Hares Haeredem: The Spectator

Through Samuel Dexter’s Spectacles

KATHERINE STEBBINS MCCAFFREY

IN THE YEAR 1792, sixty-six-year-old Samuel Dexter sat for a portrait of a type quite familiar to colonial historians: in it, Dexter surrounded himself with the objects he considered emblematic of his life (fig. 1). Though he seems to slouch some and his gaze is somewhat bewildered or bemused, Dexter looks pleased to affiliate himself for posterity with his library—proud of what his books said to him, as well as what they said about him. But Dexter’s portrait has a secret, as many from the period do. The dark eyes and vague gaze whisper something that upon reflection should seem obvious: this is a devoted reader who is losing his sight. Absent from the portrait, as from numerous eighteenth-century portraits save those of Benjamin Franklin, are the gold spectacles that Samuel Dexter acquired sometime in the 1780s to try to improve his failing vision and maintain his identity as a reader.1

Today, Samuel Dexter’s gold spectacles invite historians to see reading practices and readers’ identities as a hall of mirrors (fig. 2). In their final resting place, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Dexter’s spectacles and their accompanying spectacle case seem to present a picture-perfect narrative of eighteenth-century spectatorship and its technologies, for the case bears the inscription “Hares haeredem, velut unda supervenit undam,” which is an abridged extract from the Roman poet Horace’s Epistles that the Englishman Joseph Addison chose as an epigraph in the Saturday, July 7, 1711, issue of The Spectator, the enormously influential and enduring serial written and edited by Addison and his friend, Richard Steele.2 Like the dazzling materials used to make the artifact itself, the literal connection between Spectator and spectacles threatens to overwhelm all other interpretations and qualifications. It plays to current assumptions that spectacles and texts have long enjoyed a cozy relationship.3 This kind of thinking ignores the fact that words had a long history before spectacles came into the picture. For about five thousand years after the initial emergence of written language, no one spent any time or energy associating spectacles with literacy or knowledge, because spectacles were not invented until the end of thirteenth century.4 From that point on, representations of spectacles and the messages encoded in styles of spectacles often entered into highly contested cultural discourses, dialogues enabled to greater or lesser degrees by the actual circulation of spectacles. During the emergence and aftermath of the Enlightenment in England, for example, sophisticated and scientifically produced English spectacles like Dexter’s were traded across the Atlantic and often sold as fashionable items linked to a rapidly expanding world of consumer goods. As spectacles spread throughout the colonies, they redrew the line that divided things seen from things unseen and increasingly forced the question of what constituted a necessity or a luxury.5 Glitteringly refined, Dexter’s spectacles seem to have been built to cross this line—built, that is, not just to facilitate but to flaunt access to some configuration of the public sphere, the social space represented for Jürgen Habermas by, among other things, papers like The Spectator.6

Fig. 1. John Johnston. Samuel Dexter (1726–1810). Oil on canvas, 1791. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Fig. 2. Gold temple spectacles, ca. 1785, and gold-plated spectacle case, ca. 1810 belonging to the Dexter family. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.

Look beyond surface reflections, however, and it becomes clear that the Dexter spectacles and case tell a story with a wider circuit. The spectacles do capture Samuel Dexter’s struggle in his last years to liberate himself from material expressions of pride or avarice; all the while he remained dependent upon a device that both enabled the virtuous habits he wished to cultivate while it simultaneously expressed the vices he hoped to weed out. But, as it turns out, Dexter’s son Samuel is the one who bought and inscribed the case for the spectacles that he inherited, and who in his last years seemed to turn his back on the excesses of his youth in order to follow the general outline of his father’s lights. Hares Haeredum, Horace wrote. “Heir follows heir.” Heritage. Legacy. These are all problems of visible remains. For two generations, then, these spectacles corrected vision, negotiated print cultures, and testified to early Americans’ conflicted attempts to style themselves as serious, rational readers. This larger tension between the virtue of learning and the vice of fashion resonated in the particular circumstances of the Dexter men, for whom the spectacles came to serve as a memorial to a multigenerational struggle to balance religious faith against secular success.

