Buildings, Landscapes, and the Representation of Authority on the Eastern Frontier

KEVIN D. MURPHY

IN HIS SEMINAL CONTRIBUTION to the New England Begins catalogue from 1982, Robert Blair St. George starts his article, “‘Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England,” with the rumination that “Perhaps the historian’s persistent lack of attention to space is rooted in an unhealthy positivism. Space, after all, implies to the modern mind a kind of phenomenological absence.” St. George goes on to argue against such a conception of space and to suggest that indeed the very organization of the yeoman’s property—comprising his house, farmyard, and outbuildings—was “crucial both to his economic livelihood and to his psychological stability.”1 At the time of St. George’s writing, the extent and significance of the so-called “spatial turn” in cultural studies could scarcely have been imagined. Some of the texts that have been key to postmodern reconsiderations of the nature of space and its implications in social and political transformations had only just been published or had yet to appear, at least in English, and had yet to exert what would become their important influence on such fields as geography, social and political history, architectural history, and others.

Later in the 1980s, however, the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and other North American and Continental theorists would profoundly alter the ways in which space was conceptualized.2 Space went from being generally thought of as an empty stage on which meaningful action might take place to being considered as something at once produced by knowledge and mobilized in relation to social struggles and other contests. Correspondingly, the system of perspective, in use since the Renaissance, could no longer be thought of as a neutral technique for representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface, but instead had to be considered as historically and geographically contingent, and its implications for the construction of an ideal, immobilized viewer had to be taken into account. Moreover, the ways in which buildings and landscape elements positioned viewers in relation to the objects of their “gazes” were increasingly considered in light of a general skepticism about the politics of sight, that is to say, as a consequence of a new attentiveness to the power relations embedded in the act of looking itself.3 These intellectual developments of the last twenty-five years make it possible to pursue St. George’s suggestion, made in New England Begins (and as he himself has done subsequently), to consider how space, rather than acting as a neutral ground devoid of political importance, was instead constructed through social interactions and became a site for self-fashioning as well as for social and political positioning.

While St. George transformed our understanding of the landscape of seventeenth-century New England, his insights can apply to other places and times where the spatial turn offers some interpretative models that might be applied to familiar objects, in this case, the eastern frontier of northern New England during the Early Republic, and particularly the District of Maine prior to its separation from Massachusetts in 1820. Specifically, I would like to consider how the shaping of the natural and built environments, as well as some early representations of that process, were intended to fix social relations in a period of considerable struggle. Further, I would like to evaluate—to the extent possible given the character of the historical record—how efficacious such attempts to use landscape, architecture, and representation for political purposes truly were.

In Maine at the turn of the nineteenth century, two sites provided particularly rich opportunities for staging power relations in architecture and landscape designs: the settled towns of southern coastal Maine that were extensively rebuilt in the period to give them more definite centers, and the frontier settlements just then being established. In both contexts, elite men and women used their economic and cultural resources to give physical expression to their self-perceptions as superior in their communities. In doing so, they brought to bear two architectural and landscape models: the townhouse and the country seat as both had been developed in more southern sections of New England. Personal and trade associations between Maine settlers and their Massachusetts counterparts provided one means for the transmission of design concepts to the frontier. Builders’ guides—both American editions of English volumes of the 1760s and 1770s, as well as slightly later works by American authors—also contributed to the transfer of ideas from more established New England towns and cities to the District of Maine.4

Fig. 1. Jonathan Fisher, A Morning View of Bluehill Village, September 1824, oil on canvas, 25⅛˝ x 52¼˝, 1824–25. Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Me. Museum purchase, 1965.1465.134.

The town of Blue Hill was one community on the eastern frontier that was built up in the Early National period along the lines of nucleated villages in Massachusetts, and it is depicted in Jonathan Fisher’s large painting entitled “A Morning View of Bluehill Village, September 1824” (fig. 1). Fisher (1768–1847) was originally from Dedham, Massachusetts, and was the son of a Revolutionary War widow who had funded his Harvard education largely through weaving and with the assistance of fairly wealthy relatives. Fisher’s education at Harvard was fortuitous since the college was in the late eighteenth century the primary center for the study of perspective.5 a subject in which the budding minister excelled and of which he made use when he was settled in Blue Hill as the town’s first permanent Congregational minister in 1796.6 Early in his tenure at Blue Hill, Fisher produced elaborate drawings for his own house and other architectural projects and began to establish himself as a professional designer. His representational skills enabled him to position himself as a cultural and religious authority in the new town, where white settlers had only arrived in the mid-1760s. In 1814, Fisher added a massive two-story block to his earlier story-and-a-half house (fig. 2), again with the aid of elaborate drawings, and even a model (now lost). Although the new house took years to finish on the interior, on the exterior it proclaimed its designer/builder’s conversancy with the classical tradition through the detailing around the front door and with the wide frieze below the roof.7

Fig. 2. Jonathan Fisher House, Blue Hill, Maine, showing 1814 addition. Tad Goodale photo.

A decade after its completion, Fisher would depict his enlarged house in one of the very few surviving landscape paintings in oil on canvas from Maine dating to before 1830. On September 15, 1824 Jonathan Fisher recorded in his diary that he had that day carried his camera obscura to a hill on the outskirts of Blue Hill, his home on Maine’s Penobscot Bay, and “sketched the outlines of a view of the village.” He spent the next evening enlarging the design, working from the original drawing, and in the following days stretched and primed the canvas. Meanwhile, getting down the view of the village in a drawing continued to occupy Fisher: in mid-October he was making a stiff paperboard surface “to lay paper on when sketching a landscape” and working and re-working the drawing itself.8 At the very end of October (the 28th) he “went over the pencil marks with the pen.” Transferring the image to canvas, however, had to wait until the following spring when on the nineteenth of May, 1825, Fisher announced to his diary: “Finished my view of Bluehill village.”9

The result of this project, which stretched over some eight months, was Fisher’s best-known work.10 “A Morning View of Bluehill Village” is an image of the many transformations that had occurred in the town, and indeed throughout New England, in the years since 1796. The picture’s perennial appeal may derive in part from its close correspondence to a romanticized image of the prototypical New England village, developed in the nineteenth century. That prevalent stereotype of neat white houses grouped around a meetinghouse and village green bears little resemblance to actual colonial settlements. Such images do, however, correspond to the nucleated villages that emerged in the Early National period and were celebrated in literature and works of visual art, starting in the 1820s, the very moment that the social order the villages were supposed to make manifest was being challenged by historical change.11 Fisher’s painting serves just this ideological function of representing order and stability—indeed, almost timelessness—in the face of manifest challenges to the institutions and social groups in which he had participated since the 1790s. The artist’s insistent rendering of boundaries—wood fences and stone walls—seems an ill-fated attempt to contain a community that was growing, changing, and increasingly questioning the authority of the Congregational church and its minister. The picture inscribes Fisher’s conception of order onto the space of Blue Hill at the same time that it uses the system of perspective to create order in the representation itself.

During the decades leading up to the completion of Fisher’s Blue Hill picture, the town had been settled and Fisher had played important roles in founding many of its cultural, religious, social, and educational institutions, from the library to the singing school, from the Academy to the Sabbath School association. The same quarter century had also witnessed the larger transformation of Maine from a “District” of Massachusetts to an independent state in 1820. The area’s changed political status reflected its enormous population growth from 1760 when a variety of factors, including the exhaustion of land and timber further south in Massachusetts, had begun to push settlers into the Northern New England “hill country” south of the White Mountains and east of New Hampshire’s Lake Winnepesaukee.12

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the eastern shores of Penobscot Bay, where Blue Hill is located, were at the northern edge of the thinly-settled hill country. The town of Bucksport, at the head of the Penobscot River, was the gateway from the west to a spit of land—the Blue Hill peninsula—that runs some thirty-five miles southeast to Eggemoggin Reach, which separates the mainland from Deer Isle which lies on the other side. Situated on the peninsula, southeast of Bucksport, the town of Blue Hill, like the rest of the Penobscot Bay region, was almost entirely uninhabited by whites until the 1760s. After that time settlers were drawn there and even further “downeast” by the possibility of procuring available land. In addition to the land itself, this eastern frontier also held out the prospect of valuable natural resources, like fish and timber, to be exploited for profit, which constituted another draw for people from further south in New England.13

In the post-revolutionary period up to the moment of statehood in 1820, the District of Maine gained nearly a quarter million inhabitants, many of whom were farmers and others who participated in shipbuilding and maritime trade, both of which prospered in Maine, although after 1800 political and economic instability caused periodic disruptions to industry and commerce. The Embargo Act of 1807, the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, and the War of 1812 all imposed limitations on American international trade, with varying degrees of severity, and all interrupted Maine shipbuilding and shipping in different ways, creating hardships for many in the recent coastal settlements. Blue Hill was among the Maine towns whose shipbuilding industry was threatened by the national government’s policies regarding international trade and that formally protested against the Embargo, with Jonathan Fisher sitting on the committee that drew up the resolution.14

Fisher, who commented rarely on political events in his diary, recorded salient information regarding the War of 1812 in a commonplace book, in which he copied a line from the Boston Weekly Messenger in 1813: “District of Maine, distressed for want of provisions,” probably because it resonated with his own experience. At about the same time, he noted that “Hunger prevails in some sections of our District. A woman and two children have died of it in Frankfort [a nearby town on the Penobscot River]. Our own bread allowance is but ½ of our usual supply, and, therefore, we eat with particular relish what we have.” Fisher also copied into his commonplace book newspaper articles on both the War of 1812 and on contemporary political events in Europe, particularly the Napoleonic wars. In his journal he made explicit the connection between his two favorite topics: “I believe [the War of 1812] to be unjust on our part and greatly impolitic, a war which, I fear will issue in the subjection of America to Bonaparte, the despot of Europe [. . .]” Later, Fisher exclaimed to his journal in 1815 that he was “In consternation through a report that our vessels are condemned and to be taken by the British to Halifax,”15 underscoring the centrality of maritime trade to the District of Maine. Fisher was undoubtedly troubled by the international conflict that disrupted the flow of settlers to the eastern frontier and the livelihoods of those who were already there, and he remained conservative in his politics. He was among those Maine residents whose opposition to Jefferson’s Embargo and whose horror at the seizure of the nearby town of Castine by the British in 1814 sealed his association with the Federalist party.16

Fisher’s painting of Blue Hill village constitutes a very persuasive argument for the parson’s centrality in the place to which he devoted most of his life, not the least of all because he uses perspective to represent metaphorically his social and religious authority in spatial terms. Taking up a position from which to sketch on the hill opposite his house, Fisher was able to construct a scene that put his own residence at its center. Indeed, in the painting his farm occupies a spot very near to—if not dead on—the vanishing point of the composition. The orthogonal lines of the perspective system Fisher employed all recede to that single vanishing point. The Jonathan Fisher house sits, in the painting, just to the right of the center of the horizon line, at the top of what is now known as Tenney’s Hill, at a higher point than even the spired meeting house. By setting up his camera obscura near Mr. Treworgy’s house, Fisher was able to compose his view of Blue Hill so that it would emphasize his own crucial position in the place, if not his panoptic view of the village and its inhabitants. The fact that Jonathan Fisher painted his town at the moment at which he did, at the point when it had accumulated the institutions and fine residences that made a place a “village” in the Federal period, suggests his awareness of the process of establishing a settlement. The painting also demonstrates the degree to which its artist considered himself central to that process.

While in the Blue Hill painting Fisher captured the experience of viewing the village, the 1814 addition to his house enhanced the prospect over the settlement at the head of the bay. Fisher’s first house had been oriented in the traditional way, facing south, and thus away from Blue Hill. The addition, however, shifted the orientation of the main façade to the road (at the west). Nevertheless, in the addition Fisher made far more of the view of the village since the new parlor at the front enjoyed an elevated prospect over the town to its north. The rows of apple trees in the orchard to the north of the house seemed to trace the sight lines from the parlor windows over the settlement at the head of Blue Hill Bay. In other words, the view from the north side of town toward his own house, which Fisher captured in the painting, was returned by the gaze of the house’s inhabitants over the village below.

The dynamics of viewing, as captured in Fisher’s painting of the new settlement of Blue Hill, a growing commercial juncture on the edge of the Atlantic, reflected the young Jonathan Fisher’s conception of himself as an important, if not the only, cultural and religious authority in the place. What distinguished Fisher from other settlers of the eastern frontier were precisely his cultural ambitions and the kit of intellectual and artistic tools he brought with him to Blue Hill. In a newly-established place, and at a politically and economically precarious moment, Fisher deployed an array of self-representations to position himself as a member of the local elite. Understanding how those projections of the self succeeded or failed to establish Fisher’s place in the community provides a window onto the larger question of how space was mobilized in contests for authority in early America.

A Morning View of Bluehill Village was the most succinct statement Jonathan Fisher ever provided of his view of the ideal Puritan settlement. In it, he makes order out of a landscape which—even if it wasn’t quite in a state of chaos—was nonetheless a place that was changing in every possible way during the eventful decades in which he was the parson there. In some respects, Fisher was resilient to change, for instance, when he capitalized on growing markets for the home products he sold to advance his family’s economic standing. In other ways, for example with respect to his Federalist politics and with regard to church discipline, he refused to soften his positions and ended up by driving members of his congregation away from the Church and failing to respond to political and religious transformations. Fisher could not, as the picture of Blue Hill illustrates, relinquish his image of the harmonious Puritan village. The new houses, the vessels under construction, the churches springing up in opposition to the Congregational meetinghouse, all of these elements of the growing, changing and prospering village are held in place in Fisher’s picture of Blue Hill thanks to his use of perspective; none of them to any great degree disrupts the fundamental order of the place. The painting is the visual fulfillment of Jonathan Fisher’s wish for how Blue Hill would develop, of how a traditional view of place could accommodate change.

Maine’s elite of the Early National period were well aware of the influence that material things could wield in a bid for authority on the local level. However, Jonathan Fisher was quite rare—with respect to those who deployed imagery for political, social, and religious purposes—in that he made landscape paintings. Other members of the elite had their portraits painted, built high-style houses and laid out elaborate grounds around them as ways of claiming status locally, both in Maine’s more established towns and on the frontier. In the older settlements, for instance in southern and coastal York County, such architectural and landscape statements were incorporated into village improvements of the Early National period. On the frontier, ambitious buildings and grounds produced jarring juxtapositions with the generally modest architecture that had been planted on the newly-cleared land.17

The great frontier houses enjoyed a relationship to the surrounding buildings that recalled the ways that grand eighteenth-century houses had related to their neighbors: “The eighteenth-century mansions,” writes Richard Bushman, “had risen like bright sentinels of culture above the surrounding rough, dark houses of the common people.” By the nineteenth century, Bushman suggests, the general level of refinement in houses of all ranks had increased. Mansions were thus, in many places, not the anomalies that great eighteenth-century houses had been, but simply larger versions of what people at different economic levels all aspired to, and to some degree attained.18 Bushman’s generalization may apply to the early nineteenth-century mansions of Maine’s more established port towns, Portland among them, but on the eastern frontier the eighteenth-century model seems to have persisted. There, in the absence of well-established settlements, the grand houses of the Early National period stood for exceptional wealth and cultural ambition well beyond the means of most settlers. Moreover, they show how the spaces of the frontier settlements became battlegrounds in contests over economic resources, as well as cultural, social, and political authority.

Fig. 3. Coventry Hall, York, Maine (1794–6) and the Judge Jonas Clark House, Kennebunk, Maine (addition, 1800–03), from William E. Barry, Pen Sketches of Old Houses (1874).

Of the many examples of ambitious village seats that might be understood as concretizations of status claims made in the long-standing communities of southern Maine during the Early National period, several houses designed and built by the housewright Thomas Eaton (active 1794–1831) in York County stand out. The first of these (in this case, only attributed to Eaton) is Coventry Hall (1794–6, fig. 3), the residence of Judge David Sewall and “York Village’s only elaborate, completely new mansion of the Federal era.”19 Architectural historian Richard M. Candee has compared Coventry Hall to the elaborate urban houses designed around the same time by Boston architect Charles Bulfinch (1763–1844) and Connecticut architect and author Asher Benjamin (1773–1845). In York, Eaton followed the lead of these city architects in interpreting for the New England context the Roman neoclassicism developed during the eighteenth century in Great Britain by the Adam brothers and other designers. Thus Coventry Hall possesses a five-bay façade with center entrance surmounted by a fanlight, a balustrade at the roof, and ionic pilasters that run from basement to roof cornice and divide the elevation into three parts, all Adamesque elements. These neoclassical features are constructed, however, of the locally-favored building material—wood—rather than the masonry used for ambitious houses by urban architects in Britain and North America.

Even though he was building in a village, Eaton drew more directly from designs for country seats than from townhouse plans. This tendency is seen in the forms of the house itself, but more significantly, in its placement on the landscape. Judge Sewall signaled his social position through the sheer scale of the house, with its stylishness that associated it with the recent residences of other wealthy New Englanders, and through the way his house was sited in relation to the village center. Coventry Hall sat just outside the village—which already in the Early Republic had the reputation of being an old, established place—on the northeast side. Situated on a slight rise, the house addressed the village across a terraced yard, surrounded by a fence with posts surmounted by urns. The orientation of the house was not to the road but instead to the southwest towards the village, which comprised a cluster of houses and public buildings, including the famed eighteenth-century gaol, which it faced more or less directly. A few years after the completion of Coventry Hall, a debtor’s cell would be added to the gaol and a new courthouse built nearby in recognition of the town’s status as the county seat, a role that it played until 1832. A visual connection was thus established between the house and the expanding village, and the position of Coventry Hall on a rise above the town center metaphorically represented the relationship Judge Sewall occupied with respect to the townspeople: he was in the top two percent of taxpayers in York County in 1816, hence somebody of substantial means,20 and he had a socially authoritative and prestigious occupation. The siting of Sewall’s elaborate residence made materially manifest his position of superiority with respect to the community in York Village; in other words, it spatialized his standing in relation to other townspeople who could scarcely have ignored his house, which was an important component of the group of new buildings that added to the significance of the town center.

It is certainly plausible to assume that the house’s formal qualities—its refined classical details, smooth wood façade and more—and its self-conscious siting with respect to the village center would have been understood by others to embody a claim for its owner’s importance and authority. Indeed, the multiple implications of having an elevated view had been understood since the mid-seventeenth century, and the topic of commanding views had been discussed in “country house painting, poetry and landscaping throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” The command implied by the term “prospect,” “was as much social and political as spatial.”21 Thus, Judge Sewall’s gaze from his fine residence, across his fenced yard, and over the village would have been understood as a metaphor for his role as a legal overseer of the town and county and for his economic superiority in the community.

