Blood in the Archives

Today’s post is an example of how a healthy dose of scholarly wandering can lead to interesting finds and new questions. In a homage to Believer articles, I’ll just say this:

Discussed:

James Madison
Blood
Amalgamation
America’s Historical Newspapers
Spreadsheets
Nullification
Gothic Novels

In my research, I’ve been thinking about a small but important question that is difficult to answer: did Americans (and specifically – abolitionists) use “blood” to speak about “race” more often during the Civil War than in the antebellum period? Of course, “blood” and “race” had been used interchangeably for centuries, but I had this completely unfounded gut feeling that abolitionists used “color” more often than “blood” before the Civil War. Blood was particularly relevant during the war, and its rich religious and patriotic meaning lent significance to discussions of race and nationalism in a way that “color” did not. Yet before the CIvil War, I suspected (gut feeling!) that abolitionists’ would avoid associating “race” with “blood” except when they quoted the famous “of one blood” verse from Acts. Why? Many abolitionists subscribed to a kind of early (and inconsistent) critical race theory that would have made them loathe to connect race to something biological and permanent.

In thinking about this question of race and blood, I read an article in the experimental online religious studies project, Frequencies: “a collaborative genealogy of spirituality.” In “Blood,” Columbia Religion professor Gil Anidjar quotes from James Madison’s Federalist 14:

James Madison, for his part, reminded his listeners of “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies.”

I’d read and taught this particular Federalist Paper before, of course, but since Madison lives a few decades before my usual nineteenth-century haunts, and I haven’t taught the US Survey in a couple of years, it was a fresh insight. It made perfect sense that Madison would have used “mingled blood” and “kindred blood” in his call for national unity. I looked it up, read the complete document, and filed this away in my brain and laptop.

Even though the question of blood/race to be tangentially related to my actual article, I couldn’t resist thinking about how to go about finding evidence to support my hypothesis. I thought about some of the recent scholarship on searching databases, and how other historians have used the results from several sets of keyword searches of digital archives to establish quantitative results. Patrick O’Neil’s ”Bosses and Broomsticks” does this with jumping-the-broom ceremonies, as I wrote about here, and Caleb McDaniel has a more extensive list of articles using digitized databases as well as an analysis of the complexities and lack of uniformity in this still newish research technique.

I decided to do a few exploratory searches and see what turned up. Warning: this search was by no means scientific – I didn’t count the results or try the results on multiple databases. At this point, I’m not planning on using this particular search as evidence in my current project, I was just curious to see if anything striking would turn up. If I do proceed, I will obviously have to come up with some kind of methodology: a spreadsheet documenting each hit, perhaps even some kind of political or geographical mapping. (Perhaps a future post?)

Using Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers (Series 1-7), I checked off three historical eras: the Jacksonian Era, the Antebellum Period, and U.S. Civil War. I searched for “mingled blood” (just like that – in quotations, no Boolean terms) in the “Full Text.” There were 97 results. As I scanned through them, I discovered multiple articles citing Madison’s words (which I recognized because I had just read Gil’s “Blood” article the day before). Huh. I hadn’t expected that, but it made sense. They appeared in newspapers in the 1830s:

1. Northern and southern newspapers reprinted Madison’s call for national unity, kindred blood, and mingled blood during the Nullification Crisis in 1832.

2. They also appeared (quoted) in a speech/statement delivered at the 1835 Democratic Convention in Baltimore in support of the pro-Union Martin Van Buren’s candidacy.

This generated new thoughts and questions:

• The phrase (and the Madison excerpt) do not appear in 1850, another moment of intense sectionalism, nor did Madison’s quote appear during the Civil War. Was this a reference that only appealed to an earlier generation of Americans? Did northerners reject the southerner Madison as sectional tensions grew?
• I had been expecting to see “mingled blood” associated with “amalgamation” and interracial sex, perhaps used in newspaper articles warning against the abolitionist fanatics in Boston. Instead, “mingled blood” and specifically the quote from Madison were being used to draw together white northerners and southerners who the abolitionist fanatics and South Carolina nullifiers threatened to divide. This was interesting and unexpected. “Mingled blood” spoke to white nationalism, while in the Civil War, it was used to disparage abolitionists as supporters of interracial marriage.
• Did “mingled blood” continue to have this positive and patriotic connotation during and after the Civil War, and have I just missed it? At what point did “mingled blood” come to be associated with interracial sex, or am I wrong in assuming that this became its primary meaning?

The term also popped up in other contexts as well: in poetry, in articles rejecting the Know-Nothings’ anti-immigration policies, in regard to the blood ties binding the British and German monarchies, and, interestingly, (something for cultural historians to consider?) the term “mingled blood” can also be found in a gloomy excerpt from Charles Whitehead’s gothic novel, The Autobiography of Jack Ketch. (Ketch was apparently an executioner employed by King Charles II).

