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:

The Historical Uses of Comment Threads

I’m nearing the final stage of an article about the political implications of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” in the North during the Civil War. Race baiting and elections apparently never grows old, as Sidney Kaplan’s article on the 1864 flare up argued in 1949, months after the Dixiecrats deployed a similar campaign against Truman. My sources include a series of political cartoons from 1864 that essentially illustrated the Democratic pamphlets meant to parody abolitionists. The pictures essentially illustrated the words in some of the “miscegenation” pamphlets produced by Democrats during the election. They used caricatures of interracial couples as evidence of a world turned upside down — the world that would exist if Abraham Lincoln won the 1864 election and continued to execute the war until the South was defeated and all slaves were freed.

The images, created by G.W. Bromley & Co., are available at the Library of Congress.

A fair amount of scholarship exists on these sorts of racist caricatures. For instance, there are clear connections between these from the 1860s and the earlier “bobalition” broadsides from the days of northern emancipation. Writing about this earlier period in American history, historian Patrick Rael argues that by making black people try and fail to appear respectable (because of their clothing or the dialect in the dialogue bubbles), the creators of these images mocked “blacks’ new claims to participate legitimately in public sphere discourse” (Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest, 73).

These particular images from 1864 also contained a message about gender and sexuality (that could be found in some of the earlier images as well): emancipation would lead to sex between whites and blacks.

Significantly, the pictures do not depict the Jim Crow-era “miscegenation” discourse of sexually aggressive (and economically and politically enfranchised) black men who threaten white womanhood. These cartoons do mock African Americans for putting on airs and presuming to be whites’ social equals, but they also pillory white abolitionists – for their radical ideas and sexual deviancy (the white Republican men at the “Miscegenation Ball,” the white female abolitionists sitting in the laps of black men in the “Millennium of Abolitionism” image.) They use social (and sexual) race mixing as a way to symbolize the impending social and racial disorder that will come with the end of the war.

Much more can and has been said about this (including in my almost-finished article), but what I want to emphasize about these images and the entire “miscegenation” discussion of 1864 is that it was deeply contingent on the fact that emancipation was in play for the upcoming presidential election. While they were, of course, racist, these images (and the various Copperhead Democrat articles about “miscegenation”) were also produced to tie the Republican Party to radical abolitionists and their extremist demands for black equality on top of emancipation.

So, here’s where the title of this post comes into play. When I did a quick Google search to find the “Miscegenation Ball” image this morning (instead of going directly to the Library of Congress website), one of the top hits was from a June 2010 post on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog on the Atlantic website. [Unrelated: are people now writing "weblog" instead of "blog"? I've encountered this three or four times in the past week. Is it just historians trying to sound antiquated?]

Using these images to reflect on the persistence of race baiting in politics, Coates gives a fairly clear and short analysis – including a useful transcript of the text in the images (since it’s hard to read, even on the LOC site). My only quibble with his brief commentary is that he focuses more on how white southerners would have responded to these images, when they were meant for a northern audience. Many white Union men hated the Confederates only slightly more than they hated the radical abolitionists, and Democrats seeking to elect McClellan liked to attack the slaveholding elite as well as abolitionists. Calling out both white slaveholders and radical abolitionists as “amalgamationists” killed two birds with one stone.

What is most interesting to me, as a historian and a history teacher, are the comments. Some of the comments clearly demonstrate the readers’ scholarly knowledge (shout-outs to Edmund Morgan and Kathleen Brown, a mention of Bacon’s Rebellion, Sally Hemmings, etc.). Another thread addressed the depiction of black women in these images and links to an “anti-Michelle Obama’s clothes” discussion that took place on Ravelry, a knitters’ and crocheters’ social media site. Another thread mentions the use of dialect in The Help, and awkward book club discussions on the novel, well before the film version mainstreamed that conversation about race. There are also a  number of comments from people who are “interracially” married. Some just explain their circumstances, others point out the ongoing difficulties, while some wish that they could be at the “miscegenation ball” because it looks like a rocking good time. Many of the comments add biographical details about where people have lived, and how views towards interracial marriage have changed over time.

The comments totally derailed my morning writing.

