CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Early U.S. History, Colonial U.S., Women’s History, Gender History, American Revolution, Sex History, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania History, Sex roles, Social Marginality, Race, Sex, Class.
PLACE: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
TIME PERIOD: 1730-1830
TAKEAWAY: Clare Lyons breaks the myth of a proper, Quaker early Philadelphia and argues that in the mid-eighteenth century, diverse women and men created a pleasure-seeking culture in which women could explore the ideas of Enlightenment autonomy. After the Revolution, this culture was replaced with the familiar, Victorian norm of proper, asexual women and ravenous, virile men. To demonstrate her argument, she examines self-divorce ads, birth rate, court records, and the popular press.
SUMMARY:
To come! This is a fantastic book and highly recommended book, so I want to spend some time with the summary.
CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Early U.S. History, Print Culture, 18th and 19th Century U.S. history, Publishing History, Press and Politics, Book Industries, Book Trade, and Reading, American Studies.
PLACE: United States
TIME PERIOD: 1770-1870, especially 1770-1800 and 1830-1850.
SUMMARY: Trish Loughran interrogates the much-loved belief that the identity of an Andersonian American “imagined community” was formed in the late-eighteenth century. Because print distribution was localized and fragmented rather than simultaneous and national, no national vision of America was shared in print or public space. This is contra most historians, including Breen. She argues that Paine’s “Common Sense” and “The Federalist Papers” were not actually widely circulated. Rather, locally printed and read materials were.
The Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution actually depended on this fragmented public sphere and print network. If one existed, Loughran posits, it would have better resisted a Federal state.
By the 1830s, when the national infrastructures came to be and print became nationally distributed, the nation fractured rather than rallying together in imagined community. Regionalism and local loyalties that were forced into public national discourse ignited the Civil War.
Loughran uses material culture studies to examine various cultural items as she traces the movement from the theory of a nation-state, the Constitution, to the actual institutions of nation-state. Using the campaigns of the national abolitionist organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s (AASS), she argues that mass distribution of print revealed how deeply region the young nation was, which acted to split the US apart.
CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Early U.S. History, Colonial U.S., Capitalism, American Revolution, 18th-century Economic History, Material Culture, Marketplace Revolution
PLACE: Early United States
TIME PERIOD: 1740-1774
TAKEAWAY: The consumer revolution of mid-17th century American formed a common cause amongst the diverse and geographically dispersed US colonists as they came together in a trusting “imagined community” (per Benedict Anderson) to revolt against the British Empire.
SUMMARY:
T.H. Breen extensively documents the material culture of the American colonies in the decades before the Revolution to argue that the new consumer marketplace created an imagined community of consumers who rebelled against the English. The unjust taxes that the Crown imposed, in the 1760s and 1770s, on the colonists’ new and beloved consumer goods cause rebellions that came to define them as political individuals. Rather than Bailyn’s ideological revolution, Breen offers a movement based on the marketplace, the common man and quotidian life. The book “explores how a very large number of ordinary Americans came to the striking conclusion that it was preferable to risk their lives and property against a powerful British armed force than to endure further political oppression.”
Breen answers this oft-explored question by arguing that it was through a new language of shared consumer experience. People of different classes and genders developed radical methods of resistance, particularly through the boycott. They would suffer together the deprivation of English manufactures, sacrificing for the common cause of revolution. Similar groups in different colonies found common ground and transformed politics and society through the popular press and collective imagination.
PART ONE: AN EMPIRE OF GOODS
The American colonies, by 1750, had become an “empire of goods.” From Georgia to Maine, “even the most humble” Americans bought similar consumer items which connected them in an imagined community. They discovered a shared experience in personal choice, which Breen believes did not exist before the marketplace revolution.
PART TWO: A COMMERCIAL PLAN OF POLITICAL SALVATION
Breen dismisses Christian virtue and republican virtue for liberal consumer virtue, or “bourgeois virtue.” “When ‘A Farmer’ praised the ‘honest man,’ he had in mind a person able to exercise self-restraint when tempted by a brilliant array of imported British goods” in the consumer marketplace. It was someone with honor and character who would deny himself “private pleasures” for the public good. Too much personal debt was a danger to the common good, and this concerned the virtuous man. This bourgeois virtue did not require one hold property (at least not much) or title—only that she or he could buy goods, something literally any free person could do.
This shared experience gave them the resources to develop resistance grounded in the marketplace—particularly the boycott. Breen argues that American colonists were the first to organize mass political boycotts, just visited in Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic. If we recall John K. Thornton, American Indians used trading boycotts against the English, and Jill Lepore discussed the abolitionist Quaker Benjamin Lay’s political refusal of slave-made goods in These Truths. However, Breen argues that private consumption was transformed into intentional public and communitarian acts of resistance after the Stamp and Townshend Acts. The latter taxed indirectly English commodities like tea, paper, lead, glass, and paint. The boycotts that followed allowed ordinary people a voice in politics never before experienced.
Those who consumed the boycotted goods were suspect, and people learned trust in their follow colonist near and far, sometimes disappointed, but always persevering. By the books close before the Revolution in 1774, this trust and community extended to shared liberties and rights of the common man. Thus, this was the first revolution “in recorded history to organize itself around the relation of ordinary people to manufactured consumer goods.” Breen believes that this resistance in the consumer marketplace was in fact a revolutionary politics of “pursuing happiness.” In Breen’s telling, stuff is the basis of American liberty, after all.
CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Early U.S. History, Women’s History, American Revolution, Political History, Intellectual History, American Ideology, Property, Education, Coverture, Republican Motherhood
PLACE: Early United States
TIME PERIOD: 1768 to 1810
TAKEAWAY: Middle- and upper-class white women participated actively in the Revolutionary War and found their rights curtailed by the Revolution, contra to the ideology of the war. In response, they developed the “Republican Mother,” an active patriot who encouraged patriotism in her husband and children, especially sons. This allowed them a limited political role for which they must be educated. Women could maintain their private lives while still playing a role in the civic virtue of the republic.
SUMMARY:
While the ideology of freedom and natural rights was central to the American Revolution, Kerber argues in this 1980 classic, that these rights were restricted to men, and that the Revolution was conservative for white women, who saw rights curtailed.
Kerber offers an interesting and quick overview of Enlightenment thinkers on women in chapter one, “EMPIRE OF COMPLACENCY”: The Inheritance of the Enlightenment.” Civic virtue and patriotism were masculine. Women’s qualities, particularly “Luxury, effeminacy, and vice”” were to be avoided. Effeminacy meant timidity, luxury, and self-indulgence, qualities that threatened America’s new liberty.
During the war, however, women had participated fully as makers of American-spun clothing and blankets, boycotters of tea, grapes, and lettuce, political petitioners, policers of hoarding local merchants, home economists, cooks and carers of troops, nurses, and landlords of boarding houses who took in troops and prisoners. Their contributions were little recognized and ended abruptly after the war. These experiences were new for women, and faced with new ideologies of freedom and autonomy, they began to question why their old positions in society had not changed with the new ideology.
During the war, dowers and coverture laws came into sharp focus when women were expected to declare their loyalty to the Revolution instead of following loyalist husbands into exile. Women had to choose between their property and their husbands. Many were horrified by this prospect, and even revolutionaries usually preferred wives remain loyal to their husbands over loyalty to the Revolution.
Coverture continued after the Revolution and, contrary to Mary Beard, equity laws did not make up for the problems of coverture. Equity “eroded slowly and erratically” in the first fifty years of the United States and women’s property legislation was not a trend until the 1850s. After the Revolution, women’s property rights became more complex and access to equity courts was less common, and divorce was difficult to obtain, especially for women. Because American virtue and political participation was based on land ownership, women were fundamentally excluded. Kerber calls women’s lack of political rights an “accidental remnant of feudalism.” Demands for women’s property rights soon shifted into a demand for women’s access to republicanism.
Women’s education was the most successful aspect of “Republican Motherhood.” Educated women had been suspect and mocked, but after the Revolution, women pushed for their own education in the name of educating their sons. Women’s intellectual capacities were not challenged. Instead, reformers argued that a politically independent nation required literate women uninterested in fashion. Though she had no agency in politics, she was responsible for it through her mothering.
