Early American History Seminar

"Contested Commerce" is one section of a long chapter of Gilje's current book project, "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights: The Origins, Rhetoric, and Memory of the War of 1812." The book itself builds on his presidential address for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, which was published in the Journal of the Early Republic. Free trade did not emerge as a cause of the War of 1812 uncontested. In 1803 the British and the French resumed hostilities. Congress struggled to respond to this threat to American commerce, and Republicans and Federalists called upon their shared revolutionary heritage to control the language and legacy of free trade. As the Federalists attacked limitations on commerce established by the Embargo of 1807, they merged the concept of free trade as neutral trade with the idea of free trade as commerce without government limitations. In the end, however, the inability to solve the dilemma of sustaining American commerce in a world at war allowed the Republicans to proclaim free trade as a central reason for the War of 1812.

This seminar will take place at the McMullen Museum at Boston College, where participants will have the opportunity to view the "Making History" exhibit following the program. This paper is drawn from Estes's forthcoming book, The Campaign for the Constitution: The Politics and Political Culture of the Ratification Debate, which focuses on the first few months after the Constitution's publication in mid September 1787. This chapter focuses on the first full month after the publication, when both the Constitution's supporters and its opponents set the rhetorical tone and the rhythms of the ratification process that followed. Estes argues that most all the features of the ratification debate were present by the end of October: a strong critique, robust defenses, negative campaigning, long essay series initiated on both sides such as "Publius" and "Brutus," as well as suggestions (rejected at first by Federalists, later agreed to) that the state conventions be allowed to propose amendments. In short, most all of the hallmarks of the debate were already part of the mix in the first month including some crucial strategic decisions. Ironically, however, this print battle was fought mainly within the states; there was no single national newspaper debate. Most of the publications for and against ratification appeared in just a few states, and most saw very few publications. Also, in retrospect, the Constitution's critics missed several golden opportunities in these early weeks, marking October 1787 as a decisive moment in the timing of the debate. Focused on the external arguments that occurred in newspapers rather than the internal debates of the ratifying conventions, Estes's book is a complement to Pauline Maier's superb work, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.

This session will draw from two pieces of research. One traces the shifting demographics of Boston Almshouse children and analyzes their patterns of binding out through four multi-child narratives. The other seeks to further current discussions of women’s shifting status in the early modern period by exploring the little-known role played by midwives in the colonial courtroom.

This paper will examine patterns in the popular linkage between marital and political infidelities over a range of espionage cases from the start of the Revolutionary War. Drawing on new findings about such spies as Dr. Benjamin Church, Benjamin Thompson, and the Rev. John Carnes, it will address the topic from multiple perspectives, including actual cases, the use of marital disloyalty as a metaphor for political disloyalty, and how stories of family splits were hidden, preserved, or retold. Each side of the political conflict tried to portray the other's leaders, up to and including Thomas Gage and George Washington, as unfaithful husbands. Betrayal in the home, such reports suggested, led to betrayal of the public. Some men involved in espionage did indeed make a habit of extramarital affairs, but others appear to have undertaken their risky ventures to support their wives and children. Both at the time and in later generations, Americans have been selective about which family splits they recorded, and thus which side's agents appeared most treacherous.

This paper derives from Wulf's book project on the practice and significance of Anglo-American genealogy from 1680 to 1820. In this chapter she looks at the extensive genealogical work of eighteenth-century New Englanders and positions those labors both as a social practice drawing on and developing communities of knowledge and as a middle chapter in the Anglo-American reckoning with the relationship of family to history. The keenness for genealogy that eighteenth-century New Englanders exhibited reflected a broader Anglo-American interest in lineage as a way of understanding and ordering the world.  

Wulf is particularly interested in the ways that genealogical interest and local history in New England entwined early and regularly, not emerging in the nineteenth century as parallel interests, but as fruits of the same slow growing tree. She uncovers the eighteenth-century source materials that informed early nineteenth century work and explores the contexts for their production--what prompted them, how they insinuated into family memory practices, and how they interacted with public recordation within churches and in towns.

Months after the French capitulation at the end of the French and Indian War, a young Massachusetts man, Joshua Barnes, was discovered still in the company of his Wabenaki captors. He had been taken more than four years earlier while on patrol along Lake George. Now, Barnes was arrested and faced trial for treason before a British army court-martial. Was he, as the court insisted, a renegade who had willingly adopted Native life and taken up arms against his king? The testimony of both Barnes and the witnesses against him suggest something different: that hostage stress response, known today as Stockholm Syndrome, may better explain the behavior that led to his arrest.  

This paper, digested from a draft chapter for a proposed book, will be a departure from familiar "fate of the captive" narratives, which generally assume a storyline of assimilation into Native societies, "failure" to assimilate, or redemption. The story of Barnes's captivity demonstrates that assimilation-or-ransom was not always the goal of Native American captors, and suggests that white captives frequently, even normally, adopted survival strategies that would be familiar to psychologists and law-enforcement agencies today.

In colonial New England, classicism was not a common stylistic choice for preachers and poets. Puritan authors much preferred typology-casting Biblical figures as figurative forefathers of their own leaders-to antique heroes and forms. The guiding question of this paper is big and simple: what representative advantages does classicism confer? Or, what do you see if you look at early New England through a classical, rather than a Scriptural lens? What gets lost and what gets emphasized when Boston, for once, is a new Troy or Rome, instead of a shining Jerusalem? Only two exceptional events, Thomas Morton's Merrymount and King Philip's War, prompted a turn to classic origins: Morton's own The New English Canaan (Amsterdam, 1637) and Benjamin Tompson's New-Englands Crisis (London, 1676) and New-Englands Tears (1677). These (proto-)epics display an acute concern with place. Both authors depict the landscape and leadership of New England based on classical precedence-to opposite ends, one might argue. This paper will consider the larger stakes of such representations with an eye to future Puritan epics, such as Cotton Mather's Magnalia (1702).