As I go forward, I will expand the search terms (mingled blood, kindred blood, blood AND amalgamation, blood AND negro, etc.), and I’m also tentatively planning to start some kind of spreadsheet file keeping track of the hits I get for various search terms in different newspaper databases. There are challenges: it’s difficult to track subtle shifts in cultural history and language through newspapers alone, and I find myself very hesitant to make any definitive claims about how or why language changed over time. Yet I am also really intrigued in both the historical findings and the methodological challenges of doing this kind of cultural history work!

A sample of my findings: the excerpts from Jack Ketch and the speech to the Democrats:

Needles and Geese

In the process of revising an article on the “miscegenation controversy” of 1864, I found myself on an archival goose chase. In November 1863, the anti-abolitionist New York Herald printed an article accusing its rival paper, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, of publishing ads in which black volunteers in Arkansas sought white abolitionist women as correspondents who would become their wives. Unfortunately, the Herald couldn’t be more specific than saying that these appeared “the other day” (“The Tribune Philosophers Promoting the Amalgamation of the Races,” New York Herald, 27 Nov. 1863).

My instinct was that this was a fake story about made-up advertisements. Throughout 1863 and 1864, the Herald published rumors about race mixing with a particular focus on black soldiers, and this seems like another iteration. But unlike the usually unsubstantiated rumors, this article included quotations from the supposed ads published in the Tribune.

Using the America’s Historical Newspapers database, and focusing my search on October and November 1863, I did some searches for those quoted phrases that seemed most likely to have appeared in the Tribune: “matrimony,” “Arkansas,” “correspondence,” etc. After about an hour of this, I had yet to find the original ads in the Tribune or any other paper included in the database except for the original Herald article. I feel confident enough to include this incident in my article as a rumor rather than a reality, at least with the proper qualifying words in a footnote.

A page from the New York Herald, 1/28/1863

But — and here’s where the delight of the research goose chase comes in — in the process of seeking out those specific phases, I stumbled upon the fascinating world of the want-ads from the 1860s. So many “Strangers to the city,” “respectable gentleman,” and soldiers looking for potential wives! Like personal ads today, nineteenth-century folk also tended to be very specific when it came to age, as the last ad above (“not over 19 years old”). I wonder what the story behind this southerner in search of a Yankee wife might have been.

I knew that nineteenth-century newspapers had tons of these short ads, but I’d never looked at them closely before except for using runaway slave ads in teaching. Now, I’m filing this away as a source for some future project. Lost items, personal ads, cryptic communications, and even the nineteenth-century version of missed connections. It reminds a bit of Found Magazine: mysterious and intriguing, fleeting, and very human. Some other intriguing samples:

“The sister of Phillip Tynan is Troubled by his silence. Direct to 117 Houston Street, NY.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“Will the young lady who was last Tuesday in a Twenty-Third Street stage from 11 to 12 o’clock send her address to the gentleman she recognized in another stage? Address E.P. Station D.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“MATRIMONIAL: Two young ladies wish to make the acquaintance of two Spanish or French gentlemen of wealth with a view to matrimony. Address, enclosing carte des visite, Lorini and Evangeline, Box 123, Herald office.” [NY Herald, 9 January 1863]

“Florence, — Will you give me the opportunity to explain my conduct Monday evening? Yes? When and where? –J. New York Post Office.” [NY Herald, 28 January 1863].

Victorian Popular Culture

I’ve decided to post occasionally on interesting archival finds, including the ever-expanding world of online collections. Unfortunately, many of these online collections are restricted to library users of those library’s who hold subscriptions to these collections, including today’s post, but free trials are often available.

Wondering how to engage students who would rather be re-reading Harry Potter than listening to your amazing lecture on the transformative effects of technology during the post-Civil War era of industrialization?

Try out the Victorian Popular Culture online archive! This collection was spotlighted on Columbia’s library website today, and I was sucked in by the blurb:

Spiritualism, mesmerism, psychical science and secular magic
together define the cultural fields presented in this collection.

Secular magic? Who can say no to that?

The main page is divided into three categories:

1) Spiritualism, Sensation, and Magic

2) Circuses, Sideshows, and Freaks

3) Music Hall, Theater, and Popular Entertainment

The collection includes handbills, books, pamphlets, photographs, programs from the shows, the original printed scripts from popular plays, and audio files of songs from the early 1900s ,and the documents come from the US, Britain, and Europe. They range from famous performers like Buffalo Bill and Barnum and Bailey’s circus, as well as lesser-known acts like the Central American Wonder, M. Samayoa the Great. I once taught Louis Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America in a US Survey, and this archive would have worked perfectly. Transnationalism, racial ideology, mysticism, religion, gender, popular entertainment . . . it’s all there.

The site is very well organized, and you can download the documents as PDFs as well as read them online.

Post script: if you’ve read this blog before, you’ll notice I changed the template because I wanted a sidebar for recent comments and posts. I think the change is a good one, and I like the file folder-esque design of the title, too!