* * *

Born in 1726, the elder Samuel Dexter had a long career as a reader (and writer), and one that tells a familiar story of a Republic of Letters built on the Puritan faith in literacy and an expanding commercial reliance on numeracy in the Anglo-Atlantic world. After being trained up to follow in his father Samuel’s footsteps through Harvard and into the ministry, Dexter had shocked his parents by proving perhaps too much inclined toward scholarship—on the strength of his own reason and reading, and fueled by a contrary nature, he soon questioned Christianity’s claims to divine authority, abandoned Calvinism as a doctrine that “did violence to the moral attributes of God,” and departed Harvard to apprentice himself to the Boston merchant Samuel Barrett.7 Within fifteen years he had married, started his own shop, fathered five children (of which four lived), and made so much money selling Britain’s baubles to his fellow colonists that, a year later, he retired.8 In 1762, flush with pride in his speedy success, Samuel Dexter left his mercantile business for a position in the Massachusetts legislature, only to find himself openly at odds with the other patriots on how to conduct the Revolution. In a dramatic move, and perhaps one driven by his descent into an especially dark period, Dexter chose to extract himself from his commercial and political networks, removing to the relative wilds of Woodstock, Connecticut.9 Restored to health by strict dedication to none but “his family and a very few friends,”10 “the management of . . . private concerns,”11 and his extensive library, which was remembered as “the wonder of all the villagers,” he eventually came to embrace and enjoy the area, which made him feel “as if we were out of the world.”12

Once smallpox drove the Dexter family from Woodstock at the close of the Revolution and his wife died of cancer, Samuel lived a less settled life, and one focused on earnest preparations for his own demise.13 In the spring of 1785, he sold his family’s Dedham property, then moved to Marlboro, then Roxbury, then Weston, and, finally, he spent the last decade of his life in Mendon, Massachusetts.14 All the while he grew ever more engrossed in the “large and choice library” that he had insisted on carting with him to each new place. It “attracted much attention at the time of its removal,” one writer recalled, “but he was greatly devoted to the use of it in his retirement.”15 Sometime between leaving Woodstock and arriving at Mendon, Dexter came by his golden spectacles, either in response to the normal aging of his eyes, or possibly after hitting his head above the eye in an accident in January of 1788 as he was preparing to depart for church. All those books, and all those miles. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to be Samuel Dexter as he watched those letters gradually blur before his eyes.16 Although he lived in a kind of self-exile after 1775, he never left the universe of ideas preserved on the page, and, in the end, that was the home he most cared about. To be expelled from the pantheon of patriots was one thing, to be banished from books quite another. To maintain his independence as a reader, and to unlock the door to his domain, Dexter had to have those spectacles.17

In theory, Samuel Dexter could have had spectacles made by someone connected to his brother, John, a Marlboro goldsmith.18 But it is unlikely given that Americans did not seriously attempt to copy and improve upon the English style of spectacles until the fledgling optical industry opened up shop in Philadelphia around the turn of the century.19 Another possible source could have been someone like his brother Ebenezer, a physician, for on a handful of occasions physicians dispensed spectacles in the colonies during the eighteenth century.20 But Ebenezer had died before the war, and, in any case, Samuel’s generation did not usually look to the emergent medical community for this kind of cure. Instead, people sought spectacles on the advice of family, friends, and even acquaintances; purchased pamphlets like those written by the English spectacle makers James Ayscough, Benjamin Martin, and George Adams; or—as in Dexter’s specific case—consulted popular reference works like William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine.21

Primed by earlier reading in Buchan, Dexter would have done his best to select appropriate lenses from the range of powers stocked by a merchant. He probably procured the spectacles through a watchmaker like J. Deverell, who advertised “an elegant pair of Gold Temple Spectacles” for sale in Boston in 1785, or a merchant like Amos Atwell, who had opened a shop in 1791 that sold “Fresh Goods,” including spectacles, directly across from Samuel’s oldest son Andrew’s store in Providence, Rhode Island.22 Merchants like these had been importing spectacles, mainly from London, on a regular basis going back to the 1710s. Starting in the 1720s, the Boston bookseller Daniel Henchman’s account and day books suggest that the sale of spectacles started to take off. Between 1713 and 1748, his sales climbed from twenty to 981 pairs, while the population of Boston doubled (fig. 3). All the while he sold more spectacles to traders from outlying towns.23 After the French and Indian War, advertisements show a growing variety of styles of spectacles available from an increasing number of outlets on the coast, and even beyond the coast, in smaller towns throughout many of the colonies, especially in the north and mid-Atlantic (fig. 4). These spectacles went home, alone or in sets of half or one dozen, in the pockets of the elites, artisans, many of middling status, and their mothers, fathers, friends, nurses, and maids.24

Fig. 3. Chart showing sales of spectacles and number of customers buying spectacles in Daniel Henchman’s Boston bookshop, 1712–1749. Based on the Daniel Henchman account and day books. Microfilm at the American Antiquarian Society.