First, they provide the answer to a future historical question: What kind of reaction do these “miscegenation” images provoke in the 2010s? They lead to mini-histories, a small (and self-selecting) sociological sample of American attitudes toward race and interracial marriage. The comments also reveal thoughtful analysis of the images and how these images relate to other depictions of black Americans.

Yet at the same time, with a few exceptions, I was struck by the absence of historical awareness. Yes, the origins of slavery and the complex racial and gendered politics of colonial Virginia and the class dynamics of Bacon’s Rebellion are undoubtedly important to the history of race in the United States. But they are probably not the best way to approach the racial dynamics in the Union North in 1864. Nor did many commentators note the Civil War, the fact that emancipation happened during a war, and the understudied dynamics of race in the North.

While I would love to parse these 108 comments more (and find other times when historical evidence and widely read blogs coincide), other business calls me to other matters. I’m left with a few questions and conclusions:

On a meta level, I wonder if and how historians will deal with these kinds of sources in the future. They offer a window onto a kind of conversation (Will usernames be like pseudonymous handles of yore? Will future historians comb through blog comments looking for “marcelproust” or “socioprof” as historians now might seek “Africanus” or “Cicero” in nineteenth-century newspapers?)

On a more practical and immediate level, these comments offer insight into my students and, possibly, reading audiences. Often the reaction people have to artifacts of cultural history (especially images like these) are deeply personal. People who see them think about them in terms of how they relate to their own lives and personal histories. Yet it is vital also to understand historical artifacts as embedded in a particular time and space. Racism is not universal and unchanging; it was used differently at different times for different ends. The Democrats behind these caricatures were less concerned with white abolitionists marrying freed people than they were with smearing white Black Republicans. This isn’t to say that the commentators’ reactions about their own marriages are wrong or misplaced, but it is problematic for the takeaway message to be: “Wow. People used to be racist. I’m glad we can marry whomever we want (in New York State, at least) now.”

Finally, since I am immersed in the early 1860s at the moment, this one comment did provoke an exasperated sigh:

“Miscegenation” appears to have originated in the U.S., and coincidentally, the first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an 1864 New York article, reprinted in England. It is defined as the “mixture of races; esp. the sexual union of whites with negroes.”

Weeelllll . . . not exactly. It was a pamphlet from David Goodman Croly and George Wakefield published in December 1863 in New York City. The (pro-South) London Times picked up the story, as well as some other British publications, but it was a very American debate! But rather than be frustrated, I should just get back to work on my article on it, right? Right.

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!

What I used to do, Part III

Or, how I’ve adapted the old to fit with the new.

"Amanuensis," Scribes in the Abbey of Echternach (Luxembourg), Manuscript from the 11th century.

When I’m at an archive, I transcribe and I take copious notes. I recreate documents in huge Word documents that I can “find and search” later. I also keep a separate document for commentary — my notes, my research questions, and leads for future research.

On a recent trip to the New-York Historical Society, my confidence faded when one of the archivists tentatively told me that the speech I was reading and transcribing was also online. “You know . . . you can actually read this on archive.org . . .” she trailed off. Here I was, typing as fast as I could when everything I was entering into my laptop could be accessed at any time from my couch. A crisis of archival faith.

(An aside: this wasn’t the first time I experienced this. In Boston last spring, a very kind and helpful archivist boasted about how many abolitionists’ letters they had digitized. She told me that I could just look at those letters online. Pause. Yes, I said, but I’m here. In Boston. I could understand that she wanted to protect the documents from being handled too much, but what was I supposed to do now? Did she want me to sit in the reading room and read the letters on my computer? Did that even count as research? Historians are still supposed to go to archives, right? To paraphrase Mindy Kaling: was everyone else going online without me? (Seriously: what is everyone else doing? I know many archives aren’t online, but as so many become digitized, is this the way of the future? Is it naïve to still want to see and handle documents in person?))

After learning that the speeches I was reading at the New-York Historical Society were online, I debated whether I should just finish up early and go home. But. During the past few hours, I’d had more productive thoughts than I’d had in the past two weeks. I wasn’t just reading these speeches from 1864 — I was thinking about them, making connections, and my article’s outline had started to come together. The quiet room, the time crunch (. . . have to finish this speech before lunch), and the coffee I’d had earlier in the morning had created the ideal conditions for inspiration.