Similar to Coventry Hall in design and relationship to its site is the major addition made by another judge, Jonas Clark, to his house in Kennebunk between 1800 and 1803 (fig. 3). Local tradition that credits Eaton with the design is substantiated by formal similarities between the two buildings. The addition, which was like Jonathan Fisher’s 1814 project in that it really constituted the construction of a new house for which the existing one became an ell, resembles Coventry Hall in having a façade divided into three parts by pilasters, a fanlight over the door, and in this case a flat-head Palladian window above the door and a louvred fan in a projection above the center bay at the roof level. Just as does Judge Sewall’s house, Judge Clark’s sits on a rise outside the village, which affords it a prospect across a terraced lawn toward the center of town. And as Fisher’s addition did, so too Clark’s reconfigured the relationship between his house and the village that it faced instead of the road after the expansion. Eaton is known to have substantially remodeled and added a spire to Kennebunk’s meeting house in 1803–4, making it an even more prominent marker at the intersection of the north-south turnpike (now Route One) and Summer Street, which ran east from the village of Kennebunk to Kennebunk Landing (on the Kennebunk River where much shipbuilding took place in the nineteenth century) and then to Kennebunkport on the coast. Judge Clark’s house enjoyed an uninterrupted view toward the church and this major intersection. The siting of the house thus visually emphasized the owner’s prominent social and economic position at the same time that it gave Clark a fine prospect over the village, which was just then being monumentalized in consequence of its prosperity that had come from shipping and shipbuilding.22

Clark, who came to Kennebunk from Portland in the mid-1790s, was considered one of the major investors in shipbuilding during the period. He also ran a store with a partner and became a special justice in the Court of Common Pleas around 1800. Although it is difficult to attribute Clark’s professional success strictly to his house, it is the case that following the construction of the major addition to it, he was made a standing justice of the Court of Common Pleas (in 1808), collector of customs in 1810, and Judge of Probate in 1815.23 While his spatial position with respect to the rest of the community may not have guaranteed him unchallenged authority, it did make it absolutely impossible for others not to literally look up to him as they moved through the principal nodal point in the village.

Both of these judges’ houses stood out from their neighbors by virtue of scale and design sophistication. Despite drawing on the models of country seats, with their long prospects over fenced yards, these houses nonetheless belonged to established villages where there were other large residences and public buildings. Much more ostentatious standouts were built on the Maine frontier in the Early National period, including the house of Gen. Henry Knox (1750–1806) in Thomaston, known as Montpelier (fig. 4). Along with Coventry Hall, Candee considers Montpelier “one of the first high-style neoclassical seats in the District of Maine.”24 Like the judges’ houses in York and Kennebunk, Montpelier bears many similarities to elaborate residences of the period, and especially to those designed by Bulfinch, to whom the design of Montpelier has been attributed. Like others of Bulfinch’s houses, especially those constructed in semi-rural locations, Montpelier (built in 1794) featured an elliptical salon that provided access to elaborately laid-out grounds. As the Reverend Paul Coffin reported on Montpelier in 1796: “The General has a garden fenced ovally. Indeed circles and semi-circles in his fences &c., seem to be all the mode here.”25 These curved forms—appearing in the plans of rooms and gardens, as well as in decorative details in buildings and furnishings—were part of the vocabulary of stylish residences of the Early National period; ultimately, the forms were derived from British and Continental models. For Knox, George Washington’s Secretary of War, who had gained possession of the Waldo Patent—a tract of Maine land more than a half-million acres in size—through his wife Lucy Flucker whose Loyalist parents had controlled three-fifths of it before the Revolution and through a series of surreptitious post-revolutionary land purchases,26 an oval salon overlooking a fenced garden and the St. George River beyond contributed to his ambitious architectural and landscape statement on the frontier. Although it was to be built on a large scale and following a stylish plan, Montpelier—according to the contract Knox made with his Boston housewrights—was to be “plain without carving or other expensive ornament.”27 Its impressiveness was to have derived from sheer bulk and its visual association with Bulfinch’s grand domestic projects built closer to New England’s urban centers.

Fig. 4. Montpelier, Daguerreotype, c. 1865. Collections of Montpelier, the General Henry Knox Mansion, Thomaston, Me.

Like Blue Hill, Thomaston saw the construction of its first houses by white settlers in the 1760s. Thirty or so years later, when construction of Montpelier was begun, there were only two other houses there of two stories in height. Nineteenth-century historian Cyrus Eaton described the Thomaston area in 1796 as

. . . still a woody region, interspersed with straggling clearings, dotted here and there with small low, unpainted houses, many of them of logs and some few of hewn timber, distant from each other, along half made or newly laid out highways scarcely fit for wheel vehicles of any kind.28

In such a setting, the fashionable Montpelier stood out at the same time that it stood for Knox’s high expectations for his place in the community. Moreover, the house (although only used for part of the year, in the warmer months) was the place in which the Knox family staged their refinement and their cultural distance from the community around them. What the Reverend Coffin remembered from his visit to Montpelier in mid-August 1796 (besides the chilliness of the house) was his dinner with Lucy Flucker Knox, her daughters, and Mrs. William Bingham (the wife of Knox’s wealthy partner, William Bingham of Philadelphia) and her sister and daughter. “We had a merry dinner,” recalled Coffin, “the little Misses talking French in a gay mood. Mrs. Bingham was sensible, and had been in France, could talk of European politicks, and give the history of the family of the late King of France & c.”29 Following the general’s death in 1806, the family’s financial fortunes declined, but Lucy Flucker Knox maintained her sense of their genteel status. Her local reputation for aloofness outlived her by decades: even into the early twentieth century it could still be recalled that “Widow Knox, whose tastes in society were so exalted that she had never entered the house of anyone in Thomaston, always [sent] her coachman on any errand while she remained in her carriage.”30

As Alan Taylor has argued, Montpelier perfectly expressed the absurd grandiosity that characterized Knox’s economic exploitation of his Maine lands. He started numerous undercapitalized enterprises along the St. George River in Thomaston that produced everything from barrels to bricks, and operated mills as well as West India vessels, among many other businesses. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy did not stop—and may even have encouraged—Henry and Lucy to “obsessively [squander] their resources to demonstrate their wealth, power, taste, and enlightened benevolence to the watching world.” With its paired crescents of outbuildings, the landscape around Montpelier was a material expression of Knox’s intention to put himself at the center of the region’s economy.31 In that the entire complex of buildings was subjected to an over-arching neoclassical aesthetic—the curved fencing, for example, echoing the plan of the oval salon—Montpelier emulated the country residence of prominent families further south in New England. The house was conceived of as an instrument for convincing the local population of the Knox family’s superiority and hence of silencing any objections to Gen. Knox’s autocratic control over the land and the economy.

Other, albeit more modest examples of houses that visually dominated the spaces around them as a means of demonstrating gentility, in addition to social, cultural, and economic authority, sprang up even further east on the frontier than Thomaston and they drew on both rural and urban models of how an ambitious house should occupy its setting in order to suggest its owner’s prominence. An outstanding example is the house of Judge Thomas Ruggles in Columbia Falls (fig. 5) in Washington County northeast of Blue Hill, which was modeled on an elaborate urban house, despite having been built in a relatively new settlement. Like Jonathan Fisher, Ruggles came to the District of Maine from further south in Massachusetts in 1796. Settling in what had been Plantation 13 before 1796 and Columbia afterwards, Ruggles amassed a fortune by selling the timber from the vast tracts of land he purchased in Washington County and by exporting it in his own ships. At the time of Ruggles’s arrival, Columbia possessed several substantial houses, a two-story inn, and saw and grist mills that created economic opportunity for the community of a little more than two hundred, clustered around the Pleasant River. The area was also home to a vigorous shipbuilding industry, and Ruggles acquired part interest in nearly a dozen ships constructed locally between 1802 and 1815. Ruggles’s business interests undoubtedly colored his political views, which were Federalist, and led him, like Fisher, to oppose officially the Embargo Act.32

Fig. 5. Ruggles House, Columbia Falls, Maine (1818), Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Cervin Robinson, Photographer October 1960.

In recognition of his growing wealth, Ruggles acquired several important government posts, including chief justice of the Court of Sessions in Washington County. Like Fisher, Ruggles was conservative with respect to the timing of his investment in an ostentatious house. Both Fisher and Ruggles waited out the economic vicissitudes that accompanied the Embargo and the War of 1812 before constructing large residences. While Fisher chose to make a major addition to his existing house, Ruggles built an entirely new one with the assistance of Massachusetts housewright Aaron Sherman in 1818. The Ruggles house shares much with other large Maine residences of the Federal period. It has a five-bay façade, center entrance, hip roof, fanlight over the front door, and Palladian window in the second story. For Washington County, however, the Ruggles house was extraordinary, especially its elaborate exterior window details and its freestanding staircase in the center hall.33 Like the houses of southern Maine judges, Ruggles’s stood out from the buildings around it by virtue of its unique design, in which Ruth Clapp Ruggles, Thomas’s wife, may have had a hand. Corresponding in some of their details to widely-known builders’ guides by Asher Benjamin, and in certain concepts to the elaborate Boston-area residences designed by Bulfinch, the judges’ houses emphasized their local standing by architectural means. Like Sewall and Clark, Ruggles positioned his house to provide an elevated view of his community. Where most of the standing houses were then clustered on the east side of the Pleasant River, Ruggles built on the west side, on an elevated site oriented to the south. As architectural historian Roger Reed suggests, “[T]the visual prominence of the house would have been especially evident to anyone arriving by water.”34 The Ruggles house also had an entrance portico, which no other in town had, as well as an exceptionally spacious stairhall. Its kitchen was located in the basement of an ell to the north side, an arrangement more common to urban residences of the period. The Ruggles family’s decisions about the site of the house and its design reflected an overarching concern with how the building would be perceived. A visitor who came by water, which many likely did, who saw the house from a distance, would have understood from the presence of the porch that being received by the Ruggleses was a matter of some formality, and finally, if he or she were admitted, the first impression of the hall and stair would have been incredibly impressive.

As an economic enterprise, capitalizing on Maine’s natural resources—especially her vast reserves of timber—as Ruggles did, was a controversial one. Alan Taylor has shown that the land claims of Maine’s great proprietors in the Early National period were frequently disputed by poor settlers who had come to the District specifically to avail themselves of the property that was in short supply in more settled parts of Massachusetts. Social and economic conflict erupted over competing land claims and was expressed politically by the struggle between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, and religiously between Congregationalists and members of Protestant sects.35 In such an environment, making an authoritative architectural statement such as the one embodied in the Ruggles house would have been strategic. It would have made material Ruggles’s bid to control and profit from the timber trade, and it would have shown his cultural ambition in three dimensions. At the same time, this astonishingly elaborate house would have turned the village into a space where the disparities between rich and poor, powerful and powerless were articulated by the elements of the built environment itself.

Maine proprietor William Bingham, in addition to parts of Knox’s holdings and others previously owned by Henry Duer of New York, purchased more than two million “unsurveyed, unexplored, and uninhabited” acres of land in two tracts in 1793.36 One, the Kennebec Purchase, comprised much of present-day Somerset County. The other, the Penobscot Purchase, was located in Hancock and Washington Counties, and included the present seacoast towns of Gouldsboro, Trenton, Ellsworth, and Mt. Desert Island. Bingham’s claims were disputed by the previous settlers of the land and he therefore appointed (in 1795) an agent, General David Cobb of Taunton, Massachusetts (a former aide to George Washington), to defend his interests on-site. Cobb traveled back to Philadelphia in late 1795 to meet Alexander Baring (later Lord Ashburton), the son of Sir Francis Baring, who was part of a group of British and European investors who in 1796 would purchase a substantial interest in Bingham’s Maine lands. Bingham’s death in 1804, the Embargo, the War of 1812, and ongoing conflict with timber “thieves” made it impossible for Cobb to bring about the agricultural development of downeast Maine that he had imagined and he returned to Massachusetts in 1822.37

The English-born Col. John Black (1781–1856), General Cobb’s clerk and Sir Francis Baring’s agent, arrived in Gouldsboro in 1799 to take over. Several years later he married Cobb’s daughter Mary and the couple moved to Ellsworth in 1810. Despite his English origins, Black fought in the War of 1812 on the American sid,38 and rose to the rank of general agent of the Bingham estate’s Maine properties. Black’s method diverged from Cobb’s approach to the management of the Maine lands in that he successfully developed their timber resources. Black received a commission on the timber that settlers delivered to the landowners as payment for their tracts, logs that were then “saw’d or hew’d for the European market” and loaded onto the proprietors’ ships for export.39 Black’s success, but also the perceived need to articulate his position through a carefully-sited house, was expressed in Woodlawn, built between 1824 and 1828 (fig. 6). Like the Ruggles house, Woodlawn dwarfed most everything around it, and like all three judges’ houses, stood slightly beyond its village to enjoy a commanding view of the settlement. Woodlawn was originally located on a property of about 300 acres, and the house perched nearly at the crest of a hill that slopes upward from the Union River.40 From there it had a view over the river as well as the buildings of Ellsworth. The townspeople would also have had a good view of the house; it would have been an always visible reminder of Black’s presence there as the agent of the major landholders in the area.

Fig. 6. East Front and Office Wing, “Woodlawn,” Ellsworth, Maine (1824–28), Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress, Allen L. Hubbard, Photographer April 30, 1936.

The distinctive design of Woodlawn enhanced the experiences of both overlooking the river and town from the house, and of seeing the building from the road below or from a further distance away. The plan, uncommon in the area, has been compared to a plate in Asher Benjamin’s The American Builder’s Companion, the first edition of which was published in 1806 and in subsequent editions in 1811 and 1827. Adopting almost verbatim Benjamin’s “Plan and Elevation for a House which is intended for a country situation,” the builder of Woodlawn placed four openings on the east front of the main block of the house and shifted the principal entrance from its customary spot at the center of the façade to the south wing. This wing, matched by another on the north side of the main block, contained an entrance hall and office, while the main block of the house had double parlors running along the east with a stairhall and other secondary spaces at the back. Breaking from Benjamin’s plan, the designer added a porch running the length of the east façade of the main block, with details that nevertheless corresponded to Benjamin’s published drawing of the Ionic order.41 The four front windows, again in contrast to Benjamin’s design, extended all the way to the level of the porch floor, somewhat in the manner of Bulfinch’s contemporary country seats where similar windows enabled movement from the interiors to the porches, terraces, and landscapes beyond. Moreover, they enlarged the prospect over the property, the river, and the great expanse of the frontier to the east.

The prestige of Woodlawn thus derived from a number of sources. It was a visually prominent part of the landscape, it was large, and it was stylistically sophisticated. At the same time that the design referenced a well-circulated pattern book, it also evidenced some creativity on the part of the builder, in the way that he had added the long piazza and carefully fitted its detailing to Benjamin’s neoclassical aesthetic through the use of the Ionic order for the columns and entablature. The local viewers of the house could only have appreciated its difference from the smaller and less carefully detailed buildings nearby in Ellsworth—even the relatively large Federalist residences—which it completely outclassed. Situated on a large property, Woodlawn must also have been understood in relation to the eighteenth-century discourse of the country house in which, as we have already observed, the politics of the prospect were central.

But were houses like Woodlawn significant as anything other than metaphors for what their builders considered to be their positions in the communities around them? Did their domination of the landscape—on the bases of size, stylishness, or siting—have real significance with respect to how local struggles over religion, culture, economics, and politics were resolved? The District (and later the State) of Maine in the Early National period was an unstable place and from the perspectives of the white settlers, its eastern frontier was barely civilized. It is impossible to know how the contests there between Congregationalists and Baptists (and other members of Protestant sects), Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, proprietors and squatters, and others would have been resolved in the absence of Montpelier, the Ruggles house, Woodlawn, the Fisher house, and other buildings that constituted architectural propositions about how the somewhat fluid society of settlers should be definitively organized. What can be said, however, is that these houses powerfully embodied a set of claims about where authority should reside, and that they inscribed those claims in space. They were sites for self-fashioning in which members of the elite staged their identities as religiously, socially, culturally, or economically dominant—or some combination of all four.

To compare this handful of ambitious houses is not to minimize the significant differences between the intentions and aspirations of their various builders. As we have seen, constructing an ambitious house in an existing village that was undergoing rebuilding was a different undertaking than building one on the frontier, and called for different architectural and landscape strategies. Both Knox and Black built houses, at least in part, as a means of insuring that settlers would acquiesce to their economic projects which were seen by some (especially the landless and impoverished) as exploitive. Other builders of ambitious houses, notably Jonathan Fisher, were not angling so much for economic preeminence as for cultural or religious authority over their communities. What all of these builders shared, however, was an implicit belief in the effectiveness of landscapes and buildings as both signs of the men’s positions in their communities and as guarantors of their places in local hierarchies.42 These houses were also significant to local struggles from a material point of view, not just as metaphors. Whereas Knox made Montpelier the center of an economic empire that was intended to engage a significant proportion of the local population in his web of patronage, Fisher’s fancy house provided accommodations for boarders as well as the spaces in which they and the parson could study and recite, thus increasing his income from teaching.

However much social and economic relations may have been legible in the landscapes and buildings that the Federalist elite constructed for themselves, the built environment never effectively squelched opposition. Montpelier, for instance, “the largest and most ornate private building north of Philadelphia,” according to Taylor, was not capable of convincing settlers of Knox’s “taste and magnificence,” nor of his benevolence that would have guaranteed deference from social and economic inferiors. Taylor considers Knox one of the “Federalists [who] eloquently preached the importance of a hierarchical and stable society” but who were unable to make others subservient to themselves merely by “parading their personas of genteel superiority.” Ultimately, argues Taylor, Federalists like Knox failed to recognize (in the 1780s and 1790s) “the enduring potential of the American Revolution’s legacy to legitimate upstarts unwilling or unable to achieve or to endure genteel authority.” The self-perception of Federalist leaders as “Fathers of the People” was untenable in a political environment in which “Friends of the People”—social equals—had staked out a position more in keeping with Revolutionary ideology.43

Calvinist theology shared with Federalism an emphasis on order. Thus Jonathan Fisher’s paternalistic view of his place in the community, although acceptable to other members of the elite, gained little traction with the broader group of settlers from less affluent and educated backgrounds. Increasingly, they were drawn to seemingly less elitist and more equalitarian and engaging Protestant sects, as well as to less conservative political positions. If Jonathan Fisher, like other conservative leaders on the eastern frontier, was ultimately ineffective in securing his place in the community through representations, his attempts to spatialize his claims for authority are nevertheless revealing. They demonstrate just how important landscapes and buildings were to the struggles that characterized the eastern frontier of the Early National period. To this extent, the spatial turn in cultural studies and other disciplines provides a crucial justification for the focus on material things that art and architectural history have always maintained. At the same time, however, it demands that we rethink our understanding of space. As Foucault writes, “[W]e do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another [. . .]”44 So it is with the eastern frontier. Relations between its inhabitants of varying class, social, religious, and political positions were played out in spaces that were punctuated with the material manifestations of their self-conceptions. The central struggles that characterized frontier life, or life in the more established towns, were not played out in some airless discursive realm, but instead in the very real spaces of new or newly-monumental villages.

