Feare Nye

Another good colonial American name:

Feare Nye.

She died on October 9, 1774 at age 25, and is buried in Falmouth, MA.

Gravestone Carvers of Brooklyn, CT

One of the interesting things about Brooklyn, CT's South Cemetery is the large number of gravestone carvers whose work is displayed there. In nearby Lebanon, Windham, and
Columbia, graveyards are dominated by the carvings of Obadiah Wheeler, the Manning family, and the Collins family, with the odd Gershom Barlett or John Hartshorn thrown in.

In contrast, the Brooklyn cemetery contains the work of at least a dozen different carvers, many of whom are much better known for their work in Worcester, Boston, and Providence. I've been able to track down a few of their names, but most are unknown to me. I'll have to look through Markers for some more clues. This New York Times article may also help. If anyone knows these carvers or has seen similar work, please leave your leads in the comments!

Gershom Barlett:
Gershom Barlett (a.k.a. the "hook-and-eyeman" or the "bulbous nose carver") is well known to residents of eastern CT. That is, he's well known to crazy residents of eastern CT. There are two Barlett stones in Brooklyn — one for Israel Putnam's son Daniel (1758) and a large double stone for his wife Hannah and daughter Elizabeth, both of whom died in 1765.


Josiah Manning:
Manning's carvings are much more common in northeastern Connecticut than are Barlett's. His work on the Jane Tyler stone (1741) is notable for several reasons: it is in excellent condition, it is the earliest stone (that I have found so far) in this cemetery, it has the delightful misspelling "depated," and it is signed by Mr. Manning himself. There are about a dozen Manning stones in this cemetery, though I am not expert enough to tell which were carved by Josiah and which by his sons, Rockwell and Frederick, or others in their workshop. Since Frederick was born in 1758 and Rockwell in 1760, we might attribute the Tyler stone to Josiah even if it were not signed, but stones are often backdated. It is somewhat unlikely that Josiah Manning carved this stone in 1741, as he was only 16 at the time.




Elijah Sikes and Family:
These are beautiful stones, unlike anything in Windham or Lebanon. At first, I wasn't sure that these were Sikes family stones, since Ludwig describes their territory as a quadrangle stretching from Northampton, MA to New Salem, MA, to Leicester, MA, to Mansfield Ctr, CT, and Brooklyn does not fall withing that area. However, James Slater, author of The Colonial Burying Grounds of Eastern Connecticut and the Men Who Made Them is confident that these are Sikes stones, and I believe him. I don't have a copy of his book, but I should try to get my hands on it. Harvard doesn't have a copy and $65 on Amazon is a bit steep.

The Sikes stones in Brooklyn are wonderful. The faces are so striking and the whorls seem to be in motion. The Martha Phipps stone (1788 - above right) looks almost Egyptian. The striking tablet at left is devoted to the entire Peirce family: Capt. Benjamin Pierce (d. 1782), his wife, Hannah (d. 1736), his second wife, Naomi (d. 1757), his third wife, Sarah (d. 1759), and one of Hannah's sons, Rufus (d. 1741). These are only two among at least 10 Sikes stones in Brooklyn, and they are all beautiful, though their lack of mouths creeps me out a little.

Perhaps the most notable Sikes stone in Brooklyn is the Mary LeRoy stone (1792). It features a lovely allegorical carving of a plucked rose and the epitaph,

The Rose blossoms — it diffuses sweetness in the morning;
plucked from the Stock, it is still lovely
To thee, the morning of Eternity is come!
Mary! thy Soul is an immortal Rose.

I can't help but wonder if that sounds better in French. The epitaph says that Mary was "the wife of Francois Caesar Le Roy a French gentleman," so it's likely that he helped decide on her epitaph. I haven't been able to find this poem elsewhere, and it sounds a little awkward in English, which leads me to suspect it may have originally been in French.

Unknown Carvers:
Here are the stones whose carvers I do not know. I'll post a pic and a few details for each. if you know one, let me know. I'll update this if I can ever find that Slater book.

This is a small, rough-hewn stone with uneven letters (click to enlarge). It is barely readable, and the date may say 1734 or 1754. The round head and sloping wings are reminiscent of Collins' work, but the nose is much too wide and the face doesn't look like Collins. I can't read the name at the top, but I can make out the words "Wife," "Ebenezer Weeks," and "aged 27 years." This does not really look like the work of a skilled professional, which may make the carver difficult to identify.



This little stone looks like another example of work by a local, non-professional carver. It reads, "penuel son to mr Nahum & Mary Cady died Oct 5 AD 1754 in ye 5 year of his age." I'm not sure what the material is — it's light, like marble, but it is clearly not very expensive. The carvings are simple but deeply inscribed. The face looks like it may have taken inspiration from Hartshorn's faces. I don't know what the little leaves around the face are, but they're a little disconcerting — they look like flames.




Yet another local, amateur carver. This stone reads, "Hannah Weeks Daughter of Ebr. & Eunice Weeks Died the 29th of June 1777 in the 7th year of." This stone is very close to the unreadable stone mentioned above, which means that that stone may belong to Eunice Weeks, but I can't be sure. The organic-looking carving on this lunette looks like an amateur version of the plant on the stone below.




This organic design is common in Providence's Old North Burying Ground. The only examples I have seen are on the gravestones of women, young children, and slaves. This example is no exception: it commemorates Septimus Tyler, who died in 1782 at the age of two. The Sukey Smith stone (1775) in Providence has an almost identical carving. John and Henry Harris (1776 and 1778) share a modified version of the design.

