abstract:The 1710 assassination of Daniel Parke, the royal governor of the English colony of the Leeward Islands, was a sensational event, especially as the killers were not rebellious enslaved people or foreign attackers but instead some of the wealthiest and most respected white men of the Antiguan plantocracy. This murder has been described as one of "the most lurid episodes in English Caribbean history," an occurrence that "summed up many long years of life on the tropical firing line." But although the murder of a colonial governor, a man who had been appointed as the sovereign's personal representative within this colony, was deeply shocking to Englishmen at home and abroad, it was not as unprecedented as it might seem initially. An obscure and anonymous text that circulated in London soon afterward shows that Parke's assassination could be incorporated into the histories of the ancient world and earlier Stuart England alike. The epic poem Forty One in Miniature offers a prism through which readers can better understand the political culture of the eighteenth-century English Caribbean, helping them to appreciate its relationship to metropolitan values and practices.
{"title":"\"Sad as Horrour, Black as Hell\": The Parke Murder, the Catiline Conspiracy, and the Wentworth Execution","authors":"Natalie A. Zacek","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The 1710 assassination of Daniel Parke, the royal governor of the English colony of the Leeward Islands, was a sensational event, especially as the killers were not rebellious enslaved people or foreign attackers but instead some of the wealthiest and most respected white men of the Antiguan plantocracy. This murder has been described as one of \"the most lurid episodes in English Caribbean history,\" an occurrence that \"summed up many long years of life on the tropical firing line.\" But although the murder of a colonial governor, a man who had been appointed as the sovereign's personal representative within this colony, was deeply shocking to Englishmen at home and abroad, it was not as unprecedented as it might seem initially. An obscure and anonymous text that circulated in London soon afterward shows that Parke's assassination could be incorporated into the histories of the ancient world and earlier Stuart England alike. The epic poem Forty One in Miniature offers a prism through which readers can better understand the political culture of the eighteenth-century English Caribbean, helping them to appreciate its relationship to metropolitan values and practices.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"37 1","pages":"738 - 754"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80563972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:This essay explores the enslaved people brought to London by planters, merchants, and others from Barbados during the later seventeenth and very early eighteenth centuries. The domestic service that most of these enslaved people undertook was a far cry from the horrors of the Middle Passage or the fast-developing sugar plantation labor system emerging in Barbados, and well-dressed enslaved personal attendants may have helped normalize slavery in the eyes of Londoners who saw these Africans as being similar to the city's tens of thousands of white domestic servants. It was slavery nonetheless, and isolated, sometimes manacled, and always just one step away from a return to the Caribbean, the people featured in this essay all attempted to escape from their enslavers. The essay builds from the scant information contained in the newspaper advertisements published by their enslavers, as well as other sources such as parish records to show the determination of the enslaved to secure a measure of freedom, the ways in which Barbadian enslavers sought to strengthen slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, and the creation of the first "runaway slave" newspaper advertisements.
{"title":"Sugar Planters and Freedom Seekers in Seventeenth-Century London","authors":"S. Newman","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This essay explores the enslaved people brought to London by planters, merchants, and others from Barbados during the later seventeenth and very early eighteenth centuries. The domestic service that most of these enslaved people undertook was a far cry from the horrors of the Middle Passage or the fast-developing sugar plantation labor system emerging in Barbados, and well-dressed enslaved personal attendants may have helped normalize slavery in the eyes of Londoners who saw these Africans as being similar to the city's tens of thousands of white domestic servants. It was slavery nonetheless, and isolated, sometimes manacled, and always just one step away from a return to the Caribbean, the people featured in this essay all attempted to escape from their enslavers. The essay builds from the scant information contained in the newspaper advertisements published by their enslavers, as well as other sources such as parish records to show the determination of the enslaved to secure a measure of freedom, the ways in which Barbadian enslavers sought to strengthen slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, and the creation of the first \"runaway slave\" newspaper advertisements.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"36 1","pages":"755 - 774"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73516760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Knowledge of daily winds—gained from prolonged residence in the region—shaped life in the seventeenth-century English Caribbean. As colonists gathered, recorded, and deployed knowledge about breezes, winds, and gales, they learned the peculiar aeolian geographies of the Caribbean. In this maritime space, wind distorted distance. It took longer to sail one direction than the other. This article charts how colonists gradually adapted their economic, social, and material worlds to the rhythms of the winds. They came to realize that winds dictated sailing times, routed travel, scheduled commerce, and informed how and where colonists built structures, especially fortifications. It took even longer, though, for officials in London to grasp winds' power over daily life in—and the geography of—the Caribbean. Lack of lived experience in the Caribbean initially stymied metropolitan efforts to understand the region's climatic realities. Through continued correspondence with island residents throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, metropolitan officials learned the importance of aeolian knowledge to maritime affairs. As it circulated in letters, reports, and maps, this knowledge became crucial to the commercial and military success of the British Empire, especially as that empire expanded in the eighteenth century.