Fig. 4. Map showing cities and towns with one or more shops selling spectacles from the 1760s to the 1780s. From top to bottom, the cities and towns are: Portsmouth and Spring Hill, N.H.; Boston, Newburyport, Salem, Marlboro, Mass.; Newport and Providence, R.I.; New London, New Haven, Norwich, Wethersfield, Conn.; New York, N.Y.; Chatham and Morristown, N.J.; Philadelphia, Penn.; Baltimore, Md.; Norfolk, Williamsburg, Gloucester, Smithfield, Va.; Charleston, S.C.; and Savannah, Ga. The Daniel Henchman records suggest single shops may have served customers within a radius of 100 miles or more. Based on advertisements collected in three electronic sources—Digital Evans, Past Portal (Colonial Williamsburg), and the digital edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette—and checked against the Prime file at Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Del. Map by author.

Owners, like the spectacles themselves, varied, but they nearly all shared at least one thing: old age. Advertisers offered correction for short sight as well as long, but the vast majority of buyers bought convex spectacles for correcting the defects that develop as the eye ages, a trend also suggested by the near total absence of concave spectacles from the period in extant collections.25 For most of Dexter’s lifetime, buying spectacles meant taking up what are referred to today as reading glasses, and few in that day missed the connotations of physical and mental decline that came with their use. Stories celebrating those who managed to live into the eighth decade or beyond without the need for spectacles perennially registered a resigned attitude toward spectacles, and the continual wish that perhaps another cure for aged eyes might someday be discovered.26 Glimpses of one’s bespectacled face in a mirror surely whispered: remember death.

Not that Samuel Dexter needed reminding. By the time he got his spectacles, Dexter’s focus had already shifted from earthly matters to spiritual questions. Thanks to his spectacles, Samuel penned letters and his mother’s obituary, but mainly he spent his time writing for himself: he produced unknown quantities of manuscript pages, which he periodically burned in fits of shame; a thirty-seven-page will with two lengthy postscripts and two even lengthier codicils; his three-hundred-and-thirty-page-plus commonplace book, which he took time, before dying, to edit with pen as well as penknife; and one surviving palimpsest probing the validity of Trinitarian versus Unitarian doctrines. All betrayed his renewed interest in living a Christian life, and all put his spectacles to the kind of use they were designed to encourage: hands-on reading of many texts in succession, lengthened hours of writing and revising, more time spent attending to every detail on the page.27

The single piece Samuel Dexter produced for broad public consumption during his bespectacled period was a sixty-page anonymous pamphlet in which Dexter used a close reading of the marginal translations included in the King James Bible to argue God did not damn Esau for failing to be a “second-sighted man.”28 This argument also conveniently absolved Dexter of what he came to consider the cardinal sin of his life: his rejection of the opportunity to continue his father’s ministry in favor of the pursuit of worldly wealth and status. To atone for the folly of his youth, Dexter made plans for a funeral sermon that, by his own strict instruction, would make no mention of him—the deceased—at all. Instead, it would be a meditation on a passage from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, chapter four, verse eighteen: “The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”29 Decrying the ambition of those who sought to “lay up treasures on earth” and in “their vicious lives appear to be totally regardless of the doctrine of future existence”—in other words, condemning his younger self—Dexter urged the minister to tell “his hearers to imagine they hear ONE FROM THE INVISIBLE WORLD asserting this great truth, that ‘things which are eternal,’ are infinitely more important than ‘things which are temporal.’”30