I have never seen the work of this carver before. He seems to be working in a Boston style on slate with fine carving. It is possible that I have seen him before but do not recognize his style because he may be attempting some form of portraiture. The stone is for "Abigail Perrin (of Roxbury)" who died in 1787 at age 15. If her family moved to Brooklyn from Roxbury, they may have sent back to Massachusetts for her stone, which might explain the Boston styling.


This stone may have been carved by the same person who made the Abigail Perrin stone (above). The eye capsules and wing patterns look similar, as does the possible attempt at portraiture. It honors Joseph Scarborough, who died in 1771 at age 55. The flag in the picture is part of a GAR star on the grave, but I have no idea why that was there, since he obviously did not fight in the Civil War.



This baffles me. The carving work is so exquisite — it could have been made in Boston or Newport. This stone is for Ruth Taylor (d. 1778), who died four days after the birth of her twin sons, James, and John, neither of whom survived. Ruth's family may have been able to afford to send away for an expensive stone — her husband was the Hon. John Taylor, Esqr. and her father was John Huntington, Esqr.

UPDATE: These look like the work of John Ball of Hollis, NH. See Markers, 1985, “The Colburn Connections: Hollis New Hampshire, Stonecarvers, 1780-1820.” Similar stones can be found in Ipswich and Newburyport, MA.

There are several of these small, lightly-etched slate stones in Brooklyn. This one is for Stephen Williams (1796). Similar stones bear 1797, 1786, and 1782 dates. These carvings are very delicate.

UPDATE: I am fairly certain that these are the work of Beza Soule.















This one is a mystery too. Look at that chin! This is the Tomas Williams stone (1778). The Elizabeth Downing stone (1780) is similarly chin-tastic.

UPDATE:
I think that the cleft-chin carver may be either Richard or Lebbeus Kimball. There are some pictures of similar faces in the 1980 edition of Markers in an article called, “'And the Men Who Made Them': The Signed Gravestones of New England"
by Sue Kelly and Anne Williams.






This is the Expeaerenc Whitaker stone (1779). I think they were going for "Experience." The lines on this one remind me of the Thomas Williams stone, but the face shape is entirely different. The eyebrows are similar, though, as are the swirly shapes flanking the face.





The sunrise/sunset theme is common in Rhode Island. Actually, "common" is probably overstating things a bit — they exist, and I've never seen one in Connecticut before. There are two little sunrise stones in Brooklyn: the Sarah Tyler stone (1781) and the Betsy Weaver stone (1785).

Oh, Blogger, with your formatting issues. Sigh.

Masters of Small Worlds

Kevlev's comment reminded me of an excellent book I read recently: Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, & the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995). McCurry argues that South Carolina's many yeomen farmers, like their more affluent neighbors, based their claims to power and political privilege on their status as independent heads of households. Rich and poor alike upheld a system of power that defined white men as the undisputed masters of their families, slaves, and dependents — a system that was bolstered by proslavery Christianity. For a more in-depth review, see Jeanette Keith's article on H-Net.

While the South Carolina Low Country is remembered as a land of massive plantations, impossibly wealthy planters, and overwhelming black majorities (up to 80% of residents in the antebellum period were slaves), the region also had a thriving yeoman class. McCurry's definition of a "yeoman" is anyone who owned his land and worked it with his own hands, which was generally true of farmers who owned fewer than 150 acres and fewer than 10 slaves. While 10 slaves may seem like a large workforce, McCurry shows that yeomen typically bought children or women because they were cheaper than adult men (over half of the slaves on these small farms were children — pg. 49). Similarly, the 150 acres were generally of poor quality, since large planters owned the rich, rice-producing lowlands.

Yeomen considered themselves freemen, citizens, and heads of their own households and, thus, the political equals of their elite planter neighbors. While planters were often uneasy about the ramifications of democratic ideology, they “forged an uneasy alliance” with yeomen on the basis of their common position as heads of households and benefited from yeomen’s support at the polls (93). For their part, yeomen supported the systems of slavery and social hierarchy because their own claims to power rested on the power and privileges afforded them under those systems.

McCurry's book is important because it undercuts the ubiquitous neo-Confederate claim that very few Confederate soldiers were slave owners and thus did not fight to preserve slavery. McCurry argues convincingly that free, white heads of household supported slavery because their privileged position rested on their ability to claim absolute dominion over their households, whether those households included only their own wives and children or hundreds of enslaved workers. She also examines tensions between planters and yeomen, as well as their social interactions:

Out of the personal nature of the ties that bound them, out of their common respect for private property and property in man, and out of the social and political imperatives of slave society, yeomen and planter in the South Carolina Low Country forged a workable alliance (112).

I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever tried to explain why white Southerners who did not own slaves supported the system nevertheless. One caveat: The South Carolina Low Country had a unique social and economic landscape due to the large number of huge rice plantations, so we should be careful not to extrapolate to other parts of the South (for example, over 75% of white heads of households in some SC parishes were slaveowners). That said, her argument about household heads supporting a system of privacy and household autonomy that upheld slavery will probably travel well.

Internet Jackass Theatre

Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin draws our attention to a "Big Ass Confederate Flag" being erected on the side of a highway in Florida. Quite rightly, he points out that a group like the SCV, which purports to be educational and celebratory, could probably spend their money on better projects than the erection of a gigantic middle finger along the side of the road.

