” indicating that it is one of the 201 copies that Stone printed on vellum for the Department of State.

Figure 2.9 John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 60 1776, 1786–1820. Oil on canvas, 53 ´ 78.7 cm.

Figure 2.10 Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. Oil on 64 canvas, 152.6 ´ 214.5 cm.

Figure 2.11 John Singleton Copley, The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 66 1779–1781. Oil on canvas, 228.6 ´ 307.3 cm.

Figure 2.12 Sarah De Hart, Washington, as cut by Miss De Hart, and 73 given by Lady Washington to Kittie Duer, the daughter of Lord Stirling Philadelphia 1791, ca. 1791. Hollow-cut

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white paper silhouette, 10.7 ´ 7.1 cm (image), 24.3 ´ 19 cm (sheet).

Figure 2.13 Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid, 1782–1784. 75 Oil on canvas, 106.3 ´ 130.8 cm.

Figure 2.14 The obverse of the two-dollar bill (top) features a portrait of 78 Thomas Jefferson, engraved by Charles K. Burt (after Gilbert Stuart), ca. 1869. The reverse (bottom) features a vignette of the signing of the Declaration of Independence engraved by Frederick Girsch (after John Trumbull), ca. 1976. US Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Printing and Engraving, Two-Dollar Federal Reserve Note, 1976. Dry intaglio printing on linen/cotton paper, 6.6 ´ 15.6 cm.

Figure 3.1 Gilbert Stuart, Dolley Madison, 1804. Oil on canvas, 74.1 ´ 85 61.3 cm.

Figure 3.2 Albert Newsam, Thomas L. McKenney, ca. 1845. Lithograph 86 printed by P. S. Duval, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 3.3 Albert Newsam after Charles Bird King, Ma-Has-Kah or 88 White Cloud, an Ioway Chief, ca. 1837. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 35.6 cm (sheet), printed by Lehman and Duval, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 3.4 Albert Newsam after Charles Bird King, Young Ma-Has-Kah, 89 Chief of the Ioways, ca. 1837. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 35.6 cm (sheet), printed by Lehman and Duval, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 3.5 Alfred Hoffy after Charles Bird King, Not-Chi-Mi-Ne, an 90 Ioway Chief, ca. 1838. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 35.6 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 3.6 Complete Subscriber Set (Twenty Numbers Comprising 96 Three Volumes) of McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836–1844), in Original Buff Printed Wrappers.

Figure 3.7 After James Otto Lewis, Wa-Bish-Kee-Pe-Nas, the White 100 Pigeon, a Chippewa, ca. 1837. Hand-colored lithograph, printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA.

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Figure 3.8 Giovanni Bellini, Imago Pietatis, ca. 1460–1469. Tempera 101 on panel, 50 ´ 40 cm.

Figure 3.9 Charles Bird King, Petalesharro (Generous Chief), Pawnee, 110 ca. 1822. Oil on panel, 44.5 ´ 35.1 cm.

Figure 3.10 Samuel F. B. Morse, The House of Representatives, 1822, 111 probably reworked 1823. Oil on canvas, 220.7 ´ 331.8 cm.

Figure 3.11 Detail of figure 3.10, showing Samuel F. B. Morse’s 111 rendering of Petalesharro. Note the similarity to Charles Bird King’s portrait (fig. 3.9).

Figure 3.12 Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum (Self- 114 Portrait), 1822. Oil on canvas, 263.5 ´ 202.9 cm.

Figure 3.13 After Charles Bird King, Mo-Hon-Go, an Osage Woman, 116 ca. 1838. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 36.6 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 3.14 Left, Charles Bird King, Hoowanneka – Little Elk, ca. 1828. 123 Oil on panel, 44.3 ´ 34.3 cm.

Figure 3.15 Right, Henry Inman after Charles Bird King, Hoo-Wan-Ne- 123 Ka (Little Elk), 1832. Oil on canvas, 77.8 ´ 65.1 cm.

Figure 3.16 After Charles Bird King, Hoo-Wan-Ne-Ka, a Winnebago 124 Chief, ca. 1841. Hand-colored lithograph, 51.1 ´ 36.6 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 3.17 Prospectus for subscribers to McKenney and Hall’s History 126 of the Indian Tribes of North America, ca. 1836.

Figure 3.18 1. Prionus (Orthosoma) Pensylvanicus; 2. Prionus 128 (Derobrachus) Laticollis . . . , ca. 1837. Handcolored lithograph.

Figure 3.19 Albert Newsam after Henry Inman, Jno. G. Watmough, 130 1831. Lithograph, 49 ´ 37 cm, published by C. G. Childs, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 3.20 After Charles Bird King, M’Intosh, a Creek Chief, ca. 1838. 139 Hand-colored lithograph, 51.1 ´ 36.6 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA.

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Figure 3.21 After Charles Bird King, Major Ridge, a Cherokee Chief, 141 ca. 1838. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 35.5 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 3.22 The Picture Gallery, ca. 1857. Engraving. 144

Figure 3.23 American Stereoscopic Co. and Langhenheim, Lloyd, and 145 Co., Picture Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, 1858. Albumen print on paper, yellow colored cardboard mount, 8.3 ´ 17.1 cm.

Figure 3.24 Portraits of Appanoose, Tahrohon, and Shaumonekusse 147 from McKenney and Hall’s History decorate Tammany Hall in Gangs of New York.

Figure 3.25 Rosalind Appel, ca. 1930. Photographic print. 149

Figure 3.26 Sydney Rappaport, Joshua Boydstun, and Rosalind 151 Rappaport (left to right) celebrate Joshua’s birthday, June 1985. Polaroid photograph.

Figure 4.1 Nancy Rourke, Honor thy Deaf History, 2011. Oil on 155 canvas, 101.6 × 76.2 cm.

Figure 4.2 Detail of figure 4.1, showing Nancy Rourke’s portraits of 157 Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (left), Laurent Clerc (center), and Albert Newsam (right).

Figure 4.3 Albert Newsam, Gallaudet Monument, Erected in front of 160 the American Asylum for the deaf & dumb, at Hartford, Conn. Sept. 6th 1854, 1855. Lithograph, 83.6 × 65.3 cm (sheet), printed by P. S. Duval, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 4.4 Left, Jérôme-Martin Langlois, The Abbé Sicard Instructing 165 His Deaf Pupils, 1806. Oil on canvas.

Figure 4.5 Right, Jérôme-Martin Langlois, The Abbé Sicard Instructing 165 His Deaf Pupils, 1814. Oil on canvas.

Figure 4.6 Thomas Arrowsmith, The Manual Alphabet with One Hand, 173 ca. 1819. Engraving.

Figure 4.7 Charles Willson Peale, Mrs. Laurent Clerc, 1822. Oil on 174 63.5 × 53.4 cm.

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Figure 4.8 A lithographic stone (left) and the resulting print (right), 181 depicting fossilized ammonites for Daniel Sharpe’s Description of the Fossil Remains of Mollusca Found in the Chalk of England, vol. 3, Cephalopoda (London: Palæontographical Society, 1856), pl. xviii.

Figure 4.9 Left, Albert Newsam after Henry Inman, Jn. G. Watmough, 184 1831. Lithograph, 49 ´ 37 cm, published by C. G. Childs, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 4.10 Right, detail of figure 4.9, showing Newsam’s signature: 184 “Drawn on Stone by A. Newsam, a Deaf & Dumb pupil of C. G. Childs.”

Figure 4.11 Attributed to Albert Newsam, Self-Portrait, n.d. Two-tone 186 lithograph on cream wove paper, 14.9 ´ 11.6 cm.

Figure 4.12 Recto (left) of Albert Newsam, John Young, ca. 1850. 187 Lithograph, 27 ´ 16 cm, printed by P. S. Duval, Philadelphia, PA. Verso (right) of portrait features manuscript notes by Newsam, including what appears to be a conversation with a hearing individual.

Figure 4.13 Albert Newsam after a daguerreotype by Collins, 191 Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf & Dumb. Drawn on Stone by Albert Newsam, a former pupil of the Institution, [1851]. Lithograph, 14 ´ 20 cm, printed by P. S. Duval, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 4.14 Masthead, The Deaf Mute (North Carolina Institution for 192 the Deaf and Dumb, Raleigh, NC), November 2, 1850, 1.

Figure 4.15 Left, E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, In Memory of [65], 1845– 196 1846. Hand-colored lithograph on wove paper, 35.9 ´ 25.6 cm (sheet). Published by Kelloggs and Thayer, New York; E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, Hartford, CT; D. Needham, Buffalo, NY.

Figure 4.16 Right, E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, In Memory of [66], 1845– 196 1846. Hand-colored lithograph on wove paper, 35.7 ´ 25.6 cm (sheet). Published by Kelloggs and Thayer, New York; E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, Hartford, CT; D. Needham, Buffalo, NY.

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Figure 4.17 Robert Mills, Jonathan Maxcy Monument, 1827. University 200 of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.

Figure 4.18 Photograph of the Gallaudet Monument at the American 201 School for the Deaf, Hartford, CT, n.d.

Figure 4.19 Left, Kellogg and Co., Wooster Monument. Erected at 205 Danbury, CT, April 27, 1854. J. G. Batterson, Architect and Sculptor, 1854. Lithograph on wove paper, 49.1 cm ´ 36.8 (sheet). Published by J. G. Batterson, Hartford, CT.

Figure 4.20 Right, Photograph of the Wooster Monument, Danbury, CT, 205 ca. 1996.

Figure 4.21 Albert Newsam, Gallaudet Monument, Erected in front of 208 the American Asylum for the Deaf & Dumb, at Hartford, Conn. Sept. 6th 1854, ca. 1857–1860. Chromolithograph, printed by P. S. Duval and Son, Philadelphia, PA.

Figure 4.22 Left, E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, To the Memory of [319], 1847. 210 Hand-colored lithograph on wove paper, 35.6 ´ 25.6 cm (sheet). Published by E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, New York, NY and Hartford, CT; D. Needham, Buffalo, NY.

Figure 4.23 Right, Frontispiece (after E. B. and E. C. Kellogg’s To the 210 Memory of) and title page from Harry T. Peters’s America on Stone.

Figure 4.24 “The Horseshoe is a great place to unwind.” 211

Figure 5.1 Adeline Harris Sears, Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with 219 Signatures Pattern, begun 1856. Silk, 195.6 ´ 203.2 cm.

Figure 5.2 Detail of figure 5.1, showing diamond 7N with a signed 220 message from Abraham Lincoln (center) and diamond 7O with Andrew Johnson’s signature (bottom).

Figure 5.3 Chart showing the placement of autographs by profession in 224 the Adeline Harris Sears quilt.

Figure 5.4 Members of the Brown and Turner Families, Quilt, Album 233 Pattern, begun 1846. Cotton, 211.8 ´ 215.9 cm.

Figure 5.5 Mercy Jane Bancroft Blair, Quilt, Signature, Repeat Block 235 Pattern, 1855–1863. Cotton and calico, 229 ´ 201 cm.

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Figure 5.6 Horace Mann, “A Name, on Being Asked for His 243 Autograph,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 18.

Figure 5.7. Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Anti-Slavery Society 245 Convention, 1840, 1841. Oil on canvas, 297.2 mm ´ 383.6 cm.

Figure 5.8 Petition for Woman Suffrage from Frederick Douglass, Jr. 252 and Other Residents of the District of Columbia, 1878.

Figure 5.9 Samuel D. Ehrhart after John Trumbull, Signing the 256 Declaration of Their Independence, 1911. Photoengraving, 25.2 ´ 35 cm (sheet), printed by J. Ottmann Lithographic, New York, NY.

Figure 5.10 Natalie N. Gray, Embroidery made while imprisoned at 259 Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia for picketing for suffrage, 1917. Cotton muslin embroidered in stem stitch with blue cotton thread, 22.9 ´ 19 cm.

Figure 5.11 Rink Foto, Birth of the Quilt, 1985. Archival inkjet print 261 2009, 50.8 ´ 40.6 cm.

Figure 5.12 The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National 262 Mall in Washington, DC, October 1996.

Figure C.1 People line up to visit the grave of women’s suffrage leader 265 Susan B. Anthony on US election day at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, November 8, 2016.

Figure C.2 The grave of women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony is 265 covered with “I Voted” stickers left by voters in the US presidential election, at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, November 8, 2016.

Figure C.3 Sign depicting “Madam President Hillary Rodham Clinton” 267 and Susan B. Anthony at Anthony’s gravesite on November 8, 2016.

Figure C.4 The masthead of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady 273 Stanton’s newspaper, The Revolution, included the text, “Principle, Not Policy: Justice, Not Favors.—Men, Their Rights and Nothing More: Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less.”

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Figure C.5 The masthead of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, included 273 the text, “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives! Breaking the Way for Future Generations.”

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Chapter 1

Introduction:

Representation in Absentia

The ideal society is not outside the real one but is part of it. Far from our being divided between them as though between two poles that repel one another, we cannot hold to the one without holding to the other. A society is not constituted simply by the mass of individuals who comprise it, the ground they occupy, the things they use, or the movements they make, but above all by the idea it has of itself. —Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life1

I. Collective Representations and Corporate Portraits

On Friday, May 6, 2016, a graduating senior named Phillip Sossou turned the

halls of his Boston prep school into a gallery by adorning the walls with 411 charcoal

portraits—one of each of his classmates (fig. 1.1). In a conscious effort to visualize e

pluribus unum (out of many, one), the young artist’s aim was quite literally to draw his

community together.2 It would have been a monumental and touching project under any

circumstances, but significantly, it was inspired by a distinct lack of unity amongst the

student body. Earlier that year, African American student activists began a social-media

campaign drawing attention to racial harassment and discrimination within the

predominantly white school, as well as the administration’s failure to address the

problems. The tense spring term was characterized by bitter debate among students,

strained attempts at community dialogue, an investigation by Boston Public Schools, and 1 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 425. 2 The pictures remained up in the halls for a month.

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eventually the headmaster’s resignation.3 When asked about his motivation, Sossou

answered, “Our class has been kind of divided. Having these pictures helps us to embrace

our diversity.”4 The artist’s statement rests on a contradiction and a proposition: it

presumes that a harmonious totality can comprise distinct and disparate parts. Moreover,

it suggests that this effect can be brought about through representation.

Figure 1.1. Phillip Sossou with a self-portrait and some of the 411 portraits of his classmates, at the Boston Latin School, 2016. (Courtesy of Craig Walker/Boston Globe Staff.)

3 In the fall of 2016, a federal civil-rights probe officially determined that the school had failed to properly handle complaints of racial harassment and intimidation made by its students. See Milton J. Valencia, Jan Ransom, and Meghan E. Irons, “Federal Probe Finds Discrimination at Boston Latin,” Boston Globe, September 26, 2016, https://www .bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/09/26/federal-probe-finds-harassment-discrimination -boston-latin-school-orders-reforms/FgjoGiZVzF56iIYfIKK3PL/story.html. 4 Meghan E. Irons, “A Classmate’s Parting Gift for Boston Latin Class,” Boston Globe, May 27, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/27/boston-latin-student -creates-charcoal-portraits-graduating-classmates/jc12pachooSlIupOWg8hWK/story .html.

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Such hopes are not the mere dreams of one idealistic young person; they are

foundational to American culture and politics. After all, the democracy of this “great

experiment” is not pure or direct, but representative.5 To James Madison, architect of the

Constitution, the United States of America was decidedly not a democracy; it was a

republic. From its very inception, the new nation was poised to outgrow the mechanisms

of the former and, of necessity, had to fashion itself as the latter. This would involve the

willing abstraction, transference, and substitution of power from numerous individuals to

representative agents.6

John Adams, Massachusetts’s delegate to the First and Second Continental

Congress (and, eventually, second president of the United States), had mused in the tense

spring of 1776, “In a Community consisting of large Numbers, inhabiting an extensive

Country, it is not possible that the whole Should assemble, to make Laws. The most

natural Substitute for an Assembly of the whole, is a Delegation of Power, from the

Many, to a few of the most wise and virtuous.” Borrowing from the language of art to

describe the basic principles of representative democracy, Adams adds that this

“Representative Assembly, should be an exact Portrait, in Miniature, of the People at 5 This lasting moniker and enduring notion was coined by George Washington: “The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by reasonable compact, in civil Society.” George Washington to Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham, 9 January 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016, http://founders.archives .gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0363. 6 According to Madison, “The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic, are first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.” James Madison, “The Federalist Number 10, [22 November] 1787,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0178.

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large.”7 The establishment of that famous authorizing agent, “We the People,” is

fundamentally a representational project, one operating simultaneously on political and

visual registers.8 As proof, we may consider that the phrase now comes to mind as an

image as much as a text (fig. 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Detail of the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, 1787. (Courtesy of the National Archives. Constitution of the United States, p. 1; Constitution of the United States, Sep. 17 1787; General Records of the United States Government, 1778–2006, Record Group 11; National Archives Building, Washington, DC [online version available through the Archival Research Catalog (ARC identifier 1667751) at www.archives.gov; February 10, 2017].) 7 The full quote reads: “In a Community consisting of large Numbers, inhabiting an extensive Country, it is not possible that the whole Should assemble, to make Laws. The most natural Substitute for an Assembly of the whole, is a Delegation of Power, from the Many, to a few of the most wise and virtuous. In the first Place then establish Rules for the Choice of Representatives: Agree upon the Number of Persons who shall have the Privilege of choosing one. As the Representative Assembly, should be an exact Portrait, in Miniature, of the People at large, as it should think, feel, reason and act like them great Care should be taken in the Formation of it, to prevent unfair, partial and corrupt Elections. That it may be the Interest of this Assembly to do equal Right, and Strict Justice upon all Occasions, it should be an equal Representation of their Constituents, or in other Words equal Interests among the People, Should have equal Interests in the Representative Body. That the Representatives may often mix with their Constituents, and frequently render to them an Account of their Stewardship, Elections ought to be frequent.” John Adams to John Penn, 27 March 1776, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents /Adams/06-04-02-0026-0003. 8 Article I of the Constitution establishes and invests “all legislative Powers . . . in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives” (U.S. Const. art. I, § 1). The latter “shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States” (U.S. Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 1). At this time, senators were not elected but appointed by state legislatures (U.S. Const. art. I, § 3, cl. 1). The popular election of senators began with the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 (U.S. Const. amend. XVII).

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What tools do we have to make sense of portraits like the one Adams imagined or

the ones Sossou created? Can such pictures be called “group portraits”? These questions

force the recognition that we do not have a robust or nuanced vocabulary for visual

schemas that draw representations of individuals together into larger representational

totalities. This project attempts to expand that vocabulary. The purpose is not merely to

describe, enumerate, or categorize such pictures. Ultimately, it is to argue that these are

visual exercises in and iterations of what sociologist Émile Durkheim calls “collective

representation”: the ideas and concepts that individuals manage to agree upon in order to

make sense of their social worlds.9 Durkheim does not discuss these concepts in any

visual or material form, but he does make a claim that is absolutely relevant to the

pictures discussed here: that idealization is not only an inevitable part of the process of

representation but a condition of human existence.10 I argue that all attempts at collective

visual representation must negotiate this tension between idealized notions of

representation and the real mechanics of how representation functions in society. In this

dissertation, “collective representations” enable society to see, to become, and to know

itself but only through imperfect means. To see is also to mis-see, and this dilemma is

endemic to the nature of representation itself.

_______________

9 “Collective representations . . . add to what our personal experience can teach us all the wisdom and science that the collectivity has amassed over centuries.” Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 437. 10 “There is nothing mysterious about the faculty of idealization, then, whether in the individual or in the group. This faculty is not a sort of luxury, which man could do without, but a condition of his existence.” Ibid., 425.

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Another way we might think of collective representations is as the kind of site that

Michel Foucault calls a “heterotopia,” an “effectively enacted utopia in which all the

other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented,

contested, and inverted.”11 Significantly, Foucault ascribes to the heterotopia both the

properties and potentials of a mirror, a visual space in which the self is at once

completely real and the product of the self’s own gaze.12 Extrapolated from the individual

self to the collective, the heterotopia that we visualize through collective representation

works to bridge both distance and difference, forging a sense of group identity both

despite and because it is somehow fundamentally lacking unless (or until) it can be seen.

But we are still working our way to theorizing pictures. Art historian Alois

Riegl’s 1902 study of group portraiture in early modern Holland is still one of the few

texts dedicated to pictures of non-related individuals. There, Riegl understood that the

function and meaning of group portraits lies in a tension between autonomy and

“voluntary affinity.” The painted aggregation of visages—corps of watchmen, merchants,

and clergy—is “neither an extension of individual portraiture nor a kind of mechanical

arrangement of single portraits into a tableau; rather, it is the depiction of a number of

autonomous members of a voluntary corporation. Another way of referring to it might be

11 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 24, doi:10.2307/464648. 12 Ibid.

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‘corporate’ portraiture.”13 Riegl’s term, “corporate portraiture,” assembles subjects

together into a whole—a pictorial analogue to the “body politic.”

But what happens when a corporate portrait is desired, but the subjects cannot

actually be together? This could be a problem of spatial separation or, as Sossou’s

example introduces, one of ideological or social separation. Consider the problems that

Anglo-American painter Benjamin West encountered in his attempt at portraying the

signing of the 1783 Treaty of Paris (fig. 1.3).

Figure 1.3. Benjamin West, American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain, 1783–1819. Oil on canvas, 72.3 ´ 92.1 cm. (Photograph by Herb Crossan, courtesy of Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, Wilmington, DE, 1957.0856.)

13 Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. by Evelyn M. Kain, Texts & Documents (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 62. Emphasis added.

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West had no problem getting the American negotiators John Jay, John Adams,

Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin (left to right) to sit for

his composition. The resulting group emanates a casual confidence: they are engaged in

no particular action, and their gazes never meet. Their purpose is commemorative: simply

being together after a momentous political event. The British representatives, led by

David Hartley and Richard Oswald, however, refused to be painted, and the cloud of

absence on the right side of the unfinished canvas speaks as much or more than the

roughly worked group it abuts. These men may have, in fact, stood together in the

collective acts of ending the American Revolution and formally enacting American

independence, but representatives of the British Crown declined to participate in a

representation aiming to present a corporate portrait out of the various actors. Practical

duties they could not abjure, but a symbolic one they might.

Separating the individual subjects into discrete components offers a means of

bringing them together out of space and time, unmoored to any particular event. By

dispensing with the tableau altogether—as Sossou did—the mere assemblage of the

individuals functions as the narrative and the occasion for the corporate whole. In this

manner audiences are free to idealize by imagining and seeing “togetherness” as both

voluntary and timeless. But collecting individual portraits together into a kind of

pantheon does even more than that: it also offers an appealing picture of representation

itself. In this habitus, portraits can be individuals qua individuals and individuals qua

members, or agents, of a larger collective totality. The resulting body or corporate portrait

exists in a perpetual parallax, always shifting and reinforcing the relationship between

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part and whole. It is a relationship wholly reliant not on actual unity, but on imagined or

idealized togetherness.

II. Representation and Absence

Addressing a gathering of philosophers, Jacques Derrida began his now-famous

lecture “Sending: On Representation” with the statement, “One might say we represent

something.”14 Determining what that “something” is, however, cannot be done without

understanding what we mean when we talk about representation.15 While Derrida

approaches the problem of representation through philosophy and literature, his

contemporary, Hanna Pitkin, attempts to parse it through politics. Her book The Concept

of Representation opens with the observation that while representation has been linked

with—or even posited as the very foundation of—democracy, such a modern formulation

cannot be neatly separated from prior conceptions.16 Depending on how we define or

understand representation, a monarch could be said to represent her political subjects, yet

this is not what comes to mind when imagining the “representative democracy” that John

14 Jacques Derrida, “Sending: On Representation,” trans. Peter Caws and Mary Ann Caws, in “Current French Philosophy,” ed. Peter Caws, special issue, Social Research 49, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 295, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970865. 15 Derrida imagined, quite humorously, “Socrates arriving in the early dawn of this Symposium, tipsy, late, and asking: ‘You tell me there is aesthetic, political, metaphysical, historic, religious and epistemological representation, as if each were one among others, but in the end, aside from the fact that you are perhaps forgetting some types, that you are probably enumerating too many or too few, you have not answered the question: what is representation in itself and in general? What makes all these representations representations called by the same name?’” Ibid., 302. 16 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 2.

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Adams envisioned in his portrait. Instead, we see something more populist, decentralized,

and agentive.

Whether a representative “stands for,” “acts for,” or “appears for” others varies

dramatically based on circumstances, and the options are easily confused. Thus, Pitkin

and Derrida both ask what kind of minimal eidos, or “semantic kernel,” are common to

all cases. Both arrive at the same modest but significant conclusion: insofar as there is

any common denominator in representation, it is a making present again. While

seemingly simple, this means that, at root, representation is an operation founded on a

paradox of presence and absence.17 Pitkin explains that “representation, taken generally,

means the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present

literally or in fact.”18 Observing this empirically, however, is not so easy. “A zoölogist

may capture a rare specimen and simply observe it,” Pitkin muses, “but who can capture

an instance of representation . . . ?”19 She seems to be asking, What does representation

look like?

Conveniently enough, for scholars of art and visual culture, pictures do not merely

illustrate concepts, they constitute a form of evidence unto themselves. As an act of

creation through substitution, representation is the most elemental operation at work in

these fields—always an exercise in making present again a person, event, place, or idea.20

17 Derrida calls representation “the delegation of presence, of reiteration rendering present once again, in substituting a presentation for another in absentia.” Derrida, “Sending: on Representation,” 303. 18 Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 8–9. 19 Ibid., 1. 20 See Christopher Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

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Recently, art historian Jennifer Roberts articulated pictures’ ability—and need—to

account for absence though an exploration of what she terms “constitutive distance.”21

The images she studies—paintings and prints traveling across the North American

continent and the Atlantic Ocean—share a common material fact: they have travelled

across social, temporal, and geographical distances. Whereas other studies might treat

gaps in transmission as blank spaces between action, Roberts argues that these temporal

and spatial realities fundamentally engender behaviors of image production and viewing.

In other words, the social, temporal, and geographic spaces that such images work to

bridge constitute their very purpose and reception.

The necessity of bridging gaps in social, temporal, or physical space built into

these works makes them “active delegates rather than passive intermediaries.”22

Significantly, Roberts’s use of the word “delegate” resonates with the language of

politics: by doing the labor of representing (depicting or showing), the images in question

are also acting as agents. Reading these two enterprises of representation together,

Roberts opens up a creative new sphere of art historical inquiry, one that reads the formal

representational qualities of an image through and alongside its agentive functions as a

transmitter of meaning and information between places and audiences.

In the nineteenth century, this was a growing challenge that needed to be

addressed, particularly in a geographically and socially unbounded place like the United

States. Adams’s designation of “a community of very large numbers” is imprecise but

21 Jennifer L. Roberts Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 6–7. 22 Ibid., 3.

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seems, on its face, a numerical issue: a large population renders direct governance

unwieldy, if not impossible. And yet, there is a spatial dimension to this problem as well.

In his Politics, Aristotle famously establishes an aural boundary—the distance over

which a herald’s voice could be heard—as the circumscription of a direct democracy, but

the United States is not and never has been a direct democracy.23 In a schematic whereby

power is delegated to representatives by their constituencies, Roberts’s concept of

“constitutive distance” becomes polysemic—a space of representational negotiation

where script and print, pencil and plate operate together to extend the reach of that

embodied “voice” or presence. If aurality is the limiting boundary of a direct democracy,

then visuality, encompassing pictures and texts, can be understood as the expanding agent

of a representative democracy—the means through which distance and numbers are

sociopolitically and spatially managed.

III. On Miniaturization and the Utility of Collecting

John Adams’s vision of “an exact portrait in miniature of the people at large” was

proposed as a kind of utopian formulation, but due to the nature of collective 23 Regarding the excessively large polis, Aristotle asks, “Who will serve as its herald, unless he have the lungs of a Stentor?” (7.4.1326b5–7)—a reference to the “great-hearted Stentor of the brazen voice, whose voice is as great as that of fifty other men” from Homer’s Iliad (5.785–86). Mary P. Nichols gracefully unpacks the implications of this when she writes, “Large populations, in other words, do not permit political rule because their members do not possess the knowledge of one another necessary to elect others to office and to judge them. . . . The speech between ruler and ruled would be one-sided, appropriate more to an army of soldiers than to an association of citizens. Where Stentor’s voice is needed, there can be no partnership in speech about the advantageous and the just that expresses human nature as political and rational.” Mary P. Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992), 138–39.

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representation, any such portrait can only occupy that troubled space between the

idealized utopia and the contested heterotopia. In imagining this “representation of

representation,” Adams was probably braiding together at least two different strands from

the visual culture of his moment: the use of miniature portrait paintings as intimate

keepsakes and an emerging hobby from England known as “Grangerizing,” the organized

collection and insertion of pictures of notable individuals into works of history and

biography as supplemental illustrations. At first glance, these might seem like wholly

different enterprises. In fact they are not, and Adams’s melding of the two offers a site of

productive confusion.

Often painted on ivory or wood, portrait miniatures were object-images that were

meant to be held. Suited to small, personal viewing spaces, they effected a circuit of

visual communion: an ongoing reciprocal gaze or visual conversation between viewer

and subject.24 A 1790 miniature by Charles Willson Peale of his wife, Rachel Brewer,

and their infant daughter Eleanor (fig. 1.4) offers a particularly touching example of the

intimacy inherent in miniatures.

24 This intimate vision found its apotheosis in the mid-eighteenth-century emergence of a curious subgenre known as the “eye miniature”: a tiny painting of just a loved one’s eye or eyes. See Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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Figure 1.4. Charles Willson Peale, Mrs. Charles Willson Peale (Rachel Brewer) and Baby Eleanor, 1790. Watercolor on ivory, 6.5 ´ 5.2 cm. (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006.235.127.)

Recalling the Quattrocento paintings of the Madonna and Child produced by renaissance

master Raphael Sanzio, the soft watercolors on ivory create a microcosm of warm

familial space. Copied from an earlier and larger family portrait, Peale painted this

miniature as a keepsake shortly after Rachel’s death; it is difficult to imagine a portrait

more deeply steeped in intimacy and affection. And yet, we know that miniatures also

served as decorative ornaments. Whether affixed to walls by hooks or to the human body

with gilt or silver chains, the miniature had a curious way of making the private public,

announcing the visage of the subject and her propinquity to its bearer at the same time.

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Familiarity also motivated British clergyman, biographer, and print collector

James Granger, but in a manner that extrapolated visual kinship from personal

connections outward to all levels of society. In 1769 Granger published the first edition

of (the soon to be widely reprinted) A Biographical History of England, a work “Intended

as an Essay towards reducing our Biography to System, and a Help to the Knowledge of

Portraits.”25 Granger’s systematic classification of “great men” performed a social

taxonomy, sorting historical and contemporary figures by profession: clergy, heads of

state, men of letters, etc. The textual enterprise was intended as guide for collecting

portrait prints, a “useful” act of assemblage for anyone desiring information about

“British Heads.”26 To Granger’s mind, that “anyone” should be everyone. The preface is

full of praise for the “representative men” whose work, Ralph Waldo Emerson would

later assert, “raises the credit of all the citizens.”27 According to Granger, one “advantage

attending such an assemblage is, that the methodical arrangement has a surprising effect

upon the memory. . . . By casting the eye upon those that sat at the helm of state, and the

instruments of great events, the mind is insensibly led to the history of that period.”28

25 J[ames] Granger, A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution . . . , vol. 1, pt. 1 (London: T. Davies, 1769), iii. 26 For more on Granger, see Marcia Pointon, “Illustrious Heads,” chap. 2 in Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press / Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993). 27 The quotation continues, “But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas—the more, the worse.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850), 10. In the later part of the twentieth century, the “great men” theory of history was righteously deconstructed, eviscerated, and replaced by more ground-up “social” approaches to history. The most well-known in this vein is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). 28 Granger, Biographical History of England, 1:xvi.

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Familiarizing oneself with “representative men” thus forges a kind of closeness not just

with those individuals but the whole of their moment and milieu.

Granger’s book was an instant success, enjoying numerous printings over the

following decades. It was a boon for graphic printers as well: demand and prices for

portrait prints jumped, and a slew of visual supplements to Granger’s original work

proffered sets of portrait prints as companions to the text, as well as illustrated editions of

the original. The emergent hobby known as “Grangerizing” included various approaches

to the collection of portrait prints, organized by Granger’s biographical systemization of

society. One of the most interesting habits to result was one of “extra-illustration” of

Granger’s text (fig. 1.5), whereby owners created varied and customized scrapbook

versions in an eighteenth-century effort to “collect ’em all.”29 Grangerizing effectively

reverses the directional flow of social-visual information employed by its contemporary,

the portrait miniature. In Grangerizing, intimacy and closeness do not radiate outward,

but rather are projected onto the images by a viewer newly edified and enlightened by the

visages of the great men now in his intellectual, visual, and material possession.

29 The Huntington Library possesses an unparalleled collection of extra-illustrated books. In 2013, it hosted the exhibition “Illuminated Palaces: Extra-Illustrated Books from the Huntington Library” from July 27 to October 28, 2013. See Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens, “‘Grangerized’ Books to Take Center Stage at Upcoming Huntington Exhibition, ‘Illuminated Palaces,’” news release, May 15, 2013, http://www.huntington.org/WebAssets/Templates/content.aspx?id=14386.

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Figure 1.5. Page on King Henry VIII from Richard Bull’s extra-illustrated copy of James Granger’s Biographical History of England . . . , ca. 1769–1774. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, RB 283000.)

It is therefore unsurprising that John Adams might envision a kind of group

portrait the likes of which did not quite exist, but which would draw on both

aforementioned tendencies. In fact, John Trumbull, Adams’s friend and the self-

appointed painter of American history, was already experimenting with this mix of

distance and proximity, history and biography. Included in the Trumbull Gallery, a cache

of artwork that Trumbull donated to Yale University in 1832, is a peculiar sequence of

miniature portraits assembled into sets. (Figure 1.6 is one of the eleven sets.)

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Figure 1.6. Top left, John Trumbull, Eleanor (Nelly) Parke Custis, 1792. Oil on wood, 9.8 ´ 8.3 cm. Top right, John Trumbull, Cornelia Schuyler, 1792. Oil on wood, 9.8 ´ 8.6 cm. Center, John Trumbull, Mrs. George Washington, 1792. Oil on wood, 9.8 ´ 8.3 cm. Bottom left, John Trumbull, Sophia Chew, 1793. Oil on wood, 10.2 ´ 8.3 cm. Bottom right, John Trumbull, Harriet Chew, 1793. Oil on wood, 10.2 ´ 8.3 cm. (Courtesy of the Trumbull Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 1832.55–1832.59.)

Painted in oil on wood in the 1790s, these portraits resembled the miniatures of their time

in size only.30 They had never been intended as decorative keepsakes, but rather waged as

documentary studies of living subjects—preparations for the large-scale history paintings

that Trumbull undertook in the 1810s through the 1830s. In each set, the constituent

miniatures have been curated, grouped into small totalities, occupying space somewhere

30 Helen A. Cooper, John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982),125.

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between personal acquaintance and representatives of revolutionary-era American

history.

Miniaturization is, of course, a kind of dream unto itself. In her now classic work

On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection,

Susan Stewart investigates the phenomenon of “micrographia,” tiny books that enable a

reader to experience not only a text but the materiality of the text as a closed, contained

totality.31 Similarly, the portrait miniature proffered a type of beholding at once intimate

and controlling. Stewart concludes that “the miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of

childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of

experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination.”32

Contamination or “corruption” mattered to Adams. He was clear that not just anyone

could be a representative in this portrait, only “the most wise and virtuous.” But more to

Stewart’s point, envisioning representation in “miniature” suggests a fixed and closed

totality that may, at any given point, be known and understood. Even insofar as Adams

imagined change, it occurred within a system of set parameters defined by the

homogeneity of representatives and constituents (i.e., landed, white men of education and

virtue). We may only assume that Adams meant the phrase “at large” to denote a scaling

upwards or a generalization (in this case, of a known factor). However, bearing in mind

Stewart’s reading of the miniature as a device of control, we may permit ourselves to 31 “We see an effort to connect the book to the body; indeed, to make a ‘digestible’ book and at the same time a linking the aphoristic thinking of religious didacticism with the miniature book’s materially compressed mode of presentation.” Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Pres, 1984), 43. 32 Ibid., 69.

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dwell on the connotative contemporary function of the phrase “at large”: signaling that

which is fugitive, beyond apprehension. Embedded in the very project of containment are

the unruly seeds of surfeit.

The splintering of this idealized notion of representation—from one group portrait

into many—is the driver and the byproduct of a long passage of transition in the self-

conception of the United States from a republic to a democracy. Between 1815 and 1860,

vast and rapid expansion of both population and territory produced incalculable strain on

the needs for and limits of incorporation. Emerging from its second war of independence

battered but victorious, the United States also experienced the dissolution of the

Federalist Party in its wake, inspiring an optimistic hope for a unified Democratic-

Republican America, free from both European meddling and internal party strife. The

“era of good feelings” that followed has been treated as one of widespread patriotism and

political harmony. But it also inaugurated a new phase in the country’s history,

characterized by a turn inward: to the complicated work of negotiating geographic

boundaries and managing exploding populations, and to the labor of connecting and

integrating people, land, goods, and ideas. In the broadest strokes this might appear a

coherent, programmatic project of nation building, but as scholars of American history

have recently begun to demonstrate, the “imagined community” of the United States has

always varied based on factors such as regional, class, and ideological difference.33

Collective representations are part of that imaginative labor.

33 Trish Loughran wages an expansive response to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” in The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of US Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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IV. Towards an Expansion of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century “Period Eye”

Words and pictures do more than constitute an arena where sociology, history,

and politics play out: they determine what makes such legible in the first place.

Moreover, this legibility is subject to change over time. In 1972 social art historian

Michael Baxandall famously put forth the concept of the “period eye”: the attitudes and

expectations that viewers bring to a picture in a particular time and a place (in his case,

paintings in fifteenth-century Italy), and the ways in which pictures engage with and

respond to the viewer’s modes of seeing.34 The “period eye” of the mid-nineteenth-

century United States still needs better explication and understanding, a want that we can

attribute to a specific historiographical problem is the disciplines of art history and visual

culture: the history of photography.

A persistent obsession with what print scholar Stephen Bann recently called

“photographic exceptionalism” has positioned the invention of photography in 1839 at

the center of nineteenth-century visual culture, making the emergent medium the default

sine qua non of modern visuality.35 This focus has created unfortunate blind spots with

respect to photography, especially in our appreciation of other representational

34 Baxandall insisted “the picture is sensitive to the kinds of interpretive skill—patterns, categories, inferences, analogies—the mind brings to it. A man’s capacity to distinguish a certain kind of form or relationship of forms will have consequences for the attention with which he addresses a picture.” Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 34. 35 Stephen Bann, “Against Photographic Exceptionalism,” in Photography and Its Origins, ed. Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón (New York: Routledge, 2015), 94–103.

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mechanisms in the visual ecology of the time. Accessing a more developed “period eye”

thus means attending to sites of overlap or liminality. There, a kind of hybrid “in

between-ness” can be productively mined to better understand the connective tissue

between representational and epistemic modes.36 For example, whereas paranoid readings

of the image—extending all the way back to Plato and persisting into the present with the

poststructuralist simulacrum—pit image against text as a form of counterfeit reality,

others have argued that far from being a substitute for reading, visual literacies have

actually developed alongside lexical ones.37 I have purposely chosen to leave

photography out of this dissertation in an effort to better understand what photography

could not do and how other representational mechanisms managed those gaps.

Recall that Sossou’s project was emphatically not the same as a school picture

(fig. 1.7).

36 Martin Jay famously acknowledges the possible plurality of non-hierarchical modern ways of seeing but regards these as discrete, making “the scopic regime of modernity . . . a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices.” I prefer to explore the latter part of his formulation to fuller potential. Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture 2 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 4. 37 See B. E. Maidment, “Prints as History and the History of Prints,” chap. 1 in Reading Popular Prints, 1790–1870, 2nd ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001). W. J. T. Mitchell famously continues this argument (but with an effort to honor both continuity and change) in his now classic 1994 study, Picture Theory. Positing a “pictorial turn”—the shift from language and ideas towards images as the dominant containers and modes of meaning-making—he worries though that “we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.” W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994), 13.

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Figure 1.7. Huntington High School Class of 2012. (Courtesy of Huntington Union Free School District, Huntington, NY, http://www.hufsd.edu/.)

Those photographs are almost always characterized by rows, the most straightforward

technique of packing all the subjects into the frame. They are crowded and boring

pictures precisely because the sitters must come together in space and time; the picture

relies completely on “having been there.” This indexical nature of the photographic

medium was central to some of the most influential twentieth-century theorists of

photography, in particular Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. In his “Little History of

Photography,” Benjamin makes the same argument that Granger did one hundred and

fifty years earlier. But in Benjamin’s formulation of portraiture, only the photograph is

capable of inspiring in the viewer

an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.38

38 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol. 2, pt. 2, 1931–

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That indexical nature brands reality into the photographic image, thereby offering

viewers access to a particular point in space and time. For Barthes, this transcendence

comes in the form of another penetration metaphor: “A photograph’s punctum is that

accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”39 In other words, it is

an appealing kind of detail, which sparks interest through its connection with chanciness,

uniqueness, and historical contingency.

This all counts for very little in an incorporation project such as Sossou’s, whose

entire purpose was not to capture reality but to improve upon it. “I was trying to show

everyone in a positive light” the artist said, effectively reiterating the idealizing ethos of

romantic portraiture: the elevation of positive qualities to create a hopeful and symbolic

portrayal rather than the brute vulgarities of realism.40 This dissertation project is

purposely pitched in the interstitial cultural and representational space between the

regimes of romanticism and realism. In fact, we know that in the earliest decades of

photography in the United States—all of the 1840s and most of the 1850s—photography

could not be reproduced except, ironically, through a conversion into the very modes of

representation it supposedly supplanted: specifically, relief, intaglio, and lithographic

1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 510. 39 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27. 40 Irons, “Classmate’s Parting Gift.” I explore the question of photography as an instrument of realism and romance in “‘Now Let Us Meet the World’: Being, Appearing, and Seeing in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables,” in Technology and Humanity, ed. Carol Colatrella, Critical Insights (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013), 128–45.

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prints. In this study, I move those conjoined means of image and text (re)production from

the margins of visual culture discourse to its very center.

V. Four Fables of Collective Representation

The following chapters present four fables of collective representation, wherein

“portraits in miniature of the people at large” are employed to negotiate questions of

representation in pictures and in life. Significantly, absence of one kind or another forms

the starting point for each individual study. Eschewing the possibility that the subjects of

these corporate portraits had the option, ability, or prerogative of togetherness, each

chapter explores representation as a co-construction of presence and absence. At the core

of each fable is a gap or a need that prompts the visualization of a corpus, thereby

bringing it—however problematically or incompletely—into being.

These projects in representation were often optimistic and sometimes deeply

flawed for their conflation of representation as symbol and representation as action. In

each instance, the images simultaneously show and enact representation, sometimes for

better, sometimes for worse. On one hand, collective representations have the

problematic tendency to misrepresent social cohesion, while on the other, representation

has the power to genuinely unite individual subjects. Sometimes both outcomes are

enacted at the same time.

Chapter 2, “‘An Event Like a Ritual’: Representative Fictions in the Declaration

of Independence,” reconsiders one of our most cherished national symbols less as an

historical document and more as a group picture, assembled across temporal, geographic,

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and political distances. The Declaration of Independence began as an aural proclamation

that most Americans had no visual or material relationship with until many years later.

Moreover, the Declaration manifested no official political action in the world. Rather, it

was drawn up after the fact as a commemorative (and historically inaccurate) effort to

represent the circumstances of its creation. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, our

second war of independence, the young nation rediscovered the Declaration and began

reproducing it through facsimile copies, paintings, prints, and biographical studies of the

signers. I argue that the need to see and know these bygone heroes of the revolutionary

era was born not just of patriotism but also of anxieties over national strife, which created

a need to see and imagine the founding fathers as competent, civil, and above all united.

The “era of good feelings” characterizing this postwar period was, in reality,

wracked with sectionalism and bitter debates over the annexation and management of

new territory. President James Monroe’s efforts to clarify and secure national borders

involved a new chapter in US relations with its indigenous neighbors, particularly the

Native peoples of the Southeast and the upper Midwest territories. My third chapter,

“‘This Will Show You What You Are’: Thomas L. McKenney’s Problems of Indian

Representation,” examines the painted portraits of Indian dignitaries visiting Washington

for treaty negotiations that McKenney commissioned during his tenure as the head of

Indian Affairs in the 1820s. Following dismissal from his post, McKenney embarked on a

decades-long project of transforming his portrait gallery into a multivolume portrait print

portfolio of unprecedented richness and complexity entitled History of the Indian Tribes

of North America (1830–1847). Despite McKenney’s noble intentions, the work engages

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in a problematic unification and flattening of diverse (and sometimes bitterly opposed)

individuals and nations into an unstable totality. Moreover, this fraught exercise in

converting living Indigenous subjects into representations for consumption by educated,

white audiences in the East occurred at same time that actual Indians were being expelled

westward through increasingly brutal policies of forced removal.