{"title":"Aeolian Geographies, Daily Life, and Empire Building in the English Caribbean","authors":"Mary S. Draper","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Knowledge of daily winds—gained from prolonged residence in the region—shaped life in the seventeenth-century English Caribbean. As colonists gathered, recorded, and deployed knowledge about breezes, winds, and gales, they learned the peculiar aeolian geographies of the Caribbean. In this maritime space, wind distorted distance. It took longer to sail one direction than the other. This article charts how colonists gradually adapted their economic, social, and material worlds to the rhythms of the winds. They came to realize that winds dictated sailing times, routed travel, scheduled commerce, and informed how and where colonists built structures, especially fortifications. It took even longer, though, for officials in London to grasp winds' power over daily life in—and the geography of—the Caribbean. Lack of lived experience in the Caribbean initially stymied metropolitan efforts to understand the region's climatic realities. Through continued correspondence with island residents throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, metropolitan officials learned the importance of aeolian knowledge to maritime affairs. As it circulated in letters, reports, and maps, this knowledge became crucial to the commercial and military success of the British Empire, especially as that empire expanded in the eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"16 1","pages":"673 - 694"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82991945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:In Sugar and Slaves, Richard Dunn used the 1680 census of Barbados to depict the island as a place where stunted population growth and brittle bonds of community plagued the island's white settler society. Dunn attributed Barbados's demographic disruption to low marriage and nuptiality rates. However, by reexamining population reports from Barbados between 1673 and 1715, "Greater Numbers of Fair and Lovely Women" reveals that low nuptiality and birth rates were symptoms of a greater problem: Barbados was hemorrhaging white men. Between 1673 and 1715, the number of white women and children on Barbados remained stable, while more than four thousand men drained from the colony. This new demographic analysis of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Barbados explores how white women came to form the foundation of their communities as white men left the island to seek new opportunities. Despite Barbados's reputation as a masculine and exploitative space largely bereft of the "civilizing" influence of white women and families, by the turn of the eighteenth century, the preservation of Barbados's settler society had fallen almost entirely to white women.
{"title":"\"Greater Numbers of Fair and Lovely Women\": White Women and the Barbadian Demographic Crisis, 1673–1715","authors":"Emily Sackett","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In Sugar and Slaves, Richard Dunn used the 1680 census of Barbados to depict the island as a place where stunted population growth and brittle bonds of community plagued the island's white settler society. Dunn attributed Barbados's demographic disruption to low marriage and nuptiality rates. However, by reexamining population reports from Barbados between 1673 and 1715, \"Greater Numbers of Fair and Lovely Women\" reveals that low nuptiality and birth rates were symptoms of a greater problem: Barbados was hemorrhaging white men. Between 1673 and 1715, the number of white women and children on Barbados remained stable, while more than four thousand men drained from the colony. This new demographic analysis of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Barbados explores how white women came to form the foundation of their communities as white men left the island to seek new opportunities. Despite Barbados's reputation as a masculine and exploitative space largely bereft of the \"civilizing\" influence of white women and families, by the turn of the eighteenth century, the preservation of Barbados's settler society had fallen almost entirely to white women.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"79A 1","pages":"640 - 652"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72950754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English, 1624–1713, remains a key book that shapes our understanding of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. His work depicts the creation of the English West Indies, with a special focus on Barbados's turn to sugar, its commitment to slavery, and the emergence of its planter class. Dunn sees the region as set apart by its socially dysfunctionality, a site of unprecedented brutality. He conveys a strong sense of moral outrage about the cruelties of life there. His depiction inadvertently supports the efforts to distance the slaveholding Caribbean from the English metropole. In this view, the Caribbean attracted the dregs of English society who then of necessity created a brutal social environment, one that included slavery. Dunn does not endorse this view of how slavery developed, acknowledging the role of elites and the middling sort in the rise of both slavery and the planter class that profited from it. We now understand slavery's reach differently, so that the West Indies (and even the lowest of its English migrants) can no longer be blamed for its rise and centrality.