Lest we harbor any illusions about who supports this project, allow me to present a few of the comments from the St. Petersburg Times website:

I fully support the display of any Confederate Flag as a reminder of the Yankee armies invading the Southern people's homeland. The states had every right to seceed from the union. Lincoln's greatest concern was collecting his "cotton tax".
- "West"

Gorgeous. I can't wait to see it ! Why is this whole slavery crap revisionist stuff always trotted out when this topic comes up. This flag is about MY Southern heritage. My blood. Too many are brainwashed or gutless to challenge this indoctrination.
- "John-Kiwi"

The confederate stands for a southern uprising against the tyrannist north of the time. The North tried to control the southern states and tell them where and to whom they could sell their export. Race only entered when the north was losing.
- "Jared"

God bless the boys in gray! It's shameful that everyone in America is allowed to be proud of thier heritage except for those of us who are decended from the valiant Confederate soldiers. The NAACP has made the confederate flag "racial". Deo Vindice!
- "Jesse"

To be fair, plenty of people commented and called these jerks out.

It is important to read these comments because, for many people, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that those who want to fly the Confederate flag* are really only interested in honoring their ancestors. The whole "Heritage, Not Hate" campaign is carefully calculated to make the public display of this hateful symbol palatable. Even I fell for it — when I was a freshman in high school, I wrote a 25-page paper for my Civics class about how the administration shouldn't have suspended a kid for wearing a Stars and Bars t-shirt.

While individual people may indeed be well-meaning, the display of the Confederate flag* is an intrinsically political act — and its politics are racist, segregationist, and retrograde. This flag has been a familiar symbol since the time of the war, but it was only during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s that it began to be displayed in such a prominent, public, "f-you" sort of way.

We should read comments like those on the St. Petersburg Times' website to remind ourselves that this type of racism is alive and well in America. Remember it any time CNN or your local newspaper expresses shock at racism in the current presidential campaign or uses words like "resurface" or "reemerge" or the odious "postracial" that imply that racism died out at some time.

Of course, racism exists in many forms, of which the dumbass, slavery-denying variety is merely the most quotable. Racism, like sexism, is part of our daily lives in America, and any impression that easily-recognizable flare-ups are some sort of aberration results from a privileged ability to deny quotidian examples (see Melissa McEwan for more — she says it better than I can).

Being reflective about my own privilege and trying to recognize how it works in my life are constant projects for me, as they are for many (but not enough) people. I don't think that "West" and "John-Kiwi" really overburden themselves with similar concerns. Is there a way to clue them in? I don't know. Any discussion of privilege, even if you're only talking to yourself, is intensely uncomfortable, and I'm not sure how to reach across the aisle without seeming like an enemy.

*The "Confederate flag," is, of course, the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, not the Confederate national flag. Why isn't the SCV erecting one of the many versions of the latter? I think it's because they secretly hate the Army of the Tennessee.
I once saw a Confederate reenactor proudly flying what he thought was the First National Flag of the CSA from his truckbed at an event in Virginia. It was actually the Puerto Rican flag. I didn't tell him.

Jefferson's Midwest

There's lots of good work being done over at Strange Maps, none of it better than the discussion of this creative map of Jefferson's proposed midwestern states. According to one biography,

[W]e have a glimpse of that absurd element in Jefferson's mind which his admirers sought to excuse by calling him a "philosopher." The matter is small, to be sure, but suggestive. He proposed as named for the several subdivisions of this territory: Sylvania, Michigania, Cherronesus, Assenisippia, Metropotamia, and Pelisipia. Fortunately these wondrous classic titles have not afflicted the children of our common schools.

Assenisippia: The Easy Target State

Israel Putnam

Another interesting thing about the cemetery in Brooklyn is that it was the original resting place of General Israel Putnam. Although he is not well remembered today, Putnam was quite famous in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He never quite reached Daniel Boone or Johnny Appleseed status, but Putnam was a similar kind of folk hero: a bull-riding, wolf-slaying, escaped Indian captive who fought like a wildcat at Bunker Hill.

The smirk-inducingly named Indian History for Young Folks (1885) summarizes Putnam's career in glowing terms:

Few men ever encountered such a variety of dangers, or faced death in so many different forms. From the fierce she-wolf in her den — a story with which all boys are familiar; the burning powder-magazine at Fort Edward; the fiery torture at the stake; the tomahawk and the bullet of the concealed savage whose forest haunts he invaded; close and bloody contests with Indians and Frenchmen in the Old French War; at the Havana, fighting at the same time the Spaniard and the pestilence, which proved fatal to so many of his companions; and lastly at Bunker Hill and on other Revolutionary fields — a conspicuous target for British bullets. With the exception of the singeing he got at Fort Edward, and the cruelties inflicted on him while a prisoner, he escaped, as by a miracle, from all these manifold perils without a wound.

Putnam died in Brooklyn, CT in 1790. In the years after his death, so many people visited the little cemetery in Brooklyn to touch his gravestone that they wore the corners off of the tablet. In 1888, an elaborate equestrian statue of Putnam (designed by Karl Gerhardt) was erected about half a mile down the road and Putnam's body was re-interred underneath it. The damaged stone was moved to the Connecticut State Capitol. A replica now stands at the site of the original grave, and the equestrian bears the original epitaph.

I guess I'm so used to the Putnam statue, which is a stone's throw from my aunt's house, that I never realized how strange it is that such an impressive statue stands in such an undistinguished location. The statue is in front of the diminutive Brooklyn Historical Society on the side of a quiet road in a sleepy little town. The only reason anyone ever sees Brooklyn, CT is that Rte. 6 runs through the center of town, but "town" is a generous description. I say this with love — I got my marriage license at the (adorable) Brooklyn Town Hall. If you're ever in the area, stop by to visit General Putnam — it's pretty amazing to see such a gigantic, impressive statue in such a bucolic setting.