Only Dexter was not, as he imagined himself to be, growing more virtuously immune to the lure of earth’s treasures in his waning years. The Dexter that claimed to care nothing for the visible, material world is the same Dexter who simultaneously eschewed the many more modest choices of spectacles available in favor of the most expensive, most up-to-date, most formidable and flashy spectacles that could be had. Costing as much as four times what the same design would fetch in silver, and ten times as much as the steel version.31 Dexter’s spectacles were in the newer style, called temple spectacles. Developed in the mid-eighteenth century by the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers, temple spectacles eventually replaced the considerably more fragile and inconvenient armless designs made of horn, fishbone, wood, or thin strands of metal that had circulated for four hundred years (figs. 5 and 6)32 The London spectacle guild had parlayed its late seventeenth-century connections with members of the Royal Society and its eighteenth-century connections to the crown into dominance of the vision aid market, both at home and in the American colonies.33 The company capitalized on immigrant labor from Italy and the fortune in raw materials, including gold and silver extracted in distant realms by slave or indigenous labor, which increasingly flowed through Atlantic trade networks and into English hands.34 The spectacle makers advertised their wares as part of a spectrum of fashionable aids intended to enhance scientific inquiry and promote aesthetic development (figs. 7 and 8)35 In the colonies, the emergence of temple spectacles coincided with a shift in where spectacles were commonly sold, from being offered in bookstores, post offices, and print shops to being offered as one more item in the general avalanche of English goods from any number of merchants.36 During periods of non-importation, some Americans branded spectacles necessities by labeling them cutlery, and long after the Revolution many sellers categorized them as hardware, as Amos Atwell did.37 Yet, no matter what Revolutionary-era Americans like Samuel Dexter told themselves, when they purchased these types of spectacles, they bought into a vast commercial and imperial network heavily dependent upon vision to perpetuate and secure its hierarchies.

Fig. 5. Unknown. Leather spectacles attributed to Esak Hopkins. United States, ca. 1770. RHi X4 276. Iron, glass, leather, and silk ribbon. Personal Gear. Museum Collection. 1921.1.47. Courtesy, the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Fig. 6. Wire-rimmed spectacles, owner unknown, 18th century. Gift of Mrs. Carl W. Noren, Connecticut Historical Society Collections. Courtesy, the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn.

Fig. 7. Edward Scarlett Trade Card (mid-eighteenth century). Courtesy of the Science & Society Picture Library, a division of the National Museum of Science and Industry, London, England.

Fig. 8. James Ayscough Trade Card (ca. 1750). Courtesy of the Science & Society Picture Library, a division of the National Museum of Science and Industry, London, England.

In refashioning spectacles at mid-century to be more reliable and refined, the Worshipful Company had also made them, in a way, less polite. Temple spectacles might be durable and practical, but they were much less discreet than the designs that had preceded them. This may well have been part of the reasoning—another part being the bald admission of age and decay—behind why Samuel Dexter decided not to include them in his portrait.38 As props, books were well established as sending a positive message of improvement to the viewer, but until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Americans declined to allow the spectacles the same status.39 Although spectacles always represented an investment in the word—and in Samuel Dexter’s case, a significant investment—they remained too forceful a reminder of the lure of the material world and the discomfiting power of the gaze. As beautiful as the spectacles were, they showcased the level to which refinement depended on calculated display.40 The older Samuel Dexter got, the more distressed he became by his own visibility, and the more completely he sought to escape or repress it. In the same year that he sat for his portrait, for example, Dexter decried at length his decision to mark the height of his success in the 1760s by commissioning a fake coat of arms for his family. As an old man, he “concealed [the herald] . . . in a trunk, in my closet, and, probably, its end will be to be burned,” along with a handful of “literary vanities. . . . I despise it,” Dexter went on in his commonplace book, “and myself for having procured it.”41 No surprise, then, that even though he depicted himself as a reader, Dexter would decline to capture his unusually expensive temple spectacles in his portrait. Gold temple spectacles signaled exactly the kind of fashionable inflation of self-importance that Dexter wanted to consign to his past.