Dependent on her husband for income and political representation, she learned in the “service” of her family rather than for her own edification or use. Women did not push against the confined role of women in the home. Instead, they lifted her role to that of virtuous and educated mother.
PLACE: Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, New York.
TIME PERIOD: 1675-1725.
SUMMARY:
James D. Rice’s short revisionist narrative of Bacon’s Rebellion and the following decades provides a new but familiar thesis—he is unable to support, particularly in such a short book. The synthesis history of the rebellion itself is an enjoyable read, as is the aim of the “New Narratives in American History” series from Oxford University Press, but the entire second part of the book concerns an argument about anti-Catholic conspiracy, which seems strange to a colony known for its irreligion. While Rice builds on Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, he omits pivotal facts from Morgan’s thesis to ultimately argue that were it not for those poor, racist white populists, Native Americans would be thriving in the United States today.
Rice explains in the Afterward that his narrative style precludes a traditional academic thesis, but has allowed him to write in a way that readers must think for themselves about events in order to discover the truth of his thesis, which he spells out at the end of the book. I recommend reading this at the beginning.
The Afterward begins with a valuable historiography that explains the various turns the narrative of Bacon’s Rebellion has taken, before a segue to the benefits and pitfalls of narrative history. Next he hits on a sub thesis, closely related to his main argument, which echoes loudly in 2022. Reliable information was hard to come by for 17th-century Virginians, who “made their choices in the absence of information, operating within what is often called the “fog of war—which, as the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described it, “gives to things exaggerated dimensions and an unnatural appearance.” The unreliable stories of Sarah Grendon, Thomas Mathew, and Nathaniel Bacon indicate that “gossip, rumor, misinformation, and contending stories,” the “wild, irrational tales, full of paranoia, supernatural forces, superheated rhetoric, and outright misinformation” ruled the day (209). It’s telling that Rice does not include Berkeley in his list of unreliable narrators, for, while he concedes that Berkeley was corrupt and had little concern for the frontiersmen whose lives buffered the wealthy planters from the Indians, he believes that Berkeley was in the right. The belief in the supernatural was (and arguably still is, outside of academia, in all social classes) commonplace in this era was well established by historians such as David D. Hall.
The rebellion was caused by the settlers’ “fear, anger, and suspicious-mindedness; their paranoia and susceptibility to conspiracy theories; their vengefulness and malice; and their willingness to resort to violence, savagery, oppression, and cruelty when they felt threatened by Indians, governors, “Papists,” or anyone else outside their tribe.” Ah yes, those poor, tribal whites. Never mind the violence, savagery, oppression, and cruelty of the governors and the assemblies in their never-ending pursuit of profits. Never mind that poor, white indentured servants rebelled side-by-side with Black slaves. And never mind that the poor whites forced to the edges of the frontier by elites were frequently victims of Indians “violence, savagery, and cruelty” when the wealthy ruling class pushed them off their land.
To believe Rice’s argument requires forgetting, or ignoring, that Berkeley, long-known as an diplomat par excellence to his Indian trading allies, thirty years previous had forced the Powhatans off their land around Jamestown, killed their chief, and almost obliterated the tribe of over 10,000, by far the largest of the area. After subduing the tribe he engaged them in fur, skins, and Indian slave trade. Confusing a wish to protect his financial interests with a special concern for Indian rights is dubious and buys into a “good Indian, bad Indian” narrative (see Thornton). What his and other texts demonstrate is that white English elites used Indians when it served them and turned on them when it did not. That we are to believe that wealthy colonists did not take lands from the Indians when it suited them and when they could, that instead it was the fault of the “savage, superstitious, tribal” poor white populists is quite a fantastic thesis. But it does serve a certain political position and psychological viewpoint—that racism is the fault of racist, “tribal,” poor whites over there, rather than baked into the systems and psychology of the United States. As Morgan suggested, racism serves elites today as well as it did in 1676.
More welcome in Rice’s analysis is his inclusion of Indians’ experiences during this period. He details how English gentlemen pushed Indians westward and southward, as did the powerful Five Nations Iroquois of the mid-Atlantic region. Tribes that migrated had to negotiate with tribes already inhabiting those areas, who often used different languages. These negotiations often turned into wars, and larger tribes subsumed others as more and more Indians were dislocated.
In Part Two of the book, Rice argues that Bacon’s rebellion was not a short period of insurrection led by the notorious Bacon. Instead it was a series of rebellions caused by various political alliances and the displacement of Indians. In Rice’s telling, Bacon’s Rebellion was not against corrupt royal authority but against authority that would not remove frontier Indians’ from their lands. Rice suggests this is because of white tribal racism, ignoring the facts that the elites intentionally restricted freed servants’ access to land to decrease their power and increase the value of the elites’ land. Nor did the government seek to protect the poor whites on the frontiers who were often killed by Indians seeking revenge on actions taken by government officials. We are not asked to consider why, exactly, poor men brought, often by force, to settle and work in servitude in a faraway land with shocking morbidity rates, might be angry.
Instead we are told that the Baconites were summoned by a tract called “A Complaint from Heaven with a Huy and crye and a petition out of Virginia and Maryland ” written anonymously late in 1676, before the rebellion had been squashed. It called for a continuation of the rebellion due to Lord Baltimore’s mistreatment of his people through his alliances with Indians. He was against the people because he was a papist Catholic in alliance with Indians and the French in Canada, who were drawing closer and closer to Virginia. Bacon’s Rebellion, Rice argues, was not against royal authority but against Catholicism and the threat of Louis XIV. They continued to rebell in the 1680s and followed closely the Glorious Revolution, believing a Protestant king would serve their interests. Indeed, when William III claimed the throne in 1889 he placed Francis Nicholson as royal governor. Nicholson allegedly followed the desires of the Baconites and henceforth used broadstroke anti-Indian policies. It was not because trade with Indians for skins and Indian captives was, by the 1690s, no longer enticing for the elites, but because of the desires of the racist rabble.
The connections between Bacon’s Rebellion, the Glorious Revolution, and Coode’s Rebellion are unclear. Though Rice elaborates in his afterward, there is simply not enough evidence presented to make the connections believable. While his independent analyses carry weight, that they are all bound up together is problematic. While he asks at the end, “What if Bacon had died young?,” suggesting that perhaps Indians would have prospered under more Berkeleys and Baltimores, I was instead convinced that given the numerous uprisings before and after Bacon, and the elites’ need to control the exploited poor, and the shifts in Indian economies, these trends would have developed with or without that particular sorry rebel.
CATEGORIES: Atlantic Ocean History, Race History, British History, Christian converts, European History, Religious history, Slavery and the church, Slavery and the church, Slave history, Protestant missions, missionary work and slavery
PLACE: Atlantic World, West Indies (especially Barbados), colonies of continental North America
TIME PERIOD: 1650-1740
SUMMARY:
Before white supremacy came “Protestant Supremacy.” In Christian Slavery (2018), Katherine Gerbner offers a revisionist history of Christianity and slavery in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. She interrogates the historical narrative of Christian missionaries beneficent intentions and anti-slavery views by evaluating journals, letters, court records, and archives in various languages and countries, particularly in the West Indies where such missions first occurred. Protestant missionaries reworked ideas about the acceptibility of Christian slavery when they met planter resistance to slave conversions due to their “Protestant Supremacy.” Slave owners believed that African slaves could not be true Protestants, an ideology that dominated the period (1600-1800) in which Anglican, Moravian, and Quaker planters believed that Protestantism was central to their identity as masters and free men. Gerbner turns the dominant narrative of missionaries’ antislavery beliefs on its head by arguing that planters and missionaries battled over the Protestant Supremacy of the planters and the Christian Slavery of the missionaries. Far from being anti-slavery, Anglican, Quaker, and Moravian missionaries worked to bring slavery in line with Christianity, and they effectively created legislation to this effect. Before Quakers they were abolitionists, they were staunchly proslavery.