1. I would like to thank Rebecca Bedell, Alice Friedman, Alison Isenberg, Jane Kamensky, and Liam Riordan for their thoughtful comments on this essay. I would also like to thank my co-editor Georgia Barnhill for her wonderful insights, patience, and good humor as we worked together on this volume. The creation of “Old New England” through images and artifacts in the late nineteenth century and its relationship to national interest in the American past is discussed extensively in William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, eds. Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

2. For an overview of the history of “material culture” as an academic field of study, see Helen Sheumaker and Shirley Teresa Wajda, eds., Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2008). Scholars of early New England have notably worked with artifacts on a wide variety of scales from landscapes and buildings to textiles and decorative arts. See, for example, Joseph Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001) and David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). For an insightful and beautifully illustrated exploration of New Englanders’ objects as seen through the collections of the nation’s first historic preservation organization (founded in 1910) see Nancy Carlisle, Cherished Possessions: A New England Legacy (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 2003).

3. For some visual culture scholars, the field’s location “betwixt and between” disciplines is precisely the point: they argue that the radical nature of the field requires it to resist institutionalization as a discipline. For a classic statement of this position, see W.J.T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 540–44.

4. Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (no. 1), 1982; Sheumaker and Wajda, “Introduction,” in Material Culture in America, xi–xii. For a sample of the diversity of approaches to material culture studies, see Robert Blair St. George, “Introduction” and the essays by Prown, Rhys Isaac, and Henry Glassie in St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600–1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).

5. For a cogent overview of debates about “visual culture” and “visual culture studies” see Deborah Cherry, “Art History Visual Culture,” Art History 27 (September 2004): 479–93. For a discussion of the impact of “visual culture studies” on scholarship in American art, see John Davis, “The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship on the Art of the United States,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 540–80.

6. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

7. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture,” in Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader, 2d edition (London: Routledge, 2002), 5–6.

8. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, “Visual Culture’s History: Twenty-First Century Interdisicplinarity and its Nineteenth-Century Objects,” in Schwartz and Przyblyski, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–14; Deborah Cherry, ed., Art: History: Culture (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). For a study of the relationship between late nineteenth-century visuality and the rise of mass culture see Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998).

9. For a groundbreaking study that analyzes the densely associative nature of early New England culture as a “poetics of implication,” see Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

10. Boston Prints And Printmakers, 1670–1775, edited by Walter Whitehill and Sinclair Hitchings (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973); Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Walter M. Whitehill, Brock Jobe, and Jonathan Fairbanks (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974); Architecture in Colonial Massachusetts, edited by Abbott Lowell Cummings (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1979); Seventeenth-Century New England, edited by David D. Hall, David G. Allen, and Philip C. F. Smith (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001); New England Silver & Silversmithing, 1620–1815, edited by Jeannine Falino and Gerald W. R. Ward (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001).

11. New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston : Museum of Fine Arts, 1982).

12. The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635–1820 (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985).

13. Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce, and Art In Southern Maine, 1780–1830, edited by Laura Fecych Sprague ; essays by Joyce Butler, et al. (Kennebunk, Me.: Brick Store Museum ; Boston: Distributed by Northeastern University Press, 1987).

14. The absence in this volume of scholarship on Native American culture reflects the content of the proposals submitted for the conference from which these essays were drawn. For recent work on early New England Native communities that addresses material and visual culture, see Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, eds., Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003).

15. For a recent synthesis of early New England history see Joseph Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

1. York Deeds (Portland, Maine: Brown, Thurston and Co., 1889), 5, pt.1:82; Sybil Noyes, Charles T. Libby, and Walter G. Davis, eds., Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1979), 134, 184–85.

2. Emerson Baker, “The Chadbourne Site (1643–1690): Gentrification on the Early Maine Frontier,” paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Meeting, Williamsburg, Va., January 2007.

3. Emerson Baker, “The Great Works River and Humphrey Chadbourne,” in Jeffrey Bolster, ed., Cross-Grained and Wily Waters: A Guide to the Piscataqua Maritime Region (Portsmouth, N.H.: Peter Randall Publisher, 2002), 176–77; Elaine Chadbourne Bacon, comp., The Chadbourne Family in America: A Genealogy (Camden, Maine: Penobscot Press, 1994), xxxiii-17.

4. Noyes et al., eds., Genealogical Dictionary, 133–34, 623–24; Emerson Baker, The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 52–53, 117–18. The Shapleigh trading network extended northward in 1652 when Oliver Cromwell appointed Lucy’s brother as governor of Newfoundland.

5. Baker, “The Great Works River and Humphrey Chadbourne,” 176–77; York Deeds, 2:30–31; Noyes et al., eds., Genealogical Dictionary, 133–34.

6. York Deeds, 2: 30–31.

7. For a discussion on the rarity and symbolic importance of silver in early Maine see Edwin A. Churchill, “Glistening Reflections of Stability: The Roles of Silver in Early Maine,” in Jeannine Falino and Gerald Ward, eds., New England Silver and Silversmithing, 1620–1815 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001), 213–45; York Deeds, 2: 30–31; 5:13, 16. The quote is from York Deeds, 2: 30.

8. Amanda Lange, Delftware at Historic Deerfield, 1600–1800 (Deerfield, Mass.: Historic Deerfield, 2001), 108. For the Chinese Scholar pattern, see Sarah Fayen, “The Chinese Scholar Pattern: Style, Merchant Identity, and the English Imagination in the Late Seventeenth-Century Tin-Glazed Earthenware,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the World History Association, Salem, Massachusetts, June 2009.

9. York Deeds, 5, pt. 1: 23–24: Kathleen Deagan, Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500–1800 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 1: 76–77.

10. York Deeds, 2: 30.

11. Noyes et al., eds., Genealogical Dictionary, 101, 246–47.

12. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses and Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993), i–ii.

13. Charles Bradley, Phil Dunning and Gerard Gusset, “Material Culture from the Elizabeth and Mary (1690): Individuality and Social Status in a Late 17th Century New England Assemblage,” in Christian Roy, Jean Belisle, Marc-Andre Bernier, and Brad Loewen (eds.), ArcheoLogiques; Collection Hors-Serie 1. Mer et Monde: Questions d’archeologie maritime, 2003, 152–55, 160–67.

14. Emerson W. Baker, “The 1991 Excavations at the Richard Hitchcock Site (ME 041–12),” report on file at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine, 1991.

15. Emerson W. Baker, “The 1995 York County Archaeology Survey: A Report on ME 041–12, the Richard Hitchcock Site,” report on file at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine, 1995; Noyes et al., eds., Genealogical Dictionary, 339; Charles T. Libby, ed., Province and Court Records of Maine (Portland, Maine: Maine Historical Society, 1931), 2:453–55.

16. Emerson W. Baker, “The 1995 Survey of the Lower Kennebec River: A Report on ME 168–3, Sagadahoc Island,” report on file at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine, 1995.

17. Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New England (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988), 142; for Sewall’s mill see Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), 1:148–50; Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 94–103.

18. Emerson Baker, “The World of Thomas Gorges: Life in the Province of Maine in the 1640s,” in Emerson Baker et al., eds., American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 267–71; Peter Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 151–55, 240–42.

19. Cary Carson, Norman F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Garry Wheeler Stone, and Dell Upton, “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern America Colonies,” Winterthur Portfolio 16:2/3 (1981):136.

20. Emerson Baker, Robert Bradley, Leon Cranmer, and Neill DePaoli, “Earthfast Architecture in Early Maine,” paper presented at the Vernacular Architecture Forum annual meeting, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1993; Carson et al., “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern America Colonies,” 135–96; for the quote see Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, 142; Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 52–53.

21. Carson et al., “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern America Colonies.”

1. Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, Voyage of La Pérouse Around the World, 4 vols, ed. M. L. A. Milet-Mureau (London, 1798), I: 37–38. For discussion of the directions given to La Pérouse see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 137–40.

2. There are few modern histories of Salem; a good summary is National Park Service, Maritime Salem in the Age of Sail (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1987). For recent cultural analysis of the city see Salem: Place, Myth, Memory, Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, eds. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). There is a significant body of literature on the city’s infamous witch trails and its colonial and federal architecture. Most histories of the city, however, date to the colonial revival period, particularly the work of James Duncan Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1937); and Salem and the Indies: The Story of the Great Commercial Era of the City (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947). An excellent study of the career paths of mariners is Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). For a study of how international trade influenced the early American economy see James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

3. There is an extensive bibliography on eighteenth-century voyage narratives. Some key works that connect art and science include Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984); Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Rudiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). More recent literature in this area has focused on exploring the colonizing or imperial eye, such as Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).

4. For a discussion of the movement to found comparable subscription libraries, on Charleston and other cities, see James Raven, “Social Libraries and Library Societies in Eighteenth-Century North America,” and James Green, “Subscription Libraries and Commercial Circulating Libraries in Colonial Philadelphia and New York,” both in Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, eds. (Amherst, Mass. and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 1–23; 24–52. Like the Salem Social Library, libraries in other seaports functioned as elite social institutions collecting a wide range of books; like the East India Marine Society, they collected unusual objects for their cabinet of curiosities. See also Martha McNamara, “Defining the Profession: Books, Libraries, and Architects,” in American Architects and Their Books to 1848, Kenneth Hafertepe and James O’Gorman, eds. (Amherst, Mass. and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). For extensive study of American imprints and their circulation see the series A History of the Book in America, particularly Volume 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Volume 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: American Antiquarian Society and University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

5. My account of the holdings and charge records of the Social Library is derived from its archives held at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., collection MSS 56. The Social Library published its holdings several times. See for example, Bylaws and Regulations of the Incorporated Proprietors of the Social Library in Salem (Salem, Mass.: Printed by Thomas C. Cushing?, c. 1797); Evans 32800 in Early American Imprints digital database. The Social Library’s books are held by the Salem Athenaeum, which was formed in 1810 when the Social Library and Philosophical Library merged. Secondary sources on the Salem Athenaeum include Cynthia B. Wiggin, The Salem Athenaeum (Salem, Mass.: Forest River Press, 1971) and the Athenaeum’s website at www.salemathenaeum.net.

6. See for example, Bylaws and Regulations; Evans 32800 in Early American Imprints.

7. The records of the Philosophical Library are at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, MSS 56. They include financial, catalogue, and charge records.

8. The charge books are presently held for the Salem Athenaeum in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, MSS 56.

9. Rules and Regulations of the Library of Arts and Sciences (Salem, Mass.: Printed by Thomas C. Cushing, 1802); Shaw & Shoemaker 2532.

10. John Dabney, Catalogue of Books, for Sale or Circulation in Town or Country, by John Dabney, at His Book and Stationary Store, and Circulating Library, in Salem (Salem, Mass.: J. Dabney, 1801).

11. Harold L. Burstyn, “The Salem Philosophical Library: Its History and Importance for American Science,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 96 (1960): 169–206.

12. The most synthetic history of the EIMS is Walter Muir Whitehill, The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem: A Sesquicentennial History (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1949).

13. Daniel Finamore, “Displaying the Sea and Defining America: Early Exhibitions at the Salem East India Marine Society,” Journal for Maritime Research (May 2002) [On-line edition: http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk]; and James M. Lindgren, “’That Every Mariner May Possess a History of the World’: A Cabinet for the East India Marine Society of Salem,” The New England Quarterly 68 (June 1995): 179–205.

14. Papers of the East India Marine Society, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. MS 88, Box 1, Folder 1. The EIMS Library charge records are intermingled with the Society minutes each month.

15. Ibid.

16. Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, a highly experienced French naval officer and explorer, left Brest in 1785 on an expedition funded by Louis XVI. Over the next three years, La Pérouse crossed the Atlantic and rounded Cape Horn; stopped at Easter Island and the Hawaiian archipelago, then sailed to the west coast of North America, exploring from Alaska to California. He crossed the Pacific to Macao and Hong Kong, then headed north to Taiwan, the Phillipines, Korea, Japan, and Siberian Kamchatka, then turned south to Tonga, Samoa, Australia, and eventually the 1788 wreck of his ship on the coral reefs of Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands. Fortunately for his legacy, La Pérouse had the foresight to send back to Europe from Australia via a British ship, his journals to date and some works by the three ship illustrators. This was the basis of the sumptuously illustrated atlas published in French in 1797.

17. Papers of the East India Marine Society, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. MS 88, Box 4, Folder 2.

18. Papers of the East India Marine Society, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. MS 88, Box 4, Folder 2.

19. Papers of the East India Marine Society, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. MS 88, Box 1, Vol. 1.

20. “Landscape,” in Oxford Art Online.

21. For a study of ideological aspects of mapping see Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

22. For example, John Thomas Serres was a drawing instructor at the Chelsea Naval School in London and published Liber Nauticus, and Instructor in the Art of Marine Drawings in 1805–06. See David Cordingly, Marine Painting in England, 1700–1900 (London: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, 1974). A catalogue of East India Company drawings is published in Mildred Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1972).

23. On drawing as a polite art for men and women see Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2000).

24. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Mocha, December 1800 to October 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 568–621, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. There are approximately 3000 ships’ logs in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum; references to logs below are drawn from this repository.

25. Nathaniel Bowditch, Log of the Astrea, Salem to Lisbon, Madeira, and Manilla, March 1796 to May 1797, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

26. Frederic W. Howay, Voyages of the ‘Columbia’ to the Northwest Coast 1787–1790 and 1790–1793 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1941).

27. These books, as well as maps and atlases were easily available. For an overview of the market, see David Bosse, “The Boston Map Trade of the Eighteenth Century” in Mapping Boston, Alex Krieger and David Cobb with Amy Turner, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 36–55.

28. See the British Library Integrated Catalogue online for many of the editions of the English Pilot, http://catalogue.bl.uk.

29. Dudley Pickman, Log of the Anna, Salem to Sumatra to Boston, January 1801 to November 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

30. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to Sumatra to Manila, December 1801 to March 1803, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 122.

31. James Deveraux, Log of the Franklin, Salem to Batavia and Japan, December 1798 to May 1800, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

32. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to Sumatra to Manila, December 1801 to March 1803, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 129.

33. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 558–64.

34. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Sumatra, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 200–1.

35. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 556.

36. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 561, 563–64.

37. Dudley Pickman, Log of the Belisarius, 1799–1800; quoted in Susan Bean, Yankee India (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001), 95.

38. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 561, 563–64.

39. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to Sumatra to Manila, December 1801 to March 1803, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 124.

40. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Sumatra, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 202.

41. Nathaniel Bowditch, Log of the Astrea, Salem to Lisbon, Madeira, and Manila, March 1796 to May 1797, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

42. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 563.

43. Dudley Pickman, Log of the Derby, 1803–04; quoted in Bean, Yankee India, 113.

44. The EIMS palanquin is reproduced and discussed in Bean, Yankee India, 79–81.

45. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to Sumatra to Manila, December 1801 to March 1803, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 124.

46. William A. Rogers, Log of the Tartar, September 1817–18, quoted in Bean, Yankee India, 153. Log in Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum.

47. Nathaniel Bowditch, Log of the Astrea, Salem to Lisbon, Madeira, and Manila, March 1796 to May 1797, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

48. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 556.

49. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Sumatra, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 201.

50. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Sumatra, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 200.

51. For a comparison with holdings on aesthetics in other libraries, see Janice G. Schimmelman, Books On Art In Early America: Books on Art, Aesthetics and Instruction Available in American Libraries and Bookstores Through 1815 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2007). On sailors’ literary culture and reading on the high seas see Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

52. Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London 1757); Robert Dossie, Handmaid to the Arts, 2nd ed. (London: J Nourse, 1764).

53. Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy, The Art of Painting, trans. William Mason (York, Eng., 1783); Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour (London, 1749).

54. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753).

55. Benjamin Hodges, Log of the William and Henry, Salem to Canton, December 1788 to 1790, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. Entry for December 18, 1788.

56. Benjamin Hodges, Log of the William and Henry, Salem to Canton, December 1788 to 1790, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. Entry for July 25, 1789.

57. William A. Rogers, Log of the Tartar, 1817–18, quoted in Bean, Yankee India, 143. Log in Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum.

58. William A. Rogers, Log of the Tartar, 1817–18, quoted in Bean, Yankee India, 149. Log in Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. The sketches are reproduced in Bean, 150.

59. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 559.

60. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 556.

61. For a discussion of Carpenter’s career as well as extensive excerpts from his Journal of the Ruby, 1789–90, see Bean, Yankee India, 44–63.

1. New-England Courant, 8 October 1722; 12 November 1722; and 13–27 May, 1723, quoted in Henry H. Edes, “The Burgis-Price View of Boston,” in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 1906–07, 11 (1910): 246–47. Edes suggests that this print was never produced, however, it was; see John W. Reps, “Boston by Bostonians: The Printed Plans and Views of the Colonial City by its Artists, Cartographers, Engravers, and Publishers,” in Boston Prints and Printmakers, 1670–1775 (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973), 33–35.

2. On Burgis and his works, see Richard B. Holman, “William Burgis” in Boston Prints and Printmakers, 57–81.

3. On subscriptions for prints, see Timothy Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (London: Yale University Press for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1997), 52–57.

4. New-England Courant, 23 December–6 January, 1723–24, quoted in Edes, 247.

5. Ibid. See also Reps, 34.

6. John Harris is identified on the finished print as the engraver. On Harris, see Clayton, 21; and Edes, 253–54.

7. New-England Courant, 17 July–28 August, 1725, quoted in Edes, 247.

8. According to Reps, writing in the early 1970s, the only known copy exists at the Essex Institute (now the Peabody Essex Museum); see Reps, 33.

9. For a catalogue of these images, see Reps, 38–49.

10. On nationalism and landscape painting, see Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–75 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1–20, 65–105.

11. For these interpretations, see Reps, 33–42; and John Hallam, “The Eighteenth-Century American Townscape and the Face of Colonialism,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4: 3/4 (Summer/Fall 1990): 144–62.

12. See for example, the May 6–13, 1723 issue of the New-England Courant.

13. On the Townhouse, see Martha J. McNamara, “‘In the Face of the Court . . .’: Law, Commerce, and the Transformation of Public Space in Boston, 1650–1770,” Winterthur Portfolio 26:2/3 (Summer-Autumn 2001): 126–31, 134–35.

14. For a short list of the items for sale at Price’s shop, see New England Courant, 17 July–28 August, 1725 quoted in Edes, 247. For a brief biography of Price see Edes, 257–62.

15. On Selby’s coffeehouse, see David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press for The Institute for Early American History and Culture, 1995), 88–96. On Selby himself, see also Edes, 254–57.

16. On the rise of a capitalist ethos in New England, see Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3–12, 71–106.

17. The following discussion is drawn from P. J. Marshall, “Introduction” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2 The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1998) 1–22; Jacob M. Price, “The Imperial Economy, 1700–1776,” in Ibid., 78–104; Patrick O’Brien, “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire,” in Ibid., 59–63; and Jeremy Black, The British Seaborne Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 56–87.

18. On merchants and gentility, see Hunter, 71–146.

19. On the introduction of the picturesque to early eighteenth-century English elites, see Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790, 4th ed., (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 154–56. On the rise of the picturesque, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986), 57–85.

20. Private schools in colonial Boston often taught commercial skills, including surveying, navigation, and bookkeeping, see Robert Francis Seybolt, The Private Schools of Colonial Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 10, 14, 86–7. Obadiah Brown, a member of the Rhode Island family of successful merchants, served as supercargo on his brother James’s ships. Obadiah subsequently became a merchant, owner of sloops, brigantines, and schooners see James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 5–8.