The fourth and fifth chapters take a more optimistic tack, examining the

potential of group portraits to bring communities into being by forging visual-material

networks of affinity. Chapter 4, “Portraits in and on Stone: Visualizing Deafness,

1817–1855,” studies the work of Philadelphia printmaker Albert Newsam (1809–

1864), whose talents in the emerging medium of lithography earned him widespread

fame as a producer of portraits in multiple of celebrities and middling Philadelphians

alike. Less studied, however, is the work Newsam did to design a (now-lost) 1854

monument in Hartford, Connecticut to Thomas H. Gallaudet, the father of American

Deaf education. Newsam also created promotional memorial prints of the monument

to raise funds for and awareness of the project, enabling fellow Deaf Americans to

share a connection with this important site of burgeoning Deaf identity and

community, even (and especially) at a distance.

The fifth and final chapter, “‘Why Ask a Name?’: Women’s Autograph

Collecting and the Suturing of Social Space,” returns to autograph signatures as

representational proxies, capable of being combined into compelling assemblies. The

fascination with signatures that emerged with the “cult of the signers” of the Declaration

of Independence in the 1810s and 1820s, inspired a long-lasting (and particularly

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American) interest in autographs. Whereas extant literature on women’s autograph

collecting has focused on issues of friendship and bourgeois social behavior, I connect

the practice with literature about the political potential of sentimental persuasion.

Exploring women’s strategic collection of signatures—in albums, quilts, and

publications—in the context of the emerging political apparatus of the modern petition, I

demonstrate that for many women this was not simply a genteel hobby but a powerful

means of visualizing and structuring networks of solidarity around political causes,

specifically abolition and suffrage.

In an effort to make a “usable past” of these studies, each chapter concludes with

an “afterimage”: closing discussions that extend the life of the images into the present

and remind us that the visual and political business of representation is ongoing and

contested.41 In that spirit, the dissertation as whole finishes with a meditation on a crisis

of collective representation in the present. This conclusion applies Durkheim’s cultural

logic of the “imperfect symbol” to sociopolitical and representational scenes from the

tumultuous 2016 presidential election, which served as both the motivation and backdrop

for this historical look into the United States’ past. 41 “The spiritual past has no objective reality,” literary critic Van Wyck Brooks asserted in a 1918 Dial essay that would become oft-cited and much beloved by historians. Rather, “it yields only what we are able to look for in it. And what people find in literature corresponds to what they find in life.” In order to restore the “warm artery that ought to lead from the present back into the past,” Brooks coined the concept of “a usable past,” one that allows historical subjects to glimpse themselves in unexpected places in time. “Discover, invent a usable past we certainly can, and this is what a vital criticism always does,” claims Brooks. With this approach to history, “the real task for the American literary historian, then, is not to seek for masterpieces . . . but for tendencies.” In order to do this successfully we must begin by asking, “What is important for us? What . . . ought we elect to remember?” Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial, April 11, 1918, 337–41.

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Chapter 2

“An Event Like a Ritual”:

Representative Fictions in the Declaration of Independence

The sign comes into being at the same time as imagination and memory, the moment it is necessitated by the absence of the object from present perception. —Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”1

The Real McCoy was not. —Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy2

I. On Fancy Pictures and Matters of Fact

In a Fourth of July oratory delivered to the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania in

1810, Irish expatriate turned American journalist and political agitator John Binns made a

passionate appeal to his adopted countrymen over a serious international grievance of the

day: Britain’s humiliating and antagonistic practice of seizing and conscripting American

seamen.3 Describing in vivid detail the capture of an American sailor by a British

“floating dungeon,” he evoked the image of “a widow and helpless Orphans [who] mourn

1 Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 6. 2 Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, rev. ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 5. 3 I am very grateful for Padraig Riley’s discussion of John Binns, John Trumbull, and the Declaration of Independence, which helped shape some of my thinking and analysis in this chapter. See Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 199–202.

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his hapless fate and call upon his countrymen, you, his countrymen, to revenge his

wrongs.”4

A quarter century after the Treaty of Paris officially ended America’s

Revolutionary War and established the independence and sovereignty of the United

States, the young nation appeared to be headed for a reprise of struggles with its former

colonial parent. With the old specter of tyranny rearing its head, Binns exhorted a revival

of the revolutionary spirit from three decades prior.5 “Is this a fancy picture?” he

demanded of the scenario he described, “or is it mere dull, too oft-repeated matter of

fact? Let the documents in your public offices answer the inquiry!”6 The rhetoric appears

to pit pictures and facts against one another and neither fares particularly well in the

analysis. Whereas pictures lie with imagination and embellishment, facts—unless

motivated by meaning and passion—are boring and meaningless. While Binns proposes

documents as the solution, it is really the act of interpreting documents and understanding

their contexts that he is describing:

In the present uncertainties and overturnings of the world and in the dangers which threaten the nations of earth that will not bow down to the Tyrant . . . , it may not be unprofitable to enquire what was the situation of the United Colonies and Great Britain, when “all political connection” between them was declared to be “totally dissolved.”7

4 John Binns, An Oration Commemorative of the Birth-Day of American Independence, Delivered before the Democratic Societies of the City and County of Philadelphia, on the 4th of July, 1810 (Philadelphia: C. and A. Conrad and M. Carey, 1810), 10. 5 Binns was no newcomer to agitation. He had been imprisoned in England for his involvement in radical working-class political societies before emigrating to the US in 1801, coinciding with Jefferson’s narrow victory for presidential office. 6 Ibid., 10. 7 Ibid., 5.

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The declaration he references is of course the defining ur-document in American

history: the Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson in the summer of

1776 (fig. 2.1).

Figure 2.1. The Engrossed Declaration of Independence Declaration (1776) is significantly faded after years of public display and is now maintained under strict archival conditions. Iron gall ink on parchment, 75.6 ´ 62.2 cm. (Courtesy of the National Archives. Engrossed Declaration of Independence, recto; Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, 1765–1821, Record Group 360; National Archives Building, Washington, DC [online version available through the Archival Research Catalog (ARC identifier 1419123) at www.archives.gov; February 12, 2017].)

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According to collective national understanding, on July 4, 1776, the Founding Fathers—

fifty-six delegates of the Continental Congress—convened to apply their signatures to a

document, which constituted a declarative act—an “instrument”—responsible for nothing

less than the birth of a new nation called the United States of America.8 But how might

our appreciation of this beloved national origin story change if it were revealed to be a

mix of dull fact and fancy picture?

Here, I propose to do just this by arguing that in the case of the Declaration of

Independence, what we think of as a purely factual historical document is actually

something more akin to a group portrait that literally drew together individual historical

actors into a collective representation. It is not itself a performance of action as much as it

is a means of articulating action in a recognizable, or what Jacques Derrida called

“iterable,” way—preserving meaning in enduring legibility.9 The degree to which this

was intended by the declaration’s various original architects is not something that can be

proven here. What we can study is how remarkably well this instrument has worked at

generating its own mythology which persists to this day in a representational haze of fact

and fiction.

8 On the question of the origin of authority to make this declaration, see Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 46–54. 9 “In order for my ‘written communication’ to retain its function as writing, i.e., its readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable—iterable—in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability . . . structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved . . . A writing that is not structurally readable—iterable—beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.” Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 7.

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There is nothing particularly revolutionary or creative in the general suggestion

that nations rely on myths and symbols to cultivate authority or feelings of coherent,

shared identity among their citizens. Such collective misremembering, a kind of

dreaming about the past, is old theoretical news.10 Where this study pushes the argument

further is by asking how and why this particular representational instrument gained in

significance and what that can tell us about the particular context in which such dreaming

emerged. To do this, I focus especially on the collective signatory aspect of the

Declaration of Independence, which over time has become ritualized in the American

imaginary.

According to Jonathan Z. Smith, “Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying

attention” that relies not on “blind or thoughtless habit” but its opposite: the cultivation of

“emplacement,” sites where attention can be focused.11 Emplacement establishes links

across spatial and temporal divides, making ritual “a relationship of difference between

‘nows’—the now of everyday life and the now of ritual place; the simultaneity, but not

the coexistence, of ‘here’ and ‘there.’”12 The “here” and “there” I consider in this chapter

are the Declaration of Independence as it functioned in its original moment of inception

in 1776 and the Declaration of Independence as it came to be regarded and represented

10 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 11–12. 11 Jonathan D. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 103, 104. 12 Smith, To Take Place, 110.

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some forty years later in the aftermath of the War of 1812, as it “began to assume a

certain holy quality.”13

Fragments of saintly bone and hair—the relics at the heart of continental Catholic

ritual—seem an unlikely analogue in the Enlightenment Protestantism of the early

American republic. And yet this is the status that the Declaration of Independence and its

signatures assumed. In a culture mediated largely through words—and increasingly

through printed words—the autographic signature offers a prime site of emplacement

because it is a representational sign that is also the trace of an individual presence. Not

unlike a holy relic, a signature, as Jacques Derrida has shown, is simultaneously a self-

authorizing and self-negating antinomy: the absolute presence of absolute absence—a

proxy for what or whom, by definition, cannot endure in perpetuity. According to

Derrida, writing, like ritual, is at its core the impulse to bridge temporalities.14 The

signature does more than represent the signer in perpetuity: as a lexical index it

continually re-presents the signer, installing them forever in a present of that fleeting

moment of inscription.

What can these fifty-six famous signatures hope to fix and to iterate in perpetuity?

For a fiery critic of the Crown like John Binns, the answer might be bravery, patriotism, 13 Pauline Maier, American Scripture: The Making of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 175. 14 The gap between “here” and “there” inheres in the act of writing, which Derrida terms différance or deferral. In his essay “Différance,” Derrida begins with an etymological dissection of the French verb différer (to differ), exploring its dual meaning as “to defer,” to put off until later. His titular portmanteau merges the two meanings, collapsing identity and displacement, “this sameness which is not identical,” and “referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement that structures every dissociation.” “Differance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–30.

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or liberty. And indeed, this is what the Declaration of Independence has popularly come

to symbolize. But the present study takes a closer look. As the following sections will

demonstrate in detail, interest in visually and materially beholding the Declaration of

Independence exploded during James Monroe’s presidency (1817–1825), which at the

time was dubbed the “era of good feelings.”15 A rush of exuberant patriotism after

defeating Britain in the War of 1812 and emerging as a sovereign world power coincided

with the looming fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, creating a powerful reprise of the

past and prompting nostalgic reflection and national identity formation.16 But historians

have shown that the War of 1812 was not particularly well understood by Americans at

the time, nor subsequently. In the East, it was perceived as a battle over British maritime 15 This term derives from period journalism surrounding president James Monroe’s “Jubilee” tour of the states at the outset of his election in the spring of 1817. The first mention was a casual one in a Boston Federalist paper, which addressed the tour under the headline “Era of Good Feelings” and hailed it as “demonstrations of good feelings.” Columbian Centinel (Boston, MA), July 12, 1817, 2. Ironically, the phrase would gain momentum and currency in the unfolding context of widespread election losses for the Federalists. To many, the decline of the party signaled that “the storms of political vengeance have ceased to beat; . . . the season so happily denominated the ‘Era of Good Feelings’ has arrived.” Morning Chronicle and Baltimore Advertiser, April 8, 1819, quoted in Patricia L Dooley, ed., The Early Republic: Primary Documents on Events from 1799 to 1820, Debating Historical Issues in the Media of the Time (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 299. George Dangerfield argues that the era ended very quickly with the market panic and depression of 1819, which particularly strained agrarian states and led to an increasing democratic lobby that would eventually eschew the Democratic-Republicanism of Monroe and Adams for Andrew Jackson’s strident agrarian frontier democracy in the election of 1828. See George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), xii–xiii. 16 The most notable example is the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which stated unequivocally that the United States would not interfere with Europe’s colonial wars east of the Atlantic but would henceforth “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message [to Congress],” 2 December 1823, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896), 2:218.

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overreach and abuses, both military and mercantile.17 On the western and southern

frontiers of the United States, however, it was seen as a war of territorial expansion.18 If

the conflict consolidated US power on the world stage, it also splintered it from within, as

lines of contention drew between and within the states: commercial versus planter, slave

versus free, annexation versus antiexpansion.19 As one surmised somberly, “We have in

the War of 1812 an epitome of much of our history for the three succeeding decades.”20

How then to bridge the different “nows” of 1776 and 1812? In the intervening

years, the thirteen colonies had swelled to some twenty-five states. The Federalist Party,

which had lobbied strongly for a “we the people” of natural elites, was dead. The

Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson faced increasing pressure from the emerging

Jacksonian Democrats spurred by suffrage expansion and impassioned populism.

Wracked with sectionalist schisms and competing regional interests, young America had

been learning the hard way that independence and governance were quite different

projects.

Serious considerations of postwar fascination with the Revolution and its steadily

dwindling veterans must see past this patina of patriotism to recognize the extreme

national growing pains just beneath the surface. In this context, the Declaration of 17 For more on British maritime practices, especially impressment—the practice of kidnapping and conscripting US seamen—see Donald R. Hickey and Connie D. Clark, The Rockets’ Red Glare: An Illustrated History of the War of 1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 15–18. 18 For an overview of historiographical trends in reading the stakes of the war, see J. C. A. Stagg, introduction to The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent, Cambridge Essential Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 19 This domestic conflict is documented in Julius W. Pratt, The Expansionists of 1812 (New York: MacMillan, 1925). 20 Ibid., 274.

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Independence in particular offered a powerful site for legibly discerning the past. As

such, it increasingly found its way into both public offices and the public mindset—a

conjoined project of visual and political representation. Ultimately, in its transformation

from aural proclamation into visual representation and material fact, the Declaration of

Independence proffered a site of legible emplacement onto which Americans of could

enact a prelapsarian purity of political consciousness and process that never actually

existed in the first place but met a desperate need to reimagine national origins as more

than just brave and strong, but competent, civil, and above all united. At stake is the

revelation of our most cherished national relic as itself an incomplete picture of history,

not the infinitely messier unrepresentability of history itself.

II. History’s Alchemists, Part 1: The Signatories

What are we to think of history? when in less than 40 years, such diversities appear in the memories of living persons, who were witnesses. —John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, February 2, 181421

When John Trumbull’s painting The Declaration of Independence (fig. 2.2)

debuted to the public on an 1818 national tour before installation in the recently

rehabilitated Capitol Building in Washington, DC, reception was decidedly mixed.

21 John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 2 February 1814, early access document, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016, http://founders.archives .gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6247.

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Figure 2.2. John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, 1818 (placed 1826). Oil on canvas, 365.8 ´ 548.6 cm. (Courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol, US Capitol, Washington, DC.) Lauded as “a great national painting,” the work also had its detractors whose complaints

ranged from stylistic execution to the veracity of the representation.22 Samuel Adams’s

grandson Samuel Adams Wells wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “The painting

executed by Col. Trumbull, representing the Congress at the declaration of independence

will, I fear, have a tendency to obscure the history of the event which it is designed to

commemorate.”23 But just what was this “event”? Poll just about any American on the

22 Margaret Coons, “The ‘Great National Painting’: How John Trumbull’s The Declaration of Independence Shaped the Debate over Public Art and National Identity, 1817–1828,” Yale Historical Review 3, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 15, http://historicalreview.yale .edu/sites/default/files/yhr_fall_2013_web.pdf. 23 Samuel Adams Wells to Thomas Jefferson, 2 June 1819, early access document, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016, http://founders .archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-0464.

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street and they will likely answer, “The signing of the Declaration of Independence.” But

even a cursory look at the painting quickly reveals nary a quill in hand; no one is signing

anything. Why not? Essentially, because no such monumental event ever took place and

especially not in a way that was worthy of painting.

According to Tanya Pohrt, viewers in 1819 were of a similarly confused mindset,

as they “expected the painting to reflect the document, with bodies standing in for

signatures.”24 Many were disappointed, even offended, to see representational deviation

from “the original.” The major complaint centered on some basic art-historical math: the

Declaration of Independence bears fifty-six signatures, but only forty-seven figures

appear in the painting—including a few who had not even signed the declaration! How

could such a picture claim to constitute an accurate representation of historical events?

Then as now, viewers expected the picture to portray the events of July 4, 1776. But it is

actually a scene from June 28, the day on which the drafting Committee of Five—John

Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin

(left to right in the foreground of the painting)—submitted Jefferson’s “fair copy” (final

draft) of a declaration of independence for congressional approval.

Why choose this date, and why not depict any signatory act? Because no singular

collective, combined act of signing and declaring ever took place. The declaration was

issued without signatures; only later was it drawn up and signed. It is an “original

document” that, under scrutiny, itself turns out to be a historically problematic “group

24 Tanya Pohrt, “Reception and Meaning in John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence,” in “Teaching with Art,” special issue, Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 2013, 117, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23612147.

40

portrait”—a representation of itself. Trumbull’s painting is an imperfect pass at historical

truth, but as we shall come to see, so is the “original.”

In the next section, I will return to Trumbull’s painting in greater detail,

unpacking the artist’s methods and aims for the accurate and truthful depiction of history.

The principal task of this section, however, is to demonstrate the extent to which the

Declaration of Independence was itself a kind of picture, one that passed through stages

of emplacement in iteration as both a visible and legible site of documentary history. To

that end, this section examines the dual role simultaneously played by the individual

signature as the authorizing agent of (making) history and the visual representation

(showing or telling) of history.

At the outset, we must establish that all representations of the Declaration of

Independence considered in this chapter attempt, in their ways, to make visible something

that is inherently inaccessible but also highly desirable to laypeople, especially in

democracies: the workings of government. The introduction to this dissertation discussed

a fundamental tension inhering in the project of American democracy: It is a

representative democracy, wherein delegates perform the functions of standing and acting

for constituents whose interests they can be said “to make present again” within in the

halls of government. At the same time, there is a tension between representatives’

accountability to constituents, who inevitably represent diverse and potentially

contradictory interests, and the requirement that representatives nevertheless function as a

unified legislative body. This tension remains with us—painfully—well into the present.

For reasons explored further below, the political action leading up to the proclamation of

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the Declaration of Independence was not well documented and consequently became

porous and contested. The inability to see or to know what happened during the political

process inspired various projects of documenting what happened, each in a way that

privileged exactly what was missing from the US House of Representatives in 1819, as it

careened into one of the most divisive, schismatic battles in legislative history: the

Missouri Compromise of 1820. Amidst the vitriolic threats to the state of the union,

nothing could be more appealing to politicians and the general populace than a shared site

of representative unanimity.

_______________

What happened in the lead up to July 4, 1776? After incorporating edits and

suggestions from members of the drafting committee, Jefferson submitted his “fair copy”

of the declaration to the Second Continental Congress for review on June 28, 1776.

During the next week, debates over the text would result in further revisions, excisions,

and additions. (It should be noted that the declaration was but one of many matters

occupying the congress during this time.) The declaration comes up several times in the

journals of the Continental Congress during this period. On Tuesday, July 2, the journals

note the need for more debate: “Resolved, That this Congress will, to morrow, again

resolve itself into a committee of the whole, to take into their farther consideration the

declaration on independence.”25 On Wednesday, July 3, debate resumed and ended again

25 “Tuesday, July 2, 1776,” in Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, vol. 5, 1776: June 5–October 8, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 507.

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with the same resolution as above.26 Why is there so little documentation of these

debates? Scholars have speculated that since the delegates were operating treasonously,

they had every reason to keep their activities as furtive as possible to avoid British

punishment.27 However, there might have been something far more banal going on: the

Committee of the Whole.

As it happens, this small but significant procedural device, which determined how

representatives debate and agree upon a piece of legislation, had direct implications for

the possibilities of documentation. The Committee of the Whole was a process employed

not infrequently in the Continental Congresses, as well as the US House of

Representatives until the 1980s. “A sort of parliamentary fiction,” the Committee of the

Whole enabled the House of Representatives to temporarily switch over into a different

body, known as the Committee of the Whole House for the State of the Union. In this

new configuration, each representative functioned as a member of an all-encompassing

committee. As such, both the individual members and the body as a whole were subject

to different procedural protocols. Chief among these was that the Committee of the

Whole required a smaller quorum than a normal House session. In the Committee of the

Whole, members discussed and debated through dialogue and questions, instead of

through the formal statement of positions. Moreover, a smaller number of votes were

26 “Wednesday, July 3, 1776,” in Ford, Journals of the Continental Congress, 5:509. 27 The haziness of the drafting, revision, and printing process is explored in Wilfred J. Ritz, “From the Here of Jefferson’s Handwritten Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence to the There of the Printed Dunlap Broadside,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116, no. 4 (October 1992): 499–512, http://www.jstor.org/stable /20092759.

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required to be registered and recorded.28 The Committee of the Whole fostered candid

discussion and debate quite literally “off the record.” What actually happened and who

said what in those sessions is beyond our knowledge.

According to the congressional journals, the declaration was finally adopted on

Thursday, July 4, and it was also ordered “that the declaration be authenticated and

printed.”29 The matter of how to authenticate or authorize—the official “affixing of an

autograph signature, ‘a mark’ intended as a signature, or a seal”—this resolution

presented a problem: By what authority could this non-nation assert its sovereignty?30

Whose responsibility would it be to lend this authorization and perform the signatory

equivalent of what J. L. Austin famously termed a “speech act,” words whose very

utterance (in this case, written utterance) effect some change in the world?31 The

Declaration needed notarization by a witness entrusted with a particular kind of power.32

Then as now, notaries functioned to “certify the proper execution of many of the

life-changing documents of private citizens—whether those diverse transactions convey

real estate, grant powers of attorney, establish a prenuptial agreement, or perform the

28 Barbara Sinclair, Unorthodox Lawmaking: New Legislative Processes in the US Congress, 5th ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE / CQ Press, 2017), 40–43. 29 “Thursday, July 4, 1776,” in Ford, Journals of the Continental Congress, 5:516. 30 Wilfred J. Ritz, “The Authentication of the Engrossed Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776,” Law and History Review 4, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 189, doi:10.2307/743719. 31 The most famous example from Austin’s list of “performative utterances” is the “I do” affirmation in a wedding ceremony. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 5. 32 A brief history of the office of the notary from ancient Rome through the seventeenth century can be found in John E. Seth, “Notaries in the American Colonies.” John Marshall Law Review 32, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 865–68.

44

multitude of other activities that enable our civil society to function.”33 With so much

responsibility, notaries occupied a crucial and, at times, highly unenviable position in

early America: authorizing—and thereby making legible to posterity—any number of

civic or mercantile activities between individual parties, colonies, and even nations. Not

just anyone could assume the office and its responsibilities.34 Qualifications of character

and training mattered because, as Kathryn Burns so elegantly put it,

notaries enjoyed a special relationship to the truth. They were expected to witness noteworthy acts, from the spectacular . . . to the humble and mundane . . . It then fell to notaries to shape the messy specifics of each event into the proper form to be committed truthfully to the page. . . . Notaries were thus truth’s alchemists, mixing the singular into the formulaic in accordance with prescribed recipes to produce the written, duly witnessed, and certified truth. Their truth was recognizable not by its singularity but by its very regularity.35

It would seem that in this momentous case, the signers together formed a collective

notarial force that, with their signatures, brought into being a new nation. But this did not

happen all at once. If anyone signed Jefferson’s “fair copy” on or about July 4, it would

have been John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, or Charles Thomson,

its secretary. If any such document existed, it was quickly lost.36 Part of the reason is that

33 “What Is a Notary Public?,” Notary 101, Knowledge Center, National Notary Association, accessed February 14, 2017, http://www.nationalnotary.org/knowledge -center/about-notaries. 34 For a description of common qualifications, including education, financial means, and character, see Seth, “Notaries in the American Colonies,” 878. 35 Kathryn. Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 352, doi:10.1086/531318. 36 Wilfred J. Ritz explores the haziness surrounding the drafting, revising, and printing of the declaration. One reason he posits for the fact that there are no extant drafts from these sessions is that because war was already underway, members of the Continental Congress met that summer in secrecy. This meant that drafts might have been destroyed by obligation. Ritz, “From the Here,” 501.

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the signatures were in formal and technological conflict with the more immediate goal:

proclaiming and spreading word of the declaration.

In 1776, printing relied on hand-cast and hand-set type. Until 1796, when Binny

and Ronaldson started their successful type foundry in Philadelphia, printers in the

colonial backwaters of North America invariably imported type—much of it used and

worn, yet still expensive—from European foundries.37 Certainly, they were not equipped

for the difficult, time-consuming, and resource-intensive process of engraving accurate

facsimiles of individual signatures.38 Hancock’s signature alone would have been so

arduous an addition as to be unimaginable. Plainly, the authorizing signature could not be

reproduced and was therefore not something that people particularly expected or needed

to see in print. A printed version of the declaration, known as the Dunlap broadside, was

promptly issued bearing the title, “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United

States of America, in General Congress Assembled” (fig. 2.3). It contains the full, final

text of the declaration and John Hancock’s printed name below the phrase, “Signed by

Order and in Behalf of the Congress.”39

37 See John Bidwell, “Printers’ Supplies and Capitalization,” chap. 4, pt. 2 in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, vol. 1 of A History of the Book in America, ed. David D. Hall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 38 Steel-plate engraving and the lithographic printing process—both of which dramatically increased the ease and speed of print production—would not reach the US until the 1810s. 39 There are only twenty-six known copies of the Dunlap Broadside in existence today, but it is not clear how many were initially printed. Ritz suggests that the text had already been secretly laid out for print in advance so revision could be made quickly on the afternoon of July 4—the essence of a “rush job.” Ritz, “From the Here,” 502.

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Figure 2.3. In Congress, July 4, 1776. A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of American, in General Congress Assembled (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1776). Belonging to the National Archives, this is one of only 26 extant copies of the Dunlap broadside. (Courtesy of the National Archives. Dunlap Broadside [Declaration of Independence], Jul. 4, 1776, recto; Rough Journals, Sep. 5, 1774–Mar. 2, 1789; Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, 1765–1821, Record Group 360; National Archives Building, Washington, DC [online version available through the Archival Research Catalog (ARC identifier 301682) at www.archives.gov; February 12, 2017].)

The public proclamation of the declaration was largely an immaterial, aural

experience that bound Americans further together in an exciting but terrifying historical

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moment of precariousness and celebration. “What were Americans celebrating . . . ?”

Pauline Maier asks in describing the jubilation of the summer of ’76. “The news, not the

vehicle that brought it; Independence, the end of monarchy, and the assumption of self-

government, not the document that announced Congress’s decision to break with

Britain.”40 In fact, to the newly christened Americans of 1776, this wasn’t even a

document. Few people had laid eyes or hands on it, and if they had, it would have looked

like a generic broadside, indistinguishable from other printed matter. In 1776, hardly

anyone knew the declaration had been penned largely by Thomas Jefferson, let alone the

identities of the specific signers who, in accordance with the concluding line, “And for

the support of this Declaration . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our

Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”41 It is precisely this final line, however, that would

eventually become the defining trait of the declaration and iterate those identities through

a collection of signatures.

What happened, and by whose authority, mattered here on the grandest possible

scale. It needed to be made iterable, if not to the public, then at least to the Congress

itself.42 John Adams anticipated there would, in the future, be some kind of visualization

of the political process behind the declaration, in order to communicate an iterable 40 Maier, American Scripture, 160. 41 Ibid., 162. 42 Much debate surrounds the documentation of details in the congressional journals. A biography of Thomas McKean, congressional representative from Delaware, discusses quarrels between signers conducted via letters about which events happened on what dates. There were no definitive records they could consult because “Jefferson’s Notes were not made at the time alleged, but subsequently, and aided by the printed journals.” In effect, copies were being used to retroactively reconstruct absent originals. Roberdeau Buchanan, Genealogy of the McKean Family of Pennsylvania . . . (Lancaster, PA: Inquirer, 1890), 35.

48

version of events. In a July 9 letter to Maryland representative Samuel Chase, who had

departed Philadelphia before the presentation of the draft on June 28, the discussion of its

revisions, or the congressional vote, Adams wrote, “As soon as an American seal is

prepared, I conjecture the Declaration will be Subscribed by all the Members; which will

give you the Opportunity you wish for, of transmitting your Name, among the Votaries of

Independence.”43

As it happened, on July 4 Congress had also resolved that Benjamin Franklin,

John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson would “be a committee, to bring in a device for a seal

for the United States of America.”44 Each of the three suggested an allegorical biblical

scene for the seal, but the consultant they contracted, Swiss-born portraitist Pierre Eugene

du Simitiere, proposed a different design entirely: A heraldic shield bearing thirteen

individual symbols (one for each state), guarded by the watchful eye of providence, and

captioned with the motto e pluribus unum—out of many, one (fig. 2.4). Many of these

features would be dropped in the first official seal to be adopted by Congress in 1782.

But arguably du Simitiere’s key representational elements were also at play in a much

earlier representational device: the engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence.

43 John Adams to Samuel Chase, 9 July 1776, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02 -0155. The timeline of Chase’s travel is discussed in Emily Sneff, “Unsullied by Falsehood: No John Trumbull,” Course of Human Events (blog), Declaration Resources Project, Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University, June 27, 2016, http://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/blog/trumbull. 44 “Thursday, July 4, 1776,” in Ford, Journals of the Continental Congress, 5:517–18.

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Figure 2.4. Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, Proposal for United States Coat of Arms, September 20, 1776. This image has been manipulated to increase contrast. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Series 1: General Correspondence, 1651–1827; Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606–1827; Manuscript Division; American Memory; Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib000180.)

The desire to “transmit names” was clearly more urgent then making a seal. Two

weeks later on July 19, 1776, Congress ordered that “the Declaration passed on the 4th,

be fairly engrossed on parchment, . . . and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by

every member of Congress.”45 (fig. 2.1) Whether this meant every member of Congress

who had been present in Independence Hall on June 28, July 2, or July 4, whether they

had approved the declaration or dissented, seems not to matter. Eight men who had been

present on July 2 did not sign, while eight who did sign had not been elected to office

until after July 4.46 It is noteworthy that the engrossed copy was also ordered to be

written “with the title and the stile of ‘The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United

45 “Friday, July 19, 1776,” in Ford, Journals of the Continental Congress, 5:590–91. Emphasis added. 46 Emily Sneff, “Unsullied by Falsehood: The Signing,” Course of Human Events (blog), Declaration Resources Project, Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University, July 27, 2016, http://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/blog/signing.

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States of America.’”47 In a few weeks’ time, the representatives had become the states

and the states had become unanimous.

This engrossed copy was hand written (likely by Timothy Matlack, clerk to the

Second Continental Congress) and signed by a number of delegates on August 2, 1776.

Over the tumultuous months that followed, signers stopped in and out of Independence

Hall to affix their mark, no easy task since war was already underway and many

congressional delegates had to return home—to say nothing of the British loyalists who

promptly fled to England. It took Thomas McKean of Delaware years to get his signature

on the parchment, and Robert Livingston, a member of the drafting committee, never

signed. The real function of this “instrument,” it seems, was to create a unifying totality

capable of distilling the complexity of the political process into a single, legible site of

representation. Advances in technology over the following decades would combine with

an emerging will to see and know this totality, enabling more Americans to behold it.

III. “Splendid and Correct”: Liberty, History, Facsimile

In the lead up to the War of 1812, Binns invoked the need for the Declaration of

Independence qua public document—certified and knowable. This process, already in

progress, now began to accelerate. As previously mentioned, one iteration of this peculiar

document existed: the engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence, which lived at

this time (decidedly unknown and poorly preserved) rolled up in a drawer in the White

47 “Friday, July 19, 1776,” in Ford, Journals of the Continental Congress, 5:590–91. Emphasis mine.

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House. The merging of the two qualities—certified and accessible—happened in stages.

While the Dunlap broadside and engrossed copy both appeared in the summer of 1776, a

small resolution in Congress from January 18, 1777 bore some curious fruit. Sandwiched

in the journals of Congress, between a resolution “that the said Elisha Painter be removed

from any command in the said regiment, and referred to General Washington for an

appointment to such an office, as he shall judge him qualified to fill” and “Agreeable to

order, Congress proceeded to the election of a pay master in Baltimore; and, the ballots

being taken, Jonathan Hudson was elected,” it was “Ordered, That an authenticated copy

of the Declaration of Independency, with the names of the members of Congress

subscribing the same, be sent to each of the United States, and that they be desired to

have the same put upon record.”48

The task fell to Mary Katherine Goddard of Baltimore, printer, publisher, and first

female postmaster in colonial America. Working off the original, Goddard’s broadside

was the first to announce the identities of the signers. The signatures could not be

reproduced, but the limited number of copies—designed for solely for distribution to

each state—did receive a secondary form of authentication. At the bottom, in ink, is the

signature of Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress. Following the

words “A True Copy” is the signature of John Hancock (fig. 2.5).

48 “Saturday, January 18, 1777,” in Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, vol. 7, 1777: January 1–May 21, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907), 48

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Figure 2.5. Detail of In Congress, July 4, 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America (Baltimore: Mary Katharine Goddard, 1777), showing the annotations “Attest Chas Thomson Secy” and “A True Copy [signed] John Hancock Presid.” (Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Continental Congress Broadside Collection; Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774–1789; Rare Books and Special Collections Division; American Memory; Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://www.loc .gov/resource/bdsdcc.02101/.) But was this copy true enough? Curiously, Goddard’s broadside only includes fifty-five

names instead of the fifty-six we know to be on the engrossed copy. Thomas McKean of

Delaware is missing. While McKean had been a strong proponent of independence and a

supporter of a formal declaration, he left town on business shortly after July 4 and was

not present when the engrossed copy was ordered or when it was signed in August.

Consequently, he did not sign it until he was returned to the area years later.49 In effect,

the “original” was being copied while it was still under construction.

49 See William Leete Stone, “The Declaration of Independence in a New Light,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, July 1883, 208–12, http://harpers.org/archive/1883/07 /the-declaration-of-independence-in-a-new-light/.

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But to the tastes of post-revolutionary Republicans like John Binns, his cohorts,

and his rivals, a version of a true original document was needed—and needed to be

known. Binns first proposed his version of a “Splendid and Correct” facsimile of the

Declaration of Independence in 1816.50 In addition to rendering facsimiles of the

signatures, the “correctness” of Binn’s version rested on a small titular change and added

effects for a splendid representational conceit (fig. 2.6). With the exception of the

Goddard broadside, of which only thirteen copies were printed, Binns maintained that no

other versions of the declaration matched the framing language of the engrossed copy,

reading: “In Congress, July 4, 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United

States of America.” This change in emphasis has formal but also ideological

ramifications. As Eric Slauter has noted, the change in title (between the Dunlap

broadside and the engrossed copy) “put delegates in an awkward position. The

‘Representatives’ who had clearly been the speakers in the title of the printed text of July

4—the “WE” who resolved on independence—now further subordinated themselves to the

states they represented even as the text was for the first time specifically made available

to be signed by those representatives.”51 This unanimity and the subservience of the

individual signers to the states they represented clearly held great importance for Binns.

So much so that he solicited individual state offices for sketches and wax impressions of

50 Binns recounts the work on his facsimile in his autobiography, Recollections of the Life of John Binns . . . (Philadelphia: Printed and for sale by the author and by Parry and M’Millan, 1854), 234–37. 51 Eric Slauter, “The Declaration of Independence and the New Nation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Frank Shuffelton, Cambridge Companions to American Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17.

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their crests to include as ornamentation. These he turned over to Philadelphia artist

Thomas Sully, whom he contracted to execute the composition.

Figure 2.6. John Binns, Declaration of Independence, 1818–1819. Engraving on wove paper, 91.8 ´ 68 cm (sheet), printed by James Porter, Philadelphia, PA. (Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pga .01013.)

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Both the text and the signatures (organized, as they had always been, by state) are

ensconced in a circle of unity comprising thirteen state crests, sealed, as it were, at the top

with “the best impressions of the best likenesses” of Washington, Jefferson, and

Hancock.52 So elaborate and complex was the undertaking that it took four years to

produce, with attention to accuracy being of utmost concern at each stage. With the crests

and frame in the hands of artists and copperplate engravers, Binns sent a letter engraver

by the name of Mr. Vallence to copy the text and the signatures off the engrossed

“original” in Washington. During this visit he made sure to obtain a note of certification

from John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, who was tasked with granting Vallence

the necessary access. Binns took care to include this note of certification at the bottom of

his final facsimile, the full text of which reads:

“Department of State, 19th April 1819. I certify that this is a CORRECT copy of the original Declaration of Independence, deposited at this department; and that I have compared all the signatures with those of the original, and have found them EXACT IMITATIONS.” [signed] John Quincy Adams Binns maintains that his facsimile was “the cause of several works of art being

published; one of the earliest of them represented the interior of the hall of Congress,

with the chairman, Thomas Jefferson, presenting the result of their labors, the Declaration

of Independence.”53 It is quite likely that he is referencing John Trumbull’s painting and

Asher B. Durand’s 1823 engraving of it, which Trumbull himself had commissioned in

1820. However, as we shall see in the next section, Trumbull had already been working

on his painting for decades. As much as Binns would have loved to establish himself as

52 Binns, Recollections, 235. 53 Ibid., 236.

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the sole author of this important project, he was anything but alone in his endeavors. His

chief competitor was Benjamin Tyler Owens, a handwriting teacher and specialist also

engaged in his own “correct” facsimile production (fig. 2.7).

Figure 2.7. Benjamin Owen Tyler, In Congress, July 4th. 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, 1818. Engraving, with facsimile signatures, on parchment, 75 ´ 61 cm. Copied from the Engrossed Declaration of Independence by Tyler; engraved by Peter Maverick, Newark, NJ; and published by Tyler, Washington, DC. (Courtesy of the Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA, http://edu.lva .virginia.gov/docs/hires/DeclarationOfIndependence.pdf.)

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For Owens, the signatures were paramount. He eschewed subscription of names to states

and did not fuss with any ornamentation beyond that which was innate to his medium:

script. Owens and Binns descended into rivalry, each scrambling to secure

authentications, advertisements, and institutional patronage for their respective editions—

as well as trying to undercut each other’s prices. This degree of competition to sell the

most “authentic” product indicates, at the very least, a growing market for such facsimile

documents.54

In 1823 John Quincy Adams seems to have tired of Binns and reneged on

certification of his facsimile. Eschewing all the “splendid” fussiness for something more

realistic, Adams hired William J. Stone to produce a facsimile, which remains the most

commonly reproduced facsimile edition today—so much so that it is often mistaken for

the engrossed copy (fig. 2.8).55 This is now the version that gets reproduced, the one that

most commonly stands in for the engrossed copy. Through use, abuse, travel, neglect, and

replication during the first fifty years of its life, that problematic “original document” is

now—despite the most comprehensive imaginable restoration efforts—totally faded,

perhaps ironically, beyond legibility.

54 This rivalry is documented in John Bidwell, “American History in Image and Text,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 98, part 2 (October 1988): 261–64. 55 The method(s) Stone used to produce his edition were kept strictly secret and have been the subject of debate and speculation ever since.

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Figure 2.8. William J. Stone, Facsimile of the Engrossed Declaration of Independence, 1823. Copperplate engraving on vellum, approx. 75.6 ´ 62.2 cm. This copy of Stone’s facsimile bears the imprint, “ENGRAVED by W. I. STONE for the Dept. of State, by order | of J. Q. ADAMS Sect. of State, July 4th. 1823,” indicating that it is one of the 201 copies that Stone printed on vellum for the Department of State. (Courtesy of the Declaration of Independence Collection, 1776–1942, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://lccn.loc.gov /mm83018135.)

IV. History’s Alchemists, Part 2: The Sketcher

The son of Connecticut governor and famed advisor to the founding fathers,

“Brother Jonathan,” young John Trumbull did not see much action on the revolutionary

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battlefield, but his skills in map-drawing and strategy visualization earned him a position

as George Washington’s aide-de-camp and a significant share in the “spirit of ’76.” Ten

years later, with memories fresh enough to be vivid while also subject to historical

difference, Trumbull was sojourning in Paris. There, in 1786, he befriended Thomas

Jefferson, who encouraged his nascent plans to paint a suite of scenes from the American

Revolution. It is unsurprising that as the declaration’s principal author, Jefferson

supported this subject in particular for a work of national history painting. The scene

made an important civic addition to the military pictures—an important reminder that

independence was born of more than soldiers’ muskets on battlefields. It also required the

words and ideas of enlightened leaders in the halls of early government.56

As any attempt to reconstruct the events of the summer of ’76 frustratingly shows,

this kind of civic heroism was very hard to paint. It fundamentally lacked a core moment

of drama around which to organize a “fancy picture.” Trumbull’s painting needed to be

about something more than timeless heroics; it needed to function as its own

documentary device. In this section, I demonstrate that this mandate of visual

documentation became increasingly important throughout Trumbull’s decades-long

project of depicting the Declaration of Independence. He began work upon his return to

the US later in 1786, but the subject would continue to occupy him for decades to come.

A small version of the painting (fig. 2.9), completed circa 1793, would become the basis

of the main subject of the following analysis: the enormous 1818 version, The

56 Trumbull remembers Jefferson’s positive encouragement and review of his early plans and sketches in Autobiography, Reminiscences, and Letters of John Trumbull, from 1756 to 1841 (New York: Wiley and Putnam; New Haven: B. L. Hamlen, 1841), 95–96.

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Declaration of Independence (fig 2.2), which currently hangs in the rotunda of the

Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

Figure 2.9. John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, 1786–1820. Oil on canvas, 53 ´ 78.7 cm. (Courtesy of the Trumbull Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 1832.3.)

After the traumatic British destruction of Washington in 1814, the edifices of the

young nation—both architectural and ideological—needed rebuilding and rearticulating.

Even in a government with no precedent of arts patronage, the aging Trumbull saw an

opportunity; the timing was right for his self-nomination as a painter of national history.57

After all, his credentials extended beyond his artistic talents: he had lived through the

very history he would be depicting and even knew personally some of its key figures,

crucial boons to the authenticity of his work.

57 The questions surrounding governmental patronage are well explored in Coons, “Great National Painting.”

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Thanks to the artist’s aggressive lobbying, the federal government commissioned

the twelve-by-eighteen-foot canvas as the first installment in a series of four patriotic

scenes memorializing key events from the Revolutionary War and the establishment of

the early republic. The Declaration of Independence blends the banality of quotidian

governmental processes with the heroism of history in the making to present a

monumental triumph of civic nobility: the presentation to the Continental Congress of a

draft of the Declaration of Independence for review and, ultimately, adoption.

In an 1817 letter to Jefferson, Trumbull predicted that

the universal interest which my Countrymen feel, and always must feel in an Event important above all others, must in some degree attach to the painting which will preserve the likeness of Forty Seven of those Patriots to whom we owe that memorable act and all its glorious consequences.58

For Trumbull, any hope of articulating the significance of history had to rely on the

faithful documentation of historical actors. As we shall see, these aims were often at cross

purposes. On the one hand, he desired to elevate the subject matter, infusing it with the

kind of importance that surpasses the everyday. On the other hand, he wanted to

faithfully document for posterity the individuals involved. The working method the artist

employed between 1786 and 1793 entailed “[preparing] the picture to receive portraits”

by painting the background and leaving “pockets for faces and figures.” He then spent

years traveling throughout the states, sketching subjects from life wherever possible. The

emphasis on individual portraits was critical to Trumbull’s bid for truth in representation. 58 John Trumbull to Thomas Jefferson, 28 December 1817, quoted in John H. Hazleton, “The Historical Value of Trumbull’s ‘Declaration of Independence,’” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 31, no. 1 (1907): 34, http://www.jstor.org/stable /20085368.34.

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Yet it also served to produce a clunky painting that troubled period viewers not only for

its problematic interpretation of history but its aesthetic style and execution. I argue that

these grievances are related and that they demonstrate a painter struggling to integrate

conflicting modes of truth in representation.

Born in Connecticut in 1756 and trained in the colonies, England, and France,

Trumbull studied under Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, Anglo-American

painters negotiating representational mandates in an age of rupture and revolution. The

specific challenge facing these artists was merging the inspirational capacity of

“timeless” history with the need to document actual history as it was unfolding through

real human actors. The result was an emerging form of representation called “historical

genre,” a blending of genres that had, until the late eighteenth century, been constrained

by a strict hierarchy: the grand manner painting of mythic, biblical, and classical history

at the pinnacle, with portraiture and genre scenes occupying lower rungs.59 Insofar as a

distinction between history and historical genre can be made, “the genre painter tells a

common story, one involving ordinary, anonymous people in daily situations, while the

history painter traditionally presents significant, ideal human actions and events.” And

yet, both “share the fundamental trait of being narrative modes in which success depends

59 Mark Thistlethwaite, “The Most Important Themes: History Painting and Its Place in American Art,” in Grand Illusions: History Painting in America, by William H. Gerdts and Mark Thistlethwaite, Anne Burnett Tandy Lectures in American Civilization 8 (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1988), 34. For introduction of the term “historical genre,” see Paul Duro, “Giving Up on History? Challenges to the Hierarchy of the Genres in Early Nineteenth-Century France,” Art History 28, no. 5 (November 2005): 690, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2005.00485.x.