Missionaries also provided a rationale for colonization and slavery. The planters argued, partly because by this time it was unacceptable for Christians to own Christian slaves in Europe, that conversion would could cause the slaves to rebel and behave poorly, though there was no evidence to this effect. Slavery was acceptable because the slaves were heathens. Christians had rights; heathens did not. Planters were physically and verbally abusive to missionaries, who, eager to convert slaves and dependent on the planters permission, repositioned their beliefs to promote Christian slavery (which had been debated up to this point). These beliefs were not simply used to persuade planters, but were codified in legislation, which over time created a legal institution of race-based slavery in the West Indes and United States. Rather than creating a foundation for anti-slavery movements, these missionaries created ideologies of paternalism and Christian justification for slavery used in proslavery arguments of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Gerbner also engages the contested concept of “conversion” by noting that Protestant sects had different ideas about what constituted conversion, as well as what it meant to the converted enslaved and free Blacks. Her study is the first to focus on Black slave conversions before the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries. The baptism of blacks challenged the major justificaiton for slavery in the 17th century—they were not Protestants. This cause a shift of racial terminology that came to justify slavery. The roots of white supremacy are found in “Protestant Supremacy”; the former term is still embedded with religious signification.
Gerbner’s is an impressive account of the missionary responsibility for creating Protestant supremacy, and this is what sets her narrative apart from previous historians who have addressed it. She corrects Frey and Wood’s argument (Come Shouting to Zion, 1998), which ignores the importance of earlier conversions and overstates the importance of the Great Awakening and the “emotive worship” aspect of slave conversion. While the voices of free and enslaved Blacks are faint, this is more likely a fault of the archives than Gerber, who uses some letters and accounts by African American sources.
Chapter 1 Christian Slaves in the Atlantic World
This chapter is a brief review of Christian slavery to the 17th Century and provides a foundation for Gerbner’s argument.
Chapter 2 Protestant Supremacy
Gerbner uses a tract first read in Barbadian Anglican churches in 1662, “The Act for the better ordering of Negroes,” to illustrate the position of Anglican religion in promoting slavery and Protestant Supremacy, countering arguments that Barbadian planters were not religious.
Chapter 3 Quaker Slavery and Slave Rebellion
Quaker leader Geroge Fox encouraged slavery by criticising Anglican planters for not converting their slaves in 1671, which an Anglican minister repeated, causing a larger pressure for converting slaves. Further, Anglicans blamed Quakers for inciting rebellions by bringing Blacks into their meetings and so passed “An Act to prevent the people called Quakers, from bringing Negroes to their Meeting” in 1676.
Chapter 4 From Christian to White
In other places, slaves occasionally won baptism in other plantation colonies, usually “chief slaves” on a plantation, or the slave children of masters, although planters were against largescale conversions, as it threatened their fragile society. This was a very small fraction of slaves—less than 1%. These conversions challenged Protestant Supremacy and planters began to shift the language of mastery to race rather than religion. By 1700, slavery was justified by race, though the ideology of Protestant Supremacy remained. Barbados passed “an Act to keep inviolate, and preserve the Freedom of Elections” which added “white man” to “professing the Christian religion in 1697.
Chapter 5 The Imperial Politics of Slave Conversion
Gerbner uses the example of Christopher Codrington, governor-general of the Leeward Islands, to demonstrate that while planters reconsceived slavery in terms of race they still resisted most slaves from Christian practices as as such, Gerbner argues, shows the maintenance of Protestant whiteness. The transition to white supremacy took decades and slaveholders still required proslavery arguments from missionaries and other religious figures to feel comfortable with slave conversion. Codrington found it difficult to reconcile slavery and his Christianity, though he tried. He tried to convince planters that Christian slave communities were safe and not rebellious, but he also understood that it was a complex moral, political, and imperial matter.
Chapter 6 The SPG and Slavery
Codrinton fought against and then worked with the French, who provided an example of Christian slavery in the continetnal colonies of North America. Influenced by the Catholic colleges, he bequeathed two plantations and hundreds of slave to the Anglican missionary society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) to become a missionary college for slaves when he died in 1710. Here, the first Anglican missions to slaves began. Two French Protestants, Elias Neau and Francis Le Jau worked to make slave conversion more acceptable, the former by pursuing legal means to support slave Christianity and the latter by adding a pledge to the baptism that made clear Christian slaves were not free. Even so, Neau was blamed for a 1712 slave uprising, “demonstrating the persistence of Protestant Supremacy in the early eighteenth century.” The mission of the SPG remained devoted to the business of slavery rather than the missionizing of slaves.
Chapter 7 Inner Slavery and Spiritual Freedom
The Anlicans “master-centered” outreach to Christianize slaves took no account of why slaves might wish to convert. The Pietist Moravians, part of the Great Awakening, built on the networks laid by Anglican missionaries but had markedly new strategies, which involved the revivalist emphasis on feeling Christ in the heart. They argued with the existing Black Christians in the West Indies, most of whom had been favored slaves who were converted by their masters. They formed an elite of slave society and were too interested, the Moravians believed, in education and textual Christianity, similar to their criticism of confessional Lutheranism in Germany. Their work in the West Indies caused a shift in both missions and Black Christianity, introducing a radical, revivialist Christianity.
Chapter 8 Defining True Conversion
Moravian missions shifted their strategies over the years. Once leaning on reading and writing lessons for converts, they later forbid them altogether. Marriage policy changed from monogamy only to an acceptance of polygamy. These changes were the result of pressure from both converts and planters.
Epilogue. Proslavery Theology and Black Christianity
Gerbner traces what many consider to be the “first formal defense of slavery in the Atlantic world,” “A Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina” written by George Whitefield in 1740, to the developments of the three missionary groups, the Quakers, the Anglicans, and the Moravians, in concert with enslaved Blacks and slave owners. Whitefield, a revivalist leader, condemned slave owners for refusing to Christianize their slaves. He argued with proslavery colonists in Georgia, which had been the first founded without slavery. The early period of Protestant missionizing work in the Americas was far from abolitionist, as has previously been argued. Instead it was the foundation of later proslavery rhetoric.
CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, American Religion, Great Awakening, Early U.S. History, Women’s History, Women in Christianity
PLACE: Eastern Colonies/U.S.
TIME PERIOD: 1740-1845.
SUMMARY:
Introduction: Recovering the History of Female Preaching in America
In Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, Catherine Brekus explores the lives of forgotten women preachers of 1740-1845 America. Though she first assumed these women would be for women’s rights, she found that they were “biblical” rather than secular feminists (though the term post-dates the era) who “based their claims to female equality on the grounds of scriptural revelation, not natural rights.” As such, they did not seek ordination or institutional power, but acted as men’s assistants while also preachers in their own rights.
Why these women were forgotten is a central question for Brekus. The eighteenth-century women were forgotten because they were too orthodox in their theology for later feminists, and too radical in their beliefs and behavior to be remembered by evangelicals. Because the stories of more than one hundred women who preached were largely lost, they were difficult for Brekus to recreate, often the only narratives being in the notes of hostile male preachers who eventually wished to silence them. Their deviance led them to feel like exiles or pilgrims in their own land. Brekus uncovers their stories in order to reexamine our assumptions about the history of women and religion in the U.S.
Nineteenth-century women preachers differed from eighteenth as cultural mores and theology shifted. These women left behind memoirs and religious tracts, and they defended their right to speech in writing. Though most of these books (over seventy-five) have been lost, periodicals with writing by and letters from women preachers attest to their importance and their widespread acceptance.
It is precisely because most of these women were poor and uneducated and, while not traditional, not radical, that Brekus finds them important. They had much in common with “the countless numbers of anonymous women who sat in church pews every Sunday.” They defended the essential dignity of women rather than structural rights and as such were more representative of women than radical figures who have been well documented.
The book revises many ideas about gender, religion, and economics of the time. These preacher women were troubled by the increasing materialism of the new consumer society. Many felt that the new mammonism would lead to fire and brimstone. Brekus also challenges neat conceptions of public and private, male, and female spaces and argues that women had spaces in civil society that are not well acknowledged or understood. It is not a story of progress but one of “disjunctures, failures, new beginnings, and reinventions.”
