The King of Prussia’s Cupbearer

A talk at the 2010 American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts

Robert P. Forbes

Mark Twain—or was it Walter Mondale?--once said, “What gets us into trouble is

not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.” There are many

things we “know for sure” about Venture Smith that may not be so.

A great deal of what we think we know about Venture could be characterized as

midrash—interpretations and explications that go beyond the letter of the text. The two

texts we have of Venture are the Narrative and the epitaph on the headstone, although

neither of these is unproblematic as to authorship. Probably the most important midrash to

these writings is H. M. Selden’s “Traditions of Venture,” printed as an appendix to his 1896

edition of the Narrative.

To be sure, Henry Selden’s “traditions” contain some valuable information: they

convey the impact Venture made in his Haddam community. But the “Traditions” fall so

firmly into the genre of fables and “tall tales” genre of fables and “tall tales” as to make

them virtually unusable as historical sources.

In its recounting of a wealth of examples of Venture’s prodigious size, superhuman

strength, and [clichéd] self-debasing expressions—“Nigger never know nothing”--Selden’s

“traditions” arced from the track of oral history into the rut of fable and racial stereotype.

Composed very near the high water mark of racial essentialism, it is perhaps inevitable that

Selden’s account would reduce the iron-willed, self-possessed, keenly practical and

mordantly witty figure of the Narrative to a cartoonish black giant, a black Paul Bunyan,

right down to the ox.

Understanding the context of Selden’s compilation is useful to evaluating its

accuracy. We should note that it is the only source for the “tradition” that the revolutionary

war veteran Elisha Niles transcribed Venture’s narrative. Although the Preface describes

Venture as “untutored,” we should not assume that he was illiterate, which is nowhere

stated either in the Narrative or in the Traditions. Nor should we take at face value

Venture’s own assertion of his “ignorance of numbers”—a statement the Narrative

frequently refutes. I propose that we abandon the image of Venture imprinted by Selden’s

anecdotes and the Preface, focusing instead on the phraseology of the Narrative itself. If

we pay close attention to the language of the text, exploring the possible sources of words

or phrases, we may be able to view a world beyond the text—and to catch a glimpse of that

world through Venture’s eyes.

Venture’s idioms can point us in the direction of possible models of language.

Expressions have their own histories, and through the creation of extraordinary databases

of published material and search technologies (Ebsco Host and other proprietary

databases, Google Books, Google Ngram Viewer,etc.), it is possible to obtain important

insights into the linguistic world of the Narrative. If you have looked at the AHA website in

the last few days, you will see that a new session on the development and use of Google

Books analysis, which its inventors call “culturnomics,” has just been added to the

conference schedule, and it promises to be a very popular one.

My approach here is necessarily preliminary, and intended to be suggestive rather

than definitive. I am by no means a specialist in literary analysis, and the early exploration

of “culturnomics” in Science Magazine has been described by a Berkeley linguist as “almost

embarrassingly crude.”1 It's a good thing I'm delivering this paper at the AHA and not the

MLA. But since we are all fellow historians, you will I trust excuse my lack of analytical

sophistication.

I have discussed in other venues the significant Biblical themes, phrases, and

typologies that can be found throughout the Narrative.

This morning, however, I propose to begin with the language of the Narrative and follow it

where it leads. I can illustrate the method that I have been pursuing by beginning at the

beginning: with the first paragraph of the Narrative. (Slide 1.) Here is the text of the second

and last sentences:

My father's name was Saungm Furro, Prince of the tribe of Dukandarra… I descended from a very

large, tall and stout race of beings, much larger than the generality of people in other parts of the

globe, being commonly considerable above six feet in height, and every way well proportioned.

This passage contains a set of distinctive locutions whose roots can be investigated.

Venture's description of his father as "Prince of the tribe of Dukandarra" has powerful

biblical overtones: the phrase "Prince of the tribe of..." appears in 171 books between 1700

and 1798, in virtually every case referring to the Hebrew tribes of Judah, Dan, Ephraim, etc.

Thus “Ngram” (slide 2) charts the phrase’s occurrence during this period. (The blue line,

incidentally, shows occurrences where the words are capitalized.) This next slide (slide 3)

shows the occurrence of the term in American English, i.e. publications over here; as you

will see, the usage peaks in the publication year of the Narrative.