21. James Brown, founder of the Rhode Island merchant dynasty, began his career as a ship’s captain see Ibid., 2.

22. On the basics of navigation, see Alfred Gell, “How to Read a Map: Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation,” Man, n.s. 20:2 (June 1985): 271–86.

23. This procedure is the one typically used for coasting. Out of sight of land, mariners estimated the distance and direction sailed, measured the angle of the sun to determine latitude, and calculated longitude via mathematical equations in order to determine their ship’s position. Until the invention of the chronometer, however, this procedure was prone to error, so landfall sightings—navigational elevations—were particularly important.

24. For an well-illustrated overview of early modern sea charts and sea atlases, see John Blake, The Sea Chart: The Illustrated History of Nautical Maps and Navigational Charts (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2004), 8–27

25. For Seller’s reputation and other developments in maritime cartography in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, see A. H. W. Robinson, Marine Cartography in Britain: A History of the Sea Chart to 1855 (Leicester, Eng.: Leicester University Press, 1962): 34–113.

26. On the development of more accurate survey methods, see Ibid., 47–70.

27. As Martin Brückner has shown, map literacy increased dramatically among the general population of colonial British North America, but of course merchants had a vested interest in maps; see Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Williamsburg, Va.,: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006), 16–50. Incidentally, in the same advertisement published in the New-England Courant announcing the availability of the southeast view, William Price also announced a “new chart of the British Empire in North America,” quoted in Edes, 247.

28. The following discussion draws on Marshall, 11–12; and Price, 81–91.

29. For an example of smuggling, see the activities of Thomas Hancock as discussed in W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–1775 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), 69–73, 114–18.

30. On eighteenth-century men-of-war, see E. H. H. Archibald, The Fighting Ship in the Royal Navy, AD 897–1984, rev. ed. (Poole, Eng.: Blandford Press, 1984), 33–50.

31. On station ships, see John W. Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution: A Battlefield History (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 26–7.

32. On merchants and the changing urban fabric of New England, see Hunter, 84–88, 113–24.

33. By identifying specific structures in the print, Burgis, Price, and Selby might hope that individuals associated with these structures would purchase the print. Alternatively, they might have included the identifying numbers and labels only after subscriptions were paid.

34. On Faneuil’s house, see Hunter, 120–21.

35. On King’s Chapel and Brattle Street Church, see Hunter, who notes that a diversity of faith represented a shift away from Puritan control of Boston, 92–96.

36. On shipyards and shipbuilding, see Joseph A. Goldenberg, Shipbuilding in Colonial America (Newport News, Va.: The Mariners Museum, 1976), 68–76, 82–95.

37. The print’s text is quoted in Edes, 248–49.

38. On Long Wharf, see “Long Wharf,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 9:2 (March 1935): 17–22.

39. Quoted in Edes, 248–49.

40. On cargo carried by Boston-based vessels and the complexities of the transatlantic trade, see the career of Thomas Hancock as discussed in Baxter, 45–91.

41. On types and rigs of eighteenth-century sailing vessels, see Roger Morris, Atlantic Seafaring: Ten Centuries of Exploration and Trade in the North Atlantic (Camden, Maine: International Marine Publishers, 1992), 101–23.

42. On merchants commissioning ships, see Goldenberg, 82–86.

43. For a brief discussion of the sailing characteristics of a fore-and-aft rigged vessel, see Douglas Phillips-Birt, A History of Seamanship (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), 120, 128–29.

44. See William Armstrong Fairburn, Merchant Sail (Center Lovell, Maine: Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation, Inc., 1945), 1: 237. Depending on their size, sloops could also make transatlantic voyages, as did Thomas Hancock’s Sarah in 1733; see Baxter, 57.

45. On the sailing characteristics of a square-rigged vessel, see Phillips-Birt, 120–21.

46. The American Magazine was published for just over three years, from 1743 to 1746. On The American Magazine, see Moses Tyler, A History of American Literature (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 305.

47. For an overview of the scope of trade and the individuals affected, see Price, 78–103.

48. For example of this approach, see Ralph Hyde, Gilded Scenes and Shining Prospects: Panoramic Views of British Towns, 1575–1900 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1985). Interestingly, Hyde omits views of towns in the colonies.

49. For a short account of this incident, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 35–46.

1. Robert Blair St. George, “’Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England,” (1982) in Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens, Ga. and London: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 336–37.

2. For instance, Henri Lafebvre’s La Production de l’Espace (1974) appeared in English translation in 1991 (Oxford, Eng. and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell) and Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (1975) appeared in translation as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). For an overview of the spatial turn, see: Denis Cosgrove, “Landscape and Landschaft,” GHI Bulletin 35 (Fall 2004): 57–71.

3. This tendency is most incisively and comprehensively described and critiqued in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, Calif. and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

4. Richard M. Candee, “Maine Towns, Maine People: Architecture and the Community, 1783–1820,” in Charles E. Clark, James S. Leamon, and Karen Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic: From Revolution to Statehood (Hanover, N.H. and London: University Press of New England, 1988), 29.

5. James F. O’Gorman, The Perspective of Anglo-American Architecture: Notes on Some Graphic Attempts at Three-dimensional Representation in the Colonies and Early Republic (Philadelphia: Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 1995).

6. Fisher received an invitation to become minister at Blue Hill on October 5, 1795, according to his diary entry for that day, although he had preached in Blue Hill during the summer months in previous years.

7. The chronology of drawings for the house is laid out in Abbott Lowell Cummings, “The House the Parson Built,” Old-Time New England, Vol. 56, No. 204 (April-June 1966): 91–107.

8. Diary entries for October 13 and 15, 1824. Throughout the text, diary references are to the typescript translation now in the Blue Hill Library, Blue Hill, Me. This discussion of Fisher closely follows the text of my book, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

9. On April 19, 1825 Fisher wrote in his diary: “Began to sketch on canvas a view of Bluehill village.”

10. The painting is in the collection of the William A. Farnsworth Museum and Library, Rockland, Maine (FM). In Fisher’s time, his town’s name was written as one word (“Bluehill”) whereas today it is customarily written in two words (“Blue Hill”). Except when quoting directly from Fisher, or referring to a period title, the modern form is used here.

11. Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

12. David C. Smith has borrowed the definition of the hill country from Harold Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936) in his Studies in the Land: The Northeast Corner (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). The first chapter (“The Changing Landscape of Maine to 1820”) is a useful overview and originally appeared as chapter one in Clark, Leamon, and Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic.

13. Charles E. Clark, The Eastern Frontier: The Settlement of Northern New England, 1610–1763 (Hanover, N.H. and London: University Press of New England, 1983), 354–55; Jamie H. Eves, “’The Acquisition of Wealth, or of a Comfortable Subsistence’: The Census of 1800 and the Yankee Migration to Maine, 1760–1825,” Maine History Vol. 35, No. 1–2 (1995): 6–25.

14. A useful overview of the impact of international conflict on Maine shipowners and merchants is found in Joyce Butler, “Rising Like a Phoenix: Commerce in Southern Maine, 1775–1830,” in Laura Fecych Sprague, ed., Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce, and Art in Southern Maine, 1780–1830 (Kennebunk, Me.: The Brick Store Museum, 1987), 15–31; Mary Ellen Chase, Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson, 1768–1847 (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 236; Smith, Studies in the Land, 3–5.

15. The commonplace book was titled “National and Political” by Fisher and is now in the collection of the Jonathan Fisher Memorial, Blue Hill, Me. Also see: Diary entry of 1813 or 1814, quoted in Chase, Jonathan Fisher, 247, and Diary entries of 6/27/1812 and 4/7/1815.

16. On Federalist opposition in Maine to the War of 1812, and its impact on the statehood movement, see Ronald F. Banks, Maine Becomes a State, The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785–1820 (Somersworth, N.H. and Portland, Me.: New Hampshire Publishing Co. and Maine Historical Society, 1973), 57–66.

17. The generally modest character of American houses, and particularly those in frontier regions, is discussed on the basis of the 1798 direct tax lists by Carole Shammas, “The Housing Stock of the Early United States: Refinement Meets Migration,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, Vol. 64 (July 2007): 549–89.

18. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 142.

19. Richard M. Candee, “’The Appearance of Enterprise and Improvement’: Architecture and the Coastal Elite of Southern Maine,” in Sprague, ed., Agreeable Situations, 75.

20. Candee, “’The Appearance of Enterprise and Improvement’,” 71, 75; Candee, “Maine Towns, Maine People,” 41, 45–46.

21. Denis Cosgrove, “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1985): 55–56.

22. Candee, “‘The Appearance of Enterprise and Improvement’,” 79; Kevin D. Murphy, “The Architecture of Summer Street, Kennebunk, Maine,” Magazine Antiques 168, No. 2 (August 2005): 55–58; Arthur J. Gerrier, “Thomas Eaton (Active 1794–1831),” in A Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Maine Vol. 5, No. 8 (1988): 3–4.

23. Edward Emerson Bourne, History of Wells and Kennebunk, from the Earliest Settlement to the Year 1820: At which Time Kennebunk was Set Off, and Incorporated (Portland, Me.: B. Thurston & Co., 1875), 576, 758–59.

24. Candee, “Appearance of Enterprise,” 75.

25. Paul Coffin, “Memoir and Journals of Rev. Paul Coffin, D.D.,” Collections of the Maine Historical Society, 1st ser., 4 (1856): 327; Carolyn S. Parsons, “’Bordering on Magnificence’: Urban Domestic Planning in the Maine Woods,” in Clark, Leamon, and Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic, 62–68.

26. Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 39–40.

27. Contract made between Henry Knox and Ebenezer Dunton and Tileston Cushing, April 7, 1794; Knox Papers, Maine Historical Society, Portland, Me. Transcribed in James H. Mundy, “Two Early Building Specifications in Maine,” Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology Vol. 7, No. 1 (1975): 103.

28. Cyrus Eaton, History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine, 2 vols. (Hallowell, Me.: Masters, Smith & Co., 1865), vol. 1, 231; quoted in Parsons, “Bordering on Magnificence,” 65. Also see: Samuel M. Green, “The Architecture of Thomaston, Maine,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Vol. 10, No. 4 (Dec. 1951): 24–25.

29. Coffin, “Missionary Tour in Maine,” 327.

30. Green, “Architecture of Thomaston, Maine,” 26. Among Green’s sources were two elderly women who preserved local oral traditions from the nineteenth century: Mrs. Richard Eliot of Thomaston and Mrs. William R. Tobey who was 90 years old in 1948.

31. Taylor, Liberty Men, 41–44. The quotation is from page 43.

32. Roger G. Reed, unpublished study of the Ruggles House, 2007–8, 4–6. The author kindly made his manuscript available to me for consultation.

33. “Wilderness Elegance Restored: The Thomas Ruggles House,” Early American Homes (April, 1998): 45–52; personal correspondence (3/1/2006) with Roger Reed. Also see the documentation of the Ruggles House produced by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC and available online at http://memory.loc.gov.

34. Reed, Ruggles House, 9.

35. The fundamental treatment of this conflict is found in Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects in Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

36. Anon., The Black Mansion: Historical Introduction (n.p.: n.d.), 10; quoted in Woodlawn Museum, “Woodlawn: An Estate of History” (2008); http://www.woodlawnmuseum.com/historyfull.html. Accessed 12/8/2011.

37. Woodlawn Museum, “Woodlawn: An Estate of History” (2008); http://www.woodlawnmuseum.com/historyfull.html. Accessed 12/8/2011.

38. Some of Black’s neighbors doubted his patriotism, and prior to leading his military company on a march to Mt. Desert Island, the site of a feared British attack, Black assured the men that despite any rumors as to his allegiances, “I will defend your wives, children, and property, and the Constitution of our country, as far as my abilities permit, against the attacks of all enemies whatsoever” (emphasis present in the original). Biographical Encyclopedia of Maine of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Metropolitan Publishing and Engraving Co., 1885), 214–15; quoted in Rebecca Robbins, Colonel John Black of Ellsworth (1781–1856) (np: nd), np, reprint from the Maine Historical Society Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter 1978).

39. David Cobb to C. W. Hare, 11/10/1810; quoted in Robbins, np.

40. “Woodlawn Museum.” The property has subsequently reduced to about 180 acres.

41. Walter Knight Sturges, “The Black House, Ellsworth: An Asher Benjamin House in Maine,” Magazine Antiques Vol. 56 (May 1954): 398–400.

42. The discipline of cultural geography has been effective in describing the ways in which landscape and architecture were manipulated (in early America and elsewhere) as means of reproducing social relations. See, for example: Richard Peet, “A Sign Taken for History: Daniel Shays’ Memorial in Petersham, Massachusetts,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 1996): 21–43; and for an overview, Donald Mitchell, Cultural Geography, A Critical Introduction (np: Blackwell, 2000), especially Part II, “The Political Landscape” (89–144).

43. Alan Taylor, “From Fathers to Friends of the People: Political Personas in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 11 (Winter 1991): 466–91.

44. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 1986): 23. The text originated as a lecture given in 1967 but not published until October 1984 as “Des Espaces Autres” in Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité.

1. For a dramatic account of Oliver’s midnight ride as told by a descendent, see Peter Oliver, “Judge Oliver and the Small Oliver House in Middleborough,” in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 1947–1951, 38 (1959): 302. For information regarding the sugar box crafted by Winslow, see Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, Style, vol. 3 of New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1982), 498–99.

2. This figure is the most conservative within the recently published literature on the loyalists, and another 15,000 can be added to the total if one counts slaves that were brought with fleeing loyalists. See Maya Jasanoff, “The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 65 (April 2008): 208. Peter Coldham has recently set the figure at 70,000, although both historians agree that quantifying the number of loyalists that entered into exile is extremely difficult given the numerous destinations of flight and the ambiguities surrounding definitions of loyalism. See Peter Wilson Coldham, American Migrations, 1765–1799: The Lives, Times and Families of Colonial Americans who Remained Loyal to the British Crown Before, During and After the Revolutionary War, as Related in their own Words and through their Correspondence (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 2000), ix.

3. For a case of a loyalist leaving possessions with patriot family members, see Elizabeth Gray Otis to Harrison Gray, undated, as quoted in Mabel Swann, “Furniture of the Boston Tories,” Antiques 41 (March 1942): 187. For an attempt at retrieving abandoned property, see Andrew Spooner to Thomas Hutchinson, April 12, 1786, Hutchinson and Oliver Papers, Vol. 3, 1775 – 1811, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. Many loyalist refugees also filed claims requesting compensation for lost property from the British government; for a summary of these claims, see Mary Beth Norton, The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 196–222. These three strategies operate at the center of my dissertation, and this essay serves as an overview of the predominant themes of the larger project. See Katherine Rieder, “‘The Remainder of Our Effects We Must Leave Behind’: American Loyalists and the Meaning of Things, 1765–1800” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009).

4. Samuel Quincy to Hannah Hill Quincy, 1 January 1777. Papers Relating to the Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Families, Massachusetts Historical Society.

5. For inheritance patterns in the eighteenth century, see Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michael Dahlin, Inheritance in America From Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 3–79; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the Decorative Arts,” in American Furniture, Luke Beckerdite and William Hosley, eds. (Hanover, N.H.: Chipstone Foundation, 1995), 39–68; Amanda Vickery, “Women and the World of Goods: a Lancashire Consumer and her Possessions, 1751–81,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 247–301; and the classic text on inheritance in colonial New England, Philip Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,1970). For the structure and unreliability of transatlantic networks, see Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 26–27, 50–51.

6. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66–67, 83. For recent works relating to the movement of colonial objects through space and time, see Margaretta Lovell’s consideration of John Singleton Copley’s c. 1770 portrait of Joshua Henshaw; the author follows the portrait through the circumstances leading to its production, to the interaction of Henshaw and Copley, and then through its progression through a line of descendents and institutions. See Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 94–140. Jennifer Roberts has taken the issue of movement more literally, proving the centrality of spatial issues such as transmission and mobility in the Atlantic world, especially in relation to the objects that connected the widely dispersed subjects of the British crown; see Jennifer L. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo: Boy with a Squirrel and the Dilemma of Transit,” American Art 21 (Summer 2007): 20–41. For readings of portraiture and other objects as inert objects in schemes of self-fashioning and social emulation, see Paul Staiti, “Character and Class,” in John Singleton Copley in America, by Carrie Rebora et al. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 53–77; T. H. Breen, “The Meaning of ‘Likeness’: American Portrait Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society,” Word and Image 6 (October-December 1990): 325–50; and Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

7. Walter Benjamin’s musings on the object’s use by “primitive society,” the collector, and the allegorist are indicative of his conception of the obdurate object, which conceals its many meanings; see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 210–211.

8. For a discussion of the inalienable spirit, or hau, at the center of gifts and the social networks they create, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), viii, 11–12, 18. Mauss’s work has become a seminal text in anthropology and cultural studies, producing a number of further meditations on the hau of objects and the function of gifts within contemporary and historical societies. See, for example, Marshall Sahlins, “The Spirit of the Gift,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, Alan D. Schrift, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70–99; Nicolas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 14–34 in particular; and Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992). Weiner’s introductory discussion of the “paradox of keeping-while-giving,” or forcing common memory into the future through the repeated inheritance of an object, is particularly relevant, see Weiner, 6–8.

9. Oliver, “Judge Oliver and the Small Oliver House in Middleborough,” 302.

10. Fairbanks and Trent, Style, 498–99 and Ian M. G. Quimby, American Silver at Winterthur (Charlottesville, Va.: Winterthur Museum in association with the University Press of Virginia, 1995), 184. The above sources disagree, however, in relation to the name of the female recipient of the sugar box; Fairbanks and Trent stated it was Mary Belcher Oliver while Quimby named the recipient as Elizabeth Belcher Oliver. Given the inscription on the box: “O/D·E/ Donnum W:P 1702,” and the fact that Elizabeth Belcher Oliver (not Mary Belcher Oliver) is listed in family genealogies, Quimby’s account is likely correct. For a genealogical chart of the Oliver family, see Andrew Oliver, Faces of a Family: An Illustrated Catalogue of Portraits and Silhouettes . . . (Privately Printed, 1960), 34–35. Such an elaborate gift between in-laws—Elizabeth Oliver’s brother Jonathan married William Partridge’s daughter Mary—may seem strange, but as Ian Quimby described it, “Given the Puritan habit of not distinguishing between blood relatives and those acquired by marriage, the relationship was more important than it might appear to today’s readers.” See Quimby, American Silver at Winterthur, 183.

11. Fairbanks and Trent, Style, 498. The catalogue entry for the object describes the iconographic elements as follows: “The mounted knight, bands of myrtle, amorini, and allegorical busts are all derived from illustrations in editions of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Homer’s Iliad, where they accompany texts dealing with martial prowess and courtly love.”

12. The box was likely given to commemorate the birth of Daniel Oliver, born June 13, 1702, who did not survive infancy. See “Object Report, Sugar Box,” Silver Sugar Box (1959.3363), Curatorial Files, Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Del. Peter Oliver, although the couple’s third son, inherited the sugar box as both his elder brothers—another Daniel and Andrew—predeceased him. For information regarding the Oliver family genealogy, see Oliver, Faces of a Family, Appendices 5 and 6.