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upon readability.”60 These realms of the ordinary and the ideal were destined for collision

in a new democratic republic unbounded neither by European monarchy nor by

academy.61

In North America, and especially in the “Uniting” States, history was being made

in the moment and thus provided the perfect “emplacement” for the experimental

blending of the mythological and the ordinary. An early watershed moment in this

representational melding can be found in Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe

of 1770 (fig. 2.10). As Mark Salber Phillips and Edgar Wind have shown, the scene of a

British officer expiring during his victorious 1759 battle against the French during the

Seven Years’ War bears the formal qualities of historia painting.62 Bathed in dramatic

light, the heroic Wolfe is collapsed in a pietà pose and tended by a Mary Magdalene-

esque doctor attempting to stanch his mortal wound. The scene has all the timeless drama

and grandeur of a story from the Bible or antiquity, and yet West’s decision to portray his

60 Thistlethwaite, “Most Important Themes,” 35. Duro deepens both the difference and the reading operation by locating history painting in the poetic realm of “the ‘universal’ and the representative” and historical genre in the factual realm of “the particular and the individual.” Duro, “Giving Up on History,” 701. 61 The portrait painter Henry Inman was supposed to have said, “I should have starved long ago on any thing but portraits. But it is always so in the infancy of the Fine Arts in all countries. People are fond of their own portraits before they care a fig for a fine landscape, or a noble historical piece. . . . People would have portraits and I must have bread, and I made them pay for their own phizzes just as much as I should have asked them for a phiz of Nature, or a phiz of History.” Quoted in C. Edwards Lester, The Artists of America: A Series of Biographical Sketches . . . (New York: Baker and Scriber, 1856), 43. 62 See Mark Salber Phillips, “History Painting Redistanced: From Benjamin West to David Wilkie,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 3 (November 2014): 611–29, doi:10.1017/S1479244314000213; and Edgar Wind, “Penny, West, and The Death of General Wolfe,” in Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Imagery, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 100–4.

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figures in contemporary military dress situates it firmly in the modern world, bringing the

grandiloquent past and the fraught present into direct collision.63

Figure 2.10. Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. Oil on canvas, 152.6 ´ 214.5 cm. (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, no. 8007.)

According to West’s first biographer, John Galt, when Sir Joshua Reynolds, the

president of the newly established Royal Academy of Arts, voiced concerns about West’s

choices, West responded with a defense of history painting for a new era:

If, instead of the facts of the transaction, I represent classical fictions, how shall I be understood by posterity! . . . I want to mark the date, the place, and the parties engaged in the event; and if I am not able to dispose of the circumstances in a picturesque manner, no academical

63 Thistlethwaite, “Most Important Themes,” 9. Also see Jaffe, Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence, 37–38.

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distribution of Greek or Roman costume will enable me to do justice to the subject.64

In other words, the facts must be honored while being assembled into a good picture.65

Galt further recounts that upon seeing the painting Reynolds recanted:

He has treated his subject as it ought to be treated. I retract my objection against the introduction of any other circumstances into historical pictures than those which are requisite and appropriate; and I foresee that this picture will not only become one of the most popular but occasion a revolution in art.66 Whereas portraiture had been both irrelevant and hierarchically subservient to the

depiction of historia, it now gained new importance as a critical element of historical

genre scenes. If painters of biblical or classical history had freedom to craft figures out of

a range of models and ideals, painters of historical genre could not rightly eschew actual

documentary subjects whenever available. 67 Between 1779 and 1781, West’s friend and

rival John Singleton Copley went to great pains to compile dozens of portraits in

64 Benjamin West, quoted in John Galt, The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West . . . (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies; Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1820), 48–49. 65 West’s use of the term “picturesque” almost certainly resonates with the aesthetic philosophy of his cousin William Gilpin, who was, at this same moment, at work on his theory of “picturesque beauty.” A “third category” between Burke’s “beautiful” and “sublime,” the picturesque addressed the effect of a scene on a viewer’s emotions. On the relationship between West and Gilpin, see Grose Evans, Benjamin West and the Taste of His Times (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University press, 1959), 72–73. Although Gilpin’s work focuses mainly on landscape, he does attempt the occasional discussion of picturesque portraiture. In his essay “On Picturesque Beauty,” he posits the “patriarchal head” as the “highest form of picturesque beauty” in the representation of the human face. This seems to derive from its “dignity of character” and “rough touches of age.” William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape . . . (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 10–11. 66 Joshua Reynolds paraphrased by West, quoted in Galt, Life, Studies, and Works, 49–50. 67 Irma B. Jaffe, Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence, Art in Context (New York: Viking, 1976), 74.

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preparation for his painting of the recent death of William Pitt, the first Earl of Chatham,

who collapsed from a heart attack in the House of Lords in the spring of 1778 (fig. 2.11).

Figure 2.11. John Singleton Copley, The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 1779–1781. Oil on canvas, 228.6 ´ 307.3 cm. (Courtesy of the Tate Gallery, on loan to the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK, NPG L146.)

The figures correspond to contemporary historical actors and dialogue closely with

written and observed accounts of the events.68 Yet this was no crude reportage. “The fact

that he was able to get so many noble lords to pose for him and finish the picture by 1780

speaks well for his industry and his standing as an artist.”69 Copley dressed his figures in

period-appropriate garb, but it was ceremonial finery reserved for special occasions that 68 For a list of all the sitters and a sampling of eyewitness accounts, see “The Death of the Earl of Chatham,” Collections, National Portrait Gallery, London, accessed February 25, 2017, http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw09377/The-Death-of-the -Earl-of-Chatham. 69 Josephine L. Allen, “Portrait Drawings by Copley,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 14, no. 5 (January 1956): 122, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3257633.

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they had not been wearing on that particular day. This slight adjustment lent veracity but

also beauty to a “scene [that is] an imagined reconstruction of a shocking event, stage

managed for clarity and heightened effect by an artist who assumed his right to pictorial

license.” As a result, “The painting was sensationally convincing.”70

Within the emerging mode of historical genre, the imperative to capture the date,

place, and parties engaged in the event being depicted was central enough to make or

break a painting. Consider for instance West’s failed attempt, one decade later, to depict

the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War (fig. 1.3). West had no

problem getting the proud and triumphant American negotiators to sit for his

composition. However, the British representatives refused. Their absence on the

unfinished canvas speaks more than the roughly worked group it abuts—an absence that

effectively thwarts the painter’s effort “to tell this great event to the eye of the world.”71

The desire to show in a picture what has been amply observed through firsthand

accounts or established in formal written documents thus presents a problem to painters

working at the interstices of history and genre. While both history and genre painting

bear a critical relationship to text, “history painting’s foundational trait is shown to be its

rendering of text into image, against historical genre’s reversal of this direction to present

a textual image—that is, a narrative that is little more (and sometimes less), than a

pictorial representation of an event.”72 Trumbull’s painting of the Declaration of

Independence thus occupies a fraught position of textual image because, as demonstrated,

70 Jaffe, Trumbull: Declaration of Independence, 40. 71 West, quoted in Galt, Life, Studies, and Works, 48. 72 Duro, “Giving Up on History,” 701.

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he endeavored to create a pictorial event context for a textual document that is itself

already a representation.

We might say that Trumbull responded by working backwards, making his image

function as text, by aiming for a representational commensurability between bodies and

signatures. It is my contention that in between the smaller and larger versions, the painter,

like many other Americans, was becoming more aware of the signatory (non)event of the

declaration. During the intervening decades between beginning the small painting and

finishing the grand-scale version, Trumbull strove to make his figures function as

signatures in order shore up the veracity of his composition. But he also desired to

supplement the supposedly documentary “fact” (which we now know to be a

representation of itself) with that which a direct observer could iterate: “the living breath

of the event,” or the extradocumentary chatter that both decodes and shapes social

relations in any lived present. I suspect that Trumbull well understood the dubious

documentary quality of the engrossed copy of the declaration—that it was fundamentally

lacking in Truth. Thus he sought to craft an “explanatory fiction,” one that could

complicate and supplement the textual “facts” with the addition of other information

gained from a privileged position to convert hearsay “into a pattern acceptable as truth.”73

Trumbull faced a paucity of documentation when attempting to establish exactly

who had been in Independence Hall on any of the particular days between June 28 and

July 4. Just as the engrossed copy of the declaration diverged from the soon-lost secret

congressional journal, Trumbull engaged in a thirty-year process, at great pains—and

73 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), 232, 231.

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with many inconsistencies, omissions, and identity confusions—to portray each

individual in the painting as faithfully as possible. The result is an attempt to craft a

truthful composite out of truthful parts. Later in life, Trumbull reflected on the challenges

that he had faced:

Important difficulties presented themselves to the artist at the outset, for although only ten years had then elapsed since the date of the event, it was already difficult to ascertain who were the individuals to be represented. Should he regard the fact of having been actually present in the room on the 4th of July, indispensable? Should he admit those only who were in favour of, and reject those who were opposed to the act? Where a person was dead, and no authentic portrait could be obtained, should he admit ideal heads?74

For consultation in these matters, Trumbull turned to important acquaintances who had

been there. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams served as early advisors to the work by

supplying recollected details of the scene, its actors, and how best to depict them. The

former presidents suggested that “with regard to the characters to be introduced, the

signatures of the original act, (which is still preserved in the office of the state,) ought to

be the general guide” but “that portraits ought, however, to be admitted, of those who

were opposed to, and of course did not sign, as well as of those who voted in favor of the

declaration, and did sign it.”75 Whoever was “admitted” though, had to be depicted as

authentically as possible and “in case of death, where no portraits could be obtained, . . .

he should by no means admit any ideal representation, lest, it being known that some

such were to be found in the painting, a doubt of the truth of others should be excited in

74 John Trumbull, Catalogue of Paintings, by Colonel Trumbull . . . (New York: Nathaniel B. Holmes, 1831), 15. 75 Ibid.

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the minds of posterity.”76 Thus Trumbull began traveling up and down the seaboard,

sketching the surviving signers from life or painting small oil miniatures on the backs of

which he noted “memory aids” related to appearance (e.g., “brown eyes”).77 For those he

was not able to paint directly, the artist used extant portraits conveying “authentic

likenesses” or even, in a few cases, the sons of deceased signers. In other words, those

who could not be depicted with absolute veracity were omitted.

This mandate went from being peculiar to problematic, even specious. Trumbull’s

privileged position and his credentials as an artist were called into question by people

who assumed the facts were more stable than they actually were. The Port Folio

published a response to the painting, signed with the nom de plume “Detector,” who

decried, “It may, perhaps, be a very pretty picture, but is certainly no representation of

the Declaration of Independence. . . . To make the ‘national painting’ in question

subservient to a display of the likeness of any American, however distinguished, who was

not both a member of Congress and present in that body when Independence was

declared, is . . . ridiculous.”78

The complaints were not just about facts, but also about aesthetics. Samuel

Adams Wells, who worried that the painting would “obscure the history of the event

which it is designed to commemorate,” further added, “I will frankly avow that I was 76 Ibid., 15–16. 77 Trumbull recounts his busy sketching travels in Autobiography, Reminiscences, and Letters, 165–68. 78 Detector, “Great National Picture,” Miscellaneous Paragraphs, Port Folio, January 1819, 85. Recall that there was significant debate among those who had been there as to when “independence was declared” and who was present. Samuel Chase was not there for any of the events in July for instance, but this did not stop him from signing the engrossed copy in August.

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much disappointed at not finding it (according to my idea) executed in a style worthy of

the subject.”79 John Quincy Adams was decidedly unimpressed with the rotunda version

of 1818, remarking, “I cannot say I was disappointed in the execution of it, because my

expectations were very low; but the picture is immeasurably below the dignity of the

subject. . . . I think the old small picture far superior to this large new one.”80 Finally,

Congressman John Randolph of Virginia called the painting a “Shin-piece, for, surely,

never was there, before, such a collection of legs submitted to the eyes of man.”81 The

halls of Congress have never been filled with the sensitive minds of trained art critics.

But can any insight be gleaned from this litany of formal criticisms?

There can be no question that aesthetically and formally John Trumbull’s The

Declaration of Independence is a strange—and boring—painting whose components

seem stuck between living vivacity and stiff decoration. The silence in the Assembly

Room of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall is palpable, generated not just by the somber

magnitude of the event, as Trumbull intended, but also by the strange stiffness of the

figures, many of whom (like the trio in the rear, left of center) seem more like images

pasted into the composition than like natural presences in situ. Notably, this impression

seems to have increased between the early and later versions, perhaps prompting John

Quincy Adams’s preference for the first. While the composition changes little between

the small version and the large one, there is indeed an undeniable change in style, most

79 Wells to Jefferson, 2 June 1819. 80 John Quincy Adams, 1 September 1818, in Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1875), 4:128. 81 4 Reg. Deb. 942 (1828).

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easily characterized as a shift in emphasis from color to line. The rosy hues in the small

painting imbue the faces with a fleshy vitality, while the soft, painterly handling gives the

scene a warm and energetic atmospheric haze. The larger painting is marked by harsh

contrast: the faces become wan, framed by wigs now stark white. The blacks are darker,

the reds and yellows bolder. Detailed patterns have been added to the carpet and ceiling

molding, and each figure seems isolated by a dark penumbra. The overall effect is linear,

stiff, even severe. There are, of course, practical issues that could account for this change

in style. Not only did Trumbull face the monumental task of scaling a twenty-one-by-

thirty-one inch painting up to twelve by eighteen feet, his eyesight was also beginning to

fail by the time he undertook the rotunda commission. And yet Trumbull’s move from

color to line seems to reverse the typical stylistic progression of painters with dimming

vision. One possible explanation for this dramatic shift lies in the metonymic connection

between form and content: Trumbull was making bodies act like signatures.

_______________

While signatures happen on a line, they are by definition (at least in the Anglo-

English tradition) lines as well, continuous and contained gestures resulting in a name in

script. This is not unlike another popular representational phenomenon in late eighteenth-

and early nineteenth-century America: silhouettes or, as they were more often called in

the US, profiles (fig. 2.12).

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Figure 2.12. Sarah De Hart, Washington, as cut by Miss De Hart, and given by Lady Washington to Kittie Duer, the daughter of Lord Stirling Philadelphia 1791, ca. 1791. Hollow-cut white paper silhouette, 10.7 ´ 7.1 cm (image), 24.3 ´ 19 cm (sheet). (Courtesy of the Marian S. Carson Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://www.loc .gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.39763/.)

Like signatures, silhouettes were “graphic registers of individuality” that functioned

through a similar operation of indexical representation.82 Cheap and easily produced, the

silhouette lacks detail, color, complexity, or artistic embellishment, but its appeal lies

elsewhere: in its direct contact with the subject. Rooted in space and time, silhouettes are

82 Wendy Bellion, “Heads of State: Profiles and Politics in Jeffersonian America,” in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, Media in Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 46.

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less depictions than they are indexical transcriptions, the registering of unstable presence.

An utterly flat type of representation that makes no pretentions to pictorial conventions of

depth or illusion, the silhouette is arguably an intermediary form of representation stuck

somewhere between media.

The progenitor of the silhouette is, of course, the fabled Corinthian Maid from

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Often mistaken for the “origin of Painting,” the story

was a popular subject for painters in the late eighteenth century (fig. 2.13).83 In fact the

story begins, “Enough and more than enough has been said about painting” and

introduces the young maid as a means of segue into the origin of “the plastic art.”

Heartbroken over the imminent departure of her beloved, the daughter of the Corinthian

potter Butades “drew in outline on the wall the shadow of [her lover’s] face thrown by a

lamp.” Later, “[Butades] pressed clay on this and made a relief, . . . and it is said that this

likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by

Mummius.”84 Butades’s daughter does not gaze lovingly upon her lover’s face and then

draw what she sees; she traces his profile, marking off the two-dimensional space in the

world filled by his presence. An intermediate step within a longer process, the sculptural

83 Geoffrey Batchen discusses the connection between Joseph Wright of Darby’s 1782–1784 painting of the subject as a commission for emerging industrial pottery mogul, Josiah Wedgwood, and his son Thomas Wedgwood’s early experiments in photography. These (failed) experiments were along the lines of Henry Fox Talbot’s early photograms, a photographic process that exposed the direct trace of an object onto photo-sensitized paper, rather than capturing a framed scene in the camera obscura. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 115–17. 84 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.151.

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relief that comes later effects a semblance of presence by extending that two-dimensional

figure out into three-dimensional space.

Figure 2.13. Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid, 1782–1784. Oil on canvas, 106.3 ´ 130.8 cm. (Courtesy of the Paul Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1983.1.46.)

Acts of circumscription, silhouettes literally “cut” a person out of space and time,

and this is what Trumbull wanted to do: to transpose individuals from 1776 into 1818.

They are mediations that index a fleeting presence that is soon to be displaced, already

absent. If the artist could not reconstruct a signatory event that never happened in the first

place, he could endeavor to depict the players in an otherwise unrepresentable process.

Solemn, noble, disconnected profiles assembled into a silent scene of decorum,

Trumbull’s Declaration effects its own visual fiction of unanimity different from but

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harmonizing with the one engrossed on parchment: both are pictures of accord where

providential will moves confidently and functionally from the people, through the

representatives, and then seamlessly into unified vision and action. Such a scene couldn’t

have been further from reality in 1819. While Trumbull negotiated details for the sale of

his painting to the US government—which would eventually display the painting in the

renovated Capitol Building—the halls of the temporary Capitol were filled with bitter,

violent discord, as the Fifteenth and later Sixteenth US Congresses furiously debated

Missouri’s bid for admission into the union as a slave-holding state. It would be another

forty years until the threats of secession made that spring would be realized, but even as

they were being consecrated in the American imaginary, the beloved representative

fictions were already gone.

Afterimage: “An Event Like a Ritual”

Scholar Irma Jaffe has offered Trumbull’s The Declaration of Independence the

highest form of artistic praise: the ability to transcend the limits of representation, exiting

the frame to become more than a picture but a kind of continuous living action.

It is perhaps a tribute to John Trumbull that his painting seems to be more an event encapsulated in time, an event, like a ritual, perpetually reenacted in the minds of those who view it, rather than an invention, a representation created in the imagination of the artist.85

As demonstrated in this chapter, this was not just Trumbull’s intention for his painting,

but the larger intention for the Declaration of Independence itself. Both, in their

85 Irma B. Jaffe, John Trumbull: Five Paintings of the Revolution (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1975), 19.

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collective representation strategies, inspire the constant return to a scene, a moment, that

ultimately evades representation. The collapse of these two “pictures” into one therefore

makes a strange kind of sense: they complement one another as much as they contradict.

For all its digressions from the document, Trumbull’s painting has become a kind of

representational stand-in for the text. It is unsurprising then that Americans—including

scholars such as Jaffee—should have rediscovered Trumbull on the eve of the United

States Bicentennial. As it happened, this fable of representation would gain a curious new

chapter in that moment.

On April 13, 1976, the US Treasury celebrated Thomas Jefferson’s birthday by

reintroducing into circulation the two-dollar bill (fig. 2.14). Citing “low circulation and

usage” the currency had been discontinued ten years prior, but this might have been an

excuse. According to one report, the handy two-dollar bill actually circulated quite well

at racetracks and other institutions of ill repute, making it an easy target for the decade’s

many efforts at cultural clean-up.86 But the saga of the bill was also imbricated within a

larger power struggle over who gets to control the production of US currency. In 1963,

three years before discontinuation, President John F. Kennedy quietly signed a little-

known presidential decree restoring the US Treasury’s power to print and distribute

money without having to operate through the Federal Reserve Bank. Pushback from the

Fed arrived promptly in the wake of his assassination, shunting newly-minted US

banknotes out of circulation and replacing them with Federal Reserve notes.

Discontinued in 1966 as a US banknote, the two-dollar bill was reintroduced in 1976 as a 86 John Bennardo, dir., The Two-Dollar Bill Documentary (Boca Raton, FL: Immaginé Productions, 2015).

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reserve note—a quiet but fundamental contest of authority playing out between the

engraver’s lines.

Figure 2.14. The obverse of the two-dollar bill (top) features a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, engraved by Charles K. Burt (after Gilbert Stuart), ca. 1869. The reverse (bottom) features a vignette of the signing of the Declaration of Independence engraved by Frederick Girsch (after John Trumbull), ca. 1976. US Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Printing and Engraving, Two-Dollar Federal Reserve Note, 1976. Dry intaglio printing on linen/cotton paper, 6.6 ´ 15.6 cm. (Courtesy of Jacob Lewis Bourjaily, http://www-personal.umich.edu /~jbourj/money5.htm.)

Thomas Jefferson’s face on the obverse remains unchanged since 1896. Gone,

however, is the image of his Monticello estate, which for decades had graced the reverse.

In honor of the bicentennial, the two-dollar bill returned with a visually compelling and

patriotic makeover. Today it is the only US bill in production to feature human subjects

on the reverse. And quite a collection of people it is: the scene is a modified version of

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John Trumbull’s iconic work. This elusive, almost mythical bit of US currency is the

subject of a recent documentary film, whose makers set out to explore “why this normal

piece of currency [is] treated differently than other bills” and “the magical quality it has

to connect people.”87 Erroneously considered “rare”—since 1976 they have been printed

continuously and in almost the same quantities as ten-dollar bills—we don’t see them that

often because people prefer to save and collect them, a dynamic that yields a curious use

value rooted in non-use, an affection that far exceeds two dollars.

_______________

Americans love the Declaration of Independence and all of its representative

fictions. If we need any reminder of its endurace, at least two of note occurred during the

drafting of this chapter. In 2016, the Broadway production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s

wildly popular hip-hop musical, Hamilton, won the Grammy Award for Best Musical

Theater Album, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and eleven Tony Awards, including Best

Musical.88 Before Hamilton made its Off-Broadway debut in 2015, Miranda had cut a

brief musical number called “No John Trumbull,” which had appeared in the workshop

87 Bennardo, Two Dollar Bill Documentary. 88 “Hamilton Wins Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album,” News, Playbill, February 15, 2016, http://www.playbill.com/article/hamilton-wins-grammy-for-best-musical -theater-album-com-386468; Robert Viagas, “Hamilton Wins 2016 Pulitzer Prize; Miranda Reacts,” News, Playbill, April 18, 2016, http://www.playbill.com/article /hamilton-wins-2016-pulitzer-prize-com-347196; and “Hamilton Dominates 2016 Tony Awards but Just Short of Record; Complete List of Winners,” Broadway Buzz, Broadway.com, June 13, 2016, http://www.broadway.com/buzz/185131/hamilton -dominates-2016-tony-awards-but-just-short-of-record-complete-list-of-winners/.

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production.89 Sung by the antagonist/narrator character of Aaron Burr, it addresses the

familiar distrust of “fancy pictures”:

You ever seen a painting by John Trumbull? Founding Fathers in a line, looking all humble, Patiently waiting to sign a declaration and start a nation, No sign of disagreement, not one grumble. The reality is messier and richer, kids. The reality is not a pretty picture, kids. Every cabinet meeting’s like a full-on rumble. What you’re about to witness is no John Trumbull.90

Trumbull’s painting is only an attempt at representational truth, but then again so is that

treasured document. Squinting between them in an exercise of truth-seeking parallax will

not yield a right and a wrong. And yet taken together, they form an effective, great, and

successful sum of imperfect, untrue parts.

On November 4, 2015, while Hamilton was making headlines, Republican

presidential candidate Ben Carson, famous for bible-thumping historical blunderings,

responded via social media to accusations that he, a surgeon by profession, lacked

sufficient political experience.

You are absolutely right—I have no political experience. The current Members of Congress have a combined 8,700 years of political experience. Are we sure political experience is what we need. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience. What they had was a deep belief

89 “‘Hamilton’ Mixtape Song Meanings Revealed by Lin-Manuel Miranda Track by Track” (includes an interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda), News, American Top 40, December 2, 2016, http://www.at40.com/news-article/hamilton-mixtape-song-meanings -revealed-by-lin-manuel-miranda-track-by-track/43983. 90 A version of this cut song, from which the lyrics above were transcribed, was eventually released as the opening track on The Hamilton Mixtape, an album of selected songs from the musical reinterpreted and performed by popular hip-hop, R&B, and pop artists. The Roots, performance of “No John Trumbull (Intro),” by Lin-Manuel Miranda (lyrics) and The Roots (music), on The Hamilton Mixtape, Atlantic 551092-2, 2016, compact disc.

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that freedom is a gift from God. They had a determination to rise up against a tyrannical King.91

Journalists such as Glenn Kessler were swift to controvert this silly claim, demonstrating

that more than half of the signers had some kind of elected experience in colonial

assemblies. Carson was also in error that the signers shared a “deep belief that freedom

was a gift from God,” considering that the principal writer of the declaration, Thomas

Jefferson, exhorted his own nephew to “Question with boldness even the existence of a

god.”92 But that’s beside the point. What is most telling is the readiness with which

Carson summoned this dubious but powerfully symbolic representation of that “united”

brotherhood of the signers. That he reached for it so handily, and that any of his

supporters found it at all compelling, signals that this event-as-ritual still endures. Why?

Because the relationship that this representative fiction makes legible between people and

those who represent them in politics—with those to whom they (in theory) trust their

wellbeing, their sovereignty, their very lives—is the one we would like to see. And 91 Ben Carson, quoted in Glenn Kessler, “Ben Carson’s Absurd Notion That the Founding Fathers Had No Elected Office Experience,” Fact Checker, Washington Post, November 5, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/05 /ben-carsons-absurd-notion-that-the-founding-fathers-had-no-elected-office-experience/. 92 The quote continues, “because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” Later he adds, “Do not be frightened from this enquiry by any fear of it’s [sic] consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in it’s [sic] exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement.” However, “you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists, because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics.” Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, with Enclosure, 10 August 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0021.

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because it is both real and ideal, we keep returning to it, always hoping to find what was

already lost by the time it appeared.

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Chapter 3

“This Will Show You What You Are”:

Thomas L. McKenney’s Problems of Indian Representation

All that can be required of any individual in a righteous cause is to exert his best efforts—if these fail, then he is blameless. So with nations; and although history may often overlook the honest efforts of individuals, in the cause of humanity and justice, her eye is wide open to national acts, and these she will be sure to record, and to convey to posterity. Our country is deeply concerned in the question of saving our Indians, or permitting their destruction. I believe it has the power to accomplish the one, and avert the other. Dreadful will be the responsibility if it shall not act! —Thomas L. McKenney to Jeremiah Evarts, 1 May 18291

I. In Ease and in Dignity?

When Thomas L. McKenney, former superintendent of Indian Affairs for the US

government, published his memoirs in 1846, he dedicated the volume to, of all people,

Dolley Madison. The aging widow of James Madison, architect of the Constitution and

the fourth president of the United States, from 1809 until 1817 she had famously been the

nation’s “First First Lady.” Using her sparkling personality, the widely beloved Mrs.

Madison labored to transform the swampy backwater of the nation’s new capital of

Washington, DC into a refined hub of governance and culture befitting a young republic.

Employing her social graces in the service of soft but strong diplomacy, she quietly built

coalition support for her husband’s policies by charming congressmen and their wives at

1 Thomas L. McKenney to Jeremiah Evarts, 1 May 1829, in Memoirs, Official and Personal, by Thomas L. McKenney (1846; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 336.

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regular White House dinners and parties.2 The older Madisons had given McKenney not

just his first government appointment as superintendent of Indian Trade in 1816 but,

perhaps more importantly in McKenney’s reflection, a model of honorable comportment

in the affairs of state and country. In his dedication, McKenney praises both husband and

wife for governing “in ease, and in dignity, in purity and patriotism, in the admiration and

affection of millions, in the glory shed upon the highest place in the republic.”3

Nostalgic affection for the bygone era of the republic is everywhere in

McKenney’s memoir, including the frontispiece he commissioned for the book, which

recalls Gilbert Stuart’s 1804 portrait of Mrs. Madison herself (fig 3.1). In that painting,

the young Dolley sits modestly enthroned against the popular period backdrop of fine

drapery suspended to reveal a classical column and cheery sky. In her fashionable

neoclassical hairstyle and dress, she radiates an unpretentious warmth of character and

nobility of spirit.

2 See Catherine Allgor, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 99, 175, 189. 3 McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 7.

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Figure 3.1. Gilbert Stuart, Dolley Madison, 1804. Oil on canvas, 74.1 ´ 61.3 cm. (Courtesy of the White House Collection, White House Historical Association, Washington, DC.)

Channeling those same visual tropes in the frontispiece some forty years later, a carefully

dressed McKenney appears stoic and relaxed in a similar visual space (fig. 3.2). His

characteristic shock of white hair, which earned him the moniker “White Eagle” among

many Native Americans with whom he worked, is lively but reasonably kempt. He meets

the viewer’s gaze with an expression at once proud and resigned. His right hand loosely

clutches a roll of documents dressed in ribbon and bearing the words “Indian Treaty.”

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Figure 3.2. Albert Newsam, Thomas L. McKenney, ca. 1845. Lithograph printed by P. S. Duval, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal . . . , 2nd ed. [New York: Paine and Burges, 1846], facing p. i. Courtesy of Internet Archive and the Getty Research Institute, 2015, https://archive.org/details /memoirsofficialp00mcke_0.)

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Lest the viewer-reader need any further reminder of how McKenney wished to be

remembered, one cannot focus on his face without noticing the group of three Indian

figures behind his shoulder. At first glance, this trio might seem like a random assortment

of generically exotic Indian stereotypes. In fact, the figures can be identified with near

certainty as the Ioway chiefs Mahaskah or White Cloud (right), his son, Young

Mahaskah or Francis White Cloud (center), and his brother, Notchimine or No Heart

(left) (figs. 3.3–3.5).4 No “group portrait” of these related men ever existed. Instead, the

printmaker Albert Newsam, who had known and collaborated with McKenney for many

years, assembled one here by referencing individual portraits which had been painted

years apart—the first in 1824 and the others in 1837. In the intervening years, US

diplomacy had consistently failed Native Americans, a story that can actually be read

through the individual portraits. While Thomas McKenney was no artist, he had

everything to do with the production and reproduction of these images. How and why

they became his legacy—and the thorny problems of collective political and visual

representation inhering in that story—are the subjects of this chapter.

4 I am very grateful to Joshua Boydstun for recognizing these figures and thereby deepening the analysis of this image.

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Figure 3.3. Albert Newsam after Charles Bird King, Ma-Has-Kah or White Cloud, an Ioway Chief, ca. 1837. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 35.6 cm (sheet), printed by Lehman and Duval, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , vol. 1 [Philadelphia: E. C. Biddle, 1837], facing p. 141. Courtesy of the Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc .gov/loc.pnp/pga.07526.)

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Figure 3.4. Albert Newsam after Charles Bird King, Young Ma-Has-Kah, Chief of the Ioways, ca. 1837. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 35.6 cm (sheet), printed by Lehman and Duval, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , vol. 1 [Philadelphia: E. C. Biddle, 1837], facing p. 151. Courtesy of the Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc .gov/loc.pnp/pga.07612.)

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Figure 3.5. Alfred Hoffy after Charles Bird King, Not-Chi-Mi-Ne, an Ioway Chief, ca. 1838. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 35.6 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , vol. 2 [Philadelphia: F. W. Greenough, 1838], facing p. 59. Courtesy of the Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp /pga.07546.)

McKenney had met the elder Mahaskah in 1824, when the latter traveled with his

wife and a group of other Ioway and neighboring Fox and Sauk delegates some one

thousand miles from the Missouri Territory to Washington, DC. They had undertaken the

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arduous journey to negotiate an end to hostilities stemming from incursions by white

settlers and the American military. As newly appointed superintendent of Indian Affairs,

McKenney was the government official tasked with managing every aspect of the

delegates’ stay in Washington. He arranged fine accommodations for his diplomatic

guests and outfitted them with gifts of clothing and mementos. They were also among the

first visiting delegates to sit for local society portraitist Charles Bird King, whom

McKenney had recently contracted (with government money) to paint visiting Indian

dignitaries. Sometimes McKenney was able to commission a duplicate of a portrait to

send home with the sitter as a gift, but their immediate purpose was to hang in a growing

collection in the Indian Office.

McKenney managed this office between 1824 and 1830, a busy, pivotal, and

deeply problematic period for US-Native relations, particularly on the western and

southern frontiers, where burgeoning populations of resource-hungry settlers made

increasing forays into and demands on Native land. While this was not new behavior,

dramatic population growth, combined with General Andrew Jackson’s brutal campaign

against Creek and Cherokee factions in Florida and Georgia during the War of 1812, had

empowered a growing sense of US entitlement to this land. However, as demonstrated in

the last chapter, the United States were not particularly “united” during this explosion in

postwar growth, and this incoherence would have serious ramifications for Native

Americans who found themselves increasingly at the geographical and ideological

margins of the country. The giant swath of land now called the Missouri Territory was

classified as an “unorganized territory,” meaning it had no governing structure or clear

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ontological status within the United States. To the extent that the United States managed

the land, this was done through the federal government, at great geographic and political

distance, meaning that Native peoples like the Ioway had to deal with antagonism from

other indigenous nations, as well as encroaching white settlers. Unfortunately, things

were not much better within actual states, where (mis)management of white-Native

relations was strongly believed, not unlike the issue of slavery, to be a locally determined

matter of state prerogative and administration. In sum, to read the story of nineteenth-

century US annexation and dispossession of Native American land as a coherent,

programmatic “national act” would be a mistake. In reality, it unfolded messily,

chaotically, and piecemeal, through many encounters between individuals.

Insofar as any nexus existed for managing this situation, McKenney occupied it in

Washington. While he earnestly desired to execute his duties with “ease, dignity, purity

and patriotism and the admiration and affection of millions,” he also clung to a

republican ideal that—while dubious to begin with—was increasingly at odds with the

United States taking shape around him. As a result, he has left behind a troubled legacy.

He claimed to be a friend of and advocate for Native Americans, yet he was an early

proponent of Indian assimilation and reform who gradually came to support Indian

removal. With the benefit of history, contemporary readers should rightly recognize these

problematic positions as early steps on a path to physical and cultural genocide. But this

outcome was not a foregone conclusion for McKenney or his contemporaries, many of

whom genuinely believed that education and Christianization—and eventually voluntary,

compensated westward resettlement—promised Native Americans both freedom and

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improved quality of life. We might dismiss McKenney as a shill of racist, colonial power,

but that would mean missing some important nuance. As Nicholas Guyatt recently

demonstrated in Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial

Segregation, racial animus is only rarely motivated by outright hatred. More often it

operates through resignation and even misplaced goodwill, a vexing knot that must be

woven into our accounting of both the past and the present.5

Pictures must also resist this kind of simplistic categorization and dismissal.

Reading images and objects for histories of encounter and negotiation forms the

challenge and invitation that Elizabeth Hutchinson issued in a recent argument for a more

careful look at McKenney’s portrait gallery, one that simultaneously complicates

“existing categories of analysis” and foregrounds Native agency.6 She notes that in past

studies, the portraits associated with McKenney have been lumped together with

ethnographic portrayals of Native Americans. But this quick move from the particular

nature of portraiture—the portrayal of an individual subject—to the generalizing modes

of ethnography—groups or types of people, plural—enacts a dangerous simplification

and erasure. While critique of power structures must remain at the fore of any ethical and

responsible scholarship, those “seeking a richer art history need to look at objects created

during encounters not only for signs of the colonial domination but also for records of

5 Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 9–12. 6 Elizabeth Hutchinson, “From Pantheon to Indian Gallery: Art and Sovereignty on the Early Nineteenth-Century Cultural Frontier,” in “Special Collection: Art Across Frontiers,” special issue, Journal of American Studies 47, no. 2 (May 2013): 337, doi:10.1017/S002187581300008X.

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intercultural negotiation.”7 What might we find, Hutchinson asks, by shifting critical

lenses and viewing McKenney’s Indian portraits as a pantheon: the purposeful

assemblage of important individuals in representational form?

One thing we find is evidence of crisis in visual and political representation: for

the Native delegates populating the gallery, for the people whom the delegates

represented, and for McKenney as well. Pressure mounted from individual states

demanding that McKenney’s job be primarily one of greasing the wheels of expansion

and Native dispossession. And yet McKenney also regarded himself as a voice, within

government, for the Native Americans who genuinely held his fascination, esteem, and

concern. On the other side, the Native delegates arriving in Washington did not always

represent the greater sentiments or wellbeing of their home populations. Sometimes those

who came to McKenney, and who sat for portraits, were there in an attempt to reverse the

outcomes of previous diplomatic missions. In all, a troubling gap between the efforts of

individuals and the acts of nations begins to materialize before our eyes.

To fully engage these portraits means to mind this gap in visual and political

representation. To that end, my examination here breaks with two central relationships in

art-historical discourse: one is the primacy of the painter-sitter dynamic, and the other is a

hierarchy of media that places prints (mere reproductions) below paintings (unique works

of art). Because Charles Bird King was a hired hand contracted by McKenney to paint

portraits of Indian delegates visiting Washington on diplomatic missions, I argue that the

portraits belong as much to discourses on US political history as they do to the history of

7 Ibid.

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art.8 Moreover, as we shall see, the reason that these images have survived and thrived is

due to McKenney’s dogged efforts to reproduce the paintings as prints.

The portraits began in service to an idealized vision of diplomacy, wherein the

(presumably fair and competent) leaders of nations used flattery and gestures of mutual

respect to work out gentlemanly compromises agreeable to the larger populations for

whom they stood. In practicality, the US consistently aimed to acquire as much land as

delegates could be convinced to cede in these negotiations, betraying great rifts between

Native delegates and the larger totalities they represented. What might seem at first

glance like a disconnected assortment of individuals was designed to both shape

diplomatic relations in the present and to record a pictorial history of that exchange

during a time when Native delegates were given less and less ground to stand on—

geographically and politically. Hutchinson observes that by the early 1830s, the Indian

gallery in Washington could no longer function as a pantheon, for its members had been

demoted in representational status from political leaders of sovereign nations to

ethnographic specimens of racialized and problematic others.9 This shift would accelerate

throughout the decade and reach its apotheosis with the Trail of Tears, the forced

relocation of tens of thousands of Choctaws, Seminoles, Creeks, Chickasaws, and

Cherokees from their homes in the Southeast to territory west of the Mississippi.

For the purposes of this study, 1830 signaled a change in both politics and in

pictures. King’s paintings constitute only the first stage of a representational process that

8 Hutchinson and others have worked to parse the dynamics between the Indian subjects and the painter, Charles Bird King. Ibid., 322. 9 Ibid., 336.

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McKenney initiated when he assumed management of Indian Affairs but that continued

well beyond his dismissal from his government position (for reasons which will be

discussed in detail) in 1830. From about 1830 to 1847, McKenney invested a staggering

amount of resources into copying and proliferating these portraits, a labor that consumed

his energies for decades and eventually resulted in the publication of History of the

Indian Tribes of North America, his print project of pioneering visual complexity and

quality (fig. 3.6).

Figure 3.6. Complete Subscriber Set (Twenty Numbers Comprising Three Volumes) of McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836–1844), in Original Buff Printed Wrappers. (Courtesy of Christie’s New York, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts Including Americana [Sale 2607, Lot 129], 7 December 2012, New York, NY, http://www .christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/mckenney-thomas-loraine-1785-1859-and-james-hall-5636368 -details.aspx.)

Whereas the History has been criticized as a money-making scheme that led its bungling

proprietor to financial ruin, I see it in a different light: as McKenney’s effort—amidst the

unfolding catastrophe of US treatment of Native Americans—both to keep his failed

pantheon alive and to broaden its reach. From a perspective of visual ecology, the print

portraits have enjoyed tremendous success, inspiring countless reproductions and

appearing everywhere from textbooks to popular culture. In the best situations, they

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elevate images from the status of mere extrahistorical illustration to a gateway to history

itself.

The second section of this chapter, “Contingency, Diplomacy, and Calamitous

Democracy in Indian Country,” will further establish the changing government models of

US-Native relations that McKenney straddled during his time in government and the

emergence of his famous picture gallery in the Indian Office in Washington. Here I pay

careful attention to McKenney’s struggles within a government administration operating

under the increasing influence of an emerging Jacksonian Democracy. War hero Andrew

Jackson’s entrée into politics during the 1820s heightened deeply populist,

antirepublican, and statist sentiments that formed the basis of modern American

democracy and, along the way, accelerated conditions for Native American dispossession

and genocide. The third section, “‘The Man Who Is Known to Me’: Problems of Printing

the Unfinished Business of History,” explores McKenney’s efforts to transpose his

painted pantheon into a portable format with a wider reach. I argue for this replication

process as a means of “making present again” the actual Indians who were, in reality,

being physically removed from the United States’ midst in the very same historical

moment. The chapter will conclude with an afterimage that traces these troubled images

through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present. Throughout we must

contend with a fraught historical contingency: McKenney’s mistake was believing there

was a right way to do the wrong thing, and this mix of problematic good intentions,

impotence, naiveté, and disastrous results was painted into the original portraits and

persists in their printed copies.

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II. Contingency, Diplomacy, and Calamitous Democracy in Indian Country

“An Indian opened the door of my room to-day, and came in under circumstances

so peculiar, with a countenance so pensive, and yet with a manner so flurried, as to lead

me to call the interpreter,” Thomas Loraine McKenney chronicled in his journal in late

July 1826.10 The superintendent of Indian Affairs had spent a full month traveling from

his government office in Washington, DC to Fond-du-Lac in northern Michigan Territory

to assist Governor Lewis Cass in land-use treaty negotiations with the Chippewa.11

McKenney’s doors were known for being open to all Indians—from the illustrious to the

middling—seeking council with the “White Eagle.”12 The man before him now was

clearly no esteemed leader and yet, McKenney wrote, “I could not get the countenance of

this Indian out of my mind, nor his impoverished and forlorn looks.”13

Through an interpreter, the man explained his suffering. Six years prior, he had

been charged with leading Cass and the geologist, explorer, and government agent Henry

Rowe Schoolcraft on an expedition to the famed Copper Rock, a rare and sacred mineral

deposit on Chippewa land. It was a terrible position to be placed in. On one hand,

10 Thomas L. McKenney, Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes, of the Character and Customs of the Chippeway Indians and of Incidents Connected with the Treaty of Fond du Lac (1827; repr., Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1959), 280. 11 In the twenty-first century Chippewa people call themselves Ojibwe or Anishinaabe. 12 “For thirty years he had been an intimate friend of John Ross . . . , the celebrated chief of the Cherokee, among whom McKenney was known as ‘White Eagle,’ in allusion to his strong features and his shock of white hair.” Frederick Webb Hodge, introduction to The Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs, by Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, vol. 1 (1836–1844; repr., Edinburgh: John Grant, 1933), ix–x. 13 McKenney, Sketches of a Tour, 280.

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Schoolcraft had married venerably into the Ojibwe fold, garnering respect in the echelons

of community leadership. Yet community concerns were rapidly mounting over white

interest in their land’s natural resources. Squeezed between conflicting loyalties, the

young guide (for reasons open to interpretation) lost his way and the expedition failed.

“In the belief that he had offended the Great Spirit,” McKenney later wrote, “his band

cast him off! . . . and strange to say, a constant series of ill luck has followed him ever

since, . . . hence his forlorn appearance.”14 For six years he wandered alone, starving in

the woods, and now appeared before McKenney gaunt and miserable, in little more than a

tattered blanket and a tarnished government-issued medal. Consulting with Cass,

McKenney decided to load him up with presents in an effort to improve his social

standing. “His name is WA-BISH-KEE-PE-NAS, or the White Pigeon,” McKenney’s story

concludes. “I shall have his likeness sketched.”15

Ten years later, back on the East Coast, hundreds of images based on this sketch

would be peeled off a lithographer’s printing stone in Philadelphia and joined with a

biographical text based on McKenney’s journal. The resulting portrait (fig. 3.7) is quite

different from the majority of those in McKenney’s growing portrait gallery in

Washington.

14 Ibid., 281. 15 Ibid.

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Figure 3.7. After James Otto Lewis, Wa-Bish-Kee-Pe-Nas, the White Pigeon, a Chippewa, ca. 1837. Hand-colored lithograph, printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , vol. 1 [Philadelphia: E. C. Biddle, 1837], facing p. 171. Courtesy of Courtesy of the Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp /pga.07596.)

That pantheon was populated mostly by the finely dressed, important leaders of

indigenous communities. Compared to the healthy, dignified, and decorated Mahaskah,

White Pigeon cuts a piteous figure. His sunken gaze, bony chest, and crossed arms call to

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mind the visual trope of the suffering Christ known as the Imago Pietatis or the Man of

Sorrows (fig. 3.8).16

Figure 3.8. Giovanni Bellini, Imago Pietatis, ca. 1460–1469. Tempera on panel, 50 ´ 40 cm. (Courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute and the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, Italy, https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/3QFQTgkNZ9Tyvg.)

Though brief, this meeting demonstrates just how tangled and complex white-Native

relations were in this place and time. White Pigeon entered McKenney’s portrait

pantheon not as a representative leader, but rather as the result of what McKenney

referred to as the Native Americans’ “much dreaded contingency” within an increasingly

16 I am thankful to Joshua Boydstun for making this visual connection.

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powerful white America.17 Contingency is a condition characterized by a discomfiting

blend of proximity and chance, nearness and unknowingness. It is through the

simultaneous operations of crowding and destabilizing that colonization exerts its

destructive force, vitiating occupied subjects by rendering them perpetually contingent.

Portraiture is a perfect medium for exploring contingency because it isolates individual

subjects in the space of their own particularity. Moreover, as Marcia Pointon has argued,

all portraits contain a historical tension: they are simultaneous acts of preserving a subject

in time and place and incorporating that subject into broader regimes of ideas.18 In other

words, however much a portrait labors to project an individual into timeless perpetuity, it

also anchors that subject in a specific context. The portrait of White Pigeon is

inextricably embedded in the context of a direct face-to-face encounter, rooted in

complex relationships and nuanced contingencies that are all too often lost in the broad

strokes of history. But it is precisely this which a careful consideration of these pictures

can enumerate.