{"title":"Distance and Blame: The Rise of the English Planter Class","authors":"C. G. Pestana","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English, 1624–1713, remains a key book that shapes our understanding of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. His work depicts the creation of the English West Indies, with a special focus on Barbados's turn to sugar, its commitment to slavery, and the emergence of its planter class. Dunn sees the region as set apart by its socially dysfunctionality, a site of unprecedented brutality. He conveys a strong sense of moral outrage about the cruelties of life there. His depiction inadvertently supports the efforts to distance the slaveholding Caribbean from the English metropole. In this view, the Caribbean attracted the dregs of English society who then of necessity created a brutal social environment, one that included slavery. Dunn does not endorse this view of how slavery developed, acknowledging the role of elites and the middling sort in the rise of both slavery and the planter class that profited from it. We now understand slavery's reach differently, so that the West Indies (and even the lowest of its English migrants) can no longer be blamed for its rise and centrality.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"13 1","pages":"557 - 575"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82228521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Richard S. Dunn's portrayal of the rise of "king sugar" in the early English West Indies accords the crop a deterministic role in the entire region's development with a sugar revolution used to explain broad patterns of economic and social change: above all the shift from indentured to enslaved labor. The sugar revolution concept, despite rigorous reassessment, retains purchase and the broad historiography follows Dunn's claim that, after a brief period of plunder, Jamaica settled into sugar monoculture by the 1690s to give rise to "the starkest and most exploitive slave system in British America." This article draws on research of the last fifty years and new data to reassess this narrative and finds it wanting. Trade and population figures show that "king sugar" was no victor in early English Jamaica, which was a dual economy with a relatively small-scale, diversified agricultural sector alongside a strong entrepôt trade with the adjacent Spanish empire. Nonetheless, this diverse economy rapidly became a fully fledged slave society, in which the unfree outnumbered the free by 1673, and a harsh regulatory regime was put in place. The experience of the enslaved was far more varied than is commonly understood, and the complexities, contradictions, and collaborations involved in the process of building Jamaica's uniquely exploitive labor regime cannot be explained by a sugar revolution.
理查德·邓恩(Richard S. Dunn)对早期英属西印度群岛“糖王”崛起的描述，使这种作物在整个地区的发展中扮演了决定性的角色，一场糖革命被用来解释经济和社会变革的广泛模式:最重要的是从契约劳工到奴役劳工的转变。糖革命的概念，尽管经过严格的重新评估，仍然保留了购买，广泛的历史记载遵循邓恩的说法，在短暂的掠夺之后，牙买加在17世纪90年代陷入了糖单一文化，并产生了“英属美洲最残酷、最具剥削性的奴隶制度”。本文利用过去50年的研究和新的数据来重新评估这种叙述，并发现它的不足之处。贸易和人口数据显示，在早期的英属牙买加，“糖王”并没有获胜，这是一个双重经济，拥有相对小规模、多样化的农业部门，同时与邻近的西班牙帝国有着强大的entrepôt贸易。尽管如此，这种多样化的经济迅速成为一个成熟的奴隶社会，到1673年，不自由的人数超过了自由的人数，严厉的监管制度也到位了。被奴役者的经历远比人们通常理解的要复杂得多，在牙买加建立独特的剥削劳工制度的过程中所涉及的复杂性、矛盾性和合作性无法用一场糖革命来解释。
{"title":"The Rise of \"King Sugar\" and Enslaved Labor in Early English Jamaica","authors":"Nuala Zahedieh","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Richard S. Dunn's portrayal of the rise of \"king sugar\" in the early English West Indies accords the crop a deterministic role in the entire region's development with a sugar revolution used to explain broad patterns of economic and social change: above all the shift from indentured to enslaved labor. The sugar revolution concept, despite rigorous reassessment, retains purchase and the broad historiography follows Dunn's claim that, after a brief period of plunder, Jamaica settled into sugar monoculture by the 1690s to give rise to \"the starkest and most exploitive slave system in British America.\" This article draws on research of the last fifty years and new data to reassess this narrative and finds it wanting. Trade and population figures show that \"king sugar\" was no victor in early English Jamaica, which was a dual economy with a relatively small-scale, diversified agricultural sector alongside a strong entrepôt trade with the adjacent Spanish empire. Nonetheless, this diverse economy rapidly became a fully fledged slave society, in which the unfree outnumbered the free by 1673, and a harsh regulatory regime was put in place. The experience of the enslaved was far more varied than is commonly understood, and the complexities, contradictions, and collaborations involved in the process of building Jamaica's uniquely exploitive labor regime cannot be explained by a sugar revolution.