As much as he may have wished it, in truth Samuel Dexter’s funeral message did not come in the form of an immaterial voice from beyond. It, too, had a material manifestation—six hundred copies prepaid by Dexter and issued from the press of John Eliot “on good paper, with a fair type,” just as Dexter himself had directed. The spectacles and the sermon, and many of his final preparations, betrayed the fact that as Dexter tried to make choices informed by his deepening spiritual convictions, he nonetheless grew increasingly concerned about how he looked to posterity. Witness not only the burned manuscripts and the heavily edited commonplace book, but also his final request for “a plain coffin of pine board, blacked, without a cloth covering, and without any kind of inscription, or other ornament.” In his will he forbade “any gentlemen, termed persons of distinction and figure, to be my pall-holders,” thereby excluding many of his friends. Instead he preferred to purchase the services of “twelve men of sober life, who have families in poor circumstances, of or near the town, or parish to which I last belonged” for the sum of “five dollars and a pamphlet.” Similarly, he requested that “any poor persons” who had watched over him be paid “thirty-seven cents and five mills” for each night at his bedside. Setting aside rings as parting gifts for friends, he worried aloud that they would be considered an old-fashioned gesture. “As I have not of late years mixed with the fashionable world, I know not but some other memorial of friendship, respect, or affect has been substituted in the place of rings,” he wrote. “My executors are to conform to custom in this respect.” Without question, the generous will continued to dispense his remaining fortune as Dexter had done, or was suspected of having done, in life, with over five thousand dollars famously set aside to fund the study of scriptures at Harvard. Yet even as he cautioned his relatives against “showy and ostentatious” expressions of mourning, believing “great evil grows of the practice,” Dexter admitted that it was possible to go so far in the other direction that one risked being “censurable for [one’s] singularity.”42 In other words, it was beginning to dawn on Samuel Dexter that in his rush to encourage righteous simplicity, he might be promoting something like conspicuous non-consumption.

Samuel Dexter’s spectacles, and his faith, helped him read and write to a ripe old age. In January of 1802, he complained of “ophthalmia”—a term applied to many eye ailments in that day—and feared “total blindness.” On his eighty-third birthday in March of 1809, he penned again his yearly expression of “holy gratitude . . . for any mitigation of my bodily pains & infirmities” that God saw fit to bestow.43 At the time of his death the following summer, Dexter’s spectacles passed to his youngest son and namesake, Samuel, presumably in the unlisted jumble of personal effects and household goods divided by his sons and sons-in-law according to the instructions left in the otherwise voluminous will, some of which was reproduced against his wishes along with his funeral sermon.44 Sometime in the handful of years between Samuel the father’s departure from the earthly realm in 1810 and Samuel the son’s abrupt death during a scarlet fever epidemic in 1816, Samuel the son had the gold-plated case made.45 The youngest of Dexter’s children, born in 1761 at the height of his father’s mercantile career, Samuel had decamped to Woodstock with his parents in 1775 only to return to Cambridge in the fall of 1777 to enter Harvard. He finished at the top of his class, went on to study and practice law, dabbled in banking, and served as Secretary of War in his close friend John Adams’s administration, as well as briefly as Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury.46

That the elder Samuel carried his prize spectacles about without a case could not have been numbered among his unusual habits. According to the Henchman accounts, purchasers usually bought spectacles without cases.47 By 1810, however, there was an emerging sense that every pair of spectacles deserved its own protective container (figs. 9 and 10). In addition, both and either could be marked with not only makers’ marks and buyers’ or sellers’ addresses, but also personal names or initials and a rudimentary system for denoting powers of vision.48 While spectacles began the eighteenth century as an unreliable tool for reading, spectacles in the first quarter of the nineteenth century demanded more directly than ever to be read, literally and figuratively, as an increasingly substantial public declaration of private property, individual bodily ability, and basic belief in the value of literacy and numeracy.

Fig. 9. Temple spectacles (ca. 1800). Marked with a “30” (to denote the power of the lens, probably by reference to age) on the outer left temple piece. Photograph by the author. Courtesy, Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburgh, Vt.

Fig. 10. Temple spectacles (ca. 1810). Photograph by the author. Courtesy, Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburgh, Vt.