PART ONE—THERE IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”—Galatians 3:28″
Chapter 1 Caught up in God: Female Evangelism in the Eighteenth-Century Revivals
Brekus recreates the story of Bathsheba Kingsley who, during the Great Awakening, stole a horse in order to travel and proclaim the gospel, as ordered through a direct revelation from God. Though admonished by Puritan clergy, she continued to travel preach until her death. Because she had overcome the “limitations” of her inferior sex through direct revelations from God, Bathsheba believed that she had surpassed eighteenth-century gender restrictions, which viewed women as the same sex as men, but inferior versions of them (a same-sex model). In Kingsley’s mind, it was this lived experience of God that allowed her to preach rather than institutional sanction.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the breakdown of orthodox Puritan religion and the expansion of a market economy that pushed trade practices further and further outside of local communities which forced change and competition amongst neighbors. The revivals of the period were both “an accommodation to and a protest against the expansion of market capitalism” (31). Preachers of the Great Awakening taught not strict and theological but an exuberant, emotional, spiritual, and experiential, which gave new authority to the laity, including those previously excluded such as the poor, women, Blacks, and, as we saw in Fisher’s book, Native Americans.
By transcending male and female in the eyes of God, many women preachers moved past their “sinful” female bodies and became one with God, which allowed them to share their knowledge of God with the public. They had to purify themselves with the love of God, which allowed them to preach in spite of being women, not because they were women. As soon as the 1750s, male anxieties about women’s public preaching cause ministers to bar women from public speaking. In the South, the Great Awakening happened later (1754-1776), but had the same effect as in the North: as struggling sects of Christianity (Separates, New Lights, etc) became established and prosperous, with respectability and educated male clergy, women were silenced.
Chapter 2 Women in the Wilderness: Female Religious Leadership in the Age of Revolution
The Revolution pushed women out of the public sphere when the role of the family, as argued by John Locke and others, was a “little commonwealth” connected to the state. Instead, the power of government drew from property-owning men, not the family. Women were subject to their husbands and fathers, not the state, and the ideal republican mother had no place in men’s public sphere. In the 1770s and 1780s, women lived between the old ideology of females as “passionate, disorderly and licentious” and the new nineteenth century ideal of woman as virtuous, passionless, and pure.
Because of stronger revolutionary constraints on women in public and the backlash against women preachers, only a few radical sects allowed them by the time of the Revolution. In this chapter, Brekus shifts to apocalyptic women preachers with an examination of Ann Lee and Jemima Wilkinson, who began the evangelical sects of the Shakers and the Public Universal Friends, respectively. Brekus posits that these women were more, not less, confined by gender than the earlier revivalist women. While Kingsley had “transcended” her gender, she did not deny it. But Wilkinson tried to erase her physical gender by dressing and behaving like a man in order to follow Paul’s words, “There is neither male nor female,” in what Brekus calls a denial of physicality and self in the extreme. Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, embraced the role of womanly mother, but she rejected all sexuality and female sensuality as cardinal sin. Indeed, the Shakers were abstinent. Brekus argues that this period of flux in the definition of femininity inspired these two extreme approaches to female religious leadership, both in their way denying both their physicality and woman’s unchanged role of child bearer. Brekus allows that the Revolution was eventually revolutionary for women, but in the short term it was newly restrictive.
These women did “give birth” to a new generation of women who would more directly demand a public place in the church. Again, Brekus challenges historiographical assumptions in early American religion. Women’s public rights did not follow a linear or uncomplicated progression.
PART TWO—SISTERS IN CHRIST, MOTHERS IN ISRAEL
Chapter 3 Female Laborers in the Harvest: Female Preaching in the Early Nineteenth Century.
This chapter examines the new trend in female preaching from 1790-1845 and both contrasts and places it within a timeline of the first Great Awakening, the Revolution, and the Second Great Awakening. This preaching was performed by women in new sects, such as the Freewill Baptists, Christian Connection, Methodists, and African Methodists, who allowed them to preach partly as an indication of the sects’ new, dissenting, unorthodox ways. Most of these females were also uneducated, as in the first wave.
While the first wave of women preachers sought to transcend their gender, these women based their preaching on it, comparing themselves to women of the bible like Deborah and Phebe. Brekus connects this change in identity to larger social and cultural shifts after the Revolution. The model of gender was no longer one sex, of which women were inferior, inside-out men, but of two. Women were now perceived as the more virtuous gender, and this worked for women preachers.
The disestablishment of state religion resulted in much less power for Puritan, Congregational, and Episcopalian churches, who could no longer impose taxes or membership on the public. The popularity of less strict, more feeling evangelical sects now competed with them for membership. Because churches were less political, male leaders allowed women more speech. The separation of church and state also opened up new ground between public and private. This informal public involved reform and benevolent associations, volunteer organizations, and tract societies that acted in between family and the state.
The Second Great Awakening was inspired by these changes as well as the broad shift toward a market economy in which many Americans looked to a prosperous new future, but others became anxious about the loss of traditional values that encouraged communal responsibility and a family’s financial self-sufficiency. These revivals fundamentally changed American Protestantism around the ideology of competition and freedom. Southern churches were more restrictive and conservative than Northern.
Chapter 4 The Last Shall Be the First: Conversion and the Call to Preach
Brekus focuses on the personal experiences and preaching of women itinerants to demonstrate that these women acted on a terrifying religious call to preach and that the history of these women is more than that of ideological and institutional change. Because the public and mainstream churches refused their desire to preach, they often wrote and spoke of a call to preach directly from God, and they borrowed language from other preachers’ narratives to gain credibility. They had not chosen to be preachers but had been forced there by a punishing God. Conversion narratives were central to this experience, as was a feeling of weakness that defined their femininity difference from male preachers, which was put in question when they took the stage.
Chapter 5 Lift Up They Voice Like a Trumpet: Evangelical Women in the Pulpit:
Eventually these women surpassed their early doubts about preaching and became powerful religious speakers and leaders as (likely) the first public women speakers, who spoke with emotional to affect the feelings, rather than intellect. They could, however, explain difficult biblical passages with ease, which some saw as manly. Unlike 18th-century preachers, they openly defended their right to speak in public, as did many male preachers.
Chapter 6 God and Mammon: Female Peddlers of the Word
Though women preachers were suspicious of the new market economy and imagined a utopian, Christian past, they used its communication and marketing methods to increase their followings. Brekus pushes against Paul Johnson’s neo-Marxist reading of the revivals by showing that women did not use the free will ideology to blame the poor but instead to “imitate the life of Christ who had taught his disciples to value all human beings as the children of God” (243).
The competition between peddlers and preachers was fierce because they both sought followers who sought transformation.
Women used publishing and photography to demonstrate the new pious woman, though they were meant to be hidden. Publishing was used for marketing but also to make money with which to support themselves and photography was embraced as well.
Chapter 7 Suffer Not a Woman to Teach: The Battle over Female Preaching
The end of the Second Great Awakening brought a similar result as the first. As the dissenting congregations that had encouraged women preachers (Methodists, African Methodists, Freewill Baptists, and Christians) became established and popular, they took the cue from socially conservative mainline ministers and others who attacked and undermined women preachers. In the 1830s and 1840s, not only were these women forbidden the pulpit, but their very existence there denied by formerly supportive ministers, and their historical record erased. Again these women were slandered as prostitutes, sometimes by the churches that had supported them.
Men feared that women’s preaching was spreading too quickly and that women were needed in the private sphere of the domestic home. Women platform speakers began to advocate publicly for women’s rights in the 1820s, and it was easy to believe that allowing one group of women to speak publicly had brought on the other, though the two groups of women were from different social classes and had markedly different beliefs.
Within their own sects, the children of these churches were upwardly mobile and wanted to distance themselves from the crude speech of these women preachers and wanted educated ministers to lead their churches. By the end of the 1830s and 1840s, clergy believed an education was crucial to preaching rather than simply a calling. Women were pushed into Sunday school teaching.
Chapter 8 Your Sons and Daughters Shall Prophesy: Female Preaching in the Millerite Movement
The Millerites, an apocalyptic sect in the 1840s, were the last to encourage women’s preaching, and some female preachers who had been tossed out of their churches found a home here. When the world failed to end in 1843, many Millerites became disillusioned. Many women continued to teach in meeting through the 1850s.
Epilogue: Write the Vision
When they were forced offstage, many literate female preachers went on to write the vision of God in memoirs, letters, and articles. Brekus argues that they did not want to be forgotten and wrote to ensure that they would not be. They hoped to reach out to women in order to inspire them with trust in their visions of God and his kingdom. Sadly, they were written out of the history and forgotten. This is not, however, a story of decline as Russell E. Richey argued the fall from spirited early evangelicalism into middle-class conformity. Female preaching in the U.S. is not one of linear progress but of “discontinuity and reinvention” as new generations of female preachers reinvented themselves and the hope of these “Sisters of Christ.”