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"420 1","pages":"576 - 596"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79517806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Starting in the 1620s, Englishmen, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people from the greater Caribbean lived and labored on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Through free and forced migrations, they carried unique understandings of how to make and consume alcohol with them. Once on Barbados, American, African, and European ideas and technologies coexisted and sometimes intersected. By the 1640s, rum emerged from this maelstrom—it was an invention of the Atlantic world. A close examination of the alcohols that early inhabitants made and consumed complicates assumptions that ideas and innovations from one region could conquer the Atlantic world. It unveils how the colonization of Barbados and attendant enslavement of African and Indigenous people unleashed the creative collisions of skilled practitioners, agricultural products, technologies, and ideas surrounding consumption. Initially designed to satisfy local tastes, tracing the processes of invention surrounding rum and other alcoholic beverages demonstrates how experimentation and the development of taste preceded commodification. Understanding how rum became the "native produce" of Barbados shows us how cross-cultural interactions in the early modern Caribbean—which tied together the broader Atlantic world—created new worlds for all.
{"title":"\"The Native Produce of this Island\": Processes of Invention in Early Barbados","authors":"Jordan B. Smith","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Starting in the 1620s, Englishmen, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people from the greater Caribbean lived and labored on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Through free and forced migrations, they carried unique understandings of how to make and consume alcohol with them. Once on Barbados, American, African, and European ideas and technologies coexisted and sometimes intersected. By the 1640s, rum emerged from this maelstrom—it was an invention of the Atlantic world. A close examination of the alcohols that early inhabitants made and consumed complicates assumptions that ideas and innovations from one region could conquer the Atlantic world. It unveils how the colonization of Barbados and attendant enslavement of African and Indigenous people unleashed the creative collisions of skilled practitioners, agricultural products, technologies, and ideas surrounding consumption. Initially designed to satisfy local tastes, tracing the processes of invention surrounding rum and other alcoholic beverages demonstrates how experimentation and the development of taste preceded commodification. Understanding how rum became the \"native produce\" of Barbados shows us how cross-cultural interactions in the early modern Caribbean—which tied together the broader Atlantic world—created new worlds for all.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"59 1","pages":"714 - 737"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83688275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:This article explores the way in which the papacy and public opinion in the Papal States interpreted the American Revolution. It also considers how those interpretations evolved between the beginning of the AngloAmerican crisis and the invasion of the Papal States by the French revolutionary armies in 1798. The article shows that papal officials were not worried that the American Revolution might become the beginning of a broader wave of revolutions—of an "Age of Revolution," as historians call it today. They understood the events in America as little more than a "mutation in dominion" and an opportunity for the Holy See to obtain protections for North American Catholics' freedom of worship. Holy See views of the events in America, however, started to evolve after the outbreak of the French Revolution, which introduced a new notion of "revolution" and turned what had been papal pragmatism and flexibility into firm conservatism. By reconstructing this process, the article undermines traditional views of the eighteenth-century papacy as inherently opposed to all kinds of social and political change and as a naturally counterrevolutionary actor. It also calls into question the notion that the American Revolution marked the beginning of the "Age of Revolution."