To the memory
Of
Israel Putnam, Esquire,
Senior Major General in the Armies
Of
The United States of America
Who
Was born at Salem
In the Province of Massachusetts
On the seventh day of January
A.D. 1718:
And died
On the twenty ninth day of May
A.D. 1790:
Passenger
If thou art a Soldier
Drop a Tear over the dust of a Hero
Who
Ever attentive
To the lives and happiness of his Men
Dared to lead
Where any Dared to follow;

If a Patriot
Remember the distinguished and gallant services
Rendered thy Country
By the Patriot who sleeps beneath this Monument;
If thou art Honest, generous & worthy
Render a cheerful tribute of respect
To a Man
Whose generosity was singular
Whose honesty was proverbial
Who
Raised himself to universal esteem
And offices of Eminent distinction
By personal worth
And a
Useful life

Brooklyn Cemetery

In Brooklyn, Connecticut, there is an interesting cemetery next to the fair grounds on Rte. 169 (Canterbury Rd.). It's one of those small-town burying grounds where the earliest dated stone is from 1741 and the most recent is less than two months old.

I don't venture into modern cemeteries very often, so I was a little surprised by the modern stones in Brooklyn. I knew that people get laser-etched stones, but I had never seen one that was both laser-etched and colorized. These pictures aren't the best — I say that all the time, but this time it's for a new reason: I didn't realize that the modern stones were so reflective, so you can see my reflection in some of them. The Clifford and Frances Green stone (2001) features an olde-tyme winter skating scene complete with decorated Christmas trees and wreaths on the lampposts. I wonder what made Frances and Clifford choose this scene. Did it remind them of their childhoods? Did they collect Christmas figurines? I don't know, but I've never seen anything like it.










Other recent stones also include rural scenes. The Levola stone (2003) shows a rocky farm with silos, deer, and stony mountains in the background.
The farm picture on the Blanchette/Harrison stone (2008) is less sophisticated, but just as rural. Brooklyn is still a rural community, so it's possible that the Levolas, Blanchettes, and Harrisons were all really farmers, but it's possible that they just found the scenes peaceful.

Other residents of Brooklyn chose to adorn their gravestones with personal interests. Shaun Fredrick's family put a picture of his Harley on his gravestone. Josephine Courcy's stone (1991) attests to her love of Elvis.

Now that I know that modern stones have interesting images, I may spend some more time in more recent cemeteries. Though, I guess, it is a little weirder to photograph modern stones than it is to photograph historic stones.

Major Thomas Seward

I love the Thomas Seward stone (1800) in Copp's Hill Burying Ground. It reads:

Reader!!!
Beneath this Stone is deposited,
the Remains of
MAJOR THOMAS SEWARD;
who gallantly fought
in our late revolutionary War,
and through
its various scenes, behaved
with patriotic fortitude
& died in the calms
of domestic felicity, as becomes
a Universal-Christian,
Novr. 27th 1800 Etat 60

I love this stone because the style of the images reminds me of the illustrations in Barbara and Ed Emberly book, Drummer Hoff Fired it Off.

This Republic of Suffering

Today, I finished Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2007). I won't say I finished "reading" it because, technically, I listened to the audiobook, but that shouldn't matter. I like having nice, long audiobooks on my iPod as I walk around Cambridge — in the past few months, I've listened to The Killer Angels, Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, Simon Schama's A History of Britain, The Red Tent, The Ghost Map, Fred Anderson's The War that Made America, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and my weekly "This American Life" podcasts.

Many others have reviewed this book in recent months, and I won't rehash what they have said. I'll just say that I enjoyed this book well enough, though it wasn't life changing. I'm glad to see that a good book about 19th-century cultural history is so popular, even if that probably has more to do with Faust's position than her research skills and lucid writing.

I was also glad that the argument was Am-Civ friendly, by which I mean Faust used a lot of popular culture sources, particularly songs, rather than relying entirely on letters, speeches, and other staples of straight-up history. Professional historians are becoming more and more friendly to a wide range of sources all the time (though many of my fellow students over in the history dept are still skeptical of material culture). Sensible people in local historical societies, museums, and high schools have long understood that popular sources (songs, cartoons, advertisements) are both enlightening and engaging, but there's still a subtle prejudice against historians who devote themselves to studying women's magazines or photography as somehow being "soft." Hopefully, that attitude's on its way out, but there are still a lot of people who confuse "smart" with "abstruse."

I am happy to report that Drew Gilpin Faust is not one of those people. Her book will appeal to professional historians and interested amateurs alike. I wish she had gone a little more into memorialization, but her work is excellent background for anyone interested in Civil War memory.

Law & Order: SVU, 18th-Century Edition

I spent some time with the John Boyle diary this afternoon. Boyle was a printer's apprentice in Boston who kept a diary from 1759-1777, from the time he was 13 until he was 31. I've started transcribing it and have thought about asking Harvard for permission to publish it. That would be a big project, but it's a tremendous source.

I often watch Law & Order reruns as I blog, so it seems appropriate that I should post some of John Boyle's observations on crime and punishment in 18th-century Massachusetts.

Boyle comments most frequently on two types of crimes/trials: sex crimes and crimes committed by British Regulars. I'll leave the latter for another day. For today, I'll post the former, complete with Boyle's not-so-charming misogynist commentary.

1762:

At the Inferior Court lately held in the County of York Thomas Hammett of Berwick, Plaintiff, recovered of Peter Staple of Kittery, Defendant, One Thousand Pounds Lawful Money Damages, and Costs of Prosecution, for the Defendant’s Debauching, Ravishing, and Carnally knowing the Plaintiff’s Wife – A valuable Wife this, who in a few minutes can make so great an addition to her Husband’s Estate.