CATEGORIES: Cultural History, Atlantic History, Early American History, African History, European History, Colonial History, Civilization.
PLACE: Europe, Africa, North and South America.
TIME PERIOD: 1250-1820.
TAKEAWAY: Oh, so many (tk).
SUMMARY: John K. Thornton hopes to change our cultural memory from a U.S-Eurocentric story to include an understanding of the relationships between Africa, Europe, and the Americas to that we can revise our heritage. The result is A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820, the product of decades of his teaching and research in several languages.
As I read it, I thought, “A reviewer is going to call this ‘magisterial,'” and indeed, they did. It is a beautiful book. Though it is not a narrative, it is clearly written and a pleasure to read.
Thornton organizes the book into four parts. The first, “The Atlantic Background,” explains early exploration in the Atlantic basin. Part II, “Three Atlantic Words” surveys the cultures of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Part III, “The Nature of Encounter and Its Aftermath, and Culture” sorts the encounters of the varied peoples and cultures into three types: Conquest, Colonization, and Contact. Though the title refers to a cultural history, these three parts are largely social and political, and indeed, Thornton sees himself as a social scientist. Part IV, “Culture, Transition, and Change,” offers a cultural comparison of these regions to understand the dynamics of linguistic, artistic, religious, and revolutionary practice and change.
Thornton seeks to revise the narrative of American and European history from one of superiority, conquest, and military might to one of nuanced encounters, often between equals. He emphasizes the advantages that Europeans had in the effect of their diseases in the Americas, as well as the political systems in Africa and the Americas that allowed them to exploit enemy groups or nations and make military alliances that allowed them to win many wars they could not have (and often lost) with their more advanced weaponry alone. There is a concerted focus on African and Native American agency.
Though extensive, I found this book to be both helpful and enjoyable. As a modern Americanist, it both offered new information and filled in gaps in my knowledge.
For example, Knight culture in Europe developed around 1000 in the Lower Rhine Valley. The pinnacle of advancement came at the end of the 11th century, when horse training, shields, armor, and weapons reached their peak development, affording Knights great power over the monarchy. Their political struggles would later influence how European expansion developed and influence the later American revolutions.
PART I: THE ATLANTIC BACKGROUND
Though Europeans had nautically advanced ships that crossed the ocean, otherwise they were not more advanced than other cultures, and their prowess in the sea was not necessarily helpful on land, where encounters took place.
Chapter 1: The Formation of the Atlantic World, 1250-1600
Many peoples of the Atlantic Basin explored the sea with various craft, but it was not until the 1400s that the “Atlantic Highway” became regularly used. The Scandinavians regularly crossed the North Atlantic to North America in the 11th and 12th centuries but expanding ice ended their trade and settlements by the start of the 15th century. Pliny, in the first century BCE, wrote of strange, shipwrecked people in Germany he oddly called, “Indians.” Thornton shares several anecdotes of unknown foreigners found on European shores and also discusses African navigation of the Atlantic, possibly to the Americas.
Though people had been trading by sea for centuries, it took hundreds of years to master the Atlantic because of its currents that wind-powered ships must abide. The Canary current runs south from Portugal, along the coast of Africa, and, just south of the Canary Islands, shifts west across the ocean to the Lesser Antilles. Its flow does not reverse, so a return trip to Europe required knowledge of the Gulf Stream, another one-way current that sent ships north from the Caribbean up the North American coast then back east to Europe. Near the Azores Islands, the outer eddies of the two currents are close and once sailers learned that the southern “outbound” current flowed far west and the “inbound” current fairly close to the north created a circle that would allow travel to the Americas and back.
Thornton adds the note that Columbus discovered this because his Portuguese wife lived in the Azores and he knew the surrounding seas well. He could risk sailing out into the Atlantic because he knew the return current home. This was well known to sailors of the area and thus the fable of his terrified crew begging to turn back is a cultural myth. They knew that a ship cannot turn around in a oneway current.
Columbus was not a scientist or explorer but a trader and low knight who happened on the Americans by way of extremely lucky accidents that had built since the 1200s, with the start of the grain trade. By 1277, Mediterranean cities looked for cheaper grain in coastal areas outside the Mediterranean in other parts of Europe. One merchant was blown off course and landed in the Canary Islands, where he developed trade with the locals. This led to encounters in Madeira and West Africa, and eventually the knowledge of the paired currents. “In the end, the voyaging into the Atlantic was not part of a grand scheme, but a haphazard collection of adventures organized by lower knights and merchants willing to take some risks for profits” (18).
In the Canaries in 1424-25, the native inhabitants, the Canarians, defeated a Portuguese army with mounted knights and foot-soliders by throwing stones that knocked knights to the ground. They threw the arrows and crossbows hurled at them back and injured knights threw light armor. It was not sheer military might that defeated the Canarians but Spanish (who had stepped in) alliances with factional Canarians, which took almost seventy-five more years (1497). This is but one of many of Thornton’s accounts of native inhabitants defeating Europeans until the exploitation of indigenous factions brought European victory. The Spanish conquered the Americas with this strategy.
Thornton compares the Spanish style of conquest with the Portuguese style of contact for trade in West Africa, where the Portuguese avoided war for political and financial reasons. Though private merchants began these endeavors, European states would soon dominate the region.
PART II: THREE ATLANTIC WORLDS
The trading explorations collided three continents with vastly different cultures. Thornton emphasizes that more than anything, “Europeans, Americans, and Africans discovered a common humanity in their physical forms and in their lives, for in many ways the world of the Age of Exploration and its aftermath had more commonalities than today’s world does” (29). The preindustrial world shared the rhythms of night and day, life and death. He argues against French historian Fernand Braudel’s work on material life (see Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life (3 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds, New York, 1983 [original French 1979]) by pointing out the commonalities, rather than inequalities, of these regions. In the 1500s to the 1700s, life expectancy was not over forty for any of these societies, and twenty-five to thirty-three percent of newborns did not live past one year. Foragers in Brazil and Canada lived about as long as the French or English, unlike today, when regional differences can amount to decades. Pushing against blanket narratives of Western European superiority, Thornton estimates that vitals for the Kongo were better than those of Western Europe in the seventeenth century.
Thornton also pushes against Jared Diamond’s claim that Europe’s military advantage was part of overall uneven global development (see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London, 1998), pp. 67–82). If this followed, the victory of the Mongols or Manchus over China would signal that nomadic cultures were more developed than China, and the indigenous groups of African and the Americas that often defeated European forces must have been more advanced.
This is a key argument of Thornton’s book: these three regions were similarly sophisticated at the time of encounter. His critique of oppressive labor and taxation practices that depleted the quality and quantities of most Europeans’ lives is central to this argument. Through comparison of the various cultures, he draws out evidence to support this claim.
Chapter 2: The European Background
Western Europe was dominated by various monarchs who ruled over large sovereignties. Their power was complicated by the class of noble knights, whom they paid to fight in land and legal privileges. The knights non-fighting male family members had long entered the priesthood and gained power in local positions as priests, bishops, and archbishops. To check their power, monarch began to grant chartered towns and councils to merchants, who received various rights and powers but far less than the nobles, who could not be taxed without a meeting of parliament. Parliaments, which protected the rights of nobles, and chartered councils began in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.
Military advances gained in the Hundred Years War in the 14th and 15th centuries, such as longbows, crossbows, and gunpowder, shifted the power struggle toward the monarchy. Soldiers were recruited from peasantry by mercenary companies that sold the infantries to the monarchy. These militaries were not less expensive that the Knighted-nobles armies, but significantly, they lacked the power to make demands for land or tax exemptions from the monarchs. The problem here was these cash-paid mercenary armies lack of loyalty and would desert if unpaid.
Thus, monarchs required large amounts of cash for their wars, which they sought by taxing merchants or allowing their charters to expire so that they could profit from the global exploration. Their desire to centralize their power without the influence of the noble and priestly classes encouraged them to promote through noble and military pursuits.
As monarchs, particularly in Castille and Portugal, became adept at financing paid armies, nobles began to accept jobs as hired officials as not to lose their military status entirely. In so doing, they lost their political privileges and became at dependent on the monarch, who might fire them at will. As monarchs overcame nobles and centralized authority, they developed the “fiscal-military state” whose main goal is to wage war, which requires raising revenue by any means necessary (see Jan Glete, War and Society in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London and New York, 2002).