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17 This observation comes in a discussion of the Cherokees’ unwillingness to open their land to the construction of a road. The resistance remained despite the attempted persuasion that the road would benefit them as well: “They were not to learn for the first time the tender mercies of the white man, and, therefore, feared that the opening a way for their own accommodation, might be to open one, also, for his advances, and for afflictions for themselves that had never failed to accompany him. They preferred their own present lot, rather, than by this attempt to improve it, to involve themselves in this much dreaded contingency.” McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 34. 18 See Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press / Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993).

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McKenney’s entry into Indian Affairs began as the period of alternately strained

and collaborative cohabitation that historian Richard White famously dubbed the “Middle

Ground” was disappearing.19 Consequently his perspectives and policies of benevolent

paternalism vis-à-vis Indian populations straddle the preceding era and the new one yet to

come. Rocked by the revolution and the series of land exchanges in its wake, the War of

1812 had been a disaster for Native populations, especially the members of the Iroquois

Confederacy and Cherokee factions that had sided with the British. Under James

Monroe’s program of heightened national security, efforts to quell Indian uprisings and to

secure the frontier took on a new priority, making the crushing defeat of figures such as

Tecumseh, the Shawnee military leader and pan-Indian defender of the Northwest

Territory, rich with symbolism.20 Brilliant, cunning, brave, and charismatic, the image of

the fallen Tecumseh became a metaphor for the waning power of a “once lofty and

19 “The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. . . .

. . . People try to persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others. They often misinterpret and distort both the values and the practices of those they deal with, but from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them new practices—the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground. . . .

The real crisis and the final dissolution of this world came when Indians ceased to have the power to force whites onto the middle ground. Then the desire of whites to dictate the terms of accommodation could be given its head. As a consequence, the middle ground eroded. The American Republic succeeded in doing what the French and English empires could not do. Americans invented Indians and forced Indians to live with the consequences of this invention.” Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x, xv. 20 For a concise history of the policies and prerogatives of the “national security president,” see Gary Hart, James Monroe, American Presidents (New York: Times Books, 2005).

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independent, but now degraded race.”21 Indeed, Native populations suffered from more

than a loss of political and military clout; communities had been decimated by war and

disease, and the beavers and other game that for centuries had supplied their robust fur

trade had been thoroughly depleted, reducing their economic leverage as well. For white

Americans, however, the War of 1812 was a patriotic baptism. Emerging victorious from

the jaws of defeat, Tennessee war hero General Andrew Jackson wasted little time

moving from bloody military campaigns in the South to the halls of government,

inaugurating a period of expansionist fervor funneled into the image of the yeoman

frontier farmer and his need for husbandable land.22

In 1816, against this backdrop, merchant, recent war veteran, and Washington

hobnobber Colonel Thomas Loraine McKenney assumed leadership of the government

entity then tasked with managing US-Indian affairs: the factory system. Established in

1795, this bureaucratic organ constituted a programmatic effort to replicate the British

Crown’s policy of protection and trade that had made strong allies of eastern Indians

during the Revolutionary War. Its advocates viewed the system “primarily as a means to

control the tribes, attract the fur trade to the Americans, and counteract foreign influence

among the Indians.”23 McKenney’s mercantile background, gregariousness, and

bureaucratic savvy made him well suited to the complicated work of sourcing, ordering, 21 McKenney, address to the Indian Board, for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of North America, New York, 5 August 5 1929, in Memoirs, Official and Personal, 229. 22 See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, Oxford History of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 74. 23 Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy: 1816–1830 (Chicago: Sage Books, 1974), 6.

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and coordinating the transport of trade goods to the eight factory outposts supplying

trading stations throughout Indian country—a number he would double during his six

years in office.24

Hailed as a tool of benevolent diplomacy, McKenney called the factory system

“one of pure humanity, embracing a supply of the wants of the Indians without reference

to profit.”25 Treating the residents of Indian country as his clients and protective charges,

he understood his work as supplying their needs and tastes, while sheltering them from

the dangers of unregulated private trade.26 A proponent of Indian reform, McKenney held

out against increasing free-market pressure from Washington, regarding the status quo as

a humane and effective means of Christianization, civilization, and ultimately salvation

from the deleterious effects of white Americans’ use of alcohol, cheater, and outright

aggression in the trade process. To the modern reader, McKenney’s paternalism is odious

for its denial of Native religious, cultural, and economic sovereignty. In his eyes,

however, “The leading features of the government trade were protection and justice,

based in humanity. Its tendencies were kind and merciful. . . . . Not a drop of brandy,

rum, or whiskey, [was] permitted to pass through the factories. . . . . With no other system

but this, or others in harmony with it, the Indians would have been protected, and blessed,

24 McKenney describes how complicated this job was when he first assumed his post. The United States was broke following the War of 1812 and therefore had very poor materials for trading with Native nations. He worked to improve the quality of the materials, meet the tastes of his customers, and improve relations. See McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 20–23. 25 Ibid., 18. 26 Ibid., 18–20.

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and preserved.”27 In other words, he identified strong government policy and regulation

as honorable means of reducing the dangerous contingency threatening Native

populations.

If provision was a fraught instrument that encouraged Native dependence on a

fickle dominant power, it was at this point also steeped in centuries of intercultural

relations in North America. As scholars such as Timothy Shannon have elucidated,

honoring Native treaties meant adherence to the spirit of mutual respect, aid, and

protection implicit in a specific deed-for-land agreement, rather than its easily exploitable

letter. What white colonial powers either mistook or willfully misunderstood as

straightforward financial transactions, bespoke clear commitments of trade, sovereignty,

and protection to Native stakeholders.28 Governmental unwillingness or inability (at both

the state and federal levels) to regulate the creeping influx of land-squatting settlers or to

curb the abuses of extragovernmental free-market commerce constituted a failure in

upholding their end of the bargain.

With that honorable end of the bargain in mind, McKenney looked to Indian

country with an amalgam of genuine sympathy, paternalistic condescension, curiosity,

and fatalism. As part of his “grand object,” “the security, preservation, and improvement

of the Indians,” he began personally sponsoring the education of individual Indians in his

East Coast orbit and lobbying Congress aggressively for funding to establish Indian

27 Ibid., 19. 28 See Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, Penguin Library of American Indian History (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 81.

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schools.29 With a sincere interest in Indians’ wellbeing and their material and cultural

worlds, he made a point of studying the kinds of social and political dynamics relevant to

situations like White Pigeon’s. Out west, he authorized his outpost supervisors to barter

goods for Indian artifacts, natural specimens, and cultural objects of any kind, and began

amassing a formidable collection of ethnographic materials in his Washington office.30

By 1822, the factory system was operating at a loss and subject to increasing

scrutiny from hawkish politicos and industry-leading lobbyists eager to break up what, to

fur mogul John Jacob Astor and other powerful market masters, constituted a monopoly

on Indian trade. That year the factory system—and the mode of US-Indian relations it

stood for—was abolished and dealings with Indians henceforth consolidated fully into the

John C. Calhoun’s War Department, signaling a radically different way of doing

business. Furious but invested in the population he served—and needing a job—

McKenney lent his knowledge and expertise to the newly established Bureau of Indian

Affairs, assuming its leadership in 1824.31 Dismayed at the change in diplomatic policy

and culture, he complained that this newly formed Indian Office in the War Department

was “barren of any thing of the kind” “that relates to the condition and prospects of these 29 McKenney, privately printed circular, 4 July 1818, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 42. 30 No known visual record of McKenney’s Indian Office exists. His collections eventually made their way into the Smithsonian, where they were poorly labeled and classified as “early War Department.” For more on the Indian Office, see Viola, “The Indian Office Museum,” in Thomas L. McKenney, 237–50. 31 The interim years between positions were busy for McKenney. The dissolution of the factory system came with charges of financial mismanagement, which he defended himself against staunchly. As a means of securing work and a mouthpiece, he dabbled in publishing newspapers and campaigned vigorously on behalf of Calhoun during the 1824 election, for which Calhoun rewarded him with the job in the Indian Office. See Viola, “Political Interlude,” in Thomas L. McKenney, 71–91.

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interesting but hapless people.”32 Under these circumstances, the materials in his

collection were far more than mere objects of ethnological fancy. Rather they were

necessary to “the intelligent and efficient discharge of [the office’s] duties.”33 To the

natural specimens and cultural artifacts, he began aggressively adding more books,

manuscripts, syllabaries, and images.34

To McKenney’s critics in government, the proliferating spectacle in the Indian

Office was utterly bizarre and the mounting expense of the portraits (twenty dollars for

the usual busts) a scandalous waste. In McKenney’s estimation, the portraits were an

investment in both the making and the documenting of history. Defending his gallery in a

published open letter he stated, “Apart from the great object of preserving in some form,

the resemblance of an interesting people. . . . It is the policy of the thing. Indians are like

other people in many respects—and are not less sensible than we are to marks of respect

and attention. . . . Its effects, as is known to me, are. . . highly valuable.”35 The paintings

were part of diplomatic negotiations, and an invitation into the pantheon was part of the

performative flattery that was the cost of doing business.36 The mechanisms of this

32 McKenney to Samuel S. Conant, 5 January 1825 and McKenney to John Eaton, 22 March 1830, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 241. 33 “On Retrenchment, May 15, 1828,” H.R. Rep. No. 20-249 (1828), quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 246. 34 For a study of Cherokee syllabaries during this period, see Jill Lepore, “A National Alphabet,” chap. 3 in A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002). 35 McKenney to “his friend in Baltimore,” Alexandria (VA) Phenix Gazette, 22 May 1828, and Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 31 May 1828, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 248. 36 Marcel Mauss concludes his groundbreaking 1969 study, The Gift, by defining the “atmosphere of the gift” as a space “where obligation and liberty intermingle,” adding, “We must give back more than we have received.” Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form

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system become clear in the signed stock note that McKenney included with peace

medals, clothing, trinkets, and occasionally copies of their painted portraits: “Brother—

This will show you what you are—and what the great men at Washington think of you.”37

Just what did the “great men of Washington” think of their “brothers”? Often, as

is usually the case in politics, they thought more of the stunning individual

representatives of the “red race,” than their societies on the whole. One of the earliest

Indian subjects McKenney brought to sit for King was the Pawnee brave Petalesharro,

welcomed from the upper Missouri as a delegate in Washington amidst great fanfare in

1821 (fig. 3.9). Youthful and handsome at twenty-five years old, Petalesharro struck an

elegant figure in an elaborate Plains-style headdress, his robe “thrown carelessly but

gracefully over his shoulders, leaving his breast, and often one arm bare.”38 Regal and

exotic, he was also lauded as a hero for rescuing a young female captive moments before

she (allegedly) was to be ritually sacrificed by a rival Pawnee band. Here was living

proof that “the Indian is not, by any law of his nature, bereft of the more noble qualities

which are the pride and boast of civilized man, or that he is necessarily savage.”39

and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 83–84. 37 McKenney to Little Prince (Creek), 20 February 1828, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 122. Viola laments the lack of resources, including extant versions of the portraits that returned to Indian country, to help us understand how such presents and sentiments were regarded by visiting delegates. 38 McKenney and Hall, Indian Tribes of North America, 1:204. 39 McKenney and Hall, Indian Tribes of North America, 1:202. Women in particular fawned over him, and he received a medal of honor from “the ladies of Miss White’s Seminary,” who begged him to “always wear it for our sakes, and when again you have the power to save a poor woman from death and torture, think of this and of us, and fly to her relief and her rescue.” Jedidiah Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War of the United

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Figure 3.9. Charles Bird King, Petalesharro (Generous Chief), Pawnee, ca. 1822. Oil on panel, 44.5 ´ 35.1 cm. (Courtesy of the White House Collection, White House Historical Association, Washington, DC.)

But as we will explore in the next section, exemplary status can be both a

burdensome responsibility and a mark of disconnect between the representative and the

represented. Often these dignitaries represented not entire nations but, more specifically,

the powerful, eloquent, charismatic, and educated elite leadership of those populations.

McKenney’s portraits and medals offered their recipient-subjects a kind of

representational mirror in which to regard themselves—one that was at once genuine and

problematic. After all, the paintings embodied not just the sitters themselves but the

States on Indian Affairs . . . (New Haven, CT, 1822), 248, quoted in McKenney and Hall, Indian Tribes of North America, 1:216n10.

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relational context in which they were painted—where a legitimate regard for the subject’s

power and standing barely concealed a larger machinery keen on dismantling what little

of that power remained. The illustrious visitors’ conflicted role is poignantly captured in

Samuel F. B. Morse’s contemporary monumental painting, The House of Representatives,

of 1822–1823 (fig. 3.10).

Figure 3.10. Samuel F. B. Morse, The House of Representatives, 1822, probably reworked 1823. Oil on canvas, 220.7 ´ 331.8 cm. (Courtesy of Corcoran Collection [Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund], National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2014.79.27.)

Figure 3.11. Detail of figure 3.10, showing Samuel F. B. Morse’s rendering of Petalesharro. Note the similarity to Charles Bird King’s portrait (fig. 3.9).

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The rightmost figure in the gallery (fig. 3.11) has been read as a generic “Indian chief,”

just one of several other motley characters inexplicably present in the scene, such as the

Supreme Court justices, publishers, and a preacher. In fact, it is likely the watchful figure

of Petalesharro, whom Morse would have seen either in person or in portrait form.40

Standing both literally and metaphorically in the wings of US political machinations, the

Indian leaders visiting Washington struggled, throughout the decade, to retain power and

relevance, while being pushed further aside.

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A porous and multivalent space, the Indian Office in the War Department

welcomed and mediated “Indian-ness” to visiting Native delegates, but also to curious

white urbanites. With actual Indians virtually absent from or invisible in American cities

on the East Coast by this time, this mediated space came to substitute actual interaction.

“This [Indian Affairs] office possesses much interest, perhaps more than any other in the

Government,” lauded a period Washington guidebook. “In it are arrayed, in tasteful

order, the likenesses of one hundred and thirty Indian chiefs, in their native costume. 40 Michael Leja uses Paul Staiti’s catalogue of the painting’s formal and commercial failures when comparing Morse’s House of Representatives to Thomas Doney’s bizarre mezzotint print made of composite photographic portraits, United States Senate Chamber (1846). Creating a lineage between the two scenes, Leja observes, “Except for the Indian chief, [Staiti] could almost be talking about Doney’s print.” While the presence of an Indian chief might seem strange in this 1822 painting, it is worth noting by 1846 such an inclusion would have been highly unlikely. Michel Leja, “Fortified Images for the Masses,” Art Journal 70, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 76–77, doi:10.1080/00043249.2011 .10791072. Moreover, Morse’s father, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse was, like McKenney, a proponent of Indian reform. The portrait of Petalasharro appeared as engraving for the frontispiece for his A Report to the Secretary of War of the United States on Indian Affairs . . . (New Haven, CT, 1822).

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These likenesses . . . are not only fine specimens of the art, but in point of exact

delineation, and spirited, and close resemblance to the originals, they are perfect.”41 The

Indian Office was the first museum in the nation’s capital and, in the style of other early

East Coast museum founder-proprietors like Philadelphia’s Charles Willson Peale (fig.

3.12), McKenney functioned as both curator and interpreter of the space and its holdings,

always eager to expound upon them to visitors. Reflecting on the strange mix of political,

social, and ethnographic erudition in the Indian Office, banker Nicholas Biddle recalled

McKenney as “surrounded by uncouth portraits of savages of both sexes, whose merits he

explained with as much unction as a roman Cicerone—how nearly extremes touch when

so civilized a gentleman was in contact with so wild & aboriginal a set.”42

41 Jonathan Elliot, Historical Sketches of the Ten Miles Square Forming the District of Columbia . . . (Washington, DC: J. Elliot, Jr., 1830), 165–66. 42 Nicholas Biddle to Daniel Webster, 2 March 1841, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 246.

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Figure 3.12. Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum (Self-Portrait), 1822. Oil on canvas, 263.5 ´ 202.9 cm. (Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 1878.1.2.)

Indeed, McKenney appears to have drawn little distinction between his

professional and personal affiliations with “our Indians.”43 The mocked and embattled

“Kickapoo Ambassador” adopted and raised two native boys alongside his own son and

43 In his writings, McKenney frequently referred to “our Indians,” indicating a collective American possessiveness over, relationship with, or responsibility to indigenous people. See Memoirs, Official and Personal, 240, 331, 335.

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opened his home to Indian visitors.44 In early 1830, the young Osage widow Mohongo

(Sacred Sun) arrived in Washington with her infant child after a harrowing transatlantic

journey home from kidnapping and forced public exhibition in France. She was sent to

McKenney, who managed her sojourn in the city and then her return to Missouri.

Installing mother and child in a posh hotel, McKenney asked Secretary of War James

Eaton (who had recently cut off funding for King’s portraits) to make an exception,

insisting that, “Nothing seems to delight all the Indians as much as these portraits.” Eaton

relented but at the artist’s expense, ruling the double portrait be billed as a single.45

McKenney pressured Bird to take the commission, and the resulting portrait is a uniquely

American Madonna and Child scene, rooted in Native suffering and contingency: a baby

playfully clutching a medal bestowed upon his mother for managing to survive traumatic

mistreatment by unscrupulous white men (fig. 3.13).

44 This derisive nickname was bandied about by detractors who ridiculed McKenney for his affection for Indians and wasting government money on outfitting the Indian Office. The disgust heaped on McKenney shows an appalling disregard for actual Native Americans. According to McKenney’s biographer, “The editor of a Georgetown newspaper offered him ‘a petrified Pottawattomie and a pickled Kickapoo Squaw to adorn the Indian Bureau.” Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins: A History of Indian Delegations in Washington City (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 175–76. 45 “If Mr. King will . . . introduce the child for the usual price $20 let the Lady’s request be indulged.” McKenney to John Eaton, 19 March 1830, and Eaton to McKenney, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 253–54.

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Figure 3.13. After Charles Bird King, Mo-Hon-Go, an Osage Woman, ca. 1838. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 36.6 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , vol. 1 [Philadelphia: F. W. Greenough, 1838], facing p. 21. Courtesy of the University of Cincinnati Digital Libraries, Cincinnati, OH.)

McKenney’s Indian Office gallery clearly had different audiences in mind: it

existed to flatter visiting diplomats—charged by their home populations with maintaining

sovereignty and possession of their land—into “honorably” ceding territory. But he also

intended it to inspire learning, awe, and compassion among the curious urban denizens

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indirectly driving the engines of expansion and dispossession. These portraits in this

space disrupt a pat reading of the genre wherein visual information flows unidirectionally

from the programmatic desires of the subject or artist to the viewer. As some scholars

have suggested, portraits are not merely the passive receptacles of a viewer’s gaze; they

also look back, and it is through the meeting of gazes that meaning in constructed.46 As

the manifold reciprocity of regarding in this gallery makes clear, the portraits were

designed to communicate with multiple audiences simultaneously. Certainly, McKenney

aimed to curry favor with Indian leaders, who were often impressed with the gallery and

even occasionally inspired to donate artifacts to McKenney’s holdings.47 But the

imperative self-reflexive representation (“this will show you what you are”) applied to

white audiences as well by appealing to a “you” who engages in a politics based, at least

nominally, on dignity, compassion, and mutual respect.48

Paradoxically however, it was only through Indian removal that many white

Americans came to believe this could be achieved—and they showed a naïve insistence

that this could somehow be anything other than violent. After praising the gallery, that

same 1830 Washington guidebook added, “We are among those who believe it

46 Hanneke Grootenboer draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to make this argument in Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4. 47 Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins, 174. Viola adds that some of the gifts delegates made to government officers ended up here as well: “For instance, a peace pipe now in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution bears this label in McKenney’s hand: ‘Presented in August 1824 to President James Monroe by Mahaskah, an Ioway Chief. T. L. McK.” Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins, 174. Mahaskah is depicted in figure 3.3. 48 For an investigation of the failures of the Indian improvement policies on the prairie-plains west of Iowa and the Missouri during this period, see William E. Unrau, The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825–1855 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

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impossible for them to remain, and exist, in our states. Then we hope to see ample

provision made for them in the west for the future.”49 Still largely uncharted by US

authority in 1830, the West presented the hope of an infinite and empty utopia onto which

any number of communities could be comfortably inscribed. Deeply misguided, this

enabling myth of the open West offered new promises of sovereignty, engendering

support for removal as a benevolent reordering of space, rather than the brutal ethnic

cleansing that it turned out to be.50

In Washington, the matter of removal was increasingly not one of whether? but of

when and how? As Elliot and others made clear, the Indians could not stay; they were too

different, inadaptable to growing American systems of industry, commerce, and

Christianity. Moreover, it was clear that Native populations—ravaged by war and

disease—suffered terribly in this clash of cultures. One way or another, they would not

remain or survive in the white midst.51 In this context of impending disappearance,

49 Elliot, Historical Sketches, 167. 50 The vast blank canvas of “the West” held promise for all manner of marginalized groups in this period. As early as 1830, Joseph Smith began moving his persecuted church—the nascent Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—westward from New York and settled in Illinois. His assassination in 1844 prompted a second phase of westward migration, this time to Utah. In the 1850s John J. Flournoy, an early graduate of the country’s first school for the deaf, lobbied stridently for “a formation out West, of a Deaf State . . . by which alone our class of people can attain to the dignity and honor of Human Nature.” John J. Flournoy to William W. Turner, 21 December 1855, in “Scheme for a Commonwealth of the Deaf and Dumb,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 8, no. 2 (January 1856): 122. See Margret A. Winzer, “Deaf-Mutia: Responses to Alienation by the Deaf in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” American Annals of the Deaf 131, no. 1 (March 1986): 29–32, doi:10.1353/aad.2012.0808. 51 Brian W. Dippie notes that the “myth of the vanishing Indian” “represented a perfect fusion of the nostalgic with the progressive impulse. . . . Based on what was thought to be irrefutable evidence, it became self-perpetuating.” Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing

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images gained urgency. “But for this gallery, our posterity would ask in vain—‘what sort

of a looking being was the red man of this country?’ In vain would the inquirers be told

to read descriptions of him—these never could satisfy. He must be seen to be known.

Here then is a gift to posterity.”52 In effect, white audiences needed the pictures as

documentary substitutes for the very subjects their policies were simultaneously erasing.

But the Indian Office as it was known and McKenney’s role within it were also at

risk. Without an active site of intercultural meeting, how would this information even

been transmissible to posterity? The answer lay, as will become evident in the next

section, in a further stage of mediation: removal in visual terms. “How deeply interesting

would it be, were Col. McKenney to embody all he knows of the history and biography

of these Indians, thus represented in his office; and intersperse it with the anecdotes

which relate to so many of them,” wrote Elliot, still expounding on the virtues of the

gallery, in 1830.53 In fact, McKenney was already hard at work on such a project:

reproducing in portable format what and whom he had seen and known. Contemporary

journalist Jared Sparks voiced the hope that it would be rendered with “accuracy and

beauty . . . worthy of the subject, and honorable to the nation, & just to the Indians.”54

Unfortunately, it was actual injustice to the Indians that would both compel

McKenney to undertake the project and serve as the backdrop for its production. When

Jackson’s Indian Removal Act was passed by Congress in May 1830, it assured the American: White Attitudes and US Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), xi–xii. 52 Elliot, Historical Sketches, 167. 53 Ibid., 168. 54 Jared Sparks to McKenney, 27 September 1829, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 252.

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forced exodus of tens of thousands of Cherokees and other members of the “Five

Civilized Tribes” west of the Mississippi River, a humanitarian nightmare that would

culminate in the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838–1839. Until this point, McKenney had

been a proponent of removal, on the condition that it be voluntary by Native Americans

and sufficiently funded by Congress, with new land granted to the displaced Indians in

perpetuity.55 As his negotiations with the Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee delegations

deteriorated and money for anything resembling humane compensation and sponsorship

for the Indians failed to materialize, McKenney faced the ultimate disillusionment with

his “grand object.” “I have taken a deep stake in this business of emigration,” he wrote in

the winter of 1830, “and stand committed to the Indians, and the public, for a fulfillment

of all that I have promised the one; and assured the other would be done.”56

Like White Pigeon, McKenney was trapped, unable to appease either side.

Furthermore, his tensions with the Jackson administration were at a boiling point, and he

knew his days in government were numbered. Now more than ever, he needed to secure

his livelihood and the legacy of his work, but also to document and preserve the rapidly

spiraling situation of the American Indian. Scrambling for start-up capital and production

partners, McKenney released the first advertisement for his forthcoming History of the

Indian Tribes of North America at the end of 1830, two months after he was sacked from

office in a Jackson-ordered purge. The reason given for his firing was that “General

Jackson has been long satisfied that you are not in harmony with him, in his views in 55 McKenney frequently laments a long history of treaties followed by further US encroachment on Native land in his memoirs. See Memoirs, Official and Personal, 129. 56 McKenney to Hugh Lawson White, 26 February 1830, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 222.

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regard to the Indians.”57 One of McKenney’s last fights was over the provision of food

and supplies to Cherokee exiles.58

III: “The Man Who Is Known to Me”: Problems of Printing the Unfinished

Business of History

McKenney conceived of History of the Indian Tribes of North America as a

collectible edition of exquisite portrait prints approximately fifteen by twelve inches in

size (the same dimensions as King’s paintings), accompanied by biographical sketches

that he would write, to be issued in twenty numbers of six (fig. 3.6). Subscribers could

then have the entire collection of one hundred twenty portraits handsomely bound in

three volumes by arrangement with the printer. Each image and text pair cost one dollar,

representing an accessible but significant investment for collectors. The aim, after all,

was to deliver into the hands of enlightened urban viewers an approximate experience of

the gallery. Wealthy men—as well as libraries and institutions—were McKenney’s target 57 McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 262. 58 Ibid. In his memoirs, McKenney recounts uncovering embezzlement schemes waged by the various contractors bidding on the government commission to supply provisions to the Cherokees. Reporting that the contractors’ costs exceeded his own calculations, he became increasingly worried that legitimate provisions for the Indians would become lost in an unscrupulous scramble by outside parties to profit off their misery—with government complicity. His efforts to convince then-Secretary of War Eaton to look into the matter were rebuffed. McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 210–18. McKenney’s tensions with “Kitchen Cabinet” member General Duff Green, with whom he squabbled over settling various financial matters related to Indian issues, contributed to his problems. Of these tense years McKenney wrote, “I saw, from the known influence that Green exercised over the President, that among the officers who were destined to be struck down, I was one. General Jackson had not been long in power, before one after another of the officers of the government were dismissed. The promise that ‘General Jackson will reward his friends, and punish his enemies,’ was now in a course of rapid fulfilment . . .” McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 195.

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audience. Pitched somewhere between unique work of fine art and mass-produced

commodity, few models for this sort of publishing project yet existed in the States.

Bringing it to fruition would prove famously difficult.59 As we shall see, the final product

did not look or function exactly as McKenney desired; it would prove so ambitious as to

be barely possible at all.

From the start, McKenney faced a problem. Although he had personally collected

every shell and commissioned every daub of paint in his office gallery, nothing there,

save for the knowledge and experience he accumulated, was proprietarily his. As early as

1828, perhaps seeing what was on the political horizon, he began ferreting portraits away

from the gallery, a few at a time, to New York City. There, McKenney’s personal

employee, portrait painter Henry Inman, produced painted copies. In this manner,

McKenney was able to secure a private set of portraits based on King’s direct visual

transcriptions “from life,” a kind of mediated extension of his own personal encounters

with the subjects.

A comparison of the “originals” and the copies shows the transposition,

interpretation, and removal between encounter and picture that the replication process

entailed. In the example of Winnebago leader Hoowanneka—whom McKenney had met

on his trip west in 1826 to broker the Treaty of Fond du Lac, and who later traveled to

Washington in 1828—Inman made some changes to King’s portrait (fig. 3.13), enhancing

the subject’s physical features for a more defined and regal presentation (fig. 3.14).

59 See David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America, Early American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

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Figure 3.14. Left, Charles Bird King, Hoowanneka – Little Elk, ca. 1828. Oil on panel, 44.3 ´ 34.3 cm. (Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 41-72-10/417.) Figure 3.15. Right, Henry Inman after Charles Bird King, Hoo-Wan-Ne-Ka (Little Elk), 1832. Oil on canvas, 77.8 ´ 65.1 cm. (Courtesy of the Whitney Western Art Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, WY, 21.95.1.)

With a broader chest, straighter posture, and more youthful countenance, Inman’s

Hoowanneka fills the frame with more commanding presence than King’s scrawny

subject. If King’s “original” is the direct transcription of the actual human subject, in this

next iteration he becomes larger than life. Finally, the painterly flourishes of King’s

visible brushwork have been smoothed into a flatter, more linear style. It has been

suggested this shift was a strategic decision with an eye to the next stage of media

translation. In the move from painting to printing, higher contrast and clean lines would

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translate better, whereas painterly texture would become irrelevant. The process is

literally one of flattening a subject (fig. 3.16).60

Figure 3.16. After Charles Bird King, Hoo-Wan-Ne-Ka, a Winnebago Chief, ca. 1841. Hand-colored lithograph, 51.1 ´ 36.6 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , vol. 2 [Philadelphia: J. T. Bowen, 1841], facing p. 171. Courtesy of the University of Cincinnati Digital Libraries, Cincinnati, OH.)

60 Peter C. Marzio, Perfect Likenesses: Portraits for History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1837–44) (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 8.

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With a growing set of matrix images, promotional savvy, and the accumulated

knowledge to draft the biographical sketches, McKenney partnered with wealthy

Philadelphia printer Samuel Bradford who, in 1829, brought six of the Inman portraits to

Cephas G. Childs, who ran Philadelphia’s premier lithographic printing operation run. A

cutting-edge technology just taking hold in the US, lithography was an exciting new

printing technique that allowed artists to mass-produce drawings. Bypassing the etching

of metal or wood, lithography yielded images quickly and with the gestural feel and

immediacy of an artist’s direct sketch. The lithographic portrait business was taking off,

thanks in large part to Childs’s talented apprentice, Albert Newsam, who assumed

primary responsibility for translating the early batch of Inman paintings into prints.

Reviewing Newsam’s first test print, the richly hued, hand-colored bust of Ioway chief

Mahaskah, printed on heavy cream paper (fig. 3.3), McKenney declared, “I consider the

above copy, perfect; a perfect likeness of the man, who is known to me—and an exact

copy of the original drawing by King, now in the office of Indian Affairs.”61

This strong aesthetic and documentary genealogy, extending from original

subjects incarnate down to the prints, was one of the project’s most important selling

points. An 1836 subscriber prospectus (fig. 3.17) invited viewers to visit the exhibition

room at the printing shop of Messrs. Key and Biddle to compare lithographic samples

alongside the Inman paintings, stating “The public are assured that these portraits are

exact likenesses of the originals whom they represent.” 61 McKenney, note dated 29 April 1830, on an unlettered trial proof of Cephas G. Childs, Mah-has-kah, Chief of the Ioways (White Cloud), lithograph with hand coloring, quoted in Herman J. Viola, The Indian Legacy of Charles Bird King (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press; New York: Doubleday, 1976), 69–71, reproduced on p. 70.

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Figure 3.17. Prospectus for subscribers to McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America, ca. 1836. (Reprinted from Catalogue of One Hundred and Seventeen Indian Portraits . . . [Philadelphia?, 1836], 1. Courtesy of Internet Archive, 2006, https://archive.org/details /catalogueofonehu00mckerich.)

Securing the lineage further, former Secretary of War James Barbour endorsed Charles

Bird King’s first portraits as “executed . . . with fidelity and success, by producing the

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most exact resemblances including the costume of each.”62 It is clear that in order to

impress potential subscribers, the portraits had to be both beautiful and truthful. The

personal importance that McKenney ascribed to the portrait prints’ accurate conveyance

of both the appearance and the character of the men “known to him” is documented in the

marginalia of his own final set of the History. There “nearly every plate has some

penciled criticism, ‘Very good,’ ‘Excellent,’ ‘Bad-face ought to be old and deep

furrowed’”—a reminder that many of these portraits could be judged against or

corroborated by his own direct encounters.63

Because of the portrait prints’ exquisite color, some have been tempted to read

them in the context of natural history illustration. This highly critical interpretation,

suggests a motive of portraying Native American human subjects as “less than human”

by depicting them in a representational mode typically reserved for used for flora and

fauna (fig. 3.18).64

62 Catalogue of One Hundred and Seventeen Indian Portraits, Representing Eighteen Different Tribes, Accompanied by a Few Brief Remarks on the Character, &c. of Most of Them ([Philadelphia?], 1836), 1. 63 Catalogue of Rare Americana, Including Many Works Relating to the Indians of North America: Mainly the Collection Formed by Miss Nellie Malcolm, London, England (New York: Anderson Auction Company, 1908), quoted in Hodge, introduction to Indian Tribes of North America, 1:xv, note 1. 64 Moving, as they prompted viewers to do, from the mortality of specific individuals to the extinction of an entire race, these portraits helped move Indians out of the realm of human history, as understood through individual lives and careers, toward natural history. The lithographic reproductions of King’s oils emphasized this. Although King included generic settings for some of his paintings, the lithographs removed setting and background altogether. In so doing, the lithographs turned figures into something akin to specimens. It is no accident that an 1838 review celebrating these volumes described their importance as “second only to Audubon.” Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 53–54.

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Figure 3.18. 1. Prionus (Orthosoma) Pensylvanicus; 2. Prionus (Derobrachus) Laticollis . . . , ca. 1837. Handcolored lithograph. (Reprinted from Dru Drury, Illustrations of Exotic Entomology . . . , new ed. by J. O. Westwood, vol. 1 [London: Henry G. Bohn, 1837], pl. xxxvii, facing p. 78. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, 2009, http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/12425879.)

But a more serious study of print portraiture in this period tells us that this is not the case.

First of all, Newsam, like other printmakers of his time, produced collectible sets of

illustrious portrait prints, usually of US presidents and other government officials, clergy,

and other notables.65 Moreover, these grandly envisioned sets represented only a fraction

65 Charles Willson Peale, for instance, had a “Collection of Great Men” portrait paintings on display in his museum. One of the earliest known American lithographic portrait

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of Newsam’s business. Most of his jobs came in the form of small-batch commissions

from individual politicians, authors, and clergy seeking memorialization in print:

publication frontispieces, promotional materials, decorations, or keepsakes. While

backgrounds were sometimes negotiated between artist and client—as in the case of

McKenney’s desired background for his memoir frontispiece—the half-portrait bust on a

plain white background was the most common expression of the form. Not only was this

the easiest and cheapest way of making the portrait, it also served the picture’s function:

producing a clean, uncluttered spotlight on an individual subject. A contemporary portrait

print by Newsam, also based on a painting by Inman—this one of Philadelphia sheriff

John G. Watmough—makes some of these stylistic conventions clear (fig. 3.19).

Dignified, white subjects sought these portraits in order to appear elegant and

exemplary—precisely what McKenney wanted for his subjects too.

projects, the “American Kings” (1825–1828) was a series of presidential prints by “Monsieur Maurin” (presumably Nicolas-Eustache Maurin), based on portraits painted by Gilbert Stuart. Sally Pierce, with Catharina Slautterback and Georgia B. Barnhill, Early American Lithography: Images to 1830 (Boston: Boston Athenæum, 1997), 56. This kind of project reached its apotheosis in 1850, when Mathew Brady commissioned lithographer Francis d’Avignon to make his daguerreotypes into prints, which were published as Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans.

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Figure 3.19. Albert Newsam after Henry Inman, Jno. G. Watmough, 1831. Lithograph, 49 ´ 37 cm, published by C. G. Childs, Philadelphia, PA. (Courtesy of the Print Department, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, Portrait Prints - W [5750.F.130].)

The question of color speaks more to the project’s lofty social ambitions than it

does a reduction of human subjects to the taxonomical classes of flora and fauna. As

Jennifer Roberts recently demonstrated, even John James Audubon’s contemporary folio,

The Birds of America (1827–1838), was fueled by nothing less than a dogged

determination to elevate representation into a form of substitution—capturing and

transmitting knowledge of North American species to a degree of vivacity unknowable

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across the Atlantic via the conventional desiccated natural specimens.66 This is no

simplistic collapsing of Indians into natural history. Instead it is part of a larger desire to

transpose visual knowledge from direct encounter to painting and then to print. Rather

than aspiring to “good natural history prints,” McKenney envisioned his portfolio as

comprising, by far, the best possible portrait prints.

But this was an order of portrait print that did not yet exist. American

lithographers had only been in a business for a few years, and none had attempted a

project of such scope and scale.67 Whereas most lithographic portraiture clients were

pleased with fast, accurate, and flattering two-tone images in batches of twenty-five to

one hundred, McKenney was signing on for four hundred copies of one hundred twenty

folio-size portraits, conveying his subjects in stunning detail. That’s forty-eight thousand

prints, requiring a baseline of stylistic consistency. This included individual hand-

coloring by twenty full-time, female colorists, and the collation of several pages’ worth

of printed biographical text per image, most of it not yet written. Furthermore, efforts

were being coordinated between three major cities during the prerail, pretelegraph

infancy of the US postal service. McKenney, the text, and the original paintings were in

Washington; the copyist, Inman, was in New York; and Bradford and Childs, the printers,

were in Philadelphia. Coordinating production was a logistical nightmare so extreme that

66 See Jennifer L Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 104–6. 67 Audubon, in fact, had to have his initial double elephant folio printed in England, another fact that might have inspired the local press to compare the two. McKenney’s impressive prints were, in subject and in execution, a purely American enterprise.

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the fact it succeeded at all is more remarkable than the myriad obstacles encountered

along the way.

Curiously, this narrative of failure stalks the History, levied often as a satisfying

moral critique of McKenney’s intentions. The popular television program Antiques

Roadshow called it “a 19th-century bureaucrat’s bungling plan to get rich,” describing

“the ever-growing collection of portraits [that] hung in McKenney’s office—until a more

entrepreneurial idea occurred to him: that of making money.”68 Of course McKenney—

and all of his various collaborators—wanted to make money. This was the plight of every

American artist and every American artistic venture at that time. Lacking Europe’s long-

established patronage institutions—church and state—and the traditions of the beaux arts

academies and salons, commercial start-up ventures offered American artists the hope of

economic sustainability while democratizing art and improving taste throughout the new

country.69 Saleable engravings were one such venture, along with painting tours, but

these schemes were consistent failures.70 Like many painters of the moment, McKenney

regarded his folio as a gift to American history and reasoned that any personal monetary

68 Ben Phalen, “Rare Portraits Survive Museum Blaze (in a Way),” Follow the Stories, Antiques Roadshow, 28 March 2007, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/fts/mobile _200603A19.html. 69 See William H. Gerdts, “On Elevated Heights: American Historical Painting and Its Critics,” in Grand Illusions: History Painting in America, by William H. Gerdts and Mark Thistlethwaite, Anne Burnett Tandy Lectures in American Civilization 8 (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1988), 93–94. 70 Samuel Morse’s previously mentioned painting, The House of Representatives, was one such failed venture. The painting’s tour did not realize any profit, and Morse soon left the profession, taking up Daguerreotypy and inventing telegraphy. For more on the history of (failed) US painting tours during this period, see Tanya Pohrt, Touring Pictures: The Exhibition of American History Paintings in the Early Republic (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2013), ProQuest (3598739).

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gain made in the process would only support his continuing work as a lecturer on Indian

history and dealer of Indian artifacts.

At the start, all parties anticipated realizing a profit, on the assumption that the

project would go off smoothly. But it didn’t. Childs soon went bust, as did Bradford.

Childs’s former print artist, Peter Duval, took over the images, while publishers Key and

Biddle assumed printing duties. Production resumed, but major delays ensued.

Overwhelmed with mounting costs, coordination efforts, and drafting the text, McKenney

enlisted judge James C. Hall of Cincinnati for help with financing and writing, and

moved to Philadelphia to oversee the work. He relied now, at a distance, on government

cronies to continue underhandedly loaning out King’s paintings for Inman to copy, as

well as to provide reference materials necessary for the writing the text. Lacking

McKenney’s firsthand knowledge, Hall’s process relied heavily on such materials. When

these were unavailable, he resorted to improvisation, which perhaps contributed to the

text’s distant and especially condescending tone. Predictably, mix-ups in shipping,

communication, and portrait identification abounded, causing whole runs to be scrapped

and reprinted—setbacks in cost and time that also strained McKenney’s relationships

with collaborators.

Finally, in 1837, the first six numbers were published to strong sales and popular

acclaim. Yet the project proved too much of a strain on the resources at Duval’s

workshop, and he withdrew. Lithographer J. T. Bowen interceded, but there was new

trouble on the horizon: the market panic and subsequent crash of 1837 wiped out more

production partners and caused many of the one thousand or so subscribers to default.

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Financial setbacks continued before the final number appeared in 1844.71 Heralded in a

review of its day as “one of the largest and most splendid works which the literature and

arts of the country have ever produced,” it also took a staggering fourteen years to

complete. In the duration, much of the political, artistic, and social landscape had

changed.72 As the stories of just a few portraits can attest, history continued unfolding as

the portraits wound their way from in-person encounters to paintings, painted copies, and

finally prints.

______________________

In November 1826—the year that that McKenney undertook his treaty-laden “tour

to the lakes”—his boss, Secretary of War James Barbour, sent a year-end report on his

department to President John Quincy Adams and his administration, which ended with a

discussion of Indian affairs. The bit of “good” news it contained was that through some

of McKenney’s treaty efforts, several “large tracts of land within the limits of Indiana

have been relieved from the incumbrance from Indian title.”73 But this acquisition of land

was hardly cause for celebration, for serious trouble loomed on the horizon. Barbour

communicated that in the process, military forces had been compelled to intercede in

bloody skirmishes between the Delaware and Osage nations, “mischief likely to result

from placing in the same neighborhood, without a controlling power on the part of the 71 For a concise overview of the printing history, including variations between prints, see Christopher W. Lane, “A History of McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America,” Imprint 27, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 2–15. 72 Saturday Courier (Philadelphia), 2 April 1842, quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 277–78. 73 James Barbour to President John Quincy Adams, 28 November 1826, in Documents from the War Department, Accompanying the President’s Message to Congress, Part 2 ([Washington, DC, 1826]), 175.

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Executive of the United States, different and hostile tribes.”74 He concluded his report

with a chilling exhortation, no doubt shaped by McKenney’s strenuous

recommendations:

I feel myself impelled by an irresistible sense of duty to state, that unless a preventive is speedily furnished by law, I fear that, at no distant period, these unfortunate and unhappy people will be exterminated by intestine wars, and thereby that a subject fruitful of unavailing regret will become a portion of the inheritance of the American People.75

There is much to unpack in this statement, but one salient feature is the reminder that,

despite whatever collective representations might imply, no simple unity of “Indians”

existed on the ground. Alliances and antagonisms among Native nations had always

existed, but US land usurpation was clearly unleashing a cascade of migrations and

confrontations that heightened resource competition and conflict. It was precisely these

terrible results that enabled removal to seem like a plausible or attractive option to many

Native Americans. But a close look at any internecine conflict will likely reveal internal

fractures: disagreements and schisms that matter much more to history than larger,

simpler narratives generally permit. Two suites of portraits from McKenney’s collection

help us appreciate this messy, micro-approach to history—one that continued unfolding

alongside production of McKenney’s History.

Let us return to the trio of Ioway figures with whom this chapter began. Military

outposts established in the Missouri Territory during the War of 1812 remained in the

area well after the war to monitor and discourage native trading with the remaining

British presence. These also served as points of contact for the white settlers increasingly 74 Ibid., 176. 75 Ibid.

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impinging on land and game shared by the Ioway, Fox, and Sauk. By 1819 fighting had

broken out between the nations, a situation that would worsen throughout the year with

the arrival of a War Department-ordered surveying mission (accompanied by hundreds of

soldiers) and its overseer, the harsh War Department agent Benjamin O’Fallon.76 Chief

Mahaskah (fig. 3.3) had gained much acclaim for the warrior triumphs of his youth. But

as the 1820s began, he was exhausted and entering middle age, his people beset by all

manner of enemies in every direction. In 1824 he led a deputation of Ioway, Sauk, and

Fox delegates to Washington in an attempt to sort out the land disputes. Of course, the

US pushed for a solution that would end Native warfare while benefitting of its own

plans for expansion: why not end the struggles by collectively selling the contested land

(already infested with unmonitored white settlers anyway) to the US and move

somewhere else? The leaders agreed but would soon come to regret it. Not only was

payment for the land slow in coming, the matter of parceling out the new land west of the

Mississippi only opened a new chapter of conflict.77 Following another ineffectual treaty

mission in 1830, Mahaskah was murdered in 1834 as the result of ongoing warfare

between the Sauk, Fox, and Omaha nations.78 Following his father’s death, Young

Mahaskah (fig. 3.4) reluctantly assumed leadership duties alongside his uncle,

Notchimine (fig. 3.5).

76 See Greg Olson, The Ioway in Missouri, Missouri Heritage Readers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 54–65. 77 On the treaty of 1824 and its aftermath, see Martha Royce Blaine, “The Treaty Period,” in The Ioway Indians, Civilization of the American Indian Series 151 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 139–204 78 The full saga of the series of retaliation killings is covered in Olson, Ioway in Missouri, 102–8.