1768:

At the Superior Court at Charlestown, one Bunker was convicted of abusing his daughter (17 years old) in a most shameful Manner. As his crime is of an entire new specie[s], that of sewing up his Daughters pudenda, the Court have deferred his Sentence till next Term, that they may have an opportunity to consider what kind of punisht. will be most suitable to it.

1773:

A Rape was lately committed at Winthrop by a Married man on the Body of a Girl 13 years of Age — The Father of the Girl compromised the Affair with the Man on his paying him the trifling sum of Two Hundred Pounds Old Tenor!!!

Boyle's incredulity at the fines levied against rapists is particularly interesting. He doesn't seem to object to their being fined, but finds the size of the fines shocking. As for the genital mutilation incident — I'll have to look into that one because I've never heard of it before.

Poe's Law

I'm sure I've asked this before, but I'll ask again: Is there a Poe's Law corollary for neo-Confederates?

Recently, the Florida Times-Union ran a story about Bobby Tillet, a BJ's Wholesale Club employee whose bosses told him he could either remove the stars and bars from his truck or park it somewhere outside their lot. There's a lot of bloviating about "freedom of speech," but at least the article manages to quote someone from the ACLU who helpfully points out that BJ's is not an agency of the federal government and is thus not bound by the first amendment.

There has been some predictable reaction to this story in the Times-Union's "Rants & Raves" section, in which loyal readers rehash their predictable and blockheaded arguments.

Tuesday, 5/27:

This is concerning the article with the fellow having the Confederate flag flying from his truck. I think it's wrong that they singled him out and made him move his truck to another location. I will never shop at BJ's again. Where's the right of freedom of speech and freedom of expression? It's OK if blacks wear a shirt showing (Malcolm-X) or they wear clothing Fubu (for us by us) ... Yet somebody wants to show the Confederate battle flag and they're racist. What's really racist is NAACP, the black college fund, the black college spring break and Black Miss America. They're racist! Until those people change their ways, there will always be divisiveness.

Thursday, 5/29:

I want to give the Times-Union a huge rave for displaying the Confederate flag. Living here in the South, that shows me a time when people were kind and gentle, and worked hard for what they got. They didn't take from others. It was a much more genteel time. People showed respect for each other. It was gaiety instead of the constant sorrows and negativity . . . For the person who said he was canceling his subscription, I'm making up for it by calling in for a subscription.

Bachelor #1 just sounds like some jackass 14-year-old, but I call Poe's Law corollary on the second author. Not even the most delusional Lost Causer could come up with that "they didn't take from others" line.

Great Teaching

Wow, I wish I had a history teacher like this one.

Next Steps

Why didn’t more English women migrate to the American colonies during the seventeenth century? Perhaps the difficulty in finding a satisfactory answer to this question is that the question itself is too narrow. In order to answer this question competently, future studies must subsume several broader questions, including “Where did English women travel and for what reasons?” and “What did mobility mean in seventeenth-century England?” Several of the authors discussed earlier in this essay have suggested potential jumping-off places for these new forays.

Before we can understand why women traveled to America, we must discover why they traveled at all. Conditions in the colonies are important and must be part of any discussion of migration, but female transatlantic migration must also be situated within a larger context of English women’s mobility. By examining patterns of local transience, intra-national movement, and migration to other destinations, including Ireland, Scotland, and continental Europe, scholars can determine which aspects of transatlantic migration were extensions of other types of travel and which were anomalous. Alison Games’ research will be particularly useful for piecing together this larger context, not only because her data includes migrants who went to continental Europe as well as to America, but also because she follows individual migrants over a period of years as they undertake many separate migrations of various durations. Likewise, Susan Hardman Moore’s study of New Englanders who returned to England suggests that transatlantic migration was part of a pattern of many migrations during an individual’s lifetime, not a single removal from a point of origin to a set destination.

In addition to developing a better sense of English women’s mobility, historians must investigate the meaning of mobility within early modern English gender discourses. Kathleen Brown’s exploration of gender and social order provides a model for accounting both for events and for the meaning of those events. Englishwomen who traveled to America were not merely mobile laborers; they were variously understood as harbingers of stable community life, insolent wenches who threatened social hierarchy, and embodiments of “civilization” and whiteness who helped to define the limits of freedom and slavery.

Currently, the historiography of migration does not adequately address English ideas about the appropriateness of travel that might explain why certain women could imagine making particular journeys but not others. Under what circumstances could a wealthy woman travel to a neighbor’s house? To London? To Holland? To Jamaica? Did poor women have more freedom to make those journeys or less? What assumptions would other English subjects make about a woman who made any of these migrations? Before we can make sense of the gender disparity among transatlantic migrants, we must better understand how Englishwomen imagined travel and themselves as travelers.

There can be no doubt that transatlantic migration from England was “overwhelmingly a man’s business” (Games, 47). Yet, it is not enough to leave the reasons for this disparity unexplored and unexplained. White women’s restricted mobility is such an ingrained feature of our imagined historical landscape that historians have left the historical processes underlying sex-specific migration unhistoricized, thereby naturalizing men as movers and women as homebodies. That English men crossed the ocean and English women, in general, did not is a matter of historical record. The beliefs, experiences, and policies that created this imbalance remain obscure.

Involuntary Migration

In contrast to both “push” and “pull” arguments, several recent authors have drawn attention to involuntary migration, which accounted for the vast majority of all transatlantic migration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.* Although most involuntary migrants were enslaved Africans bound for the sugar islands, the exploration of coerced relocation contributes to the literature on Englishwomen’s migration through its discussion of the labor history of the American colonies. Since forced migration involved large-scale planning, studies of this phenomenon can illuminate elites’ understanding of the relative importance of male and female laborers to their colonial projects.