For Samuel the younger, the case presented an unusual literary opportunity (fig. 11). On it and through it he renewed and revised the themes of visibility and invisibility, heritage and legacy that so consistently absorbed his father’s attention. Like the obituary that appeared in magazines and newspapers during the summer of 1810, which Samuel the son is suspected to have authored, the engraved case provided a comment upon his father’s generosity and personal style.49 More than that: it functioned as a piece of revisionist history, not unlike his father’s faux coat of arms. For example, though Samuel Sr. was certainly familiar with the works of Horace, he did not record owning any editions of Horace in his library inventory, nor did he comment at length upon Horace in the pages that remain in his commonplace book. He did, coincidentally, make a bare mention of Horace when he had injured his head above his eye back in 1788, but whether his son had any idea of this is extremely hard to say.50 Son Samuel emulated and enjoyed Horace more extensively, at Harvard and through his correspondence with his friend John Adams, who owned and quoted freely from several editions.51 And while the father Samuel almost certainly used his spectacles to peruse his multivolume set of The Spectator, like many, many others did in the eighteenth century—one does not have to look far to find spectacle buyers leaving Daniel Henchman’s bookstore with copies of The Spectator in tow52—in fact Samuel Sr. never sat, as it might seem, gazing at his case, with words extracted from The Spectator branded across the reflection of his bespectacled face.

Fig. 11. Gold-plated spectacle case belonging to the Dexter family, ca. 1810. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Son Samuel read both Horace and The Spectator, and responded by linking them, through the case, with his father’s life and the glasses left in his care. This was not an obvious connection to make, in part because Mr. Spectator and the denizens of the coffeehouses did not conspicuously or uniformly mark themselves by wearing actual spectacles. Isaac Bickerstaff, the lead persona in Steele’s Tatler wore old-style nose spectacles.53 But in The Spectator, though Mr. Spectator boasted “I have, methinks, a more than ordinary Penetration in Seeing,” Addison and Steele chose to forgo depicting actual spectacles in favor of portraying the act of social observation as akin to the sense of wearing spectacles. In some later engravings of coffeehouses, temple spectacles functioned as a conduit for information, a frame for scenes, and as a mask that created the kind of urban anonymity upon which Mr. Spectator thrived.54 And in both serials, they repeated one conceit, that in public spaces people made snap judgments based on nothing but “the Intimations Men gather from our Aspect,” because “A Man, they say, wears the Picture of his Mind in his Countenance.” Moreover, Mr. Spectator went on, “one Man’s Eyes are Spectacles to [those] who look at him to read his Heart.”55

This posture had social dimensions, but for Samuel the son, it had very personal dimensions as well. It mimicked the stance that his father took in relation to him as he set out for Harvard. From the start, his father’s advice had a clear theme: literacy, and the growing role it played in making a living. Samuel the son’s studies would not be for the sake of pure intellectual or spiritual development, they would have to prepare him to support himself. In a way, his father argued in a letter, this education was his inheritance, invested.56 At Harvard, son Samuel mounted a mini-rebellion just as his father once had, immersing himself in epic poetry and publishing a long poem extolling “The Progress of Science.”57 He quickly found himself more inclined to read things from a secular perspective, and without the guilty conscience that plagued his father. He also wasted no time in fretting over the volatility of the new economy, as his father once had. Instead, he tried to make circumstances work to his advantage, and as the fortunes of his sometimes quite public speculative enterprises abruptly rose and fell in the early Republic, Dexter moved quickly on to the next big thing with scarcely a backward glance.58

The spectacle case suggests Samuel did not miss some of the ironies in how he ended up using his inheritance, such as it was. In his letter, Horace reminded his friend Florus, “Experience shows you, as your riches swell / Your wants increase. . . . With heirs following heirs like waves at sea, / And no such thing as perpetuity,” Horace asked, “What good are farmsteads, granaries, pasture-grounds / That stretch long leagues beyond Calabria’s bounds, / If Death, unbribed by riches, mows down all / With his unsparing sickle, great and small?” Instead of obsessing about accumulating a fine estate to pass on to his descendents, Horace vowed in the letter that he would not “fear what my next heir may think” if the descendent found “There’s less than he expected left behind.”59 As Michael Ketcham has argued, various essays in The Spectator also addressed this issue, tracing the dissolution of traditional forms of society, which were often figured in inheritance. But rather than bemoaning the sad state of affairs, The Spectator’s writers set to replacing the old modes of exchange with new stories that reconciled people to the social and economic flux around them, while demonstrating, as Erin Mackie has pointed out, how to remain upstanding consumers on such unsteady terrain.60