13. Linda Ayres, Harvard Divided (Cambridge, Mass.: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1976), 20–21.

14. For the inherent liquidity of silver objects, see Mark A. Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (April 2001): 327, 331–34 and Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution, 106. Given silver’s complex role as both money and a material used to constitute decorative objects, it is important to note that prior to the advent of “modern banking,” silversmiths and goldsmiths often took on the “many of the functions of a banker and a broker.” See Fairbanks and Trent, Style, 480.

15. For a discussion of the inalienable spirit of objects enmeshed in social networks, see Mauss, The Gift, 11–12 and Weiner, Inalienable Possessions, 4–6.

16. There is some disagreement as to when the sugar box left the Oliver family’s possession. The New England Begins catalogue posits that the English branch of the Oliver family sold the sugar box to a dealer in 1937, who subsequently sold it to American collector Henry Francis du Pont, upon which it became part of the Winterthur Museum’s collection. See Fairbanks and Trent, Style, 498. The provenance of the object at Winterthur, however, maintains that it left the family at some point in the nineteenth century and entered the collections of a Scottish Church, where the same American dealer found it in the 1930s. See “Object Report, Sugar Box,” Silver Sugar Box (1959.3363), Winterthur Museum Curatorial Files, Winterthur, Del.

17. Mary Beth Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (Jul. 1976): 398. As Samuel Quincy wrote to his wife in regard to her fear of transatlantic travel: “If therefore Things sh^d not wear a more promising aspect upon the opening of the next year, by all means summon resolution enough to cross the Ocean. M^rs Hutchinson tells me this was your greatest dread. Believe me you will find it infinitely less dangerous & terrifying than your imagination suggests. The recompence which awaits you, shall be the careful attention of friendship & the embrace of a faithful partner,” see Samuel Quincy to Hannah Hill Quincy, 15 October 1777, Papers Relating to the Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Families, Massachusetts Historical Society.

18. Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 141–43.

19. See Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1980), 120; Joan R. Gundersen, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,” Signs 13 (Autumn 1987): 59–61, 63; Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Woman and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 11–15; and Linda Kerber, “Paradox of Women’s Citizenship in the Early Republic: the Case of Martin v. Massachusetts, 1805,” American Historical Review 97 (Apr. 1992): 349–78. Coverture has also been defined in legal terms as “unity of person,” meaning that the husband and wife together formed one legal entity rather than two. See Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America, 14–15.

20. Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, 14.

21. Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, xv. The adoption of the principle of separate estates largely depended on a colony adopting the dual system of English law, which involved establishing both courts of law and courts of equity (chancery courts). These equity courts then enforced the right of families to endow women with separate estates, which were meant to remain in their control rather than their husband’s, a precedent that was based on the example of English chancery courts. While Salmon states that the Puritan bias against chancery courts prevented them from being established in New England, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina did establish chancery courts. Pennsylvania did not, but did give its courts of law the ability to rule in cases of equity, giving the courts some teeth in terms of enforcing separate estates. See Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, 81–84, 120–23. For colonial women who articulated political opinions, particularly in opposition to those of their spouse, see Cynthia Kierner, Southern Women in Revolution, 1776–1800: Personal and Political Narratives (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 100, 151–58; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 119–55; and Gundersen, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,” 68–71.

22. The exception of course, is the aforementioned settlement of a separate estate within a marriage contract. Separate estates, however, were not available to women in all thirteen colonies (see n21, above), and were employed by only a few families. Salmon labels them “not numerous”, and Gunderson states that they failed to grant women any real measure of economic independence. Furthermore, even if a colonial woman was endowed with a separate estate, her husband’s political opinions still “covered” her own. The separate estate did not translate into an opportunity for political agency, which a woman’s marriage continued to nullify. See Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, 83 and Gunderson, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,” 72–73.

23. Confiscation laws varied by state, although all state governments acted against the estates of loyalists in some manner. For confiscation law in Massachusetts, see Richard D. Brown,“The Confiscation and Disposition of Loyalists’ Estates in Suffolk County, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21 (Oct. 1964): 534–50; Andrew McFarland Davis, “The Confiscation Laws of Massachusetts,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 1902–4, 8 (1906): 50–72; and David Edward Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1989), 270–337. For Connecticut, see Oscar Zeichner, “The Rehabilitation of the Loyalists in Connecticut,” New England Quarterly 11 (June 1938): 308–30. For New York, see Harry B. Yoshpe, The Disposition of Loyalist Estates in the Southern District of the State of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 13–27. For Pennsylvania, see Anne M. Ousterhout, A State Divided: Opposition in Pennsylvania to the American Revolution (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 148, 172–73, 279, 288 and Anne M. Ousterhout, “Pennsylvania Land Confiscations During the Revolution,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102 (July 1978): 328–43. For Georgia, see Robert S. Lambert, “The Confiscation of Loyalist Property in Georgia, 1782–1786,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 20 (Jan. 1963): 80–94. For an excellent summary of the confiscation policies of the four southern states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—see Kierner, Southern Women in Revolution, 7. For the hope that loyalist objects entrusted to women would remain safe from confiscations, see Kerber, Women of the Republic, 9–10.

24. Samuel Eliot Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 1765–1848: The Urbane Federalist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), 28.

25. If Gray were dead, the case for Elizabeth’s possession would have been stronger, although the property would have most likely devolved to her brother or her son. Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 18; Samuel Eliot Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray, Loyalist,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 1911–13, 14 (1913): 324–27. Art historian Ellen Miles has also noted that Gray initially “opposed the use of violence by either side,” see Ellen G. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 34.

26. Elizabeth Gray Otis to Harrison Gray, 6 July 1776 as quoted in Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray,” 328.

27. For one of the Gray homes remaining in the possession of Elizabeth Gray Otis and her husband, Samuel Alleyne Otis, see Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray,” 330–31. Morison declared Gray’s other real estate, and the implied goods within it, “long past recovery” by the end of the Revolution. The outstanding debts were recoverable because Gray’s grandson, Harrison Gray Otis, had them assigned to him, thus preempting the appeal that would undoubtedly arise—that the debts were owed to a loyalist and should therefore be exempt from repayment. See Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 61 and Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray,” 336–50.

28. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo,” 26–28.

29. Jonathan Lamb, “The Crying of Lost Things,” English Literary History 71 (2004): 949–58.

30. Lamb, “The Crying of Lost Things,” 955.

31. Massachusetts General Court, An Act to Prevent the Return to this State, of Certain Persons Therein Named, and Others, Who Have Left This State, or Either of the United States, and Joined the Enemies Thereof, (16 October 1778), The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Wright & Potter, printers to the state, 1905), 5: 912 (hereafter Acts and Resolves).

32. Massachusetts General Court, An Act for Confiscating the Estates of Certain Persons Commonly Called Absentees, 4th sess. (1 May 1779), Acts and Resolves, 5: 971. The act went on to explain that “her dower therein shall be set off to her, by the judges of probate of wills, in like manner as it might have been if her husband had died, intestate, within the jurisdiction of this state.”

33. There is some disagreement as to when Ann repurchased the property; one source states the purchase occurred in 1781, another cites Ann’s intervention as taking place in October, 1785. See Tim Clark, “The Saga of Aunt Bessie’s Chest-on-Chest,” Yankee (April 1988): 81 and Wendell Garrett, “The Story of a Boston Merchant,” in Sotheby’s New York, Important Americana Sale, 19–21 January 2007, 150.

34. Although Gilbert died in England in 1791, he returned briefly to Boston in 1789 and while there, made a will. An inventory of his possessions followed in 1792 and included a large number of goods, all of which Ann Deblois likely played a role in preserving. See Gilbert Deblois Inventory, 13 March 1792, docket no. 19898, Suffolk County Registry of Probate. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston also holds a c. 1740–1750 clothespress with a Deblois family provenance, as well as a portrait of Gilbert Deblois (1990.300) painted by John Singleton Copley while both men resided in London during the Revolution. See Clothespress (1987.254), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Curatorial Files, Boston, Mass.

35. The desk-and-bookcase is missing some of its original ornament—the upper portion of the bookcase most likely included a finial and three small holes above the arched central prospect door indicate the possible presence of nail/sprigs that once secured a piece of carving—yet its overall condition is remarkable given its age. This is evidenced by the fact that all the original hardware is intact and most of the damage sustained has been the result of wood expansion and shrinkage related to natural shifts in climate. See Robert Mussey Associates, Inc., “Treatment Report,” 26 March 2007. The fact that the desk-and-bookcase was constructed of a grade of particularly hard, dense mahogany also made it less susceptible to the dents, bruises, and dings that occur with the passage of time. Robert Mussey, email message to author, 15 June 2010.

36. Lewis Deblois to Steven Deblois, 10 March 1951, Private Collection. The Deblois desk-and-bookcase proceeded down a direct line of family descent until 2007. See Lot 294, Sotheby’s New York, Important Americana Sale, 19–21 January 2007, 154. For a detailed description of the object’s provenance to 1896, and its unique hold on the Deblois family’s collective memory, see Wendell Garrett, “The Story of a Boston Merchant,” 152–53. The Deblois clothespress, or chest-on-chest, has a similar provenance, remaining in the family until the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston acquired it in 1987. See Edward S. Cooke, “Boston Clothespresses of the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts 1 (1989): 94n15.

37. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 1 January 1777, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777, Folder 1.3, Reference Collection, Morris-Jumel Mansion, New York, N.Y.

38. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 4 October 1775 and 23 December 1775, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777. For additional considerations of the difficulty accompanying the receipt of transatlantic letters and the anxiety that accompanied such an uncertain exchange, see Jennifer Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo,” 26–27 and Sarah Pearsall, “‘After All These Revolutions’: Epistolary Identities in an Atlantic World, 1760–1815” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2001), 92, 94–95, 104–6.

39. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 4 July 1775, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777.

40. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 14 March 1775 and 23 December 1775, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777.

41. Anne Verplanck, “The Social Meanings of Portrait Miniatures in Philadelphia, 1760–1820,” in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field, Ann Smart Martin and Ritchie Garrison, eds., (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum), 201–2; 206–7.

42. Art historian Marcia Pointon has noted the similarity between portrait miniatures—which she terms “portrait-objects”—and letters as agents of personal connection, a relationship I believe can be extended to other, larger objects as well. See Marcia Pointon, “‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” Art Bulletin 83 (March 2001): 65–67.

43. Pointon, “‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” 52–66.

44. In some cases the artist crafting the miniature mixed hair into the pigment used to create the image, inserting the body even further into the object’s inextricable fabric. See Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven: Yale University Press), 109–17.

45. In 1735, William Byrd wrote his good friend John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, that he had had “the pleasure of conversing a great deal with your picture.” See Marion Tingling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684–1776 (Charlottesville, Va.: The Virginia Historical Society in Association with The University Press of Virginia, 1977), 487. Byrd also talked with another portrait in his home, that of his sister-in-law, Jane Pratt Taylor. Byrd wrote Pratt, “We often discourse with you in effigie, and call the painter a bungler for falling so short of the original.” See David Meschutt, “William Bryd and his Portrait Collection,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (May 1988): 26–27. I owe this citation to the collegiality of Jennifer Van Horn.

46. Belting credits the quote to Erhart Kästner via a parenthetical quotation, but does not provide a full citation in an endnote or bibliography. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9.

47. Both Margaretta Lovell and Marcia Pointon have discussed this function of portraiture; Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution, 29, 34–35 and Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press, 1993), 159–75. Pointon’s consideration of the issue of absence is double-layered. Not only does she liken the conversation piece to a will, in which the person responsible for the object’s creation is now (and necessarily) absent, but she also considers how literal absences are painted into conversation pieces, which highlights the complicated line drawn between the “real” and the “representation.”

48. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 2 September 1775, 4 October 1775, and 23 December 1775, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777.

49. Mary Morris changed residences several times during Roger’s absence, shifting possessions to and from the couple’s two country estates—one in Harlem, the other in Dutchess County—a rented house in Manhattan, and her family home in Yonkers. The Copley portrait evidently made some, if not all, of these trips with her. Although the series of letters between husband and wife ceased before the couple’s final move to England in 1783 (Roger had by then returned to British-controlled New York and the couple undertook the move together), the provenance of the painting has led scholars to believe that the portrait also undertook the Atlantic voyage. See Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 300 and Wendy A. Cooper, An American Vision: Henry Francis du Pont’s Winterthur Museum (Washington, D.C.: Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, 2002), 112.

50. For example, a pair of pendants painted in 1769 by John Singleton Copley for Massachusetts native Isaac Royall shared in their owner’s political exile in London by 1778, see Jules Prown, John Singleton Copley (Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 1966), 2: 266. The pendants of James and Susannah Boutineau painted by Robert Feke in 1748 are also believed to have made the trip from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia with fleeing loyalists; see Richard H. Saunders and Ellen G. Miles, American Colonial Portraits: 1770–1776 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1987), 167–69.

51. Art historian Ellen Miles calls the Fitch portrait the largest of Copley’s surviving group portraits. Only The Knatchbull Family (c. 1800–01) was larger, and it has since been cut down. See Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82, 86n9. For comparative purposes, Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch measures 101½ x 134 inches while two of Copley’s other large group portraits, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard (1775) and The Copley Family (1776–77), measure 69 x 88½ inches and 72½ x 90¼ inches, respectively.

52. Memorandum, 26 August 1988, Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch (1960.4.1), Curatorial Files, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. See also Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82 and Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:419. There is some debate regarding who was the intended recipient of the painting. Although both the artist and the donors of the portrait believed it was intended for Dr. James Lloyd, the Fitch sibling’s uncle, earlier owners maintained it was intended for Lloyd’s son, also James Lloyd. The fact that father and son had the same name has certainly contributed to this confusion. See Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 86n1. Whoever the intended recipient, however, the painting’s function as a means to reunify strained family bonds remains the same.

53. Samuel Fitch Claim, undated, T 12/105/90, Public Records Office, Kew, Eng.

54. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82.

55. Most historians link the beginning of the cultural turn to the “white wedding,” particularly in Great Britain and the United States, to the wedding of Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha that took place on February 10, 1840. Contrary to tradition, the young Queen eschewed state robes and court dress, wearing a white silk satin dress (made of English cloth no less) instead. While the Queen’s sartorial choice cemented the widespread shift to the white wedding dress, some brides did choose to wear the color prior to 1840 and, like Queen Victoria, also wore veils. In 1801, the Peirce family of Salem, Massachusetts, initiated an extensive refurbishing of their east parlor in preparation for their daughter Sally’s wedding, to which she wore a white muslin empire-waist dress and a lace veil “put on turban fashion,” an ensemble that very closely resembles that of Sarah Fitch in the Copley portrait. See Paula Bradstreet Richter, Wedded Bliss: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Peabody Essex Museum, 2008), 117–20, plate 4, and Barbara Penner, “‘A Vision of Love and Luxury’: The Commercialization of Nineteenth-Century American Weddings,” Winterthur Portfolio 34 (Spring 2004): 2.

56. Margaretta Lovell has argued that “almost all private portraits were made at the time an individual’s achievement of majority, inheritance, marriage, or first issue—moments that mark the movement of family substance in an orderly, prescribed manner.” See Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution, 10.

57. Richter, Wedded Bliss, plate 4

58. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82.

59. For the description of the ground the Fitches stand upon as a “terrace” see Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 84.

60. Ann Uhry Abrams, “Politics, Prints, and John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” The Art Bulletin 61 (June 1979): 267.

61. See Abrams, “Politics, Prints, and John Singleton Copley,” 268, 276 and Maurie McInnis, “Cultural Politics, Colonial Crisis, and Ancient Metaphor in John Singleton Copley’s Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard,” Winterthur Portfolio 34 (Summer-Autumn 1999): 90. I, however, believe that Copley was much more of a loyalist than scholars tend to admit. The fact that he never returned to the United States after the Revolution, despite a more willing and established clientele in the former colonies, leads me to this conclusion. Although the financial situation of the colonies was precarious post-revolution, Copley had to struggle for a British audience and rely heavily upon the financial support of his father-in-law, putting him in a similarly unpredictable financial situation. See Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:259n2.

62. It is important to note that Susanna left one of the couple’s four children, Clarke Copley, in Boston under the care of Copley’s mother, Mary Copley Pelham. It was not unusual for women to leave infant children behind with relatives while the remainder of the family embarked on a transoceanic trip as it was feared that their bodies could not withstand the physical difficulties associated with a long sea voyage. Clarke Copley, who had been born in January 1774, was simply too young to take with the family in May 1775. He was left in the care of Copley’s mother, Mary Copley Pelham, who was expected to venture to London soon. Clarke died in January 1776 and Mary Copley Pelham could never be persuaded to make the trip to England; she died in Boston in 1789 after successfully serving as Copley’s agent for his Beacon Hill property for nearly fifteen years; see Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:262, 341. It is believed that the reaching infant in the portrait was initially conceived by Copley as Clarke, as the family did not learn of his death until after work on the portrait had begun. His wife was expecting, however, so the child was not omitted from the composition, and has since been referred to as Susanna, who was born in London in October 1776. See Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 48 and Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:262.

63. The popularity and influence of antiquity in eighteenth-century arts and letters has been well demonstrated in recent years, and there is no doubt of its cultural force. See, for example, Colin B. Bailey, The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting From Watteau to David (New York: Rizzoli,1992), 99–515; Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Cutlure, 1665–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 173–227; Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 40, 86; and Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), 26–27. While Hades and the River Styx were not often used as visual motifs in this period, they did serve as potent literary references ranging from Odysseus’s visit to Hades in the Odyssey to Dante’s discussion of his journey, accompanied by Virgil, down the River Styx into the Inferno. Such references would have resonated with those viewing the image who recognized William Fitch’s portrait as posthumous. Notably, the River Styx was also supposed to ascend from a great height at its origin, as explained in Apuleius’s tale of Venus’s trials for Pysche in The Golden Ass, further likening the falls in the Fitch portrait with those of the mythical river.

64. According to art historian Maurie McInnis’s analysis of the iconography of the Izard portrait—the elements of classical Greek sculpture and pottery in particular—the image presents a moment of contemplation on Ralph’s part with symbols of both loyalism and patriotism included in the work. The eighteenth-century metaphor that figured the colonies as belligerent children who rebelled against their wise mother England serves as the basis of her argument, which she then relates to the antiquities present in the painting. McInnis identifies the mythical scene portrayed on the volute krater, located in the upper-right-hand corner of the image, as one of matriarchal tyranny. Leto, angered that Niobe boasted that her happiness outweighed Leto’s, ordered her children, Artemis and Apollo, to kill Niobe’s sons and daughters. Conversely, the statue portrayed in the background of the canvas and on the sketch that Ralph holds relates to the story of Papirius and his mother, the former being a virtuous young man who refused to tell his mother the proceedings of the Roman senate, which he recently witnessed, despite her urging. The mother acts dishonorably in both narratives, but it is Papirius, in his virtuous immunity to his mother’s wrongful appeals, that signifies patriotism while Artemis and Apollo’s blind faith in their mother’s request conveys loyalism. McInnis ultimately concludes, based on the double inclusion of Papirius and His Mother and the positive connotation of its narrative, that the painting evidences Ralph’s ultimate alignment with the patriot cause. See McInnis, “Cultural Politics,” 103–6.