Thornton argues that the “tyranny of cash revenues” dictated policy. Though the policies that would become mercantilism such as “the interest in the concentration of bullion, the zero-sum trade policies, the privileged monopoly of companies” originated in the need to maximize cash flows. It was no matter that such policies were detrimental to the economic health of the nation, as Kings were interested in the supplies of cash that were essential to centralized authority rather than the overall health of the nation.
This, and the wars of Western Europe, drove European states into Atlantic exploration to raise funds, which Thornton details, as well as their excursions in the Americas.
Chapter 3: The African Background
In this chapter, Thornton interrogates the African role in the slave trade, “to explore the complex role of the slave trade to African decision making, state building, and resource allocation (61).” What follows is a bare summary of a detailed and intricate chapter.
In the late 1400s, a large portion of Africa was drawn into the new economy with Europe and the Americas as the Portuguese worked their way around Africa. Africa was involved largely through trade rather than conquest and colonization, with the exception of Angola, where the Portuguese inserted a colony in the 1600s, as well as several islands.
European warfare was not successful in Africa, and Europeans worked to keep their small trading posts (called factories), which they paid rents and taxes on to African rulers through diplomatic rather than dominant means. By the mid-1500s, slaves were a central part of African trade with Atlantic merchants, which grew massively until the early 19th century. From 1500 to 1830, between eleven and fifteen million Africans were sold to the Americas.
Many North Americans do not realize that Africans were far more numerous than Europeans in the New World, partly because less than six percent of all slaves went to North America. Three Africans crossed for every European between 1500 and 1800.
The brutality of the slave trade was obvious, even in the treacherous premodern world. Africa lost important human resources in the export of its people. Thornton acknowledges that the suffering and loss has made this trade “problematic for historians” because the question of why African rulers exported Africans, which was detrimental to their societies, is crucial.
Geographically, the slave trade extended from Senegal inland along the Senegal River far inland, though in the southern areas of West Africa, trade did not penetrate very far. It existed most intensely in the regions 125 miles from the coasts. Rivers, roads, political systems, and trade networks influenced where slaves were sold. Because records were not kept in Africa, the texts of various missionaries in the Americas are used to reconstruct the geography of the slave trade. Trade was centered in mid-Africa (see map), but it was not consistent. Some kingdoms in the region did not engage in the slave trade while others stopped, or stopped and started again, for various political and reasons.
If the slave trade harmed Africa due to the tremendous loss of the population (50,000 a year at the height of the trade in the 1780s). Gender and labor relations shifted as more males were lost and females took over work that had been considered men’s domain. Why did it happen? Europeans did not have the power to capture slaves in Africa. They had to be bought from African traders. Why was this practice legal when it was so harmful to both regions and the continent? European commercial records indicate that the trade was controlled by the political and economic elites of Africa, who both taxed the sales and sold slaves directly. These rulers oversaw access to the coasts and could prevent the enslavement of their people if they so chose.
Thornton refutes (controversially) two major theses. One is that Africans sold slaves to gain access to the arms trade. The other is that Africans were dependent on Europeans for “vital, nonmilitary goods.” Because Africa was not a poor continent in the preindustrial period, Thornton argues, Africa had significant economic power, which allowed them to keep Europeans from capturing slaves and avoiding fees and taxes. This argument is expanded in detail.
Referring to missionary interviews with American slaves, Thornton examines how slaves were captured. Regularities in accounts feature the majority (e.g. two-thirds) were taken violently through kidnapping or as war captives. Others were sold by creditors or family members, and about five percent were sold as punishment by a court, and about five percent tricked into captivity through “treachery” (business associates, etc). Other accounts find a larger fraction of judicial enslavement, usually for debt or adultery.
Africa was politically organized into large and small states that were often at war. Defeated people were often killed or taken captive to be sold into the slave market. Most frequently, captives were not sold by their own people but a warring faction. Thornton argues African leaders were operating the same “fiscal military state” that Europe was, a zero-sum game that maximized profits for wars that consolidated state power.
Chapter 4: The American World, 1450-1700
Thornton emphasizes the wide variety of social organizations of indigenous societies in the Americans which determined the structure of the resulting American societies. Societies ranged from highly democratic small-scale groups with little social stratification to empires with strict bureaucracies that ruled millions. Thornton organizes these into free associations, or “egalitarian democracy,” marked by no formal government or permanent social class, and those with formal governments with a hierarchical state and social classes. These with formal states are divided again into mini-states (chiefdoms), with weak hierarchies, and imperial states, which were complex and inegalitarian. These divisions are functional and are often blurred in his analysis.
Throughout the text, Thornton argues against evolutionary trends in social science that view small, democratic societies as poor, primitive, “pre-state” or “backward remnants of ancient people who had failed to progress” (102) by noting that the standard of living for the average person in free associations may have surpassed Europeans of the same period.
Societies with egalitarian decision making were usually no larger than a few thousand people living in one or a few close settlements. Very little authority was permanently imposed on its people, yet societies lived with the welfare of the group in mind. Hierarchical societies generally exploit the average class members which pushes their standard of living below that of free association societies. “If one takes what people around the world today value as important in society, namely large-scale political participation and equality of incomes, then egalitarian democracies were the most advanced of their time.” While this is an interesting point, I am not sure how he concluded that people view equality as important, as this is a minority opinion. Many find income inequality entirely justified. That Thomas More and Michel de Montaigne used the system of egalitarian democracies as a base for their theories of political participation, however, is fascinating.
Examples of free-association people, such as the Island Caribs of the eastern Caribbean, who had classes and inequality; the Tupinambá of Brazil, The Iroquois and Huron of North America, who were similar to the Tupi in that their societies were loving and peaceful but their warfare with outsiders was brutal and vengeful; and the Mapuche of modern-day Chile.
Mini-state peoples included the Algonquin of North America, the Llanos of the Orinoco, the Tainos of the Carribbean, and the Zipa of Colombia.
The Mayans are classified as heirs of a disintegrated empire, the Mayapan, which fell around 1441 CE. The Spanish found Mayans living amongst the remnant of its great buildings, in various polities. Similarly, the remains of the Cahokia empire of the Mississippi Valley revealed a complex and socially stratified society that disintegrated from mini-states to free-associations by the time Europeans arrived.
The surviving imperial states of the Americas at the time of European arrival included the Aztecs of the Valley of Mexico, who used writing, and the Incas of the Andes. Both had complex taxation and trade that the Europeans were able to use to their advantage.
In areas of smaller states and free association, Europeans had to use vying groups as military allies (which they also did with fragmented groups of the American empires), or to enslave them for labor.
PART III: THE NATURE OF ENCOUNTER AND ITS AFTERMATH
Chapter 5: Conquest
Conquest requires a change of state, and as such requires a central authority who surrenders to another state, and whose subjects follow that dictate. Some states in the Americas surrendered to the Spanish. Only Angola in Africa was conquered by the Portuguese and Spanish. In these cases, the conquerors used the existing governments to manage the territories and very slowly phased in their own system of rule.
Thornton again pushes against the argument that Spain’s advanced military might was essential to their victory because they were far outnumbered and fighting in an unknown and sometimes severe ecology that their opponents knew well. Further, in some areas up to 90% of the native population was killed by diseases to which they had no resistance.
This leads to Thornton’s argument in this chapter: victor came not from military superiority, which helped, but from “substantial participation by Native American and African armies, who supplied the bulk of the soldiers with whom Spanish or Portuguese superiority was established.” These were largely through contracts of mercenary service. Cooperative allies had power to shape their roles in post-conquest landscape. Allied states, such as Tlaxcala, and groups such as the nobles of Cuzco, enjoyed tax and tribute exemptions.
Chapter 6: Colonization
When conquest was not worthwhile because there was no existing, profitable tax structure, Europeans turned to colonization. This occurs in uninhabited areas, such as Madeira and Azores in the early 15th century. Colonization also occurred in smaller states that could not defeat European invaders but did not collect enough taxes or surplus goods to make conquest attractive. Free associations also invited colonization, as many had no leader with the authority to surrender, and no taxes or surplus. The Portuguese in Brazil and northern Europeans largely expanded through colonization.