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The Ioway had barely occupied their new lands in the Platte country for a decade

before white settlers followed, crowding the Ioway again—so closely that settlers’

roaming livestock repeatedly destroyed the Ioway’s “meager fields.”79 By now, the state

of Missouri wanted to annex this land as well. When Francis White Cloud and

Notchimine traveled to Washington to treat in 1837, the Ioway were living in poverty and

frustration in a small scrap of land in present-day Kansas. The treaty they signed there

ended the Ioway claim to land between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in exchange

for $157,500.80

The War Department still occasionally retained Charles Bird King’s services and

some semblance of the portrait gallery, but if the portraits had ever “delighted” the Native

visitors, as McKenney thought, they did not any longer. During Young Mahaskah’s trip

to King’s portrait studio, a sales agent for McKenney’s History provided the visitor with

a look at the portrait numbers that had, to date, been completed:

As he turned over the leaves bearing the likenesses of many of those Indians of the far West who were known to the party, Mahaskah would pronounce their names with the same promptness as if the originals had been alive and before him. Among these was the likeness of his father. He looked at it with a composure bordering on indifference. On being asked if he did not know his father, he answered, pointing to the portrait, “That is my father.” He was asked if he was not glad to see him. He replied: “It is enough for me to know that my father was a brave man, and had a big heart and died an honorable death, in doing the will of my great father” . . .81

Young Mahaskah had every reason to be nonplussed. He had undertaken the same

arduous thousand-mile journey as his father had a decade earlier, in an effort to

79 Ibid., 109. 80 Ibid., 122. 81 McKenney and Hall, Indian Tribes of North America, 1:304.

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ameliorate an ongoing crisis that should have been resolved by previous diplomatic

efforts. Instead, their failures had led to his father’s death. A handsome picture of him

offered neither substitute nor consolation.

_______________

To the south, another series of nightmarish deals was unfolding through

individual portraits that together formed a larger composite of failed diplomacy. When

Creek chief William McIntosh (fig. 3.20) sat for Charles Bird King in Washington in the

winter of 1825, he had come on dubious grounds, feigning tribal backing for the Treaty

of Indian Springs—a fraudulent land cession that had actually been forbidden by Creek

authorities.

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Figure 3.20. After Charles Bird King, M’Intosh, a Creek Chief, ca. 1838. Hand-colored lithograph, 51.1 ´ 36.6 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , vol. 1 [Philadelphia: F. W. Greenough, 1838], facing p. 129. Courtesy of the University of Cincinnati Digital Libraries, Cincinnati, OH.)

His striking figure and astonishing dress—a sartorial expression of his mixed Scots and

Creek heritage—portray a man at the height of his power, but this would not be the case

for long. Two months later, McIntosh would pay dearly for his treason. To fellow Creeks

betrayed by his backhanded deal, he was no vision of a handsome diplomat but a

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traitorous shill for the Georgia government. They burned his lavish house, stabbed him

through the heart, stripped him of his finery, and dumped his naked body in an unmarked

grave.

A second delegation led by Cherokee council head Major Ridge (fig. 3.21), his

son John, and Creek leader Opothle Yoholo soon followed and managed to temporarily

invalidate, albeit temporarily, McIntosh’s treaty. So as not to miss any opportunity to

document history, McKenney brought them all to sit for King as well. Major Ridge’s

“gloomy expression” was noted by President John Quincy Adams, and under the

circumstances we can see why. The delegation stayed in Washington for months in an

effort to get back the land that had been signed away by one purporting to act in their

interests. “Every attempt to prevail upon them to cede the whole of their lands within

Georgia has proved abortive,” President Adams noted, leaving negotiations at a stalemate

that only changed when the desperate Opothle Yoholo attempted suicide in his fancy

Washington hotel room. We may only imagine the nightmare of contingency and

responsibility he carried. This crisis appeared to have softened the US position, allowing

the Creeks to make, for the time being, only a small concession. “Mr. Barbour said this

was all he could expect to do, and advised to conclude with them on these terms,”

reflected Adams. He accepted Barbour’s recommendation, which included the expedient

delivery of “provisions for the benefit of the other portion of the Creek tribe, the friends

of Mackintosh.”82

82 John Quincy Adams, 18 January 1826, in Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1875), 7:106.

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Figure 3.21. After Charles Bird King, Major Ridge, a Cherokee Chief, ca. 1838. Hand-colored lithograph, 51 ´ 35.5 cm (sheet), printed by J. T. Bowen, Philadelphia, PA. (Reprinted from Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , vol. 1 [Philadelphia: F. W. Greenough, 1838], facing p. 181. Courtesy of the Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp /ppmsca.24339.)

Eerily, Ridge himself would meet a similar end a decade later for his role in

brokering the Treaty of New Enchota in 1835. Ridge felt this was the last chance for

them to receive any compensation for Cherokee land east of the Mississippi and ceded it

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in the hopes of securing some “ample provision” in new territory. But his people were

firmly split for and against it. McKenney, highly skeptical of this “so-called treaty,”

remembered speaking with Ridge and his son John in Philadelphia shortly after they

signed in Washington: “Major Ridge, in reply to my reference to the peril in which he

had, in my opinion, placed himself, said, ‘I expect to die for it.’”83 His words would

prove darkly prophetic. The same year Ridge’s portrait print and biography rolled off the

presses and were incorporated into the History, he and his family moved west only to see

the remaining Cherokees brutally rounded up and marched—many to their deaths—into

Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears.84 Subscribers could not have known that two years

later, in June 1839, Ridge too would meet a grisly end, assassinated by retaliatory

Cherokees in Arkansas.85

That the History could not keep up with actual history as it was unfolding is one

of its shortcomings but also its own self-authorizing raison d’être. At the conclusion of

his memoir, McKenney writes,

The war was alike unjust, inhuman, and inglorious. But the agony is over, and there remains no remedy but to study, in the future, to atone for the evils of the past. The Indians are now, nearly all of them, beyond the limits of our States and organized Territories. The means employed in placing them there, which have been resorted to for the last sixteen years, can never be approved by the good, the

83 McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 274, 265. 84 The details of Ridge’s mournful move are amply documented in Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People, 2nd ed., Civilization of the American Indian Series 169 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 304–15. 85 The split in the Cherokee nation over the removal question and the treaty of New Enchota is much more fascinating, complicated, and heartbreaking than can be addressed here. Brian Hicks provides a useful condensation of key events, issues, and players in “The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson,” Smithsonian, March 2011, http://www .smithsonianmag.com/history/the-cherokees-vs-andrew-jackson-277394/?all.

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humane, or the just. And yet, the Indians, though through so much tribulation and suffering, and amidst such accumulated wrongs, are not only in a far better condition for their tranquillity and peace, than when surrounded by the whites, and in the midst of organized States, but where, under a suitable system, and one altogether adapted to their condition, they can rise in the scale of human advancement, to a level with those at whose hands they have experienced so many wrongs, and by whose agency they have been made to endure such deep sorrows.86

Alas, the agony was not in fact over. Nor is the United States of America a place where

people are particularly inclined toward either study of or atonement for the past.

Afterimage: Decorating with History

McKenney’s life ended in penury and relative obscurity. To pay down his debts,

he sold off his collection of painted Inman copies in bits and pieces.87 McKenney’s

Indian Office gallery had been dismantled shortly after his dismissal. Following a

reinstallation in the short-lived National Institution, his collection of natural and cultural

specimens was placed in storage at the Smithsonian in 1862, dispersed and poorly

cataloged as simply “early War Department.”88 In 1855 the original Charles Bird King

paintings migrated to the recently opened Smithsonian Institution, but they would not

remain there for long. On January 24, during the exceptionally cold winter of 1865, two

preparators in a gallery on the lower southwest part of the Smithsonian Institution

building lit a fire in a poorly situated stove to keep warm as they worked. Stray sparks 86 McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 283–84. 87 Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 279–80. Many of them ended up in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology but have since been deaccessioned and sold. Most now reside in private collections. Stuart Ferguson, “Portraits of Native-American Leaders,” Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2006, https://www.wsj.com/articles /SB114237561224698179. 88 Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 250.

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ignited, and a conflagration ensued, engulfing the second-floor gallery above in flames.

The blaze left much of “the contents of what was called the Picture Gallery” in ruins.

Few visual records of this space’s interior remain, but an 1857 woodblock engraving (fig.

3.22) and a stereoscopic photograph (fig. 3.23) help provide a sense of what it was like.

Figure 3.22. The Picture Gallery, ca. 1857. Engraving. (Reprinted from William J. Rhees, An Account of the Smithsonian Institution, Its Founder, Building, Operations, Etc. . . . [Washington, DC: Thomas McGill, 1857], 27. Courtesy of the Institutional History Division, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC, 93-9501.)

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Figure 3.23. American Stereoscopic Co. and Langhenheim, Lloyd, and Co., Picture Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, 1858. Albumen print on paper, yellow colored cardboard mount, 8.3 ´ 17.1 cm. (Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Architectural History and Historic Preservation Division, Washington, DC, SI.2004.020.)

The Picture Gallery contained Indian portraits by George Catlin, Charles Bird King, and

John Mix Stanley, as well as statuary, natural landscapes, and an assortment of birds—in

both print and taxidermy form. Among the losses catalogued a month later were “a

number of half-size Indian portraits, painted by Mr. King for the government” and “a

copy, in Carrera marble, of the antique statue known as the ‘Dying Gladiator,’ by John

Gott, and owned by Mr. J. C. McGuire, of this city.”89

This seemingly motley amalgam of images and objects was likely no accident but

a clear curatorial vision. Gott’s centerpiece sculpture, also known as the Dying Gaul,

depicts a fallen warrior in his moment of noble expiration. No doubt it served a symbolic

function in this particular gallery as “an image of a vanquished enemy” that “embodies

89 Richard Wallach and Joseph Henry, “Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution Relative to the Fire,” February 1865, in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution for the Year 1864 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 119.

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courage in defeat, self-possession in the face of death, and the recognition of nobility in

an alien race.”90 This, then, was the final dissolution of the pantheon into a viewing

context that incorporated Native American history into a distant past shared by

mythology and the natural world. Twenty-five years after McKenney first began his

program of Indian portraiture, the paintings suffered a tragic fate while his lugubrious

prophecies for the fate of actual Native Americans were increasingly fulfilled during an

era of unchecked US expansion.91

And yet, the portraits do endure. Because McKenney went to such lengths to

replicate them in full “living color,” they have managed to be reassembled in different

kinds of pantheons across the globe, divorcing themselves physically (and, we may hope,

culturally) from Hall’s condescending and colonialist text. Throughout the 1830s and

1840s, as history unfolded and the History struggled to reach completion, subscribers

dropped out or died, and most of the sets failed to reach full assembly. Many of the

numbers took on new life as standalone pictures eventually disassociated from their

companion text and framed as decorative portraits. In this ironic turn, McKenney’s Indian

portraits embody a kind of transmediality. Bearing qualities of both book and gallery, the

faces within look back at viewers both from the pages of history and the sites of

contingency where so much of that history, in bits and pieces, unfolded. 90 Susan M. Arensberg, The Dying Gaul: An Ancient Roman Masterpiece from the Capitoline Museum, Rome, exhibition catalog (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2013), 1, http://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/exhibitions/pdfs/2013 /dyinggaulfinalbrochure.pdf. The first- or second-century Roman copy of a lost Greek masterpiece was recently shown in the United States for the first time in history, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC from December 12, 2013 to March 16, 2014. 91 Because King issued copies of these paintings as diplomatic gifts, a number of them do exist in some form in various collections here and there.

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The types of decorative contexts in which they find themselves vary and

perpetuate the tension in function bred into the creation of the original paintings. The line

between genuine regard and shallow dismissal inhering in McKenney’s original office

gallery persists. For example, the art department for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New

York (2002) decorated the walls of antebellum Tammany Hall with framed portraits of

Appanoose, Tahrohon, and Shaumonekusse from the folio edition of McKenney and

Hall’s History (fig. 3.24).92

Figure 3.24. Portraits of Appanoose, Tahrohon, and Shaumonekusse from McKenney and Hall’s History decorate Tammany Hall in Gangs of New York. (Reproduced from Martin Scorsese, dir., Gangs of New York [Santa Monica, CA: Miramax, 2002], Amazon Video.)

92 These same folio-size prints of Tahrohon and Shaumonekusse—framed in dark wood with a gilded fillet—have also appeared as set decorations in episodes of the period dramas Boardwalk Empire and The Knick, respectively. See Tim Van Patten, dir., “Gimcrack and Bunkum,” Boardwalk Empire, season 2, episode 5, aired October 23, 2011 (New York: HBO, 2011); and Steven Soderbergh, dir., “Crutchfield,” The Knick, season 1, episode 10, aired October 17, 2014 (New York: Cinemax, 2014).

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By their mere presence, the portraits simultaneously convey period authenticity,

“Americanness,” “Governmentality,” and “Indianicity.”93 The latter was a critical

element for the actual Tammany Society, which was the namesake of the Lenape leader

Tamenend and which referred to its halls as “wigwams,” its leaders as “sachems,” and its

members as “braves.”94 As standalone images or as reassembled pantheons, McKenney

and Hall prints offer a decorative analog to what Philip Deloria famously characterized as

white America’s ongoing love of “playing Indian.”95 Is there any room for study and

atonement amidst this play? Submitting herself as an example, the author suggests there

might be.

_______________

A photograph from circa 1930 introduces us to a grinning, nine-year-old Rosalind

Appel, standing in the bedroom of her eldest brother Benny, in the family apartment in

the Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx (fig. 3.25). In rumpled socks and leather Mary

Janes, her face framed by braids secured with twine or leather lanyards, she is a sturdy

tomboy, clutching two antique rifles in the morning sun and exuding a sense of belonging

in and ownership over her environs.

93 This notion of “Indianicity” is an extrapolation of Roland Barthes’s conception of “Italianicity” as “the condensed essence of everything that could be Italian.” “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 48. 94 Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Liveright, 2014), 4–6. 95 See Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, Yale Historical Publications (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

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Figure 3.25. Rosalind Appel, ca. 1930. Photographic print. (Courtesy of Suzanne Rappaport Boydstun, White Plains, NY. Digitized by Joshua Boydstun, 2007.)

Rosalind had grown up “playing Indian” with her brothers during summers spent in the

Catskills or rural New Jersey. As children of Jewish immigrants from Poland, they

longed for entrée into American institutions of nature, culture, and history. This identity

tension is everywhere in the décor of Benny’s room, a semiotic mix of erudition and

ruggedness. A glass-front bookcase teems with papers, magazines, and books, including

Winesburg, Ohio and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. On top rests an alarm clock, an old bottle

of German Allasch liqueur, and an antler or horn—possibly a shofar but more likely a

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powder horn. Rodent pelts, routinely killed and skinned by Rosalind’s three older

brothers, soar on the wall over a panoramic view of the dining hall at Benny’s alma

mater, Lafayette College. Flanking this assemblage hang two printed portraits whose

heads extend just beyond the frame of the snapshot. They are, respectively, Ojibwe chief

Shingaba W’Ossin and Fox chief Wapella from McKenney and Hall’s History of the

Indian Tribes of North America.

Some thirty years later, such prints would migrate from tacks to fine heavy

frames, eventually lining the hallway of Rosalind and Sydney Rappaport’s apartment on

the Upper East Side. In adulthood, Rosalind began collecting McKenney and Hall prints

prodigiously, not just for herself but for her newborn grandson, Joshua. Beginning on his

first birthday, Rosalind marked the occasion with the annual gift of a framed royal octavo

portrait reprinted in a second edition of McKenney’s History in 1854 (fig. 3.26).

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Figure 3.26. Sydney Rappaport, Joshua Boydstun, and Rosalind Rappaport (left to right) celebrate Joshua’s birthday, June 1985. Polaroid photograph. (Courtesy of Robert Boydstun and Suzanne Rappaport Boydstun, White Plains, NY. Digitized by Joshua Boydstun, 2007.)

To Josh, the portraits prints had always been revered possessions and sites of

learning, but members of his scholarly cohort in the early 2000s dismissed them with

disdain. “Objectifying,” said one girlfriend. “Colonialist,” declared a roommate. To his

wife, however, they have been fascinating enough to prompt a years-long project of

looking, reading, and thinking that she would never have embarked on otherwise.

Beginning to learn who these individuals were and how both McKenney—and by

extension the United States—ultimately failed them and millions of others, has forced the

author to interrogate her own role in tangled networks of both historical contingency and

the bureaucratic violence of colonization.

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Unlike McKenney, we are not free to hope or imagine that this violent history is

over. As this chapter was undergoing extensive revision in the fall of 2016 and winter of

2017, local, state, and federal forces violently aligned against the Dakota Sioux and their

supporters at the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota. Throughout the fall, an

encampment of protestors had gathered at Standing Rock to block the building of a

dangerous and toxic gas pipeline through Native land. In the harsh winter cold,

government officials unleashed attack dogs, beatings, tear gas, and rubber bullets on the

self-named Water Protectors—young and old—who amassed to resist the intrusion and

pollution of their living environment. Coverage of this months-long standoff was

conspicuously absent from major news outlets, but social media succeeded in bringing

some measure of attention to the crisis, enough to eventually force the Army Corps of

Engineers to announce a rerouting of the pipeline. Whether the next route will attempt a

pass through Native land elsewhere remains to be seen—and fought.

Lest we make the mistake of thinking that modern-day officials are any more

enlightened then the problematic McKenney (to say nothing of those he opposed), we

would do well to note that government leadership has remained shamefully silent through

this conflict. Prominent members of both major political parties have exhibited reluctance

to either unequivocally condemn the pipeline or effectively secure permanent Native

control over what remains of their land. On November 28, North Dakota governor Jack

Dalrymple announced a mandatory evacuation of the protest camp, citing health and

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safety concerns.96 Two days later, protest organizers accused law enforcement of

intercepting supplies, thereby exacerbating threats to health and safety and creating a

pretext for evacuation.97 Governor Dalrymple subsequently vowed not to prevent

supplies from reaching the camp.98 This combination of reticence and shallow

benevolence speaks volumes about the need for a powerful reckoning with US-Native

American history in the present—one that can make more of the “honest efforts of

individuals,” “the cause of humanity and justice,” and, ultimately, “national acts.”

96 William Yardley, “North Dakota Governor Orders Evacuation of Standing Rock Protest Site, but No Forcible Removal Planned,” Nation, Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-standing-rock-corps-20161128-story .html. 97 Stand with Standing Rock, “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Issues Proclamation in Support of Oceti Sakowin Camp Safety,” news release, November 30, 2016, http://standwithstandingrock.net/standing-rock-sioux-tribe-issues-proclamation-support -oceti-sakowin-camp-safety/. 98 Elizabeth Dunbar, “ND Gov: We Won’t Block Supplies to Protesters,” Minnesota Public Radio, November 30, 2016, https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/11/30 /dalrymple-standing-rock-protest.

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Chapter 4

Portraits in and on Stone:

Visualizing Deafness, 1817–1855

I. Introduction: Honor Thy Deaf History

Who speaks best for the interests of those who do not speak? This question of

representation forms the crux of Deaf history.1 Is deafness an affliction of sensory

deficiency requiring medical and social intervention to integrate its sufferers into

dominant hearing society, or rather is it a different but altogether legitimate mode of

being and communicating in the world, befitting a unique culture and community unto

itself? Deaf liberation artist Nancy Rourke’s 2011 painting, Honor Thy Deaf History,

answers with an argument in the form of a composite portrait, the kind we have also

come to recognize as a collective representation (fig. 4.1). Vibrating in primary colors

and painted in a kind of pop-fauvist style, twelve faces, each framed in a discrete window

of time and place, compose the grid. This is Deaf history as the artist wants it understood:

a history told through individuals—both hearing and deaf—who have been righteous

representatives of the Deaf by advocating, in different ways, for a distinct Deaf culture

based in manualism: communication through sign language.

1 Following Padden and Humphries, in this study I use the lower case deaf to refer to the condition of deafness and the capitalized Deaf to describe Deaf culture and identity, or “the cultural practices of a group within a group.” Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1.

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Figure 4.1. Nancy Rourke, Honor thy Deaf History, 2011. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 76.2 cm. (Courtesy of Nancy Rourke, http://www.nancyrourke.com/deafhistory .htm.)

It is a visual history that pushes back against a powerful current of audism, the

assumption that hearing and speech are the ideal forms of language expression, and that

deaf people should be integrated into those sound-based regimes of communication.2

2 Deaf theorist Tom Humphries writes, “[Audism] appears in the form of people who continually judge deaf people’s intelligence and success on the basis of their ability in the language of the hearing culture. It appears when the assumption is made that the deaf person’s happiness depends on acquiring fluency in the language of the hearing culture. It appears when deaf people actively participate in the oppression of other deaf people by demanding of them the same set of standards, behavior, and values that they demand of hearing people.” Tom Humphries, “Audism: The Making of a Word”

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There are no audists or advocates of oralist integration in this visual history.

Rourke’s portraits move chronologically, beginning with Spanish priest Juan Pablo

Martin Bonet (top left), who formulated one of the first-known methods of

communication through manual signs in 1620, and ending with twenty-first-century Deaf

scholar and activist Paddy Ladd (bottom right). While most of the people included in this

composite portrait are deaf, not all are. Bonet, for instance, was hearing, as was William

Stokoe (bottom middle), a literature scholar turned linguist, who helped launch a

manualist revival in the 1960s by designating American sign as a fully developed

language. In Rourke’s formulation, one need not be deaf to figure into the artist’s

historical pantheon, but those included all share a common thread in their attitude toward

deafness and representation of deaf people: that sign language forms the core of Deaf

ontology, identity, and community.

Rourke’s act of collective representation is born of painful absence; it is an

attempt to reconstruct a Deaf history against the grain of a Deaf experience in America

that has been impacted—often destructively—by stridently audist beliefs and approaches.

Oralism—the conviction that the deaf should learn to read lips and become speakers

themselves, as well as its programmatic means of enactment—has always been part of the

debate over the place of the Deaf in society. But this was not the guiding philosophy of

Deaf education at its inception. Rather it became that way, and the shift during the course

(unpublished essay, 1975), quoted in H-Dirksen L. Bauman, “Audism: Exploring the Metaphysics of Oppression,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 9, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 240, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42658711.

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of the nineteenth century has a great deal to tell us about the entwined and fraught nature

of visibility and representation.

The three figures—one hearing and two deaf—forming the second row in

Rourke’s painting (fig. 4.2) offer a portal into an important early chapter in American

Deaf history. They are (left to right) hearing reverend turned deaf educator Thomas

Hopkins Gallaudet (1787–1851); his French colleague, Deaf educator Laurent Clerc

(1785-1869); and Deaf artist Albert Newsam (1809–1864), whose work with Thomas L.

McKenney was discussed in Chapter 3 of this dissertation.

Figure 4.2. Detail of figure 4.1, showing Nancy Rourke’s portraits of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (left), Laurent Clerc (center), and Albert Newsam (right).

Contemporaries, these men knew one another and worked collaboratively, often quite

closely, as shapers of early Deaf education and culture in the United States. Their shared

project was rooted in the primacy of manualism. All approached deafness as a unique—

and not necessarily inferior—mode of being that required the cultivation of Deaf

community and identity as a precursor to productive integration into the hearing world.

This social and pedagogical conception of deafness would flourish for several

generations before it became subject to a controlling and reactionary audist and oralist

backlash in the later nineteenth century, which regarded deafness as a biological

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deficiency and deaf culture as an obstacle to the full and proper integration of deaf

individuals into mainstream society.

Following the famous words of Michel Foucault that “visibility is a trap,” I argue

that ultimately the project of representing deafness and the Deaf fell victim to its own

success by creating a collective minority identity so strong and so different it became a

threat to the dominant, hearing social order.3 As a result, representatives such as

Gallaudet, Clerc, and Newsam were, for a while, effectively written out of history and

their contributions to Deaf visibility and visual culture variously erased. It is this

important passage in US Deaf history and visual culture that this chapter seeks to

reconstruct by focusing on a critical early site of Deaf collective representation: a

monument in Gallaudet’s honor that was designed by Newsam (featured in his portrait

above) and funded entirely by Deaf Americans.

The study begins in 1817, when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc,

the head teacher whom Gallaudet had brought over from France, opened the United

States’ first residential school for the deaf, the Connecticut Asylum for the Deaf and

Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut.4 Gallaudet had imported more than just a talented

teacher; he was adapting an entire French philosophical and pedagogical tradition about

deafness and sign to American paradigms. Schools of this model quickly proliferated and

the community that emerged from this experiment in Deaf residential education reached

its apotheosis in 1854, when Albert Newsam, one of the first beneficiaries of this new 3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 200. 4 The institution has gone through several changes in name, location, and structure. It is currently the American School for the Deaf.

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form of Deaf education and identity formation, designed a monument honoring Gallaudet

to be installed at the school in Hartford. This memorial was significant as the first

monument in the hemisphere (and possibly the world) to be an “exclusively deaf-mute

enterprise”—that is, conceived and funded entirely by Deaf Americans, who had become

recognizable to one another both as individuals and as members of a community that was

connected through shared language and experience. A formal entrée into a burgeoning

American monument and memorial culture, Newsam’s Gallaudet monument offered Deaf

Americans the promise of a lasting and enduring site of collective belonging, while

signaling the coalescence of their minority population within a larger culture.

But Newsam’s primary artistic medium of lithographic printmaking employed

stone in a different manner, one that enabled this site of collective representation to

transcend its fixed location in both space and time. To raise funds to pay for the

monument, Newsam crafted commemorative prints of the site, enabling hundreds of Deaf

Americans in residential schools along the eastern seaboard to have a financial, social,

and visual/material share in the project of memorialization (fig. 4.3). In an ironic

subversion of our expectations about the durability of paper versus stone, the print is

sadly the only enduring version of the monument. The original would meet an

unfortunate fate when, generations later, both its appearance and the representation of

Deafness for which it stood were deemed aesthetically and socially passé.

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Figure 4.3. Albert Newsam, Gallaudet Monument, Erected in front of the American Asylum for the deaf & dumb, at Hartford, Conn. Sept. 6th 1854, 1855. Lithograph, 83.6 × 65.3 cm (sheet), printed by P. S. Duval, Philadelphia, PA. (Courtesy of the Popular Graphic Arts Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc .gov/loc.pnp/pga.02292.)

II. Seeing a “Very Singular Condition”

On April 20, 1817, a crowd assembled in Hartford, Connecticut for a stirring

sermon delivered by the popular local reverend Thomas H. Gallaudet. The occasion was

a formal celebration of the opening of the new Connecticut Asylum for the Education and

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Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, the first of its kind in the country.5 Those who

gathered for the ceremonies were almost all hearing individuals: prominent locals who

had either contributed money to the new school or helped lobby the state of Connecticut

for additional support.6 For Gallaudet, the occasion was a formal point of embarkation,

the beginning of a still-uncharted social, religious, and pedagogical quest to uplift deaf

Americans from the “dungeon” of silence and isolation where the “immortal mind prey[s]

upon itself.”7 Gallaudet was committed both to understanding the “very singular

condition in which the minds of the deaf and dumb are placed,” and determining the

optimal means of communicating with and educating them.8

Gallaudet encountered deafness through accidents of circumstance, but the

direction his ministry took would become his life’s work and legacy.9 A graduate of Yale

5 Briefly, there had been a school for the deaf in Cobbs, Virginia. Not only was it short-lived (1812–1814), it also differed from the Hartford Asylum in several ways: it prioritized oralist methods and also lacked the institutional and community support and infrastructure undergirding the Hartford school. 6 An early history of the school is documented in Job Williams, A Brief History of the American Asylum, at Hartford, for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood, and Brainard, 1893), 12–14. Published simultaneously in Public Schools in the United States, Established 1817–1854, vol. 1 of Histories of American Schools for the Deaf, 1817–1893, ed. Edward Allen Fay (Washington, DC: Volta Bureau, 1893). 7 Thomas H. Gallaudet, A Sermon Delivered at the Opening of the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, at the Request of the Directors, on Sunday Evening, April 20th, 1817, in the Brick Church in Hartford (Hartford, CT: Hudson, 1817), 8. 8 Gallaudet, Sermon, 6. 9 These early years are amply documented in most histories of Deaf culture and American Sign Language, including John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989), 32–43; and R. A. R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture, History of Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 11–16.

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and the Andover Theological Seminary, in 1814 Gallaudet returned to his family home in

Connecticut, where he befriended a prominent neighbor, Dr. Mason Cogswell, and his

young daughter Alice, who had lost her hearing from meningitis at age two. The

Cogswells had the financial means to educate a deaf child but faced a dearth of qualified

teachers. In 1812, Cogswell had formed a committee of concerned citizens and

orchestrated a census, which had counted eighty-four deaf people in the state of

Connecticut and estimated the existence of four hundred deaf souls in New England,

most of them languishing without companionship or education.10 The need for

specialized deaf education could be quantifiably demonstrated, but how best to enact it

was still unknown. In 1815 Gallaudet embarked on a trip to England, in the hopes of

learning deaf education techniques. His initial destination was the Braidwood Academy

of London, run by the Braidwood family, who guarded their proprietary system based

largely in oral education (teaching deaf students to read lips and speak) and charged

potential teachers steep prices to learn the methods.11

Disappointed with the Braidwood models, Gallaudet happened to attend a

demonstration of an entirely different kind of deaf education while in London—one

10 An interesting exception is the integrated hearing and deaf community that flourished in the eighteenth century on Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. The geographic isolation and hereditary representation of deafness in the population resulted in high rates of deafness, intermarriage between deaf and hearing, and widespread use of sign language amongst deaf and hearing alike. By 1900 the community had largely dispersed. For an anthropological and historical study of deafness on the Island, see Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 11 John Braidwood, grandson of the Braidwood Academy’s founder, had attempted to open school a for the deaf in the United States, but the venture was troubled and ultimately short-lived. See Van Cleve and Crouch, Place of Their Own, 24–28.

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based in visual communication of signs and written language—conducted by the

Frenchman Abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, principal of a school for the deaf in

Bordeaux. A student and eventual successor of pioneering deaf educator Abbé Charles-

Michel de l’Épée, Sicard impressed Gallaudet and other audience members by

communicating with two of his talented students, Laurent Clerc and Jean Massieu,

entirely through manual signs. To prove not only the genuine efficacy of his methods but

their elegance and efficiency as well, Abbé Sicard welcomed impromptu questions from

audience members, which he translated into sign for his pupils, who then wrote their

answers in neat, eloquent French on a chalkboard.

Whereas demonstrations of oral technique aimed to impress audiences with a

literalized enactment of the passages from Isaiah heralding that in the presence of the

Lord “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped . . . and

the tongue of the dumb sing,” the French mode engaged providence more figuratively.12

Though Sicard experimented with coaxing articulation from his students, he eventually

moved away from these techniques to focus more on signing and writing. By 1814 his

demonstrations sought less to showcase deaf students attempting to croak out sounds—

spoken communication for its own sake. Rather he presented the cultivated minds of deaf

people through gesture: signing and writing.13 According to Sicard and his apprentices,

12 Isa. 35:5–6 (Authorized [King James] Version). 13 Scottish Philosopher Dugald Stewart, a contemporary critic of the oralist technique, argued for the superiority of Sicard’s methods, observing that manual gestures and writing sought “not to astonish the vulgar by the sudden conversion of a dumb child into a speaking automaton; but . . . to convert his pupil into a rational and moral being.” Dugald Stewart, quoted in Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002), 99.

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teaching the deaf meant more than opening ears and loosening tongues; it returned to the

original godly work of Genesis: separating darkness and light, bringing order to chaos.

When asked by an audience member, “What is education?” Laurent Clerc answered on

his slate, “Education is the care which is taken to cultivate the minds of youth, to elevate

their hearts & to give them the knowledge of the science, & of art that is necessary to

teach them to conduct well in the world.”14 Performances like this proved definitively

that the deaf and dumb were not, as many had mistaken them, uneducable or “idiotic.” In

fact, quite the opposite was true: they were pure potential, waiting to be unlocked by

methods optimally designed to meet their “singular condition.”

A pair of paintings by Jerôme-Martin Langlois (figs. 4.4 and 4.5), a student of

Jacques Louis-David, who had taken an interest in the emotional, gestural, and narrative

potential of painting deaf subjects, offer a glimpse into Sicard’s progression away from

speech and towards visual communication in writing and sign. Painted in 1806 (fig. 4.4)

and 1814 (fig. 4.5) respectively, the two pictures share the same interior space—the

consistent tiled floor and blackboard return the viewer to a familiar classroom—and the

same title: The Abbé Sicard Instructing His Deaf Pupils. Yet subtle compositional

differences show changes in both teaching methods and group dynamics. Whereas the

earlier painting privileges the primacy of oralism and a hearing viewer, the later painting

depicts a silent visual realm primarily of and for the deaf.

14 Van Cleve and Crouch, Place of Their Own, 35.

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Figure 4.4. Left, Jérôme-Martin Langlois, The Abbé Sicard Instructing His Deaf Pupils, 1806. Oil on canvas. (Courtesy of L’Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris.) Figure 4.5. Right, Jérôme-Martin Langlois, The Abbé Sicard Instructing His Deaf Pupils, 1814. Oil on canvas. (Courtesy of L’Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris.)

In the earlier painting (fig. 4.4), Langlois turns the chalkboard background into a

vehicle for describing the action. In the top left corner, Sicard’s deaf pupil Jean Massieu

points to words taken from a section of Sicard’s Course of Instruction for the deaf:

“Moyen de faire articuler les sons par le sentiment de la pression” (Means of making

sounds articulated by the feeling of pressure).15 Here, Massieu serves as a visual

interlocutor, a stand-in for aural explication. In the later painting (fig. 4.5), Langlois does

not include any text, forcing a viewer to read gestures in the tableau unaided. This time

15 Nicholas Mirzoeff adds that restoration shows this text actually replaced an earlier version: “La reconnaissance est la mémoire du coeur” (Recognition is the memory of the heart)—Massieu’s response during exhibitions to the question, “What is memory?” Both question and answer were designed to contradict the notion that because they lacked speech, the deaf also lacked memory. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 85–86. For Mirzoeff’s complete discussion of these two paintings, see 81–89.

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the teacher’s touch does not prompt the pupil to speak: instead, he draws a line in chalk at

his teacher’s direction. A stack of books at the front of the picture plane signals the

students’ induction into the world of literacy. Writing appears to have supplanted speech

in this teaching paradigm, but group dynamics have also changed. This time, the male

figure on the left looks inward, completely focused on the lesson. To Sicard’s right, a

female student turns, hands on hips, to meet the viewer’s gaze. Whereas Massieu had

been instrumentalized to translate the scene for a hearing viewer, the young woman

regards her audience coolly, as if their lesson has been interrupted by an intruder,

signaling the viewer’s entry into a deaf-centric space.

The standing male figure at the top left of Langlois’s later painting is Massieu’s

younger colleague Laurent Clerc. Then a gifted twenty-nine-year-old instructor at the

Royal Institution for the Deaf in Paris (where he himself had begun schooling at age

twelve), Clerc was a particularly compelling performer in Sicard’s exhibitions of deaf

ability. Well-spoken through writing and manual signs, “he had the virtue of being an

exemplary model of what a deaf person could become—educated, industrious, socially

skilled.”16 That all of this was possible through silent, visual means more than impressed

Gallaudet, it restructured his expectations. He realized that this trip (funded, at great

expense, by Cogswell’s Connecticut committee) could not sufficiently prepare him as a

qualified educator of the deaf back in the US. Crafting an ingenious personnel solution to

the urgent problem of the “intolerable ignorance of deaf American children,” he managed

to persuade Laurent Clerc to return with him and become the principal teacher at a

16 Van Cleve and Crouch, Place of Their Own, 37.

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fledgling residential school in Hartford.17 Astonishingly, Clerc agreed, and on their

voyage home the two men began instructing each other in their native languages. Clerc

tutored Gallaudet in the language of signs, while Gallaudet taught Clerc English.

This initial language exchange serves as an important reminder that sign

languages are not merely gestural pantomimes of spoken languages but have their own

grammatical and rhetorical structures. Early on, Abbé de l’Épée “observed that the deaf

possessed a natural language for communicating with each other.” Working together,

deaf students negotiated the personal vernaculars of “home signs,” which they had

previously constructed to communicate within their individual families, into a shared

language system. De l’Épée and his followers put forth the argument that sign language

was innate to the deaf and therefore the most optimal means of bringing the deaf into

language usage (and, as we shall see, linguistic identity). However, this raw gestural

material, the “natural language of signs” needed to be shaped into a system of

“methodological signs,” in order to become standardized and commensurate with spoken

and written language. De l’Épée was not so much an inventor of signing—this the

students did on their own—as he was a structural codifier of the language.18 In his role as

shaper, he purposely drew on French linguistics, for the ultimate educational goal was to

17 Ibid., 40. The terms of Clerc’s tenure were carefully negotiated in an extensive contract, which carefully outlined all aspects of his salary, workload, lodging, and religious autonomy as a Catholic in a Protestant community. Clerc was venturing into the unknown and was careful to protect his interests. The initial contract was for a term of only three years, ensuring his return to France if the school were to fail. For more details on the contract, see Van Cleve and Crouch, Place of Their Own, 37–40. 18 John Tabak, Significant Gestures: A History of American Sign Language (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 9–10.

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structure communicability between the two languages.19 Only in this way could deaf

students go on to access the world of knowledge beyond their teachers and colleagues

and benefit from the moral and intellectual cultivation that textual discourse provides.

Educating the deaf, as Nicholas Mirzoeff has eloquently argued, was a deeply

modern project born of an enlightenment ethos.20 It offered intellectual and moral

promises to both deaf and hearing alike: the opportunity for the former to exit linguistic,

social, and religious isolation, and for the latter, the divinely inspired quest to

systematically construct knowledge—a project of effectively encoding into gesture not

just vocabulary but all parts of speech. Not unlike the Latinate root system, de l’Épée’s

“methodological” development of sign relied on “radical signs,” which could be built

upon and modified in a range of syntactical contexts. The result offered a complex but

systematic means of bringing the deaf into an ordered world of structured

communication.21 Not only was this mode of communication considered by its

19 For a collection of primary source texts by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French deaf educators, see Harlan Lane, ed., The Deaf Experience: Classics in Language and Education, trans. Franklin Philip, Gallaudet Classics in Deaf Studies (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006). 20 Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry, 6. Additionally, “the Enlightenment may have been a European phenomenon, but its unfolding was very different in different national contexts. The French engagement with the deaf was not an accident, but the result of a century of debate over natural and vernacular language, which was not replicated elsewhere.” Ibid., 30. 21 John Arrowsmith illustrates the expansiveness of the root system with the example of the infinitive of the verb “to love,” which “is executed by looking at the object in question, and pressing the right hand strongly upon the mouth, while the left is laid upon the heart; then carrying the right with fresh vivacity to the heart, conjointly with the left, and concluding with the sign for the infinitive. . . . If want to dictate friendship, I make the radical sign, accompanied by the sign for substantive . . . If love is the noun I want, I make the same signs as for friendship, only giving a greater degree of vivacity to my action on the mouth and on the heart, because love is more ardent than friendship . . .”

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proponents perfectly sufficient for rational thought and eloquent expression, it was

arguably superior.22 In every case, however, the mastery of sign language was considered

the initial learning stage for the Deaf. To gain proficiency in a written foreign language,

such as French or English, they needed expressive fluency in their own manual language

first.

_______________

Back in the United States, Gallaudet and Clerc would have a fresh slate on which

to transfer these methods. The residential school brought deaf individuals out of isolation

and into direct communication with one another in a space where the first pedagogical

priority was the cultivation of a full manual linguistic system, which is today called

American Sign Language. In Words Made Flesh, R. A. R. Edwards argues that in the

early years of Deaf education in America, learning and constructing sign language were

interrelated activities, a departure from the traditional teacher-student dynamic, whereby

knowledge flowed unidirectionally from seasoned instructor to initiate pupil.23 Instead,

John Pauncefort Arrowsmith, The Art of Instructing the Infant Deaf and Dumb . . . (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819), 177–78.. 22 “It cannot be denied, that a written question or answer is more to be depended upon than a verbal one. Does not reason tell us, there is no more connexion between ideas and sound, which affects our ears, than between those ideas and written characters, which affect our eyes. Speech is nothing more than a translation of writing.” Arrowsmith, Art of Instructing, 9. 23 Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 41–43.

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signs were codified organically within the immediate community, and the teacher’s role

was to shape and guide this process.24

In the United States, the deaf were now positioned to become fluent and

expressive in their own language, which they themselves were co-constructing, before the

dominant language of the nation. This approach had the full backing of the Hartford

asylum’s directors, who in 1828 stated, “it is desirable that a uniform system should

prevail, that the Deaf and Dumb, who form in some measure a distinct community,

should have a common language.”25 As history bore out, the concept and practice of a

common language exclusively by and for a “distinct community” would come under

suspicion.

_______________

Opening minds was well and good, but Gallaudet and Clerc keenly understood

that this stage was only part of the larger goal: preparing students, to the greatest extent

possible, to function productively in a hearing world. The deaf and dumb, as they were

classified (and self-identified) during this period, needed more than the ability to “speak”

through signs. They needed the ability to think, read, and write in English. Students in the

early institutions were thus engaged in two modes and two worlds of communication: the

24 “The language was understood to be of Deaf origin, with idioms and other constructions very different from those found in English. And the natural signs truly belonged to Deaf people; they were the only ones who could properly teach it.” Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 41. 25 Twelfth Report of the Directors of the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, Exhibited at the Asylum May 10, 1828, quoted in Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 43.

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realm of signs used freely amongst themselves and the rare hearing people who

endeavored to operate there too, and written English, used to interact with the hearing.

The results were highly effective as “Deaf students largely believed that the sign

language enabled them, finally, to learn English.”26 Thus, in the early decades of Deaf

instruction when manual signs and written expression ruled, these linguistic projects and

identities were mutually constructed.

The functional and symbolic site of connection between deaf and hearing

communication—the most basic linguistic bridge between divides—was (and remains)

the manual alphabet. Like all alphabets, manual alphabets are composed of discrete

signifiers but also function as symbolic totalities, representing as a whole the infinite

possibilities of communication. Whereas children’s ABC primers induct a would-be

English reader into the semiotic world of their language, representations of the manual

alphabet signify something different. As mentioned previously, sign languages have their

own linguistic structures. In English and many other languages, the distinct letters

(graphemes) that serve as the basic units of writing (more or less) correspond to the

distinct sounds (phonemes) that serve as the basic units of speech. Similarly, cheremes

26 Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 74. Oralism would eventually change the Deaf relationship with English. By emphasizing speech, oralism touted the supreme integration of the deaf into English hearing and speaking society. Ironically, it also had the unfortunate outcome of separating deaf people from the English language. “By denigrating the sign language and making it the language of ‘oral failures,’ oralists created a deep suspicion of English among signing Deaf people, who began to suspect that oralists were using English as a weapon to destroy ASL. Since this was indeed the mission of oralists, Deaf people were correct in their suspicions. But the resulting situation left Deaf people unable to claim English as their own, as a language that could be used by both Deaf and hearing people.” Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 75.

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are the basic gestural units of a sign language.27 These cheremes are distinct from the

manual alphabet, which is effectively a means of transmitting graphemes manually. The

manual alphabet does not form the building blocks of language for the Deaf, but rather

the building blocks of sign-based linguistic commensurability. In other words, the manual

alphabet both proffers and symbolizes the possibility of non-oral communication between

the deaf and the hearing.

Manual alphabets began to enter visual culture, promoting this sense of possibility

to both hearing and deaf audiences, while inspiring a heightened degree of agency and

unity amongst a coalescing Deaf population. For instance, John Pauncefort Arrowsmith, a

British man enamored of de l’Épée’s methods, published an 1819 manual on The Art of

Instructing the Infant Deaf and Dumb, a volume “Illustrated with Copper Plates, Drawn

and Engraved by the Author’s Brother, an Artist Born Deaf and Dumb” (fig. 4.6). The

illustrations—of double- and single-handed manual alphabets—offered deaf and hearing

learners a visual shorthand for both deaf ability to understand English and a hearing

world’s reciprocal induction into the world of sign.

27 While this structure had always been a part of sign languages, William C. Stokoe, Jr. was largely responsible for clarifying and codifying such a structure within the parlance of twentieth century structural linguistics. He proposed use of the term “chereme” in his groundbreaking early work, Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf, Occasional Papers 8, supplement to Studies in Linguistics 15, no. 1–2 (1960).

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Figure 4.6. Thomas Arrowsmith, The Manual Alphabet with One Hand, ca. 1819. Engraving. (Reprinted from John Pauncefort Arrowsmith, The Art of Instructing the Infant Deaf and Dumb . . . [London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819], preceding p. 92. Courtesy of Google Books and the New York Public Library, 2006, https:// books.google.com/books?id=twITAAAAIAAJ.)

The manual alphabet also provided a means of signaling and proclaiming deafness. For

instance, Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 portrait of Laurent Clerc’s deaf wife, Eliza

Crocker Boardman Clerc, and their infant daughter Elizabeth, quietly employs the

manual alphabet as a signifying mark of identity (fig. 4.7). With a single gesture, the

lovely Eliza visually announces both her name and her deafness with her right hand

curled into a letter E.

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Figure 4.7. Charles Willson Peale, Mrs. Laurent Clerc, 1822. Oil on 63.5 × 53.4 cm. (Courtesy of the American School for the Deaf, on loan to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, T.L.1984.41.2.)