1 John Bohannon,“Google Opens Books to New Cultural Studies,” Science, 330 (17 December 2010), 1600.

Venture describes himself as coming from “a very large, tall and stout race of beings,

much larger than the generality of people in other parts of the globe, being commonly

considerable above six feet in height, and every way well proportioned.” The expression,

“race of beings” (Figure 2) does not appear in any volume in Google’s database before

1707, in the 1699 Sermon of William Dawes, “The Certainty of Hell-Torments, from

Principles of Nature and Reason.” It appears in William Derham’s Physico-Theology of 1716

and Addison and Steele’s Spectator in 1726. The phrase takes off, as you can see, in the

early 1760’s, with uses by Lord Kames, Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, Lord Chesterfield,

and Thomas Hutchinson. There is a brief decline in the use of the phrase until 1776, when

Gibbon publishes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which makes the expression

quite frequent. It peaks, for all time, in about 1795. I want to draw your attention to one

particular appearance, in the Hibernian Magazine, or Compendium of Entertaining

Knowledge, published in 1783, where the phrase appears twice in a delightful essay called

“Account of the Origin and Progress of Fictitious History,” which discusses fairies, and

describes them as “a race of beings favorable to man.” I’d like you to keep the Hibernian

Magazine in mind, because we’ll see it again.

Venture describes the “race of beings” from which he comes as “much larger than

the generality of people in other parts of the globe.” The phrase “generality of people”

charts a graph quite similar to “race of beings.” It first appears in 1649, in a Puritan tract,

and takes off around 1745. It has a peak of popularity in the mid-1790s, again, within five

years of when Venture is composing his Narrative.

Finally, let’s look at the last phrase of the paragraph: “every way well proportioned.”

Venture uses this identical locution three times—here, to describe his people; once more to

describe his father, and a third time to describe himself in his prime. The phrase “every

way well proportioned” appears in only four volumes between 1700 and 1800 in the

Google Books dataset: in the identical entries on the great legal scholar Sir Edward Coke in

the Biographica Britannica of 1748 and the Bibliotecha Biographica of 1760; in the profile

of the Duke of Albermarle in volume 46 of the Universal Magazine, published in 1770, and

in the following notice in the London Chronicle of 1759: “A Polish Lady is impatiently

expected at Paris, who is bringing with her a Polish Gentleman, who is two-and-twenty

years old, and but sixteen inches high. He is every way well proportioned, and his

understanding well cultivated.…”2 (This was Count Josef Boruwlaski, who wrote an

autobiography; he was actually a lot taller than 16 inches.) This item also appears in the

Boston Evening Post of March 3, 1760. The phrase reappears in 14 other newspaper

articles between 1788 and 1798—all of them advertisements for horses. (Slide 8).

Venture recounts the news that invaders are coming to attack his father’s

allies. “Two days after their retreat, the report turned out to be but too true.” [Slide 9]

This locution turns out to be a relatively recent coinage. Google Books has no

examples before 1600, and only 24 in the entire 17th century. The frequency bounces

around for a few decades from the 1650s to the 1720s, then takes off, with examples in

Addison, Daniel Defoe, and the plays of Fletcher and Beaumont. Around 1760, it appears in

our friend the Universal History, vol. 29. In the 1770s and ‘80s it is picked up by the

Reviews: Town and Country Magazine, the Edinburgh Magazine, the Novelist’s Magazine,

and the Hibernian.

2

[Slide 10] In American publications, as you can see in this graph, the locution “but

too true” has almost no examples until about 1783 and peaks around 1794, four years

before Venture publishes the Narrative. Unfortunately, Google does not permit searches by

city or country, so we can’t see what works it appears in. But it would be a mistake to think

that southeastern New England merchants and farmers would only have access to

American publications; as we learn from Bernard Bailyn’s work on the ideological origins

of the American Revolution and Richard D. Brown’s study of communication in early

America, British newspapers and periodicals were in demand, and in circulation,

throughout the colonies, particularly among the well-to-do such as Venture’s owners and

their associates.

One of the most unusual words in the narrative is “cup-bearer.” This was actually

the first term that I began to research last year, in the old days before “culturenomics” was

invented. I found only 91 examples of “cup-bearer,” as a hyphenated word, in the Evans

Periodical Series of American publications before 1800. Almost all of these either refer to

the Biblical figures of Pharaoh’s cupbearer in Genesis or to Nehemiah, cup-bearer to

Artaxerxes. The one exception is in Whitefield’s Almanack, published in Newport in 1760,

in a chatty New-Yorker-style profile of the King of Prussia. [Slide 11] That would have

been the year that Venture spent with Daniel Edwards of Hartford, the owner of whom

Venture speaks most positively. Richard L. Venesky emphasizes the importance of

cheap, practical texts such as almanacs had in promoting literacy, even though such

ephemeral documents rarely appeared in probate inventories. One feature of Whitfield’s

Almanack might have been of particular value to Venture, who discusses earning interest

on his note with Oliver Smith: a table of interest [Slide 12].