That meant that for Joseph Addison, Horace’s dark view of material acquisition provided the impetus to ponder the deepest questions of existence. As Mr. Spectator wandered the fields and forests of his friend Sir Roger Coverley’s estate, he looked beyond the land to think about Horace’s view of heredity in an entirely different way. Why, he wondered, did “the Soul, which is capable of such immense Perfections, and of receiving new Improvements to all Eternity, . . . fall away into nothing almost as soon as it is created”? Turning to the extract, Mr. Spectator concluded that, since “Man can never have taken his full measure . . . before he is hurried off the Stage, . . . he does not seem born to enjoy Life, but to deliver it down to others.” Thus, he argued, men should look “on this World as only a Nursery for the next,” in which, he reasoned, “. . . The several Generations of rational Creatures, which rise up and disappear in such quick Successions, are only to receive their first Rudiments of Existence. . . Afterwards,” he concluded, souls are “to be transplanted into a more friendly Climate, where they may spread and flourish to all Eternity.”61

Dexter’s spectacle case offered a tangible way to experience the lesson encapsulated in this quote. The Dexter spectacles were made of solid gold, instead of the more common silver or steel bows, which meant that they wouldn’t tarnish or rust. Their brilliance lasts for what, to humans, seems like forever.62 How could such a precious and lasting thing have persuaded Samuel Dexter to put aside earthly riches? It could if Dexter looked through those spectacles, not at them. If he looked through them to read the gold-plated case in his hand or on his desk, he would be materially reminded of Addison’s vision of the earth as heaven’s hothouse, or Horace’s vision of the deeply illusory quality of material possessions—the lesson that, as Shakespeare famously put it, “All that glisters is not gold.”63 If looking through the gold spectacles to view the plated case did not remind Dexter the younger to focus his vision, as his father had come to, on lasting, invisible, heavenly goals, then at the very minimum, it suggested to him that he was capable of learning to sense when he was in the presence of things of real value versus things bearing only a surface shine. But to make the material motto work, Dexter would have to keep reading the text—and not let his eyes refocus on his own image, that of the smartly ornamented spectator reflected in the case.

In this way, Dexter molded his father’s meditations concerning the invisible, spiritual world into a very visible secular object lesson. And perhaps by 1810 he believed he had begun to learn it—after all, Dexter had the case made right around the time he took his final major office, that of the first president of the Massachusetts State Temperance Society. In a similar maneuver, three weeks before his illness and subsequent death, he happened to produce a manuscript titled “Thoughts on the Immortality of the Soul.” In it, the younger Dexter argued for the existence of the invisible world on the basis that scientists had shown that “the inability of a blind man to discover colors . . . does not disprove their existence.” This prompted one eulogist to applaud his “far reaching and comprehensive view, beyond the ken of ordinary optics,” just as the “gigantic telescopes of Herschell and Rosse . . . surpass all others, in their powers of celestial investigation.”64 For Samuel the son and his contemporaries, temple spectacles belonged more firmly to the realm of science, the logic of which could be substituted for traditional religious reflections.

At least once the case and its message attracted attention. Years after Samuel the son’s death in 1816, one of his contemporaries recalled it, writing that “Mr. Dexter . . . had great pleasure, in treasuring up the memorials of those, who were the natural guardians of his earlier years. I recollect, that he had preserved a pair of spectacles, which had belonged to his father, and for which he had caused a case to be prepared, bearing for its inscription—Hares Haeredem velut unda supervenit undam.” By then, however, the context had shifted again. Instead of pondering the quote’s original sources, the Epistles or The Spectator, the words reminded him, he wrote, of a letter of Daniel Webster’s, in which Webster “expressed much anxiety to find a pair of steel spectacles, which his father had worn, the last ten years of his life; he feared they were lost, but [after] devot[ing] a day to hunting for them, he found them.” The lesson, Dexter’s friend wrote, was that it was not “an unusual thing, for great men to enjoy a peculiar satisfaction, in looking through the eyes of their fathers.”65 As much as those who inherited the revolution talked about seeing through their father’s eyes, though, descriptions suggest that the younger Samuel Dexter did not use the spectacles all that much before he died at the age of fifty-five.66

Thus, in matters of spectatorship, the Dexter spectacles and case did not function as simple lens and mirror. They mark the intersection of broader trends in the dissemination and use of spectacles with one family’s own shifting understanding of salvation and birthright. They are fine specimens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vision aids, and they capture the contradictions and complications that marked the understanding of the visual world at that moment in history. But gaze on them from another viewpoint, and their shapes quickly shift into something altogether different.