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Indebted to and inspired by French models and methods, Deaf education in the

United States still had to forge its own institutional footing. Although motivated by men

of the cloth on both sides of the Atlantic, support in the states would come from neither

Crown nor papacy. Rather, funding would need to be coaxed from the Protestant pockets

of motivated individuals and fledgling benevolent-society coffers, raised through

American-style campaigns of republican virtue and civic piety. In order for Deaf

Americans to become visible to one another, they first had to become visible to the

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hearing as a recognizable demographic, comprising compelling individual subjects,

worthy of aid and instruction.

This project started first and most vigorously in Hartford thanks to the Cogswell

family, but it was not confined to Connecticut. In other East Coast cities, particularly

New York and Philadelphia, Deaf Americans were becoming more visible. In addition to

the percentage of people in any population born deaf, at the time deafness was also a

frequent side effect of illnesses that would largely disappear by the middle of the

twentieth century, thanks to improvements in sanitation and medicine.28 Increasing

concentrations of deaf people, often indigent children, therefore grew along with swelling

urban populations and their attendant needs for civic infrastructure. Rather than a top-

down mandate from government, this infrastructure would emerge from the ground up

through committees and networks of affiliation and shared belief. At the core of this

movement were people like Cogswell, Gallaudet, and Arrowsmith, hearing people whose

loved ones benefited directly from this social movement. “Too much praise cannot be

bestowed on the establishment of the benevolent institutions for educating the indigent

individuals of this class,” Arrowsmith applauded. “These institutions were established

when there was no apparent possibility of meliorating their condition by any other 28 “Appendix: List of Pupils Admitted to the Kentucky School for the Deaf from Its Opening, April 3rd, 1823 till April 3rd, 1893” provides a compelling primary source document in this regard. Columns in the registry are devoted to age and cause of deafness. There is little data listed on students before 1851, but from that year forward, those marked as “congenital” were only a small fraction of enrollees. Childhood accidents and maladies, usually high fevers now largely cured or controlled through vaccines (scarlet fever, brain fever, whooping cough, meningitis, measles, scrofula, severe cold, etc.) were common causes. In Charles P. Fosdick, A Short History of the Kentucky School for the Deaf, Danville, KY (Danville, KY: Office of the Kentucky Deaf-Mute, [1893]), 39–87. Published simultaneously in Fay, Public Schools.

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preceptors; consequently, every credit is due to a generous public for their

philanthropy.”29

As the most populous US urban area at the dawn of the nineteenth century,

Philadelphia was home to “quite a number of deaf children . . . who were frequently to be

seen wandering about the streets, exciting by their neglected appearance and uncouth

gestures the laughter and ridicule of the cruel and thoughtless, and the interest and

compassion of the benevolent.”30 In 1819 a local Jewish crockery merchant named David

Seixas (1788–1864) took a particular interest in these children and began housing and

feeding them in his home on Market Street, west of 16th Street. Reading about the

developments in Hartford and employing “the crude sign language which his ingenuity

devised, he was able to begin the education of his unfortunate charges.”31 Using his

connections to prominent Philadelphia philanthropists and social reformers, he convened

a meeting at the Philosophical Society early in 1820 to begin planning the establishment

of a local institution like the one in Hartford (and another already underway in New York

City).

The Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb opened shortly thereafter,

with a handful of students and a difficult beginning. Unlike Gallaudet, who had the

benefit of operating alongside Clerc, Seixas was largely untrained and lacked qualified

support. It quickly became clear that private charity alone would not suffice, and in

29 Arrowsmith, Art of Instructing, 7. 30 H. Van Allen, A Brief History of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (Philadelphia: Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, 1893), 8. Published simultaneously in Fay, Public Schools. 31 Ibid.

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January 1821 Seixas brought several of his pupils before the Pennsylvania legislature to

formally appeal for assistance from the state.32 In one of the earliest acts of US state-

sponsored education, the legislature agreed to supplement the cost of every pupil whose

parents could not be located or who could not afford tuition at the school, one hundred

twenty dollars per annum, for up to three years of instruction. Before 1817 the US did not

have a single institution dedicated to housing and educating the deaf. Within four years it

had three, a number that would triple over the next fifteen years. A rapid emergence of

opportunities for deaf people to exit social and geographic isolation, find one another,

and forge a shared language, culture, and identity was underway.

III. Portraits on Stone: Albert Newsam, Deaf Mute Artist

Among the earliest students in the Pennsylvania Institution were two young boys

who already displayed talent in the visual arts, John Carlin and Albert Newsam. The two

would go on to become lifelong friends and eventually collaborate on creating the

Gallaudet monument. It was Newsam’s unusual talent as a budding draughtsman that first

brought him to Seixas’s attention and made him a particularly compelling example of the

orphaned deaf waif heretofore abandoned by society who needed only education and

training to thrive.

32 No sooner had Seixas secured this critical support for his fledgling school than controversy erupted over charges that he had sexual molested several female students. The scandal proved difficult to investigate, let alone adjudicate because so new were the educational efforts, communication between the hearing stakeholders and deaf students was barely possible. Seixas was dismissed from his post, and Laurent Clerc was brought down from Hartford to serve as interim principal. For an account and analysis of this incident, see Padden and Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture, 23–31.

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Born deaf and mute in Steubenville, Ohio in 1809, Newsam was abandoned by

his mother and then orphaned at a young age when his boatman father drowned in the

Ohio River.33 A local man by the name of Thomas Hamilton adopted the young boy, who

displayed early drawing talent. In 1819 a deaf man passing through town, William Davis,

lured Newsam away from Ohio and Hamilton’s care with promises of increased

opportunity in the East. Davis is portrayed as a kidnapper and exploiter in Newsam’s

biography, but the full story of their relationship is unclear. As Deborah M. Sonnenstrahl

has observed in her history of Deaf artists in America, at this time there was no “deaf

community” to speak of.34 The rare deaf people lucky enough to be born into families of

means, such as the portrait painter John Brewster, Jr. (1766–1854), could have their

talents nurtured and supported.35 More often they were marginalized and left uneducated,

33 The major source of biographical information on Newsam is the posthumous 1868 biography written by his friend, an instructor at the Pennsylvania Institution, Joseph O. Pyatt. The circumstances of Newsam’s departure from Ohio and arrival in Philadelphia are recounted in Pyatt, Memoir of Albert Newsam, Deaf Mute Artist (Philadelphia: Printed for the author, 1868), 16–20. 34 “Early American deaf artists, prior to 1817, were most likely not conscious that culturally deaf communities existed elsewhere in the world, nor were they aware of their potential to be members of a minority group.” Deborah M. Sonnenstrahl, Deaf Artists in America: Colonial to Contemporary (San Diego: DawnSignPress, 2002), xviii. 35 John Brewster actually enrolled in the Asylum at Hartford the year after it opened. Already a successful portrait painter at fifty-one years of age, he put his career on hold to spend three years in the asylum. “Why did a man of his ability and maturity stay in an elementary school so long?” his biographer Harlan Lane asks. “There could, of course, have been practical reasons: he may have been improving his ability to read and write English, wishing to become educated like his brother and clients. But to Deaf people another answer to the question of why he stayed is self-evident. . . . Consider the penchant of two countrymen, in a chance encounter abroad, to start a conversation. Then imagine how much more this personal, sustained contact with other Deaf people must have meant to Brewster: beyond the joys of communication, and the new knowledge of the world that the school offered him, was the opportunity to identify with other Deaf people, to share familiar values and mores, and to adopt felicitous new ones, to move

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unskilled and consigned to penury. Because deaf people in the United States lived largely

in isolation from one another, Davis’ company and promises of increased Deaf fraternity

and education likely held great sway.

The ragged deaf child drawing street scenes in chalk on the watch-box at Market

and Fifth streets in Philadelphia in the spring of 1820 was quickly noticed by a

neighborhood resident named Bishop White, who also happened to be the president of

Seixas’s fledgling school. News of the recently arrived pair—and the extraordinary

talents of the boy—were promptly conveyed to Seixas, and at a May 20 committee

meeting, philanthropic backers pledged support to keep Newsam in Philadelphia as

Seixas’s charge. Having appeared in Philadelphia at exactly the right time, eleven-year-

old Newsam “was accordingly placed in the Institution as a State pupil, and from this

time he became a protege of that humane establishment.”36

Enrolled under the name Albert Davis, Newsam managed to first communicate

his identity and origins through drawing. A series of detailed sketches he made of a small

town were recognized by a visitor to the school as a view of the Ohio River from

Steubenville, eventually clarifying the boy’s background and correct name. Affable and

mild mannered, a budding lover of European art and collector of prints, Newsam’s

primary mode of engagement with the hearing world would always be drawing. As his

friend and fellow artist John Carlin remembered later in life, “He was not a brilliant

scholar, . . . but he was as attentive to his lessons as might be expected of a young artist

from the margin to the core, albeit late in life.” Harlan Lane, A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster, Jr. (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 54–55. 36 Pyatt, Memoir of Albert Newsam, 23.

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whose soul was wholly absorbed in his darling art.”37 So prodigious was the boy’s

sketching—to the exclusion of almost all other activities—that the directors of the

Pennsylvania Institution set him up with drawing and painting lessons with the painter

George Catlin and a local painter of portrait miniatures, Hugh Bridport. “Other Artists

paint to live,” Newsam was said to have remarked throughout his life, “but I live to draw

or paint.”38 Thanks to the advent of lithography, Newsam would make a lifelong career of

his craft, becoming the first Deaf lithographer in the US and one of the most respected

lithographic printmakers of his generation.

_______________

Lithography was invented by Bavarian playwright and composer Alois Senefelder

in 1798, but only appeared on the American scene in the 1820s.39 Like photography after

it, we see here a nomenclature denoting a medium, in this case from the Greek lithos

(stone) and graphein (to write). Lithography emerged as a hybrid, multipurpose medium

whose potential uses were manifold and not immediately understood. One thing was

abundantly clear though: it offered the promise of copying and multiplication on a scale

37 John Carlin to Joseph O. Pyatt, in Pyatt, Memoir of Albert Newsam, 145. 38 Pyatt, Memoir of Albert Newsam, 101. 39 Bass Otis is generally considered the first American lithographer, producing his first efforts in the medium (landscapes) in 1819. See Bass Otis: Painter, Portraitist, and Engraver, essays by Gainor B. Davis and Wayne Craven (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1976); and Joseph Jackson, “Bass Otis, America’s First Lithographer,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37, no. 4 (1913): 385–94, http://www .jstor.org/stable/20086138.

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previously unrealized.40 Drawn and written directly onto heavy, polished, chemically

treated limestone printing matrices (fig. 4.8), lithographs bypassed the need for the

intermediary stage of carving or cutting away involved in all relief and intaglio printing

methods, which rely on the variation of recession and prominence on the printing matrix.

Figure 4.8. A lithographic stone (left) and the resulting print (right), depicting fossilized ammonites for Daniel Sharpe’s Description of the Fossil Remains of Mollusca Found in the Chalk of England, vol. 3, Cephalopoda (London: Palæontographical Society, 1856), pl. xviii. (Stone image courtesy of Freunde der Geowissenschaftlichen Sammlung der Universität Bremen e.V., Bremen, Germany. Print image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, 2013, http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/41174340.)

40 In his 1834 tome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Design in the United States, William Dunlap notes, “Lithography or drawing on stone, and taking impressions by the aid of acids, transferring innumerable copies to paper, is a very useful invention, and tends to multiply pictures, many of them of a character which diffuses taste and facilitates the progress of art.” William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834; repr., New York: Dunlap, 1969), 2:454.

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In a fluid series of gestures and mechanized processes, then, lithography combines the

actions of writing, drawing, and replicating into one matrix of production. It was a perfect

medium for a talented Deaf draughtsman who needed to make a reliable living off his

artistic talents.

In 1827, at the suggestion of a board member of the Pennsylvania Institution for

the Deaf and Dumb, seventeen-year-old Albert Newsam began apprenticing to

Philadelphia printmaker Col. Cephas G. Childs, who trained him first in copper and steel

engraving. Intrigued by lithography’s swift production possibilities, Childs saw an

opportunity to remake his printmaking business with cutting-edge reproductive

technology. In 1829 he traveled to France to study lithography with the eminent French

lithographer Peter Duval, whom he persuaded to return to Philadelphia and join his firm.

They in turn trained Newsam and together formed one of the earliest and most successful

lithographic businesses in the country.41 Newsam would spend the next thirty years—his

entire career—in this business, even as the firm changed hands, eventually coming under

Duval’s proprietorship. The work he produced there and the reputation he built bear

closer examination through lenses of both visual culture and Deaf history.

_______________

Inevitably this new form of printmaking had to be absorbed into extant debates in

the arts about the hierarchy of mediums and the reproductive print versus the unique

work of art. Lithography cut out a full step of removal between the hand of the original

41 The first was Pendleton’s in Boston, formed in 1825.

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artist and the final print. This gestural immediacy was readily apparent in the results: the

soft crayon texture of lithographs made them look like drawings. In effect, lithography

managed to elevate an image resembling an artist’s preparatory sketch to the status of

final product. The results were well suited to a transitional period wherein representations

attempted to bridge romanticism and realism.

But were lithographers themselves artists or merely anonymous copyists engaged

in mechanically reproducing the work of actual artists? In the first work of American art

history, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States (1834),

William Dunlap only discusses three American lithographers, and the one who receives

the most attention is Albert Newsam: “Mr. Newsham [sic] is deaf and dumb, but endowed

with much talent. I understand that he is the draughtsman of the lithographic prints,

issued by Childs & Co. of Philadelphia.”42 Dunlap’s characterization of lithographic

firms as “almost innumerable” less than a decade after the first one opened offers some

insight into the proliferation of lithographic print culture. Moreover, his focus on

Newsam suggests that the artist’s unique biography, specifically his deafness, actually

helped attract attention to the medium in a cycle of mutual promotion. Newsam elevated

the visibility of the medium, and the medium also elevated Newsam’s visibility—a

dynamic evidenced by the fact that Newsam’s staggering output of prints includes many

bearing his own name in addition to the name of the printing firm. Significantly, a 42 Dunlap, History, 2:455. Dunlap was clearly impressed enough with Newsam to here add one of the rare explanatory notes in his work: “[Lithographic establishments] are now almost innumerable throughout the United States. But however beautiful or perfect the plates are, the credit is transferred to the master of the establishment, and the artist is sunk. This must change. The artist must be announced, and must be the Master.” Dunlap, History, 2:455n.

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number of his earlier prints explicitly identify him as deaf and mute. An early

lithographic portrait print by Newsam of Whig politician and future Philadelphia sheriff

John G. Watmough (fig. 4.9) bears one such signature in the corner (fig. 4.10): “Drawn

on Stone by A. Newsam, a Deaf & Dumb pupil of C. G. Childs.” A common variation of

this signature reads, “Drawn on stone by A. Newsam, Deaf Mute Artist.” As time wore

on, many would simply read, “On stone by A. Newsam.”

Figure 4.9. Left, Albert Newsam after Henry Inman, Jn. G. Watmough, 1831. Lithograph, 49 ´ 37 cm, published by C. G. Childs, Philadelphia, PA. (Courtesy of the Print Department, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, Portrait Prints - W [5750.F.130].) Figure 4.10. Right, detail of figure 4.9, showing Newsam’s signature: “Drawn on Stone by A. Newsam, a Deaf & Dumb pupil of C. G. Childs.”

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Unlike his childhood friend John Carlin, Newsam never went to Europe to study

original paintings and sculptures. This lack of an educational experience considered de

rigueur for serious artists of his generation, combined with the fact that he pursued

printmaking as a primary medium rather than a side dalliance, might suggest that

Newsam was a failed artist. But this would be akin to faulting a gifted graphic designer

for not obtaining a theory-driven MFA. Newsam was incredibly skilled at producing the

drawings needed to print pictures in multiple, in a method that blurred distinctions

between mediums and promoted the work of painters through reproduction. His specialty

in portrait prints enabled representations of individuals, particularly local Philadelphians,

to be replicated and to travel as intimate gifts, promotional giveaways, or publication

frontispieces. Through Newsam’s lithographs, individuals could know and behold one

another across space and time in ways that painting or sculpture could not offer. Newsam

even made a lithographic self-portrait of himself (fig 4.11).

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Figure 4.11. Attributed to Albert Newsam, Self-Portrait, n.d. Two-tone lithograph on cream wove paper, 14.9 ´ 11.6 cm. (Courtesy of the John S. Phillips Collection, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1985.x.530.)

It is arguable that Newsam’s deafness contributed to his fame as a talented

practitioner in the emerging lithographic medium. Not only was he working in a cutting-

edge medium of image production, he was one of the first institutionally educated Deaf

individuals in the country to be successfully employed within a completely hearing

professional environment. As we saw in Dunlap’s discussion, he was often singled out as

a principal artist at Childs and Duval’s firm, surpassing his talented colleague James

Queen in renown. He appears to have interested people not just with his portrait prints but

as an illustration of the exciting visually oriented potential that could be unlocked in deaf

people when they had access to education and professional training.

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Newsam’s ability to read and write English enabled him to communicate with

hearing coworkers and a rich network of fellow artists. The collections of the Historical

Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company of Philadelphia include a number of

Newsam’s prints that bear, on their verso sides, traces of written conversation between

Newsam and his colleagues: bits of banal office chit-chat on topics including the weather,

personal finances, and day-to-day business operations (fig. 4.12).

Figure 4.12. Recto (left) of Albert Newsam, John Young, ca. 1850. Lithograph, 27 ´ 16 cm, printed by P. S. Duval, Philadelphia, PA. Verso (right) of portrait features manuscript notes by Newsam, including what appears to be a conversation with a hearing individual. (Courtesy of the Print Department, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, Portrait Prints - Y [5750.F.169c].)

These textual traces offer us glimpses into an overlooked chapter of pre-oralist Deaf

history, in which a deaf person could interact with hearing people entirely in the realm of

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writing.43 Significantly, Newsam’s integration into hearing society would not have been

possible without the increasing awareness of the Deaf and deafness that he had benefited

from and would, in turn, help further with his role in designing a monument in stone for

Deaf Americans. Moreover, he would use lithography to put printed pictures of that

monument before their eyes and into their hands across the country.

IV. Portraits in Stone: The Gallaudet Monument, an Exclusively Deaf-Mute

Enterprise

As we have seen, beginning in the 1830s, lithographic portraits “on stone”

increased the opportunities for American subjects to be memorialized in mobile printed

images. At first, the stones necessary for this printing technique had to be imported from

Bavaria, making them a costly resource that had to be reused. Like palimpsests, the

stones would be chemically wiped clean, ground down, and redrawn afresh. But a

building boom was also underway, which relied on stone to build more permanent

structures to serve communal and individual purposes. Along the way, it also generated

domestic limestone to fuel the growing lithographic print business, ensuring that as stone

structures proliferated, representations of them did as well.

The explosion of Deaf residential schools provides an apt study in the emergence

of institutions both in and on stone—physical structures that were inhabited up close and 43 For more on these conversational fragments, see Abby Glogower, “On Visual Eavesdropping and the White Noise of History: Albert Newsam and Deaf Culture in Nineteenth-Century America,” blog, Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind, September 1, 2015, http://commontouch.librarycompany.org/on-visual-eavesdropping-and-the-white-noise-of-history-albert-newsam-and-deaf-culture-in-nineteenth-century-america/.

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visible from afar. By 1824 the Pennsylvania Institution’s enrollment had quadrupled to

seventy-four students, and architect John Haviland was hired to design a grand and

lasting home for the institution at Pine and Broad streets.44 A host of prominent

Philadelphians joined the school’s staff and pupils at the ceremonial laying of the

building’s corner stone on June 15, 1824, an “event well calculated to arouse public

attention, for it gave assurance of permanency and stability to one of the most valuable of

the numerous charitable institutions which adorn the city of Philadelphia.”45 Erected in

just one year, the resulting edifice—one of Haviland’s early commissions—was a

harbinger of the coming wave of institution-building in the United States.46

The desire for “permanency and stability” was, at this moment, motivating a swell

of commercial and civic construction projects throughout the United States. The 1820s

and the 1830s were a boom period that saw the emergence of US granite and limestone

quarries, as well as the concurrent construction of railroads and canal systems capable of

moving this heavy cargo.47 Decreased reliance on European stone meant lower costs and

increased facility for all manner of domestic building projects. Such economic and

44 This structure, at 320 South Broad Street, still exists and is currently home to the University of the Arts. The school is now called the Philadelphia School for the Deaf and is located at 100 Schoolhouse Lane in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. 45 Democratic Press (Philadelphia, PA), June 16, 1824, quoted in Eugene Bolt and Sara MacDonald, “Dorrance Hamilton Hall,” University Archives, University of the Arts Libraries, accessed February 22, 2017, http://library.uarts.edu/archives/hamilton.html. 46 For more on Haviland’s role in the Egyptian revival—including his most famous work, the Halls of Justice and Detention Center, also known as “the Tombs,” built in New York in 1838—see Richard G. Carrott, The Egyptian Revival: Its Sources, Monuments, and Meaning, 1808–1858 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 113–18. 47 Indiana in particular was home to the earliest limestone quarries, which began industrial hewing of Bedford limestone in 1827.

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logistical possibilities dovetailed with the coalescing civic needs and desires in growing

US urban populations, both collective and personal.

Significantly, these stone structures became popular subjects of prints, which

served a combination of purposes. Most broadly, building prints functioned as

journalistic visual reportage on new edifices, appealing both to architectural enthusiasts

and a public curious about changes in urban landscapes. Prints of buildings also served a

commercial or advertising function by rendering a place of business visual. This was a

means of drawing customers in with their eyes, even from afar.48 Prints of civic or

institutional structures also engaged in the promotional work of establishing relationships

between viewers and edifices, fostering cognitive and civic connections with

institutions.49 The plethora of engravings of the Pennsylvania Institution building—from

its original inception through its various expansion projects—gives a sense of the

popularity and visibility of the structure, as well as a widespread sense of affiliation with

and investment in it.

For hearing people the building affiliation was a matter of conviction or

contribution, but for the Deaf it was one of emplacement and strong personal connection.

More than mere physical enclosures, early Deaf residential schools were the first places

where students encountered other deaf people. The buildings were sites of belonging and

identity formation. According to Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, it is still common 48 See Dell Upton, “Commercial Architecture in Philadelphia Lithographs,” in Piola,

Philadelphia on Stone, 153–75. 49 To this day, building projects funded in any part through charitable donations rely on the same mechanism of relationship cultivation. Individual donors at the highest level are inscribed into edifices through building-, room-, or wing-naming, but even small-time contributors are encouraged to see themselves as monetary bricklayers.

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for Deaf people educated in schools for the Deaf to introduce themselves by the school

they attended and to “refer to the school’s location as being where they are ‘from.’”50

Although Albert Newsam’s lithograph of the Philadelphia Institution (fig. 4.13), used as

the frontispiece for the school’s 1850 director’s report, shows only the façade, but his

identification of himself as “a former pupil of the Institution” imbues the image with an

implied interiority, the sense that its maker knows this place inside and outside.

Figure 4.13. Albert Newsam after a daguerreotype by Collins, Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf & Dumb. Drawn on Stone by Albert Newsam, a former pupil of the Institution, [1851]. Lithograph, 14 ´ 20 cm, printed by P. S. Duval, Philadelphia, PA. (Courtesy of the Print Department, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, W276 [P.2164].)

Images of residential schools actually formed a subset of collective representation

in the emerging Deaf culture of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Structures

themselves acted as metonymic collective symbols capable of uniting and “speaking” for

50 Padden and Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture, 13.

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the individual deaf inhabitants within and affiliated from a distance. Consider, for

instance, the masthead of the first regular publication by and for Deaf Americans, The

Deaf Mute, which students at the North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb

(established in 1845) began publishing in 1850 (fig. 4.14).

Figure 4.14. Masthead, The Deaf Mute (North Carolina Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, Raleigh, NC), November 2, 1850, 1. (Courtesy of Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/61576424/.)

The text is ensconced within a built space, framed by a gothic-style architectural

structure. Atop, two angelic figures extend laurel wreaths over an inlaid visual

“keystone” from which rays of celestial light emanate: a depiction of the North Carolina

Institution. In the foreground, two small individuals—possibly newly arrived students—

face the building in appreciation. The implication is clear. These institutional buildings

offered what many of their names announced: asylum, the promise of enlightenment and

kindred belonging within a harsh and lonely hearing world. As the deaf congregated

within these built communal structures, they would also come to agitate for a share of

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another type of portraiture in stone that had been developing in the United States as well:

monument culture.

_______________

As new civic institutions, such as schools, prisons, and courthouses, proliferated

in American cities, there was a concurrent explosion in another kind of masonry work:

monuments and memorials, most often of a funerary nature. Across the Atlantic, the old

and cramped cities of Europe had begun, in the later eighteenth-century, to construct

“rural” or “pastoral” cemeteries, which had the twin benefits of modernizing and

sanitizing cities while simultaneously creating picturesque green spaces for tranquil

enjoyment. The increased space meant that the common practice of disinterring and

removing decomposed remains to space-saving ossuaries could yield to permanent and

final resting places for the dead.51 This trend found immense popularity in the US where

growing cities also sought improvements in space, sanitation and beautification—and

with plenty of room for expansion.52 Moreover, the War of 1812 had recently produced a

fresh generation of heroes—from the famous to the ordinary—whose bodily remains and 51 See Peggy McDowell and Richard E. Meyer, The Revival Styles in American Memorial Art (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994), 13. Also see Carrott, Egyptian Revival, 86–88. 52 The website for Philadelphia’s famous Laurel Hill Cemetery, founded in 1836 begins with the vision of its founder: “In late 1835, John Jay Smith, a Quaker, and librarian, recorded in his diary: ‘The City of Philadelphia has been increasing so rapidly of late years that the living population has multiplied beyond the means of accommodation for the dead . . . on recently visiting Friends grave yard in Cherry Street I found it impossible to designate the resting place of a darling daughter, determined me to endeavor to procure for the citizens a suitable, neat and orderly location for a rural cemetery.’” “History,” About, Laurel Hill Cemetery, accessed February 22, 2017, https://thelaurelhillcemetery.org/about/history.

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immortal memory could be “emplaced” with gravitas, permanence, and elegance. Thus as

stone proliferated in new urban buildings, it also became an increasingly visible and

prominent feature of cemetery green spaces on the cities’ edges. Unveilings of both kinds

of structures was often accompanied by public ceremony and mention in the popular

press.53 Not surprisingly, in 1836 Philadelphia became one of the first US cities to open a

rural cemetery, Laurel Hill, which remains a popular tourist attraction to this day.54

Both manifestations of this building boom—shared spaces for living and

quotidian activity on the one hand, and for death and memorial on the other—also

engaged in aesthetic and stylistic transitions, resulting in a blend of revival styles, in

particular the fusing of classical and Egyptian vocabularies. (The Pennsylvania Institution

building was, and remains today, a handsome early example.) Whereas the early republic

period had privileged the clean, simple grandeur of Greece and Rome, a burgeoning

interest in ancient Egypt (fueled by the diffusion of scenes and antiquities from

Napoleon’s 1801 conquest) offered Americans of the 1820s through 1840s the tantalizing

opportunity to imagine a “civilization more antique than Antiquity; the cult of the 53 McDowell and Meyer, Revival Styles, 9. 54 Rochester’s own Mount Hope Cemetery was one of the next cemeteries in this style, opening two years later in 1838. Laurel Hill Cemetery was the fourth United States Cemetery to be designated as a National Historic Landmark, a list that, to date, includes eleven cemeteries and burial grounds (not counting individual grave sites, tombs, or ancient burial mounds): 1. Trinity Church and Graveyard, NY (1976); 2. Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial Cemetery, AR (1992); 3. African Burial Ground, NY (1993); 4. Laurel Hill Cemetery, PA (1998); 5. Grove Street Cemetery, CT (2000); 6. Mount Auburn Cemetery, MA (2003); 7. Green-Wood Cemetery, NY (2006); 8. Spring Grove Cemetery, OH (2007); 9. Congressional Cemetery, DC (2011); 10. Woodlawn Cemetery, NY (2011); and 11. Wyandotte National Burying Ground, KS (2016). “List of National Historic Landmarks by State,” December 2016, National Historic Landmarks Program, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, https://www.nps.gov/nhl /find/statelists/LIST16.pdf.

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immortality of mortals; the Land of Wisdom and Mystery.”55 Moreover, the introduction

of Egyptian forms (obelisks, columns, pyramids, trapezoidal tomb doorways, and façade

patterns) created an expanded formal vocabulary whose “eclecticism” suited the symbolic

needs of subjects transitioning from a collective ethos of shared “republican virtue” to the

exploration of emerging bourgeois individuality.56 In these picturesque grounds,

consistency and variation proliferated at the same time, offering a visual variety and

harmony of “masonry worked in great masses.”57 Installed in well-mannered garden-like

spaces, the elegant and permanent stone monuments to the deceased offered mourners

and strangers alike the opportunity for veneration, aesthetic enjoyment, and quiet

contemplation.

As stones piled up in city streets and pastoral graveyards, they also stacked up in

lithographic printing shops. Print culture proffered a private, two-dimensional analogue

to site-specific monument culture. Memorial prints were some of the earliest prints

produced by the Kellogg lithographic firm of Hartford, Connecticut and would grow into

a popular staple of their business by mid-century.58 Kellogg memorial prints offered

customers the affordable option of inscribing a lost loved one on a blank monument

55 Carrott, Egyptian Revival, 1. Perhaps the most prominent period expression of Egyptomania in the US is Joseph Smith’s 1823 “discovery” and “translation” of the Book of Mormon, which was supposed to have been written in something he called “Reformed Egyptian”—a language based on hieroglyphics that remains unrecognized by non-Mormon Egyptologists to this day. See Carrott, Egyptian Revival, 48. 56 For more on eclecticism, see Carrott, Egyptian Revival, 16–17. 57 Ibid., 16. 58 Georgia B. Barnhill, “Written on Stone: Family Registers, Family Trees, and Memorial Prints,” in Picturing Victorian America: Prints by the Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, Connecticut, 1830–1880, ed. Nancy Finlay (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 2009), 67.

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situated in picturesque scenery (fig. 4.15). Another style further literalized the act of

visiting a memorial within the depiction (fig. 4.16).59

Figure 4.15. Left, E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, In Memory of [65], 1845–1846. Hand-colored lithograph on wove paper, 35.9 ´ 25.6 cm (sheet). Published by Kelloggs and Thayer, New York; E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, Hartford, CT; D. Needham, Buffalo, NY. (Courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT, 1950.202.162.) Figure 4.16. Right, E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, In Memory of [66], 1845–1846. Hand-colored lithograph on wove paper, 35.7 ´ 25.6 cm (sheet). Published by Kelloggs and Thayer, New York; E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, Hartford, CT; D. Needham, Buffalo, NY. (Courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT, 1950.202.163.)

Hand-coloring applied in formulaic washes at the final stages of production helped

enliven these scenes, balancing the stark contrast of black mourning fashion and freshly

59 Due to spotty record keeping, Kellogg prints from the first decade of the business (roughly 1830–1845) have proven difficult to date with exactitude. See Nancy Finlay, “Some Evidence for the Sale and Distribution of Kellogg Prints” (paper presented at “Representations of Economy: Lithography in America from 1820 to 1860,” the Ninth Annual Conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, October 15, 2010), 2, http://www .librarycompany.org/Economics/2010Conference/papers/PEAES-VCP%20--%2010% 20conf%20Finlay%20paper.pdf.

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hewn stone with the symbolic verdancy of willow trees and flower patches. The prints—

themselves a product of lithographic stones—offered viewers a portable and tangible

connection to sites of memorial. Displayed inside the home, they evoked not so much a

portrait of the lost loved one as a visual ode to the kind of enduring connection between

the dead and the living that could be maintained across distance and absence through

sentimental referents.

_______________

In September 1850 Gallaudet and Clerc were honored in the largest convocation

of Deaf people to date in the United States: a grand gathering of Connecticut Asylum

alumni. The event, which drew some four hundred celebrants, was the brainchild of

Thomas Brown, an 1827 graduate of the school, who “said his spirit could not rest until

he had expressed his gratitude to Gallaudet and Clerc.”60 A public parade through

Hartford culminated in a festive ceremony where Clerc and Gallaudet were presented

with custom-made silver pitchers, engraved with scenes of their voyage across the

Atlantic and an interior view of a Connecticut Asylum classroom filled with pupils. A

former student named George Loring presented the silver service to Gallaudet, with a

speech (in sign) that began, “Accept this plate which I offer to you in the name of the

subscribers, former pupils of the American Asylum, as a token of their profound gratitude

and veneration.” Recounting Gallaudet’s journey overseas and his successful enlistment

60 Christopher Krentz, ed., A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816–1864, Gallaudet Classics in Deaf Education (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2000), 139.

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of Clerc (“your coadjutor in your labors”), Loring pointedly added that “it was also by a

kind dispensation of Divine Providence, that you adopted the best method of instruction

of the deaf and dumb.”61 Loring concluded, unknowingly, on a note of adumbration:

For these blessing of education, . . . we have long wished to make you some permanent testimonial of our gratitude, and have happily succeeded in getting one prepared. In presenting it to you, we all offer our earnest prayers for your welfare in your declining years, and for your reward in the other world.62

One year later (nearly to the day) Gallaudet died from dysentery at age sixty-four. The

passing of this universally beloved friend to the Deaf would provide an opportunity for

them to forge their own site of collective memory: a monument in stone.

According to Newsam’s biographer, the idea for a monument honoring Gallaudet

originated with Newsam’s childhood friend and fellow deaf artist, John Carlin. Shortly

after Gallaudet’s funeral, the same Thomas Brown who orchestrated the 1850 reunion

convened a Gallaudet Monument Association, which elected Laurent Clerc as leader.63

At the outset, the association determined that “the monument should be, just as far as

possible, the exclusive product of deaf mute enterprise”—in other words, “theirs alone.”64

This meant that designs for the monument and the funding to build it would be solicited

from the Deaf only. In the summer of 1853, the association unanimously adopted the

design submitted by Albert Newsam, with the decision to incorporate a bas-relief scene

61 George H. Loring, “George H. Loring’s Address to Gallaudet,” in Krentz, Mighty Change, 146–47. Emphasis added. Loring refers to the method of manual signs as opposed to oralism. 62 Ibid., 147. 63 Krentz, Mighty Change, 153. 64 Pyatt, Memoir of Albert Newsam, 85, 84

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drawn by John Carlin.65 James G. Batterson, the young (hearing) Hartford mason,

sculptor, and owner of a monument and gravestone business, Batterson’s Steam Marble

Works, was hired to execute the project.

Newsam’s design is hardly unprecedented; it drew on the funerary and monument styles

of the period by combining key elements from the Egyptian revival: the obelisk and the

sarcophagus. Robert Mills—who would later go on to design that ultimate obelisk, the

Washington Monument—combined similar forms in an 1827 monument he designed for

Jonathan Maxcy, the first president of the University of South Carolina (fig. 4.17). But

originality is not what makes Newsam’s monument significant—in fact, quite the

opposite: it achieved elegant and notable entry into an extant visual conversation. As

Andrew Shanken has observed, historical memorial studies must resist contemporary

emphasis on formally and conceptually unique monuments and instead approach

“memorials as a form of vernacular,” much of which “tends to lie beneath high cultural

radar.”66 In short, the radicalness of the Gallaudet Monument lay in a minority group

using the memorial parlance of the majority to honor an individual significant to that

emerging population.

65 Ibid., 85. 66 Andrew M. Shanken, “Research on Memorials and Monuments,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 26, no. 84 (2004): 168, doi:10.22201/iie.18703062e.2004.84.2166.

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Figure 4.17. Robert Mills, Jonathan Maxcy Monument, 1827. University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. (Photograph courtesy of http:// persnicketylady.blogspot.com/.)

Measuring twenty and a half feet tall, the Gallaudet monument was installed in

the front lawn of the Connecticut Asylum in late summer 1854. A number of its features

are visible in Newsam’s lithograph (fig. 4.3) and in a photograph from 1876 (fig. 4.18),

but we must rely on written sources for a full inventory of its qualities. Set atop a granite

platform and plinth was a rectangular marble base (a die) with four carved panels, a

stylistic reference to the painted sarcophagi of ancient Egypt. The smaller east panel bore

the inscription:

THOMAS HOPKINS GALLAUDET, LL.D., BORN IN PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 10TH, 1787,

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DIED IN HARTFORD, SEPTEMBER 10TH, 1851, AGED SIXTY-FOUR YEARS.

Figure 4.18. Photograph of the Gallaudet Monument at the American School for the Deaf, Hartford, CT, n.d. (Courtesy of the Gallaudet University Archives, Washington, DC, http://hdl .handle.net/1961/2041-72576.)

The inscription on the west panel read:

ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF REV. THOMAS HOPKINS GALLAUDET, LL.D., BY THE DEAF AND DUMB OF THE UNITED STATES,

AS A TESTIMONIAL OF PROFOUND GRATITUDE TO THEIR

EARLIEST AND BEST FRIEND AND BENEFACTOR.67

67 Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, quoted in Pyatt, Memoirs of Albert Newsam, 86.

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The north panel of the die featured a bas-relief of the letters of the manual alphabet.

Finally, Carlin’s bas-relief scene occupied the south panel of the die. “In that [sculptured]

group Mr. Gallaudet is represented in the act of teaching little children the manual

alphabet,” wrote Newsam’s biographer. “Two boys and one girl are presented, and the

execution of their forms is very beautiful. Mr. Argenti, a talented sculptor from Italy,

succeeded remarkably well in transferring to the stone the features of Mr. Gallaudet, and

the expression of his countenance.”68 Atop the marble base stood a seven-foot column, on

whose south side “surrounded by radii, is the Syriac word ‘Ephphatha,’—that is, ‘Be

opened,’ which was spoken by our Savior, when he caused the dumb to speak and the

blind to see. The band which connects the two blocks of the main column is encircled

with a wreath of ivy, the type of immortality, and the column itself is crowned with an

ornate capital, surmounted by a globe.”69 A decorative iron fence punctuated by granite

posts surrounded the whole.

As determined by the monument committee, the entire cost of the monument—

$2,500 (about $73,000 in 2017 dollars)—was to be financed solely by the Deaf; money

from the hearing was not accepted.70 Drawing on the network of institutions of New

England, the eastern seaboard, and the Midwest, donations were collected with great

speed. In this manner the country’s growing Deaf population was invited to participate in

building a shared site of collective importance. As Newsam in Philadelphia and Batterson 68 Pyatt, Memoirs of Albert Newsam, 85. 69 Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, quoted in Pyatt, Memoirs of Albert Newsam, 87. 70 “The Deaf and Dumb. Completion of the Monument to Gallaudet. Interesting Ceremonies at Hartford. Convention of the Deaf and Dumb,” New-York Daily Times, September 7, 1854, 4, https://search-proquest-com.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/docview /95840556?accountid=13567.

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in Hartford worked out design details via an exchange of letters, sketches, prints, and

daguerreotypes, plans developed for two related projects: a grand dedication ceremony in

Hartford on September 6, 1854 (the third anniversary of Gallaudet’s death) and a

lithographic print of the memorial.71

The monument dedication in Hartford was a major and noteworthy event for deaf

and hearing alike, attended by the governor of Connecticut and state senators, and

garnering press attention from around New England. Newsam’s friend John Carlin

delivered an hour long “oration” in sign, which was simultaneously read aloud for the

benefit of the hearing. The following day, an article in The New-York Daily Times

described both the monument and the order of ceremonies in great detail, including a

fascinating feature of the monument: its function as “time capsule.”

His Honor [Henry C. Deming, Mayor of Hartford] prefaced his remarks by reading a list of the articles, consisting of publication related to Sign Language; its history in the United States; local publications; names of City, State, and National Civil Officers, &c., &c., to be deposited in the monument, and handing the copper box in which they were encased to H. G. Batterson, Esq. of Hartford, the sculptor, who put it in the place designed for it.72

71 Some letters to Newsam regarding the design and execution of the memorial are preserved in the Albert Newsam Papers at the Library Company of Philadelphia. One aesthetic and logistical issue discussed was Newsam’s proposed plan to include a portrait of Gallaudet within the wreath. When this idea proved difficult in execution, it was scrapped from the design, possibly inspiring Newsam to include a portrait medallion of Gallaudet in his print of the monument. To prepare this portrait, he had solicited source material from Gallaudet’s son, Thomas who responded, “Dear Sir, Having been informed by Mr. Carlin of your very generous designs in relation to preparing a lithograph of the monument, & my father’s likeness, I send you one of the proof impressions of the steel-plate recently executed, trusting that you will find it a faithful guide in your genial pathway.” Thomas Gallaudet to Albert Newsam, 13 July 1854, box 1, folder 5, Albert Newsam Papers, McA MSS 003, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA. 72 “Deaf and Dumb,” New-York Daily Times, 4.

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In this manner, the Gallaudet Monument became a kind of crypt, an attempt to enshrine

and ensure for posterity the visual culture of deafness in America. It was precisely these

contents and this history that later generations of advocates for the Deaf would endeavor

to erase.

_______________

It is not clear when Newsam came up with the idea of a print, but letters suggest

he began planning it in the summer of 1854. His motive was to create a fundraiser to pay

off the balance of the monument costs.73 Laurent Clerc coordinated with representatives

at various institutions to collect subscribers for the print, which would sell at different

prices: “It was agreed that the price of each copy for the Deaf & Dumb would be fifty

cents and for speaking persons one dollar.”74 While it would have been ideal to have the

prints ready for sale at the dedication ceremony, it appears that Newsam was not only too

busy to meet that deadline but still undecided as to the design. Based on letters between

Newsam, Carlin, and Clerc, the main points of contention seem to be the size of the print,

the presence of the asylum building in the background, and the effect of these two

elements on the overall cost. For reference and inspiration, in August 1854 Carlin sent

Newsam a copy of a new lithographic print likely commissioned by Batterson of his

73 In a letter dated December 10th, 1855, Laurent Clerc wrote to Albert Newsam, “When the balance of the debt due Mr. Batterson shall have been wholly paid with the product of the sale of the pictures, the proceeds of all future sales will be for you.” Clerc to Newsam, 10 December 1855, box 1, folder 3, Albert Newsam Papers. 74 Ibid.

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recently executed monument to Revolutionary War hero David Wooster in Danbury,

Connecticut (fig. 4.19).

Figure 4.19. Left, Kellogg and Co., Wooster Monument. Erected at Danbury, CT, April 27, 1854. J. G. Batterson, Architect and Sculptor, 1854. Lithograph on wove paper, 49.1 ´ 36.8 cm (sheet). Published by J. G. Batterson, Hartford, CT. (Courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT, 2004.123.0.) Figure 4.20. Right, Photograph of the Wooster Monument, Danbury, CT, ca. 1996. (Courtesy of Kenneth Jennings Wooster, http://web.cortland.edu /woosterk/locher.html.)

The Connecticut lithographer, perhaps under Batterson’s direction, appears to have taken

some liberties with the scale of the monument, making the thirty-foot structure dwarf the

human figures that surround it. The monument itself completely dominates the print—in

all likelihood a promotional instrument for Batterson—the total size of which is 49.1 by

36.8 centimeters.

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Clerc, Carlin, and Newsam all seemed to agree that Newsam’s view of the

Gallaudet Monument should be larger, but they worried how large and complex it could

become without requiring a massive, expensive stone and extensive drawing labor.

Newsam appears to have been set on including the asylum in the background. Initially

Carlin balked, worried that this would accomplish an inversion of the Wooster print

proportions: “I argued [to Clerc] that the Asylum, if introduced in the view would require

a very large plate so as to give a respectable height of the monument, therefore its cost

would necessarily be $600; and that it should best be omitted, and the whole plate should

contain the monument alone, with letters and a very small view of the asylum in the place

of the proposed likeness of Rev. Gallaudet, which might cost much less.”75 Carlin added

that Clerc ultimately left the decision up to the two artists but hoped the prints would be

ready for sale in October 1854.

In fact, the project would go far over budget and past deadline, presumably due to

Newsam’s stubborn commitment to his design and dedication to the subject. By April

1855 the print had still not materialized, and Clerc wrote to Newsam to check on his

progress:

Now, my dear friend, allow me to tell you that the Deaf & Dumb both here [Hartford] and elsewhere are very anxious to know how you progress with the Lithograph of the Gallaudet monument, where you are now, and when it is to be finished. Our Spring vacation takes place on the 25th inst., and several of our pupils who are to leave us, not to return any more, desire very much to receive, before their departure, the copies for which they have Subscribed, or else to be informed of the time when they may expect them.76

75 John Carlin to Albert Newsam, 15 August 1854, box 1, folder 2, Albert Newsam Papers. 76 Laurent Clerc to Albert Newsam, 11 April 1855, box 1, folder 3, Albert Newsam Papers.