The author who most directly addresses the fundamental question of gender disparity in migration is David Eltis. In The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000), Eltis attempts to explain why Europeans were willing to import enslaved African women but did not encourage European women to emigrate. He argues that white men were willing to accept African women as field workers who could contribute to the staple crop economy of the colonies, but that European women’s labor was neither profitable nor in demand in the colonies. English women were not coerced or coaxed into migrating because they were “never a significant part of the labor force of the export sectors of the Atlantic economies” (Eltis, 99). The idea that elite planners devising an ideal workforce preferred English men to English women is supported by the work of Robert C. Johnson, who found that when the Virginia Company sent vagrant children to their colony as servants, they chose to send three times as many boys as girls.**

Even if we accept Eltis’ supposition that “the work of women was closer to the core of the African economy than was its English counterpart,” his belief that women’s labor was not in demand in the colonies does not fit the evidence supplied by other authors (Eltis, 92). In addition to Carr and Walsh’s argument that white women were scarce, sought after, and highly valued in seventeenth-century Maryland, Kathleen Brown’s work on seventeenth-century Virginia demonstrates just how valuable white, female workers were to the planter economy.

In Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996), Brown contradicts many of Eltis’ key assumptions about the value of white women’s work by pointing out that tobacco production reached its peak only after women, “whose processing and commercial skills made possible both subsistence agriculture and internal markets,” reached demographic parity with men (Brown, 84). Where Eltis argues that “European settlers in the New World did not reshape European norms in family and sexual conduct,” Brown finds that colonial courts and legislatures spent a great deal of time passing and defending laws that struggled to impose ideal European gender relations on a populace that challenged them constantly (Eltis, 103). Where Eltis assumes that “demand for [English] women stemmed from their reproductive role,” and that “there was no economic demand to sustain the female component of transatlantic migration,” Brown argues that white women’s field labor was crucial to their husbands’ economic success because, unlike black women and all men, they were not taxed as potential field workers. This allowed white planters to profit from the field labor of their untithable wives and children while the law defined women as household laborers and ignored evidence that white women actually performed agricultural work (Eltis, 96; Brown, 121).

Brown is not explicitly concerned with transatlantic migration, but her compelling arguments about white women’s economic value in the colonies and English discourses of gender and social order provide essential background for further work on female migration.

Although Eltis makes several untenable assumptions about white women’s place in colonial economies, his focus on labor markets is essential to unraveling the causes of gender disparity among transatlantic migrants. In the face of insatiable demand in the American colonies and a surplus of unmarried women in England, arguments that attribute gender disparity principally to the laws of supply and demand fall flat. Since the economic explanations of labor demand that seem to explain male migration to the Americas cannot fully account for the lack of European female migration, future investigations must grapple with the influence of culture.

Though they take different routes to arrive at similar destinations, both Eltis and Brown agree: “culture-bound assumptions” have economic and political consequences, and no argument that ignores ideology can fully explain gender or race relations in early America.

*David Eltis finds that African slaves made up 61.3% of all migrants during the period 1640-1700 and 75.7% between 1700 and 1760. In addition, he estimates that 80% of all women and 90% of all children who crossed the Atlantic before 1800 were enslaved Africans. In addition to the coerced migration of Africans, many European prisoners were transported against their will. It is difficult to assess the number of European indentured servants who should be added to this tally, since some contracted their indentured willingly, while others may have been coerced. In any event, most transatlantic migrants did not travel of their own volition. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11, 97; Carr and Walsh, 542.
**Since the Virginia Company had a vast supply of vagrant children and paupers of all ages and both sexes at their disposal, their decision to send “seventy-five boys and twenty-four ‘wenches’” in 1619 seems to be calculated to meet the colony’s perceived labor needs. Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618-1622,” in Early Stuart Studies, ed. Howard S. Reinmuth, Jr., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 140.

"Pull" Arguments

In contrast to the “push” arguments, “pull” arguments emphasize the American colonies’ attractiveness for those seeking political, social, and economic advancement. In this telling, transatlantic English migrants are neither the beleaguered victims of government harassment nor huddled masses yearning to escape lives of crushing poverty. Instead, “pull” arguments portray colonists as entrepreneurs, adventurers, and shrewd assessors of risk and reward. For these authors, the unanswered question is not, “Why didn’t religious/economic/demographic upheaval push women, as well as men, to America?” but rather, “If America provided such attractive opportunities, why didn’t more women migrate?”

In their landmark article, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland” (1977), Lois Carr and Lorena Walsh argue that the scarcity of marriageable white women in Maryland during the first generation of settlement gave women enormous economic and social power. Though nearly all female migrants arrived in Maryland as indentured servants, they soon found that successful planters were eager for marriage partners, even if they had to buy out their wives’ indentures (Carr and Walsh, 542). Impoverished women who were “seeking opportunities they had not found at home” took advantage of the marriage market to improve their status, often marrying planters with large and growing estates and practicing a form of “serial polyandry” because so many outlived their husbands (Carr and Walsh, 544, 558). Carr and Walsh cite enticing advertisements as evidence that poor women in England knew of favorable conditions in Maryland and sought indentures with the expectation that they would eventually benefit socially and financially (Carr and Walsh, 547).

The women in David Ransome’s “Wives for Virginia, 1621” (1991) are similarly well-informed and aspiring. Unlike their Maryland counterparts, the 57 women who departed for Jamestown in 1621 came from middle-class or gentry families, but they shared a desire to find successful husbands in the colonies (Ransome, 12). Ransome notes that Virginians were eager to marry, even though they had to pay up to 150 pounds of tobacco for the privilege, and many complained that there were not enough potential wives to be had at any price (Ransome, 6). The men of Virginia agreed with their Maryland neighbors: women made their colonies happier and more productive, and they would take all the white women England could send.