Throughout the eighteenth century, users thought and spoke of spectacles as a second pair of eyes.67 For late eighteenth-century users, the new style of temple spectacles also acted as something of a shroud. Those wishing to convey intimacy or sincerity frequently felt compelled to draw back the curtain, as it were, by taking off or at least propping up their spectacles to reveal the actual, undistorted eyes behind.68 This image of the confusion of body and accessory was taken up in The Spectator, as it neared the end of its run. In the Saturday, October 18, 1712 issue, Addison reproduced a letter that referenced the fifth chapter of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, arguing,

. . . this Veil of Flesh parts the visible and invisible World: But when we put off these Bodies, . . . new and surprising Wonders present themselves to our Views; when these material Spectacles are taken off, the Soul, with its own naked Eyes, sees what was invisible before. . . . Death opens our Eyes, enlarges our Prospect, presents us with a new and more glorious World, which we can never see while we are shut up in the Flesh.69

“And,” the writer concluded, “methinks this is enough to cure us of our Fondness for these Bodies” and “make us willing to part with this Veil, as to take the Film off of our Eyes, which hinders our Sight.”70

When Samuel Dexter Sr. died in 1810, he was only too happy to cast off the veil and join the invisible world. So much so that, in addition to the notes about bequests, gifts, inheritances, coffins, services, sermons, and mourning, he added to his will one last set of instructions, which, as it turns out, were followed to the letter.71 After burying his wife and then his mother, Samuel Sr. began to think about the family’s vault. He grew more disgusted by the thought of bones “cast about” by cemetery workers, “disturbed and thrown together to make room for other bodies. . . It is my ardent wish to meet my relations, who have been and may be laid in my tomb, in a better world,” he wrote, but “I do not think it proper to rescind the resolution I have made” to be buried instead at “the spot hereby assigned for the place of my interment,” which he had “fixed upon . . . before I left Woodstock,” the single place where he had felt least bound by earthly concerns.72 That spot was about three and a half acres that had once been part of his farm. On his burial day, just as he wished, his poor but virtuous pall-bearers lowered his simple coffin into the center of the lot, and when the service was done, they covered it over and left it completely unmarked. The family then transferred the land to the local minister so that it might be used for “mowing, pasturage, and tillage for ever.” Though late nineteenth- century historians noted the site “has not been left vacant according to his directions,” they uniformly agreed that Samuel Dexter Sr. had succeeding in erasing all evidence of his earthly remains.73 This suggests that, in the end, the younger Samuel may have meant for the spectacle case to act as nothing more than a small sepulcher, as a place to bury the spectacles, a valuable vestige of his father. In the absence of a tomb or marker, he may well have focused his grief on this portable site, turning Addison’s epigraph into his father’s epitaph.

After his own death in 1816, observers noted that the younger Samuel Dexter lived and died by another of Horace’s quotes, from Ars Poetica: “—Si vis me flere, dolendum est / Primum, ipsi tibi.” “If you wish me to weep, you must first feel grief.” He knew, they noted, how to use his allegedly “cold and repulsive” manner to draw figurative blood and literal tears in the courtroom. Observers marveled at the younger Samuel Dexter’s way with words, and they also noted young Samuel’s ability to make abstruse concepts simple and compelling.74 No surprise, then, that interred together in their final resting place, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Dexter spectacles and case seem to present a picture-perfect narrative of spectatorship and its technologies. But cast off the first impression. Release the clasp and cast open the casket carefully prepared by the son. Draw out the eyes that sustained his father’s lights; unfold the arms that embraced his father’s mind. Place these relics side by side, and consider them from many angles. Recognize their genealogy, as well as what they have bequeathed to the present. Return the spectacles, finally, to their dark velvet bed. As Horace’s words swing into sight, watch the Dexters disappear.

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.