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Shortly thereafter Newsam sent Carlin an updated sketch, which appears to have changed

the latter’s previous position on economy. On May 12 Carlin wrote to Newsam, “Having

just . . . examined the larger sketch, I am struck with the graceful effect which the

building gives to the monument. I would think it best to introduce the building in the

view in a sketchy, not finished manner, though it costs more. You will do as you think

best.”77 The final product, however, would not appear until early December 1855, when

Clerc wrote to Newsam thanking him for the delivery of an initial run of one hundred

copies of the print, reporting that “the pupils are much pleased with the pictures.” Clerc

then provided a breakdown for the delivery and distribution of nine hundred further

copies to Deaf institutions in Boston, New York, Kentucky, and Virginia. “You may also

print and sell as many as you possibly can to the Deaf & Dumb of the Pennsylvania

Institution,” Clerc concluded, “and elsewhere, and to all who want them, such as the

booksellers, news offices &c, and you will keep an account of the number of sales and of

the amount of receipts.”78

Unfortunately, one year later the Duval lithographic studio where Newsam

worked was almost completely destroyed by a fire. It is therefore difficult to know how

many additional prints he made beyond fulfillment of subscriber obligations.79 The

77 John Carlin to Albert Newsam, 12 May 1855, box 1, folder 2, Albert Newsam Papers. 78 Clerc to Newsam, 10 December 1855. 79 The disastrous effects of the fire on the Duval firm are chronicled in Sarah J. Weatherwax, “Peter S. Duval, Philadelphia’s Leading Lithographer,” in Philadelphia on Stone: Commercial Lithography in Philadelphia, 1828–1878, ed. Erika Piola (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press / Library Company of Philadelphia, 2012), 109–12.

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existence of a different version of the print (fig. 4.21) indicates the possibility of some

subsequent printing and experimentation with the image.

Figure 4.21. Albert Newsam, Gallaudet Monument, Erected in front of the American Asylum for the Deaf & Dumb, at Hartford, Conn. Sept. 6th 1854, ca. 1857–1860. Chromolithograph, printed by P. S. Duval and Son, Philadelphia, PA. (Courtesy of the Print Department, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, GC - Monuments [5812.F.19].)

In the style of the Wooster Monument print, Newsam here chose to isolate the monument

by omitting the school from the background. Perhaps in acknowledgement that the

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building meant less to a wider public than it did to students and alumni of the school, the

alternate composition suggests a flexible approach to fostering visual awareness of and

communion—at both social and geographic distance—with the actual monument and all

it symbolized.

V. Afterimage: To the Memory of

American print collector Harry T. Peters’s four-hundred-page tome, America on

Stone: The Other Printmakers to the American People (1931), is itself a kind of

monument, in book form, to the practitioners of a “superlatively American” art form of

the mid-nineteenth century: lithography.80 For the frontispiece, Peters engineered a clever

quotation of one of Kellogg’s popular mid-nineteenth-century memorial prints (fig. 4.22).

Here, two men dressed in coattails and top hats stand beneath a willow tree in solemn

veneration, flanking a memorial obelisk inscribed: “To the Memory of the American

Lithographer” (fig. 4.23).

80 Speaking of Abraham Lincoln, Harry T. Peters writes that lithography “like him, was crude, simple, enterprising, democratic and honest. Both were ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Both were superlatively American.” America on Stone: Printmakers to the American People . . . (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1931), 35.

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Figure 4.22. Left, E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, To the Memory of [319], 1847. Hand-colored lithograph on wove paper, 35.6 ´ 25.6 cm (sheet). Published by E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, New York, NY and Hartford, CT; D. Needham, Buffalo, NY. (Courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT, 1995.43.3.) Figure 4.23. Right, Frontispiece (after E. B. and E. C. Kellogg’s To the Memory of) and title page from Harry T. Peters’s America on Stone. (Reprinted from Harry T. Peters, America on Stone: The Other Printmakers to the American People . . . [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1931]. Courtesy of Skinner, Fine Books and Manuscripts [Auction 2764B, Lot 330], 16 November 2014, Boston, MA, http://www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/2764B/lots/330.)

Employing that romantic-period mix of celebration and gravitas, Peters leads his

reader through a cultural graveyard of long-dead and largely forgotten image makers.

Indeed, many of these printmakers are lost to history. Writing nearly a century ago,

Peters remains one of the only voices to attempt an articulation of what was lost in the

passing of this representational medium and its moment: a “vast and absorbing jungle,

which can be explored by collectors and students for many years,” containing “the

complex story of the origin, growth, and the final decay of a popular art . . . a skein of

dramatic and fascinating individual lives of artists, lithographers, and publishers.”81

Delving into the life of lithographer Albert Newsam has enabled access to one such

81 Peters, America on Stone, 12.

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individual life, but also opened a door onto a lost chapter in the life of an American

minority population.

It would be nice to close with a story of triumphant endurance, such as that

enjoyed by the old John Maxcy monument in Charleston, today a beloved community

gathering spot in the heart of a bustling college campus (fig. 4.24).

Figure 4.24. “The Horseshoe is a great place to unwind.” (Courtesy of the University of South Carolina, http://www.sc.edu/visit/campus_photo _gallery/index.php.)

Sadly, this is not the case. Albert Newsam’s Gallaudet Monument in Hartford is long

gone. In an ironic twist, his prints—the pieces of paper, which represented but also linked

viewers to the real and permanent thing—have outlived their counterpart in stone. Why

some monuments live and others die is a question that deserves a book of its own. But the

Gallaudet Monument in Hartford offers at least one compelling case study in the crisis of

visual and social representation. This monument was not felled by a clear, programmatic

decision. Instead the story is far more banal: it slipped out of style, both aesthetically and

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semiotically, and without advocates—representatives acting in the spirit of its honoree—

did not survive. This was allowed to happen because ideas about who best represented

Deaf people in America changed. Unfortunately, the project of Deaf visibility and

community formation fell prey to its own success, as a strain of long-present paternalism

on the part of the hearing gave way to audist thinking that sought to forcibly integrate the

deaf into hearing society and on hearing terms.

In 1819, when Laurent Clerc informed Thomas Gallaudet of his engagement to

Eliza Boardman, a deaf former pupil of the asylum, the initial reaction was negative.

Gallaudet insisted that “deaf people should not marry each other; they should only marry

hearing people, if they marry at all. Society was likely to disapprove of such a match, and

it could result in deaf children.”82 For all the interest in the communicative possibilities

that sign language opened up, the problem remained that somewhere, at root, deafness

would always be regarded—even among its most compassionate and progressive hearing

advocates—as a condition that could be ameliorated but under no circumstances

propagated.83

Yet one inevitable outcome of Deaf people coming together to live, learn, and

construct a language and culture is that they will fall in love, marry, have children, and

form networks of kinship and community. According to US census records, which only

began identifying the deaf and blind in 1830, deaf Americans were part of the general

population boom that occurred during the antebellum period. The 1830 census listed 82 Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 23. In fact, Edwards observes, all six of the Clercs’ children were hearing, and several went on to become educators of the deaf. 83 Gallaudet also married a deaf pupil, a match that was considered more socially and biologically acceptable because he was hearing.

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5,363 “deaf and dumb” white persons in the US.84 Twenty years later, the 1850 census

reported 9,136 “deaf and dumb” white persons—an increase of more than seventy

percent.85 The deaf were not only becoming populous but gaining a “voice” through

newspapers, prints, schools, clubs, and societies.86

It is perhaps unsurprising that following the Civil War, a new approach to

deafness and Deaf education should emerge among the hearing to counter the prospects

of Deaf community and continuity. In the technologically-driven reconstruction era,

oralism found a new champion in the famous wealthy inventor of the new aural

technology, the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was also a self-appointed expert in

Deaf education. In 1883, Bell delivered a paper to the National Academy of Arts and

Sciences entitled “Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.” Here, Bell

entwined evolutionary theories of natural selection with naturalist concerns about

degeneracy to classify deafness as a hereditary disease and to sound alarm over the

curious and, by his accusation, even programmatic “natural self-selection” of the deaf in

84 J. D. B. DeBow, Statistical View of the United States . . . (Washington, DC: Beverley Tucker, Senate Printer, 1854), 60, table 39. In 1830, these 5,363 “deaf and dumb” persons accounted for a mere 0.051 percent of the aggregate white population (10,537,378). Ibid., 45, table 18. 85 Ibid., 60, table 39. In 1850, these 9,136 “deaf and dumb” persons accounted for 0.047 percent of the aggregate white population (19,553,068). Ibid., 45, table 18. It should be noted that while the number of “deaf and dumb” persons increased by 70.35 percent from 1830 to 1850, the total white population actually increased by 85.56 percent during that same period. As a result, the number of “deaf and dumb” individuals as a percentage of the total white population actually decreased by 8.20 percent. Nevertheless, such a decrease was arguably negligible with respect to deaf visibility, due to the growth of deaf identity, community, activity, and organization during the same period. 86 Information about non-white deaf populations is more difficult to analyze, particularly given the failure to differentiate between the “free colored” and slave populations when counting the “deaf and dumb” in the 1830 census. Ibid., 93–94, table 89.

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perpetuating their condition—a threat to social order and wellbeing.87 Under Bell, the

visual emphasis in Deaf pedagogy shifted away from the gestural project of sign

language towards that of lip-reading or “visible speech.”88 By the close of the century, the

American schools once founded on asylum and manual instruction had become draconian

institutions where sign language was banned. Students’ hands were bound to keep them

from signing. They were beaten if they persisted in trying or if they failed to master their

excruciatingly difficult lessons in the foreign arts of vocalization and elocution.89

Like many policy nightmares, oralism gained legitimacy through appeals to

science and public welfare—what scholar of Deaf history and culture Harlan Lane termed

“the Mask of Benevolence.”90 Although “the aims and methods of ‘pure’ oralism were

both abhorrent and ultimately violent,” Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, “oralism was not

simply evil or ignorant.” Much like the early movement for education and writing in

manual signs, oralism was able to command both governmental and intellectual support.

He goes on to note that by 1900, oralism was transformed from one of several schools of

Deaf education in the eighteenth century into the only acceptable method, as far as the

87 Alexander Graham Bell, “Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race: A Paper Presented to the National Academy of Sciences at New Haven, November 13, 1883,” Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 2 (1884): 177–262. 88 Jill Lepore, “Visible Speech,” chap. 7 in A Is for American. 89 Albert Ballin’s powerful memoir, The Deaf Mute Howls, chronicles the Deaf author’s tortured upbringing—including traumatic abuse and attempts to stamp out sign language—in a residential Deaf school during this era. The Deaf Mute Howls (1930; repr., Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1998). See esp. chap. 7, “Pure Oralism.” 90 Harlan Lane, The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community (New York: Knopf, 1992).

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great majority of hearing people and a small minority of the deaf were concerned.”91

Deaf communities began to be systematically dismantled by depriving their members of

access to manual language.

Such was the state of Deaf education and community life when, in the late 1910s,

the Connecticut Asylum (since renamed the American School for the Deaf) began

contemplating a move away from the location on “Asylum Hill” that it had occupied

since 1821. A new site in West Hartford was selected, but it became increasingly clear

that the Gallaudet Monument—in need of serious conservation—would not move with

the school. A 1917 report to the National Association of the Deaf by the Committee on

the Gallaudet Monument Repair Fund stated that as yet nothing had been done to fix the

crumbling monument because

any attempt to repair [it] at present would probably result in a waste of money. Moreover, whether the school remains or goes, it is a question of health

and taste whether the Monument should be rebuilt on its present site. If the school stays, all the space around the Institution now occupied by the monument is needed for the healthful exercise of the girl pupils, who have no other playground; if the school moves and the grounds are converted into a public park, civic taste might endure the presence of the Monument for the sake of its associations, but there is no doubt that it would prefer some form of memorial less suggestive of a grave-yard.92

The monument, in essence, fell out of fashion both aesthetically and socially.

Steeped in the Napoleonic rediscovery of ancient Egypt, the romantic monument

forms and memorial culture of Newsam’s design sought life everlasting in the graceful

91 Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry, 8. 92 Thomas Francis Fox, Jno. B. Hotchkiss, and H. D. Drake, “Report of the Committee on the Gallaudet Monument Repair Fund,” 1 July 1917, in “Proceedings of the Twelfth Convention of the National Association of the Deaf,” special issue, The Nad 3, no. 1 (February 1918): 126.

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ruination of stone forms. (As Percy Bysshe Shelley famously wrote in “Ozymandias” of

1818, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains.”) But this

monument would only last sixty-four years—exactly the life span of the man it

honored—before succumbing not only to time but to the twin storms of realism and

oralism. As a formal totality, it no longer made sense; monuments of the new century

increasingly employed bronze and human figures.93 Moreover, the symbolism of its

individual parts—the manual alphabet, the scene of children learning in sign language,

the cache of documents contained within attesting to the value of sign language—had

been deemed worse than unfashionable: deleterious to the very people who had once

celebrated them. When the school moved to its new facility in 1921, the memorial seems

to have been unceremoniously cleared. Carlin’s bas-relief scene was spared and installed

in the entryway of the new building, but that is the only trace of that “exclusively deaf

mute enterprise” to remain—except in print.94

93 A storm of controversy erupted within Deaf communities in the 1880s, when Edward Miner Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s son (and the first president of Gallaudet University), commissioned the hearing artist Daniel Chester French to execute a statue of his father on the campus grounds. Gallaudet the younger apparently gave the commission to French before reviewing plans with a monument committee and without even seeing designs submitted by Deaf artists. This fascinating and unfortunate saga—a complete inversion of the former ethos of an “exclusively Deaf Mute enterprise” is documented in Michael J. Olson, “The Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Alice Cogswell Statue: Controversies and Celebrations,” in A Fair Chance in the Race of Life: The Role of Gallaudet University in Deaf History, ed. Brian H. Greenwald and John Vickrey Van Cleve (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2008), 33–49. 94 Further research in Hartford, Connecticut is needed to determine the specific course of the monument’s demise. Sadly, there is no mention of it in a contemporary “Deaf Heritage Trail” pamphlet of historic Hartford sites in Deaf history. American School for the Deaf, Hartford Area Sites Important to the History of Deaf Education (Hartford, CT: American School for the Deaf, n.d.), https://www.asd-1817.org/uploaded/pdf/hartford _history.pdf.

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_______________

And yet, a tradition of that enterprise has endured. In 1992, a Deaf actor and

educator by the name of Alan Barwiolek came to Hartford to pay homage at the grave of

his hero, Laurent Clerc. Alas, he found the graves of Clerc and his wife Eliza in

deplorable condition, knocked down and damaged by vandals. Horrified, Barwiolek

launched a national fundraising campaign to build new headstones. Six years later, in

April 1998, a crowd of more than three hundred people—mostly Deaf, a few of whom

had traveled all the way from France—gathered in the pouring rain for a ceremonial

unveiling of the new stones. Alan Barwiolek, however, had died two years prior and was

unable to see the fruits of his labor. “Alan knew that it was his destiny,” spoke his friend

at the ceremony, “to bring honor and recognition to this humble, noble man whose

lifework had the greatest, most profound and lasting effect on every American who is

deaf.”95

95 Robin Stansbury, “New Headstone for Educator Unveiled,” Hartford (CT) Courant, April 18, 1998, http://articles.courant.com/1998-04-18/news/9804180192_1_deaf-people-headstones-laurent-clerc.

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Chapter 5

“Why Ask a Name?”:

Women’s Autograph Collecting and the Suturing of Social Space

Why ask a Name? Small is the good it brings; Names are but breath; deeds, DEEDS alone are Things. —Horace Mann, “A Name, on Being Asked for His Autograph”1

I. So Many in a Bed: Stitching Together Society

In 1856, seventeen-year-old Adeline Harris began a decades-long project of

assembling a mosaic of autograph signatures into a stunning abstract group portrait of

living US leaders in arts, sciences and politics (fig. 5.1). Hailing from a wealthy Rhode

Island textile family, Adeline literally rubbed shoulders with politicians and literati of the

day. (She danced with Abraham Lincoln at his inaugural ball in 1861).2 Appropriately,

her method of solicitation took a very material form: the young woman mailed diamonds

of white silk to prominent Americans, requesting that they kindly sign and return them.

1 Horace Mann, “A Name, on Being Asked for His Autograph,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 18. 2 For more on Adeline Harris Sears’s biography, see Amelia Peck, “‘A Marvel of Woman’s Ingenious and Intellectual Industry’: The Adeline Harris Sears Autograph Quilt,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 33 (1998): 263–66, doi:10.2307/1513018.

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Figure 5.1. Adeline Harris Sears, Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with Signatures Pattern, begun 1856. Silk, 195.6 ´ 203.2 cm. (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 1996.4.)

We may imagine the president-elect removing the swatch of silk from its parcel, thinking,

“Why not give the industrious young lady what she asks for?” and then laying it flat on

his desk and reaching for a fountain pen, securing the edge to pull it taut with one hand

while inscribing it—carefully, so as not to blot the fine fabric—with the other: “yr friend

/ & Servant / [signed] Abraham Lincoln / 1860” (fig. 5.2). What he mailed back was an

acknowledgement, a request fulfilled through indelible inscription, a means of giving

recognizable form to a fleeting moment of connection between two people.

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Figure 5.2. Detail of figure 5.1, showing diamond 7N with a signed message from Abraham Lincoln (center) and diamond 7O with Andrew Johnson’s signature (bottom).

An illustrious figure like Abraham Lincoln was probably well accustomed to such

requests—for decades now a flattering but annoying fact of life for public personas. One

of Dolley Madison’s first biographers, Maud Wilder Goodwin, described the female

fanaticism for such inscriptions during the First Lady’s term in office (1809–1817) thus:

It was no easy task in Mrs. Madison’s day for folk of consequence to escape the intrusion of the autograph-hunter, and in Washington the evil reached its climax. Women waited outside the door of the Senate with open albums, ready to beset the first man who ventured out. Others besieged the court-rooms, and boldly sent up their little autograph volumes to the judges on the bench with an accompanying request for “just a line,” until public men were forced to keep on

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hand a supply of appropriate sentiments or verses of gallantry to satisfy the collector’s greed of their admirers.3

What were these women asking for, and what did their “little volumes” mean, both to

their individual owner-curators and as a mode of social-material interaction? Why

characterize it as “evil”?

Chapter 1 of this dissertation approached the emerging national obsession with

the Declaration of Independence by treating the representational body it created as

something caught between the realms of document and art, the imbuement of the mere

chronicle of history with cohering narrative meaning. The declaration cemented the

autographic signature doubly in the American imagination: as an instrument of action—

in this case, the presumed ex nihilo creation of a new nation—but also as a semiotic

shorthand capable of collapsing act and actor. In other words, the signature becomes a

device of both making and representing history, rendering history iterable through the

acts of individuals. It is unsurprising then that the fascination with the Declaration of

Independence—which began during the War of 1812 and exploded in the decades after—

emerged alongside a wider phenomenon of “autographomania”: fascination with

signatures and signature collecting.4 While the Declaration of Independence became

exalted “American scripture,” commemorating the lost leaders of the revolution, interest

also grew around the lexical indices of contemporary America’s historical actors.

3 Maud Wilder Goodwin, Dolley Madison, Women of Colonial and Revolutionary Times 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), 272. 4 Josh Lauer, “Traces of the Real: Autographomania and the Cult of the Signers in Nineteenth-Century America,” Text and Performance Quarterly 27, no. 2 (April 2007): 143–63, doi:10.1080/10462930701251207.

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The fields of both historical action and the historical record have almost always

excluded women, who are rarely named as history’s shapers or chroniclers.5 Women,

especially in mid-nineteenth-century America, operated largely in “juxtapolitical” spaces,

influencing family, society, and history through indirect means.6 That the act of

collecting and curating representational presence-traces should be enacted primarily by

women is hardly insignificant. It constitutes an effort at indirect imbrication in the action

of history—an extrahistorical and extrapolitical project adopted when more immediate

means of participation were unavailable or off limits. Signatures are things, but as was

evident in the example of the Declaration of Independence, they are also events—“speech

acts” executed through writing. The signature is therefore a special kind of

representational mechanism that anchors an individual in an action. By extension, the

practices of soliciting, accumulating, and organizing such traces anchor the autograph

collector in a sociotemporal space—however small, however indirect—of historical

agency.

5 Reinscribing women into history thus became a primary avocation for second-wave feminist thinkers. Significantly, individual names constitute the compositional unit of Judy Chicago’s monumental artwork from this period, The Dinner Party (1974–1979). Names of individual women from history are both embroidered in script on individual place settings, and hundreds more are scrawled neatly on the floor between the triangle of tables. See Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1979) and Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History (New York: Monacelli Press, 2014). 6 The juxtapolitical is that which “thrives in proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over into political alliance, . . . but most often . . . acting as a critical chorus that sees the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement enough.” Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), x.

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As scholars have noted, these economic and social changes in the passage from

early republic to antebellum periods resulted in immense reconfigurations of family life

and household economy, as well as gender roles. Amidst industrial boom, population

growth, and geographic expansion during the 1820s, the cooperative agrarian-based

family unit gave way to centralized wage labor outside the home, increasing distinctions

between the domestic and public spheres as the domains of women and men,

respectively.7 The emergence of an American middle class afforded many women

increased economic security and more leisure time but at a cost: the expectation that such

resources would be channeled into the cultivation and maintenance of new ideals of “true

womanhood” and a domestic space that functioned as “portrait, in miniature” of

republican virtue. Crafts, hobbies, art, and education served as the main vehicles for

(aspiring) middle-class women to express these values.

Projects that involve the collection, curation, and representation of autographs

form a particular subset of this visual-material world of “shared womanhood.”8 What

makes the Adeline Harris Sears quilt such a compelling object is the way it brings

together and expands upon common mid-century modes of women’s autograph

7 See Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870, Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany 129 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 190; and Barbara K. Weeks, “Domestic Spheres and Home Circles: The Dimensions of Early Nineteenth-Century Baltimore Women’s Lives,” in Lavish Legacies: Baltimore Album and Related Quilts in the Collection of the Maryland Historical Society, by Jennifer Faulds Goldsborough with Barbara K. Weeks (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1994), 38–39. 8 Steven M. Stowe, quoted in Anya Jabour, “Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 127, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4249766.

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collecting. The three hundred and sixty autographs contained in the quilt reflect a careful

organization according to profession and with respect hierarchy and chronology (fig. 5.3).

Figure 5.3. Chart showing the placement of autographs by profession in the Adeline Harris Sears quilt. (Reprinted from Amelia Peck, “‘A Marvel of Woman’s Ingenious and Intellectual Industry’: The Adeline Harris Sears Autograph Quilt,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 33 (1998): 268, doi:10.2307 /1513018.)

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A carefully plotted social geography functions as a metonymic shorthand for Sears’s

impressive level of education and awareness of her historical moment. In stitching

together these condensed, microrepresentations of individuals, she managed to visually

articulate an American social cartography while simultaneously playing with its

boundaries and borders. It is an object engineered by a single young woman who, in her

act of solicitation, turned individual contributors into collaborators in an (as-yet-

unknown-to-them) whole.

Most silk diamonds returned with compliant, even generous contributions. (A

number of the autographed salutations even address the quilt medium by including

references to bed and sleep from sources like Macbeth.) But at least one solicitee

responded playfully to this manipulative enterprise, hinting at some misgivings about his

personal representational trace becoming mixed up in a totality beyond his control.

Believed to be the hand of writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis, the final square

on the quilt (20R in fig. 5.3) contains a verse submitted in lieu of a signature:

Miss Addie pray excuse My disobliging Muse,

She contemplates with dread So many in a Bed.9

Willis (if it is Willis) absents himself from the project, participating while protesting.

Though humorous, the author’s balk signals anxiety about an expanding and proliferating

American social geography and the way it might be visualized. The quilt offers a

taxonomical iteration of individuals in an effort to condense and distill this chaos into

fine well-ordered specimens, but what picture emerges as a composite whole? The quip 9 Peck, “A Marvel,” 290.

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points to many reasonable questions about collective representation. Just where can (or

should) historical subjects be located vis-à-vis one another? How does autograph

solicitation visually and materially imbricate individuals in social networks, and why was

(and arguably still is) this a female activity?

To untangle these questions, I examine signatures and solicitation autograph

collecting by asking what kind of social, political, and representational “work” names

perform when organized by women. Whereas extant literature on women’s autograph

collecting in the nineteenth century has approached the practice in terms of friendship,

fad, or polite social obligation, this study makes a more explicit case for seeing signature

collection as a joint endeavor of visual and political representation.10 I bring together

examples of women’s autograph collecting in mid-nineteenth-century America that have

heretofore been separated into different discourses: women’s signature quilts, autograph

albums, and extrapolitical or juxtapolitical instruments, such as petitions. These objects

and behaviors were born of efforts at strengthening social, political, and emotional

affinity between people, drawing them together to create networks of representational

association across social and geographical distance. In the sections that follow, I position

the autograph signature as a representational nexus rooted in the urgency of the present

that, in the hands of female collectors, lends visual and material form to feelings of

solidarity. In this way, names link individuals together because—and in spite of—their

10 See Jabour, “Albums of Affection,” 125–58; and Andrea Kunard, “Traditions of Collecting and Remembering: Gender, Class, and the Nineteenth-Century Sentiment Album and Photographic Album,” Early Popular Visual Culture 4, no. 3 (November 2006): 227–43, doi:10.1080/17460650601002214.

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physical separation and absence, both from one another and from the primary agentive

spheres of history and politics.

II. We Are Journeying: Albums, Quilts, Memory, and History

The interest that women in the United States demonstrated in signature collecting

throughout the nineteenth century quietly reveals the porosity of the domestic-public

sphere divide, as well as the need to make visually legible the familial and social

connections beyond those offered in formal institutions of government and the historical

record. In this section, the “womanly” practices of decorative drawing, calligraphy, and

sewing come together around the basic representational unit—whether scrawled or

stitched—of an individual name. Building on the extant literature of women’s albums and

quilts as sentimental keepsakes and social activities, I argue for an emerging feminine

interest in the visualization of social networks. Through ink and thread, women

performed representational labor. The networks of affiliation they articulated in the

process enact a soft but strong “suturing of social space” that includes friendship and

family, but also primes the ground for what I will explore in the next section: women

leveraging these newly visualized networks and modes of communication to enact

substantial political change.

Autograph albums have roots in seventeenth-century German and English

scholastic environments. A distant precursor to the modern yearbook, these albums

enabled young scholars to compile written remembrances from the schoolmates with

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whom they lived and studied before their inevitable dispersal upon graduation.11 Whether

strategically referenced or originally penned, the bits of verse included by each

contributor served as an extension of his signature, a kind of parting memento verbi that

created a small site of enduring communication between signer and collector.

It is unsurprising that such a mechanism should proliferate alongside increased

literacy and mobility, both of which defined the American social landscape in the middle

decades of the nineteenth century. While some literature on autograph albums has

focused on albums as object nexuses of striving bourgeois intercourse or on the

performance of female friendship, I want to push these analyses further by returning to

the same Derridean knot with which this dissertation began: the absence of the individual

that necessarily inheres in their signature. In many circumstances, the very existence of

an autograph album is predicated upon removal and distance, the inky traces of the

individuals and their parting remembrances contained within, the trace of that which is

already about to be gone during the moment of contact.

A little album unremarkable for its ordinariness serves to enumerate this reality:

the Stuart Mitchell autograph album at the Library Company of Philadelphia.12 The

signatures and remembrances contained within are dated circa 1860, and all indications

point to the album having been compiled for Mitchell, a young pastor from western New 11 See Margaret Anne Eugenie Nixon, Early Autograph Albums in the British Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1970). 12 Archives and special collections are full of these albums, but they do not get very much attention. Some individual studies have been used as points of entry into particular historical circumstances or networks. For instance, see Lisa Ricker, Performing Memory, Performing Identity: Jennie Drew’s Autograph Album, Mnemonic Activity, and the Invention of “Feminine” Subjectivity. PhD. diss., Arizona State University, 2008, ProQuest (AAT 304686362).

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York, by his wife, Jane Patterson Mitchell. From 1855 to 1863, Mitchell was away

serving congregations in Wisconsin, and the pain of separation is palpable within the

album’s pages. Beginning with Jane’s own poem to her husband, the inscriptions

overwhelmingly address absence, making it clear that the romantic ethos of longing is

based as much in logistical reality as in lofty rhetorical sentiment. “Remembered when

Absent,” wrote Mary L. M. Gregory from Oneida, New York, on May 16, 1860. One pal

inscribed himself doubly, including a small photographic picture of himself and then

signing it, “The Autograph of your friend, J. W. Browne, May 26th, 1860, Montreal.”13

Perhaps the most telling little comment accompanying a signature came from a

fellow clergy couple, Joseph E. and Elizabeth Nassau, also of Oneida. “We are

Journeying,” it says next to their names. The phrase is a direct reference to Numbers

10:29, a passage that would have been not only familiar but particularly meaningful to a

young man of the cloth on a holy mission with no clearly defined end. In this verse,

Moses states to his brother-in-law, “We are journeying to the place of which the Lord

said, ‘I will give it you: come thou with us, and we will do thee good: for the Lord hath

spoken good concerning Israel.”14 Significantly, this quote draws not from an episode

early in the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness but as they head into a final stage of

that wandering, their sense of nationhood and collective purpose now formed and

coalesced. Between clergy, this quotation offers a powerful shorthand expression of

13 Stuart Mitchell, Stuart Mitchell Autograph Album, 1860, Michael Zinman Binding Collection, Coll Albums Mitchell 110528.D (Zinman), Rare Books and Other Texts, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA. 14 Num. 10:29 (Authorized [King James] Version).

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camaraderie, an acknowledgment both of the shared duty and sacrifice involved in their

work: the need to leave home and not see loved ones for a very long time, if ever again.15

_______________

While autograph albums have a history shared between genders, autograph

collecting soon found its way into an artistic medium and practice distinct to American

women: quilting. Material embodiments of sentiment and memory-making, signature

quilts began to emerge in the 1830s and enjoyed a swell in popularity in the 1840s and

1850s. In signature quilts, individual names—inscribed in ink or embroidered in thread—

become integrated within a larger design scheme. In the Adeline Harris Sears quilt, for

example, the white silk diamond-shaped substrate for the signatures became the tops of

stunning trompe l’oeil cubes, in what was at the time a popular new pattern known as

“tumbling blocks.”16 Most commonly, signature quilts employed a variable pattern that

also appeared mid-century, known appropriately as the album quilt pattern. Inspired by

the pages of a paper album, the album quilt emerged as a flexible and variable pattern

that formally capitalizes on the easy-to-piece square shape. Like a deconstructed book

15 Sadly, when husband and wife were reunited in 1863, they only got to enjoy one year together. Jane Patterson Mitchell died in March 1864. 16 One of the most compelling compendia of the rich and varied quilting tradition lives in the Spencer Collection at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. Over a period of thirty years, roughly between 1900 and 1930, a midwestern woman named Carrie A. Hall undertook a project of sewing a single sample block in every known pattern. Her collection of some eight hundred blocks serves as a unique material encyclopedia of US quilt patterns. Included among these is a signature-album-style quilt block, bearing her own name. See Bettina Havig, Carrie Hall Blocks: Over 800 Historical Patterns from the College of the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas (Paducah, KY: American Quilter’s Society, 1999).

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whose pages have been removed and organized in a grid, the album quilt design

transposes the motley and sundry function and feel of a paper album into a single visual

plane made of cloth.17

The addition of signatures to album squares crafted by separate individuals and

joined into a single quilt literalizes the relationship between individual and communal

labor that historically inheres in US quilt-making traditions. While sewing is often an

individual task, it is one that women have also undertaken together—whether sitting

together while working on separate projects or, as was often the case with quilting in

particular, collaborating on a single object. Like barn raisings, slaughtering, husking, and

logging did for men, quilting bees brought women of neighborhoods and communities

together in a space of shared labor exchange and communal support.18 There is a

metonymic quality to the quilting bee: the labor usually performed within is the suturing

of the individually designed quilt top to the quilt’s other layers: the middle (batting) and

backing. The finishing, the making whole of the quilt, was a site of shared endeavor and

the binding together of interdependent individuals.

17 There is a good deal of overlap between the terms friendship quilt, signature quilt, and album quilt. Friendship quilts submit to a consistent design scheme, meaning all blocks participate in the same pattern. Album quilts consist of individually composed (usually appliqued) blocks that are then combined in a grid-like pattern. Instead of being uniformly incorporated into a pattern, their distinctness is the formal organizing design. While this taxonomy is a handy means for quilt historians to order objects, it creates some confusion for this study. This is because album quilts are often, conceptually, de facto friendship quilts—made in the spirit of mutual affection, communality, intimacy, and connection. 18 Jaqueline Marx Atkins, Shared Threads: Quilting Together—Past and Present (New York: Viking Studio Books, 1994), 3. Atkins credits the twentieth-century rise of consumer commodity culture with the decline of exchange labor that gave rise to an American quilt culture based in a distinct “women’s sphere.” Atkins, Shared Threads, 7.

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Collective and collaborative endeavors, quilts brought women together in real

time. Signature quilts representationally enacted this enjoinment. “Commemorative

artifacts,” friendship, album, and signature quilts were often time-bound and event-

inspired creations that gave graphic, lexical, and material form to social, familial, and

geographic relations.19 This became especially significant for marking transitions—“life

passages” such as marriages, births, or departures. In the example of the Brown-Turner

Family Album Quilt (fig. 5.4), the signed, hand-appliqued blocks were given to Mary

Brown Turner by members of both her and her husband’s families on the birth of her

daughter Margaret in 1847. A material corollary to the child’s lineal makeup, the

component pieces yield a unique composite whole when assembled.20 In such an

instance, the names of the family members—lexical indices on fabric—perform the

decorative and graphic work of binding together individuals and families, cinching social

and familial space that was, until the daughter’s birth, uncharted.

19 Jessica F. Nicoll, Quilted for Friends: Delaware Valley Signature Quilts, 1840–1855 (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1986), 10–11. 20 Amelia Peck notes that the machine stitching reveals the quilt was not assembled until later, meaning the squares were given individually with the idea that Mary (the mother) would assemble them on her own at some point in the future. This never happened, and instead it was Margaret, the daughter herself, who actually sewed them together some twenty years after her birth. Amelia Peck, American Quilts and Coverlets in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Dutton Studio Books, 1990), 55.

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Figure 5.4. Members of the Brown and Turner Families, Quilt, Album Pattern, begun 1846. Cotton, 211.8 ´ 215.9 cm. (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 1988.134.)

But just as signature quilts marked new social territory through points of

convergence, they also commemorated and sealed networks that were closing. “Used to

mediate experience by marking major, potentially disruptive, life transitions,” friendship

and album quilts were a recognition and means of coping with the painful side of social,

familial, and geographic movement.21 A young bride who left her own family to join her

husband’s moved from more than a house or family. She was leaving a network of

friends and kin. It is hardly coincidental that the vogue for signature quilts coincided with 21 Nicoll, Quilted for Friends, 11.

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mid-century westward expansion and the rapid movement of Americans to the Midwest

and beyond. In the decades before telegraph wires and railroads reliably networked the

nation, and while the modern postal service was just coming into being, such removals

were absolute and permanent in nature. Parting meant separating for years at minimum

and possibly for life, with little promise of future contact whether incarnate or epistolary.

A beautiful quilt might be comfort in itself, but the addition of the lexical index bears the

absent individual forth on the journey into unknown social, familial, or geographic

territory.

A signature quilt by Mercy Jane Bancroft Blair (fig. 5.5), begun in 1855 and

finished in the early 1860s, offers an astonishing glimpse into the role that signature

quilts played in negotiating these forms of distance. An independent, unmarried woman

living in central New York, Mercy Jane Bancroft (1825–1900) supported herself by

working as a seamstress, sewing dresses for women in a network of friends, family, and

acquaintances spread throughout several counties.22 During the 1850s, Mercy began

saving a small bit of remaindered cloth from each individual commission and labeled

each with the name of the customer. Only in 1860 does it appear that she began to

actually piece this material into a quilt—the occasion being a marriage proposal from a

younger widower from northern Pennsylvania named Addison Blair. At thirty-eight,

Mercy Jane Bancroft Blair’s life changed dramatically. Moving meant parting with

friends and family, as well as with an entire mode of being in the world. In crossing state

22 Mercy Jane Bancroft Blair’s biography, family, quilt, diaries, and social networks are documented in Melissa Jurenga, “She Hath Done What She Could: Discovering Memories on a New York Friendship Quilt,” Uncoverings 23 (2002): 1–30.

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lines, she was also assuming a new role—changing from independent artisan to

homemaker and stepmother. On the threshold of this journey she assembled a visual-

material representation of the social actors in the life she was leaving behind.

Figure 5.5. Mercy Jane Bancroft Blair, Quilt, Signature, Repeat Block Pattern, 1855–1863. Cotton and calico, 229 ´ 201 cm. (Courtesy of the Ardis and Robert James Collection, International Quilt Study Center and Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1997.007.0852.)

One quality the Harris Sears, the Brown-Turner, and the Bancroft Blair quilts

share (along with many other mid-century signature quilts) is a notably pristine condition.

Contrary to popular notions of US quilting—which positions its female practitioners in a

mythology of industrious thrift—many of these quilts were never actually intended for

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use as bed clothing. They were cherished objects that lived most of their lives folded up

as keepsakes or displayed occasionally for family members and sometimes for larger

communities. As art historian Janet C. Berlo has demonstrated, American women’s

quilting has always been an endeavor driven more by artistic skill, expression, and

innovation than household economy.23 Signature quilts form a subset of this larger

ecology of beloved representational works of art, forming a particular kind of object

nexus in which a pen and needle function together, a site where intimacy and history

mingle. Indeed, Melissa Jurenga’s extensive research on the Mercy Jane Bancroft Blair

quilt is but one example of the signature quilt’s unique ability to function as a historical

ledger, a picture-document articulating networks of connection and affiliation that might

not otherwise have been visible or knowable.24

As quilt historian Janet Marx Atkins has noted, quilts and quilting would go on to

enjoy an even greater role in “pricking the social conscience” as the nineteenth century

wore on, serving as fundraising endeavors, prizes, and even political signage.25 But as the

23 See Janet Catherine Berlo, “Chronicles in Cloth: Quilt-Making and Female Artistry in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 201–22; and Janet Catherine Berlo, “‘Acts of Pride, Desperation, and Necessity”: Aesthetics, Social History, and American Quilts,” in Wild by Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts, by Janet Catherine Berlo and Patricia Cox Crews (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 5–31. 24 Jessica F. Nicoll writes that “every signature quilt served to preserve the memory of relationships that once existed. . . . Today, it is possible to reconstruct the communities represented on these quilts by tracing individuals through family genealogies, church records, censuses, and newspaper notices. The composite of these individual histories provides a picture of the type of people who made signature quilts, of the relationships they valued, and of the events that they singled out as significant.” Nicoll, Quilted for Friends, 5. 25 Atkins, Shared Threads, 77.

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next section explores, by mid-century, women were in fact leveraging the

representational power of signatures to political ends.

III. Causes at Hand: Race, Gender, and Autographs for Activism

Polite manners and expressions of sentimentality were not empty performances in

the mid-nineteenth-century United States. They were paradigmatic modes, indicative of a

whole system of social relations.26 In this social calculus, expressions of female

sentimentality performed critical labor for civilization, neutralizing the toxic roughness of

masculine tempers and missteps and, by extension, the beastly world of politics. While

many women chafed under this forced role, others accepted it with abiding

responsibility.27 Then as now, arguments for strictly determined gender roles—which

almost always curtail the rights of women—rely on a highly effective persuasion: that the

power and control women assume through their designated position is, while different,

indeed equal—if not superior—to that which male counterparts enjoy in their respective

arenas. Encouraging all sexes to esteem women’s “reign” over the “government of the

26 See Halttunen, Confidence Men. 27 Novelist Annie Proulx captures this dynamic brilliantly in her most recent novel, Barkskins. When, c. 1845, the Duke family of timber magnates move from Boston to Michigan, unmarried, independent, business minded Lavinia Duke has to live in close quarters with her cousin’s Cyrus’ wife, Clara, whom she strongly dislikes. “Clara . . . was the Ideal Woman with a simpering way, averted gaze and subservient fealty to Cyrus, who sprawled about in a lordly manner. She was known for her collection of silk scarves and shawls. The children were automatons, chirping ‘yes, Mama,’ ‘yes, Papa,’ curtsying and very quiet. After dinner the company had to go to the music room and endure an hour on narrow chairs while Clara played the parlor organ and entertained them with mournful songs of lost dear ones.” Annie Proulx, Barkskins (Scribner: New York), 497–98.

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household,” offered women a version—a resemblance—of political participation without

actual political representation.28

Cultivating virtuous sentimentality and the domestic sphere were mutually

entwined women’s projects; the latter forged a site where the former could be enacted.

Women’s social labor and its sites of performance were juxtapolitical. While women

were increasingly separated into individual homes and families, sentimentality linked

them together in the forging of an “intimate public” that is “constituted by strangers who

consume common text and things . . . [and who] already share a worldview and

emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical

experience.”29

The key component of this “common historical experience” that I wish to

highlight here is the way in which women operated on the political realm as both insiders

and outsiders. That is to say, they did so indirectly and by leveraging the tools of crafting

and expanding that same “intimate public.” The personal networks women had already

been articulating through visual representation in albums and quilts found their

28 This terminology comes from a lengthy passage attributed to Goethe (but lacking any mention of its original source) and reprinted as “The Sphere of Woman” in Godey’s Lady’s Book, March 1850, 209–10. There is a tragic irony in calling woman the ruler of her home when, in fact, laws of property and inheritance explicitly denied married women ownership over land, domicile, or its contents. In 1848 and 1849, New York State passed a suite of legislation known as the Married Women’s Property Acts, which guaranteed the “real and personal property of any female who may hereafter marry.” While this legislation provided a model for other states, it was by no means universal, even following the Civil War. See “Married Women’s Property Acts, New York (1848–1849),” in Women’s Rights in the United States: A Documentary History, ed. Winston E. Langley and Vivan C. Fox, Primary Documents in American History and Contemporary Issues (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 80–82. 29 Berlant, Female Complaint, viii.

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counterpart in the public sphere through a handy extrapolitical apparatus known as the

petition. As “an instrument of supplication through which individuals or groups might

seek redress of personal grievances,” the sine qua non of the petition is, of course, the

autographic signature.30 In the context of a petition, a name is both a representation and

an action. It is a sign whose referent is an individual subject announcing redress in a

visual chorus of others. The visual articulation of this chorus, already inscribed into

women’s lives through ink and thread, enabled women to craftily traverse the presumed

barriers between “public” and “domestic” spheres. The case studies below demonstrate

how names—and women’s solicitation collecting of them as visual representations—

became powerful tools in the mid-nineteenth-century struggle to expand the political

rights of historically underrepresented populations: women and African Americans.

_______________

In 1853 Julia Griffiths, secretary of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society,

undertook a unique fundraising project entitled Autographs for Freedom. Collected

within are poems, essays, and reflections that Griffiths solicited from prominent figures

in the abolition movement, each concluding with a facsimile of the author’s signature.

“Should this publication be instrumental in casting one ray of hope on the heart of one

poor slave, or should it draw the attention of one person, hitherto uninterested, to the deep

wrongs of the bondman, or cause one sincere and earnest effort to promote

30 Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 11.

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emancipation,” she wrote in the preface, then all involved in its production would “feel

themselves gratified and compensated.”31 Griffiths’s emphasis on the individual is made

more explicit in the opening passage of the collection, “Be Up and Doing,” written by

New York senator (and later Lincoln’s secretary of state) William H. Seward. “Can

nothing be done for Freedom?” begins his appeal. “Yes, much can be done. Everything

can be done.” Yet, this action will not happen (at least, not at first) in the constitutions of

the slave holding states, but rather must occur in “the erroneous sentiments of the

American people.”32 The monstrosity of slavery, he urged, was a disease of the heart and

soul first and of politics second; only by treating the former could the latter be cured.

Marshalling moral and emotional resistance to the institution of slavery had taken

on new importance following the Compromise of 1850—a complicated suite of

legislative machinations cooked up in Washington, DC in a desperate effort to avoid

mounting conflict between slave-holding and free states. Among the concessions that

northern states made was a particularly heinous piece of legislation called the Fugitive

Slave Act. This made feeding, clothing, or sheltering runaway slaves in free states a

crime punishable by imprisonment and astronomical fines. The Compromise of 1850

transported debates over slavery from the floors of Congress to the doorstep of the home,

disintegrating the boundaries between abolitionist political “action” and simple

humanitarian impulse. Women’s domestic sphere became activated as a political site as it

never had before.

31 Julia Griffiths, preface to Autographs for Freedom, v–vi. 32 William H. Seward, “Be Up and Doing,” in Griffiths, Autographs for Freedom, 1, 2.

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This crisis forms an early and critical framing apparatus in Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s monumental work of sentimental women’s fiction, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which

began serial publication in 1851. Stowe brilliantly depicts the collapse of domestic and

political spheres early in the novel, in an exchange between Senator John Bird and his

wife, Mary. Recently returned from an exhausting congressional vote on a fugitive slave

law, Senator Bird finds his refuge of domestic bliss tainted by the inappropriately

masculine political meddling of his otherwise sweet and virtuous “better half.” “Now,

John,” she asks “I want to know if you think such a law as that is right and Christian?”33

John admits that while the law does not sit well with his values, he nevertheless voted for

it because “there are great public interests involved, . . . we must put aside our private

feelings.” But Mary refuses any simple distinction between public interest and private

feelings, soliloquizing:

You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless, houseless creatures! It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do! Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can’t give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!34

33 Mary continues, “I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, John Harvard Library (1852; repr., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 107. Much has been written about the role of Christian piety in the abolition movement. For an overview of the impact of Protestant revivalism of the 1820s and 1830s on the abolition movement, see James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 37–40. 34 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 107.