{"title":"\"Mutation in Dominion\" or Revolution? The American Revolution as Seen from Papal Rome","authors":"A. Vincenzi","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article explores the way in which the papacy and public opinion in the Papal States interpreted the American Revolution. It also considers how those interpretations evolved between the beginning of the AngloAmerican crisis and the invasion of the Papal States by the French revolutionary armies in 1798. The article shows that papal officials were not worried that the American Revolution might become the beginning of a broader wave of revolutions—of an \"Age of Revolution,\" as historians call it today. They understood the events in America as little more than a \"mutation in dominion\" and an opportunity for the Holy See to obtain protections for North American Catholics' freedom of worship. Holy See views of the events in America, however, started to evolve after the outbreak of the French Revolution, which introduced a new notion of \"revolution\" and turned what had been papal pragmatism and flexibility into firm conservatism. By reconstructing this process, the article undermines traditional views of the eighteenth-century papacy as inherently opposed to all kinds of social and political change and as a naturally counterrevolutionary actor. It also calls into question the notion that the American Revolution marked the beginning of the \"Age of Revolution.\"","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"466 - 505"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83921911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:This article examines how elite, white women in England and New England participated in the construction of masculinity during the long eighteenth century. In their correspondences, elite women frequently expressed their ideas about what an ideal man should be. In letters to their female friends and family members, they offered examples of men whom they thought either embodied their high ideals or who served as ideal counterexamples. In their letters to their sons and younger male relatives, these letter writers were often very direct in offering their opinions and guidance on how to be good men and good patriarchs. None of the letter writers examined in this article overtly challenged the patriarchal social order in which they lived. Rather, these privileged women championed values like attention to the home and Christian morality that enabled their elite, male kin to become successful providers, heads of households, and leaders in their communities. This was no less true in the new United States after 1783 than in England in the 1740s, suggesting a long-lived pattern of elite women's role in ensuring the continuity of patriarchal societies, even if some aspects of the ideal man did change over time.
{"title":"Remembering the Ladies: Eighteenth-Century Female Letter Writers and Patriarchy","authors":"Conor Howard","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article examines how elite, white women in England and New England participated in the construction of masculinity during the long eighteenth century. In their correspondences, elite women frequently expressed their ideas about what an ideal man should be. In letters to their female friends and family members, they offered examples of men whom they thought either embodied their high ideals or who served as ideal counterexamples. In their letters to their sons and younger male relatives, these letter writers were often very direct in offering their opinions and guidance on how to be good men and good patriarchs. None of the letter writers examined in this article overtly challenged the patriarchal social order in which they lived. Rather, these privileged women championed values like attention to the home and Christian morality that enabled their elite, male kin to become successful providers, heads of households, and leaders in their communities. This was no less true in the new United States after 1783 than in England in the 1740s, suggesting a long-lived pattern of elite women's role in ensuring the continuity of patriarchal societies, even if some aspects of the ideal man did change over time.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"78 1","pages":"407 - 439"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83642682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:The delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787 needed to know the population of the United States in order to distribute representation. They faced problems, however, in doing so. They had only fragmentary and often outdated census estimates. Some delegates unhelpfully withheld information from their colleagues about their state's population. The legacy of the Confederation Congress influenced them to be more concerned about the relative rather than the absolute size of states' populations. For whatever reasons, the population estimates of states which circulated among them disagreed among themselves. Furthermore, skepticism about quantification remained strong, and the ability of the delegates to do numerical analysis was limited. Consequently, the population estimates they put in the Constitution were significantly revised by the Census of 1790, but because of ambiguities in the Constitution about apportionment, Congress struggled to reallocate representation. In sum, numbers were malleable agents in shaping Constitutional affairs in transactional ways, not precise yardsticks to resolve conflicts. The gradual introduction of quantification into public affairs in the late-eighteenth century, represented by the creation of the United States census, increased contentiousness rather than resolved differences. These events remind Americans in the twenty-first century that counting the nation's population has always been a difficult and contentious endeavor.
{"title":"A \"Supposititious Enumeration\": The Role of Population Estimates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention","authors":"Robert J. Gough","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787 needed to know the population of the United States in order to distribute representation. They faced problems, however, in doing so. They had only fragmentary and often outdated census estimates. Some delegates unhelpfully withheld information from their colleagues about their state's population. The legacy of the Confederation Congress influenced them to be more concerned about the relative rather than the absolute size of states' populations. For whatever reasons, the population estimates of states which circulated among them disagreed among themselves. Furthermore, skepticism about quantification remained strong, and the ability of the delegates to do numerical analysis was limited. Consequently, the population estimates they put in the Constitution were significantly revised by the Census of 1790, but because of ambiguities in the Constitution about apportionment, Congress struggled to reallocate representation. In sum, numbers were malleable agents in shaping Constitutional affairs in transactional ways, not precise yardsticks to resolve conflicts. The gradual introduction of quantification into public affairs in the late-eighteenth century, represented by the creation of the United States census, increased contentiousness rather than resolved differences. These events remind Americans in the twenty-first century that counting the nation's population has always been a difficult and contentious endeavor.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"2014 1","pages":"506 - 548"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86737973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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