The colonies described by Ransome, Carr, and Walsh seem like ideal destinations for both poor and well-born women, particularly given the dire state of the English economy. Why, then, did women make up fewer than 15% of migrants to the Chesapeake?* Both articles imply that the best way for a 17th-century Englishwoman to advance both materially and socially was through an advantageous marriage, but the evidence suggests that Maryland and Virginia’s insatiable demand for marriageable women was never enough to entice very many.**

The “pull” arguments advanced by Ransome, Carr, and Walsh are limited by their focus on women’s positive experiences in America instead of on their pre-migration decision-making process. While it may be true that women were able to exercise greater power within their families because their productive and reproductive labor was so highly valued in the colonies, women in England remained skeptical, perhaps because they suspected that they would be put to work in the tobacco fields (Kathleen Brown, good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 82). “Pull” motivations are an important piece of the migration puzzle, but they remain unsatisfying for explaining why women were unwilling to migrate when they had both the opportunity (about 20% of adult women never married during the 17th century) and the means (in the form of passage-paid indentures).

David Cressy’s appraisal of migrants’ motives in Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (1987), provides a useful model for extending “pull” arguments into more rewarding discussions. Rather than ascribing migration to the charms of the New World, he investigates the convoluted decision-making process of prospective migrants in England and argues that their manifold motivations and incentives were much more muddled than either pure “push” or “pull” arguments admit. Cressy rejects religious persecution as a “self-serving” narrative advanced by both colonists and historians searching for a useable past, neither of whom could admit that most migrants emigrated for economic gain or to escape personal troubles (debt, crime, bad marriages), and that some “crossed over in a casual or impulsive manner” (Cressy, 85, 98-106).*** By recognizing that uneasy conditions at home could prompt English subjects to contemplate alternatives, Cressy lays the groundwork for exploring why they were pulled to particular colonies.

Despite their flaws, the “pull” arguments do introduce an important idea: the American colonies provided economic and social opportunities for women as well as for men. Furthermore, all of the mainland colonies, even those that specialized in tobacco production needed and actively recruited white, female migrants. Beyond their value as companions and reproductive laborers, women were active, productive, and coveted workers whose industry contributed to the material wealth of the colonies.

*Alison Games finds that 13.6% of those bound for Virginia in 1635 were female. Games, 47. Carr and Walsh deliver one short paragraph to this question, suggesting that ties to families and communities in England, as well as their lower desirability as field workers accounted for limited female migration. Carr and Walsh, 546.
**Approximately one fifth of English women born between 1575 and 1700 never married. Those who did typically did not wed until the age of 26. see Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
***Cressy does not discount the importance of migrants’ religious motives, but he does argue that their accounts of persecution were “a caricature of conditions in Caroline England.” Instead, he casts religious motivations for transatlantic migration as aspirational and secondary to economic concerns.

"Push" Arguments

Proponents of “push” arguments have focused on two types of hardship: religious persecution and economic opportunity. Since at least 1886, when George Bancroft portrayed the “Pilgrim Fathers” as “peaceful farmers” who were “harassed by imprisonments, search warrants, trivial prosecutions, and the various malice of intolerance,” historians have considered religious intolerance in England, particularly under the policies of Archbishop Laud, to be a major factor in transatlantic migration. Although the religious persecution argument has come under attack from more recent historians, including David Cressy, it is still a major element of many “push” arguments.

In Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), David Hackett Fischer places religious persecution at the forefront of the many factors driving the “Great Migration” of Puritans to New England during the 1630s. Fischer argues adamantly that religion was “not merely [their] leading purpose[;] it was their only purpose” (Fischer, 18). Although he acknowledges economic opportunity in New England and the possibility of evangelizing among the Native Americans, Fischer sets out a strong “push” argument. “This exodus was not a movement of attraction,” he declares, “the great migration was a great flight from conditions which had grown intolerable at home” (Fischer, 16). Since the East Anglians who settled in New England intended to establish godly communities rather than plantations, gender ratios were more balanced and “normal family life was not the exception but the rule” (Fischer, 27).

Susan Hardman Moore echoes Fischer’s arguments in Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (2007), emphasizing Laudian policies as a driving force behind the Puritan exodus and characterizing movement to New England as “the most family-centered migration in America’s history” (Moore, 21). Moore draws a clear sociological distinction between those who migrated to New England and those who traveled to other Atlantic colonies, noting that the former were more prosperous, better skilled, and were spread across a wide age spectrum. The New England settlers’ most important trait was their tendency to travel in family groups along with “other local families, bound together by kinship and acquaintance over many years” (Moore, 21). By stressing the importance of family migration, Moore gives the impression that gender ratios among New England-bound migrants were balanced, and she does not offer any evidence to dispel that assumption.

What neither Fischer nor Moore can explain is why there was any gender disparity at all in migration to New England. While a population that is nearly 40% female is much more balanced than those found in most other English colonies, the imbalance is still pronounced.* If they are correct in arguing that religious persecution was the primary force driving whole families to New England, equal numbers of men and women should have been affected. Fischer notes that, if church membership is any indication, “it would be statistically more correct to say that many Puritans led their husbands to America,” but does not venture any explanations for the gap between women’s religious loyalties and their failure to cross the ocean (Fischer, 27). Ultimately, Fischer and Moore’s explanations of migration to New England are unsatisfying because they ignore the realities of gender disparity in favor of the logic of their family-centered arguments.