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Only moments later, Mary finds her chance when an escaped slave, Eliza, knocks on their

door. Bird has much to lose if he’s discovered for flouting the law, but the sentimental

persuasion levied by his dear Mary compels him to change his mind and take the

runaways to a safe house. Without intervention from a women’s juxtapolitical position,

John would likely have turned Eliza away.

Stowe illustrated through fiction what the politician Seward exhorted in practice.

In “Be Up and Doing,” he exhorts the reader:

Reform your own codes and expurgate the vestiges of slavery. Reform your own manners and customs and rise above the prejudices of caste. Receive the fugitive who lays his weary limbs at your door, and defend him as you would your household gods . . . Inculcate that the free States can exercise hospitality and humanity. . . . Do all this, . . . and you will ultimately bring the parties of this country into a common condemnation and even the slave-holding States themselves into a renunciation of slavery . . .35

This impressive paradigm shift and historical change stems, he argues, from the small

actions and personal decisions of individuals. To this utopian appeal to individual moral

authority he affixes his signature—his declaration, his proxy, his pledge. The signature

here functions as an attestation, as well as a “mark of spiritual transformation.” During

the Second Great Awakening a generation earlier, the same religious fervor that would

guide the fictional Mary Bird in her convictions about what was right and true had

inspired new believers to follow preachers’ exhortations to “let your names be enrolled”

in the church registry and, by extension, “the lamb’s book of life.”36

So what is a signature in this context? Event? Representation? The question of

what constitutes action is taken up by education reformer Horace Mann in his 35 Seward, “Be Up and Doing,” 2–3. 36 Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, 106–7.

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contribution to the Griffiths’s volume, a telling meta-comment on the power (or lack

thereof) inhering in a signature (fig. 5.6).

Figure 5.6. Horace Mann, “A Name, on Being Asked for His Autograph,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 18. (Courtesy of Internet Archive and University of California Libraries, 2006, https://archive.org/details/autographsforfre00grifrich.)

“Why ask a Name?” he publically quizzes his solicitor, continuing—as if instructing a

pupil in one of his common school classrooms—“Small is the good it brings; Names are

but breath; deeds, DEEDS alone are Things.”37 Presumably, Mann intended his categorical

quibble as a motivator, pushing readers beyond the immaterial and unquantifiable realm

of “breath” (ideas or sentiments) and into the sphere of concrete “Things” (action). And

yet, in the context of this compilation, a name is undeniably more than mere breath and

indeed both some kind of deed and thing; each name composes and authorizes the text.

37 Mann, “A Name,” 18.

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The volume is not called Pleas for Freedom or Arguments for Freedom, but Autographs

for Freedom—a self-legitimizing textual enterprise, the assertion of committed individual

allegiance to a cause and adherence to its moral and behavioral demands. As if signing a

three-party contract with the cause and the reader, the signature included after each text

says, “This is where I cast my lot.” In the Derridean configuration, the signature states

something like, “This is where I send myself.”38 “Small is the good it brings” indeed, but

this was exactly the point. Name by name, heart by heart, law by law until, laden with

enough feathers, surely the unjust ship would sink.

_______________

Where abolitionists “sent themselves” representationally was hardly a unified

enterprise, especially with regard to the rights and roles of women within the movement.

When a group of Philadelphia Quakers formed the American Anti-Slavery Society in

December 1833, they only afforded voting rights within the organization to men. A few

days later, women broke off to form their own Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery

Society.39 While some prominent men in the movement, such as William Lloyd Garrison,

championed women’s rights alongside emancipation, this was not a mainstream

position.40 In June 1840 hundreds of abolitionist delegates from different countries and

38 Jacques Derrida, “Sending: On Representation,” trans. Peter Caws and Mary Ann Caws, in “Current French Philosophy,” ed. Peter Caws, special issue, Social Research 49, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 324, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970865. 39 Stewart, Holy Warriors, 52. 40 Centrist abolitionists found Garrison was too fiery and alienating. The “harsh rhetoric” of the society’s Declaration of Sentiments that Garrison penned in 1833, modeled after

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colonies, joined by thousands of local spectators, gathered in London for the first World

Anti-Slavery Convention. British painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s depiction of the

scene, painted that same year, documents some one hundred thirty known participants in

the convention (fig. 5.7).

Figure 5.7. Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840, 1841. Oil on canvas, 297.2 mm ´ 383.6 cm. (Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK, NPG 599.)

The locked gaze between elderly Quaker abolitionist orator Thomas Clarkson and former

slave turned abolitionist Henry Beckford (foreground center) forms the focal point of the

painting. The viewer assumes Beckford’s vantage, cementing the subject position of the

the Declaration of Independence, “appeared to most Americans as undiluted fanaticism.” Stewart, Holy Warriors, 53.

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formerly enslaved black male.41 Beckford’s welcome into the masculine sphere of ideas

and politics is articulated bodily by the supportive touch of white English abolitionist

leaders William Allen and George Stacey.

Whereas male faces form the teeming core of the group, the few women present

are consigned to the perimeter. In fact, Haydon’s compositional structure was kinder to

women in spatial organization than the event had actually been. Crushed together as they

are, it takes the viewer a little while to notice that men and women have been separated

by a red fence. The entire first day of the convention was occupied by heated debate

about what role women would have in the event and what space they would occupy. Male

delegates decided that women should stand beyond a dividing barrier, separated out as

silent listeners, not active participants.42 While a handful of male abolitionists (most

notably William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass) supported women’s rights

alongside the rights of enslaved black men, the majority did not share such feelings.

Increasingly, women who condemned slavery and its abominable injuries to civil rights 41 Of the painting Haydon wrote, “a liberated slave, now a delegate, is looking up to Clarkson with deep interest, and the hand of a friend is resting with affection on his arm, in fellowship and protection; this is the point of interest in the picture, and illustrative of the object in painting it—the African sitting by the intellectual European, in equality and intelligence.” Benjamin Robert Haydon, Description of Haydon’s Picture of the Great Meeting of Delegates Held at the Freemasons’ Tavern, June 1840, for the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade Throughout the World ([London]: Charles Reynell, [1844]), 10. 42 This slight against the women at the convention would later emerge in the memory of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who attended on her honeymoon with Henry Stanton, as a crystalizing moment in the history of the women’s movement. As Lisa Tetrault argues, however, women in the abolition movement at this time were accustomed to such treatment, and only later was this event imbued with the mythological qualities of an origin story. Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 10–12.

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found themselves trapped in a quest to secure for others the rights that they themselves

did not possess.

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Inspired by Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society Declaration of Sentiments of 1833, in

the summer of 1848, a young mother in central New York undertook her own version,

this time for women’s rights. Whereas Garrison had merely nodded to the 1776

declaration, Elizabeth Cady Stanton deftly inhabited Jefferson’s famous language and

rhetorical form, stitching sentiment to action by appropriating every formal aspect of this

by-then holy “instrument.”43 Whereas abolitionists had already seized upon the famous

line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Stanton

expanded it further with the insertion that “all men and women are created equal.”

Modeled directly on colonial America’s explication of grievances against King George

III, Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments moves from a monarchical to patriarchal address,

making man into the unjust and exploitative ruler of woman: “The history of mankind is

a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having

in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”44 In the style of the

original declaration, Stanton’s preamble is followed by a point-by-point enumeration of 43 For an in-depth discussion of how the Declaration of Independence became a source of inspiration for expanding civil rights in the ante-bellum period, see Eric Slauter, “The Declaration of Independence and the New Nation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Frank Shuffelton, Cambridge Companions to American Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12–34. 44 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Sentiments,” in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 1848–1861, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 70.

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specific grievances all beginning with “He has”—facts submitted as proof of tyranny to

“a candid world.”45

On the morning of Thursday July 19, 1848, some three hundred locals from

Seneca Falls, New York and nearby counties gathered in the Wesleyan Chapel adjacent

to the Seneca Waterway portion of the Erie Canal, which had recently brought so much

economic and social change to the area.46 The occasion was a two-day convention to

“discuss the social, civil, and religious condition of women.”47 As a public notice made

clear, the first day would be for women’s speech and participation alone. While male

presence was permitted, only on the second day would they be allowed to speak. The

declaration itself was the main order of business on the first day, specifically the review

and adoption of its points and eleven resolutions of action to follow. One of the key

debates on this first day was whether or not men would be invited to sign this declaration

following Stanton’s public reading of it on the second day, which was eventually

resolved in the affirmative.48

That evening, veteran Philadelphia abolition and women’s rights activist Lucretia

Mott proposed the addition of one last resolution: “That the speedy success of our cause 45 The articulation of sixteen separate grievances to match the eighteen of the original Declaration was a collaborative effort that involved careful review of legal and religious statutes. Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 192–93. 46 For extensive research on and demographic breakdown of the attendees of the Women’s Rights Convention, as well as the one hundred signers of the Declaration of Sentiments, see Judith Wellman, “The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks,” Journal of Women’s History 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 14–17, doi:10.1353/jowh.2010.0101. 47 Notice dated July 11, 1848, quoted in Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls, 189. 48 Although Stanton preferred to keep the signing exclusively a women’s enterprise, she was outvoted. Wellman, “Women’s Rights Convention,” 15.

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depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women, for the overthrow

of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman an equal participation with

men in the various trades, professions, and commerce.”49 The next day, one hundred men

and women, ranging in age from fourteen to sixty-eight, responded to the final line of the

Declaration of Sentiments, which read “Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the

Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this Declaration.” Significantly,

two thirds of the signers were women, and nearly all lived within forty miles of Seneca

Falls.50 While some prominent leaders numbered among them, the overwhelming

majority were ordinary people, few of whom left any other “record of what shaped and

sustained their egalitarian ideals.”51

What would, by the end of the nineteenth century, become cemented in historical

memory as a watershed moment in both the American and global history of women’s

rights had been, in its own time, a gathering of individuals already basted together into

overlapping networks of political and personal affiliation. Harnessing the language, form,

mythos, and action-oriented power of the Declaration of Independence enabled the

signers to claim the original’s promises of liberty and sovereignty for a new generation of

activists and a new segment of the population demanding its freedom. But as we have

learned from considering the original declaration in careful detail, the Declaration of

Sentiments quietly did something more: it created a corporate portrait out of names and in

49 Lucretia Mott, quoted in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 73. 50 Wellman, “Women’s Rights Convention,” 14. 51 Wellman, “Women’s Rights Convention,” 11.

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so doing offered up a mirror of representation, a new angle from which the American

people might glimpse their great composite “we.”52

Afterimage: Members of the Cult?

Writing on the rarity of dedicated female autograph collectors, New Jersey

attorney and self-described “member of the [autograph collecting] cult” Adrian H. Joline

sniffed acidly, “They exist, but there are not many of them. Perhaps if they had more

autographs they would not be so crazy about voting.”53 Joline was writing in 1913, the

height of the struggle for women’s suffrage. A deep irony pervades his paternalistic

suggestion that shrill, troublesome feminists sublimate their activism through a serene,

disciplined hobby rooted in the private gratification of the individual collector. In fact, as

we have seen, there have been no more dogged collectors of autograph signatures than

women, particularly in the multigenerational struggle for women’s suffrage.

The petition work that women began in the 1830s to combat the evils of slavery

became their own instrument of liberation as the battle for women’s rights, specifically

52 While the engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence (commonly spoken of as the “original”) is guarded in Washington, DC under the greatest protection afforded any artifact in the entire world, the “original” Declaration of Sentiments is nowhere to be found. See Megan Smith, “The Lost History: Help Us Find the Declaration of Sentiments,” The White House (blog), October 14, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov /blog/find-the-sentiments (site discontinued), archived at https://web.archive.org/web /20151015182208/https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/find-the-sentiments. 53 He continues, “I fear that if they finally obtain the glorious privilege of going to the polls and putting in their ballots . . . they may feel about it as I sometimes do after acquiring a long-sought-for autograph, that it is not after all such a wonderful thing as I thought it was, and that there are multitudes of other things more worth having. . . . Possibly it may be so with the suffragists.” Adrian H. Joline, Rambles in Autograph Land (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 111–12.

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suffrage, wore on through the long nineteenth century. In the wake of President Lincoln’s

1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which technically freed US slaves but did not ascribe

to them any rights of citizenship, abolitionist and suffragist Susan B. Anthony still had

high hopes for a universal suffrage movement that would extend to both women and

freed slaves these basic rights of democratic participation. Amidst the horrors of the Civil

War, she addressed a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society with the reminder

that “women can neither take the ballot nor the bullet to settle this question; therefore, to

us, the right to petition is the one sacred right which we ought not to neglect.”54

And of suffrage petitions there would be many over the coming decades.

Universal suffrage was dashed with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869,

which nominally extended the right to vote to African American men but not to women

of any race. The power of representational solidarity between sexes and races, which

antislavery petitions and the Declaration of Sentiments brought into visual and material

form, continued to struggle onward. An 1878 petition for women’s suffrage by the

“colored citizens of the District of Columbia” provides a particularly meaningful example

(fig. 5.8).

54 Susan B. Anthony, speech, in Proceedings of the American Anti-Slavery Society, at Its Third Decade, Held in the City of Philadelphia, Dec. 3d and 4th, 1863 (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1864), 74.

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Figure 5.8. Petition for Woman Suffrage from Frederick Douglass, Jr. and Other Residents of the District of Columbia, 1878. (Courtesy of the National Archives. Petitions and Memorials, 1813–1968; Records of the US House of Representatives, 1789–2015, Record Group 233; Center for Legislative Archives; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.)

The fact that the word “state” is crossed out and replaced with “District of Columbia”

signals that this was but one of many preprinted petitions designed to be filled out within

individual communities.55 Signatures separated into separate columns for men and

55 Preprinted petitions became an important strategy to aid in the process of collecting signatures both in the US and abroad. For example, “The Nineteenth Century [a British monthly journal] published petition forms for women to fill in and send up, and in August

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women have the word “colored” scrawled on top of each, indicating a community within

a community. The District of Columbia had famously been one of the first post-Civil War

polities to extend voting rights to black men (in 1867), and the first signature on this

petition is from none other than Frederick Douglass, who had just relocated to

Washington, DC from Rochester, New York the previous year. We may imagine the

door-to-door and missive-based appeals, the word of mouth, the breath of action involved

in coordinating and obtaining this particular set of signatures. This is how women’s

autograph collecting had always worked: suturing together social and geographical space

through the direct solicitation of names.

Arguably, this is exactly why women’s autograph collecting would be shut out,

overlooked, and denigrated by Joline and his ilk. Joline’s “rambles” are part of an

explosion of books on the subject that appear in the US, France, and England in the early

twentieth century, penned almost without exception by well-to-do, old, white men.56 Like

so many other sports and hobbies in the later decades of the nineteenth century, a move

towards specialization and professionalization increased the complexity of “rules” for

proper participation. To distinguish oneself from the masses of amateurs, a true collector

1889 printed an appendix of over twenty-nine pages listing more than 2,000 names.” Consequently, “the petition formed part of a debate in serious journals.” Jad Adams, Women and the Vote: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 101. 56 This phenomenon has not, as far as I can tell, received any scholarly attention and deserves a study of its own. Examples of such titles include: [Henry T.] Scott and Samuel Davey, A Guide to the Collector of Historical Documents, Literary Manuscripts, and Autograph Letters, Etc. . . . (London: S. J. Davey, 1891); George Burbeck Hill, Talks about Autographs (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896); George R. Sims, Among My Autographs (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904); and A. M. Broadly, Chats on Autographs (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1910), as well as scads of catalogues documenting specific individual collections.

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“must learn to regard as valueless mere signatures of individuals cut out from letters or

other documents; for with few and rare exceptions, such are never admitted into the

portfolio of the collector.”57 A signature without a larger context might indeed be a

signature of lesser worth, but not all contexts are created equal: “Signatures not ‘cut out’

but written by request may be a little better, but the principle is the same.” Emphasizing

this last point, he adds, “Words fail to describe the appalling insignificance of a

‘collector’ with a lot of signatures obtained by request, whether original or not. For a few

pennies he could procure from a dealer signatures of every one of the people whose

names he gives.”58

Here Joline takes aim at the dominant, and highly female, mode of signature

collecting that reigned in the early and middle decades of nineteenth-century America:

solicitation collecting where autographs were every bit as much deeds as they were

things. But by the end of the nineteenth century, autograph collecting had split entirely

into deeply gendered spheres, hardly recognizable as a common enterprise. For men such

as Joline, collecting functioned increasingly in a market-mediated system wherein

autographs became commodities to be bought, sold, and traded among “true collectors,”

for whom the solicitation method was both passé and déclassé.59 Autograph collecting for

these men was a polite, antiquarian hobby that enabled them to feel a connection with

“great men” of the past, while bypassing any of the signature’s power as an action in the 57 Scott and Davey, Guide to the Collector, 31, quoted in Joline, Rambles in Autograph Land, 14. 58 Joline, Rambles in Autograph Land, 22. 59 Serious autograph collecting is thus clearly limited not only by gender but also by class: the best and most dignified prizes are the fine and expensive specimens available for purchase or trade with other similar-caliber collectors.

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present. “I don’t know whether any Roman ever cornered Julius Caesar on the Appian

Way, thrust a reed pen into his hand, and demanded his signature on a scrap of papyrus,

but I do know that the great Roman orator Cicero prized a handwritten letter of Caesar’s

in his personal collection,” wrote Charles Hamilton, the “World’s Foremost Authority”

on autograph collecting.60 Autographs weren’t solicited, they were hunted or they “just

appeared.”

Autographs have always occupied a complicated status between action and

thing—between deeds and breath. The transformation of autographs from actions into

things provided antiquarian collectors with a way of neutralizing, redirecting, and

ultimately masculinizing the ontological status of a collected signature. A 1911 cartoon

from the American satire magazine Puck, entitled “Signing the Declaration of Their

Independence” (fig. 5.9), makes a fitting final study on this point. Here, Trumbull’s

iconic scene is recreated with dowdy, unsmiling, masculine feminists in the place of

those honorable, history-making delegates to the Continental Congress. In John

Hancock’s seat, a Susan B. Anthony figure presides, preparing to authorize a statement

on suffrage.

60 Charles Hamilton, The Book of Autographs: An Introduction to the Joys and Techniques of Autograph Collecting by the World’s Foremost Authority (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 13.

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Figure 5.9. Samuel D. Ehrhart after John Trumbull, Signing the Declaration of Their Independence, 1911. Photoengraving, 25.2 ´ 35 cm (sheet), printed by J. Ottmann Lithographic, New York, NY. (Reprinted from Puck, June 28, 1911. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.31147/.)

Here the signatory event threatens to disrupt a patriarchal status quo, an unacceptable act

of revolt necessitating a retaliatory response: a representational shift from somber

nobility to cartoonish hideousness. The cartoon denies the reality with which many

anxious men like Joline had to contend on the eve of women’s long-awaited success in

securing representational voice in their democracies: by using signatures to bind together

the fabric of social space, women have in fact been extraordinarily good autograph

collectors as they struggled to articulate not some distant connection with a neutral past,

but to perform the urgent labor of representational coherence in the present.

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By 1916 the US women’s suffrage movement had to contend with the frustrating

fact that extensive petitioning—even pageants and marches—were not acting quickly or

forcefully enough to secure the women’s vote. “We can’t organize bigger and more

influential deputations. We can’t organize bigger processions,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s

daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch told the Congressional Union Committee for Women’s

Suffrage. “We can’t, women, do anything more in that line. We have got to take a new

departure.” 61 More radical tactics were needed: names had to be embodied in the form of

picketers—representatives—visible and unflappable, in constant vigil outside the White

House. Blatch insisted, “We have got to bring to the President, individually, day by day,

week in and week out, the idea that great numbers of women want to be free, will be free,

and want to know what he is going to do about it.”62

Picketing in Washington began a particularly violent but ultimately effective stage

in the fight for women’s suffrage. Picketers were verbally and physically assaulted by

swarming gangs of men and boys, and received virtually no protection from police, who

often joined in the harassment and only tended to intervene in order to arrest the

picketers. Women were jailed and held in abominable conditions. Under direction from

leaders such as Alice Paul, the jailed picketers claimed the status of political prisoners

and employed passive-resistance strategies in captivity. The refusal to comply with prison

orders resulted in tortures that included undressing by male wardens, violent forced

61 Harriot Stanton Blatch, quoted in Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 59. 62 Ibid.

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feedings, and cruel psychiatric treatments.63 Reports of the women’s brutal mistreatment

by authorities raised awareness and sympathy for their cause, and the escalation of protest

tactics, violence, and publicity eventually helped force the ratification of the Nineteenth

Amendment (stating that suffrage may not be abridged nor denied based on sex) on

August 18, 1920.

During the particularly tense years of 1917 through 1919, the registers of

Washington-area jails and workhouses swelled with the names of suffrage prisoners. But

sometimes the incarcerated women turned to their classic tools of needle and thread to

create their own records of collective captivity. A scrap of muslin fabric now in the

museum of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) bears the names of five women

imprisoned together late in the muggy summer of 1917 at the Occoquan Workhouse in

Lorton, Virginia (fig. 5.10). It is “signed” at the bottom by Natalie Gray, a twenty-two-

year-old suffragist who had answered Blatch’s call and traveled to DC all the way from

Colorado. Under most circumstances it would be unthinkable for a family in 1917 to

willfully send their young, single daughter so far from home and into such dangerous

circumstances. But Natalie’s mother, a leader in the Colorado branch of the NWP, had

done just that. The US was by now deeply embroiled in the global nightmare of the First

World War, but as this little shred of fabric quietly reminds us, another battle was raging

63 See Library of Congress, “Tactics and Techniques of the National Woman’s Party Suffrage Campaign,” Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 8–10, accessed February 20, 2017, https://www.loc.gov/collections/static/women-of-protest /images/tactics.pdf.

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on the domestic front. “I have no son to fight for democracy abroad,” she said, “and so I

send my daughter to fight for democracy at home.”64

Figure 5.10. Natalie N. Gray, Embroidery made while imprisoned at Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia for picketing for suffrage, 1917. Cotton muslin embroidered in stem stitch with blue cotton thread, 22.9 ´ 19 cm. (Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Textile Collection, National Woman’s Party at Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, Washington, DC, 1917.005.001.)

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64 Susan H. Gray, quoted in Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of the Woman’s Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 466.

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The medium of the quilt would emerge again later in the twentieth century, from a

community coalescing around a wave of catastrophic absence. In 1985 San Francisco’s

thriving gay population was decimated by the AIDS epidemic. The losses were

staggering, and the pain and tragedy of every inexplicable death were amplified by the

ambivalence or outright contempt of the straight majority. The shame that surviving

family members felt toward the ailing and dead, coupled with public hysteria over the

transmissibility of the disease, meant that thousands of people—mostly young men—

were denied formal burials or remembrance in death. The suffering living and dying were

stalked by silence and isolation. Of course, the antidote for pathological anonymity is the

act of naming.

At a November 1985 vigil commemorating the seventh anniversary of the double

assassination of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and openly gay city supervisor

Harvey Milk, vigil organizer and gay rights activist Cleve Jones made a last-minute

addition to the program. Jones dispensed poster board and markers to attendees, inviting

them to make legible the names of loved ones lost to AIDS. Arriving at the old federal

building in downtown San Francisco, marchers surged upon the structure and plastered

the name signs to its side (fig. 5.11). Jones later reflected:

There was a deep yearning not only to find a way to grieve individually and together but also to find a voice that could be heard beyond our community, beyond our town. Standing in the drizzle, watching as the posters absorbed the rain and fluttered down to the pavement, I said to myself, It looks like a quilt. As I said the word quilt, I was flooded with memories of home and family and the warmth of a quilt when it was cold on a winter night.

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And as I scanned the patchwork . . . I could see quite clearly the National Mall, and the dome of Congress and a quilt spread out before it—a vision of incredible clarity.65

Figure 5.11. Rink Foto, Birth of the Quilt, 1985. Archival inkjet print 2009, 50.8 ´ 40.6 cm. (Courtesy of Rink Foto and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, NY, https://www.leslielohman.org/exhibitions /2009/the-making-of-a-queer-mecca.html.)

Jones and other activists began working on the quilt in earnest in 1987, calling

their endeavor the Names Project. Quilt blocks would be assembled out of discrete name

panels, each measuring three feet by six feet—the standard size of a human grave. Using

ink, paint, fabric, and thread, each panel fills that empty space of loss and erasure with a 65 Cleve Jones with Jeff Dawson, Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000), 107.

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vibrant memorial to an individual person. What began as a single block comprising eight

individual name panels in San Francisco grew to almost two thousand panels by that fall,

when Jones saw his vision fulfilled and the quilt laid out on the National Mall for public

viewing, mourning, and mobilization (fig. 5.12).

Figure 5.12. The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall in Washington, DC, October 1996. (Courtesy of Janet C. Berlo.)

Half a million visitors came to see the quilt in that one weekend before it launched on a

twenty-city tour around the country, garnering more panel contributions at every stop.

Within a decade, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt had become the world’s

largest community-art project and act of collective representation. As of this writing, it

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contains panels commemorating some forty-eight thousand individuals who have died

from AIDS. In both the process and the form of its accrual, the quilt has drawn the dead

and living together with a representational totality whose materiality is as soft as it is

strong.

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Conclusion

The Cultural Logic of Imperfect Symbols

The evening of November 8, 2016—Election Day—was a cold and rainy one in

Rochester, New York. By five in the evening, the sky had darkened, and freezing drizzle

slickened the roads. Still, they kept coming. Between 6:00 am and 9:00 pm—polling

hours in New York State—an uncharacteristic crush of vehicles clogged Mount Hope

Avenue, conveying a steady stream of pilgrims to the city’s historic Mount Hope

Cemetery. Each of the thousands of visitors was eager to participate in a new local ritual:

paying post-voting homage at the gravesite of women’s suffrage activist Susan B.

Anthony (1820–1906). Some waited in line for more than an hour to stand before the

modest little Quaker gravestone (fig. C.1) and make their individual contributions to a

growing project of collective representation: affixing their I voted today! stickers to

Anthony’s headstone. By midday, the stone was already encrusted, layers deep with

stickers (fig. C.2).

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Figure C.1. People line up to visit the grave of women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony on US election day at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, November 8, 2016. (Courtesy of Adam Fenster/Reuters.)

Figure C.2. The grave of women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony is covered with “I Voted” stickers left by voters in the US presidential election, at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, November 8, 2016. (Courtesy of Adam Fenster/ Reuters.)

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Anthony had been dead for more than a century, and it was almost one hundred

years since the women of New York had gained the vote. But in all that time and on no

other election day had anything quite like ever happened in Rochester. What was

different this time? Almost all of the people arriving at Susan B. Anthony’s grave had

come there after casting their votes for Hillary Rodham Clinton, former New York

senator, former secretary of state, and now the first female candidate to be nominated by

a major party for the nation’s highest office: the presidency. Early in the day, someone

had literalized the connection between the two women by affixing a sign to the headstone

that featured side-by-side portraits of Anthony and Clinton, with the title Madam

President over Clinton’s visage (fig. C.3).

Emotions ran high in this heady mix of nostalgia and anticipation. “I’m voting for

the first woman president,” one local woman (who admitted this was her first time at

Anthony’s grave) told a reporter. “As a woman, I can vote because of the sacrifices she

made.”1 “I’ve never cried when I filled out my ballot before,” said another. “But I

realized my daughters . . . have the right to vote for a woman. It made me cry.”2 The

direct lineage between Anthony and Clinton and their respective struggles seemed as

clear and obvious as Clinton’s presumptive victory. Yet the startling and dramatic failure

of that second assumption should prompt a careful reevaluation of this symbolic site of

collective representation.

1 Steve Orr, “Susan B. Anthony Grave Draws Huge Crowds Tuesday,” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), November 8, 2016, http://www.democratandchronicle.com /story/news/2016/11/08/hundreds-flock-to-susan-b-anthonys-grave/93431564/. 2 Ibid.

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Figure C.3. Sign depicting “Madam President Hillary Rodham Clinton” and Susan B. Anthony at Anthony’s gravesite on November 8, 2016. (Original uncropped photo courtesy of Max Schulte/Democrat and Chronicle.)

On the morning of November 9, the US public woke up in a world where the

unthinkable had happened: Hillary Clinton narrowly lost the presidency to Donald J.

Trump. Throughout the nation, the same question coursed through millions of stupefied

minds: “What happened?” The complete answer will take historians decades to fully

understand—if ever. There was no question that Trump had engaged in the most

simplistic and venal campaign rhetoric in modern presidential election history. His

absolute dearth of either experience or platform, combined with consistent appeals to

base racist, nationalist, and sexist attitudes, made it abundantly clear that this was a

contest between a qualified female candidate and an incompetent rogue bully.

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But American Democrats had grievously miscalculated the latter’s appeal. The

result of the election had seemed assured when in fact it was not. The perceptions of

unity—and its exercises in collective representation—were actually beset by some kind

of critical absence. But who or what was to blame? While not baseless, the belief that

misogyny alone had damned Clinton seems dubious at best, in a time and place where

women voters constituted an automatic majority. The triumphalist line so many traced

between Anthony and Clinton might actually have been part of the problem. Perhaps

idealistic love for and investment in fraught symbols got in the way of perceiving

infinitely more complex realities, both in the present and the past.

_______________

The historical touchstones that the Mount Hope pilgrims of 2016 were likely

rehearsing in the Anthony hagiography concentrate on events in November 1872. On

November 1 of that year, Susan B. Anthony succeeded in leveraging the Fourteenth

Amendment to pressure the local voting office into letting her register to vote. On

November 5, Election Day, she famously flouted the law by casting her vote, and on

November 18 she was arrested at her home in Rochester.3 Released on bail, in January

3 Passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868, section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1). For more on Anthony’s vote and the “New Departure”—the legal argument that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteed suffrage, regardless of gender—see Ida Husted

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1873 she was convicted by a jury for voting illegally and fined one hundred dollars,

which she famously refused to pay. Not until the ratification of the Nineteenth

Amendment in 1920 would women in all states gain the vote—an astonishing half-

century after these events in Rochester and fourteen years after Anthony’s death. But her

simple and stoic individual act of civil disobedience lends itself beautifully to apocryphal

canonization. It is the kind of story that concentrates the efforts and agitations of many

into the cipher of a single person, thereby appealing to our highest ideals of individual

courage, nobility, and agency. With each sticker transferred from sweater breast to

marble, the brave acts of breaking barriers, blazing trails, and standing up for good in the

face of evil were all emotionally, visually, and symbolically commuted between Clinton

and Anthony, present and the past.

But as this dissertation has argued throughout, our collective representations are at

best imperfect symbols; for better or worse they perpetuate their dubious authority

through ongoing affirmation from personal experience.4 This is how they perform their

useful but problematic labor of social coherence. In this final fable of representation,

there is a crucial historical fact that many election-day visitors to Anthony’s grave were

either unaware of or simply chose to look past: when Susan B. Anthony famously cast

Harper, “Republican Splinter—Miss Anthony Votes,” chap. 24 in The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony . . . , vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck, 1898); Joan Hoff, Law, Gender and Injustice: A Legal History of US Women, Feminist Crosscurrents (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 151–77; and Lisa Tetrault, “Movements without Memories: 1870–1873,” chap. 2 in The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 4 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 439.

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her vote in 1872, there was in fact a woman running for president. Not only did Anthony

not vote for her, she distanced herself from the candidate both personally and politically.

Moreover, Anthony ultimately excluded this first female candidate for president from the

monumental multivolume History of Woman Suffrage that she undertook with lifelong

collaborator and cofounder of the National Woman Suffrage Association Elizabeth Cady

Stanton.5 Why would self-described women’s rights activists find themselves divided

over a prospective woman president in 1872? As it turns out, for reasons astonishingly

similar to those that divided feminists in 2016. I believe that any complete explanation of

why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election must necessarily include a deep and

honest confrontation of this question—one that is ultimately a question of representation.

_______________

There is no shortage of scholarship on Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), the first

woman to run for the US presidency.6 Yet compared to Susan B. Anthony’s, Woodhull’s

star is but a dim dot in the popular constellation of women’s history. This is a shame but, 5 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. (Vols. 1–2, New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881–1882; vols. 3–4, Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony, 1886–1902; vols. 5–6, New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922). Victoria Woodhull is mentioned a few times in the early volumes but without fanfare and only in the context of her suffrage work prior to her presidential campaign. 6 Recent book-length studies include: Mary Gabriel, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored (New York: Books of Chapel Hill, 1998); Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999); Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age (New York: Twelve, 2014).

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I strongly suspect, not an accident. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s sage observation

that “well-behaved women seldom make history,” has by now achieved ubiquity as

feminist bumper-sticker gospel. But its widespread repetition poses a danger by

suggesting some shared essential character in all significant women’s misbehavior. It also

sidesteps the fact that women themselves can be the harshest and most powerful

determiners of what constitutes good or bad female conduct. In Woodhull’s case, we

would be forced to adapt the adage to something less punchy, such as “well-behaved

women sometimes get written out of history by other women.” But these lacunae too are

part of women’s history.

In 1870 Victoria Woodhull—rags-to-riches stockbroker, writer, lecturer,

newspaper publisher, spiritualist, and outspoken critic of marriage, capitalism, and the

church—announced her campaign for the presidency. The thirty-two-year-old self-

proclaimed “future presidentess” was technically ineligible for office because of her age,

but her sex and status as a scandalous public celebrity and political outsider were the sites

of her ideological, social, and political struggles. For Woodhull, truly the personal was

political. A passionate proponent of what she called “social freedom,” she was an

unapologetic divorcée and conductor of open love affairs who invited public scorn. “Yes,

I am a Free Lover,” she declared to audiences in New York and Boston. “I have an

inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as

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short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right

neither you nor any law you can frame have [sic] any right to interfere.”7

In Woodhull’s expansive and very modern configuration, female emancipation far

exceeded obtaining the vote. To her mind, this issue was but one way in which women

were systematically denied full participation in society, as well as self-determination and

personal fulfillment. Having already attempted to vote in New York City in 1871, she

saw own her bid for presidency as an important practical and symbolic next step in the

advancement of women’s rights. Breaking with mainstream suffrage allegiance to the

Republicans, she formed a new party called the Equal Rights Party and published her

1870 candidacy announcement in the New York Herald, proclaiming:

While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of woman with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women should be treated, socially and politically, as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics and exercised the rights I already possessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised women of the country.8

Woodhull was a powerful, wealthy, self-made woman. In 1870 she began publishing a

weekly newspaper with her sister (and stock brokerage partner) Tennessee Claflin.

Whereas Anthony and Stanton’s paper, The Revolution, calmly demanded “Men, Their

Rights and Nothing More: Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less” (fig. C.4), the

7 Victoria Woodhull, A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom . . . (New York: Woodhull, Claflin, 1872), 23. 8 Victoria Woodhull, “First Pronunciamento,” in The Origin, Tendencies and Principles of Government . . . (New York: Woodhull, Claflin, 1871), 19.

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masthead of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly emphatically heralded “Progress! Free

Thought! Untrammeled Lives! Breaking the Way for Future Generations” (fig. C.5).9

Figure C.4. The masthead of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s newspaper, The Revolution, included the text, “Principle, Not Policy: Justice, Not Favors.—Men, Their Rights and Nothing More: Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less.” (Reprinted from The Revolution, February 5, 1868, 1.)

Figure C.5. The masthead of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, included the text, “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives! Breaking the Way for Future Generations.” (Reprinted from Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, November 2, 1872, 1.)

Their weekly—comprising a strange mix of business news, celebrity gossip, and

Woodhull’s political writings on political economy, feminism, and religion—enjoyed

considerable subscription. Scandalized advertisers often dropped their support, but 9 Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly holds the distinction of being first American publication to print an English translation of The Communist Manifesto, which appeared in the December 30, 1871 issue. (This English translation, executed by Helen Macfarlane, had originally appeared in a British socialist newspaper, The Red Republican, in 1850.) [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels], “German Communism—Manifesto of the German Communist Party,” [trans. Helen Macfarlane], Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, December 30, 1871, 3–6.

Restricted image

Restricted image

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adoring readers wrote in regularly to express their support for the editors’ unorthodox and

outspoken views. A passionate advocate of socialism, labor reform, free love, and

religious freedom, Woodhull was a loud troublemaker—a troublemaker of a very

different sort than the celibate, disciplined, buttoned-up Susan B. Anthony.

While Anthony was famously casting her ballot in Rochester on November 5,

1872, Victoria Woodhull was sitting in the Ludlow Street Jail in New York City. She had

been arrested on obscenity charges three days prior, at the request of none other than

prominent reverend and suffrage advocate (and friend of Susan B. Anthony) Henry Ward

Beecher.10 Beecher had publically condemned Woodhull’s espousal of the “free-love”

doctrine, but as so often proves to be the case with righteous public figures, he cast his

stones from a glass house. When Woodhull learned that Beecher had been carrying on an

extramarital affair with the wife of his close friend and former pupil, Theodore Tilton,

she felt compelled to take action against “a society that said one thing and did another;

that rewarded sinners if they hid their crimes and punished those who owned up to them;

that publically condemned the words ‘free love’ but privately condoned the act.”11 The

November 2 issue of her Weekly ran a lengthy exposé of the affair that opened with

Woodhull expressing her hope “that this article shall burst like a bomb-shell into the

ranks of the moralistic social camp”—a camp that included Anthony.12

10 Woodhull’s arrest and a timeline of the case are discussed in Gabriel, Notorious Victoria, 183–213. 11 Gabriel, Notorious Victoria, 117. 12 Victoria Woodhull, “The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case: The Detailed Statement of the Whole Matter by Mrs. Woodhull,” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, November 2, 1872, 9. Soon thereafter, Woodhull began an open love affair with Theodore Tilton, a development that increased public shock at the scandal.

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The fallout from the Beecher-Tilton affair was sensational and long-lasting, and it

exacerbated extant personal and political rifts within the woman’s suffrage movement.

Anthony was careful not to publically condemn Woodhull’s personal choices, but neither

did she lend support. Her position seems to have been one of silent distancing. When

asked her opinion of Woodhull in a June 1872 interview, she said, “Of this woman’s

social and financial theories I have nothing to say. She has done the woman’s movement

some service in the past by obtaining for its advocates a hearing before a Congressional

committee. This service I gratefully acknowledge.”13 However when the interviewer

asked about Woodhull’s formation of a new political party, Anthony responded with a

condescending charge of treason: “I regret very much that Mrs. Woodhull should have

gone off to a party of discontented men, who, being devoid of money, reputation or social

position, seek to vent their spleen and disappointment through her. But against Mrs.

Woodhull personally I have nothing to say.”14

In early January 1873, as Anthony and Woodhull were both embattled in legal

cases—voting and obscenity, respectively—Woodhull wrote to Anthony with an overture

of unification: “There is no time, now, to indulge in personal enmity. I have none toward

anybody; and I ask everybody to put aside whatever there may be against me, and permit

as great unity as is possible, until the contest in which we are as one devotedly engaged,

13 Susan B. Anthony, interview by Anne E. McDowell, ca. 11 June 1872, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Ann D. Gordon, vol. 2, Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 510. 14 Ibid.

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is won.”15 She went on to offer Anthony assistance interpreting the legal aspects of the

voting case, urging that they were both victims in a sympathetic struggle: “I fear they

intend to crush out, in your person, the Constitutional Question of Woman’s right to

suffrage, as they are attempting, in my person, to establish a precedent for the

suppression of recalcitrant journals— . . . Your case is my own, and that of every other

woman’s who thinks . . . that citizenship, means suffrage.”16 Anthony did not appear

moved.17 A month later, at a women’s suffrage meeting in Toledo, Ohio, Anthony

engaged in a somewhat veiled criticism of Woodhull. She recalled that, “Mr Bassett

spoke of the Woodhull arrest & its injustice—& there was great fluttering— When I was

through with my argument—I just wheeled into the work of telling them my mind—that

W. was the first woman man had succeeded in fashioning to his own ideal—so that she

theoretically accepted man’s practical theory of promiscuity and change.”18

15 Victoria Woodhull to Susan B. Anthony, 2 January 1873, in Gordon, Selected Letters, 2:549. 16 Ibid., 2:549–50. 17 In her diary she simply noted without comment, “Letter from V. C. Woodhull offering her legal aid in my W.S. prosecution.” Susan B. Anthony, diary, 4 January 1873, in Gordon, Selected Papers, 2:550. 18 Susan B. Anthony, diary, 19 February 1873, in Gordon, Selected Papers, 2:593–94. Interestingly, Anthony’s remarks seem to have been misunderstood by at least one observer—an interpretation that Woodhull and Claflin actively promoted. According to a letter reprinted in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly: “I dropped in to the Woman Suffrage Convention, at the Opera House, and just in time to hear a candid defense of Mrs. Woodhull by Miss Anthony. Previous to my entrance Mr. E. P. Bassett . . . had been invited to speak, and in his remarks referred to the persecution of Mrs. W., a commenced reading from her paper. . . . The President of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association, Mrs. Longley, called him to order! and the audience applauded the interim of silence. Miss Anthony followed, and, after a long discourse, remarked, ‘Now I want to say one word.’ And she said it, ringing truths and facts in the defense of a persecuted sister that turned the tide of applause. Bravely she did it, but she might have said more! Still it was a victory for the leading woman of this century—Mrs. Woodhull.” John A. Lant, “Extract

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In the eyes of the mainstream women’s rights movement, Victoria Woodhull

misbehaved in the wrong kinds of ways. She was perceived as an outlier and ultimately a

liability. Whereas Anthony’s imprisonment and legal case resulted in her canonization,

Woodhull’s led to her financial ruin. Her newspaper and other business enterprises

collapsed under the legal costs of her role in the Beecher-Tilton scandal. Bankrupt and

ostracized, she departed the United States for England in 1876, where she remained until

her death in 1927. Victoria Woodhull was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea.

And so, we arrive at the curious phenomenon in Rochester, New York, in 2016,

whereby sojourners desiring to honor she whom they took to be the first US woman to

run for president ended up paying homage to a woman who had firmly rejected the actual

first woman presidential candidate. The point of this story is emphatically not to suggest

a simple swap of icons, Woodhull for Anthony. Not only was Woodhull a deeply flawed

and problematic persona, that simplistic move would controvert the real purpose of this

historical fable: to question a presumption of unity in the present based on a dubious

perception of unity in the past.

The mere fact of Hillary Clinton’s womanhood was more profound for some

women in 2016 than for others. During the heated and acrimonious primary season, as

Clinton squared off against Vermont senator and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders,

numerous feminists felt trapped between conflicting representational needs. Did it make

more sense to support the disciplined, experienced, woman candidate whose positions,

platforms, and attitudes were more conservative, or the male candidate whose idealism Private Letter to a Friend from Editor Toledo Sun,” 19 February 1873, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, March 22, 1873, 4.

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and charisma awakened ambitious hopes for expanding justice and freedom for all—

including women? If this seemed a wholly unprecedented crisis, we need only return to

the election of 1872. An excerpt from Victoria Woodhull’s presidential platform is so

uncannily relevant it bears quoting at length:

A great national question is wanted, to prevent a descent into pure sectionalism. That question exists in the issue, whether woman shall . . . be elevated to all the political rights enjoyed by man. . . . But besides the question of equality others of great magnitude are necessarily included. The platform that is to succeed in the coming election must enunciate the general principles of enlightened justice and economy.

A complete reform in our system of prison discipline, having specially in view the welfare of the families of criminals, whose labor should not be lost to them; the rearrangement of the system and control of internal improvements; the adoption of some better means for caring for the helpless and indigent; the establishment of strictly mutual and reciprocal relations with all foreign Powers who will unite to better the condition of the productive class, and the adoption of such principles as shall recognize this class as the true wealth of the country, and give it a just position beside capital, thus introducing a practical plan for universal government upon the most enlightened basis, for the actual, not the imaginary benefit of humankind.

These important changes can only be expected to follow a complete departure from the beaten tracks of political parties and their machinery; and this, I believe my canvass of 1872 will effect.19

In 2016 many American women, and their male allies, felt a similarly desperate yearning

for this “complete reform” and “complete departure.” The scorn and accusations of

feminist betrayal they encountered during the primary, for not holding the “correct”

feminist position on women’s rights, resemble Anthony’s judgment of Woodhull almost

to the letter. It is thus perhaps fitting that so many women gathered at Anthony’s grave

this past election day. Unknowingly or not, they were (re)enacting a ritual of collective

representation that elided as much as it iterated.

19 Woodhull, “First Pronunciamento,” 20–21.

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The most obvious lesson to be gleaned from this scene is the powerful rejoinder

that women deserve a richer and more complex pantheon of representation, one that can

accommodate diversity, conflict, and nuance. But we need more than just expanded

offerings of representatives. As political theorist Hanna Pitkin mused in her effort to

define political representation, the answer rarely lies in more examples. Rather, “what is

necessary is to interpret each view by identifying its angle of vision, . . . by

identifying the context for which it is correct and exploring the assumptions and

implications imposed by that context. This process discloses the meaning of

representation as no single definition can.”20 This work is messy, difficult, and ongoing.

It requires us to always look at our collective representations in two ways at once: seizing

upon what we can see while also searching for what is not there. In this way, we are sure

to find much inspiration and also much ugliness. In the United States of America, this

heterotopia is—for worse or better—both our inevitable inheritance and truest mirror.

20 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 11.

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