Later in the day, it hit me: this is what I need in my digital research! I need to find a way to create these conditions when I’m reading the 45 PDFs from the New York Tribune or the Google Book I’ve downloaded to my iPad.

So, to conclude this series of posts: how do I institute slowness in a research environment where speed and quantity rule? I’ve started to transcribe again. I organize the many newspaper articles I’ve been collecting in folders in DropBox, each titled with the date, the newspaper, and something of the headline or topic. I can then access them via my iPad with iAnnotate or Good Reader, programs that allows me to zoom in and out so that I can see the entire article or page. I also store Google Books (I’ve been reading nineteenth-century memoirs of dead missionaries most recently) on my iPad. The key is to treat these documents as if they aren’t digital. When I’m reading them, I open a Word document on my computer and I read through the documents as if I’m in a reading room at an archive. I transcribe long passages, I take notes, and I write out my thoughts.

This felt like unnecessary labor at first because it’s counterintuitive to the promise of accessibility. I don’t need to transcribe these documents. I have them with me basically all of the time. But this was beside the point. For me, the transcribed passages themselves are less important than the time I spend transcribing and taking notes. The process puts slowness back into my process and sets aside time to think.

Part I and Part II

What I used to do, Part II

Words I never thought I would say: I miss microfilm.

Not the faint chemical odor or the kind of sea sickness that inevitably results, of course, but the time it required of me. I came to this realization during a recent visit to the New-York Historical Society. I had to look at a few things on microfilm, and it felt like returning to an old friend. (More on this visit in a later post).

With a few exceptions (including my day at the NYHS), I haven’t used microfilm since my dissertation research because most of what I need has been digitized. Digitization has allowed more people to access historical documents, and the ability to do keyword searches of an entire run of a newspaper has led to new kinds of research questions, as Caleb McDaniel has discussed on his excellent Offprints blog.

At first, I didn’t put a lot of thought into how digital research differed from what I did before. When I began my first post-dissertation research project, I turned to databases like America’s Historical Newspapers to collect dozens of articles on a topic in a 30-minute break between classes. I saved the articles that seemed relevant, and, if I had time, I created an entry in Zotero. ”Search/scan/save” became my new research process by default. I rarely had time to read and take notes on the articles as I found them; nor did I read through complete issues of newspapers anymore. But I did have several brand new folders on my laptop’s desktop filled with PDFs. I would read through them later, I told myself — when I had time.

While this looked like research, it didn’t feel that way.

In the old days – the early 2000s – I lived in the microfilm room. I spent hours each week sitting in the basement of the library. The microfilm reader and the ten-cent charge for printing a page forced me to progress slowly. I read every handwritten letter then and there. Using the old notecard system, I wrote out an index card for each one – author, date, a few notes about the content. The already glacially slow process would ground to a halt when I decided to print. Later in the day, I would sort and staple the day’s stack of documents, at which time I had to re-read each letter again in order to make more detailed notes on the letter’s card.

I do not mean to romanticize microfilm. The microfilm room could feel like an over-air-conditioned prison. There were no windows, and time seemed to stand still. To make matters worse, while I had sentenced myself to this machine for three or four hours, I watched the editorial assistants for the Journal of Southern History come and go, fact-checking their one item, merrily rewinding their reel, and returning to the light.

Yet now I understand how vital this experience was to my work. The process of reading and printing from microfilm forced me to move slowly. It carved out a quiet portion of my day when I was alone with my thoughts and unable to multitask. I had to focus on each letter at that moment. I can’t remember this time in the library’s basement leading to any particular breakthrough – for me that happens when I write and revise – but I think this time away from books, my own writing, and, of course, the Internet was essential. It was a researcher’s version of what Pico Iyer describes in a recent New York Times piece about the importance of quiet and solitude to creative thinking.

One of running topics here will be to consider how the means of research shapes our process and the relationship we have to our sources. If you have any similar experiences or thoughts on this matter in your own research, please share!

Part III will examine how I’ve tried to reinsert slowness into my research process and to blend the good aspects of my old practices with the advantages offered by new technology.