65. Jules Prown has also noted the similarity of the vases in the Fitch and Izard portraits; see Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:419–20.

66. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82.

67. “Royal Academy,” Morning Post and Gazetteer, 27 April 1801, 3 and “Exhibition of Paintings &c. At the Royal Academy, Somerset-Place,” The St. James Chronicle: or, British Evening-Post, 7–9 May 1801, 4. Both are quoted in Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 85. See also Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch (1960.4.1), Curatorial Files, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

68. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 84.

69. “Royal Academy, III,” Morning Herald, 1 May 1801, 2; Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch (1960.4.1), Curatorial Files, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

70. Susanna Clarke Copley to Elizabeth Copley Greene, undated, as quoted in Martha Babcock Greene Amory, The Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley, R.A.: With Notices of his Works, and Reminiscences of his Son, Lord Lyndhurst, High Chancellor of Great Britain (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882), 195–96.

1. The life of Elizabeth Freeman is discussed in Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Mumbet,” unpublished mss., Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.; Mary Kelley, ed., The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 69–71, 124–26; Theodore Sedgwick, The Practicability of the Abolition of Slavery: A Lecture (New York: J. Seymour, 1831). Freeman’s legal case is discussed in Arthur Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser. (Oct. 1968): 614–24. Quote is from Sedgwick, “Mumbet.”

2. My discussion of Betsey Way Champlain’s life is drawn from Ramsay MacMullen’s invaluable collection of the Way-Champlain Family correspondence, Sisters of the Brush: Their Family, Art, Lives, and Letters, 1797–1833 (New Haven: Past Times Press, 1997). The original letters, and many unpublished examples of Betsey Way Champlain’s literary activities, can be found in the Way-Champlain Family Correspondence, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

3. This argument is developed at length in my “Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment,” Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 124–43. A rare example of an ivory miniature painted by a “schoolgirl” who attended Mrs. Morris’s Philadelphia academy is included in Dale T. Johnson, American Portrait Miniatures in the Manney Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), 156. For general descriptions of the art made by female students, see Lynne Templeton Brickley, “Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy, 1792–1833” (Ed.D. Diss, Harvard University, 1985); Catherine Keene Fields and Lisa C. Knightlinger eds., To Ornament Their Minds: Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Academy, 1792–1833 (Litchfield Conn.: Litchfield Historical Society, 1993); Suzanne L. Flynt, Ornamental and Useful Accomplishments: Schoolgirl Education and Deerfield Academy, 1800–1830 (Deerfield, Mass.: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1988); Betty Ring, Let Virtue be a Guide to Thee: Needlework in the Education of Rhode Island Women (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1983) and her Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1690–1850 (New York: Knopf, 1993), vol. 1–2.

4. “RUDIMENTS OF TASTE and a POLITE FEMALE EDUCATION,” Juvenile Port-Folio and Literary Miscellany 1:38 (July 3, 1813): 150. See also the letters of the fictional Miss Penelope Airy, who supports herself with her needle after the premature deaths of her parents in [Judith Sargent Murray] The Gleaner. A miscellaneous production. In three volumes. By Constantia (Boston: I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews, 1798), 176–78.

5. Susan Ridley Sedgwick’s titles included The Morals of Pleasure: Illustrated by Stories Designed for Young Persons (1829), Allen Prescott: or, the Fortunes of a New England Boy (1834), Alida; or, Town and Country (1844), and Walter Thornley, or, a Peep at the Past (1859). On Susan Ridley Sedgwick’s life and place in the Sedgwick clan, see Kelley, Autobiography, 90–94; Timothy Kenslea, The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2006), 48–50, 225 n. 48. On the fraught relation between creative women and publicity in the nineteenth century, see Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Anne Sue Hirshorn, “Anna Claypoole, Margaretta, and Sarah Miriam Peale: Modes of Accomplishment and Fortune,” in Lillian B. Miller, ed., The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870 (Washington, D.C.: Abbeville Press in Association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 220–47.

6. Elizabeth Way Champlain to Mary Way, May 1822 and 1819 in Sisters, 242, 129. Lizzie W. Champney, “Sea-Drift from a New England Port,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Dec. 1879 (60:355): 62. Betsey Champlain’s career is summarized in MacMullen, Sisters, 33–44; for a detailed description of taking the likeness of a corpse, see Betsey Way Champlain to Eliza Way, c. 1822, Sisters, 242–43.

7. Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). For a different perspective on the psychological resonances of miniatures, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 125–27. Katherine C. Reider astutely analyzes the gifting of miniatures in the construction and perpetuation of status in “Gifting and Fetishization: The Portrait Miniature of Sally Foster Otis as a Maker of Female Memory,” unpublished paper in author’s possession. On exchange and status more generally, see Chris Packard, “Self-Fashioning in Sarah Goodridge’s Self Portraits,” Common-place 4:1 (2003); Marcia Pointon, “‘Surrounded by Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England.” Art Bulletin 83:1 (March 2001): 48–71; Anne A. Verplanck, “The Social Meanings of Portrait Miniatures in Philadelphia, 1760–1820,” in Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, eds., American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; Knoxville, Tenn.: Distributed by University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 195–223.

8. On miniature prices, see Reider, “Gifting and Fetishization;” Verplanck, “The Social Meanings of Portrait Miniatures,” 195–223, 201–3; Mona Leithiser Dearborn, Anson Dickinson: The Celebrated Miniature Painter (Hartford Conn.: Connecticut Historical Society, 1983), 155–68; MacMullen, Sisters, 24, 92.

9. See Eliza Champlain to Betsey Way Champlain, January, 1818, Sisters, 98. Way’s business and her faltering eyesight encouraged her to dictate letters through Eliza when the young woman was visiting. The history of the correspondence is described in Sisters, 477–78, n. 2.

10. Kelley, ed., Autobiography, 68; 125–26; Sedgwick, “Mumbet.”

11. The tombstone inscription is quoted in Kelley, ed., Autobiography, 71, n. 33. Practicability, 18. Authorities disagree over who delivered the lecture; some attribute it to Henry Dwight Sedgwick, others to Theodore Sedgwick II. I have here followed the lead of Sedgwick specialists.

12. For example, Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (Washington, D.C.: New York Graphic Society in association with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973), describes the image as “lovingly painted in watercolors,” 217. For similar references, see Jon Swan, “The Slave Who Sued for Freedom,” American Heritage (March 1990): 51–55.

13. Ivory miniatures depicting African-descended people are exceedingly rare. But for examples of a different strategy for representing people of color, see the portraits of Haitian-born hairdresser Pierre Toussaint, his wife, Juliette Toussaint, and his niece Euphemia Toussaint, all painted by Anthony Meucci around 1825. Now part of the collection at the New-York Historical Society, they can be viewed online (www.nyhistory.org). On racialized aesthetics and the representation of race in the long eighteenth century more generally, see Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Andover, Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy; Seattle, Wash.: In association with the University of Washington Press, 2006); David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England & America, 1780–1865 (London: Routledge, 2000); Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

14. See John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon, and Roy Strong, The English Miniature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 85–157.

15. My account of the process draws on T. S. Cummins [sic], “Practical Directions for Miniature Painting,” printed in William Dunlap’s 1834 Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York: Dover Publications, 1969) vol. 2, part 1, 10–13. Significantly, Dunlap himself struggled with the technical aspects of miniature painting; he managed to work as a miniaturist for years before Edward Malbone showed him how to prepare the ivory. Dunlap, “Autobiography of the Author,” in Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design, vol. 1, 269–70. For further discussions of the technical difficulties presented by ivory miniatures, see Murdoch, et al., English Miniature, 16–19; 163–95; Frank, Love and Loss, 1–13, 155–230; Carol Aiken in Johnson, American Portrait Miniatures, 13–26; Harry B. Wehle and Thomas C. Bolton, American Miniatures, 1730–1850 (New York: Doubleday, 1927).

16. See Murdoch, et al., English Miniature, 16–19; 163–95; Frank, Love and Loss, 1–13, 155–230; Johnson, American Portrait Miniatures, 13–26; American Miniatures.

17. For a complementary discussion of racialized portraiture in eighteenth-century Britain, see Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture,” Art History 27:4 (September 2004): 563–92. The literature on sensibility is too large and complex to be cited here in any detail. But on sensibility among eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American elites, see esp. Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).

18. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, with an Appendix (New York: T.B. Jansen & Co., G. Jansen & Co., 1801), 205. On the political and cultural significance of transparent skin as an index of individual sentiment and character, see Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 192–95.

19. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), especially chapter 1, 2–48.

20. Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, second edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: J. Simpson & Co. and Williams and Whiting, NY, 1810), 49, 66, 67–68, 162, 168. Scholarly discussions of Smith include Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 41–49, Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 207–14; Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 251–53; Scott Juengel, “Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science,” ELH 68 (2001): 897–927; Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1968), 486–88.

21. “Complexion in the Human Species,” Port-Folio, July 1814, 30.

22. “Familiar Letters on Physiognomy,” The Visitor, 1809, vol. 1, p. 148.

23. Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1795), v. 1, 375.

24. Elizabeth Way Champlain, “On Flattery,” in Sisters, 40–42. On skin and representations of skin as communicative surfaces, see Mechthild Fend, “Bodily and pictorial surfaces: skin in French art and medicine, 1790–1860,” Art History 28:3 (June 2005): 311–39; Susan Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,” American Art 15:3 (Fall 2001): 8–33.

25. P[eter] F. Cooper, The Art of Making and Colouring Ivorytypes, Photographs, Talbotypes, and Miniature Paintng on Ivory, &c. By PF Cooper, Miniature, Portrait, Pastil, and Equestrian Painter, and Photographer (Philadelphia: Published by author, 1863), 28.

26. John Dougall, The Cabinet of the Arts; Being a New and Universal Drawing Book, second edition (London: Ackermann, 1821), 226.

27. Ibid., 268.

28. Cooper, Art, 26.

29. John Russell, Elements of Painting with Crayons (Dublin, 1773), 70–75.

30. Mr. Hayter, Introduction to Perspective, Drawing, and Painting (London: Black, Parry, & Co., 1815), 180–81.

31. W. M. Craig, A Course of Lectures on Drawing, Painting, and Engraving, Considered as Branches of Elegant Education (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 350–55.

32. Dougall, Cabinet, 268–70.

33. See Mary Way to Betsey Way Champlain, c. 1814, Sisters, 27–30; Mary Way to Eliza Champlain, Dec. 1816, Sisters, 59.

34. Betsey Way Champlain to Eliza Champlain, 16 Nov. 1824, Sisters, 322–23.

35. Betsey Way Champlain to Eliza Champlain, 1822, Sisters, 264.

36. Betsey Way Champlain to Eliza Champlain, January 1825, Sisters, 327; William Champlain to Eliza Champlain, 13 February 1825, Sisters, 328.

37. John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). Barbara Ryan situates Elizabeth Freeman and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s fiction in the context of racialized service and dependence in Love, Wages, and Slavery: The Literature of Servitude in the United States (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006), chapter 1.

38. Last Will and Testament of Elizabeth Freeman, Oct. 18, 1829, Sheffield Historical Society, Sheffield, Mass. Located at www.mumbet.com, accessed Feb. 1, 2007.

39. Practicability, 16, 18; Sedgwick, Autobiography, 69; Sedgwick, “Mumbet” mss.

40. “Africans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts,” on-line exhibition, Massachusetts Historical Society (http://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/?queryID=54), accessed Oct. 15, 2007.

41. This perspective significantly revises the standard historical accounts of race in North America, which associate nineteenth-century whiteness with masculinity, commerce, and politics. Women, and the family more generally, enter the equation only when abolitionist and feminist agitators together raise the specter of race and slavery in the private sphere. The classic accounts are David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995); Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Scholars considering the visual representation of race and racial identity look to the Civil War to structure their inquiries. In their telling, the nineteenth-century imaginary juxtaposed black/slave/South against white/free/North. See, for example, Mary Niall Mitchell’s “‘Roseboom and Pure White,’ Or So It Seemed,” American Quarterly, (Sept. 2002): 369–410.

1. Lauren B. Hewes, Portraits in the Collection of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 2004), 145–47; on the portraits of Benjamin Franklin wearing glasses, see Charles Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 68–69, 71, 73, 329.

2. There are many books and articles that address The Spectator and its relationship to eighteenth-century American and British culture and society, in addition to recent work on coffeehouses as historical sites and literary venues, and of course Habermas’s seminal work on the public sphere [Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991)]. Most helpful to me have been: Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler and Spectator Papers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

3. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996), “The Book Fool,” esp. 296.

4. For general information about the history of spectacles, see the collectors’ website, www.antiquespectacles.com; Richard Corson, Fashions in Eyeglasses from the Fourteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Peter Owen, 1967; second revised edition, 1980); Frank W. Law, The Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers: A History (London: The Company, 1978); Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, Glass: A World History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Edward Tenner, Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (New York: Vintage, 2003). See also, Manguel, A History of Reading.

5. On the political economy of fashion see Linzy Brekke, “The ‘Scourge of Fashion’: Political Economy and the Politics of Consumption in the Early Republic,” Early American Studies, 3, No. 1 (Spring 2005): 111–39. On the problem of vision, glasses, and fashion, see Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses: American Spectacles in the Age of Franklin (Ph.D. diss. Boston University, 2007), 297–98.

6. See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Chapters 2 and 3; Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America; and Warner, The Letters of the Republic. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), especially Chapters 2 and 3, which deal in part with the presentation of the self through the exchange of letters and the regulation of the body.

7. [Samuel Dexter, son], “Biographical Notice of the Hon. Samuel Dexter,” The Farmer’s Museum, Vol. 16, No. 45 (August 27, 1810). This is the same notice that appears in Monthly Analogy and Boston Review, IX (July 1810): 3–4, as well as other magazines of the time. The quote regarding the father’s attitude toward Calvinism and the reaction of his parents comes from this source, and thus should be understood as from the perspective of Samuel’s son. Orrando Perry Dexter, et al., Dexter Geneaology, 1642–1904; Being a history of the descendents of Richard Dexter of Malden, Massachusetts, from the notes of John Haven Dexter and original researches (New York: J. J. Little, 1904), 53–58 [Hereafter Dexter Genealogy].

8. Dexter Genealogy, 53–58; Carlton Albert Staples, Samuel Dexter, 1726–1810: A Paper Read Before the Dedham Historical Society, February 3, 1892 (Dedham, Mass., 1892), 6–11; William Pencak, “Dexter, Samuel,” American National Biography Online (http://www.anb.org/articles/01/01-00217.html); Clarence Winthrop Bowen, The History of Woodstock, Connecticut (Norwood, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1926), Chapter 14.

9. Bowen, History of Woodstock, 185. Staples, Samuel Dexter, 8–9.

10. [Samuel Dexter, son], “Biographical Notice of the Hon. Samuel Dexter,” The Farmer’s Museum, 16:45 (August 27, 1810).

11. Samuel Dexter, Commonplace-book, 1763–1809, P-201, 1 reel (microfilm), Ms. SBd-219, Massachusetts Historical Society, p. 94. (Hereafter referred to as Commonplace-book.)

12. Staples, Samuel Dexter, 9. Jane Kamensky has traced some of the Dexter family’s history in her book, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008). Many thanks to Dr. Kamensky for allowing me to read an early draft of Chapter One.

13. Commonplace-book, 231, 234–235.

14. Dexter Genealogy, 53–54.

15. Bowen, History of Woodstock, 189.

16. Dexter makes reference in his Commonplace-book (p. 251) to hitting his head above the eye in an accident in January of 1788 as he prepares to depart for church. By January of 1802, he is complaining of ophthalmia and fears “total blindness” (p. 308) but it is very difficult to say whether the one followed from the other. “Ophthalmia” referred very generally to eye problems, ranging from errors of refraction and accommodation to infectious diseases, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. David Fleishman, an expert collector, has dated the spectacles at 1785, and they could have easily been bought before Dexter starts mentioning these eye problems in the commonplace-book. In theory, he could have bought them as early as before the beginning of the Revolution, in 1774 or 1775, when he was in his late fifties; styles like his were available from the 1750s onward.

17. Readers with spectacles means older people no longer require the assistance of younger people; see Tenner, Our Own Devices, 217.

18. Dexter Genealogy, 36, 59.

19. See Deborah Jean Warner, “Optics in Philadelphia During the Nineteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 129, No. 3 (September 1985): 291–99.

20. See T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144, 146; and John Van Solingen v. Benjamin d’Harriette, July 14, 1730, in Richard B. Morris, ed., Select Cases of the Mayor’s Court of New York City, 1674–1784 (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1935), 554–60.

21. See, for example, Benjamin Franklin to Jane Mecom, London, July 17, 1771, ALS, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Penn. The major works by members of the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers that circulated in the colonies were: Benjamin Martin, An Essay on Visual Glasses (Vulgarly Called Spectacles) (London: Printed for the Author, 1756); James Ayscough, A Short Account of the Eye and the Nature of Vision, Chiefly Designed to Illustrate the Use and Advantage of Spectacles (London: E. Say, 1752); and George Adams, An Essay on Vision, Briefly Explaining the Fabric of the Eye and the Nature of Vision. . . , second edition (London: Printed for the Author, by R. Hindmarsh, 1792). See also William Buchan, Domestic medicine: or, A treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases, by regimen and simple medicines, Twentieth edition (Waterford [N.Y.]: Printed by and for James Lyon & Co., 1797).

22. “Spectacles” (Advertisement for J. Deverell, watchmaker) The Massachusetts Centinel, September, 3, 1785. “Fresh Goods” (Advertisement for Amos Atwell and Son) The United States Chronicle, June 6, 1791. Kamensky discusses Andrew’s business in Chapter One of The Exchange Artist.

23. Refer to the Daniel Henchman Papers, microfilm collection at the American Antiquarian Society for examples of this. Henchman’s customers are discussed in Chapter 2 of Reading Glasses, and digested in Appendices 1, 2, and 3. See Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, 383–94. These calculations are based on population estimates for 1710, 1720, 1730, 1742, and 1760, as listed in Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City Upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst, Mass.: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Alan McBrayer to David Fleishman, Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey, Laura Brandt, and Charles Letocha, June 20, 2007, email correspondence in the possession of the author.

24. Again, refer to advertisements in the colonial papers from the era, as well as the Daniel Henchman accounts, both digested in Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, Chapter 2, and 383–94.

25. I have found concave lenses to be very rare in the material record for this period, even though they were highly advertised at the time. They do not show up until the mid-nineteenth century or later in collections such as those at the Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburg, Vt.; the New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, N.H.; the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn.; the Maine Historical Society, Portland, Me.; the Massachusetts Historical Society; and the private collection held by the Stout family of Ipswich, Mass. Instead, single lens perspective glasses seem to have been used by myopes. See also Daniel Henchman Papers. Microfilm collection at the American Antiquarian Society, in particular, the purchases of Rev. Thomas Foxcroft, on August, 15, 1748; August 9, 1732; and December 5, 1732.

26. An early example of this would be The Most Wonderful Relation of Master John Macklain ([London]: Printed for T. Vere & W. Giberson, 1657), title page, 2–5, 8–9, 12. A later example of this would be James Calder, “Information to Old People,” New York Magazine, Vol 2 (1797): 568.