The colonization of societies with free association brought problems with military affairs and finding labor to create wealth for the charter or crown. If crops brought wealth, such as sugar, the colony was highly unequal and socially stratified, often with an African underclass. Without a lucrative product, race and class distinctions were smaller and the government more democratic. In North America, however, where settlers arrived in family groups, democratic government was high but so was racial distinction. Where settlers were only male, racial differences were fewer because elite men married into the existing indigenous elite and had mixed children who usually spoke the indigenous language.
Chapter 7: Contact
When one region could not subdue another, or when colonization was slow enough that frontiers were established, as in much of North America, cultures came into prolonged contact with cultural and political exchange between equal partners. Along the African coast, Europeans established trading systems with African states. With the exception of Portuguese Angola and the colonization of South Africa, the African encounter was largely contact.
Europeans could not conquer the state-organized societies of Africa, yet in America, most state-organized societies were conquered early on by Portugal and Spain, aside from small states of the Maya and along the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. The Incas, Aztecs, the Chesapeake, and the Massasoit societies were conquered fairly quickly, but the free-association societies that remained took centuries to subdue, as when they were defeated, they retreated and moved their homes. This created frontiers of cultural interaction in which indigenous Americans learned about European culture, politics, and warfare. Thornton examines how cultures all over the Americans were able to fend off Europeans until the late 19th century. Where it has been assumed that free associations were the weakest social structures, their egalitarian cultures and mobility (with no great riches to protect) made them a difficult conquest.
PART IV: CULTURE TRANSITION AND CHANGE
The interaction of people from thousands of societies from the four continents of the Atlantic World created unique social products and practices. Some people moved to entirely new home environments, while others stayed an interacted with newcomers. Thornton sorts the cultural change into the categories of hard, which are difficult to change and tend to break, such as language. Soft elements of culture change easily and quickly and benefit from new ideas, such as aesthetics like art and music. In between, he places religion, worldview, and philosophy, which are difficult but able to be changed if done within the system.
In addition to hard and soft elements of culture, the preservation of communities during popular transfer is key. Northern Europeans who moved freely with their families kept much of their original culture, whereas the violent transfer of slaves did little to preserve community and therefore, culture.
Chapter 8: Transfer and Retention in Language
Thornton uses the colonization of North America as a model for language survival in immigration. English and French colonists kept their languages whereas Danish, Dutch, German, and Swedish colonists lost their languages over generations as younger generations were first bilingual, and then eventually monolingual, as English was the lingua franca. An exception is the Amish of Pennsylvania who interacted little with surrounding communities and intentionally kept their culture as strictly as possible.
In areas that were conquered such as the Aztecs or Incas, their languages survived as the communities survived. Yet over generations, their languages followed similar patterns outlined above. If business came to be conducted in Spanish, and if rural people moved to cities for work, often their children would be bilingual and their grandchildren monolingual Spanish speakers.
In places that conquest did not involve women settlers, elite men married elite American or African women who often preserved the native language for their children, which the Spanish and Portuguese also spoke. This sometimes led to the native language being dominant rather than that of the conqueror. In these cases, other aspects of culture would remain more intact as well.
Another pattern was the adoption of a lingua franca for communities that were displaced, particularly in North America. Often Native Americans did not know their neighbor’s language, but one member of their society would learn their allies language and be the translator. This changed as movement west pushed many tribes together, they adopted the language of the dominant group, such as Algonquin or Iroquois.
Africans lost their languages in America due to community dissolution, and second-generation slaves would often become bilingual in a creole with the colonial base language which Thornton argues was developed through trade on the coast of Africa rather than in the Americas. Most languages were lost over generations as the dominant language took over.
Chapter 9: Aesthetic Change
Thornton explains that the concept and creation of beauty is universal and mark humans as a unique species, though aesthetic values between classes and cultures differ. Aesthetics are a soft and fluid form of culture which change easily and often positively when exposed to outside influences.
Because of its durability, pottery is a well-examined remnant of aesthetic decoration, and Thornton reviews the cultural changes in elite and non-elite pottery of various cultures, as well as the various pressures on fashion change, such as religion and the influence of European elites on colonial elites.
In Africa, elites worn their own clothing or mixed it with European suits and accessories, at least when meeting Europeans. Indigenous Americans adapted their own traditional fashion to European textiles and European men often adopted elements of Indian dress, though women did not. Music is analyzed through the elements of patronage, virtuosity, elite and folk styles, and the new forms that came to be. The aesthetic mixing of cultures is the most dynamic form of cultural exchange and account for the popularity of American culture around the world.
This chapter, while interesting, begins to make Thornton’s vast synthesis and comparative analysis seem selective and arbitrary. Perhaps I’m tiring of the style of the book, as others liked this section most.
Chapter 10: Religious Stability and Change
Religion is neither soft nor hard in Thornton’s schema, but in the middle. It is flexible to change without breaking, but requires the change of beliefs, which requires time. Indeed, Christianity became the major religion of the Americas by 1800, but only had minor inroads in Africa. What all religions of the Atlantic basin had in common was a belief in the “Other World, a normally invisible sphere that coexisted with but dominated This World, which is the material sphere we all live in.” The existence of the other world was not directly known to humans.
Thornton grounds this chapter in the religious unrest in Europe in the period of exploration, inspired by the Reformation of 1517. He writes a summary of religious change in Europe, African and the Americas based on revelations which he (unsurprisingly) categorizes into two types: discontinuous and continuous. Discontinuous revelations are vast and rich, delivered infrequently, with information on how entire peoples should live. They provide the material for the great books of the Talmud, the Bible and the Qur’an and were received by only a few people. Continuous revelations are valuable to one or a few rather than a community unless they occue within an established religion. These are the revelations of fortune tellers, astrologers, apparitions, spirit-mediums, and witches. Indeed most types of continuous revelations were condemned by the Christian church and labeled demonic. Questions of authority in Christianity drove politics strife and wars in Europe, which reverberated throughout the Americas. Christian missionaries were successful in converting much of the Americas, however the practices created on the ground were an amalgamation on indigenous beliefs blended with Christian to suit the needs of each community, and example of which we saw in Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening. Co-revelation was a dynamic part of this process that was sometimes denounced by religious leaders, but religious practices merged nonetheless.
Chapter 11: The Revolutionary Moment in the Atlantic
In his final chapter, Thornton reviews the Revolutions that pushed back the Europeans in the age between the American Revolution in 1775 to the Spanish American Revolutions in 1825.
By the 1700s, all European colonial countries maintained a “military-fiscal state,” which Thornton first discussed in the struggles between the monarchy and noble class in Portugal in the 14th and 15th centuries. European militaries were increasingly expensive, and courts could not tax nobles, church bodies, many corporate entities, towns, and provinces had privileges that limited their taxation. The richest of Europe were essentially untaxed, the kings were reluctant to change this, and so the burden fell on commoners. The sheer unfairness of this system was obvious and widely criticized. “French economic thinkers, often drawn from that class, constantly reminded the kings that huge untapped revenues awaited them in the privileges of the nobles and the church.”
The revolutionary spirit that swept America and Europe was championed by the middle-class merchant elites who were burdened by royal taxation. Monarchies of the era of expansion (early modern Europe) were funded by taxation systems that exempted the church and nobility while new commercial elites were unprotected and unable to buy nobility. In the Americas almost no one could avoid taxation, and monopolies favored metropolitan merchants. The republican Enlightenment of late-1700s Europe looked to write “rational” tax policy that would be applied more evenly and make the rulers accountable to their funders, the taxpayers.
Merchant elites in the Americas came together to fight these taxes, and eventually the British, hoping that the lower classes who helped fight would not make their own demands of fairness beyond taxation. Thornton provides a survey of American revolutions from the U.S., New Granada (now Colombia), the French and Haitian Revolutions, South America, Mexico, and Brazil. These revolutions for independence were won through a fight between interrelated elites, and no side clearly won. These wars were partially civil wars. The marginalized and the lower classes played a large part in most of these revolutions, especially in Haiti, and they won a small amount of freedom and power. How the new governments would manage the demands of these groups, who, it was hoped by elites, would not significantly gain from these wars of freedom, is a question these governments still struggle with today.
HISTORIOGRAPHY:
Eric Hinderaker and Rebecca Horn, “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 57 (2010): 395–432, https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.67.3.395.
CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Native American Religion, Great Awakening, Early U.S. History, Colonial U.S., Native American History, New England History, Southeastern New England.
PLACE: Southeastern New England and eastern Long Island.
TIME PERIOD: 1700-1820.
TAKEAWAY: The Indian Great Awakening in the northeastern US was not one of wholehearted conversion but a complex engagement with Christianity.
SUMMARY:
Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening (2012) revises twentieth-century narratives about Indians’ wholesale conversions to Christianity in eighteenth-century New England. Fisher interrogates the 1899 history book Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England by William DeLoss Love to argue for the complexities of Native Americans’ experiences with Christianity in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and eastern Long Island. Love’s primary sources (Occom’s diaries, letters, and manuscripts) are plumbed, as well as some new sources.
Rather than trumpeting Indians’ “conversions” to Christianity (a Eurocentric concept), Fisher demonstrates the subtleties of their “engagement” with the Christian beliefs that were embedded in colonial interactions, often inspired by desires to retain their land and autonomy. With a focus on Native Americans’ agency, Fisher examines how various Indian communities engaged, affiliated with, “debated, considered, enacted, adapted, and even retracted” Christian belief over generations. Indians did not reject their own native spiritual beliefs to accept Christianity. Instead, they “tested, sampled, and appended” new practices to those they already engaged.
Fisher traces Native experiences with Christianity in this region from the “second wave” of evangelism in the early eighteen century, which included education for Indians. Because they understood the political advantages of education, Indians engaged missionaries on their lands and in their schools. Internal political battles over these practices caused problems, as did internal struggles about land. Fisher suggests that Natives were not interested in Christianity so much as the education for children that missionaries provided.
The participation of Indians in the revivals of the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s is “arguably” the most misunderstood aspect of their lives in this region and period, Fisher posits. These much-studied revivals tended to empower lay people, including groups excluded from the ministry like women, Indians, and Blacks. This spiritual empowerment destabilized traditional (and often very strict) churches and inspired separatist churches. Fisher addresses the Native separatist church movement run by unlicensed Indian ministers which has been mentioned by other historians but not explored. This movement is detailed in the second temporal phase of the text from 1740 to 1750.
Indians also participated in white churches. Instead of “wholesale conversion,” Native Americans engaged with everything from indifference to (yes) conversion. Historians have focused on the conversions, baptisms, and other shows of faith, however many and sometimes most Natives were entirely absent from church records. Those who did practice Christian customs did not necessary remain engaged, and sometimes turned to Indian-run Separate Churches. “Indian Separatism was a thriving, largely underground, post-Awakening movement that provided several decades of cultural connectivity and intertribal fellowship for Christian subsets of Native communities.” This was not what the English had in mind.
Chapter one, “Rainmaking,” is a brief introduction to the region to 1725, by which time English colonists outnumbered Indians by about fifteen to one in Connecticut. From the journey over the Bering Strait to the voyage of Giovanni Verrazano, the basics are covered for a reader not familiar with early American history. The importance of land to both Indians and English colonists is discussed, as well as seventeenth-century evangelism. Because warfare, disease, and displacement killed so many Indians, by 1700, they lost much of their political power, land, and autonomy. Even so, they retained their culture and customs by taking them underground.
In chapter two, “Evangelizing,” Fisher revises the argument that Natives were averse to Christianity until the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s by extending the period of their affiliations with Christianity and demonstrating its complexity. In the 1720s, he argues, the continued evangelization by the English (which he terms, the “second wave”) combined with Indians actively pursuing education, brought about conflict within native families and communities, as some were opposed to “something as seemingly innocuous as receiving basic education in the English language” (36).
In Fisher’s opening example, the Native matrons were against “education” and the males were in favor. [Aside: juxtapose the words “matron” and “patron.” Ah, I see.] Education “for their children [became] an attractive option for some families, opportunities that were almost always sweetened by the material benefits and potential political alliances that education, schoolteachers, and sponsoring societies brought. Such religious and cultural decisions were embedded within a larger lived reality of cultural engagement, adaptation, and accommodation that included ideas about labor, land dispossession, kinship, and strategies for survival” (36). Differences in accommodation to English customs caused damaging political rifts in Indian communities.
Central to Fisher’s historical revision: Indians wanted education, not conversion to Christianity—a “Eurocentric concept.” Yet to argue that Indian children were not educated because they were not taught to read and write in schools is equally Eurocentric. This definition of “educate” dates only from 1610. Previously, it meant to bring up children generally, and most certainly Indians had their own knowledge traditions that were taught to children. It is also interesting that he pushes a gendered narrative of who desired European education. For Fisher, it is noble to desire one’s children be educated in the business, politics, and written culture of Europeans, but not their religion. The tone Fisher takes is not condescending and reflects various nuances of Indians’ impetus to seek or reject European education. His argument is less Eurocentric than that of wholesale conversion to Christianity only because he accounts for nuances of what is accepted and rejected—though he largely speaks to what is engaged in aspects of Christianity rather than the colonizers’ attitudes toward land, business, and materialism.
Fisher also argues in this chapter that Natives were particularly suspicious of Christianity because the religion of those stealing their land and the religion of the missionaries were one. Because religious belief was intertwined with all facets of Native life and worldview, land and religion were not separable (though one might argue the same of the colonizers’ Manifest Destiny). As the Indians lost more and more land, they increasingly lost trust in Christianity, as it had not helped them maintain their autonomy.
Chapter three, “Awakening,” reiterates in detail that the Great Awakening of the 1740s was a “continuation of, not a break with, prior religious engagement and strategies of creative cultural and religious adaptation and survival (67).” The experience of the Awakening is explored in the Indian communities of the Mashantucket and Lantern Hill Pequots, Niantics, Mohegans, Montauks and Shinnecocks, Narragansetts, and Pachgatgochs.
Chapter four, “Affiliating,” documents through baptismal and membership church records the affiliation of Natives with white churches during the Awakening. The affiliations rose in the 1730s, spiked in 1741-1742 fell sharply thereafter. As such the affiliations were less common and of less duration than has previously been assumed. Fisher generally plays down Indian involvement in the Great Awakening.
Chapter five, “Separating,” describes how Indian communities left the revivals of the Awakening and built Separate churches of unofficial Indian teachers, preachers, and worshipers in the 1750s and 1760s. Samson Occom, who was not a Separatist minister but often functioned as one, Samuel Ashpo, and Samuel Niles are featured as Indian ministers who led Separatist congregations. These churches tended to pick and choose what Christian beliefs and practices were useful to them while still attending to aspects of their Native spiritual customs which gave Native Christianity a unique form.
Chapter six, “Educating,” explores how Natives dismissed the religious oversight of Christian missionaries and insisted on control over their churches and education in the 1760s. This struggled intersected with the larger issues of autonomy, culture, and land rights. Fisher argues that Native schools were attended in far greater numbers than Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian Charity School, which has received undo attention in historical scholarship.
Chapter seven, “Migrating,” surveys the problems and varied solutions sought by Natives in the region in the 1770s. A literate group of Native Christians from various tribes and led by the minister Samuel Occom planned a migration to the new Brotherhood community in the Oneida region of New York. Because these migrants were literate, they have received more attention than their size warrants, as most Indians of Southeast New England stayed home and fought increasing intrusion on their culture and land. The first migration just before the Revolutionary War was small. The second, in 1885, was more successful, but still a minority of the areas Natives. The chapter also covers Indians and the Revolutionary War. While many young men died fighting, the Indians’ lands were untouched.
Coming full circle, chapter eight, “Remaining,” opens in 1809, with a new missionary effort by Protestants toward the Narragansetts. The Natives who did not leave for Brotherton (the vast majority) stayed back to advocate for themselves in various ways, while still others migrated to other locations. New movements of resistance to colonization were formed as Indians fought to retain their traditions.
The “Epilogue” features a tour of four present-day Native churches in the region and shares some of their history as well as current status. Fisher reiterates his point, “the story of New England native religious engagement between 1700 and 1820 and beyond is far more complex and nuanced than the framework of ‘religious conversion’ can effectively or actively capture.”
Mills, Kenneth, and Anthony Grafton, eds. Conversion: Old Worlds and New. Studies in Comparative History. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003.