The other type of “push” argument foregrounds economic hardship and population pressure in England. Even historians who argue that migrants were attracted to America by the promise of opportunity concede that 17th-century England was undergoing rapid population growth, massive dislocation of agricultural workers, and a tightening job market. While modern historians seldom advance a strong “push” argument without acknowledging that migration was a “multilayered, multitextured phenomenon,” many explain migration primarily as a direct result of poverty at home (Horn, 48).

In Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (1994), James Horn defines economic upheaval in 17th-century England as the result of three interconnected trends: demographic growth, the development of national markets, and the creation of new types of economic ventures, including cottage industries and joint stock companies. In this telling, overseas migration was merely an extension of England’s internal migration patterns as populations responded to new social and economic realities. While some wealthy individuals hoped to increase their fortunes by moving to America, most English inhabitants of the Chesapeake arrived as servants, for whom “poverty appears again and again as a determinant” (Horn, 62).

Alison Games makes a similar argument in Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (1999), contending that, “migration within England was a part of the life cycle for most young men and women” during the period of demographic growth and economic strain (1580-1640) (Games, 16). Although she mentions women’s mobility briefly, most of her subsequent discussion focuses on migrants who “tended to be young and male, menacing in their poverty and freedom from masters” (Games, 17). The great strength of Games’ work is in her meticulous collection of data, which allows her to give precise statistics for migrants by age, sex, and destination. Using records from overseas voyages originating in London in 1635, Games can compare groups of migrants who traveled to Virginia with those who traveled to Barbados, New England, and continental Europe. In all cases, male migrants far outnumbered their female counterparts (Barbados, 94:6; New England, 60.9:39.1; continental Europe, 73:27) (Games, 24, 47). Although Games discusses gender imbalance as a defining characteristic of transatlantic migration, she does not explain why men and women seem to have responded differently to the potent forces of population increase and unemployment.

Both Horn and Games offer persuasive arguments about the economic and demographic roots of migration, but they do not go far enough in historicizing the developments that led to the gender disparities that both acknowledge. If English subjects were indeed starving in their villages and migrated both within England and beyond to find sustenance, historians must provide compelling evidence to explain why men left while women stayed when both would have suffered. In the absence of investigation, these authors imply that it is natural for men to move and for women to remain homebound. Their work, particularly Games’ data, will be essential to further inquiry into English migration, but it is not sufficient for explaining the scarcity of women among transatlantic migrants.

Horn and Games do not reconcile their “push” arguments with the data suggesting that men and women were unequally prodded, but they do suggest a potentially fruitful area in which their work could be extended. Both agree that London served as a crucial “staging post” for those wishing to travel to any overseas destination. According to Horn, “younger sons of gentry, yeomen, and provincial tradesmen flocked to London” to take advantage of new jobs created by transatlantic commerce, and many ended up accompanying their goods to America (Horn, 61). Although neither Horn nor Games explores this point, a possible explanation for gender disparity in migrating populations is the importance of initial travel to London, which may have attracted more “masterless men” than masterless women.

*Fischer cites the gender ratio as “approximately 150 males for every 100 females,” a 3:2 ratio that agrees with Games’ data (60.9% male, 39.1% female). Fischer, 27; Games, 47.

English Women and Transatlantic Migration, 1607-1675

I haven't written about books in a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading.

I recently finished an historiographical essay on the problem of gender disparity among English transatlantic migrants in the seventeenth century. These essays aren't my favorite things to write, but this one turned out pretty well. I'll post it here in several parts.

Introduction:
In 1635, over 82% of all English migrants who traveled from London to the American colonies were male (see Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 47). While it is axiomatic that most English colonies experienced stark gender disparities during the seventeenth century, the causes of this imbalance are less clear. Many historians have taken on the task of explaining the massive exodus from England between 1610 and 1675, but few have attempted to understand how the various factors that inspired people to emigrate may have held differential sway over men and women.

It is not enough to accept men’s mobility and women’s inertia as predestined or to offer off-hand speculation instead of investigation and evidence. Left unhistoricized, the cultural norms that defined early modern English men as potential movers and women as weak, dependent, and homebound, take on the cast of natural distinctions. If historians hope to unravel the complex web of motivations that induced some English subjects to cross the ocean while most remained at home, they must not be satisfied by knowing that transatlantic migration was “overwhelmingly a man’s business,” but must explain why it was.

Explanations for English-American migration generally rely on “push” arguments that locate the impetus for migration in deteriorating prospects at home (starvation, religious persecution, crippling unemployment, disease, etc.) or “pull” arguments that emphasize the colonies’ drawing power for migrants seeking economic, religious, or political opportunity. More recently, a third strand of argumentation has stressed involuntary migration as a major factor in European as well as African transatlantic crossings. In this essay, I will examine examples of all three types of arguments, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities for explaining European female migration.

Part I: "Push" Arguments
Part II: "Pull" Arguments
Part III: Involuntary Migration
Part IV: Next Steps

Shared Uprights

After my visit to Marblehead, I commented briefly on the common practice of using a single vertical stroke to carve two adjacent letters on 17th-century gravestones.

I have never seen a better example of this than the Sampson Waters stone (1693) at Copp's Hill. Of the 16 words on this stone, six include shared uprights. The Sampson Waters stone is a fairly small stone with very wide borders and a reduced space for the inscription. I don't know for sure, but this suggests that sharing vertical lines was mostly a matter of conserving space.

The funny thing is, shared uprights are often difficult to spot. It's like those passages that show that letter order and vowels aren't all that important for reading comprehension — when you're reading, your eyes skip right over the shared parts and just make the letters appear. Look at the word "Sampson." Unless you concentrate, the "p" looks perfectly normal.
Several other stones at Copp's Hill use the shared upright trick. As far as I can tell, they are not all carved by the same person, but most seem to have been carved before 1720 or so.