27. Commonplace-book, 4, 114, on p. 270–71 he writes “There seems to be no end of burning old wills, and executing new ones”—dated Weston, June 14, 1792; he describes his mother’s will on p. 296–99. The obituary is copied in Dexter Genealogy, 42–43, and appeared in The Columbian Centinel, June 21, 1797. The palimpsest is listed as a commonplace-book, and it is housed in a folder with the Ward-Perry-Dexter Papers, 1733–1927, Ms N-1727, Massachusetts Historical Society.

28. “Philotheorus” (Samuel Dexter) Thoughts on Several Passages of Scripture. . . . (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1791), 7–8, 10, 14–18, 45.

29. Samuel Dexter’s will is listed in the Worcester County Probate Records for 1810, Vol. 39, beginning on page 391; these are available on microfilm at the Massachusetts State Archives, see page 399 [Hereafter Will]. The sermon is Samuel Kendal, A Discourse Delivered at Mendon, June 14, 1810 (Boston, Mass.: John Eliot, 1810).

30. Will, 399; Kendal, A Discourse Delivered at Mendon.

31. This general sense of the cost of the spectacles is based on the John McAllister account books: Account and day books, John McAllister, Philadelphia optician, Downs Special Collections, Winterthur Library, Winterthur, Del. Prices are listed in the appendices of Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, 391–97, especially 397.

32. See, for example, the early spectacles shown in Corson, Fashions in Eyeglasses.

33. Spectacles were sold under a wide variety of signs in many shops that didn’t specialize in them, but the spectacle makers had early on regularized their signage, advertising, and trade cards. E. G. R. Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor & Stuart England (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1970), especially pages 248–49, 256–59, 262–63, 276–77, 280–91, 294–95, and 302–3; Corson, Fashions, 47; Law, A History, Chapter 3. Only a handful of cards are left from that earliest period, in the collection of the British Museum, and they are often reproduced in secondary sources, such as Corson, Fashions, 47. When compared to the print ads and descriptions of signage in Taylor, they suggest a strong degree of uniformity among spectacle makers. See also D. J. Bryden and D. L. Simms, “Archimedes as an Advertising Symbol,” in Technology and Culture, 34, No. 2 (April 1993): 387–91; as well as Bryden and Simms, “Archimedes and the Opticians of London,” in Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 35 (1992): 11–14., D. J. Bryden and D. L. Simms, “Spectacles improved to perfection and approved of by the Royal Society,” Annals of Science, 30 (1993): 1–32. See also, Adams, An Essay on Vision; as well as E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England, 1714–1840 (Cambridge, Eng.: For the Institute of Navigation at the University Press, 1966).

34. Laura Rigal, “Electric Books of 1747,” Common-place, 1, No. 2 (January 2001). For more on mining in Brazil, see also Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Minas Gerais (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1999). On the importance of situating materials in their historical eras (and the revelations that frequently follow), see Robert Friedel, A Material World (Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1988). Many thanks to John Mayer for calling my attention to this excellent work. Richard Bushman, “The Complexity of Silver,” in New England Silversmithing, 1620–1815, Jeannine Falino and Gerald W. R. Ward, editors (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001); Silvio Bedini, Thinkers and Tinkers: Early American Men of Science (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 299.

35. See, for example, the advertisements copied in Law, A History, as well as Ayscough, A Short Essay on Vision, and especially the pamphlets of Benjamin Martin, all cited in note 21.

36. See especially Appendix 1 in Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, 383–90 to track this trend.

37. Annapolis, Md., “Annapolis (in Maryland) June 22, 1769. We, the Subscribers . . . [to] prevent the Use of foreign Luxuries and Superfluities . . .” (Annapolis, Md.1769), 2; similarly, in “An Inventory of Goods on hand taken 20^th August 1770,” the Merchant Firm of Briggs & Blow of Williamsburg listed “16 pair spectacles, 10 pair Temple, 5 Plain Irons” under their account of cutlery. See “Prentis Store Historical Report Block 18–1 Building 5 Lot 46,” Colonial Williamsburg Digital History Center Archive, available at http://www.pastportal.com/, accessed August 4, 2005. The original papers are available in the William and Mary College Archives, Williamsburg, Va.

38. Hewes, Portraits in the Collection of the American Antiquarian Society, 145–47.

39. Except for Benjamin Franklin, spectacle-wearers uniformly declined to be shown in their spectacles in formal portraits until the nineteenth century. This statement is based in part on my survey of the portraits in collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn., but reviews of collections of portraits by Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, and Charles Willson Peale all confirm this trend.

40. Bushman, The Refinement of America, 45, and Chapter 3.

41. Commonplace-book, 276.

42. Will, 404, 406; Kendal, A Discourse, 23; Staples, Samuel Dexter, 17.

43. Commonplace-book, 302, 332.

44. Will, 404, 406; Kendal, A Discourse, 4–5.

45. Lucius M. Sargent, Reminiscences of Samuel Dexter, Originally written for the Boston Evening Transcript, by Sigma (Boston: Henry Dutton & Son, 1857), 71.

46. The US Treasury has a brief general biography of Samuel Dexter available on its website. See http://www.treas.gov/education/history/secretaries/sdexter.shtml. For insight into Samuel Dexter Junior’s career, see Kamensky, The Exchange Artist, Chapter One.

47. Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, Appendix 2, 391–93.

48. See for example the early Robinson family spectacles in the collections of the Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburgh, Vt., and also the Isaiah Thomas spectacles in the collection of the New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, N.H.

49. [Dexter], “Biographical Notice.”

50. Samuel Dexter catalogued his library in his Commonplace-book, 8–20. He most likely added to this list, started early in the book, as he acquired books, just as he made notes when he lent them (for example, to his son Samuel, see p. 15). Dexter makes note of his 9-volume set of The Spectator on p. 18, and to Horace on p. 251.

51. For John Adams’s use of Horace, including in his letters with Dexter, see Dorothy M. Robathan, “John Adams and the Classics,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 1946): 91–98.

52. Daniel Henchman records John Dennie, a frequent purchaser of spectacles as far back as April 9, 1720, as buying “1 set of Spectators” on September 24, 1722, for example.

53. The Tatler, No. 103, December 6, 1709; Donald F. Bond, ed., The Tatler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 364. See also The Tatler, No. 88, November 1, 1709; Bond, The Tatler, 273ff. The Tatler, No. 64, September 6, 1709; Bond, The Tatler, 110ff. The Tatler, No. 176, May 23–25, 1710; Bond, The Tatler, 321ff. The Tatler, No. 93, November 12, 1709; Bond, The Tatler, 303–04.

54. Quoted in, among other places, Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 12. For examples and a discussion of coffeehouse engravings, see Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, 187–92.

55. The Spectator No. 206, Friday, October 26, 1711 (Steele); Bond, The Spectator, Vol. 2, 307. See also The Tatler, No. 145, March 11–14, 1709–10; Bond, The Tatler, 165.

56. Commonplace-book, 166–72.

57. See Sargent, Reminiscences, Chapters 4 and 5.

58. This is the case made in Kamensky, The Exchange Artist, Chapter One.

59. Horace, The satires, epistles and art of poetry of Horace, translated into English verse by John Conington (London: Bell, 1888).

60. Ketcham, Transparent Designs, 1–3.

61. The Spectator No. 111, Saturday, July 7, 1711 (Addison); Bond, The Spectator, Vol. 1, 456–59.

62. See Hans-Gert Bachmann, et al., Gold: The Noble Mineral (East Hampton, Conn.: Lapis International, 2003).

63. The quote is from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7.

64. Sargent, Reminiscences, 36–38; See also Samuel Dexter, “Thoughts on the Immortality of the Soul,” MS 724, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

65. Sargent, Reminiscences, 71.

66. Sargent, Reminiscences, 20–23. Jane Kamensky notes that during the end of the Adams administration, Dexter the younger was skewered by Democratic-Republican newspapers with the accusation that he seemed like a “doddering grandmother”; because old women were often depicted in drawings as sporting spectacles, it is possible this was a coded reference to his own use of vision aids, however, it seems slim in comparison with other descriptions that make no mention of the use of spectacles, even in his office. Kamensky, The Exchange Artist, 47.

67. See, for example John McAllister to Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, December 1, 1806.

68. Cynthia Wall, “The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, No. 1 (1997): 1–25, especially page 8.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. See Dexter’s Will; Bowen, History of Woodstock, 187–89; Staples, Samuel Dexter, 11–13; Dexter Genealogy, 55–57.

72. Will, 403–4.

73. Will, 402–3; Staples, Samuel Dexter, 10; Sargent, Reminiscences, 14–15.

74. Sargent, Reminiscences, 8, 41. See also Joseph Story, A Sketch of the Life of Samuel Dexter (Boston: John Eliot, 1816).

1. “A Memorandum of persons invited to Wait Winthrop’s Funeral, Nov. 14, 1717, with the distribution of Mourning Emblems,” The Winthrop Papers, 6 vols, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser., (Boston, 1892), 5:354–56. All information below about the presents given at the Winthrop funeral comes from this list, which is hereafter cited as “Winthrop List.” The editors suggest that the “Memorandum” is “somewhat confused and probably imperfect.” (II, 356) They do not reveal if the heading given the document, which is not in the Massachusetts Historical Society collections, appears in the original. The purpose of the list was probably more to plan for distributing gifts rather than deciding who would attend. New England funerals in this period did not rely upon invitations and were open to all who wished to attend.

2. Boston News-Letter, November 18, 1717; Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. [paginated continuously.] (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1973), II, 867 (November 14, 1717). Hereafter cited as Sewall, Diary.

3. Winthrop List.

4. The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, vol. 2 (Boston, 1874), 80–84. See also Alvin Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America: 1607–1775 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. 2008), 462.

5. Acts and Resolves, II, 229–30.

6. Among the large literature, see Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fashions in Old New England (London, 1893), 373–75; David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Gordon E. Geddes, Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan New England (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981); Laurie Hochstetler, Sacred rites: Religious rituals and the transformation of American Puritanism (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2007), 207–60. There is also a large literature on gravestones, a topic that I do not discuss here. See, for example, James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1977), 89–124; Peter Benes, ed., Puritan Gravestone Art, 2 vols. (Boston: Boston University, 1976, 1978); Dickran and Ann Tashjian, Memorials for Children of Change: The Art of Early New England Stonecarving (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1974).

7. Sewall, Diary, I, 582 (December 12, 1707). These figures are calculated from an examination of all funerals noted in Sewall’s diary.

8. The standard biographies of Sewall are T. B. Strandness, Samuel Sewall: A Puritan Portrait (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1967); and Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Samuel Sewall of Boston (New York: Macmillan, 1964).

9. Samuel Sewall to Rev. Thomas Cotton (London), August 28, 1717, II, 79; Samuel Sewall to Gurdon Saltonstall, January 15, 1717/8, II, 81, Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall (1686–1729), 2 vols., in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser., 1–2 (1886–88); Sewall, Diary, II, 874 (December 16, 1717).

10. Sewall, Diary, II, 864 (October 20, 1717); John Danforth, Greatness & goodness elegized, in a poem, upon the much lamented decease of the honourable & vertuous Madam Hannah Sewall, late consort of the Honourable Judge Sewall . . . [Boston, 1717].

11. Westminster Assembly of Divines, A Directory for the Publique Worship of God, Throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1644), 35. See also the attack on Anglican funeral services for the same reasons by John Canne, A Necessity of Separation from the Church of England Proved by the Nonconformists’ Principles, ed. Charles Stovel (London, 1849; originally pub. Amsterdam, 1634), 112–13.

12. Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing or News from New England, ed. J. Hammond Trumbull (Boston: J. K. Wiggin & W. P. Lunt, 1867; originally pub. London, 1642), 87–88.

13. Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1957), II, 96 (August 17, 1711).

14. John Danforth, Profit and loss: an elegy upon the decease of Mrs. Mary Gerrish . . . [Boston, 1710].

15. Sewall, Diary, I, 582 (December 12, 1707).

16. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1628–1686, 5 vols. (Boston: W. White, 1853–54), II, 239; III, 162.

17. Samuel Willard, The High Esteem Which God hath of the Death of his Saints (Boston, 1683), 14–15. Samuel Sewall to Rev. Thomas Cotton (London), August 28, 1717, Sewall, Letter-Book, 2:79.

18. Samuel Sewall to John Storke, October 30, 1717; Samuel Sewall to John Storke, July 31, 1696, Sewall, Letter-Book, 2:76; 1:164.

19. Sewall, Diary, I, 431 (May 25, 1700).

20. Samuel Sewall, Jr., Note Book, (August 16, 1724) as quoted in “Introduction,” Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, 3 vols., in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th ser., 5–7 (1878–82), 1:xix. This edition of Sewall’s diary, with a variety of material not found in the later edition, is hereafter cited as Sewall, Diary (MHS ed.).

21. Sewall, Diary, II, 974 (February 16, 1720/1).

22. See “The Interment of William Lovelace, New York, 1671,” The American Historical Review, 9 (1904): 522–24, for the extensive use of mourning in an elaborate earlier funeral.

23. John Cotton to Rowland Cotton, November 7, 1717, Miscellaneous Bound Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. (hereafter MHS).

24. The New-England Weekly Journal, September 15, 1729.

25. Samuel Sewall to Thomas Burbank of Rumsey, July 22, 1695, Letter-Book, 1:154. Sewall had earlier that year noted mourning for the Queen in England by merchants as well as courtiers. I, 329, 331 (March 29, April 30, 1695).

26. Sewall, Diary, I, 451 (July 27, 1701).

27. Benjamin Walker, Jr., Diary, MHS, March 23, 1737/8; Boston Evening Post, March 20, 27, 1738. See also the diary of Benjamin Lynde, Jr., March 23, 1738, in The Diaries of Benjamin Lynde and of Benjamin Lynde, Jr. (Boston, 1880), 153. I am grateful to Sally Hill of the New England Historic Genealogical Society for generously sharing her transcriptions of the Walker diary.

28. Sewall, Diary, I, 160 (February 10, 1687/8); Boston Evening Post, March 27, 1738.

29. Sewall, Diary, I, 387 (February 14, 1697/8); II, 618 (May 2, 1709).

30. Henry Wilder Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel from the puritan age of New England to the present, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1882, 1896), I, 350.

31. [Thomas Paine], A discourse, shewing, that the real first cause of the straits and difficulties of this province of Massachusetts Bay, is it’s extravagancy (Boston, 1721), 3.

32. Sewall, Diary, II, 307 (January 8, 1727/8).

33. Sewall, Diary, II, 794–95 (July 30, 1715).

34. Benjamin Walker Jr. regularly uses the term in his diary. See, e.g., December 26, 1729, January 1, 1729/30, June 6, 1733.

35. “Of the Extravagance of our Funerals,” The Independent Reflector, 29, June 14, 1753, 116.

36. Winthrop List; Sewall, Diary, II, 867 (November 14, 1717). Because of the declining value of Massachusetts currency, the expenditures in the paragraph cannot be compared precisely.

37. Winthrop Papers, 3:412–13.

38. Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, I, 360–61, 355, 336; New-England Weekly Journal, March 11, 1728.

39. Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, of his Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, in New England: Begun and Held at Salem, in the County of Essex, on Wednesday, the Twenty-eighth Day of May . . . 1729 (Boston, 1729), 81–83, 109. William Winslow to [David Ayrewell?], September 22, 1729, Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS.

40. Sewall, Diary, II, 1008 (August 29, 1723).

41. Sewall, Diary, I, 396 (July 18, 1698). See the letters of Sewall to John Ive (Sr.), June 10, October 28, November 4, 1698 in Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall, 1, 201, 204, 206–7. For the comment on Winthrop, see Sewall, Diary, II, 716 (May 27, 1713).

42. Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1957), I, 83 (February 9, 1683/4); II, 461 (June 28, 1717); [Cotton Mather], A Christian Funeral (Boston, 1713), 21. For some indication of the length of a funeral, see Sewall, Diary, I, 560–61 (January 24, 1706/7).

43. Sewall, Diary, I, 601 (August 28, 1708). For other examples of prayer, see I, 74 (August 19, 1685); I, 565 (April 23, 1707).

44. Cotton Mather, Ratio disciplinae fratrum Nov-Anglorum. A faithful account of the discipline professed and practised; in the churches of New-England (Boston, 1726), 117.

45. Sewall, Diary, I, 66 (June 9, 1685).

46. Cotton Mather to John Winthrop, December 16, 1707 in “The Mather Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., 8 (Boston, 1868): 407.

47. Sewall, Diary, I, 565 (April 23, 1707).

48. This is stated more clearly in two later sources: Connecticut Courant, December 26, 1774, datelined Boston, December 22, italicized in original; Samuel Stearns, The American Oracle (New York, 1791), 243.

49. Sewall, Diary, I, 667 (August 11, 1711). See Jeremiah Bumstead, Diaries, 1722–1733, American Antiquarian Society, August 23, 1723.

50. Sewall, Diary, II, 1045–6 (April 14, 1726), clarifies some of the system that Sewall used. For an example of room left for unknown names, see the entry for January 27, 1710/1 (II, 652). The practice may suggest that Sewall may have filled in unknown names later in other places.

51. Sewall, Diary, I, 582 (December 12, 1707).

52. For examples, see Sewall, Diary, II, 945 (April 8, 1720), II, 1016–17 (May 6, 1724); see also I, 572 (September 15, 1707). For Mather’s funeral, see II, 1059–60 (February 19, 1727/8).

53. Sewall, Diary, II, 667 (August 3, 7, 1711).

54. Sewall, Diary, II, 891 (March 26, 1718).

55. Sewall, Diary, II, 623 (August 6, 1709).

56. Sewall, Diary, I, 493 (December 14, 1703); see also I, 439 (December 5, 1700).

57. [Cotton Mather], A Christian Funeral: A brief Essay, On that Case, What should be the Behaviour of a Christian at a Funeral? (Boston, 1713), 6.

58. Sewall, Diary, II, 891 (March 26, 1718).

59. Sewall, Diary, I, 585–86 (January 23, 1707/8); for the same experience, see I, 586–87 (January 31, 1707/8).

60. Sewall, Diary, I, 267 (September 23, 1690).

61. Sewall, Diary, I, 586–587 (January 31, 1707/8).

62. Sewall, Diary, I, 565 (April 23, 1707).

63. Cotton Mather, Ratio disciplinae, 117.

64. Sewall, Diary, I, 444 (January 15, 1700/1).

65. Sewall, Diary, I, 511–12 (July 24, 1704).

66. Sewall, Diary, II, 1044 (March 25, 1726).

67. Sewall, Diary, II, 1060 (February 19, 1727/8). See also I, 560–61 (January 24, 1706/7); II, 631 (January 10, 1709/10).

68. [Mather], A Christian Funeral, 21–22.

69. Sewall, Diary, I, 565 (April 23, 1707).

70. Sewall, Diary, I, 1021 (August 18, 1724); II, 1038 (October 17, 1725).

71. Sewall, Diary, II, 1044 (April 4, 1726).

72. Ann F. Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 92–184.

73. Isaac Watts to Benjamin Colman, October 12, 1739, in Charles C. Smith, “Letters of Dr. Watts,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2d ser., 9 (1894–95): 369; Colman to Watts, January 16, 1740, in Thomas Milner, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Rev. Isaac Watts (London, 1845), 654; “Of the Extravagance of our Funerals,” The Independent Reflector, 29, June 14, 1753, 117.