I just want to look at a couple more “culturenomical” examples.

“pinioned and haltered”: 6 examples between 1700 and 1800. These six are really

three; one is cited three times, one twice, and another once.

One example of “pinion and halter” appears in James Boswell’s Scots Magazine of 1746, in

an account of the executions of the rebels of the 1745 Jacobite uprising.

Two of the examples come from different volumes of An Universal History, from the Earliest

Account of Time: One, from Volume 41, “The Modern Part,” published in 1784, described

the arrest and detention of a Scottish rogue in the court of King James III. The identical

account appeared in William Guthrie’s A General History of Scotland of 1767 and the third

edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1797. The other, from Volume 8, “The Ancient

Part,” published in 1747, related the torture and execution of Bessus, the self-proclaimed

king of Persia. I’d like to read the description of the killing of Bessus: [Slide 3] “But no

sooner did Bessus rise, and approach them, than the pretended guards seized him, pinioned him,

took his crown from his head, and tore his robes….Spitamenes afterwards led him, with an halter

about his neck, into the presence of Alexander, who delivered him to Oxathres, Darius's brother,

with directions to have him crucified, after having his nose and ears cut off, and then shot to

death with arrows, which Oxathres accordingly undertook to do….3

3 An universal history: The ancient part, Volume 8, p. 577.

We can also use Ngram, Google Books, and the proprietary eighteenth century databases to determine that certain noteable phrases in the Narrative appear to be entirely original to Venture, such as " interval country," p. 6 "big with authority" p. 15 "upstart master" p. 15 “at odd spells" p. 18 These are beautiful and apt expressions, and help to underscore what a remarkable authorial voice Venture commands.

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We have so far restricted our examination to the text of the Narrative itself, in keeping with the

principle that we began with: to stick to the letter of the text. However, if we apply the Google

method to the Preface, we find some interesting discoveries.

The Preface stresses the complete want of education of the

"Sages and Patriots"

Reasonably it is said to be expected, says a correspondent--that the deliberations of the sages and

patriots, who are to meet in Convention in Philadelphia, next month, will be attended with much

good--An union of the abilities of so distinguished a body of men, among whom will be a

FRANKLIN and a WASHINGTON, cannot but produce the most salutary measures.--these last

names affixed to their recommendations (and it is to be hoped that this will be the case) will

stamp the confidence in them, which the narrow-soul’d, anti-federal politicians in the several

States, who, by their influence, have hitherto damn’d us as a nation, will not dare to attack, or

endeavour to nullify.

--Massachusetts Centinel, 14 April 1787.

By 2 June this paragraph was reprinted 13 times: three times each in New Hampshire,

Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and once each in Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and

New York.

Conclusions: The language of the Narrative is the language of a well-educated, well-informed,

up-to-date resident of British America. It is elegant, direct, idiomatic, and original. It is not

overly influenced by the Bible or by religious writing, but rather by the literature of the Quarterly

Reviews and other “approved” and “useful” publications. Based on the frequency of appearance

of certain phrases, one could hazard the speculation that the author had access to at least several

issues of the Hibernean Magazine and the two volumes of the Universal History. Internal

evidence, such as the passage “It may here be remembered, that I related a few pages back” (p.

21), strongly suggest at least that the author proofread a manuscript copy of the Narrative during

its composition, or otherwise that it was drafted by the author personally. In either case, it seems

that the concept of a “black message in a white envelope” is entirely inapplicable and

inappropriate in the case of Venture’s Narrative; he wears his society’s literary culture with as

much confidence, elegance, and ease as any of his European-American neighbors. Rather than a

“black message in a white envelope,” we have been looking at a purloined letter: an

accomplished literary masterwork has been before our eyes, unrecognized, all along.

“Prince of the Tribe”/”prince of the tribe”1700-1800

“prince of the tribe” American imprints, 1775-1805

“race of beings” – p. 51700-1800

“generality of people”1700-1800

Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser, April 23, 1789

“but too true” – p. 9British English

“but too true” – p. 9American publications

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