74. Winthrop List.

75. Winthrop List. The connections between the Dudleys and the Wainrights is noted in Sewall, Diary (MHS ed.), 3:14n.

76. Sewall, Diary (MHS ed.), 1:469–70; 2:10–11.

77. Sewall, Diary (MHS ed.), 1:469–70; 2:10–11.

78. Sewall, Diary, II, 671 (November 15, 16, 1711).

79. Sewall, Diary, I, 612 (December 22, 1708); II, 870 (November 22, 1717). Winthrop List.

80. The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay . . . (Boston, 1874), II, 229–230; Benjamin Colman to Isaac Watts, January 16, 1740, in Thomas Milner, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Rev. Isaac Watts (London, 1845), 654.

81. Winthrop List.

82. Sewall, Diary, I, 581 (December 4, 1707), II, 945 (April 8, 1720), 1016–17 (May 6, 1724).

83. Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly, April 1684–June 1692, Archives of Maryland (Baltimore, 1894), XIII, 290; Jonathan Belcher to Richard Waldon, April 25, 1737, Jonathan Belcher Letter-Books, MHS, V, 179.

84. Sewall, Diary, I, 153 (November 11, 1687). See also I, 396 (July 18, 1698).

85. Sewall, Diary, I, 364–65 (December 25, 1696).

86. Winthrop List; John Boydell to John Yeamans, March 8, 1737/8, D. S. Greenough Collection, MHS.

87. Walker, Diary, July 2, 1728.

88. The only use of hatbands that I have found is in the funeral of Rev. Samuel Myles of the Anglican King’s Chapel in 1728. Walker, Diary, March 8, 1727/8.

89. John Boydell to John Yeamans, March 8, 1737/8, D. S. Greenough Collection, MHS.

90. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, Genealogical Memoir of the Family of Elder Thomas Leverett, of Boston (Boston, 1850), 12n. On poems on the hearse, see Stannard, Puritan Way of Death, 203; [Cotton Mather], An Elegy on the Much-to-be-deplored Death of That Never-to-be-forgotten Person, the Reverend Mr. Nathaniel Collins . . . (Boston, 1685), front matter, n.p.

91. John Cotton to Rowland Cotton, November 7, 1717, Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS. Cotton notes six ministers before adding an “&c.” The ministers from Old South, Belcher’s (and Sewall’s) church, are not listed. Sewall’s account enumerates the bearers but does not mention the ministers. Sewall, Diary, II, 866 (November 6, 1717).

92. Sewall, Diary, I, 396 (July 18, 1698).

93. Sewall, Diary, II, 741 (October 27, 1713).

94. Sewall, Diary, I, 600 (August 23, 1708).

95. Sewall, Diary, II, 945 (April 8, 1720).

96. Mather, Diary, II, 96 (August 17, 1711).

97. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967), is the classic study. See also Mark Osteen, ed., The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines (London: Routledge, 2002); Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1979).

98. Boston Evening Post, October 18, 1736.

99. Henry Newman to Benjamin Colman, May 31, 1722, Henry Newman, New England Letter-Book, February 2, 1721/22–September 13, 1723, Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Manuscripts, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, Eng. The second minister was Boston’s Andrew Eliot; Lucius Manlius Sargent, Dealings with the Dead, By a Sexton of the Old School (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1856), I, 91–92. For another minister who passed on a tankard of rings to his heirs see, Lura Woodside Watkins, “Middleton Buries its Dead,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 98 (January 1962): 28.

100. Anita Schorsch, Mourning Becomes America: Mourning Art in the New Nation (Clinton, N.J.: Main Street Press, 1976).

101. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in Winthrop Papers, 6 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929–1992), II, 294. Quotation from modernized text at http://www.lewishyde.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ModernText; Boston Evening Post, October 18, 1736.

1. For an introduction to the history of New England maps see Barbara McCorkle, New England in Early Printed Maps, 1513 to 1800 (Providence, R.I.: John Carter Brown Library, 2001) and her “The Mapping of New England before 1800,” in Mapping Boston, eds. Alex Krieger and David Cobb with Amy Turner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 23–35; Peter Benes, New England Prospect: A Loan Exhibition of Maps at the Currier Gallery of Art (Boston: Dublin Seminar, 1981); the Osher Map Library exhibit, “The Cartographic Creation of New England,” posted at http://www.usm.maine.edu/~maps/exhibit2/; and David Bosse, “‘To Promote Useful Knowledge’: An Accurate Map of the Four New England States by John Norman and John Coles,” Imago Mundi 52 (2000): 138–154. See also the brief entry in Robert C. D. Baldwin, “Colonial Cartography under the Tudor and Early Stuart Monarchies, ca. 1480– ca. 1640,” in The History of Cartography. Cartography in the European Renaissance, Vol. 3, Part 2, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1774–1779.

2. Similar map designs can be found in most small-scale maps that supplemented geography books and atlases published by Patrick Gordon, Herman Moll, or Robert Wells. See also the anonymous “An Exact Mapp of New England and New York” (1702) inserted into Cotton Mather’s opus, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). In many examples the maps’ cartographic rendering of “New England” does not always reflect the territorial dimensions dictated by royal charters. On charters and New England in geopolitics see Philip S. Haffenden, New England in the English Nation 1689–1713 (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1974).

3. Nathaniel Mather to Increase Mather, Dublin, 26. Feb. 1676/77 in “The Mather Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 9.

4. Leo Bagrow, The History of Cartography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 22.

5. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, Eng.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 249. On the cartographic reformation see also Matthew H. Edney, “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making,” in Geography and Enlightenment, eds. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 165–198.

6. For similar patterns among prominent maps of America see the work by John Mitchell, Thomas Kitchin, Emmanuel Bowen, Malachy Postlewayt.

7. It’s not absolutely clear that Jefferys—an engraver by training—created the cartouche himself since it is by now assumed that the map itself was co-authored by his employee, John Green. See the excellent discussion in “The ‘Percy Map.’ The Cartographic Image of New England and Strategic Planning during the American Revolution,” Osher Map Collection (http://www.usm.maine.edu/~maps/percy/). On the difficulty of attributing primary authorship to the map or cartouche see J. B. Harley, “The Bankruptcy of Thomas Jefferys: An Episode in the Economic History of Eighteenth Century Map-Making,” Imago Mundi 20 (1966): 27–48; and Joan Winearls, “Thomas Jefferys’ Map of Canada and the Mapping of the Western Part of North America, 1750–1768,” in Images and Icons of the New World: Essays on American Cartography, ed. Karen Severud Cook (London: The British Library, 1996), 27–54.

8. Norman J. W. Thrower, Maps and Man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972), 168.

9. A. H. Robinson, The Look of Maps (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), 17.

10. G. N. G. Clarke, “Taking Possession: the cartouche as cultural text in eighteenth-century American maps,” Word & Image 4, 2 (1988): 471, 455.

11. See also J. B. Harley, “Text and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps,” in The New Nature of Maps, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 33–49; and William Boelhower, “Inventing America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis,” Word & Image 4, 2 (1988): 475–97; and debates published in Cartographica and Imago Mundi during the 1990s.

12. Clarke, 455.

13. Eileen Reeves, “Reading Maps,” Word & Image, Vol. 9, No. 1, (January-March 1993): 51 [51–65].

14. See Stephanie Pratt, “From the Margins: the Native American personage in the cartouche and decorative borders of maps,” Word & Image 12, 4 (October-December 1996): 349–65. For studies discussing New England maps in relation to the dispossession of Native Americans, see J. B. Harley, “New England Cartography and the Native Americans,” in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, eds. Emerson W. Baker et al. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 287–313; or, Margaret Wickens Pearce, “Native Mapping in Southern New England Indian Deeds,” in Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Uses, ed. G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 157–186.

15. See Pratt, 362; also Clarke, 474.

16. My choice of New England maps for explaining the morphology of the cartouche is motivated in part by the genre’s unique cartographic archive. Maps of “New England” continued to be defined consistently throughout the eighteenth century and as a result of this stable definition is today a well-documented thematic map genre within which it becomes possible to trace formal developments of the cartouche over an extended period of time.

Most of the maps consulted for this essay are now available in digital archives offered by the Library of Congress; the New York Public Library; the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine; and the David Rumsey collection. Maps consulted but that cannot be found online are in William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (New York: Abrams, 2002); Seymour T. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York: Abrams, 1980); and Barbara McCorkle, New England in Early Printed Maps, 1513 to 1800 (Providence, R.I.: John Carter Brown Library, 2001).

17. For critical discussions see David Woodward, ed. The History of Cartography. Vol. 3. Cartography in the European Renaissance. Part 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For visual examples, see Pierluigi Portinaro and Franco Knirsch, The Cartography of North America 1500–1800 (New York: Crescent Books, 1987), 57, 73, 79, 83, 102.

18. Clarke, 464; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983).

19. Throughout the essay I use the term “Indian” rather than “Native American” because the essay addresses artifacts and images coming out of a European lexicon of representation; conversely, this kind of address should therefore not to be mistaken for past or present representatives of American peoples.

20. On the mapmakers’ use of White and de Bry in New England maps see McCorkle.

21. Pratt, 352–56.

22. See John Seller, A Chart of the West Indies (1675); John Senex, North America (1710); Henry Popple, A Map of the British Empire (1733); Johann Homann, Americae (1746).

23. On the Indian as allegory of America see Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 84–117. Also see Clare Le Corbeiller, “Miss America and Her Sisters: Personification of the Four Parts of the World,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 19, 8 (April 1961): 209–21; E. McClung Fleming, “The American Image as Indian Princess, 1765–1783,” Winterthur Portfolio 2 (1965): 65–81; John Higham, “Indian princess and Roman goddess: the first female symbols of America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 100, 1 (1990): 45–79. See also J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, Power,” in The New Nature of Maps, 51–81; Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

24. Pratt observes that the relationship between figure and architecture serves to “to produce a balanced design.” Pratt, 356.

25. See also cartouches such as Seller’s cartouche of A Chart of the West Indies (London 1675); Lea’s A New Map of America (1690).

26. Joseph Roach, “The Global Parasol: Accessorizing the Four Corners of the World,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2003), 94. He applies the concept developed by Arjun Appadurai, “Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, 2 (1990): 1–24.

27. On the rationale of depicting Native Americans in a black color see Ellwood Parry, The Image of the Indian and the Black Man in American Art, 1590–1900 (New York: Braziller, 1974); Alden T. Vaughan, “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review 87, 4 (October 1982): 917–53; Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origins of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247–64; Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

28. Alpers, 163–64; see also Dorinda Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment (Los Angeles: Thames & Hudson and The Getty Museum, 2006).

29. Jefferys’s focus on the Indian is unique in more than one sense. Mapmakers were hesitant to allow Indian figures to enter the actual tablet or interior space of the cartouche; after viewing much of the cartographic archive pertaining to New England and North America, I found only two examples in which engravers placed Indian figures on the inside of the cartouche frame.

30. Thomas Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern . . . Vol. 1–4 (London, 1757–1772); the Dutch figure is from Dresses, Vol.2, 62; the Indian figure, Vol. 4, 114; and the figure of Liberty, Vol. 4, 156.

31. Here I expand from the reading by Clarke, 459–60.

32. Jefferys, Collection, Vol. 3 and 4.

33. See T. W. Craik (ed.), The Revels History of Drama in English, Vol. V, 1660–1750 (London: Methuen, 1976), 145 and Plate 27; and Honour, 88. Also see Steven Mullaney, “The New World on Display: European Pageantry and the Ritual of Incorporation of the Americas,” in New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700, ed. Rachel Doggett (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1992), 105–113.

34. Alice Nash, “Antic Deportments and Indian Postures,” in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, eds. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 163–76. On actor training see Marion Jones, “Actors and repertory,” in The Revels, 119–57.

35. Jefferys’s cartouche is not the only one to activate or mobilize Indian figures along theatrical lines. Other mid-century cartouches, such as those prefacing John Mitchell’s A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (1755) and Emmanuel Bowen/Henry Gibson’s An Accurate Map of North America (1755), show actor-like Indian figures engaged in some form of dramatic dialogue.

36. For studies addressing Indians in eighteenth-century plays see, for example, Eugene H. Jones, Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, 1753–1916 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988) and Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

37. On the context for this play see Eric Hinderaker, “The ‘Four Indian Kings’ and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire,” William Mary Quarterly 53, 3 (July 1996): 487–526. The irony is that the Native American guests, while being presented as Indian puppets on the playbill, were supposed to see a show in the Punch-and-Judy tradition, and thus would have not seen themselves presented as puppets.

38. My interpretation of Indians as puppets, marionettes, and automatons is shaped by Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

39. Roach 93, 94; he cites Katherine S. Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1976). For studies on the history of moveable scenery see Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery. Its Origin and Development in the British Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) and his “Theatres and Scenery,” in The Revels History of Drama in English, Vol. V, 1660–1750, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1976) 83–118; Richard Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); and Roy Strong, ed., Festival Designs by Inigo Jones (London: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1969).

40. In A. M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover, 1952), 205. Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery and his earlier Proscenium and Sight-Lines (1939; London: Faber, 1964); and Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (New York: Harcourt, 1927).

41. Southern, Changeable Scenery, 206. See also Louise Pelletier, Architecture in Words: Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture (London: Routledge, 2006), 80.

1. “Astonishing Invisible Lady” (Wilmington, Del., [1804]), broadside, American Antiquarian Society. I explore the North American history of the Invisible Lady and its cultural functions at greater length in Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011).

2. This engraving, accompanied by an explanation of the illusion, was published in William Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy (London, 1807), 69–71. Nicholson’s exposé (but not his picture) was quickly reproduced in several American publications; see “British and Foreign Intelligence, Chiefly Scientific,” The American Register; Or, General Repository of History, Politics, and Science, vol. 1 (Jan. 1, 1807), 67; “Literary and Philosophical Intelligence . . . Great Britain,” The Christian Observer (Boston) vol. 6. no. 2 (Feb. 1807), 127.

3. Less frequently, the exhibition took the form of a rectangular glass box suspended from the ceiling by chains at each corner. On this construction, which was originally exhibited in Paris, see Jann Matlock, “The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9:2 (Fall 1996): 175–221.

4. “Last Week of Exhibition,” Salem Gazette, Dec. 11, 1804. Previously, the woodcut had been featured in an advertisement for the Newburyport exhibition; see “The Astonishing Invisible Lady,” Newburyport Herald, Nov. 9, 1804. For exhibitions elsewhere in New England, see “Astonishing Invisible Lady,” Salem Gazette (Salem, Mass.), Oct. 5, 1804; “An Extraordinary Aerial Phenomenon,” Columbian Centinel (Boston), Sept. 1, 1804; and “The Exhibition of the Invisible Lady,” Eastern Argus (Portland, Me.), Oct. 4, 1804.

5. William Frederick Pinchbeck, The Expositor; or Many Mysteries Unravelled, Delivered in a Series of Letters, between a Friend and a Correspondent (Boston, 1805), esp. 27–37, 85–87. For a discussion of Pinchbeck’s exposé of the Invisible Lady in relation to contemporary discourses of acoustical deception, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

6. See, for example, the terrors visited by the ventriloquist Carwin upon a Pennsylvania community in Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland, ed. and intro. by Jay Fliegelman (New York: Penguin Classics, 1991). It may be no coincidence that the Invisible Lady enjoyed its greatest popularity during 1804–05—the very years in which Brown’s sequel to Wieland, the unfinished Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, was serialized in The Literary Magazine.

7. The scholarly literature on visual culture has grown to proportions too vast to cite adequately here. On the points briefly discussed in this essay, see Angela Miller, “Breaking Down the Preserves of Visual Production,” American Art 11:2 (Summer 1997): 11–13; Nicholas Mirzoeff, “What is Visual Culture?” in The Visual Culture Reader (New York, 1998), 3–13; James D. Herbert, “Visual Culture/Visual Studies,” in Critical Terms for Art History, 2d ed. (Chicago, 2003), 452–64.

8. Victor Buchli, “Introduction,” The Material Culture Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), 13.

9. For a sampling of recent approaches to material culture studies in different fields, see Sophie White, “‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans,” Gender & History 15:3 (Nov. 2003): 528–49; Elizabeth DeMarrias, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew, eds., Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (Cambridge, Eng.: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004); Susan Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); Bernard L. Herman, Townhouse: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005), esp. 1–32; Kariann Yokota, “Postcolonialism and Material Culture in the Early United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d series, 64:2 (Apr. 2007): 264–74; Shirley Wajda and Helen Shoemaker, eds. Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2008); Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

10. Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004), esp. 1–7.

11. Like visual culture and material culture, the image/word relation has been the subject of long and extensive scholarly treatment. Print culture studies have a more recent genesis. For recent scholarship that usefully models an integrated approach to visual and/or material culture and print culture, see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 1993); David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998); Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006).

12. “For Sale or To Let,” The New-York Evening Post, May 3, 1806; John Mix, see “Left with the Subscriber,” Connecticut Herald (New Haven), Dec. 30, 1806.

13. “An Extraordinary Aerial Phenomenon,” Columbian Centinel (Boston), Sept. 1, 1804.

14. Here I mean to recognize the enduring influence of the exhibition and exhibition catalogue New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1984), which remains an indispensable source for research about early New England material culture.

15. For an excellent introduction to the history of colonial Canada, see Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

16. On the concept of the “middle ground,” see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and “Forum: The Middle Ground Revisited,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63:1 (Jan. 2006): 3–96.

17. Mary Cochrane Rogers, Glimpses of an Old Social Capital (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) (Privately printed, 1923), 72. See pp. 72–81 for an account of the Rogers’s marriage and biographical data about Elizabeth.

18. On the painting, and Blackburn’s possible use of a print source for the composition, see “Elizabeth Browne Rogers, 1761,” in Barbara Millhouse, American Originals: Selections from Reynolda House, Museum of American Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 23.

19. On these points, see ibid., 22.

20. Robert Rogers, A Concise Account of North America (London, 1765); idem, Journals of Major Robert Rogers (London, 1765); idem, Ponteach: The Savages of America; A Tragedy (London, 1766).

21. Rogers’s military exploits have attracted the attention of a range of scholarly and popular writers, including Burt Garfield Loescher, The History of Rogers Rangers, Vol. 1: The Beginnings, Jan. 1755–April 6, 1758 (San Francisco, 1946); James Cuneo, Robert Rogers of the Rangers (New York, 1959); Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2005); Walter Borneman, The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). In 1937, Kenneth Rogers published a fictionalized novel about Rogers—Northwest Passage (New York: Doubleday, 1937)—that MGM made into a movie of the same title.

22. On this point see Wayne Craven, American Art (Madison, Wisc.: Brown and Benchmark, 1994), 97.

23. On the tendency to overlook the significance of the southern colonies in art-historical scholarship, see Maurie McInnis, “Little of Artistic Merit? The Promise and Perils of Southern Art History,” American Art 19:2 (Summer 2005): 11–18.